Early Life
Arthur Ford was born on January 8, 1896 at 10:30 a.m. local time in the small town of Titusville, Florida. He studied Christianity and was offered a ministerial scholarship in 1917 to Transylvania College, a Disciples of Christ school in Lexington, Kentucky. He was ordained as a Disciples minister, and served a church in Barbourville, Kentucky until 1924 when he began touring.
Arthur Ford claimed that during the First World War while serving in the Army that he did not serve outside the States with his company and then later while serving in France he would hear the names of fellow soldiers who were going to die of the 1918 Spanish flu. Later he began to hear the names soldiers who within the next days would appear on the casualty lists. Their names were in exactly the same sequential order on the list as Ford had previously recorded the day before. Ford claimed that sometime before 1932 when he visited India, he had already learned methods of conscious projection from the Hindu religious teacher Swami Paramahansa Yogananda and was constantly in touch with him. In Yogananda's 1946 Autobiography of a Yogi Arthur Ford is not mentioned. Ford stated he was called David by the Hindus, which he said meant "Door to Heaven."
After the war he researched purported psychic phenomena and became a Spiritualist around 1921. In 1924 Ford toured the New England States appearing between the acts of the S.S. Henry's illusion production. The Sphinx, a conjuring periodical stated on August 1924 "he gave one of the finest talks on magic ever heard" in Athol, Massachusetts. He lost his interest in magic and became fascinated with the occult. He became a professional "hot and cold reader" and "billet reader," reading sealed messages given to him by members of his audience. This type of mentalism entertainment was very popular in the 1920s. Ford claimed he could read minds.
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