All Episodes
Previous Next
March 30, 2024 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
58:31
Edition 802 - Ron Felber - The "possession" Of Clara Fowler
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes.
This is The Unexplained.
And kind of, sort of, maybe spring continues here in London with a mix of showers and the odd bit of sunshine.
But the thing that I notice, because it is now getting into April, that when the sun shines and you look at it, your face feels warm.
So the seasons have definitely changed and the clocks have changed too, the time zone in the UK.
We have this thing in the UK.
I know that other parts of the world do it.
In North America, you do it, where they change the clocks at particular times of year.
And in the UK, there's been a big debate since I was knee-high about whether we should actually do that.
And I'm not a fan of doing it.
I think we should stick on one time and then everybody knows where we're at.
Now, that is going to affect people in the far north of Scotland.
But if you think about the way things are in Sweden and Norway, where in the winter time it goes dark at, what, 2 p.m. or so?
I've been in Lapland where it barely got light in December.
So I think we need to cope with that and maybe think again in this technological world where we have all kinds of AIDS.
Maybe think about not putting the clocks back or moving them forward.
But we're into our new summer time zone and I'm busily booking guests for the podcast here and trying to keep going.
As I mentioned on the last edition, I'm fighting increased tinnitus and hearing problems.
So I'm hoping it's not going to mean any disruption in the schedule here because doing these podcasts and doing the broadcast that I do is the thing that keeps me going in life.
So I kind of, you know, it's kind of important to me to keep that going.
It's my fuel.
And without it, and it's all that I've known, really, sound and recording, then I'm a bit lost.
And thank you very much for your good wishes over my recent absence.
But I know I've said all that before, so I won't bore you with that again.
Ron Felber, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, he was on a few years ago on the Mojave incident, a very curious case involving aliens and abduction and all kinds of other things.
Just to tell you something from his biography, he's a graduate of Georgetown University, Loyola University, and Drew University.
Got a doctorate.
He began his career writing stories for True Detective magazine and the iconic Nick Carter series while he was working as a deputy sheriff transporting federal prisoners.
The Runaway earned Ron the United Press International Award for Fiction.
He was the recipient of the Albright Award for his non-fiction bestseller, Mojave Incident.
There's much more on his biography.
You can find all of it online, but he's a great guest.
And he was very keen that I should have the conversation that you're about to hear about his latest book and the story of the curious case of Clara Fowler.
Now, this case is worthy of being put in the same bracket, I would say, as The Exorcist.
And there are parallels for very interesting reasons why I should say that, which you will hear in this conversation.
Ron Feldberg, the guest, The Curious Case of Clara Fowler.
So I said on the last edition of The Unexplained, things a little bit up in the air about the radio show at the moment.
I don't actually know solidly.
I've got to be careful how I say this.
I don't know solidly its future right now for a whole bunch of reasons that I can't go into and won't go into now.
But, you know, once again, we're back here.
I will tell you what happens.
And the thing to do is always to check in with my Facebook page or check in on the podcast because I will talk about what's going on so that if there are any discontinuities in the schedule, let's put it that way, if I'm not there one week, then you know that you can check in on the podcast and I will tell you precisely what's happening.
Or if you want to get direct news immediately, I will always put it on my official Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained With How It Hughes.
Boy, there's a lot going on.
Thanks to Adam as ever, my webmaster, for his ongoing hard work with these shows.
Let's not mess about or hang about.
The curious case of Clara Fowler.
Let's cross to the United States now.
I think at the moment, we've got a four or five hour time difference between us.
Ron Felber is there.
Ron Felbert, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
Much appreciated.
I'm glad to be here.
Well, Ron, I was working out before that you were last on my show around about 618 or 19 editions ago.
And for both of us, I suspect an awful lot of water has flowed under that bridge.
Yes, and it also shows how resilient we are over time, huh?
We must be doing something.
However, small in my case and large in your case, we must be doing something worthwhile.
Otherwise, we wouldn't still be here.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I certainly hope so.
I'm very proud of this new book, and I'm anxious to talk about it.
Well, I can tell that, and certainly our emails over this last month or so to do with the book, radiate the excitement that you've got about this.
And I can understand the excitement that you have about this story.
And I'll tell you for why.
You know, I'm a journalist, and when you get a story as a journalist, whatever it might be, whether it's something pleasant or whether it's about some wrongdoing, whatever it might be that nobody else has got, you have something that they don't have, and you're itching to tell it.
There is nothing like that excitement.
And I sense with this story of Clara Fowler, that's how you feel.
Yeah, you know, I say this in passing.
It was 50 years in the making, but really this goes back to when I was in college at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and William Peter Blatty and Billy Friedkin were filming The Exorcist there.
And so I was a student, and I got to meet Bill Blatty, not easily, but I got to meet him and turn over a manuscript that I had.
And really a friendship generated from there.
And he's the one that passed this story along to me back in something like 72.
And you said that you were a student and you were working on The Exorcist.
Were you actually working with those people or were you part of the process of them being there?
No, no, I wasn't working with them, but they did have extra.
So they had crowd scenes at the university where I think there was a protest going on or something, and I was among those students.
But you also had an interest, as you say, you were already writing stories.
You've got a more than half-century track record of writing mystery-type stories, various kinds of things.
And so you handed over a manuscript to one of the people who would have been very busy with their movie.
And to get the response that you got, I think, is quite a rare thing.
You know, sometimes...
And I've done this.
I've handed over...
In fact, I'll tell you who it was.
I was interviewing Curtis Sleewer, who was on WABC Radio in New York.
Yeah, I know who he is.
And, you know, he's very famous as the founder of The Guardian Angels.
But while I was there, I couldn't resist handing over my demo CD, as it was then, to the program director, a guy called Phil Boyce.
You know, I wasn't there to do that.
I was there to interview Curtis Sleewer.
But I don't think I was good enough for WABC.
I never heard any more.
But for you to get that response, okay, and to chime with that person must have been the greatest excitement.
Well, you know, like I said, I was a student, I was a sophomore, as I recall, and I gave it to a secretary.
I didn't meet Bill initially.
I gave it to a secretary, and she said, okay, I'll put it with the others.
And there were about 70 manuscripts, this mountain of manuscripts behind her.
I said, no, no, please, don't put it in that pile.
And maybe I'm a good salesman.
But what I said was, you know, I'm at Georgetown.
I'm from Newark, New Jersey.
I'm here on scholarship.
Bill was from the Bronx in New York, here on scholarship.
We both come from, you know, not wealthy backgrounds.
He wanted to be a writer.
I want to be a writer.
I said, you know, she said, I have all these manuscripts.
I said, well, how many people actually came to the Marriott Hotel to this room to hand it over in person?
She said, none.
I said, that's right.
Perseverance brings its own reward.
Just a quick request on behalf of my listener.
If you have some distance between you and whatever microphone you're using, and I suspect you're probably using a microphone that is primarily for video, which means you can be a further amount away.
On radio, we need to be a bit more intimate.
There's a lot of reverberation in your room.
It's not terminal.
We can live with it.
But if you can be slightly closer to the mic, it'll probably notch out some of that.
Sure.
Okay.
Consider it done.
Okay.
No, I can tell already that's going to be fine.
So there you are on the road to stuff.
How did you become a writer and get writing credentials?
Yeah.
You know, I always wanted to be a writer.
You know, it's funny.
When I was in the sixth grade, I remember a teacher said, we had these essays that you do in grammar school where, you know, what did you do on your summer vacation or who's your hero?
And I wrote a short essay on Willie Mays, who was a baseball player at the time.
And she said, you know, this isn't the best essay, but it's the most unique essay.
You have a point of view, a way of expressing yourself that's different from the others.
And I started writing short stories then.
And my brother, I was in grammar school, sixth grade or so, and he was in high school and they had a high school magazine.
And so I asked him to submit my short stories to the high school magazine and they started publishing them.
And then I became editor of that magazine when I graduated grammar school and went to high school.
And I won an award for best short story.
And it was produced into a play, you know, a local play at a university, Rutgers University.
And that's when I really just started to write seriously.
And I had my first novel published.
I guess I would have been maybe 25, something like that.
And then I wrote the Nick Carter series, which was sort of the American James Bond.
I wrote three of those novels under the name Nick Carter, a pseudonym.
And then Blatty actually helped me get my first book published and was kind enough to turn over the story.
He had been researching The Exorcist and came upon the story of Clara Fowler in his research and said, you know, this is the story I was thinking about doing, but I decided to go in a different direction and maybe you'd want to pursue it.
And so he called the Harvard Medical School Library on my behalf and to the curator and they allowed me in to see the records and whatnot.
And I wrote a story.
I wrote it, it took me a couple of years, but I wrote it and delivered it actually to his home in Malibu, California.
It didn't get published, but a different book that I'd written did get published then.
And I had all the research done.
I'd been to that library, lived there for hours and hours and days and days, got photographs, got letters between the psychiatrists and the patient, transcripts.
They had a stenographer there, so their transcripts were intact.
But I didn't have the talent to write it at the time.
You know, it was set in 1898 to 1904.
And so I took a stab at it.
But then many years later, already about three years ago, I was moving and I found my whole suitcase full of information.
I said, you know, let me take another try at this.
And I did.
And fortunately, the fate smiled down upon me and I came up with a pretty good version of the story.
I think it's powerful and I think it's really just so unique that it needs telling.
It was a story that needed telling.
It is.
And we're not going to be able to do the book justice.
And we're not going to be able to tell people the whole story of the book.
And nor would we want to because the book is just out.
We don't want to spoil it for you.
But however, you know, we have to understand what this is about.
But we need to break it down into its component parts, I think, as we discuss this.
But just to say this before we launch into that conversation, you must always have known that this was going to do something for you, and you were going to do something for it, because it was handed to you On a platter by the people who created The Exorcist, which is still chilling people to this day.
Of course, it is.
That's almost like a guarantee.
And as we get into this world that is obsessed with celebrity and showbiz, the best selling line that you've got for this book is this story was handed to me in this way.
Who could turn that down?
Yeah, you know, like I said, I think really it's a matter of coming to grips with the story itself and how to tell it.
Originally, when I first tried to tell it, I said, well, I'm going to stick to every word is going to be exactly the way it is from transcripts and whatnot.
And it was a noble idea, but it's not storytelling.
You know, at the end of the day, actually, Bladdy said this to me, and he was correct.
He said, you know, in former times, primitive tribes would have, you know, a witch doctor, they'd have a warrior, they'd have a chief, they'd have this, that.
And they would also have a storyteller.
And the storyteller would sit around the campfire with members of the tribe, and he or she or he, I guess, would tell the story.
And this storyteller would tell a story that was relevant to the tribe, captured their interest and entertained them, and in the end taught them something.
And he said, nothing has changed.
And I guess I forgot those words of advice when I was writing the first version of this because I just said, okay, here are the facts of the story.
I didn't tell the story.
And so this latest version, which I call a novel based on a true story, I was able to take some liberties with modernizing the language, for example, and just creating a setting that was conducive to storytelling and great drama and a page turner.
How far does it deviate from the true story?
Well, almost everything that happens between the doctor, the doctors, but particularly Dr. Morton Prince, and Clara Fowler comes directly from transcripts.
Now, I modernize the language a little bit.
You know, there's us and ows and ohs and this and that.
So, of course, you, you know, you edit a little bit.
But by and large, it's certainly true to almost word for word in terms of what the transcripts said.
And I guess that's really the important part of the story.
You know, there's some descriptions and things of that nature that maybe were enhanced or clarified.
Because in these cases, people ramble when they talk.
And so you need to condense what they've said into something that's more readable.
So beyond that, very little has been fictionalized.
The case and the story itself is true.
It's been dramatized because, again, you want to tell a story and you don't want to just spit out facts.
We'll get to this detail a little later.
But one thing that struck me, and I can only ever do journalist speed read with things.
I take my favorite books, I take them away on holiday and I spend the time sitting in the sunshine.
If I ever get breaks, that's what I tend to do.
So I did the speed read of this.
But one thing that hit me as somebody who writes for a living, which journalistically I have in news, though, but writing's writing, is that you've written this as a screenplay.
We'll get into that a little later because there are a couple of points I want to make about that.
But it lifts itself off the page in that way.
And I think that's much to your credit.
I want to read this from the publicity material for the book.
Quotes, Is evil real?
Is it a metaphor for the bad things people do?
Or does it prowl the earth like a living, breathing entity that possesses the souls of vulnerable humans?
The unwelcomed, this is the book, begins with the arrival of a young Radcliffe student at the office of renowned psychotherapist Dr. Morton Prince.
Pursued by a city marshal, hell-bent on solving the murder of two infants strangled by her father, Clara Fowler relives the nightmare that was her childhood, exalted by visitations from Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin, caused by the emergence of a demonic presence obsessed with her demise.
I think it's important that I said those words because we're going to get a picture of what we're talking about.
Who was Clara Fowler and how did she find herself in this terrible situation?
Yeah, she was a college student, a young college student, by that I mean 21 at Radcliffe College in Boston.
And this was a sort of a sister college of Harvard and the Cambridge group of universities there.
So it was a prestigious school.
And she was a very shy and almost saintly individual.
She was very religious.
She was very studious.
She was very bright.
And she had talked about visitations from Jesus Christ and from the Virgin Mary that guided her.
So when she had a problem of sorts, whatever it might be, she would turn to these religious personages and ask for help.
And she got it.
And according to her, she literally had visitations and the Virgin Mary would appear to her and give her direction and give her solace and comfort, let's say.
She then started suffering from what they called in those days neurasthenia.
And neurasthenia was really a kind of fatigue, a general collapse of the physical collapse of an individual.
She suffered from insomnia.
She had horrible, started having horrible nightmares where she'd be walking in processions with robed figures and just horrible distortions to their faces, etc.
She had no appetite because when she tried to eat food, it would be covered with maggots and things like that to just revolt her.
So she wasn't sleeping, she wasn't eating, she was afraid to sleep because of the horror of these nightmares that she would experience.
And so she was completely run down.
She went originally to a general practitioner who's pretty famous himself.
This would have been Jackson Putnam, who was a Boston Brahmin and a Harvard medical school graduate.
But of course, he was a general practitioner.
And if you're dealing with just fatigue and those kinds of things, I guess that's fine.
But then she started to get notes that she would find, threatening notes to her.
Things like, well, I have one right here.
Hypocrite, whore, how I hate you.
The pains of hell shall come down upon thee.
You shall find no help, no comfort in heaven or earth from my wrath, not till student Clara is dead and puts a bullet through her head.
Devil, devil, devil.
So she'd find these notes and she'd find her money would be ripped up.
So Putnam realized this was something way beyond his pay grade.
And since Dr. Morton Prince and William James, the famous William James from Harvard, who was really the father of abnormal psychiatry, he turned the case over to them.
And that's how it started.
And then it progressed to levels that certainly in medieval times would have been called demonic possessions, 100%.
This was at the birth of what we know as psychiatry today.
People were beginning to understand these things at that point.
So the first assumption of those people would be, I assume, but you should never assume really, because it can make an ass out of all of us, but as they say in the famous saying.
But let's just assume for a moment, the first assumption that would be made is that she had some kind of difficulty with personality, perhaps another personality presenting itself.
There's a quote from the book, and I don't know whether this drops in at a relevant point here, but you'll tell me if it doesn't fit.
But it's a lovely piece of writing anyway.
In the book, I quote, Vertiginous with fear, she stumbled to her desk, sat down pencil in hand, and began writing, then stopped to consider what was happening.
She tried to write, but couldn't.
Seconds later, her hand began moving on its own.
The letters were large and unaligned.
B-A-S.
They began appearing in a burst of fury until finally the pencil snapped, her eyes dropping to the words she had written.
Bassett, Bassett, Bassett, die, die, die.
Now, I just thought that was a nice piece of writing, but that's what we're dealing with.
Yeah.
So that kind of thing would happen.
And the entrance of Bassett into all of this, and this is what makes the story so intriguing.
Rufus Bassett Hilliard, they called him Bassett because he was like a Bassett hound.
He was a city marshal.
He was the fellow that in Fall River, Massachusetts, investigated the famous Elizzie Borden axe murders, where she murdered her father and mother brutally with an axe.
And then, Howard, this is what makes it so strange.
Then within six months, a city that had no murders for 50 years, a farm worker named Juan Carriero walks into the kitchen of his boss and axe murders Bertha Manchester, brutally murders her, very, very similar to what Lizzie Borden did to her parents.
He did to the owner of the farm's wife.
In both cases, Lizzie Borden had no memory of committing the murders and said she was innocent.
Bassett knew better.
Also, Juan Carrearo had no memory of committing the murders and actually went into town and bought a pair of shoes, directly coming from this terrible murder scene.
So going back, same situation.
So this would be within six months, within a few miles of one another.
This happened in Fall River.
But Clara Fowler's father, who was an alcoholic and a wife beater and just not a nice man at all, two of her siblings died.
And Bassett was convinced that it was murder, that the father had murdered her two siblings, Charles and Bessie.
And so he wanted her to testify against the father.
And so he pursued her to Boston from Fall River, Massachusetts.
And what does he find?
That she is under the care of Dr. Morton Prince and William James and Richard Hogson and a team of physicians and spiritualists, actually.
And they're treating her for what appears to be demonic possession.
That is almost incomputable, which probably isn't a real word, but I've just invented it anyway.
That is just such a string of coincidental events that's amazing, really.
What happened?
I mean, the only thing I can say is what happened.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, Bassett becomes very much involved in all of this.
And the other sort of subplot, if you want to call it that.
So there were about 9 million spiritualists in the United States and in Europe at the time.
This was again 1898 to 1904.
And so Prince put a team together of himself.
So Prince, James, William James, George Waterman, Dr. George Waterman, all Harvard medical school graduates and practitioners of psychiatry.
And then he also asked Richard Hogson, who was a dear friend of his and a spiritualist, also a doctor, and Leonora Piper, who was a clairvoyant at the time.
Hogson insisted on that.
So you had a team of a spiritualist, a clairvoyant, and three rather famous Harvard Medical School graduates and practitioners of modern, in quotes, modern psychiatry.
And the reason Prince did that was because he wanted credibility.
At the time, he was a rival.
He had a rivalry with Sigmund Freud.
And Sigmund Freud wanted the direction of psychiatry to go towards psychoanalysis.
And Prince, you know, found that he called it rubbish.
You know, the idea of sexual fantasies and whatnot.
He said, no, no, no.
These illnesses, whether it's schizophrenia or multiple personality, whatever, stem from chemical imbalances in the brain.
There is a physical route to these psychological problems, and it has nothing to do with sexual fantasies or, you know, childhood issues.
And so he looked at this case as his ticket to fame, but also directing psychiatry in the direction of behavioralism, materialism, as opposed to, first of all, spiritualism, and second of all, psychoanalysis.
So to put this team together, he needed credibility.
And he wanted to do a, and he did, a lecture at the University of Paris, a conference for psychiatrists and psychologists, et cetera.
And this was the case that he thought would overshadow Freud, who had recently published Interpretations of a Dream in 1901, which really set the world, you know, rock the world.
So there was this rivalry.
So he was hell-bent on finding a cure and also examining and diagnosing a disease which he wound up calling dissociation.
But it seems that there are a number of researchers involved in this case, and they're all looking at it from a different perspective, which sounds to me like the person caught in the middle of it, that's Clara, is going to be pulled in all kinds of directions.
Well, actually, Prince did most of the, almost all of the sessions, and he had them as observers.
So they observed the sessions, and it wasn't like they were involved in the hypnotic session.
She wasn't being interrogated by people who would be coming at her from a different perspective.
No, no, not at all.
My feelings and thoughts are with her.
Was she carrying on with her studying?
Was she carrying on with anything like a normal life?
What was going on with her while all of this investigation and presumably the phenomena surrounding her continued?
Yeah, actually, she was, the demonic presence realized that the weaker she was, the weaker the body was, the easier it was to take over, to take control.
And there would be sessions where literally there was a battle going on within Clara Fowler, where the demonic presence, who had a voice that was like a booming, this booming, explosive man's voice, with a remolding of her face into sort of a hideous mask, would go on in rapid succession, where she would appear, it would appear, she would appear, it would appear, and they'd struggle for control of the body.
And when she was weakest, it was more easy for the second consciousness, the demonic presence to come.
And so what the demon did was have her take long walks, missing time.
So she wouldn't know it, but she'd find herself, you know, five miles away, you know, with no shoes, with her dress torn, and say, where am I?
And have to find a way to get back home.
She wouldn't sleep because of the insomnia that I mentioned and the nightmares.
She wouldn't eat.
And so she was brought to the brink of physical collapse.
And the demon was absolutely joyous about that.
You know, she wanted to be a nun.
And in dialogues, the demon would say, she'll never be a nun as long as I'm around.
And I want her dead.
And so Prince would say, you know, you share the same arms and legs.
If she's dead, you'll be dead.
And the demonic present said, absolutely not.
I won't be dead.
I won't be dead.
I'm a spirit.
So there was an attempt.
Sorry to jump in, but this is a big point, I think.
There was an attempt to rationalize with whatever the entity was.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And finally, it would say, you know, I'm the devil.
I want her dead.
I want her in a wooden box with worms eating her corpse.
And to me, that means nothing.
You know, I will be intact.
It's all fine with me.
And it's just a chilling story in that sense.
What this woman went through.
She would wake up with lacerations on her back that were bathed in alcohol, for example.
She would find herself paralyzed, sitting on top of furniture that had been piled one on top of the other for hours at a time.
So this was a real intrude torture.
And Prince did everything in his power to try to find out what the root cause was.
And there was a root cause.
There were a couple of root causes, traumas that she had experienced that, from his point of view, were catastrophic and caused dissociation.
From another point of view, This would be Hogson's.
I mean, he would argue: you've got somebody that experiences no pain, that has tremendous strength, that speaks in languages that she shouldn't know.
Her voice and face remold into something different from another personality totally.
She rages at religion.
She hates church.
She feels no pain.
She has no need of food, no fatigue, no illness.
You know, the odds of one person at the same time experiencing all of these symptoms points to just one thing, demonic possession.
And so that argument raged between them.
But again, Clara is caught in the middle, isn't she?
Time is elapsing and she's caught in the middle of something that's getting worse.
Yeah, they do eventually go to an exorcism.
From Prince's point of view, it's for shock value.
Meaning, if I believe that the devil is inside me, then I also believe that an exorcism will eject the demon from inside of me.
So he did it for shock value.
Of course, from Hogson and Leonora Piper's point of view, it's quite different.
There really is a demon inside, and exorcism is the way to extract it.
Now, Ron, if you were to have listened, I'm sure you have, to the remarkable contributions over the years, sadly he's no longer with us, the remarkable contributions of the late Father Malachi Martin.
He gave a detailed description of the prerequisites for carrying out an exorcism.
He believed that, as you believe, that evil is real and there is the propensity, there is the possibility that this can manifest itself with any of us, really, if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough.
But he used to spell out the prerequisites for doing an exorcism.
And the most important thing was to give the person a mental health check.
Now, they wouldn't have known quite as much about these things as we do now.
So you can forgive them some of this.
But they were going to put Clara through an exorcism not being certain of her mental state.
I wouldn't say that.
I think Prince was very, very certain of the mental state.
He was convinced that a trauma that she had experienced as a child fractured her personality and created this state of dissociation.
So he was very clear in his beliefs.
Although, again, there were issues with clairvoyance where, for example, they would battle physically.
I mean, it would take three people to restrain the demonic presence at a tremendous strength and threatened one time, said, you will lose the thing that you love most.
And Prince had a horse, a quarter horse named Garland that was his pride and joy.
The next morning, it got hit by a car and was killed.
So those kinds of things were really spooky and really Prince worried about himself going crazy because there was such stress and strain on him and his family because he had his office in his house and the demonic presence would threaten his daughter.
And so it really got eerie and frightening to the point where Prince went to James.
There's a great conversation between them and said, you know, I'm at the end of my rope with this.
I'm having nightmares myself.
And of course, there's always the possibility of what they call infection.
And for example, Aldous Huxley in the Devils at Loudoun talked about this convent where there was an epidemic of demonic possession.
So these nuns became possessed.
They sent four priests to perform exorcisms and to stem the tide of this epidemic.
And what happened is they all became possessed.
Two of them, three of them died within a year.
And the fourth wound up in a lunatic asylum where he spent the last 25 years of his life.
So Prince knew that from Hogson and knew that from Leonora Piper.
And it started to work on his mind.
And it's always hard to know, isn't it?
But at the core of the case, this is a fact.
It's always hard to know how much of this is the mental state of the person and how much of this is something evil, unpredictable, and external.
Yeah.
You know, Howard, I used to transport federal prisoners when I first got out of college.
You were a sheriff, weren't you?
Or mandated by a sheriff.
Deputy Sheriff, yeah.
And at the time, I was in Arlington, Virginia, which is right across the river from Washington, D.C. And the jails, prisons were overflowflowing.
And there was a new prison in Arlington.
And so I had the delightful responsibility to transport these federal prisoners.
And federal prisoners of this kind were like serial killers, hitmen, serial rapists, terrorists, those kinds of people.
And I got to meet them.
And really, putting all of this together, so people would ask, do you believe in demonic possession?
Absolutely, I do, because I've met people that have just done things that are so horrible.
I don't even want to go into the details, but just so horrible.
Anybody famous?
Yeah, they're not famous.
No.
The Jack the Rippers, there's the H.H. Holmes, but there's a whole, there's many, many people, many criminals, et cetera, criminal minds that you'll never know their name, but they're equally as vicious and just enjoy hurting things, enjoy killing.
So what you're saying to me is that those people that you were transporting outwardly to you, perhaps in your day-to-day work, you would wonder, how could somebody like this, that he was being reasonably pliant and pliable as I'm transporting them, how could they do this terrible thing?
And the missing link, you believe, was some kind of demonic possession or imperative?
Yes, I do.
But I don't think it was like a lot of them, but there was a handful that just did things, would do it again, and would tell you they'd do it again.
And I think at some point in time, people, whether for the good, you know, a Mother Teresa or, you know, there's a whole body of people that are on the other side that surrender themselves to good.
But there is a handful of people that surrender themselves to evil and literally, I think, become evil incarnate.
I think Jack the Ripper was one of those.
I think H. Holmes was one of those.
But like I said, there are people whose names you'll never know who surrender that, call it their soul, but at the end become an entity, an evil entity that literally prowls the earth.
Ron, you've got a hell of a background for this, and this is a hell of a story.
And I made the point at the beginning of this that you've written this in a very cinematographical way, if that is the right word for it.
In other words, I get the feeling that you've written this to be made into a film.
I suspect it might be.
My listener is going to be on the edge of his or her seat right now, wanting to know what happened to Clara.
I mean, the exorcists move in.
They know what they're dealing with, or they think they do.
They're ready to do battle with it because they know the downsides of this could be very serious for them.
And indeed, there were manifestations of that with the horse, as you said.
So the stage is set.
What happens to her?
Well, you know, I don't want to get into too much detail, which I think is understandable, but I'll tell you this.
And this is what, again, when Bill Bladdy turned this story over to me, he looked at it from a case, very well documented, incredibly documented, that he could take scenes from for the exorcist.
And also there was a case in 1949 in Maryland, and that was one of the primary sources.
But this was also one of the sources.
And what he looked at, because he was looking at it from a certain point of view, were the symptoms, how the exorcism happened.
But it's a much deeper story than that, because there are murders involved, and there's a detective involved, Rufus Bassett Hilliard.
And it's a more complex story, almost like a detective novel in a way, because Hilliard, the city marshal, has to find out these murders.
The father, he thinks, committed the murders, but maybe not.
Maybe not.
And Clara is connected.
Yes.
And if at the end somebody commits murders and they have no knowledge whatsoever afterwards of doing it, because Lizzie Bordens, the one Coriaros, then if it's not them, literally they have no knowledge of what happened during this missing time.
Are they guilty of murder?
Or if it's not them that's in that body, who is in that body?
Who did commit the murders?
And so that has a lot to do with the issue between Hilliard, the city marshal, and Morton Prince.
So did Cara become a suspect?
Yes.
Good lord, how did that play out?
Well, it played out because in her demonic state, and this is part of the transcripts, she pretty much bragged about it.
So at the point where she does that, does that mean that the investigation of her as an academic subject, as somebody who people who are interested in possession want to know more about, does that necessarily stop?
Or does it get put on the back burner?
What happens to the investigation of her once she becomes suspected?
Well, Howard, that one I'm going to have to keep to myself.
Well, give me a clue.
But I can tell you this.
It's a dilemma.
It's a dilemma at the end for both Prince and for Bassett.
But this is the thing, Howard, this is the wild, wild thing about this story.
She winds up being cured.
Okay, so I don't think that's giving away too much.
She winds up being cured.
But this sounds almost impossible, but she winds up marrying George Waterman, Dr. George Waterman, who was one of the physicians that was on the team, and becoming a socialite in Boston, a high-level socialite with a famous doctor.
They live on Beacon Hill for years.
Oh, that's a very smart part of Boston.
Yes, it's the part of Boston.
So Prince then writes a book, but he disguises all the names.
He leaves out big chunks of significant information because the worst thing that could happen is that this woman be identified as his protégé's wife.
And so he disguises the name.
He leaves sections out that I uncovered in my research.
I hired a detective actually as well.
But the letters, for example, the names are all crossed out.
And even to find out her real name was very difficult, but we did.
And then once we found out her name, and then we found out her father's name and her mother's name, we were able to put the picture together and from the transcripts that were not in his book, able to come to this very eerie, Weird and complex story.
I call it a story of science, murder, and the paranormal.
And Bill, I don't think, knew, or I don't think he could have known anything beyond the symptoms, the fact that Prince documented what he did and some of his sessions.
But he had no idea, I don't think, about the backdrop to Fall River and Bassett and the rest.
When I first tried to do this, I had a story about demonic possession.
But then when I really researched it, I realized I had a psychological thriller, actually, that involved murder, science in a large scale, and the paranormal.
At the risk of sounding like Columbo.
At the end of this, though, there is the small matter of the unresolved murders.
What happened about them?
Yeah.
Well, really, Bassett was the only one outside of a coroner in Fall River that thought necessarily that these siblings were murdered.
The original conclusion by the doctor involved was, you know, wasn't murder.
It was just a natural, died of natural causes.
That turned out not to be true, but the only people that knew that were the coroner and Fassett.
So really, what Prince says, I mean, you'd be laughed out of a courtroom.
This woman has no knowledge of any of this.
So he leaves it alone.
And as a matter of fact, one of the more interesting lines or two, let me see if I can't find it.
I can, I think.
So this is pretty much the end.
So Bassett and Prince are meeting on a bridge, the Harvard Bridge, between Cambridge and Boston.
So the marshal pulled his steed derby tight down onto his head, fixed his eyes on the narrow walkway, touching the steel slat railing with one hand to steady himself against the wind.
Bassett, Prince called out to him.
He turned.
What made you change your mind, Bassett?
The demon said it would reshape the world and create the future, he shouted back at him, plucking the wooden effigy, demonic figure, he had come upon at the Fowler House so many years ago from his pocket and hurling it into the river.
I know how to prevent that, how to fight the demon with the only weapon we have.
The doctor stood waiting.
Acts of kindness, Dr. Prince.
Acts of kindness.
So good trumps evil.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
But it has to be conscious and there's a choice.
I think that everybody in their life, obviously not to the degrees that we're discussing, okay?
We're not talking about Mother Teresa.
We're not talking about Jack the Ripper.
We're talking about normal people.
It's my belief that everybody at some point in time makes a choice.
Who are you?
And either you're a force of good in the world or you're a force of menace in the world.
And I think that's a choice every individual makes in their life.
So what conclusion are we to come to about Clara?
She had what you say is a happy ending, living a nice life at Beacon Hill and putting all of that behind her.
I mean, thankfully, all of those things happened when she was young, but she was a hostage to bad things that happened in her childhood then.
Is that what we're to believe?
That somehow let something bad step in.
Well, actually, there was a satanic cult in Fall River.
Yeah.
And those close to her, were they involved in that?
Like her father?
Yes, her father was involved in it.
And actually, the interesting thing is there was a, I think it might have been in the 70s.
I have to check again, but I think it was in the 70s that they uncovered a satanic cult in Fall River.
And, you know, there were murders involved there.
I think it was in the 1970s.
It was headlines.
A question we can ask with the sophistication of 2024, but I wouldn't have expected them to ask this question then, but maybe they did.
How can somebody be in the grip of something so intense that drains them, that takes them over, that absolutely possesses quite literally them?
How can anyone break free from that forever?
You're telling me that she did?
Well, at least according to the records, I think that early along, they said that she was cured, let's say, in 1904 and this was part of a book called Dissociation of a Personality that Morton Prince wrote and published in 1906.
Even according to that, she had some bouts immediately following, but in terms of the long term, in terms of her life after things were settled and maybe there was a relapse of sort, it was a normal life and a productive one.
So what lessons do you think, if any, we learn from this?
Do we learn lessons?
I think a lesson that I learned, and I put this together again with my experiences in law enforcement, if you want to call it that, transporting prisoners, I guess it's law enforcement, but really it's transporting really terrible people.
In any case, what I come to is that evil is real and that people are susceptible to it.
And that in moments of weakness, in maybe moments of greed, maybe sexual rapaciousness, whatever, it can take over, just like drugs or alcohol or gambling.
It can become who you are.
Evil can become who you are.
And that's something that I think everybody should be conscious of moment to moment.
And for me anyway, I believe that moment to moment there's a battle that goes on between the forces of good and the forces of evil.
I think it's primordial.
I think it goes back, You know, it's a spiritual world.
One of the things I've also learned just in reading Doors of Perception by Huxley and The Case Against Reality by Hoffman is that with quantum mechanics and all the rest, Newtonian physics is out the window.
And most serious physicists at this stage of the game think we know nothing about reality.
I mean, we're discovering more and more whole universes, hundreds, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of universes beyond our own.
So that what we see as reality is some fraction, some tiny, tiny fraction, a pinhole of what's real.
And even that's arbitrary, whether that's real or not.
But my conclusion is that probably a huge percentage of human existence is spiritual.
There is something just at the end of this.
It doesn't exactly bug me, but it's a question that remains, so let's ask it.
How is it possible in your mind, and you can't know you never met her, but how is it possible for her to go from somebody who was meeting with Jesus in her visions and meeting with the Virgin Mary to then being taken over by the essence of evil?
Something must have made that switch flip.
I'm just curious as to what that might have been.
Well, she had a history of sexual assault.
So that was part of her background.
So you think that as she was abused, that was allowing in the evil, the appallingness of abuse?
Yes.
As a matter of fact, one of the things that Huxley talks about is that the human brain, through evolution, is taught to screen out reality.
I mean, basically, what you want to do is find food, find water, find a place where it's warm to sleep and procreate.
That's the function of the brain and to screen out the millions and millions of inputs that are out there that would drive us mad if we could actually see them and know them.
And so sometimes I think when there's the collapse of a personality, the evil can enter.
Or sometimes maybe the brain doesn't screen out, in certain situations doesn't screen out the spiritual world.
And so it's much different than people would assume.
The assumption that Huxley has is that the world is incredibly spiritual.
We don't see it on purpose because we wouldn't be able to, it would distract us from the things we need to do.
But in certain times through illness or catastrophic events, the brain lets in that other world.
And in that other world, just like in this world, there are good people and there are bad people.
There are evil forces and there are good forces.
So I think to me, the mystery, and I'm not a big believer in evolution.
Neither was Francis Crick, who discovered the co-founder of DNA.
I think that if evolution were correct, we'd be gutting each other and eating intestines in the street, but we don't do that.
And there is a Mother Teresa.
There is a guy that jumps on a hand grenade selflessly to save the members of his platoon.
So I think that's as much a mystery as evil, the mystery of goodness.
And I think they battle one another for the souls of human beings on a moment-to-moment basis.
That's what I think.
I think you said to me that she was cured and then she went on to live this much happier life.
Yes, correct.
If somebody was to ask you simplistically which somebody's bound to, and I'm going to do it now, the simple question requiring a one-line answer, what was it that cured her, how would you sum that up?
The demon was bored.
Wow.
So the demon let go in the end because it was tired of fighting and it wanted to go on to easier prey.
Actually, it was talking about World War I and massive destruction.
Ron, this is an amazing story.
I know that at the head of the book, very close to the preface, I think you have a little note saying, if you're interested in the screenplay, it's available from so-and-so.
I have a feeling this will become visual at some point.
It is called The Unwelcomed, The Curious Case of Clara Fowler.
And I suppose, Ron, you're going to watch how the book goes and you're going to wait for the phone to ring, yeah?
Yeah, I think so.
Actually, I've just got some good news today.
The publisher is doing an audio book, so that's good.
And it's out on Kindle and the quality paper back, and it'll be out on e-book.
So people are really interested.
They had a trailer, which I sent along to you.
It was out for three days, had 120,000 views.
That's incredible.
Yeah, it's heartening.
I mean, I think people, somehow or another, this story intrigues and fascinates them, scares them.
But I think everybody senses that there's something very real about it.
And that there's a lesson for everybody.
Yeah, the things that, as you said, things that people don't talk about, and there's maybe a lesson for us all in that.
And when I was looking through the book today, reading chunks of it, I heard Morgan Freeman speaking it in my head.
I think that's what you need.
I don't know if you could afford him yet, but I think you might be able to one day.
Good luck with it, Ron.
Pleasure to speak with you again.
Always a pleasure, Howard.
Great talking to you.
Thank you.
Ron Felber, The Chilling and Curious Case of Clara Fowler.
The book is out literally as I speak these words, and I recommend you check it out.
And if ever a book was written to be a screenplay, I think, you know, what's my view worth?
You tell me.
I think this one was.
So we might see this on the silver screen in some form at some point.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection