Beginning with D.D. Home, the great and inevitably notorious names of physical mediums such as Florence Cook, Eusapia Palladino, Martha Beraud (Eva C.), the Schneider brothers, Franek Kluski and ‘Margery’ Crandon chart the course taken by the leading psychical researchers of the day from the last quarter of the nineteenth-century through to the early 1930s.

Haunted houses weren’t exactly forgotten during this time and several important cases stand out – one of the SPR’s founders Frederick W.H. Myers investigated the classic Cheltenham haunting soon after the Society had been established and the SPR itself organised what in effect was the first systematic investigation of an alleged haunting when it rented Ballechin House in Scotland for three months during the early part of 1897 – but with the fuelling of the spiritualist movement through the slaughter of the Great War giving rise to countless families desperate to establish contact with their lost loved ones, the investigation of the paranormal became a search for psychic truth amongst what became in effect the organised fraud of phoney mediums and crank psychics.

At this time the most prominent paranormal investigators were drawn from the ranks of the more open-minded sections of the international scientific establishment - university-educated doctors, physicists and psychologists they included Baron von Schrenck-Notzing from Munich; Dr. Hereward Carrington in America; Drs. Gustav Geley and Eugene Osty in France; while in England, newcomer Dr. Eric Dingwall was starting to make his mark as one of the twentieth-century’s leading psychical researchers.  The discoveries and research of the day was communicated through the pier-reviewed journals of institutions such as the American Society for Psychical Research, the Institut Métapsychique in France and the SPR in England.  Not surprisingly, little of this actually filtered through to the proverbial man in the street, the general public at large having to make do with the headlines and sensationalism of the national press together with the editorials of the spiritualist newspapers that conveyed sincere yet obviously biased accounts of investigations into the claims of psychics and mediums.  Psychical research had yet to obtain a hero who would be able to present the subject at just such a level.  

All this changed in June 1920 when Harry Price was elected a member of the Society for Psychical Research and began in earnest his controversial career in organised paranormal investigation.  Harry Price was a Londoner and since he first became prominent in the popularising of psychical research in the 1920s and 1930s he has become a seminal figure in the field of modern day ghost hunting.  Paranormal investigators of today, even though they may know little about Price himself are following the procedures that he used to bring the scientific study of ghosts and abnormal phenomena firmly into the public eye over fifty years ago.  Harry Price was forty when he made the decision to take an active role in international psychical research and felt that he had a lot to offer on several levels.  For many years he had taken a practical interest in conjuring and magicians’ tricks and when these techniques, which he himself mastered on an amateur but nevertheless competent level, were applied to the marvelous claims of the many mediums who were operating at the time, he was able to demonstrate that much of their phenomena were in fact cheap but effective parlour tricks designed to relieve the credulous and the desperate in search of their departed relatives and friends of their money.  Price was also an avid bibliophile and had amassed an impressive collection of books and pamphlets on conjuring and the occult in the years leading up to his joining the ranks of the SPR, which he offered on loan to the Society.  As a collection of rare and important reference material it has never been equaled and survives to this day as one of the most frequently consulted Special Collections at the University of London Library to whom Price eventually bequeathed all his effects and papers in 1937 after what was to be one of the most exciting, eventful and ultimately controversial careers in paranormal investigation ever.

As a person Harry Price was an incredible dichotomy – a talented amateur scientist and a prankster; a serious investigator and a showman; a talented technical author and a sensational journalist.  Although he quickly proved through his exposure of the fraudulent ‘spirit’ photographer William Hope that he was a force to be reckoned with, he was unable to accept the confines of the organisation and the personalities of the scene in which he had become a prominent part and, after five years of operating in the shadow of the SPR with whom he had an uneasy relationship for the rest of his life, he felt the need to reorganize British psychical research on his own terms and in January 1926 opened his own institution dedicated to the study of the unknown, the National Laboratory of Psychical Research which in various incarnations survived continuously as a rival organisation to the SPR for a period of twelve years before being closed permanently on the outbreak of war in 1939.  As the Honorary Director, Price found he had the control to present his work in the way he felt was to his best advantage and using his good relations with the editors of several of the national newspapers of the day soon began his popular education of the masses, showing the public what was being done to discover the truth behind the mysteries of the séance room and the haunted house.

 

Today, Harry Price is known first and foremost as a ghost hunter and although he himself acknowledged this as is made clear by the title of his 1936 book Confessions of a Ghost Hunter, the truth is that the investigation of spontaneous cases of pure haunting made up only a small part of his overall career in psychical research.  Despite taking part in the first live broadcast from a haunted house decades before programmes such as Most Haunted Live made the event commonplace and although his most famous and controversial case is that of Borley Rectory, ‘the most haunted house in England’ which through his sixteen year association and two full length books he made world famous, the two main areas of paranormal study that occupied Price between 1920 and the time of his death in March 1948 were physical mediumship and poltergeist phenomena.  As has been mentioned previously, he was committed to the investigation of the former through the prevailing trends of the day, while with the latter, by his own admission he was drawn to study the Poltergeister simply because they attracted him so much.  Harry Price himself had much in common with these “mischievous ‘entities’” as he liked to call them.

Over the years Harry Price had countless sittings with spiritualists who claimed to be able to contact the dead or psychics apparently possessing remarkable paranormal powers.  He became notorious as an investigator who was able to see through much of the deception to the point that many mediums would not sit for him or allow him to be present at their séances.  Among the fakers whom he exposed were Jean Guzik whose materialized séance room animals were nothing but the medium’s own hand inside a sock painted with ‘eyes’ in phosphorescent paint; Pasquale Erto, the ‘luminous man of Naples’ whom Price discovered was able to glow in the dark only by rubbing iron filings between his buttocks; Helen Duncan who ran screaming into the street during a sitting at the National laboratory after Price had requested he X-ray her to disprove the theory that her materialized spirit forms were nothing but regurgitated cheesecloth and rubber gloves; ‘Margery’ Crandon who fooled many people, brought about major divisions within the American Society for Psychical Research and wrangled with Houdini; and there were many others.  On the other side of the coin were what continue to be looked at as impressive and genuine cases of physical mediumship – Stella Cranshaw, a young English nurse that Price met on a train and who was able to lower the temperature of the séance room and produce impressive PK effects; the Austrian Rudi Schneider whom Price brought to London for several series of sittings between 1929 and 1932 and who produced a impressive array of phenomena including materialized limbs, cold breezes and the movement of objects.  Price met and examined them all.

In 1945, Price published Poltergeist Over England, an extended work of 160,000 words, the longest of his many books and which took him two years to write.  It was a history of poltergeist phenomena both ancient and modern and could well be described as a summing up of all that Harry Price found fascinating about the subject.  When he first approached the task, Price found that he had so much material at his disposal that he could have written a dozen books, so therefore he made the decision to publish detailed accounts of all the famous English cases – Cock Lane, Hinton Ampner, Tedworth Drummer and the Wesley case are all there – as well as including some outstanding foreign cases such as the moving coffins in the haunted vault of Christ Church in Barbados where they merited inclusion.  In his presentation of his material, the principle of selection used by Price was one of excluding totally fraudulent cases and including only such cases as might, more or less, be considered as being genuine, which resulted in a wider variety of poltergeist cases collected in one book than had ever been presented before and as such, despite later books on the subject, Price’s book remains an impressive and useful reference work.

Price personally investigated many cases of alleged poltergeist phenomena during the course of his career in psychical research.  A Scottish case in Fifeshire which he described as ‘Poltergeist Manor’ where furniture and ornaments were overturned and thrown about and several mysterious fires were started occupied him in the immediate years leading up to his death and this was one case about which he hoped but never succeeded in writing a full-length report; but his adventures with the ‘entities’ had begun many years before.  In early 1929 he visited a house in Eland Road in Lavender Hill, London where the owners were reporting striking and startling phenomena.  This has become known as the ‘Battersea Poltergeist’ and caused a sensation at the time with mounted police being drafted in at the height of the disturbances to keep crowds of sight seers away from the ‘mystery house’ where moving furniture, apported objects and projectiles such as pieces of coal and red-hot cinders were making headlines.  Price visited the house several times and was present when objects moved mysteriously, apparently when no one was near them. 

Three years earlier in 1926, Price took part in an investigation of the Rumanian peasant girl Eleonore Zugun who became known as the ‘Devil girl’ or ‘poltergeist girl’.  After visiting Eleonore in Vienna where she was the ward of the Countess Wassilko-Serecki, a titled lady interested in psychical research, and where he witnessed several impressive manifestations including the movement of objects and the appearance of scratches and bite-marks on the girls arms and face, caused so it was said by a possessing spirit or demon, Price brought the girl to London in September 1926 and carried out observations at his newly opened National Laboratory.  Price was rewarded for his efforts with several incidents of what he considered true poltergeist phenomena, which included the movement of a coin totally unaided and the movement of objects apparently from one room to another without human agency.

Controversial amongst his colleagues in the field of psychical research during his lifetime due to his love of the limelight, this critical attention continues to this day and as an individual he continues to arouse interest and comment.  However, several leading figures in modern day paranormal research including former Most Haunted investigator Phil Whyman, arch sceptic Prof. Richard Wiseman and ghost hunter supremo Peter Underwood (who corresponded with Price on several haunted house cases shortly before Price’s death) acknowledge him as a leading and influential character.  In his 1978 book A Dictionary of the Supernatural, Underwood gives a concise review of Harry Price's activities and finishes his entry with a very fair comment on the man himself when he says:

"An informed but impartial estimate of the character of Harry Price suggests that he was neither a totally dedicated, saintly, much-wronged scientific researcher, nor an out-and-out fraud on whose views or whose word no reasonable person could ever rely.  He was a mixture of the two, and he possessed a genuine and very knowledgeable enthusiasm for all facts of psychic research, mysteries and the unknown, and devoted much of his time, energy, money, gifts and ingenuity to these interests.  On the other hand, there is evidence that, where his personal self-esteem was involved, he was capable of the most extraordinary double-dealing, spite and intrigue."

Several of Price’s cases and Borley Rectory in particular, have been the subject of much critical study in the years since his death, as has Price’s own personal reputation.  Recent studies have uncovered much about Price the man that will of course be used by his critics to dismiss his work and the achievements obtained during his lifetime, but although as a person he was indeed a shrewd, complicated and at times calculating individual, his writings and adventures provide a legacy that continues to inspire to this day.

More information about Harry Price including detailed accounts of his many cases, a comprehensive bibliography of his books and writings and the latest news about things connected with his life and times can be found at the Harry Price Website www.harryprice.co.uk which was set up in December 2004 by Paul Adams and Eddie Brazil. 

This essay first appeared as a chapter in Darren W. Ritson’s In Search of Ghosts – Real Hauntings From Around Britain (Grosvenor House Publishing, 2007)