Patience Worth: Psychic Mystery

Perhaps if it were not for the scholarly Casper S.Yost, the writing of Patience Worth might never have been brought to the public eye. It was Casper Salathiel Yost who published the first book about Patience Worth which provided a brief history of the coming of Patience Worth and a sampling of her poetry and prose as well as his interpretations of some of it. His small book was titled “Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery” and was published by Henry Holt and company in 1916. It was due to this book that the writing of Patience Worth gained some degree of notoriety attracting the attention of other newspaper men, doctors, lawyers, psychologists and college professors.Other books would eventually be written about Patience Worth and Pearl Curran over the next 100 years or so, but it was Casper Yost, with his gentle trust and belief that Patience Worth was a spirit of a woman who lived 250 years ago, who presented the story of Patience Worth in a simple non-scientific way that enabled Patience Worth to gain a substantial readership during the early 20th century. It helped of course that Casper Yost was the Editorial Director of the St. Louis Globe Democrat. He was an accomplished writer himself having written several books among which were “The Carpenter of Nazareth”, “The Making of a Successful Husband; Letters of a Happily Married Man to His Son” and “The Principles of Journalism”."The compiler of this book is not a spiritualist, nor a psychologist, nor a member of the Society for Psychical Research; nor has he ever had anything more than a transitory and skeptical interest in psychic phenomena of any character. He is a newspaper man whose privilege and pleasure it is to present the facts in relation to some phenomena which he does not attempt to classify nor to explain, but which are virtually without precedent in the record of occult manifestations. The mystery of Patience Worth is one which every reader may endeavor to solve for himself. The sole purpose of this narrative is to give the visible truth, the physical evidence, so to speak, the things that can be seen and that are therefore susceptible of proof by ocular demonstration. In this category are the instruments of communication and the communications themselves, which are described, explained and, in some cases, interpreted, where an effort at interpretation seems to be desirable.”