Religion: Pike’s Medium

The Right Rev. James A. Pike’s lifelong spiritual quest led him gradually away from Christian orthodoxy into controversial denials of such basic dogmas as the Trinity and Virgin Birth. Toward the end of his life, he began to explore the occult. Having resigned as Episcopal Bishop of California, he experimented with mediums, and claimed ghostly contacts with his suicide son, James Jr. In January 1971, Pike died after becoming lost in the Judean desert while attempting to retrace Jesus’ steps in the wilderness.

In one eerie episode in September 1967, the Canadian Television Network broadcast a séance in which the Rev. Arthur Ford, a Disciples of Christ minister as well as a prominent medium, supposedly brought Pike into communication with his son and a number of other dead acquaintances. Most critics dismissed the performance as theatrical charlatanism that embarrassingly exposed the bishop’s gullibility.

Arthur Ford died in 1971 at the age of 73. Now Allen Spraggett, the Canadian journalist who brought Pike and Ford together for the TV séance, has published his own account of the incident. In Arthur Ford: The Man Who Talked with the Dead (New American Library; $7.95), a biography written with William V. Rauscher, a close friend of Ford’s and his literary legatee, Spraggett admits that he is a believer in Ford’s psychic powers but says that Ford had the canny habit of cramming for many of his séances.

Gifted. In Pike’s case, he came prepared with a headful of research about the bishop’s past: Although Pike clearly believed that he was communicating with his son, Spraggett points out that the most elementary investigation into the bishop’s background could have given Ford all the information he needed to fake the “contact”—facts about the Pike family’s Slavic origins or James Jr.’s precarious mental, health. During the séance, Ford purportedly made contact with a former colleague of Pike’s, the Rev. Louis W. Pitt. Ford had said, somewhat with an air of mystery: “He tried, or people tried, twice to make a bishop of him, but failed.” Spraggett observes that Ford had in his files a clip of Pitt’s obituary in the New York Times in 1959, which mentioned that he had twice been a candidate for bishop of New York.

Spraggett, on the other hand, insists that there are a few references to people or events in the séance for which he could find no research in Ford’s papers. The author concludes: “Personally, I think the evidence supports the hypothesis that Arthur Ford was a genuinely gifted psychic who, for various reasons, scrutable and inscrutable, fell back on trickery when he felt he had to.”