The Stolen Body #1000897

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was one of the most popular British writers of all time. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography and autobiography, but Wells is now best remembered for his Science Fiction novels and has been called the “Father of Science Fiction”. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.
A great initiate and scholar of Esotericism and Occultism, and a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn - a secret society devoted to the study and practice of occult Hermeticism and metaphysics founded in 1887 in Great Britain by William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell Mathers -, in addition to his fame as a writer, Wells was prominent in his lifetime as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His Science Fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering before these subjects were common in the genre.
Wells’s science fiction short story The Stolen Body, was originally published in November 1898 in The Strand Magazine, and then collected in Twelve Stories and a Dream (1903) and Tales of the Unexpected (1924); it was reprinted in Weird Tales magazine (November 1925) and in many collections and anthologies.
The story’s main characters are a pair of casual paranormal researchers who are experimenting with the idea of astral projection. One night, one of them inadvertently succeeds in projecting his spirit from his body, which is then taken possession of by a malevolent entity in his absence. His partner receives a vivid sensation of him calling out for help and rushes to his residence, only to find him absent and the place in shambles. The researcher continues to search for his partner and learns that he has perpetrated a series of violent incidents around London. He seeks the aid of a medium, who he discovers had channelled his partner’s spirit and finds that he has fallen down an excavation shaft and subsequently been abandoned by the possessing entity. They locate the shaft and rescue him, after which he recounts the story of his possession.