L. Ron Hubbard's secret, lethal book

Before he wrote Dianetics, back when L. Ron Hubbard was a broke and struggling writer, he pounded out a book in 1938 titled Excalibur. By all accounts, the novel is a sort of preliminary report that led into the basis of Scientology. It shows Hubbard working out all of his core concepts that would build into Dianetics.

And it made people commit suicide.

While speaking at a science fiction convention in 1948, Hubbard said that his inspiration for Excalibur came from an eight minute span when he was dead. (Reportedly this was just a hallucination from the nitrous he received during a dental extraction. But regardless of the origin, the experience itself was clearly a powerful one for Hubbard.)

Hubbard received inspiration during his hallucination which he called "a great Message he must impart to others." He believed it would be more important than the Bible, and that it would "revolutionize everything."

Publishers took a pass on Excalibur and it remained unpublished. Hubbard later told people that "whoever read it either went insane or committed suicide." He also said that the last time a publisher gave it to a reader, the reader "came in with the manuscript, threw it on the table, and threw himself out of the skyscraper window."

The legend of Hubbard's Excalibur is so powerful that even today, Scientology keeps the book under wraps. At one point they offered locked, gold-bound copies of the book for a sum equivalent to $29,000 in today's dollars. In advertising the book, they claimed that "four of the fifteen people who read it went insane."

It raises the question, what could possibly be in this book to make it so powerful? That's assuming we take the legend at face value, and not an embittered author's attempt to lionize one of his early failures, of course.

Image courtesy Flickr/pyrogenic