Feda

Feda was the spirit control of Gladys Osborne Leonard, an English medium who began her professional career in 1914 and became one of the most closely studied trance mediums in the history of British Spiritualism. Communicating through Leonard while the medium sat in trance, Feda presented herself as a young Hindu girl who claimed to be Leonard's own great great grandmother, and it was in this persona that she conducted the sittings that made Leonard's reputation. Leonard rose to national attention after Sir Oliver Lodge, the physicist, and his wife came to her for a sitting following the death of their son Raymond, killed in action during the First World War in 1915. The messages Feda relayed during those sittings, and the evidential details they were said to contain, formed the basis of Lodge's 1916 book Raymond, or Life and Death, which brought both Lodge's grief and Leonard's mediumship to a very wide public audience at a moment when the war had left enormous numbers of British families searching for exactly this kind of contact with the dead. Leonard continued to work as a professional medium for decades after the Lodge sittings, but it was the Raymond case specifically, arriving at the height of British wartime grief, that fixed Feda's name in the public record and drew the sustained scholarly attention that followed for the rest of Leonard's career.

Feda's standing as either a discarnate communicator or a psychological phenomenon generated by Leonard's own mind was the subject of sustained investigation by the Society for Psychical Research across several decades, and the controlled testing behind that investigation is as much a part of Feda's documented history as the sittings themselves. The parapsychologist Whately Carington devised experiments specifically designed to probe whether Feda behaved as an independent personality or as what researchers call a secondary personality, a distinct psychological pattern arising from within the medium's own unconscious mind rather than from any communicating spirit, and Carington's conclusion favored the secondary personality explanation. Other substantial and closely recorded sittings, published in the Society's own Journal and Proceedings, involved the writer Radclyffe Hall and her partner Una Troubridge, and the Methodist minister Charles Drayton Thomas, whose long series of sittings with Leonard became one of the most extensively documented mediumship case studies the Society produced. Feda remains, within that documented record, one of the most rigorously tested spirit controls in the entire history of organized psychical research.