Arthur Ford's Reflections about His Trance Seances for Mrs. Houdini and Bishop Pike

Arthur Ford   Harry Houdini   Beatrice Houdini   Bishop James A. Pike

  
  
Trance Medium Arthur Ford (1897-1971) in his second autobiography Unknown But Known: My Adventure Into The Meditative Dimension (1968) reflected about the famous seances for Houdini's widow and many years later for Bishop James Pike.  These passages are presented in this blog article.  There was an interim of 39 years between the seances that brought worldwide attention to Arthur and his 'control spirit' known as 'Fletcher.' 

Arthur Ford first discovered his psychic ability when he was a soldier during World War I.  After the war, he became a minister at a Kentucky parish only to find his mediumship gift gradually determining the path of his career.  He recalled: "In 1924 I went to New York, where I found myself much in demand for platform appearances as a lecturer and demonstrater of psychic phenomena."  He was 27 and in a trance during a seance when "without preliminaries . . . a discarnate personality identifying himself simply as 'Fletcher' announced that henceforth he would function as my permanent partner on the unseen plane.  In all seances since that time Fletcher has invariably come on first, and opened proceedings by introducing himself."

Arthur had written in his first autobiography Nothing So Strange (1958) about the events involving him and Fletcher (article) that soon thereafter "propelled us into world-wide headlines."  He looked back at this period in his life with the first chapter of Unknown But Known:
 

. . . Fletcher began, in a series of sittings which commenced in February, 1928, to bring in messages purporting to be from Houdini.  The news was an instant sensation in the press.  Every session after the first was attended by an editor of the Scientific American—where the entire case was eventually published—and taken down by a stenographer.  Beatrice Houdini testified, when the long sequence was completed, that the message was the one she and her deceased husband had agreed upon, and that it had been transmitted in their private code.  Fletcher and I found ourselves world-famous overnight.  We were praised by the press of two continents — and denounced by skeptics from coast to coast.  Not until 1967, when Fletcher and I established communication between Bishop James Pike and his discarnate son, did any demonstration of psychic ability attract such universal public attention. 

  
Arthur had described in Nothing So Strange what happened when seance group participants Mr. Fast and Scientific American Associate Editor John W. Stafford delivered the witnessed Houdini message to Mrs. Houdini —
 

She read the report, then stirred with emotion, dropped it at her side, and said, "It is right!"  Then after a moment she asked in wondering, "Did he say ROSABELLE?"  Upon being assured that he had, she exclaimed, "My God!  What else did he say?"  They repeated all they had recorded.

 
She arranged for Arthur to come to her house the next day. 
 

As soon as I was well into trance, Fletcher came through, announcing, "This man is coming now, the same one who came the other night.  He tells me to say, 'Hello, Bess, sweetheart,' and he wants to repeat the message and finish it for you.  He says the code is one that you used to use in one of your secret mind-reading acts."  Then Fletcher repeated the ten words as he said Houdini was them to him, "He wants you to tell him whether they are right or not."
 
Mrs. Houdini replied, "Yes, they are."
 
"He smiles and says, 'Thank you, now I can go on.'  He tells you to take off your wedding ring and tell them what ROSABELLE means."
 
Drawing her left hand from under the cover she took off the ring and holding it before her sang in a small voice:
 

Rosabelle, sweet Rosabelle,
I love you more than I can tell;
O'er me you cast a spell,
I love you, my Rosabelle!

 
Fletcher continued, "He says, 'I thank you, darling.  The first time I heard you sing that song was in our first show together years ago.'"
 
Mrs. Houdini nodded her head in assent.

 
After communicating the full unfoldment of the coded message known only to Houdini and his wife—"ROSABELLE, BELIEVE"—Fletcher asked Mrs. Houdini: "Is this right?"
 

"Yes," answered Mrs. Houdini, with great feeling.

 

 

 * 

The chapter "What Actually Happens in a Seance?" of Unknown But Known includes Arthur Ford's remembrance of the seances involving James Pike, Jr., 22-year-old son of Bishop James A. Pike.  One seance took place in a Toronto television studio in the presence of Bishop Pike. 
 

Young Pike shot himself to death in a New York City hotel room in February, 1966.  About two weeks later, physical phenomena of psychic origin began to occur in Bishop Pike's apartment at Cambridge University in England, where the Bishop was studying.  Most of these events were witnessed by—besides Pike himself—his secretary and a clergyman, the Rev. David Barr.  One morning all the clocks stopped at exactly 8:19 — the probable time, translated into Cambridge time, that the younger Pike had killed himself.  Then safety pins began turning up throughout the apartment, bent open to the angle made by the hands of a clock at 8:19.  Books having some connection with the dead son appeared in locations other than their accustomed places.  Hymnals and prayer books were found open on verses having eternal life as their theme.  Once, while Pike, Barr, and the secretary were working in the apartment, there was a commotion in a closet.  Pike quickly opened the door; no one was there, but the closet was a shambles of scrambled clothing.  "If only," a visitor remarked on one occasion, "something of this sort would happen in the direct presence of witnesses."  Immediately, in full view of the three witnesses present, the younger Pike's shaving mirror left the top of the bureau he had used while visiting his father, and floated gently to the floor.

When word of these happenings reached Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark and a student of psychic phenomena, Stockwood surmised that Pike's son was desperately trying to establish communication with his father.  Stockwood put Pike in touch with a medium, Mrs. Ena Twigg.  Mrs. Twigg did not know who her new sitter was, but gave Pike messages he accepted as being from his dead son.  The Rev. John Pierce-Higgins, who accompanied Pike as a witness, said James, Jr., through the medium, expressed regret for his suicidal act.  He didn't mean to hurt anybody and wished he hadn't done it.  He'd been under stress at examination time, "said something about drugs" (Pierce-Higgins) and guessed his mind had just cracked — couldn't face up to things all on his own.  He'd had a premonition that "something terrible was going to happen" when he'd left his father at the airport.  He expressed his affection for his father, and also his resentment over "the way they've been kicking you around"— referring to the disapproval by unorthodox churchmen of some of Pike's theological ideas.

More than a year after all this, in September, 1967, events conspired to bring Bishop Pike and myself together.  Allen Spraggett, religious editor of the Toronto Star, had written a book on psychic phenomena.  Pike and I had been invited to speak on television as part of the publication-day publicity.  At the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Toronto station, Pike fell in step beside me and said he'd like, if it could be arranged, to have a sitting sometime.  We had previously agreed that a seance would be a good thing, but had not arranged a definite release date for the transcript.  "What's the matter with right now?" I said.  We went into the studio and made the tape that was later shown, in part, on the major United States and Canadian television networks.

An abundance of fresh material came through Fletcher, not only from Pike's son, but from other discarnates who had known the bishop.  The younger Pike identified the drug he had previously mentioned as LSD — it had been another LSD tragedy.  He had "got mixed up with the thing" in California, at college and had fallen in with some of the same crowd on his return to New York.  The suicide had been the result of a "bad trip."

After the Pike seance, telephone calls were made immediately to persons as far apart as Los Angeles and London, to check the discarnates' statements.  One of the more interesting bits of the "trivial" variety had to do with two long-deceased pet cats.  It suggests something that has long been speculated about in parapsychological lore — that animals as well as humans survive death.

"There's an old gentleman here," Fletcher said to Pike during the seance, "who's with your son on the other side.  He wants you to check out something that will prove his identity.  He has two cats with him that once were pets of his son, who bears the same name he does — Donald MacKinnon.  The present MacKinnon now lectures at Cambridge.  James, Jr. used to drop in at his lectures."  On the long-distance phone to Cambridge MacKinnon, who, it turned out, makes a hobby of cats, at once remembered the specific two Fletcher referred to.  "That's extraordinary," he exclaimed, "I did have two pet cats—a black one and a grey one—when I was a boy.  One disappeared some time before my father's death, the other acted strangely on the day of his funeral."

Fletcher spoke of "an elderly man of Slavic and Jewish background" who helped James, Jr., make his adjustment to the "other side."  "Correct," said Bishop Pike, "Jim's maternal grandfather was a Russian Jew."  Fletcher had said: "A man somewhat older than yourself, a university chaplain—Louis Pitt—says you'll remember him.  They tried twice to make a bishop of him but failed."  "It checks," said Pike.  "Louis Pitt was my predecessor as chaplain at Columbia.  He had poor luck in the matter of elevation to bishop — always a bridesmaid, never a bride."  Another predecessor of Pike's—Karl Block, former Bishop of California—came on, through Fletcher, to identify himself and describe certain real estate transactions he had handled for his church that presumably only he could know about in any detail.  Finally James, Jr., told about "a delightful elderly lady named Carol—Carol Rede—with whom you were associated at the cathedral (of St. John the Divine in New York).  She asks that you look up her brother, a retired major living in Carmel, when you go back to California."  "That was a shocker," Pike said, "I remember Carol Rede well, but didn't know she had died!"

After the seance there were the questions usually asked on such occasions — as to whether I might have picked up all this information by researching published materials, or by reading the minds of living persons.  "I don't think so," Pike answered.  "Some of the material was of such an intimately personal nature it had to be erased from the film.  It certainly could not have been published and still is not published.  Yet it checked out" — though understood in its full significance only by the Bishop himself.  "Some details that proved correct were definitely beyond anything I could have known in my conscious mind — and I suspect, in some cases, in my unconscious."

 
A 1973 biography of Arthur Ford written by Allen Spraggett and William Rauscher included derogatory material that made people question the medium's authenticity.  After many years, Allen Spraggett explained this denialism and the disclosure is included in An Arthur Ford Anthology (1999), as follows:
 

But we included evidence only of possible mediumistic fraud and of his protracted battle with the bottle that contributed so much to his actions in his later years. 
 
However, having said that, I must confess that spontaneously, irrationally, I long felt a sense of guilt over the negative personal disclosures about Arthur.  Literary ghouls, who wait until a person is safely dead to print infamies about him, are the jackals, the vultures of journalism.  Many times I have asked Arthur to forgive me for the literary intrusions into his personal habits — and I believe he has.

About one point in the biography I want to set the record straight.  In the biography I recount what I speculate probably was an instance of collusion between Ford and an unnamed "parapsychologist" who appeared to have aided and abetted him in fraud at a seance in Montclair, N. J.  Long since, I have become convinced beyond doubt that what my overly-skeptical mind had interpreted as a guilty note, actually was entirely harmless.  The parapsychologist—who was, by the way, the legendary cigar-smoking Gertrude Tubby—simply took notes during a seance, either to give to Ford for his records or for her own use.

 
Nowadays, at 59, I understand better the dark nights of the soul that Arthur Ford went through, the horror of his addictions to various pills and chemicals, and the general ambiguity of him as a human being.

 
But if you're interested, and ask me the usual question: Yes, yes, yes — Arthur Ford did have fantastic psychic gifts.

 
An Arthur Ford Anthology was compiled and edited by Frank C. Tribbe.  The book includes Arthur's final formal interview comments about his interaction with Bishop Pike.  The Q&A transcript article was originally published in the October 1970 issue of Psychic magazine.  The following passages are three excerpts.
 

Interviewer: What do you think convinced Bishop Pike that his dead son communicated through you?

Ford: I think the thing that convinced Bishop Pike that he was getting messages from his son was not the seance we televised in Toronto.  That wasn't done live, you see.  I wouldn't go on the air live, because you can't turn it on that way.  I agreed to it only if it were done quietly with just the Bishop and Allen Spraggett, religion editor of the Toronto Star, who arranged it.  Then Bishop Pike checked out what I said, and cut out some of the more intimate things about his life.  It was two weeks before the program was shown.

About two months later, Bishop Pike and his wife to be, Diana, came for a sitting at my home in Philadelphia.  It was during that sitting that Bishop Pike's son told about the people who the Bishop was able to check out.


Interviewer:  Has Bishop Pike come through you since his death?

Ford: No.  I haven't given but four sittings in the last year.  I have been very ill.  The doctor doesn't want me to do sittings, because when I go into trance I induce the very condition he is treating me for.


Interviewer: It would seem you feel that psychical phenomena fit in with the rest of man's experience.

Ford: Yes.  I think it is a universal thing.

Detailed accounts of Arthur Ford's seances for Bishop Pike are included in Pike's memoir The Other Side (1968) written with Diane Kennedy.  These passages included the statements about the final seance: "The Fletcher personality figured very little once it appeared Jim was able to communicate well by himself.  And all that had come through was consistent with what we already knew and what had been said in other seances."