Music, friendship and bereavement
Dresser came from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and worked as a music teacher before settling in southern California. Her surviving correspondence records family relationships, musical work, travel and her enthusiasm for life in California. She became a close companion of Fred and Carrie Rafferty, travelling with them and sharing their household. Her birth year is uncertain: published accounts give 1845 or 1855. She died in 1930.
In the preface to Spirit World and Spirit Life, Dresser calls herself Sis and recalls the companionship of Dee and F. R. After Carrie’s death in 1917, she and Fred began experiments with friends, first using table-tipping and a Ouija board. Dresser then tried automatic writing. She described messages arriving unexpectedly and sometimes contradicting her own thoughts. Fred undertook the selection and editing of the resulting material. Her letters to a niece and grandniece, now preserved at the William L. Clements Library, provide a further record of the person behind these publications.
Recording a spiritual world
The held 1922 Spirit World and Spirit Life names C. E. D. as the recipient of the automatic writing and F. R. as editor. Dresser and Rafferty attributed the communications to Dee, a guide called Mary and other speakers. They assembled passages by subject, moving from the difficulties of communication to spiritual senses, occupations, music and moral development. Questions and answers also address their doubts about whether the writing could originate in the medium’s own mind.
