Image by Amy_Gillard from Pixabay

The True Story of Patience Worth, the Novel Writing Ghost

In 1913, a St Louis Housewife named Pearl Curran claimed she took dictation from a medieval spirit and produced award-winning literature

15 min readNov 5, 2021

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Pearl Curran, ca 1919, Public Domain Image

In 1913, Patience Worth pierced the veil between life and death to use a lonely housewife, Pearl Curran, as a Medium. Together, the ghost and the mortal allegedly wrote and published three successful novels and many award-winning poems. Patience and Pearl committed over 400,000 words to paper — and that isn’t the entity’s strangest achievement.

Pearl Curran

“Many moons ago, I lived. Again I come — Patience Worth is my name.”-Patience Worth, 1913

Pearl Lenore Pollard was born on February 15, 1883, in Mound City, Illinois. She was the only daughter of the newspaper editor, George Pollard, and his wife, Mary.

Pearl was a wise girl but not conventionally intelligent. She made below-average grades and dropped out during her first year of high school due to a “nervous breakdown” from the stress that came with studying.

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Welcome readers! Heather Monroe is a genealogist and writer who resides in California with her partner and their nine children. •True Crime• History• Memoir•