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April 19, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:42
Edition 293 - Harry Price

Paul Adams has spent years researching Harry Price - the UK\'s most famous paranormalinvestigator...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is the Return of the Unexplained.
Many thanks for bearing with me, and I'm going to do some shout-outs on this edition and also address some points that you made about the appearance of Richard C. Hoagland recently.
That is still to come.
If you want to get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, designed by Adam at Creative Hotspot, and follow the link.
You can send me an email from there, whatever you want to say.
Guest on this edition, Paul Adams.
We're going to talk about the lifetimes and amazing research of perhaps the most famous British paranormal investigator.
And if that hasn't whetted your appetite, then I don't know what will.
But that's coming soon with Paul Adams.
All right, shout outs.
Let's do them now.
And these will include some of the emails about Richard Hoagland.
So let's do it.
Nate from New Mexico, thank you for the guest suggestion.
Dakota, nice to hear from you.
David Thomas suggested Bruce Fenton as a guest.
Thank you for that, David.
Corey in South Carolina says about Richard Hoagland, I wish he'd written science fiction because he'd have been great at that.
Corey says, number one, I love his enthusiasm.
Number two, I'd like him to be right.
Number three, he's not able to produce, says Corey, evidence capable of producing anything more than a need for a look at photographs, a closer look at photographs.
Corey believes that Mr. Hoagland, he says, is clinging to his old arguments.
Bob in Boston, disappointed, he says, nonsense, says Ed Nazaro.
Barry in Preston thought the same.
Sandy, though, in New South Wales, says, I just wonder what some people expect.
It was a good interview with Richard Hoagland.
Thank you for that, Sandy, and your support.
Charles in Shropshire, like the John Rappaport show.
Kathy in Buffalo, New York State, thanks for getting in touch.
Tim in Nebraska, thank you.
Robert in Napa, California, says, thank you for the positive, open-minded, and insightful way you converse with your guests.
Thank you very much for that.
Matt Bevan in Manly Sydney, Australia says, I love your show.
Listen on my way to work.
Nice to know that you're there in Sydney.
What a great city that is.
He says, I wanted to express how brilliant an interviewer you are, and I like how you questioned Richard Hoagland on certain points.
You are not a yes man.
Thank you for that, Matt.
Some may disagree.
Richard Ray, thank you for your good thoughts.
Mike Smith in San Francisco, nice to hear from you.
Andy in Texas, thank you for what you said.
Comparing me with Art Bell, that's kind.
Ben Noble, thank you.
Gene Keyes, thank you for the email.
And nice comments from Christopher Oldroyd.
And that is by no means everybody.
But thank you very much for getting in touch.
Okay, let's get to the guest on this edition, Paul Adams.
I'm going to talk about Harry Price and his remarkable paranormal investigations.
Paul Adams, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for inviting me, Howard.
Thank you.
All right, Paul.
Before we get into the subject at hand, which is the very famous Harry Price and much discussed Harry Price, talk to me about you.
Well, I'm a writer from Luton in Bedfordshire.
I've been interested in sort of psychical and sort of paranormal things for a long time now.
I think probably since about 10 years old.
And Harry Price was one of the main figures that sort of got me interested reading about his work in the past.
But really, my sort of interest in sort of paranormal, it sounds a bit corny, but it came from reading sort of children's ghost stories in the early 70s and hammer horror films, watching them with my father.
And then later on, I read books by sort of Dan Farson and Peter Underwood and became interested in it from there.
Yeah, well, I mean, don't knock it.
I talk to a lot of people and you will find that people who are interested in space were often inspired by Gerry Anderson and Thunderbirds and stuff like that when they were kids.
Well, you know, we're of a generation, Paul, and that was part of us.
But, you know, a lot of these things are seeded in childhood and then we develop them if we stay interested, if we stay connected, and if we're lucky enough to be able to get an outlet, then we develop them in later life.
That's right.
I became interested in writing through another through reading, again, sort of horror books by Guy Smith, Guyan Smith, who was still a popular British fiction writer.
And his work sort of really, I discovered those books around about 1977.
And they were my real sort of, that made me want to write and try and combine my interest with the paranormal with actually putting it down on paper.
Well, this book about Harry Price, I have to say, is a really lovely piece that you put together.
I've done a speed read, so I can't say that I've read every single word, but I've done a journalist-style speed read of the thing, and it's very nicely assembled.
It must have taken a lot of research.
Yes, I mean, I started that book such a long time ago now, about 2008.
I mean, I hadn't been working on it all the time.
It's sort of been picked up and put down.
But yes, it took a lot of time and getting access to various archives and correspondence and interviews and things like that.
So it did take a long time, but it sort of picked up.
I did a lot of work on it last year, early last year, and that's where it sort of came to a conclusion.
But I've been working on it for some time, yes.
Now, in the introduction to this show that you may not have heard, and I'll just tell you what I said on it, I said that Harry Price was perhaps the most famous historical figure in British paranormal research.
And I base that on the fact that he's referenced by other people so many times.
Was I correct when I said that?
Oh, definitely, definitely.
I mean, in the interwar period, in Price died in 1948, in the interwar period, Price, certainly for the English man, you know, the man in the English street, Harry Price was the man.
He was the face of paranormal investigation and psychical research in this country for sure.
Very, very, still a very influential figure.
You know, even people who don't really know much about investigations other than, say, Bawley Rectory, which is his most famous case, are still sort of using techniques in their investigations that Price sort of pioneered, you know, back in the 20s and 30s.
It could be argued that it is a lot easier for people today to do this kind of research because there is so much technology that you can deploy.
Now, in the era that Harry Price was working, and we'll talk a little bit more about the man in a second, but in the era that he was working, this was the great era of fakery.
There were fake mediums around every corner, and it was easy for them to fake phenomena.
So he was working at a very difficult time to be doing this stuff.
Yes, certainly.
And this is the great difference between paranormal investigation today and the time that Price was active in the 20s and 30s.
Then, people were more concerned with investigating spiritualist phenomena and testing mediums to see whether their claims could be substantiated.
Today, that is not the case.
I mean, there are a few people who are still carrying out that sort of line of work, but there is a distrust grown over many years between spiritualists and psychical researchers, which has become quite a wide gulf.
And today, people are more interested in the spontaneous investigations, you know, haunted houses and poltergeist investigations and things like that, rather than the spiritualist and soundstorm investigations.
But yes, Price was involved in what I call a sort of a golden age of spiritualist phenomena, certainly where physical mediums like Mrs. Duncan and Jack Webber and people like that were giving demonstrations.
So yes, it was a very exciting time for sure.
But one of the reasons I think that a lot of academics have shied away from all of this is that in recent years, some people have been notably hoodwinked and taken in.
And so academics are a little bit wary of getting involved in all this.
Of course, there is still very good research being done at places like Edinburgh University.
But perhaps some people are not as keen to do it because they don't want to be the victims of trickery and fagery.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I agree with that.
I mean, I think one of the most pioneering investigations in recent years, certainly where physical medium shipment sort of sounds from phenomena, was the Skoll experiment, the Skoll investigation that was undertaken by members of the Society for Psychical Research in the 1990s.
I mean, that was a very an important milestone in modern investigations.
It was, and it looked pretty convincing to me, but there were plenty of people naysaying that and saying, for example, that Skoll investigation, and we will get to Harry Price in a moment, by the way, but that Skoll investigation in the 90s, they thought they were being as diligent as they could be.
And from what I read, they certainly were.
But they put some film, didn't they, in a sealed box?
And there were impressions and images imprinted on the film.
And there were people who were getting in touch with me when I talked about it on the radio to say it's possible for those things to happen in perfectly natural and non-paranormal ways.
Yeah, I mean, the researchers admitted that they were invited guests and that some of the control conditions that they wanted to deploy were not acceptable to the Skull team.
So I think they did as well as they could under the circumstances.
But it's a fascinating case.
I would love to talk to some of the people who were directly involved because I think there was something in all of that.
And it was a very, very detailed investigation.
Harry Price and the era that he worked in, what kind of a man was he?
You've got to have a certain amount of money in your pockets to be able to do these investigations.
So what was he?
Was he a scientist, gentry?
What was he?
He was in actual fact.
He was a paper bag salesman.
Really?
Yes, Price was various sort of careers up until when he was about 40, when he sort of became very active in paranormal investigation.
But now he worked for Edward Saunders and Company, who were paper manufacturers, all of his life.
And later on, he was sort of in a sort of a managerial capacity where he could sort of juggle his quite very high-profile career as a writer and an investigator with the day job.
He wasn't a man of completely independent means because he did have a full-time, well, a part-time job.
He did have some money from a sort of a legacy from his wife, who was not interested in his sort of psychical work at all.
So he was this sort of semi-independent, very independent in that he wanted to be in control of everything.
And that was one of the things that rubbed him up the wrong way with other people.
But he became sort of actively involved in sort of salance room investigation in the sort of roundabout during the Great War and then afterwards when he joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1920.
But he was a very fiercely independent man.
I think a difficult man to get on with.
I think I actually read a review where someone today called him, he was a sort of a Marmite person at that time.
People either really got on well with him or he was very difficult to get on with.
Marmite, we just have to explain for our American listeners, of whom there are many.
I don't know whether you get Marmite in the States.
I don't think you do.
It's a kind of yeast type paste that you can either make a drink out of or spread on your toast.
And people either love it.
I personally love it.
And I love the Australian version Vegemite.
In fact, please don't tell the Brits listening, but I prefer Vegemite, but that's another story.
But you either love it or you hate it.
So when we say somebody's a Marmite person, that's what we mean.
But what was it that impelled him to start doing this?
You know, he had the means to do it.
He had the kind of job that would have facilitated travel and allowed him to do it.
But what was the curiosity in him?
I think, well, he says in his sort of early writing, well, in his autobiography, he came across sort of fairground psychics, tarot readers and people like that when he was a young man growing up in South London.
And it sort of inspired him.
He became Very interested in sort of conjuring and became quite a proficient amateur conjurer.
He was a member of the Magic Circle during his lifetime.
He just became interested in, I think, like us already, just trying to discover the truth to see whether these claims could be substantiated.
And he in the sort of late, very early 1920s, he still had a lot of the spirit photography still going on.
So that was one of the first investigations that he sort of tried to carry out.
And he did an exposure of the spirit photographer, William Hope, who was making these spirit photographs.
Literally an exposure.
It wasn't.
Yeah, definitely an exposure.
Yeah, Price had some prepared plates which he sort of brought along and there was a sort of a ghostly figure superimposed on one of him.
So yeah, that was one of his early investigations.
Was Harry Price the James Randy of his time?
You said he had a background in press to digitation, conjuring magic, etc.
Yeah, he became a sort of terror of the fraudulent mediums.
He quite gleefully exposed fakery, and this is what he was treated with a lot of suspicion by people within the sort of spiritualist community as an exposer of fraudulent mediums.
He was also looked on, he was in a sort of a difficult situation because he was a very media savvy person and he had a great love of the limelight and he enjoyed quite a big ego as well.
But he was very good.
He was very cleverly used newspapers and to publicize his work.
But he became very high profile and more conservative colleagues felt that his sort of publicity side was a sort of a detriment to psychical research.
So he was treated, he sort of made a rod for his own back in both sort of camps, you know, spiritualist and the psychical researcher.
Well, certainly in the First World War and definitely in the Second World War, there were many people who made a living and a good living out of giving hope to people who had been bereaved.
So it was a time, wasn't it, where those sorts of people were out there, the ones who set themselves up whether they believed they had the power, whether they had the power or whether they were faking the power.
They were touting themselves around as being able to give those who'd been bereaved some hope in the midst of their grief.
That's right, yes.
I mean, in about 1922, Price was involved.
He was a book collector for much of his life, and he amassed a very, very impressive collection of occult and books on magic and conjuring and paranormal subjects, mediumship during his lifetime.
That is now housed at the University of London in the Senate House.
But in the early 20s, he collaborated with Eric Dingwall, who was then a colleague in the Society of Psychical Research, and they reissued a book called Revelations of a Spirit Medium, which was written in the sort of mid-1800s by a phony medium from America with a conscience, who put down all these ways that spiritualist sances could be faked.
And Price actually brought out a new edition of this book.
He had two copies of the rare original, one of which he sacrificed for photographic reproduction.
And they reissued this book as a sort of an antidote to people being taken in by people, by conmen and frauds in the wake of the slaughter from the Great War.
So he would have seen himself as doing a public service?
Oh, definitely, definitely.
Yes, and this was carried on later on in his life at the time that he was involved in the Rosalie case.
He was trying to get a parliamentary bill through Parliament to regulate fraudulent practices in mediumship.
This was something that he had drawn up by a parliamentary draftsman and he published it in 1939.
And he was hoping to get it through Parliament, but it never happened.
And obviously, the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which came out, and I think about 1951, was sort of a thing that did actually get onto the statute book.
But Price was there before trying to sort of regulate this.
I mean, it's easy to say he was a sceptic, he was sceptical, but at the same time, when he did encounter genuine phenomena, he championed it and he championed the mediums that he felt were producing genuine phenomena.
So he wasn't a complete Randy, if you like.
He wasn't a complete skeptic in that way.
He did believe and he did say that he had seen genuine phenomena during his investigations.
And presumably he wasn't offering anybody a million-dollar reward.
No, definitely not.
You mentioned a man called Dingwall, and you also mentioned the famous Rosalie case, which is the bulk of what your book is about to do with Harry Price.
Dingwall became involved with Harry Price later on after the Rosalie case, didn't he?
This was an investigation of that Rosalie investigation itself.
Well, Eric Dingwall was, I think he joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1920, the same year that Price himself joined.
And he rose through the ranks of the SPR quite quickly.
He became the sort of research officer for the SPR.
And he was quite instrumental in introducing Harry Price to mediumistic phenomena.
There was a famous medium over in, well the two famous mediums, the Snyder brothers, Rudy and Willie Snyder, in Austria.
And Dingwall was invited over to 10 sittings with Willie Snyder.
And he did invite Harry Price to accompany him.
This is on the back of their collaboration on reissuing the Revelations of a Spirit Medium book.
So they did get on well together at that point.
But later on, their sort of relationship fell out.
And by the time of the Rosalie case, Dingwall was quite antagonistic and sceptical towards Price.
So they didn't really have, their working relationship was really only really limited to the early 1920s when they were involved with Willis Schneider in Austria.
So even though it was so long ago, nearly 100 years ago, give or take some years, there was just as much difference of opinion between people in this field as there is now.
It's very hard to get two investigators to agree on things these days, and it was just the same then.
Yeah, that's very true.
Before we get to the Rosalie case, which is fascinating and chilling and amazing and any superlatives I can use to describe it, I want to talk about his visit to Borley Rectory for a reason.
Emailers to my show are always telling me about Borley Rectory and perhaps they've visited it or they've read about it.
It is reputed to be and has been for a very, very long time, Britain's most haunted building, isn't it?
Yes.
Borley Rectory, yes, it was a large house built in the early 1860s by the Ball family.
And it garnered a reputation down through the years as the most haunted house in England.
It was destroyed by fire in 1939 and demolished in 1944.
So there's nothing there of the actual house today.
But Harry Price had a sort of an on and off relationship with it from about 1929.
He went there with newspaper reporters and he sort of kept in touch with the various rectors who lived there.
Initially, he was somewhat sort of sceptical of some of the things that were said to have gone on there.
But later on, in 1937, he decided to, when the house was actually empty, he decided to carry out what was one of the first sort of on-site investigations into, you know, a controlled investigation of a haunted building.
He rented Ball Erectory for a year and advertised, being very frightfully British, he advertised for observers in the personal column of the Times newspaper.
And he selected groups of people.
I think there were about 80 people in total.
And they went down there on weekends and weekdays as well when they could, to sort of stake the place out, you know, and try and find evidence for psychical phenomena.
But yes, it is the classic British haunted house, I think, definitely.
And advertising for people to come and help you, assist you at Bawley Rectory.
sounds to me like he approached his work in the way that explorers like Shackleton, who explored the South Pole, approached their work.
Yeah, in the He had two places, one at 16 Queensbury Place in South Kensington, and another one at Rowland Gardens in South Kensington.
And there he had his own sort of laboratory where he had a seance room where the mediums would come and he would do investigations there.
But later on, by about mid-30s, and certainly at the time when he was renting Bawley Rectory, his sort of organisation had been scaled down and he was trying to negotiate a department of psychical research within the University of London.
So they sort of took a lot of his, they took his library collection and things like that and his equipment.
And he had this organisation called the Grand Sounding University of London Council for Psychical Investigation, which was a sort of a watered down version of his earlier National Laboratory of Psychical Research.
So it had a lot of corresponding members, but not really people who were experienced in actual carrying out on-site investigations.
So this was one of the reasons, so he said, why he advertised for intelligent people with scientific backgrounds, doctors, people like that, who had the time to go and carry out this investigation.
And he prepared, he had a special book of instructions, which has become known as the Blue Book of Instructions, which gave information, protocols on how to go about the haunting.
Obviously, after Price's death, when Bawley Ratchet came under sort of suspicion as being not so haunted, people felt that this Blue Book of Instructions was sort of leading people to, you know, it was sort of priming things.
But, you know, it's difficult to see how Price could have done things in another way.
If he'd have gone there and been there himself, he would have been accused of faking things, you know, and the other side is the fact that he tried to keep himself out of it as much as possible.
And then he was accused of being of sort of promoting things by, you know, planting things in people's minds with his instruction book, you know.
But it was a very important, I think it's one of the most important pioneering investigations, the Borley Rector case for sure.
What were his, I'm asking you to sum up an awful lot, but what were the sorts, what was the tenor of his conclusions?
Price believed that the house was a haunted house.
I mean, some of his observers reported seeing things, hearing footsteps and things like that.
But they weren't the huge displays of poltergeist phenomena, which were said to have taken place in the early 1930s when the Foyster family were at Borley.
So initially he was very sceptical of that.
I think in later years his sort of critical stance slightly waned a bit.
And I think he was promoting Borley Rectory more as a ghost story than an actual case of organized psychical research.
So I think he became a little bit strayed off the path, you know.
And yet there are people today who will tell me that they are, I mean, I was talking to one American guest six months or so ago who said, of course, I want to come across and see Borley Rectory.
Yeah, I'm afraid it's not there anymore.
But the site, at least the site is, and whatever is alleged to cling to it is still there.
It's a private, I mean, it's a private garden now.
I mean, the Rectory Cottage, which was an older, actually a building older than Borley Rectory itself, that is still there.
But that's a private house and the grounds of what was Borley Rectory is private, you know.
But it's a blink and you'll miss it type village.
You know, it's very, very, even today, it's remote, you know.
And, you know, when Price was investigating in the 30s, when you had to get, you know, a steam train up and then walk for several miles in the station to get there, it really was a very, very remote place.
The house itself had no electric light.
Water had to be hand-pumped from a well, and it was a very remote building.
Right.
And what was it about the site, do you think, that led to it becoming so notable for spirits and spooks and hauntings and things that go bump in the night?
Well, I think I quite sort of buy into this the idea that places, that actual places can be, like the ground almost can be haunted by whatever.
I'm not sure.
But I feel that it was just the right sort of place.
And maybe if you built a block of flats there today, something might happen on the same site.
It used to have a reputation going back to when the Ball family first built the house, that it was built on the side of a monastery.
But that's actually been disproved.
There's no evidence that there was a sort of ecclesiastical building on the site.
But they think these sort of legends grew up to explain away appearances of some of the apparitions which were said to have been seen.
There was the famous Bali nun or a nun-like figure that was seen walking in the garden, walking in the roadway, and also a brown monk-like figure.
So I think these legends were sort of created, these stories were created to try and explain away the sightings of these figures.
I mean, I think the actual sighting of figures over a long period of time at Borley is one of the convincing things about the haunting.
Now, you said that he had his own investigation facility and mediums and people who practice paranormality were invited there to be checked out.
This is one of the difficulties today, isn't it?
Getting people who do those sorts of things to put themselves up for investigation.
So how was Harry Price successful in getting people to go there and be tested?
Well, certainly he paid them money.
It's always an incentive, isn't it?
Certainly in the case of a very famous medium that he invited to be tested, Mrs. Duncan, Helen Duncan, who has become famous as known as the last witch in England because she was famously prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act of 1753 in 1944 and put in prison for nine months for carrying out allegedly fraudulent sances.
But certainly where Mrs. Duncan was concerned, he actually had a bit of underhand business.
She was actually exclusively sitting for the London Spiritualist Alliance.
But Price sort of stepped in and said, well, I can pay you more.
And so he got a series of sittings with Mrs. Duncan, which were very controversial.
I mean, the photo that he had, he issued a big report saying that she was a fake, that she regurgitated things and created phantoms out of cheesecloth and things like that.
I mean, that's the sort of controversy still goes on today.
I mean, there's still a campaign to get Mrs. Duncan pardoned from her sort of imprisonment during the war.
I mean, she died in 1956.
But, yeah, I think Price had a sort of a certain amount of kudos, you know, and I think people willingly, certain mediums willingly went there, not realizing how stringent Price's controlling methods would be.
He had what he described as a model psychic laboratory, cameras and thermographs and all sorts of different apparatus which he would use, X-ray machines to control and to investigate the phenomena.
Certainly where Mrs. Duncan was concerned, there was a famous episode where Mrs. Duncan didn't wish to be X-rayed and she ran screaming out into the street and ran down the street in a seance gown, being chased by Harry Price carrying an X-ray machine.
So you can't sort of write this sort of stuff.
People didn't perhaps understand X-rays the way they do now.
So either she was genuinely afraid of being irradiated or she was afraid of being found out.
Yeah, definitely.
I think from Harry Price's report on her, I think we may be moving in, you know, we'll look to view it in one particular way.
Who knows?
Now, the most famous case, the case that your book centers around, is this Rosalie case.
Now, in my time, I've been told tales of sessions where figures have presented themselves and occasionally shaken hands with or patted on the knee people who've been sitting there in the darkness.
This is that kind of thing, isn't it?
But of a bigger order of magnitude.
Yes, definitely.
It's a case of materialization or alleged materialization, which Price said that he experienced in 1937.
Its actual background is actually stems straight from his Borley investigation, which was being carried out at the same time.
Price gave a radio broadcast in November 1937 about Borley Retro.
It wasn't mentioned by name, but he did a broadcast about it on BBC Radio.
Later on, he published an article in the Listener magazine.
And a month later, he was contacted by a lady who said that she had read the article.
She was impressed with Price's credentials and that she was intrigued by a phrase that he'd used in the article where he said, I can guarantee you a ghost at this haunted house.
She said to Harry Price, well, I can guarantee you a ghost of a more tangible nature.
There is a home circle which meets at my house regularly, once a week, where the solid form of a little six-year-old girl called Rosalie, who died of diphtheria in 1921, always materialized to the sitters and her mother.
And if Price was willing, he could come along as a sort of a single opportunity.
There could be no follow-up investigation.
It had to be a single opportunity to witness the materialization of Roseley.
Yes, so that's the Roseley case in a nutshell, a case of alleged spirit materialization.
So for once in his life, the ground rules were not being set by him.
That's right, yes.
There were several rules that he had to abide by.
The main one was anonymity.
He could write about his experience, but the people involved and the location of the house were not to be mentioned at all, and there was to be no follow-up investigation.
But as long as he agreed to these principles, he was free to control the seance and the sitters and the room in whichever way he felt necessary.
So he was being given a certain amount of control, but at the same time, he could not publish a full report about it, and there could be no follow-up investigation.
And initially, he treated it with some levity.
He felt that it was not worth following up.
But Richard Lambert, who was the editor of the BBC's Listener magazine, who was a friend of Harry Price and a collaborator, they had gone to the Isle of Man off of the English coast the year before and involved themselves in what has become known as the Talking Mongoose case, the case of Geff, the alleged talking mongoose that sort of said to have lived on the Isle of Man and rode around on the island on a bus.
Oh, I haven't heard that one.
Rode around on a bus.
You need to get Chris Josephy on your programme because he's the expert on Geff, the talking mongoose.
Please give me the contact.
I'd be very keen to get him on.
And travelled around on a bus.
Yeah, and sang hymns and all this sort of stuff.
It all happens in the Isle of Man, doesn't it?
It definitely.
It was just the sort of case that Harry Price couldn't resist getting involved.
And he went there and he did publish a book on the mongoose case with Richard Lambert.
And Lambert was the man who encouraged Price to investigate Rosalie.
He said, look, you've got to take this up.
This could be interesting.
And, you know, can you try and get me in?
Can I come along as well?
So Price wrote to the family.
He never names them at all.
He just calls them Mr. and Mrs. X. And the mother of Rosalie was Madame Zedd.
And he wrote to them and said, yes, I will take up your offer to come along to take part in your salance.
Can I bring Richard Lambert along?
But they said, no, it has to be only you because Madame Z was frightened that too many strangers would frighten away her, you know, frighten away the materialized child.
So on the 15th of December 1937, Price himself went alone to a house in London.
He said later on that it was in South London where he experienced the Rosalie séance.
And the fact that these people who invited him didn't want to be named and didn't want to be identified by location or in any other way, I wonder if that adds a little bit of credibility to the story because they clearly were not seeking publicity.
They weren't seeking publicity in any way.
And this is one of the things that Price found difficult to understand.
Later on, he did try to, so he said, try to encourage them to carry out, for him to carry out further investigation.
But they said, no, it had to be, it was only a one-off thing that the mother of Rosalie did not want, was worried that the spirit child would be frightened away.
And this was the reason that Price had this one opportunity and could not go back again.
So he was encouraged to go there and do it.
And he did.
What happened?
He went there.
He met the family.
They had a sort of a supper beforehand.
He was introduced to the members of the circle.
There was Mr. X, who described as a London businessman, his wife, their sort of teenage daughter, and the daughter's boyfriend.
And he met Madame Zedd, who he described as a woman just on the right side of 50, a French woman.
She was apparently married an English captain or a soldier in the army.
He had been killed in 1916, but they had had a child before then.
And Rosalie had passed away of diphtheria in 1921.
He went to the house.
He gives quite a detailed description in his book.
The case was first published in 1939 in a book called 50 Years of Psychical Research, which was a sort of a digest of the history of paranormal investigation over the past sort of previous sort of 50 years.
He said he went there, he describes the house, he describes going into the room, and the salance took place in a large drawing room there.
He was able to control the sitters, he searched the sitters, he sealed the doors and windows with tape, he put starch powder on the floor to make sure there was no people could get in or out without leaving a trace.
And he arranged the chairs.
The seance took place in, it was a blackout seance, as is the usual sort of procedure for materialization.
And he said that during the seance, which lasted for nearly two hours, people became very emotional.
And it got to a point where Mrs. X said, Rosalie's here, don't speak.
And in the darkness, Price was able to reach out and he said he felt the solid form of a naked, a solid naked figure.
He could hear her breathing.
He could feel her pulse.
And he was subsequently able to examine the materialized figure using a luminous plaque which he had held sort of had face down on the floor.
And he said that he saw a figure of a child was standing there, completely naked.
He tried to speak to the child.
It didn't say anything.
He asked her several questions.
You know, who are you?
Where do you come from?
Do you have any pets?
Where you live?
Do you play with other children?
And then in a sort of a very emotional scene, he said, Rosalie, do you love your mummy?
And the child said, yes, yes.
And then that was the sort of climax of the seance.
The plaques were put on the floor.
Darkness was resumed.
And in about 20 minutes, Christ said the lights were put up and the room was empty apart from the original sitters.
Rosalie had gone.
He checked his seals.
He checked all his controls.
Nobody had come in through the windows.
Nobody had come down the chimney or disturbed anything.
And crucially, he didn't have access to things we have today, like night vision cameras.
But what he did do was he sprinkled powder on the floor.
So if there'd been big or tiny footsteps in and out of there, faking things, then it would have been seen.
That's right.
Yeah, he brought along what he called his ghost hunter's kit, which had various bits of equipment in there.
I mean, it sounds a bit sort of Heath Robertson today, but it was practical, you know, practical things.
He put tape across the door jambs and sealed the windows.
As you said, sprinkled starch powder on the floor, which and none of these controls were broken, and he could not, he was astonished.
Well, as you say in the book, I mean, here's a quote from the book.
I've got it here.
It says, despite his years of seance-room investigation, Price's account gives the impression that he was clearly stunned at what he was experiencing.
Definitely, definitely.
He went back.
He left the house in the early hours of the morning.
He went back to the Royal Society's club in St. James's Street in Piccadilly, where he had a room.
And he started writing up a report on his experience.
And the following day, several people, including his secretary, Ethel Beenham, and Mrs. Goldney, who was a prominent female cycle researcher of the time, happened to see him that day.
And he was quite clearly shaken.
He was clearly shaken that he could not work out if it was a fake, how it had happened.
Yeah, and it did.
It made a huge effect on Harry Price.
I mean, very hard for a man who's been so quizzical and so critical to come out with a conclusion if he was going to, that this was genuine, because that is putting him, not only the people involved in this, and they were anonymous, so they were safe, putting his reputation right on the line.
Definitely, yes.
I mean, he kept quiet about it.
And then in January 1939, he gave a Price revived the Ghost Club, which was a long-standing organisation.
It started up in the 1850s in England.
And he sort of revived it in recent years as a sort of society dining event where over a meal at a swanky restaurant in London, the psychic news of the day would be discussed and there would be entertainment.
And Bryce gave an after-dinner talk, and that was the first 24th of January, 1939, was the first time he publicly spoke about Rosalie.
And it was quite an eventful thing.
He found himself up against, you know, the spiritualists on one hand could not believe that he'd had such an experience that he could still be sceptical.
He said, no, if it had taken place in my laboratory, then I would without doubt proclaim that survival is a fact and materialization has been proven.
But because I was not in my own laboratory, I can't give those guarantees.
So the spiritualists were frustrated with him that he didn't come out on the side of spiritualism.
And then his old adversaries like Eric Dingwall in the SPR were sort of again super critical saying, this is just another tall story that you're telling to get publicity and get your name in the paper.
So he came up against it from both sides.
And without him here now to question, you know, we can't get a better handle on that.
But one of the compelling things that I've just actually seen in the book here, in the account, was that he was allowed to move his chair closer to this figure, Rosalie, and he grabbed her, picked up her arm and checked her pulse.
And she had a pulse rate of 90, what was it, 90 beats to the minute?
90 beats to the minute.
That's right.
That's right.
Yes.
Yes.
He said he examined the figure, that he listened to her chest and heard her heart beating.
He felt her pulse.
He could hear her breathing.
So it was almost, it was, you know, as like a solid person was standing there.
And this child's life, sadly, was claimed, it is said, by disease.
If you were a diseased child, you would have a heart rate of 90 beats to the minute, wouldn't you?
I presume so, yes.
Yeah, I think he said it was the average.
He said it was an average for a child of that age.
Okay.
Yes, yeah.
Also, the account says following this, he put his ear to her chest and was able to hear her breathing distinctly.
To all intents and purposes, the impression was that this was real.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah, he was shaken by it.
He could not see how if it was a fake, how it had been carried out.
And Price was a very shrewd man, and he was very, very, very, very clued up on fraudulent techniques.
And if this was a real child, I'm just remembering back to what I was like when I was a kid.
a real child couldn't be expected to keep a secret or take part in some kind of subterfuge like that.
A real child would probably have given the game away somehow.
That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a very, it's a very, yeah, you're walking a tightrope there, definitely.
So it seems to me, then, Paul, that the question that hung around Harry Price to his dying day was, was Harry Price conned?
That's right.
He, after the sort of critical sort of backlash he had over that when he published Rosalie in 1939, he moved on to other things.
He carried on with Borley investigation.
In 1946, he wrote a piece for a charity Christmas annual, and in it, he gave another account of the Rosalie case and sort of brought it up to date.
He said that he tried to continue to press the family for more seances, that they had said there might be a possibility of him attending other seances.
Then the war came.
Apparently, Madame Z, Rosalie's mother, was in Paris when the Germans, when the Nazis invaded France, she was sort of swept up in the conflict and was never seen again.
So that was how he sort of drew a line, if you like, underneath the Rosalie case.
Well, that's a potential flaw in the story, but then in wartime, those things did happen.
Yeah, yeah, surely.
And then after Price's death in 1948, his work at Bawley was very critically examined by members of the SPI, Eric Dingwall again.
And they published a very damning report in 1956, which charged Price with sort of fraudulent practices, that he had built up the legend and that he himself had faked things by burying bones to be discovered and things like this, bones that were said to be the remains of the ghostly nun and things like that.
And a couple of years after that, another book, again written by Eric Dingball, said that the Rosalie, there was no evidence at all that Rosalie ever took place.
And they said that it was a complete sort of fabrication that Price had used just to create headlines in his books.
So Price's reputation in the late 50s at its absolute lowest point.
What about the Cohen investigation?
There was another, it seems to me, more scientific investigation.
Yeah, David Cohen was an amateur investigator from Manchester in England.
He became very interested in Rosalie in the early 60s.
He became very frustrated with this.
There seemed to be a sort of a period of fashionable denigration of the psychical research figures from the past, like William Crookes, Edmund Gurney, Frederick Myers, were being sort of attacked and their work being sort of smeared, if you like.
And Cohen felt that Harry Price was being tarred with the same brush.
So he became very interested in Rosalie and he tried to carry out, he did carry out his own investigation, tried to find evidence that Price did go there.
And he published a book in, self-published a book in 1965, Price and His Spirit Child, Rosalie, in which he presented the case again to readers and tried to, he found correspondence amongst Price's papers which were linked to the case, but he missed a very vital piece of evidence which was subsequently discovered in 1965 after his book came out, which was a letter.
I've called it the Mortimer letter in my book, because it's the carbon copy of the letter that Price said that he wrote to Mrs. X back in 1937, agreeing to come to the salance.
And it's a letter, frustratingly, it doesn't give the address, but Price has typed the name Mrs. Mortimer on the top sheet.
So this is the only clue without this, this is the only clue that Price ever gives.
The potential identity of these people.
So two people from the Society for Psychical Research, Mary Rose Barrington and Richard Medhurst, they realized that it might be possible to track down the address of the house by going through the telephone directory for 1937 and listing all of the Mortimers in the London area and then painstakingly going around and looking at the houses from the outside to see if there was any one that matched the description that Price gives in his
book.
Now, Mortimer is not an uncommon name, so they set themselves a hell of a task.
Yeah, they found, I think a total of about 108 people that they found that were on the telephone because that was the key.
Yes, of course, it's the era, isn't it?
Not that many people would have had phones.
That's right.
But Price got the phone call from Mrs. X, so the house had to be on the phone.
So that was what they surmised.
But they couldn't find it.
They couldn't find any house that matched the description that Price gives.
There was one house in Wickham Road in Broccoli, in South London, which seemed had some aspects to it which did correspond with Price's description.
But the families there was different.
And so again, it sort of petered out.
And really, the last sort of piece of work done on the Rosalie until myself working on it, there was a drama on BBC television in 1976 called The Mind Beyond.
It was a series of sort of supernatural plays.
And a playwright called David Halliwell did a version.
It's the only time that Rosalie has ever been sort of dramatised on the television.
And it had Donald Pleasance playing the sort of Harry Price character.
And it gave a sort of a resume of the case.
Funnily enough, that was my very first introduction to the Rosalie story.
I saw that when it was broadcast in 1976 when I was 10 years old.
And I had no idea about it and what it was.
But the dramatisation really sort of made an impression on me.
And it was only several years later that I read Paul Tarbury's biography of Harry Price, where he describes the Rosley science.
And I realised that that was what the programme was about, you know.
But from about the mid-70s onwards, nobody had looked at Roseley until I sort of made the decision to try and do some work on it.
Many authors, probably most authors, when they research a subject like this, they come away with a view.
Now, yours is a great piece of research.
Tell me what you think about Harry Price.
Now that you've investigated him, you've looked back into the records, you must have come to a view about him.
I think the Roseley case, it shows Price as a very, very human character.
I mean, it's a tragic story.
It's a real drama.
The Roseley case, it deals with grief, it deals with loss.
There's a grieving mother, the loss of a child.
And I think that Price was affected by that.
I mean, my attitude to Price, I believe he was a sincere man.
He passionately believed in the work he was doing.
And he went to great lengths to try and get the truth of things.
The problem was he was sort of divided against himself because he had this sort of attitude that he had to be the big man in charge of things.
He had a huge ego and he couldn't, he found it difficult to work with other people.
So he was sort of divided against himself.
So he was a difficult man to work with.
But I think he, and in later years, I think he did tend, some of his later writings did tend to lose a little bit of the critical stance that he had with certainly his reports into, say, him, Helen Duncan and Rudy Schneider, the brother of Willie Schneider, who he brought to London for a very important series of seance investigations in the early 1930s, 1931.
So I think he sort of lost his critical edge in later years.
Do you think he felt under pressure to deliver?
To keep delivering?
Yeah, to keep delivering the goods as it were.
But I think with Rosalie, he didn't really, I think he came to the conclusion later on in years that he probably had been fooled.
I mean, for all the reasons that we described, the fact that the powder was undisturbed, the fact that the child didn't give it away, it's very hard to see how it could have been done.
I'm sure there are going to be people who will email me now and say, oh, how it, for goodness sake, there are a million ways in which you could do that.
Well, yes.
I mean, this is the thing with my, I mean, in writing the book, I initially set out to put together and assemble as comprehensive a history of the case as I could because, you know, you had Price's account, you had various other people's writings on it, but they were sort of scattered in various books, several of which were out of print.
Certainly David Cohen's book is a very rare, very rare item now.
So I wanted to try and bring all that information together.
But in the back of my mind, there was always this, you know, there was always this thing that is it possible that we could be able to try and find out more about it.
Is it possible to find where this sounds, where did Price go and who were these people?
So that was sort of my own investigation was sort of going on in tandem with the historical, putting together all the historical material.
I spent a lot of time at the Price's archive at the University of London looking through the original correspondence and I was helped greatly by having material from the late Peter Underwood who was a friend of mine and a very great writer on paranormal subjects in this country.
And I was left a lot of material from him by his family and that helped me as well.
But one of the most interesting things about the case was that David Cohen back in the mid-60s received a letter.
In his book, he actually offered a reward, £25, which in those days was quite a considerable sum.
And he wasn't a rich man by any means, for information leading to the identity of the people involved.
And in April 1966, he received this remarkable anonymous letter purporting to come from Rosalie herself.
The writer said that she was the daughter of the family, that they had been holding seances in the house.
Her father had borrowed money from Madame Z to pay up to support business dealings.
And when he hasn't been unable to pay the money back, they realized that Madame was sort of had a, you know, was attached to the memory of her child who had died.
So they started holding fake salances and that the reason that the price had become involved was that she had given some wrong information during a salance.
Madame Zedd had become suspicious.
She wanted an investigation.
Who should they call him?
Well, the most famous person in England at that time was Harry Price.
So that was the reason that he was involved.
So the writer said that this was the reason Price that it had been a fake.
But because her parents, to keep the memory of her parents and not to sort of smear the family name, she didn't want to give any details.
Well, that's plausible.
And if that is what happened, it's absolutely reprehensible, isn't it?
Well, that's right.
That's right.
And so, but a lot of people at that time felt that that letter itself was a hoax, you see, that the letter itself was a hoax, that it was somebody sort of making fun of Cohen and just, you know, having a joke on his behalf, you know.
So I was interested in examining the Rose Lee letter as well, you know.
And so that formed part of my own sort of investigation into the case with very, you know, very interesting results.
So is the work finished for you now, or are you going to pick this up again?
A huge amount of work on the Rosalie case has been solved.
I mean, I have, if anyone is kind enough to read the book, they will find that I have found out the location of where Price went and I know the identity of the people who carried out the seance.
What I don't know is the identity of Rosalie herself and her mother.
I mean, I had some very strong contenders for them, but I could not get the sort of smoking gun evidence that I wanted.
So it sounds to me like there's more for you to do.
There is, yes, yeah.
I mean, it would be very nice to, I mean, there are some, I've got some, in the book, there are various sort of lines of thinking about where the research might go, you know.
But yes, that would be the final thing to actually completely close the file.
But I mean, at the end of the day, Harry Price is very much vindicated over the Roseley salance.
He did go to a salance when he said he did, and he did experience something shooking.
And he comes.
I didn't set out to champion Price.
The truth is the truth.
And if Price had lied about it, then that's what I would have written.
But he didn't.
Great piece of research and very, very well written, if I may say so, Paul.
Just give our listeners the title of the book.
The book is called The Enigma of Rosalie, Harry Price's Paranormal Mystery Revisited.
And it's published by White Crow Books of Brighton in the UK.
Well, it's been a great pleasure to talk with you.
I hope this is picked up by more media and you get the chance to talk about this with other sections of the mainstream media who really ought to be taking an interest in this.
But Paul, thank you very much for being on here.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
Paul Adams, and a true British tale of paranormality and paranormal investigation involving a man, as you heard, called Harry Price.
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