From 1913 to 1937 a St. Louis homemaker, Pearl Cur-ran, seemed to channel conversations and literary works from a seventeenth-century Englishwoman named Patience Worth. The communications were at first produced through the use of a Ouija board and then later through automatic speech. “Patience” displayed knowledge, sophistication, and creative capacities apparently radically different from those of Mrs. Curran. In addition to volumes of engaging and often acerbic conversation, Patience produced several novels, plays, thousands of poems, witty epigrams and pithy aphorisms, many of them of exceptional merit. Patience also displayed unprecedented improvisational, mnemonic, and creative capacities. She could improvise poems on any subject proposed to her, sometimes performing astonishing literary stunts, and her works were produced without need of revision or correction. Moreover some of her works were written in a novel archaic Anglo-Saxon dialect, and even her more modern works contained a peculiar preponderance of Anglo-Saxon root words. Because scrupulous investigation has found no person corresponding to the Patience Worth persona, it seems likely that Patience represents a set of latent creative talents unleashed dissociatively in Pearl. This achievement resembles similar accomplishments of savants and prodigies, and the case raises intriguing issues about the limits of and prerequisites for human creativity.
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