The Séances

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1:05Thank you very much for doing this. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much for thinking of me. Margalit Fox is a writer. For many years, she wrote obituaries for the New York Times. You know that we're not live, and so if I get anything wrong or you want to take anything again, feel free to let me know. Wonderful. It means I can swear if need be. Well, you can do that, and we won't even cut it out. You know, that's a great thing. That's true. It's not FCC. That's right. We can do whatever we want. Although swearing isn't really that germane to this story. Well, who knows what they were saying to each other.

1:45I mean, if any two guys could have sworn, what have we gotten ourselves into? It sounds like these two could have. In 1915, two British men, Elias Henry Jones, or Harry Jones, and Cedric Waters Hill, signed up to fight in World War I. They were sent to fight the Ottoman Empire. The two men had never met, but when they were captured, they ended up in the same prisoner of war camp, in what is today Turkey. The camp was so remote, people said it was escape-proof. About a hundred British prisoners were locked up in empty houses in a small town called Yozgad. The Ottomans did not use barbed wire camps.

2:30What was used to house their prisoners of war were existing buildings like schools, hotels, and private homes. The camp was run by a man named Kazim Bey, a retired Ottoman army officer. He always wore a gray uniform coat and a gold-braided Turkish cap. He was, by the accounts of various British prisoners in that camp, cold, aloof, basically unapproachable. The British prisoners had to pay for their meals at the camp. When they complained that the prices were too high, Kazim Bey's response was, eat less. And the most severe thing he did, and this was done by camp commandants on both sides, allied commanders also did this as well in their camps.

3:26An escape attempt by any one captive, even just an attempt, would bring down the most severe reprisals, lockdown, solitary confinement, and even execution on every single prisoner who remained behind. And so these British captives were men of honor. They didn't want to get their comrades in danger, so they swore to one another that they would not flee. But Harry Jones and Cedric Hill wanted to go home. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

4:11Margalit Fox says Harry Jones and Cedric Hill were very different from one another. Harry Jones had gone to Oxford. His father was a British knight and a professor. Cedric Hill hadn't gone to college. He grew up on a cattle ranch in Australia and described himself as painfully shy. He liked airplanes and magic. When the war broke out in 1914, Cedric Hill wanted to become a pilot, so he went to London to enlist. he spent weeks in London waiting for his assignment and spent his time going to magic shows he would sometimes notice a woman who he passed in the street they talked a few times and he liked her he wanted to ask her out and was trying to build up the courage when she asked him when he was going off to war he said he was still waiting for his posting she leaned close to him and he said Gosh, you're beautiful.

5:11I want to kiss you. And then the woman put a white feather in his buttonhole, a symbol of cowardice. Cedric Hill went straight to the war office, demanding an immediate posting. Two days later, he joined a pilot training program. He did well as a pilot. He was made second lieutenant, but said he felt very much like a fish out of water in an officer's uniform. One day, his plane was hit, and he had to make an emergency landing. He was captured and moved to the prison camp in Yozgad. That's when Cedric Hill met Harry Jones. Harry Jones had studied psychology and law. He married a woman he'd known since they were 13.

6:00They had a daughter. His wife was pregnant with their second child when he enlisted to fight in the war. He wrote in a letter to her, I am coming back, perhaps in six months, perhaps when the little unknown is a toddler, and when we meet, the war will be over. But then he was captured. Jones and thousands of fellow officers were forced marched for two full months. They were marched through harsh conditions for nearly 2 ,000 miles. walking through villages that were seemingly empty. A number of the officers who were on that march who survived wrote memoirs, and they talk about seeing these ghost towns, just houses with nobody in them, streets with nobody on them.

6:55These had been Armenian villages, and it's now already into 1916, so the Armenian population had been either murdered outright or driven out on forced marches of their own to desert concentration camps, so de facto death either en route or in the camps. Ottoman forces killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenian people in the Armenian genocide, about 90 % of the region's Armenian population. The number of deaths, and the term genocide, is still denied by Turkey today. So it was a pretty devastating thing to pass through on a march that was already physically and emotionally devastating. They also saw signs of genocide when they arrived at the Yozgad prison camp.

7:52The camp was made up of abandoned houses. Private homes were empty because their Armenian owners had been murdered or driven out. The POW stayed in the empty houses. The walls had traces from pictures or paintings that had been hanging there. And they found things left behind by the villagers. One officer writes of seeing exercise books where French was translated into Armenian and Armenian was translated into French, all written out in what was clearly a child's hand. and he said it was so distressing to think of the cruel fate of the little writer. For the first several weeks, the captured officers were not allowed to leave the houses, which were crowded with about seven men sleeping and living in each room.

8:49The camp commandant, Kazim Bey, didn't speak English, so he gave orders to the prisoners through the camp interpreter. The prisoners at the camp had a nickname. for the interpreter. The British officers in turn there called him the pimple. One of the British POWs said the pimple was sharp as a needle and remarkably observant, but also conceited and patronizing. When they asked if they could go outside for exercise, he told them, lie on your mattresses, read your books, smoke your cigarettes, and be happy. Over time, the British prisoners were given more freedom, and they tried to make life more comfortable for themselves.

9:38They built furniture out of empty packing crates. Cedric Hill made a bed by nailing legs to an old door. Some of the officers knew how to knit, and would unravel old sweaters and re-knit them into socks. They began a lecture series. The prisoners took turns explaining a subject they knew about, beekeeping, sleeping sickness, and wireless telegraphy. They put on shows with singing and clog dancing. Cedric did magic tricks. They resorted to any kind of homemade amusement they could find, playing chess with hand-whittled chess sets made out of scrap lumber. They even played roulette with a wheel made out of a discarded door.

10:26But after a while, these amusements paled. They looked forward to the mail. Letters and packages could take six to eight months to arrive. Sometimes they never made it at all. The POWs received clothes, food, and money from home. But the pimple could often be seen around camp wearing socks and clothes sent to the prisoners. Around the holidays, the prisoners performed a secret musical, mocking the commandant and the guards. Someone played the pimple and sang a song about how much he loved looting packages. The pimple had heard about the show and said he wanted to come. The prisoners lied and said they'd decided to cancel.

11:15The acting had been too bad. The pimple told them, you English are too easily discouraged. The primary problem was boredom, depression, hopelessness, the crushing ennui of being with the same people and in the same routine with nowhere to go and nothing to do. strikingly, this psychological syndrome was named barbed wire disease by a Swiss psychiatrist who in 1918 studied prisoners of war. And so by the winter of 1917, they're all really depressed and just kind of emotionally exhausted. And then one day in early 1917, Jones gets a postcard from his aunt in Britain. Now, the aunt knows that Jones and his comrades have these long, empty days in captivity with nothing to fill them, so she suggests something he had never before considered, that he and his fellow officers try experimenting with a Ouija board.

12:33That was the beginning of it.

12:41We'll be right back.

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15:38For people who don't know, what is a Ouija board? And were they popular? I had no idea when Ouija boards came about. Ouija boards are a product of the spiritualist fervor that permeated both sides of the Atlantic from the mid-19th century on. They were used either just as a lighthearted parlor entertainment but they were also used by spiritualists who believed that they were communicating messages from the dead. And, of course, along comes 1914 and the Great War, and there is this huge uptick of interest in spiritualism because people have fallen loved ones. Gold Star families desperate to contact their fallen husbands and sons and sweethearts.

16:36Starting in the late 1800s, Ouija boards were manufactured and sold in stores in the U.S. and Europe. In her 1917 postcard, Harry Jones' aunt explained how a Ouija board worked and what it looked like. Where do you get a Ouija board in a prisoner of war camp in the mountains of Anatolia in 1917? You can't go to Woolworths and buy one, as I did when I was a kid. so you make one as you've made everything else, your tables, your chairs, the bed you sleep in, you make it from found objects. They made it out of a piece of wood. They added the letters of the alphabet in random order. The men in the camp were excited to try the board.

17:22They started gathering at night to experiment with it. They found an old glass jar that had been used for potted meat and put it on the board. They would all crowd around a small table. Harry Jones sat in front of it with his hand on the jar. Night after night, men gathered around the table, and night after night, the glass refused to move. Finally, it starts moving, seemingly of its own accord, and the men get a ripple of excitement, but it spells gibberish. It just goes to meaningless strings of letters, you know, B-R-X-Z. So the men are increasingly frustrated and disappointed. This is not working out as the promised entertainment and relief from boredom it purported to be.

18:11One by one, they drop out. So one night when they say, let's give the board one last shot, and if not, we're going to jettison it, somebody says to the board, who are you? And the glass is now moving, apparently of its own accord, touches the letters S-A-L-L-Y. And there's the first ghost and a woman. These men are desperate for female company. They've been locked up for years, some of them. Sally the ghost told the men in the camp that she preferred sailors over soldiers and made, according to Jones, quote, one or two most unladylike remarks. Saucy Sally is just what the doctor ordered. She flirts with them.

19:05Truly a delight. Soon, other ghosts started speaking through the Ouija board, too. They called one of them Demure Dorothy. The prisoners began holding seances almost every night, and more and more officers joined. So, once Sally emerges with Jones helming the board, do people in the camp start to, does word start to get around that Jones might be kind of a medium? It does, and while many of his fellow British officers are skeptical at first, when you're in a situation of hopelessness, you're with the same people day after day, you haven't seen your family for years, you want to believe anything.

19:57Harry Jones insisted that he had no control over the board He invited the other officers to test him So they blindfolded him They changed the position of the board and even turned it upside down But no matter what they tried The board spoke to them in perfect sentences As long as Harry Jones was holding the glass One of the things that made the possibility of communication with the world of the dead so believable was that the late 19th century had seen this eruption of new communications technologies. With the telephone, you had these widely separated voices able to communicate over unimaginable distances.

20:49With the phonograph, you had bygone men and women speaking as if from beyond the grave on wax cylinders preserved for all time. And so spiritualists would say, well, if all of these miraculous technologies are possible, what's to say that communication between the world of the living and the world of the dead, what's to say that these miracles aren't possible too? And there is a very beautiful moving quote from Jones's memoir where he says he realized it behooved him to keep his ghosts alive, not to come clean and say, this is just a trick. I've been guiding the glass myself. And the reason for it was, he said, being with these ghosts, we could converse with Shackleton on his polar expedition.

21:51We could converse with ships on the wide seas. We could walk down Piccadilly. And it was the nearest we could get outside our dreams to a breath of freedom. One day, Harry Jones heard that a group of officers in another house had held a seance without him. A window had suddenly broken during the seance. Everyone ran out of the room, terrified. Harry Jones investigated and found footprints on a ledge outside the broken window. Harry knew that Cedric did magic and went to talk to him. Cedric came clean, and Harry did too. They promised not to tell anyone. and they came up with a plan for something new.

22:43They would convince the camp that not only were they spirit mediums, but also mind readers. Cedric Hill had studied telepathy acts, along with magic. They performed their act in front of the whole camp. Jones sat blindfolded on a chair. Hill would walk around the room and ask random officers to empty their pockets, asking Jones, What is this? and Jones, concentrating fiercely and receiving all of the mental waves that one does in telepathy, would say, ah, you have a piece of wood, and sure enough, the prisoner would be holding up a piece of wood. And so it went with Jones identifying keys and eyeglasses and you name it, handkerchiefs, whatever prisoners had.

23:35This act, of course, centered on a covert verbal code. The code had taken three months of creation, rehearsal, preparation, memorization. For example, if Hill used the words, quickly, what have I here, it meant the object was a piece of wood. If Hill said, tell me what this is, it meant the object was a pipe. They created hundreds of variations on the code for different items. The pimple had heard about these performances, and he knew about the messages that Jones received on the Ouija board. One day, he had asked Jones if it was true that he was, quote, a student of spiritism. Jones got nervous.

24:24He worried he was going to get punished for using the Ouija board. But instead, the pimple said he wanted to ask the board some questions about his romantic prospects So Jones agreed and invited the pimple to a seance The pimple showed up with a whole list of questions and the spirits told him what he'd hoped to hear Jones later wrote The answers created a deep impression on him This is an aha moment for Harry Jones. He thinks, if one of my captors is interested in this board, maybe I don't know how, I don't know when, but somehow maybe I can use it to open the door to freedom. At this point, the prisoners had been in the camp for about a year.

25:22They wanted to know what was happening in the war. They wrote and received letters, but they were censored, and they couldn't share war news. But then, one of the spirits who spoke through the Ouija board began telling them what was happening. Jones, who is by this time totally skilled in working the glass without being seen to move it on its own, he knows where all the letters are around the board, He has his primary ghost, who is a towering, fearsome figure known only as the spook. He has the spook start to deliver war news. And the war news the spook delivers, which supposedly is obtained from the military gossip swirling around the beyond, the war news is authentic.

26:16The spirit told the prisoners that the British had taken Baghdad in March of 1917, which they had. Where it's actually come from is these brilliant coded letters in both directions that the POWs have been exchanging with their families in Britain. Because mail in both directions was vetted by military censors, Anything that families from Britain told them about the progress of the war had to be written in code, and likewise anything that the prisoners wanted to relay back to Britain about their own condition. When Harry Jones wrote to his wife or his parents and wanted to let them know to look for a code, he used words in odd ways he knew his family would notice.

27:06Then his family knew that the first letter of each word put together would spell out new words and contain his real message. His wife responded in the same way. She wrote, Have sent parcels of the following. She then listed a number of items like malt, elastic, novels, tea. The initial letter of each of these words spelled out, England very strong now, enemies collapsing. Harry Jones would then use these updates on the war in his Ouija seances. Along with updates he had heard from other officers who wrote similar letters to their families. After this had gone on for some time, an extraordinary memorandum was posted in the camp, and it forbade the British officers from relaying, quote, news obtained by officers in a spiritistic state.

28:05and that was the second great aha moment for Harry Jones. He knew that that memorandum would have been issued by the commandant, Kazim Bey, and that meant that the commandant believed in the spirit world, saw the spirit world as a force to be reckoned with, and when Jones read that memorandum, his heart leapt because he thought, aha. You know, the pimple is a low-level officer. He's gullible. It's easy to convert him to spiritualist belief, but it doesn't really get me anywhere. He has no real authority here. But the commandant, my goodness. One day, the pimple came to talk to Harry Jones. He wanted to know if the spirits could find buried treasures.

28:59Jones asked if they were looking for an Armenian treasure. The pimple was surprised. Did the spook tell you, he asked? It had long been rumored in the camp that the wealthy Armenians of the town, anticipating the coming genocide, had buried their riches somewhere in the area and that the local Ottomans, including the commandant, had been searching for them in vain. Harry Jones knew that if he had information the commandant wanted, he might be able to use it to get himself and his friend Cedric Hill out of the camp. Harry hoped the commandant would show up to one of his regular seances, but only the pimple came.

29:49Harry wrote that the pimple had great respect for the Ouija board and would address it, sir. Then, one day months later, Harry was called to the commandant's office. He walked in and told the commandant he already knew what the meeting was about. How can you know what's in my mind? Kazim Bey asked. Harry said that he was both a spirit medium and a mind reader. He said, you are going to ask me to find a treasure buried by a murdered Armenian of Yozgad by the aid of the spirits. They made an agreement. Harry would help the commandant find the buried treasure. But Harry's spiritual powers were not strong enough to find the treasure by himself.

30:37He would need a partner. The Ouija board suggested a name, Cedric Hill. Harry knew he could trust Cedric. He wrote that he had loyalty like the sea. Plus, Cedric Hill had been ready to go for a long time. He had been training by running around the grounds every day before breakfast. At night, he walked around an empty basement, carrying a bunch of tiles over his shoulder. He saved canned food to take with him on his escape. But there are no secrets in a prisoner of war camp. The senior British officer interned there one day, took him aside and said, I know all your plans. You will be putting the entire camp at risk if you escape.

31:25and so you must give me your word of honor that you won't escape, which Hill did, but he seethed for months and months and months. So when Harry Jones approached him about the escape plan, Cedric Hill worried what the other prisoners would think. He said he'd already become the most unpopular officer in the camp when people heard he was thinking about escaping. But Harry told him he'd been thinking about a way they could escape without anyone getting hurt. It was risky, but Cedric agreed to join him. I'll go all out, he said. They shook hands. And so you have Jones's mastery of psychology, and then you have Hill, who can do anything with his hands, including make objects appear and disappear.