2023-08-31 12:53:43
Harry Price was quoted on ABC for the first time in January 1933, during the Second Republic. The headline read: ‘Mars Signals Will Be Made From Alpine Peaks.’ In the news it was said that a group of British scientists had built a “giant lighthouse” with the aim of “sending light signals to the red planet, to see if they can be picked up and answered there, in the event that there are inhabitants on it” . At that time, our protagonist was the secretary of the National Laboratory for Psychical Research in London, who was in charge of carrying out the experiment.
In the interview that the editor of this newspaper did with him, he was not very cautious as far as his aspirations were concerned: “I have proof of the existence of plant life on Mars and that it is inhabited by intelligent beings.”
“Do you have hope?”
—Yes, very well founded on the fact that our signals will reach the neighboring planet and that its inhabitants will find the means of indicating to us that they have received them.
The next time he was summoned eleven years ago he had died of a massive heart attack at his home in Pulborough, who knows if as a result of a heart battered by a life of stress dedicated to hunting and capturing the spirits that so devastated him. They had been in fashion since the mid-19th century. It was on the occasion of the criticism of a book entitled ‘English Ghosts’, published in 1959, in which it was said: «The famous journalist and writer on psychic subjects, Harry Price, narrator of several cases in which he had spiritualistic experiences, assured having seen the apparition of a deceased girl at the age of five and summoned by means of a magical table by a group of people, in which her mother was.
All that faith in the existence of the afterlife is curious, if we take into account that Price dedicated his entire life to unmasking many of the spiritualists who became famous at the beginning of the 20th century. He was like a prey dog against all those who claimed to have contacted the dead or to have starred in paranormal episodes, except if it was himself. A conviction to which what is known today as the “first ghostbuster” in history – in reference to the famous film starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Sigourney Weaver in 1984 – came after years of study.
the occult
Harry Price was born in London in 1881, although he always maintained that he was from the county of Shropshire, in Wales. At that time, several centuries ago, the first attempts to bring the occult sciences closer to reason had taken place, even if they were timid. However, it was not until the birth of the Ghost Club in the same British capital in 1862 and of the Theosophical Society of New York, in 1875, when for the first time the occult moved away from the fair booths and housed archives dedicated to the study of phenomena that could not be explained by the laws of nature. These were joined by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888.
Price studied at the most prestigious secondary school in New Cross, in south-east London, where he founded the drama section and directed and performed his first written play. It was a drama based on a supposed ‘poltergeist’ lived by himself in a haunted house in Shropshire. The first appearance of him in the English press occurred shortly after, as a result of an experiment related to telepathy and space telegraphy that he himself described as “a failure.”
Although in his early years he shared this obsession with archaeology, even leading several excavations from Roman times, while working as a salesman for a paper distributor, he soon began to abandon all these activities to focus on the occult. Above all, when he traveled to Shrewsbury, the capital of Shropshire, and met the Great Sequah, who he said was “the main inspiration” for his work. This famous conjurer was really called Charles Rowley and in his shows he made objects appear from his top hat, guessed the profession of those present and was even able to extract infected teeth, without causing any pain, through hypnosis.
false seers
However, it was reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, ‘A Study in Scarlet’ (1887), that prompted Price to use detective reasoning to analyze, and unmask if possible, paranormal events. more famous, which were advertised in the press and turned into lucrative shows held in theaters. In short, he wanted to scientifically study the actions of those who claimed to have supernatural powers, but without losing contact with the main occult experts.
The first he charged against was Marthe Beraud, a French widow who claimed to have psychic powers that allowed her to speak with her recently deceased husband and, as if that were not enough, with a three-hundred-year-old Hindu saint named Bien Boa, who appeared behind a curtain at their shows. The stunned and naive spectators of him were members of the Gallic aristocracy who paid good sums of money to attend his séances. Over time it was discovered that it was all a hoax, and that the apparition was, in reality, a domestic worker of Arab origin in disguise.
With all prestige lost, the medium fled to Britain to continue her lucrative ruse under a new name: Eva Carriere. There she was visited precisely by Arthur Conan Doyle, who swallowed her show, unlike the great Harry Houdini. In 1920, the famous illusionist wrote to Price to help him unmask her. Our protagonist did not take long to demonstrate that the supposed trance was a distraction maneuver so that a sidekick would place papier-mâché figures in the semi-darkness. He also demonstrated that the spirit’s ectoplasm that was supposedly escaping from her mouth was just a piece of newspaper that the spiritualist regurgitated and spit out.
Magic Circle
Encouraged by Houdini, two years later he joined the Magic Circle, an organization created to study magic in which he received training as an illusionist and conjurer. That helped him to investigate other paranormal phenomena. The first he focused on was William Hope, a photographer who had been capturing ghost images for fifteen years. Price, however, presented a lengthy report in which he demonstrated that he replaced the original plates with prepared ones on which, after double exposure, the spectrum image appeared. His conclusions caused a great scandal at the time. Conan Doyle publicly attacked him and his fame grew a lot.
His next victim was Willi Schneider, a false spiritualist who used sleight of hand to defraud relatives of soldiers killed in World War I. And he got it. And it is that there were many unsuspecting people who fell into the trap, convinced by such prestigious believers as William Crookes, one of the most important scientists of the 19th century; the physicist Max Planck, Nobel Prize winner in 1918, or Conan Doyle himself, who came to publicly assure that he also had the ability to speak with the dead. The writer even began to write books related to the subject and even opened a shop in London specializing in spiritualism. «I am not afraid of the death of the child. Since I became a convinced spiritualist, death has become rather an unnecessary thing,” the creator of detective Sherlock Holmes wrote to his mother during World War I about a son he had at the front.
In 1923, Price accused the famous Jan Guzyk in Cracow of moving objects using his feet, using the same method used by Maria Silbert, whose case he uncovered in Vienna in 1925. In every major European capital he encountered a similar character, all of them skilled charlatans integrated into high society who took advantage of the naivety and desperation of those who wanted to contact their deceased loved ones.
The R101 airship
Everything changed on his return trip to England. On the train from London to his residence in Pulborough he met a young nurse, Stella Cranshaw, who very shyly told him that sometimes, lying in her bedroom with the windows closed, she would begin to feel a slight breeze, and then , small objects such as matchboxes and pencils began to rotate in the air accompanied by flashes of light. Price had not revealed her identity, but he still convinced her to hold three séances. The hope of our protagonist was to find a case that was not a fraud… and it seems that he convinced him.
In 1926, inspired by the young woman, he founded the National Laboratory for Psychical Research, cited by ABC at the beginning of the article. The objective of this association was to collect data on paranormal phenomena for which no scientific explanation was found, of course, after carrying out a series of rigorous and impartial studies to confirm it. Thanks to Price’s growing notoriety, his laboratory received a large number of cases asking to be investigated and large donations with which he expanded his facilities and his staff with a large number of professionals, from different disciplines, which he organized according to the nature of the cases. cases.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he continued to expose fraudsters, many of whom ended up publicly acknowledging their fraud after our protagonist published his findings, but he also recorded some cases that shocked him and he could not explain. One of these was the one that occurred shortly after, on October 5, 1930, the British airship R101 suffered an accident in which all the passengers and crew died. Simultaneously, the Irish medium Eileen Garrett, during a session in which she tries to contact the recently deceased Conan Doyle, said that she had contacted the spirit of Lieutenant HC Irwin, captain of the ship, who transmitted a series of technical data about the causes of the tragedy and the exact location of the remains. There was no way he knew them, but he was right, becoming the second an impressed Price failed to dismount.
Price’s prestige grew so high among the scientific community that, in 1934, the University of London’s Board of Psychological Studies established an unofficial body for Psychical Research. One of the first actions he carried out was to house the extensive private library of our ‘ghostbusters’, who little by little left more and more cases for his disciples. Until his death, he dedicated himself to writing several books and tidying up the files of a lifetime. When he died, among his papers a brief note was found that said: “If something real exists beyond, I will return after my death to communicate it to you.”
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