TIME LINE__________

Psychic Investigators at the beginning of the 19th Century studied Mesmerism, a widely exhibited procedure in Europe and America. The press wrote many reports about extraordinary cases of extrasensory vision and clairvoyance; mesmerized young men and women, it was claimed, often identified objects held before them even with their eyes tightly blindfolded. Some subjects saw events happening at a great distance away or could look back into the past or forward into the future. Psychic investigators noted that these mesmerized people, especially those who said their powers were inspired by guardian spirits, were not that different in their actions from many of the later trance mediums in the seance rooms of the 1880s.