Etta Wriedt (1862–1942) was an American direct voice medium.Benjamin B. Wolman. (1977). Handbook of Parapsychology. McFarland. p. 314.
Wriedt was born in Oswego, New York and was well known in the field of spiritualism, she employed a trumpet in the darkness of the séance room which she claimed spirits would use to make noises and voices. She charged people money to attend her séances, one of her spirit guides was "John Sharp" who claimed he was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in the eighteenth century.Victoria Barnes. (1948). Centennial Book of Modern Spiritualism in America. National Spiritualist Association of United States of America. p. 148 She visited England five times and held séances with W. T. Stead.Roy Stemman. (1972). One Hundred Years of Spiritualism. Spiritualist Association of Great Britain. p. 4. Stead and Vice-Admiral William Usborne Moore author of the book, The Voices (1913) endorsed her mediumship as genuine.Leslie Shepard. (1991). Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology. Gale Research Company. p. 1612. Allan Levine. (2011). King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: a Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny. Douglas & McIntyre. p. 250.
Fraud
W. B. Yeats who attended séances found them interesting but was skeptical and expressed doubts about the voices. This led to his dismissal from Wriedt's séances.A. Norman Jeffares. (2001). W. B. Yeats: A New Biography. Continuum. p. 153. Margaret Mills Harper, Warwick Gould. (2013). Yeats’s Mask: Yeats Annual No. 19. Open Book Publishers. p. 202.
Wriedt was exposed as a fraud by the physicist Kristian Birkeland when he discovered the noises produced by her trumpet were caused by chemical explosions induced by potassium and water and in other cases by lycopodium powder.Terje Emberland, Arnfinn Pettersen. (2006). Religion for a New Era: Open Mind or a Hole in the Head?. pp. 257-258 Joseph McCabe wrote:
McCabe also wrote that the "spirit" voices heard in the séance were Wriedt herself and were performed by a hidden telescopic aluminium tube.
She has been described as a skilled practitioner of ventriloquism.Steven Connor. (2000). Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford University Press. 367-383.
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