Leonora Piper in the context of Mentalism

Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged spirits to manipulate the practitioner's hand. The instrument may be a standard writing instrument, or it may be one specially designed for automatic writing, such as a planchette or a ouija board.

Religious and spiritual traditions have incorporated automatic writing, including Fuji in Chinese folk religion and the Enochian language associated with Enochian magic. In the modern era, it is associated with Spiritualism and the occult, with notable practitioners including W. B. Yeats and Arthur Conan Doyle. Claims associated with automatic writing are unfalsifiable, while some documented examples result from the ideomotor phenomenon.

Richard Hodgson (24 September 1855 – 21 December 1905) was an Australian-born psychical researcher who investigated spiritualist mediums such as Eusapia Palladino and Leonora Piper. During his later life, Hodgson became a spiritualist medium himself and believed to be in communication with spirits.