Harriet Tubman - Psychic, Seer
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Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in the fall of 1849, and returned to Maryland to free at least 70 more slaves before the Civil War. Tubman believed that she had a number of God-given powers that allowed her to free so many people, but many of her most remarkable abilities can be reproduced by those trained in remote viewing, for example, or lucid dreaming. A review of the anomalous events in Tubman’s life suggests that she may have exercised a number of psychic, or “psi,” abilities to sense danger, scout terrain, and even see the future.
Early Life
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross in February or March of 1822, the fifth of nine children born to slaves on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. Like her parents, Araminta - known as “Minty” in her youth - honored her West African heritage, but was also a practicing Christian.(1) It is likely that she attended sermons as a child, and nurtured a strong belief in God.(2) When she was around 13 years old, she suffered a head injury in a conflict at a local store: another slave had tried to run away, so his overseer threw an iron weight at him that inadvertently struck Minty in the head. The impact broke her skull, and for the rest of her life, she experienced headaches, seizures, hallucinations, and spontaneous sleeping spells.(3) These spells struck without warning, at all times of day, and left her in a sleep from which nothing could wake her. She often had strange dreams or visions while she was out, and believed that they had deep spiritual meaning.(4) Minty claimed to be under the protection of God, and many who knew her remarked that she seemed to have higher forces working in her favor. She prayed multiple times a day, and on many noteworthy occasions, she got what she requested. She claimed that she also felt aware of a “mysterious unseen presence” at times, especially when travelling alone through the woods at night in the years after her escape.(5)
Sometime around 1844, Minty married John Tubman, a free black man, and took his name, as well as her mother’s name, Harriet.(6) In the years after, her owner tried to sell her, and although he insisted that he’d sell her close to home, he had already sold some of her family out-of-state.(7) For several months in 1849, Tubman prayed that her owner would decide to keep her, then prayed that he be killed, and he died shortly after. But his widow continued trying to sell Tubman and her family out-of-state. In this time, Tubman repeatedly dreamt of a family being torn apart by men on horseback, and heard the screams of women and children. She also saw scenes of green fields, flowers, and “beautiful” white women with arms outstretched awaiting her on the other side of a line on the ground. Although she’d also heard rumours that her owner planned to sell her out-of-state, this dream was an important factor in her decision to escape to Pennsylvania in the fall of 1849.(8)
Tubman followed the Underground Railroad, a clandestine network of abolitionist supporters and safehouses that helped guide slaves to freedom. Along the way, she recognized a number of those who helped her as the beautiful women from her dream.(9) Shortly after settling in Pennsylvania, she returned to Maryland to free her family and other slaves, and spent the next 11 years leading rescue missions across state lines.(10) By the outbreak of the Civil War, she had freed some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions.(11) She never lost a passenger, even as slaveholders and professional slave-chasers grew increasingly repressive. She served with the Union in the war, and spent the rest of her life running a hospital from a home that she bought in Auburn, New York.(12)
Extraordinary Rescues
Most of what we know today of Tubman’s life is derived from the letters that she dictated, and the interviews that she gave with her primary biographer, Sarah Bradford, who published the first books on Tubman’s life.(13) Bradford documented a number of incidents in which Tubman seemed to acquire life-saving information through non-ordinary means, and many of those who worked with her corroborated these accounts.(14) Tubman claimed that she was gifted with a number of intuitions that helped her to avoid danger: her heart would “flutter” when a threat was near - a sense that she claimed she inherited from her father, who could predict the weather.(15) Bradford mentions an incident in which Tubman felt “troubled in ‘spirit’” and sensed that her three enslaved brothers were in danger. She came to their rescue just before they were sold out of state.(16)
Often, Tubman claimed that God had simply “told” her something. While sneaking two slaves out of state, Tubman said that God had told her to stop, and she announced a change of plans. Instead of continuing on the road, she crossed two deep and rapid streams, despite the fact that neither she nor her passengers could swim. Tubman sought guidance from God and was directed to an area shallow enough to walk across. On the other side, Tubman found the home of a black family who sheltered her and her fugitives. Later, they discovered that officers in the area had already been notified of the slaves’ escape, making their capture very likely had they not switched course.(17) Other times, Tubman was given very specific information, right down to dates and numbers: several times she came to a prominent abolitionist named Thomas Garrett who provided her rescues with shoes, but had never before given monetary support. One time, however, another supporter gave Garrett over 24 dollars in donations. When Tubman came to see him, Garrett said that she announced that God had money for her. Garret asked how much she wanted, and Tubman specified “about $23.” About a year later, Tubman again requested money from Garrett just days after he’d received a donation, already aware that it was a smaller sum than before.(18)
Sometimes, the solutions to Tubman’s problems just seemed to present themselves at the right time. Once, Bradford prepared a box of Christmas goods to send to Tubman’s hospital after being gifted $10 from another supporter. She spent 3 of the $10 on groceries to include, and sent the remaining $7 to Tubman in cash. Shortly after, a doctor in Auburn told Bradford that Tubman had requested exactly $7 from her a few days prior. Tubman had promised the doctor that she’d pay this money back the following Tuesday, though she couldn’t tell her how she knew. Tubman received Bradford’s $7 by Tuesday, and paid the doctor back as promised.(19) On one expedition, Tubman found that a safehouse she’d come to rely upon had been taken over by a new owner, leaving her and her passengers without shelter or supplies. Tubman asked God for guidance and was directed to a swamp outside of town. The group waited at the swamp until nightfall, when a Quaker man came walking by, speaking aloud about his nearby horse and wagon as he passed. Tubman found a horse and a well-provisioned wagon where the man had indicated, and took them to the next town, where another Quaker met them to return the assets.(20)
Tubman’s Visions
Somehow, Tubman’s brain injury never proved to be a handicap, and her sleeping spells never caused her to be captured. In fact, they often worked to her advantage, triggering visions that provided critical insights into life-or-death decisions. Tubman said that her spirit would sometimes leave her body in these visions, and soar through the air while she scanned the ground below. The terrain that she saw in these out-of-body experiences often proved to be accurate to reality, and the scouting that she did helped her to navigate unfamiliar areas.
Other insights came in coded dreams, or “visions.” In 1858, she dreamed several times of encountering three snakes with human heads: two with the faces of younger men, and one with the face of an old, bearded man. The snakes looked at her before a large crowd of men rushed in and beheaded them. Tubman was unable to interpret this recurring dream until she met John Brown, a radical abolitionist, and recognized him as the bearded snake. Brown was captured and executed after leading a failed slave revolt in Virginia in 1859, and two of his sons were killed in combat.(21) In another vision, Tubman saw an empty chariot flying south across the sky before returning with the lifeless body of a young woman. Tubman recognized her as the daughter of a local government official, and carried the message to his office just as the news of her death arrived in town. Tubman claimed that she once dreamed of the ground opening up and swallowing entire houses, killing many people. She shared this with her neighbours, the same day a telegram came telling of a deadly earthquake in South America.(22) Unfortunately, this event was not dated, and so its coincidence with an earthquake cannot be verified. Tubman was staying with a supporter in January of 1884 when she told her host that she could hear harp music in her home, and said that the week before she’d dreamt of people drowning and burning up. This dream seems to have coincided with the wreck of a steamer ship at Martha’s Vineyard on January 18th that took over 100 lives.(23) It seemed as though Tubman could sense the pain of others - even those on other continents - both in the present and the future.
Significance
Tubman’s story has been retold endlessly since Bradford’s first biographical works. There were several more biographies in the next hundred years, and many book and film versions for youths.(24) For the first time ever, Tubman’s life was made into a feature film in 2019. None of these accounts had concentrated their analysis on Tubman’s anomalous abilities, however, until James McGowan published The Psychic Life of Harriet Tubman in 1995. McGowan drew comparisons between Tubman and other psychics: for example, many psychics claimed to have gained their anomalous abilities after a traumatic injury. Peter Hurkos, the Dutch psychometrist, claimed that he gained the ability to see the past and future after falling from a ladder and hitting his head.(25) Research has also shown that people with childhood trauma are more likely to have anomalous experiences, and to enter into altered states of consciousness.(26) Clearly, there is a subjective component to Tubman’s psi experiences, and a strong link to brain activity.
There are also clear medical explanations for many of Tubman’s most common symptoms; visions and seizures are both common symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy, or TLE. Those with TLE also report hearing music and other sounds, and have dreamlike trances and out-of-body experiences, or OBEs. In materialist philosophy, these experiences are explained as hallucinations, created entirely within the brain.(27) But Tubman’s visions repeatedly foretold future events, and provided her with verifiable facts that she didn’t know before the dream. This suggests that Tubman’s visions were more than just figments of the imagination, and occasionally relaid details of the outside world. And Tubman’s symptoms are by no means unique to those with TLE. Anecdotally, at least, precognitive dreams are relatively common, and many claim to be able to “sense” when friends and family are in pain or danger.(28)
OBEs, too, are common amongst the general public. Many of those who report OBEs claim to fly through the air in their visions, and see people, places, and things that they were not previously aware of.(29) In one famous anecdote, a woman undergoing cardiac arrest at a hospital in Seattle in 1977 had an OBE before resuscitation. Afterwards, she told her social worker that she floated from her body and drifted outside the hospital walls, where she saw a tennis shoe on the ledge of a third floor window. Her social worker confirmed that the shoe of her description was on the ledge she claimed, and could not be seen from the woman’s hospital window.(30) Lucid dreamers also claim to be able to fly over unfamiliar landscapes, and see real places with which they were not previously familiar.(31) Experiments have also shown that trained remote viewers can make accurate observations of real-world places that they hadn’t seen before, even without the experience of an OBE.
While the evidence does not permit us to confirm her family heritage, Tubman and others believed that she was descended from the Asante people of Western Africa.(32) Like other West African cultures, the Asante placed great importance on dreams and divination, consulting them for guidance in life, and foretelling future events.(33) Christians have traditionally placed the same importance on dreams and divination, as have the other Abrahamic faiths. In fact, many of the alleged encounters with God documented in the Hebrew Bible occurred in dreams, and involved coded, mystical visions like Tubman’s.
Summary
Tubman lived the rest of her free life in poverty, devoting the bulk of her earnings to the needy. She continued giving lectures against the horrors of slavery and campaigning for civil and women’s rights until her death in 1913.(34)
Tubman’s case serves as crucial evidence to suggest that certain people, at least, can access information remotely, and “see” things in the past, present, and even the future. Tubman claimed that her gifts were attributable to God, but they were very similar to the kinds of abilities demonstrated by trained psychics and seers today. Even if Tubman was a particularly gifted individual, the skills that she possessed are probably more common than one might think.
Notes:
1) Kate Clifford Larson. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), xiv, xvi, 16, 301; Franklin Sanborn, “Harriet Tubman,” Boston Commonwealth (July 16, 1863), in Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn, NY: WJ Moses, 1869), 72 - 73. Note that Sanborn states she has ten siblings, assuming this to be incorrect.
2) Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 72, 80, Tubman describes inheriting a “power” from her father; Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People (New York: George R Lockwood & Son, 1886), 23; Larson, Bound, 12 - 13, 44 - 53 for discussion of Tubman’s religious upbringing.
3) Larson, Bound, xvi, 41 - 44; Bradford, Harriet, 15 - 16; Bradford, Scenes, 13; Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 73 - 74; Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Harriet, 109.
4) Frank C. Drake, "The Moses of Her People. Amazing Life Work of Harriet Tubman," New York Herald (September 22, 1907), as it appears in Kate Clifford Larson, “Harriet Ross Tubman.” Essential Civil War Curriculum (April 2015), 3.
5) Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney, “Moses,” Freedmen’s Record (March 1865): 36; Bradford, Harriet, 23, 61, 76, 83; Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People (New York: J. J. Little & Co., 1901), 138 - 139.
6) Larson, Bound, xvi, 62; Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 76.
7) Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 76; Bradford, Scenes, 13 - 14; Bradford, Harriet, 15, 22 - 23; Larson, Bound, xvi, 32, 42 - 43, 55, 64.
8) Bradford, Scenes, 14 - 16; Bradford, Harriet, 23 - 27; Larson, Bound, xvi, 29, 72 - 74.
9) Bradford, Harriet, 1901 edition, 147; Bradford, Scenes, 56; Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 79.
10) Larson, Bound, xvii, 77, 80 - 84, 88; Bradford, Scenes, 15, 19 - 20; Bradford, Harriet, 28 - 32.
11) Larson, Bound, xvii, 99 - 102, 276; Bradford, Scenes, 25 - 26, 50; Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 79; Bradford, Harriet, 36 - 37, 46, 84; Jones in Introduction to Harriet, ix; Larson, Bound, 120 - 21, 149.
12) While contemporary biographers estimated that she made as many as 19 trips and freed over 300 slaves, recent biographers claim that she made about 13 trips, and freed 70 or 80 slaves directly, while helping another 50 or 60 more to escape. Almost all the slaves freed were from the same two counties in Maryland. Larson, Bound, xvii, 100; Bradford, Harriet, 3,6, 33, 88; Bradford, Scenes, 21, 49, 53.
13) Bradford, Scenes, 36 - 37, 52, 55; Bradford, Harriet, 5; See Bradford, Scenes, 5 - 8 and Bradford, Harriet, 133 - 143 for testimonies to Tubman’s character and contributions; See Bradford, Harriet, 90 and Jones in Introduction to Bradford’s, Harriet, vi for mentions of lack of record-keeping.
14) Bradford, Scenes, 55 - 56; Bradford, Harriet, 5.
15) Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 79 - 80.
16) Bradford, Harriet, 61 - 64; Larson, Bound, 110 - 113.
17) Bradford, Scenes, 50 - 51; Bradford, Harriet, 73 - 75, 84 - 85.
18) Bradford, Scenes, 51 - 52.
19) Bradford, Harriet, 1901 edition, 145 - 46.
20) Bradford, Harriet, 53 - 57.
21) Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 82 - 83; Larson, Bound, 302.
22) Bradford, Harriet, 1901 edition, 147 - 148.
23) Larson, Bound, 262.
24) Larson, Bound, xv, 290, 305 note 3.
25) James A. McGowan. “The psychic life of Harriet Tubman.” Visions Magazine (March, 1995): 1 – 3.
26) Thalbourne et al., "Childhood Trauma as a Possible Antecedent of Transliminality," Psychological Reports (December 1, 2003); Thomas Rabeyron and Caroline Watt, "Paranormal experiences, mental health and mental boundaries, and psi." Personality and Individual Differences 48, 4 (March 2010): 487 - 492; Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research, "The Concept of Transliminality."
27) Larson, Bound, 43 - 44, 317 note 46; Erica Cirino, “Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,” (2017); Greyson et al., "Out-of-body experiences associated with seizures," Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8, 65 (2014).
28) Penny Sartori, "Can you foresee the death of a loved one," DailyMail.com (2014).
29) Ian J. Thompson, "Verified OBE (Out-Of-Body) Experiences," New Dualism Archive.
30) Gideon Lichfield, "The Science of Near-Death Experiences," The Atlantic (April 2015); Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino, Lessons from the Light (Needham, Massachusetts: Moment Point, 2003).
31) Robert Waggoner, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self (Needham, Massachusetts: Moment Point Press, 2009), 27 - 30.
32) Larson, "Harriet Ross Tubman," 3; Larson, Bound, 10 - 12.
33) R. S. Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 192 - 96; Edward Geoffrey Parrinder, West African Religion: A Study of the Beliefs and Practices of Akan, Ewe, Yoruba, Ibo, and Kindred Peoples (London: Epworth Press, 1969), 137, 151, 168 - 69.
34) Bradford, Harriet, 1901 edition, 137; Larson, Bound, xiv, xviii, xx, 171, 236, 250, 252, 273. Bradford, Scenes, 103; Bradford, Harriet, 6, 78 - 79; Jones in the Introduction to Bradford’s, Harriet, x.
Sources:
Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research. "The Concept of Transliminality." Accessed December 4, 2019.
https://www.aiprinc.org/documents/The_Concept_Of_Transliminality.pdf.
Bradford, Sarah Hopkins. Harriet, the Moses of Her People. New York: George R Lockwood & Son, 1886. Accessed December 4, 2019.
https://archive.org/details/harrietmosesofhebrad.
Bradford, Sarah Hopkins. Harriet, the Moses of Her People. New York: J. J. Little & Co., 1901. Accessed December 4, 2019.
https://archive.org/details/43bf505d-39de-4b7b-a565-b1cdfba0156d.
Bradford, Sarah Hopkins. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Auburn, NY: WJ Moses, 1869. Accessed December 4, 2019.
https://archive.org/details/scenesinlifeofha00brad/page/n7.
Cheney, Ednah Dow Littlehale. “Moses,” Freedmen’s Record, March 1865: 34 - 38.
Cirino, Erica. “Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.” Healthline, 2017. Accessed December 4, 2019. https://www.healthline.com/health/temporal-lobe-epilepsy.
Drake, Frank C. "The Moses of Her People. Amazing Life Work of Harriet Tubman." New York Herald, September 22, 1907.
Greyson, Bruce; Fountain, Nathan B.; Derr, Lori L.; Broshek, Donna K. "Out-of-body experiences associated with seizures." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8, 65 (Feb 2014). Accessed December 4, 2019. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3923147/.
Larson, Kate Clifford. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004.
Larson, Kate Clifford. “Harriet Ross Tubman.” Essential Civil War Curriculum, April 2015. Accessed December 4, 2019.
https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/assets/files/pdf/ECWC%20TOPIC%20Tubman%20Essay.pdf.
Lichfield, Gideon. "The Science of Near-Death Experiences: Empirically investigating brushes with the afterlife." The Atlantic, April 2015. Accessed December 4, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-science-of-near-death-experiences/386231/.
McGowan, James A. “The psychic life of Harriet Tubman.” Visions Magazine, March, 1995: 1 - 3.
Parrinder, Edward Geoffrey. West African Religion: A Study of the Beliefs and Practices of Akan, Ewe, Yoruba, Ibo, and Kindred Peoples. London: Epworth Press, 1969. Accessed December 4, 2019. https://archive.org/details/westafricanrelig0000parr.
Rattray, R. S. Religion and Art in Ashanti. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927. Accessed December 4, 2019. https://archive.org/details/religionartinash0000ratt.
Ring, Kenneth; Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino. Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience. Needham, Massachusetts: Moment Point, 2003.
Sanborn, Franklin. “Harriet Tubman,” Boston Commonwealth, July 16, 1863. [as it appears in Bradford’s Scenes, 72 - 85 or Harriet, 106 - 119.]
Sartori, Penny. "Can you foresee the death of a loved one... and choose the exact moment you die? These accounts from an intensive care nurse will astonish you." DailyMail.com, January 26, 2014. Accessed December 4, 2019. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2546462/Can-foresee-death-loved-one-choose-exact-moment-die-These-accounts-intensive-care-nurse-astonish-you.html.
Thalbourne, Michael A.; Houran, James; Crawley, Susan E. "Childhood Trauma as a Possible Antecedent of Transliminality." Psychological Reports. (December 1, 2003). Accessed December 4, 2019. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.2003.93.3.687.
Thompson, Ian J. "Verified OBE (Out-Of-Body) Experiences." New Dualism Archive. Accessed December 4, 2019. http://www.newdualism.org/nde-papers/OBE-verifications.html.
Rabeyron Thomas; Watt, Caroline. "Paranormal experiences, mental health and mental boundaries, and psi." Personality and Individual Differences 48, 4 (March 2010): 487 - 492. Accessed December 4, 2019. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886909004929.
Waggoner, Robert. Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self. Needham, Massachusetts: Moment Point Press, 2009.
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Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Illustrations by V. R. Laurence. Research by Clark Murphy. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in the fall of 1849, and returned to Maryland to free at least 70 more slaves before the Civil War. Tubman believed that she had a number of God-given powers that allowed her to free so many people, but many of her most remarkable abilities can be reproduced by those trained in remote viewing, for example, or lucid dreaming. A review of the anomalous events in Tubman’s life suggests that she may have exercised a number of psychic, or “psi,” abilities to sense danger, scout terrain, and even see the future.
Early Life
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross in February or March of 1822, the fifth of nine children born to slaves on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. Like her parents, Araminta - known as “Minty” in her youth - honored her West African heritage, but was also a practicing Christian.(1) It is likely that she attended sermons as a child, and nurtured a strong belief in God.(2) When she was around 13 years old, she suffered a head injury in a conflict at a local store: another slave had tried to run away, so his overseer threw an iron weight at him that inadvertently struck Minty in the head. The impact broke her skull, and for the rest of her life, she experienced headaches, seizures, hallucinations, and spontaneous sleeping spells.(3) These spells struck without warning, at all times of day, and left her in a sleep from which nothing could wake her. She often had strange dreams or visions while she was out, and believed that they had deep spiritual meaning.(4) Minty claimed to be under the protection of God, and many who knew her remarked that she seemed to have higher forces working in her favor. She prayed multiple times a day, and on many noteworthy occasions, she got what she requested. She claimed that she also felt aware of a “mysterious unseen presence” at times, especially when travelling alone through the woods at night in the years after her escape.(5)
Sometime around 1844, Minty married John Tubman, a free black man, and took his name, as well as her mother’s name, Harriet.(6) In the years after, her owner tried to sell her, and although he insisted that he’d sell her close to home, he had already sold some of her family out-of-state.(7) For several months in 1849, Tubman prayed that her owner would decide to keep her, then prayed that he be killed, and he died shortly after. But his widow continued trying to sell Tubman and her family out-of-state. In this time, Tubman repeatedly dreamt of a family being torn apart by men on horseback, and heard the screams of women and children. She also saw scenes of green fields, flowers, and “beautiful” white women with arms outstretched awaiting her on the other side of a line on the ground. Although she’d also heard rumours that her owner planned to sell her out-of-state, this dream was an important factor in her decision to escape to Pennsylvania in the fall of 1849.(8)
Tubman followed the Underground Railroad, a clandestine network of abolitionist supporters and safehouses that helped guide slaves to freedom. Along the way, she recognized a number of those who helped her as the beautiful women from her dream.(9) Shortly after settling in Pennsylvania, she returned to Maryland to free her family and other slaves, and spent the next 11 years leading rescue missions across state lines.(10) By the outbreak of the Civil War, she had freed some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions.(11) She never lost a passenger, even as slaveholders and professional slave-chasers grew increasingly repressive. She served with the Union in the war, and spent the rest of her life running a hospital from a home that she bought in Auburn, New York.(12)
Extraordinary Rescues
Most of what we know today of Tubman’s life is derived from the letters that she dictated, and the interviews that she gave with her primary biographer, Sarah Bradford, who published the first books on Tubman’s life.(13) Bradford documented a number of incidents in which Tubman seemed to acquire life-saving information through non-ordinary means, and many of those who worked with her corroborated these accounts.(14) Tubman claimed that she was gifted with a number of intuitions that helped her to avoid danger: her heart would “flutter” when a threat was near - a sense that she claimed she inherited from her father, who could predict the weather.(15) Bradford mentions an incident in which Tubman felt “troubled in ‘spirit’” and sensed that her three enslaved brothers were in danger. She came to their rescue just before they were sold out of state.(16)
Often, Tubman claimed that God had simply “told” her something. While sneaking two slaves out of state, Tubman said that God had told her to stop, and she announced a change of plans. Instead of continuing on the road, she crossed two deep and rapid streams, despite the fact that neither she nor her passengers could swim. Tubman sought guidance from God and was directed to an area shallow enough to walk across. On the other side, Tubman found the home of a black family who sheltered her and her fugitives. Later, they discovered that officers in the area had already been notified of the slaves’ escape, making their capture very likely had they not switched course.(17) Other times, Tubman was given very specific information, right down to dates and numbers: several times she came to a prominent abolitionist named Thomas Garrett who provided her rescues with shoes, but had never before given monetary support. One time, however, another supporter gave Garrett over 24 dollars in donations. When Tubman came to see him, Garrett said that she announced that God had money for her. Garret asked how much she wanted, and Tubman specified “about $23.” About a year later, Tubman again requested money from Garrett just days after he’d received a donation, already aware that it was a smaller sum than before.(18)
Sometimes, the solutions to Tubman’s problems just seemed to present themselves at the right time. Once, Bradford prepared a box of Christmas goods to send to Tubman’s hospital after being gifted $10 from another supporter. She spent 3 of the $10 on groceries to include, and sent the remaining $7 to Tubman in cash. Shortly after, a doctor in Auburn told Bradford that Tubman had requested exactly $7 from her a few days prior. Tubman had promised the doctor that she’d pay this money back the following Tuesday, though she couldn’t tell her how she knew. Tubman received Bradford’s $7 by Tuesday, and paid the doctor back as promised.(19) On one expedition, Tubman found that a safehouse she’d come to rely upon had been taken over by a new owner, leaving her and her passengers without shelter or supplies. Tubman asked God for guidance and was directed to a swamp outside of town. The group waited at the swamp until nightfall, when a Quaker man came walking by, speaking aloud about his nearby horse and wagon as he passed. Tubman found a horse and a well-provisioned wagon where the man had indicated, and took them to the next town, where another Quaker met them to return the assets.(20)
Tubman’s Visions
Somehow, Tubman’s brain injury never proved to be a handicap, and her sleeping spells never caused her to be captured. In fact, they often worked to her advantage, triggering visions that provided critical insights into life-or-death decisions. Tubman said that her spirit would sometimes leave her body in these visions, and soar through the air while she scanned the ground below. The terrain that she saw in these out-of-body experiences often proved to be accurate to reality, and the scouting that she did helped her to navigate unfamiliar areas.
Other insights came in coded dreams, or “visions.” In 1858, she dreamed several times of encountering three snakes with human heads: two with the faces of younger men, and one with the face of an old, bearded man. The snakes looked at her before a large crowd of men rushed in and beheaded them. Tubman was unable to interpret this recurring dream until she met John Brown, a radical abolitionist, and recognized him as the bearded snake. Brown was captured and executed after leading a failed slave revolt in Virginia in 1859, and two of his sons were killed in combat.(21) In another vision, Tubman saw an empty chariot flying south across the sky before returning with the lifeless body of a young woman. Tubman recognized her as the daughter of a local government official, and carried the message to his office just as the news of her death arrived in town. Tubman claimed that she once dreamed of the ground opening up and swallowing entire houses, killing many people. She shared this with her neighbours, the same day a telegram came telling of a deadly earthquake in South America.(22) Unfortunately, this event was not dated, and so its coincidence with an earthquake cannot be verified. Tubman was staying with a supporter in January of 1884 when she told her host that she could hear harp music in her home, and said that the week before she’d dreamt of people drowning and burning up. This dream seems to have coincided with the wreck of a steamer ship at Martha’s Vineyard on January 18th that took over 100 lives.(23) It seemed as though Tubman could sense the pain of others - even those on other continents - both in the present and the future.
Significance
Tubman’s story has been retold endlessly since Bradford’s first biographical works. There were several more biographies in the next hundred years, and many book and film versions for youths.(24) For the first time ever, Tubman’s life was made into a feature film in 2019. None of these accounts had concentrated their analysis on Tubman’s anomalous abilities, however, until James McGowan published The Psychic Life of Harriet Tubman in 1995. McGowan drew comparisons between Tubman and other psychics: for example, many psychics claimed to have gained their anomalous abilities after a traumatic injury. Peter Hurkos, the Dutch psychometrist, claimed that he gained the ability to see the past and future after falling from a ladder and hitting his head.(25) Research has also shown that people with childhood trauma are more likely to have anomalous experiences, and to enter into altered states of consciousness.(26) Clearly, there is a subjective component to Tubman’s psi experiences, and a strong link to brain activity.
There are also clear medical explanations for many of Tubman’s most common symptoms; visions and seizures are both common symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy, or TLE. Those with TLE also report hearing music and other sounds, and have dreamlike trances and out-of-body experiences, or OBEs. In materialist philosophy, these experiences are explained as hallucinations, created entirely within the brain.(27) But Tubman’s visions repeatedly foretold future events, and provided her with verifiable facts that she didn’t know before the dream. This suggests that Tubman’s visions were more than just figments of the imagination, and occasionally relaid details of the outside world. And Tubman’s symptoms are by no means unique to those with TLE. Anecdotally, at least, precognitive dreams are relatively common, and many claim to be able to “sense” when friends and family are in pain or danger.(28)
OBEs, too, are common amongst the general public. Many of those who report OBEs claim to fly through the air in their visions, and see people, places, and things that they were not previously aware of.(29) In one famous anecdote, a woman undergoing cardiac arrest at a hospital in Seattle in 1977 had an OBE before resuscitation. Afterwards, she told her social worker that she floated from her body and drifted outside the hospital walls, where she saw a tennis shoe on the ledge of a third floor window. Her social worker confirmed that the shoe of her description was on the ledge she claimed, and could not be seen from the woman’s hospital window.(30) Lucid dreamers also claim to be able to fly over unfamiliar landscapes, and see real places with which they were not previously familiar.(31) Experiments have also shown that trained remote viewers can make accurate observations of real-world places that they hadn’t seen before, even without the experience of an OBE.
While the evidence does not permit us to confirm her family heritage, Tubman and others believed that she was descended from the Asante people of Western Africa.(32) Like other West African cultures, the Asante placed great importance on dreams and divination, consulting them for guidance in life, and foretelling future events.(33) Christians have traditionally placed the same importance on dreams and divination, as have the other Abrahamic faiths. In fact, many of the alleged encounters with God documented in the Hebrew Bible occurred in dreams, and involved coded, mystical visions like Tubman’s.
Summary
Tubman lived the rest of her free life in poverty, devoting the bulk of her earnings to the needy. She continued giving lectures against the horrors of slavery and campaigning for civil and women’s rights until her death in 1913.(34)
Tubman’s case serves as crucial evidence to suggest that certain people, at least, can access information remotely, and “see” things in the past, present, and even the future. Tubman claimed that her gifts were attributable to God, but they were very similar to the kinds of abilities demonstrated by trained psychics and seers today. Even if Tubman was a particularly gifted individual, the skills that she possessed are probably more common than one might think.
Notes:
1) Kate Clifford Larson. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), xiv, xvi, 16, 301; Franklin Sanborn, “Harriet Tubman,” Boston Commonwealth (July 16, 1863), in Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn, NY: WJ Moses, 1869), 72 - 73. Note that Sanborn states she has ten siblings, assuming this to be incorrect.
2) Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 72, 80, Tubman describes inheriting a “power” from her father; Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People (New York: George R Lockwood & Son, 1886), 23; Larson, Bound, 12 - 13, 44 - 53 for discussion of Tubman’s religious upbringing.
3) Larson, Bound, xvi, 41 - 44; Bradford, Harriet, 15 - 16; Bradford, Scenes, 13; Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 73 - 74; Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Harriet, 109.
4) Frank C. Drake, "The Moses of Her People. Amazing Life Work of Harriet Tubman," New York Herald (September 22, 1907), as it appears in Kate Clifford Larson, “Harriet Ross Tubman.” Essential Civil War Curriculum (April 2015), 3.
5) Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney, “Moses,” Freedmen’s Record (March 1865): 36; Bradford, Harriet, 23, 61, 76, 83; Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People (New York: J. J. Little & Co., 1901), 138 - 139.
6) Larson, Bound, xvi, 62; Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 76.
7) Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 76; Bradford, Scenes, 13 - 14; Bradford, Harriet, 15, 22 - 23; Larson, Bound, xvi, 32, 42 - 43, 55, 64.
8) Bradford, Scenes, 14 - 16; Bradford, Harriet, 23 - 27; Larson, Bound, xvi, 29, 72 - 74.
9) Bradford, Harriet, 1901 edition, 147; Bradford, Scenes, 56; Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 79.
10) Larson, Bound, xvii, 77, 80 - 84, 88; Bradford, Scenes, 15, 19 - 20; Bradford, Harriet, 28 - 32.
11) Larson, Bound, xvii, 99 - 102, 276; Bradford, Scenes, 25 - 26, 50; Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 79; Bradford, Harriet, 36 - 37, 46, 84; Jones in Introduction to Harriet, ix; Larson, Bound, 120 - 21, 149.
12) While contemporary biographers estimated that she made as many as 19 trips and freed over 300 slaves, recent biographers claim that she made about 13 trips, and freed 70 or 80 slaves directly, while helping another 50 or 60 more to escape. Almost all the slaves freed were from the same two counties in Maryland. Larson, Bound, xvii, 100; Bradford, Harriet, 3,6, 33, 88; Bradford, Scenes, 21, 49, 53.
13) Bradford, Scenes, 36 - 37, 52, 55; Bradford, Harriet, 5; See Bradford, Scenes, 5 - 8 and Bradford, Harriet, 133 - 143 for testimonies to Tubman’s character and contributions; See Bradford, Harriet, 90 and Jones in Introduction to Bradford’s, Harriet, vi for mentions of lack of record-keeping.
14) Bradford, Scenes, 55 - 56; Bradford, Harriet, 5.
15) Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 79 - 80.
16) Bradford, Harriet, 61 - 64; Larson, Bound, 110 - 113.
17) Bradford, Scenes, 50 - 51; Bradford, Harriet, 73 - 75, 84 - 85.
18) Bradford, Scenes, 51 - 52.
19) Bradford, Harriet, 1901 edition, 145 - 46.
20) Bradford, Harriet, 53 - 57.
21) Sanborn 1863 in Bradford, Scenes, 82 - 83; Larson, Bound, 302.
22) Bradford, Harriet, 1901 edition, 147 - 148.
23) Larson, Bound, 262.
24) Larson, Bound, xv, 290, 305 note 3.
25) James A. McGowan. “The psychic life of Harriet Tubman.” Visions Magazine (March, 1995): 1 – 3.
26) Thalbourne et al., "Childhood Trauma as a Possible Antecedent of Transliminality," Psychological Reports (December 1, 2003); Thomas Rabeyron and Caroline Watt, "Paranormal experiences, mental health and mental boundaries, and psi." Personality and Individual Differences 48, 4 (March 2010): 487 - 492; Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research, "The Concept of Transliminality."
27) Larson, Bound, 43 - 44, 317 note 46; Erica Cirino, “Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,” (2017); Greyson et al., "Out-of-body experiences associated with seizures," Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8, 65 (2014).
28) Penny Sartori, "Can you foresee the death of a loved one," DailyMail.com (2014).
29) Ian J. Thompson, "Verified OBE (Out-Of-Body) Experiences," New Dualism Archive.
30) Gideon Lichfield, "The Science of Near-Death Experiences," The Atlantic (April 2015); Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino, Lessons from the Light (Needham, Massachusetts: Moment Point, 2003).
31) Robert Waggoner, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self (Needham, Massachusetts: Moment Point Press, 2009), 27 - 30.
32) Larson, "Harriet Ross Tubman," 3; Larson, Bound, 10 - 12.
33) R. S. Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 192 - 96; Edward Geoffrey Parrinder, West African Religion: A Study of the Beliefs and Practices of Akan, Ewe, Yoruba, Ibo, and Kindred Peoples (London: Epworth Press, 1969), 137, 151, 168 - 69.
34) Bradford, Harriet, 1901 edition, 137; Larson, Bound, xiv, xviii, xx, 171, 236, 250, 252, 273. Bradford, Scenes, 103; Bradford, Harriet, 6, 78 - 79; Jones in the Introduction to Bradford’s, Harriet, x.
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Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Illustrations by V. R. Laurence. Research by Clark Murphy. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
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