Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  Typical of Pheneas’s other transmissions, it was a description filled with flowers but few checkable facts or evidentiary details. In one communication, Pheneas said he had brought Kingsley to speak to his father. Kingsley addressed his father directly, but then Doyle asked, searching for some proof of this spirit’s identity, “Why do you not call me what you did in life?”

  “Kingsley” he answered, “I do in my heart still, but somehow it is so difficult to get any names through, especially what we feel in our hearts.” In other words, attempting to squeeze any hard evidence out of the spirit world was going to be exceedingly difficult.

  If Conan Doyle had been worried about being attacked by his enemies when the book came out, he was right. H. G. Wells, in a scathing review in the Sunday Express, called the book “a platitudinous bore.” But he didn’t stop there. “This Pheneas, I venture to think, is an imposter, wrought of self-deception, as pathetic as a rag doll some lonely child has made for its own comfort.… We are told of floods of spiritual light.… Wonderful prophecies are spoken of. Where are they?”

  But not all of Pheneas’s prophecies were wonderful. In fact, as the years went by, the premonitions and warnings offered by Pheneas turned into an impending tidal wave of darkness. The picture he painted of the coming days was so dire that Sir Arthur chose not to include any of it in the published book but instead shared these warnings only with an inner circle of true believers.

  Very soon, Pheneas warned, the world would be plunged into a horrific natural cataclysm akin to Armageddon. “A great light shall shine into the souls of men through a great external force,” he said one night. “It will come very soon. The world will be staggered. It is the only thing which can arouse the lethargy of the human race. Such a shock! It is like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  In a private note to his spiritualist colleagues, marked “confidential,” Doyle summed up Pheneas’s warnings: There would be “a period of terrific natural convulsions during which a large portion of the human race would perish. Earthquakes of great severity, enormous tidal waves would seem to be the agents.” In general, Pheneas warned “that the crisis will come in an instant. That the general destruction and utter dislocation of civilized life will be beyond belief.… That the total period of the upheavals will be roughly three years. That the chief centres of disturbance will be in the Eastern Mediterranean basin where not less than five countries will entirely disappear.”

  During this whole period of fiery desolation, there was to be a “complete rending of the veil so that spirit and matter will be face to face for a time.” A great number of spiritualists would pass over to the spirit world without having to pass through death. Others of the “Elect” would stay on earth for a few years “to establish a new order.” In fact, the coming events sounded not unlike those predicted in Revelation.

  In March 1927, Doyle sent a confidential memo to Oliver Lodge summarizing eighty-seven of these warnings. This was all, of course, highly incendiary material, and in private Doyle warned against letting too much of it get out into the public square. He advised other spiritualists in his inner circle that “these various forecasts of the immediate future of the world should be used with the utmost discretion. We have above all to avoid sensationalism and undignified newspaper stunts.… We want no hysterical developments, nor do we wish to commit the spiritualistic movement to a prophecy which may not materialize.”

  Nevertheless, he added, “it is impossible in my opinion not to take them seriously, for they represent in themselves a psychic phenomenon for which I know no parallel.”

  Though he warned his spiritualist colleagues to be wary of spreading this electrifying message too carelessly, the word leaked out anyhow. And it was not always received with the sort of seriousness Sir Arthur might have wished for. Harry Price, the famous psychic investigator and medium buster at the Society for Psychical Research, openly scoffed at Pheneas’s predictions: “The cataclysmic disaster of cosmic magnitude with which Doyle has been trying to make our flesh creep for the past two years still hangs fire and the dawn of 1927 finds us sleeping serenely in our beds, giving little heed to the devastating seismic catastrophe with which—says Sir Arthur—we are threatened by evil spirits on both sides of the veil.… We are now promised a new Armageddon for 1928!”

  Even Sir Arthur began to have his doubts about the timetable of these supposed events. Pheneas kept using words like “soon” or “very soon,” but what did that mean? When, exactly, was all this supposed to happen? In a year? Five years? Fifty? Five hundred?

  “I have moments of doubt,” Doyle wrote to a friend, “when I wonder if we have not been victims of some extraordinary prank played upon the human race from the other side.… I have literally broken my heart in the attempt to give our Spiritual knowledge to the world and to give them something living, instead of the dead and dusty stuff which is served out to them in the name of religion.”

  At the same time, Doyle pointed to upheavals around the world in recent times. There had been earthquakes in various places that seemed to correspond to Pheneas’s warnings. In Russia, the Bolsheviks had upended an empire. Meanwhile, on October 24, 1929, later known as Black Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would lose a quarter of its value in a single day. In almost an instant, the gay exuberance of the 1920s would pop, like a champagne bubble. And in the coming weeks and months, the Great Depression would rumble across the industrialized world, leaving desolation in its wake. And in Germany, a little man with an absurd little mustache was preparing to drag the world into the bloodiest war in human history.

  No: It wasn’t exactly what Pheneas predicted (or even close, actually). But the old lion was not about to back away from the fight. And he refused to kowtow to H. G. Wells or anybody else about his convictions.

  * * *

  IT WAS about this time that a series of events began unfolding that would become one of the most remarkable and complex cases demonstrating what Doyle had always wished for—proof of life after death. Investigated in great detail in a 1979 book by the journalist John G. Fuller called The Airmen Who Would Not Die, the case drew Sir Arthur into its web of intrigue very early and kept him there for the rest of his life.

  At that time, in the spring of 1928, the world was thrilled by the exploits of the daring young men (and some women) who took to the air to break ever-more-dangerous records in the new world of aviation. Only twenty-four years after the invention of heavier-than-air flight, by two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, in 1903, an obscure twenty-five-year-old postal service pilot named Charles Lindbergh, equipped with four sandwiches and a thermos of water, flew alone across the Atlantic from New York to Paris. The year was 1927, and “Lucky Lindy” became an instant international hero. Not surprisingly, daring young pilots in Europe quickly began scheming how they could match Lindbergh’s feat by flying across the North Atlantic in the opposite direction. The great challenge was that a pilot would face brutal and unpredictable headwinds, making the east-to-west crossing far more difficult. In fact, in the previous year seven men and one woman had lost their lives attempting an east-to-west transatlantic crossing.

  Some felt that these crazy-dangerous attempts in tiny planes would soon be eclipsed by the enormous, gas-filled dirigibles now being built by the Germans and the Americans. In fact, the world’s largest and most luxurious dirigible, the R101, more than seven hundred feet long and with glorious accommodations akin to a lavish steamship, including seven-course meals and a dance floor, was already being built at the Royal Airship Works in Cardington, in the British Midlands. Its maiden voyage was to be a flight from London to India—the outer reaches of the British Empire—in five or six days, traveling at a mile a minute.

  But the hope of glory was heady, and in 1928 a daring British pilot named Captain Raymond Hinchliffe decided to throw his hat in the ring and attempt an east-to-west transatlantic crossing. He was one of the most experienced pilots of his day, having shot down seven German planes during World War I, thou
gh he still bore one unforgettable mark of combat: He’d lost his left eye to a German machine gunner and wore a black eye patch. He was an old-fashioned hero, devoted to his young wife, Emilie, and their two small girls, fluent in four languages, and an Olympic athlete.

  As it happened, there was someone else who dearly wished to become the first European to cross the Atlantic: the stunning, stylish, and obscenely rich thirty-four-year-old Elsie Mackay, who was heir to her father’s shipping fortune and considered one of the wealthiest, and best-dressed, women in England. She was also an accomplished actress and a pilot in her own right. In secrecy, Hinchliffe and Mackay struck a deal. Despite his reservations, and with his wife’s consent, Captain Hinchliffe agreed to take Mackay on as co-pilot, in exchange for which Mackay would pay him a considerable sum, including a generous insurance payment for his wife and two small children should the risky venture fail and they crash into the North Atlantic.

  Just after dawn on March 13, 1928, with driving snow blowing in off the heath, Captain Hinchliffe and Elsie Mackay were driven to the Cranwell Aerodrome, near Grantham. They had their picture taken beside the alarmingly tiny plane, the Endeavour, in their leather flying suits, smiling but nervous. Though it was no secret that Hinchliffe was going to attempt an Atlantic crossing—it was reported in The Times of London that afternoon—it had been decided that Elsie’s participation would be kept secret. She slipped into the cockpit at the last minute, seen only by the small crew gathered around the plane on the freezing runway. If they succeeded, she would become the first woman to cross the Atlantic in either direction—and give the world a big surprise to boot. Then they took off, and the plane quickly disappeared into the brightening dawn, like a brave little bee.

  Like Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Louis, Hinchliffe did not carry a wireless radio, so the only thing his wife, Emilie, could do was to wait at home with her two children and one of her husband’s pilot friends, Gordon Sinclair, and hope for news that her husband had made the crossing safely. But the weather news quickly darkened; a North Atlantic gale, laden with rain and sleet, was rapidly moving across the little plane’s path. At 1:30 that first afternoon, a lighthouse keeper in County Cork, Ireland, reported seeing the Endeavour pass over, a tiny dot moving into the teeth of an incoming storm. But after that, there was nothing but silence. That day passed, and the next, and the next, with no news. Emilie Hinchliffe, not a religious woman, began to pray. But gradually, after the days turned to weeks, all hope seemed to be lost.

  Meanwhile, about the end of March, a gentle elderly lady named Mrs. Beatrice Earl (a pseudonym later used by Emilie Hinchliffe in retelling the story) came back from a meeting of the London Spiritualist Alliance, filled with wonder and with questions. At the meeting, a well-known trance medium named Eileen Garrett had slipped into a trance state and channeled the weird, Oriental-sounding voice of a spirit “control” called Uvani. This spirit had seemingly made contact with Mrs. Earl’s son, whom she had lost in the war, passing on precise and accurate details about his life.

  On the night of March 31, drawn on by her sorrow and curiosity, Mrs. Earl got out her Ouija board, put her fingers on the tablet, and watched as it moved aimlessly around the alphabet. Then, suddenly, the tablet seemed to move deliberately to a series of letters and stop on each one in turn.

  It spelled out this message:

  CAN YOU HELP A MAN WHO WAS DROWNED

  Startled, Mrs. Earl asked aloud, “Who are you?”

  I WAS DROWNED WITH ELSIE MACKAY

  Like everyone else, she’d read about the heiress’s disappearance at sea and wondered if that was what this was about.

  “How did it happen?” she asked.

  FOG STORMS WINDS WENT DOWN FROM GREAT HEIGHT

  Then the board seemed to continue of its own accord:

  OFF LEEWARD ISLANDS TELL MY WIFE I WANT TO SPEAK TO HER AM IN GREAT DISTRESS

  And that was all. After this last anxious message, the tablet stopped moving. Not knowing what to make of all this, if anything, Mrs. Earl put the board away until April 11, when she tried again. The messages came through right away.

  HINCHLIFFE TELL MY WIFE I WANT TO SPEAK TO HER

  “Where shall I find her?”

  PURLEY IF LETTER DOES NOT REACH APPLY DRUMMONDS HIGH STR CROYDON PLEASE FIND OUT WHAT I SAY IS QUITE CORRECT

  Mrs. Earl knew that Purley was a suburb next to the town of Croydon, where the big aerodrome was. That was the busiest airport in London and where Lindbergh had landed after his flight from Paris. It was all so curious and distressing, but she still did not know what to make of any of it. The next night, when she tried the board again, more messages came through:

  HINCHLIFFE PLEASE LET MY WIFE KNOW I IMPLORE YOU

  TAKE THE RISK MY LIFE WAS ALL RISKS I MUST SPEAK TO HER I WISH I HAD NOT BEEN OVERPERSUADED TO COME

  Ultimately, Mrs. Earl put down her usual British reserve and decided to write to two people. One was Hinchliffe’s wife, Emilie, whom she wrote to care of Edridges, Martin & Drummonds, her lawyers, whose offices were on High Street in Croydon. The other was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whom she knew slightly because he was president of the London Spiritualist Alliance, where she’d heard Eileen Garrett.

  She wrote to Emilie,

  Will you excuse a perfect stranger writing to you? I am supposing you are the wife of Mr. Hinchliffe, the airman, lost the other day. I get writing, and I had a communication from him the other day that they came down into the sea off the Leeward Islands, at night, etc. His great anxiety is to communicate with you. Of course you may not believe the possibility of communication, but he has been so urgent, three times, that I must direct to you and risk it.

  The grieving Emilie, not knowing what to make of this letter, showed it to some of her friends. They pointed out that the reference to “Leeward Islands” was crazy, because the only islands known by this name were in the West Indies, hundreds of miles off her husband’s course. She concluded it was what it appeared to be: nonsense. Meanwhile, Mrs. Earl went back to the Ouija board. It spelled out this message:

  THANK YOU FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE MY WIFE STILL HOPES I AM ALIVE GLAD YOU HAVE TOLD DOYLE

  When Doyle got Mrs. Earl’s letter, he, too, was intrigued but bothered by the reference to “Leeward Islands.” But then he wondered, could this be a reference to the leeward side (the side sheltered from the wind) of some other islands? Checking his map, he noticed that the Azores would qualify: They were on Hinchliffe’s route, they were reachable, and they might have become his target if he and Elsie Mackay were foundering in a storm.

  Believing that the transmission might be genuine, Doyle contacted Mrs. Earl and made an appointment for her to have a séance with Eileen Garrett, probably the most respected deep-trance medium in England. Because Mrs. Earl already knew Eileen Garrett, she was comfortable with this arrangement. So it was that on April 18, 1928, a sweet little elderly lady from Surrey sat down with Eileen Garrett as she slipped into trance and her “control,” Uvani, came through. And a spirit claiming to be the airman Hinchliffe told a harrowing tale of how the Endeavour encountered a terrific storm at sea and was swept four or five hundred miles south. When the plane went down and he drowned, he did not suffer, he said. “It happened too quickly.” After reviewing a transcript of this séance, Sir Arthur wrote directly to Emilie Hinchliffe, expressing his “deep sympathy” and laying out a series of specific details that made him believe the transmissions might be genuine.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s reputation as a serious student of the paranormal, as well as a kindhearted Edwardian gentleman, preceded him. The same day she got Doyle’s letter, Emilie Hinchliffe wrote to Mrs. Earl, and they arranged to meet and to go to see Eileen Garrett for a séance. Emilie Hinchliffe, who was extraordinarily adept at shorthand, was able to take real-time notes of all of it. Afterward, the two of them went to have tea with Conan Doyle, who was as kindly and gracious as his reputation suggested.

  And over the next weeks and months, through a ser
ies of remarkable sessions with Eileen Garrett, Emilie Hinchliffe recorded a catalog of the sorts of specific, verifiable details that were often so hard to come by in most séances (including those given by Pheneas).

  Some examples of things Uvani communicated that were true: He described the interior of their house perfectly. He mentioned that Emilie had not one but two wedding rings. That he had a portrait of baby Joan with him when he crashed. That he had a small scar on his throat. He asked if she had the watch he gave her, the one with his name on it. He said she could find an important document hidden behind a certain drawer in a certain writing desk, and she later found it there.

  He also implored Emilie not to worry about money, though she did. The insurance policy that Elsie Mackay had set up for Hinchliffe’s family was now in limbo because her wealthy but difficult father, Lord Inchcape, had refused to honor his daughter’s arrangement. The matter had even made it into the newspapers. But Hinchliffe claimed that the money would come through, on July 25. On that day, Winston Churchill announced in the House of Commons that Lord Inchcape had honored the insurance policy taken out by Elsie Mackay.

  And, in agonizing detail, Hinchliffe also retold the story of his own death at sea. How the Endeavour’s left strut broke in the storm, the plane began losing altitude, he altered the plane’s course to the south, desperately trying to find someplace to land, perhaps in the Azores, but by 3:00 a.m. he had lost all hope. Elsie was “terrified, out of all limits,” and at one point tried to take over the plane. He took a swig from his flask—“he says his wife knows the flask he means,” Uvani said—and when the plane crashed in the water, he broke free from the wreckage. He made a “superhuman effort” to swim to shore, a few miles away, but did not make it, he said. He said the name of the island where he crashed, in the Azores, was “Carvo” (the correct spelling is Corvo).