The woman who became America’s most famous preacher and then disappeared

Wearing a white dress with a blue cape and carrying roses, Aimee Semple McPherson walked to the microphone, smiled, greeted, and blessed her congregation. With her reddish hair and large, expressive eyes, she was beautiful, gifted, and loved by thousands of worshipful followers.

“I gazed in breathless admiration at the copper-haired, white-clad angel on the platform above me,” her daughter, Roberta, remembered. “Mother’s arms were outstretched as she blessed the humble congregation, her face aglow with some mystical inner light, her voice vibrating joyously alive … ”

McPherson, one of the early Pentecostal preachers, triggered the phenomenal growth of the religion, which started in America in the early 1900s. By the 21st century, one-fourth of the world’s Christians were Pentecostals. As Claire Hoffman explains in

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