Arthur Ford

Arthur Augustus Ford (January 8, 1896 - January 4, 1971) was one of the most famous American trance mediums of the twentieth century. Born in Titusville, Florida, and raised in Fort Pierce, he attended Transylvania College, a Disciples of Christ school in Kentucky, and was ordained a Disciples minister before turning to mediumship; he said he first recognized psychic abilities during World War I, when he seemed to “hear” the names of soldiers before they appeared on casualty lists.

Working in trance through a purported spirit control named “Fletcher,” Ford built a national reputation and helped sustain interest in Spiritualism across the mid-century decades. Two episodes made him a household name.

In 1928-29 he claimed to have received and decoded the secret message that the late Harry Houdini had arranged to send his widow as proof of survival; the séance was celebrated at the time, though after Ford’s death his biographers found notes among his papers indicating the sitting had been faked.

In 1967 he gained renewed fame on network television by claiming to contact the deceased son of Bishop James Pike. Around 1955 Ford helped found the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship, a network bringing Spiritualist practice into mainline Christian circles.

Within the Atlas, Ford stands as a central, and deliberately ambivalent, Spiritualism node: hugely influential in popularizing survival-of-consciousness belief, yet also a documented case of fraud, which the skeptical literature of the system preserves rather than hides.