Prior to recording EVPs on Computers, IC /Casette /Reel to Reel Tape Recorders, discarnate messages were recorded through Morse Code and Automatic Writing:

Messages from a Dead Soldier

Posted on Dec 5th, 2007 by metgat

http://metgat.zaadz.com/blog/2007/12/messages_from_a_dead_soldier

A heartwarming movie titled "A Rumor of Angels" was released about six years ago and is an occasional rerun on television.

The film stars Vanessa Redgrave as an elderly recluse in a small ocean-front town.   She befriends a 12-year-old neighbor boy who is grieving the loss of his mother in an auto accident.  She tells the boy about how her son had communicated with her following his death in the Vietnam War during 1974 and gives the boy her diary of spirit communication from her son.  The boy reads various entries in the diary and finds comfort in them until his stepmother and father discover the diary and conclude that the boy's mind is being poisoned by the elderly woman and prohibit him from further visiting her.  When the elderly woman dies, she communicates with the boy from the Other Side.

Probably few people who viewed the movie realize that it was based on a true story, although it took place in World War I, not the Vietnam War.
 
The story, with many Hollywood modifications, came from the 1918 non-fiction book, "Thy Son Liveth: Messages from a Soldier to his Mother," by Grace Duffie Boylan. 

The soldier in the story was Bob Bennett, who grew up with his widowed mother in an old home on the Hudson below Tarrytown, New York.  He went to Columbia University, where he studied electrical engineering, and was then commissioned as a second lieutenant in the army and sent off to fight in World War I.   Well before he went to college, Bob developed an interest in telegraphy and set up a wireless in his home with a large mast on the roof.  He persuaded his mother to learn Morse Code and they frequently experimented together.  "We used to sit up here in this room and pick up diplomatic secrets which we could not, fortunately, decode, and international messages, which we could not, unfortunately, I believe now, decipher," the mother related, going on to point out that Bob spent many of his leisure hours trying to simplify Marconi's already simple apparatus.

Not long after Bob was sent to France with the Engineers' Corps, his mother received a letter from him.  She took the letter up to his room to read it, and as she was reading it, the wireless signaled: 

"Attention!"   Then, the message came through in Morse Code:   "Mother, be game.  I am alive and loving you.  But my body is with thousands of other mothers' boys near Lens.  Get this fact to others if you can.  It's awful for us when you grieve, and we can't get in touch with you to tell you we are all right.  This is a clumsy way.  I'll figure out something easier.  I'm confused yet.  Bob."

A month later, official notice of Bob's death on the battlefield was received by his mother.   Before then, however, the mother had already received several additional wireless messages.  In the second one, Bob communicated:  "Get this across - there is no horror in death.  I was one minute in the thick of things, with my company, and the next minute Lieutenant Wells touched my arm and said:  ‘Our command has crossed: Let's go.'  I thought he meant the river, and followed him under the crossfire barrage the Tommies made, up to a hillside that had not noticed before: a clean spot and not blackened by the guns.  Lots of fellows I knew were there, and strange troops.  But they looked queer.  I glanced down at myself.  I was olive drab, all right.  But my uniform was not khaki.  It seemed to be a fabric of some more tenuous kind.  I had no gun. I overtook Wells.  ‘What in the deuce is the matter with me, with us all?' I asked.  He said, ‘Bob, we're dead.'  I didn't believe it at first.  I felt all right.  But the men were moving, and I fell in line. When we marched through the German barbed-wire barricades and in front of the howitzers, I realized that the body that could be hurt had been shed on the red field.  Then I thought of you.  Sent the wireless from an enemy station in the field.  The officer in charge couldn't have seen me.  But he heard, I guess, by the way his eyes popped.  He sent a few shots in my direction, anyway.  I am using an abandoned apparatus in a trench today, depending on relays."

Bob went on to explain that he was still very confused, but that Lt. Wells seemed to have a better handle on what was going on.   In a third wireless message, Bob communicated:  "Wells is getting to be a whale of an oracle.  Some of the fellows are in a funk, and others are sullen and unhappy, homesick, I guess.  The young married men, mostly.  If they could get in touch with their folks, it would be all right. That's why I want to try and simplify some system of communication.  You have never failed me; and now if you can get it firmly fixed in your mind that I am I, not what is vulgarly called a ghost but a being just as much as I ever was, we can start something worth while.  It's got to begin with someone as level-headed as you are.  I'm called away."

In the fourth wireless message, Bob encouraged his mother try automatic writing, as it was too difficult trying to get through on a wireless.  He received instructions from a "fellow" on his side as to how to do automatic writing and passed them on to his mother.   He pointed out that he would project his thoughts to her and she would just take dictation.  He warned her, however, to beware of "scalawags" - mischievous spirits who try to mix up things. 

"Don't try to hold your pencil any differently than you hold it ordinarily, mother, dear,  I am not guiding your pencil.  As I figure it out, I am simply dictating these letters by some improved form of telepathy, to your mind.  You do the writing.  It is wholly simple.  I really talk and you hear...We all have perceptions and faculties that are capable of lifting us into supermen. The rub is we do not suspect our own powers.  Do not let yourself be led into a maze of reasons why this thing cannot be.  What is, is."

After several failed attempts, Bob's mother got the hang of automatic writing. 

In the first clear automatic writing message, Bob explained that he was now working with sort of a "Red Cross unit" on his side, guiding newcomers as well as working with the wounded.  He said he could see his mothers mind like a white screen and knew he could write on it.   "Mother, the soul leaves the body as a boy jumps out of a school door," he wrote through his mother's hand.  "That is, suddenly and with joy.  But there is a period of confusion when a fellow needs a friend.  Quote that.  We are the friends.  I guess that is the best explanation I can give.  I told you Jack Wells came through with me.  He has gone away now.  I am told we go to other departments of usefulness, as others, suited to this field work, come on here.  I will tell you as much as I can."  

As Bob Bennett saw it from his side of the veil, there is little or no fear of death among men who go into battle.  "The soul seems to remember, suddenly, that it may be about to repeat an interesting experience," he communicated to his mother via automatic writing.  "The physical side of the soldier is dominated by the spiritual and carried on with a kind of thrilling joy.  The meanest man sometimes surprises his comrades by exhibitions of courage." 

Bob then mentioned "Cooper," whom he had described as "a sniveling ‘willy boy' who was afraid to go home in the dark" in a letter to his mother before he crossed over. 

"Well, he came west since I last wrote you," Bob communicated.  "I happened to be near [in spirit form] when the grenade fell in the trench and saw him grab it in his arms and scramble out with it before it exploded.  He saved a whole company, among them many wounded.  I went with him over the top and yelled, ‘Bully for you, Coop, old man!'  Then the bomb blew away his mortality, and he saw me.  We left the field together, and I took him back among the hills where the particular group of helpers headed by Jack Wells gave him a glad hand. He's all right and a trump among us.  Get word to his mother."

Bob's mother mentally communicated to him that his mother probably wouldn't believe her if she told her about the messages she had been receiving from Bob.  "Well, get such comfort across as you can, but do not try to convince any one that you communicate with me,"  Bob responded.   "You would probably be carted off to a padded cell if you should tell all we shall talk about."

"Cooper is in a blue funk about his mother," Bob continued.  "She is frantic with grief, and he cannot communicate with her.  She is like many Christians.  She subscribes to a creed - but she doesn't believe it.  If she would just take her pencil in her hand, and let Coop do the rest!  Then she would come to know that her son and all the other sons are living and only kept from being happy and full of new and splendid ambitions by the tears of those they love on earth.  To mourn is natural, but it really isn't natural to be hopeless."

In addition to fallen soldiers greeting the newly deceased, Bob said that there were a number of "deceased" relatives looking out after their own.   "There is a mobilization here of the generation immediately connected with the troops - fathers and mothers and near of kin - to attend these boys and to bring them out."

Bob urged his mother to read Swedenborg in order to get a better handle on what happens during the separation of soul from body.   Then, he communicated:  "We hear continually that the Savior is often seen on the fields.  I have not dared to look, sometimes, when I have felt, rather than seen, a strange soft light.  I am not ready to look just now.  But there is no doubt but that He moves among the soldiers. I am called away."

In a later communication, Bob explained that he really doesn't know much more than he did when in the flesh and that he found it difficult to describe his condition in words.  Moreover, he had come to understand that as he progressed on that side he would have a more difficult time in communicating with her.

At another sitting, Bob said that he had heard on of the more evolved spirits on that side talking with Spencer, a recently-"dead" soldier, who was concerned about his fiancé.   It was explained to him that "each  created being is the half of another created being.  When these two halves are brought together, it is marriage  There are may be many alliances in a person's life.  But only one marriage...There are no separations of those who belong together.  Emphasize ‘belong.'   Spencer's girl will come to him here if she is his other half, and their marriage will be consummated in heaven."

Bob asked the advanced spirit what would happen if the girl were to marry and have children.  "...and he surprised me by saying she probably would, certainly should do so.  That she should fulfill the law of her being on earth by wife and motherhood.  That accomplished, she will find her spiritual mate and the man who had been her husband on earth will find his own complementary self."

The mother asked what Bob could "hear" from her. "I get any thought, I suppose, that is directed to me.  I cannot undertake to say how or why. In fact, I am not informed as to these things.  I do not know why any more than I knew in class, why one ray of light was white and one was violet."

While tending a mortally wounded soldier, Bob reported an awesome experience.  "I was easing a boy in my arms, but he was very young and he wanted his mother.  I could not comfort him.  Some One beside me said:  ‘I will take him.'  I could not look up.  But I knew Who it was.  Let mothers hear of this."

On another occasion, Bob say "Him" tending to "dead" Germans.  "I talked with Wells about this, later, in my tent.  He said we must give up thinking of Christ as ours alone.  He quoted His words, as the mob howled around Him on Calvary:  ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'"

Bob also observed that "dogs come and go freely, back and forth across the invisible line."  He said that they do not need to leave their natural bodies to associate with those who have died.   They often follow their masters.  "I often find a certain embarrassment in saying things that I, myself, would once have called bunk.  But I guess they are true, all right," Bob communicated, again stressing that he did not know much more than when he was in the flesh.

One of Bob's final comments before communications ceased was: 

"The easiest thing in life is death."