Love Shack, Baby
Ninety-nine years later, the mystery surrounding the identity of Miss X remains unsolved
The love shack is a little old place where
We can get together. — The B-52s
The mysterious couple slipped quietly into the rented bungalow on Scenic Drive near Ocean Avenue before dawn on May 19, 1926. The gentleman had identified himself to the property manager as George McIntire. He said he and his invalid wife would be staying for several months.
Even in bohemian Carmel, the peculiar couple drew neighborhood curiosity, mainly due to Mrs. McIntyre’s efforts to avoid notice. She mostly remained secluded inside the stucco home that had the look of a small fortress. When Carmelites did manage to catch a glimpse of her, she was half hidden behind dark goggles and a hat that partially covered her face, adding to her mystique.
Her furtive demeanor led to much speculation in Carmel. Was she actually George McIntire’s wife? A mistress? Not that it was anybody’s business, but still …
Eventually, the odd woman of uncertain identity would become known as “Miss X.”
The couple departed suddenly after 10 days, though George McIntyre had already paid three full months of rent. He needed to get his wife to New York as quickly as possible, he told the property manager, Daisy Bostick, because Mrs. McIntyre’s sick mother had taken a turn for the worse.
Several days later, newspapers across the country carried banner front-page headlines declaring that the country’s most famous evangelical preacher, Aimee Semple McPherson, had miraculously reappeared in the Arizona desert after she had presumably drowned off a Southern California beach on May 18.
News of the flamboyant minister’s apparent death had gripped the country for several weeks, and her sudden reemergence was a stunning turn of events. Everybody knew Aimee Semple McPherson, so this was huge news. Headline writers could refer to her simply as Aimee, and readers knew exactly who they meant.
Aimee was a charismatic one-woman public relations machine for Jesus Christ. She is credited with establishing one of America’s first-ever megachurches, Angelus Temple, a massive campus in a Los Angeles neighborhood. She promoted herself as a healer and a revivalist, and services at Angelus Temple had the high-production drama of a three-ring circus.
Aimee filled her 5,000-seat Jesus arena each day with fire-and-brimstone sermons about the wretched temptations and debauchery of modern life. Every service was an extravaganza, with a full brass band, a 14-piece orchestra and a 100-person choir. Volunteer congregants staffed something called the Miracle Room, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In shifts, Miracle Room volunteers prayed for the hobbled and the infirm; the hallways were littered with medical devices allegedly cast off by those who had been healed.
Righteous sanctimony might have been her stock in trade, but Aimee’s personal life was a hot mess. She was often a central figure in the occasional high-profile scandal, legal entanglement or family drama that consumed the public’s attention in the 1920s and 30s. She was a strident soldier of Christ with a supporting cast of true believers, ex-husbands, and a scheming mother who served as her business agent. Aimee’s difficulties were plastered all over the front pages of America’s newspapers.
“Women evangelists are not unknown, but they are rather rare,” according to a deep-dive biography published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which described the phenomenon of Aimee Semple McPherson soon after she vanished from the Southern California beach. “A woman evangelist who had two husbands, and has been divorced from the second, who charged her with desertion, and then in six years accumulated a following which enabled her to build a ‘temple’ covering a whole city block, to establish her own broadcasting station, to publish a magazine with an alleged circulation of 20,000, to attract attention throughout half the United States, is something else.”
Aimee had her critics. Of course she did. One rival revivalist once called her a “20th Century Jezebel” who was “as dangerous as a man who goes to the schoolhouse to sell poisoned candy.” Aimee’s personal life exposed a certain hypocrisy. She had a knack for answering her critics with spiritual gaslighting and self-righteous inanities that delighted her cultish fans and gobsmacked her detractors.
In the days following her “drowning,” Aimee’s fans gathered by the hundreds for prayerful vigils along the Santa Monica shoreline. And on the Sunday following her disappearance, thousands of brothers and sisters in Christ descended upon the beach with the certain expectation that Sister Aimee would rise from the dead and pull herself from the depths of the Pacific.
“A miracle of God is at hand,” her bodyguard told reporters. It would be the next best thing to The Rapture. (Alas, it didn’t happen.)
Normal folks were more skeptical of Aimee’s antics. In the alleged “drowning,” they assumed that Aimee had manufactured yet another dumb stunt to fool the rubes and dimwits who had been falling for her dumb stunts for years.
Sure enough, Aimee did suddenly emerge — alive! — on June 23, but not from the deep blue sea. Instead, she presented herself to startled residents in Douglas, Ariz., of all places. From a hospital bed there, she spun a wild tale about her escape from kidnappers who had snatched her from the beach and held her hostage in the Sonoran Desert, in a shed across the Mexican border near Agua Prieta. By the grace of God, she managed to escape and treked through the desert until she reached Douglas.
It was a miracle.
Or was it?
Authorities thought the whole thing sounded fishy. The Los Angeles District Attorney insinuated that Aimee’s story was full of holes. Even before she turned up in Douglas, several citizens from Carmel started to wonder aloud if the mysterious woman they had seen in town might be the missing evangelist.
Pacific Grove’s daily newspaper, The Morning Review, reported persistent rumors that a woman fitting Aimee’s description had been seen in Carmel.
It wasn’t long before the stuccoed “love nest” on Scenic Drive became the epicenter of yet another Aimee Scandal, while a handful of Carmel residents enjoyed brief fame for delivering testimony during a sensational legal proceeding in a Los Angeles courtroom.
Just a love nest, cozy with charm,
Like a dove nest, down on the farm — Doris Day (Otto A. Harbach & Louis Hirsch, songwriters)
It didn’t take long for the gossip in Carmel to filter down to Los Angeles County. District Attorney Asa Keyes sent one of his assistants, Joseph Ryan, to the quiet little town to follow the rumor trail.
Ryan spent a day or two in Carmel, armed with mug shots of Aimee and a fellow named Kenneth Ormiston. Ormiston had been the Angelus Temple’s “radio operator,” the fellow who produced Aimee’s radio broadcasts. Ryan showed the mug shots to Daisy Bostick and a couple of dozen other locals.
Take a close look. Do you recognize this man?
Looks like Mr. McIntyre to me.
How about this woman?
Can’t tell for sure, but maybe it’s Mr. McIntyre’s wife.
Ryan returned to L.A. with evidence he presented to a grand jury. Soon after, the kidnapping investigation turned into a potential perjury prosecution against Aimee Semple McPherson and Kenneth Ormiston. Prosecutors surmised that the two were lovers who cooked up the abduction story to avoid public scandal.
The District Attorney was convinced that Aimee had involved several others within her inner circle in a conspiracy to falsely validate her perjured reports. In a statement to the press, Asa Keyes said “there has been the tainted atmosphere of a gigantic hoax” surrounding Aimee’s alleged kidnapping. He charged Aimee and others with conspiracy to defeat justice and to manufacture evidence.
Newspapers across the country fueled their readers’ insatiable appetite about Aimee’s misadventures with daily stories about the sensational twists, turns, speculations and conspiracies that followed the trial. Ormiston went on the lam, leaving California for parts unknown, refusing to return to California to face charges. A blind attorney that Aimee had hired to track down her alleged kidnappers died, mysteriously, only days before he was supposed to announce whodunit. A woman told authorities she had accepted several hundred dollars from Aimee to say that she was “Miss X,” the mysterious woman seen in Carmel.
In her public statements, Aimee claimed she was the victim, that powerful people were out to get her. Shameless, she also used the opportunity to solicit $1,000 donations to fund her defense, which she called the Fight the Devil Fund. “My enemies will never rest until my tongue is stilled and my temple is in ruins,” she declared. “Those who want to see the truth prevail must come to our defense.”
Through it all, the love shack on Scenic Drive near Ocean Avenue became a draw for tourists. Photos of the bungalow and its owner, H.C. Benedict, were published in newspapers from New York City to Los Angeles.
Benedict was summoned to Los Angeles to testify at the preliminary hearing. So were Daisy Bostick, the real estate representative; Jennette Parkes, who lived next door to the bungalow; Ralph Swanson, who delivered groceries to the house; Ernest Rankert, who unloaded firewood at the home. Also making a cameo appearance at the proceedings was Monterey County Judge J.A. Bardin, who testified that he had accepted a signed affidavit from someone claiming (falsely) to be Miss X.
It was all great entertainment, of course, and most of the newspapers in Monterey County eagerly published every wire story they could find about Aimee.
Curiously, the Carmel Pine Cone seemed to consciously avoid mention of the scandal in its own backyard. At the time, the weekly newspaper was mostly concerned with the arts and culture of the small town. It wouldn’t deign to publish sensationalistic yellow journalism, consciously avoiding the plebian tastes of the sordid lower classes … until it couldn’t.
In one brief story, the Pine Cone noted that several local citizens were en route to Los Angeles to testify in the case. Inside, the editor penned an unsigned but on-brand and hilariously supercilious editorial about the entire mess.
“Carmel, the delightful village, the sina qua non for many, the place of hearthstones versed in discussions of philosophy, art, literature and coal oil stoves, comes to time with the verve that is distinctly American and one hundred percent bred in the bones of a nation of newspaper readers, when Aimee arrives at the fore. The crossroads of Ocean avenue and San Carlos are of a sudden the same as the crossroads of all other small towns. The common level is attained by an almost unanimous consent. Aimee is on every hearthstone, the most cherished figure in the gossip of the follies of 1926, lovely, pathetic, ridiculous, dogmatic, flamboyant, human Aimee, the woman who above all others on the Pacific Coast knows how much the late, great Barnum was right.”
The primary concern for Carmel residents, according to the Pine Cone, is that Aimee had brought “dubious fame” to Carmel that “may bring an increase in population, providing quantity rather than quality.”
Bang bang bang on the door, baby. — The B-52s
The preliminary hearing against Aimee and her co-conspirators dragged on for several months, interrupted incessantly by a lot of screwy procedural issues and extravagant drama that involved swooning defendants who wept openly and often in the courtroom or who professed illnesses that delayed testimony. The case was also hampered by witnesses who recanted what they had already claimed in court. Other witnesses simply disappeared.
The witnesses from Carmel made a splash with their testimony, though not all of them could declare under oath that the Miss X they had seen in the bungalow was definitively the Aimee Semple McPherson sitting at the defendant’s table.
Finally, on Jan. 10, 1927, District Attorney Asa Keyes announced he was dropping all charges against Aimee and all associated parties.
Was Aimee Semple McPherson holed up in the Carmel love shack with her side piece? Or had she actually been abducted by kidnappers who were never identified and never prosecuted? Ninety-nine years later, the mystery remains.
“Years of investigation and interrogation failed to definitively solve the mystery of McPherson’s vanishing,” according to The New Yorker, in its April 14, 2025, recap of a recent book by journalist Claire Hoffman called “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson,”
According to The New Yorker, Aimee had “made no confession before she died—in the fall of 1944, of an apparently accidental overdose of sleeping pills—and she doesn’t seem to have availed herself of the afterlife to clarify what happened in Carmel-by-the-Sea, or anywhere else.” And Hoffman was unable to uncover the truth, despite her thorough investigation.
Note: L.A. District Attorney Asa Keyes would later spend years in San Quentin Prison for taking bribes in a case not involving Aimee. The last thing Keyes said before we walked through the prison gates was: “What is life? We have an hour of consciousness and then we are gone.”
Sources:
Time Magazine
The New Yorker
The Carmel Pine Cone
The Pacific Grove Daily Review
The New York Times
The Monterey Peninsula Herald
The San Francisco Examiner
International Newsreel photos
The Los Angeles Evening Express
The Los Angeles Times
The Oakland Post Enquirer
The Pasadena Star News
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
The Foursquare Church
“Aimee Semple McPherson Recordings,” Internet Archives
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