I had seen this story appear for a few weeks, and today’s coverage finally ‘rose’ to the level of sharing. Pun fully intended.

I knew Aimee Semple McPherson was famous. I knew she was missing. But thousands of people hoping she’d rise from the sea? Too interesting not to look into further.

Several thousand worshippers had gathered at the beach at Ocean Park, California — the same spot where their leader had disappeared six days earlier. They were following the tides in and out, the paper said, "supplicating the cold, unresponsive waves to give up the leader that had been taken from them."

The waves crashed on. She didn't come.

If you weren't following American religious life in the 1920s, the name might not be instantly familiar. It wasn’t to me. But in 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson was one of the most famous people in the country. She had founded the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles. A church so popular that Hollywood came to watch her sermons. She had her own radio station. Her theatrical, charismatic style of preaching was unlike anything most Americans had ever seen.

She was also 35, twice divorced, and by all accounts completely magnetic.

On May 18th, 1926 she went for a swim at Venice Beach with her secretary. Her secretary came out of the water. Aimee didn't.

By the time this newspaper landed on doorsteps on May 24th, she had been missing for six days. Three airplanes hired by her mother were flying up and down the coast. Deep sea divers had gone in looking for a body. One of her young followers had drowned herself in grief.

And thousands of people were at the water's edge. Praying. Waiting.

The paper described it this way, showing off the skill of 1920’s journalists, and also the dramatic nature of the story:

I kept pulling papers from the weeks that followed because I couldn't leave it there, and wikipedia sucks at context.

Five weeks after she disappeared, Aimee Semple McPherson turned up in a hospital in Douglas, Arizona — exhausted, with worn shoes and a story about being kidnapped by a couple who lured her to their car by asking her to pray for their sick baby. Chloroformed. Held in a desert shack. Escaped by crawling through the desert in the night.

She said nothing would suit her better than for a grand jury to investigate her case.

The grand jury investigated.

Investigators found a telegram that had been sent to her mother three days after the disappearance saying Aimee was alive and safe. The sender was traced to Oakland. Partially identified as Kenneth G. Ormiston, her radio technician. A man who had quietly resigned from the temple months earlier. A married man whose wife had already threatened to sue for divorce, citing his friendship with McPherson.

Ormiston denied everything. Her mother called the telegram a frame-up of "the darkest cast." A witness before the grand jury created a sensation by testifying that he had seen McPherson on the beach — an hour after she claimed to have been kidnapped — and that her mother had asked him to change his story.

A night attendant at a garage in Salinas identified McPherson from photographs as the woman who had been with Ormiston when he drove in on May 29th, eleven days after the disappearance. They had registered at a hotel down the road as Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gibson.

Ormiston denied it. McPherson denied it. Her attorney — and this detail I found buried in the Modesto Bee — died in a car accident before the case went to trial. 👀

Charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence.

The Foursquare Church she founded that year still operates in 150 countries. They stand by her account. She was kidnapped. She escaped. End of story.

The historical record is considerably murkier. The garage attendant's identification. The hotel registration. The telegram from Oakland. The fact that Ormiston's car was traced from Salinas to San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara, always with a woman who wasn't his wife.

I found these stories in hundreds of different newspapers spread across three months of 1926. Each one adding a new detail, each one leaving the central question exactly where it started.

Nobody was ever charged. Nobody ever confessed. The case was never resolved.

I did find one more thing in my search — a recording she made, a sermon called "The Big Bad Wolf," public domain, still available to hear. Whatever else she was, she was magnetic.

Her full story has a very long Wikipedia page. I'm not going to summarize it. What I find interesting was what these specific papers chose to print — and what they chose to leave out. The cutting room floor today has three other stories from May 24th, 1926 that change the mood and give us a laugh.