Meet: Aurora Medium

GIRL HEARS RADIO GHOSTS:

INSISTS THEY ARE NOT DEAD

Explanation hailed by physicists and mystics alike

From The Beantown Borealis, June 21, 1938

17-year-old Aurora Medium of New Jersey is no ordinary girl.  As a radio enthusiast, she’s tuned into sounds and ideas from all over the globe.  She follows politics and will readily quote from President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats.  A music lover, Miss Medium adores everything from opera to Appalachia, and can play violin along to Mozart as easily as she fiddles to A. P. Carter.  As extraordinary as she already is, Miss Medium claims to tune her radio even further afield:  into the spirit realm.

“People always ask me how I speak to the dead, which isn’t exactly accurate,” says Miss Medium.  She explains,  “The voices that I hear are not dead.  They are of people living in parallel dimensions, alternate realities that could have been had something gone a bit differently.”

This writer had the pleasure of seeing Miss Medium perform her radio feat at the Somerville Theatre last week.  Not far from Harvard University, Tufts College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Miss Medium’s stage show drew many from the scientific community, as well as those interested in spiritualism.  Certain academics in the audience came as outspoken skeptics, but were won over by evening’s end—not just by the young lady’s charm, but by her clear understanding of science.

“She had a clear analysis of two physical principles,” stated professor John C. Slater, chair of M.I.T.’s department of Physics, “that of radio waves, which are rudimentary, and also of quantum mechanics, which are not.” 

Professor Slater went on to cite recent work by a group of physicists based out of Princeton University, summing it up like this:  “When an event occurs, it takes us down a certain pathway, just as if we were take the left fork at a split on a highway.  But should that same event have a different result, say going right at that same fork in the road, it changes our entire reality altogether.  But the other path still exists, running parallel to the one we took.”

Miss Medium demonstrated this concept onstage by tuning in her radio to hear voices of people in alternate realities.  In one such communication, we heard the voice of a longshoreman in Nova Scotia in a reality where the Great Halifax Explosion of 1917 had never occurred, resulting in that city becoming the second largest in North America.  In another broadcast, we heard the voice of the first woman governor of Rhode Island, although our nation has never had any female heads of state.  For her finale, Miss Medium spoke to the famous magician Harry Houdini who passed away a dozen years ago.

“In this universe,” says Miss Medium, referring to the reality with which we are all familiar, “Mr. Houdini died from complications due to a poorly timed punch to the stomach.  But tonight we hear the Great Houdini himself, not back from the grave, but having sidestepped that grave altogether!”

“As supernatural as it seems,” say Professor Slater, “this is actually very advanced physics.  Should she come to Cambridge, our department is prepared to offer the young lady a full scholarship.” 

But Miss Medium isn’t interested.  “I learn more about the world by traveling around it with my stage presentation,” she says, “and about other worlds just by tuning my radio.”