Disappearance

Los Angeles, haven of the spiritually restless, has a mystery. Its famed and wealthy evangelist, builder and owner of the $1,000,000 Angelus Temple, Mrs. Aimee Semple McPherson, has disappeared. No one can account for her. All that is known is that three weeks ago she entered a beach hotel and reappeared in a bathing suit variously described as dark green or dark blue. She was a well formed woman and attracted many an idle eye. High-piled, unshorn dark hair; full, wide lips a little irregular; unusually white teeth; a generous nose; eager, long-lashed eyes--her description has been so minutely detailed that it is certain she prepared to go in swimming. Her bathing suit had a white edging around the armholes. It was a one-piece suit with the pretense of a short skirt. The trunks came down almost to her knees. Her legs that day were vague. Some reports have her wearing stockings, others none. Her followers--those that pray night and day in the Prayer Tower of her Angelus Temple, those who have seen her in her white nurse's uniform exhorting them, those who have heard her over her KFSG radio station--have been hunting for her incessantly. Most believe her drowned, have crowded to the ocean front off Los Angeles to pray, knees buried in the sands, that their beloved leader be returned them. Divers have searched the ocean floor. Airplanes are still scooting around, pilots looking through the waters from the heights. Last week one such reported a body offshore. It was a big dead fish. A second reported another body. It was a dead seal. Her congregation last week abandoned hope of her living. Many have known her since she, a little Canadian Baptist girl of 17, ran away from home with the evangelistic troupe of Robert Semple.* That was 18 years ago. She became ordained in the Apostolic Church and evangelized on her own account so inspiredly that the June issue of the Bridal Call Foursquare Gospel, her personal magazine, ranks her with those other great evangelists, Moody, Spurgeon, Evan Roberts, William Booth, Gypsy Smith and Billy Sunday. Indeed it considers her greater than these because at only 35 she had created the largest stable congregation in the world.

*He died in China. A year and a half later she married again--Harold McPherson, a California grocer, whom she divorced in 1920. By him she has a 12-year-old son, Rolf McPerson. Last week her other child, 15-year-old Roberta Semple, preached in her mother's absence at Angelus Temple.