The deaths of four Brewer High School students a few days before their graduation a century ago cast a pall over the city. Lawrence Aiken, Winfield Brown, Norman Herrick and Lamont Parker drowned during a class outing after their sailboat capsized and sank on June 12, 1906, on Hymes or Hines Pond, known today as Brewer Lake. The next day, while searchers looked for the bodies, bells tolled at City Hall and at the fire station. Graduation was canceled. One thousand people attended a funeral for three of the victims at the First Congregational Church.

This tragedy would have been forgotten long ago had it not been for a strange event that occurred the next day in an Old Town hotel 18 miles away. Over the noon meal, Henry T. Sparks, superintendent of the Brewer Public Works Department, was describing to Samuel D. Crocker, proprietor of the Crocker Hotel, about where searchers thought the bodies might be located in the pond.

Suddenly, at a table some 15 or 20 feet away, Crocker’s wife was observed to have gone into a trance. With tears streaming down her face, speaking in a “constrained and very peculiar voice,” she described where the boat was lying on top of one of the boys “in a great boiling spring” spewing forth sand, and where the other bodies were located at the bottom of the lake. Mrs. Crocker’s vision turned out to be generally accurate, although it was of no help to the searchers who found the sailboat and the bodies around 2 p.m. before the information had reached the pond.

We are aware of this story today only because of the efforts of Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, the scrupulously accurate Brewer historian and folklorist who also was interested in clairvoyance. Eckstorm investigated the case for professor H.N. Gardiner, a psychology professor at Smith College, her alma mater. He published the results four years later in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.

Eckstorm’s interest in psychic events was hardly unusual at that time, although even believers admitted the field was littered with exaggeration and fraud. That’s why investigators like Eckstorm and professor Gardiner conducted research in an effort to establish a scientific basis.

The newspapers in the summer of 1906 were full of examples of people who pursued supernatural interests. Mrs. Crocker was known as an amateur psychic, but there were plenty of professionals around. One of them was “The World’s Greatest Clairvoyant,” Prof. Von Cella, “Late of India.” At his office on Main Street from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week, Prof. Von Cella promised to “tell you whether your husband, wife or sweetheart is true or false, tell you how to gain the love of the one you most desire, even though miles away; how to succeed in business speculation, lawsuits; … how to regain youth, health and vitality” and other things – all with a money back guarantee.

One could choose from several less flamboyant mediums and clairvoyants who advertised in the newspapers and the city directory such as Mrs. M.E. Willis, “the great business and spiritual test medium” at 244 Harlow St. Another, Madam Zola, who had set up shop in Bar Harbor, was currently defending her honor. She issued a press release making it clear that “she is in no way connected with Gipsies or ordinary fortune tellers; that she is a scientist, palmist and not a grafter or a thief,” the Bangor Daily News reported Aug. 11.

For those looking for something with more of a religious flavor, there was plenty going on. The Penobscot Spiritual Temple Association was planning to meet Aug. 12-26 at Verona Park, while the Temple Heights Spiritualist Campmeeting was running Aug. 11-19 in Northport. The latter meeting featured Albert E. Tisdale, whose name had become “a household word among spiritualists” because of the “grandeur of his mediumship.” Mrs. Effie Webster Chapman, “one of the most gifted psychics in New England,” would also be there “to give tests and spirit messages from the platform each afternoon.”

The First Maine Spiritualists’ State Campmeeting Association would hold its 30th annual session at the group’s campground in Etna early in September. One of the featured speakers, the Rev. F.A. Wiggin, had made headlines in February when he channeled a message from a deceased Maine congressman, Joseph Manley, on the stage of Jordan Hall in Boston. Manley sent greetings to a friend, one Reynolds, who acknowledged them from the audience.

Alas, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm was not able to complete her research and the results left professor Gardiner unconvinced. Eckstorm had failed to get an exact account of Mrs. Crocker’s vision. Nor could she find the mysterious stranger who had delivered it to the principal of Brewer High, Clifton H. Preston. Preston had maintained the information conformed with the details of the retrieval of the bodies, however, as did Superintendent Sparks. But was it a case of “clairvoyance or coincidence?” asked Gardiner. He couldn’t decide.

Eckstorm did research on several other cases for professor Gardiner, according to letters discovered by Pauleena MacDougall, who is writing her biography. The Brewer historian, who is today famous for her writings on Maine Indians, was emotionally involved in the subject. She had a “fervid belief” in life after death, said MacDougall.

“No stranger to death, Eckstorm had already lost husband and daughter and soon would lose father and mother. What great comfort these cases of paranormal must have been to her as a proof of something beyond what could be seen in this life, providing some hope of reunion with loved ones after death,” according to MacDougall, who is associate director of the Maine Folklife Center.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net