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Ron Felber is a graduate of Georgetown University, Loyola University, and Drew University, where he earned his doctorate. He began his career writing stories for True Detective magazine and the iconic Nick Carter series while working as a deputy sheriff transporting federal prisoners. The Runaway earned Ron the United Press International Award for Fiction. He was the recipient of the
Albright Award for his nonfiction bestseller Mojave Incident. Some of his books have made their way to film and television, including The Mojave Incident, Il Doughty, The Double Life of a Mafia Doctor, and The Hunt for Coon Saw. His most recent title, The Unwelcomed The Curious Case of Clara Fowler, is based on a true medical case history passed along to him by William Peter Bladie, author of The Exorcist. Ron Felber, Welcome back to Coast to Coast AM.
How are you good to be with you? Richard?
What were the circumstances under which you met William Peter Bladdie, the author of the Exorcist, and his sharing of this remarkable case of Clara Fowler.
But I think this is a case where luck and maybe determination meet because he was filming The Exorcist in nineteen seventy two when I was a student at Georgetown University, and oddly enough, I had just finished my first novel. So, like a lot of first novel novelists, you know, I desperately wanted to get this published. And I thought, well, if I could get this into the hands of Bill Bladie, who at the time had a book that was on the bestseller list for fifty six weeks, maybe he would
help me get it published. So I didn't get to see him directly because the film stat was closed off and they had fog machines and everything else around Georgetown at the time, but he had an office across the Potomac at the key Bridge Marriott, and I did get to meet his administrative assistant. I handed her the manuscript and said, please give this to William Peter Blattie. She said, well, I'll put it in the stack over here.
And there are about.
Seventy manuscripts from all over the world that people young writers like me had sent to him hoping that he would help them get published. I guess in any case, I convinced her because I was there physically and didn't put it in the mail or something like that to give it to him. He did. And actually I went back for Thanksgiving.
Holiday my parents in.
New Jersey, and I got a call from William Peter Blatty, and of course I was delighted about that. He said he liked the manuscript, he wanted to meet.
So we struck up a friendship.
And actually i'd finished writing another novel that he offered to help me with, and I flew out to California, and by coincidence, again this wasn't planned. It was ost week, Academy award week, and so I stayed with he and his wife Linda at the time in Malibu, and during that time he told me about this case that he had come upon in researching The Exorcist, and this was the case of Clara Fower.
So why didn't Bladdie write this case? Why did he he write The Exorcist? Why didn't he write the Clara Fowler case or is part of Clara Fowler in his work The Exorcist?
Yeah, I think what he did he tried, like I did in writing this story, to write.
It as a documentary.
So he at first wrote The Exorcist as a documentary based on two cases.
One of them was a.
Clara Fowler case, but the other was the more predominant one, which was a young boy I think about fourteen years old who was in Maryland and just down the street from Washington Georgetown, and in the paper he had read an article when he was a student at Georgetown and
it talked about this possession case. And so I think he tried to write it as a documentary as I did, and found that it was dry and too too much like a medical case history and a textbook, And so he decided to take the general concept of demonic possession and exorcism and novelize them.
So tell us more about Clara Fowler. She's a student at Radcliffe College. What sort of behaviors was she exhibiting and who witnessed those behaviors?
Yeah, this is what makes us such a such a incredible.
Story because it went on for a number of years, and.
It was studied by a team of physicians that really the most prominent psychotherapists and psychiatrists of the time, doctor Morton Prince, who whose father, by the way, was Mayor of Boston, so Boston Brahmin, graduate of Harvard Medical School and a lecturer at Tough Medical School. The famous William James, really the father of abnormal psychology, who was the first
to teach abnormal psychology at Harvard Medical School. Richard Hodgson, who was president of the Psychical Research Society and a spiritualist, and they were joined by Princess protege, George Waterman who was also a Harvard graduate, and the clairvoyant Leonora Piper. So this was study from a number of points of view. It started with Clara being afflicted by what they called at the time nourristhenia, and this would be a condition
of fatigue, lack of a appetite, insomnia for example. And originally she went to Putnam Jackson Putnam who was a prominent general physician, and the symptoms got so extreme that he wrote to Prince sent her to Prince realizing this was above his you know, this was not his field of expertise. And when he wrote to Prince, and I have the letter in the book was basically, she exhibits
all the symptoms. If I didn't know better, and if we were living in different times, I would suggest that this is a case of demonic possession, but I leave that up to you. And so Prince formed this team around this.
Young woman.
And the symptoms were, you know, were incredible. I mean, her face would remold into a different faith. Her voice would change into this boomy, raspy, terrifying voice that of a man. She spoke in different languages, tremendous strength, had unbridled rage at religious articles, you know, a Bible, rosaries.
A priest at church.
She even exhibited some elements of clairvoyants where she would predict what was going to happen to Prince Ergo James, and of course it would happen, and usually they weren't nice things. James studied.
William James, who was a.
Great practitioner in terms of abnormal psychology, studied the demonic presence and came to some conclusions. It felt no pain, for example, it had no need for food or sleep. Of course, it called itself a spirit and a demon. It exhibited no illness or fatigue. It was awake twenty four to seven, so it knew clarifyllers every thought, every desire, and it exploited those things against her to take over the body and to actually uh try to kill her.
Were these behaviors witnessed by any of her fellow students When she was attending Radcliffe.
What she would have, and this is a phrase that I think we're all familiar with, is missing time. When the demonic presence would appear, she would her they actually have battles for the body, where with great rapidity Clara would face would appear, then the demon's face would appear, and it would be the struggle for control of the body. The demonic presence realized that the weaker, the weaker Clara was physically and mentally, the easier it was to take over,
and so she experienced missing time. And during that missing time a number of things would happen. One is that she would be taken on long walks, exhaustly walks for miles and then just left and awakened, so she wouldn't know where she was, She wouldn't know how she got there, and this of course was mentally disturbing, but physically she would have to find her way back, you know, back to the back bay where she lived. And these were the kind of things.
So there were.
Elements where students, associates, neighbors, things like that.
Witnesses, for example.
Of her landlady and a boarder that lived nearby lived in the same roomy house as.
She did when she was under the watchful eye of this Harvard medical team. Was she pulled out of Radcliffe College or was she actually able to I don't know, you know, maintain her educational pursuit.
Yea, now she dropped out. She had to drop out. She was two weeks she couldn't hold. She was a stenographer, she worked as a stenographer and went to school part time, and she had to drop out of all of those things due to just erratic health. But she struggled against this from a large percentage of her life, and eventually she was cured.
So doctor Morton Prince, can we describe him as a materialist? He was, yeah, yeah, so he was looking I'm sorry, really, oh, I was just going to say, so he was looking for some what physiological behavioral explanation, like what schizophrenia or something exactly.
You know, it's interesting. Years ago, I had a conversation with a publisher actually, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what science was like at the turn of the twentieth century. So I'm talking eighteen ninety eight to nineteen oh four that range. But I mean you had Sigmund Freud it just public nineteen oh one interpretation.
Of the dreams.
So there was psychoanalysis, which Prince thought was garbage science, pseudo science. Then you had at the time spiritualists, and there were about seven million spiritualists in the United States and in Europe at the time. That included people like Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes books, Madame Cure, the founder of X rays, Sir Francis.
Latt Lodge who Richard Lodge.
I'm sorry, who was a prominent physicist at the time.
And so that was the other.
Then the other was Prince's point of view, which is really something that's come into favor these days, which is behavioralism. He believed, he was a materialist. He believed that let's say schizophrenia or let's say multiple personality really boiled down to a physical ailment that created these symptoms. So for example, a brain lesion or a chemical imbalance in the brain, so Tourette syndrome for example. You know, nobody would he would not look at that as some did at the
time as some exhibition of possession. He said this was caused by a physical malady. The spiritualists, and this argument goes on to this day, believed that there was an interdimensional world, that there was a spiritual world that existed either alongside ours or maybe you know, our reality is in question altogether, and it's a spiritual world as opposed to the materialists.
Somebody in between that was on this team.
Was William James, who was really open minded to all of these possibilities.
Who assembled this team? I mean, such a disparate collection of world views. You've got the materialist Prince, You've got the spiritualist Hodgson, and then, as you say, William James kind of somewhere in the middle, opened to either side. Who put this together? And I'm trying to imagine. I mean, the battles must have been incredible.
They really were. But you know, it sounds like it was difficult to do. But these were all buddies. They belonged to the same high society social clubs, the same they went to the same parties, et cetera. So you know, William James was a professor at Harvard. Prince was a professor at Harvard and then Tuft's University as well. George Waterman, who was Prince's protege, graduated from Harvard Medical School, so Prince took him under his wing as a young associate.
And then as far as hogs and Hogson was a buddy of Morton Prince, you know, they happened to have different points of view. But in those days, I suppose, you know, you would smoke a cigar and have a you know, a cushioned couch, and you'd have these discussions and they would relate to you things like spiritualism and materialism, and you know, the basic questions I guess all of us have, and they're answered in different ways, is you know, where do I come from? What's the purpose of my life?
And what happens when I die? And these were subjects that were very prominent at the time.
And for you when you first heard this story from William Peter Bladie, were you were you a skeptic?
Were you.
A believer in the supernatural?
Not?
Really?
You know, I was a writer looking for a great story and I've been fortunate enough to stumble onto them or have them find me whatever. But really, the way Bill presented to me. Wasn't you know in any kind of depth? It was, you know, there's a great story I uncovered. All the information is at the Harvard Medical School Library. There's a curator there named Richard Wolf.
I'll contact him.
You can go in there and you can look at all this material. But what you'll find is an incredibly studied and documented chase that's jaw dropping.
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