Gladys Osborne Leonard was born in Lytham St. Annes, Lancashire, England, on 28 May 1882 and passed away in Broadstairs, Thanet, England, on 19 March 1968. A popular singer, she learned to sing as a child and became famous in her time. However, due to an illness that arose in her childhood, her career was interrupted in 1906, when a spiritist nurse introduced her to séances with revolving tables.

Considering the period in which she lived, within the Belle Époque, mesmerism was widespread, with revolving tables and other spiritist séances in fashion. Even more so in the period after the Kardecian Codification, when, in addition to recognising the paranormal, the sentient nature of the manifestations greatly encouraged people to engage in such activities, mainly to seek contact with their departed loved ones.

She reported that from childhood she had visions of beautiful places, which she called the “Happy Valley”, shown to her by spirits. Motivated by this, she participated with friends in some 26 séances without positive results, until one day, around 1913, during another seemingly fruitless séance, she began receiving messages from beyond, in a sudden trance, manifesting the spirit of a woman named Feda, who had been the wife of the singer’s great-great-grandfather. In addition to Feda, the spirit North Star also began to manifest, for spiritual treatment through passes, making her, in addition to a clairvoyant, a therapeutic pass practitioner.

She was considered a psychiatric patient, with dissociative disorders. But Feda provided her with information that was later verified as true, which the singer could not have known otherwise. Her main researchers were Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge and Reverend Charles Drayton Thomas. Thanks to her mediumship, the young Raymond, Lodge’s son who died in 1914 during the First World War, was able to communicate.

She became a regular presence at the SPR in 1918, when Mrs W. H. Salter studied her in further séances, in addition to the 500 conducted by the Reverend and another roughly 75 conducted by Sir Oliver Lodge. According to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, she was one of the greatest trance mediums he ever knew, as recorded in his famous book translated into English as The History of Spiritism.

Developing further, she also practised out-of-body experiences, with wonderful accounts of places in this and other spiritual worlds, as recounted in her famous book My Life in Two Worlds.

Her fame earned her the nickname “the British Mrs Piper”, in reference to the famous medium Leonora Piper (1857–1950).

Mrs Leonard was tested by the most notable psychic investigators of the time, such as Rev. C. Drayton Thomas, Rev. Vale Owen, James Hewat McKenzie, Mrs W. H. Salter, and Whately Carington, to name just a few.

After almost fifty years of mediumship, she passed away in 1968, aged 85, and, like Leslie Flint, Eusapia Palladino, and many other famous mediums, Gladys Osborne Leonard was never caught in fraud.