Hey, I'm Going to be on "The UnXplained" on Aug. 15
I'll be discussing Milwaukeean Arthur Price Roberts, a "psychic detective"
A few months ago, I was flown out to Boise for an interview session for an episode of The UnXplained. If you’re not familiar, the show is hosted by our Captain, William Shatner, for the History Channel. It’s a similar format to Unsolved Mysteries and similar shows. Each show focuses on a paranormal or mystery topic, Shatner delivers dramatic narration, and a motley crew of experts weigh in.
This season, the show producers wanted to focus an episode, “Unlocking the Sixth Sense,” on people who have claimed to have psychic ability. Their research led them to discover the story of a highly unusual Milwaukeean named Arthur Price Roberts (1871-1940). We’ll talk more about him in a minute. My friend, fellow Milwaukee writer Anna Lardinois (Milwaukee Ghosts and Legends) penned an article on Roberts for Milwaukee Magazine. The producers found this and set up an interview with Anna and asked if she could recommend anyone else to speak on this matter and she did your guy here a solid and said they should talk to me, Tea Krulos.
I’m a bit leery of TV shows. Some of them will ask you to do stuff like roll around on the ground and pretend you’re being attacked by a ghost and all sorts of rubbish. But in this case they just wanted me to talk about what I knew about Roberts and other famous psychic case files. In the case of Roberts, I didn’t want to just parrot Anna’s article, so I took a bit of a dive into newspaper archives (mostly the Milwaukee Journal and Sentinel) and I found some pretty great stuff. I’ll be talking about it more on the show, of course, and I’m also writing an article that goes into more detail (I’m not sure when or where that article will appear yet). Meanwhile, here are some things I discovered about Arthur Price Roberts to give you a little bit of background.
-Roberts was born in Wales, and moved to Fox Lake, WI as a teen to live with an uncle. He moved briefly to North Dakota, where he worked on a ranch. It’s unknown exactly when he moved to Milwaukee, but he opened his psychic detective business out of his house here in 1895.
-Roberts was often in the press and he was definitely a well-known local character (maybe an early 1900s answer to the Milverine). Reporting on him was not mean-spirited but often tongue in cheek. They referred to him as “Doctor” or “Professor,” perhaps a sarcastic nickname at first. Roberts was illiterate and said that learning to read or write would damage his psychic abilities (this also meant he didn’t leave behind correspondence or a journal) so he was not an actual doctor or professor. There were also plenty of jokes about how “he failed to predict” things like his very public divorce.
-Roberts was also probably hard to understand at times. He spoke in a thick Welsh accent and while in a trance he would speak rapidly in the Welsh language. He reportedly had no teeth and was fond of whiskey, telling one reporter he had “two whiskies before breakfast,” and five the day before.
-Despite this, there are several reports that say Roberts was successful in visualizing where missing persons, alive and dead, would be found.
-He had some issues with the law, getting arrested at least 3 times for “telling fortunes for gain.” His divorce from a wife he claimed was violent was widely reported, as was a case where a woman tried to sue him for “breach of promise” after he asked her to marry him but got cold feet when his “spirit guides” told him to back out.
-The most enduring story of a Roberts predication is the claim that he visualized a string of bombings in 1935. Two bombers dynamited Shorewood Village Hall, two banks, and two police stations before they accidentally blew themselves up. There is a report on this in a newspaper that was called Milwaukee News and it’s been handed down in collections of supernatural stories ever since, The UnXplained being the latest. I’m pretty sure this is the first TV show to explore the case.
The UnXplained episode featuring this story will air Friday, August 15, 8pm CST on the History Channel. I’ll also be discussing Roberts and another unique Wisconsinite, Morris Pratt, in a presentation at the Milwaukee Paranormal Conference on October 18. Here’s some “bonus material” while you wait.
One profile I found was by Dixie Tighe, a reporter from New York. It appears she spent a couple weeks in Milwaukee as a guest writer for the Sentinel and they told her to check out Roberts. She wrote a fun, slightly snarky profile on him for the December 20, 1929, edition of the Milwaukee Sentinel. It sounds like Dixie was a total badass. She’d report on her adventures scuba diving and skydiving and became a war correspondent during WWII, the first woman correspondent to ride along on a bombing mission, though she was not allowed to accompany paratroopers on D-Day because she was told the parachute would “damage her delicate female apparatus.” She was “famous for her blunt language and flamboyant lifestyle.” She died at age 41 of a stroke in Tokyo.
Below is one of my favorite finds, from the June 5, 1928 edition of the Milwaukee Journal. Some notes follow.
1. I love the term “Drys” as slang for Prohibition officers. And this headline…*chef’s kiss*
2. 1405 Fond du Lac Ave was about a block away from where Roberts lived and operated his psychic consultation business out of his home office.
3. “they’re going to pinch the place,” another *chef’s kiss”
4. “Wildcat brewery” refers to an illegal, Prohibition-era brewery.
