Harry Price (17 January 1881 – 29 March 1948) was a British psychic researcher and author, who gained public prominence for his investigations into psychical phenomena and his exposing fraudulent spiritualist mediums.
Harry Price and 'Rosalie'
The following article is taken from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 43, No. 726 (1965-66). Prior to Medhurst's paper, S.P.R. member David Cohen, who was President of the Manchester Society for Psychical Research, had published a book on the 'Rosalie' case - Price and his Spirit Child 'Rosalie', (Regency Press, London, 1965) - which had been reviewed in the December 1965 issue of the Journal. This was the current state of play with 'Rosalie' in the mid 1960s following Cohen's work on the case.
Of all the strange phenomena reported by parapsychologists, that of 'full-form materialization' is perhaps the most difficult for the non-converted to take seriously. Both Crookes's 'Katie King' and Richet's 'Bien Boa' attracted their share of ridicule. The physiological difficulty that a structure as complex as a living body, carrying in itself the minutely detailed record of its remote and recent history, should be created and destroyed almost at will in the séance room has daunted more than one otherwise sympathetic man of science.
Harry Price's story of 'Rosalie', which is the principal subject of Mr Cohen's book, is, taken at its face value, almost unique among such cases, insofar as Price had a degree of control over the sitters and the conduct of the sitting hardly ever permitted to the earlier investigators of phenomena of this kind. The story was first told by Price in his Fifty Years of Psychical Research (1939), and is reproduced in full in Dr Paul Tabori's Harry Price: The Biography of a Ghost Hunter. Price presents it as a 'verbatim and uncorrected' record, written on the night of the séance it describes.
In his account, he says that on the morning of Wednesday, 8th December, 1937, he was rung up by a lady who told him that every Wednesday evening she and some friends held a family séance at her house, during which a little girl spirit known as Rosalie always materialized. Price was invited to attend, provided that he promised not to reveal the identity of any of the sitters, or the locality where the séance was held. He 'was not to seek a scientific enquiry, as the mother of "Rosalie", who attended each sitting, was terrified that her girl might be frightened away'. Price was told that 'these Wednesday meetings were in the nature of a sacred communion with the spirit of her daughter, and would be maintained as such'. However, he was assured that before the séance he would have complete freedom to search premises and sitters and to introduce any control measures that he wished.