Marines Commando George Chapman who became a supernatural healer through the dead Dr Lang

George Chapman, who died in 2006, was brought up in the working-class docklands area of Merseyside, Liverpool. He worked variously as a docker, a firefighter, and he was a professional boxer. Maurice Barbanell, former Fleet Street newspaper editor once remarked about Chapman; ‘When Spiritualism’s history comes to be written, the Lang/Chapman partnership, which has brought health to thousands of sufferers after their cases were called “hopeless”, will contribute some of its most illumined pages’, and this will shortly be explained. During World War II Chapman became an Air Force Commander and then he joined Marines, where he taught unarmed combat. He met his wife Margaret in 1945 and they had a daughter Vivian, but sadly she died just 4 weeks after her birth. This tragedy caused Chapman to consider, was there an afterlife? In search of answers, he turned to the Clergy, but they warned him not to dabble ‘in the supernatural.’ After the War, Chapman joined the Fire Brigade where he met a fellow fireman called Leslie Miles. On the long nightshifts between emergency calls, Miles would experiment with an upturned tumbler and the letters of the alphabet, in an attempt to receive messages from the spirit world, and it wasn’t long before the rest of the fire crew, their curiosity fully aroused, joined in with him. Soon, they were all sitting around the table at night at the fire station, putting their fingers on the glass and watching it move from letter to letter to spell out words and phrases. Meanwhile at home, Chapman began to do the same thing with his wife, and before long he was stunned to receive a message purportedly from his dead mother, who had died when he was just 5 years old. Of course, he needed to check that he wasn’t simply deluding himself, and so he asked his relatives to see if what his dead mother had told him could be verified. To his surprise, his relatives confirmed it all to be completely correct. This helped Chapman to believe that there really could be life-after-death and he began to spend a couple of hours at home every day trying to receive more messages from spirits. To his surprise, many of the messages they gave him told him that he was a healer. As well as being a fireman, Chapman was a professional boxer. How on earth could he be a healer then, he wondered to himself? He had to find out more and so soon he put together a development circle with likeminded people, where further spirit messages repeated to him that he was a healer. Spirits were coming through Chapman – even though he had no idea at the time because he had gone into trance and was completely oblivious to it. The spirits were healers too, they said, and they were going to work with him. According to Chapman’s later biography, ‘One of the spirits was introduced to us as Dr. Lang.’ Dr. Lang told them that Chapman would be working with him to heal sick patients. Of course, Chapman didn’t take this as fact; after all, it sounded completely incredulous, and firstly, he wanted to know if a Dr. Lang had even ever really existed. He wanted absolute proof. ‘Too many alleged spirit guides do not stand up to critical exam,’ he wrote, and the spirit communicating with them, ‘should be able to give dates, names, and details of his earthly experiences.’ Dr. Lang duly went on to give names, dates, places, for the purpose of verification, and Chapman began to check them out.  ‘There were colleagues of Lang still in practice. There were also patients who had consulted him while he was a surgeon on earth…they confirmed that it was the same Dr. Lang they had known.’ Pretty soon, Chapman began to do what the spirits were urging him to do – to become a healer and treat people, and he set up a clinic at his home in Aylesbury. One of his patients was a Dr. Kildare Singer, who had been taught ophthalmology by Dr. Lang at the Middlesex Hospital and was suffering with cancer. When Dr. Singer came to hear that people were visiting Chapman to receive spiritual he...