[2][3] Aged 17, James Arthur Findlay had become interested in the field of comparative religion, something of which his staunchly Christian parents disapproved of - they even burned many of his books on the subject.

In 1918 Findlay attended a séance with the direct voice medium John Campbell Sloan at a spiritualist church in Glasgow.

[4] However, the psychical researcher J. Malcolm Bird investigated Sloan and wrote he had no doubt that all the voices heard could be produced by the medium talking into the trumpet in a normal fashion.

According to Rosemary Guiley "Fodor asserted that the psychosis was an episodic mental disturbance of schizophrenic character, and that Mrs. Forbes' unconscious mind was responsible for the activities finally determined to be fraudulent.

"[7] Because he was skeptical of the case, Fodor was heavily criticized by spiritualists and was dismissed from his post at the International Institute for Psychical Research.