One of the most famous mediums of the 20th century was Arthur Ford, an American whose career spanned five decades. Ford's legions of admirers were convinced he was the genuine article, a man who really was in touch with the spirits of the deceased. But after his death, a pair of biographers looking into Ford's personal papers found evidence to the contrary.
Allen Spraggett and William Rauscher were researching their authoritative biography, Arthur Ford: The Man who Talked with the Dead, when they came across a newspaper clipping among Ford's personal effects. The clipping profoundly troubled them. It was a New York Times obituary of Bishop Karl Morgan Block, and it contained several minor details about the late clergyman. What worried the two researchers was that precisely these details had come up in Ford's famed televised séance with Bishop James Pike.
In the séance, writes Spraggett,
The Block communicator [i.e., the alleged spirit of Bishop Block] had mentioned several small - even trivial - details which Pike considered especially evidential since their very triviality seemed to rule out the possibility of prior research by the medium. The details Pike found impressive appeared to be too obscure, too idiosyncratic, to be accessible to research. However, every one of these supposedly unresearchable items was mentioned in the New York Times obituary...
"This," I muttered to Bill Rauscher, shoots down the whole Block message."
And how much more?
If, as now seemed ominously possible, Arthur Ford had researched the Pike séance in advance - some critics had alleged this all along - the entire edifice of supposedly evidential messages might crumble....
My own stated judgment on the séance had been that whether or not Ford had demonstrated communication with the dead, which I regarded as an open question, he certainly appeared to have obtained information supernormally. Though prior research might explain some of the messages, others appeared to be virtually research-proof. Now some of these research-proof messages were staring at me from the obituary I held. [Pp. 246, 247]
The two men continued looking through Ford's papers. Unfortunately, a great deal of documentation had been destroyed by Ford's private secretary immediately after Ford's death. This in itself was somewhat suspicious since presumably the secretary was acting on Ford's instructions. Nevertheless, enough material remained to determine that Ford "had a marked propensity for clipping obituaries." Furthermore, "Rauscher discovered among Ford's papers a single sheet, from the sort of small loose-leaf notebook many people use for appointments. The page for typewritten data (apparently typed on the same machine Ford used for his correspondence) which were suspicious." The suspicious data consisted of notes gleaned from obituaries. The heading of the paper read "Unitarian." It appears that Ford was making notes to be used in a reading at a Unitarian church.
More unwanted revelations were in store.
Harmon Bro, a noted clergyman-psychotherapist, told me that Arthur Ford once confided to him that during the darkest days of his alcoholism he had resorted to cheating in public clairvoyance....
Dr. Ian Stevenson told me Ford admitted to him that he looked up people in Who's Who before a sitting.
A friend of Ford's, who knew him well as a public and as a private figure, said that in his opinion the medium possessed a photographic memory...
William Rauscher and I came across direct evidence - as contrasted to the circumstantial sort - indicating fraud on Ford's part. The evidence was in the form of accusations made against the medium by a former secretary of his... He made damaging charges against Ford's integrity as a medium, accompanied by a grudging admission that "he really was psychic when he wanted to be." In weighing this informant's accusations, it is pertinent that he and Ford parted on unfriendly terms...
There follows a long quote from this informant:
Arthur Ford never went to a thing like the Pike sitting without untold research... He did the research himself. He showed me how to do it. He went to the library in Philadelphia...
Here's where Arthur got his information. School records, see? He always told me this, "You find out where a guy went to school and you can get anything on him that you want."...
One woman sent him five hundred dollars in advance for sitting. I was with him when he did the research for this command performance. He showed me where to find the information. Who's Who. School directories....
One day I said to Arthur, "Are you reading your poems?" And he was frightened because nobody else was supposed to know what his poems were. That was the code name for his notes - "poems."
He'd say before sitting, "I think I'll go back here and read a little poetry." He kept his poems up to date by reading the papers constantly and cutting out obituaries from all over the United States.
He carried these poems of his in a gladstone suitcase and we'd hide it under the front seat of my car. Arthur was afraid to die or have a heart attack in a hotel room because he had the material hidden.
Mind you, I think he got a lot of things psychically. He could give things that mattered to people who mattered.
But Arthur always told me that anybody who could perform 100 percent of the time was a fraud.
It is also worth noting that Ford himself, in his book Unknown but Known, misrepresented the circumstances under which the Bishop Pike séance took place. He said that the séance had been arranged on the spur of the moment when Ford and Pike just happened to find themselves together in Toronto. As Spraggett, who arranged the séance personally, points out:
The fact is that in the invitation to Ford I had made it perfectly clear that his visit to Toronto was for the express purpose of holding a séance with Bishop Pike before the television cameras.... Why, then, did he say that "no séance was planned"? Was it to defuse criticism that he could have done research on Pike beforehand?
Despite this damning evidence, Spraggett and Rauscher do not conclude that Arthur Ford was a complete fake. They believe that some of the information he passed on could not have been acquired by library research or other fraudulent means. They suggest that Ford, like many other mediums, mixed legitimate paranormal abilities with a willingness to cheat when necessary.
To back up this claim, the authors review a second séance that Ford conducted with Bishop Pike, in which material of a highly personal nature was presented. At the authors' invitation, Bishop Pike's widow reviewed the transcript of the second séance and concluded that while four of the items could have been researched in advance, six others could not have been discovered by any sort of detective work. Some examples of the latter sort:
That [Pike's son, Jim, Jr.] ran into some people in New York who were part of "a crowd."
That a friend of his in Berkeley (whose name and father's occupation he was able to give) could explain about the crowd and "clear things up." (We checked this out and the friend did in fact know about the crowd and was able to clear up a lot of things.)
That drugs were not Jim, Jr.'s, difficulty. (He was explicit about the other difficulty.)
That he and his dad had talked about this second problem in England (they had never talked about it before that), and that Jim, Jr., had become convinced that this second problem was irreversible while he was in Europe...
He made reference to a conversation he and his father had in Cambridge which Jim, Sr., had not thought about since then, and which no one else knew about. He quoted some of the things his father said to him.
Of course, Spraggett and Rauscher had been similarly impressed by some of the hits in the first Pike séance, which turned out to have been obtained from newspaper obits. Could Ford have tracked down the even more obscure information in the second séance from some unknown source? Or did he genuinely have mediumistic abilities?
As with so many things in the area of psychic phenomena, the truth remains ambiguous. I'm starting to think that a very high tolerance for ambiguity is the only mindset with which to approach this baffling subject.
MP, just out of curiosity, how many mediums have you been to? I mean you can analyze historical accounts of other medium's work all day long, but I think with your interest in the subject matter, you should get out there and do your own research.
In fact, I have offered you a free 2 hour reading, which you failed to respond to. I know of other mediums who would gladly offer you free readings if the aim was to do some sort of honest statistical or analytical research. Just remember that no reading or medium in the world is going to give you 100% hits. That's just impossible.
On a side note, knowing your interest in psychokenesis stories, I thought you and your readers might like to watch this documentary I found on the web containing an amazing amount of vintage footage of psychical research.
The documentary is from a UK production called, "Mind over Matter" and it features impressive footage of a Russian housewife, Nina Colagula. Also, at the beginning of the documentary is some home footage of an almost comical display of teleketic power by "Stan," a stone-faced teenager in the Netherlands. There are two part to the documentary. The second part is listed as a link below the video viewer. It's well worth the time to watch. Here is the link -->http://www.untoldmysteries.com/xmenu/Mind-over-Matter-Experiments-Part1of2-Psychokinesis-Telekinesis-Paranormal.html
Posted by: Marcel Cairo | October 16, 2006 at 07:30 PM
P.S. I'll try to better proof and edit my postings in the future... I make more typos than an old, rusty typewriter.
Posted by: Marcel Cairo | October 16, 2006 at 08:26 PM
>MP, just out of curiosity, how many mediums have you been to?
Only one. It was a telephone reading with Laurie Campbell. I tape-recorded the session and later rated her accuracy at 77%. However, several major items of information were flat wrong, and a good deal of the correct information was rather general. I was not able to draw any definite conclusions.
>you should get out there and do your own research.
I'm not sure that it would be very useful. Even if I came across a medium who delivered information that I felt could not have been obtained normally, I couldn't rule out ESP (i.e., the medium reading my mind).
>In fact, I have offered you a free 2 hour reading, which you failed to respond to.
Sorry if I didn't respond. I thought I replied by thanking you for the offer and saying I would keep it in mind. My reasons for not jumping on the opportunity, even though I do appreciate it, are 1) the ESP thing mentioned above, and 2) the fact that there is a fair amount of info on me available on the Web, which would make any reading problematic unless the medium did not know my identity. I'm not saying you would use this info; I'm just saying that, since you already know who I am, the conditions would be less than ideal.
To be honest, there is a third reason, too. I'm aware of the "dark side" of the paranormal. Some people who get too caught up in this subject have become emotionally unstable. I wrote about this here. There is something to be said for keeping one's distance from the phenomena.
Thanks very much for the link. I'll watch the video ASAP. I've heard of Nina Kulagina, who certainly seems to have been genuine - though some skeptics allege that she hid magnets in her bra to attract metal objects! I think the experimenters would have detected such an obvious trick.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | October 16, 2006 at 08:48 PM
Michael, the offer on the reading is good for 20 years (if you and I are lucky to live that long).
I have had to do readings before for "public" figures, and their spiritual friends and families make it a point to bring forward information that is not printed or recorded anywhere publically... I actually ask them to do this as well, as my reputation is also on the line.
About the ESP theory, I've heard it mentioned before as a possible explanation to the source of a medium's information. I believe that theory to be virtually impossible in my readings based on the nature of the information that is revealed.. and the process of how it's revealed.
In my 22 years doing readings, I have encountered the dark side of "spirit" only a handful of times. Just a couple of those times have been what one might call, "hairy." Fortunately, I know that I have bouncers on the other side who will help me toss out any "tossers" that sneak past the velvet ropes of my mind.
Hope you enjoyed that amazing documentary.
Posted by: Marcel Cairo | October 16, 2006 at 10:12 PM
Everyone is a little bit psychic. It's just how our brains work. We are all connected to the collective unconscious in some inexplicable way. It takes an extroverted charismatic showman to be able to take this natural inborn ability that we all possess and turn it into something lucrative. Every once in a while in my own life I have little mystical experiences. Unfortuneately, I'm not charistmatic enough nor a good enough "talker" to make people believe I'm bigger than life. I still like watching John Edward on TV, even though I know he's really no different than you or I. He's just better at putting on a show. He really is entertaining, and that's what makes him so interesting. - Artie
Posted by: Art | October 17, 2006 at 12:17 AM
I don't buy the kid at the beginning of the vid at all. Why's it necessary to move one's hands at all if this is a mental phenomena? It just invites suspicion.
Posted by: Darryn | October 17, 2006 at 09:25 AM
Michael Prescott, I wanted to let you know how impressed I am with the essay you wrote about the dangers of involvement with the paranormal. Any time anyone enters into an element with which they are not familiar, they are in danger. If a child is suddenly thrown into a pool, without first having become acquainted with the methods for staying afloat, it will of course drown, or at least be severely endangered. The collective designation "the beyond" is barely known to us here on earth. Based upon the amount of evil which is readily witnessed already here, it makes sense to assume that this beyond is also populated by spirits whose intentions are less than pure. The difference is that if we use our normal physical senses, we can recognize and avoid evil while on earth to a great extent. When we invite the inhabitants of the great murky beyond into our living rooms, without being able to see them, and lacking a complete and conscious connection to their environs and activities, we should expect mischief of the highest order. Unfortunately, because the damage done to the investigators is by and large on the level of the body which the spirits can have contact with (namely the etheric body), the effects are not always immediately noticeable in the physical. Your beautifully written warning is an important public service in this regard. Thanks.
Posted by: tina brewer | October 17, 2006 at 04:10 PM
I found this article and was quite intrigued, just having a spirit drawing done under the mediumship of rev. Hoyt Rabinette. What can you share with me about "spirit drawings"?
Posted by: Janice Cottrill | October 27, 2006 at 05:56 PM
Sorry, I don't know anything about spirit drawings. However, if you Google the term "automatic writing," you may come across some relevant info.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | October 27, 2006 at 11:46 PM