In the 1850s, a wave of spiritualism swept the nation. The press reported spirits knocking on tables, children speaking in tongues, psychic healers who cured by laying on hands, and mediums who spoke with the dead.
Whitewater, Lake Mills and Waterloo were local hotbeds of the movement, and Milton farmer Morris Pratt (1820-1902) could usually be found at spiritualist meetings. He vowed that if he ever got rich he would devote his fortune to support the scientific teaching of spiritualism.
Most Americans eventually concluded that spiritualism was unsound or uninteresting, but Pratt remained a true believer. About 1884, he invested his life savings of $4,000 with fellow mystic Mary Hayes Chynoweth, whose guiding spirit had told her to buy a specific tract of northern forest. It turned out to contain some of the richest iron ore in the Gogebic Range, and Pratt was soon worth more than $200,000.
True to his word, he constructed an $80,000 building in downtown Whitewater for a spiritualist academy. Known locally as “Pratt’s Folly,” the Morris Pratt Institute enrolled its first students in 1902. The curriculum contained the typical slate of conventional courses, augmented by classes in psychic studies, mediumship, and the science of seances.
The school still exists today, relocated to West Allis, and one can enroll there to study clairvoyance, telepathy, mediumship and psychic surgery, among other subjects. Its graduates can go on to serve as clergy in one of the dozens of churches that belong to the National Spiritualist Association.
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment