In 1913 Pearl Curran, a St. Louis housewife, began using a Ouija board and said she was receiving messages from Patience Worth, a seventeenth-century New England Puritan woman. Over the following years Curran produced an enormous body of work attributed to this spirit, including novels, poems and plays. Critics and literary organisations praised it at the time as genuine early American writing. Today it is mostly forgotten, and it raises questions about who really wrote a text.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.