Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

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  To my parents, Dr. Paul Moyer Bechtel (1909–1998) and Mary Krom Bechtel (1923–2016), whose faith never faltered

  —S. B.

  To my parents, Donald Eugene Stains (1917–2013) and Shirley Greiner Stains (1922–1974)

  Twilight and evening bell,

  And after that the dark!

  —L. R. S

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We’d like to thank the many people who contributed to this fascinating project. Special thanks to Don Fehr, stellar agent at Trident Media Group, without whom this book would never have happened, and to Daniela Rapp, our smart editor at St. Martin’s Press, for her questions and encouragement. Thanks to our readers Adam Bechtel, Lilly Bechtel, Lawrence R. Bechtel, Charles Shields, Jonathan Rintels, Matthew Carter, and Kay Ferguson. Thanks especially to Tamara Lacy, for her rivers of sweetness and her ability to read between the lines. Thanks to Ron Nagy, historian at the Lily Dale Museum, at Lily Dale (the country’s oldest spiritualist community, in upstate New York), for help with archival photographs. Thanks to the many librarians who have lit our way, especially Mandi Shepp at the Marion H. Skidmore Library at Lily Dale and Kristina De Voe at Temple University. Also to Kate Mix, our tireless photo editor, for the many hours spent tracking down obscure photo permissions. (It’s harder than it looks!) Thanks also to Cristina Meisner, Michael Gilmore, and the staff at the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, for help navigating through their superb archive of Conan Doyle materials, the best such collection for our purposes in the country. Many thanks to the multimedia artist Tony Oursler for the use of images from his archive. And, of course, hats off to Arthur Conan Doyle and the many other authors over the past century and a half who have contributed to world knowledge about the curiosities and conundrums of spiritualism.

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  “Spiritualism” has receded so far into the fogs of history that many educated people today don’t even know what it means, or once meant. It meant (and still means, to its comparatively few remaining followers) that the soul is eternal and that the departed are willing and able to communicate with the living.

  From the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1930s, spiritualism was a worldwide movement with millions of adherents. But if you were to consult today’s online resources for some enlightenment, you’d be greeted with the foregone conclusion that it was pure bunk. And that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, its foremost spokesperson toward the end, was a credulous old fool.

  As two journalists fascinated by this extraordinary subject, we decided to approach the historical record without prejudice. We are not true believers, but it’s fair to say we don’t not believe. As we began delving into the rich archival record, we were impressed by the thoughtfulness and sincerity on the part of highly intelligent men and women—including some of the finest minds of the day. We were also impressed by their courage. Skeptics quite willfully spread lies about them and attempted to ruin their lives, but they persisted in seeking the truth. They were explorers, every bit as much as the naturalist in the jungle, the adventurer in the Arctic, the scientist in the laboratory.

  We’re bringing back a fair-minded report of what we found. The record is complex, filled with blatant fraud and at the same time replete with phenomena that are eerily difficult to explain away. What the reader takes away from all this is a personal matter. Are ghosts real? You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

  On a triumphal lecture tour to the United States in 1922, Conan Doyle drew rapt crowds eager for news of the world beyond death. He filled Carnegie Hall six times in 1922, and three more times on a return trip in 1923.

  THE HARRY RANSOM CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

  PROLOGUE:

  The Infinite Strangeness of Life

  Drifts of white dogwood blossoms had just begun to show in the trees along Seventh Avenue that eerily warm evening of April 21, 1922. People waiting for tonight’s performance in the main auditorium at Carnegie Hall had formed a queue that stretched all the way down Fifty-seventh to the corner of Sixth Avenue. The crowds were giddy with the balmy air, and nobody seemed to much mind the wait. After all, tonight’s guest was to be none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the celebrated creator of Sherlock Holmes and one of the most famous authors in the world.

  Sir Arthur and his wife, Lady Jean Doyle, three children, and two nannies had arrived in the port of New York on the ocean liner Baltic three days earlier, for the beginning of Doyle’s triumphal speaking tour of America. The day after his arrival, Doyle had taken his family to the highest point in the city—the fifty-seventh floor of the Woolworth Building (the Empire State Building did not yet exist) to survey the busy hive of Manhattan Island. “There is a rush and roar with a brilliancy and sense of motion and power such as can nowhere else be found,” he later wrote.

  Many of those waiting in line tonight had come just to lay eyes on the man who brought the world the eccentric sleuth in the deerstalker hat, a surprising number of whom believed that Mr. Holmes was actually a real person. Some had written him letters at 221B Baker Street, imploring his help in some trouble or other; women offered their services as his housekeeper or even their hands in marriage. But fascination with the gaunt, haunted, cocaine-imbibing detective did not fully explain why tonight’s lecture-demonstration had drawn a standing-room-only crowd of more than three thousand (and, over successive nights, would fill Carnegie Hall five more times and three times the next year, 1923). Because it was by now widely known that Sir Arthur had opened an astonishing—some said, ridiculous—new chapter in his life. The poster for tonight’s event, on display across the city, summed it up:

  Lee Keedick presents SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, Famous English Novelist, author of the “Sherlock Holmes” mystery series, whose investigations of Life After Death have aroused worldwide interest.

  What had come to be known as “spiritualism”—the conviction that those who have passed over had the ability and the desire to make contact across the veil of death with those they’d left behind—seemed to have bewitched the Western world. Spiritualist lectures filled guild halls and auditoriums with seekers from Boston to Brittany; séances accompanied tea in upper-crust British parlors, and even in the White House; there were state and national spiritualist conventions and summer camps attended by thousands. More than two hundred spiritualist journals, some of them published weekly, had appeared on the market. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were both now searching for the precise electrical frequency that would enable them to create a “ghost machine”—a device that would enable people to communicate directly with the spirit world. The movement had attracted a throng of distinguished seekers, including the Nobel laureate Pierre Curie; the evolutionary biologist and co-discoverer of evolution Alfred Russel Wallace; the Harvard lecturer and psychologist William James; Lewis Carroll; an
d the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.

  At the same time, the movement had also attracted an opposing army of equally eminent, and equally vocal, skeptics. Ralph Waldo Emerson branded spiritualism a “rat-revelation, the gospel that comes by taps in the wall and humps in the table-drawer.” Scientists railed against this “popular madness.” Preachers rained down fire and damnation on what was clearly the work of the prince of darkness. Henry David Thoreau simply dismissed all believers as “idiots.” And to the naysayers’ delight, it seemed that every few months another phony “medium” was unmasked.

  Sir Arthur, backstage at Carnegie Hall with Lady Jean, calmly glanced over his lecture notes while a low roar arose out of the vast auditorium as the crowd settled into their seats (if they were lucky enough to get one). Now sixty-two years old, Doyle was a huge slab of a man, six feet two, fourteen stone (about two hundred pounds), with a shambling, bearlike gait and enormous hands. His intimidating physical presence was due partly to his size but also to his easy athleticism; as a young man, he had been naturally gifted at every sport he ever tried, excelling at cricket, football, boxing, golf, skiing, and even bowling. As a twenty-one-year-old third-year medical student, he’d spent six months as ship’s surgeon on a whaling vessel sailing north to the Arctic, and he’d reveled in the physical exhilaration, the danger, and the manly challenge of the voyage. “I came of age at 80 degrees north latitude,” he later wrote.

  But now, four decades later, his drooping, walrus mustache had gone almost entirely gray, and his feet hurt. His broad shoulders were beginning to slump, and behind his steel-rimmed spectacles his blue-gray eyes were shadowed with sorrow. He was a genial man, greathearted, generous, scholarly, and kind. Some said he was a child at heart, and for that reason too credulous. He had been sweetly, devotedly in love with his second wife, Lady Jean, since the moment they met. Every spring, in celebration of their union, he would come in from the garden and hand her a single white snowdrop, the first pendulous white blossom of the receding snow. Lady Jean once told Doyle’s old friend and antagonist Harry Houdini that her husband “never loses his temper and that his nature is at all times sunshiny and sweet.” He hated putting on airs, despite a lifetime of astonishing accomplishment. Though he had been knighted in 1902 for a book he wrote in support of the British role in the Boer War, he refrained from signing his many books “Sir Arthur.” Instead, he simply called himself “Conan Doyle.”

  By now, after lecture tours across the English-speaking world, Sir Arthur knew that in tonight’s crowd there would likely be many who had recently been touched by the angel of death. In the decade just passed, the world had suffered not one but two tragedies of almost unimaginable proportion, and almost every family in America had an empty seat at the dinner table. In 1914, “the war to end all wars” had hurled the world into a murderous darkness. It was at that time the bloodiest conflict in human history, and also likely one of the most futile. In the first day of the Battle of the Somme, more than fifty-seven thousand British soldiers were wounded or killed on the western front. By the time the offensive was over, more than a million men lay dead in the bloody mud. Yet the offensive had succeeded in moving back the German trenches by only about six miles.

  But even before the war came to a close, another grim and relentless enemy began stalking new victims. In March 1918, a soldier at Fort Riley, Kansas, reported to the infirmary complaining of a clanging headache and fever; within months, an extraordinarily virulent strain of the Spanish influenza had killed between twenty and forty million people worldwide—far more than the war. It came to be known as the Blue Death, because the sick turned blue before they died, horribly and very quickly. It seemed to strike the young and healthy first. There was no vaccine or medication to stop or even slow it. And the velocity of its spread was astonishing; it spread far more widely and with more ruthless efficiency than the Black Death of medieval Europe.

  So it was perhaps not surprising that spiritualism had attracted millions of adherents by 1922. For so many, the scale of the carnage brought on by these two great calamities raised the ancient questions, and the ancient hopes. Did human personality survive death? If so, was there some way of breaching the veil that separated the living from the lost and making direct contact with loved ones? In this world of seemingly random and meaningless tragedy, was there some hope of comfort and consolation outside the confines of traditional religion?

  “The subject of psychical research is one upon which I have thought more, and about which I have been slower to form an opinion, than upon any subject whatever,” Doyle had written in a small book called The New Revelation. In fact, his interest in the subject went far back, to his days as a young doctor in his twenties, in the port city of Southsea, and now spanned forty years.

  But being a reticent man, he wasn’t telling the whole story. Part of his absolute conviction of the truth of human survival after death grew out of his own grief. Not long after the outbreak of the war, his beloved son Kingsley had given up his medical studies to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. Eventually, he was sent to the front, where the life span of a typical officer was a fortnight. In the Battle of the Somme, Kingsley took two bullets in the neck but narrowly survived, only to succumb later in a military hospital, a victim of the influenza pandemic. It was October 1918. He was twenty-five years old. For years afterward, Doyle could hardly speak his name without tears welling up in his eyes.

  “In the presence of an agonized world,” he would soon tell his audience, “hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our race in the first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved ones had gone to, I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond.”

  This new revelation was, he said, “infinitely the most important thing in the history of the world.”

  Sir Arthur was well aware that his new convictions had made him the object of derision and befuddlement to throngs of people on both sides of the Atlantic. How, they wondered, had the creator of the world’s most hyperrational sleuth, the master of dispassionate deductive reasoning, gone so soft in the head? How had this brilliant and accomplished man been hoodwinked by the claims of phony mediums, “spirit guides,” and fairies?

  Yet beneath the noisy hubbub of a mocking world, and despite all the many well-publicized fakes and frauds, Sir Arthur and his eminent colleagues had produced a long catalog of evidence that, as Sherlock Holmes once observed, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”

  But to explain how it all happened, the gaunt detective might observe, sucking pensively on his meerschaum pipe—to show what the spiritualists actually found—made for a long, long story, one that deserved to be told from the very beginning.

  Conan Doyle’s father, Charles, dreamy and disordered, spent his last years in a lunatic asylum, drawing pictures of fairies and elves. “His thoughts were always in the clouds,” Doyle recalled.

  COURTESY OF CHRIS BEETLES GALLERY, ST. JAMES’S, LONDON

  CHAPTER ONE

  Into the Unknown

  “Only a week from Shetland and here we are far into the icefields,” wrote the twenty-year-old ship’s surgeon in his logbook. “It has certainly been a splendid voyage. Beautiful day, wonderfully clear. Ice fields, snow white on very dark blue water as far as the eye can reach. We are ploughing through in grand style.”

  The date was March 20, 1880, a Saturday on the cusp of spring, and by now they were well north of the Arctic Circle. The ship, a four-hundred-ton, three-masted steam whaler, had sailed out of Peterhead, Scotland, on February 28. Just forty-five feet long, it somehow had room enough for a crew of fifty-six and a hundred tons of whale oil—that is, if all went as planned during its six months in frigid waters
. But there was no guarantee of commercial success, or for that matter of survival. The voyage, involving the harpooning of fifty-ton whales in open boats, in freezing Arctic waters, was heart-stoppingly perilous. All the uncertainties of this enterprise were reflected in the ship’s name: the S.S. Hope.

  The young man looking out from the deck that day was not a seasoned seaman or even a certified doctor. He was, in fact, only a third-year medical student at Edinburgh University. Barely a week before the Hope was to set sail, a fellow student named Currie, who had the job, found that he could not go. So he approached the big, athletic kid in class—the Arthur with two last names: Conan (the surname of his granduncle and godfather, an editor in Paris) and Doyle. The big kid made up his mind on the spot to exchange the dismal grind of medical school for a wild adventure at sea, confessing later in his autobiography that at that age he was “wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless.”

  It turned out to be a transformative experience for him, as a writer and as a man. What possessed him to interrupt his life and take a long, uncomfortable, dangerous journey? Just this: Arthur Conan Doyle could not resist an adventure. And he never would.

  * * *

  IN THE coming days, Conan Doyle’s Arctic adventure would get kicked up a notch. April 3 was the start of seal-hunting season, when the crews of whaling ships go scrambling out onto the ice in order to kill seals, skin them in place, and drag their hundred-pound skins back to the ship. Yes, it was “bloody work,” as he confessed in the log. And perilous: Those ice fields were not the terra firma they appeared to be. “The ice is not a solid sheet, but made up of thousands of pieces of all sizes floating close to each other,” he wrote. “Now in a swell those pieces alternately separate and come together with irresistible force. If a poor fellow slips in between two pieces as is easily done, he runs a good chance of being cut in two.” And if he isn’t cut in two, he nonetheless has about ten minutes to get out of the water before exhaustion gives way to unconsciousness and death.