By William Bruce

Webster defines a séance as a meeting in which people attempt to make contact with the dead.  The movement was labeled Spiritualism and reached a peak in the United States in the first half of the 20th Century.

And Safford, Alabama, just 10 miles up the road from my hometown, had a practitioner of spiritualism.

An article in Wikipedia says that Spiritualism was “a religious movement based on the belief that the spirits of the dead exist and have both the ability and the inclination to communicate with the living.”

Well … uh … a’hem.

Enter Ms. Stroud.  Today, no one seems to remember her given name or much else about this mysterious individual.   For many years and into the 1950s, she owned The Spot Restaurant in Safford.  What is remembered is that she was rather nicely dressed and coiffed, was well-spoken and wore attractive jewelry.  Some also remember that she raised parakeets and had monkeys in cages out behind the restaurant.

Others wonder if she was related to the erudite Oxford Stroud, a legendary and well known literature professor at the University of Alabama.

But what is not well known is that Ms. Stroud was a spiritualist.  She held séances after hours in The Spot Restaurant.  The knowledge of these séances exists only among a few today who heard an older generation talking about their experiences.

My father, Henderson Bruce of Catherine, was a congenial sort of guy who apparently became friendly enough with Ms. Stroud to be invited to her séances.  I’m thinking this would have been in the 1940s or early 1950s.

I remember Daddy speaking several times humorously of the séance experiences.  He says the participants would sit around a table in a darkened room.  The table at some point would start vibrating and Ms. Stroud would go into a trance with her hands palms down on the table and in a strained voice say, “Edward [or whomever they were trying to reach] is that you trying to come through.”

Whether the table was vibrating from spirit machinations or manual manipulations by living humans is unanswered.

My father’s memories were later confirmed by Randolph Oxford of Orrville who laughingly told me years after my father’s death about the experiences.  He said that he and Daddy attended some of the séances together.  Daddy indicated that he and possibly others would knock back several shots of Early Times before the gatherings.  The Early Times bit is wholly believable.

But apparently, attendance at the séances had more of a negative effect on others.  Anne Orr, who grew up in the Orrville area, says her parents accepted an invitation from Ms. Stroud and attended only to “humor an older lady.”

However, Anne says her parents’ experience was not benign.  She says her father could never reconcile what happened that night with his religious beliefs and that afterward he slept with a shotgun by his bed.

The Spiritualism movement waned in the latter half of the 20th Century.  And alas, The Spot Restaurant is no more.

Perhaps the Spiritualism movement declined as the deceased got tired of blabbing with the earthbound.  Maybe they have set up a distilling operation in their current environs and are producing enough Early Times to entertain themselves without any idle chit-chat with the living.