During my proofreading of Mary’s interviews, I came across some details, anecdotes and trivia that I thought would be fun to share with you. There are also some topics here from other sources. Click on images to enlarge them. The entries are in no particular order. You can use these links to jump to topics of interest and the arrow in the bottom right corner to return to the top of this page. Bracketed [ ] info are my comments. I hope you enjoy reading at least some of this!
JANE’S TRANSFORMATION WHEN SPEAKING AS SETH
CADDY SWEET CADDY
THE LOADED GUN
A RARE TYPO IN NoPR
THE FLOOD OF ’72
JANE’S SACRIFICE?
NY BOYS HYDROPLANE
A PSYCHIC READING FOR JANE
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT SETH THREE
RICH SINGS THE (SUMARI) BLUES
FIVE TABLE TIPPING TALES
A SURPRISE BONUS
• THE NAKED CLASS
Leonard Yaudes Interview, October 2009 | Leonard lived below Jane and Rob in the Water Street house. Jane’s handmade A Little Book to Leonard was a get-well gift to Leonard when he had bypass surgery. You can see and purchase a copy of the book here. Some of you might be familiar with “The Naked Class.” A detailed version of this “revealing” event can be found in the Sue Watkins book Conversations with Seth, Chapter 9 “The Naked and the Dead: Or How We Took Off Our Clothes and Put on the Opposite Sex.” Now for the rest of the story…

Leonard: As I said, we’ve been going to Cape Cod since 1963. And I think it was in the early seventies that summer near Provincetown out at Truro down through to Wellfleet, the National Park Service declared a clothing optional beach. I’ve always been one that wanted to try everything. So one day I thought, oh, I guess I’ll go out to the clothing optional beach to see what it’s all about. It was five miles long, and I was a runner at the time, and I waited till the tide went out and then the sand would be as hard as a gym floor, and I would run down the beach. Someone way down had put a pipe in the dunes and spring water came out, and someone else had put a big glass there, a jar and we could drink water over there. That was a good place to turn around and come back. That summer after I went the one time, I went every day.About three or four days after I was home, Jane said, “Tell me about the therapy you went through this past summer.” And I said, “I didn’t do therapy or anything like that, workshops.” She said, “Oh, no, don’t kid me.” She said, “I know that you went to therapy or something this summer because you’re so different.” And I said, “Well, what’s different about me?” She said, “You’re unlocked,” which was a strange expression. I said, “Unlocked? What do you mean?” She said, “It’s like what you see is what you get, and you’re just totally relaxed. You’re not on guard or anything like that.” She said, “You’re just different. Now tell me all about it.”
And I said, “Well, Jane, the only thing I did,” I said, “I met a lot of interesting people and some good conversation. But,” I said, “it was at the nudist beach.” Well, that was like putting a lightbulb on. “Tell me all about it.” So then she said, “If it did that much good for you,” she said, “I’m going to experiment with it with my group.” I said, “Oh, Jane, I wouldn’t do that.” I said, “It’s not natural in the middle of winter with snow outside to run around nude in the house.” She said, “No,” she said, “I think it’s expressing more freedom and just…” well, she went on. I said, “Okay, well, who am I to boss you?” I said. But it didn’t work. I mean it just didn’t work. And that’s the only thing I know that she tried that didn’t succeed. And maybe it did with the smaller group? I never pursued it…
• JANE’S TRANSFORMATION WHEN SPEAKING AS SETH
Ed Young PhD Interview, March 2011 | Physicist, Stanford U. Private session with Jane/Seth in 1976

Ed Young: The most astonishing thing was in real life even at that stage of her life in 1976, she had pretty bad rheumatoid arthritis.
But she was bent over. And it’s hard to even picture it for you. She was – her fingers and hands were gnarled and she was bent over. And she had this little mousy voice that was, you know, like a, almost a little old – she wasn’t that old, really. But the rheumatoid arthritis made her older than she seemed. I mean, made her seem older than she was. But she had this little voice, and she was crippled and bent over and stuff. And then Seth would come through, and when Seth came through, boom, there was this voice that was like Charles Laughton on the English stage.
And she could get up and walk around and everything as if there was nothing wrong with her.
Yeah. And I would just be fascinated. I’d go, “Holy cow. Look at how much of – look at the body respond to the difference, how quickly it could respond one way or the other, depending on who was controlling the body.”
And I was just amazed at that flexibility in the body. I thought, “Wow. What does that say about the disease? That it’s something that she needs to experience, needs to go through. And it’s generated by her, her personality. Not this other entity. And look how fast the body changes to being just fine whenever he entered.”
And I’m telling you sometimes this would happen as quick as turning on and off a light switch.
Mary Dillman: Okay. Because I knew that between she and Seth it could happen – flash back and forth quite fast. But I didn’t realize the physicality or the, her…
Ed Young: Yes. Yes. Yeah. You could feel the presence. You could hear it in the voice difference. Think of a great Shakespearean actor from the days before microphones and you really had to project in the room. He came across that way. Okay. And yet when she came back she would say in this tiny little voice and crunched over again, she’s like, “I’m back.”
Well, it went back and forth because the stupid professor that was with me, he wasn’t paying attention. He had this narrow, logical brain. And Seth would say something like, “Well, you ask the mind to give you the answers.” Something we were talking about. And this professor would say, “Well, let me see. I don’t know. Let’s see. Well, how would you do this?” And Jane would be back at this point. Okay? And all of a sudden Seth would come right back in the body, and he had a bit of like an Italian accent.
So, it was kind of like imagine a great Shakespearean actor with Pavarotti doing Shakespeare.
Okay. So, imagine that, okay?
So, this stupid professor would say, “Well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And all of a sudden Seth would get mad. He’d come right back into Jane and go, “You ask of the mind.” [Laughter]
“What did I just tell you?” You know? And she’d be back and there would be this pause because it was so startling. And then she’d be back and like, “I’m back.” [Laughter]
So, there was the voice thing, the energy of the voice, and then there was the physicality switch that was so instantaneous that it was just amazing. And while I was watching Dr. Oz earlier today, I thought, “You know, I should send him a note because I should tell him if you think the faith healing thing is interesting as a physician,” I said, “you should see what I’ve seen.”
• CADDY SWEET CADDY
Marilyn Aber Interview, April 2011 | Marilyn worked with Rob at Artistic Greetings in the ouija board days.

Marilyn: Oh yeah. They [Jane and Rob] met. He was out of New York working on a cartoon strip [Captain Marvel & more]. He was stressed and needed to get out of New York, and he met her. They just said let’s get out of here. They went to Florida in the Cadillac and lived in it for a while, until they figured out what they were gonna do. [This would probably have been in 1954 when Jane divorced Walt in Volusia FL.]
• THE LOADED GUN
Not from an interview, but a September 2, 1990 article in The Saratogian: “Walter E. Zeh: It ended with a bang!” You can read more about Walt here.

From the Article: “During the summer of 1951, my first wife (the late author Jane Roberts) and I set out from Baltimore to leave the rigors of the big city life for the beauty of northern New York state, where we had both grown up.
“We had decided to take a temporary job at a dude ranch near Warrensburg. The exact nature of our work had not been divulged to us in advance by our prospective employer…. It was simply a state of our incompatibility with the work and with our backgrounds… I was to be a kitchen helper, and my wife… on the desk in charge of souvenir sales….”
[Skipped content, mostly about Walt’s kitchen misadventures including mistaking a jug of vanilla extract for salad dressing which he poured on an institutional-sized bowl of salad.]
“With that I proceeded to what was to prove the second element in a chain of events that would terminate our employment at the ranch… As I was preparing the bag of coffee for the large urn in the dining room, I heard a shot come from the direction of the souvenir stand, which was in my line of sight. I saw my wife with a rifle in her hands, and one of her fellow employees taking it away from her. I was so upset by all of this that I knocked the coffee onto the floor, and the ensuing mess can only be imagined.”
[skipped content]
“It developed that my wife, who had been asked to hand out a .22-caliber rifle to a patron who had requested one for the target practice range at the ranch, had inadvertently pulled the trigger, sending a bullet into the ceiling. We were never able to determine why the rifle was loaded while not in use. The next morning, we were informed (by the proprietor) that the relationship was not working out well. We seemed to cost him more than we were worth, and (he) politely suggested we terminate our employment immediately…
“Post Script: Zeh went on to become an administrative analyst with the New York State Office of General Services. He recently retired after 25 years of OGS employment, and admits he doesn’t attempt to make many salads in the kitchen at the Greenfield Center home he shares with his second wife, Gretchen.”
• A RARE TYPO IN NoPR
Arthur Fine Interview, October 2008 | One of the New York Boys but didn’t attend many classes
Arthur: Today I was reading in The Nature of Personal Reality and I noticed something which seemed to me to be a typo. The word was resolved, and it seemed that it should be unresolved. It was page 132.
[The word is “resolved” in both the Amber-Allen and Prentice Hall publications.]
“For all her talk of desperation, then, Dineen has chosen her field of conflict. She will avoid any kind of disfiguration or severe health problem, which to her would be a far greater danger. Because of different personal characteristics, another individual will hold qualities of the mind, say, inviolate, and work out challenges through bodily illness. Another may choose the severest poverty, projecting into that situation his or her own resolved conflicts. Another may choose alcoholism.”
—The Nature of Personal Reality, Part Two: Chapter 17: Session 661, May 7, 1973
Mary picked up this discrepancy in her comparison of the printed books to Rob’s notes. Arthur was correct, the word should be unresolved. Nice catch, Arthur!
• THE FLOOD OF ’72
Most of us have read a bit about the great flood of June 1972 (NoPR) caused by Hurricane Agnes, but did you know that the Chemung County Historical Society in Elmira, NY had produced a booklet about it? Publication date is August 1972. The Water Street apartment was about a block away from the Chemung River, so in prime flooding area. The water came up to the second floor of the house, where Jane and Rob were hunkered down. Flooding finally dissipated July 6, 1972. This June was the 50th anniversary of the flood. I purchased a copy of the booklet from CCHS a year or so ago, but it looks like now they’re only available as used books on Amazon and eBay. Here are just a few photos. Click to enlarge.



• JANE’S SACRIFICE?
Pat Norelli Interview, October 2008 | Pat was a class member and friend, Seth’s student who “kept falling in love with men she couldn’t have” (see previous excerpt for more info). I listened to Pat’s interview after I’d listened to the 2022 California Seth Conference, in which Virginia Bennett brought up something similar, “Jane Roberts Died for Our Sinful Selves.” Virginia also did a little astrology about Jane. You can watch her YouTube presentation on this page.
Pat: Jane’s southern moon node, where she was in a previous lifetime and should not have been in this lifetime, should not have hung around in, was in the tenth house, which is the house of public service and the house of being before the public. People with suns in the tenth house tend to be leaders, you know, they tend to be well-known, that kind of thing.
And her northern moon node, where she was supposed to be in this lifetime and develop in this lifetime, was in the fourth house, which is a very private house, a very spiritual house but a very private house. And I think the more she became public, the more she was published, the more the public interfered with her life, the more she deteriorated.
And I’ve often – I don’t know what more to make of it. I sit there and I say, but, you know, I’m arguing with the chart, I’m arguing with the spirit in the chart, and I said, but she’s given us so much, how else could she have done this.
Mary: Yeah.
Pat: How else? You know, I see her almost like a Christ figure, sacrificing herself having – knowing that this is where she wanted to stay, this is where her soul wanted to stay but she had to give it to other people and she was like a sacrifice on her part to go there.
• NY BOYS HYDROPLANE
Larry Herschaft Interview, July 2008 | A New York Boy, has some of Rob’s paintings including the York Beach one of Jane sitting on some rocks.

Larry: Yeah we’d get home at 5 or 6 in the morning. It was really really dangerous. I remember once I was driving and it was the winter and our car hydroplaned. Wait, you’re going to like this. Maybe you heard this story. There were too many people in the car. It was a big car. It was Jeffrey’s car, and there were so many people in the car, Jeffrey was in the trunk.

And the car hydroplaned, it went (making swishing noises). I wasn’t even going fast. That happens. So, and it came to a stop. I think there was a sign that said “Rest Area.” We thought that was very Sethian. And then Jeffrey [Marcus] got out of the trunk and said, “That was great!” [Said with much enthusiasm.]
• A PSYCHIC READING FOR JANE
Peggy Huddleston Interview, July 2010 | She heard Jane being interviewed on the radio in Philadelphia and tracked her and Rob down at the studio. She had not heard of Jane or Seth before and was instantly hooked. They immediately became friends. Peggy drove up to Elmira to get a reading from Jane one day, and then Peggy did one of her own for Jane. Jane had been wondering why she was having health problems.
Peggy: So I – what I – I just sort of closed my eyes and just listened to that place where I always can hear. I can ask questions and hear the answers. It said – it told Jane that she was conflicted because she was used to information coming from her own intellect of things she had thought of and said, and so she was sort of in resistance to someone else knowing more than she knew. It was an ego thing. And that she had to let go more and not sort of fight against. Like this force was coming through and her own ego would sort of get a little annoyed that it knew something she didn’t know. And that was the tension that was being caused in her throat…. I said, “This who tension is causing you to hold…” That’s right, she wanted to know what was causing the tension in her body that was causing arthritis. It was one or the other. I can find the script and it will remind us.
So it was either the tension in her throat or the rheumatoid arthritis because she had it then. And it explained that it was a resistance to all this material of Seth coming through and she had to relax and just accept this was possible because she’s very intellectual and she was always trying to struggle with well, “How could this be happening?” But they were very friendly and they’re just loads of fun to hang out with. I mean they’re very casual. We’d go out to some local deli to have lunch or dinner or Jane would just make sandwiches. We’d just sit around and talk. It was just like you know hanging out with good friends.
[Peggy could not find the transcript of the Seth Session.]
• A LITTLE BIT ABOUT SETH THREE
Pat LaGrassa Interview, May 2007 | Pat and her daughter Kim both attended ESP classes
Pat: The one thing I do remember: thinking about things during the week and you then getting to class and Seth would bring it right up.
Kim: That’s not a coincidence
Pat: I don’t know how he did it, but he did it. When I was in class he went from one reality on to the next where his voice got deeper.
Kim: In other words, there was Seth 1, Seth 2, Seth 3. He actually would say himself that he was going into the next one which was too hard for him almost to communicate. His language was limited.
Pat: I don’t know what goes on.
Kim: Even to him he did not know what went on in the next…. He was Seth 3 at one point and you couldn’t understand it – it would be too slow or too fast. Then it would come back to Jane as being just her Seth number one and say “sorry, I don’t know what happened to me either.”
• RICH SINGS THE (SUMARI) BLUES
Jeff Marcus/Rich Kendall Interview, October 2006 | Jeff and Rich were both NY Boys

Jeff Marcus: In mid-December, Sumari had come through. And we’d come to class and Seth was coming, Sumari come home. It’s right in the transcript, I believe. We don’t have a tape for it. We never did. We were getting it from Fred and Pete, but their tape was warped or something. We never were able to get that one. I would really love to get a copy of that one.
Richard Kendall: Yeah. That would be nice to have that tape of that first class.
Jeff Marcus: But Sumari came through, and various people in the class were singing along, which I thought was pretty amazing. But the most amazing of all, I turn around, and he’s [Rich Kendall] singing along in Sumari at the very first class that he had ever gone to, and he had never even heard of it before.
Mary Dillman: Rich?
Jeff Marcus: Yes.
Mary Dillman: Singing.
Jeff Marcus: And he says he doesn’t remember anything about it.
Richard Kendall: I don’t.
Jeff Marcus: But I would –
Richard Kendall: But I take your word.
Jeff Marcus: But I would swear on the Bible that you were, or anything else for that matter.
Richard Kendall: I don’t believe you. [Laughter]
Mary Dillman: Well, you do sing Sumari sometimes?
Richard Kendall: Yeah. I do sometimes.
• FIVE TABLE TIPPING TALES
Rich Kendall Interview of Jeff Marcus, September 1988
Rich: AA go get Ricky – that’s what I want to know… First of all I talked to Sue because as I was doing the transcript, I thought the name of the table was AA but then as Jane was talking she said, “AA I know you’ve never worked with a four-legged table before,” so obviously it was
like some kind of personality or something. [Deb: See my update below which includes an explanation.]
Jeff: It was an entity that moves tables. Or I don’t know why… I don’t quite know why Jane came up with the AA in the first place, but she had done exercises like that before with an entity called AA. For whatever reason I don’t know if it has anything to do with Alcoholics Anonymous, American Airlines…
Rich: I think the simplest way to do it is, why don’t you just talk about what
you remember since I wasn’t there, just ramble on boy…

Jeff: I don’t remember too much at this point. What I do remember is I was extremely skeptical. To me this wasn’t what I was going up to class for, it was just parlor tricks and the kind of stuff that was quote, “mere psychism” as Francois might have called it. The kind of stuff that I felt gave the whole psychic field a bad name. And Jane didn’t have this attitude at all. She had done it before, evidently from previous class members wanting to do this kind of stuff. It was an energy exercise to see if we could generate energy from ourselves into inanimate objects, psychokinesis, as it would be called technically. That is what it’s called, right? And there were a number of tables around the room that were being moved, not just by Jane but by other people as well. And we put our hands not flat down on tables but touching the tables in a way that would be like touching the Ouija board.
Rich: Keep going.
Jeff: Where the fingers would be…
Rich: On top of it…?
Jeff: Yeah, straight up as you would be to play a piano, if you start out playing the piano.
Rich: Right. Cute analogy. And then exactly…
Jeff: And then I guess some people did lower their hands somewhat…
Rich: Some people did what?
Jeff: Lower their hands but I didn’t see anybody holding it from underneath and I forget whether the tables actually moved a little with no one holding it after a while. These things were not just moving slightly, after a while they were spinning, and gyrate… they were rocking and doing all kinds of crazy things and it was quite amazing and I just would have liked some of those Long John Nebel, those people who pride themselves on exposing psychic fraud, to tell me exactly how that was done. Because we were quite amazed and as I said…
Rich: So the table, like the leg would lift up, because on the tape it sounds like it’s thumping.
Jeff: It was moving…
Rich: Turning, like, they keep going twirling…
Jeff: Turning a bit, moving, going up and down, turning around.
Rich: I would have loved to see that. Wow.
Jeff: It was pretty incredible. It looked like special effects that you might see in a movie.
Rich: What kind of table was it? She said 4-legged I think.
Jeff: One was like maybe a card table, another was an end table. Since there were, I don’t know, 20 of us or so in the class that evening, and she had us sitting, a few of us, at each table. I don’t know if everybody participated or not, I don’t really recall. I don’t think it was one of the more heavily attended classes by comparison. What was the date on it?
Rich: August 1, ‘72.
Jeff: Yeah, it was in the first year and was during the summer.
Rich: So the table lifted up a little and thumped and also like moved, turned, like…
Jeff: I just remember it was doing way too much for one person with hands underneath there to…
Rich: Even if they had their hands underneath which they didn’t.
Jeff: I don’t think it was done with knees or anything else. The movements were much too…
Rich: Well, we’ll have to try it sometime.
Jeff: And that was the only time of any classes I went to after that or from any of the transcripts that I heard of, that was the last time that we did it in class.
Rich: Yeah, and I missed that class.
Jeff: It wasn’t… evidently done in class before. And as I said, I was not into it when she was talking about it, I thought it was… You know I’m traveling all this way and for doing this psychic nonsense. And by the end of the night I was completely astonished. And it’s one of the reasons I point to when people say, oh come on, this kind of stuff doesn’t really happen. She’s just talking, it’s just her subconscious, or her this and that. This truly amazed me and people singing Sumari, including people who had never even heard of it before singing along word for word with a language that nobody consciously understood. I defy any so-called expert debunkers to figure out how the heck that happened.
Rich: I’m just sad I missed that table class.
Jeff: And Jane definitely was the ultimate cheerleader that night. I don’t know why I taped it, but I did. I don’t think anybody by the end of the night was disappointed that Seth didn’t come through and we did spend the whole night doing it. It was just… it turned out to be a lot of fun. I don’t know how many people took what happened there to make a big impression on what they did for the rest of their lives, but I was upset that this was going on in the beginning of class, that I traveled all the way up there and this was all we were going to do. By the end of the night, we just had too much fun to worry about that, and we were definitely in an upbeat mood when we went home that night.
Shirley Bickford/Linda McCracken Interview, October 2009 | Mother and daughter who both attended the classes
Shirley: Ah, some of the other things that we did, ah, the table tipping was my favorite. One of the classmates [Ruth Klebert] had made, I believe she made it in industrial arts – a three-legged table. We tried it because we thought that maybe we could make it answer questions.
We had tap once for yes and tap twice for no, and so forth. We asked if the table, whoever was handling the table, if they would give us a name. Went through the whole alphabet, came back to A and stopped. Went through the whole alphabet and came back to A and stopped…. So we figured it was AA. And then on, any time we used the table tipping, it was AA who came through.
The first time that we ever tried it, we barely had our fingertips on the table, and I think there were 5 or 6 of us around this little tiny three-legged table, and it took off like mad. There’re three legs, and one leg would go up and the other two would come down. In other words, the third leg would go up and the other two… it just kept going, just walking; only it was really running. We literally ran to keep up with it. And the funny part was, that there was a mirror on the door to the bathroom, and we could watch ourselves running with this fool table and we were laughing our fool heads off all the time that we were running towards the mirror. So, the table tipping was fun.
Later on, we did try another table – it was her dining room table, I believe. It was a drop leaf table – very very heavy, four legs. We all got around the table, gently putting our fingertips on it and it would rock back and forth, side to side. As it rocked, we kinda got tired of it going back and forth, so people, one at a time, walked away. After a while, everybody was gone except me. There I am with this huge table going back and forth, back and forth. No way I could do it all by myself. So this was… this was really a fun experiment.
Linda: Remember the scale?
Shirley: Oh yes, on that little three-legged table, when Jane decided to try an experiment with pressure on the table to see whether they could get that third leg down once it came up. They took a scale, a bathroom scale, put it on the table, pressed down on it – got something like 50 lbs. of pressure on it and it still wouldn’t go down. Finally, one of the men who was trying this made a lunge toward it and broke the table completely.
[laughter]
Shirley: The whole side of the table. And of course, my worry was, if Ruth had made that table, I was very, very worried about how she would feel about that.
Mary: Right. So that was Ruth Klebert, did you say?
Shirley: Yes. Yes. And ah, the table tipping was really the most fun. I can’t remember what else. Let’s see. Oh. When Seth did come through, this was after we had tried the various experiments. One of the other experiments was Jane would put a picture or something on the door in the morning and then we were to concentrate on her door to see if we got anything, and then bring that to class with us. And then the next morning she would change whatever it was and we would try again. I wasn’t very good at that at all. I didn’t get anything. Some of the group, they really did. They got very close to the real thing, but that was one of the things I wasn’t that interested in. Just give me a three-legged table and I’m happy.
[laughter]
Marian Rutty/Judy Franzen Interview, August 2011 | Daughters of ESP class member Ruth Klebert
Marian: Yeah, because see that was back – when I saw her I mean it was really early on – I mean it was just growing and developing, but I also had a young family and so, you know, and things were tense between my husband and me so there was a whole bunch going on so I didn’t stick with it like mom did, you know? And mom with the table – you know, I never was there for any of those sessions. Were you Judy?
Judy: No. No.
Mary Dillman: But that table that you gave me photographs of, which I really appreciate –
Marian: Well, it’s sitting in Judy’s living room.
Mary Dillman: I mean it’s been written about in a couple of her books –
Judy: It’s good, hard wood. See, I hit it the other day.
Mary Dillman: But that must have been that they did the table tipping over at your house then – or your mother’s house.
Marian: No, mom took it to – it’s small so –
Mary Dillman: Okay. So she took it over there.
Marian: She took it over, yeah.
Mary Dillman: Okay. Well, then they broke it one time?
Marian: Oh yeah, it was in pieces.
Mary Dillman: Trying to get it back on the ground.
Marian: Right.
Mary Dillman: That’s pretty amazing.
Marian: I know. Is that what they said? That it was –?
Mary Dillman: Yeah.
Marian: It didn’t want to go down, huh?
Mary Dillman: They just kept pushing – yeah, I think they actually – I think at one point – I think it was Bill Gallagher and Rob – with Peg and Jane – put a scale on the table too to see how many pounds they were inserting there or pushing down.
Marian: Interesting. Because the table – when you look at the picture of the top of the table it was just boards glued together to make this big thing that mom then cut the pie crust shape out of. And so… Interesting. Yeah.
Mary: That’s pretty amazing. Pretty amazing.
[I’ve been looking for the table photos but could not find them.]
Marilyn Aber Interview, April 2011 | Friend, worked with Rob at Artistic Greeting
Mary Dillman: Do you recall any of the things that happened Friday nights, other than… I mean, any specific stories of any one time?
Marilyn Aber: Oh, we did a little table tipping one night.
Mary Dillman: Oh, that must have been fun.
Marilyn Aber: Yeah. Just placing hands on the table and seeing if it would move or rise.
Mary Dillman: Did you have much luck with it?
Marilyn Aber: Well, it wiggled. [laughter]
Weisssenbuhlers Interview, May 2007 | Elsbeth was the “Woman From Big Flats” Jane talked about in The God of Jane in Chapter 11. Rich Kendall wrote a more detailed accounting of their friendship and some related synchronicities in his book A Creative Journey.
Elsbeth: And you know, when Robbie and Janie first got into this [speaking for Seth], she said, “Well what the heck is this?” She said Janie didn’t even have enough tea cups or anything and all of a sudden this thing happened to them. And I remember Bill saying one night they were sitting around at the couch table – either Gallaghers or Butts, I forgot – and they were trying that levitation thing, and the table rose, and they could not get it back down. He said it was the absolutely the spookiest, scariest thing. I don’t remember how they did it then – it just hovered, and they got scared.
UPDATE: Just a little more information to round out this topic. According to Mary’s notes, there were at least four table-tipping sessions. 10/21/67 (The Gallaghers, mentioned in Session 374); 11/22/67 (described in Session 381 notes); 9/7/68 (Tam Mossman and Kathy Koklas, no notes); 8/1/72 according to Jeff Marcus, interview above).
10/23/67 “Give us a moment here however. (Pause.) Now. First of all: the affair the other evening with the Gallaghers was legitimate. There was contact made with the Jesuit’s [Bill Gallagher] father. (Saturday, October 21, 1967, at a table-tipping session.) I told you that Ruburt’s abilities were developing along several new lines, and this is the beginning of one of them.” Session 374, 10/23/67 9:15 PM Monday, TES08.
– – –
11/24/67 Session 381, TES08 Notes by Rob: “(Part one: A table tipping session on Wednesday, November 22, 1967, in our living room, with the following: Jane and Rob, and Claire Crittenden and Carl Watkins. Highly successful, the best achieved up to that time, with seemingly a full levitation almost accomplished.”)
[The full and very detailed story can be found in Session 381, approx 3 full pages of notes. Mentioned are “AA,” the table belonging to Ruth Klebert and the damage done to it in a previous TT event, and placing the bathroom scale to gauge pressure used to get the table level and/or back on the floor several times—up to 90 lbs! Rob commented that it seemed the table had a mind of its own, and at one point vaulted towards the ceiling and inverted itself.]
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11/24/67 Session 381, TES08 Notes by Rob: “(PART TWO): (The 381st session took place, unscheduled, after a lengthy and active table-tipping session of the evening of Friday, November 24, 1967. Claire Crittenden, Carl Watkins, Jane and I, along with Pat Norelli, from Boston, were joined by Bill and Peg Gallagher, Doug Hicks, Danny Stimmerman, Curt Kent and Peg’s brother Dick and his wife Carol, for an even dozen present, at our apartment.”
[Again, a very detailed accounting (more than two pages of text) can be read in Session 381, TES08. The table was again broken in this session. This is followed by Peg Gallagher’s notes of Seth coming through after the table experience.]
Seth: “The name Carol is called Arparka now you have seen a physical object behave in a manner in which no physical object has a right to behave. The physical universe is as unpredictable as the behavior of that table. If you have questions I shall answer them but all of this is meant to showy that reality is more than you thought reality to be… I am not here as the host of a party. I am not here for your amusement or pleasure. I am here for your education and training.” [See Session 381 for the rest.]
(“Who is AA?”)
Seth: “AA is a friend of Rupurt’s student, Venice. It is Alexander Anare (the “e” is silent), who died in 1906 and was a friend of her family….” [This continues on with more info about AA, and explaining the TT experience.]
• A SURPRISE BONUS [well it was for me]
Stephen Fieno Interview, June 2012 | Fieno was an ESP class member
Stephen Fieno: All of her [Jane’s] work can be found in the Library of Congress?
Mary Dillman: Not her personal journals and things, just her books.
Just her books! Hah! I learn something new every day. Here’s the Library of Congress page. Following a link on that page, I came across other national libraries that hold Jane’s books. If you go here, and hover over the flags next to the book, you’ll see what countries they are. I also came across this page, WorldCat Identities, about Jane Roberts.
Thank you so much Deb! Such entertaining reading!
Thank you Marianna! And thank you for reminding me to turn on “commenting” !