My Search for the Ghost of Flight 401 by Elizabeth Fuller

 

Working on my new book My Unexpected Path of Spiritual Discovery has induced me to reflect about some other contemporary autobiographical accounts of unusual spiritual journeys.

A variety of extraordinary events in the life of Elizabeth Fuller are chronicled in My Search for the Ghost of Flight 401 (1978).

She met her future husband John G. Fuller when she was a stewardess who agreed to work as his part-time research assistant "tracing how a jet-age ghost legend began."  At the time, John had written several books about unexplained phenomena including Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife (1974) and Incident at Exeter (1966).

"We were researching an alleged story of an Eastern Airlines flight engineer, Don Repo, who had been killed in a 1972 crash in the Everglades.  Several months later, crew members and even passengers reported seeing an apparition of the dead flight engineer.  The deceased crewman would appear on an L-1011 Whisperliner, a sister ship of the crashed airplane.  In several cases the alleged apparition was supposed to have warned that something dangerous was going to happen to the plane.  Senior pilots, cabin attendants, and passengers claimed to have had firsthand encounters with the ghost."

Elizabeth's book followed her husband's The Ghost of Flight 401 (1976): "My rule during the writing of this book is to print everything that happened exactly as it happened."  When she participated in a séance circle, she found herself calling out names of people who were later discovered to be related to the crash of Eastern's Flight 401.

Another remarkable incident was an encounter with Uri Geller in his New York City livingroom-office.  After Elizabeth watched her cockpit key curl, Geller left the room.  Moments later, she plucked her gold cross out from under her blouse and then saw it bend to a 45-degree angle.

After witnessing diverse psychic phenomena, Elizabeth and John discussed their predicament.   She wondered if meeting him on a flight to Edmonton wasn't an accident: "Maybe, just maybe," I said, "a force greater than the two of us arranged this . . ."

Her second book Poor Elizabeth's Almanac (1980) continued to record uncanny incidents pertaining to her "psychic development," including automatic writing of proverbs reminiscent of Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac.

Elizabeth Fuller's other books include The Touch of Grace (1986), Me and Jezebel: When Bette Davis Came for Dinner and Stayed . . . (1992) and When You See the Emu in the Sky: My Journey of Self-Discovery in the Outback (1997).

The nonfiction books of John G. Fuller also include The Airmen Who Would Not Die (1979) and The Ghost of 29 Megacycles (1985).