Helen Piper, an American clairvoyant saved many lives during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937.
Helen Piper, a 58 year-old American clairvoyant, palmist, and nurse, calmly tended wounded Chinese, though Japanese planes roared overhead, dropping bombs within 300 yards of her house.
Madame Piper refused to lose faith in her clairvoyant powers, which, she said, had told her that her establishment Rubicon Inn would not be bombed. Humanitarian impulses, too, had told her to stay on and help wounded Chinese soldiers and refugees. Her devotion to the cause of the wounded won the admiration of many foreigners and Chinese in Shanghai. Wounded Chinese from villages miles away were brought to her for treatment, and laid on her dance floor. Madame Piper declared:
“I am not going to leave. My clairvoyant powers tell me this place is not going to be hit. Apart from that, somebody must stay and care for the Chinese peasants when they are wounded. The noise of the bombing scares me to death, but I must stand by. I don’t know what the war is about, but I look at it from a humanitarian view point.”
She had done similar humanitarian work thirty years earlier during the Russo-Japanese war.
This is her advertisement published in The China Press in 1933.
