Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  Eventually, in a Ouija board message to Beatrice Earl, he said,

  MY BODY HAS WASHED NEAR JAMAICA

  Yet there he was, continuing to speak from a world that was, he said, in many ways like the world of the living. Eventually, Emilie Hinchliffe became a convert to spiritualism and began giving lectures about her experiences in the séance room. She shared the sense of peace and reassurance she had gained from these transmissions from her lost husband, conveyed through Uvani.

  But not all the news from Uvani was good.

  By October 1929, the British newspapers had begun to crow about the upcoming maiden flight, to India, of the empire’s greatest dirigible, the R101—a floating luxury hotel that moved through the air like a great fish, almost silent and perfectly splendid. But Hinchliffe, coming through Uvani, had begun to give vent to his anxieties. “I do not think these dirigibles are able to face climatic conditions.… R101’s maiden flight may be all right.… But there certainly is a great risk.… There will be an accident. I have seen Leslie Hamilton [a pilot friend of Hinchliffe’s, killed in an attempted Atlantic crossing in 1927] and he agrees with me.”

  * * *

  AMONG THE many other spiritualist matters that crossed his desk, the matter of the airman Hinchliffe, and the warnings about R101, were of enormous concern and interest to Sir Arthur. But he was a busy man. In the winter of 1928–29, Doyle embarked on another spiritualist lecture tour, this time to South Africa, Rhodesia, and Kenya, accompanied by Lady Doyle and the three children. His lectures included the story of the Cottingley Fairies, explaining later, “I took the line that I was prepared to consider any explanation of these results, save only one which attacked the character of the children.” (More than likely a mistake, as any parent knows.)

  Though Doyle found the spiritualist movement alive and thriving in South Africa, not all of his audiences were appreciative or respectful. Especially in areas where the strict Dutch Reformed Church held sway, Doyle’s belief that spiritualists were true Christians, and that Jesus was in essence a medium who stood between two worlds, was met with stony silence or open hostility. He gave a lecture in Cape Town to an audience of nearly two thousand, and afterward, during the question period, someone called out mockingly, “If the other world is so pleasant, why don’t you all commit suicide?” Someone else asked, about relationships in the afterlife, “Must I have the same husband?”

  Despite their somewhat mixed reception in Africa, when Doyle returned to England, he told the press brightly, “We come back stronger in health, more earnest in our beliefs, more eager to fight once more in the greatest of all causes, the regeneration of religion and of that direct and practical spiritual element which is the one and only antidote to scientific materialism.”

  By autumn, he was off again on another lecture series, this time to Scandinavia and the Low Countries. Doyle remained sweetly cheerful and phenomenally busy, as always. He published a collection of essays on spiritualism, The Edge of the Unknown, much of which had earlier been published in newspapers but had been extensively revised. In May, he turned seventy. That summer, he appeared in his garden at Windlesham in a short Movietone newsreel, chatting about Sherlock Holmes and the “psychic matter.” Sitting at a little table in the garden, with his dog, looking like a beloved, nattily dressed, though slightly daft, uncle, Doyle gently chided the naysayers. “When I talk about this subject, I am not talking about what I think, or what I believe; I’m talking about what I know,” he said. “I suppose I’ve sat with more mediums, good, bad, and indifferent, than anyone,” and with all the wonders he had seen over forty-one years of psychic research, “there were usually six or eight or ten other witnesses, all of whom have seen the same thing.… [T]his is not the foolish thing as it is often represented, but a great philosophy and as I think the basis of all religious improvement.”

  But now the old boxer, whaling-ship doctor, and cricketer was beginning to show his age. He wrote to Bernard Ernst, “I have broken down badly and have developed Angina Pectoris. So there is just a chance that I may talk it all over with Houdini himself before very long.” But he added, “I view the prospect with perfect equanimity. That is one thing that psychic knowledge does. It removes all fear of the future.”

  The spring of 1930 rolled around, and one morning Doyle wandered out into the garden, just after the snow cover had melted and the first flowers appeared. As he did every spring, he picked a single snowdrop flower—Galanthus, the pendulous, three-petaled harbinger of the coming sun—and brought it indoors for Jean.

  But there was no getting around it. His health was failing. Breathing was difficult. His feet hurt. He grew exhausted easily. Now seventy-one, he’d begun to have heart trouble. Sometimes the boys would have to drive into nearby Tunbridge Wells to get bottled oxygen for their father. At two in the morning on July 7, 1930, Denis and Adrian—who loved fast cars—blasted into town on an emergency run to get oxygen, because their father was having trouble breathing. They brought it back to the house, and shortly after seven that morning Doyle asked to be lifted out of his bed so he could have a better look at the world. He was clearly sinking quickly. The boys helped him into a big basketlike armchair by the window, where he could look out over Crowborough Common. He said to Lady Jean, with a serene smile, “You are wonderful.” And shortly thereafter, with his wife and three children gathered around him, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle went to greet whatever lies on the other side.

  * * *

  SEVERAL DAYS later, on July 11, 1930, the family had a private burial, and the old warrior was laid to rest in a flower-lined grave in the garden at Windlesham, under a copper beech tree beside the little summerhouse where he loved to write. About three hundred people were there, mainly spiritualists and literary friends—an “intimate” gathering for a man who was by now beloved by the world. There was a short service by a spiritualist pastor, which dwelled not upon mourning but upon the coming wonders of Summerland, the spiritualist conception of the paradise that awaits us.

  “We know that it is only the natural body that we are committing to the ground,” said the Reverend C. Thomas. “The etheric body … is the exact duplicate, and lives on, and is able when the psychic conditions are attuned to the spiritual, even to show itself to earthly eyes.… Sir Arthur will continue to carry on the work of telling the world the truth.”

  In its obituary of July 8, 1930, The New York Times described Doyle as “creator of Sherlock Holmes and a noted spiritist.” In fact, the paper noted, Sherlock Holmes was probably better known than his author, and countless visitors to Baker Street in London were bitterly disappointed to discover that Holmes was not a real person.

  In the latter part of his life, the Times opined, Sir Arthur “presented an heroic and at the same time somewhat tragic figure. For the past few years he had devoted virtually all his time to the propagation of spiritism, and was recognized as one of the great leaders of the world in that belief. Because of his association with this crusade which he himself characterized as an unpopular one, he gradually lost some of his old-time literary friends who saw no virtue in spiritism and were inclined to look upon him as an eccentric.”

  Nevertheless, Sir Arthur was quoted as saying, “I pledge my honor that spiritism is true, and I know that spiritism is infinitely more important than literature, art, politics, or in fact anything in the world.”

  Adrian and Denis told the Times that they had every expectation of hearing from their father after death. “Of course, my father fully believed that when he passed over he would continue to keep in touch with us. All his family believe so, too,” Adrian said. He added, “My mother and my father’s devotion to each other at all times was one of the most wonderful things I have ever known.”

  Two days later, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, an overflow crowd estimated at eight thousand people attended a memorial service for the beloved author and “spiritist.” There was an empty chair on the stage, between Lady Jean and Denis, with a cardboard sign on it reading “S
ir Arthur Conan Doyle.”

  It was the only empty seat in the house.

  The crowds were enormous partly because of Doyle’s fame and partly because there was the widely rumored hope that Sir Arthur might actually return to speak from beyond the grave.

  A diminutive medium named Estelle Roberts walked onto the stage, stood in contemplative silence for a very long time, then called out, “There are vast numbers of spirits here with us!” Then she began naming them—“There is a gentleman on the Other Side, John Martin, looking for his daughter Jane.… He has got your mother and your sister Mary with him.” This went on for more than half an hour, at which point the medium cried, “He is here! He is here!”

  She pointed to the empty chair between Lady Jean and Denis. Later Roberts claimed to have seen Conan Doyle, in evening dress, walk to the chair. Then Roberts announced to the multitude that she had received a transmission from Sir Arthur, the guest of honor in absentia, and strode across the stage to where Lady Jean was sitting to deliver it to her. Just as she leaned over to speak to Lady Doyle, an overenthusiastic organist filled the auditorium with several resounding chords from the Albert Hall’s giant pipe organ, completely drowning out the message.

  Lady Jean never revealed what the communication from her beloved had been—if there had been one at all.

  Shortly after the great dirigible R101 crashed and burned in 1930, its deceased pilot seemed to “come through” during a séance with the medium Eileen Garrett. Then the spirit of Conan Doyle came through.

  CHRONICLE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sir Arthur, Is That You?

  “At three forty-three on the afternoon of July 7th, 1930, a press agency rang me up and informed me that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had ‘come back’ and manifested through a medium in the Midlands—exactly 6½ hours after the passing of the great apostle of spiritualism,” the famous psychic investigator Harry Price wrote in a 1931 article for the British literary periodical Nash’s magazine.

  When the press agent asked if Price had any opinion on the matter, Price predicted that before the day was out, phone lines would be “red-hot” with reports that Sir Arthur had sent “messages” from beyond. And, in fact, within forty-eight hours of Doyle’s death, Price had received reports of at least seventeen mediums—from Vancouver and Paris to New York and even Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—that Sir Arthur had “come through.”

  Price had made his reputation debunking phony mediums and was the founder and director of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, which was an attempt to bring the rigor of scientific methods to the study of occult phenomena. His laboratory bristled with all manner of gadgetry—ultraviolet, infrared, and X-ray equipment, galvanometers, thermographs, an array of cameras and darkroom equipment, and other paraphernalia intended to catch a fake medium in the act. (In truth, Price probably knew where to look, because in his early days he was a conjurer and magician and had also been accused of occasionally faking psychic phenomena.) Now, with the passing of Sir Arthur, Price reveled in mocking all these alleged transmissions from beyond. Most of them were preposterous, he said, even “pathetic.” Some originated from two different locations at once.

  And some were worse than fraudulent. Price reported, with glee, a case from Milan in which two men called on a spiritualist family with news that one of them was able to invoke the spirit of Conan Doyle and suggested holding a séance. That evening, the whole family gathered for the sitting; the medium’s “manager” agreed to stay outside the séance room to ensure that there was no confederacy involved. At the end of the séance, in which the family “drank in Doyle’s philosophy from the grave,” and just before the lights came on, the medium excused himself. The family sat there waiting for a long time until, finally growing impatient, they left the room, only to discover that they’d been robbed blind, the medium’s confederate having stripped the house and driven off in a van full of loot.

  Harry Price had had an uneasy acquaintance with Conan Doyle while the famous author was still alive. In 1922, Price had exposed as a fraud a “spirit photographer” named William Hope whom Doyle believed to be genuine. In public and in private letters, the two men quarreled bitterly for years afterward. Price felt that Doyle was too credulous, too quick to believe; Doyle felt that Price’s rigorous and demanding testing filtered out mediums who were genuinely gifted.

  About one of their quarrels, Price wrote, “For more than half an hour we discussed the various differences between us. Doyle accused me of medium-baiting. I suggested that his great big heart was running away with him and that he was no match for the charlatans who, like giant parasites, battened on his good nature.” Though he later wrote that Doyle “never really forgave me,” a few months before his death Sir Arthur seemed to declare a truce, and the two men became, if not friends, at least friendlier.

  It was almost three months after Sir Arthur’s death, in early October 1930, that an Australian journalist named Ian Coster contacted Price about setting up a séance. Coster, who wrote for Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and the British magazine Nash’s, had heard of Price’s reputation as a reputable psychic investigator and someone who might be able to set up a credible séance. Coster’s assignment, from the editors of Nash’s, was both simple and somewhat silly: They wanted him to see if he could have Price conduct a séance in which he tried to make contact with Conan Doyle’s spirit, exactly three months after his death. That would be October 7, 1930, only a few days away.

  Price agreed, but only if he could find the right medium. And the one who came immediately to mind was Eileen Garrett. Not only was Garrett highly respected, but also she had known Sir Arthur personally, and that might make establishing contact easier. Price also liked it that Garrett was not a spiritualist and was in fact not even convinced that the soul survives bodily death. “In all my years’ professional mediumship I have had no ‘sign,’ ‘test’ or slightest evidence to make me believe I have contacted another world,” Garrett had written.

  Her own theory was that her gifts might have come from a nightmarish childhood—both her parents committed suicide—in which psychological trauma created a “split personality” that somehow created a “magnetic field” that made it appear she was contacting other worlds. “I prefer to think of the controls as principles of the subconscious,” she explained. “I had, subconsciously, adopted them during the years of early training, and given them names. I respect them. But I cannot explain them.”

  Nevertheless, whatever the source of her gifts, according to Price, “not the slightest suspicion attaches to her name and integrity as a medium and she has achieved some brilliant successes.” (More than likely, he was referring to the Hinchliffe case, among others.) Mrs. Garrett eschewed the flashier effects of some of the famous mediums—ectoplasmic hands, table tipping, spirit photography, and so on—and simply “channeled” voices of apparent discarnate spirits.

  Because she was available, the séance was arranged for October 7, 1930, at three in the afternoon, in Harry Price’s specially designed séance room (which he often referred to as his “laboratory”). It was designed to be as impervious to deception and fraud as possible, with windows and doors tightly sealed, and stripped bare of every object except tables, chairs, and a few other necessary things. Unlike most séances, which were conducted in very dim or red light, this one was to take place in full light. When Mrs. Garrett arrived, a bit early, nothing was said to her about the nature of the séance. When Coster arrived a few minutes later, no one told her who he was or what he wanted, only that he had requested a sitting. The only ones present for the séance were Mrs. Garrett, Harry Price, Ian Coster, and Ethel Beenham, Price’s longtime secretary, who took notes in shorthand.

  According to Price’s later account, Mrs. Garrett sat down in a comfortable armchair and slipped into a trance state not long after Coster arrived. Her eyes closed, and she began breathing deeply. She yawned. She seemed to relax. Then she began speaking in an odd, Oriental-s
ounding voice.

  “It is Uvani. I give you greeting, friends; peace be with you and in your life and in your household.” Uvani, Garrett’s “control,” always announced himself with these words. After a short pause, he continued, in his usual halting, broken English. He had a visitor there, he said—an aristocratic Viennese medical man and psychic investigator named Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing. He was a friend of Harry Price’s (and of Conan Doyle’s) who had died a year earlier. A skeptic, he had once remarked that “hardly one medium has appeared that has not been convicted of fraud.” The baron said a few things to Price, but seemingly nothing of any particular consequence. Then, abruptly, Mrs. Garrett became visibly upset, and for a moment tears streamed down her cheeks. Her voice became rushed and disjointed, full of urgency and emotion.

  “I see for the moment I-R-V-I-N-G or I-R-W-I-N,” Uvani said. “He say he must do something about it … apologizes for coming … for interfering … seems to be anxious to speak to a lady in the body.… Never mind about me but do, for heavens sake, give this to them.… The whole bulk of the dirigible was entirely and absolutely too much for her engine capacity.”

  Then, after a short pause, the voice continued, heavy and sorrowful, speaking in broken sentences:

  Engines too heavy. It was this that made me on five occasions have to scuttle back to safety. Useful lift too small. Gross lift computed badly—inform control panel. And this idea of new elevators totally mad! Elevator jammed. Oil pipe plugged. This exorbitant scheme of carbon and hydrogen is entirely and absolutely wrong! To begin with, the demand for it would be greater than the supply.

  Scribbling as fast as she could, Ethel Beenham did not understand what any of it meant. She just kept on writing it all down.

  Also let me say this: I have experimented with less hydrogen in my own dirigible, but with the result that we are not able to reach 1,000 meters. With the new carbon hydrogen you will be able to get no altitude worth speaking about. With hydrogen, one is able to do that quite easily. Greater lifting than helium. Explosion caused by friction in electric storm. Flying too low altitude and could never rise. Disposable lift could not be utilized. Load too great for long flight. Same with S.L.8. Tell Eckener …