AN ALLEGED victim of a former Methodist minister who is said to have hypnotised four teenage boys before abusing them told how a court how he rubbed him up and down his body.

The now middle-aged man said he was in training to be a lay preacher when the Reverend John Price, his then tutor, offered to teach him relaxation techniques and said he would like to hypnotise him.

He said: “I was not altogether thrilled at the prospect, but did not want to be unpolite.”

The complainant said Price, of Ash Tree Close, Bedale, North Yorkshire, who is now retired, went through a routine with him which left him feeling a bit unnerved, although he was not convinced it was a genuine hypnosis.

He said: “I almost felt I was going along with him to please him.”

In another incident while the pair were alone in a lecture theatre together, he said he was told to sit in a chair, with Price saying he would hypnotise him again.

He said: “As part of the relaxation he said he needed to spread the energies around my body.”

He then felt Price putting his hands on his shoulders and rubbing up and down the sides of his body, down to the top of his thighs.

The complainant said: “It was a very definite ‘I am touching you’.

“I felt very anxious about the whole thing and I became aroused, which is an occupational hazard for a teenager and it made it doubly embarrassing.”

He said Price then told him to “Wake up 1,2,3” and asked if he wanted anything else to happen.

“I said I did I not want to go through any of that sort of rigmarole again.

“I was thinking the less I have to do with you from now on the better.”

Price, 82, who walks with a stick, denies 14 counts of indecent assault on boys aged between 11 and 17 while he was a Methodist minister in York and Pocklington in the late 70s and early 80s.

The trial being heard at Teesside Crown Court continues.