This Day in History: Thomas Lynn Bradford of Detroit, Michigan was a spiritualist who committed suicide on this day in 1921 in an attempt to confirm the existence of an afterlife and communicate that information to a living accomplice, Ruth Doran.
Some weeks earlier, Bradford had sought a fellow spiritualist in a newspaper advertisement and Doran responded. The two agreed "that there was but one way to solve the mystery—two minds properly attuned, one of which must shed its earthly mantle". The New York Times ran a follow-up under the headline "Dead Spiritualist Silent".
Bradford's body was found a day later inside a small rented room in a boarding house at 2500 Howard Street in Detroit. The gas had been turned on, suffocating the life out of the forty-eight year old man. Dropped from the hand of the lifeless Bradford were several typewritten pages, the first bearing the title: "Can the Dead Communicate With the Living?"
Ruth Doran claimed that Bradford had indeed reached out to her from beyond and became a minor celebrity as a result.
"The evidence seems to suggest that Mrs. Ruth Starkweather Doran, who once distanced herself from Bradford and denied belief in the occult, gradually embraced her newfound fame and publicity and used it to her financial advantage. In subsequent interviews, Doran often contradicted herself, sometimes claiming that she first met Bradford at his apartment, and other times claiming that he had first visited Doran at her home. Sometimes she claimed to have only met him once, other times she claimed to have met him several times. Sometimes she claimed to have been a skeptic in the occult, other times she claimed to have been a devout and lifelong student of the metaphysical. Sometimes she described Bradford and being pompous and arrogant, and other times she spoke of him as a dear friend. These inaccuracies, along with a national decline in the spirituality trend, eventually resulted in Doran's fading into obscurity." Source
Thomas Bradford died because he was was totally committed to his belief.
An ancient Greek lawyer named Charondas committed suicide because of a law that he issued that he was totally faithful to.
Charondas announced a law that anyone who brought weapons into the Assembly must be put to death. One day, he arrived at the Assembly seeking help to defeat some brigands in the countryside but with a knife still attached to his belt. In order to uphold his own law, he committed suicide.
See also The Mysteries of Death - 250 Books on DVDrom and Spiritualism and the Cult of the Dead - 120 Books on DVDrom (Spiritism)
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