On December 18, 1975, George and Kathy Lutz and their three children moved into a six-bedroom Dutch colonial home in Amityville, New York. But soon they were driven out, they claimed, by horrific supernatural forces. Ghosts? A poltergeist? Demons? Let’s take a look, as new claims continue to surface.

The Horror Tale

The Lutzes lasted just twenty-eight days before fleeing the house, reportedly leaving behind their possessions except for a few changes of clothes. Just three weeks later, they were telling an incredible tale.

The Lutzes claimed they had been attacked by sinister forces that ripped open a two-hundred-fifty-pound door, leaving it hanging from one hinge; threw open windows, bent their locks, and wrenched a banister from its fastenings; caused green slime to ooze from a ceiling; slid drawers rapidly back and forth; flipped a crucifix upside down; caused Kathy to levitate off the bed and turned her, briefly, into a wrinkled, toothless, drooling ninety-year-old crone; peered into the house at night with red eyes and left cloven-hooved tracks in the snow outside; infested a room in mid-winter with hundreds of houseflies; moved a four-foot ceramic statue of a lion about the house; produced cold spots and stenches; and caused other ostensibly paranormal phenomena, including speaking in a masculine voice, “Get out!”

These claims were detailed in the book, The Amityville Horror: A True Story, by Jay Anson (1977). However, the tale was a suspicious admixture of phenomena: part traditional haunting, part poltergeist disturbance, part demonic possession, with elements curiously similar to those from the movie The Exorcist thrown in for good measure.

In fact, the story soon began to fall apart, and in time a civil trial yielded evidence that the reputed events were mostly fiction.

‘Poltergeist’ Antics?

Although claims in The Amityville Horror book and movie once seemed to have been laid to rest, in 2013 the case resurfaced again. This time the oldest child of the troubled family, Daniel Lutz, who was nine at the time of the brouhaha, has come forward to claim the essential story was true and that he and his stepfather George had been “possessed.”

A documentary, My Amityville Horror (2013), focuses on Daniel, who revises discredited material. For example, he says that on the day the family moved into the house, while carrying boxes into one room, “there was [sic] probably four- or five-hundred flies.” He says he killed them by swatting them with a newspaper, but that when his mother came the dead flies had disappeared. This leaves one wondering whether he had simply made up the incident. Again Daniel tells how a window smashed down on his hand, causing it to swell to several times its size before it quickly returned to normal. That is, of course, unlikely in the extreme.

In fact, such scenes raise the possibility that many of the alleged incidents—which some have described as “poltergeist” effects—could have been staged or falsely reported by Daniel. For instance, according to The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson (1977, p. 28), Daniel and the other children were suspected by their mother of having blackened a toilet bowl by throwing paint into it.

Daniel Lutz certainly had a motive to play poltergeist. Like other unhappy children who secretly act out their hostility, he was unhappy with his situation and wanted to effect change. Daniel hated his stepfather, calling him “the biggest f---ing a-----e you could ever meet,” and boasted that he was glad he was dead. An ex-Marine, George was, according to Daniel, a violent disciplinarian who beat him. And so he admits, “I started destroying this guy’s world every opportunity that I walked into” and would “just do anything to get him” so that “we could go back home.”

Throughout the documentary, Daniel Lutz retells many of the now-familiar Amityville incidents in elaborate fashion, often claiming things happened to him that were previously attributed to his parents. Distinguished psychologist (and CSI Fellow) Elizabeth Loftus explains on camera how people can fill in gaps in their memory with exaggerations and even outright additions, so as to make things seem more dramatic and interesting. At the end of the video, Daniel is asked by the director if he will take a lie detector test. He refuses. His younger brother and sister do not appear to endorse his claims: they declined to be interviewed for the documentary.

Revelations

Unfortunately for both the possession claim and the poltergeist-mimicking hypothesis, however, there is much better evidence as to what really happened at Amityville: the tale was mostly deliberate fiction. Some of the reported events were simply made up, while others were exaggerations of mundane occurrences.

William Weber—an attorney seeking a new trial for his client, who had murdered his parents and siblings in the Amityville house the previous year—admitted colluding with the Lutzes on a book deal. Weber told the Lutzes, for example, how one murder victim’s body had lain in the room for over eighteen hours, yielding a stench and maggots; the Lutzes subsequently developed this for their demonic tale, using what Weber calls their “creative imagination.” Again, Weber says he showed the couple numerous crime-scene photographs, some of which revealed “black gook” in the toilet bowls, which he attributed to police fingerprint powder. Weber says that he and the Lutzes “created this horror story over many bottles of wine that George Lutz was drinking.” (See Kaplan and Kaplan 1995, 174–86, and Nickell 1995, 122.)

Additional, clear evidence that major events in The Amityville Horror did not occur came from researchers Rick Moran and Peter Jordan (1978) who discovered, for example, that there had been no snowfall at the time the Lutzes allegedly discovered cloven hoof prints in the snow. Other claims were similarly disproved (Kaplan and Kaplan 1995).

Still More Revelations

On three occasions I talked with Barbara Cromarty who, with her husband James, purchased the house after it was given up by the Lutzes. She told me not only that her family had experienced no supernatural occurrences in the house, but that she had evidence the whole affair was a hoax. Subsequently, I recommended that a producer of the then-forthcoming TV series That’s Incredible, who had called for my advice about filming inside the house, should have Mrs. Cromarty point out various discrepancies for close-up viewing. For example, recalling the extensive damage to doors and windows detailed by the Lutzes, she noted that the old hardware—hinges, locks, doorknobs, etc.—was still in place. Upon close inspection one could see that there were no disturbances in the paint and varnish (Nickell 1995).

A transcript of the September 1979 trial of George and Kathy Lutz vs. Paul Hoffman—Hoffman being perhaps the first writer to publish an account of the Amityville happenings—reveals the Lutzes’ admission that virtually everything in The Amityville Horror was pure fiction (Stein 1993, 63). Indeed, Newsday columnist Ed Lowe observes: “It had to have been a setup since Day 1. The day after the Lutzes fled, supposedly in terror, they returned to hold a garage sale—just lots of junk. It was obvious they hadn’t moved in there [the $80,000 house] with anything worth anything.” Lowe added, confirming the findings of other investigators, “And during the entire 28-day ‘siege’ that drove them from the house, they never once called the police” (quoted in Peterson 1982). Lowe should know: His father was the Amityville police chief at the time of the alleged demonic events.

References

Anson, Jay. 1977. The Amityville Horror: A True Story. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Kaplan, Stephen, and Roxanne Salch Kaplan. 1995. The Amityville Horror Conspiracy. Lacyville, PA: Belfrey Books.

Moran, Rick, and Peter Jordan. 1978. The Amityville horror hoax. Fate May: 44–45.

My Amityville Horror. 2013. A Lost Witness Pictures Production, aired on Sundance NOW, March 17.

Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Peterson, Clarence. 1982. Demonologists hellbent on selling ‘Amityville II.’ Chicago Tribune (September 23).

Stein, Gordon, ed. 1993. Encyclopedia of Hoaxes, Detroit: Gale Research.

For its fourth season, the popular television show Monster Fish, on the cable channel National Geographic Wild, asked for my opinion of an old photograph depicting a humongous catfish—one estimated to weigh between 500 and 800 pounds. Was the photo authentic? I flew to Chattanooga to give my opinion for a segment of the episode “Giant Catfish” that aired July 5, 2013. Here is a more detailed presentation.

A Fish Tale

There are different versions—folklore at work—regarding the origins of both the giant fish and the old photo. Some say the picture is genuine, while others insist that it is not.

For example, some accounts hold that the fish was caught in the Tennessee River at the Cerro Gordo community in Hardin County, Tennessee, in 1914. Some say it was landed by the late Joe B. Pitts, the proprietor of Harbour-Pitts Company’s general store, while others insist it was actually taken by Green Bailey, a local fisherman who caught it on a trotline. Another story holds that the giant fish was captured after it was trapped in shallow water during a dry spell; one local historian thinks the picture may date from the 1940s; and so on (Wilson 2003; Cagle 2010).

Photo Analysis

Figure 1. Questioned photograph: real or fake?

A copy of the original photograph (Figure 1) bears (in the upper right corner) a handwritten notation, “Cerro Gordo, Ta[ken?] by Green Bailey / Apr 6th / 1914” and (in the lower left) the initials “E. F. P.,” presumably those of the photographer. That the script is white is consistent with its having been directly penned, probably with india ink, on the photographic negative, a common practice. (See examples in Nickell 2005, 64, 125.)

Immediately one notices that the photo’s ratio of width to height is like that of a picture postcard rather than a standard photograph. Common in the period indicated were what are known to deltiologists (postcard collectors) as “real photo” postcards: black-and-white photos that were not printed on a press but were actually developed onto photographic cardstock having a preprinted postcard back.¹ By 1902, Kodak was selling such prepared cards (Nicholson 1994, 178). Real photos were often made by local or itinerant photographers and so were typically one-of-a-kind or limited-edition prints (although some were commercially made and tended to have typeface captions rather than handwritten ones). Real photos were especially common during the “golden age” of picture postcards, 1898–1918 (Nickell 2003, 105–107; Nickell 2005, 41–43, 56; Willoughby 1992, 68–77; Nicholson 1994, 3, 13, 178).

Looking at the photo image itself, it is quite typical of the postcard genre known as “exaggerations” (Range 1980, 62–63)—a genre now recognized in folklore scholarship as a form of American folk expression representing a “visual twist on the tall tale” (Axelrod and Oster 2000, 184–185). I have a collection of these: examples include a man being attacked by a monster jackrabbit, a workman hauling a single huge bunch of grapes in a wheelbarrow, two great cabbages (or again two titanic oranges) filling a train’s flatcar, a tractor pulling one gargantuan potato, and so on and on. (See Figures 2 and 3.)

Figure 2. “Real photo” postcard of “exaggeration” genre (made by photo montage technique), 1908. (Author’s collection)

Figure 3. Another “real photo” card shows one that did not get away, 1910. (Author’s collection)

But fish are perhaps the most common, no doubt because, as one folklorist observes, “Verbal lore concerning fabulous catches represents a whole category of exaggerated narrative, highly formulaic and entertaining in content, with skeptical reaction from the audience an expected part of the performance” (Brady 1996). To this verbal lore is added the pictorial variety: photos or artworks that often turn into jokelore—funny instances of the one that didn’t get away.

Now, such photographs are typically made by photomontage techniques. The term montage (French for “mounting”) loosely describes any means of making one picture from two or more—as by background projection, collage or “cut montage,” sandwiching (of negatives), and other techniques (Nickell 2005, 120–127). The figure of the man standing atop the wagon and staring at the giant catfish does have a “different” look than other elements in the photo—it is a bit out of focus, for example—and could seem to indicate photomontaging. It could, that is, if there were not additional evidence pointing to authenticity.

Genuine Photo…

As I told the star of Monster Fish, fish biologist Zeb Hogan, the photograph is actually genuine and unretouched. But that doesn’t mean the giant catfish is the real McCoy: the scene the genuine photo depicts has been faked!

Joe Brownlow Pitts of Savannah, Tennessee, speaks with authority: “My daddy had a little wagon that looked like a log wagon. He put the fish—which weighed, I recall, about 85 lbs.—on it. Then my Uncle Frank [Elisha Franklin Pitts (1890–1953)], who was good at photography, cut out a cardboard man that was being used in a clothing advertisement and stuck it on the wagon, along with the fish. He took the picture” (qtd. in “Giant Catfish” 2007). Another source (Cagle 2010) explains that “the wagon, perhaps a quarter or less than the size of a standard wagon, was a freight wagon used to move goods in tight quarters, such as the basement of the Harbour-Pitts Company Store and was pulled by workers, not horses.”

The cutout figure—known to cameramen of the period as a “photographic statuette” (a photo mounted on a rigid base, such as cardboard or plywood, and cut with an appropriate tool such as a mat knife or jigsaw [Fraprie and Woodbury 1896, 90–96])—was, as mentioned, reportedly made from an advertisement. However, another source (Wilson 2003) cites hearsay evidence that the man in the picture was one Warren McConnell. It is possible that photographer Frank Pitts posed him and took his photograph rather than using an advertising figure.² But what is important is that Jay Barker, president of Tennessee’s National Catfish Derby, reportedly had “a copy of another photo of the same man and fish taken from a different angle”—in which “the man is posed exactly the same as he is in the other photo” (Wilson 2003). This would appear to corroborate the use of a “photographic statuette” in staging the scene.

As to the catfish itself, it may well have been caught by Green Bailey “who worked as a gin-man [cotton-gin operator] for Habour-Pitts Company.” He reportedly caught it on a trotline (which would not have been strong enough to hold a 500–800 pound fish!³). Then he “took his catch to the gin where it could be weighed on a cotton scale” (Cagle 2010). Sources say a former bookkeeper for the Pitts store, Rilla Callens, who actually had passed the photo down to her son, agreed Bailey had caught the fish; so did Green Bailey’s sister (Wilson 2003).

Re-Creation

The evidence fully explains the picture as I conclude, and so does photo expert Tom Flynn, a CFI photographer and videographer I consulted, who has expertise in special effects. Tom suggests the staged scene was photographed with a view camera, using a wide aperture and slow-speed film. That the background, especially, is out of focus is consistent with a small object being photographed close up. This effect is often seen when miniature objects are photographed with the intention of making them look larger.

It remained to do a recreation, and for that I flew to Chattanooga. A small wagon was found (on eBay, as I recall), Zeb brought a sizeable catfish in a cooler, and the National Geographic Museum shop provided the excellent cutout picture of Zeb, much smaller than life size. As with the original Frank Pitts photo, the fact that one assumes the wagon and figure are of usual size creates an illusion in which the catfish appears to be huge indeed (Figure 4): larger than life—in fact much, much larger.

Figure 4. Re-creation of the process used for the photo in Figure 1. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

Acknowledgments

In addition to individuals cited in the text, I am grateful to National Geographic’s Drew Pulley and Bailey Frankel, and to CFI’s Libraries Director Tim Binga and librarian Lisa Nolan, as well as to Tom Flynn, and to Ed Beck, my assistant at the time of this investigation.

Notes

1. Although the image in Figure 1 is halftone-screened, the half-toning extends even over damaged areas, showing that it results from copying at some later time (either by a photocopier that screens or from a printed reproduction of the card).

2. Frank Pitts may not have had the capability of making such a big enlargement.

3. I have some experience with trotlines, having often accompanied my late grandfather, Charlie Turner, as he removed catfish from his.

References

Axelrod, Alan, and Harry Oster. 2000. The Penguin Dictionary of American Folklore. New York: Penguin Reference.

Brady, Erika. 1996. Fishing (sport), in Brunvand 1996, 274–275.

Brunvand, Jan Harold, ed. 1996. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing.

Cagle, David. 2010. Statement and copy of original photo from Hardin County, Tennessee, Historical Society, August; provided by National Geographic Television.

Fraprie, Frank R., and Walter E. Woodbury. 1896. Photographic Amusements, 10th ed. Boston: American Photographic Publishing Co., 1931.

Giant Catfish—Some of the World’s Biggest Catfish. 2007. Online at http://www.oodora.com/life-stories/funny-finds/giant-catfish.html; accessed August 30, 2013.

Nicholson, Susan Brown. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Antique Postcards. Radnor, PA: Wallace-Homestead.

Nickell, Joe. 2003. Pen, Ink, and Evidence: A Study of Writing and Writing Materials for the Penman, Collector, and Document Detective. New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press.

———. 2005. Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Range, Thomas E. 1980. The Book of Postcard Collecting. New York: Dutton.

Willoughby, Martin. 1992. A History of Postcards. Secaucus, N.J.: The Wellfleet Press.

Wilson, Taylor. 2003. Something’s fishy in Hardin County. ESPNOutdoors.com (November 11); accessed July 6, 2012.

When a great magazine like National Geographic speaks, the world naturally listens. We were especially glad this is so when—for its March 2015 cover article, “The War on Science”—it cited such attacks as those on climate change, evolution, vaccinations, and genetically altered food, as well as the moon landing. “Thanks, National Geographic,” we said (2015) in our magazine, Skeptical Inquirer.

And yet science—and truth—have since come under attack by an online article that bears the imprimatur of National Geographic. Written by Frank Viviano, the article “Why Shroud of Turin’s Secrets Continue to Elude Science” (2015) is so misleading, so replete with falsehoods, so lacking in basic facts about the notorious “shroud” that it is an affront to the proud name of National Geographic.

It is also a glaring example of how not to approach a controversy. Just as one would not get information about the curvature of the Earth from the Flat Earth Society alone, one should not primarily get “facts” about the Turin cloth from The Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) and other partisans. STURP’s leaders served on the executive council of the Holy Shroud Guild, which is devoted to the “cause” of the reputed relic. Viviano tells us in glowing terms of the “scientific disciplines” covered by STURP, without being aware that it lacked experts in art and forensic chemistry. We shall see presently why this matters, but let’s first look at the shameful portions of the shroud’s history that Viviano shamelessly omits.

Relic or Fraud?

Figure 1. Negative photograph of a rubbing image done by the author using an iron oxide pigment.

When the cloth first appeared in Lirey, France, in the middle of the fourteenth century, its owner could not, or would not, explain how he had acquired the most holy relic in Christendom. In 1389 a bishop reported to Pope Clement VII that it had been used in a faith-healing scam in which persons were hired to feign illness, then, when the cloth was revealed to them, to pretend to have been healed, “so that money might cunningly be wrung” from unsuspecting pilgrims. “Eventually,” he said, after “diligent inquiry and examination,” the “fraud” was uncovered. The cloth had been “cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who painted it” (D’Arcis 1389).

This sordid origin of the supposedly sacred relic is corroborated by much other evidence. According to Jewish burial practices, Jesus’ body would have been washed and covered with burial spices, and the body wound in multiple cloths of plain linen. In contrast, the Shroud of Turin depicts an unwashed “body” without any myrrh and aloes, is a single cloth woven in herringbone pattern (a medieval but not first-century weave), and shows an anachronistic under-and-over draping style.

Moreover, there is no history of this cloth (there have been some forty True Shrouds) prior to its appearance in Lirey, and the image’s elongated forms are those of French gothic art of that period. Iconographic elements also date the image to the middle ages. The radiocarbon date, obtained by three laboratories, was 1260–1390 ce, consistent with the ca. 1355 hoax and forger’s confession. This is what is called corroborative evidence, and there is more.

Blood or Paint?

A secret commission appointed in 1969 to study the shroud examined the “blood” stains, which are suspiciously picturelike and still red. Internationally known forensic serologists reported that the red substance failed all microscopical, chemical, biological, and instrumental tests for blood. Instead, there were reddish granules that would not even dissolve in reagents that dissolve blood.

STURP’s own tape-lifted surface samples were examined by renowned forensic microanalyst Walter C. McCrone. He discovered red ocher pigment making up the image (but not the background, so it was not contamination) and identified the “blood” as tempera paint containing red ocher and vermillion with traces of rose madder—pigments used by medieval artists to depict blood (McCrone 1996; Nickell 2013, 122–124). For his efforts, McCrone was held to a secrecy agreement while statements were made to the press that there was no evidence of artistry. Subsequent claims that the tempera “blood” was genuine have ranged from the incompetent to the disingenuous (Nickell 1998, 143–144, 156–158).

One claim held that there was human DNA in a shroud “blood” sample although the archbishop of Turin and the Vatican refused to authenticate the samples or accept any research carried out on them. Nevertheless, shroud advocates claimed there was human blood on the shroud, while the scientist at the DNA lab, Victor Tryon, told Time magazine that he could not say how old the DNA was or that it came from blood. “Everyone who has ever touched the shroud or cried over the shroud,” he said, “has left a potential DNA signal there.” Tryon resigned from a post-STURP shroud project due to what he disparaged as “zealotry in science” (Van Biema 1998, 61).

It must be remembered that the burden of proof regarding a question of authenticity is on the claimant—not on anyone else to prove a negative. Viviano (2015) seems unaware of this, stating “the sum result is a standoff with researchers unable to dismiss the shroud entirely as a forgery, or prove that it is authentic.”

Imprint, “Photo,” or Portrait?

Viviano has been lured by shroud partisans into thinking that if an exact replica cannot be made then somehow this proves the shroud could be genuine after all. Actually, of course, no artifact—not for instance the hoaxed Cardiff Giant stone figure of 1869—can be precisely duplicated. Shroud partisans claim—or hint strongly—that if the shroud cannot be exactly recreated it suggests a supernatural origin. This is nothing less than the logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance. One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. Yet it is the way “miracle” claims are typically made, in a shrewd attempt to have dogma seem to trump science.

In fact, it is the shroud’s advocates who lack any viable hypothesis for the image formation—although Viviano only cites the notion of some believers that the image was produced by a “divine light,” a miraculous burst of energy at the moment of Jesus’ resurrection. Miracles cannot be demonstrated. We can also rule out simple contact imprinting (which would have caused wraparound distortions) and “vaporography” (since the postulated vapors do not travel in straight lines and so produce blurred images). Researchers have proposed some far-fetched—and unsuccessful—techniques including scorching by hot reliefs and the notion that photography might have been invented in the middle ages (Nickell 1998, 78–140; 2015).

Skeptics have offered several demonstrable methods of producing shroudlike images (see Figure 1), although believers have hastily dismissed these—often on wrong grounds (such as the image areas being too sharply defined when, of course, the replications have not been subjected to 6–7 centuries of handling). More recently, Luigi Garlaschelli, professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, used hypotheses I advanced in my Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (Nickell 1998) to produce a full-size replica of the shroud with the properties of the original. (For example, Garlaschelli’s reproduction has sparse red-ocher pigment confined to the tops of the threads, accompanied by cellulose degradation.) (Nickell 2013, 130–131)

Conclusions

Scholarship and science have proven the Turin “shroud” a fake, from its incompatibility with first century burial cloths and procedures, its lack of historical record, and a bishop’s report that the forger had confessed, to the suspicious-looking “blood” that is really tempera paint, pigments making up the body image, and the radiocarbon dating that confirms the cloth originated at the time of its documented appearance in the fourteenth century—when it was fraudulently claimed to the be Holy Shroud of Christ. Such evidence against any secular object would be considered clear proof of inauthenticity.

Frank Viviano’s article is a disservice to science and unworthy to appear under the respected name National Geographic.

References

D’Arcis, Pierre. 1389. Memorandum to the Avignon Pope, Clement VII, translated from Latin by Rev. Herbert Thurston, reprinted in Wilson 1979, 266–272. (Portions quoted in Nickell 2013, 120–121.)

McCrone, Walter C. 1996. Judgment Day for the Turin Shroud. Chicago: Microscope.

Nickell, Joe. 1998. Inquest on the Shroud of Turin: Latest Scientific Findings. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 2013. The Science of Miracles. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 2015. “CNN’s ‘Finding Jesus’: Disingenuous Look at Turin ‘Shroud.’” March 6. Online at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/cnns_finding_jesus_disingenuous_look_at_turin_shroud.

“Thanks, National Geographic.” 2015. Skeptical Inquirer 39.3 (May/June), 9.

Van Biema, David. 1998. “Science and the Shroud.” Time, April 20, 53–61.

Viviano, Frank. 2015. “Why Shroud of Turin’s Secrets Continue to Elude Science.” Online at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150417-shroud-turin-relics-jesus-catholic-church-religion-science/; accessed April 21, 2015.

Wilson, Ian. 1979. The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ? Rev. ed. Garden City, New York: Image Books.

On April 27, 2014, two former popes—John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli, 1881–1963) and John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla, 1920–2005)—were made saints of the Roman Catholic Church. As such, they are believed to have acquired the supernatural power of intercession with God—that is, they may be prayed to in hopes of receiving some blessing, such as a cure for an illness. But how are saints created?

Making Saints

In the Christian tradition, a saint is someone with exceptional holiness. Before the end of the first century, those martyred for their faith (martys is Greek for “witness”) were likely to be canonized. Over time, not only martyrs but missionaries of the faith, bishops of great zeal, Christian rulers, founders of religious orders, and others were raised to sainthood. Their tombs became pilgrimage sites, their relics believed to be imbued with magical power. (In this light the church has conserved a vial of John Paul II’s blood and a piece of the skin of John XXIII.)

Three elements that came to identify a saint by the fifth century and that would eventually become codified in the canonization process were reputation (particularly as a martyr), legends (telling of exemplary virtue), and miracles (allegedly worked by the saint, especially posthumously) (Woodward 1990, 50–86). There came to be saints who exhibited, supposedly supernaturally, the wounds of Christ (St. Francis of Assisi, ca. 1181–1226, being the first of many), or who allegedly demonstrated such other remarkable powers as the ability to fly (Joseph of Copertino, 1603–1663) (Coulson 1960, 187–188, 276–277). When testimonials were needed to establish miracles for beatification (the first step in the process) or for canonization purposes, the faithful were happy to give them. For example, when the Church wished to certify that Hyacinth (“the Apostle of Poland,” 1185–1257) had indeed walked on the water of the river Vistula, no fewer than 408 persons attested that they were able—centuries later—to see the intended saint’s footprints still remaining on the water (Nickell 2014)!

John Paul II canonized numerous saints and beatified over 1,300 people—more than had all of his predecessors taken together. In 2008, following complaints that the congregation for the causes of saints was becoming a “saint factory,” the Vatican instituted stricter procedures.

Healing Miracles

Today, two miracles are required for canonization (down from three—ironically by order of Pope John Paul II himself). The current preference is for healing miracles—no doubt in part because they are easier to obtain and less likely to involve magic tricks. (For instance, Padre Pìo’s most famous “miracle”—exhibiting the stigmata, for which there is much evidence of trickery—was ignored, in favor of two alleged healings: one for beatification, the other for final canonization [Nickell 2013, 335–340].)

The major criterion for a healing to be classified as a miracle is that, in addition to being instantaneous and permanent, it be “medically inexplicable.” This is an attempt to use negative evidence. Claimants are therefore engaging in a logical fallacy called argumentum ad ignorantiam “an argument from ignorance.” That is, one cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge: “We don’t know why her symptoms went away; therefore, it was a miracle.”

In fact, such cases do have alternate explanations: some illnesses (such as multiple sclerosis) are known to show spontaneous remission. Other “cures” may be attributable to misdiagnosis, psychosomatic conditions, prior medical treatment, the body’s own healing power, and other effects. Some illnesses and their cures may be faked, for a variety of reasons (Nickell 2013, 175–222). It was thus two requisite “medically inexplicable” cures that qualified to make Pope John Paul II a saint. Only one was required for Pope John XXIII, a second being waived (as discussed later). Here we look at each in turn, beginning with John Paul.

Parkinson’s ‘Miracle’

For years before he was diagnosed in 2001, Pope John Paul II had been observed with symptoms of apparent Parkinson’s disease. By 1996, he was unable to walk without the aid of a stick, and he could not control the tremors of his left hand. Media speculation prompted the Vatican to admit that the pope suffered from an “extrapyramidal neurological disorder”—referring to the family of degenerative nervous disorders to which Parkinson’s belongs, without actually using the term itself (“Poperazzi problems” 1996; “Vatican” 2006).

With added knee and hip debilities, the ailing pope visited Lourdes, the French healing shrine, in August 2004. Far from being healed, he struggled through Mass, gasping and trembling. In a rare reference to his own condition, he assured other ill pilgrims that he shared their suffering. Poignant as was that statement, it nevertheless underscored the fact that the claimed healing powers of Lourdes—and of various other shrines he visited, prayers he made, and holy relics he kissed—were ineffective, even for the head of the church that promotes claims of such miracles. He died the following year.

If the proverb “Physician heal thyself” (Luke 4:23) should seem to apply, to the embarrassment of the Church and the pope’s legacy, one can therefore appreciate the irony of a case that seems to vanquish the problem. That is the supposedly instantaneous and permanent cure—from Parkinson’s itself, no less—bestowed on a French nun after she prayed to the late pontiff.

If this sounds too good to be true, it may well be. The nun—who first wished to remain anonymous—was Sister Marie Simon-Pierre Normand, who worked at a hospital in Paris. Beginning in 2001, she and the pope would share a series of remarkable coincidences (if such they were) that would ultimately seem revealing:

Onset. In June 2001, no doubt well aware of speculation that the pope’s tremors indicated Parkinson’s, she was herself diagnosed with the disease. Subsequently, she said, “It was difficult for me to watch John Paul II on television.” Engaging in magical thinking, she added, “However, I felt very close to him in prayer and knew he could understand what I was going through.”

Location. She states that “The disease had affected the whole left side of my body, creating great difficulties for me as I am left-handed.” The location was noteworthy, since, as we have seen, the pope had been observed by 1996 with an uncontrollable tremor in his left hand.

Development. “After three years,” she says (the pope’s diagnosis being acknowledged by the Vatican in 2003) she experienced “an aggravation of the symptoms.”

Worsening Condition. Strikingly, beginning on April 2, 2005—the very day of the pope’s death—her condition “began to worsen” and continued to do so “week by week.”

“Miracle.” Finally, after Pope Benedict XVI initiated the cause to beatify John Paul, and all the nun’s sisters throughout France and Africa began to pray for her to be cured by the late pontiff’s intercession, she suddenly experienced a remission of her symptoms during the night of June 23, 2005, the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Thereupon she stopped taking her medicines (Sister Marie 2011; Pope John Paul II 2014). As she would later tell a reporter, “I am cured, but it is up to the church to say whether it was a miracle or not” (qtd. in Pope John Paul II 2014).

As these continuous parallels suggest, Sister Marie’s reputed Parkinson’s disease seems to have been eerily responsive to John Paul’s. Could it have been a copycat phenomenon? I am not suggesting malingering, but rather conversion disorder (previously called hysteria). This is a neurotic reaction wherein a person’s anxiety is converted unconsciously into any of a great variety of symptoms, including blindness, deafness, muteness, vertigo, paralysis (sometimes affecting only one side of the body), motor symptoms such as tics and tremors, and many, many others. Conversion symptoms may stem from an immature personality, may bring the patient certain benefits such as attention or sympathy, and may be eliminated by suggestion or narcosis (Goldenson 1970, 260–263). I have personally investigated an outbreak of several cases of twitching illness that were diagnosed as conversion disorder (Nickell 2012).

Now, true Parkinson’s disease is a brain disorder that usually afflicts the elderly, being most prevalent among those aged seventy-five to eighty-five (Taber’s 2001, 1519). Its common symptoms include tremors, slow movement, stiffness, cramped handwriting, and other signs. However, it can be difficult to accurately diagnose because there are other conditions with similar symptoms, according to the National Parkinson Foundation (“About Parkinson’s” 2006).

As reported by The Guardian (citing a Polish newspaper), three years after Sister Marie claimed to have been miraculously healed she had relapsed. The paper stated “that the 49-year-old nun had become sick again with the same illness” (Hooper 2010). One of the doctors investigating her case was of the opinion that she had not actually suffered from Parkinson’s, observing that a similar nervous disease could go into remission. Whatever the actual facts of the matter, the nun’s “miracle” claim was ultimately accepted, and in January 2011 Pope John Paul II was beatified. Only one more miracle was required for sainthood.

Aneurysm ‘Miracle’

The second miracle attributed to John Paul’s intercession was also somewhat suspicious in its manifestation: It took place on May 1, 2011, “just after” the actual rite of beatification for the late pope (Pope John Paul II 2014).

The patient was a Costa Rican woman named Floribeth Mora Diaz, who was reportedly healed of a “cerebral fusiform aneurysm.” That is an abnormal, localized dilation of a blood vessel in the brain; fusiform refers to the blood vessel walls dilating approximately equally all around, forming a symmetrically tubular swelling (Taber’s 2001).

Reportedly, in April 2011 Diaz walked into a San Jose hospital complaining of headaches. A neurosurgeon diagnosed an aneurysm, which he felt was inoperable. He sent her home to rest and to take medication for pain. In short order, however, she was healed, according to her doctors. She attributed the “miracle” to her gaze having fallen upon a photograph of John Paul in a newspaper. Later she would say she heard the image speak to her, “Stand up. Don’t be afraid.” She has since abandoned both law studies and work for her family’s security company in order to devote herself exclusively to being the symbol of faith she has become (“Woman allegedly healed” 2014).

While the Associated Press wrote of “the symptoms that she felt brought her to the brink of death three years ago” (“Woman allegedly healed” 2014), Diaz may have had an exaggerated view of her own prognosis at the time. In fact, a cerebral fusiform aneurysm, like she supposedly had, does not usually rupture (“Intracranial aneurysm” 2014). And because high blood pressure is associated with cerebral aneurysms, reducing it (and other associative factors such as smoking, drinking, and using cocaine) may well be therapeutic.

Diaz states that she ignores those who doubt her alleged healing. “Everyone can think what they want,” she told an Associated Press reporter. “What I know is that I am healthy.” Given the paucity of information released about Diaz’s diagnosis, it may be that the “inexplicable” nature of her alleged aneurysm is due to a lack of conclusive evidence for it in the first place. In any event, the argument from medical inexplicability is an “argument from ignorance,” pure and simple.

Stomach ‘Miracle’

A single “miracle” is attributed to Pope John Paul XXIII. A second miracle—usually required for canonization—was waived by Pope Francis, on the basis of John’s having called the historic Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which dramatically changed the church. As with the miracles attributed to John Paul II, the reputed miracle—which occurred in 1966 after an Italian nun suffered unexplained stomach hemorrhages—seemed suspiciously ironic: Pope John had himself died of stomach cancer, despite the church’s healing shrines, relics, and other touted mechanisms.

The nun, Sister Caterina Capitani, was hospitalized and underwent a five-hour operation to remove most of her tumor-studded stomach, along with her pancreas and spleen. Over several days she began to recover but noticed that a fistula (an abnormal opening) had developed on her abdomen, allowing gastric fluid, blood, and a little orange juice she had sipped, to flow out. Later she covered the area with a relic—a piece of the sheet upon which Pope John XXIII had died. Still later, she awakened to a vision of the dead pontiff and found herself healed. She ate ravenously and subsequently returned to a normal life (Allegri 2014).

In fact, Mrs. Capitani, who died in 2010 at age sixty-eight, obviously benefitted from several successful surgeries. It was not a miracle by the deceased Pope John XXIII that removed her stomach tumors; it was medical science. As to the alleged fistula, it may have been nonexistent, a mistaken claim to explain stomach contents that appeared on her abdomen but that may have simply resulted from “a serious crisis of vomiting.” Capitani had a “very high fever” and may have misperceived the situation. She is the source of the second-hand claim, attributed to an unnamed doctor and apparently not otherwise documented (Allegri 2014). Alternately, if it actually existed, the wound had eleven days to heal naturally. Her experience of seeing Pope John standing beside her bed and speaking to her is consistent with a waking dream (which occurs between being fully asleep and awake). As she herself admitted, “I wondered whether it had been a dream” (Allegri 2014).

Conclusions

As these examples demonstrate, there is invariably more to miracle claims than first meets the eye. What is truly objectionable are miraculists’ attempts to trump modern medical science—not only by downplaying science’s role in cures but by choosing remarkable cases so as to emphasize their supposedly “medically inexplicable” nature. No matter how well-intentioned, by attempting to assert superiority over science with supernatural claims and the illogic of arguing from ignorance, one succeeds only in promoting superstition.

References

About Parkinson Disease. 2006. Online at http://www.parkinson.org/site/pp.aspx?c=9dJFJLPwB&b=71125&printmode=1; accessed January 31, 2006.

Allegri, Renzo. 2014. An uncontested miracle. Online at http://www.saintanthonyofpadua.net/messagero/pagina_stampa.asp?R=&ID=80; accessed April 30, 2014.

Coulson, John, ed. 1960. The Saints: A Concise Biographical Dictionary. New York: Hawthorn Books.

Goldenson, Robert M. 1970. The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, vol. 1. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Hooper, John. 2010. Pope’s sainthood setback after “miracle cure” nun reported to be ill again. Online at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/05/nun-cured-pope-parkinsons-ill; accessed April 30, 2014.

Intracranial aneurysm. 2014. Online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_aneurysm; accessed May 5, 2014.

Nickell, Joe. 2012. Neurologic illness or hysteria? A mysterious twitching outbreak. Skeptical Inquirer 36(4) (July/August): 30–33.

———. 2013. The Science of Miracles. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 2014. St. Hyacinth’s miracles. Online at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/st._hyacinths_miracles/; April 18.

Pope John Paul II. 2014. Online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II; accessed May 8, 2014.

Poperazzi problems. 1996. Online at http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/poperazzi-problems-1350450.html; accessed May 27, 2014.

Sister Marie Simon-Pierre on her cure from Parkinson. 2011. Online at http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/sister-marie-simon-pierre-on-her-cure-from-parkinson; accessed April 30, 2014.

Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary. 2001. Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Co.

Vatican hid Pope’s Parkinson disease diagnosis for 12 years. 2006. Online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/1513421/Vatican-hid-Popes-Parkinsons-disease-diagnosis-for-12-years.html; accessed May 27, 2014.

Woman allegedly healed by John Paul II miracle. 2014. Online at http://www.cbsnews.com/news/woman-allegedly-healed-by-john-paul-ii-miracle-hes-already-a-saint/; accessed April 29, 2014.

Woodward, Kenneth L. 1990. Making Saints. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Not since Jesse James, had a bank robber attained such a Robin Hood image. Although there were other “public enemies” of the Depression Era—such as “Pretty Boy Floyd” and “Baby Face” Nelson—John Dillinger had daring and style to spare. But so did a tenacious G-man named Melvin Purvis (Figure 1), an agent so effective and so adored by the public and press that his boss, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover, seethed with jealousy. Hoover—well, I’m getting ahead of a most frightening story in the annals of crime fighting, and I don’t mean the tale of Dillinger’s ghost.

Dillinger

Figure 1. Melvin Purvis, autographed photo to close friend James McLeod, courtesy of McLeod’s daughter Florrie Ervin; copy photo by Joe Nickell.

The biography of John Herbert Dillinger (1903–1934) begins with an endearing story of him at age three, dragging a chair to the side of his mother’s coffin, climbing up, and trying to shake her awake. It is tempered by the account of a moonshine-intoxicated punk of twenty-one, who teamed up with a more seasoned thug and attempted to rob an elderly grocer of his weekend receipts. As they beat the struggling old man, Dillinger’s revolver went off and the pair fled, the accomplice driving off and leaving young Dillinger to fend for himself. Although both were soon arrested, the latter was sentenced to just two years, while Dillinger drew a prison term of ten to twenty years. Freed in 1933, after nine years, he was rearrested while still on parole as the leader of a new band of bank robbers (Girardin 1994, 10–32).

After some of his old prison buddies escaped, they raided the jail in Lima, Ohio, where Dillinger had been lodged, freeing him but accidentally killing the sheriff in the process. Over the next few months the gang committed a series of bold bank heists, although probably not the more than thirty credited to them. Then, in January 1934, police in Tucson, Arizona, arrested Dillinger and most of his gang. Sent to an “escape-proof” jail in Indiana, he was soon escaping—using a pistol he suddenly brandished. Legend says it was a dummy that Dillinger carved from wood and blackened with shoe polish, while a conspiracy theory holds that a bribed judge smuggled in a real pistol (Girardin 1994, 32–108; Toland 1963). (A popular photo of a smiling Dillinger holding a machine gun in his left hand shows him also clasping the little dummy pistol in his right. The photo was made outside his father’s house following the outlaw’s escape. The picture graces the cover of Girardin’s Dillinger: The Untold Story [1994].)

Dillinger assembled another gang, this time including the infamous George “Baby Face” Nelson. Two robberies later, the FBI got the drop on Dillinger in St. Paul, but he escaped with only a gunshot to the leg as his girlfriend, Evelyn “Billie” Frechette, stepped on the gas and sped them to safety. Dillinger had another close call one night a month later in the infamous affair at Wisconsin’s Little Bohemia Lodge. FBI agents led by Melvin Purvis approached the lodge but were forced to dive for cover from machine-gun fire. Three non-gangsters, who jumped in a car and failed to stop when ordered to, were shot by Purvis’s men, one fatally; Dillinger, Nelson, and others escaped (Girardin 1994, 113–156; Purvis 1936, 21).

Dillinger underwent plastic surgery to alter his appearance and damage his fingerprints. Neither attempt was very successful. Billie having been arrested, Dillinger had taken up with a waitress who shared an apartment with a Romanian woman, Ana Cumpanas, a brothel owner known as Anna Sage. She recognized Dillinger and tipped off police who passed her on to Melvin Purvis. Sage later informed Purvis that Dillinger was to take her and his girlfriend to a movie, and that she could be identified by her attire. She would become forever known as “the woman in red,” although she actually wore an orange skirt and white blouse that night. John Dillinger was soon dead in a hail of gunfire outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater (Girardin 1994, 169–173, 217–230).

Melvin Purvis

Dillinger’s nemesis was the FBI’s Melvin Purvis (1903–1960) who became a special agent in 1927 and soon headed investigative offices in Cincinnati, Washington, Oklahoma City, and Birmingham before taking charge of the Bureau’s most high-profile office in Chicago in 1932. In just eight years he captured more FBI-designated public enemies than any agent in the history of the FBI (“Melvin Purvis” 2014).

Standing just five feet nine inches and weighing only 140 pounds, Purvis appeared an unlikely hero, and the newspapers sometimes called him “Little Mel.” They also dubbed him “Nervous Purvis”—especially after he admitted that the cigar shook in his mouth that fateful night when he lit it to signal agents that he had identified Dillinger. Purvis would later write, with the candor of a man of integrity:

The romantic newspaper writers have, on occasion, pictured me in their deathless prose as a combination of Wild Bill Hickok, Nick Carter and Frank Merriwell. Nothing could be farther from the truth; I am not a gun fighter; I am not a wily sleuth; and I am not a Fearless Frank. To tell the truth, I was thoroughly frightened every time it fell to my lot to carry a gun on a foray of any kind.

There were men who served with me who never knew the emotion of fear. They belonged to the glory company of history, those joyous daredevils who, from time immemorial, have been vainly waiting for a commander to order a charge on the gateways of hell. I admire them, but my nervous system is not built that way. I never led a raid without apprehension, and only the knowledge that there was a job there to do kept me functioning in the death-haunted sectors where bullets were flying.

Purvis added, “A sense of responsibility is often an effective substitute for courage” (1936, 246–247).

So, as he and other agents moved in on Dillinger on the sidewalk outside the theater, Purvis would later admit, “I was very nervous; it must have been a squeaky voice that called out, ‘Stick ’em up Johnny, we have you surrounded.’” Dillinger drew his automatic pistol, but it never fired. Public Enemy Number One was shot by Purvis’s men and lay dying. “Later after leaving this scene,” Purvis wrote, “I tried to button up my coat and found both buttons gone. Apparently I had grabbed for my gun without thinking, and I am frank to say that I do not know how it came into my hand” (Purvis 1936, 275–277).

Purvis’s self-effacement notwithstanding, he gained tremendous notoriety for his lead role in bringing down John Dillinger, and—three months later—Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, killed in an Ohio farm field. J. Edgar Hoover steamed at the attention given Purvis. He wanted his brave agents to remain faceless so he would get credit for their achievements. So it was that Hoover maneuvered behind the scenes to keep Purvis from the next target, George “Baby Face” Nelson (real name Lester Gillis). When Nelson shot agent Sam Cowley (after Nelson turned a car chase into a trap), a scheming Hoover ordered Purvis to stay at the hospital with Cowley while urgently scrambling less experienced agents to pursue Nelson. When, as Cowley lay dying, Purvis vowed to a Chicago American reporter that he would get Nelson, Hoover had had enough (Purvis 2005, 259–260).

Hoover

John Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), the man who would become “the nation’s top cop,” had parlayed his Master of Laws degree into a job with the Department of Justice in 1917. Thus escaping the draft, he pursued draft evaders, suspected German partisans, and communists on the home front. A biographer (Hack 2004, 54) observed, “The fledging civil servant had developed an unpopular habit of ridiculing those who dared to disagree with his interpretation of the law, dismissing them with a flutter of the hand as if clearing the air of annoying cobwebs.” It was a sign of things to come.

Working twelve-hour days every day of the week, Hoover received promotions for his industry. He lobbied for, and obtained, the job of assistant chief of the Bureau of Investigation, and, in 1924, became director, charged by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone with implementing a laundry list of ethical reforms. After minor name changes it became, in 1935, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Meanwhile, Hoover sought to improve efficiency and obtain laws permitting agents to make arrests and carry guns, as well as making the slaying of a special agent a federal offense. And he allowed Charles Appel—an accountant as well as a document examiner—to found the Bureau’s now-famous crime laboratory, beginning with a borrowed microscope (Gentry 1991, 124–148).

In 1927, a handsome young lawyer named Clyde Tolson caught Hoover’s eye, and in just two years he would become in rapid succession an agent, a staff supervisor, special agent in charge of the Buffalo office, and finally assistant director! Thus began a friendship—others say a romantic liaison—that lasted until Hoover’s death. Neither married, and the two dined together, spent weekends together, took vacations together, albeit while keeping separate residences; Hoover lived with his mother until her death in 1938. Hoover’s sexual orientation has been made an issue due to his public crusade against homosexuals—his professed contempt of them being second only to his hatred of Communists. Hoover refused to allow gays into the FBI, subverted their positions elsewhere, and sometimes blackmailed them into becoming informants (Hack 2004, 281–282; Gentry 1991, 90, 307–310, 412–413).

Hoover also took an interest in another young lawyer, the dashing Melvin Purvis to whom the Bureau director wrote (April 3, 1934), “. . . get Dillinger for me and the world is yours” (Summers 1993, 70). Things soured with the shootout-turned-fiasco at Bohemia Lodge, and Hoover sent agent Sam Cowley to assist. When Purvis did succeed against Public Enemy Number One, Hoover briefly feted Purvis and Cowley in Washington, privately praising Purvis for “almost unimaginable daring” (Summers 1993, 72). Unfortunately the press kept referring to Purvis—not Hoover—as “The Man Who Got Dillinger,” and when Purvis also brought down Pretty Boy Floyd and became a media sensation, Hoover’s jealous anger finally boiled over.

Hoover secretly demoted Purvis—one of the greatest G-men of all time—and began to load him with demeaning assignments and to rewrite history, omitting Purvis’s name from the Dillinger saga. An early example of Hoover’s spite came following Purvis’s telegraphed resignation in 1935, when he accepted a lucrative offer from Post Toasties cereal. Comic strips featured Purvis’s exploits and promoted the Melvin Purvis Junior G-Man Club, which offered—in exchange for cereal box tops—such items as a fingerprint kit, code wheel, invisible ink and developer, and a Secret Operator’s Manual, plus Junior G-Man badges as well as Secret Operator badges for girls as well as boys. Although this was wonderful promotion for the FBI, Hoover nevertheless tried to find a pretext for challenging the little toy badges. He had to content himself with getting Post Toasties to remove any mention of the FBI in their Junior G-Man promotion (Purvis 2005, 283–284, 295).

While pretending to be friendly with Purvis, Hoover in fact launched an unrelenting sneak crusade against him, sabotaging Purvis’s career opportunities whenever possible, spreading rumors, and encouraging agents to look for anything negative about this principled American hero. Although successful in blocking his appointment as a federal judge, undermining Hollywood offers, and the like, Hoover was unable to thwart Purvis’s appointment to the Military Intelligence Division during World War II. Purvis instigated surveillance of Martin Bormann, helped organize a War Crimes Office, investigated the report of Hitler’s death, and assisted with the Nuremburg trials. Unfortunately, Colonel Purvis’s service records were destroyed in a fire, so crucial details are lacking, but he served with distinction (Purvis 2005, 260–313).

Months after Purvis had resigned from the FBI, Hoover had been humiliated at a senate subcommittee hearing on appropriations when a senator pressed him on whether America’s top cop had ever made an arrest. Hoover was forced to reply—four times—that he never had, that he was a desk-bound administrator. He probably never in his life wished more for credentials like Purvis’s. The very next morning Hoover ordered his agents to notify him immediately when targeted gangster Alvin Karpis was about to be arrested. Three weeks later, Hoover arranged to be on scene, kept safely out of harm while brave agents pulled in front of Karpis’s car and arrested him with drawn guns. But in the official version, it was Hoover who lunged at Karpis and grabbed him before he could reach his weapon. (Actually Karpis’s two rifles were in the trunk.) “Karpis Captured in New Orleans by Hoover Himself,” headlined the New York Times. Years later, in an autobiography, Karpis would make fun of these lies (Gentry 1991, 182–195).

The Death of Melvin Purvis

Hoover’s decades-long jealous vendetta no doubt contributed to Purvis’s suicide on February 29, 1960, and even then—as we shall see—Hoover would add insult to injury.

The sound of a gunshot brought Purvis’s wife, Roseanne, running upstairs from the kitchen. He had shot himself with a gun from his impressive collection—ironically the pistol of a gangster, Gus Winkler—the bullet entering beneath the jaw and exiting at the top of the head. It then hit the plaster ceiling, ricocheted into a bedroom opposite Purvis’s own, and, by then spent, fell on the floor (Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 30–32).

In 2004, I spent most of a week in Florence, South Carolina, where Melvin Purvis—after resigning from the FBI—had raised a family and died. From March 27 to 31, I visited his former home, talked with people who had known him, made a pilgrimage to his grave, and conducted research at both the county library and courthouse—being permitted at the coroner’s office to make a supervised examination of the file on Purvis’s death. I obtained a copy of the Coroner’s Inquest report (1960), and I held in my hand the bullet that killed the great G-man.

I met only one person who thought Purvis had been murdered, even though his son Alston writes (Purvis 2005, 337), “Despite the evidence to the contrary, some are convinced that my father was murdered and I have been urged to demand that an investigation into the death be opened.” I had a lengthy talk with murder-theorist Charles Ducker, resident of the former Purvis home. He was a child when he knew Purvis (being only ten when the shooting occurred) and so, he quipped, regarding Purvis’s stature, “He always looked big to me.” Ducker (2004) insisted the death was no suicide, believing instead that someone deliberately shot Purvis, someone who knew him well enough to get close to him. He told me in conspiratorial fashion that the alleged death bullet was suspiciously pristine, that it “doesn’t have a mark on it” even though the home’s plaster-over-lath ceiling was extremely hard. However, like the questioned “super bullet” in the JFK-assassination case (Posner 1993, 335–336), the Purvis bullet has two features to which I can attest: It is copper-jacketed, making it resistant to the damage that would accrue to a soft lead bullet, and it was indeed deformed, flattened on one side. Moreover, using an illuminated Coddington magnifier, I noted traces of what appeared to be plaster on the bullet’s tip.

Speculations that Purvis was murdered are completely unfounded. Mrs. Purvis reached the scene—at the top of the steps—within moments. Neither she nor her maid saw or heard anything suspicious. Nor did the investigation reveal any trace of an intruder, any report of a stranger in the neighborhood, or anything else that suggested foul play. Purvis’s physician, Dr. Walter R. Mead, arrived within minutes, followed by another doctor and then the coroner; none found anything other than evidence of a self-inflicted wound, and that became the official verdict (Coroner’s Inquest 1960). The coroner who allowed me access to the file, M.G. Matthews (2004), told me he thought the presence of both Mrs. Purvis and a maid in the kitchen was very good evidence against the intruder theory and that therefore homicide was unlikely.

Still questions are raised. Why did the victim shoot himself under the jaw—a supposedly unheard of site (Allen 1960, 14; Purvis 2005, 339)? In fact it has been chosen in a significant number of instances (DiMaio 1998, 363), and, indeed in this case it proved effective. The site seems much less likely for a homicide. Speculations that the gun may have been in Purvis’s left hand—he was right-handed—are misleading (Purvis 2005, 2). According to the Coroner’s Inquest report (1960, 2–3, 9, 48), the deceased—dressed in pajamas, housecoat, and slippers—was lying in a “crumpled” position, “slightly on his right side” with the pistol on the floor “to his back.” Since these are positions into which the body and gun fell (the latter even possibly rebounding), a left-handed grip is not indicated. Anyway, it seems possible that Purvis held the weapon in some manner in his left hand (the bullet entered the left-of-center portion of the jaw), and then pushed against the trigger with his right thumb. This could explain why, although there were powder burns showing “that the shot was close” (Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 15), the wound did not appear to have been a contact one (Purvis 2005, 339); the thumb pushing on the trigger could have pushed the weapon away slightly at the same time. He could even have been seated on the floor—to help steady the gun—as possibly suggested by a butted-out cigarette there to the right of the body (Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 12, 51). This hypothesis would seem to account for all the known evidence; there are other credible scenarios as well, though I do not think that homicide is one of them.

But could the death have been accidental? Those hypothesizing that possibility suggest different scenarios. One, that Purvis was attempting to extract a round jammed in the .45 automatic (“Melvin Purvis” 2014), is pure speculation—an obvious rationalization to deflect the label of suicide, which many regard as a stigma. (More on this presently.) Moreover, such carelessness on the part of a gun expert like Purvis would be unlikely, and the powder burns under the jaw showed he was not looking down the barrel at the moment the pistol fired.

Another notion is that, intending to clean the firearm, Purvis may have attempted to pull the rope that would lower stairs to the attic where his gun-cleaning equipment was stored, and, in the process, put his weight on a previously injured foot, whereupon “He stumbled and fell and the gun, which he did not know was loaded, pressed against his throat and went off” (Ducker 2005). This complex scenario fails the test of Occam’s razor, the principle that, of competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions is most likely correct.

The preferred hypothesis is therefore that Melvin Purvis committed suicide, a possibility that becomes a probability when the elements relative to a psychological autopsy are considered, providing corroborative evidence. Dr. Mead testified at the inquest, having talked with Purvis the night before:

Mr. Purvis was very much depressed, had been so for several days, I might say even weeks before then, but he had returned from Washington some eight or nine days before this and had seen me several times during that period. On each occasion he was very much depressed because of his inability to sleep, because of some constant pain that he was having in his back, his feeling that he was not gaining his strength. He was very much worried about the work that he was doing in Washington [investigating graft in the federal manpower system], that he didn't see how he could get well enough to carry on, and he expressed many times the feeling of futility of trying to go ahead with so many circumstances against him.

When asked if Purvis mentioned the possibility of suicide, Dr. Mead replied:

By indirection only, I would say, he mentioned it one time—I can’t recall whether it was the night before or sometime during the previous week but he had been unusually hopeless in his outlook and he said “I just don’t see any way out of this at all” and then quickly he said, “But I am not thinking of the same thing you are.”

(Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 6–7)

There, at least obliquely, was Purvis mentioning the idea of suicide, while at that time seeming to reject it. Certainly he was depressed and expressing such futility as to be consistent with subsequent suicide. In very recent weeks—“about the latter part of January”—his attorney said, Purvis had asked to have his will revised (Willcox 1960), another indication that he was thinking of death. Yet another highly suggestive fact was that— only the day before his death—Melvin Purvis asked his son Alston where the Winkler automatic was. (Alston had used it for target practice at the Police Pistol Range.) Purvis claimed he was “planning on giving it away” (Purvis 1960, 25–26). And in the middle of that very night, helping his frail, sick father get to and from the bathroom, Alston “breathed the odor of alcohol and morphine” (Purvis 2005, 327).

I do not see Purvis’s suicide as a stigma at all. Ambrose Bierce wrote: “Suicide is always courageous. We call it courage in a soldier merely to face death—say to lead a forlorn hope—although he has a chance of life and a certainty of ‘glory.’ But the suicide does more than face death; he incurs it, and with a certainty, not of glory, but of reproach. If that is not courage we must reform our vocabulary” (Bierce 1909–12).

Melvin Purvis was a courageous man. His epitaph is carved in stone: “Saepe Timui Sed Numquam Cucurri” (“Always Afraid, Never Run”). His son Alston (whom I have talked with) says:

And when my son asks me, as I know he will, if my father was a hero, I will have an answer for him. I will tell him my father led men into battle, that he risked his life more than once. I will tell him my father believed in duty, honor, dignity. I will tell him he never boasted or bragged about the things he did. I will say, “Yes, my father was a hero.”

(Purvis 2005, 342)

Mrs. Doris Rogers (later Doris Lockerman, 1910–2011) had worked for Purvis in Birmingham and came to Chicago at his request to manage the office. There were no female special agents then (not since an “experiment” with two in the 1920s), but she was involved in behind-the-scenes FBI activity during the gangster era. On one occasion she was asked to identify the wanted criminal Verne Miller, who happened to have once been sheriff in her native county in South Dakota. She sat on a high stool in a nearby apartment in such a way that she could peer out without being seen. Another time she remonstrated with Purvis for his agents’ harsh treatment of a woman suspect, and Purvis simply asked, “What should I do?” As to J. Edgar Hoover and his treatment of Purvis, her anger never ceased (Gentry 1991, 133; Purvis 2005, 344).

She summed up Hoover’s vendetta against the great G-man: “It is the story of a man whose littleness and meanness and smallness led him to destroy another man. It is a calumny of the worst order, and there is no way to recall it without raging against it” (Lockerman 2005). After Purvis’s funeral, his widow gathered her three sons and sent a terse telegram to Hoover: “We are honored that you ignored Melvin’s death. Your jealousy hurt him very much but until the end I think he loved you.” Hoover did not respond (Purvis 2005, 329).

Dillinger's Ghost?

Some conspiracy theorists maintain that it was not Dillinger who died near the Biograph Theater. Rumors circulated after his death that the FBI shot down the wrong man. They cite discrepancies in the description of Dillinger versus the autopsy that “point to Dillinger’s permanent escape and disappearance” (Nash 1978, 394). Some have postulated that the FBI had actually killed a small-time hoodlum by the name of Jimmy Lawrence “and was covering up its tracks” (Ogden 2009, 117).

This is a familiar conspiracy claim. Supposedly, the “wrong” person likewise was killed instead of such “escaped” outlaws as John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid (Nickell 1993). Even Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, was not in Oswald’s grave, according to one ludicrous book. (See my forensic refutation, “Assassin or Look-alike,” Nickell 2009, 143–154.)

In fact, Dillinger’s body was identified by his own father—once he had looked past the minor plastic surgery—and he had his son’s coffin covered with three feet of concrete to keep the curious from digging it up (Ogden 2009, 117). A death photo leaves little doubt the corpse was indeed Dillinger’s, and fingerprints left no doubt at all: The tiny scars that obliterated his prints’ major pattern features (called “cores” and “deltas”) did not prevent comparison, and the postmortem prints unquestionably match those of Dillinger on his FBI wanted poster. As to “Jimmy Lawrence” that was simply the alias Dillinger was using at the time of his death (Kurland 1994, 101–108; Girardin 1994, 220; Gentry 1991, 173).

Now that we know “Dillinger” was indeed Dillinger, we need not be mistaken as to just whose ghost allegedly visits Dillinger’s death site. According to ghost raconteur Tom Ogden (2009, 117): “Within months of Dillinger’s death, people began to report seeing a misty male form floating down the alley where he died. Sometimes it would pull a gun before it fell to the ground and faded away.” In other words, the alleged ghostly drama simply repeated the drama people had read about.

But did these paranormal reenactments actually occur? Ogden is contradicted by another writer, Ursula Bielski (1998, 134), who insists: “In light of the mania following Dillinger's death, it seems almost unbelievable that no unusual phenomena were reported at the shooting site in the immediate months and years that followed. In fact, it was not until the 1970s that passersby on north Lincoln Avenue began to spot a bluish figure running down the alley, stumbling, falling, and disappearing.” Hauck (1996, 154), repeats claims that Dillinger’s ghost “has been seen racing down the alley.”

In fact, however, the reported ghostly reenactments are no such thing, since Dillinger never ran and was never in the alley. For these facts we turn to the first-hand account of his death by Melvin Purvis, leader of the team of G-men who brought down John Dillinger.

As Purvis wrote in his American Agent (1936, 275–276), “I was about three feet to the left of him,” when agents closed in on Dillinger.

I had to give the signal to close in then because I had seen the woman at his right [his current girlfriend] tug at his shirt in a furtive sort of way as if to warn him that all was not well. I had seen him reach for his right-hand pocket and give it a slight jerk as if in an effort to draw a gun. When I called out to him he drew his .380 automatic pistol, but he never fired it. He dropped to the ground; he had been shot.

Purvis continued, making clear that Dillinger never ran or even entered the alley:

He had made a long stride toward the entrance to an alley at the end of which were some of our men. I am glad he didn’t get into the alley, as there might have been a cross fire, although we had planned to avoid this as in all cases. Dillinger fell with his head in the alley and his feet on the sidewalk. In his right hand was his gun, and as he fell the elbow hit first, causing a sort of bounce. When his hand bounced up I took the gun from it. Turning him over, we immediately determined that he had no other weapons. We spoke to him, but he couldn't speak. An ambulance was called.

So the alleyway ghost is a figment, obviously based on misreports of Dillinger’s slaying. Besides, “In recent years . . . paranormal tales of that alleyway have lapsed . . .” (Bielski 1998, 134). Let us hope that Dillinger’s imagined ghost now rests in peace, and let us remember Purvis and Hoover in the contrasting ways that each deserves.

References

Allen, Dr. Edwin. 1960. In Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 10–16.

Bielski, Ursula. 1998. Chicago Haunts: Ghostlore of the Windy City. Chicago: Lake Claremont Press.

Bierce, Ambrose. 1909–12. “On Taking Oneself Off,” in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (12 vols.); reprint New York: Guardian, 1966, 338–344.

Coroner’s Inquest: The State of South Carolina vs. The Dead Body of Melvin Purvis. 1960. Inquest held April 13. (Table of contents, p. a; report, pp. 1–57.)

DiMaio, Vincent, J.M. 1998. Gunshot Wounds. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Ducker, Bill. 2005. Quoted in Purvis 2005. 339–340.

Ducker, Charles. 2004. Conversation with Joe Nickell, March 28.

Gentry, Curt. 1991. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Girardin, G. Russell, with William J. Helmer. 1994. Dillinger: The Untold Story. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hack, Richard. 2004. Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. Beverly Hills, CA: New Millennium Press.

Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books.

Kurland, Michael. 1994. A Gallery of Rogues. New York: Prentice Hall.

Lockerman, Doris. 2005. Quoted in Purvis 2005, 344.

Matthews, M.G. 2004. Discussion with Joe Nickell, March 29.

“Melvin Purvis.” 2014. Online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Purvis; accessed Feb. 11, 2014.

Nash, Jay Robert. 1978. Among the Missing: An Anecdotal History of Missing Persons from 1800 to the Present. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Nickell, Joe. 1993. “Outlaw Impostors,” in Stein 1993, 112–113.

———. 2009. Real or Fake. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Ogden, Tom. 2009. Haunted Theaters: Playhouse Phantoms, Opera House Horrors, and Backstage Banshees. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press.

Posner, Gerald. 1993. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. New York: Random House.

Purvis, Alston. 1960. Testimony in Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 24–27.

Purvis, Alston, with Alex Tresniowski. 2005. The Vendetta: Special Agent Melvin Purvis, John Dillinger, and Hoover’s FBI in the Age of Gangsters. New York: Public Affairs.

Purvis, Melvin. 1936. American Agent. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co.

Stein, Gordon. 1993. Encyclopedia of Hoaxes. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.

Summers, Anthony. 1993. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Toland, John. 1963. The Dillinger Days. New York: Random House; cited in Kurland 1994, 105–106.

Wilcox, Hugh L. 1960. Testimony at Coroner's Inquest 1960.

In the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alleged cures for “female weakness” were among the nostrums marketed by quacks. Apparently these were sold with the realization that women represented a lucrative special market. Among the most successful of such marketers was a Buffalo physician who became known as “The Prince of Quacks” (Hirsch 2004).

Nostrums for Females

The popular female nostrums included “Wine of Cardui”—a preparation sold as the “Woman’s Tonic”—that contained 20 percent alcohol. Other, similarly constituted nostrums were “Gerstle’s Female Panacea” (20 percent alcohol) and “Andrews’ Wine of Life Root or Female Regulator” (14 percent).

As well, the La Franco Medical Company of Philadelphia sold “Female Pills No. 2”; Margaret M. Livingston, MD, of Chicago offered a variety of products, including “Dr. Livingston’s Medicinal Tampons”; and the Phen-ix Chemical Company sold “Stargrass Compound—Nature’s tonic for women,” among other products. The American Medical Association regarded all of these as quackery (Cramp 1921, II: 160–182).

One of the most famous merchants of quack medicine for women was Lydia E. Pinkham (1819–1893) who marketed “Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.” Among its outrageous claims was that it was “A Sure Cure” for “Falling of the Womb” (Prolapsus uteri) and, indeed, “All Female Weaknesses,” including irregular menstruation and even labor pains. In fact the product contained only a minor amount of vegetable extracts in water but was 18 percent alcohol (Cramp 1921, II: 160–163).

Pierce and ‘Weak Women’

The man who became one of the greatest sellers of nostrums in America was Buffalo’s Ray Vaughn Pierce (1840–1914).

Pierce parlayed an off-beat medical degree into a quackery empire that included an Invalids’ Hotel. His World’s Dispensary Medical Association endlessly dispensed Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery and a host of other elixirs, copies of his medical tome (The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser [1888]), and a profusion of advertising giveaways. (See the Nickell Collection of Dr. R.V. Pierce Medical Artifacts, part of the New York state digital repository initiative, posted by CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga.¹)

Of course, Pierce had something special for women—or rather “Weak Women.” Now, he was not saying women were weak per se, indeed enlisting Anna “Annie” Edson Taylor, the first daredevil to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, for some ads.² Rather, when strong women became weak through illnesses suffered by women, the good doctor had just the remedy—one second only to his tonic, Golden Medical Discovery, as a cure-all.

Pierce’s Favorite Prescription

Dr. Pierce offered women a product that—like his other concoctions—was in keeping with the “eclectic” school of medicine from which he graduated. This advocated replacing “noxious medicines” with “more effective agents, derived exclusively from the vegetable kingdom” (Pierce 1888, 294–295)—in a word, botanicals (drugs from herbs, bark, etc.). He called his medicine for females “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription.”

In his book, Pierce (1888, 342, 346, 355) described his preparation as “a tonic nervine” that both “quiets nervous irritation” and “strengthens the enfeebled nervous system, restoring it to healthful vigor.” Moreover, “In all diseases involving the female reproductive organs, with which there is usually associated an irritable condition of the nervous system, it is unsurpassed as a remedy.” In addition, it was “a uterine and general tonic of great excellence,” as well as “an efficient remedy in cases requiring a medicine to regulate the menstrual function.” Finally, Pierce claimed expansively, “In all cases of debility, the Favorite Prescription tranquilizes the nerves, tones up the organs and increases their vigor, and strengthens the system.”

Figure 1. Bottle of “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription.” (Author’s collection; see www.nyheritage.org.)

The label of a bottle in my collection reads in full: “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription For the Relief of The Many Weaknesses and Complaints Peculiar to Females, Manufactured at the Chemical Laboratory of World’s Dispensary Medical Association, Buffalo, N.Y. Contains 8¹/₂ Ozs. Trade-Mark Registered in U.S. Pat. Office, Dec. 11^th, 1908. Mdse. 59.” No ingredients are listed. (See Figure 1.)

However, a notebook in possession of Dr. Pierce’s grandson names the ingredients of some Pierce products, including Favorite Prescription for which it lists berberis, valerian, blue cohosh, black cohosh, and viburnum (Hirsch 2004, 15). These are still found in herbal guides, recommended for some of the same conditions that Dr. Pierce named. For example, viburnum (black haw root) is reportedly an antispasmodic, used for “threatened miscarriage,” while valerian root is found in some over-the-counter sleep aids, and black cohosh is a relaxant said to relieve menstrual cramps (Balch 2002, 138–139; Naturopathic 1995, 91, 92, 124). Whatever value the ingredients might have if properly prescribed, does not argue for the wisdom of dumping them together and urging them on persons whom the physician has not seen, who may in fact be harmed by the product.

Pierce was accused of worse. Collier’s called him a “quack,” and Ladies Home Journal went even farther—too far as it turned out. The Journal article, penned by its celebrated editor Edward Bok, alleged that Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription contained not only alcohol but also opium and digitalis. In fact it contained none of these, as laboratory tests soon showed. The Journal issued a retraction and apologized. However, Dr. Pierce felt entitled to more and, in agreement, a court awarded him $16,000 in a libel judgment. Pierce also sued Collier’s, but—after examining the varied definitions of the word quack—the court rejected Pierce’s claim (Hirsch 2004, 14).

Pierce’s Legacy

In his heyday, Dr. R.V. Pierce was, notes one historical writer, “Buffalo’s most famous doctor,” one “whose name and bearded countenance were familiar to people all over the world” (Hirsch 2004, 10). Today, however, the same writer observes of Pierce: “He’s disappeared into the mist. Nobody’s really ever heard of him” (Hirsch 2009).

Figure 2. Commercial sign for Dr. Pierce’s nostrum “For Weak Women” (1918 or later). (Author’s collection)

Of course, historians, skeptics, and collectors, among others, learn about Dr. Pierce, and his legacy remains sizeable. In collecting Dr. Pierce items, I am fortunate to live in the area where he flourished, where such artifacts may be especially findable. Looking just at Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription, I have been able to purchase several specific collectibles as I’ve made my way to antique shops and centers, mostly within a one-hundred-mile radius (again, see Figure 1). Also, dealers who know of my interest sometimes inform me of a newly discovered rare item. For example, Peter Jablonski, president of the Greater Buffalo Bottle Collectors Association (GBBCA—of which I am a member), obtained for me the Pierce sign—addressed to “Weak Women”—shown in Figure 2.

While returning from an investigation in LeRoy, New York (Nickell 2012), along Route 5, I passed an old barn with faint advertising lettering. I made a U-turn and parked at the site, where I took photographs (see Figure 3) of what clearly reads, “FAVORITE PRESCRIPTION.” Given the location and the fact that the words were a trademark of Dr. Pierce, it is clear that this was one of several Pierce barn signs across the United States (“Looking” 2012), and now—so far as we can yet determine—the only remaining one known in New York state.

Figure 3. Western New York barn featuring a rare, faded advertisement for “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription” discovered by the author.

I had wondered why the “DR. PIERCE’S” portion was no longer legible. On a return visit, when my wife Diana used her GPS to obtain location coordinates,³ I met the property owner. He told me that a shed had once been built onto the end of the barn, where the legible lettering now is, which obviously protected it from the many years of weathering that the other portion was subjected to.

Such discoveries give hope that other “time capsules” will yield their treasures, giving us insights into medical science’s past that can help us plot a more informed future course.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the help of the CFI Libraries staff—notably Tim Binga, director, who has done extensive work on my Pierce collection, and Lisa Nolan, former librarian—as well as my wife Diana Harris.

Notes

1. Online at www.nyheritage.org. Many new items await posting.

2. This is strongly suggested by some rare photos in the possession of my friend, photo expert and collector Rob McElroy, showing a woman accompanied by a barrel, believed to be Annie Taylor, holding a Pierce sign (Neville 2012).

3. The coordinates are N 42° 59.875 and W 78° 17.308.

References

Balch, Phyllis. 2002. Prescription for Herbal Healing. New York: Avery.

Cramp, Arthur J. 1921. Nostrums and Quackery (in 3 vols.), Vol. II. Chicago: American Medical Association.

Hirsch, Dick. 2004. The emperor of elixir. Western New York Heritage, Spring: 10–16.

———. 2009. Quoted in Rey 2009.

Looking at Dr. Pierce’s Barn Advertising. 2012. Online at www.peachridgegrass.com/2012/12/looking-atdr-pierces-barn-advertising/; accessed August 22, 2013.

Naturopathic Handbook of Herbal Formulas. 1995. Ayer, Massachusetts: Herbal Research Publications.

Neville, A. 2012. Legend of the Falls. . . . The Buffalo News (July 7).

Nickell, Joe. 2012. Neurological Illness or Hysteria? Skeptical Inquirer 36(4) (July/August): 30–33.

Pierce, R.V. 1888. The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser, 17^th ed. Buffalo, NY: World Dispensary Printing Office.

Rey, Jay. 2009. D’Youville College building site has peculiar past. Buffalo News (February).

As early as 1711, the old English word bitter (from biting) was extended to mean a “bitter medicinal substance” (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 1971). In his “first” dictionary, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Dr. Samuel Johnson records this extended meaning (citing Locke), “In medicine, a bitter plant, bark or root.” In time the word for this meaning was given as bitters, as in Noah Webster (1849, 125), “A liquor in which bitter herbs or roots are steeped; generally a spirituous liquor. . . . In the materia medica, the term bitters is applied to such medicinal substances as are characterized by their bitterness”—especially as are thought to exert a “tonic power on the digestive organs.”

According to one authority, bitters appears to have originated in Germany in the seventeenth century, and then spread to Italy and England. In the latter country during George II’s reign (1727–1760), gin began to be regulated. It was taxed and the number of taverns was limited. As a consequence, “the gin sellers added various herbs to their product and sold it as a medicinal liquor (a ploy that has been used ever since in many countries whenever there have been attempts to control the distribution of spirits)” (Munsey 1970, 111).

Bitters Cocktail?

One such bitters has an interesting story. According to several popular sources, the cocktail was invented in the early nineteenth century in New Orleans by a Creole apothecary using bitters as an ingredient.

The pharmacist was Antoine Amédéé Peychaud, whose history is murky—various sources say he arrived in New Orleans as early as 1795 or as late as 1824. However, he was apparently married there in 1811. He eventually opened his own “Pharmacie Peychaud” on Royal Street in what is today called the French Quarter.

Figure 1. Peychaud’s “first” cocktail can still be made with these available ingredients (described in the text).

It is said that Peychaud liked to drink his cognac brandy from an egg cup, and in this fashion he served drinks at his shop, beginning with his fellow Freemasons after their meetings. Supposedly he added bitters, along with sugar and water, thereby—according to dubious legend—creating the first cocktail. In any event, the French egg cup was called a “coquetier” and this may indeed have evolved in pronunciation (through cock-tay) to cocktail ¹ (Peychaud’s Bitters 2014; Downs and Edge 2000, 196). (See Figure 1.)

Peychaud reportedly began to market his bitters in 1830. The rights to the product were purchased by Thomas H. Handy in the 1870s. Today Peychaud’s is used more or less exclusively as a flavoring in cocktails. Sweeter than another popular brand, Angostura Bitters, Peychaud’s is still made in Louisiana, a bright-red liquid sold in five-ounce bottles, its ingredients including gentian root (Peychaud’s Bitters 2014).

Hostetter’s Bitters

Figure 2. Almanac advertising booklet for Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters.

A much more widely known bitters in its time, an alleged “vegetable tonic” (restorer of normal tone), “alterative” (health reestablisher), and “stomachic” (stomach medicine), as well as a “gentle laxative” and “anti-bilious agent” (a liver treatment), was Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, as described in one of its almanacs (an advertising giveaway) of 1866. (See Figure 2.) Deriding “homeopathists” and “skeptics,” the booklet claims, “. . . it is endorsed by practical chemists as the safest, and by unprejudiced physicians as the SUREST PREVENTATIVE, REGULATING, and RESTORATIVE PREPARATION OF THE AGE.”

The product originated about 1852–1853 (the almanac says it has “been about fourteen years before the public” [p. 15]). In partnership with George W. Smith, David Hostetter of Pittsburgh began to manufacture a formula developed by his father, Dr. J. Hostetter. In its early form, Hostetter’s contained various amounts of alcohol—up to 47 percent (Fike 2006, 36). This consisted of “good Monongahela spirit,” i.e., “essence of rye,” indeed “Sound Rye,” which was “mixed with the juices of tonic and alterative roots, barks, and herbs” (p. 3).

Hostetter and Smith claimed to have received “voluminous correspondence” from throughout the United States and South America, without a single expression of dissatisfaction. A few testimonials are included in the almanac. Generally, the users have endorsed the wide range of afflictions for which the bitters were said to be effective (pp. 3–21). In addition to those already mentioned, they included indigestion, flatulence, nausea, nighttime restlessness, palpitation of the heart, memory loss, depression, sour stomach, dimness of the eye, chills and fever, diaphragm pains, feebleness, nervousness, unsteady appetite, sudden spasms, nervous headaches, hysterics, bowel complaints, unease of pregnancy, and more—even hypochondria!

So much was Hostetter’s a cure-all that it could replace “a whole medicine-chest full of tinctures, essences, powders and pills” (p. 10). And not only did it claim to cure but also to prevent the effects of poisoned air and water as an “unequaled tonic and disinfectant” and to provide “an absolute protection against intermittent and remittent fevers” and, indeed, “all epidemics” including malaria. It was also claimed to be an antidote to mercury poisoning, and (perhaps not surprisingly) “in cases where a morbid craving for alcohol has been generated,” the bitters “will be found an efficient means of allaying it”!

Hostetter’s was always sold in bottles (these were embossed beginning in 1858); the proprietors decried “unscrupulous impostors” who “pretend to sell the article by the gallon or barrel” (p. 23). After Smith’s death in 1884, the enterprise became Hostetter & Co., still operated by the family. After passage of the 1906 Food and Drug Act, the alcohol content was lowered to 25 percent. During prohibition, the herbal content was increased to compensate for the loss of alcohol, but this produced an almost unbearable taste and consequently poor sales. The formula was restored after the repeal of prohibition, and it survived until 1958 (for its last four years known as Hostetter Tonic) (Fike 2006, 36).

As shown by an advertisement on the back of the almanac (Clark & Barker, dealers in drugs, medicines, chemicals, etc., in Fredonia, New York), local drug or general stores were thereby identified as “agents for the sale of Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters.” The almanacs may have been provided without cost to the agents in return for their ordering a certain amount of the product.

Atwoods et al.

Numerous other bitters were sold—from A (African Stomach Bitters) to Z (Zingari Bitters). Among them was Moses Atwood’s Jaundice Bitters, sold originally as “Genuine Vegetable Physical Jaundice Bitters,” beginning in 1840 at Georgetown, Massachusetts. (It is often confused with Charles Atwood’s Quinine Bitters, the pair evidently being competitors.) Slightly more than a quarter of its volume was alcohol. It was claimed to be “an effective cure for jaundice, headache, dyspepsia, worms, dizziness, loss of appetite, darting pains, colds and fevers.” Also, it “cleanses the blood from humors and moistens the skin. It is also good for liver complaints [hence its name], strangury [slow, painful urination], dropsy, croup, and phthisic [i.e., phthisis, a consumptive condition].” (Fike 2006, 30.)

Figure 3. Bottle and advertisement for Baxter’s Mandrake Bitters. (All items from author’s collection.)

Advertised as early as 1881 was Dr. Henry Baxter’s Anti-Bilious and Jaundice Mandrake Bitters. An advertisement (Figure 3) promised to “expel all morbid secretions and obstructions from the system, stimulate the internal organs into healthy action, and purify the blood.” It asked, “Are you suffering with any of the diseases that follow a torpid or diseased Liver—such as Jaundice, Dyspepsia, Bilious diseases, Foul Stomach, Costiveness [constipation], or Weakness? Then these Bitters will do you good.” They sold for twenty-five cents per bottle. Also shown in Figure 2 is a twelve-paneled, aqua, embossed bottle with paper label dating from the later nineteenth century. It was manufactured by Henry, Johnson & Lord, Proprietors, Burlington, Vermont. Much later the product was sold by the Burlington Drug Co. (Fike 2006, 31).

The name “Dr. Baxter’s Mandrake Bitters” suggests a possible ingredient. It was unlikely to contain the European Mandrake, but it could have included the so-called American Mandrake or Mayapple—once thought safe to use as a purgative but now known to be dangerous if taken internally (due to its cytoxic, or cell-killing, action) (Chevallier 1996, 250). Other bitters whose names suggested a main ingredient included California Fig & Herb, Curtis & Perkins Wild Cherry, Gilbert’s Sarsaparilla, Oregon Grape Root, Prickly Ash, Angostura Bark, Buhrer’s Gentian, Dr. Chandler’s Ginger Root, Dr. C.D. Warner’s German Hop, and Begg’s Dandelion Bitters (Fike 2006, 29–44; Kovel and Kovel 1979, 30–42).

Analysis by government chemists acting under the 1906 Food and Drug Act (effective from the beginning of 1907) revealed the medically doubtful contents of many bitters concoctions. For instance, Hamburg Stomach Bitters was revealed to contain only “a sweetened water and alcoholic liquor flavored with a small amount of flavoring material and colored with caramel.” Kaufmann’s Sulfur Bitters did not contain an appreciable amount of sulfur as alleged, and its claims of treating diabetes and curing syphilis and leprosy were declared false and fraudulent. Proprietor Aaron P. Ordway was convicted and fined. Again, a Pale Orange Bitters of Cincinnati was found to be 32 percent alcohol colored with caramel; the defendant was fined. Yet again, a Pepsin Magen Bitters was revealed to contain only “an infinitesimal quantity of pepsin,” some sugar, and 28.44 percent alcohol. The Bettman–Johnson Company was fined accordingly. The list goes on (Nostrums and Quackery 1921, II: 748–754).

Harmful Ingredients

Not only were the ingredients of most bitters unspecified (until the 1906 Food and Drug Act), but even popular herbal remedies could be harmful in certain cases. We have already looked at American Mandrake. For another example, wild black cherry bark—touted to relieve coughs, diarrhea, indigestion, and irritable bowel syndrome—is “highly toxic” if taken in excessive doses (Chevallier 1996, 255).

Then there was alcohol, a common ingredient. Specified so were Clarke’s Sherry Wine Bitters, Greeley’s Bourbon Bitters, Doctor Gregory’s Scotch Bitters, and, among others, Tippecanoe, Chapin & Cone Sour Mash Bitters. Dr. Henley’s Wild Grape Root Bitters reportedly contained 52 percent alcohol in 1905. When the proprietor of Dr. Harter’s Wild Cherry Bitters died, his enterprising daughter married a whiskey manufacturer. Wholesale liquor dealers were themselves makers of some bitters, such as German Balsam Bitters of Oakland, California, and Hibernia Bitters of San Francisco.

Concludes one source (Kovel and Kovel 1979, 30), bitters “was often of such high alcohol content that the user felt healthier with each sip.” Still the proprietors of Brown’s Iron Bitters insisted theirs was “A Valuable Family Medicine. Not a substitute for whiskey. Not sold as a beverage. Not composed mostly of spirits. Not sold in bar-rooms.” Some bitters, like Dr. Webb’s, succumbed to prohibition (Fike 2006, 29–44).

The American Medical Association, in its Nostrums and Quackery (1921, 7–40), cited Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters (discussed earlier), noting that its contents were 25 percent alcohol or half the strength of straight whiskey. If one took the daily dose of six tablespoons of Hostetter’s, one would drink the equivalent of nearly two bottles of beer or one-and-a-half shots of whiskey.

Needless to say, alcohol could exacerbate some conditions. And who today would think it suitable for a pregnant woman to take—especially in unregulated amounts? Nor was alcohol the most outrageous ingredient of some bitters.

Patent medicines of the day sometimes contained cocaine, among them a product sold by J.F. Miller of Chicago (under the name R.W. Davis Drug Company). This was called Cocainized Pepsin Cinchona Bitters. Not only did it lack pepsin, but it contained cocaine and cocaine derivatives without mention of that fact on the label. The amount of alcohol contained was also incorrectly stated, and the company made “false and misleading” claims that it would purify the blood and act speedily as a remedy for a host of ailments. It was analyzed by government chemists, declared misbranded, and—following an entered plea of guilty—Miller was fined (Nostrums and Quackery 1912, I: 551).

Bitters Bottles

Most bitters bottles date from 1840 to 1900, and some were hand-blown. The earliest ones were free-blown (typically showing on the base a round scar where a pontil rod was temporarily attached by a blob of molten glass to hold the bottle for finishing); later ones were mold-blown (as evidenced by seams running from the bottom to somewhere along the neck). By 1903, bottles began to be made by the automatic bottle machine (and they exhibit seams that, as a rule, run the full length of the bottle, extending over the top). (For a fuller discussion, see Fike 2006, 11–12; Munsey 1970, 30–36, 47–50.)

Bitters bottles are highly collectible. They exist in a great variety of shapes—typically flat front and back (i.e., having a rectangular base), but also cylindrical, multi-paneled (e.g., twelve-sided for Atwood’s Jaundice Bitters), and artistic forms, including figures like barrels (especially for those containing bourbon whiskey), a lady’s leg, even (for example, for American Life Bitters of Omaha) a log-cabin shape. They are found as well in various colors of glass: clear, aqua, green, differing hues of amber, light blue, cobalt, amethyst, and (very rarely) red, among others. Due to such variety, experts caution, “The word bitters must be embossed on the glass or a paper label must be affixed for the collector to call the bottle a bitters bottle” (Kovel and Kovel 1979, 30–31).

Bitters bottles are a window into an earlier era of quackery (although sometimes perhaps well-intentioned), as well as into the related worlds of unbridled advertising, liquor sales and consumption, and, of course, the very human need for relief from myriad ailments. Bitters may sometimes have alleviated these, but more often only pretended to—no doubt sometimes causing actual harm, perhaps especially to the untold unborn.

Note

1. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (1971) says cocktail is a slang American term of lost origin, known from as early as 1809. At issue is the definition of the word, the OED describing it as “consisting of spirit mixed with a small quantity of bitters, some sugar, etc.” However, the word has come to mean any mixed drink of distilled spirits and would include juleps, which are centuries older than Peychaud’s cocktail (Nickell 2003, 4–6).

References

Chevallier, Andrew. 1996. The Encyclopedia of Medicinal Plants. New York: D.K. Publishing.

Downs, Tom, and John T. Edge. 2000. New Orleans. London: Lonely Planet Publications.

Fike, Richard E. 2006. The Bottle Book: A Comprehensive Guide to Historic, Embossed Medicine Bottles. Caldwell, NJ: The Blackburn Press.

Hostetter’s United States Almanac. . . . 1866. Pittsburgh, PA: Hostetter & Smith.

Johnson, Samuel. 1755. A Dictionary of The English Language. Abridged from an edition of 1756; reprinted New York: Barnes & Noble.

Kovel, Ralph, and Terry Kovel. 1979. The Kovels’ Complete Bottle Price List. New York: Crown Publishers.

Munsey, Cecil. 1970. The Illustrated Guide to Collecting Bottles. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Nickell, Joe. 2003. The Kentucky Mint Julep. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Nostrums and Quackery. 1912, 1921. Second ed.; vols. I, II; Chicago: American Medical Association Press.

Oxford English Dictionary, The Compact Edition of. 1971. New York: Oxford University Press.

Peychaud’s Bitters. 2014. Online at www.cooksinfo.com/peychauds-bitters; accessed December 4, 2014.

Webster, Noah. 1849. An American Dictionary of the English Language. Revised and Enlarged by Chauncey A. Goodrich. Springfield, Mass: George and Charles Merriam.

Figure 1. The Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Poland, is the subject of many pious legends.

One of the most famous of true icons (traditional religious panel paintings) is the so-called Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Poland (Figure 1). Its notoriety was boosted when, following his election to the papacy, the “Polish Pope” John Paul II prayed before it on a visit in 1979. For an international History Channel series, Miracles Decoded, I was asked to look into the icon’s origins. I found that it has an intriguingly legendary history, an iconography that repays study, and a reputation for many miracles.

Folkloric Origins

According to legend, the panel for the dark-skinned Madonna and Child came from a table that had been made by Jesus himself while apprenticing to his carpenter father, Joseph. After Jesus’s crucifixion, his mother allegedly took the table with her when she went to live in the home of a disciple, St. John. Upon the top of this, according to fanciful tradition, St. Luke himself painted her portrait. It was subsequently discovered by Helena, the mother of Roman emperor Constantine the Great (274–337 ce), among a remarkable group of treasures on a trip to Jerusalem—or so it is said in pious tales (Aradi 1954, 62; Mullen 1998, 135).

The locations of the reputed treasures were allegedly revealed to the then almost eighty-year-old Helena by divine visions. She is said to have uncovered nothing less than the Holy Sepulchre and found that it not only contained the True Cross of Jesus but that it was an incredible storeroom of Christian artifacts. In addition to the Titulus Crucis—the Cross’s headboard (on which was inscribed, in three languages, “This is the King of the Jews” [Luke 23:38])—the disciples had thought to include the crosses of the “two thieves” crucified with Jesus (Mark 15–27). As well, there were nails from the crucifixion, the crown of thorns (Matthew 27:29), the chalice known as the Holy Grail, and more (Nickell 2007, 57, 77–95, 102). There, or elsewhere, she supposedly found the table-top portrait.

In other words, no one had any idea where such bogus items actually came from. The claimed Titulus, for example, has been radiocarbon-dated not to the first century but to 980–1146 ce, fully consistent with the actual time (1144–1145 ce) it had been acquired by a church in Rome. As to the True Cross, fragments were distributed as relics so frequently, noted Protestant John Calvin (1543, 67), that there were enough for “a whole ship’s cargo.” A supernatural explanation was provided by St. Paulinus of Nola (353–431 ce), who claimed that no matter how many pieces were removed, the cross never diminished in size! (See Cruz 1984, 39.) One piece has been radiocarbon-dated to 1018–1155 ce (Finding Jesus 2015).

Nevertheless, continues the Black Madonna saga, Helena returned with the picture to Constantinople, where it remained in a church until the eighth century. Then, threatened by war, it was carried for safekeeping to (curiously enough) Eastern Poland. In 1382 the Tartars invaded but failed to discover the Holy Virgin’s portrait because “a mysterious cloud enveloped the chapel.” Later, a local prince “was ordered in a dream by an angel to take the picture to an insignificant, obscure village named Czestochowa” (Aradi 1954, 63).

A contradictory legend tells how the icon was being transported for safekeeping when it was stored overnight in Czestochowa’s monastery of Jasna Gora. On the following morning, when the image was returned to the wagon, the horses refused to move—a miraculous sign, it was thought, that it should remain there (Mullen 1998, 135–136). In yet another tale, the balking horses are those of invading Hussites who in 1430 were attempting to take the icon as plunder. When the horses unaccountably stopped at the village limits, however, and no amount of beating could get them to move, the Black Madonna was abandoned (Aradi 1954, 63). Such variants (differing versions of a narrative), together with common motifs (story elements), are indicative of the folkloric process at work.

In the latter tale, the Hussites were so riled that they angrily grabbed up the icon, which had already been pierced by an arrow in the Madonna’s throat during the siege, and cast it on the ground, where it broke into three pieces. Moreover, one of the thieves struck the image with his sword, inflicting two gashes. As he started to strike a third time, he fell down and writhed in agony until his death (Cruz 1993, 400). It must have been embarrassing to the faithful that the icon—reputed to protect all of Poland (Aradi 1954, 63–66)—could not even protect itself. It could, however, inspire a tale about how it nevertheless exacted retribution.

A further magical tale relates that after the Holy Picture was abandoned by the Hussites and found covered in dirt and blood, the monks wanted to clean it. However, all the wells were dry from putting out the fires set by the invaders’ torches. Therefore, “It was at this time that a miraculous fountain sprung up, a spring that has since healed thousands and thousands of sick and has supplied water to millions of pilgrims” (Aradi 1954, 63; for a discussion of “miracle” healings see Nickell 2013, 175–222).

As we shall see presently, there were many black Madonna icons that were claimed to be the original. According to Scheer (2002, 1421–1422), “All share a common set of recurring motifs.” These include “the refusal of an image to leave a certain spot,” “the resistance to or revenge taken for damage or ‘wounding,’” and others. She adds: “Only one motif can be said to come up relatively often in connection with black madonnas: that of the prestigious artist—in most cases, St. Luke the Evangelist.”

Iconography

There are as many as perhaps a few hundred black Madonnas in Europe. In addition to small statues (commonly about thirty inches tall and mostly of polychromed wood), they consist of icons either imported from Byzantium (which Constantine renamed Constantinople) or rendered in Byzantine style. This style was influential across Europe for a millennium, and in icon painting it continued until the seventeenth century, traces of it surviving in paintings by El Greco (ca. 1545–1614). Byzantine-style icons were produced in quantity in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Scheer 2002, 1413–1416; Levy 1962, 25).

Now, distinctly Christian images had begun to appear about 200 ce. By the beginning of the fifth century there had developed “a cult of portraits of saints, including the Virgin,” in different parts of the Christian Empire (Grabar 1968, 7–30, 84). Apparently the earliest icon of Mary reputedly painted by Luke was a large circular portrait of her head only. Its circular shape is unusual, and it may have indeed been painted on a table top or a semblance thereof. A tradition holds that in the first half of the fifth century it was discovered—not by Helena but (in this variant tale) by Eudokia (wife of Byzantine emperor Theodosius II) and sent by her from Palestine to Constantinople. There it was fitted into a great rectangular full-length picture of Mary holding the infant Christ. It was reportedly this composite that became known as the Hodegetria (“She who shows the Way”)—a representation of the Theotokos (“Mother of God”). In this type, the Holy Mother holds the Christ Child while gesturing to him as the salvation of humankind (Guarducci 1991; Grabar 1968, 84; Hodegetria 2014). As we shall see, this portrait set—now presumed lost (Hodegetria 2014)—probably had dark-complexioned figures. It was doubtless the prototype of subsequent Hodegetria-type “black” Madonnas.

The Black Madonna of Czestochowa is a late evolutionary example of this type.1 According to anthropologists Leonard W. Moss and Stephan C. Cappannari (1953, 320), it is “distinctly thirteenth to fourteenth century Byzantine in form.” Various additional sources agree that it is of “Byzantine origin,” that its “Byzantine style is obvious,” and so on (Leonard-Stuart and Hagar 1912; Duricy 2013). However, Pasierb (1989, 6) cautions that “In fact even today neither stylistic nor iconographic analyses are of much help.” That is because the icon was repainted in 1434.2 Pasierb insists that therefore it is only possible to say that it was a prototype of the fifth-century one in Constantinople and therefore “it could have been made some time between the 6th and 14th centuries."

Nevertheless, there are indications that the repainting was faithful to the original (Pasierb 1989, 6), and the image does actually contain a number of iconographic clues relating to its dating. Even as a work of imagination, it is anachronistic for the first century. For example, the infant Jesus holds in his left hand a codex (a bound book, as opposed to the earlier scroll), said to be a book of gospels. But there could be no such texts until, decades after Jesus’s crucifixion, they were separately written and eventually collected. That did not take place until the late second or even third century ce (Bible 1960; Price 2003, 40), long after the deaths of the supposed painter and his portrait subject.

One motif is of particular interest. The Madonna’s blue garment is studded with gold fleurs-de-lis, the lily being symbolic of the Trinity as well as of the Virgin (Webber 1938, 178). The combination of colors and motif also echo the royal French coat of arms—d’azur, semé de fleurs de lis d’or (“blue, interspersed with gold lilies”)—which was not officially adopted until the twelfth century (Black Madonna 2014; Hall 1979, 124; Fleur-de-lis 1960). From this, it has been suggested that the icon was probably produced at the Jasna Gora monks’ founding monastery in Hungary, during the reign of the Anjou dynasty, 1308–1386 (Black Madonna 2014). That time period is supported by the fact that the monastery was established in Czestochowa about 1382 (Leonard-Stuart and Hagar 1912), and the icon arrived there “most probably on 31 August 1384” (Pasierb 1989, 6). I would emphasize that the icon has no provenance before that time.

Art scholar Ernst Scheyer (2013) studied the image and concluded that “the present image was restored in the nineteenth century and painted somewhat darker than previously.” This brings us to the persistent question: Why is the Madonna of Czestochowa black? Some have claimed the picture darkened over time—either from the smoke of “innumerable candles” or the age-darkening of pigments used for the skin color (Beissel 1909)—or from the flames and smoke of a burning chapel (Broschart 1961). (In the case of one similar icon restored in 1799, the “thoroughly black” faces of mother and child were attributed to the smoke of centuries after examination of the paint flakes revealed underlying light flesh tones. In his restoration, the artist chose to repaint the faces black because that was what churchgoers expected [Scheer 2002, 1435].)

An alternate view is that many of the numerous black Madonnas (icons and statues) were intentionally created black (i.e., dark-skinned). That is in fact true of certain Madonnas whose features and skin color match that of the native population—for example, various “Negroid madonnas” in Africa (Moss and Cappannari 1953, 319) and the dark-skinned Image of Guadalupe in Mexico (alleged to have appeared miraculously but in fact painted by an Aztec artist [Nickell 1988, 103–117; 2013, 31–34]). Moss and Cappannari (1953, 324) go further, suggesting that “The black madonnas are Christian borrowings from earlier pagan art forms which depicted Ceres, Demeter, or Isis as black in the color characteristic of those goddesses of the earth.”


It may also be true that a dark complexion was simply thought appropriate for a Jewish woman, as one Dominican scholar insisted in the sixteenth century (de Barletta 1571). Also, as early as the sixth century appeared allegedly miraculous self-portraits of Jesus (termed acheiropoietos or “not made with hands”) that were actually painted (Nickell 2007, 69), and these were likewise dark-complexioned presumably for the same reason (Scheer 2002, 1425, n. 36).

Conclusions

The Black Madonna of Czestochowa is a traditional, Hodegetria icon, of a type that evolved from its probable prototype in fifth-century Constantinople. The claim that it was painted by Luke on a table-top made by Jesus in his father’s carpentry shop derives from that prototype—and, of course, is nothing more than pious legend. The image was apparently rendered with original dark flesh tones (there being no evidence that the “black” coloration resulted later from smoke, fires, or the discoloration of age). It is probably of fourteenth-century manufacture, consistent with the lack of provenance before 1384 when the icon appeared at the Jasna Gora monastery.

As to the claims of miracle healings and protection, the sad fact is that it was unable to heal or protect itself—despite the best efforts of further pious legend-making. It does stand as a testament to the faith of its countless devotees.

It remains for the Black Madonna of Czestochowa to be radiocarbon dated. A tiny sample of wood could be taken from the edge,3 specially cleaned to remove contaminants, and then subjected to the carbon-dating process—just as was done for the Titulus Crucis and piece of the True Cross (albeit with the devastating result of disproving their authenticity). The icon’s custodians should commission this test or admit, by their refusal, that their faith in its authenticity is weak.

Notes

1. The wood panel measures (without the frame) about 13” wide by 19” high and is nearly 1/2” thick (Cruz 1993, 401).
2. When the Black Madonna was repainted in 1434, two pen slashes were made to the right cheek to commemorate the previous vandalism (Black Madonna 2014).
3. The back of the panel is illustrated with scenes from its legendary history, rendered in 1682 (Pasierb 1989, 210).

References

• Aradi, Zsolt. 1954. Shrines to Our Lady Around the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young.
• Beissel, Stephan. 1909; cited in Scheer 2002, 1418.
• Bible. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1960. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.
• Black Madonna of Czestochowa. 2014. Online at http://en.wikipedia.org/Black_Madonna_of_Czestochowa; accessed January 15, 2014.
• Broschart, Charles B. 1961. Call Her Blessed; cited in Duricy 2013.
• Calvin, John. 1543. Traite des Reliques; reprinted in English as Treatise on Relics (transl. by Count Valerian Krasinski), Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2009 (with an introduction by Joe Nickell).
• Cruz, Joan Carroll. 1984. Relics. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor.
• 1993. Miraculous Images of Our Lady. Charlotte, North Carolina: Tan Books.
• de Barletta, Gabriel. 1571. Cited in Scheer 2002, 1425.
• Duricy, Michael. 2013. Black Madonnas: Our Lady of Czestochowa. Online at http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/meditations/olczest.html; accessed January 2, 2014.
• Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery. 2015. CNN documentary, episode “The True Cross” aired March 29.
• Fleur-de-lis. 1960. Encyclopedia Britannica. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.
• Grabar, André. 1968. Christian Iconography: A Study of Origins. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
• Guarducci, Margherita. 1991. The Primacy of the Church of Rome. San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 93–101.
• Hall, James. 1979. Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row.
• Hodegetria. 2014. Online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodegetria; accessed January 20, 2014.
• Levy, Mervyn, ed. 1962. The Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. New York: Graphic Society.
• Leonard-Stuart, Charles, and George J. Hagar. 1912. Everybody’s Cyclopedia. New York: Syndicate Publishing Co., vol. 2, n.p. (s.v. “Czenstochau” [sic]).
• Moss, Leonard W., and Stephen C. Cappannari. 1953. The black Madonna: An example of culture borrowing. The Scientific Monthly, June, 319–324.
• Mullen, Peter. 1998. Shrines of Our Lady. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Nickell, Joe. 1988. Secrets of the Supernatural. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
• 2007. Relics of the Christ. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• 2013. The Science of Miracles. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Pasierb, Janusz S. 1989. The Shrine of the Black Madonna at Czestochowa, 3rd ed. Warsaw: Interpress Publishers.
• Price, Robert M. 2003. The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Scheer, Monique. 2002. From majesty to mystery: Change in meanings of black Madonnas from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The American Historical Review, col. 107, no. 5 (December), 1412–1440.
• Scheyer, Ernst. 2013. Quoted in Duricy 2013.
• Webber, F.R. 1938. Church Symbolism. Cleveland, Ohio: J.H. Jansen.

Having long observed that many Bigfoot sightings seem consistent with bears, I have for some time been expounding on the subject—showing that, when bears stand upright on their hind legs, they become North America’s foremost Bigfoot lookalikes (other than for people in Bigfoot suits). Bigfoot also 
usually behaves like a bear and is typically found in bear territory (Nickell 2013a).

The resemblance is sometimes made especially clear when we look at regional subtypes of Bigfoot—the Skunk Ape of Florida, for example, or a unique “bluish” creature seen in the Yukon. As it happens, the former, together with its bad odor, is consistent with the black bear (Nickell 2013b), and the latter is illuminated by the fact that black bears of a bluish color may be found in the southwest Yukon (Nickell 2014; Gloia 2011).

Here we look at several more of these regional variants of Bigfoot—such well-known creatures as Old Yellow Top, the Traverspine “Gorilla,” the Fouke Monster, Big Muddy, and others—to compare their appearance and behavior with those of bears.


Old Yellow Top

In 1906 at a mine near Cobalt, Ontario, a group of men saw a creature that would become known as Old Yellow Top because it was described as having a light-colored mane.

Seventeen years later, in July 1923, two miners working on their claims in the Cobalt area saw “what looked like a bear picking in a blueberry patch” (Green 1978, 248–249). One stated: “It kind of stood up and growled at us. Then it ran away. It sure was like no bear that I have ever seen. Its head was kind of yellow and the rest of it was black like a bear, all covered with hair” (qtd. in Green 1978, 249).

Actually, Black Bears (Ursus americanus) love blueberries, are indeed completely covered in hair—which may be all or partially blond—and often stand on their hind legs to better sense something that has attracted their attention (“Black Bears” 2013; Herrero 2002, 87). (A photograph of such a blond-maned bear—although a brown bear in this instance—is shown in Herrero 2002, 133.) This ability of bears to stand upright “no doubt influenced some people’s perception of them as being humanlike . . .,” according to Herrero (2002, 139).

A similar creature (not the same one of course) was seen again in the same area—in April 1946, by a woman with her son, and another in August 1970, by a bus driver. “At first I thought it was a big bear. But then it turned to face the headlights and I could see some light hair, almost down to its shoulders. It couldn’t have been a bear,” he concluded.

A passenger on the bus stated that it “looked like a bear to me at first, but it didn’t walk like one. It was kind of stooped over. Maybe it was a wounded bear, I don’t know” (qtd. in Green 1978, 249). Both men’s first thoughts were no doubt correct, as they themselves would probably have recognized had they been more familiar with bears’ stances and color phases.

Traverspine ‘Gorilla’

A famous 1913 sighting of the Traverspine “Gorilla,” named after a community in Labrador, occurred when a little girl saw a huge, dark-haired creature come out of the woods. “It was about seven feet tall when it stood erect, but sometimes it dropped to all fours.” It left tracks in the mud, and later in the snow, “twelve inches long, narrow at the heel, and forking at the front into two broad, round-ended toes” (Merrick 1933).

Again, this is consistent with a black bear. Yes, such bears have five rather than two toes (as do most “Bigfoot,” based on their alleged tracks); however, we learn that “in mud a black bear’s toe separation may not show” (Herrero 2002, 178). Given the clue that the “two” Bigfoot toes were “broad,” the likely explanation is that separation only appeared between the second and third toes. That would give the appearance that there were just two notably broad toes. That the heel was described as “narrow,” characteristic of a bear’s hind foot (Napier 1973, 61), also helps to further identify the tracks as probably a bear’s. (The estimated twelve-inch length of, presumably, the hind foot is uncommonly large, but the tracks may have been overlaps of front and hind feet or the size could have been overestimated.) Besides, size can vary, that of the same foot impression being “different in the mud, in snow, or dry ground” (Herrero 2002, 175). The estimated standing height of the “gorilla” seems about right too, since a black bear can easily be seven feet tall—with or without a little girl’s misperception or exaggeration.

One account tells of two creatures, one supposedly smaller than the other, yet contradictorily stating, “They sometimes stood erect on their hind legs at which time they looked like great hairy men seven feet tall” (Wright 1962). Another indication that the creatures were indeed bears came from reports that the first creature “ripped the bark off trees and rooted up huge rotten logs as though it were looking for grubs” (Merrick 1933). Indeed, the Black Bear, in spring “peels off tree bark to get at the inner, or cambium, layer” and “will tear apart rotting logs for grubs, beetles, crickets, and ants” (Whitaker 1996, 705).

The Fouke Monster

Probably the first sighting of what would become known as the “Fouke Monster” after Fouke, Arkansas, near where it was sighted, was in 1953. It was not seen again until 1955 when a squirrel-hunting fourteen-year-old boy fired at it with birdshot.

He described the monster as covered in reddish-brown hair or fur, standing upright at a height of some seven feet, and having very long arms. It also had a flat nose that was dark brown. The creature “stretched, sniffing the air,” then started toward the boy, who shot at it. That seemed to have no effect, and the youth ran away. In 1971 hundreds of three-toed, thirteen-and-a-half-inch tracks were found in a bean field and attributed to the monster (Green 1978, 189–191). The Fouke Monster was the inspiration for the Legend of Boggy Creek movies (Coleman and Huyghe 1999, 56–57; Fuller 1972, 24–28). (As an example of careless research in some quarters, one source [Matthews 2008, 110] places Fouke in “Kentucky.”)

Be the tracks as they may, the boy’s description is a pretty good fit for an Ursus americanus (black bear) of cinnamon color. States one bear expert (Herrero 2002, 131–132): “An individual [black] bear’s coat color may range from blond, cinnamon, or light brown to dark chocolate brown or jet black.” (See also Van Wormer 1966, 21.) Significantly, the Fouke Monster stood and sniffed the air; that is common behavior for a bear “trying to sense something” (Herrero 2002, 139), as the creature obviously was attempting in this instance.

Momo

In 1972, “Momo,” short for “Missouri Mon­ster,” appeared near Louisiana, Missouri. A huge creature covered in black fur, it stood upright on two legs. Reports of such monsters date back to the 1940s, and a year prior to “the Momo scare” two women had encountered a hairy ape-man on River Road near the town (Green 1978, 194–195; Coleman and Huyghe 1999, 50–51).

Then, on July 11, 1972, an incident occurred that received national attention, with many eastern U.S. newspapers sending reporters to cover the story. About 3:30 pm on that sunny Tuesday, a fifteen-year-old girl heard her younger brother scream. Looking out a window, she saw a blood-flecked monster holding a dead dog under one arm; then it “waddled” off (Coleman and Huyghe, 1999, 50; Green 1978, 195). According to John Green (1978, 195), “after the fuss started several other people claimed to have seen something similar, generating even more excitement, and a lot of people spent time monster hunting, but nothing came of it.”

I have compiled this composite description of the creature: It stood about six or seven feet tall, was neckless, and was completely covered in long black hair—even its face, according to one source. It appeared to be bipedal yet “waddled” or walked awkwardly. It had a foul smell and was, at least in part, carnivorous, capable of killing and carrying away a dog (Green 1978, 195; Coleman and Huyghe 1999, 50–51).

I submit that this is a convincing description of a black bear standing upright with its waddling gait a corroborative detail. Of course we should read “arm” as “front leg.” (See Nickell 2013a.) As to the hair-covered face, a feature not reported by all witnesses, it may be that the creature was actually seen from the back. In this light, an artist’s conception of Momo, reproduced in Coleman and Huyghe’s The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide (1999, 51), strongly resembles a black bear viewed from behind.

Big Muddy

In the vicinity of the Big Muddy River near Murphysboro, Illinois, came reports of a seven-foot Bigfoot described as “dirty white” or white “with muddy body hair,” or even as a “big white ghost”—from three sightings in two nights, June 25 and 26, 1973 (Bord and Bord 2006, 270). Two of the witnesses, teenagers, thought it had been covered in mud or slime from the river. Later that summer it was seen “three or four” additional times (Green 1978, 204).

"The Big Muddy Monster"—as it was now known—was seen again the following year, July 9, 1974, and again in July 1975, both times in the vicinity of Murphysboro (Green 1978, 204; Bord and Bord 2006, 270, 277, 281). On its way to legendary status, “Big Muddy” has also been styled the “Murphysboro Mud Monster” in that learned tome, Monster Spotter’s Guide to North America (Francis 2007, 107), which tells us that it is “Seven to eight feet tall, weighing over two hundred pounds,” that it is “omnivorous,” and “may be dangerous if cornered or startled.”

I do not doubt it. Big Muddy sounds for all the world like a tall black bear—one not black in color however. Black bears can be off-white and even white—as shown in Whitaker (1996, 703, color plate 337)—and albino ones are also known (Herrero 2002, 132).

Sister Lakes Monster

This Michigan creature eventually attracted others—including some faux monsters. In May 1964, something that seemed to lurk in the swamps nearby caused frightened fruit pickers to abandon their fields near Sister Lakes, a rural community in the state. For two years there had been reports of a mystery creature, but now they had escalated until they dominated the headlines in local newspapers. The entity was described as very tall, covered in black fur, and having eyes that “glowed with reflected light” (Bord and Bord 2006, 77). That is, the creature merely exhibited animal eyeshine, reflecting light from such sources as car headlights.

Indeed, two fruit pickers, brothers from Georgia, saw the creature in their headlights on June 9, standing upright at an estimated nine feet tall. It appeared to be a cross, they said, between a gorilla and—a bear. What this characterization probably meant was that it looked like a bear if (as they perhaps did not know bears did) one stood on its hind legs. Over the next couple of days, what is now called the Sister Lakes Monster had presumably returned to its lair (Bord and Bord 2006, 77–78; Brandon 1978, 115; Coleman and Huyghe 1999, 50).

Nevertheless, would-be monster hunters and sightseers flocked to the area, where cafes served Monster Burgers, a theater played horror fare, and the radio station interrupted its Monster Music with monster updates. One enterprising storekeeper marketed a monster-hunting kit, complete with a light, net, baseball bat, and—just in case—a wooden stake and mallet. All in good fun, but when the teenagers began to don old fur coats and imitate the monster, the sheriff stated, “I had to order hunters away because it’s getting mighty dangerous—three thousand strangers prowling about at night with guns . . .” (Bord and Bord 2006, 78).

It would hardly have been safe for people or bears. Allowing for a little understandable exaggeration (monsters tend to loom larger, rather than smaller, in frightened witnesses’ eyes), I think the Sister Lakes Monster was likely to have been, once again, a black bear.

Dwayyo

In Maryland, near wooded Gambrill State Park in 1965, one John Becker claimed that he went outside his house to investigate a strange noise, and on his way back, he said, he saw something approaching. “It was as big as a bear, had long black hair, a bushy tail, and growled like a wolf or a dog in anger.” Moving toward him, it stood upright and began to attack, but Becker fought it until—with his wife and children looking on in horror—the creature ran away. He subsequently claimed to have filed a report with the Maryland State Police (“Dwayyo” 2013).

Now, this account of a four-footed creature “as big as a bear” sounds just like a bear (save perhaps for the “bushy tail”—a black bear’s being only about six inches long), but in what is described almost like hand-to-paw combat, surely one would recognize a bear. Actually, this story was almost certainly a hoax. A state police spokesman denied they received any such report, and “Becker” proved to be a pseudonym.

An opportunistic reporter for the Frederick News Post, George May, who cranked out several articles on the creature, is implicated: Someone had used the Becker name to apply for a “Dwayyo License” from the county treasurer’s office and the return address was in care of George May at the Frederick News Post ! (“Dwayyo” 2013; Chorvinsky and Opsasnick 1988; “Big hairy monsters” 1973) Whatever the truth, some earlier and subsequent sightings of a creature in the area could well be those of bears.

Summary and Conclusions

As these several examples show, not only does Bigfoot most resemble an upright-standing bear generally, but certain well-known regional subtypes—both past and present—seem to tally with black bears: Florida’s Skunk Apes (smelly black bears); a “bluish” Bigfoot in southwestern Yukon (a blue-gray or “glacier” variety black bear); the blueberry-picking Old Yellow Top of Cobalt, Ontario (a blond-maned black bear); Labrador’s bipedal/quadrapedal traverspine “Gorilla” (a typical large black bear); Arkansas’s reddish-furred Fouke Monster (a familiar cinnamon-colored black bear); Momo, the Missouri Monster, with “waddling” walk (an upright-walking black bear); Illinois’s “dirty white” creature known as Big Muddy (a white, possibly rare albino black bear); the nine-foot Sister Lakes, Michigan, monster with “glowing” eyes (the exaggeration of a black bear with normal eyeshine); and the Dwayyo of Maryland lore (a hoax with occasional bear sightings).

Many other examples could be given, but these should be sufficient to show that indeed, not only do bears often double as Bigfoot but some specific subtypes are mimicked by particular bear behavior, varieties of coloration, or other traits.

Acknowledgments

Librarian Lisa Nolan, of the CFI Libraries staff, provided considerable assistance with the research for this article.

References

• “Big hairy monsters.” Maryland. 1973. INFO Journal III.3 (Summer): 27–28.
• “Black Bears.” 2013. Online at http://www.catskillmountaineer.com/animals-bears.html; accessed March 25, 2013.
• Bord, Janet, and Colon Bord. 2006. Bigfoot Case Book Updated. N.p.: Pine Winds Press.
• Brandon, Jim. 1978. Weird America. New York: E.P. Dutton.
• Chorvinsky, Mark, and Mark Opsasnick. 1988. Notes on the Dwayyo. Strange Magazine 2: 28–29.
• Coleman, Loren, and Patrick Huyghe. 1999. The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide. New York: Avon Books.
• “Dwayyo.” 2013. Online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwayyo; accessed December 18, 2013.
• Francis, Scott. 2007. Monster Spotter’s Guide to North America. Cincinnati, Ohio: HOW Books.
• Fuller, Curtis. 1972. I see by the papers. Fate March: 7–35.
• Gloia, Carol. 2011. Facts about the American Black Bear. Online at http://www.critters360.com/index.php/facts-about-the-american-black-bear-4012/; accessed December 18, 2013.
• Green, John. 1978. Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us. Saanichton, B.C.: Hancock House.
• Herrero, Stephen. 2002. Bear Attacks, rev. ed. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press.
• Matthews, Rupert. 2008. Sasquatch: True-Life Encounters with Legendary Ape Men. Edison, NJ: Chartwell Books.
• Merrick, Elliot. 1933. True North. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Cited in Green 1978, 252–254.
• Napier, John. 1973. Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality. New York: E.P. Dutton.
• Nickell, Joe. 2013a. Bigfoot lookalikes: Tracking hairy man-beasts. Skeptical Inquirer 37(4) (September/October): 12–15.
• 2013b. Tracking Florida’s Skunk Ape. Skeptical Briefs 23(3) (Fall): 8–10.
• 2014. The Yukon’s Bigfoot Bears. Skeptical Briefs 24(2) (Summer): 8–9.
• Van Wormer, Joe. 1966. The World of the Black Bear. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott.
• Whitaker, John O. Jr. 1996. National Audubon Field Guide to North American Mammals, rev. ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Wright, Bruce. 1962. Wildlife Sketches Near and Far. Fredericton, NB: University of New Brunswick Press.

What has been called “one of the most extraordinary outbreaks of poltergeist phenomena” of the twentieth century began with an English schoolboy, aged eleven and a half years, Matthew Manning (Harrison 1994, 9).

Like many other disturbances labeled poltergeist (from poltern “noisy” and geist “spirit”), the events began with rapping sounds, objects thrown about, heavy furniture moved, objects disappearing (but sometimes reappearing in other rooms), and so on. The activities not only centered around Matthew and his home at Queen’s House, Linton, Cambridge, but they followed him to boarding school. Many of today’s paranormal believers suggest the phenomenon, once attributed to the devil, is caused by psychokinetic (“mind-over-matter”) energy from pubescent children with repressed hostilities (Guiley 2000, 293–295). However, proper investigation typically shows the effects are simply due to the mischief of clever children. I have therefore termed the phenomenon the poltergeist-faking syndrome (Nickell 2012, 325–331; Bartholomew and Nickell 2015, 129, 136–137).

The phenomena at Queen’s House that began in February 1967 soon waned but then were renewed more violently beginning at Easter 1971 and continuing through the summer. On July 31 a new phenomenon appeared and continued for a week. The effect, shown in photographs (Harrison 1994, 70–72) is remarkable.

Figure 1. Matthew Manning's bedroom walls were covered with over 600 historical “signatures.”

Signatures on the Walls

Covering the walls of Matthew’s bedroom—from floor to ceiling—appeared over six hundred signatures of deceased persons, most bearing dates spanning six centuries (Figure 1). By August 6, they had largely ceased, but there were occasional later additions. Among the writings were seven “poetic aphorisms” that were signed “Robert Webbe.” A significant number of the dated signatures are those of Webbe family members—former tenants of the house—or others connected to it in some way, including persons who resided in the vicinity or in nearby villages. Admits Harrison (1994, 10), however, “It would be impossibly difficult and time-consuming to try to identify them all.”

The writings were supposedly produced by “discarnate entities” using pencils that were left lying on a table. These writings were never seen being done—unlike Matthew’s later automatic writings and drawings (to be discussed presently) that were frequently observed as he produced them (Beloff 1994, 5). In my experience, a spiritualistic phenomenon that appears shy about being witnessed is most likely faked. And the idea that a ghost—which necessarily lacks a brain—could grip a pencil, let alone engage in writing, is ludicrous.

Dr. Vernon Harrison—described as a handwriting expert and professional photographer—took photos of the wall writings before they were painted over, and then studied them. Although he found problems here and there, he convinced himself that the writings “were examples of direct writing by some entity or entities,” but he was careful to add, “I do not insist on it” (Harrison 1994, 39). John Beloff of the Society for Psychical Research (which published Harrison’s lengthy report) thought the behavior that deliberate hoaxing would have required “is so bizarre that the case would at least force us to question our assumptions regarding the limits of human perversity” (1994, 5–6).

Matthew would have been the obvious, and perhaps only, suspect for hoaxing. Since the signatures that covered the bedroom walls like graffiti came as part of a “poltergeist” outbreak, the prankster may have been looking for attention. In fact, we learn:

Matthew had been working on local history as part of a school project, so some of the names must have been familiar to him. “Webbe” said that he had noticed his good work and decided to help him by providing him with “half a thousand” names of his “friends, allies and family.” (Harrison 1994, 10)

Handwriting Examination

I was determined to make my own examination of the photographed wall writings. (I have had training in forensic writing examination [Handwriting 2008], authored textbooks in the field [Nickell 1990; 1996; 1999; 2009], and worked on many famous cases. These include the alleged diary of Jack the Ripper, the manuscript of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the purported original of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and the identification card of Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk.) I studied the wall writings at length.

Unfortunately, the “spirit” scripts have the characteristics of having been slowly drawn rather than naturally written. They exhibit unnatural evenness in pressure, reveal tremor from hesitancy, show occasional kinked lines betraying uncertainty of movement, and demonstrate blunt beginning and ending strokes. (See Nickell 1996, 65–72.) These are traits associated with imitative writings, such as forgeries, yet these are not the most serious faults.

Most of the “signatures” cannot really be called that because—as in the case of “Robert Webbe”—there are no known examples of either signature or handwriting for comparison (Harrison 1994, 11). The same is true of most of the other writings. Thus, if Matthew Manning, say, were secretly making them, he would not have to reproduce an actual signature, but merely write in a variety of amateurishly created styles—rather like a mimic speaking different made-up voices.

A signature purporting to be that of a well-known historical figure, “Oliver Cromwell 1643” (Harrison 1994, 76), not only fails to have any resemblance to genuine signatures of Cromwell (cf. Rawlins 1978, 24, 25, 55), but it even has some wrong (non-Cromwellian) letter forms. Moreover, it is in the same hand as that of some of the other bogus scripts—mostly variations of the hand of “Robert Webbe,” as Harrison admits (1994, 16, 19), some of them “ornamented.”

Then there is the evidence that the individual who actually wrote the scripts failed to understand the handwriting of the periods in question. Thus, even though he offers writings dated in the sixteenth century for example, he shows no knowledge of the common English Secretary Hand that evolved in the late fifteenth century and continued well into the seventeenth (Nickell 1990, 122–124, 202–203). Apart from the handwriting per se, there are anachronisms, such as “Robert Webbe’s” use of ye (for the article the) that had become effectively obsolete long before Webbe’s death in 1736. Harrison (1994, 11) admits the use may have been intended to give, spuriously, a ye olde antique air to the writing, and I am convinced that that is so. Another example is a copy of an excerpt from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscript. The copyist did not even understand the letter forms, let alone comprehend what the text said. (See Harrison 1994, 26, 86.)

Automatic Writings

Soon, Matthew Manning had discovered that he could produce “automatic” writing. In this activity, spirits allegedly guide the hand of the “entranced” medium to produce writings, drawings, or other expressions. If not deliberately faked, such activities are attributed to persons producing the effects while in a dissociative state. (Dissociation is the unconscious process in which a group of mental activities are separated from the main stream of consciousness and so function as a separate unit.) (Nickell 2012, 204–205, 347; Mühl 1963)

Figure 2. Genuine signature of psychical researcher Frederick W.H. Myers (top) is shown with Matthew Manning's automatically written one, which is obviously bogus.

As with the “signatures,” there are serious problems with the “automatic” writings of Manning. In the case of a message purportedly from psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901), not only does the script bear no resemblance to Myers’s handwriting, even lacking his nineteenth-century features (like the lower-case “p” with tall ascender), but the “F” of the signature is even the wrong form (printed rather than cursive). Indeed, all of the “Myers” text is very similar to the print-writing of Manning himself. Moreover (trumping the rationalization that Manning’s hand was asserting itself while being guided), what should have been “Frederic W. H. Myers” is actually rendered as “Frederick Myers.” (Figure 2; see Harrison 1994, 33–34, 91–93.)

There are similar problems with other writings. Bertrand Russell, the atheist philosopher, supposedly writes in acknowledgment that, indeed, one does not die at death. Spiritualists such as Manning are always trying to posthumously convert nonbelievers, but this shrewd attempt fails because, once again, the writing is spurious: for example, the signature includes the wrong forms of the letters B and r. (See Harrison 1994, 89; cf. Rawlins 1978, 198.)

Again, the writing of “Millicent Webbe” is bogus. Although there is no known specimen for comparison, it has a welter of internal inconsistencies, such as multiple variants of pseudo-antique forms. Also, it is signed once with its three letters e in Roman form, and again with one Roman and two Greek forms (Harrison 1994, 28, 87).

Automatic Drawings

In producing both automatic writings and drawings, Matthew Manning follows in the footsteps of others with multiple automatism skills, notably Rosemary Brown. She first claimed to receive dictations of writing from spirits of the dead (such as Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, and George Bernard Shaw), then, prompted by an injury to pass time at her piano, began to receive compositions from noted composers such as Bach, Chopin, Mozart, and Rachmaninoff. Brown gave more than 400 public performances of her “channeled” music. While some saw her as indeed exhibiting the various composers’ styles, others more critical regarded her as only a mimic (Guiley 2000, 27).

Manning’s automatic drawings appeared to be works by Aubrey Beardsley, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso—among others. Purportedly, the spirits of the great artists would visit Manning while he was in a trance. He told the San Francisco Examiner that an expert from Sotheby’s in London had said a “Picasso” he had done looked so much like an original that Sotheby’s would have authenticated it had they not been informed it was a “Manning.” However, noted psychical investigator James Randi wrote to Sotheby’s, receiving the reply that the claim was “absolutely not true.” The official stated that the drawings allegedly done by “spirits of various artists” were all produced by a single hand, and while clever, were obviously forgeries of known works (Gordon 1987, 101).

Consider one example of alleged Manning automatism that Harrison (1994, 43) terms “the pièce de résistance.” It is ostensibly a decorative pen-and-ink work by master Art Nouveau illustrator Beardsley (1872–1898), although “received” through Matthew Manning. In fact, the drawing is a composite of two forgeries of Beardsley from a published book of the artist’s works! (Harrison 1994, 44). But even this evidence does not dissuade the credulous Harrison.

Overall Assessment

Matthew Manning began as the focus of “poltergeist” activity that morphed into the phenomenon of spirit inscriptions appearing all over his bedroom walls that in turn led to his becoming an automatic writer and drawer. He has also claimed to be a psychokinetic metal bender—though his efforts cannot be distinguished from magic tricks (Booth 1986, 57). And he has claimed to apport objects (i.e., cause them to magically appear), communicate telepathically, astrally project himself into the past, and predict the future (Guiley 2000, 27). By the 1990s, he was also calling himself a healer (Harrison 1994, 8). In fact, he has many of the traits associated with a fantasy-prone personality (Nickell 2012, 347–348).

Manning’s purported psychic abilities were tested in 1972 for a proposed BBC broadcast. Researchers asked him to provide information—using automatic writing—about a set of small objects as well as information about the authors of some letters (each in a sealed envelope). The information Manning provided was essentially erroneous, and the planned broadcast was canceled. Later it was observed that all but one of the eight extant automatic messages had been written “clearly in variations of one hand” (that of “Robert Webbe”). The other began in an obviously disguised hand that slowly evolved into a semblance of the others, revealing that the writer was unable to keep up the disguise (Harrison 1994, 24–25).

Manning was also tested by physicist John Taylor (1980, 83) and colleague Eduardo Balanovski as to his abilities in remote viewing (the alleged power of seeing things at a distance by clairvoyance or out-of-body travel). The researchers judged the results to be “completely unsuccessful.”

In brief, the evidence does not show Matthew Manning—self-proclaimed wonderworker and jack-of-all-trades occultist—to have the paranormal powers he professes. But he keeps trying to convince us otherwise.

References

• Bartholomew, Robert E., and Joe Nickell. 2015. American Hauntings: The True Stories behind Hollywood’s Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
• Beloff, John. 1994. Editor’s Preface, Harrison 1994, 5–6.
Booth, John. 1986. Psychic Paradoxes. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Booth, John. 1986. Psychic Paradoxes. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Gordon, Henry. 1987. Extrasensory Deception. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, second ed. New York: Checkmark Books.
• Handwriting expert. 2008. Online at http://www.joenickell.com/HandwritingExpert/handwritingexpert1.html; March 24; accessed June 8, 2015.
• Harrison, Vernon. 1994. The signatures on the walls of Queen’s House, Linton, Cambridgeshire, and some of the automatic scripts and drawings of Matthew Manning. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 58(218)(July): 1–104.
• Mühl, Anita M. 1963. Automatic Writing, second ed. New York: Helix Press.
• Nickell, Joe. 1990. Pen, Ink, and Evidence. Reprinted New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2003.
• ———. 1996. Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 1999. Crime Science: Methods of Forensic Detection. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 2009. Real or Fake: Studies in Authentication. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 2012. The Science of Ghosts: Searching for Spirits of the Dead. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Rawlins, Ray. 1978. The Stein and Day Book of World Autographs. New York: Stein and Day.
• Taylor, John. 1980. Science and the Supernatural. New York: Dutton.

So-called “ghost lights” are reported at various sites worldwide, the term being applied to luminous phenomena that, many claim, defy explanation. However, Rosemary Ellen Guiley in her The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits (2000, 156), cautions: “Many reports of ghost lights can be explained naturally, such as car headlights or phosphorescences known as ignis fatuus” (literally “foolish fire,” e.g., combustion of marsh gas).¹

Among the most famous ghost lights are the Marfa Lights, after a town in Texas, reported first by a settler in 1883 (Lindee 1992; Guiley 2000, 156); the Hornet or Ozark Spooklight, south of Joplin, Missouri; and the Brown Mountain Lights, near Morganton, North Carolina, reported since 1913 (Guiley 2000, 156–157; Corliss 1995, 71–72).

There are also ghost lights at sea—for example the Bay Chaleur Fireship, seen off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada, and attributed to the phenomenon of St. Elmo’s fire (Corliss 1995, 72–73).² In 1999 at Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, I investigated the Teazer Light, another reputed phantom ship in flames. Although the rare light did not appear to me during a vigil, my research turned up an instance when the phenomenon proved to have been the moon, just coming over the horizon and being viewed through a bank of fog (Nickell 2001, 188–189).

Here is my report on the Brown Mountain mystery, based on lengthy research and two visits my wife, Diana, and I made to Brown Mountain in 2014 (the first, however, becoming a fiasco when the area was shrouded in fog!). (See figure 1.)

Figure 1. The author at Brown Mountain, NC (the plateau-like ridge to the right).
(Author’s photo by Diana Harris.)

Evolution of the Lights

In investigating the Brown Mountain Lights, I discovered that the phenomena—plural—have evolved over time, along with explanations for it. I consider that there are three main historic periods or phases:

1. Before 1913: Myths and Superstitions. A number of legends are associated with Brown Mountain. A sign at the Brown Mountain overlook (on highway 181, at mile marker 20, north of Morganton) claims that “For hundreds of years, people have seen mysterious lights floating above Brown Mountain.” Although no historical record is cited or, indeed, appears to exist, the text nevertheless asserts: “According to Cherokee legend, in 1200 the Cherokee fought a great battle near Brown Mountain against the Catawba Indians and many warriors died. The lights are said to be the spirits of Cherokee maidens who search in vain for their loved ones.” The sign’s text continues:

A more recent legend says the lights are caused by the spirit of a heartbroken woman searching the mountain at night by torch light looking for her fiancé who failed to come for her on their wedding day. Another legend tells the story of a young mother-to-be, murdered by her wicked husband. The lights materialized to help neighbors find the young woman’s body, and still appear today reminding evildoers that their crimes will be revealed.

This latter tale is elaborated into an entire chapter in Dixie Spirits (Coleman 2011, 173–179), a book with many laughable errors and a complete absence of references. (However, see Walser 1980, 44–45, for earlier sources.) Somehow the author—ghost ballyhooer Christopher K. Coleman—has discovered a wealth of detail about “Belinda” and “Jim” (as he calls the supposed ghosts). Not only are no sources cited, but elsewhere in his book (2011, 280) he actually disparages such “scholarly trappings”—just what could help us decide whether he was relating folklore or mostly writing fakelore.

Still another legend of the Brown Mountain Lights was told to me by a young man visiting the overlook. Supposedly, an old slave had become lost and wandered with a lantern, trying to find his way back to his master’s home but failing, a pursuit that he now perpetually continues as a ghost. This is a variant (as folklorists say) of a legend related by Joshua P. Warren (2014, 8):

Brown Mountain was named after a plantation owner who lived in the area in the 1800s. He was kind to his slaves. One night he ventured onto the mountain to hunt. When he did not return, one of his slaves took a lantern and scoured the ridge for him. He, too, was never seen again. Today you can still see the “faithful old slave’s” lantern burning as his spirit still searches for his lost master.

As I note, however, this tale is, in turn, quite similar to a narrative from West Virginia about the Cole Mountain Light (near Moorefield), attributed to the mid-1800s. An important difference is that the hunter at Cole Mountain was not a man named Brown but a landowner named Charles Jones (Musick 1977, 65–67, 184). It is evident that the legend of the slave searching with a lantern is what folklorists term a migratory legend—one known in widely different locales but able to become attached to particular places, whereupon “they are said to be localized, or local legends” (Brunvand 1978, 106). Finally, the Brown Mountain Lights have been claimed by some mountain folk as a form of divine warning (Norman and Scott 1995, 266–267).

2. 1913–1960: Records and Theories. The first known reference to the lights in print was in the September 13, 1913, Charlotte Daily Observer.³ In 1913 a U.S. Geological Survey geologist concluded the lights were those of locomotives, while a U.S. Weather Bureau report of 1919 explained the phenomenon as an electrical discharge compared to South America’s “Andes Light,” although the writer had not actually visited the site.

A serious investigation was carried out in 1922 by geologist George Rogers Mansfield (1922, 18), who spent two weeks in the area. His report concluded that the lights were “clearly not of unusual nature or origin” consisting of automobile headlights (about 47 percent), locomotive headlights (33 percent), and stationary lights and brush fires (10 percent each). While others have postulated swamp gas, luminous electrical discharge, mirages, and still other possibilities (Warren 2014, 11, 20), Mansfield discredits such phenomena.

Mansfield perhaps too quickly dismissed the suggestion that some lights were mirages. Yet he called attention to the unstable atmospheric conditions in the basin-like area that is almost surrounded by mountains. With dense air comes an increase in refractiveness (the bending of light waves). Fine particles like dust and mist can obscure and scatter the refracted light, as well as impart to it the yellowish and reddish tints that are often reported. Therefore the light is especially active during a clearing spell following a rain, as many observers have noted. When the mist becomes quite dense, the light is obscured. The effect of the variations in atmospheric density is to sometimes increase and at other times diminish the lights’ intensity. Thus a light may suddenly appear then effectively disappear, as frequently observed (Mansfield 1922, 7–15). In his conclusions Mansfield (1922, 16) reasoned:

As the basin and its atmospheric conditions antedate the earliest settlement of the region, it is possible that even among the first settlers some favorably situated light may have attracted attention by seeming to flare and then diminish or go out. As the country became more thickly settled the number of chances for such observations would increase. Before the advent of electric lights, however, it is doubtful whether such observations could have been sufficiently numerous to cause much comment, though some persons may have noted and remarked upon them.

3. After 1960: UFOs and Other Paranormalities. Although legends mostly interpret the Brown Mountain Lights as ghosts, since about 1960 tales of UFOs, alien contact, and “interdimensional beings” have proliferated there, as well as of “little people, fairies and such” (Warren 2014, 8). For example, a local man named Ralph Lael claimed to be in telepathic communication with the lights, which he said directed him to a secret crystal-filled cave. From there, he said, alien humanoids from a planet called Pewam took him on space trips as they advised him how to save Earth. Lael operated the Outer Space Rock Shop Museum, where he exhibited an “alien mummy.” A grainy photo shows it looking for all the world like a carnival sideshow fake. However, since Lael died, the whereabouts of the “creature” have become unknown (Warren 2014, 5, 15).

In 1990, a book by “Commander X” identified Brown Mountain as one of several other “underground alien bases” (Warren 2014, 15). Thus Brown Mountain is counted among such extraterrestrial conspiracies as the MJ-12 crashed-saucer reports, animal mutilations, Men in Black, and claims of secret bases on the moon.

Meanwhile, the lights’ early folkloric identity as ghost lights resurfaced as part of the ghosthunting craze of modern times. Thus amateur enthusiasts are drawn to the mountain as to an old house, graveyard, or other “haunted” site.

We see not only that the Brown Mountain Lights have evolved but that they have done so as cultural beliefs and expectations changed. It appears that as the lights were adapted first to the isolated local lore, they later began to be influenced by various encroachments—migrating folktales, visits by outside scientists and others—and finally they attracted fringe notions from America’s burgeoning UFO and ghost-hunting mythologies.

Investigating on Site

Various sites offer views of Brown Mountain, which is a flat-topped or “plateaulike” formation with a maximum elevation of approximately 2,600 feet. However, we chose the overlook on highway 181, which is described as “by far the best spot to see Brown Mountain” (Warren 2014, 18). (Again, see figure 1.)

Following a picnic dinner at the site in the early evening, I was sitting in the car when I saw an extremely bright flash on the mountainside. Startled, I got out and immediately realized that I had seen a firefly! I was later amused to learn that “some have even attributed the lights to giant fireflies” (Warren 2014, 16) or, more reasonably, on rare instances, to fireflies flying near a person “yet appearing unduly large because his eyes were focused on the distant hillside” (Mansfield 1922, 6).

As dark set in, I interacted with several people there, mostly from a family who looked for the lights with me. We saw, in addition to airplanes, lights that we attributed to automobiles and to Morganton town lights, as well as to a distant tower’s red flashing light. Ghost light promoters will be quick to say that we did not see the “true” Brown Mountain Lights, but which are they?

The lights are reported in widely varying descriptions. One source (Loven et al. 1908) encountered a light “like a toy fire balloon, a distant ball . . . much smaller than the full moon, much larger than any star and very red.” Another (Perry 1919) stated he saw a “glowing ball of light, slightly yellow and lasting half a minute.” Again, a witness (Gregory n.d.) described a light “like a ball of incandescent gas, in which a seething motion could be observed.” Still another (Harris 1921) reported “a pale white light, as one seen through a ground glass globe,” having a halo around it.

At least those describe single, orb-like lights, despite the different colors. These are ever-changing; states Warren (2014, 2–3): “The lights frequently begin as a red glow, flaring into white. They can also appear as orange, blue, green or yellow.” A light can last from six seconds to over a minute, “especially when floating into the air over the ridge.” Also, rather unpredictably: “One orb can divide into several, the smaller ones eventually combining to form a large one again. They might seem to ‘ooze’ around the trees and drift over the ridge; dwindle and fade away, or simply wink and vanish.”

Yet again, according to a pair of writers who acknowledge that “Descriptions vary from one observer to another” (Norman and Scott 1995, 266): “A minister described the light as cone-shaped and larger than a star. When two more arose, he, and his sons who were with him, watched through field glasses. The lights rose high in the sky and terminated.”

Moreover, the lights are reported in a still more bewildering variety, for example as “red and white shooting lights” (Hauck 1996, 311), “the fey array of lights dancing before the slopes of Brown Mountain,” and “like flaming balls shooting from a roman candle,” as well as “multi-colored orbs of light [that] appear to rise higher and higher in the air, sometimes darting about, sometimes zooming straight up the slopes” (Coleman 2011, 173). As well, they are “sometimes moving so fast and in such numbers that it is impossible to count them all. Some lights fade away as they rise; others, however, expand as they ascend and then burst in mid-air like silent fireworks” (Coleman 2011, 173–174).

Mystery Still Solved

Apparently unaware or unconvinced of the powerful effect of the atmosphere on lights, one proponent of the mystery insists that “the paranormal lights . . . often move in strange ways and can change color before your eyes, unlike the stationary lights from normal sources, or car lights that always move on the same route” (Warren 2014, 18). It is easy to be mystified. Experts in the causes of nocturnal light UFOs know this well. Allan Hendry (1979, 26) notes that not only color change but motion effects can be created by atmospheric refraction, turning, for example, a celestial light into a flying saucer, and something as simple as a cloud can cause “dramatic ‘disappearance’ acts.”

In 1977, a visiting team of scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory aimed a distant arc light to a point west of Brown Mountain where observers waited. The blue-white beam appeared as an “orange-red orb apparently hovering several degrees above Brown Mountain’s crest.” The scientists concluded that most of the sightings were indeed refractions of lights in the distance (Clark 1993, 55). This supports Mansfield’s observations and deductions of 1922.

Several more recent researchers have also spent time studying the lights, only to conclude that they were produced by campfires, vehicle headlights, airplanes, and distant town lights. One researcher called attention to a few reports that could describe the rare phenomenon of ball lighting (Washburn 2012). Moreover, the lights are not limited to Brown Mountain but in fact have been reported throughout the entire area (Warren 2014, 2).

Proponents of the “mystery” are quick to challenge the scientific explanations. But as Rosemary Ellen Guiley (2000, 156) acknowledges, “Ghost lights have a power to fascinate, and some individuals who see them do not want the mystique spoiled by an explanation.” Neither do writers selling mystery. Whenever one explanation is offered, they describe other eyewitness reports (or alleged reports, since often no sources are given) that supposedly rule out that cause. They suggest, therefore, that no scientific explanation solves the “mystery” of Brown Mountain (Coleman 2011, 176; Floyd 1993, 57–58). We should refuse to fall for such tricks. The evidence is clear: There is no single explanation because there is no single phenomenon. Just as we know that not all UFOs are weather balloons, not all Brown Mountain lights have a single cause.

Certainly, automobiles, trains, and other mundane sources have been responsible for most of the lights. The response of locals, relying on folklore—that the phenomena occurred long before there were such vehicles—is based on “exceedingly slight” evidence (Clark 1993, 55). More recently have come various potential light sources, such as off-road vehicles (ORV) and campers that “are commonly mistaken for paranormal illuminations”—an ORV park having been installed in the mid-1980s (Warren 2014, 7, 14).

As with UFOs, some lights will remain unidentified—not because they are inherently mysterious but because they are just eyewitness reports or snapshots with so many variable factors. But to claim that something unknown (negative evidence) is therefore paranormal is to engage in the logical fallacy of arguing from ignorance: drawing a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. Consider this the next time Brown Mountain “researchers” engage in their mystifications.

Notes

1. Such ghostly phenomena, often witnessed as dancing lights, are known variously as will-o’-the-wisp, jack-o’-lantern, etc. (Haining 1993, 126).
2. St. Elmo’s fire is a luminous electrical discharge, sometimes seen during stormy weather at prominent points of a ship or airplane.
3. A claim by the careless Coleman (2011, 174) that in 1771 William Gerard de Brahm, then British colonial surveyor general of the South District of North America, was “the first white man to view the lights” is untrue. He was simply trying to explain some loud noises in the mountains as spontaneous igniting of “nitrous vapors” (Warren 2014, 4).

References

• Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1978. The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction, 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
• Clark, Jerome. 1993. Unexplained! Detroit, Michigan: Visible Ink Press.
• Coleman, Christopher K. 2011. Dixie Spirits: True Tales of the Strange & Supernatural in the South, 2nd ed. New York: Fall River Press.
• Corliss, William R. 1995. Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena. New York: Gramercy Books.
• Floyd, E. Randall. 1993. Ghost Lights and Other Encounters with the Unknown. Little Rock, AR: August House.
• Gregory, Rev. C.E. N.d. Cited in Mansfield 1922, 7.
• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, 2nd ed. New York: Checkmark Books.
• Haining, Peter. 1993. A Dictionary of Ghosts. New York: Dorset Press.
• Harris, Col. Wade H. 1921. Letter Cited in Mansfield 1922, 7.
• Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books.
• Hendry, Allan. 1979. The UFO Handbook. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.
• Loven, Anderson, et al. 1908. Cited in Mansfield 1922, 4.
• Lindee, Herbert. 1992. Ghost lights of Texas. Skeptical Inquirer 16(4)(Summer): 400–406.
• Mansfield, George Rogers. 1922. Origin of the Brown Mountain Light in North Carolina. Reprinted as circular 646, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1971.Musick, Ruth Ann. 1977. Coffin Hollow and Other Ghost Tales. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• Nickell, Joe. 2001. Real Life X-Files. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• Norman, Michael, and Beth Scott. 1995. Historic Haunted America. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.
• Perry, Prof. W.G. 1919. Cited in Mansfield 1922, 7.
• Walser, Richard. 1980. North Carolina Legends. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History.
• Warren, Joshua P. 2014. Brown Mountain Lights: A Viewing Guide. Available at shadowboxent.brinkster.net/bml%20viewing%20guide_9-16-13.pdf; accessed October 3, 2014.
• Washburn, Mark. 2012. Lights still enchanting mystery. Charlotte Observer (November 4).

Like the fabled Yeti or Abominable Snowman of the Himalaya Mountains, and the Sasquatch/Bigfoot of North America, Australia’s Yowie (or Yahoo, among many other names) is a supposed hairy man-beast that leaves strange tracks and wonderment wherever it ambles. Equated with an entity from Aboriginal mythology, also called Dulagarl (or Doolagahl, “great hairy man”), it was regarded as a magical being from the time of creation—what Aborigines call the Dreamtime. Interestingly, however, “[M]any early Europeans claimed to have seen the Yowie, many years before they came to learn about it from the aborigines” (Gilroy 1976, 9). It remains, according to cryptozoologist Loren Coleman (2006), “one of the world’s greatest zoological or anthropological mysteries.”

I first went in search of the creature in 2000 guided by skeptic Peter Rodgers. We ventured into the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, which—according to Yowie popularizer Rex Gilroy (1995, 212)—“continues to be a hotbed of Yowie man-beast activities—a vast region of hundreds of square miles containing inaccessible forest regions seldom if ever visited by Europeans.” We drove into the Katoomba township bushland and took the world’s steepest incline railway (originally built as a coal-mine transport in 1878) down into Jamison Valley rainforest where Gilroy himself once reported an encounter (1976, 10). We next drove to Jenolan Caves—which Gilroy (1995, 219) claims the Aborigines believed to be Yowie lairs—and bushwalked (hiked) through the surrounding mountainous terrain in a vain search for the elusive creature (Nickell 2001, 16–17).

In 2015, before and after the annual Australian Skeptics National Convention in Brisbane (of which I was honored to be a headliner) held October 16–18, I was able to resume my quest for the Yowie (and began several other investigations). I am indebted to Ross Balch for his tireless help in Brisbane and rural Queensland to the north, and to Kevin Davies and Nick Ware for their dedicated assistance in Canberra and the New South Wales countryside. I photographed a Yowie with a rather wooden personality, did research at an Aboriginal institute, and kept an eye out for any exotic creature in the wild. Here is some of what I found.

Figure 1. Yowie statue in Yowie Park at Kilcoy, Queensland, Australia (Author's photo).

Will the Real Yowie . . .

My study began when Ross Balch drove Myles Power and me through scattered Yowie territory to Yowie Park at Kilcoy. There, with parrots flitting about, we took photographs of the cracked wooden sculpture of the fabled man-beast (Figure 1). As I did so I quipped, “It doesn’t get more real than this!” I meant that, of course, to apply to skeptics’ sightings: Yowies seem not to appear to skeptics—even those looking for them, although it is obligatory for those who report encounters to insist they were previously skeptical.

But what about the Aboriginal elder who insisted, regarding the Dulagarl, “He only appears to Aboriginal people” (Mumbulla 1997)? Do the numerous non-Aboriginal sightings contradict him? Or is it possible he is talking about a quite different being—not the Yowie/Yahoo who today apes (so to speak) Bigfoot, but rather his people’s supernatural entity who could induce sleep and fly through the air to kidnap lone women from the bush, yet who—according to some tribal/regional traditions—contrastingly carried clubs, used fire, and ate men. Other creatures of Aboriginal lore included the Quinkins who, variously shaped, were generally quite small; however, the giant Quinkin, Turramulli, towered over tall trees, had three taloned fingers on each hand, and as many clawed toes on each foot (Healy and Cropper 1994, 116, 118; 2006, 6–12). None of these entities sounds like a Bigfoot type.

Indeed, just as Bigfoot was originally a “wild man of the woods” adapted from European tales and retrofitted onto Native American supernatural beings synthesized for the purpose (Nickell 2011; Loxton and Prothero 2013, 30–36), the Yowie/Yahoo is similarly derivative. Australian examples (from “A Catalogue of Cases” 2006) show that the earliest reports—the first in 1789 being acknowledged as “obviously a hoax,” and continuing well after the beginning of the twentieth century—were sightings of a “WILD MAN or monstrous GIANT,” a “Hairy Man,” “in appearance half man, half baboon,” “wild man of the bush,” “like a blackfellow [Aborigine] only considerably larger,” “hairy men,” “an old man . . . covered with a thick coat of hair,” “the hairy man of the wood,” and so on.

As an example, in 1871 a “little girl” reported an encounter that was part of a “wild man” tradition in the area. She described an old man having a bent back, a covering of hair, tremendously long fingernails, and being about the height of her grandfather. He seemed to wish to avoid the girl (“A Catalogue” 2006, 207).

The term Yowie appears to have been used little if at all during this period, but the appellation “yourie” or “yowrie” appears by perhaps the 1920s, maybe after the Yowrie River or the nearby crossroads community of Yowrie, named by 1885. There was a Yowie Bay, but it was originally named Ewey Bay after the offspring of ewes called “eweys” (Healy and Cropper 2006, 13–143, 25), so the term Yowie may not be aboriginal at all (“A Catalogue” 2006, 217; Healy and Cropper 2006, 14, 25).

Yahoos

Moreover, if we consider the earlier, parallel term “Yahoo,” we must at once recall that it was used—indeed invented1—by English satirist Jonathan Swift in his Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 343–351). It describes his race of hairy, goat-bearded, manlike animals. Swift’s Yahoos are brutes but, satirically, have human depravities.

By 1856 comes a report of a man-beast described alternately as a “wild man of the woods” or a “yahoo.” A case of uncertain date in the 1860s involved a twelve-foot-tall Yahoo that had webbed feet and belched fire. In the same decade a Miss Derrincourt encountered “something in the shape of a very tall man, seemingly covered with a coat of hair . . . what the people here call a Yahoo or some such name.” Still another case of that period involved an encounter with a “hideous yahoo” near an abandoned village (“A Catalogue” 2006, 204–206).

Graham Joyner (1994) conducted an in-depth study of the issue, which he reported in Canberra Historical Journal. He found that Aborigines probably adopted the term Yahoo from settlers, rather than the other way around.

‘Littlefoot’

In addition to the “hairy giant” tradition, another type of Yowie is represented by the Aborigines’ Junjudees (among other terms). These are small, hairy, magical creatures comparable to European fairies, elves, and leprechauns. Still, they seem as real as any if we believe the stories of teenagers who encountered them in 1978–1979 on Towers Hill, near Charters Towers, Queensland. One teen was attacked but claimed to have fought off the three-foot-tall creature with a rock (Healy and Cropper 2006, 120–121). Among many other reports were multiple sightings of similar creatures in 1994 in the vicinity of Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland (Pinkney 2003, 31–32).

Some Aborigines emphasize the Junjudees’ supernatural powers, telling colorful tales about their exploits. For instance, they are guardian beings of certain places, are mischievous, and are attracted to honey. They are also a sort of bogeyman, used to keep children from wandering off, according to Australian Folklore (Ryan 2002, 137–138).

Yowie hunters, somewhat embarrassed by the little hairy folk, rationalize that they may be very young Yowies—no matter what Aborigines say about their “indigenous fairies” (as one researcher calls them [Povah 2006]).

What Manner of Beast?

Yowies are described in a widely diverse manner—beginning with height, which, based on 263 cases (“A Catalogue” 2006), ranges from about two to thirteen feet. The earliest-known record of an Aboriginal sighting came in July 1871 when a “gorilla”-like creature was encountered, but we must keep in mind that due to their long isolation on the Australian island–continent, the Aborigines had no knowledge of primates other than man. It was the early settlers and journalists who began to describe man-beasts with terms such as “huge monkey or baboon,” “upright gorilla,” and so on—from 1849 to the present.

In the early 1870s, in New South Wales, prospectors saw what they thought were “hairy men creeping around their tents,” but a Sydney Mail correspondent concluded, “They were probably the large badgers or wombats which abound there” (“A Catalogue” 2006, 207). Wombats, marsupials that somewhat resemble (according to American Heritage Dictionary 1970) “small bears,” may well be responsible for a number of other Yowie reports.

The kangaroo and its cousins the wallaby and the wallaroo are also good suspects. When, in 1954, three Queensland youths reported an encounter with a six-foot-tall creature covered with hair, possessing a long tail, and having an “apron” draped from its waist, the latter detail was an obvious clue pointing to a marsupial pouch. Someone suggested that the boys had been scared by “a cranky old wallaroo” (“A Catalogue” 2006, 224). Again, other cases may be explained by such related marsupials.

In addition to animals, there are numerous other possibilities: hoaxes, including those of a diminutive man who wore a hairy suit with bicycle-reflector eyes (Healy and Cropper 2006, 168–169); claims made by persons with fantasy-prone personalities and by ubiquitous attention seekers; real wild men, like a bearded, naked, mentally disturbed man mistaken for a Yowie (“A Catalogue” 2006, 262); and many other possibilities, including simple hallucinations and apparitional experiences. For example, “waking dreams” that occur between wakefulness and sleep (Nickell 2012, 353–354) may explain some cases of persons waking to see a Yowie looking at them (see Healy and Cropper 2006, 105, 170–171, 223). Again, like sightings of ghosts—typically seen when the percipient is tired, performing routine work, daydreaming, or the like—a Yowie’s image may well up from the subconscious and be superimposed on the visual scene (Nickell 2012, 345).

‘Bigfoot’

The American Sasquatch—after 1958 usually called Bigfoot (Nickell 2011, 68)—no doubt had an influence on Yowie sightings. That is especially so after 1967 when Roger Patterson’s famous hoax film greatly publicized that elusive manimal (Nickell 2011, 68–72).

Patterson’s “Bigsuit” (a modified gorilla costume) had pendulous breasts, one of several details found in Australian cases occurring (or being reported) only post-Patterson (at least as found in “A Catalogue” 2006). In addition to breasts, these motifs include Bigfoot’s legendary foul odor; large, clawless, human-like footprints; and possibly other features (cf. Bord and Bord 2006, 215–310).

The Yowie is becoming increasingly standardized in its appearance. It is sometimes said that it resembles “depictions of the American Bigfoot” or that “America’s Bigfoot would be an identical type” (“A Catalogue” 2006, 239, 271; cf. Nickell 2011, 225–229; 2013).

Even so, people I spoke with generally dismissed the Yowie. In 2000, for example, staffers at the information center at Echo Point in the Blue Mountains (Nickell 2001, 17) insisted the Yowie was only a mythical creature pursued by a few fringe enthusiasts, and this seems to remain the majority view. Several people laughed at my query, and a young bookstore employee in Canberra told me that, although having been born and raised in the Blue Mountains, she had never seen a Yowie or had reason to take the possibility seriously. Still, the wooden statue at Kilcoy stares vacantly on, a little monument to belief.

Acknowledgments

In addition to those mentioned in the text, I am grateful to the staff at AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Studies), Canberra, and CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga. I again want to thank John and Mary Frantz for their generous financial assistance, which makes many of my investigations possible.

Note

1. The invention of the word is credited to Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, 1726, by the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (1971).

References

• American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 1970. New York: Houghton-Mifflin Co.
• Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord. 2006. Bigfoot Casebook Updated. N.p.: Pine Winds Press.
• “A Catalogue of Cases 1789 to 2006.” 2006. Appendix A of Healy and Cropper 2006, 203–295.
• Coleman, Loren. 2006. Introduction to Healy and Cropper 2006, vii–viii.
• Gilroy, Rex. 1976. Psychic Australian, August, 8–25.———. 1995. Mysterious Australia. Mapleton, QL, Australia: Nexus Publishing.
• Healy, Tony, and Paul Cropper. 1994. Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia. Sydney: Ironbark.
• ———. 2006. The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot. San Antonio, TX: Anomalist Books.Joyner, Graham. 1994. Cited in Healy and Cropper 2006, 12–13.
• Loxton, Daniel, and Donald R. Prothero. 2013. Abominable Science! New York: Columbia University Press.
• Mumbulla, Percy. 1997. Quoted in Healy and Cropper 2006, 12.
• Nickell, Joe. 2001. Mysterious Australia. Skeptical Inquirer 25:2 (March/April), 15–18.
• ———. 2011. Tracking the Man-Beasts: Sasquatch, Vampires, Zombies, and More. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 2012. The Science of Ghosts. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 2013. Bigfoot lookalikes. Skeptical Inquirer 37(5) (September/October): 12–15.
• Oxford English Dictionary. 1971. Compact Edition, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Pinkney, John. 2003. Great Australian Mysteries. Rowville, Victoria, Australia: The Five Mile Press.
• Povah, Frank. 2006. Quoted in Healy and Cropper 2006, 123.
• Ryan, J.S. 2002. The necessary other, or “when one needs a monster”: The return of the Australian Yowie, Australian Folklore 17: 130–142.
• Swift, Jonathan. 1726. Reprinted as Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1876.

On the afternoon of Friday, February 28, 1890, a single pistol shot rang out in a corridor of the United States House of Representatives. Former eastern Kentucky congressman William Preston Taulbee (Figure 1) laid mortally wounded on the marble stairs leading up to the congressional Press Gallery. Standing over him holding a pistol was a Louisville Times correspondent, Charles E. Kincaid, who 
had just ended a simmering feud between the two prominent Kentuckians.

Being from the 1980s to present a “Historical Writer” for the Morgan County, Kentucky, newspaper, The Licking Valley Courier (published in my hometown of West Liberty), I was able to research and write about the murder of native-born Taulbee for the centennial of his death (Nickell 1990). This—written for the 125th anniversary—is an expanded version of that account, plus what I came to learn was “the rest of the story”: a tale of ineradicable bloodstains and the “Ghost of the Gallery Stairs.”

Figure 1. William Preston Taulbee as a young man, from a tintype in possession of his great-grandniece (copy photograph by Joe Nickell).

Taulbee

William Preston Taulbee was born in Morgan County on October 22, 1851, a son of state senator William Harrison Taulbee (1824–1905) and Mary Ann (Wilson) Taulbee (1832–1916).¹ Called “Will Press,” he was educated in the county one-room schools and later (1871–1877) was himself a schoolteacher. In the meantime he married Lou Emma Oney (1852–1903) with whom he eventually had four sons (three of whom became colonels in the U.S. Army).

Taulbee studied for the Methodist ministry from 1875 to 1878 and subsequently “itinerated” (i.e., was an itinerant preacher) for several years (“Taulbee, William Preston” 1893). He became clerk of the Magoffin County Court in 1878 and again in 1882. A year earlier, he was admitted to the Kentucky Bar. A Democrat, he was elected to the House of Representatives from what was then the Tenth District in 1884. He was re-elected in 1886 but declined to run for a third term, instead remaining in Washington engaged in real estate business (“Shooting” 1890).

According to The New York Times, Taulbee, then thirty-nine, was “of tall figure, with a frame sinewy and strong, but lean.” The paper continued: “He soon became known in the House as a ready talker, and was more frequently on his feet than any other young member. He had a very powerful voice, and in the tumult which sometimes occurred in the House it could be heard above the din.” His ability as a speaker earned him the appellation, “The Mountain Orator” (“A Murder” 2015).

A Feud

Taulbee’s attacker, Charles Euston Kincaid, was born in Boyle County, Kentucky, on May 18, 1855, a son of Capt. William Garrett and Elizabeth (Banford) Kincaid. He obtained an AB degree (1878) and a master’s degree (1881) from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and he was admitted to the bar in 1879. He became, in turn, a Louisville judge, member of the state railroad commission, an editor of the Courier-
Journal, and private secretary to Governor Knott. He was unmarried. As The New York Times said of him (“Shooting” 1890):

Kincaid is a slightly built, inoffensive-looking man. . . . [H]is family is one of the best known in Kentucky. He has a wide acquaintance in social circles here, and has spent considerable time in attending receptions, parties, and other society events. He has been in ill health for about two years, suffering from nervous and other ailments, following an attack of typhoid fever. He went to England last Summer for the benefit of his health, and returned somewhat improved.

Little was known about the strife between the two men except that, according to the Times, it “originated about a year and a half ago in the publication, by the correspondent, of a statement affecting the moral character of the Congressman” (“Shooting” 1890). Indeed, the frail Kincaid, described as not over five feet three inches (in contrast to Taulbee who was “considerably over 6 feet tall” [qtd. in Gilbride 1962]), “had written a story accusing Taulbee of misconduct with a woman in a government office”—what the Washington newspapers at the time had called “the patent office scandal” (Gilbride 1962).

According to Taulbee’s brother Dr. J.B. Taulbee, the feud between the two men actually began when congressman Taulbee objected to Kincaid’s having received a political appointment that he then sublet to another for half the pay; Taulbee sought a congressional resolution prohibiting such unethical acts. When Taulbee later refused to endorse Kincaid for a position, Kincaid, according to Dr. Taulbee, threatened to make the congressman sorry. Kincaid responded that those charges were baseless and that he had no ulterior motive in writing that Taulbee had allegedly been having an affair (“A Murder” 2015).

The two men had had an altercation earlier on the day of the shooting when the two met and Kincaid said something in an undertone. Taulbee, reported the Times, “who is large-framed and muscular,” was seen to “grab Kincaid by the lapel of the coat and with a strong grasp held him while he said: ‘Kincaid, come out into the corridor with me.’” To this, Kincaid responded, “I am in no condition for a physical contest with you. I am unarmed.” Taulbee replied that he was also unarmed, took Kincaid by the ear, and directed him to the door. The two were then “separated by some common friends.” At that, “Taulbee and Kincaid then went their way, the former into the House and the latter, it is supposed, after a pistol, for, as he stated, he had none at the time” (“Shooting” 1890; “A Murder” 2015).

The Shooting

The final incident occurred about 1:30 pm. Taulbee, having spent some time in the House, came out and began to descend the eastern marble stairs that led from the capitol’s main floor to its lower one. Samuel Donaldson, a former Doorkeeper of the House, would subsequently testify at the inquest. According to him, he and Taulbee were walking downstairs together talking when the latter stopped and turned to him. “At this moment on the landing just behind us, on my right and on Mr. Taulbee’s left, Mr. Kincaid appeared. Mr. Taulbee’s face was turned partly toward Mr. Kincaid when the latter said: ‘Mr. Taulbee you can see me now.’”

Donaldson continued:

The deceased turned his face further toward him, when Mr. Kincaid fired the pistol shot, the ball taking effect just at the outside of the left eye, the blood spurting out over my left hand. I turned to Mr. Kincaid and said, “Judge, for God’s sake, don’t shoot any more.” As the ball struck him, Mr. Taulbee cried out: “Oh!” and, staggering in a stooping position down the stairs, was assisted into a committee room. Someone then asked who fired the shot to which Mr. Kincaid replied, “I am the man who did it.”

As the Times concluded, “The remainder of the testimony was merely corroborative” (“Kincaid Held” 1890).

At first, doctors thought the shot was not fatal, but over the next few days at Providence Hospital his condition worsened; he died at 4:45 on the morning of Tuesday, March 11. An autopsy by Dr. D.S. Lamb revealed that the bullet had passed under the eye, in a downward trajectory. (More on this presently.) The projectile had fractured a part of the orbital plate (eye socket) and heading toward the brain, splintered an area (the petrous region) of the temporal bone (a bone on either side of the skull, at its base). The bullet was found imbedded in that bone and in dura mater (brain membrane). Dr. Lamb concluded that had the penetration been deeper, even perhaps a sixteenth of an inch farther, death would probably have been instantaneous (“Kincaid Held” 1890).In its report on the day following the shooting, The New York Times had offered: “Who was the aggressor at this last meeting, or what position either man occupied with reference to the other at the time the shot was fired it is impossible to state definitely” (“Shooting” 1890). Actually, though, Kincaid initiated the second, fatal encounter, and it seems likely that he had armed himself before that event. He approached Donaldson and Taulbee from behind. Congressman Carlisle saw Taulbee right after he had been shot and stated soon thereafter that Taulbee asked him who had shot him—“showing,” as the Times had concluded, “that he had not seen his assailant” (“Shooting” 1890).

Crime Reconstruction

Now, the descending trajectory of the bullet indicates that the much shorter Kincaid was elevated with respect to Taulbee. Indeed that is borne out by Donaldson, who testified that he and Taulbee “had passed across the first landing” and proceeded to the left “when he stopped on the second or third step” and turned to Donaldson, at which moment Kincaid appeared “on the landing just behind us” (“Kincaid Held” 1890). Thus elevated, he aimed downward to shoot Taulbee in the face. The pistol was no more than “the length of a man’s arm” away (“Shooting” 1890).

It is for a reason that I have reconstructed the elements of the scene: the shooter’s elevated position relative to the victim, the downward trajectory of the bullet, the statement of Samuel Donaldson that Kincaid had appeared on the landing behind and above them, that Taulbee had just turned to look back, and Congressman Carlisle’s statement that Taulbee had not known who had shot him. The reconstruction is necessary in order to counter Kincaid’s later claims as to what had happened.

Although the inquest jury had found that Taulbee died from the shot of a pistol that was “held in the hand of Charles E. Kincaid in the United States Capitol Building on Feb. 28, 1890” (“Kincaid Held” 1890), Kincaid would claim he shot Taulbee in self-defense.

In a statement, Kincaid claimed that Taulbee had been pursuing him aggressively for over a year. “I am almost ashamed to acknowledge it, but he has assaulted me six times.” On the morning of February 28, he said, he and Taulbee argued, and “Mr. Taulbee then gave me a violent push against the door and the doorkeepers separated us.” He made no mention of Taulbee claiming to have a gun or urging him to get one, as would eventually be alleged. “Later, about 1:30 p.m. I went to the House restaurant to get my lunch. Mr. Taulbee met me and advanced toward me in a threatening manner. I warned him off, but he drew back his arms as if to strike, when I fired and he fell” (“Settled” 1890).

Taulbee lingered for many days, eventually being kept on opiates for the pain. Some newspaper reporters, seemingly sympathetic to their colleague Kincaid, reported on his suffering as if he were the victim instead of the assailant. One account, for example, said of Kincaid:

He seemed oblivious to his surroundings. Momentarily his muscles would twitch convulsively and a groan would escape his lips. The awful strain under which he has been subjected since the shooting has told on him. He is a wreck of his former self. As the reporter was about to leave the prisoner broke out in sobs and called for his mother. The scene was touching in the extreme. (“A Murder” 2015)

The trial was held about a year after Taulbee’s death. Although there was never any evidence that Taulbee was armed, Kincaid claimed he had been terrorized by Taulbee and had shot him in self-defense. Disputing that claim was his initial statement made as he was taken into police custody, claiming that he shot Taulbee as a matter of honor: “When he pulled my ear today and I knew the boys on the [press] row had seen it, I was crazed” (“A Murder” 2015; “Charles E. Kincaid” 1906).

Gallery Stairs Ghost

After my centennial article on Taulbee’s assassination appeared (Nickell 1990), I learned of a follow-up claim: Taulbee’s unrequited ghost haunts the steps that are still marked with his blood. On a later visit to Washington, I was directed to the site by a capitol guard.

According to ghost raconteur John Alexander (1998, 69), capitol workers have claimed the supposed bloodstains are resistant to all cleaning agents. The motifs (or narrative elements)—“Revenant [ghost] as blood” and “Ineradicable bloodstain after bloody tragedy”—are common in legends and are well known to folklorists (being catalogued in a six-volume reference set [Thompson 1955, 2: 446]). I have encountered several such legends, which are invariably intended to suggest some supernatural agency. In one case amenable to forensic investigation, when a stain proved not to have been blood and its actual source identified, a particular claim was discredited (Nickell with Fischer 1988, 119–128).

Now, in the case of the stains on the capitol gallery steps, Alexander (1998, 69) reports that some (unspecified) persons deny the splotches are actually from Taulbee’s spilled blood. On the other hand, it would be quite a coincidence for the original bloodstains to have been cleaned away while other stains subsequently appeared on the steps—stains forensically consistent with blood having first dripped and pooled then blackened with age (Cf. Genge 2002, 98–102; Kirk 1974, 194–95). Blood could have seeped into the marble, which is highly porous.² Years of throngs shuffling over the stairs have not worn the stains away, and cleaning crews have long since resigned themselves to their presence (interview by Gilbride 1962).

I had hopes of finding an early reference to the blood that might provide a clue. Center for Inquiry Libraries Director Timothy Binga found for me several additional newspaper accounts, and therein was what I was looking for. It was from a lengthy article in The Chicago Tribune of March 1, 1890—only the day after Taulbee was shot:

No sooner had Taulbee been taken from the Capitol, than the janitors began to wash the blood off the staircase and the floor. It seemed as if the blood had gotten into the marble and granite, as much of it could not be gotten out. Some of the stains will remain there for all time. (“Settled” 1890)

As to the “Ghost of the Gallery Stairs” itself, “some say” they have witnessed the specter of the former congressman at that exact spot, but it appears their testimony, if any, is not even at third hand. Reportedly, “They believe that every time a reporter appears to stumble on those well-worn steps that, in fact, they have just been tripped by Taulbee’s ghost who loves to show his eternal contempt and distaste for journalists”—or so “some say,” according to Alexander (1998, 69), giving no sources for his assertions. (Later writers repeat the claim of tripping [Krepp 2012, 30], while Hauck [1996, 105] only says Taulbee’s ghost “haunts the stairs.”)

I strongly suspect that any claimed ghost appearances, at the “exact spot” of the bloodstains, are the result of the latter inspiring the former. The common motifs linking bloodstains to ghosts may well have inspired the tale of haunting—whether there were actual reports of sightings or not. It is likely there was also an impetus for such a story from the unsettling fact that Taulbee’s assailant got away with murder.

Acknowledgments

Early suggestions for my 1990 centennial article came from Roger Buchanan of Hazel Green, KY, and Earl Kinner, Jr., ed. of The Licking Valley Courier, W. Liberty, KY. The tintype of William P. Taulbee was generously provided for copying by Ella Mae Phipps, then Postmaster of Cottle, KY. (Lou Taulbee was her great, great aunt.) Recent research assistance was provided by CFI Libraries Director Timothy Binga, including online materials and acquisition of books.

Notes

1. Wikipedia (“William P. Taulbee” 2015) gives the birth year of Mary Ann Wilson Taulbee as 1831; however, I have used the date inscribed on her tombstone in the Taulbee Cemetery, Insko, Kentucky (Nickell et al. 1981, 108).
2. According to an authority (Grotz 1976, 129), marble “sucks in stains as fast as unfinished wood will.”

References

• Alexander, John. 1998. Ghosts: Washington Revisited: The Ghostlore of the Nation’s Capitol. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Co.
• A Murder in the Capitol. 2015. Online at http://www.genealogy.com/ftm/p/u/r/sandi-I-Purol-MI/BOOK-0001/0024-0001.html. Accessed August 25, 2015.
• Charles E. Kincaid. 1906. The New York Times (November 3).
• Genge, N.E. 2002. The Forensic Casebook: The Science of Crime Scene Investigation. New York: Ballantine Books.
• Gilbride, Neil. 1962. The Arizona Republic (February 25).
• Grotz, George. 1976. The Antique Restorer’s Handbook. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books.
• Kincaid held in jail. 1890. The New York Times (March 13).
• Kirk, Paul L. 1974. Crime Investigation, 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley.Krepp, Tim. 2012. Capitol Hill Haunts. Charleston, SC: Haunted America.
• Nickell, Joe. 1990. Historical sketches. Licking Valley Courier (February 22).
• Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1988. Secrets of the Supernatural: Investigating the World’s Occult Mysteries. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Nickell, Joe, J. Wendell Nickell, and Ella T. Nickell, compilers. 1981. Morgan County, Ky., Cemetery Records. West Liberty, KY: privately printed.
• Settled a grudge. 1890. The Chicago Tribune (March 1).
• Shooting in the Capitol. 1890. The New York Times (March 1).
• Taulbee, William Preston. 1893. The National Cyclopædia of American Biography. Vol. 3. New York: James T. White & Co.
• Thompson, Stith. 1955. Motif-Index of Folk Literature, rev. ed., in the 6 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• William P. Taulbee. 2015. Online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_P._Taulbee.

Artículo traducido por Alejandro Borgo, Director del CFI/Argentina.

A todo el mundo le gustan los misterios. Resuelva uno en el campo científico y enseguida vendrán los elogios. No así en el reino de lo paranormal, donde la evidencia, la lógica y las teorías suelen quedar patas para arriba. Mientras que los científicos forenses, digamos, comienzan por la evidencia para llegar a la solución más probable de un misterio, los “paracientíficos” empiezan por la respuesta deseada y a partir de allí buscan la evidencia, empleando el sesgo de la confirmación: buscan aquello que parece confirmar sus creencias y desacreditar cualquier posición contraria, o a quien la sostenga.

Por ejemplo, en el campo paranormal de la criptozoología (término acuñado por Ivan T. Sanderson para describir el estudico de animales “ocultos” o sin verificar ), los defensores de la existencia del Bigfoot (Pie Grande) ofrecen una gran cantidad de evidencia. Lamentablemente, ésta es muy pobre: relatos de testigos, huellas de pisadas, muestras de pelo -justamente aquello que se puede atribuir a la percepción defectuosa o al engaño. Toda esa evidencia es cuestionable porque, más allá de los fraudes, no se dispone de ningún Pie Grande vivo, un esqueleto, ni siquiera de una muestra de ADN para someterlos a un estudio científico.

This article was originally featured in Skeptical Inquirer in English.
Click here to read it.

Ocurre lo mismo con otras afirmaciones: fenómenos parapsicológicos, fantasmas, poltergeists y demonios, platos voladores y extraterrestres, el monstruo del Lago Ness, la combustión humana espontánea, la curación por la fe y las estatuas que lloran, el Triángulo de las Bermudas, etc, etc, etc. La ciencia no ha verificado ninguno de estos objetos, entidades o hechos como fenómenos paranormales genuinos.

Debatir sobre los misterios

Los paracientíficos usualmente se desvían del camino. Para ellos la investigación no es una búsqueda para explicar un misterio (lo cual ridiculizan como “justificación”) sino seleccionar misterios acerca de cualquier hecho paranormal en el que crean, con lo cual esperan convencer a la gente de que “algo debe haber”. Para decirlo brevemente, no son detectives sino traficantes de misterios.

Para ellos, el misterio es esencialmente un punto de llegada más que de partida. Si no se explica rápidamente, no protestan por la falta de evidencia. En cambio, de alguna manera suponen que se ha determinado algo: “No sabemos qué hizo que apareciera aceite en una estatua; por lo tanto, debe ser un signo divino”. Pero este es un tipo de falacia lógica conocida como argumentum ad ignorantiam, un razonamiento que parte de la ignorancia -esto es- llegar a una conclusión a partir de la falta de conocimiento. Uno no puede decir “no sabemos” y luego afirmar que por lo tanto lo sabemos.

Y sin embargo, este razonamiento defectuoso se halla en la mayoría de las afirmaciones sobre lo paranormal: “No podemos explicar qué causó A, por lo tanto probablemente sea B”, donde A es el avistaje de un monstruo peludo o una luz suspendida en el aire o una curación médica inesperada y B es presumible y respectivamente un Pie Grande, un plato volador o un milagro. Realmente podría tratarse -otra vez respectivamente- de un oso, de Venus visto a través de las capas atmosféricas, o el resultado de un tratamiento médico previo.

La evidencia negativa

Como observara el psicólogo Ray Hyman (1996, 23) sobre una disciplina paranormal: “La historia de la parapsicología está repleta de experimentos “exitosos” que no pueden repetirse”. Señalando que las llamadas visión remota y otras supuestos tipos de PES (Percepción Extrasensorial) se definían negativamente -esto es, como un efecto remanente luego de que las explicaciones normales fueran supuestamente eliminadas- Hyman nota que un mero problema técnico en los datos experimentales puede ser tomado como evidencia de un fenómeno parapsicológico. “Lo que se necesita, por supuesto”, dice con razón Hyman, “es una teoría positiva del funcionamiento parapsicológico que nos permita decir cuándo psi está presente y cuándo ausente” (destacado en el original). Agrega: “Según mi opinión, cualquier otra disciplina que pretenda ser una ciencia trata con fenómenos cuya presencia o ausencia pueda ser claramente establecida”.

Este requisito -esta necesidad- de obtener evidencia positiva en lugar de negativa es ignorado o descartado por los traficantes de misterios. En los títulos de sus libros y documentales de televisión, ponen palabras como “no resuelto”, “inexplicado”, “desconocido” -presentando a los misterios no como algo que debe ser investigado y resuelto sino supuestamente como enigmas que prueban (usando el argumentum ad ignorantiam) la existencia de lo paranormal.

Consideremos, por ejemplo, las afirmaciones sobre curaciones milagrosas en Lourdes, Francia. Son afirmaciones que provienen de aquellos casos que se consideran “médicamente inexplicables” -argumento clásico que parte de la ignorancia. (En 2008, sin embargo, el Comité Médico Internacional de Lourdes anunció que el panel de médicos ya no debería estar en el asunto de los “milagros”: a partir de ahí, solo debería indicar si un caso era “extraordinario”. “No deberán inferir un milagro a partir de lo “médicamente inexplicable” ).

Respecto de los “milagros” y otras afirmaciones paranormales, apelar a la evidencia negativa es algo común. Por ejemplo: Grant Wilson, que conducía junto a Jason Hawes el programa de televisión Ghost Hunters, dijo que su enfoque respecto de la caza de fantasmas consistía en “solo terminar con aquellas cosas que no puedes justificar” (Hawes y Wilson, 2007, 6).

En el libro Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion Larry Arnold (1995, 463) dice descaradamente: “Soy el primero en admitir que la CHE (combustión humana espontánea) desafía al sentido común y suena misteriosa. No tengo todas las respuestas para ello; puede que no tenga ninguna respuesta. Y ciertamente, no tengo todas las piezas de este rompecabezas enigmático”. Sin embargo, concluye, “lo que puedo decir con seguridad es esto: la combustión humana espontánea es un hecho, aunque haya permanecido oculto”.

Aquellos que creen en los círculos de maíz (crop circles) han sugerido varias “teorías” para explicar los patrones supuestamente inexplicables en los campos de maíz en Inglaterra (a pesar de la abundante evidencia de fraude ). Ken Rogers, de la Sociedad de lo Inexplicado opina: “Los círculos son verdaderamente el resultado del aterrizaje de un OVNI para investigar los cultivos. No hay otra explicación...” (citado en Randles and Fuller, 1990, 16).

Objetos voladores no identificados

Quizá nunca se vio tanta evidencia negativa, y promovida tan ávidamente como en el caso de los ufólogos, cuyo principal objeto de estudio comienza con el término no-identificado (unidentified, por Unidentified Flying Objects, N. del T.). Charles Fort (1874-1932) se destacó entre los coleccionistas de evidencia negativa. Alguna vez considerado como el “primer” ufólogo (Clark 1998, I:420), Fort fue un proveedor de misterios de escritorio. Con una herencia que le permitió darse el gusto de tener un hobby, pasó sus últmos veintiseis años explorando viejos periódicos que contenìan casos inusuales -incluyendo fenómenos aéreos anómalos- provocando a los científicos “ortodoxos” para que los expliquen (Fort 1941). Su evidencia no solo era anecdótica y su enfoque acientífico, sino que su “documentación no era completamente rigurosa” (Gross 2001, 204).

Sin embargo, Fort es adorado por muchos ufólogos y otros aficionados a los fenómenos que supuestamente “desafían una explicación natural”, lo que ellos llaman “Fenómeno Forteano” o “Forteana” (Guiley 2001, 212-213; Gross 201, 203-205; Clark 1998, 420-425).

Uno de los ufólogos “top” de la historia fue el astrónomo J. Allen Hynek (1910-1986), consultor y autoproclamado “desmitificador” en la Fuerza Aérea de los Estados Unidos cuando investigaba el Proyecto Libro Azul. A Hynek (1977, 7-9, 17) le impresionó que, al principio, el 23 por ciento de los OVNIs que estudió permanecieron como “desconocidos” y -luego de fundar el Centro para el Estudio de los OVNIs (CUFOS)- adoptó la evidencia negativa:

La transformación de escéptico -no a no-creyente, porque ello tiene cierta connotación “teológica”- sino a un científico que sintió que estaba en la senda de un fenómeno interesante, fue gradual, pero a fines de los 60 ya era total. Hoy no perdería ni un minuto con los OVNIs si no pensara seriamente que el fenómeno OVNI es real y que los esfuerzos para investigarlo y comprenderlo, y eventualmente para resolverlo podrían tener un profundo efecto – siendo quizás el trampolín hacia una revolución respecto de cómo el hombre se ve a sí mismo y su lugar en el universo.

Sin embargo Hynek se volvió cauteloso acerca de la hipótesis extraterrestre, remarcando que “se enfrenta a una gran dificultad, a saber, que estamos viendo demasiados OVNIs. La Tierra es solo un grano de polvo en el universo. ¿Por qué tendríamos el honor de ser visitados tan frecuentemente?” En cambio dijo: “me siento más inclinado a pensar en términos de algo metaterrestre (sic), una suerte de realidad paralela”, planteando que “los OVNIs están relacionados a ciertos fenómenos parapsicológicos” (citado en Story 2001, 252). De esta manera, ¡trató de “explicar” un fenómeno desconocido invocando otro!

Hoy, los ufólogos, por ejemplo Peter B. Davenport, director del Centro Nacional de Informes sobre OVNIs (NUFORC), creen que el gran número de casos no identificados indican al menos que hay algo muy transcendente tras ellos. Debido a “la impresionante cantidad de datos principalmente provenientes de testigos”, dice Davenport, cuando se sabe que la mayoría de las descripciones de testigos son de muy pobre calidad, “muchos de los informes de avistajes de alta calidad implican ciertos aspectos objetivos, los cuales, para un espectador con mentalidad abierta, son bastante impactantes”. Agrega que “la firme evidencia sugiere que estamos tratando con un fenómeno causado por objetos sólidos, palpables, cuyas características no pertenecen al diseño humano, y cuyo comportamiento sugiere un control inteligente” (citado en Story 2001, 150). Por supuesto, está refiriéndose a extraterrestres -con evasivas- mientras los “objetos” permanecen como no-identificados.

Otro que cita la naturaleza inexplicada de los OVNIs es Richard Hall, un partidario de los OVNIs asociado con grupos tales como MUFON y CUFOS. Enfatiza: “entre los cientos de los llamados 'informes OVNI' que aparecen cada año, una fracción considerable de los que son claramente observados por testigos respetables permanecen inexplicados- y es muy difícil explicarlos en términos convencionales”. Hall cree que “colectivamente, estos casos constituyen un misterio científico genuino, que necesita imperiosamente una investigación sistemática y bien sustentada”. Otra vez, vuelve a decir: “La evidencia circunstancial -a veces física- indica que está ocurriendo algo real para lo cual no hay explicación satisfactoria”.

Hall cree que las observaciones incorrectas de objetos terrestres así como la “imaginación/fraude” deben ser rechazadas como explicaciones porque ambas son “inaplicables a los casos límite inexplicados”. En cambio, prefiere la posibilidad de los “llamados 'secretos' visitantes de otro lugar” (citado en Story 2001, 239).

Vacilando, el ufólgo/mitólogo Thomas E. Bullard (2010, 311) sugiere, al menos tentativamente:

Los investigadores de informes OVNI actuales e históricos han filtrado aquellos casos con suficiente evidencia creíble para que califiquen como defendibles. Estos casos sugieren que la naturaleza de las historias sobre OVNIs depende en parte de la naturaleza de los eventos OVNI, y dichos eventos deben su naturaleza a una fuente independiente de la mitología OVNI... Incluso aceptando la falibilidad humana y el autoengaño, parece que hay un misterio genuino.

Bullard está basándose claramente en el método de proceso de eliminación, que es la base de la evidencia negativa.

Luego está Stanton T. Friedman, que promueve la noción de visitas extraterrestres con jactancia, pantallas de humo y alharaca. Friedman racionaliza: “Aprendí rápido que la ausencia de evidencia no es lo mismo que evidencia de ausencia”. Aunque esto sea cierto, sigue aún con ausencia de evidencia. Este ufólogo, que una vez se autodefinió como “físico nuclear itinerante” fue engañado por los “documentos MJ-12” hechos por amateurs, que pretendían probar que el gobierno de los EE.UU. había rescatado un platillo volador con ocupantes humanoides que se había estrellado. Friedman cree, que una consipiración de alto nivel ocultó la evidencia positiva (Friedman 1996, 8, 13, 209-219; Nickell y Fischer 1992, 81-105)

Conclusión


El problema con semejante extrapolación de datos es que falta evidencia positiva. No ha sido capturado ningún piloto extraterrestre o plato volador- a pesar de los fraudes, cuentos folclóricos y teorías conspirativas. Solo hay informes de testigos, fotos, rastros en el suelo y otras cosas por estilo, todas sobre algo no identificado.

Pero todas estos no identificados ¿no valen para nada? Bueno, cantidad no es calidad. Como muestra la gran evidencia, los casos algunas veces promovidos como inexplicados eran solo eso; no eran inexplicables, y muchos de ellos, al ser estudiados, sucumbieron a la investigación. Ni uno solo probó que se tratara de otra cosa que un fenómeno natural o hecho por el hombre- ni los casos clásicos, por ejemplo, Roswell, Rendlesham Forest, Flatwoods, Kecksburg, Exeter, Phoeniz y Stepehville (Nickel y McGaha 2012; McGaha y Nickell 2011, 2015). Puede que algunos casos nunca sean explicados debido a errores de los testigos, evidencia falsificada, falta de información esencial y otras fallas. Por razones similares algunos asesinatos quedan sin explicación, y sin embargo no consideramos a esos casos evidencia de un homicidio cometido por un duende.

Nada de lo dicho hasta ahora significa que no debamos continuar investigando los fenómenos inexplicados, incluyendo los OVNIs. Después de todo, alguna vez el escepticismo sobre piedras que caían del cielo abrió el camino para probar la existencia de los meteoritos. La ciencia no tiene nada que temer acerca del examen de los informes sobre OVNIs, los cuales, hasta la fecha, no han sido inútiles después de todo: hemos aprendido mucho acerca de los engaños, percepciones erróneas y de la fantasía, acerca de los rasgos de personalidad, sobre fenómenos extraños tales como los relámpagos en bola, acerca de la propensión de personas inmaduras a cometer fraudes (¡escépticos incluidos!), y mucho más. Pero la investigación debe ir más allá de la recolección de evidencia negativa. Debe representar un intento real para resolver -esto es, explicar- un misterio.

Referencias

• Arnold, Larry E. 1995. Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion. New York: M. Evans and Co.
• Bullard, Thomas E. 2010. The Myth and Mystery of UFOs. Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas.
• Clark, Jerome. 1998. The UFO Encyclopedia, 2da ed. (en dos volúmenes). Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics.
• Fort, Charles. 1941. The Complete Books of Charles Fort. Reimpreso New York: Dover, 1974.

• Friedman, Stanton T. 1996. Top Secret/Magic. New York: Marlowe & Co.
• Gross, Loren E. 2001. In Story 2001, 203–205.
• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2001. Encyclopedia of the Strange, Mystical, & Unexplained. New York: Grammercy Books.
• Hawes, Jason, and Grant Wilson. 2007. Ghost Hunting. New York: Pocket Books.
• Heuvelmans, Bernard. 1968. In the Wake of the Sea Serpents; trad. Richard Garnett. New York: Hill and Wang.
• Hyman, Ray. 1996. Evaluation of the military’s twenty-year program on psychic spying. Skeptical Inquirer 20(2)(March/April): 21–26.
• Hynek, J. Allen. 1977. The UFO Report. Reimpreso, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1997.
• McGaha, James, and Joe Nickell. 2011. Exeter incident solved! Skeptical Inquirer 34(6)(November/December): 16–19.
• ———. 2015. Alien lights? At Phoenix, Stephenville, elsewhere: A postmortem. Skeptical Inquirer 39(2)(March/April): 50–53.
• Nickell, Joe. 2004. The Mystery Chronicles. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 2013. The Science of Miracles. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1992. Mysterious Realms: Probing Paranormal, Historical, and Forensic Enigmas. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• Nickell, Joe, and James McGaha. 2012. The Roswellian syndrome. Skeptical Inquirer 36(3)(May/June): 30–36.
• Randles, Jenny, and Paul Fuller. 1990. Crop Circles: A Mystery Solved. London: Robert Hale.
Story, Ronald. 2001. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters. New York: New American Library.

Are astrologers really able to prognosticate—to see the future as supposedly foreordained by the stars? Something wonderful happened to me in 2003 that I never saw coming. Had it been foreseen by stargazers in their forecasts for me in that year? What about a horoscope I commissioned for a special individual on an earlier occasion: How accurate did it prove to be? And what about a unique “Electronic Horoscope” I once tested at a carnival arcade?

Astrology

The “science” (actually pseudoscience) of astrology is a supposed means of character reading and fortune-telling. Had Ambrose Bierce included an entry for it in his witty The Devil’s Dictionary (1967), he might have defined it as “a means of picking a dupe’s pocket while he is gazing at the stars.”

Astrology is a system of divination based on the notion that, depending on their positions, celestial bodies somehow exert influence on people and events. Allegedly, when one is born, he or she comes under one of twelve astrological signs. They are listed in Figure 1 together with the main personality traits attributed to them, according to famed astrologer Evangeline Adams (1868–1932).However, according to astrology critic Milbourne Christopher (1970, 113–114):

Bypass the many objections astronomers and other scientists make to the movements of the planets as fixed astronomical calculations. Why is someone born at a certain time, on a certain day, in a certain part of the world of a certain nature? Did the originators of astrology study the traits of millions of people and discover that all those born at a specific time had identical characteristics and futures? No! Nor has it been proven since that the early fictions are fact.

Essentially, astrology may seem to be accurate because the astrologer supplies vague statements and generalities, which the credulous person attempts to apply to his or her own situation. (For a critical discussion of astrology, see Dean et al. 1996.)

Figure 1. Astrological signs, symbols, and traits by Evangeline Adams (1931).

A Daughter in the Stars

You will discover a beautiful thirty-six-year-old daughter you did not know you had, along with two grandsons. Your life will be changed forever.

This is the astrological forecast I should have received for 2003, but it never came. Should not that remarkable occurrence have been “in the stars”?

The discovery was the big event in my life that year, to say the least, but apparently no astrologer (or, for that matter, palmist, tarot reader, or other fortune-teller) had had an inkling of it. Not that I had checked them all, of course, but over the years I have visited many prognosticators and been unimpressed with their offerings—very unimpressed. After the wonderful revelation of parenthood in the fall of 2003, I decided to purchase three astrological guides that were still available on bookshelves. At last I am getting around to writing my assessment of these, although I thumbed through them at the time for their forecasts for me.

Having been born on December 1, I am, astrologically speaking, a Sagittarius. Such folk “are always seeking to expand their horizons” says one astrological guide (Polansky 2002, 299), being “noted for the development of the mind—the higher intellect—which understands philosophical, metaphysical and spiritual concepts.” That’s me all right, a poet, although the guide seems unaware of my analytical, detectivist bent. Another guide, aimed exclusively at Sagittarians, is by famed astrologer Sydney Omarr who states (2002, 176), “Sagittarius is the natural cheerleader of the Zodiac, spurring others on to make the most of themselves.” I certainly would like to be like that.

Regarding actual dates, the guide by Polansky (2002, 306–307) predicted a dynamic influence on Sagittarians by Uranus for the period of March 1 to September 15, specifically “a need for breaking the domestic routine (the rut), the domestic patterns and stifling family relationships.” But how wrong could one be? My family relationships were anything but stifling: As to immediate family, my parents were dead; I was largely estranged from my only sibling (an older brother); and I had neither wife nor children. That was to change, but the drama began with positive DNA tests a month later, on October 14.

Figure 2. Author and his daughter at their first meeting, November 26, 2003. (Author’s photo by Diana Harris.)

Briefly, in the fall of 2003 I learned of my daughter, Cherie—my only child—whose mother, Diana, had been my college sweetheart. (Diana left me in 1966 to return to her former boyfriend. While she thought she became pregnant, we now know she already was pregnant.) Three years after we knew Cherie was our child, the two of us (both divorced) married—almost exactly forty years later. (See my “Intuition: The Case of the Unknown Daughter” [Nickell 2005a].)

Polansky not only missed my learning of the existence of my daughter but also missed the big event for November: father and child meeting each other for the first time, on the 26th (see Figure 2). Instead, almost laughably the stargazer foresaw possibly “upheavals with uncles or aunts” (Polansky 2002, 327–330). A little 2003 Zodiac Guide failed equally, seeing only “new friends” and “home improvements” for November (Smither 2002, 47). Well perhaps the well-known astrologer and “psychic” Sydney Omarr would do better with his volume devoted entirely to Sagittarius. For October 14 Omarr did caution, “Be sure to obtain information about legal rights and permissions,” and he predicted a “romantic involvement.” However, I’m skeptical that that was supposed to mean, “DNA results reveal a long unknown child”! For November 26, did he see that I would travel from Amherst, New York, to Lexington, Kentucky, to meet my daughter? Alas, to the contrary, he advised: “Stay close to home. Stress harmony, voice, music, romance. What you have been seeking is right there, where you live . . .” (Omarr 2002, 287). Not to be too technical, I believe that would be counted as a miss. In the entire matter, astrologers were worse than useless.

Commissioned Reading

But if such off-the-shelf prognostications were failures, what about a targeted reading? It was too late to try that in my case, but as it happened, years before, I had tested this approach by having a reading made for an individual with a most unusual situation. The idea occurred to me when, in 1991, I came upon an astrology booth at an antiques show in Lexington, Kentucky. (I was living in Lexington then, teaching technical writing at the University of Kentucky where I had received my PhD in 1987.) As a test, I commissioned the seer to do a “yearly personal forecast” for a name and date of birth I gave her: Jean Michel Gambet, born December 22, 1948. One could hardly blame her for assuming this was a woman who, being approximately in my age range, was possibly a love interest—unless, of course, the astrologer was psychic (as many claim to be).I paid her in advance for the reading. Her brochure called her an “Astro-Numerologist” who combined the “sciences” of Astrology and Numerology in readings that were “done personally . . . no computers.” (Before I left to await the results by mail, the diviner asked if I was a Virgo, because, as she stated, I seemed “so detailed”; however, I informed her I was a Sagittarius.)

In fact, the subject whose reading I commissioned was a man who in 1982—just nine days before his thirty-fourth birthday—was found shot through the head and his body burned in his car. This was a unique case I had investigated with a forensic analyst and Lexington police homicide detectives. (I relate the investigation as “The Case of the Shrinking Bullet” in one of my books [Nickell with Fischer 1992, 107–129].)

Unfortunately, in what I could not distinguish from a computer printout, the ten-page reading that arrived seemed to be a generic one, suitable for anyone to read into it whatever he or she wanted (except for the subject’s birthdate of December 22, 1948, being acknowledged here and there). Despite being dead, the subject was blithely informed that “there will be financial ups and downs,” was most belatedly warned to “take special care against violence” (September 9, 18, 27), and was advised to “search for a deeper and more important life purpose,” along with other stock sayings (Key 1991). None of this was helpful to a man who died over nine years earlier.

Perhaps it will be thought unfair to have sought, as a test, a reading for a dead person, but this personal forecast purported to involve long time periods, and it occasionally referred to the past. It seems to me that if the oracular forces cannot even know if the subject is alive or dead, the pronouncements cannot really be meaningfully accurate.

‘Electronic Horoscope’

If astrology can be combined with numerology, then why not with palmistry? Indeed, such was an “Electronic Horoscope” I had the opportunity to test in an arcade on a carnival midway. It was allegedly “personalized from your palm reading by the miracle of electronics.” I came upon the savant machine while doing research for my book Secrets of the Sideshows (Nickell 2005b, 47). (See Figure 3.)

How would we test such a coin-operated device? (The reader might wish to pause here to consider the question and perhaps devise what I call an investigative strategy.)

Figure 3. The author investigating an “Electronic Horoscope” derived from a “Palm Reading” (sup- posedly scanned—but not). (Author’s photo.)

I did two things, both pretty simple. First, I decided to obtain two readings of the same hand, scanned as similarly as possible. The presumption would be that—if the method of analysis had merit—the readings would be the same each time for the same hand. In fact, however, they were completely different—consistent with random printouts from a bank of readings, generalized statements that seemingly fit pretty much anyone.

For example, the first read (in part):

YOUR PALM READING INDICATES A STABLE AND CONSTRUCTIVE PERSONALITY. YOU ARE HIGHLY METHODICAL AND PERSEVERING. YOU ARE CHARACTERIZED BY HONORABLE DEALINGS ESPECIALLY IN MONEY MATTERS AND GREAT RELIANCE CAN BE PLACED UPON YOU. YOU ARE VERY THOROUGH IN YOUR WORK AND YOUR CONSTRUCTIVE ABILITIES SHOULD BE GIVEN FREE REIN. YOU ARE ABLE TO GET ALONG EASILY WITH OTHERS. YOUR HIGHLY SENSITIVE INTELLECT AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU TO HANDLE LARGE ISSUES INVOLVING THE PUBLIC AS A WHOLE. . . .

The second printout read:

YOUR PALM READING INDICATES THAT YOU ARE GENEROUS TO A FAULT WHERE YOUR FRIENDS ARE CONCERNED. YOU TEND TO BE SHY AND RESERVED WHEN MEETING PEOPLE. YOU ARE A PERFECTIONIST AND WORK HARD AT DOING YOUR JOB WELL. YOU TAKE GREAT PRIDE IN THE APPEARANCE OF YOUR HOME.

YOUR HOROSCOPE COMBINING THESE PERSONALTY TRAITS WITH THE ASTROLOGICAL ASPECTS OF YOUR SIGN, SHOW [sic] A HEALTHY TREND TOWARD A MORE OUTGOING AND CONFIDENT WAY OF LIFE. . . .

As a second test, I decided to avoid placing my hand on the machine at all. If the device made legitimate scans and analysis, then no reading should be generated. However, the printout came as usual, airily supplying more blather:

YOUR PALM READING INDICATES A PERSON WITH GREAT POWERS OF DISCRIMINATION AND INSIGHT. YOUR INTELLECTUAL DEX­TERITY, YOUR INTUITIVE FACULTIES, THE VERSATILITY OF YOUR WHOLE PERSONALITY GIVE YOU THE ABILITY TO DO WELL IN MOST FIELDS OF ENDEAVOR. THE SPEED OF YOUR MENTAL AND PHYSICAL REACTIONS IS ADVANTAGEOUS. YOUR CHARM AND UNDERSTANDING IN YOUR CONTACTS WITH OTHERS IS A RESULT OF ALERTNESS OF YOUR INTERESTS. YOU HAVE AN INTENSE LOVE OF DETAIL AND A HEALTHY SKEPTICISM AND YOUR MIND PREFERS TO CONCENTRATE ON THE WORLD OF IDEAS RATHER THAN OF ACTION. . . .

The device is thus revealed as a deception—suitable for entertainment only. I suspect that the cards were pre-printed and that the machine therefore neither scanned nor analyzed; it only dispensed pre-printed stock readings.

My three investigations—(1) comparing a major life event with three commercial horoscope readings, (2) commissioning a personalized reading for someone who happened to be deceased, and (3) experimentally testing an arcade “Electronic Horoscope”—all showed that such astrological readings are about as dependable as an assortment of slips from fortune cookies. Here is my forecast for you: Astrologers will have you in their sights, so you must guard against having a mind and wallet that are too open to pilfering.

References

• Adams, Evangeline. 1931. Astrology for Everyone. New York: New Home Library.(For chart summary, see Nickell 1991, 43.)
• Bierce, Ambrose. 1967. Devil’s Dictionary (originally published as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906) New York: Castle Books.
• Christopher, Milbourne. 1970. ESP, Seers & Psychics. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
• Dean, Geoffrey, Arthur Mather, and Ivan W. Kelly. 1996. “Astrology,” in Stein 1996, 47–99.
• Key, Glenn. 1991. Personal Year Forecast for Jean Michel Gambet 1991 to 1992. Commissioned by Joe Nickell and received October 4.
• Nickell, Joe. 1991. Wonder-workers! How They Perform the Impossible. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.———. 2005a. Intuition: The case of the unknown daughter. Skeptical Inquirer 29(2) (March/April): 12–13, 33.
• ———. 2005b. Secrets of the Sideshows. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1992. Mysterious Realms: Probing Paranormal, Historical, and Forensic Enigmas. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.Omarr, Sydney. 2002. Sydney Omarr’s Day-by-Day Astrological Guide for 2003: Sagittarius. New York: Signet.
• Polansky, Joseph. 2002. Your Personal Horoscope 2003. London: Thorsons.
• Smither, Suzanne. 2002. 2003 Zodiac Guide. Boca Raton, FL: Media Mini Mags.
• Stein, Gordon, ed. 1996. The Encyclopedia of the Para­normal. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

The easternmost Canadian province—Newfoundland and Labrador—consists of Newfoundland Island (with an interior of myriad glacial lakes and forests) plus the Labrador territory on the mainland (with more lakes and land that is nearly half moss barrens and bogs). Newfoundland(as its name is often shortened) has a jagged coast marked by bays, cliffs, coves, islands, and fiords and is lined with fishing villages.

I visited the province in 2008 initially to investigate the Lake Crescent creature for an episode of Monster Quest (which aired on the History Channel September 17 of that year). Our crew was hosted by the villagers of Robert’s Arm who generously treated us to a huge seafood dinner and much “screech” (rum), while making each of us—in a rather drunken ceremony—an “Honorary Newfoundlander” (Nickell 2009).

I had flown into the airport at Deer Lake and driven to Robert’s Arm on a lucky Friday the thirteenth of June. After that night’s festivities and the next long day of filming, I set out on the Viking Trail for the World Heritage Site of L’Anse aux Meadows and, for the next few days, other sites including Labrador, finally flying out of Deer Lake on the eighteenth. Here are some investigative highlights.

Figure 1. Remains of Viking sod structures such as this are scattered about L’Ance aux Meadows at the tip of Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula.

L’Anse aux Meadows

Various questionable Viking sites and artifacts are known—for instance a “Viking church” in Newport, Rhode Island (which is actually a stone windmill from the colonial period), and the Kensington Rune Stone (a forgery from the nineteenth century). However, there are genuine Viking artifacts—such as a Norse coin from the eleventh century, discovered on the Maine coast—although these may be either from Viking visits or simply the result of trade (Bahn 1995, 234–235; Feder 1996, 111–115).

It is indisputable, however, that there was a Norse settlement in early North America. It is located at the northernmost point of the island of Newfoundland. I made my way there on June 15, 2008 (having a picnic lunch of moose burger, as I wrote in my journal, “at a scenic beach site”). Arriving at L’Anse aux Meadows, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I learned that it was believed settled by a Norse expedition led by Leif Ericson. The Vikings followed Greenland’s coast, crossed to Baffin Island and Labrador, then, traveling south, entered the Strait of Belle Isle where they saw land on either side of their ship. They crossed to the eastern side and there—at the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula—built a settlement of sod houses. This would serve as base camp for additional explorations southward (Bock 2008, 39).

The site was discovered in the early 1960s by a Norwegian team led by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad. They had looked for Viking landing places along the eastern North American coast, searching northward from New England. Reaching the northern tip of Newfoundland Island, they were directed to a group of unusual mounds by a man named George Decker, one of the local residents who had long known there were ruins of an ancient settlement. Anne Stine Ingstad, an archaeologist, directed the excavation of the site from 1961–1968 (Bock 2008, 39; Colombo 1988, 1–2; Feder 1996, 116–118) (Figure 1).

In addition to eight turf houses, they discovered four boatsheds, an iron smithy, and a variety of artifacts. Radiocarbon dating provided a mean age of 920 ce (Feder 1996, 116–118). I studied the entire site, including museum displays, and sat at a fire in a sod hut with a costumed interpreter as part of the “Viking experience” (Bock 2008, 38) (Figure 2).

Helge Ingstad identified L’Anse aux Meadows as the long-sought Vinland—the Vineland or Wineland of the old Norse sagas—and others have accepted this as so. However, the Newfoundland climate of a thousand years ago, although warmer than now, would not have supported the growth of wild grapes. “Nevertheless,” as archaeologist (and CSI fellow and friend) Kenneth L. Feder concludes, “wherever Vinland actually was, the sagas seem to indicate quite clearly that the Vikings indeed discovered, explored and attempted to settle the New World about five hundred years before the Columbus voyages” (1996, 113).

Figure 2. “Viking” interpreter sits at the fire in a reconstructed hut on the site, founded ca. 920 ce. (Photos by Joe Nickell)

The Uniped Creatures

In his book of “unexplained” mysteries of Newfoundland and Labrador, Dale Jarvis (2005, 104–108) discusses a strange creature in his entry on L’Anse aux Meadows. He cites the medieval Icelandic narrative The Saga of Eirik the Red. This relates the death of Thorvald Eiriksson (i.e., Eirik’s son), who was killed by one of a supposed race of unipeds—or one-legged humanoids.

Jarvis (2005, 105) notes that “During the Middle Ages, people believed that the edges of the known world were populated by strange and often dangerous things, including one-eyed creatures or humans with the heads of dogs. One-legged men were par for the course!” One type was the sciapod, which (as depicted on the Mappa Mundi, a late thirteenth-century map) protected himself from the scorching sun with his single gigantic foot! In Scotland and Ireland, there was a pitch-colored monster covered in feathers from its foot to its head that was surmounted by a cockscomb. Known in English as Peg Leg Jack, it also had a single hand growing out its chest and just one eye, set in mid-forehead (Jarvis 2005, 106). However, Africa apparently held the most unipeds, including a Ugandan monster called “Kalisa”—a half-man with, well, half a body (one arm, one eye, etc.). States Jarvis (2005, 107), “Indeed, the thirteenth century Icelandic author of Eirik’s Saga was probably familiar with the theories current in his time that Vinland possibly extended all the way to Africa.”

To attempt to learn what kind of creature killed Thorvald, we must look at the account in chapter 13 of Eirik the Red’s Saga (given below in an 1880 translation [Sephton 1880]). The Vikings were on an expedition led by one Karlsefni:

One morning Karlsefni’s people beheld as it were a glittering speck above the open space in front of them, and they shouted at it. It stirred itself, and it was a being of the race of men that have only one foot, and he came down quickly to where they lay. Thorvald, son of Eirik the Red, sat at the tiller, and the One-footer shot him with an arrow in the lower abdomen. He drew out the arrow. Then said Thorvald, “Good land have we reached, and fat is it about the paunch.” [The sense seems to be that they had gotten fat off the bounty of the land. Thorvald died of his wound a bit later.] Then the One-footer leapt away again northwards. They chased after him, and saw him occasionally, but it seemed as if he would escape them. He disappeared at a certain creek. Then they turned back, and one man spake this ditty:—“Our men chased (all true it is) a One-footer down to the shore; but the wonderful man strove hard in the race. . . . Hearken, Karlsefni.”

The Norse words used to refer to the One-footer or uniped—einfæting, einfætingi, einfætigur, einfætingaland, etc.—are from the root meaning “one-foot” or “one footed.” In one narrative, Grettis Saga, it describes a man with a wooden leg (Einfætingur 2015).

Other than the assertion in Eirik the Red’s Saga, there is no reason to think the entity that killed Thorvald was from a race of One-footers—of which there is neither fossil record nor historical proof in any case. Rather, it appears the arrow-shooter was merely a single individual of those the Vikings called the skrælings: Native Americans who were the possible ancestors of the Beothuk and the Mi’Kmaq. The saga writer, a medieval scholar, may simply have added a stock motif of the genre of “medieval traveler’s wonder tales” (Einfætingur 2015). The assailant might even have been a one-legged Indian!

Deer Lake’s Roadside Specter

As we shall see, another Newfoundland entity is much more familiar to us—though not without a twist. It inhabits a “spooky story” told “several years ago” in the area of Deer Lake (Jarvis 2005, 137–138). I arrived there on returning from the Northern Peninsula (after a side trip to Labrador).

According to the tale, if one were driving at night from Deer Lake toward the city of Corner Brook one might encounter “a woman in a white dress.” Thereupon, “it was said,” one of two things happened. If the driver slowed down as if to offer a ride and pulled to the side of the road, “The woman would never be there,” and “The puzzled driver would carry on and not see the woman again.”

On the other hand, if the driver failed to stop, something even more puzzling “was said” to occur: “Those who carried on down the road without her would often turn their head to look into the mirror to see the woman. Terrifyingly, the woman would be seen suddenly sitting in the passenger side seat.” Allegedly, continues Jarvis (2005, 138), “It was local knowledge at the time that the strange hitchhiker was the ghost of a girl who had been trying to thumb a ride out of Deer Lake and who had been killed on the highway.”

Actually, of course, no such accident—or woman, white dress or otherwise—is known. The reader will naturally recognize this as one of the many versions (or variants, as folklorists say) of the ubiquitous urban legend known as “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” The authority on the subject, Jan Harold Brunvand, famed folklorist (and another CSI fellow and friend) says in his The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981, 24):

A prime example of the adaptability of older legends is “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”—the classic automobile legend. This returning-ghost tale was known by the turn of the [twentieth] century both in the United States and abroad. It acquired the newer automobile motif by the period of the Great Depression, and thereafter spawned a number of subtypes with greatly varied and oddly interlocking details, some of which themselves stemmed from earlier folk legends.

The many variants, observes Brunvand, point to “the legend’s incredible development.” Nevertheless, just to give the lady in white a chance to appear, on the evening of June 17, 2008, I drove from Deer Lake to Corner Brook—an uneventful trip.

The Phantom Trapper of Labrador

I was only briefly in Labrador, and that was in the summer rather than winter, so I was destined not to encounter the ghost trapper of Labrador. Nevertheless, the trapper had been a real man who had gone from his home on Newfoundland Island to Labrador to trap, crossing the Strait of Belle Isle, and I at least followed a similar route into that bleak northern land. (It took me along the coast to an archaic burial mound, the earliest known funeral monument in North America, about 7,500 years old; the ruins of Marconi’s historic Wireless Telegraph Station, built in 1904; and Point Amour Lighthouse, the tallest in Atlantic Canada.)

The story of the specter is part of Canadian folklore. It is summarized in Mysterious Canada (1988, 11) by John Robert Colombo (a friend from my Toronto days; he published some of my poems when he was editor of The Tamarack Review). He writes:

The desolation of Labrador is said to be the haunt of the Phantom Trapper or the Damned Trapper. Following several accounts there was once a trapper who led a wicked life. Despite his vile acts, which included peddling poisoned alcohol and attacking local women, he never repented his crimes and sins and died a natural death. But in death he found no rest, for to atone for his sins he was cursed to drive through the snow throughout eternity a matched team of fourteen pure white huskies. The vision of the Phantom Trapper making his ghostly rounds is said to be a harrowing one. Yet Newfoundlanders rejoice in the sight of him and his team, for he helps to guide lost travellers and trappers through blizzards to safety. This cursed, Cain-like creature was last spotted on his life-saving rounds in 1959.

The trapper’s name was Esau Gillingham. The true facts of his life are mixed with legend, in which he is sometimes called “Smoker” (after a vile alcoholic concoction he allegedly brewed—from spruce cones, yeast, and sugar—known as “smoke” [Jarvis 2005]). Gillingham left a will, which was probated in 1920, giving some facts about his family and property (Gillingham 1920). He was later fictionalized in White Eskimo: A Novel of Labrador, in which he was described as a “giant stranger” who “came down out of the hills in the dead of winter dressed in the skin of a white bear, driving a team of white dogs . . .” (Horwood 1972, 8; see also, Rosengarten 1973).

One storyteller relates that the trapper even painted his sled white, including its lashed-on keg of illicit alcohol, thus becoming nearly invisible in the snow. And so “The RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] tried their best to get their man, but it was like chasing a ghost” (Jarvis 2005; 2014). This transforming of the protagonist of the story into a ghost-resembling figure who subsequently becomes a ghost is a literary device known as foreshadowing (providing a hint of something to come [Quinn 1999, 130].)

Not surprisingly, there are variants of the tales told about the trapper. For example, regarding the motif (story element) of his all-white team of huskies, one source says there were eight dogs (Schlosser 2010), while another confidently states fourteen (Jarvis 2005, 143; 2014). In my experience, such precise details are less likely to be reported by someone having an apparitional experience (Nickell 2012, 345) than they are by raconteurs interested in dressing up a story.

Again, in the variant tales, the trapper’s fate was that he either became lost in a snowstorm and died (Jarvis 2014), or became drunk and suffered a fall from which he lingered for three days (Jarvis 2005, 143), or “went a little too far in his pursuit of a local innkeeper’s fair wife and was shot to death by her disgruntled husband” (Schlosser 2010). Then again, maybe he simply “died a natural death” (Colombo 1988, 11). You decide.

Consider the cleverness of the following story. A man with a dog team was lost in a blizzard when another man and team—all in white—came by and could be followed to the safety of some fishermen’s winter huts. When the man who had been lost remarked to a fisherman about the team that had passed before him, he received the reply that there had been no one ahead of him (Jarvis 2005, 143). This is the punch line that makes clear—with spine-tingling effect—that the tale is one of ghostlore.

When we study the variants, we can see how events are elaborated and multiplied. Compare the previous tale with a variant that has become greatly exaggerated:

Once a lost trapper found himself caught in a terrible blizzard, far from the nearest town. As he sought in vain to find a place to shelter from the storm, the phantom trapper appeared with his sleigh. Animal skins flapping in the raging wind and blinding snow, the phantom tenderly lifted the nearly-frozen man, placed him among the rugs of his sleigh, and drove the dying trapper to the nearest town. The phantom carried the man right into the inn, placed him gently on a chair by the door, summoned the innkeeper to care for the man, and then vanished right before the astonished innkeeper’s eyes. (Schlosser 2010)

But are the profound differences due to folklore (the oral tradition at work) or fakelore (writers deliberately making things up)? Could some of the tales even relate actual encounters with the phantom trapper?

Well, the tales frequently employ passive-voice constructions (“it was rumored that” [Schlosser 2010]), as well as other devices to obscure sources (“Other folks say,” “Legend maintains that,” “Still others claim” [Jarvis 2005; 2014]). This approach—in which alleged eyewitnesses’ names, dates, and precise source citations are missing—demonstrates that such narratives are written for their entertainment value. We should therefore give them no more seriousness than they deserve.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga and Melissa Braun for their research assistance.

References

• Bahn, Paul G. 1995. 100 Great Archaeological Discoveries. New York: Barnes & Noble Books.
• Bock, Allan, ed. 2008. Where It’s At: Official 2008 Tourist Guide of the Viking Trail and Labrador Coastal Drive. St. Anthony, Newfoundland, Canada: Transcontinental Media.
• Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.
• Colombo, John Robert. 1988. Mysterious Canada: Strange Sights, Extraordinary Events, and Peculiar Places. Toronto: Doubleday Canada.
• Einfætingur: The One-Legged Beast from Eiriks Saga & the Medieval Traveler’s “wonder stories.” 2015. Online at http:/www.vikinganswerlady.com/Einfaettr.shtml; accessed July 21, 2015.
• Feder, Kenneth. 1996. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, 2nd ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co.
• Gillingham, Esau. 1920. Probated will signed August 7, 1914; Newfoundland will books, vol. 11, p. 517. Online at http://ngb.chebucto.org/Wills/gillingham-esau-11-517.shtml; accessed July 24, 2015.
• Horwood, Harold. 1972. White Eskimo: A Novel of Labrador. Don Mills, Ontario: PaperJacks.
• Jarvis, Dale. 2005. Wonderful Strange: Ghosts, Fairies, and Fabulous Beasties. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Flanker Press, 142–144.
• ———. 2014. Smoker the ghostly trapper of Labra­dor. Online at http://www.thetelegram.com/OpinionColumnists/2014-12-15/article-3976088/Smoker-the-ghostly-trapper-of-Labrador/1; accessed July 23, 2015.
• Nickell, Joe. 2009. Quest for the giant eel. Skeptical Inquirer 33(4) (July/August): 18–20.
• ———. 2012. The Science of Ghosts: Searching for Spirits of the Dead. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Quinn, Edward. 1999. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Checkmark Books.
• Rosengarten, Herbert. 1973. Survival of the fittest. Canadian Literature 58 (Autumn): 92–95; online at http://canlit.ca/reviews/survival_of_the_fittest; accessed July 23, 2015.
• Schlosser, S.E. 2010. Trapper’s Ghost: A Labrador Ghost Story. Online at https://americanfolklore.net/
folklore/2010/07/the_trappers_ghost.html; accessed July 23, 2015.
• Sephton, Rev. J. 1880. Eirik the Red’s Saga: A Translation. Read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, January 12. A Project Guten­berg eBook, online at http://www.gutenberg.org; accessed July 17, 2015.

Figure 1. Brisbane’s historic Tower Mill is reportedly haunted. (Sketch by Joe Nickell)

According to The Ghost Guide to Australia (Davis 1998, 224), one or  perhaps both of the ghosts of two Aborigines—convicted of murder and hanged at Tower Mill in Brisbane in 1841—may still be seen there. Residents in the neighborhood in the mid-twentieth century reported that “sometimes when they looked up at the small window facing the street they could see a faint glow and a figure inside the tower, swinging gently from side to side.” No sources are given, but various online sites repeat the claims (e.g., “Tower Mill Ghost” 2016), and Tower Mill is a stop—sometimes even a point of origin—for ghost tours.


I became acquainted with the old tower (Figure 1) in October 2015 when I stayed for several days at a hotel just down the street from the historic site. (I was there to speak at the annual Australian Skeptics National Convention, October 16–18, 2015, spending some two weeks in Australia and New Zealand and conducting several investigations.) Here is my solution to the mystery of the ghosts in the tower.

Background


Tower Mill is the oldest remaining building in Brisbane. Constructed of sandstone blocks and brick in 1828, it was at that time encircled (about a third of the way up) by an exterior balcony. The tower was built as a windmill for grinding grain, especially corn. That was the main staple of the diet of convicts, who were transported from Britain to Australian penal colonies (beginning with Sydney in 1788).


The mill was outfitted with wind-powered sails, but when these proved unreliable a treadmill, powered by convicts, was installed. When the convict settlement closed in 1842, the treadmill was dismantled.


From its inception as a grist mill, the four-story structure became (at one time or another) a signal station, a fire tower, first home of the Queensland Museum, a radio-experiment site, a pioneer television broadcasting tower, and (presently) a weather observatory (“Old Windmill” 2015; Dawson 2009, 22). Once, of course, it briefly served as a gallows.

Murder


There had been conflicts between the Aborigines and British occupants of the penal colony of Moreton Bay since the 1800s. However, with the seizure of hundreds of square miles of Aboriginal land and the arrival of squatters in 1840, the native people began a coordinated response, largely involving attacks on livestock. To this powder keg, surveyors came waving firebrands. They were intruding on Aboriginal land filled with cultural sites (Dawson 2009, 4–6; Chambers 1999, 131–139).


On Sunday, May 31, 1840, members of a survey party, including a number of convicts, awoke at their bush camp some thirty kilometers south of Mount Lindesay. Surveyor Granville Stapylton—who exhibited a low regard for indigenous people—sent five convicts to clear a passage over a creek while he remained at camp with several Aboriginal men and two other convicts, William Tuck and James Dunlop (Dawson 2009, 12).


Soon three of the Aborigines left camp but returned with another, all now armed with spears. Two went to Sta-
pylton’s tent and two to Tuck’s, while yet another knocked the observing Dunlop senseless with a waddy (a club). When the work party returned from the creek about noon, they found Stapylton and Tuck murdered. Abandoning the injured Dunlop, they fled back toward Brisbane. A group of thirty or so Aboriginal men meanwhile returned to the scene to strip the bodies and loot the camp. One Aboriginal man came to Dunlop’s aid, and he later managed to crawl into the bush. The next evening, exhausted and hungry, he ran into a search party that had been alerted by the fleeing convicts (Dunlop 1840).


A gruesome scene awaited the searchers. Tuck’s body had been stripped and partially burned, while Stapylton’s was found so “torn and mangled” (possibly by the marauders’ dogs) that it could not be legally identified. Three of five identified Aboriginal suspects were captured. One died before trial, but two others, named Mullan and Ningavil, faced the Sydney Supreme Court in May 1841. The prosecution focused on the murder of Tuck whose body had been identifiable, but, since it was impossible to say who struck the death blow, the accused were tried as accessories. They proclaimed their innocence, but—although Dunlop swore they were not the attackers—other convicts claimed to have seen them in the vicinity, and they were wearing clothes stolen from the camp. They were convicted and sentenced to death (Dawson 2009, 12–20, 27).

Figure 2. Experimental photograph recreates a ghostly glow reported in one of the tower’s windows. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

Hanging


The tower served as an improvised gallows for the men’s hanging on Saturday morning, July 3, 1841. While ghost raconteurs more than a century later would claim people had seen through a window a hanged man swinging back and forth, it seemed to me unlikely the hanging was carried out inside the tower. That it stood on a hill suggested the hanging was to be a very public display, not one hidden from view.


I investigated and found that this was indeed the case. The hanging was exterior to the tower, and a large crowd gathered, including a hundred or so Aborigines. The Foreman of Works in the Brisbane settlement, Andrew Petrie, provided a strong round beam that he extended from an upper window. The rope was hung from this beam, its noose dangling to the balcony. Possibly a trapdoor was put in the floor, or, more likely, the prisoners may have been dispatched by pushing them off the balcony (Knight 1892; Dawson 2009, 23). In any case, the drop was a short one, resulting in the condemned being slowly strangled to death. (In later executions a “long drop” was employed as a humane measure, allowing the body to fall far enough to create a force sufficient to break the person’s neck.)


A ten-year-old boy who watched the gruesome event was foremen Petrie’s son, Tom. A convict led him by the hand to one of the dead men’s coffins where he saw the man’s face. As Tom Petrie’s own daughter would later write (Petrie 1904, 245), “The eyes were staring, and the open mouth had the tongue protruding from it. The horror of the ghastly sight so frightened the child that it set him crying, and he could not get over it nor forget it for long afterwards.”

Hanging Specter


The dead man’s features that so traumatized young Tom Petrie are consistent with a strangulation death. Such a victim will often bite his tongue (Geberth 1993, 250) that “frequently protrudes from the mouth” (Spitz 1993, 463). This confirms reports of the “short drop” of the hanging.


It also casts further doubt on the hanging-ghost story. Not only is that often-repeated tale effectively discredited by the historical error of placing the hanging inside the tower, but (and this is a more subtle point) there was no mention of the hanging ghost having grotesque features—as did at least one of the two executed Aborigines. Moreover, the description of the ghost does not give any indication that it was Aboriginal, and only a single ghost is mentioned.


I suspect that the ghost tale—or someone’s apparitional experience that inspired it—was prompted by knowledge of the fact of a hanging at the tower, while, at the same time, that knowledge was factually limited. Thus, like many other apparitional experiences that have the ghost supposedly returning “to reenact its death” (Guiley 2000, 150), the Tower Mill tale is based on a false re-creation and is therefore itself obviously false: apparently the work of some percipient’s faulty imagination or the creation of a writer of fakelore.


Light in the Tower


The other element of the alleged Tower Mill apparition, we recall, is the accompanying glow—seen allegedly by unspecified eyewitnesses who had “looked up at the small window facing the street.” A light-in-the-window motif is common in ghostlore.


The usual explanation for such lights is a simple illusion. While the glow or apparent light source (such as a supposed ghost lantern) does indeed appear to be located inside the structure, the source is typically not an interior one at all. Rather, as explained (with examples) in my The Science of Ghosts, it is a celestial or terrestrial light being reflected by the window glass (Nickell 2012, 113–114). This illusion has fooled many.


I conducted experiments at Tower Mill on two successive nights. Various effects are possible, such as the glow apparently emanating from the window in question shown in Figure 2, but are actually a reflection of a nearby light.


These experiments, along with historical research on the execution of two convicted murderers at the site, indicate that the reported ghostly phenomena at Tower Mill are part of this—and not some supernatural—world.

Acknowledgments


I am exceedingly grateful to John and Mary Frantz for their financial assistance, which helps make many of my investigations possible. I also thank Ross Balch, president of Brisbane Skeptic Society, for inviting me to Australia, and both Cassandra Perryman of Rainbow Beach, Queensland, and Tim Binga, CFI Libraries director, for crucial research assistance.

References

• 
Chambers, John H. 1999. Australia: A Traveller’s History. Gloucestershire, Great Britain: The Windrush Press.
• 
Davis, Richard. 1998. The Ghost Guide to Australia. Sydney, NSW, Australia: Bantam Books.
Dawson, Christopher. 2009. The Hanging at the Brisbane Windmill. Fairfield Gardens, Queensland, Australia: Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society.
• 
Dunlop, James. 1840. Deposition of June 7; cited in Dawson 2009, 13.
• 
Geberth, Vernon J. 1993. Practical Homicide Investigation, 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
• 
Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, 2nd ed. New York: Checkmark Books.
• 
Knight, J.J. 1892. In the early days–XI. The Queenslander (Brisbane), February 27, 402–403. Available online at http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article19821754; accessed January 19, 2016.
• 
Nickell, Joe. 2012. The Science of Ghosts: Searching for Spirits of the Dead. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• 
The Old Windmill, Brisbane. 2015. Available online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Windmill,_Bristane; accessed October 12, 2015.
• 
Petrie, Constance Campbell. 1904. Tom Petrie’s reminiscences of early Queensland. Brisbane, Australia: Watson and Ferguson. Quoted in Dawson 2009, 28.
• 
Spitz, Werner U. 1993. Spitz and Fisher’s Medicolegal Investigation of Death, 3rd ed. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
• 
Tower Mill Ghost. 2016. Available online at www.brisbanehistory.com/ghosts_of_Brisbane.html; accessed January 7, 2016.

Much of what is called “the paranormal” today has intrigued mankind since the most ancient times. The term refers to those things that are supposedly beyond the normal range of science and human experience—ghosts, strange lights in the sky, psychic phenomena, and the like. It includes the supernatural but also things such as monsters that—if they exist—might be quite natural.


With the advent of modern spiritualism in 1848, launched by the Fox Sisters’ hoaxed messages from the ghost of a murdered peddler (Nickell 2004, 31–32), the paranormal began to proliferate and to attract advocacy groups such as the British Society for Psychical Research. Founded in London in 1882, it was concerned with alleged psychic phenomena and the supposed survival of consciousness following bodily death (Guiley 2000, 304).

The paranormal grew increasingly throughout the twentieth century with various “new” (either substantially new or newly refocused-on) topics being expanded by individual gurus and groups of enthusiasts, and many cross-correspondences developing (say, between UFOs and Bigfoot). This article is a discussion of the “creation” of the paranormal by a series of major figures, each of whom took a concept—some fantasy, myth, or speculation—and transformed it into “reality” (Keel 2001b). (I have, of course, excluded a long list of topics—from astrology to zombies—whose origins are ancient.)

Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained

In the early twentieth century, Charles Fort (1874–1932) began the work that led one biographer to call him the “Prophet of the Unexplained” (Knight 1970). Having come into an inheritance that permitted him to engage in armchair endeavors, Fort spent his last twenty-six years scouring old periodicals for reports of alleged occurrences that science was supposedly unable to explain: UFOs (before there was such a term), archaeological oddities, mystery creatures, ghosts, rains of fish, and other anomalies—what would come to be called “fortean phenomena.” Fort was not himself an investigator, and his anecdotal evidence left much to be desired (Nickell 2004, 335–337).


Nevertheless, Fort was a major innovator. In an excellent biography of him, Jim Steinmeyer (2008, xv) states, “What Fort invented was our modern view of the paranormal.” Others had pointed out strange occurrences and asked why they happened, but Charles Fort championed their significance and accused science of being too conventional to care. Many of today’s paranormal claims can be traced to Fort’s writings.

Supposed communication with spirits of the dead is at least as old as the Biblical “Witch of Endor” who, at the behest of King Saul, allegedly conjured up the ghost of Samuel (I Samuel 28). From the first century ce came a prototypical chain-rattling ghost at a house in Athens investigated by one Athenodorus who allegedly observed the specter and laid it to rest (Nickell 2012a, 17–18). This is an early example of what folklorists call a “legend trip”: a visit to a site to test a legend there (Brunvand 1996, 437–440). As spiritualism developed in the mid-nineteenth century, photography was soon adopted to make “spirit photos”—first faked by William Mumler in Boston in 1862 (Nickell 2012a, 298–300).

Harry Price: The Original Ghost Hunter


The instigator of today’s ghost-hunting craze was England’s Harry Price (1881–1948), who was among the first to use “modern technology” to detect spirits of the dead and for that purpose famously had a “ghost-hunting” kit (see Price 1936, photo facing p. 32). He employed such devices as a camera with infrared filter and film (for photographing in the dark), “an electronic signaling instrument” (for detecting an object’s movement from anywhere in a house), and “a sensitive transmitting thermograph” (to measure temperature variations). Along with a notebook, flashlight, and other utility items, he included a flask of brandy in case anyone fainted (Price 1940, 107).


Having married an heiress, Price could indulge his interests in psychical research beginning in the 1920s. Although he was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, the organization’s skepticism of much physical phenomena led him to found his own lab. He combined the use of gadgetry with mediums and séances but was never able to prove the reality of ghosts. Worse, he remains suspected of trickery in some of his own investigations, including that of the Borley Rectory, the subject of his The Most Haunted House in England (1940). Although he posed as a scientist, Price was a school dropout whose use of scientific methods was an act, and he sought only to prove his ideas—not rigorously test them (Morris 2006, xv; Guiley 2000, 299; Nickell 2012a, 261–263).


Nevertheless, Price was followed by huckster Hans Holzer (1920–2009), who cranked out books about his visits to supposedly haunted houses with psychics in tow—in one instance earning him a scathing assessment from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. More recently, television’s Ghost Hunters and their countless imitators have taken mystery mongering to new lows. Besides the dubious legends and pseudoscience, it appears they are often merely detecting themselves (Nickell 2012a, 263–264, 275–280).

Raymond A. Palmer: The Man Who 'Invented' UFOs

Whether or not the label is “exaggerated,” as UFO historian Jerome Clark (1998, 2: 695) finds, many knowledgeable persons regard Ray Palmer as “the man who invented flying saucers” (Keel 2001a, 536). Certainly, the idea of airships was a much earlier one stemming from science-fiction writers, such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Expectations aroused by science fiction no doubt helped spark the “Airship Wave”—the aerial-phenomena hysteria that plagued the United States between November 1896 and May 1897, preceding the modern wave of reports that began half a century later. After World War I, Charles Fort, the previously mentioned “Prophet of the Unexplained,” included unidentified objects in the sky among his discussions of mysterious phenomena, earning him the further appellation “the world’s first UFOlogist” (Clark 1992, 21–23), by suggesting the objects indicated visits from space aliens.


Enter Raymond A. Palmer (1910–1977). Although a childhood accident left him a hunchback of short stature, Palmer’s runaway imagination and audacity—including his unrelenting self-promotion—made him “something of a giant,” says Clark (1998, 2: 695). Obsessed with science fiction, Palmer created in 1933 the Jules Verne Prize Club. In 1938, he became editor of the first science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories (founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1926), its wild action tales prompting critics to label it “space opera.” He was cofounder of Fate in 1948 and publisher of other magazines, including Other Worlds, which evolved into Flying Saucers, during the 1950s. He also published other writers’ books on flying saucers, so-called “contactees” (those supposedly chosen to receive the wisdom of the “Space Brothers”), and other topics (Clark 1998, 2: 694–696; see also the biography of Palmer [Nadis 2013]).


Today largely forgotten, Palmer played a huge role in UFOlogy. He filled Amazing Stories with tales and articles hyping the “Shaver Mystery.” Based on one Richard S. Shaver, this featured a race of freakish creatures called “Deros” who lived in the hollow Earth. Palmer bought reams of material from Shaver, rewrote it, and added stories he penned himself under various pseudonyms. Responses poured in from readers who told of seeing strange objects in the sky and encountering alien beings (Keel 2001b). On the back cover of Amazing Stories’ August 1946 issue were depicted flying discs that, less than a year later, would launch the era of “flying saucers” (Clark 1998, 2: 695; Nickell 2014). On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine objects in a five-mile-long formation moving like “a saucer skipped across water”—probably a phenomenon called “mountain-top mirages” (McGaha and Nickell 2014).


In any case, Ray Palmer latched onto the “flying saucer” witness. About a month after Arnold’s sighting, Palmer hired him to investigate another saucer case in Washington State, though unfortunately the credulous Arnold was taken in by what is now known as the Maury Island Hoax (Sachs 1980, 191–192; Clark 1998, 2: 612–614). When the premier issue of Palmer’s Fate magazine first appeared in the spring of 1948, its cover story was by Kenneth Arnold, and it gained national attention. In 1952, Arnold wrote, with Palmer, a book titled The Coming of the Saucers. By then UFOs—that is, meteors, stars and planets, balloons, various aircraft, and other mundane phenomena, sometimes seen under unusual conditions such as temperature inversions—were beginning to become “real” presumed extraterrestrial craft. While Jerome Clark (1998, 2: 695) insists, “The UFO phenomenon is the creation not of one man but of tens of thousands of UFO sightings,” this is rather like observing that the Wright Brothers did not create the aircraft industry. To the extent that one man “invented” UFOs—that is, more than any other single person transformed them from fiction to seeming reality—that man was Raymond A. Palmer. Once in 1965, my late friend James W. Moseley (himself a saucer satirist) asked Palmer what he thought about flying saucers. Palmer answered, “What would you say if I told you the whole thing was a joke?” (Sachs 1980, 238).

Dr. J.B. Rhine: The 'Discoverer' of ESP

The term extrasensory perception (ESP) refers to the alleged ability to acquire information by means other than through the known senses, and it would include telepathy (mind reading), clairvoyance (remote viewing), precognition (future knowledge), and retrocognition (paranormal knowledge of past events). Together with psychokinesis (PK, mind over matter), it constitutes what parapsychologists refer to as “psi” to describe two seemingly closely related phenomena. In fact, however, “psi” has never been proven, and, despite extensive research over many decades, there is still a lack of both scientific evidence and theory for its existence (Alcock 1996).


Although there were ancient seers and psychics, the modern interests in such phenomena paralleled rapid developments in science (such as the discoveries of X-rays and radio waves) and scientific reasoning (such as Darwin’s theory of evolution). Interest was also stimulated by the mid-nineteenth century spiritualist craze. When, in 1882, in London, a small band of scientists and spiritualists founded the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), unfortunately, their credulity, even outright gullibility, did not serve them well—and some members such as Harry Price, the ghost hunter, found the society too skeptical (Alcock 1996; Nickell 2012a, 21–22, 195–199, 261).


Despite the SPR’s work, it fell to a botanist, Dr. J.B. Rhine (1895–1980), to attempt to establish psi as a scientific reality. He and his wife, Louisa, wished to establish that the soul existed and hoped to use psychical research (soon called “parapsychology”) to link religion and science. Unfortunately, in 1929, the credulous Rhines were taken in by a “mind-reading” horse named Lady Wonder. Lady appeared to be telepathic, nudging levers to activate alphabet cards and spell out answers to queries, but she was in fact responding to subtle cues from her trainer (Nickell 2004, 279–280).


Nevertheless, Rhine’s parapsychology laboratory at Duke University—founded in 1940—pioneered in ESP research. His card tests—involving a subject’s guessing the sequence of symbols on a special deck of cards—seemed to begin to offer proof of a phenomenon for which he had coined the term Extra-Sensory Perception (as the title of a monograph in 1934). However, the tests were plagued with criticisms that subjects were allowed to handle the cards, that cheating was possible and not adequately guarded against, that the statistical analyses were flawed, and so on. Moreover, when Rhine tightened the controls, the scores went down. Rhine died having never convinced mainstream science that either ESP or psychokinesis was real (Alcock 1996; Hansel 1966).


Even so, Rhine became the most famous parapsychologist in America, his name almost synonymous with ESP. He dominated the field until his death, and even then left an indelible mark on it.

Bernard Heuvelmans: 'Father of Cryptozoology'



The term cryptozoology—the study of unknown or “hidden” creatures (i.e., cryptids)—has been found in use as early as 1941 (Loxton and Prothero 2013, 16). It applies to such purported creatures as sea serpents, the Loch Ness monster, the Yeti, Bigfoot (each discussed here in turn), and many others.


Although sea serpents are reported from ancient times, it was British hydrographer and author Rupert T. Gould (1890–1948) who presented them seriously to readers, beginning in 1930 with his book The Case for the Sea-Serpent. (This was followed by Bernard Heuvelmans’s In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents in 1968.) Gould went on to also promote river and lake creatures in articles, radio broadcasts, and his 1934 book, The Loch Ness Monster and Others (Keel 2001b). Such creatures typically prove to be the misidentification of known creatures (such as otters swimming in a line), or other mundane phenomena, or hoaxes (Nickell 1995, 238–243; 2013a).


Another cryptozoologist was Ivan T. Sanderson (1911–1973), whose important writings on the subject included There Could Be Dinosaurs (1948) and Investigating the Unexplained: A Compendium of Disquieting Mysteries of the Natural World (1972). His 1961 Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life helped turn the Yeti into supposed evidence for Bigfoot. For example, a footprint many believed to be that of a Himalayan Yeti (but more likely an animal track altered and enlarged by melting snow) helped set the stage for the appearance of giant footprints in 1958 at Bluff Creek in northern California, leading to the creature being dubbed “Bigfoot.” In 2002, the tracks were revealed as a hoax by Ray Wallace (Nickell 2011, 68).


In 1967, Bigfoot enthusiast Roger Patterson set out to film the creature at Bluff Creek and returned with footage showing what was more recently revealed as Patterson acquaintance Bob Heironimus wearing a gorilla suit bought from costumer Phil Morris and modified (Nickell 2011, 68–72). Meanwhile, books on the man-beast had begun to proliferate, including Patterson’s Do Abominable Snowmen of American Really Exist? (1966) and John Green’s Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978). Many Bigfoot sightings are attributable to what I call the “Bigfoot Bear”—that is, any bear standing upright and even walking on its hind legs—such lookalikes typically being found in bear country and engaging in bearlike activity (Nickell 2013b).

The "Minnesota Iceman" hoax — supposedly a Sasquatch of a Neanderthal man frozen in ice.


Despite all these paranormal claims, the man usually designated the “Father of Cryptozoology” is Bernard Heuvelmans (1916–2001) (Coleman and Clark 1999, 161). Another claimant for the title would be his friend, the previously mentioned Ivan T. Sanderson; both were taken in by the “Minnesota Iceman” hoax—supposedly a Sasquatch or a Neanderthal man frozen in ice but actually the work of a Disneyland model maker (Nickell 2011, 87–90). However, it was actually Heuvelmans who did the most to create the field of cryptozoology, first with his serious 1955 book, Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées (republished in English, On the Track of Unknown Animals, 1958, 1962), then with his many additional books, his founding a Center for Cryptozoology in 1975 and being elected first president of the International Society of Cryptozoology at its founding in 1982 (Coleman and Clark 1999, 105–108).

Vincent H. Gaddis: The Bermuda Triangulator


The concept of an area of the Atlantic where ships and planes mysteriously disappear can be traced to a Miami Associated Press (AP) writer, E(dward) V(an) W(inkle) Jones. His article appeared in the Miami Herald, September 17, 1950, and was accompanied by an AP map showing Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico partially connected by dashed lines approximating a triangle. Jones (1950) vaguely referred to a “misty limbo of the lost.” Two years later, writing in Fate magazine, George X. Sands (1952) expanded Jones’s article (without citing him or other sources), and added the word triangle and a heavy dose of mystification.


Others also began to get onto the little bandwagon started by E.V.W. Jones, and soon there was a caravan. The flying saucer hucksters fell in behind (e.g., Morris Jessup with The Case for the UFO, 1955, and Donald Keyhoe with The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, 1957), as did writers of the “strange” genre (including Frank Edwards with Stranger Than Science, 1959) and others.


It remained for Vincent Gaddis (1913–1997)—a writer who once made up “filler” stories for Raymond Palmer as “a matter of livelihood” (Gaddis 1991, 16–17)—to get out in front and lead the burgeoning effort. His article in the February 1964 Argosy landed on major American newsstands and gave the mystery area a definitive name and ominous tone: “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.” Gaddis followed a year later with a book on sea mysteries, Invisible Horizons (1965), in which a chapter gave an alternate, even more ominous name for the area, “The Triangle of Death.” Many joined Gaddis with books of their own. John Wallace Spencer’s 1969 self-published book borrowed its title from E.V.W. Jones but pretended otherwise, referring to an area “that I call the ‘Limbo of the Lost.’” (Spencer loaded his auto with books that he then promoted on talk shows, until Bantam Books transformed the work into a bestselling paperback in 1973 [Kusche 1996, 104].)

Map of the “Bermuda Triangle” and some other such alleged regions. (Map by Joe Nickell)


In fact there was no clear “triangle,” and writers proposed greatly varying sizes and even different shapes, including a rough square called “The Hoodoo Sea” and another very large configuration, “Devil’s Trapezium” (Nickell 2007, 5). Worse, reports authority Lawrence David Kusche (1996, 102), “Many of the losses that are credited to the Bermuda Triangle actually occurred nowhere near it, but near Ireland, Newfoundland, in the Pacific Ocean!” Ivan Sanderson took things further into the ridiculous, discovering there to be not just one jinx area but a dozen, his article for the pulp Saga (October 1972) being titled “The 12 Devil’s Graveyards Around the World.” (Reprinted in Ebon 1975.) Some were over land, Sanderson opined, and he called their shapes “Lozanges” (Sanderson 1975, 15–25). Much of the information on which these “Vile Vortices” were based was false or imaginary (Kusche 1996, 114). Still other writers followed, notably Richard Winer with his The Devil’s Triangle and Charles Berlitz with his The Bermuda Triangle—both bestsellers published in 1974.


Meanwhile, the impressive investigation by Kusche—The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved (1975)—used original records and detective work to take the mystery from the mystery mongers. Kusche provided prosaic explanations—severe weather, human error, and equipment failure among them—to case after misrepresented case. For example, the 1963 “disappearance” of the S.S. Marine Sulphur Queen was instead an accident caused by structural weakening due to the removal of bulkheads to accommodate vats containing tons of molten sulfur; wreckage was found, including the name board reading “ARINE SULPH” between its shattered ends (Kusche 1975, 206–216). Still, of course, the claims continued. (I have myself responded to some of them, including for an episode of National Geographic Television’s Is It Real? [2006; see also Nickell 2007]. Kusche revisited the subject in his recent Skeptical Inquirer cover article on the fortieth anniversary of his book, calling the “mystery” of the Bermuda Triangle “one of the most widespread frauds that has ever been perpetrated” (Kusche 2015, 36).

Erich Von Däniken: Charioteer of the Gods

The modern ancient-astronauts craze was sparked in 1968 with the publication of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?—a book that consistently underestimates the abilities of ancient peoples and assigns many of their impressive works to visiting extraterrestrials. Von Däniken (b. 1935) wrote several other books capitalizing on the worldwide success of his first—works that scholars and scientists label pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology—and other writers followed suit.


Von Däniken did not invent the idea of ancient astronauts; it has its beginnings as far back as the nineteenth century. Also, in 1919, Charles Fort speculated in his Book of the Damned about archaeological indications for early extraterrestrial visitation. Such speculation was also common to pre–von Däniken saucer writers such as Morris K. Jessup (Clark 1998, 1: 75–86).


Nevertheless, von Däniken did create modern worldwide interest in the notion in his books. Again and again, however, he misrepresents the archaeological facts. For example, he suggests that the Egyptians could not have built the pyramids, that they lacked the means of quarrying the stones, transporting them (having neither rope nor wood for rollers), or lifting them in place (von Däniken 1971, 74–80). In fact, the quarries are still extant (one of them being the hollow area in which the Sphinx stands); the “nonexistent” rope is displayed in quantities in museums; the Egyptians left a drawing showing how they transported a colossal statue of many times greater weight than any pyramid stone using rope and a wooden sledge; and traces still exist of the great earthen ramps (progressively lengthened as necessary to lessen the steepness) that were used to raise the stones (Nickell 1995, 187–188).


Von Däniken again overstates the difficulty of making the famous Nazca lines and giant ground drawings that are etched across thirty miles of Peruvian desert. Lines and figures, he opines, could have been “built according to instructions from an aircraft” (von Däniken 1971, 17). In fact, using sticks and knotted cord, I twice recreated Nazca geoglyphs: the giant condor (in 1982 on a Kentucky landfill) and the great spider (in 2006 on a California ranch for filming by National Geographic Television). No flying saucer was required to make the figures, whose lines are believed to be used for ritual processions (Nickell 1983; 2012b, 121–125; Aveni 2000, 212–222).


As to the “chariots” in the title of von Däniken’s first book, they refer to the fiery spaceships he imagines had landed anciently, witnessed by awed primitives. He sees the large drawings as “signals” and the longer and wider lines as “landing strips” (von Däniken 1971, 17; 1972, 105). However, Maria Reiche, the German-born mathematician who mapped and studied the markings, had a ready rejoinder. Noting that the earth there is quite soft, she quipped, “I’m afraid the spacemen would have gotten stuck” (quoted in McIntyre 1975, 718).

Doug Bower and Dave Chorley: Crop Circle Makers



As early as 1978, mysterious, swirled patterns began to appear in southern English fields—most often in wheat and other cereal crops, or “corn” as the British say. They inspired countless articles and a spate of books, no fewer than three in 1989. Circles-mystery enthusiasts were now called “cereologists” (after Ceres, the Roman goddess of vegetation), and “circlemania” was in full bloom (Nickell with Fischer 1992, 177–178).


The phenomenon was essentially new. An attempt to link it with a circle that had appeared in a field of oats in Hertfordshire in 1678—then attributed to witchcraft—fails because that circle was cut, not bent down in a swirled pattern. Although reports of such circles have surfaced in modern times, such as those of reeds in Australia in 1966 and a burned circle of grass in Connecticut in 1970, few had the flattened swirl feature and few were well documented at the time. All were supposedly suggestive of flying-saucer landing spots, such as circles shown in tall grass in a Swiss village by a man claiming to be regularly visited by extraterrestrials (Nickell with Fischer 1992, 183–184).


As investigation showed, several factors pointed to hoaxing as the most likely explanation: Suspiciously, crop circles were more prevalent in southern England, had proliferated as media reports increased, were becoming more complex each season, and exhibited a “shyness” effect (that is, the mechanism avoided being seen in operation). Then two retired artists—Doug Bower and Dave Chorley—confessed they had pioneered in the making of the patterns using planks and cord. They proved their ability by fooling cereologist Pat Delgado, who had declared a pattern they had produced for a British tabloid to be genuine. Soon, others came forward to admit that they too had made circles, helping it become a copycat phenomenon (Nickell with Fischer 1992, 177–210).


“Doug and Dave,” as they became known, were not only the originators of the modern phenomenon, they kept at it and were responsible for many of the giant grain-field patterns made over the years. Although they wrote no articles or books, they demonstrated their circle-making technique for television crews—for example, for ABC-TV’s Good Morning America (September 10, 1991)—and their proclaimed hoax gained worldwide publicity.


Those who did write the articles and books—and who therefore certainly helped promote the mystery of the phenomenon—were much less the “creators” of crop circles than they were its victims. Among them were Terence Meaden (author of The Circles Effect and Its Mystery, 1989), who had postulated that the crop circles were due to wind vortexes, but, as he kept modifying his theories to fit the evidence on the ground, the patterns continuously changed to keep one step ahead. Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews (authors of Circular Evidence, 1989, and other books) were major promoters, but they were fooled by Doug and Dave and their imitators, and, as other hoaxes were revealed, they were left foolishly holding their dowsing rods. Many other circles promoters were likewise fooled, but there were die-hards such as Eltjo H. Haselhoff, PhD (2001), who were undaunted by “self-proclaimed” hoaxers and soldiered on, as the circles became ever more elaborate, morphing into mathematical formations, pictograms, and even rectilinear designs that seemed a spoof of the very term “crop circles.”


One wonders what these several “creators of the paranormal” would today think of what they had wrought. No doubt most felt their cause important. Some were credulous but principled (Bernard Heuvelmans and J.B. Rhine); some were out to make a buck (Harry Price, Vincent Gaddis, and Erich von Däniken); and still others wished to stir things up and enjoy the fray (Charles Fort, Raymond Palmer, and Doug Bower and Dave Chorley). Perhaps each was rewarded in his own way. Despite some side benefits (our learning more about such things as waking dreams, misperceptions, the will to believe, etc.) the paranormal has proved largely a chimera—that fire-breathing, lion-headed, goat-bodied, serpent-tailed monster of ancient mythology. Nevertheless, it still lurks at the common boundary of superstition and science, endlessly chasing its scorched tail.

References

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An American embodiment of the Robin Hood legend, notorious outlaw Jesse James, with his older brother Frank, rode boldly into U.S. history in the wake of the Civil War, during which the two had trained for a career of daring bank and train holdups. Born in Missouri, they nevertheless had many connections to Kentucky, and it was these the editor of The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Kleber 1992) asked me to investigate—with special attention to the 1868 robbery of the bank at Russellville to determine if it was actually perpetrated by the James gang. I completed that assignment (Nickell 1992), as well as a longer, historical-journal article (Nickell 1993a), and produced other related writings (Nickell 1993b; 1999). The following is a summary that also looks into Jesse James ghost-lore and other legends.

Background

The James boys, Frank (1843–1915) and Jesse (1847–1882), were born and reared in Missouri, the sons of Robert Sallee James (1818–1850) and Zerelda Cole James (1825–1911). Beginning in 1839, Robert attended the Baptist institution Georgetown College (where I once taught and examined the original records).

Zerelda’s grandfather, Richard Cole, 
Jr., operated a stagecoach inn near Midway, Kentucky. I visited it and the home of Zerelda’s guardian, Judge James Lindsay, where the couple was married on December 28, 1841. They then moved to Missouri. Following the births of Frank and Jesse, they had one more child, Susan Lavinia, born in 1849 (Nickell 1993a, 218–220). After Robert S. James died during the California gold rush, his widow remarried but was soon widowed again, and finally, in 1856, she wed Dr. Reuben Samuel, by whom she had four more children.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Frank James joined a Confederate guerilla band, and his fifteen-year-old kid brother did likewise two years later. Jesse thus embarked on a course of outlawry that would end only with his violent death in 1882.

Figure 1. The Long Bank in Russellville, Kentucky, was robbed in 1868. Was it by the Jesse James Gang as legend holds? (Photograph by Joe Nickell.)

The James Gang

After the war, the so-called James Gang—largely a postwar band of former Quantrill’s Raiders, originally led by Cole Younger—was held responsible for numerous robberies in several states. These included, in Kentucky, a pair of stagecoaches near Mammoth Cave and banks in Columbia and Russellville (Nickell 1993a; Beamis and Pullen n.d., 10–19, 45, 56–60).

The Long Bank (owned by Nimrod Long) in Russellville (Figure 1) was the scene of a “daring” robbery on the afternoon of Friday, March 20, 1868. Days before, a man using the apparent alias of “Thomas Coleman” attempted to sell a $500 bond, but it was suspected of being counterfeit. On the Wednesday before the robbery, he tried again with a $100 treasury note, which was also declined. He was accompanied by a man who appeared to be observing the layout of the bank. Finally, on March 20, “Coleman” and two others arrived at the bank from different directions, hitched their horses, and walked inside. While they attempted to cash a $50 counterfeit note, two other riders came up and waited outside.

The robbery began when Coleman drew his gun, but owner Long sprang toward a rear door, receiving a bullet-grazed scalp in return. (A bullet hole was left in the bank’s wall where I examined it during my visit to the historic building.) Nevertheless, Long escaped and ran to the street where the two sentries were now firing their Spencer repeating rifles at anyone who approached. The three robbers ran outside carrying saddlebags filled with greenbacks and silver and gold coins. The band then fled out of town and, although citizens soon pursued them, vanished in the woods (Nickell 1993a, 222–224). Were the bank robbers indeed the James Gang?

To answer this question, I approached it from several angles. One strategy was to assess the perpetrators’ modus operandi (or M.O., “method of operation” [Nickell and Fischer 1999]) for which I had had special training (Nickell 2008). I also used additional clues, such as aliases, descriptions, and other factors. It is necessary, however, first to recognize that the group—at this time really the Younger-James gang—was a loosely constituted band whose membership could vary from robbery to robbery.

In fact, both of the James brothers had an alibi for the Russellville robbery: they were holed up in Chaplin, Nelson County, Kentucky, recovering from gunshot wounds. But the modus operandi of the crime was exactly that used and developed by the Younger Gang: “genteelly dressed” men arriving in town posing as cattle buyers or the like, then converging on the bank, with half going inside and the rest keeping guard with Spencer rifles—the two groups able to communicate with each other through a man inside the doorway. The desperadoes then fled on fast horses, splitting up to take preplanned routes, and disappeared. The 1872 Columbia bank robbery, for example, followed the same M.O., and the robbers escaped into Nelson County, a known James sanctuary (Nickell 1993a, 225–232).

Despite the alibi of the James brothers, Louisville detective D.G. Bligh, who investigated the case, believed they were nevertheless involved. Moreover, two of the actual robbers were identified: One, having a “defect in one eye,” was George Shepherd, a Chaplin resident and compatriot of the James brothers; so was the other, George’s cousin Oliver Shepherd, who had been away from home at the time of the robbery and who signaled his guilt by resisting arrest. Oliver was shot to death, and George was sent to prison for his role. The alias used by the leader of the band, “Thomas Coleman” (as given in the legal indictment against the five holdup men, probably having been taken from a hotel register), almost surely identifies Thomas Coleman “Cole” Younger (1844–1916), the original leader of the “James Gang” (Nickell 1993a, 228–232; “Russellville” 1868; Settle 1977, 30–44).

Riding into Legend

Although only five men robbed the bank in Russellville, popular writers would extend the number to eight or even a dozen and spur them into town at a gallop with guns blazing. Soon, the legend grew that the robbery was that of the James brothers.

Jesse’s cowardly murder by Bob Ford in 1882 helped make him the focus of later legends. Pistols, often with his name carved thereon, proliferated. So did photographs “said to be” of the outlaws or their family members (Nickell 1994, 78). Among other artifacts, there are no fewer than three gold watches alleged to have fallen from dead Jesse’s pocket.

In the legends, the James Gang’s adventures multiplied. For example, Jesse was said to have robbed a bank in West Virginia in 1875 (more on this presently). Again, he has been seriously credited with another Kentucky heist—that of a Muhlenberg County coal mine office—although Jesse, his wife “Zee,” and their two children were in Kansas City at that time, while Frank was in Texas (Nickell 1993a, 231, 236).

The James brothers’ alleged hideouts were also ubiquitous. Said one writer, there were a reputed “thousand places where Frank James and Jesse James had been seen and it wasn’t only Kentucky; it extended all the way to Florida, New York” (qtd. in Watson 1971, 75).

The Impostors

As artifacts and tales about Jesse James proliferated, so did the persons who—following his death on April 3, 1882—claimed to be the real, escaped-from-death outlaw, some seventeen by one count (Nickell 1993b).

Jesse had been living as “Thomas Howard” with his wife and children in St. Joseph, Missouri. On that fateful day, young Bob Ford and his brother Charles—new members of the James Gang—were at the home. Bob Ford intended to kill Jesse for the reward money offered by Missouri Governor Crittenden, so when the unarmed notorious outlaw and respectable family man stepped up on a chair to dust a picture, Ford quickly drew his pistol and shot Jesse in the back of the head, killing him instantly. The act inspired a ditty: “. . . Oh, the dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard! And they laid Jesse James in his grave.”

Almost immediately, however, came doubt that the dead man really was Jesse James. This was despite a positive identification by a coroner’s jury—relying on people with personal knowledge of his features and on distinctive identifying wounds (including a pair of scars on his right chest and a missing left middle fingertip). Scarcely had a year passed when a Missouri farmer claimed he had seen Jesse James. Other sightings followed, not unlike those of Elvis Presley in more recent times. Eventually, men claiming to be the “real” Jesse came forward (Nickell 1993a, 234–235). As American folklorist Richard M. Dorson (1959, 243) observed: “In the tradition of the Returning Hero, who reappears after his alleged death to defend his people in time of crisis, ancient warriors have announced that Jesse James lives in their emaciated frames.”

The last—and best known—Jesse James claimant was one J. Frank Dalton. I recall him on a television program when I was a boy. I have an old book that was used to promote Dalton’s claim—first made on May 19, 1948—that he was James; the book (Hall and Whitten 1948) was published in that year. According to Dalton—then said to be nearly 101 years old—the man killed as Jesse was Charley Bigelow, a former member of the James Gang. Jesse’s wife acted her part in the conspiracy, the book says, crying out, “They have killed my husband.”

Figure 2. The author at the site of Jesse James’s grave in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, Missouri, where his remains were exhumed in 1995. (Author’s photo.)

Investigating ‘Jesse’

This is all fantasy and conspiracy nonsense of course, aimed at the credulous. I compared some of Dalton’s “memories” (as related by the authors of his story in 1948) and found them absurd. For example, except for the date of the Russellville bank robbery, he gets almost nothing else correct, referring to the town as “Russell” and describing what had been a carefully planned act as a wild raid: “A group of mounted men, armed with revolvers and bowie knives, dashed through the streets of Russell, shouting and yelling. They rode up to the front of the bank and two lines of men were placed across the street to keep anyone from interfering.” Then the James brothers went inside the bank, where Frank trained his pistol on the cashier while Jesse “took the money from the safe” (Hall and Whitten 1948, 19).

Other evidence discredits Dalton. Whereas writers cite his “damaged fingertip” (“J. Frank Dalton” 2015) and specifically the “mutilated tip on the left hand index finger” (Taylor 2014) as supposed proof that he was Jesse James—in fact, as we have already seen—the actual digit in question was Jesse’s left middle finger, and its tip was missing (Settle 1977, 117–118). Then there is the handwriting. Forensic document examiner Duane Dillon determined that Dalton’s writing characteristics were distinctly different from James’s (Starrs 2005, 185).

As a historical document consultant (see Nickell 2009) and author of textbooks on handwriting (Nickell 1990; 1996), I independently compared Dalton’s “Jesse James” signature (on the cover of the 1948 book by Hall and Whitten) with known signatures of James (Hamilton 1979, 89, 91).

In contrast to the real Jesse’s “Jesse W James” and “JWJames,” Dalton omits the middle initial, writes the first name above the last, fails to connect the first J with the following e and the second J with the following a, uses an entirely different form for the three s characters, adds an uncharacteristic final stroke to the last s, and more. The real James did not pen the words “Jesse James” written by J. Frank Dalton.

I also ran down two stories of old men in my hometown area who thought they had encountered Jesse James in 1875, about the time he supposedly robbed a West Virginia bank (mentioned earlier); one was in Morgan and the other in Elliot County, Kentucky. In 1950, the latter (then in his nineties) reportedly visited J. Frank Dalton in Missouri and declared, “He is Jesse James” (Nickell 1999). Dalton died the following year. His death left for many the question: Who is buried in Jesse James’s grave?

Identifying Jesse James

That question has since been answered by James E. Starrs, a professor of law and forensic science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He headed the James identification project. (He and I were fellow speakers in 1998 at a forensic conference in Nova Scotia where we swapped investigative stories over lunch.) In July 1995, the project exhumed the remains from the grave in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, Missouri (having in 1902 been transferred there from Jesse’s initial burial in his mother’s front yard). (See Figure 2.)

The skeletal remains yielded evidence consistent with being those of Jesse James. For example, an anthropological analysis showed the remains to fit his known profile as to sex, age, height, and racial typing. A spent bullet was found amid fragments of the right ribs where Jesse was known to have carried an unremoved bullet. The skull—carefully reconstructed—yielded evidence of a single entrance wound behind the site of the right ear. Found later were traces of the lead from a bullet’s passage on a fragment of an occipital bone. Many of the teeth had gold fillings and evidence of tobacco chewing (nicotine staining and corrosive influence)—both expected from known facts of the outlaw’s life (Starrs 2005, 181–185).

The definitive evidence came from mitochondrial DNA (mt DNA), i.e., genetic material passed from mother to child. A DNA specimen from one of the teeth matched that from blood samples taken from Robert Jackson and Mark Nichols, the two known descendants of Jesse’s sister Susan. The remains thus proved to be those of Jesse Woodson James (1847–1882) with a significant degree of scientific certainty. The sequence of base pairs in the DNA matching was “so singular” that it was reportedly “the first time it was encountered in the entire mt DNA database for the Northern European population” (Starrs 2005, 185–186).

Ubiquitous Ghost

In death, the legendary Jesse James attracts mystery mongers—including buried-treasure enthusiasts and ghost hunters—like a magnet. Often the two topics are combined.

A large component of the lost-treasure genre consists of proliferating yarns about lost mines and outlaws’ buried loot, including the alleged troves of the James Gang. As it became fashionable to identify places where Frank and Jesse had allegedly had a meal or hidden from pursuers, numerous caves were supplied with suitable “legends.” Said one writer, “There was hardly a cave they hadn’t hidden in” (qtd. in Watson 1971, 75). Buried treasure (real or hoaxed) was sometimes used to promote caves as commercial attractions. (For example, see Hauck 1996, 340.)

The same problems with lost-treasure tales are also true of haunting yarns—so many of them also beginning with the ubiquitous “It is said that.” I have spent quality time in places allegedly haunted by the ghost of Jesse James. For example, as a board member I attended a meeting of the Historical Confederation of Kentucky at the old Talbolt tavern in Bardstown in 1993 that was, however, uneventful as to ghost activity. A display in the inn’s upstairs foyer warned guests that they might experience ghostly phenomena (Holland 2008, 195), thus using the power of suggestion to set them up for a “haunting” experience.

Reportedly, there were various banging noises, common to the setting of old buildings and the effects of temperature changes on timbers and stairs; the sounds of people talking and laughing, possibly real people at the bar or nearby; the chiming of a bell eleven times at 4:00 am, likely a clock needing resetting; and a dream of a man being hanged, perhaps the effects of alcohol, and the “eerie” atmosphere, together with the historical backdrop.

I have also toured the old James farm where Jesse’s original gravesite still reposes in the front yard. (From there, his mother sold pebbles to souvenir hunters for a quarter each, replenishing them as necessary from a nearby creek [Settle 1977, 166].) The entire farm is haunted, according to sources citing the usual anonymous experiencers. The sounds of “low voices” and “restless horses” that were allegedly heard by a single staff member (possibly due to imagination or to sounds carried on the wind) were claimed in another source, exaggeratedly, to be from multiple reports (Taylor 2000; cf. “Missouri Legends” 2015). Supposedly, lights “have been seen” inside the farmhouse at night, one source claiming they are “moving” (Taylor 2000) and another that they go “on and off” (“Haunted” 2013); a common explanation for many such ghostly house lights is reflections on the window glass from various external sources (Nickell 1995, 50–51).

With ghost tales of Jesse James—as with buried-treasure and other legends of the notorious outlaw—we must remember the old skeptical maxim: Before trying to explain something, first be sure that it really occurred.

References

• Beamis, Joan M., and William E. Pullen. N.d. [ca. 1970]. Background of a Bandit: The Ancestry of Jesse James, 2nd Ed. N.p.: privately printed.
• Dorson, Richard M. 1959. American Folklore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Hall, Frank O., and Lindsey H. Whitten. 1948. Jesse James Rides Again. Lawton, OK: LaHoma Publishing Co.
• Hamilton, Charles. 1979. The Signature of America. New York: Harper & Row.
• Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books.“Haunted Jesse James Farm.” 2013. Available online at http://seeksghosts.blogspot.com/2013/08/haunted-jesse-james-farm.html; accessed August 28, 2015.
• Holland, Jeffrey Scott. 2008. Weird Kentucky. Toronto: Sterling Publishing.
• “J. Frank Dalton.” 2015. Available online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Frank_Dalton; accessed August 28, 2015.
• Kleber, John E. 1992. The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.
• “Missouri Legends.” 2015. Available online at http://www.Legendsofamerica.com/mo-
hauntedjamesfarm.html; accessed August 28, 2015.
• Nickell, Joe. 1990. Pen, Ink & Evidence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 1992. James, Frank and Jesse. In Kleber 1992, 462.
• ———. 1993a. Tracking Jesse James in Kentucky. The Filson Club History Quarterly 67(2) (April): 217–239. (See this source for additional references.)
• ———. 1993b. Outlaw impostors. In Stein 1993, 112–113.
• ———. 1994. Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 1996. Detecting Forgery. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 1999. Jesse James in Morgan, in two parts. Licking Valley Courier (West Liberty, Ky.) (July 22 and August 12).
• ———. 2008. Forensic Trainee. Available online at http://www.joenickell.com/ForensicTrainee/forensictrainee/.html; accessed August 31, 2015.
• ———. 2009. Historical Document Consultant. Available online at http://joenickell.com/HistoricalDocs/historicaldocs1.html; accessed August 31, 2015.
• Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1999. Crime Science: Methods of Forensic Detection. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• “The Russellville Bank Robbery—Capture of the Gang.” 1868. Louisville Daily Courier (March 23).
• Settle, William A., Jr. 1977. Jessie James Was His Name: Or, Fact and Fiction Concerning the Careers of the Notorious James Brothers of Missouri. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 18–33.
• Starrs, James E., with Katherine Ramsland. 2005. A Voice for the Dead: A Forensic Investigator’s Pursuit of the Truth in the Grave. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Taylor, Troy. 2000. Haunted Missouri: Haunts of Jesse James. Available online at http://www.prairieghosts.com/jessejames.html; accessed August 28, 2015.
• ———. 2014. The man who would be Jesse James. Available online at http://troytaylorbooks.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-man-who-would-be-jesse-james.html; accessed August 28, 2015.
• Watson, Thomas Shelby. 1971. The Silent Riders. Louisville, KY: Beechmont Press.

The Lalaurie House—once the New Orleans residence of the now-
infamous Delphine Lalaurie (or LaLaurie) and her third husband, Louis—has become synonymous with horror. There, lurid stories of torture and death in 1834 combine with later tales of macabre spirits, rendering it one of the mostspine-tingling sites in the Vieux Carré (or “Old Square”), more commonly known today as the French Quarter. (I was able to begin investigating the case in October 2011, while in New Orleans to speak at a Committee for Skeptical Inquiry conference.)

The elegance of the Lalaurie House in New Orleans’ French Quarter belies its reputation as a chamber of horrors. (Sketch by Joe Nickell)

Horror Revealed

The story begins with the elegant masonry townhouse catching fire on the morning of April 10, 1834. The fire brigade extinguished the flames with difficulty but not before discovering, in a locked attic room whose door they forced open, a veritable torture chamber, a dark room where almost unimaginable human abuse reportedly transpired. According to one source (Klein 1996, 8–9):

The slaves were both male and female. Some were fastened to the walls with cruel chains. Others were restrained on makeshift operating tables. Still others were confined in metal cages hardly large enough for an average size dog. Laying helter-skelter were human body parts and pails containing organs and severed heads. Haphazardly arranged on the shelves which hung from the back wall were scientific specimen jars holding grizzly souvenirs appropriated from the hapless wretches who were sold into slavery to serve the rich and elegant Lalauries.

The stout firemen fled in disgust to summon the municipal police. The police arrived with doctors and ambulances from Charity Hospital. Most of the wretched slaves were dead. Those that still clung to life were scarcely recognizable as human beings. One hapless Negress was reduced to a writhing trunk. Her limbs had been amputated and the majority of flesh had been surgically pared from her skull. Another woman, confined in a small cage, had virtually every bone in her body broken and reset at obscene angles. She appeared to be more crab-like than human. Hanging from a gore splattered wall was what was left of a large Negro male. He had been castrated in a fashion which seemed to suggest he had been the victim of a crude sex change experiment. Others had parts of their jaws and facial features so mutilated that they resembled gargoyles. The dead were fortunate for their torments had been silenced by the cold embrace of death.

The Lalauries fled before an angry mob arrived to ransack the horror house, and their subsequent fate remains uncertain. Apparently, Madame Lalaurie died in Paris on December 7, 1849 (“Delphine LaLaurie” 2014).

Other sources give very similar accounts of the affair with added details (Ramsland 2013, 73; deLavigne 1946); these were said to be part of physician Louis Lalaurie’s “cruel medical experiments” (Smith 2010, 27).

Horror Elaborated

Unfortunately, the Lalaurie catalog of horrors is mostly a litany of imaginings. The earliest accounts (which I obtained and studied) beginning with a New Orleans newspaper that was published on the day of the fire (“From the Courier” 1834) give a different picture, albeit horrible enough.

The fire had broken out in the kitchen, and as the flames progressed, and neighbors informed authorities that the upper floor contained “a prison.” “Mr.” (not Doctor) Lalaurie was asked to remove the slaves to safety. When he failed to respond, the doors were broken open. A woman over sixty had to be carried out while six badly scarred men emerged, “loaded with chains.” One “had a large hole in his head; his body from head to foot was covered with scars and filled with worms!!!”

The next day The Bee reported: “Seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated, were seen suspended by the neck with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other.” The slaves were reported to have been confined by “the woman Lalaurie,” the paper stated, “for several months . . . to prolong their sufferings, and to make them taste all that the most refined cruelty could inflict . . .” (“The Conflagration . . .” 1834). So while the slaves were indeed much abused, the medical “experiments” conducted by “Dr.” Lalaurie were imagined by writers over time. Ironically, The Bee stated the mistreatment was “too incredible” to describe, so it would be left “rather to the reader’s imagination to picture what it was.” In a book published just four years later, “M[onsieur] Lalaurie” was described as “many years younger than his lady, and had nothing to do with the management of her property so that he has been in no degree mixed up with her affairs and disgraces” (Martineau 1838, 263–264).

According to that writer, of nine mistreated slaves:

The skeletons of two were afterward found poked into the ground; the other seven could scarcely be recognized as human. Their faces had the wildness of famine, and their bones were coming through the skin. They were chained and tied in constrained postures, some on their knees, some with their hands above their heads. They had iron collars with spikes which kept their heads in one position. The cowhide, stiff with blood hung against the wall; and there was a stepladder on which this fiend stood while flogging her victims, in order to lay on the lashes with more effect. (Martineau 1838, 265–266)

Gradually the story became elaborated through folklore, and, after 1945, by fakelore, as details began to be conjured up by popular writers. For example, Jeane deLavigne in her Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans (1946) imagined:

Male slaves, stark naked, chained to the wall, their eyes gouged out, their fingernails pulled off by the roots; others had their joints skinned and festering, great holes in their buttocks where the flesh had been sliced away, their ears hanging by shreds, their lips sewn together . . . intestines were pulled out and knotted around naked waists. There were holes in skulls, where a rough stick had been inserted to stir the brains.

Not surprisingly, she failed to directly cite sources, and the primary sources she did list failed to support the incredible claims (“Delphine LaLaurie” 2014).

Other myths abound, for example that the house standing today at 1140 Royal Street was built in 1780 and that the subsequent King of France, Louis Philippe, as well as the Marquis de Lafayette, slept there. In fact, while Louis Philippe visited New Orleans in 1798 and Lafayette in 1825, the Lalaurie House was not erected until 1832.

The noted New Orleans expert, Stanley Clisby Arthur (1880–1963), wrote (1936, 96) that the central story of slave abuse “has grown in ferocity through its countless retellings and the probabilities are that even the original story . . . was a gross exaggeration. It now appears that the mistress of this home was the first victim of yellow journalism in this country and that she was far from being the ‘fiend’ tradition has labeled, or should we say, libeled her.” Be that as it may, Arthur is even more explicitly skeptical of the ghost tales that sprouted from the story.

Spirits Appear

For years, the Lalaurie House stood abandoned, the “strange sight of its gaping windows and empty walls, in the midst of a busy street” rendering it a spooky place (Martineau 1838, 267). Tales began to grow that it was a “midnight rendezvous for ghosts,” complete with clanking chains (Arthur 1936, 96, 98). It eventually became known locally as “the Haunted House.” (I have in my collection an old New Orleans postcard view of the mansion with that title. Although it is undated, I would attribute the card to the early twentieth century, before 1907, based on printing and format.) Cries and screams were said to be heard, emanating from within, and the superstitious crossed the street to avoid its supposedly ghostly horrors (Smith 2010, 28; Arthur 1936, 96).

As Arthur (1936, 98) noted, “The principal ‘ghost’ is, according to the most frequently quoted tale, that of a little girl slave who, to escape the whip of her mistress, climbed to the roof and jumped to her death into the courtyard below.” (This story—but not the ghost portion—first appeared in Mar­tineau [1838, 264–265].) Arthur continued, “Another tale, equally untrue, was that the mistress of the mansion buried all her victims in the courtyard well.”

Victor C. Klein in his New Orleans Ghosts (1996, 11) attributes the end of a long silent period of ghost activity at the house to an 1890s influx of Italian immigrants who used it as a tenement. “Almost as soon as the hardy Italians had taken up residence then did a whole new generation of hauntings appear,” reported Klein. This suggested that—if that characterization is correct—the percipients may have been superstitious and susceptible to suggestion from the lurid ghost folk tales. A longshoreman who came home late from work one evening allegedly encountered on the dark stairs the specter of a slave bound with chains, who then instantly vanished.

Assuming the story is true, it relates what is called an apparitional experience. Dissociative states—such as daydreaming or (as in this instance) sleeplessness—can produce ghost sightings. The spectral image wells up from the subconscious and becomes superimposed onto the visual scene (Nickell 2012, 345). One must wonder, if ghosts consist of “life energy” as many paranormalists imagine, how is it that such inanimate objects as slave chains and manacles appear? The answer is that they are seen in apparitions (just as they are in dreams) because they are necessary to the “apparitional drama” (Tyrell 1953, 83–115).

Over time, the house had become, in turn, a girls’ school, a music conservatory, and a crowded tenement. Before going on to become a furniture store, apartment building, and again a private residence, it was a “Haunted Saloon.” Its owner proved to be “a fount of ‘ghost stories’” (Klein 1996, 11), perhaps intending to boost business.

One night in the 1970s, reports Smith (2010, 29), a tenant, who had an apartment at the rear, was “awakened from a deep sleep” to be “confronted by a man who stood above him looking down.” At the time, he believed he was dreaming, but, when he saw the next morning that a table had been moved, he concluded he had seen a ghost. The case is easily explained. The dreamlike occurrence was obviously what is called “a waking dream”—an experience that occurs between being fully asleep and fully awake and has features of both. As to the table, it may have been moved (earlier or later) by a family member or housekeeper (the account does not say the percipient saw the table being moved).

According to Hauck’s Haunted Places: The National Directory (1996, 192), “strange sounds were also heard: an invisible chain being dragged down the staircase; the pitiful cries of the slave girl near the cherub fountain in the courtyard; and tortured screams coming from the attic.” Note that the chain, visible in the earlier-mentioned apparition, is now “invisible.” Of course, auditory hallucinations may occur under the same circumstances as apparitions, but such brief, colorful incidents as Hauck relates sound like the story elements (or motifs) of folklore—nothing approaching firsthand accounts.

On Site

On October 27, 2011, I visited the Lalaurie mansion, although I had been told it was privately owned and not open to the public. When I got there, I found it was even closed for renovation. I searched around the house, finding a side door open, and slipped inside but was soon stopped by workmen. However, for the price of a few of my wooden-
Nickell business cards—presented in a brief sleight-of-hand show—I was admitted and allowed to look around. No ghosts appeared, but I was told how a caretaker once played a prank on a ghost-tour group that stopped outside. He secretly broadcast through the speaker-box located by the doorbell a muffled “Get out! Get out!”—thus, he said while laughing at the results, spooking the group.

Perhaps such antics will inspire a new generation of ghost hunters, modeled after guide Kalila Katherina Smith of Haunted History Tours and author of New Orleans Ghosts, Voodoo and Vampires (2010). Judging from her book and a nighttime tour I had with her, it appears such ghost-hunting raconteurs need very little evidence—perhaps only a thrice-told anecdote or a bit of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo—in order to spin their fantastic tales.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga for research assistance, and I also appreciate the professional assistance of the New Orleans Public Library in providing copies of early newspaper articles.

References

• Arthur, Stanley Clisby. 1936. Old New Orleans. N.p.: Harmanson Publisher; revised and reprinted as Walking Tours of Old New Orleans (ed. by Susan Cole Doré), Gretna, LA: Pelican, 96–99.
• “Authentic Particulars.” 1834. The Bee. April 12, p.2, c.1. (lower).
• “The Conflagration. . . .” 1834. The Bee. April 11, p.2, c.1. (See also “The Popular fury” 1834; “Authentic Particulars,” 1834.)
• DeLavigne, Jeanne. 1946. Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans. New York: Rinehart; quoted in “Delphine LaLaurie” 2014.
• “Delphine LaLaurie.” 2014. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_LaLaurie; accessed July 21, 2014.
• “From the Courier of Yesterday.” 1834. Reprinted Louisiana Advertiser, April 11, 1834, p.2, c.1.
• Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books.
• Klein, Victor C. 1996. New Orleans Ghosts. Metairie, LA: Lycanthrope Press, 7–12.
• Martineau, Harriet. 1838. Retrospect of Western Travel, in two vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, vol. 1: 263–267.
• Nickell, Joe. 2012. The Science of Ghosts: Searching for Spirits of the Dead. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• “The Popular Fury. . . .” 1834. The Bee, April 12, p.2, c.1.
• Ramsland, Katherine. 2013. The Human Predator. New York: Berkley Books.
• Smith, Kalila Katherina. 2010. New Orleans Ghosts, Voodoo and Vampires: Journey into Darkness. New Orleans, LA: De Simonin Publications.
• Tyrell, G.N.M. 1953. Apparitions. Rev. ed. London: Gerald Duckworth.