For me alone, the instrument will not move; for myself and wife it moves slightly, but its writing is mostly in monosyllables. With my daughter's hands upon it, it writes more freely, frequently giving, correctly, the names of persons present whom she may not know, and also the names of their friends, living or dead, with other and similar tests. Its conversations with her are grave or gay, much according to the state of her own mind at the time; and when frivolous questions are asked, it almost always returns answers either frivolous or, I am sorry to say it, a trifle wicked. For example, she on one occasion said to it: "Planchette, where did you get your education?" To her horror, it instantly wrote: "In h--l," without, however, being so fastidious as to omit the letters of the word here left out. On another occasion, after receiving from it responses to some trival questions, she said to it: "Planchette, now write something of your own accord without our prompting." But instead of writing words and sentences as was expected, it immediately traced out the rude figure of a man, such as school children sometimes make upon their slates. After finishing the outlines--face, neck, arms, legs, etc., it swung around and brought the point of the pencil to the proper position for the eye, which it carefully marked in, and then proceeded to pencil out the hair. On finishing this operation, it wrote under the figure the name of a young man concerning whom my daughter's companions are in the habit of teasing her.
My wife once said to it: "Planchette, write the name of the article I am thinking of." She was thinking of a finger ring, on which her eye had rested a moment before. The operator, of course, knew nothing of this, and my wife expected either that the experiment would fail, or else that the letters R-i-n-g would be traced. But instead of that, the instrument moved, very slowly, and, as it were, deliberately, and traced an apparently _exact circle_ on the paper, of about the size of the finger ring she had in her mind. "Will you try that over again?" said she, when a similar circle was traced, in a similar manner, but more promptly. During this experiment, one of my wife's hands, in addition to my daughter's, was resting lightly upon the board; but if the moving force had been supplied by her, either consciously or unconsciously, the motion would evidently have taken the direction of her thought, which was that of writing the letters of the word, instead of a direction unthought of.