The curtains were drawn, fluttering from time to time with the gentle caress of the sea breeze. There was a writing pad on the table in the living room of the suite, along with two ordinary pencils. The medium was sitting in front of the pad. To her side sat her husband, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the world’s most famous mystery writer, the man who created Sherlock Holmes. He bowed his head.
“Almighty, we are grateful to you for this new revelation, this breaking down of the walls between two worlds. We thirst for another undeniable message from beyond, another call of hope and guidance to the human race at this, the time of its greatest affliction. Can we receive another sign from our friends from beyond?” Doyle recited.
He reached out and gently touched his wife’s hands, as if he were transferring power to her. Taken by their sincerity, Houdini closed his eyes and meditated on religious thoughts, so he could help as much as possible.
Lady Doyle suddenly seized a pencil and began to strike the table with her hand.
“This is the most energetic the forces have ever come,” she said.
She seemed to almost resist the agency that was making her hand quiver as she poised the pencil over the pad, but then she seemed to relent and the pencil began to move, as if on its own.
“Do you believe in God?” Lady Doyle asked. It was a cautionary question, to ensure that an evil spirit had not taken control of her.
Houdini desperately sought to contact his dead mother (pictured with Houdini). Lady Doyle facilitated it. From the collection of Kenneth M. Trombly
As if in answer, her hand beat the table three times, which was an affirmative response.
“Then I will make the sign of the cross,” she said, and she drew a cross on the top of the pad.
Sir Arthur soothed her as she began to write, as if he was admonishing the spirit to be gentle with her.
The pad began to fill up with frenzied scribbling, page after page.
“Who is standing alongside of Houdini?” Sir Arthur inquired. “Is it Houdini’s mother?”
The medium struck the table three times. She continued to frantically fill up page after page, with Conan Doyle tearing off the pages, one by one, and passing them to Houdini.
He began reading.
“Oh, my darling, thank God, thank God, at last I’m through—I’ve tried, oh so often—now I am happy. Why, of course, I want to talk to my boy—my own beloved boy—Friends, thank you, with all my heart for this. You have answered the cry of my heart—and of his—God bless him—a thousand fold, for all his life for me—never had a mother such a son—tell him not to grieve, soon he’ll get all the evidence he is anxious for—Yes, we know—tell him, I want him to try to write in his own home. It will be far better so.
“I will work with him—he is so, so dear to me—I am preparing so sweet a home for him which one day in God’s good time he will come to—it is one of my great joys preparing it for our future—I am so happy in this life—it is so full and joyous—my only shadow has been that my beloved one hasn’t known how often I have been with him all the while, all the while—here away from my heart’s darling—combining my work thus in this life of mine.
“It is so different over here, so much larger and bigger and more beautiful—so lofty—all sweetness around one—nothing that hurts and we see our beloved ones on earth—that is such a joy and comfort to us—Tell him I love him more than ever—the years only increase it—and his goodness fills my soul with gladness and thankfulness. Oh, just this, it is me. I want him only to know that—that—I have bridged the gulf—That is what I wanted, oh so much—Now I can rest in peace.”
Houdini leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath.
Sir Arthur looked at Houdini. “Why don’t you ask her a question? Some test so that you will be certain that this really is your dear mother.”
“I don’t know if the spirit will answer direct questions,” Lady Doyle cautioned.
“Ask her if she can read your mind,” Sir Arthur suggested.
Houdini didn’t even have the time to get that question out of his mouth, when Lady Doyle grabbed the pad and began to write furiously.
“I always read my beloved son’s mind—his dear mind—there is so much I want to say to him—but—I am almost overwhelmed by this joy of talking to him once more—it is almost too much to get through—the joy of it—thank you, thank you, thank you, friend, with all my heart for what you have done for me this day—God bless you, too, Sir Arthur, for what you are doing for us—for us over here—who so need to get in touch with our beloved ones on the earth plane—
“If only the world knew this great truth—how different—life would be for men and women—Go on, let nothing stop you—great will be your reward hereafter—Good-bye—I brought you, Sir Arthur, and my darling son together—I felt you were the one man who might help us to pierce the veil—and I was right—Bless him, bless him, bless him, I say from the depths of my soul—he fills my heart and later we shall be together—oh, so happy—a happiness awaits him that he has never dreamed of—tell him I am with him—just tell him that I’ll soon make him know how close I am all the while—his eyes will soon be opened—Good-bye again—God’s blessing on you all—”
It had taken nine years but Houdini’s mother had finally contacted him.
An ex-physician and a current magician among the spirits, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle meets Houdini.Conjuring Arts Research Center
That the creator of the world’s most rational and analytic materialist, Sherlock Holmes, would embrace a religion that viewed itself as the antidote to that moribund philosophy would seem odd, but Conan Doyle’s conversion came after years and years of spiritual inquiry.
Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Scotland on May 22, 1859 to Charles and Mary Doyle, both religious Catholics. His father was a visionary artist who early in Arthur’s life descended into alcoholism and mental illness and was repeatedly institutionalized. Growing up in poverty, Arthur became extremely close to his mother, who sent him to Jesuit schools. Doyle rebelled against the strict teachings of the Church, but he sought alternative outlets for his spirituality, even while studying medicine. In 1880, he attended his first Spiritualist lecture, while his father was undergoing his horrific descent into madness. The next year he graduated medical school and set up a small practice. Business was slow so he began to write short stories. He delved into esoteric spiritual practices like mesmerism and Theosophy, and began experiments in telepathy. His successes opened him up to the possibility of psychic phenomena, and in 1887, the same year that his first Sherlock Holmes story was published, he attended a séance of an elderly male medium. He was so impressed that he wrote a letter to a Spiritualist magazine proclaiming that the séance “showed me at last that it was absolutely certain that intelligence could exist apart from the body.”
By 1889, Conan Doyle was convinced of the basic indestructibility of the human soul. By then he was writing full-time and his Holmes stories were beginning to catch on, a pleasant development since he now had a wife and son to support. As his success grew, he began to branch out—writing sprawling historical novels and answering a call to wanderlust. He was like an English Teddy Roosevelt, large, raw-boned, walrus-mustached, roaming the world in ill-fitting clothing, soaking in experience. He accompanied Lord Kitchener on his Egyptian campaign and traveled to South Africa for a firsthand glimpse of the Boer War. It was his book on that war and his defense of English foreign policy that led to his knighthood in 1902.
By then, Doyle was one of the most celebrated authors in the world. He had killed off his fictional detective Holmes, and then revived him when an old friend named Fletcher Robinson told him of the legend of a phantom hound that haunted the man who killed the dog and his wife. To the delight of the literate world, Holmes returned in the book The Hound of the Baskervilles, originally planned as a collaboration between the two men. In 1906, Doyle’s wife died after a long bout of tuberculosis. A year later he married Jean Leckie, who he had fallen in love wi
th ten years earlier, supposedly maintaining a secret, platonic relationship with her as his wife’s health slowly deteriorated.
It was through his second wife, Jean, that Doyle finally embraced Spiritualism as a religion. The ranks of Spiritualism began to swell as grieving families sought to come to terms with the loss of their soldier sons in World War I. Doyle saw the devastation firsthand, visiting the French and Italian fronts. Back at home, Jean’s friend Lily Loder-Symonds moved in with the family. Lily was an avid Spiritualist and a devotee of automatic writing. In autumn of 1916, she produced a series of messages from her dead brothers. Skeptical of automatic writing, Conan Doyle quizzed her about a conversation he had years earlier with Jean’s dead brother Malcolm. When she accurately recalled the conversation, Doyle was convinced.
Now Doyle saw the war as a spiritual conflict between forces beyond comprehension using the competing armies as mere pawns. The war had wreaked havoc on the Doyle-Leckie families, ten members dead from combat or disease. Doyle lost his brother, his son Kingsley, two brothers-in-law, and many nephews. “Where were they? What had become of those splendid young lives? They were no longer here. Were they anywhere?” Doyle would ask in a later lecture on Spiritualism. “The question was [by] far the most pressing in the world. It filled my mind.” He began to connect the rappings and table thumping of Spiritualist séances with attempts by dead spirits to communicate. “I understood at last that these foolish phenomena were really not so foolish, but had a purpose. They were signals.”
On September 7, 1919, the signals bore full fruit. Doyle and his wife attended a séance given by Evan Powell, an amateur medium. They went to Powell’s hotel room, accompanied by a few friends. The medium insisted he be searched and then tied to a wooden chair by Doyle. A megaphone with luminous paint was placed beside him. The room was darkened. Suddenly a deep, strong voice issued from the void. It was the voice of an Indian spirit, Black Hawk, Powell’s spirit control. He told them that “Leely” wanted to speak with “the Lady of the Wigwam.” It was Jean’s by then departed friend Lily.
Thrilled with the séance, the Doyles returned the next night. “Then came what to me was the supreme moment of my spiritual experience,” Doyle would write. “Almost too sacred for full description.”
In the darkness, a voice called out.
“Jean, it is I.”
Lady Doyle felt a hand on her head and she cried out.
“It is Kingsley.”
Doyle heard the word “Father.”
“Dear boy, is that you,” he whispered.
“Forgive me!” the voice said.
Then a large, strong hand rested on his head and he felt a kiss just above his brow.
“Tell me dear, are you happy?” Doyle asked.
There was silence and Doyle feared that he was gone.
“Yes,” the voice finally answered. “I am so happy.”
That was the turning point in Doyle’s life. “Therefore my wife and I determined that we would, so far as possible, devote the rest of our lives to trying to make people understand that this subject is not to be laughed at, but that it is really the most important thing in the world,” Doyle wrote, obsessed with spreading the gospel of Spiritualism. With this monomania came the intolerance of the true believer. “He carried it to extreme lengths showing impatience with anyone who expressed the slightest doubt,” an acquaintance noted.
“With all modesty I am inclined to ask, is there any man on this globe who is doing as much psychic research as I?” Doyle would later ask. “I have clasped materialized hands…I have listened to prophecies which were quickly fulfilled. I have seen the ‘dead’ glimmer up upon a photographic plate which no hand but mine had touched…I have seen spirits walk round the room in fair light and join in the talk of the company. I have heard singing beyond earthly power…If a man could see, hear, and feel all this, and yet remain unconvinced of unseen intelligent forces around him, he would have good cause to doubt his own sanity. Why should he heed the chatter of irresponsible journalists, or the head-shaking of inexperienced men of science, when he has himself had so many proofs? They are babies in this matter, and should be sitting at his feet.”
Doyle began to recruit an army of believers. What better way to aid in this crusade than by spreading his gospel and converting other prominent men? Now Doyle received another important communication. It wasn’t from a departed spirit, though; it was from the very corporeal Master Mystifier, Harry Houdini.
“Have you read that some of the folks like Conan Doyle…are dabbling in Spiritualism again?” Houdini wrote Kellar at the very beginning of 1918. With his move into film and his hoped-for retirement from the stage, Houdini was planning to write more books, and one of his first projects was a tome about Spiritualism. Houdini had maintained interest in the subject since his own days as a phony medium before the turn of the century. He had even been approached by a prestigious lecture bureau at the end of 1919 to take the negative side of the subject and debate a prominent Spiritualist like Conan Doyle or Sir Oliver Lodge, a British scientist who had converted to Spiritualism after getting in touch with his dead son, Raymond. Houdini turned the offer down mainly because he was about to travel to England for six months to make up bookings that had been postponed by the war.
Once in England, he settled into his typical routine. “Am very busy,” he wrote to a friend. “Taking a few shots for a proposed new picture, appearing at Trade showings, writing a book against Spiritualism, and doing my Show as usual.” At this stage, Houdini was researching his book and it seemed to be hard going. Although Houdini was thought by a leading British psychic researcher to have powers of dematerialization after he had served as a committeeman during one of Houdini’s Milk Can escapes, most mediums were wary of sitting for him.
Houdini’s attitude toward communication between the dead and the living was complex. There had been strange circumstances in his own life that he had been unable to explain. In Berlin once, he had been handcuffed and roped and locked in a cabinet so securely that he thought that he wouldn’t be able to escape. Bess, on hearing his groans, realized that he was in deep trouble and began to pray for assistance from Rabbi Mayer Samuel, who, before his death, had promised the young boy that if he ever ran into any difficulty, he would return to aid him. Within seconds, Houdini had solved the mystery of the cuffs and had escaped. Years later, while en route to a performance in Europe, Houdini saw a fleeting vision of his mother. The next day he was informed that she had died.
“I too would have parted gladly with a large share of my earthly possessions for the solace of one word from my loved departed—just one word that I was sure had been genuinely bestowed by them,” he wrote. “In this frame of mind I began a new line of psychical research in all seriousness and from that time to the present I have never entered a séance room except with an open mind devoutly anxious to learn if intercommunication is within the range of possibilities.” So it was both as researcher and seeker that Houdini sought out mediums during his stay in England. Who could be a better character reference for him than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
Soon after arriving in England, Houdini dispatched a copy of his book The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin to Doyle. On March 15, 1920 Doyle wrote and thanked him for the book and asked him a question about the Davenport Brothers, the American performers who were thought to have been aided in escaping their secure rope ties by cooperative spirits. “Some of our people think that you have yourself some psychic power, but I feel it is art and practise,” Doyle commented. Within two months, Doyle would change his mind.
Houdini was tactful in his correspondence with Doyle. When the author pressed him on whether the Davenports had real occult power or were just tricksters, Houdini responded diplomatically, “I am afraid that I cannot say that all their work was accomplished by the spirits…. You will note that I am still a sceptic [sic], but a seeker after the Truth. I am willing to believe, if I can find a Medium who, as you suggest, will not resort to ‘manipulation�
� when the Power does not ‘arrive.’”
Now the floodgates were open. Doyle suggested two or three honest mediums, singling out Mrs. Annie Brittain as the best. “In a series of 72 clients whom I sent her, she got through 60 times, 5 failures and the rest half and half,” he wrote. On April 25, accompanied by Bess and their niece Julia, they sat with Mrs. Brittain. Houdini’s diary entry reflects his disappointment. “Mrs. Brittain not convincing. Simply kept talking in general. ‘Saw’ things she heard about. One spirit was to bring me flowers on the stage. All this is ridiculous stuff.”
Two weeks earlier, Houdini had finally met the Doyles. He went alone as Bess “was not able” to make the trip. Houdini lunched at their house and was regaled with tales that would make a materialist cringe. “Sir Arthur told me he had spoken six times to his son,” he wrote in his diary. “No possible chance for trickery.” A few days later he wrote Kellar. “[Doyle] saw my performance Friday Night. He was so much impressed, that there is little wonder in him believing in Spiritualism so implicitly.”
By the end of May, Doyle was convinced that Houdini was masking his true occult powers. The magician was playing in Bristol and had accepted and won a challenge to escape from a packing box built onstage. “I heard of your remarkable feat in Bristol. My dear chap, why go around the world seeking a demonstration of the occult when you are giving one all the time?” Doyle wrote him.
With his search for a genuine medium stalled, Houdini turned his attention to spirit photography, a phenomenon where depictions of spirits were unintentionally captured in the course of taking regular photographs. Houdini wrote Doyle asking to see some photos taken by a psychic researcher named Crawford but Doyle didn’t have the photos on hand. “They are too precious to have lying around…. But I have something far more precious—two photos, one of a goblin, the other of four fairies in a Yorkshire wood. A fake! you will say. No, sir, I think not. However, all inquiry will be made. These I am not allowed to send. The fairies are about eight inches high. In one there is a single goblin dancing. In the other four beautiful, luminous creatures. Yes, it is a revelation.”
The Secret Life of Houdini Page 42
