Paranormal Pioneers and Other Strange Phenomena

Arthur Ford (1897-1971)

Arthur Ford was born on January 8, 1897 in the small town of Titusville, Florida. He studied Christianity and in 1917 was offered a ministerial scholarship to a Disciples of Christ school in Lexington, Kentucky and was ordained as a Disciples minister, serving a church in Barbourville, Kentucky until 1924.

His psychic abilities first showed themselves during the First World War when he claimed he would "hear" the names of soldiers who were going to die of the 1918 Spanish flu. Later he began to hear the names soldiers who within the next days would appear on the casualty lists. When the lists appeared, the names were in the same order on the list as Ford had recorded the day before

Later on, Ford became a trance medium. One day a deceased control began to speak from Ford's mouth. Words were delivered slowly and deliberately, unlike Ford who spoke rapidly and slurred his words. The control announced himself as Fletcher. He became Ford's personal guide to the dead in the spirit world for the next three years.

Sometime after 1927, Ford founded a Spiritualist congregation in New York City, but soon a disagreement arose between the National Spiritualist Association, the main Spiritualist organization of the time and Ford. It revolved around Ford’s belief in reincarnation, a belief the association rejected. After many years of friction, in 1936 Ford led in the founding of the General Assembly, which had a more open point of view on reincarnation.

Arthur Ford’s main claim to fame came when he claimed to have received the coded messages from Harry Houdini to his wife. However, the three messages have never been proven to be authentic.

Below are the accounts of the messages as published on Wikipedia:

Message No. 1

Bess Houdini wrote a letter dated December 16, 1926 to Arthur Conan Doyle. She told about Harry's restless nights as he awoke with "Mama, are you here?" on his lips. She said he never stopped hoping to hear the word "FORGIVE" from his mother. When Ford visited England in 1927, he talked to Doyle several times. Did Doyle mention the key word or show the letter to Ford?

A year before the "FORGIVE" message was heard from Houdini's deceased mother and disclosed in a letter by Arthur Ford to Bess Houdini; Arthur Conan Doyle mentioned in a 1930 article that Bess had disclosed the word to a Brooklyn Eagle reporter on March 13, 1927. Bess was quoted as saying that any authentic communication from Mrs. Weiss would have to include the word "FORGIVE".

Doyle believed Ford when he said he knew nothing about it;. Houdini's mother only called him Erick, never Harry, as Ford delivered in this message. She also never wrote or spoke in English. She wrote and spoke in five other languages. Ford delivered her message in English.

Message No.2

"ROSEBELLE" was not relayed to Bess by Ford in the Houdini code. Inside the wide gold wedding ring Bess wore were the words of this song, with a miniature likeness of Harry. Bess had shown this unusual inscription to many people. This was hardly a secret. Before Bess sang Rosebelle, in delirium, Ford had asked her to remove her wedding ring. Did he know what was engraved inside?

Message No.3

On page 105 of Houdini: His Life-Story by Harold Kellock, from the recollections and documents of Beatrice Houdini, Harcourt, Brace Co., June, 1928, are disclosed the associated 10 letters, 10 key numbers and key words of the Houdini code as it was used in performance by Harry Houdini and wife Bess. Every letter of B E L I E V E, this secret message from beyond the grave communicated by Arthur Ford to Bess Houdini on January 7 1929, had been available to the general public for a period of six to seven months if one recognized how to use it. In a statement Bess made to the January 9, 1929 World, Bess said, "I had no idea what combination of words Harry would use and when he sent "BELIEVE" it was a surprise" There is no mention of Kellock and Bess Houdini's public disclosure of the code letters in The Secret Life of Houdini by William Kalush and Larry Sloman.

Messages No. 2 and No. 3

Mentalist Joseph Dunninger, a close friend of the Houdini family, told reporters Nurse Sophie Rosenblatt, who attended Houdini in his last hours, heard him murmur Rosebelle-Believe to Bess. This information may have found its way to Arthur Ford. There were other tests devised by Houdini to protect his wife from psychic fakers, one was the opening up a huge pair of handcuffs. Bess Houdini told reporters her husband planned to send messages to Arthur Conan Doyle and Remigius Weiss (Weiss had worked with Houdini to expose psychic fraud.) Both men said they had not planned any messages with Houdini. Bess told the press the only copies of the three messages were locked up in her safety deposit box at the Manufacturers Banks on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City. B.M.L. Ernst, Bess Houdini's attorney, told historian Milbourne Christopher that these documents existed only in her imagination.

As a result of a car accident in 1931 Ford was severely injured and subsequently became addicted to morphine and alcohol. In his autobiography Nothing So Strange (1958) Ford says that it took him twenty years and a great amount of suffering to conquer his addiction, and some say he never really did overcome it, suffering from alcoholism until the end of his life.

In 1967 Ford again came into the public eye when, during a television talk show on life after death, he went into a trance and delivered several messages to Episcopal bishop James Pike. One claimed to be from Pike's son and another from the prominent theologian Paul Tillich. Pike was impressed and publicly declared his belief in the authenticity of psychic phenomena in his book The Other Side (1968). It was only after Ford's death that Allen Spraggett and William Rauscher, while gathering materials for his biography, discovered his notes for the session among his papers, revealing the fact that he faked the séance.

Ford died in Miami, Florida, January 4, 1971.

Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932)

Fort was an American writer and researcher into unusual phenomena. He was born in 1874 in Albany, New York but lived most of his life in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. His father was somewhat of a bully. In Many Parts, Fort's unpublished autobiography, he relates several instances of harsh treatment, including physical abuse, by his father. This may be one of the reasons Fort developed a strong distrust of authority and a strong sense of independence.

As a young man, Fort was a budding naturalist, collecting seashells, minerals, and birds. Curious and intelligent as he was, Fort did not do well in school. However, he was considered quite witty and full of knowledge about the world – yet this was only a world he knew through books. So, at the age of 18, Fort left on a world tour to learn more about the world he had only read about. He traveled through the western United States, Scotland, and England, until falling ill in Southern Africa. After returning home, he was nursed by Anna Filing, a girl he had known from his childhood. They were married in October of 1896.

In 1916, an inheritance from an uncle gave Fort enough money to quit his various day jobs and to write full time. Fort wrote ten novels and his books earned mostly good reviews; they were popular enough to go through several printings.

Suffering from poor health and failing eyesight, Fort was surprised to find himself the subject of a cult following and there was talk of the formation of an organization to study the type of odd events related in his books. Fort himself found the idea quite amusing. Yet he continually corresponded with his readers, some of whom had begun sending the findings of their own investigation into anomalous phenomena.

For over thirty years, Charles Fort sat in the libraries of New York and London, reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, gathering information on phenomena that lay outside the accepted theories and beliefs of the time. Examples of the odd phenomena in Fort's books include many of what are referred to as occult, supernatural, and paranormal. Reported events include teleportation (a term Fort is generally credited with coining) poltergeist events, falls of frogs, fishes, unaccountable noises and explosions and many other things.

Many of these phenomena are now referred to as 'Fortean' phenomena while others have developed into their own schools of thought, for example, UFOs into ufology, or the reports of unconfirmed animals classified as cryptozoology.

Fort often said the boundaries between science and pseudoscience are "fuzzy" and the boundary lines not very well defined. In fact, those boundaries they might change over time. He also points out that even if facts are objective, how those facts are interpreted depends on who is doing the interpreting and in what context. His point was that alternative conclusions can be made from the same data and that the conventional explanations of science not necessarily more justified than other explanations.

Nonetheless, Fort is considered by many as a pioneer of modern paranormalism, not only because of his interest in strange phenomena, but because of his "modern" attitude towards the subject.

The Fortean Society was founded at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1931 by his friends. As a strict non-authoritarian, Fort was extremely uncomfortable with those who looked on him as “an authority”, and objected to the formation of these kinds of groups on the grounds that they would attract those who really believed in their chosen phenomena: an attitude exactly contrary to Forteanism.

Fort was not a joiner of established groups and, perhaps, it is ironic that many such Fortean groups have been established. Most notable of these are the magazine, Fortean Times (first published in November 1973) and the International Fortean Organization (INFO).

Fort distrusted doctors and refused to seek medical help for his worsening health. On May 3, 1932, Fort was rushed to Royal Hospital in The Bronx. Later that same day, Fort's publisher visited him to show the advance copies of Wild Talents. Fort died only hours afterward, probably of leukemia. He was interred in the Fort family plot in Albany, New York. His more than 60,000 notes were donated to the New York Public Library.

The Fox Sisters

Kate Fox (1838–1892), Leah Fox (1814–1890) and Margaret Fox (also called Maggie) (1836–1893) were three women who played an important role in the creation of the contemporary Spiritualist movement.

In 1848, the younger sisters were living in a house in Hydesville, New York with their parents. The house had some prior reputation for being haunted, but it wasn't until late March that the family began to be frightened by unexplained sounds, that at times sounded like knocking and at other times like the moving of furniture.

During the night of March 31, 1848 Kate challenged the invisible noisemaker, which was presumed to be a "spirit", to repeat the snaps of her fingers. "It" did. "It" was asked to rap out the ages of the girls. "It" did. After a while the neighbors were called in, and over the course of the next few days a type of code was developed where raps could signify yes or no in response to a question, or be used to indicate a letter of the alphabet.

The girls initially addressed the spirit as "Mr. Splitfoot" which is a nickname for the Devil. Later, the alleged "entity" claimed to be the spirit of a peddler named Charles B. Rosma, who had been murdered five years earlier and buried in the cellar. There are claims that the neighbors dug up the cellar and found a few pieces of bone, but it was not until 1904 that a skeleton was found, buried in the cellar wall. However, no missing person named Charles B. Rosma was ever identified

Because the situation was getting out of hand, Kate and Margaret were sent away to nearby Rochester during the excitement — Kate to the house of her sister Leah, and Margaret to the home of her brother David — and it was found that the rapping followed them. Soon after this a Quaker couple and long-standing friends of the Fox family, invited the girls into their Rochester home. Convinced of the genuineness of the phenomena, they helped to spread the word among their radical Quaker friends, who eventually became the early core of Spiritualists.

The Fox girls soon became famous and their public séances in New York in 1850 attracted notable people including William Cullen Bryant and James Fenimore Cooper. They also attracted imitators, or perhaps encouraged people who previously had hidden their gifts.

Over the years, sisters Kate and Margaret had developed serious drinking problems. Around 1888 they became embroiled in a quarrel with their sister Leah and other leading Spiritualists, who were concerned that Kate was drinking too much to care properly for her children

After a reporter offered them $1,500 if they would "expose" their methods and give him an exclusive on the story, Margaret and Kate appeared publicly at the on October 21, 1888. Before an audience of 2,000, Margaret demonstrated how she could produce – at will – raps audible throughout the theater. Doctors from the audience came on stage to verify that the cracking of her toe joints was the source of the sound.

Margaret told her story of the origins of the mysterious "rapping" in a signed confession given to the press and published in New York World, October 21, 1888. She said:

“The rapping are simply the result of a perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee….”

She also notes:

"A great many people when they hear the rapping imagine at once that the spirits are touching them. It is a very common delusion. Some very wealthy people came to see me some years ago when I lived in Forty-second Street and I did some rappings for them. I made the spirit rap on the chair and one of the ladies cried out: "I feel the spirit tapping me on the shoulder. Of course, that was pure imagination.”

However, in 1889, Margaret recanted her confession in writing and within five years, the sisters died in poverty, shunned by former friends, and were buried in pauper's graves.

Frank’s Box

Ghost hunters throughout the ages have tried to communicate with the dead through various electric and electronic devices. As mentioned previously, Edison is supposed to have invented such a device. Today there are other methods of communication being employed.

Frank’s Box is one of these methods. Created by Frank Sumption, it allows for two-way communication with the other side, in a way that is more interactive than typical EVP collection methods. It said to be interactive because you can ask questions directly to the spirits and receive replies from them as you are talking.

Mr. Sumption made the first box in 2002 from random computer components and says he did so after encouragement from the spirit world. At the time, he made less than 3 dozen, and soon gave a few of them out to selective people so that they could test them for themselves.

Simply put, Frank’s Box scans AM/FM and low band frequencies to create a noise matrix from which the dead can use to modulate for messages.

After word got out about the Frank's Box, people began trying to create their own and there are a number of variations on the original device, including one which is made by altering an AM/FM radio by cutting the mute pin on the radio, so it continuously scans the radio frequencies. Those who have tested this method and other similar methods, say that they have gotten results that are just as good as the result obtained by the genuine Frank's Box.

While some people claim to hear spirit voices in the Frank’s Box, others say they hear nothing. What a person does here are voices from various radio frequencies. It is entirely possible that if you ask enough questions, eventually you will hear a voice “answer” them.

In our opinion, Frank’s Box is not a reliable method of communication because there are too many variables involved and it seems to leave much of the accuracy up to the interpretation of the listener.

Frank Sumption died in 2014, and as far as we know, he has not communicated with anyone.