An Ouija board, a posthumous novel, and a lawsuit create and odd coda for Mark Twain.
In the summer of 1918, New York publisher Mitchell Kennerley found himself the subject of an unusual lawsuit.
The previous year, Kennerley had published a novel by the late Mark Twain, titled Jap Herron. Twain’s estate, represented by his daughter Clara Clemens, claimed that Kennerley had no right to publish the work and that all the profits ought to be given to the estate and Twain’s publisher, Harper & Brothers, who had an exclusive contract.
When he was still alive, Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, had testified before Congress in favor of a law that extended copyright protections beyond the death of the holder, arguing that it would help provide a living for his daughters when he eventually passed away.
The circumstances pointed toward a fairly open-and-shut case of copyright infringement, except for one bothersome detail: Kennerley claimed the work had been written not by Mark Twain the man, but by his ghost.
Writing from the grave
The dead, it seems, were particularly talkative in early 20th-century St. Louis. The Ouija board, having been patented for the first time in 1891, was enjoying popularity as a means of otherworldly communication. Across the city, psychic societies met to demonstrate the powers of the board. One day in 1913, St. Louisan Pearl Curran received a communication from a spirit which began: “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name.” Pearl would eventually receive multiple works of fiction and poetry from this spirit, including The Sorry Tale, which was published in the same year as Jap Herron, and gained Pearl a minor celebrity.
She had been introduced to the Ouija board through a friend named Emily Grant Hutchings. An experienced practitioner of the psychic arts, Emily relocated to St. Louis from Hannibal in the 1890s. In 1915, she was invited to a lecture being given to a psychic research society. When the lecturer was delayed, a medium named Lola V. Hays was asked to distract the audience with a “demonstration of her ability to transmit spirit messages by means of a planchette and a lettered board.”
As fate would have it, the first ghostly presence to communicate with the group gathered on that afternoon in March announced himself as “Samuel L. Clemens, lazy Sam.” Emily was well acquainted with the work of her fellow Hannibal native, but the others in the room ostensibly were not. The ghost made a couple of jokes about his memoirs, which didn’t land with the audience, and then was interrupted by the arrival of the scheduled lecturer.
Emily, in a written account of the incident, professed to be immediately tantalized by the opportunity to speak with a figure whom she both admired and shared a hometown. She arranged another meeting with Lola, and sure enough, the ghost of Twain once again appeared.
Choosing his writer
Since his death in 1910, Twain had apparently not been able to give up the habit of writing. According to Emily’s account, he had appeared before the same research society about one year after his death and stated that if the right corporeal counterpart could be availed upon, he had some literary material he would share. Emily was theoretically the vessel his restless spirit had been waiting for.
Her penchant for paranormal communication aside, one can appreciate why the deceased Twain might have chosen Emily. In 1914, an edition of Notable Women of St. Louis included a story about her, outlining her impressive education and her numerous publication credits for works of journalism, fiction, and poetry, which included outlets such as Atlantic Monthly and Cosmopolitan.
According to the profile, she had written a new story every day for the General Press Bureau of the 1904 World’s Fair, and these stories had been printed across the world. The short biography also mentions that after Emily wrote an article on Twain, it captured the attention of her future husband, Charles Edwin Hutchings, who also shared an interest in Twain.
From Emily’s first sitting with Lola Hays, the ghost of Twain began to relay literary material. In an essay titled “The Coming of ‘Jap Herron,’ ” which serves as a preface to the novel, Emily describes their working process. Both Emily and Lola would have their fingertips on the planchette, but only Emily would observe the letters on the Ouija board and transcribe them. According to her, Lola “never permitted herself to look at the board, fearing that her own mind would interfere with the transmission.”
In that first session, Twain’s ghost outlined the plot of a short story. After working through a few of these shorter works, he explained his desire to write Jap Herron. Emily claimed that she, Lola, and occasionally Edwin would sit for two hours, twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays, taking down the text of the novel one letter at a time.
According to Emily, some modifications had to be made to the board to facilitate more expedient transmission, including the addition of an apostrophe mark in the middle of the board. She claimed that the ghost of Mark Twain had apparently found the apostrophe’s original sentence or paragraph. By these means, Emily claims to have proven herself worthy of discerning the spirit’s revelation. She was also responsible for the general continuity of the novel. Emily writes that the reason the book was outlined at the beginning of the process was so that she and her colleagues would not mistake the ghostly hand of Twain for some other forlorn spirit who was desirous of communication with the living.
“You must be determined not to permit intruders,” Twain’s ghost is supposed to have said. “If they are recognized, you will not be free of them again. I am pushed aside. Leave the board when they appear.”
Divining the plausibility
For Sarah Kay, a present-day evidential medium, aura reader, and teacher in St. Louis, the process described by location, near the bottom of the board, too cumbersome and had taken to using a comma in the apostrophe’s place, which caused considerable confusion.
“The Coming of Jap Herron” is full of colorful details like this. At one point, Emily’s essay relates that the spirit was pleased by Edwin’s fondness for tobacco, a custom he shared with the late Twain.
Emily writes: “We had worked patiently on the latter part of the narrative and had accomplished a big evening’s work, when the dictation was interrupted by this remark: ‘It is going good; but I sure wish that I had Edwin’s pipe.’ We fairly gasped with astonishment; but we had no time for comment, as the planchette continued its amazing revelation: ‘Smoke up, old man, for auld lang syne. In the other world, they don’t know Walter Raleigh’s weed, and I have not found Walter yet to make complaint.’ ”
By and by, the novel’s full text was relayed to Emily, Edwin, and Lola. Emily states that from time to time their spiritual liaison would ask her to make minor edits or to find an appropriate place in the text to interject a Emily sounds plausible. Although Sarah says she has been able to see the dead since childhood and has been performing readings for over a decade, she does not use the Ouija board because of the uncertain nature of the content trying to be communicated from the other side.
“When you don’t have clear boundaries energetically,” Sarah says, “I do think people open the door to stuff.”
Sarah says a client once asked her if she had done back- ground research before their virtual reading. “I had to look down at the corner of the screen to see what her name even was,” she says. She prefers to have as little knowledge as possible about the client going into a reading and also prefers not to know whom the client is trying to reach. Sarah’s practice primarily focuses on people reaching out to their deceased loved ones—people they have had a relationship with in life. But in her view, a trained medium like Lola Hays could indeed have called on the spirit of a famous author whom she had not met. Emily and Edwin had likely heard Twain speak and had corresponded with Twain.
Sarah suggests that it’s even possible that Twain was drawn to serve as a sort of spirit guide for Emily.
Criticizing Jap Herron
The action of Jap Herron, a Novel Written from the Ouija Board, takes place in the Missouri Ozarks. It largely revolves around the life of its impoverished protagonist, who spends part of his formative years assisting in the production of a country newspaper. There are aspects of the story that resemble other works by Twain and that echo aspects of his biography, particularly the knowledge of running a small town newspaper, but then again, Emily’s experience as a journalist could have provided much of the same color and detail.
In the early 20th century, works of fiction written by ghostly spirits were not an unusual phenomenon. The New York Times review of Jap Herron in 1917 lists it as the third book that year “that has claimed authorship by some dead and gone being.” The Times review is not especially positive and expresses some degree of doubt as to the authorship. “If this is the best that ‘Mark Twain’ can do by reaching across the barrier,” it reads, “the army of admirers that his works have won for him will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary.”
In general, the critical viewpoint was that Jap Herron wasn’t a bad novel, but that if it was supposed to have been penned by a hand as adroit as Twain’s, it was probably among his weaker efforts. Per the review in the Oakland Tribune: “Jap Herron, without Mark Twain’s name, would find ready sale as an interesting story in which humor and pathos are mingled. Had Mark Twain written it while he was alive, it is probable that his publishers would have advised against its appearance, for in no way could it do anything but detract from his reputation.”
A review in The Bookman, titled “Another ‘Ouija Board’ Book,” seemed willing to accept the claim of the novel’s origin. “The story is unquestionably in Mark Twain’s style: it is set in his Missouri country, the conversation is in the dialect that appears in Huckleberry Finn, and the type of humor recalls the enjoyment experienced in reading Innocents Abroad. From internal evidence, there is at least no contradiction to the theory of its origin.”
How Jap Herron compares to Twain’s other works is subjective, but it was objectively short in length for one of his novels. Emily claims to have raised this point with Twain’s ghost, who replied: “I went to church, heard a missionary sermon, was carried away—to the extent of a hundred dollars. The preacher kept talking. I reduced my ante to fifty dollars. He talked on. I came down to twenty-five, to ten, to five, and after he had said all that he had in him, I stole a nickel from the basket. Reason for yourselves. Not how long but how strong.”
Publishing a ghosts novel
When the novel’s publication was contested by Mark Twain’s estate, Emily and publisher Kennerley, despite being prepared to call Twain to the stand via Ouija board, were faced with a no-win situation. Either they would be forced to renounce their claims about the book’s prove- nance, or they would try to prove that Twain had written it from beyond the grave and then be faced with untangling the thorny legal issue of phantasmal copyright in court. In the end, the case never went to trial. Emily and Kennerley agreed to cease sale of the book and destroy their remaining copies. Today, its text falls under public domain and is widely available online.
In “The Coming of Jap Herron,” Emily relays a quote, allegedly from Mark Twain’s ghost, that is of special interest. “There will be a great understanding some day. It will come when the earth realizes that we must leave it, to live, and when it can put itself in touch with the heavens that surround it … there is everything to learn, after the shackles of earth are thrown aside.”
One can only wonder what Twain would have made of this quote or of the larger story behind it. Perhaps he’ll be once again conjured by a Ouija board or other means during our lifetimes. Otherwise, we’ll simply have to wait until the great understanding comes.
This article was originally published in the October 2025 issue of Missouri Life.
