Secondary Personality or Spirit: The Scientific Case Built Around Feda

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.