One historical application of dowsing has been to trace missing people, either alive or deceased. In this account, taken from the BSD Journal of September 1950, we find the police working with a dowser in an attempt to find a missing young girl, who it turned out sadly had been murdered.

http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No69_p131-141.pdf

Although the girl was eventually located by other means, the account is an interesting study in actual dowsing. There are many accounts in which dowsers have successfully traced people. This is probably because it appears to be quite a specialised task and only a handful of dowsers specialised in it, but as a result they became very good. But dowsing is not always exact, because there are often confounding issues, however it may be a helpful guide.

The first part of this very detailed account is provided by the Police inspector who worked with the dowser, a Mr Latham, and the latter part contains the comments of the dowser himself.

The dowser begins the search by dowsing a large scale map using a pendulum.  He describes the action of the latter as he closes in on the area in which the girl was later found.  Changes in the pendulum’s swing  from oscillation to and fro to gyration is a common dowsing reaction,  but the meaning of the swing may often depends on the dowser themselves.

He later moves to on-site dowsing, using a traditional (and at that time widely used) Y shaped dowsing rod, here made of whalebone, which was a material of choice at this time. I think few dowsers today would use the Y rod.  He is feeling the “pull” in the rod, to get a bearing on the location of child.

Note also that he speaks of “emanations”. Dowsers, especially at that time, but also today, consider that everything radiates in some way, and that they are receiving and homing in on this radiation or emanations. If we stay with that metaphor, then to help him “tune” himself into what he is seeking, he uses a “sample” representing whatever is sought. In this case, it is the child’s slipper. As he points out, an inanimate object can become imbued with the characteristics of the thing sought, if the two are connected for a sufficient amount of time (often referred to by dowsers as rémanence). Interestingly though he mentions the child’s hair and dog’s hair within the slipper, the former should have aided the search, while the latter may have been sufficient to confuse the search.

Dowsers often give vent to their own ideas about how their art works and he expounds on this at some length near the end, hopefully this does not distract from the actual proceedings.