Enoch Soames: The Man Who Sold His Soul To Spend An Afternoon In The Future
Originally <a href='/showthread.php?p=17272630'>posted</a> on 12/27/2012:
This is classified under the WTF Files Series.
This story starts in 1916 through a short story written and published by Max Beerholm titled "Enoch Soames: A Memory Of The Eighteen-Nineties" in which Beerholm tells of an incident that happened in 1897 involving time travel and pacts with the Devil.
In the book, Beerholm states that he met a struggling poet named Enoch Soames who made a pact with the Devil to spend an afternoon 100 years into the future in the British Museum Reading Room to see what posterity had to say about his life and work as he was certain he was going to achieve fame posthumously. The price of this offer? An eternity in Hell.
"On the afternoon of June 3, 1897, Beerbohm was talking with Soames in a Soho café when a sinister stranger in a scarlet vest interrupted. The stranger introduced himself as the Devil and made an offer. He would transport Soames a hundred years into the future, to visit the Round Reading Room of the British Museum as it would be in 1997. Here Soames could consult the library's all-knowing catalogue and at last be sure of his place in literary history. The price for such a trip: eternity in Hell. Soames accepted. At ten past two on June 3, 1897, Enoch Soames vanished into the future."
Soames returns some hours later looking grim and immediately got drunk. Beerholm asked Soames about his trip prodding him for answers. Soames stated:
"They stared at me, I can tell you.... I think I rather scared them. They moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about at a distance, wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle seemed to have a sort of panic...."
Soames then goes on to tell Beerholm that the only mention of him was a short story by Beerbohm himself "in which he portrayed an imaginary character called Enoch Soames, a third-rate poet who believes himself a great genius and makes a bargain with the Devil in order to know what posterity thinks of him!"
The Devil then arrives to take Soames away.
It sounds like a great fiction story, right? Full of suspense, intrigue, and drama. A person who this story had an effect on was none other than Teller, whom you know as the silent half of the Penn & Teller team. You can see his writings on the subject here: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...nov/teller.htm
He sums up the end of the story and the start of the mystery. Says Teller:
"In other words, anyone in the Round Reading Room of the British Museum at ten past two on June 3, 1997, would be able to verify Beerbohm's memoir, and see an authentic, guaranteed, proven ghost."
He says his English teacher finishes reading the story and says to Teller, "I wonder how many Enoch Soameses will show up?"
Teller then states: "At the time, I thought he was merely musing. Later I understood. He was giving me a homework assignment."
Teller becomes so obsessed with this story that he actually traveled to London to be in the Reading Room on June 3, 1997.
Are you ready for the mind fukk now?
Someone matching Soames' description indeed arrived! Soames' classic description: "His appearance is described as "vague" and leaving little impression, except for his persistent habit of wearing a grey waterproof cape and wearing or carrying a soft black hat."
Chris Jones, writing in Esquire covers the incident and muses on the possibility that Teller staged the whole event, something that Teller has never admitted.
Here is Teller's own words of the event in his Esquire Interview:
As it turned out, there were about a dozen people in the Round Reading Room that afternoon — a dozen people who had been so struck by that short story at some point in their lives, they too had decided to make the trip to London. There was a woman from Malibu named Sally; there was a short, stocky Spanish man; there was a slender woman wearing pale green. And at ten past two, they gasped when they saw a man appear mysteriously out of the stacks, looking confused as he scanned empty catalogs and asked unhelpful librarians about his absence from the files. The man looked just like the Soames of Teller's teenage imagination, "a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair," and he was dressed in precise costume, a soft black hat and a gray waterproof cape. The man did everything Enoch Soames did in Max Beerbohm's short story, floating around the pin-drop-quiet room before he once again disappeared into the shelves.
"For some reason," Sally from Malibu said, "I'm having to fight tears."
As Teller has never actually come forward to admit that he staged this incident, I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. In fact, Teller has this to say about a possible staging of the incident..."Taking credit for it that day would be a terrible thing — a terrible, terrible thing," Teller says. "That's answering the question that you must not answer."
You may be wondering where the mind fukk in the story comes in. Well, I save the best for last of course.
You see, among the many witnesses to the event that day, there was one person who brought a camera...........and took the only known photo of Enoch Soames, the man who sold his sold to the Devil and time-traveled into the future.
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Enoch Soames: The Man Who Sold His Soul To Spend An Afternoon In The Future
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