This story is a
chapter of a memoir focused on the insights I gained from interactions with
certain notable people. All these stories are true. I admit, however, my memory
may not be flawless. I did not take notes at the time.
Arthur Ford: A Voice from the Other Side
"This is
Fletcher speaking. I have a message for someone in the room."
A standing room
crowd of forty to fifty Bucknell students crowded the downstairs lounge of the
New Dorm (now called Vedder Hall) to listen to a lecture on Spiritualism by Rev. Arthur Ford. He was
about half an hour into his lecture when suddenly his eyes glazed over, his
body stiffened and his head fell back. The voice we heard was much deeper than
Ford’s with a slight French-Canadian accent. Ford's mouth was open but the
words were unearthly, disembodied somehow. His lips barely moved as he
continued.
"A recently
departed soul wants you all to know that he has successfully made the
transition to the other side. He wants his friends and especially his roommate
to know that he is sorry he did not say goodbye. What he did, he did because he
felt there was no other way."
Ford now appeared
to fall asleep. The room was utterly still. I was completely stumped. What
should I do? Should I try to wake Ford? Would that possibly harm him?
I was sitting at a
table in front of the audience right next to Rev. Ford. I had volunteered to
introduce the speaker and assist during the question and answer period. That
task seemed simple when I volunteered. I had never heard of Arthur Ford but I
was given a couple of sheets that outlined his background and accomplishments.
Obviously, I was not adequately prepared.
After about a
minute, Ford awoke. He said he was extremely tired and could take only a few
questions. He steadfastly maintained he had absolutely no knowledge of what
transpired during the visitation by Fletcher. He also maintained that when he
agreed to lecture he had no intention of demonstrating his psychic abilities, but
that he was not always able to control when Fletcher would make an appearance.
It was the fall of
1967. Rev. Ford was on campus as part of a series of informal talks on current events.
The idea was that holding lectures in the dormitories would foster open
discussion. I got involved because I was then organizing a group of my friends
into a homegrown education reform movement we called “Outer Ripple.” This
lecture, sponsored by the Bucknell Christian Association, was a prototype of
the sort of living/learning event Outer Ripple advocated.
Arthur Ford was a
bit of a strange choice. He had been internationally famous as a trance medium
back in the 1920s but his star had faded. He achieved new notoriety only a few
months before the Bucknell event when he conducting a televised séance involving
Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike. During this televised event Ford’s spirit guide,
Fletcher, was summoned and spoke at length. Fletcher passed on accurate
information from many of Bishop Pike’s deceased associates. He also revealed
details of the life of Bishop Pike’s son who had committed suicide a year and a
half earlier. After the broadcast Bishop Pike proclaimed that Ford was
completely credible. This created a considerable stir in the media.
Although Ford was variously referred to as a psychic,
a clairvoyant, or a medium, I think the term “mentalist” is more accurate. He
was born in 1896 and grew up in a time when there was widespread belief in
spirit phenomena. Beginning with the Fox sisters in 1848 and continuing through
the rest of the nineteenth century especially in America and Great Britain
scores of trance mediums claimed to have the ability to communicate with the
dead. Ford was a direct descendant of this tradition.
Always the performer, Arthur Ford also had a serious
interest in magic. In the late 1800s continuing into the late 1940s spiritualism
and magic merged to created so-called “mentalists,” men and women who toured
the U.S. and Europe providing an occult show for the paying public. This phenomenon
was so prevalent that the great magician and escape artist Harry Houdini began
a crusade aimed at unmasking mentalists as frauds.
Ford reported that he became aware of his spiritual
powers and acquired his spirit guide, Fletcher, in 1924. Fletcher was killed
during the First World War. Ford knew Fletcher as a boy so had a personal
connection to him and was able to visualize his face.
Beginning in 1924 Ford toured New England appearing
between the acts of the S. S. Henry magic show. The Sphinx, a magic
periodical at the time reported, “he [Ford] gave one of the finest talks on
magic ever heard.” Gradually Ford expanded his repertory. He claimed his contacts
in the spirit world gave him access to names, information and whereabouts of
items otherwise only known to close family members. He said this allowed
him to read minds and sealed messages handed up by members of the audience.
Ford’s decision to tour with magic shows certainly raises questions
about the validity of his claim to possess genuine psychic powers. To be fair,
during that time magic shows and touring carnivals where about the only places
psychics could practice their profession. If Arthur Ford ever hoped to be paid
as a psychic, joining a mentalist show was one of his few options.
In 1929, Ford
publically announced he had received a message he believed to have originated
from the spirit of Harry Houdini, the
very man who had sworn to unmask spiritualism as a fraud. Prior to his death
Houdini devised a plan to prove or disprove spiritualism once and for all. Houdini
announced that he was going to leave a coded message with his wife. If a
spiritualist medium was able to contact Houdini after his death and obtain the
code that would provide proof for spiritualism’s claim of that the spirit
survived death.
Ford was one of
several mentalists who claimed to have accomplished the feat. All the others
failed the test. Initially, Mrs. Houdini appeared to validate Ford’s claim,
then she recanted. A storm of fierce arguments pro and con erupted in the
media. Some feature writers championed the authenticity of Ford's claim, while
others quoted Houdini’s widow as saying that the message was not correct.
Ford’s reputation as a mentalist was thus secured.
In the early 1930s,
however, Ford was involved in a serious automobile accident and subsequently descended
into severe alcoholism and morphine abuse. He stopped appearing publically. He
eventually found his way to Alcoholics Anonymous and learned to control his addictions.
In the early 1950s Ford began once again to provide mentalist demonstrations now
focusing on contacting the spirits of the deceased.
By the time Ford
resumed his mentalist performances, more than one hundred years had passed since
spiritualism first caught the attention of Christians struggling to reconcile
the claims of their religion and science. Increasingly, as science advanced,
the idea that it was possible to communicate with the dead through a séance was
losing credibility. The claim that Spiritualism was itself somehow a science
was no longer taken seriously. As early as 1941 spiritualism and séances had
become the basis for popular comedy as witnessed by the wild success of Noel
Coward’s play Blithe Spirit.
The rise of new age
spirituality in the 1960s briefly revived general interest in
Spiritualism. Ford made concerted
efforts to participate in this revival, the most famous of which was a séance
he conduced in 1965 for Dr. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church,
whose members believed Moon was a sort of deity. Somewhere along the way Ford
must have realized that the best hope for reviving the popularity of
Spiritualism was through the medium of television. The result was the televised
séance with Bishop Pike in 1967. Television, it seems, did not provide the
resuscitation Spiritualism needed. Arthur Ford spent the final years of his
life in Miami, Florida, where he died of cardiac arrest on January 4, 1971.
After the
presentation Ford gave at Bucknell the campus buzzed for a few weeks with rumors
that Ford had given a genuine psychic reading that contained a message from a
classmate who had recently died. I spoke at length with the sophomore class
president, who confided that the message Fletcher delivered was probably
intended for him. He was the roommate of a young man who had committed suicide a
few weeks before Ford’s lecture. The family had kept the cause of death secret.
My friend concluded that the message delivered by Fletcher with its veiled
reference to suicide had to be genuine. I remained skeptical. The message
appeared deliberately vague. It seemed possible to me that Ford had somehow
obtained information about a suicide of a Bucknell student from public records,
or just made it up and hoped it would hit the mark.
Shortly after
Ford’s death in 1971 a number of researchers obtained access to Ford’s private
papers. They found masses of evidence that prior to performing his séances Ford
conducted detailed research into the private lives of his subjects. Included in
this discovery was information on the life of Bishop Pike and his son. One Ford
biographer, Allen Spragget, made a very careful study of Ford’s papers and concluded,
"The evidence is disquietingly strong that Ford cheated—deliberately as
well as unconsciously."
There can be no
doubt that it is very human to hope the individual soul will somehow survive
death. The desire for immortality of the individual spirit is so strong that it
can overcome almost all evidence to the contrary. The longevity of Spiritualism
is a testament to the strength of this desire. Eventually the evidence against
Spiritualism was just too overwhelming. Houdini was right. Mentalists like Ford
were frauds preying on those who love their family and friends so deeply that
they cannot bear to let them go. It is unbearably cruel to deceive people who
grieve for those they have lost.
Yet, somehow, it is
hard for me to blame Arthur Ford for wanting to make a career out of mentalism.
Magicians are masters of fooling people and we love them for it. Ford was
genial and entertaining. He appears to have meant no harm. I have no doubt that
Ford genuinely believed that the spirit survived death and he wanted to
convince others to share his belief. Nonetheless, his act required a
fundamental dishonesty. I cannot forgive him that.
As for being able
to communicate with spirits, in my opinion John Mortimer’s character, the crusty
old lawyer Rumpole, says it best in "Rumpole and the Dear Departed"
(1981):
"What I can't accept about spiritualism is the
idea of millions of dead people (there must be standing room only on the Other
Side) kept hanging about just waiting to be sent for by some old girl with a
Ouija board in a Brighton boarding house, or a couple of table-tappers in
Tring, for the sake of some inane conversation about the Blueness of the
Infinite. I mean at least when you're dead you'll surely be spared such tedious
social occasions."
Allen Spragget. Arthur Ford: The Man Who Talked with the
Dead (1974)
On Ford,
Moon and Houdini: http://www.oocities.org/craigmaxim/s-1a.html
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