Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  One day during the autumn of 1927, Bess wrote to Sir Arthur to tell him of a curious occurrence: A mirror in her home had suddenly shattered, for no apparent reason. She wondered whether this might be some manifestation from Houdini—an attempt to make contact, perhaps. Sir Arthur wrote back,

  I think the mirror incident shows every sign of being a message. After all, such things don’t happen elsewhere. No mirror has ever broken in this house. Why should yours do so? And it is just the sort of energetic thing one could expect from him, if for some reason he could not get his message. Supposing our view of the future is true, is it not possible that the Powers might for a time forbid him to use those gifts which he was foremost in his lifetime in denying? But you will get your test. I feel convinced of that.

  On the other hand, was Conan Doyle—a true believer if ever there was one—simply trying to put a positive spin on slender evidence in order to produce the answer he wanted? Meanwhile, Sir Arthur continued to visit medium after medium, hoping to get a direct transmission of Houdini’s secret code, for his own satisfaction, Bess Houdini’s comfort, and the smug satisfaction of showing the world that he was right.

  After her husband’s death, those who knew Bess best began to notice that she seemed to be coming unraveled. Her house was a mess. She began drinking heavily, and her appearance grew increasingly disheveled. At Christmastime, in 1928, she apparently took an overdose of sleeping pills and nearly died. A reporter who came to visit later wrote that she was “nearly delirious” and kept asking for her husband.

  Meanwhile, the ten thousand dollars offered to anyone who could contact Houdini remained unclaimed. Then, on January 8, 1929, Bess received a quartet of interesting visitors at her home in New York. One was Arthur Ford, a well-known medium and a pastor at the First Spiritualist Church in New York City, along with one of Bess’s old friends, Minnie Chester, and a couple of reporters. Bess did not look her best when she appeared at the front door, with her head bandaged from a recent fall.

  But she was eager to see them because the previous year, on February 8, 1928, Ford had conducted a séance in which his “guide,” named Fletcher, appeared to make contact with a woman who claimed to be “the mother of Harry Weiss, known as Houdini.” According to Ford’s later account, the woman said that “for many years, my son waited for one word which I was to send back. Conditions have now developed in the family which make it necessary for me to get my code word through before he can give his wife the code he arranged with her. If the family acts upon my code word he will be free and able to speak for himself. Mine is the word ‘FORGIVE’!”

  When Ford later conveyed this message to Bess, she wrote back that “this is the first message which I have received among thousands which has an appearance of truth.” (She did point out that the entity claiming to be Houdini’s mother referred to her son as “Harry,” though his birth name was Erich, an odd mistake for a doting mother to make.)

  Now, on this frigid January night in 1929, Ford and his visitors told Bess they wished to conduct a séance to see if Fletcher, Ford’s spirit guide, could make contact with Houdini’s spirit directly. Ford explained that over the course of several months, in a series of séances, an entity claiming to be Houdini had laid out a coded message, using a system Houdini and Bess had once used in a stage act they’d done together. Bess told Ford she was willing, so candles were lit, the lights were lowered, and the five of them joined hands around a séance table. Ford, wearing a blindfold, seemed to fall into a trance and began to speak in the strange, quavering voice of Fletcher.

  “Hello, Bess, sweetheart,” the voice intoned earnestly. “I came to impress you that this is of great importance, greater than you ever dreamed. I desire you to bring this message before the world.” He then recited the ten-word code that Houdini and Bess had agreed upon before his death: Rosabelle … answer … tell … pray … answer … look … tell … answer … answer … tell.

  Then the voice continued, apparently speaking to Bess: “Now take off your wedding ring and show them what Rosabelle means.”

  Bess, startled and near tears, took off her ring. Along the inside rim of her wide gold ring were inscribed the words to an old song. Then Bess began softly singing it, in a barely audible voice:

  Rosabelle, sweet Rosabelle

  I love you more than I can tell.

  O’er me you cast a spell,

  I love you, my sweet Rosabelle.

  The song, she explained when she was through, was one she and Houdini had sung as part of their stage act thirty-five years earlier. Houdini had had the ring engraved with the lyrics as a remembrance of their youthful, long-lasting love. Ford, supposedly as Houdini, explained that the ten words were actually a complex code that spelled out the word “Believe.”

  “My words to you before death were ‘Rosabelle, believe,’” he said. “Is that correct?”

  Bess, in astonishment, nodded her assent. It was.

  “Then tell the whole world that Harry Houdini still lives!” the entranced Ford shouted in triumph. “There is no death! That is my message to the world!”

  Later that same evening, someone (apparently not Bess, because the handwriting was not hers) wrote out in neat, somewhat childish-looking block letters the following note:

  REGARDLESS OF ANY STATEMENTS MADE TO THE CONTRARY, I WISH TO DECLARE THAT THE MESSAGE, IN ITS ENTIRETY, AND IN THE AGREED UPON SEQUENCE, GIVEN TO ME BY ARTHUR FORD, IS THE CORRECT MESSAGE ARRANGED BETWEEN MR. HOUDINI AND MYSELF.

  It was signed by Beatrice Houdini. The statement was witnessed and signed by John Stafford, associate editor of Scientific American; H. R. Zander, a reporter for the United Press; and Minnie Chester.

  This news flashed across the wires, appearing in the next morning’s newspapers around the country. Conan Doyle was exultant. “This might become the classic case of after-death return,” he was quoted as saying.

  But almost as soon as the word was out, the doubts, recriminations, and accusations began.

  It was pointed out that the “secret” code, “Rosabelle, believe,” had already appeared in print, in a book published the previous year called Houdini: His Life-Story, by Harold Kellock. It was also pointed out that Houdini’s mother’s code word, “forgive,” had also appeared in print previously, in an article in the Brooklyn Eagle on March 13, 1927.

  Two days after the séance, a sleazy tabloid called the New York Evening Graphic ran a story headlined “Houdini Message a Big Hoax!” The story claimed that Bess and Ford had arranged the séance to promote a lecture they were supposed to do together. Bess published an angry letter denying it. She did not know how other people might have gotten the code, but if they did, it was not from her. “If anyone claims I gave the code, I can only repeat they lie. Why should I want to cheat myself? I do not need publicity. I have no intention of going on stage or, as some paper said, on a lecture tour.… I have gotten the message I have been waiting for from my husband, how, if not by spiritual aid, I do not know.” But by three years later, Bess had changed her tune. She asked her friend (and lawyer) Bernard Ernst to issue a statement, saying that “for three years she had sought to penetrate beyond the grave and communicate with her husband, but had now renounced faith in such a possibility: she denied that any of the mediums presented the clue by which she was to recognize a legitimate message.”

  It’s not clear what caused her to change her mind, but when she died in 1943, it appears that she did not believe she had ever heard from Houdini.

  For his part, Arthur Ford continued to claim that he’d cracked the Houdini code. He later wrote that he might have had some help from Houdini, who “may have been paying his respects to the fact that my act had been performed not while handcuffed but while sound asleep.”

  As to the general public, people seemed to believe what they already believed. As Blake once wrote,

  Both read the Bible day and night,

  But thou read’st black where I read white.

  In the 1920s Conan Doyle t
oured the world promoting spiritualism with slide shows of spirit photographs. Though they could be easily faked, he nonetheless believed that many images were the genuine work of “a wise invisible Intelligence.”

  COURTESY OF THE ARCHIVES OF TONY OURSLER

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Lion in Winter

  By 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was sixty-eight years old, and by all rights he was a man brimming with success, prosperity, and the contentment of what he called his “golden autumn.” He was arguably the best-known writer in the world. His lectures and public appearances drew devotees by the thousands. He had a sweet, devoted marriage to a woman who deeply shared his passions and belief in spiritualism. He was financially secure. (In 1928, he calculated his and Lady Jean’s net worth at around 110,000 pounds sterling, or more than $9 million in today’s dollars.) Though he had lost Kingsley, he had four surviving children from his two marriages—Mary, Jean, Denis, and Adrian—and he lived like a country squire in his rambling estate, Windlesham, in Crowborough. (He had spent so much money on maintaining the place that in his despairing moments he sometimes called it “Swindlesham.”)

  He also maintained a charming thatched-roof country house in Bignell Wood, surrounded by beech forest, which he had purchased as a love gift to Jean in 1925. He moved easily among the brightest and the best, describing in his memoirs his encounters with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, and British royalty of all kinds.

  Yet he was not content. He was a man on fire, a man who could not allow himself to rest. He had, after all, a despairing world to convert to his point of view. Because, above all else, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his later years had become the world’s greatest defender, most passionate crusader, and most affable advocate of spiritualism. His great goal was to offer scientific proof of immortality—not the mere faith of the world’s dusty and outdated religions—and the great hope that those who have passed on were not truly gone at all. He considered himself a warrior in a righteous war, a war against the stuffy old dead religions, against the bloodless rationalists and materialists, those who did not believe in magic or elementals or the glorious transcendence of the human soul.

  Sir Arthur’s productivity had always been prodigious, but for a man approaching seventy it was astonishing. According to John Dickson Carr, an early biographer, who had access to the great mounds of private papers he left at his home, Doyle sometimes wrote forty or more letters a day and at least once as many as three hundred. In his lifetime, he wrote fifteen hundred letters to his mother, “The Ma’am,” alone. According to those who knew him, despite his worldwide fame, Doyle felt compelled to respond to inquiries from everyone from Guglielmo Marconi to the ordinary bloke who thought he’d seen a ghost, hadn’t even told his wife about it, and just wanted to talk.

  Yet now he seemed even more driven to spread the “gospel” of spiritualism, and he never seemed to stop writing, in careful, close-cropped, graceful longhand, on stationery from hotels and restaurants and shipping lines when he was traveling, or on Windlesham letterhead when he was at home, or anything else that was close at hand when the urge struck. By the end of his life, he would author 22 novels, 23 nonfiction books, 204 stories, 14 plays, and even an operetta. (In his younger days, he told The Ma’am, he could dash off two or three Holmes stories a week.) But it was the 13 books he wrote about spiritualist and paranormal matters, especially the two-volume History of Spiritualism, published in 1926, that he considered his life’s work, the thing he would be remembered for, his contribution to mankind.

  Sherlock Holmes? A mere trifle. By comparison with his work as a spiritualist missionary, Holmes seemed to him little more than an indulgence. Besides, he was sick of him. “I couldn’t revive him if I would,” he told one reporter, “for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.”

  As part of his great spiritualist calling, Sir Arthur would regularly depart from the Crowborough train station on another far-flung lecture tour, often with his wife and children in tow, drawing huge crowds wherever he went—to South Africa, America, Scandinavia, Australia. By 1923, he had traveled more than fifty thousand miles and addressed nearly a quarter of a million people. According to his booking agent, Lee Keedick, he broke all previous attendance records for a lecture series. Doyle, ever humble, did not believe this had anything to do with his own personal renown. “Me? These crowds have nothing to do with me,” he said once. “I tell you because it is the subject, not the man; and it is the subject which counts. They must disprove our facts or else admit them.”

  Of course, not everyone was enamored of Doyle’s facts or his spiritualist message. “Wherever I go, there are two great types of critics,” he said, pithily summing things up. “One is the materialistic gentleman who insists on his right to eternal nothingness. The other is the gentleman with such a deep respect for the Bible that he has never looked into it.”

  His devotion to spiritualism now began to engulf the popular novels from which he had grown rich and famous. In 1926, he’d published The Land of Mist, the third in his Professor Challenger series, in which the great, roaring, spade-bearded scientist, the ferocious rationalist and debunker, becomes an improbable convert to spiritualism. The book did not go over terribly well. People complained that it was a thinly veiled spiritualist tract and that Doyle was preaching. Which he was.

  “Thank God that book is done!” Doyle wrote to Herbert Greenhough Smith, editor of The Strand Magazine, where it was serialized. “It was to me so important that I feared I might pass away before it was finished.”

  When the book did not sell well, Smith implored Doyle to shift back to stories that were more plot, less preaching. And, above all, what about Holmes? Doyle wrote back, “I wish I could do as you wish but, as you know, my life is devoted to one end and at present I can’t see any literature which would be of any use to you above the horizon. I can only write what comes to me.”

  (During the heyday of his literary career, Conan Doyle’s earnings were almost without parallel. In 1901, The Strand Magazine offered him 4,795 pounds—about $623,000 in current dollars—to serialize The Hound of the Baskervilles. The following year Collier’s magazine offered him the equivalent of $1.3 million just for the serial rights to thirteen Sherlock Holmes stories. The fact that Doyle chose to turn his back on all this loot, and instead begin self-publishing small books about spiritualism, is convincing evidence of how serious he was about his new convictions.)

  Meanwhile, Doyle opened a little “psychic bookshop” and spiritualist museum in Victoria Street, in the shadow of Westminster Abbey. He created a small center for spiritualist literature and began distributing it throughout the world. He spent thousands of pounds of his own money to keep the enterprise running. “I am in a position to do it,” he told a reporter for The New York Times. “I might play with a steam yacht or own race horses. I prefer to do this.”

  His daughter Mary, from his first marriage, took over the day-to-day affairs of running the shop. But though she was an earnest believer, as he was, she sometimes wondered about his unflagging devotion to the cause, as if he were forever handing out fiery pamphlets on the street corner.

  “Why do you go on hammering at proof after proof after proof?” she asked him one day. “We know these things are true. Why do you try to prove it by so many examples?”

  “You have never been a rationalist,” he replied.

  * * *

  IT WAS in 1927 that Doyle self-published, through his own Psychic Press and Bookshop, a short book called Pheneas Speaks. It purported to be a transcript of observations, advice, and predictions from a spirit channeled by Lady Jean between July 1921 and November 1926. In his preface, Doyle wrote, “We would beg the most orthodox reader to bear in mind that God is still in touch with mankind, and that there is as much reason that he should send messages a
nd instructions to a suffering and distracted world as ever there was in days of old.”

  Pheneas, the messenger, had first appeared one night when Doyle, his wife, and their young children, Denis, Adrian, and Jean, were gathered for a “home circle” séance at Windlesham. In those days, strange as it might seem now, this was a common, cozy practice in the Doyle family. Lady Doyle was almost immediately seized by a new spirit, who called himself Pheneas. This night, and on many that followed, the transmissions from Pheneas came through Lady Jean in a form that Doyle described as “semi-trance inspirational talking.” Jean would sit down in a comfortable chair, cross herself, and begin talking in a low, gruff male voice, without ever fully losing consciousness, though “her hold upon her own organism was slight.” Her eyes would close and remain so “until the power left her.”

  Pheneas offered advice on politics and world affairs, helped Doyle make contact with Kingsley, his brother Innes, and others who had passed on, and gave him practical advice about the homely details of life. Doyle and Lady Jean would routinely ask Pheneas’s advice about their travel plans, once scotching a trip to Scandinavia on his warning. And it was Pheneas who originally advised Doyle to buy the country house at Bignell Wood. (Pheneas also explained, when the house was partially burned, that “bad psychic energy” had built up in it and it had to be cleansed with fire.)

  When asked to describe the world “up there,” Pheneas waxed rhapsodic: “It is lovely. I never saw any home on earth to compare to ours. The whole scheme of home life is so much more radiant. Flowers cover my home. Such roses. Beyond is wonderful scenery and other sweet homes, full of dear sweet, bright people, full of laughter, from the mere fact of living in such wonderful surroundings.”