Sister Aimee Vanishes

Aimee Semple McPherson preaches, 1938

(Los Angeles Examiner, Regional History Collection)

Eighty years ago today, on May 18, 1926, one of the most prominent religious figures in America disappeared without a trace.

The pioneering 35-year-old evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanished while swimming off the beach in Venice, California. Out of the ensuing medley of scandal, religion, and ballyhoo was born a mystery that endures to this day.

McPherson’s presumed drowning set off paroxysms of grief in her followers. Thousands waited by the surf. Newspapers issued extra editions. Her already considerable fame mushroomed. Her body was not found.

Gossip flew. She had been murdered by the underworld for converting petty criminals. She had snuck off to a love nest with a married man. The whole thing was a publicity hoax. None of the rumors could match the “truth,” which would emerge 36 days later.

Ever since the founding fathers turned the new nation away from tax-supported religious institutions, America had enjoyed a religious free market that allowed anyone with a vision and a robust set of vocal chords to start his or her own sect. Evangelical enthusiasm had swept the country in periodic waves.

Christian fundamentalism was the trend that dominated the early decades of the twentieth century, with the Pentecostal movement holding down one flank. In addition to Biblical literalism and an emotional conversion experience, Pentecostals added a doctrine of a second birth in the spirit, which manifested itself in gifts that included speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy.

Aimee Kennedy was born in 1890 in rural Ontario, her mother an ardent enlistee in the Salvation Army. The bright and energetic girl fell in love at age 17 with Robert Semple, an early proselytizer of the Pentecostal message. They married and sailed off on a mission to China, where Semple promptly died. Aimee returned with her daughter and married Harold McPherson, with whom she had a son.

The dynamic Aimee could not settle down, and her second marriage soon faltered. Drawn to preach, she went on the road in 1918 at age 28 with her mother Minnie and two small children in a “Gospel car.” Strong, statuesque, and striking, she began to offer tent revivals across the United States. “Everyone who saw her was curious,” her biographer Daniel Epstein wrote. “Everyone who heard her voice was moved.”

Female preachers were a controversial novelty at the time. Nor did McPherson follow in the shoes of fire-breathers like Billy Sunday. “One can do more with the bait of love than with the club of bombastic preaching,” she declared. She accentuated the positive, even cracking jokes from the pulpit.

She knew that delivering God’s message required relentless promotion, and she promoted herself relentlessly. She traveled the streets shouting through a megaphone. She dressed up in costumes and turned her sermons into theatrical performances. By 1920 she was famous.

Part of her electric appeal was her ability to heal the sick, the lame, and the blind. The record of the many who walked away from her services healed defies explanation by skeptics. The American Medical Association of San Francisco once sent investigators, and they judged the healing “genuine, beneficial, and wonderful.”

By the 1920s she had decided to settle in Los Angeles, along with the many others who were streaming west to look for a cure, a change of climate, or a fresh start. She campaigned nationwide to raise money for her million-dollar, 5,000-seat Angelus Temple, where she set up shop permanently in 1923. Her services drew enormous crowds, including stars of the budding motion-picture industry who came to study how she mesmerized audiences.

Sister Aimee embraced radio in its earliest days. She was the first woman to be granted a radio license and became the queen of religious broadcasters. Her station, KFSG (Kall Four Square Gospel), sent its signal from an antenna on the temple roof.

Her disappearance created a national sensation. After five anxious weeks, her mother held an elaborate memorial ceremony at the temple. Three days later, on June 23, Aimee walked out of the desert into a Mexican hamlet near Douglas, Arizona.

She had been kidnapped off the beach, she said, by two men and a woman who had chloroformed her and held her for half a million dollars in ransom (Minnie had indeed received a letter demanding this amount, signed by the “Avengers,” but had ignored it amidst a deluge of crank mail). The desperados had transported her to an adobe hut in Mexico and held her prisoner until she saw a chance to cut her bindings on the jagged lid of a can, climb through a window, and trudge for 17 hours across the sands until she reached a town.

The press played the story to the hilt. Obvious contradictions made it even juicier. Her shoes were not scuffed, she was not dehydrated or sunburned, and she was sporting a watch that she had not worn to the beach. An exhaustive hunt for the shack where she had been held proved fruitless. The iron-willed McPherson simply ignored the skeptics and said, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

And she did, in the face of relentless vilification by envious preachers like “Fighting Bob” Shuler, who led the Los Angeles Church Federation, and members of the local chamber of commerce, who viewed her antics as blemishes on civic decorum.

When a grand jury met to investigate the kidnapping, District Attorney Asa Keyes put Aimee herself on trial. He tried to prove that she had spent the time in Carmel, California, living with a former Temple radio engineer with whom she was known to be friendly. The jury indicted no one. Keyes then filed morals and obstruction of justice charges against Aimee and her mother. When a key witness changed her story, he was forced to dismiss the case, leaving it to “the court of public opinion.”

The verdict in that tribunal was equally ambiguous, and the truth remains elusive. Epstein, in his book Sister Aimee, holds out the possibility that if the kidnapping really happened—no one proved that it didn’t—McPherson might have fabricated her story not to cover for an assignation but as a reaction to an unthinkable trauma, presumably meaning rape. The tall tale was “her psyche’s defense against a reality that was worse.”

McPherson emerged from the incident more famous than ever. In an age besotted by celebrity she stood shoulder to shoulder in name recognition with Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh. In 1927 Sinclair Lewis published his scathing satire Elmer Gantry with the oversexed female evangelist Sharon Falconer an obvious allusion to McPherson.

In the years after the disappearance, a series of troubles weighed on Aimee, including a break with her mother, a succession of lawsuits, failed real estate ventures, and another short-lived marriage. But with her characteristic energy, she continued to preach and heal, and during the Depression she organized the largest relief effort in Los Angeles. She died in 1944 from a barbiturate overdose that was ruled accidental. Her funeral was the biggest ever seen in Southern California.

After her death, her International Church of the Foursquare Gospel thrived under the leadership of her son Rolf, and today it claims more than 3.5 million members worldwide. What’s more, her founding of a “megachurch,” her use of radio, her upbeat spiritual message, her knack for marketing, and her instinctive showmanship all found parallels in the revived evangelical fervor that swept the nation later in the century and that remains a formidable component of American religion today.

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).