Dr. Albert Durrant Watson probably didn’t anticipate the flood of derision he would unleash when he began hosting séances at his Toronto home on Euclid Avenue on the evening of January 20, 1918.
Born in Peel County in 1859 and educated at Victoria College in Cobourg and Edinburgh University in Scotland, Watson had been practising medicine in Toronto for three decades when the séances began. In addition to being a renowned physician, Watson wrote poetry, served as a fellow in the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, and was active in the Methodist Church. Watson was also president of the Association for Psychical Research of Canada, an organization that investigated ghosts, clairvoyance, and other out-of-this-world phenomena.
The doctor’s interest in Spiritualism — the practice of conversing with the deceased, usually during a séance led by a medium — wasn’t unusual. Hugely popular in the Victorian era, Spiritualism had enjoyed a renewed surge of interest during World War One. Devastated family members tried to console themselves by reaching out to the spirits of dead sons, fathers, and brothers.
Watson’s séances were so bizarre, however, that they would become widely mocked and earn a putdown from Canada’s most famous writer.
The doctor didn’t conjure any spirits himself. He relied on an acquaintance named Louis Benjamin to serve as the “instrument” for receiving messages from beyond the grave, explained the TorontoStar. Benjamin had known Watson from childhood, when the latter served as the honourary president of a west-end Toronto YMCA and a Bible-class instructor.
Left: Photo from the January 9, 1919, edition of the Toronto Daily Star; ad from the March 26, 1921, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
Benjamin’s Spiritualist bent apparently began around Christmas 1917, when he purchased a Ouija board from a department store more or less as a joke, stated the Star. Once he’d started using the Ouija board, however, Benjamin began to believe it was sending him messages from the Other Side. In his early thirties by this point, Benhamin worked as a travelling salesperson for a surgical-equipment company. He informed Watson of his psychic abilities, and a regular series of séances ensued.
“Born of Hebrew parents, he is something of a mystic,” wrote Watson of his protégé.
Watson approached the first séance in a mood of engaged skepticism. Lying on a couch because he was tired, he watched “without the least expectation of being impressed,” he later recalled.
Seated on the floor, fingers splayed over a Ouija board, Benjamin began relaying messages from an unearthly realm. When séance attendees posed questions to the spirits, Benjamin channelled their responses in a trance-like state. Watson was impressed.
Display from the January 9, 1919, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
“Deep interest and surprise were soon awakened by the unusual and startling originality of the answers to the questions I asked,” he wrote.
Benjamin was “as honest as you or I” and entirely believable, Watson later told the Star.
At future séances, Benjamin sometimes scribbled down ghostly commentary via a process called “automatic writing.” Usually, he stuck to the Ouija board or other means of supernatural communication.
Benjamin showed a flair for connecting with the spirits of historic figures, including Abraham Lincoln, Plato, and Mozart. These celestial celebrities resided in a place with eternally pink skies and enviable weather conditions (no rain, frost, or snow) and had the ability to move about merely by thinking. As conveyed by Benjamin, messages from the dead were delivered in a clunky, pseudo-literary style.
“Listen. Once I said, the Irish are an imaginative race and their home is beside the melancholy ocean … On the pallid crest of time comes healing. So, Ireland, after the eruption, will sail into a harbour of calmer water,” observed former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli during a session on April 28, 1918, with regard to Irish protests against British rule.
“It was explained that while Disraeli was a reincarnation of the soul Spinoza, that soul can speak in the capacity of either of these persons at will,” noted a later account of this séance, referencing 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
On another occasion, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan,” offered insights about eating habits “on the astral planes,” as Watson put it.
There was no farming in the afterlife. Instead, the dead ate chemical-based “proteins,” including a “beef extract made of a synthetic meat product … Fats, too, are made here synthetically. All the equivalents of your richest foods …The distinction between our food and yours is one of vibration,” explained the poet.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle discusses interest in spiritualism
Bizarre as such revelations were, intellectuals such as A.H. Abbott, an associate philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, stood by them. Abbott attended Watson’s ghostly gab sessions and hosted a few at his own residence. The professor told reporters that Watson’s reputation was impeccable and insisted that Benjamin was sincere.
“Scores” of “professors, lawyers” and “eminent men and women all of Canada and the United States” who had attended or heard about the séances also had faith in “the Toronto medium,” noted the July 3, 1919, Ottawa Journal.
Benjamin said his heritage helped hone his psychic abilities.
“It is to my Jewish ancestry that I attribute my intense faith and that is the basis of any accomplishment, especially in spiritual things. To my ancestry, also, I attribute my power of concentration which is also necessary for any mediumship,” he told a Star reporter.
Watson decided to compile the wisdom gathered from the private séances in a book called TheTwentieth Plane: A Psychic Revelation. Published in early 1919, the book featured an admiring profile of Benjamin and trippy details about the spectral world. The book, which exudes a definite psychedelic vibe, included several unlikely exchanges with the dead, some of them cited above.
Needless to say, such mystical musings became fodder for brutal reviews.
Headline from the April 8, 1922, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
“The early part [of this book] deals with more or less personal matters and most of it will cause more laughter than anything else,” sniffed the Toronto Star on January 7, 1919. “A very peculiar feature of the book and one which the ordinary reader will at once consider ludicrous is that it is arranged ‘in harmony with a plan’ prepared by an editorial committee, consisting of Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Robert J. Ingersoll.”
Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery was also a critic, at least in private. While Montgomery had an interest in Spiritualism, she was dubious about Watson’s findings.
“Tonight, I enjoyed the treat of a ‘good read.’ I read The Twentieth Plane, the book which has made such a sensation in Toronto. I was much disappointed in it. It was absolute poppycock — utterly unconvincing … There was a certain enjoyment in the book, though, because it is really exquisitely funny — all the funnier because it is so deadly serious,” wrote Montgomery in her diary on March 29, 1919.
Echoing the Star, Montgomery noted that the séances seemed to attract only the elite of the ethereal world: “There isn’t a single non-famous spirit on [Watson’s] calling list, except his mother. Shakespeare and Plato and Wordsworth and Lincoln, etc., etc. etc. jostle each other for a chance to expound … and all use precisely the same literary style and a very awful one at that. There don’t seem to be any grocers or butchers or carpenters on the Twentieth Plane.”
While Montgomery was amused, others were appalled, and “an uproar of controversy” followed the book’s release, reported the Ottawa Journal.
A few days after The Twentieth Plane was published, Watson was forced to quit teaching a Bible class at his church. Clergy on the Methodist plane found the book too weird for their liking.
Left: Headline from the May 4, 1926, edition of the Globe; portrait of Albert Durrant Watson, author unknown. (Wikimedia)
Watson eventually broke with Benjamin, converted to the Baha’i faith, and became increasingly skeptical about mediums (although he still believed in Spiritualism). He died of heart disease at his home on May 3, 1926.
His obituary in the Globe called him a “well-known physician” and noted his accomplishments, both earthly and otherworldly. Leaving behind a widow and five children, the doctor had also written prodigiously. The Twentieth Plane aside, Watson’s publishing credits included scientific articles, books of poetry, and even a few hymns that made it into the United Church of Canada hymnal.
For his part, Benjamin briefly flourished after the break with Watson, hosting lectures and séances alike. He allegedly communed with the dead son of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when the Sherlock Holmes author and confirmed Spiritualist toured Toronto in May 1922.
Left: Article from the March 14, 1928, edition of the Globe; article from the March 15, 1928, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
Six years later, Benjamin was arrested in the middle of a Windsor séance for “non-support” of his wife. The charge was withdrawn when the couple reconciled, but Benjamin’s star was on the wane. By early 1932, he was living in Illinois (a local newspaper identified him as a “Waukegan psychic and student of astrology”).
In late 1933, the Toronto Star reported that Benjamin’s wife and son hadn’t heard from him in a year and were searching for him. They believed he was still in the U.S. Midwest. Media mentions of Benjamin trail off after that, so it’s unclear whether the Twentieth Plane traveller reconnected with his earthbound family.
Sources
The June 15, 1910, January 11, 1919, and May 4, 1926, editions of the Globe; the January 11, 1919, edition of the Kingston Whig Standard; the January 13 and July 3, 1919, editions of the OttawaJournal; the February 9, 1932, edition of the Republican-Northwestern; the January 7, 8, 9, 29, 1919, April 8, May 17, 1922, April 5, 1924, March 14, March 15, 1928, and December 5, 1933, editions of the Toronto Star.
Books
Bunch, Adam. The Toronto Book of the Dead. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2017.
Rubio, Mary and Elizabeth Waterson, editors. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery – Volume 11: 1920 – 1921. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Watson M.D., Albert Durrant. The Twentieth Plane: A Psychic Revelation. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Company, Publishers, 1919.
Websites
Debra Barr and Walter Meyer zu Erpen, “WATSON, ALBERT DURRANT,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 15, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed October 16, 2024, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/watson_albert_durrant_15E.html
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