In 1918 W.T. Allison, a professor of English at the University of Manitoba and a close friend of T.G., returned from a visit to American medium Pearl Curran. He passed on his interest and enthusiasm for spiritual communication to T.G. This may never have amounted to more than a passing interest had not fate intervened. In 1919, one of T.G.’s twin sons, Arthur, died at the age of three, a victim of the Spanish flu. T.G.’s daughter Margaret attributed the family’s lifelong search for life after death to this event. Her father’s grief was profound; her mother, having read Frederic William Henry Myers's book "Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death", encouraged her husband to investigate the phenomenon.