Observations placeholder
Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's daughter's stolen harp
Identifier
011150
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
From Opening Heaven’s Door – Patricia Pearson
University of California psychiatrist Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer’s … daughter had a rare and valuable harp stolen near San Francisco in 1991; neither the police nor the family's public appeals managed to recover it.
After several months, a friend suggested to Mayer that she had nothing to lose by consulting a dowser.
"Finding lost objects with a forked stick?" Mayer responded. But her friend gave her the phone number of the president of the American Society of Dowsers, at the time a man named Harold McCoy who lived in Arkansas.
"I called him that day. Harold picked up the phone-friendly, cheerful, heavy Arkansas accent."
She told him she was looking for a stolen harp in Oakland, California, and asked, dubiously, if he could help her locate it. "Give me a second,” he said. “I’ll tell you if it's still in Oakland.” He paused, then said, “Well, it's still there. Send me a street map of Oakland and I’ll locate that harp for you.”
Mayer sent the map by express post, and two days later, McCoy phoned back to tell her precisely which house in Oakland contained her daughter's harp. Feeling as though she'd surely lost her mind, she put up flyers in a two-block radius of this house, in a neighborhood she was unfamiliar with. She soon received a phone call from someone who had seen the harp in his neighbour's house. He was able to get it back to Mayer.
'As I turned into my driveway [with the harp]," she later wrote, "I had the thought: This changes everything."