Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 13, 5/13 by Estelle Roberts
The voice stopped as abruptly as it had begun and in the silence that followed, Red Cloud’s voice was heard quoting the words: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
The fourth member of the quartet was Flight-Lieutenant Bill Castello, D.F.C. On earth he had been a keen racing motorist and his war service covered raids on Germany, occupied France, Libya, Albania, Iraq and Greece. In all he had made over fifty operational sorties and the citation for his D.F.C. spoke of “outstanding skill,
courage and devotion to duty.” When he was posted missing after a raid on Hamburg, his parents visited his air station, where they were handed an envelope marked, “Please post this if I fail to return.” It was a moving little letter of farewell, rounded off with a phrase that was characteristic of the writer – “Keep the Castello flag flying.”
Shortly after he had been shot down, Mrs. Castello, who was evidently a natural psychic, saw him walk into her room at home and sit in a chair opposite her. It was her first experience of psychic phenomena and not unnaturally she was greatly impressed.
Her husband, she knew, had no time for the “indulgence of such fancies,” and so she sought out a friend who, though Mrs. Castello did not know it at the time, had long been interested in Spiritualism. The friend listened to her story and then came to see me.
Bill Castello must have been very determined to make contact with his parents because as the friends entered my room, he came in with her. I described him closely to her and said: “He says his mother came to see you because she saw him sitting opposite her in their home.”
Before she left that day, the friend had made an appointment for me to receive Mrs. Castello on the following week. In the event, however, it was not Mrs. Castello who presented herself at my home but her husband, Colonel Castello. From his watchful and guarded behaviour I guessed that he was not a willing substitute.
He told me he had agreed to come at his wife’s insistence only because she had been unexpectedly taken to hospital for an emergency operation. He placed in my hand the pen with which his son had written his last letter and silently dared me to do my worst.
Unconcerned, I took the pen and I was immediately conscious of its strong emanations. I told Colonel Castello: “You have your son’s diary in your possession. Pressed between its pages is a flower. If you examine the diary entries on the pages on either side of the flower, you will find they refer to when your son was stationed in Greece. He says the flower was given to him by an old woman one day when he was admiring some gardens near the Acropolis.
“Your son was a keen amateur mechanic. When war was declared he was engaged in building a sports car, to his own design, from parts he had bought from a great variety of sources. He says that without any blueprint to work to, these parts are of little value. You must find the Red-Covered notebook in which his plans for assembling the car are set out in detail.”