Stefan Ossowiecki: Interwar Poland’s Most Famous Clairvoyant
They say he could read a letter without opening it, move objects with the power of his mind, and even be in two places at the same time. Just by holding an object belonging to a person he could, allegedly, discover their fate. Ossowiecki’s purported powers made him famous and were tested under controlled conditions thanks to which even until this day some still consider him a truly remarkable phenomenon.
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Stefan Ossowiecki in his apartment, 1932, photo: National Digital Archives / audiovis.nac.gov.pl
The story of Stefan Ossowiecki is a tricky one, as it’s hard to separate fact from fiction. There’s plenty of legitimate information about his life but it’s mixed with stories and reports of his psychic powers which seem suspicious from a purely rational standpoint.
But what separates him from other clairvoyants is that his powers seem to have been verified by a number of tests. For example, another well-known Polish psychic active in the Interwar period, Jan Guzik, was eventually exposed as a fraud. An experiment showed that the objects he allegedly moved by sheer willpower were actually put into motion by… his elbows and legs. When one reads about Stefan Ossowiecki no such clear-cut stories debunking his supposed powers pop up. On the contrary, there’s a wealth of accounts confirming Ossowiecki’s clairvoyance.
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Ossowiecki was outstanding, and he may have been the greatest clairvoyant of whom we have reliable knowledge. Moreover, he came as close as anyone has ever done to providing repeated demonstrations of clairvoyance under controlled conditions.
Author
‘A World in a Grain of Sand: The Clairvoyance of Stefan Ossowiecki’ by Mary Rose Barrington & Zofia Weaver, 2005, McFarland
Marble statues & esoteric knowledge
Stefan Ossowiecki was born in 1877 in Moscow, into a well-off Polish family. His father Jan Ossowiecki, who had been an assistant to the famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, was an engineer and owned a chemical factory in Moscow producing paints and varnishes. Stefan’s mother was Bona née Newlin-Nowohońska. He had three brothers and two sisters.
In a book that Stefan Ossowiecki published in 1933 titled Świat Mego Ducha i Wizje Przyszłości (The World of My Spirit and Visions of the Future), he writes that he had started to exhibit telepathic abilities by the age of fourteen.
At seventeen, he graduated from the Third Cadet Corps school in Moscow and later began to study at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology. In his aforementioned book, he writes that as a student he would put on séances showing off his telekinetic abilities:
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They’d tie me up with ropes, they’d put a long shirt on me and tie its long sleeves behind my back. Lying on the ground in such a state, constrained, I could move the heaviest of objects. I tore off clothes, moved marble statues and other heavy objects, I took paintings off of walls.
Author
From ‘The World of My Spirit and Visions of the Future’ by Stefan Ossowiecki, trans. MK
Also, according to Ossowiecki, as a student he travelled to the town of Homel in today’s Belarus where he met a man by the name of Wróbel. This old Jew learned in esoteric knowledge immediately recognised Ossowiecki’s special powers and helped him develop them.
In 1899, Ossowiecki completed his education at the Institute of Technology receiving an engineer's diploma. After his father’s death in 1914, he took charge of the family chemical factory.
Enormous horizons & visions
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Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw, 1926-1934, photo: National Digital Archives / audiovis.nac.gov.pl
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Ossowiecki was imprisoned under charges of spying for the French military. The accusations were linked to the fact that the offices of the French Military Mission were located in his house. He spent half a year in jail and was eventually sentenced to death. Fortunately, he was pardoned at the last moment.
After this difficult experience, in 1918, Ossowiecki decided to move to Warsaw. That year Poland, which had been partitioned by Prussia, Austria and Russia toward the end of the 18th century, finally regained its independence. In reborn Poland, Ossowiecki had various jobs: for example, he co-founded a company dealing with telephone disinfection, was vice chairman of the Bank for Foreign Trade, and started a partnership for trade in coal. But still, he was best known not as a businessman but as a clairvoyant.
Due to his (purported) psychic powers he became one of the most famous people in Interwar Poland. He was written about in the press and his circle of friends grew to include celebrated individuals like the political and military leader Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the composer Karol Szymanowski, and the actor and director Juliusz Osterwa. As to his family life, in 1922 he married the Russian Alietta de la Carriere whom he divorced in 1930. His second and final marriage was in 1939 to Zofia Skibińska.
Ossowiecki was especially valued for his psychometry, namely clairvoyance based on objects. Just by coming in contact with an object belonging to a particular person, he could allegedly discover their fate. He is said to have used this power to locate missing persons such as victims of drownings or suicides. Apparently, the police employed his services and he helped them identify criminals. Using his psychic powers, Ossowiecki could supposedly also see people’s auras and locate missing objects, for example, pieces of jewellery.
Here’s how Ossowiecki described his process:
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Above all I try to recreate the object in my imagination, and once I have it in front of me as it is in reality, this desensitises my consciousness, makes it subject to autosuggestion. I try to keep this object in front of my eyes all the time, and once I see the object or the landscape or the man I am interested in, then the form of the object I held before my eyes begins to disappear. […] Enormous horizons and visions arise before my eyes; it is enough to pick up an object, and instantaneously it transports me to those places on which I am concentrating, and which it has just touched.
Author
From ‘A World in a Grain of Sand: The Clairvoyance of Stefan Ossowiecki’
Ossowiecki was also believed to be able to read the contents of a letter without opening it and… to be present in two places at the same time. In his book, he describes a situation where he was lying on a couch in a Warsaw apartment but his apparition or perhaps doppelgänger was simultaneously present at a science conference in Vienna. ‘My signature appeared on the attendance list, I was seen there by plenty of people,’ he writes. At this point one simply has to say that the tales of Ossowiecki’s psychic powers do sound quite unbelievable…
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The psychical researchers Gustav Geley and Stanley De Brath with an alleged spirit, 1919, photo: Stanley De Brath / Commons.wikimedia.org
Ossowiecki was a believer in the Christian faith and never accepted money for his psychic services. He was quite willing to put his alleged paranormal powers under scrutiny. That’s why today we have a number of accounts describing his unusual skills.
Among the most intriguing tests of his clairvoyance were the ones conducted by Dr Gustav Geley, a French physician researching paranormal phenomena. They’re described in detail in the 1927 book Inżynier Stefan Ossowiecki – Polski Jasnowidz (Engineer Stefan Ossowiecki: the Polish Clairvoyant), edited by Zofia Tuwanowa.
According to the experiments organised by Geley, Ossowiecki repeatedly foretold the contents of sealed letters. Some of these experiments were conducted with the participation of the Nobel Prize in Medicine winner Professor Charles Richet. For example, Richet entrusted Geley with a sealed letter written by a certain Anna de Noailles. Geley later asked Ossowiecki to describe the contents of this letter at a conference attended by about a hundred people. Here’s what happened according to the French doctor:
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I handed the letter to Ossowiecki. Very quickly, after about five or seven minutes, he began to speak. He described Mrs. Noailles and her apartment […] and then said: ‘In this letter she speaks of a great contemporary genius. She feels a strong affinity with him. She says that the genius Richet is as grand as his heart. She signed with her name and surname. […] Then I opened the letter in front of all the gathered people. It contained the following words [in French]: ‘The noble qualities of Professor Charles Richet’s heart are equally as touching as his scientific genius. Anna de Noailles.’
Author
From ‘Engineer Stefan Ossowiecki: the Polish Clairvoyant’, trans. MK
Geley goes on to add that all the other experiments with Ossowiecki ended with success. However, one should probably mention that in the 1950s, after his death, Geley was accused of covering up a fraudulent mediumistic case he had researched. Apparently, he kept the truth about this case secret so as not to undermine the public’s belief in the paranormal. This, of course, ought to be taken into account when one ponders the credibility of Geley’s tests of Ossowiecki’s clairvoyance.
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Marshal Józef Piłsudkski playing solitaire on Madeira, 1931, image: Piotr Mecik / Forum
Another curious story about Ossowiecki is linked to Marshal Piłsudski – a man known to have been interested in parapsychology. Piłsudski had a sealed letter delivered to Ossowiecki who was asked to describe its contents. In the presence of a number of witnesses, including Piłsudski’s adjutant Lieutenant Czesław Świrski, the clairvoyant began to hold the letter and focus on it. Soon he declared that the writing contains the numbers two, four, five and seven, interspersed with the recurring letter ‘l.’
Afterwards Piłsudski (who at the time held the office of Chief of State) was contacted via telephone and confirmed that this was indeed the content of his letter. As an avid chess player, he had written down the notation of a chess opening.
The whole affair was described in an official report written by Świrski:
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As soon as Mr. Ossowiecki described the content of the letter, I telephoned Belweder Palace [Piłsudski’s residence – ed.]. The Chief of State, who was very interested in this experiment, personally confirmed that the content of the letter was read accurately and that engineer Ossowiecki hadn’t made a mistake. The letter was only opened by the Chief of State the next day.
Author
From ‘The World of My Spirit and Visions of the Future’, trans. MK
This story seems particularly noteworthy as it involves high ranking military men, individuals who you wouldn’t necessarily suspect of naivety or susceptibility to deception.
An extraordinary & modest man
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A New Year’s Eve party organised at the Royal Castle in Warsaw by Poland’s president Stanisław Wojciechowski, Stefan Ossowiecki is in the right-hand side, 1926, photo: National Digital Archives / audiovis.nac.gov.pl
Ossowiecki’s psychic powers were also supposedly confirmed by tests conducted by Prosper Szmurło, president of the Warsaw Psychophysical Society, and in an experiment organised by the British anthropologist and librarian Eric Dingwall.
Apart from experimental data about Ossowiecki’s clairvoyance, there are also plenty of accounts of it given by people whom he helped in some way. For example, there’s the charming story told by Alice de Glass in a letter to Geley.
Mrs. de Glass had lost a brooch in on the streets of Warsaw and personally asked Ossowiecki if he could help her find it. Upon touching her dress, the clairvoyant had a vision of the brooch, described it in detail, and declared that it had been found by a man with a small black moustache. The following day, he encountered by chance that very man and retrieved the brooch from him. He then contacted Mrs. de Glass and gave her back her piece of jewellery. Toward the end of her letter, she writes:
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This extraordinary and modest man, unsparingly devotes his precious time and effort to serving people in a completely selfless manner.
Author
From ‘The World of My Spirit and Visions of the Future’, trans. MK
Unfortunately, Ossowiecki’s purported paranormal powers didn’t help him avoid an abrupt end. Even though he could’ve left Poland when World War II broke out, he chose to stay in Warsaw. In the first days of the Warsaw Uprising, he went missing and his body was never found. Most probably, he was murdered by the Nazi Germans in a mass execution of civilians.
Some say he couldn’t have foreseen his own death because he wasn’t gifted with a convincing power of precognition. For example, in May 1939 he prophesised in a press interview that there wouldn’t be a war that year or that it would only be limited to the seas.
Despite Ossowiecki having lived so long ago, the amazing stories about him continue to inspire. Another biographical book about him, Mag: Stefan Ossowiecki (The Magus: Stefan Ossowiecki) by Karolina Prewęcka, was published as recently as 2018. As to the accounts of his paranormal skills – they won’t convince the sceptics but those who choose to believe in Ossowiecki’s psychic powers may view them as proof. What seems to be undeniable is that Ossowiecki was a truly remarkable character.
Written by Marek Kępa, Nov 21
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