The Séances
44:34 Share

Hi, it's Phoebe. We're heading back out on tour this fall, bringing our 10th anniversary show to even more cities. Austin, Tucson, Boulder, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, Madison, Northampton, and Atlanta, we're coming your way. Come and hear seven brand new stories told live on stage by me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr. We think it's the best live show we've ever done. Tickets are on sale now at thisiscriminal.com slash live. See you very soon.

Hey, I'm Sean Ely. For more than 70 years, people from all political backgrounds have been using the word Orwellian to mean whatever they want it to mean.

But what did George Orwell actually stand for? Orwell was not just an advocate for free speech, even though he was that. But he was an advocate for truth in speech. He's someone who argues that you should be able to say that two plus two equals four. We'll meet the real George Orwell, a man who was prescient and flawed, this week on The Gray Area. Thank 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,

Well, who knows what they were saying to each other? I 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. What 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, an escape attempt by any one captive, even just an attempt, would bring down the most severe reprisals.

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. ♪

Margalit 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. I 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. They 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. These had been Armenian villages, and it's now already into 1916, so the Armenian population had been either murdered outright or

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. The 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. The 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 interned 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. They 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. But 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. The 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, John

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. That was the beginning of it. We'll be right back. ♪

Support for Criminal comes from Ritual. I love a morning ritual. We've spent a lot of time at Criminal talking about how everyone starts their days. The Sunday routine column in the New York Times is one of my favorite things on earth. If you're looking to add a multivitamin to your own routine, Ritual's Essential for Women multivitamin won't upset your stomach so you can take it with or without food. And it doesn't smell or taste like a vitamin. It smells like mint.

I've been taking it every day, and it's a lot more pleasant than other vitamins I've tried over the years. Plus, you get nine key nutrients to support your brain, bones, and red blood cells. It's made with high-quality, traceable ingredients. Ritual's Essential for Women 18 Plus is a multivitamin you can actually trust. Get 25% off your first month at ritual.com slash criminal.

Start Ritual or add Essential for Women 18 Plus to your subscription today. That's ritual.com slash criminal for 25% off. For people who don't know, what is a Ouija board? And was this, 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. Starting 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. They 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. One 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-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 and

Truly 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. Harry 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 Harry

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. With 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 this,

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. We 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. They 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,

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. This act, of course, centered on a covert verbal code. The code had taken three months of creation, rehearsal, preparation, memorization, and

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. He 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, 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. They 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 war,

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. The 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.

Then 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."

Harriet 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. And 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. Jones 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 séances, but only the Pimple came. Harry 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. Harry's spiritual powers were not strong enough to find the treasure by himself. He 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. 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, and 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. Together they are an unbeatable combination. We'll be right back. Harry Jones and Cedric Hill spent months secretly working on an escape plan. Harry wrote that they had never been happier in the camp. We no longer merely existed. We were partners in a great enterprise.

The whole plan hinged on the Ouija board. The Commandant and the Pimple requested private séances with Harry and Cedric. The séances could take almost five hours, and Harry and Cedric presented the detailed story that they'd spent months creating, one letter at a time.

A certain rich Armenian of the town of Yozgat, anticipating the coming genocide, converted his wealth to gold and buried it in a spot known only to him. Now, he didn't tell even his family about

where this was because he didn't want them tortured for it. So what he did was he made up three clues that only together would reveal the treasurer's whereabouts. Harry and Cedric had the Ouija board say that the three clues were buried in different places. The board said that the rich Armenian man had chosen three friends. Each friend knew how to find one clue,

If the rich man didn't survive the war, his three friends could get together and find the treasure. But you needed all three of them, and two of them had died. Jones and Hill can use the Ouija board to contact the spirits of the two dead friends, learn the locations of the buried clues, and dig them up. And then they can all, with their captors, set out...

to find the third friend who is still living. But it would mean leaving the camp. What Jones and Hill are actually planning to do is travel with their captors to the Mediterranean coast, get a boat, drug their captors, bind them, stick them in the boat, and sail to join the British forces at Cyprus, turning over their captors, who now themselves will become British prisoners of war.

However, they also knew that if at any point the slightest false move gave their hoax away, it would mean a bullet in the back for each of them. They found a way to sneak out and bury the first two clues close to the camp. One day, they all met exactly at noon in Yozgad's graveyard, as the spirit had told them to do. They brought a shovel and followed the directions.

When they had found the right spot, they started digging. Suddenly, they hit something. It was a small tin can. Inside the can, the pimple found a slip of paper with a clue written on it. An Armenian. Harry and Cedric had used an Armenian dictionary to write it. The clue was a compass direction. The commandant shook hands with each of us several times over, Harry wrote. The pimple was ecstatic. The next day, they found the second clue.

Another tin can with a clue written on a slip of paper. That night, the commandant sent them a bottle of wine. Now, they all needed to go further away to find the third clue. After a year of planning, Harry and Cedric would finally be getting out. But the night before the trip, the commandant panicked. He got scared that something was spiritually wrong. He thought that the spirits weren't happy. He was scared that if he moved forward, the spirits would punish him.

maybe even kill him, and he canceled the trip. The trip is off. The escape is off. It is completely devastating. But as all good con men do, Jones and Hill from nearly the beginning have had a plan B. Plan B is to go insane.

there is a slender chance that they will both be repatriated to Britain in an official exchange of sick prisoners. That's their plan B. And so the day the treasure hunt falls through, they embark on losing their minds.

How do they do that? How do they convince people that that's what's happened? Oh my goodness, what they do to themselves in terms of mortifying their own persons. They don't bathe for weeks on end. They don't shave for weeks on end. They pour pails of slop all over the place. The one...

And so he schools them and he says,

Hill becomes a religious melancholic, and his job is really the harder of the two. He has to sit motionless for hours and hours on end, praying and reading the Bible and weeping. He makes himself cry by covertly blowing cigarette smoke into his eyes when no one is looking.

Jones comes down with what was then called general paralysis of the insane. It's a disease that results from syphilis, and its mental hallmarks are rampant egoism, delusional boastfulness, and just generally running around and making a pest of yourself. So each one of them for weeks starts playing his respective madman role.

Local doctors are brought in, and Jones and Hill play their role so well that the local doctors are clearly scared out of their wits. And so they immediately issue them two certificates of lunacy, signed and sealed, and that allows Jones and Hill to be dispatched to Constantinople. Margalit Fox says that part of why this plan worked was

was because many people believed that being able to talk to spirits could damage your mind.

They wound up having to stay in the hospital, shamming insanity for six full months, during which time their doctors, who suspected them of malingering—they were, after all, enemy combatants— their doctors subjected them to all sorts of really arduous traps. One of the doctors gave Harry Jones a bottle of ink and said it was medicine.

He drank the whole bottle and smiled. The doctors constantly watched them. Harry Jones later wrote about their stay at the hospital. We did not attempt to talk. We were too closely watched for that. But at night, under cover of darkness, sometimes he and sometimes I would stretch out an arm and for a brief moment grip the other's hand. The firm, strong pressure of my comrade's fingers used to put everything right.

They were very, very worn physically. And of course, they were very, very worn psychologically. As Jones says, when you sham madness for that long, the real danger is slipping into authentic madness in yourself. And they both clearly came close to that. But in the end, after six months, the doctors there finally certified them as insane.

and they were repatriated to Britain. They actually wound up being repatriated on two separate ships, but the minute each of their ships cleared Ottoman waters, first Hill and then Jones, made a miraculous recovery. They were just fine. They were just fine. They reached England, and then, two weeks later, the war ended.

In a sense, their whole escape with first the spiritual con game and then the sham insanity

It literally bought them two weeks, but it probably saved their lives because they're both very articulate about the fact that it gave them hope in a world otherwise devoid of hope. It gave them something to live for, something to get up and work toward every day. Before Harry Jones and Cedric Hill left the Yozgad prison camp for the hospital in Constantinople, they had secretly confessed to some of the other prisoners in the camp that

that the Ouija board had all been a con, but the other prisoners didn't want to hear about it.

The officers in the prison camp, these are educated British men, refused to believe that the spiritualism had been a sham. That was how good Jones's powers of persuasion had ultimately been. As Hill later said, true believers remain true believers through everything.

They just need it. They just need it. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

where we'll also have a link to Margalit Fox's book. It's called The Confidence Men, How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.