John Farkas: Fire Boy! April 20, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
John Farkas’ name seems to have flared up very briefly in history and then to have died down again just as quickly. Many of the things associated with John (Janos?) were, let’s say, poltergeist tricks and not that remarkable. But what about the fire? Note that this newsreport dates to 1921 and appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post of all places: I’ve been unable to find any other reference local, national or, for that matter, international. Magyar, I must admit, is not one of my languages.
Much excitement has been caused in Hungarian spiritualist circles by the mysterious agencies which are apparently at work with a 13-year-old peasant named John Farkas. the son of a scavenger from the country town of Kecskemet. Since his earliest youth. his simple family have been frightened to see furniture moving when he was in the room and to hear whispers from empty corners. Since he passed his twelfth birthday these uncanny happenings are said to have taken more serious aspect.
The intensification in sightings concern fires that jumps up all around salamander boy.
Mysterious fires broke out in the house where he lived. The local authorities, after investigations, put down the cause of these fires to evaporation of naptha in the soil. The superstitious villagers, however, were not satisfied, and John and his mother were obliged to leave the town and go to Budapest.
Note here then that John had a reputation AND more importantly the village were not having someone with his talents in the area: did they call him a witch or something worse? In any case, he continued to burn.
[In Budapest] events repeated themselves. At night flames flickered on the bed where the boy slept, with his cheeks burning in fever, and singed the pillows. Very soon no house in Budapest was willing to harbour the dangerous tenant who seemed unconsciously to bring invisible and unwelcome guests. John is now in the house of a prominent Hungarian spiritualist who hopes to solve the riddle, and who claims to have discovered a new and brilliant medium for seances.
Another child exploited by spiritualists. Any more on John? Any parallels for this living flame phenomenon outside the annals of Marvel comics? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Kecskemét is, for anyone who wants to do any searching, a central Hungarian city between the Tisza and the Danube. It is an overwhelmingly Hungarian city, with no significant Romanian minority: Hungary’s Romanians are further to the north. It does have a traditional, if tiny, Roma grouping.
24 April 2014: Filip writes in: Farkas was mentioned a couple of times in Polish newspapers, I shall translate the most interesting passage I found with my own search engine: And [after the strange happenings in Kecskemét and Budapest, and after Farkas came back to Kecskemét] one chemical engineer, named Anthony [Antal?] Papp, found that the boy [Janos Farkas] had latent powers, which he wanted to exploit “scientifically”. Indeed, the boy turned out to be a perfect medium and the engineer would induce a hypnotic trance in him and tell him to do all sorts of things. At that time, a number of mysterious fires broke out in Kecskemét and finally, the police focused their attention on Janos and Anthony Papp, the hypnotist. It turned out that Papp made the boy commit all sorts of criminal acts by hypnosis. […] The engineer was arrested. (Sorry for the peccable English, I am a hacker and a folklorist, not a translator.) Here is the scan: http://mbc.malopolska.pl/Content/76556/index.djvu, (page 3). It was published on August, 11th, 1923.’ Thanks Filip!
