In the mid-nineteenth century, the New York law firm Edmonds, Bushnell, & Hamilton provided legal services to the New York Life Insurance Company. The eminent John W. Edmonds was the Edmonds name partner in that law firm.^ In an insurance case in 1869, Edmonds claimed important spiritual insight:

I was in a court in Brooklyn, when a suit against a life assurance company for the amount claimed to be due on a certain policy was being heard. Looking toward that part of the court-room occupied by the jury, I saw the spirit of the man whose death was the basis of the suit. The spirit told me the circumstances connected with the death; said that the suit was groundless, that the claimant was not entitled to recover from the Company, and said that he (the man whose spirit was speaking) had committed suicide under certain circumstances; I drew a diagram of the place at which his death occurred, and on showing it to the counsel, was told that it was exact in every particular.

I had never seen the place nor the man, nor had I ever heard his name until I entered that Court-room; ^

A subsequent defense witness, Charles F. Livermore, declined to describe the spirits he saw. He explained:

I do not care about going into all my experiences. …There are matters which I do not care to go into or make public to the world.

After some sparring among attorneys and the judge, the prosecution’s attorney allowed the question to be dropped.^