Carried by the Spiritualist wave that swept across the United States and Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, Helen Butler Wells began taking an interest in Spiritualism after the death of her mother in 1901, then her husband, and finally her son Bertrand in 1913. She established a Spiritualist circle in New York, the “Jansen Group,” with two other women; the three of them practiced within a domestic setting.
Butler Wells communicated with the spirits of the deceased—introduced to her by her son, who had died at a young age. From 1916 onward, she devoted herself to spirit writing, which in some respects anticipates the automatic writing later championed by the Surrealists. She claimed to be guided by men of science such as Pythagoras, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Bishop Cornelius Jansen, founder of Jansenism, as well as the Native American leader Tecumseh and even visitors from the planets Mars and Jupiter.
Beginning in 1920, she also experimented with spirit drawing under the dictation of a spirit guide named Oswald. Butler Wells signed her drawings “Helen Butler Wells – Instrument I” to indicate that she was merely the channel of a transmitted voice. She held a prominent position within the New York Spiritualist community, becoming president of the Spiritual and Ethical Society of New York and writing numerous books under the dictation of spirits.