The Bishop Pike poltergeist in the Cambridge flat and the séances that followed

James A. Pike was the fifth Episcopal Bishop of California. In early 1966 he was on sabbatical in Cambridge, England, sharing a flat with his son, James A. Pike Jr., known as Jim. His chaplain, the Rev. David Barr, and his secretary, Maren Bergrud, lived there too. On 4 February 1966, Jim died by suicide in a New York City hotel room. He was 20.

20 February 1966. About two weeks after the death, the household began to notice things. Postcards, which Jim had liked to save, appeared on the floor near the bishop's bed. They were carefully arranged in a 140-degree angle. Books were found placed the same way. Safety pins were sprung open at the same angle.

Then the clock. It had been broken, stopped for months at 12:15. Now it read 8:19. The hands made a 140-degree angle. To the household, 8:19 pointed to the time of Jim's death. Time magazine later wrote that books and cards kept toppling over to an angle that matched the hands of a clock at 8:19.

Half the clothes in a closet were found disarranged and heaped up. A shaving mirror slid off the shelf. Fresh milk turned sour. The flat grew unexpectedly hot. Cigarette butts appeared. Between 22 and 24 February, Maren Bergrud's bangs were gradually singed off in a straight line, higher and higher until they were gone. Jim had hated her hair cut that way. Almost nothing was seen in motion. Most of it was simply found, already done.

Pike came to believe Jim was trying to reach him. On 2 March 1966 he sat with the London medium Ena Twigg, with Bergrud and Canon John Pearce-Higgins beside him. Twigg held Jim's passport. She said Jim was present and asked forgiveness for the suicide, which he called an accident.

On 14 March, four hours before Pike left England, Twigg went into trance and Jim was said to speak through her. "I am not in purgatory, but something like hell, here," the voice said. And: "Remember our discussions about life after death? Well, I guess we settled that one." Back in America, Pike sat with George Daisley in Santa Barbara, whose sittings were said to give evidential details about Jim.

3 September 1967. Toronto. Arthur Ford covered his eyes with a black silk cloth and went into trance. The session was organised by Allen Spraggett, religion editor of the Toronto Star, and Charles Templeton, a TV producer and former evangelist. Ford's spirit control, "Fletcher", introduced dead churchmen Pike had known, among them Bishop Karl Block of California. Then came a "boy". It was Jim. About two weeks later, a half-hour portion was shown on CTV. Pike told the whole story in The Other Side, written with Diane Kennedy and published in 1968.

Ford died in 1971. Spraggett and William Rauscher, his literary executor, found obituaries and newspaper clippings among his papers, disguised as bound poetry books. One was an obituary of Bishop Block. Spraggett wrote that the evidence was "disquietingly strong that Ford cheated". Yet he and Rauscher still judged Ford "a genuinely gifted psychic" who fell back on trickery when he had to. The magician John Booth suspected Twigg already knew about the Pike family, and Georgess McHargue noted that Jim's suicide had been reported in major newspapers only a month before the first seance.

Martin Gardner observed that Pike's doubts about immortality were "short-lived". Merrill Unger, a demonologist at Dallas Theological Seminary, took the opposite view in The Haunting of Bishop Pike. The events were real, he concluded. But demonic. No one ever tested what happened in the Cambridge flat itself.

No photograph of the postcards, the pins or the clock is known. The poltergeist rests almost entirely on Pike's own book. Still, it travelled far, from Time magazine to the 1982 In Search of... episode "Bishop Pike", hosted by Leonard Nimoy. Pike died in the Judean Desert in September 1969. Twigg said his messages soon reached her too.