At her father's death, Theodate's inherited money. Although she had already made a large gift in 1906 to benefit psychical research in the United States, and had become in 1907 a founder of the newly reconstituted American Society for Psychical Research with a gift of $5,000, she increased her participation in the ASPR both financially and actively after 1913. In memory of her father, who had shown a keen interest in the investigation of psychic phenomena, she donated $8,000, which she meant to continue annually. Part of the initial $8,000 was intended to enable the ASPR to move its office from the quarters of its director, Professor James Hyslop of Columbia University, to a new office in the same building at 15 East 40th Street in which she had her own office. She immediately had one of her draftsmen get to work redesigning the space. The rest of her gift provided a salary for a new recruit meant to assist and eventually succeed Hyslop. Hyslop chose Edwin Friend, a Harvard graduate who had studied classics and Indic philology, and who, after pursuing further studies in Berlin and then teaching at Princeton, had returned to Harvard to obtain his final degree in philosophy.¹

Theodate's relationship with the ASPR and Hyslop began to unravel when she appropriated Friend and his wife for herself, housing them in a farmhouse on the Hill-Stead estate. With Theodate's intervention, Friend took over the editorship of the Journal of the ASPR, a function he could perform in Farmington. However, instead of publishing material sent to him by Hyslop, Friend wrote articles about séances held in Farmington where his wife produced automatic writing in communication with deceased members of the psychical organization.² Having lost control over his assistant, Hyslop took back the editorship, thus firing Theodate's short fuse. Friend resigned and so did Theodate from the board of directors, but not without a daringly ambitious idea. She and Friend would form a new American psychical organization. Seeking the approbation of the English SPR and willing to brave German threats, she set sail on May 1, 1915, on the Lusitania with her maid and Edwin Friend, who had left his pregnant wife at home.

The German warning that ships in waters adjacent to the British Isles were considered targets for destruction appeared in the New York Tribune and the New York Sun only on the day of sailing, and then as small notices below the Cunard sailing schedule. Still, some passengers canceled their reservations. With an air of apprehension, the rest entered this "floating palace" lavishly decorated according to eighteenth-century taste with tapestries, Louis XVI furniture, and panels painted after Boucher. That reporters were told the Lusitania was the fastest ship on the Atlantic, able to out-sail any German submarine, was not very comforting. And no one knew, except for a few high-ranking officials, that the Lusitania was carrying a secret cargo of arms, gun powder, and explosives.

When the unescorted ship entered the war zone off the coast of southern Ireland, a German submarine lay in wait. In the early afternoon of May 7th, a lone torpedo made a direct hit, blowing up the munitions in the starboard bow. The ship listed sideways, water pouring through the portholes, before nosing towards the bottom some twenty minutes later. Babies were placed in wicker baskets to which life preservers had been all too hastily attached. Theodate refused Friend's suggestion to enter a lifeboat with other women, which, as it turned out, was no guarantee of salvation. Because of the list, many lifeboats were dashed against the side of the ship, spilling their passengers into a sea which had been heretofore peacefully calm.³ Theodate, her maid, and Edwin Friend donned life belts and jumped overboard. Theodate found herself trapped underwater between the decks. Thinking that she was about to drown, her last thoughts were of her mother, friends, and the buildings she had designed; and she hoped that she had "made good." She was struck unconscious by a blow to her head and rose to the surface, which she described as a "watery inferno" where she was "jostled by hundreds of frantic, screaming, shouting humans," and where a man, "insane with fright," was clinging to her shoulders. His weight dragged her below the surface and she lost consciousness again. When a rescue ship arrived, Theodate was the last to be pulled out of the water - with boat hooks - and she was laid on the deck with the dead, her body so stiff with salt water that it was like "a sack of cement." Luckily she was singled out for resuscitation.⁴ For someone absorbed by the possibility of life after death, this experience must have seemed like a journey into hell and back. Mary Cassatt wrote to Theodate, "If you were saved it is because you have still something to do in this world. As long as we live, we do not know to what usage's we are to be put."⁵ 1,198 passengers drowned, among them Theodate's maid and Edwin Friend.⁶

Her friends rallied round her as she recuperated slowly, first in Ireland and then in London at the Hyde Park Hotel. These included Henry James. Although she had arranged a delightful stay at for him at Hill-Stead in the early summer of 1911, he had, just the same, chastised her severely by letter in 1912 for setting up a séance to commune with his deceased brother William. Now he visited her daily, sitting patiently at the foot of her bed, "like a mezzotint," she remembered later.⁷ Towards the end of May she and James motored to Hampton Court and Richmond Park where the chestnut trees were a blaze of white candlelike blossoms. Several days later they ventured to St. Albans Cathedral with its massive fourteenth-century abbey gatehouse. Was this a casual outing or was she seeking inspiration for her new project?