A Letter from the Dead

Participants in a noonday service at an Anglican Church in London were startled last week by a message from the dead. Up rose Lord Dowding to read a letter which he believed was dictated to him by the spirit of a sailor missing in action.

Said the 61 -year-old retired Air Chief Marshal, who helped direct the magnificent R.A.F. defense during the Battle of Britain: "I have the largest number of messages from men who have passed over in this war. The fact that I want to stress is that the tone of these messages is 'We are O.K.' and 'Don't grieve for us. We're the lucky ones. We've never been so happy. . . .' There is a great organization of Air Force men on the other side and I receive frequent messages from them." Modern war's horrors and personal tragedies have turned many a grieving man & woman to spiritualism. But until Lord Dowding spoke up, there have been no such notable conversions of late as those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge during World War I. After his conversion, the zealous author of Sherlock Holmes toured Britain exhibiting spiritualistic snapshots in which he pointed out blurred spots that he claimed were pixies frolicking in a hazy landscape.

Famed Scientist Sir Oliver Lodge wrote a book (Raymond) purporting to be conversations with his soldier son, who had been killed in France.

The conversion of Sir Oliver Lodge also moved Sir Max Beerbohm to draw one of his funniest imaginary confrontations, in which Convert Lodge and Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, a British skeptic about spiritualism, look at each other and wonder at an ectoplasmic enigma.

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