Note from MRB: The metaphysical experiences of William Dudley Pelley didn't prevent him from behavior that brought him the reputation of being an anti-Semitic fascist. I'm presenting this profile article about a Hollywood screenwriter and experiencer of transcendental communication who eventually became regarded as a fascist 'American Hitler' because very few people know any of the details about this man's life. This article was written by myself many years ago after my interest in documented accounts of transcendental communication resulted with my being loaned a copy of an autobiography otherwise unobtainable at that time. Regarding anti-Semitism, personally I'm at a loss to comprehend the value of associating any particular individual with some traditional dogmatic religion because a person's orientations may span a vast spectrum of individually accepted beliefs and perspectives. One example of this is the varying reactions among Jewish people to the mass destruction and deaths in Gaza caused by US-Israeli bombing. Concerning the transcendental communication transcripts documenting this realm of experience in the man's life, today it's impossible to know to what extent personal recollection was involved. Transcripts probably were never planned to be verbatim.
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with Anna May Wong and Lon Chaney in the filming of "Mr. Wu" in Hollywood
William Dudley Pelley (1890-1965) decided to end his career as a Hollywood screenwriter shortly before he underwent at age 39 what he would later call a "hyperdimensional experience" that would lead him to appraise in 1953, "My whole career and life-errand was to be predicated on the happening . . ." Among Pelley's books are autobiographical accounts, including The Door to Revelation (1939) and a book of memoirs focusing on his metaphysical experiences Why I Believe the Dead Are Alive (1942, revised edition 1954). There are also published works that resulted from automatic writing and Pelley's utilization of "clairaudient faculties."
At the time of his birth in Massachusetts, his father was pastor of a Methodist country church yet soon left the ministry and earned a living in a succession of occupations, including cobbler, newspaper reporter and storekeeper. In 1907 Pelley was withdrawn from school to assist his father in a manufacturing enterprise that resulted with the younger Pelley overseeing operations at a tissue paper products factory employing 103 men.
Looking back at the success of the Pelley Tissue Company while writing his autobiography, Pelley decided: "In all of this, father was but an instrument at the command of higher forces. I believe it now—visualizing that sequence in perspective—with absolute conviction." There was youthful heartache when Mabel, whom he planned to marry, decided to wed another.
As a young man, Pelley had earned seventy-five thousand dollars. To continue the schooling that working at the mill had interrupted, each night he read before sleeping to continue educating himself: "The lore of the world was contained in its books. I had but to read and all knowledge was my heritage."
After resigning from the plant due to acrimony among elder co-workers as he directed the business of the quarter-million dollar corporation, several months later the damaging financial decisions by new managers sent the company into bankruptcy. The receiver of the company asked Pelley to return yet Pelley soon found that he could not recoup. His appraisal of this turning point in his life reveals the detrimental bigotry that would undermine his attempts to communicate other spiritual conceptions.
Pelley's newspaper career began with a position as feature news writer for a Springfield society newspaper. The proofreader Marion was an attractive young woman who was sympathetic regarding his recent business losses. They married in December 1911. He was a night editor in Boston before becoming a printing plant operator and publisher. He had concluded that working for a salary was not suitable to his temperament. Pelley soon found himself in a predicament that would be the first of many in his life to confront him with questions of ethics and morality.
Pelley approached the mayor of a town ten miles north of Springfield during a reelection campaign to underwrite a newspaper enterprise. The mayor promised to reduce the number of saloons from 75 to 42. "I knew that the nearby city newspapers were antagonistic to the mayor, most of them profiting from liquor advertisements." Pelley supported the mayor with crusading zeal in the weekly newspaper. On the morning before the election, a newspaper friend from Springfield confronted Pelley with photostat copies of disturbing documents.
Pelley rushed the photostats to the engravers as he prepared to immediately publish the information; however, his press was vandalized. "Someone had obviously phoned the mayor of how I had reacted and what his own journal was to say of him that night." The City Marshal arrested Pelley for obtaining money under false pretenses.
Pelley wrote that the incident concluded with his newspaper receiving "financial backing that permitted me to conduct that paper for six prosaic months for the city's wholesome element." Pelley added that the mayor soon died in office. "When the Better Classes expected too much reprint of Sunday sermons in The Journal and the papers were becoming too flossy to sell, I disposed of the project and went up to Vermont."
Pelley learned a lesson in fallibility when he accepted a job as printer of a Vermont village newspaper. He became editor by arranging to have the mortgage on the newspaper transferred to him with the condition that he'd support a reservoir project for the New England Electric Power Company. "I was the subservient tool of the power company . . . I had alienated the valley by the power company high jinks . . . I had failed with The Times. Failed Miserably." He was replaced when he couldn't pay the interest on the mortgage. During this period, the Pelleys endured the death of their infant daughter Harriet. He then joined the staff of another Vermont newspaper and a second daughter, Adelaide, was soon born.
An ad in The American Magazine encouraging submissions by new authors resulted with Pelley commencing work as a short story writer. He compiled a collection of 175 rejection slips and sold his first story after four months. Soon thereafter, his prolific work was being accepted at top national magazines. For a period he devoted all his time to writing magazine stories and novels and then he purchased a bankrupt town newspaper.
An exciting opportunity arose for 27-year-old Pelley when funds donated from the Rockefeller Foundation made possible the Methodist Centenary Movement organization sending him on a trip around the world to report about the work of missionaries. Pelley's visit to Japan led him to conclude that the Japanese already cultivated and practiced Christian ethics. He stated that he found no validity in proselyting the theological hypothesis of the Vicarious Atonement. Although he recognized that his trip placed him in the position of becoming "a polite propagandist for the missionary movement," he labeled the movement a blunder. He attempted to place these events in perspective: "I was out there in preparation for something—that was it!—getting an education in international politics while I yet had time, seeing a world of international affairs that in my previous provincialism I had scarcely dreamed existed."
Pelley's itinerary changed when the Siberian Intervention brought a hiatus to passenger shipping. The International YMCA Secretary for the Far East enlisted Pelley to begin "acting as a sort of scout for the establishment of the canteens we're going to install all through Russia." He was asked to "take on certain espionage work that needs to be done" and see Russia under Bolshevism. In his 1956 book Stairs To Greatnesss he referred to the mission as that of "Military Intelligence officer with the American forces."
The most noteworthy aspect of this interlude was Pelley's indoctrination to what he described in his book as "the world-wide Jewish question." His travels brought him in contact with people whose opinions reflected rationales of anti-Semitism during the period. The autobiography reveals the events and conversations that convinced him he was correct in declaring: "I sweepingly indict the Jews of the world."
Pelley recited one anecdote from his youthful occupation in the tissue paper business that shows how a single interaction with one person can encourage bitterness for a mentality susceptible to some form of prejudice.
Concerning his wartime experience, Pelley observed: "I found out that I was combination Red Triangle secretary, war correspondent, espionage agent, secret photographer, canteen proprietor, and consular courier — a sort of field scout for the advance guard of the Christian Y, striving to plant sanity, decency, and political stability in a land being slowly mutilated and mangled by Communism."
The time in Bolshevia resulted with Pelley encountering "that Bath of Horror that would one day change me from a nondescript writer with a nonchalant existence to a grim crusader — that no similar Four Horsemen should ever ride my country."
By the time he was reunited with his wife in Japan, the first World War had ended. The couple decided to return home and during the three-week voyage Pelley expanded one of his popular stories into his first book, the novel The Greater Glory. Considering the wartime catastrophes that he'd witnessed, Pelley concluded: "Had God Himself chosen me for an instrument, sent me afar on the other side of the earth, to see that America was defended and protected?"
Upon his return to Vermont, he found his newspaper venture was near bankruptcy and resumed writing short stories to pay debts. The newspaper was sold, a son was born and his second novel The Fog was published. Twice a week as the film changed at the local movie house, he went uptown and 'saw the pictures.' Pelley acknowledged the pettiness of his existence and was aware of "the famine in my spirit." He avowed: "Marion and I were not hitting it off very well . . . I was ostracizing myself in a grubby little maple-sugar town living in my children.'"
A severe case of typhoid left him an invalid for several months and during the malady he described experiencing delusions and illusions. The tonic that "whisked me off that sick-bed with such energizing swiftness" was learning that a three-part serial he wrote had brought a lucrative screen rights sale offer. Pelley embarked on a "seven-year submergence in movies" that included a friendship with actor Lon Chaney. About separating from his wife, Pelley wrote: "None of the usual motivations of such episodes in married life were present. For nearly fourteen years thereafter we lived apart, and when a divorce was finally the order, it was I who procured it . . . we had looked upon life from two different angles."
In addition to his writing for the screen, Pelley continued to contribute stories to magazines and his third novel Drag—a fictionalized self-history—was published in 1924. He divulged that he either wrote or supervised 21 screen productions in Hollywood for a compensation of nearly $100,000 in the period preceding the advent of the 'talkies.' Pelley characterized the time as one of 'easily-gotten' wealth and "money-drunk children." Persistent in his enmity reserved for Jewish people, he complained that in the movie business he "toiled in their galleys and got nothing but money."
One chapter of The Door To Revelation is devoted to an interlude where Pelley describes the circumstances that brought him to encounter Helen Hansmann, a nurse who after many years of friendship and support became his wife after the divorce. He reported an occasion when Hansmann heard a disembodied voice.
Hansmann had left her current boarding place in Pasadena to ring the doorbell of a bungalow and inquire if a room was available to rent. She learned that a room had been vacated earlier that afternoon. Another room in the house was rented by Pelley, who had traveled from Southern California to New York at the time. The situation compelled him to consider, "Were there little notches cut on the Subconscious that arranged such things — that told when we had stayed long enough in one place and should move somewhere else because friends we ever must meet in each new life are waiting to greet us?"
Pelley described an assignment as operative for individuals with government associations when he accepted the job of writing a story intended to expose inhumane prison conditions. During the course of events that followed, he reported about a Department of Justice executive along with a Washington press correspondent informing him about an "Invisible Government" with "Jew bosses." A future Communist regime for the United States was perceived by Pelley as a threatening possibility. During this period of his life, he appraised, "I was struggling to acquire and compile a philosophy." His perception of damaging political and social manipulation by clandestine Jewish magnates influenced Pelley's conduct for many years until it was clear to him that he would never foster social change through achieving some form of individual political office.
Looking back at his movie industry exploits, Pelley concluded:
At the time of his birth in Massachusetts, his father was pastor of a Methodist country church yet soon left the ministry and earned a living in a succession of occupations, including cobbler, newspaper reporter and storekeeper. In 1907 Pelley was withdrawn from school to assist his father in a manufacturing enterprise that resulted with the younger Pelley overseeing operations at a tissue paper products factory employing 103 men.
Looking back at the success of the Pelley Tissue Company while writing his autobiography, Pelley decided: "In all of this, father was but an instrument at the command of higher forces. I believe it now—visualizing that sequence in perspective—with absolute conviction." There was youthful heartache when Mabel, whom he planned to marry, decided to wed another.
As a young man, Pelley had earned seventy-five thousand dollars. To continue the schooling that working at the mill had interrupted, each night he read before sleeping to continue educating himself: "The lore of the world was contained in its books. I had but to read and all knowledge was my heritage."
After resigning from the plant due to acrimony among elder co-workers as he directed the business of the quarter-million dollar corporation, several months later the damaging financial decisions by new managers sent the company into bankruptcy. The receiver of the company asked Pelley to return yet Pelley soon found that he could not recoup. His appraisal of this turning point in his life reveals the detrimental bigotry that would undermine his attempts to communicate other spiritual conceptions.
With predatory Jews from Manhattan tearing at the carcass of the business I had built, I found temporary sanctuary at a desk in a newspaper office. I was twenty-one at last, and full captain of my soul. I had regrets, heartaches, and a generous quota of experience.
Pelley's newspaper career began with a position as feature news writer for a Springfield society newspaper. The proofreader Marion was an attractive young woman who was sympathetic regarding his recent business losses. They married in December 1911. He was a night editor in Boston before becoming a printing plant operator and publisher. He had concluded that working for a salary was not suitable to his temperament. Pelley soon found himself in a predicament that would be the first of many in his life to confront him with questions of ethics and morality.
Pelley approached the mayor of a town ten miles north of Springfield during a reelection campaign to underwrite a newspaper enterprise. The mayor promised to reduce the number of saloons from 75 to 42. "I knew that the nearby city newspapers were antagonistic to the mayor, most of them profiting from liquor advertisements." Pelley supported the mayor with crusading zeal in the weekly newspaper. On the morning before the election, a newspaper friend from Springfield confronted Pelley with photostat copies of disturbing documents.
They were reproductions of a true secret contract which My Lord Mayor had entered upon, weeks before, with the aforesaid brewing company, guaranteeing to work for it clandestinely and only close those saloons which it did not supply, if it supplied him with funds for his political campaign. Of such was the money that had financed my enterprise.
Pelley rushed the photostats to the engravers as he prepared to immediately publish the information; however, his press was vandalized. "Someone had obviously phoned the mayor of how I had reacted and what his own journal was to say of him that night." The City Marshal arrested Pelley for obtaining money under false pretenses.
Father bailed me out and fetched me an attorney.
"They can't do this to you!" roared that lawyer when he saw me — an opinion belated by fifty-four hours.
Thereat he interviewed the mayor.
One hundred and eighty-six dollars an hour, I believe it was that he paid me, for every sixty minutes of that dark incarceration.
The charges were withdrawn.
Pelley wrote that the incident concluded with his newspaper receiving "financial backing that permitted me to conduct that paper for six prosaic months for the city's wholesome element." Pelley added that the mayor soon died in office. "When the Better Classes expected too much reprint of Sunday sermons in The Journal and the papers were becoming too flossy to sell, I disposed of the project and went up to Vermont."
Pelley learned a lesson in fallibility when he accepted a job as printer of a Vermont village newspaper. He became editor by arranging to have the mortgage on the newspaper transferred to him with the condition that he'd support a reservoir project for the New England Electric Power Company. "I was the subservient tool of the power company . . . I had alienated the valley by the power company high jinks . . . I had failed with The Times. Failed Miserably." He was replaced when he couldn't pay the interest on the mortgage. During this period, the Pelleys endured the death of their infant daughter Harriet. He then joined the staff of another Vermont newspaper and a second daughter, Adelaide, was soon born.
An ad in The American Magazine encouraging submissions by new authors resulted with Pelley commencing work as a short story writer. He compiled a collection of 175 rejection slips and sold his first story after four months. Soon thereafter, his prolific work was being accepted at top national magazines. For a period he devoted all his time to writing magazine stories and novels and then he purchased a bankrupt town newspaper.
An exciting opportunity arose for 27-year-old Pelley when funds donated from the Rockefeller Foundation made possible the Methodist Centenary Movement organization sending him on a trip around the world to report about the work of missionaries. Pelley's visit to Japan led him to conclude that the Japanese already cultivated and practiced Christian ethics. He stated that he found no validity in proselyting the theological hypothesis of the Vicarious Atonement. Although he recognized that his trip placed him in the position of becoming "a polite propagandist for the missionary movement," he labeled the movement a blunder. He attempted to place these events in perspective: "I was out there in preparation for something—that was it!—getting an education in international politics while I yet had time, seeing a world of international affairs that in my previous provincialism I had scarcely dreamed existed."
Pelley's itinerary changed when the Siberian Intervention brought a hiatus to passenger shipping. The International YMCA Secretary for the Far East enlisted Pelley to begin "acting as a sort of scout for the establishment of the canteens we're going to install all through Russia." He was asked to "take on certain espionage work that needs to be done" and see Russia under Bolshevism. In his 1956 book Stairs To Greatnesss he referred to the mission as that of "Military Intelligence officer with the American forces."
The most noteworthy aspect of this interlude was Pelley's indoctrination to what he described in his book as "the world-wide Jewish question." His travels brought him in contact with people whose opinions reflected rationales of anti-Semitism during the period. The autobiography reveals the events and conversations that convinced him he was correct in declaring: "I sweepingly indict the Jews of the world."
Pelley recited one anecdote from his youthful occupation in the tissue paper business that shows how a single interaction with one person can encourage bitterness for a mentality susceptible to some form of prejudice.
. . . we had sold extensively to New York Jewish jobbing houses. I recalled one motherly Jewess who had been treasurer of one of these, who had got me into the office of her concern and encouraged me to tell her frankly and confidentially the exact financial status of our business. Her intimation had been strong that if I would be candid, her associates might be generous in supplying us with capital to carry our accounts. I knew no Gentile woman of her years and personality who would ever have solicited me so and then betrayed my confidence. Among our kind it simply was not done. Noblesse oblige was too strong. No one had warned me that there is no such thing as noblesse oblige among Jews. So I responded in adolescent trust, particularly in womanhood. Ten days later father had come home to Fulton, furious that I had visited New York and been so loquacious. "Maybe it will get you to guard your tongue in future," said he, "to know that we've got to take a loss of over two hundred dollars a carload on our next shipment to that firm, just because it discovered our financial weakness and knew we couldn't afford to refuse the business, even for less." I was appalled. The woman was cold as flint when I next saw her and foolishly made complaint that she had violated my confidence. I perceived that it was all quite within Hebrew ethics to gain by any means or expedient, information which helped in more canny buying. That elderly Jewess doubtless flattered herself that she had turned a clever trick on a callow Christian youth at the time. But ever thereafter I had looked askance at people of her race. . . .
Concerning his wartime experience, Pelley observed: "I found out that I was combination Red Triangle secretary, war correspondent, espionage agent, secret photographer, canteen proprietor, and consular courier — a sort of field scout for the advance guard of the Christian Y, striving to plant sanity, decency, and political stability in a land being slowly mutilated and mangled by Communism."
The time in Bolshevia resulted with Pelley encountering "that Bath of Horror that would one day change me from a nondescript writer with a nonchalant existence to a grim crusader — that no similar Four Horsemen should ever ride my country."
By the time he was reunited with his wife in Japan, the first World War had ended. The couple decided to return home and during the three-week voyage Pelley expanded one of his popular stories into his first book, the novel The Greater Glory. Considering the wartime catastrophes that he'd witnessed, Pelley concluded: "Had God Himself chosen me for an instrument, sent me afar on the other side of the earth, to see that America was defended and protected?"
Upon his return to Vermont, he found his newspaper venture was near bankruptcy and resumed writing short stories to pay debts. The newspaper was sold, a son was born and his second novel The Fog was published. Twice a week as the film changed at the local movie house, he went uptown and 'saw the pictures.' Pelley acknowledged the pettiness of his existence and was aware of "the famine in my spirit." He avowed: "Marion and I were not hitting it off very well . . . I was ostracizing myself in a grubby little maple-sugar town living in my children.'"
A severe case of typhoid left him an invalid for several months and during the malady he described experiencing delusions and illusions. The tonic that "whisked me off that sick-bed with such energizing swiftness" was learning that a three-part serial he wrote had brought a lucrative screen rights sale offer. Pelley embarked on a "seven-year submergence in movies" that included a friendship with actor Lon Chaney. About separating from his wife, Pelley wrote: "None of the usual motivations of such episodes in married life were present. For nearly fourteen years thereafter we lived apart, and when a divorce was finally the order, it was I who procured it . . . we had looked upon life from two different angles."
In addition to his writing for the screen, Pelley continued to contribute stories to magazines and his third novel Drag—a fictionalized self-history—was published in 1924. He divulged that he either wrote or supervised 21 screen productions in Hollywood for a compensation of nearly $100,000 in the period preceding the advent of the 'talkies.' Pelley characterized the time as one of 'easily-gotten' wealth and "money-drunk children." Persistent in his enmity reserved for Jewish people, he complained that in the movie business he "toiled in their galleys and got nothing but money."
One chapter of The Door To Revelation is devoted to an interlude where Pelley describes the circumstances that brought him to encounter Helen Hansmann, a nurse who after many years of friendship and support became his wife after the divorce. He reported an occasion when Hansmann heard a disembodied voice.
The Voice that had spoken soundlessly had said, "Leave here at once. . . . Get out tonight . . . now . . . now!" Or was it a voice? Many times in her life warnings had come to her . . . they were always spoken suddenly and when not expected.
Hansmann had left her current boarding place in Pasadena to ring the doorbell of a bungalow and inquire if a room was available to rent. She learned that a room had been vacated earlier that afternoon. Another room in the house was rented by Pelley, who had traveled from Southern California to New York at the time. The situation compelled him to consider, "Were there little notches cut on the Subconscious that arranged such things — that told when we had stayed long enough in one place and should move somewhere else because friends we ever must meet in each new life are waiting to greet us?"
Pelley described an assignment as operative for individuals with government associations when he accepted the job of writing a story intended to expose inhumane prison conditions. During the course of events that followed, he reported about a Department of Justice executive along with a Washington press correspondent informing him about an "Invisible Government" with "Jew bosses." A future Communist regime for the United States was perceived by Pelley as a threatening possibility. During this period of his life, he appraised, "I was struggling to acquire and compile a philosophy." His perception of damaging political and social manipulation by clandestine Jewish magnates influenced Pelley's conduct for many years until it was clear to him that he would never foster social change through achieving some form of individual political office.
Looking back at his movie industry exploits, Pelley concluded:
"Everything was in a forward crescendo," I argued to myself, "till I put aside everything for Hollywood, for movies." Movies! Flickering shadows and seething high lights. Big money. Easy money. Slipshod work. Gin and cocktail parties. Concupiscence. Had I 'gone Hollywood'?"
The answer seemed to arrive in the form of street sign that warned —
BEYOND THIS POINT IMPASSIBLE
GO BACK!
Pelley interpreted the signboard as bearing a message of allegorical significance and immediately set out to "quit Hollywood for good." He purchased a little Queen Anne bungalow in Altadena and appraised, "The ease with which I acquired the property evidenced to me further that Kismet was arranging it." Pelley lived in the cottage from midsummer 1927 and would remain there for a period of less than two years. On the night of May 1928, as Pelley wrote: ". . . the Panels of Understanding rolled back and I looked from the murk of all that I had ever been, into a vista whose radiance, please God, I am still exploring wondrously. I was 38 years and two months old."
On the momentous night, Pelley recalled that he was reading a book on medieval history as he continued his twenty-year practice of reading himself to sleep. He didn't remember any special dreams during the first half of the night, no physical distress or insomnia.
In his autobiography, Pelley again detailed the experience that created a sensation when first published in the March 1929 issue of The American Magazine. The article "Seven Minutes in Eternity" was later republished as a short book with additional commentary by Pelley. The experience described shows some vague similarities with reports of psychic phenomena that have come to be known as 'out of body experiences' and 'near-death experiences.' As always, the event as chronicled by Pelley could only have been influenced by the limits of his memory, beliefs and perceptions. Perhaps, the following statement offered by Pelley is sufficient to find some perspective for the experience that Pelley accepted as one tantamount to "re-birth."
During the experience, Pelley found that he had "carried some sort of body into that new environment . . . a sort of marble-tiled portico the place was, lighted by that soft, opal luminescence . . . the illumination came from the material itself, a soft alabaster whiteness . . ." There was a garden vista and night sky. He conversed with a man whom he recognized as a past acquaintance whom he knew had died. He also found himself reunited with a large assembly of people he'd previously known — now with "physically glorified" countenances.
Pelley decided to go to New York and probe these uncanny occurrences. In Why I Believe The Dead Are Alive, Pelley recalled hearing his "first clairaudient voice" on the morning before his trip east when he was told to give up smoking.
On the momentous night, Pelley recalled that he was reading a book on medieval history as he continued his twenty-year practice of reading himself to sleep. He didn't remember any special dreams during the first half of the night, no physical distress or insomnia.
But between two and three o'clock in the morning—the time I later verified by the clock on the bed table—a ghastly Inner Shriek seemed to tear through my consciousness. In despairing horror I wailed to myself — I'm dying! I'm dying!"
I had come to it at last. . . . The fraught Door was opening!
In his autobiography, Pelley again detailed the experience that created a sensation when first published in the March 1929 issue of The American Magazine. The article "Seven Minutes in Eternity" was later republished as a short book with additional commentary by Pelley. The experience described shows some vague similarities with reports of psychic phenomena that have come to be known as 'out of body experiences' and 'near-death experiences.' As always, the event as chronicled by Pelley could only have been influenced by the limits of his memory, beliefs and perceptions. Perhaps, the following statement offered by Pelley is sufficient to find some perspective for the experience that Pelley accepted as one tantamount to "re-birth."
Dreams I have had, and occasionally a fine, old-fashioned nightmare, but I have known them for such. Somehow or other, in sleep that night, I unhooked something in the strange mechanism that is Spirit in Matter, and for some three to four hours my own conscious entity that is Bill Pelley, writing-man, slipped over to the Other Side.
During the experience, Pelley found that he had "carried some sort of body into that new environment . . . a sort of marble-tiled portico the place was, lighted by that soft, opal luminescence . . . the illumination came from the material itself, a soft alabaster whiteness . . ." There was a garden vista and night sky. He conversed with a man whom he recognized as a past acquaintance whom he knew had died. He also found himself reunited with a large assembly of people he'd previously known — now with "physically glorified" countenances.
Pelley decided to go to New York and probe these uncanny occurrences. In Why I Believe The Dead Are Alive, Pelley recalled hearing his "first clairaudient voice" on the morning before his trip east when he was told to give up smoking.
Another experience on the train trip to New York is guardedly mentioned by Pelley. While reading Emerson's "Over-Soul," Pelley described a "great flood of Revelation" yet what the Voice said on this occasion he avowed "to keep permanently to myself." His conclusion was: "Particularly I knew of the reality of that Entity whom the world now knows as Jesus of Nazareth!"
Pelley disclosed that when he returned to his own berth on the train, he had an entirely new concept of his future and observed: "This sounds, I know, like a Messianic complex." In New York, he contacted a lady friend whom he knew was involved with psychical research and through her he was introduced to automatic writing. Pelley noted: "I might say that I carefully preserved every scrap of paper, and for years have taken care of every word of Intelligence which has Come Over thus—or in any sitting at which I have been present—transcribing it carefully and filing it for future reference." Some of these early messages include:
"There is in all the universe no force but that of Love. All hatred, all evil and all ugliness, are merely the absence of the positive pole, which is Love. Many of the evils, so called, are not even the result of the absence of this force but are the result of its operation on a plane beyond your limited comprehension."
"We are not working for the material benefit of those who serve us except as that material benefit will free them for wider and finer service."
"So Art is to each man the highest good he is able to conceive, and the deepest beauty he is able to perceive, in whatever aspect of Man, Nature or God he is at the moment contemplating."
"Only remember, . . . that there may be Art in the simplest act of the humblest creature's day.
"Art is spirit, and they that worship her must worship her in spirit and in truth. Many of the greatest artists have known the truth and shut their hearts to her because the price was too heavy to pay.
"They did not know that all the price was the relinquishing of the bonds of limitation, and that only in paying the price could they taste the very joys for which they refused it!"
Pelley explained, "Over a period of 26 years I continued to receive these papers, and my original purpose in founding a publishing house was to reprint the most interesting and vital of them." He provided anecdotes where the penmanship of automatic writing was recognized to be that of specific individuals, including his late brother-in-law Ernest. There was also an incident divulged where the automatic writing delivered "irrelevant material," leading Pelley to comment: "Up to this time I was unaware that there were such entities in existence as makers of mischief in the affairs of psychic persons, and that the levels just above mortal life held 'unclean spirits who delight to confuse.'" There were further reflections about the predicament, including:
I assumed, as most people assume when they are convinced of the continuity of life, that anything given from the Unseen Dimensions must necessarily be truthful because of the sources and methods from which it is derived.
Every person who essays to investigate the machinery behind life, must pass through this period and learn the bitter lesson of experience.
I had no one to advise me what to do, what "forces" I was toying with, what parts of the communication I could believe—if any whatever—and what not.
During another sojourn in New York City that the automatic writing messages had directed him to take, Pelley was in a hotel room when he heard a voice instruct him to begin another automatic writing session. "The pencil commenced to write, practically of its own volition, from right to left, and kept on until the script had filled the sheet."
This is the substance of the strangely inverted script —
"You are to become a Mentor in a world of bleak science that is slowly undermining faith in things spiritual, and you will be the means of stopping much of the faithlessness of the present generation by your advice and teaching."
Pelley had to carry the pages to the mirror in order to read them. When instructions didn't turn out in the way he expected, he made an inquiry and the answer related to an "antic-maker" having been involved.
"We, not the antic-maker, arranged that expense-money for you. But the antic-maker cut in with an audible explanation for the trip which you seized on in your subconscious mind, shutting out the true voices of your friends so that no other explanation seemed valid to you. We had to let the matter rest until you discovered the bogus explanation; then we could correct you, as we propose to do now."
". . . your physical condition of your mind may make a wall between us that we cannot penetrate. When this happens, your own subconscious, not wanting you to be disappointed, takes things over. It is then that all sorts of promises are made which seem to be deception on our part."
In California during an automatic writing session, Pelley watched his friend go into a trance and the automatic writing was then accompanied by "a sensation in the room that I can best describe as 'angel wings beating softly.'" The advice presented during this session included "Ask no questions about material affairs; we will be with you in them and if you add to your judgment a sure, calm faith in us, you will find things working out, and when they seem to go astray you will know there is a reason and will trust us . . . But never accept anything wholly unless you know that it is in harmony with the principles we have given you, and your heart speaks for them."
Pelley divulged that it was a semi-audible disembodied voice that had asked him to write the magazine article that became "My Seven Minutes in Eternity." The editor-in-chief of The American Magazine had been so moved by the account that the presses were stopped so that the planned lead article could be replaced with Pelley's. Despite the popularity of the issue, the magazine's editorial staff changed and Pelley noted that the future emphasis was to be on "sports, business articles, typically Americana from the metropolitan viewpoint."
The automatic writing sessions evolved to where Pelley could hear the words spoken to him as they were written backwards on paper.
That it is an independent intellectual force operating externally seems attested as well by the fact that on other occasions I have had this thought Voice speak to me in languages other than English — and ancient biblical Aramaic is the only tongue with which I am familiar outside of English. Six to twelve pages of purest Sanskrit was thus "dictated" or "overheard" one evening later in Manhattan — which on being recorded phonetically was quickly and readily translated by Sanskrit scholars who saw the original.
The voice that Pelley now referred to as "the Friend who had been transmitting the communication" and usage of the pronoun "We" became a customary occurrence. Pelley even described the voice advising him during a conference what to say in order to obtain the best possible price for movie rights to his novel Drag.
Another of the strange episodes recalled in Why I Believe The Dead Are Alive is the voice of the late author Joseph Conrad offering evidence for collaborating with Pelley from the other side to bring forth the novel Golden Rubbish (1929). Sittings with trance medium George Wehner are recounted by Pelley, who provides details of a conversation with Conrad from the other side speaking through Wehner.
I recall that I said to him: "It seems a little bit unfair for you to dictate literary productions for me out of your own fine mind and experience, and by your skilled technique, giving them to me for publication as my own. I feel that in putting out such material over my own signature, I am masquerading under false colors."
Smiling indulgently he answered: "My dear William, you will discover as you go along in this work that such is the procedure. In aiding you I am but paying my debt to others who in my own mortal writing career, aided me. I got all my own books psychically, from another dimension, exactly as every author does, whether he is conscious of it or not. And when you return to us after your own work is completed, you will repay not me, but some other craftsman who needs higher supervision."
"Are you still writing?" I asked him.
"Certainly," he answered.
"What disposition do you make of your writings when done in the higher realms of consciousness?"
"We have great libraries over here," he replied, "whose size and contents your mind could not grasp. We write for people in the higher dimensions exactly as we wrote in life for those in the three-dimensional world. More often we compose, however, for transmission to some mortal author to aid him in his career, although he may accredit our help only in the sense of 'inspiration.'"
"But why were you especially drawn to help me?"
"First, because I had read and admired your work before I made the Transition, and was able to get close to your character mentally and spiritually when I had shed the husk of my physical self. Second, and the more important, I am interested in you for the greater work of spiritual revelation which you are attempting."
Pelley was also greeted by Hollywood scenarist June Mathis speaking through the entranced Wehner. Prior to her death two years earlier, Pelley had successfully sued Mathis in court for using the title of his first novel for a motion picture.
Looking backward over ten years of the most dramatic of experiences in psychical research, I am forced to assert that no other one incident has since furnished me with more conclusive and irrefutable proof that there is survival after mortal death, than the appearance of this woman in George's physical instrument, and the conversation which consumed the next half-hour between us.
Mathis correctly answered Pelley's question where they had last met in California.
She made intimate statements about her contacts and business associates while in life, and confided data to me about the personal affairs of people in movie-land, that I had to check up on when I was next in California, and which I proved to be absolutely correct!
Incidentally, she confided that she in turn had become a great screen writer while in mortality through having thorough knowledge of psychics. She said that a world-famous movie star, in whose career she assisted, had been clairaudient as I was clairaudient. They had shut themselves away in a Hollywood room together time after time and gotten story material from others in a higher dimension which she had sold to Hollywood producers without the slightest difficulty. All her professional life and affairs were guided by instructions received in this manner.
The author Robert Louis Stevenson also spoke through Wehner's body, telling the group of his "'explorations' on the bottom of the Pacific in the discarnate condition since he had been living in the unobstructed universe." Stevenson was quoted:
"I was not only impressed by the submerged Lemurian cities but by the forms of animal life that exist on the deep floor of the Pacific. For instance, there are worms down there that never have seen the light of day, that measure thirty to a hundred feet in length. They are tremendously scaled, to withstand the water pressure at the depths at which they live. Occasionally a submarine volcano or earthquake precipitates them to the surface, and when they appear at the top of the water, sailors behold them and take tales of 'sea-serpents' into port. But actually they aren't serpents — they're worms!"
Pelley recalled in Why I Believe The Dead are Alive: "By 1930 I had abandoned all further work for the popular American periodicals and was devoting my time the clock around to the zealous compiling of this great mass of erudition from life's higher octaves."
Pelley also described sittings with physical medium Bertie Lilly Candler, who would be entranced as people materialized from the ascended realm to speak with assembled loved ones. At the first Candler sitting attended by Pelley, around twenty-five materializations occurred, including his own maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather. The first person to appear was the young Indian girl who called herself Silverleaf. Pelley had heard about her from his friend George who'd brought him to the gathering.
She was not so much Miss Candler's "control," as her mediumistic companion. Usually Miss Candler's brother, Howard—at whose decease, as aforesaid, she had truly begun her mediumistic work—acted as her control. But Howard did not seem to be with her this night. Silverleaf took charge of the sitting.
The illumination in the room was provided by a small spotlight with a ruby lens focused on the red velours drapes outside the wooden cabinet where the medium sat and slept during the proceedings. Silverleaf appeared around sixteen years old with long braids down each side of a dark pretty face, her shoulders covered by a beaded jacket, and a flowing white skirt billowing down from her belt. Pelley, whom Silverleaf called "Uncle Billy," was astonished when she put her hand on his forearm. "It felt as the hand of any 16-year-old girl would feel." Silverleaf also caught up her right-hand braid and brushed it playfully against his features.
I had expected to feel coarse Indian hair. Instead it was soft as silk and delicately perfumed with lotus. I say that I smelled that beautiful scent and yet I couldn't have done it with nostrils alone, for unknown to many of my friends I lost my sense of smell during a siege of typhoid in Vermont in 1921.
To my astonishment, it seemed that she hadn't done with me, because I sensed her running after me, I felt her hand in the crook of my right elbow, and she playfully whirled me around to face her. I weigh 154 pounds. No ethereal "phantom" grabs hold of a 154-pound man and has strength enough to turn him completely about. As I recall, it was some trivial promise about listening at times for her voice in my clairaudient ear, so that having thus met her I could identify her, that caused the whirligig.
Finally she said that she had to go back into the cabinet and help "build up the ray" for others. I asked, "What ray?" "The materializing ray," she answered.
When Pelley's grandmother appeared, he recognized her when she used his middle name in calling to him as she was the only one who'd addressed him that way when he was a boy. Although she had been an elderly woman when passing in 1912, she now didn't look a day over forty and declared: "The door has been unlocked already."
Pelley later hosted a long series of seances with Candler in Noblesville—where his publishing house Soulcraft Chapels was situated—and other cities in Indiana. At the first sitting in Indianapolis, he described beholding "a great 'snowball' of whitish effluvia beginning to quiver and contort in front of the drapes." It grew and became elongated vertically to oscillate into a young woman who called him "Daddy." His daughter Harriet had died as an infant and grown up on the Higher Side. When she mentioned her uncle Ernest to Pelley, he asked about him and what resulted inspired Pelley to comment —
It was the beginning of a colloquy on family relationships that established beyond all doubt that I had met up again in truth with my long-lost baby girl. It was likewise the beginning of a sixteen-year intimacy in other and greater matters, during which I have watched her grow from a vivacious maiden in her middle twenties to a sedate woman of forty-one. I was to confront her equally vividly time upon time when visiting Mary Beattie at Chesterfield and Anderson, Indiana — the same girl, same Juliette cap and white gown, same characterful profile, same dainty and cultured voice, same personality in every respect.
Harriet asked Pelley to loan his handkerchief to her and after handing it to her, she did something with it that he would never forget.
I handed across the wobbled square of cloth. Standing in the rug's center in plain sight of all guests, she pulled it taut across all four corners. Then grasping it by right and left edges she started a peculiar motion of seeming to throw it away from her. She called it "weaving."
Presently we were thunderstruck to note that the fabric was increasing in size. It was big as a towel. She continued to give it that outward-throwing motion, till it became so wide that she could no longer keep it taut between her hands. Rapidly it was increasing to the size of a bedsheet.
"Harriet, darling, how in the world are you contriving that?" I wanted to know. "I'm increasing the distances—by the powers of thought—between each electron and proton in the linen atoms," she replied. "It's the way, too, that we weave clothing for those of you who come up into Our Side naked when they've quitted their physical bodies for good."
She was commencing to pant from the exertion of it. And the fabric was so sizable and so filmy that if floated and billowed on the still air of the library where twenty spectators about three walls were feeling its gossamer edges against their faces. Suddenly she tossed her clutch of it in the air, darted under it, seized it in its center, and began doing a ballet dance under it — unfortunately without music, but no less graceful for that.
Then she retreated to her original position before me, reversed her efforts, "wove" the gossamer fabric closer and closer to herself — and we watched it diminish in proportions. Back to bedsheet and towel size she worked it, back to the dimensions of a man's everyday handkerchief. Suddenly with a dexterous flip of her fingers she had seized it by opposite corners, twisted it and tied a knot in it. Knotted thus, she tossed it down upon my lap.
Later in the evening when the electric lights were on, I examined the knotted fabric. It was some sort of fourth dimensional knot she had tied. The diagonal handkerchief-corners were inside this knot.
Another association with a person from the ascended realm chronicled by Pelley was the series of contacts with Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. In Why I Believe The Dead are Alive, Pelley wrote: "I have continuous rolls of electronic recording tapes containing the celebrated lady's voice at all sessions of her materialized appearances." At the third of four sittings where Mary Baker Eddy materialized and conversed with Pelley, he quoted her as having stated —
"You must remember this: through the Divine Mind of the Christ there is always a channel open that we can work through. We reach the channel that is opened to bring forth the message."
Pelley wrote that he also communicated with her through the 'Inner Voice' and heard her respond through his 'Inner Ear.' This collaboration resulted with his book Beyond Grandeur (1954). The same year, the revised version of Why I Believe The Dead are Alive was published when Pelley was almost 65 years old.
An influence for Pelley's socio-political aspirations seems to have been a prophetic clairaudient discourse heard in August 1929. In his 1939 autobiography, Pelley prefaces this incident with a reference to Socrates: "Plato tells of Socrates, in his final dialogue with Crito, of 'the oracle within me that ever tells me those things I should not do, without informing me of voluntary actions.' . . . I knew what Plato meant. I felt that I knew of what Socrates was speaking. I too had 'an oracle within me' . . ."
Pelley related that day after day for months he'd relaxed in a chair and dictated thousands of similar pages to Helen Hansmann. One evening what he described as "the voice of the oracle" instructed him, "Prepare to write strange statements." Pelley was urged to acquaint his friends about the upcoming "horrible debacle" in the stock market in October.
Throughout his life Pelley would devote himself to fulfilling prophecies and observed: "The oracle spoke of the mysterious 'German chancellor,' of what some of his lives had been in the past—without ever mentioning his name! . . . of the task he had assumed—to lead all the nations in the world in the cooping of the world's international marplots, even as I was supposed to lead in delineating constructively that better order of human relations to be called the Christian Commonwealth." Pelley regarded himself as called upon to fulfill a divine mission. No detail, however, fully substantiates how Pelley could be convinced that after the stock market crash, as he wrote: "The international Jews were preparing America for Communism and we were mere gnats in that greater diablerie."
Writing his memoirs prior to the culminating horrors of the Holocaust, Pelley bragged: "I was actively at work agitating and exposing the Jewish menace before Hitler was even known throughout his own Fatherland." Occasionally in The Door to Revelation, Pelley revealed that individuals close to him didn't approve of his opinions concerning Jewish people yet he remained unwavering in his rhetoric. When Pelley read that Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor on January 30, 1933, he immediately proclaimed the founding of the Silver Legion. The formation of the Legion's weekly periodical Liberation was stated by Pelley as being inspired by having witnessed an 'optical illusion' of the front page of a publication with that title.
Concerning Pelley's interpretation of the "prophecy" and his plan for a Christian Commonwealth, one contention was: "The thing that I was doing was locating and proving leadership for the country's greater plight years further ahead." Pelley didn't acknowledge any plans for violent reprisals and recognized the difficulty of leading the Silver Shirts, lamenting "volunteer fixers" who "announced themselves as speaking for me, and made the most asinine or dangerous addresses, further confusing and disgusting the public."
"I'm doing the best I can with what I've got to work with," I told myself wearily. "If this apathetic and menaced nation wants to leave it to one man to carry on its war against the looters and despoilers, it's not for me to groan about. So long as I know in my own heart that I'm doing the best I can, I'll have to leave the outcome to Higher Powers than mine."
In his autobiography, Pelley chronicled his response to being investigated by the Federal Congress and being indicted by North Carolina's Buncombe County Grand Jury on thirteen counts of fraud. He attributed his difficulties to "Jewish influences behind the legal machinery of our country as I subsequently encountered it." He recounted that the judge ruled out and negated thirteen of the indictments so three counts involving stock sales were left to be heard by the jury. He was found guilty on two of the charges — for publishing a stock-selling advertisement and advertising stock for sale in an insolvent corporation. Pelley accepted the judge's proposition of paying a fine and court costs totaling $1,700 and be discharged.
On April 4, 1942, several years after publication of his autobiography, Pelley and two employees of his Fellowship Press were charged with 12 counts of sedition under the 1917 Espionage Act. A biography of Pelley by Scott Beekman summarizes the verdict from Indianapolis Star newspaper accounts.
The jury of farmers and small businessmen took three hours to find the defendants guilty. Pelley was found guilty on eleven counts, with Brown and Henderson guilty of one count, and the Fellowship Press guilty as a vehicle of sedition. On August 13 Judge Robert Baltzell sentenced Pelley to fifteen years in prison, Brown to five years, and Henderson to two years suspended, and he fined the Fellowship Press $5,000. Two days later Pelley entered the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana; he quickly began a futile appeals process.
This photo was selected for the cover of Beekman's book.
Concerning Pelley's parole granted in February 1950 after being imprisoned for seven years and five months, Beekman noted that in the changing political climate at the time American communists had replaced right-wing extremists as the country's leading boogeymen. With the understanding that his political labors were finished as foretold, Pelley dedicated the remainder of his life to metaphysical publications. The purposes of five of his metaphysically themed books were acknowledged in Star Guests . . Design for Mortality (1950). Concerning Behold Life — Design for Liberation (1938) "we had the general preview of why life functions and achieve in mortal form." In Thinking Alive — Design for Creation (1938) "we considered most of the vitalities of Thought as a creative and motivating universality." Regarding Earth Comes — Design for Materialization (1941) "we had the exposition of the integration of the Cosmos and the solar planet on which we find ourselves in particular." In Star Guests — Design for Mortality "we have the first broad foundations laid for the drama of Man as a creature of physical predicament and sensation — that has to be more minutely examined and assimilated in Adam Awakes" (1953). The full title of the latter is Adam Awakes — Design for Romance.
In Star Guests, Pelley commented: "I had my own thinking on the mysteries of Cosmos so altered that I gave over my career to expounding these subjects publicly." He mentioned "occasional phenomena in connection with such transcriptions, the nature of which I can't divulge upon this page . . . I did the obvious and human thing. I took the text as bona fide and governed my thinking and life and career accordingly."
'Star Guests' was one of a variety of expressions used by Pelley to help readers better comprehend Those he also termed "Unseen Friends" and "Subliminal Mentors." Some quotations of "Discarnate Intelligence of some sort" via automatic writing to be found in Star Guests include the following.
In Star Guests, Pelley commented: "I had my own thinking on the mysteries of Cosmos so altered that I gave over my career to expounding these subjects publicly." He mentioned "occasional phenomena in connection with such transcriptions, the nature of which I can't divulge upon this page . . . I did the obvious and human thing. I took the text as bona fide and governed my thinking and life and career accordingly."
'Star Guests' was one of a variety of expressions used by Pelley to help readers better comprehend Those he also termed "Unseen Friends" and "Subliminal Mentors." Some quotations of "Discarnate Intelligence of some sort" via automatic writing to be found in Star Guests include the following.
"We have lived through human limitation ourselves and now we look on from the vantage-point of a world where Time, Space, and Matter are mere figments of speech. We must use your terms when we must reduce Thought to Form, and must seem therefore, for the moment, to have put on something of limitation ourselves. But take heart. You will be amazed at the speed with which you shed limitation, once you have embarked upon that journey that leads you into conscious realization of the Oneness of all life and the creative power of those vibrations that work through rhythm, harmony, and love."
"Humor is another of the essential ingredients of Love. Love is made up of many elements and Humor is its harmonizer — the binding force that holds those elements together."
"We are many," the Sages said, when Mary and I began our session for the sixth succeeding night, "and our Younger Brother is merely the one who helps
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