Spirit communication? Report of widow briefly reuniting with her husband during materialized seance

S.O.T.T: British Spiritualist journalist Maurice Barbanell commented about materialization seances in his 1949 memoir Power of the Spirit. He described seeing visitors from the ascended realm take shape "in what is, to all intents and purposes, a complex duplicate of the human body":

You see and handle forms which are solid and life-like. They are not ghosts. These materialised forms have a heartbeat and a pulse beat; their faces are perfectly formed with normal hues; their hands, complete even to fingernails, are warm to the touch and the grip is firm. The eyes have the usual pigmentation. The materialisations speak with voices which are replicas of the ones they had on earth. They move with human gait towards you. The colour of the hair follows the usual mortal fashion, blonde, brunette or grey as the case may be. Sometimes they even reproduce the clothing that they wore, but usually they are garbed in robes that drape the figure.

The substance that makes this possible is ectoplasm, which has been analysed. It is highly plastic and malleable. Just as protoplasm is the basis of material construction, so ectoplasm is the foundation for these materialised formations.

Materialisation is the apex of Spiritualism's phenomena, so far as a physical demonstration is concerned. Its purpose is to provide the supreme evidence for Survival.Maurice's 1959 memoir This Is Spiritualism includes a detailed description of a materialization seance with medium Louisa Bolt (Mrs. Ashdown) that he personally witnessed circa 1935; otherwise, he attended Direct Voice (disembodied voices) seances with her. During this epoch, it was common for materialization mediums to be fastened to their chairs with ropes so there could be no suspicion for any kind of duplicity among sitters and scientific researchers...read more>>>...