xperts identified Matthew as the catalyst. After a series of laboratory tests, he was declared to be “probably the most gifted psychic in the western world.”
Matthew outlined his story in The Link. The biography created such a stir that his life became one long round of promotional appearances around the world.
Eventually, Matthew turned his back on the limelight and knew that his path was to be a spirit healer.
The proposed film will focus on Matthew’s early life as the “poltergeist boy.” It is being developed by These Pictures, the production company run by top-earning Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Lia, who has worked with pop icons Madonna and Beyoncé.
Previously, Matthew told PN that he insisted on having control over the direction the film would take.
“They have to stick to the original facts of the story,” he said. “It’s not going to be The Exorcist mark two, but I have allowed them to change the chronological order of some of the events for dramatic impact.”
A search in newspaper archives for stories on Matthew Manning turns up over 2,000 articles.
Adjectives such as “amazing,” “miraculous” and “beyond belief” are sprinkled across headlines, but the healer also attracted criticism from sceptics, none more so than magician James Randi.
In 1977, the Sunday Mirror carried out a test in which Matthew mentally transmitted images from the top of London’s BT Tower.
Members of the public were invited to send in their impressions. A statistical expert judged the results to be significantly above chance expectation.
Randi wrote to complain that the paper’s accounts contained “gross errors” and “falsehoods,” suggesting that Matthew might have sent a lot of the images on postcards himself.
Matthew’s response was thorough and convincing. Randi had to admit that the accurate results were many times higher than pure chance.
Following Randi’s passing aged 92 in October 2020, Matthew wrote a headline on his Facebook page which read, “The debunker whose explanations for the paranormal were less likely than the phenomena he sought to dismiss.”
Matthew said Randi “locked horns with me on numerous occasions in the 1970s whenever there was a chance of self-publicity.”
Recalling the BT Tower experiment, Matthew commented that “more than 25 per cent of the 2,500 postcards received gave at least one of the three images correctly.”
According to a top statistician, “The probability of these results happening by chance are more than a thousand to one against.”
In response to Randi’s claim of cheating, Matthew suggested he might like to check each entry personally.
“He never did,” said the healer, “but he got some headlines for his outlandish ‘explanation’ of the results.”
