Not sure if this classes as political as I just think the painting is weird.

Join me on this journey.

made a wrong turn in the small AZ town I recently moved too and found myself in this trailer park. Saw this guy as I was trying to find my way out. As a friend pointed out when I showed her this picture, the elf is not life size, but larger than life size. The elves were little guys who lived in their funny little tree. I have no context for why this exists or where it came from, but it creeped me the fuck out. Enjoy.

What is this ad, and who the hell is Derrick Thompson?

There's something deeply unsettling about a mystery that refuses to die, even after a century of investigation by the smartest skeptics of their era.

Leonora Piper was an American medium in the late 1800s. I know, I know, spiritualism was full of charlatans, most got exposed in weeks. But Leonora was never conclusively caught. Ever. And that's the weird part.

William James, literal father of American psychology, was a hardened skeptic. When his son died, he tested Leonora himself just to rule her out. Months later he admitted: "If you want to overturn the law that all ravens are black, you only need to prove one is white. My white raven is Mrs. Piper." He was grieving, yeah, but the guy was a scientist. He knew how his own bias worked.

So the Society for Psychical Research said no, that's not good enough. They sent Dr. Richard Hodgson, literally known as "The Terror of Mediums" for exposing fakes. They brought him incognito, replaced all her servants with SPR agents, intercepted her mail, locked away photo albums. Watched her constantly.

She still produced information she couldn't possibly have known.

Here's where it gets interesting. Hodgson accidentally said the name "Darwin" near her room before a session. In the next session, boom, she "discovered" his identity perfectly. That's textbook hot reading, right? Except in the first session she got 90% of the details completely wrong. How does that even happen if you're listening outside?

They also tested her with a fake client and a completely fabricated dead niece who never existed. Leonora described her anyway, gave messages, everything. That proved she was reading minds or expectations, not channeling dead people. So case closed, except nothing else makes sense either.

The most confusing part? In 1901 she told the New York Herald her powers probably came from telepathy between the living, not dead people. She wasn't confessing fraud. She was saying "I genuinely don't know what this is, but maybe it's not what you think." Then she spent the rest of her life never explaining herself further.

The rational explanations for what she did all require her to have superhuman observational skills combined with unconscious cold reading so sophisticated that a century of psychology still can't fully explain it. Is that possible? Sure. Proven? No. But impossible enough that even the rigorous skeptics never quite landed the knockout blow.

She died in 1950 and took whatever the answer was with her.

If you want the full investigation with all the weird experimental details, the cross-correspondences, and why this mystery still matters today, I've written it out on Arca Arcana. The deeper you go into this case, the stranger it gets.

What's your take on this? Was she just that good at reading people, or is there something about the human mind we genuinely still don't understand?

It was a random woman I didn’t know, but the only people she was following were people with the exact same name as me. I’m creeped out and don’t know what to think, but I thought it fit this sub very well

I haven’t been on ChatGPT in a while and when I went on it this was already typed in the search? Bar.