Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  It is not clear, based on Mrs. Beenham’s real-time notes taken during the séance, at what point the participants began to realize what seemed to be happening. But they would realize soon enough. That morning’s newspapers had been filled with the dreadful details of the crash of the British Air Ministry’s dirigible R101, which had gone down in flames in the woods near the French town of Beauvais two days earlier, at two in the morning on October 5. Of the fifty-four people on board, forty-eight were killed, including its captain, Flight Lieutenant H. Carmichael Irwin. The enormous airship, the largest flying craft in the world with an interior volume of five and a half million cubic feet, had been on its maiden voyage, from London to India, when it foundered and went down in an electrical storm.

  This strange, disjointed, disembodied voice, filled with sorrow as well as technical detail—could it be the voice of the R101’s captain, Irwin, coming through?

  Cruising speed bad and ship badly swinging. Severe tension of fabric, which is chafing. Starboard strakes started.… Airscrews too small. Fuel injection bad and air pump failed.… Bore capacity bad.… It had been known to me on many occasions that the bore capacity was entirely inadequate to the volume of the structure. This I had placed again and again before engineer, without being able to enlarge capacity of diesel twin-valve.… At inquiry to be held later, it will be found that the superstructure of the envelope contained no resilience, and had far too much weight in envelope. The added middle section was entirely wrong. Too short trials. No one knew the ship properly.… Two hours tried to rise but elevator jammed. Almost scraped the roofs at Achy.

  Mrs. Beenham, writing as fast as she could in shorthand, took down “Irwin’s” melancholy monologue, consisting almost entirely of technical details. Several things were remarkable about this. First, it was well-known that Mrs. Garrett was so unsophisticated about technology that she did not even drive a car and knew nothing of engineering or aeronautics. And second, “Irwin” was providing such a wealth of detail that the session contained what Conan Doyle and Price had always sought—“evidential” facts that could be independently verified.

  As the séance unfolded, no one in the room yet knew what “strakes” were, what “S.L.8” meant, who “Eckener” might be, or what “scraped the roofs at Achy” could possibly mean. (Therefore this did not appear to be telepathic communication of facts from someone in the room to the medium.) It was only later, when Harry Price began investigating, that he learned “Eckener” was the name of the German designer of the Graf Zeppelin. “S.L.8” turned out to be the name of a design series of German dirigibles. “Strakes” referred to a continuous line of planking or plates running from stem to stern of a ship. It was a nautical term, but because many of the men of the R101 crew, including Captain Irwin, were former navy men, it made sense that the term was used. “Almost scraped the roofs at Achy” was tougher. There was no town called “Achy” on the Michelin map of France or any of the atlases Price consulted. The name was not mentioned in any of the newspaper accounts of the crash. It was only later, when he found a large-scale flying map such as Captain Irwin might have used, that Price saw the place-name Achy—really, not much more than a railroad crossing—about twelve miles from Beauvais and directly on the R101’s fateful path. Later accounts revealed that the doomed airship had precipitously dipped, to perhaps less than three hundred feet above the ground, in that area.

  In fact, it later turned out that this session with Eileen Garrett contained so much technical detail that Harry Price shared the séance report with Will Charlton, a supply officer at Cardington, where R101 had been built and tested. After studying this report, Charlton declared it an “amazing document,” containing more than forty technical, and often highly confidential, details of the airship’s construction as well as a harrowing narrative about what likely occurred during its final flight. Some details were known only to the builders or suppliers of the airship. For instance, the reference to the “exorbitant scheme of carbon and hydrogen,” apparently a reference to upcoming experiments involving a mixture of oil fuel—“carbon”—and hydrogen, experiments still only in the planning stages at Cardington, had never been reported in the press and were known only to project team members like Irwin. The fact that the flight trials were “too short” was a concern to those working at Cardington, but unknown to the public.

  The séance report was later submitted to Sir John Simon, who was in charge of the investigation into the crash. Simon found that most of the details given in the trance session tallied almost precisely with what was later found in the course of the official inquiry into the crash, whose results were not released until six months later.

  Seven other séances were later held with Eileen Garrett and Major Oliver Villiers, senior assistant intelligence officer in the British Air Ministry, an expert in aeronautics and a personal friend of Irwin and the rest of the R101 crew. Other members of the crew appeared to come through, describing technical details of the crash and using expressions of speech Villiers associated with them. One voice, claiming to be the crew member Lieutenant Commander Atherstone, the first mate, claimed he had kept a secret diary to record his worries about the R101 program. When officials questioned his widow about the diary, she claimed never to have heard of it. But almost forty years later, in 1967, Mrs. Atherstone was to come forward with her husband’s diary, which contained the very same concerns expressed by the supposed “Atherstone” personality in the séance.

  Over the ensuing years, there were many attempts to discredit the material produced in these séances. Skeptics later pointed out that not every single thing that “Irwin” said was true; that it was theoretically possible that Garrett could have found some, though not all, of the details she mentioned in the newspapers; and that she was the only medium involved in both Price’s and Villiers’s séances, whereas the case would have been much stronger had three or four mediums been involved. In the early 1960s, the researcher Archie Jarman—who had known Garrett for years—investigated the case thoroughly. He knew that she often traveled by car from Calais to Paris and would have known of the tiny town of Achy. He suggested that she might have subconsciously picked this name from her own memory. But how would she have known that people in Achy later reported seeing the airship descend dangerously right over the town, a fact not reported until days after the séance? In the end, Jarman’s exhaustive report took six months, ran 455 pages, with maps and blueprints, and involved interviews with aeronautical experts. Jarman concluded, “My opinion is that greater credulity is demanded to believe that Eileen obtained her obscure and specialized data by mundane means than to accept that, in some paranormal manner, she had contact with the remembering psyche of the dead Captain Irwin.”

  Harry Price himself was more cautious: “It is not my intention to discuss if the medium were really controlled by the discarnate entity of Irwin, or whether the utterances emanated from her subconscious mind or those of the sitters. ‘Spirit’ or ‘trance personality’ would be equally interesting explanations—and equally remarkable. There is no real evidence for either hypothesis. But it is not my intention to discuss hypotheses, but rather to put on record the detailed account of a remarkably interesting and thought-provoking experiment.”

  But, of course, the whole purpose of the séance that afternoon of October 7 was to attempt to contact Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, now dead for three months.

  It was now nearly four o’clock in the afternoon, and “Uvani” seemed to be growing weary when he announced the presence of someone else. “An elderly person here saying that there is no reason in the world why he attend you, but he has got here an SOS sent out to him, to be precise, five days ago.” It had been five days earlier when Price phoned the medium to set up the séance.

  Uvani described the person who was waiting to speak to Price: “He is tall, rather heavy of stature, feet rather bad, jolly, great of heart, deep blue eyes, a drooping moustache, strong chin, dominating, courageous, stubborn, heart of a child … amus
ing, and at times very difficult.… Has almost a threefold personality.” According to Price, this was a remarkably accurate description of Conan Doyle—not just his physical presence, but his innermost nature.

  Then the medium’s voice changed suddenly, shifting to a British lilt with a bit of a Scottish burr on the r’s.

  “Here I am. Arthur Conan Doyle. Now how am I going to prove it to you?” Speaking very rapidly, as Doyle was inclined to do, the voice went on to say, “I, myself, did not recognize the difficulty there would be in getting through this wall or ‘density’ that stands between us.… I would like you to know my location—that I am in a nebulous belt lying outside the earth’s surface.” He went on to say, “I shall be most happy if anything I can say from this side helps you to understand the blackness on your side and the intricacies and difficulties of communicating. The difficulties are stupendous.”

  The two men talked about their recent dispute.

  “It was your fault that we disagreed,” the voice said.

  “We were working with the same object in view, but in different ways. I am trying to arrive at the truth,” Price replied.

  “I always had my eye on you, and you used to watch me like a cat watching a bird in a cage!” “Doyle” said.

  After a time, the two men good-naturedly agreed to shake hands over the matter. The Doyle voice, with some amusement, observed that “most people think I made a great deal of money out of spiritualism by beating the big drum, but I realized there was very little money in the whole business. Many of my friends said ‘You are a stout old dog—it must bring you in a tidy income!’”—but that, he said, was entirely untrue. In fact, his devotion to the cause of spiritualism, his extensive lecture tours, his short-lived psychic bookshop, and so on had actually cost him a small fortune, not to mention the stress and inconvenience of international travel. In fact, according to his biographer John Dickson Carr, Doyle spent 250,000 pounds promoting the cause of spiritualism (several million dollars in today’s money).

  Price asked which of Doyle’s fictional characters he liked best.

  Without hesitation, he answered “Rodney Stone,” hero of a little-known novel of the same name, a coming-of-age story about a Sussex lad taken to the big city, set in the world of the bare-knuckle boxing of the day. He made no mention of Sherlock Holmes at all.

  When Price inquired about the nature of his current condition, “Doyle” replied, “When I say I am living in a world considerably like the one I have left, people will be surprised. I find myself doing many of the things which I did there. I am living in a world as dark as that which I left, more’s the pity. It is a country where pain is forever ended; where emotion is born a thousand times stronger; where inspirations reach me easier.… I understand that it tends to confirm the theory of reincarnation and the soul goes through many phases.… I am still ‘material,’ and so long as I am material, I feel myself the man I was on earth.”

  Price thanked “Doyle” for having written a letter to the Evening Standard, about a month before his death, applauding the work of Price’s organization and its efforts to scientifically study paranormal phenomena. “Do you still think the scientific investigation of [psychic] phenomena is necessary?” Price asked.

  “I cannot help thinking, my dear Price,” the voice replied, “that after many years’ study of spiritualism, I have definitely come to the conclusion that before you get a sane, sound, sensible man to take hold of the thing and lead it to our goal, which is world knowledge, you need the most rigorous care from the scientific point of view. It is far more difficult to establish a fact than it is to advertise an illusion.”

  Indeed.

  NOTES

  The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

  The reader will notice here that this book has not been footnoted down to the tiniest detail, in academic fashion. That’s because it aspires to be a jolly romp, rather than a scholarly treatise. While raising the profound questions inherent in this material, we aimed to favor high spirits, delicious speculations, and compelling scenes and characters. Hence, the authors have footnoted only direct quotations, major factual details, and other key specifics.

  PROLOGUE: THE INFINITE STRANGENESS OF LIFE

  “There is a rush and roar”: Lachtman, Sherlock Slept Here, 66.

  “ghost machine”: www.paranormal-encyclopedia.com, s.v. “Thomas Edison and the Ghost in the Machine.”

  “I came of age at 80 degrees north latitude”: Doyle, “Dangerous Work,” journal of the whaling ship S.S. Hope, entry from May 22, 1880.

  “never loses his temper”: Houdini, Magician Among the Spirits, 139.

  simply called himself “Conan Doyle”: Ibid.

  “The subject of psychical research”: Doyle, New Revelation, 13.

  “In the presence of an agonized world”: Ibid., 39.

  “infinitely the most important thing”: Ibid., 97.

  CHAPTER ONE: INTO THE UNKNOWN

  “Only a week from Shetland”: This and all quotations from the logbook of the S.S. Hope are from the annotated reprint Doyle, “Dangerous Work.”

  a fellow student named Currie: Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 29.

  a fierce feud: Ibid., 5.

  “My real love for letters”: From an interview first published in the New York World, July 28, 1907.

  “to his family he was becoming”: Carr, Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 9.

  “they are more weird”: Lamond, Arthur Conan Doyle, a Memoir, 9.

  “Nothing can exceed”: Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 15.

  “Well, my man”: Ibid., 20.

  CHAPTER TWO: “MISTER SPLITFOOT, DO AS I DO!”

  This account of the story of the Fox sisters is based on several sources, both contemporary and archival. Chief among them are E. E. Lewis’s Report of the Mysterious Noises (1848); E. W. Capron’s Modern Spiritualism; the journalist Reuben Davenport’s Death-Blow to Spiritualism; Leah Underhill’s Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism; Robert Dale Owen’s classic Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World; Conan Doyle’s much later (1926) account in The History of Spiritualism; Miriam Buckner Pond’s Time Is Kind; and two good more recent books, Barbara Weisberg’s Talking to the Dead and Nancy Stuart’s excellent The Reluctant Spiritualist.

  At other times, Mrs. Fox later reported: Capron, Modern Spiritualism, 6; Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, 285.

  “On March 30th we were disturbed all night”: Capron, Modern Spiritualism, 6.

  “I advise you not to say a word”: Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, 287.

  “Now do this just as I do”: Ibid., 41.

  “That rude room”: Doyle, History of Spiritualism, 63.

  “on the night of March 31st, 1848”: From Wallace’s critique of Mesmerism, Spiritualism, &c., Historically and Scientifically Considered (1877), by William B. Carpenter.

  “On Sunday morning, the second of April”: Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, 145.

  Lucretia Pulver told this story: Stuart, Reluctant Spiritualist, 14.

  “sit under the bedroom window”: Ibid.

  “believed him to be a man”: Ibid., 16.

  “One day about two o’clock, P.M.”: Capron, Modern Spiritualism, 38.

  “completely broken down”: Stuart, Reluctant Spiritualist, 27.

  “the sun shone brightly”: Underhill, Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, 34.

  “Oh, that dreadful sound!”: Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, 58.

  “I was particular to tell the agent”: Underhill, Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, 35.

  “Can it be possible?”: Ibid., 37.

  “I can’t pray”: Ibid., 45.

  “He was much disappointed”: Capron, Modern Spiritualism, 60.

  “Dear friends, you must proclaim these
truths”: Underhill, Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, 49.

  “MY DEAR CHILDREN”: Ibid., 51.

  “This proposition was met”: Capron, Modern Spiritualism, 93; Underhill, Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, 62.

  “the citizens of Rochester”: Stuart, Reluctant Spiritualist, 50.

  “She is a very interesting and lovely young lady”: Underhill, Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, 63.

  “I know it is true”: Ibid.

  “were not altogether right”: Capron, Modern Spiritualism, 93.

  “conclusively shown [the sounds] to be produced”: Doyle, History of Spiritualism, 82.

  “we shall not stir from this room”: Underhill, Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, 69.

  “I cannot have you go without me”: Doyle, History of Spiritualism, 71.

  “So long as the public”: Ibid., 82.

  “This infantile explanation”: Richet, Thirty Years of Psychical Research, 28.

  “great souls from Atlantis”: Godwin, Upstate Cauldron, chap. 12.

  CHAPTER THREE: THE SPIRITUAL WILDFIRE

  their first visitor was Horace Greeley: Cadwallader, Hydesville in History, 49.

  Two nights later, they conducted: This account was given in full detail in the June 8, 1850, edition of the New-York Tribune.

  “They have prepared me for this hour”: Cadwallader, Hydesville in History, 50.

  “Most advised a maximum”: Braude, Radical Spirits, 20.

  “In five years it has spread like wild-fire”: Fornell, Unhappy Medium, 35.

  “The dear spirits”: Braude, Radical Spirits, 17.

  “wise mentor at the elbow”: Doyle, History of Spiritualism, 87.