Modern mystic and teacher Neville Goddard gave quite a provocative lecure on November 11, 1968, titled “Jesus Christ, Your Creative Power”. In it he gives a firsthand account of fraud against the famous medium and psychic Arthur A. Ford.

Neville never explicitly mentions the medium’s name, but he drops an undeniable, forensic marker for his audience. The name of the medium’s spirit guide is Fletcher. In mid-century America, Fletcher was known as the exclusive, signature trance control of Arthur A. Ford.

In Ford’s Apartment on Riverside Drive

In 1968, there was a lot of public discourse about a bestselling book titled The Other Side, penned by Bishop James Pike, a highly prominent and controversial Episcopal church official.

Shattered by grief and a bunch of strange poltergeist phenomena and synchronicities following his son’s tragic suicide, Bishop Pike turned to various spiritualist and mediums. Arthur Ford was one of them.

That séance was televised in 1967 on a Canadian television special on the CTV networkby journalist Allen Spraggett who, (despite orchestrating the sensational on-camera séance), would later co-author Ford’s 1973 biography and expose some of Ford’s systematic investigative frauds.

Neville Goddard, watching the frenzy of the book launch unfold from Los Angeles, recognized the name instantly. In 1926, he had met Ford, attended a “sitting” and later remained on for coffee, cakes and sandwiches.

“For when one leaves this world, they’re not spirits they’re solidly built, as we are solid. So that if I should hear tonight that some member of my family has departed this world, they’re solid. Unseen by the eye here, as though you drew a veil, but that veil is very thin, it’s really very, very thin. But they are not made of gossamer; they’re solidly real and they’re made of flesh and blood…something that you can’t explain to others. But here you find people high in a church, like the current story now of a book by Bishop Pike. He is a man who rose to the highest office in the Episcopal world and just as confused today as when he was ordained. Hasn’t the slightest concept of the great mystery of Christ, none whatsoever, for his words are his judge. Here he is going to all the mediums in the world. And the one that he first picked up and believed him implicitly and still believes him…I met that man back in 1926 in New York City. One night he invited me to his home on Riverside Drive and I attended. Then he invited me the following week. He would have a circle of about thirty people sitting in the dark with one little flickering light, and he would have these lights all over the place. Well, I was in the theater and I was young, twenty-one years old back in 1926, and he liked the glamour of the theater and all the things about it. So he would always ask me to remain on and we had coffee and cakes and sandwiches and so on.“

Finding a residential track linking Ford to an apartment on Riverside Drive in 1926 wasn’t an easy task. But we found an immigration manifest from September 18, 1927.

Returning from an international lecture tour aboard the S.S. Belgenland, thirty-year-old Arthur Ford, born in Titusville, Florida is officially recorded listing his permanent United States address as 315 West 97th Street, New York, NY. This grand, pre-war apartment block sits on the corner of Riverside Drive.

So twenty-one-year-old Neville Goddard, who at the time was a young and famous vaudeville and theater dancer infiltrated Ford’s dimly lit circle and pretty much shattered the psychic illusion with his index finger:

“Well, this night in question being very curious when I saw all these lights jumping around…and he is telling me in the so-called trance that this one came through him to speak and that he’s now controlled by Fletcher. He called this man Fletcher and Fletcher was the guide, and he would single out different ones and talk to them as though Fletcher was speaking. Well, I had a very curious bug, I still have, and when I saw something there that was luminous, I put my finger on it and it sparked, that sparked and that sparked. I realized that the man had put phosphorous on that rug of his to deceive those who came. Well, when you’re lost in this atmosphere you are willing to believe anything. When I called him on it, he said, “Well, sometimes I’m tired and this amuses them and they’ll feel the atmosphere of spirits present.”

The Science of the “Fictitious Luminous”

Neville’s observation of the “sparking” carpet is well known in historical exposures of fraudulent mediumship. In his seminal 1905 study, Metapsychical Phenomena, French psychical researcher Joseph Maxwell explains the chemistry used by fraudulent operators to simulate supernatural manifestations in dark rooms:

“These flitting lights can be easily imitated. A prudent experimenter ought never to lose sight of the fact, that it is possible to employ diverse substances in order to produce phosphorescent effects. The use of phosphorescent oil, for example, will give fictitious luminous phenomena… Phosphorescent preparations, as a rule, have the advantage of only becoming very luminous, when they are shaken about in the air; for the lights, which are given forth by the phosphorus they contain, are only produced when there are phenomena of oxydation.”

Mediums routinely hid small glass bottles of this “Tincture of Phosphorus” (dissolved in oil or paraffin) inside their pockets. By treating spots on a carpet or dipping fabrics into the liquid, the mechanical friction of a footstep or, in Ford’s case, the pressure of a curious young dancer’s finger would trigger this localized oxidation, causing the chemical to react and release “luminous phenomena” in the dark.

And They Meet Again

Decades later, after Arthur Ford had achieved global fame and Neville Goddard had become a preeminent metaphysical lecturer, the two men crossed paths one final time in New York. Neville said:

“I didn’t go back, I just didn’t go back. I liked him personally, but I saw the phoniness connected with all of this stuff. Yet this is the one who is asking me to believe him now. Well, I don’t believe him now. I met him in New York about three or four years ago, and he knows what I’m doing and he’s read my books. He likes what I said in the books, but he asks me now to really believe that he’s a convert completely and now it’s on the level. Well, I am so constituted that I can’t go for it. First of all, I don’t go for such things in the first place. You will contact them if you are so destined to, yes you’ll contact those, but they’re on their own. They’re living a full and wonderful life doing what they have to do for the image to be formed within them.”

In the climax of his 1968 lecture, Neville delivered an unyielding statement on the true nature of existence after death, drawing an absolute line between external illusions and inner reality:

“So don’t try, don’t go to mediums, just leave them alone. You’ll meet them…unless, of course, while here, Christ is born within you. If he’s born within you, you do not enter that sphere at all. You enter the entirely different sphere known as the kingdom of God. So death to you when it comes after the birth of Christ within you will vary from all previous departures from this world. And you departed many a time, and I don’t mean re-incarnation, for there’s been no loss of identity.”

The stoop was still intact when Black & White photo left was shot in 1941. via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services

And Once Again 30 West 72nd Street

The historical physical intersection deepens. Spiritualist directories and print advertisements show that Arthur Ford’s Manhattan headquarters of the First Spiritualist Church and his subsequent “Psychic Center” were firmly anchored at the now famous 30 West 72nd Street.

Remember the quote of Neville’s “I am standing in his place on 72nd Street, off Central Park West; that’s where he lived. He lived at 30 West 72nd Street.” from “Gift’s Bestowed By God“ and from that tiny piece of information we previously tracked down his mentor Abdullah or rather G. Mahmud Ahmad Abdoullah in our investigation? You can read about in “The Final Link to 30 West 72nd: This Is Neville Goddard’s Real Teacher, Abdullah.”

Well, the building was a known stronghold for the elite figures of American Spiritualism and was the studio of Frank Decker, an internationally celebrated “test medium” who famously accepted Harry Houdini’s public $10,000 challenge to duplicate psychic phenomena through conjuring.

Ford and Decker “Three Musketeers” of the spiritualist movement alongside Psychic Observer editor R.G. Pressing.

Ford and Decker were it appears professional allies. Here they are photographed together as the self-styled “Three Musketeers” of the spiritualist movement alongside Psychic Observer editor R.G. Pressing.

Vintage advertisements show their joint headquarters: “Psychic Center, 30 West 72nd St. Arthur Ford. Frank Decker. Telephone Schuyler 4-0180.”

So, between 1933 and 1936, the first floor of this exact same building belonged to Abdullah.

Well, that did not make sense to me. I am standing in his place on 72nd Street, off Central Park West; that’s where he lived. He lived at 30 West 72nd Street. And here I am in his place, and he’s telling me that I am in Barbados! He didn’t explain what he meant. So, as the days went by, I said to him, “Ab, I am no nearer to Barbados than I was when I spoke to you.”

Neville Goddard Lectures: “I Am All Imagination”

“Well, what I’m getting at is, I didn’t have a job, I had no money, and I was living in a basement on 75th Street and he (Abdullah) lived on 72nd Street, in a very lovely home that was owned by Morgenthau, whose son (Henry Morgenthau Jr) was then the treasury (sic) of our country, a cabinet member (US Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt), but his father owned this house, but he didn’t live there, and he rented the first floor to my friend Abdullah.”

Neville Goddard Lectures: “Abdullah How We Got Together Q&A”

It’s surreal that while grieving New Yorkers were visiting the studios of Arthur Ford and Frank Decker paying to hear messages dictated by spirit guides and watch glowing phosphorus sparks, Neville Goddard was most likely sitting directly downstairs on the first floor while Abdullah was slamming doors in Neville’s face to force a doctrine of absolute internal sovereign authority: You do not need a medium, a ghost, or a parlor trick. Your own human imagination IS Jesus Christ, the only creative power of God.

View from timestamp 17:14

References

Blau, Eleanor. “Cheating in Pike’s Seance Is Alleged.” New York Times, March 11, 1973.

Ford, Arthur. Unknown But Known: My Adventure Into the Meditative Dimension. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Ford, Arthur, and Frank Decker. “Psychic Center, 30 West 72nd St.” Newspaper advertisement, n.d.

Ford, Arthur, and Pete Martin. Nothing So Strange: The Autobiography of Arthur Ford. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958.

Goddard, Neville. “Jesus Christ, Your Creative Power.” Lecture, November 11, 1968.

Maxwell, Joseph. Metapsychical Phenomena: Methods and Observations. London: Duckworth & Co., 1905.

Pike, James A. The Other Side: An Account of My Experiences with Psychic Phenomena. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968.

Spraggett, Allen, and William V. Rauscher. Arthur Ford: The Man Who Talked with the Dead. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973.

UK and Ireland, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878–1960. Shipping Manifest for the S.S. Belgenland, September 18, 1927. Record for Arthur Ford. National Archives.

Cheating in Pike’s Seance Is Alleged

By ELEANOR BLAU

Biographers of the late Rev. Arthur A. Ford, the medium, say they have found evidence that he cheated in the celebrated 1967 television séance in which the late Right Rev. James A. Pike, resigned Episcopal Bishop of California, believed he had communicated with his dead son. Nevertheless, they conclude that Mr. Ford was a “gifted psychic.”

Allen Spraggett, a Canadian journalist who arranged the séance, and the Rev. Canon William V. Rauscher, Mr. Ford’s literary legatee, report that the medium’s private papers indicate he had done advance research on the Bishop’s deceased colleagues who allegedly sent messages during the séance.

Details purportedly communicated from a dead bishop and seemingly too obscure for Mr. Ford to have discovered, for example, appeared in a New York Times obituary of Sept. 21, 1958, which the biographers say they found in the medium’s files.

The séance was taped and shown on a Toronto station in September, 1967. During the session, Bishop Pike received through Mr. Ford messages supposedly from the colleagues as well as his son, James Jr., who committed suicide in February, 1966, at the age of 20.

Bishop Pike said afterward that his son’s message had “contained some general ideas and a loving affirmation of me in current circumstances”—an allusion to the bishop’s dispute with his church over his challenges to certain traditional doctrines.

Impressed by Details

According to Mr. Spraggett, there were also comments by the son about his confused state of mind at the time of his suicide and other details that even Bishop Pike said could have been turned up through “the most elementary research.”

What particularly impressed Bishop Pike, Mr. Spraggett says, were obscure details of messages said to have come from his predecessor as bishop, the Right Rev. Karl Morgan Block, and from the Rev. Louis W. Pitt, former rector of Grace Episcopal Church here.

All the details, Mr. Spraggett says, were found in clipped obituaries. These included a nickname that Bishop Block had applied to himself: “ecclesiastical panhandler,” an allusion to a clergy preaching program he had established and the fact that he died, as Mr. Ford put it, “during some rite of the church.” The Times obituary said he died during an ordination service.

The séance attracted wide public attention and provoked criticism of Bishop Pike in his church.

The bishop was found dead in the Judean wilderness near the Dead Sea in September, 1969, after he had been lost in the desert during an expedition with his wife.

The biographers say that Mr. Ford collected obituaries, had a prodigious memory and was reported to have admitted to faking during the darkest days of his alcoholism (a condition, they say, the medium freely acknowledged).

‘Gifted Psychic’

He also contradicted himself, they say, on such matters as the identity of Fletcher—the supposed spirit who spoke through Mr. Ford when he was in a trance. At one time, it seems, Mr. Ford said he had not seen the live Fletcher since childhood; at another, he said they had been college friends.

Despite these findings, the biographers say that Mr. Ford, a Disciples of Christ clergyman, had authentic and extraordinary powers.

“I think the evidence supports the hypothesis that Arthur Ford was a genuine gifted psychic who, for various reasons, scrutable and inscrutable, fell back on trickery when he felt he had to,” Mr. Spraggett writes in the forthcoming biography.

The book, “Arthur Ford: The Man Who Talked With the Dead,” was written by Mr. Spraggett and researched by himself and Father Rauscher, rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Woodbury, N.J., who has long had an interest in psychic phenomena. The book is to be published next month by W. W. Norton & Co.

A private Ford-Pike séance three months after the television session remains convincing, Mr. Spraggett writes. Bishop Pike reported parts of the session in his book, “The Other Side,” but omitted one segment, apparently because it was so personal.

Mrs. Pike’s Comments

Asked to re-examine the transcript of that segment in the light of discoveries that Mr. Ford apparently had faked the television session, Diane Pike, the bishop’s widow reported, the biographers say, that she continued to be impressed by “the amount of personal data that it seems virtually impossible for Arthur Ford to have researched.”

For example, she cited a message “that drugs were not Jim Jr.’s difficulty,” (although, Mr. Spraggett writes, psychedelic drugs were among his problems). Another convincing detail, she said, was that the youth talked about the difficulty with his father in England and became convinced in Europe that it was “irreversible.”

Mrs. Pike said Mr. Ford had been explicit about the problem, but she did not reveal it.

Among the indications that Mr. Ford cheated, Mr. Spraggett cites, for example, a fragment apparently from a destroyed notebook containing biographical data on his clients. He also quotes a former secretary of Mr. Ford that the medium carried with him a suitcase full of notes on prospective sitters because nobody could “perform 100 per cent of the time.”

Recalling Father Rauscher’s discovery of the Block obituary, Mr. Spraggett said in a telephone interview:

“It really was a traumatic moment for both of us. I had believed up to that moment that Ford never compromised his mediumship, whatever personal weaknesses he may have had.”

The author describes Mr. Ford in the book as, among other things, “a wizard,” a preacher, a marvelous raconteur, “a bit of a saint,” a manic-depressive and a “driven denizen of his own heart of darkness.”

In the interview, Mr. Spraggett said that to him, Mr. Ford “is a deeper enigma now then when I started writing the book.”

The New York Times Published: March 11, 1973

Pike Asserts He Got Messages From Dead Son at TV Seance

By JOHN LEO

The Right Rev. James A. Pike, resigned Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California, said yesterday he believed he had been in communication with his dead son.

At a televised séance earlier this month in Toronto, Bishop Pike directed messages through a medium to several deceased colleagues, as well as to his son, James Jr., who committed suicide in February, 1966, at the age of 22.

He said in a telephone interview yesterday that, during the television program, he had received, in return, messages he considered authentic. “To me,” he said, “this is the most plausible explanation of the phenomena that occurred.”

He added that the messages from his son contained “some general ideas and a loving affirmation of me in current circumstances”—an allusion to the Bishop’s dispute with the Episcopal Church over his challenges to certain traditional doctrines.

The séance was part of a two-hour program on the Bishop’s ideas. It was taped Sept. 3, edited down to 40 minutes and shown Sept. 17 on a Toronto station.

Besides Bishop Pike, others on the program were Allen Spraggett, religious editor of The Toronto Star, and the Rev.

Continued on Page 57, Column 3

SEANCE MESSAGES REPORTED BY PIKE

Continued From Page 1, Col. 7

Arthur Ford, a minister of the Disciples of Christ Church, who is a prominent American medium.

Mr. Ford, whose powers have been pronounced authentic by several American psychiatrists, operates through a “spirit control” named “Fletcher,” a deceased French-Canadian friend who is said to bring forth third-person messages through the mouth of Mr. Ford when the latter is in a trance.

Bishop Pike said his son was the only contact who spoke directly rather than through the voice of “Fletcher.”

Small details in the messages ostensibly relayed by “Fletcher” led Bishop Pike to regard them as authentic. “Fletcher” said that the father of Prof. Donald McKinnon—the son was a friend of Bishop Pike in Cambridge, England—gave Professor McKinnon two cats years ago.

Professor McKinnon, reached by a reporter by phone the day after the séance, said his late father had given him two cats during the nineteen-thirties.

Bishop Pike commented: “I don’t see how research by the medium could very well have brought out the role of Donald McKinnon in my life, or the fact of his having had two cats.”

‘The Ring of Truth’

Bishop Pike also said that a conversation he had, through “Fletcher,” with the late Right Rev. Karl Block, former Episcopal Bishop of California, “had the ring of truth.” The exchange included jocular references to Episcopal real estate dealings in California.

“Everything matched up,” said Bishop Pike. “All the long-forgotten facts and details matched up.”

He said that if he had not read and written about psychic phenomena, he would have “leaned over backwards” to explain these conversations some other way.

“But in the context of what we know about man’s psyche transcending the space-time continuum, about mystical experience and the accumulating evidence of extrasensory perception, plus all the data about apparent communication with the deceased—not excluding the Resurrection—one can say that it is the most plausible explanation to accept it as true,” he said.

In the last year, Bishop Pike’s theology has become increasingly influenced by psychic phenomena. In trying to combine the scientific method with the act of faith, the Bishop has turned to such phenomena in search of data upon which man might find a rational basis for religious affirmation.

General Convention. concurrence of both houses is required before any action becomes final.

Earlier today, the bishops approved a resolution authorizing the church to participate in the development of a plan of Protestant unity, but forbidding its representatives to “negotiate the entry of the church into such a plan.”

The resolution, having previously been passed by the House of Deputies, thus becomes the official position of the church.

Late today the general convention adopted a three-year budget of $45.6-million, including a $2-million-a-year program called for by the Presiding Bishop, the Right Rev. John E. Hines.

In his keynote address a week ago, Bishop Hines asked that a substantial amount be earmarked for work in Negro ghetto areas in cooperation with community organizations.

The House of Bishops approved the budget today and the House of Deputies yesterday.

Only one individual was found among the Bishops and delegates today who was aware that Bishop Pike had reported believing he conversed with his late son at a spiritualist seance.