Achsa Sprague was born and lived in Plymouth Notch, where she was teaching in the stone school by age 12. At 20, she contracted a mysterious disease and spent seven years bedridden before waking one day miraculously cured. Believing that angelic powers had restored her, she became a trance medium and lectured on Spiritualism throughout the United States and Canada. She was also a prolific author of Spiritualist articles, prose, poems, and letters through automatic writing, which she said was controlled by worldly energies. She supported women's suffrage, prison reform, and the abolition of slavery. She died at age 34 and was buried in the Plymouth Notch Cemetery, where her tombstone bears her verse, "I Still Live."