The Secret Life of Houdini (66 page)

They gathered around the table again, the same as the night before and the night before that. Lady Doyle had her pad and pencil at the ready. Conan Doyle soothed her and held her hand and the communication started flowing. But on this night there was a major breakthrough. Tonight, Sir Arthur was going to be in direct communication with his own spirit guide, a guide who would control him, literally, for the rest of his life. Conan Doyle’s mother made the introduction, but first she had to thank Sir Arthur for making plans to lay flowers on her grave.

I am so happy, my beloved son. We all know and love you for the thought. But not while you are so busy, dear one. I can’t bear you to tire your dear self.

“What about the undeveloped spirit?” Conan Doyle asked. During the last séance, an undeveloped spirit had come to them for advice.

Your guide says you did him untold good. He has progressed far. He is almost here. His mother guards and helps him onwards and up. Your guide is such a high soul! He loves you beyond words. You are often with him at night. He helps and instructs you over here. The name is Pheneas. He is a very, very high soul, sent especially to work through you on the earth plane. He died thousands of years ago in the East, near Arabia. He was a leader among men. He wants me to say, dear one, that there is much work before you.

“In this world?” Conan Doyle asked.

Why, of course, my darling, it is here on this grey earth that you are needed. Your guide is here. He places his arm round you and kisses your brow and blesses you, and blesses you both. It gives us such joy over here to see the love light always round you in your own dear home. It is our earth centre. We are happy in that sweet atmosphere. Bless and keep you all, my dears. Your guide is here.

“I am proud to have such a guide,” Conan Doyle said.

And then, for the first time, his guide spoke directly to him.

Pheneas speaking. We are brothers. Your wife is invaluable to us. We use her a great deal.

“Do I work on right lines?” Conan Doyle fretted.

You are right. Go on as you are doing. You are doing far more than you have any idea of. It is far-reaching, the effect of it.

“What is this sign which we hear of?” Conan Doyle asked.

It is this way. God has ordained that a great light shall shine into the souls of men through a great external force which is slowly penetrating through into the earth’s sphere. It is something which the most ignorant must see and believe. 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.

“It is destructive, then?” Conan Doyle worried.

Not entirely so.

“Will it be here?” he asked.

Yes, it will be here and everywhere. It
must
be. The world of men will not wake otherwise. And this truth has got to be as a great cloud of knowledge settling down all over the world. All the shams and ceremonies must be swept away for ever, and only this sweeping power can do that.

This has been a happy evening for me. I have often wanted to come to you, for you see you are so much to me, and it hurt that I meant nothing to you. Now we are close. It will be easier for me to work through you in consequence.

Then, for the first time, Lady Doyle spoke up.

“Have I done wrong by being angry with the persecutors of the Cause?” she asked.

Quite right, my dear soul,
Pheneas assured her.
We, too, are furious, so how can we blame you for being so? But they too will know the truth very soon. It will be the biggest thing that has ever happened in the earth’s history. But great blessings will follow. All the shadows will flee away.

“Is it like Atlantis?” Doyle asked.

Yes, very much. Only much bigger—more sweeping and different.

“But how would any cataclysm convert folk to Spiritualism?” he astutely asked.

By what everyone will see for themselves at that supreme time. Another time I will tell you more—much more. There will be no preparation.

“Shall we go to America?” Doyle asked.

It is God’s will. It is ordained.

“The children too?” he said.

Yes, emphatically. Yes. You are all needed, each in your own way doing work for the cause.

Pheneas’s first message was of a total upheaval of the world order. The enemies of the cause would be meeting their end in a cataclysm similar to those that befell the heathens at Sodom and Gomorrah. With Lady Doyle enjoying more prestige thanks to Pheneas’s commendations, she began to assert herself on the Doyles’ second American adventure. Shortly after arriving in New York, she went to a Westinghouse studio on the top of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and broadcast a wireless message extolling Spiritualism to 500,000 people. Doyle was impressed. “The stars were above, the lights of the huge city below, and as I listened to those great truths ringing out in her beautifully modulated voice it was more like an angel message than anything I could imagine.” A few weeks later, that angel voice turned strident. With Doyle lecturing in Pittsburgh, Lady Doyle, back in New York, publicly rebuked Mayor Hylan when he made some unflattering comments about “that man Doyle” and his Spiritualist beliefs. Then she wrote a long newspaper article that was headlined “Mansions in the Sky Like Our Earthly Home Says Lady Doyle.”

On the second lecture tour, which covered the Western states that Doyle had neglected on his first go-round, pretenses were dropped and battle lines were drawn between him and Houdini. Instead of feting Doyle, the SAM, which Houdini completely controlled, offered to reproduce any of the most puzzling phenomena that Spiritualism had to offer. “Conan Doyle has seen fit to call magicians tricksters…. Sir Arthur has not shown himself a competent judge,” the SAM officer and brilliant magician Servais LeRoy told the press.

Relations with Houdini were deteriorating rapidly. When Lord Carnarvon, an explorer who led an expedition to the tomb of King Tut in Egypt, died under mysterious circumstances, Doyle was quoted around the world theorizing that an evil spirit may have been responsible. “I think it is possible that some occult influence caused his death,” Doyle said. “There are many legends about the powers of the old Egyptians, and I know I wouldn’t care to go fooling about their tombs and mummies. There are many malevolent spirits.”

Houdini jumped into the controversy. He agreed with authorities that the death was due to blood poisoning from an insect bite and asked Doyle why no other Egyptologists had befallen a similar fate. Despite the controversy, Doyle still harbored hopes of converting Houdini to the cause and referred him to mediums who might sway him. “I have found the mediums very averse to sitting with you, and they all regard you as one who has insulted them, but I do my best to clear away that impression,” Doyle wrote Houdini on April 30. There was one medium who would never sit with Houdini again, and she was Lady Doyle. “Pray remember us all to your wife,” Doyle ended that letter. “Mine is, I am afraid, rather angry with you.”

Even though their relationship was deteriorating, Houdini still tried to engage Doyle in reasonable discussion about spiritualistic phenomena. While lec turing on Spiritualism in Los Angeles in April, he investigated a spirit photograph that had been taken at the funeral of a medium named Mary Fairfield McVickers. Convinced that the ghostly apparitions were a product of the irregular surface of the wall, Houdini hired a photographer, went back to the church, and attempted to replicate the original photo, taking ten exposures. When his own photos were developed, Houdini was shocked to find a weirdly shaped luminous streak in the second negative. Convinced that there was no normal explanation for the strange streak of light, Houdini sent a copy of the photo to Doyle in New York. Blinded by his anger, Sir Arthur missed his opportunity to restart the conversion of Houdini and deemed Houdini’s photo absurd. Undeterred by Doyle’s negative response, Houdini still urged his audiences to attend Sir Arthur’s upcoming lectures.

In May, Houdini and Doyle found themselves in Denver at the same time. Even though the Doyles attended Houdini’s show and Bess sat through Doyle’s lecture, relations were strained, especially after
The Denver Express
ran a huge headline: “
DOYLE IN DENVER DEFIES HOUDINI AND OFFERS TO BRING DEAD BACK AGAIN
.” The article quoted Doyle as challenging Houdini to a $5,000 bet to attend a sitting where he would bring his own mother back in physical form. Doyle rushed up to Houdini in the lobby of the hotel where they both were staying to apologize profusely for the story, claiming he had been misquoted. Houdini told Doyle that the papers misquote people all the time and he wouldn’t hold it against him, but then he went to the paper’s offices, where the editors told him that Doyle positively was not misquoted.

Later that month, the tables were turned. Doyle was enraged when Houdini was quoted in
The Oakland Tribune
to the effect that Doyle had been fooled by two mediums who had been discredited. Doyle counterattacked in the pages of the paper and then wrote Houdini and asked him to send him a written denial of making his original charges. “Our relations are certainly curious and are likely to become more so, for so long as you attack what I
know
from experience to be true, I have no alternative but to attack you in return. How long a private friendship can survive such an ordeal I do not know—but at least I did not create the situation.”

The final straw occurred a few days later, when Houdini participated in a séance that exposed a leading American medium. Houdini’s explanatory letter went unanswered and, as far as we know, there was no further correspondence between the two for the next seven months.

After not corresponding with Doyle for months, Houdini wrote him in December, presumably asking Doyle for some favor. The Spiritualist’s response was curt. “I was surprised and sorry to get your letter…. You can’t bitterly and offensively—often also untruly—attack a subject and yet expect courtesies from those who honour that subject. It is not reasonable. I very much resent some of your Press comments and statements.”

The spirit photograph that Houdini couldn’t explain.
FATE
magazine

A spirit photograph Houdini could explain.
From the collection of George and Sandy Daily

Two months later, the charade was repeated. Houdini wrote Doyle asking for permission to use some of his writings in his book on Spiritualism. Doyle shot back a letter on February 26, 1924. “You probably want these extracts in order to twist them in some way against me or my cause, but what I say I say and I do not alter. All the world can quote.

“What you quote, however, about your own frame of mind is obviously a back-number…. I read an interview you gave some American paper the other day, in which you said my wife gave you nothing striking when she wrote for you. When you met us, three days after the writing, in New York, you said ‘I have been walking on air ever since.’ I wonder how you reconcile your various utterances!