Harriet Tubman, Precog

Harriet Tubman, Precog

Eric Wargo

As a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Tubman earned the appellation “Moses,” but there was as much or even more of Joan of Arc in the dreaming and gun-toting freedom fighter. Because so many children’s stories about Tubman play up that comparison, serious biographers have had a hard time believing the supernormal aspects of Tubman’s story, assuming that her dreams and talking to God must simply be parts of the myth, or at best symptomatic of slave superstition or even brain disorder. But I will argue in what follows that, despite their anecdotal nature—with history and biography, we’re inevitably in the realm of anecdote—the abundant claims made independently by Tubman’s many abolitionist associates, friends, and early biographers add up to a picture that historians of the supernormal should not ignore. Tubman does seem to have regularly experienced precognition both in dreams and in her waking life, even if she herself used a religious idiom to describe and explain those experiences. Her story is consistent with what has been reported by other, better-studied psychic individuals in more recent times, including military remote viewers and contemporary precognitive dreamers.