In the old-town portion of Genoa, Italy, the city where Christopher Columbus was born, stands the great Romanesque-Gothic cathedral of San Lorenzo (Saint Lawrence).¹ Here in the subterranean Museum of the Treasury—which houses reputed pieces of the True Cross, relics of John the Baptist, and other religious objects—is displayed Il Sacro Catino, “The Holy Basin.” This is one of the most famous embodiments of the legendary “Holy Grail,” and I was able to study both it and its legend there in the fall of 2009 (figure 1), attempting to resolve some of the mysteries and controversies concerning it.

Grail Legends

Romantic stories about the quest for the San Gréal, or “Holy Grail”—reportedly the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper—have proliferated for centuries. Popularly, the Grail (originally the word meant “dish”) is the talisman sought by the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table. The quest is known to English audiences largely though French romances compiled and translated by Sir Thomas Malory in his Morte d’Arthur in 1470. Therein the Grail is represented as the chalice from which Jesus and his disciples drank at the Last Supper and which was subsequently used to catch and preserve his blood from the Crucifixion. This act was usually attributed to Mary Magdalene or Joseph of Arimathea (the latter having claimed Jesus’s body for burial—see Mark 15:43–46).

The earliest Grail romance is Le Conte du Graal (“The Story of the Grail”), which was composed by Chrétien de Troyes around 1190. It describes how, when a girl “entered holding the grail, so brilliant a light appeared that the candles lost their brightness like the stars or the moon when the sun rises…. The grail... was made of fine, pure gold, and in it were precious stones of many kinds….” Two other grail stories, both written by Robert de Boron circa 1200, were Joseph d’Arimathie and Merlin. These gave the Grail quest a new Christian focus, representing it as a spiritual rather than chivalrous search. This epic constitutes the most important and best-known English version of the Arthurian and Grail adventures (Barber 2004, 19; Cox 2004, 75–76).

Other legends represent the Holy Grail variously as a silver platter, a miraculous cauldron or dish of plenty, a salver bearing a man’s severed head (like that of John the Baptist in Matthew 14:3–12), or a crystal vase filled with blood. Over time the Grail has also been represented as a reliquary (containing the Sacred Host or holy blood), a secret book, an effigy of Jesus, the philosopher’s stone, and many other portrayals. Around 1205 in a Bavarian poem titled Parzival, it was described as a magical luminous stone, more specifically as an emerald from Lucifer’s crown that had fallen to earth during the struggle in heaven. The term Holy Grail now popularly refers to any object of a quest, usually an unattainable one (Nickell 2007, 50–53).

The Historical Evidence

Unfortunately, there is no story about Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail in any text until the close of the twelfth century, when Robert de Boron penned his romance. Notably, the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s death do not suggest that Joseph or anyone obtained a dish or other vessel from the Last Supper and used it or any other receptacle to preserve Jesus’s blood. Records of the Holy Blood—the reputed contents of the cup Joseph possessed—are also of late vintage, perhaps the earliest coming from Mantra, Italy, in 804 (Nickell 2007, 53–56).

Nevertheless, several vessels lay claim to being the true Holy Grail—some twenty of which had surfaced by the sixteenth century. John Calvin ([1543] 2009, 62, 63) reported on several of the rival claimants for the title of “the cup in which Christ gave the sacrament of his blood to the apostles” (at the Last Supper). Calvin mentioned one at Notre Dame de l’Isle, near Lyons; another was in a monastery in the Albigéois; still another could be found at Genoa. This was “a vessel or cup of emerald” so “costly,” says Calvin sarcastically, that “our Lord must have had a splendid service on that occasion.” (See also my introduction to Calvin [1543] 2009, 32–33.)

The Emerald Bowl

Figure 2. A Genoese palace fresco depicts Guglielmo Embriaco, merchant and military leader, with the Catino as war booty.

Calvin is clearly referring to Il Sacro Catino, “The Holy Basin.” Most sources allege that this vessel—actually an emerald-green, hexagonal bowl—was brought to Genoa by Guglielmo Embriaco, following the conquest of Caesarea in 1101.² A fresco on the main façade of the Palazzo San Giorgio (figure 2) depicts crusader Guglielmo (“William” in English) holding as war booty the distinctive Catino. Twelfth-century writers acknowledged the purported intrinsic value of the bowl. For example, William of Tyre noted circa 1170 that it was “a vase of brilliant green shaped like a bowl” and that “the Genoese, believing that it was of emerald, took it in lieu of a large sum of money and thus acquired a splendid ornament for their church.” He adds, “They still show this vase as a marvel to people of distinction who pass through their city, and persuade them to believe it is truly an emerald as its color indicates” (quoted in Barber 2004, 168).

Others have seemed even more skeptical. States George Frederick Kunz in his The Curious Lore of Precious Stones ([1913] 1971, 259):

A queer story has been told regarding the Genoese emerald. At one time when the government was hard pressed for money, the Sacro Catino was offered to a rich Jew of Metz as pledge for a loan of 100,000 crowns. He was loath to take it, as he probably recognized its spurious character, and when Christian clients forced him to accept it under threats of dire vengeance in case of refusal, he protested that they were taking a base advantage of the unpopularity of his faith, since they could not find a Christian who would make the loan. However, when some years later the Genoese were ready to redeem this precious relic, they were much puzzled to learn that a half-dozen different persons claimed to have it in their possession, the fact being that the Jew had fabricated a number of copies which he had succeeded in pawning for large sums, assuring the lender in each case that the redemption of the pledge was certain.

Be this anti-Semitic folktale as it may, the Catino was pawned in 1319 and redeemed in 1327 (Marica 2007, 7; “The Dish of the Last Supper” 2010). It is still owned by the municipality of Genoa (Marica 2007, 12).

In any event, the Catino is not made of emerald—no matter how much its color and hexagonal shape give it the appearance of a faceted gemstone. At about fifteen inches in diameter it would have been an immense emerald indeed! Actually, according to the museum’s guidebook (Marica 2007, 12), it is simply of “mould-blown green glass.” Its manufacture is said to be Egyptian (Barber 2004, 168) or ninth-century Islamic (Marica 2007, 12), or possibly later.

Figure 3. Supposedly made of emerald, the Catino was broken in the early nineteenth century, disproving the claim. (Photos by Joe Nickell)

Its glass composition was revealed when it became broken (figure 3). According to the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica (s.v. “Genoa”), the Catino “was long regarded as an emerald of matchless value, but was found when broken at Paris, whither it had been carried by Napoleon I., to be only a remarkable piece of ancient glass.” (Another view is that it was broken on its return to Genoa [Marica 2007, 7], and a 1914 New York Times story claimed—possibly because of erroneous translation—that it had just been “accidentally broken” and was “beyond the possibility of repair” [“‘Holy Grail’ Shattered” 1914].) In any case, the bowl was restored in 1908 and again, finally, in 1951, when it received the metal armature that holds the pieces together (“The Dish of the Last Supper” 2010; Marica 2007, 7). (A rumor claims that the missing piece—again see figure 3—was kept in Paris in the Louvre [“The Dish of the Last Supper” 2010].)

Unholy Grail

When the belief that the Catino was made of emerald was broken to pieces, so was the claim that it was the Holy Grail. Its alleged Christological link was asserted long after the bowl arrived in Genoa, and it was predicated on the basis of its supposed emerald composition. This leap of faith was made by Jacopo da Voragine, archbishop of Genoa and author of Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend).

In a chronicle of Genoa written at the close of the thirteenth century, Jacopo, believing the vessel was indeed made of emerald, linked it to one of the Grail traditions. He cited certain English texts that claimed that Nicodemus had used an emerald vessel to collect Jesus’s blood when his body was placed in his tomb and that these texts called it “Sangraal”—that is, “Holy Grail” (Marica 2007, 7; Barber 2004, 168).

Alas, there is nothing to credibly connect the Sacro Catino to a first-century Grail, and the same may be said of other supposed Grail vessels. Indeed, observes Barber (2004, 170), “there is little or no evidence that anyone claimed in the thirteenth century to possess the Grail.” Certainly, claims for all such vessels date from after the period when most of the Grail romances were penned: between 1190 and 1240 (Nickell 2007, 60). This realization should put an end to fanciful Grail quests, but it probably will not: witness the popularity of such books as The Da Vinci Code (Brown 2003) and the book on which its author drew heavily, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Baigent et al. 1996)—silliness all.

Acknowledgements

I appreciate the help I received from Massimo Polidoro, who in 2009 not only saw to it that I was invited to Italy’s largest science festival, held in Genoa, but who, with other skeptics including Luigi Garlaschelli, accompanied me to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. CFI Libraries Director Timothy Binga and CFI visiting scholar Christina Stevens provided valuable research assistance.

Notes

1. St. Lawrence was a deacon of the Roman Church, martyred during the persecution of Valerian in 258.

2. Another source reports that the bowl was booty from Almeria, Spain, taken in 1147. (See Marica 2007, 7.)

References

Baigent, Michael, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. 1996. Holy Blood, Holy Grail. London: Arrow.

Barber, Richard. 2004. The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Brown, Dan. 2003. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday.

Calvin, John. (1543) 2009. Treatise on Relics, from a translation of 1854. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books (introduction by Joe Nickell).

Cox, Simon. 2004. Cracking the Da Vinci Code. New York: Barnes and Noble.

The dish of the Last Supper. 2010. Available online (in Italian) at http://www.cicap.org/new/articolo.php?id=102013. Accessed January 26, 2010.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. 1910. New York: The Encyclopedia Britannica Co.

‘Holy Grail’ shattered. 1914. The New York Times (April 18.)

Kunz, George Frederick. (1913) 1971. The Curious Lore of Precious Stones. New York: Dover Publications.

Marica, Patrizia. 2007. Museo del Tesoro. Genoa, Italy: Sagep Editori Sri.

Museum of the Treasury of the Cathedral of St. Lawrence of Genoa. N.d. Museum handout in English. Copy obtained by author, October 31, 2009.

Nickell, Joe. 2007. Relics of the Christ. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. (Additional sources given in this source.)

Art of the Hoax

Artist Sam Van Aken told me he was surprised to learn that there really is a Grovers Mill, New Jersey, where—according to Welles’s broadcast—extraterrestrial invaders supposedly first landed. There, behind the Wilson farmhouse, was a water tower with thin iron legs. Panicked by the broadcast (and failing to hear the disclaimers that it was a dramatization of the H.G. Wells novel), a group of armed townsfolk reportedly went hunting for the aliens, mistook the tower for one of the metal-legged “tripod machines” of the Martian invaders, and consequently riddled it with bullets.

Influenced by trompe l’oeil (“deceives the eye”) paintings, Van Aken explores the interface between the real and the seemingly real, understanding that it can be difficult at times to distinguish one from the other. His exhibit—featuring drawings, a replica of the old water tower, and a radio-studio exhibit (broadcasting his own dramatized hoax)—is an homage to the power of illusion to motivate people.

If the legendary incident at Grovers Mill really occurred, how could a water tower be mistaken for an alien “tripod machine”? First, there was the broadcast’s semblance of reality: in 1938, news-bulletin radio enjoyed a position of trust, and the dramatization of Welles’s story by the Mercury Theater players made the event seem terrifyingly real, all the more so because there were no commercial interruptions (see Stein 1993, 100–101). Then there was the expectation of seeing a certain thing: Just as someone primed to see a giant lake serpent can mistake a few otters swimming in a line for a monster, so an excited mob, anticipating an alien “tripod machine” and encountering in the darkness something approximating that description, can be deceived. The supposed paranormal is rife with such illusions of expectancy—something magicians well understand. But did the water-tower shooting incident really occur?

Invasion Panic

According to Welles’s realistic dramatization (broadcast on October 30, 1938), the Martian invaders spewed forth destruction from their heat rays. As a consequence, according to Martin Gardner (1957, 67):

Thousands wept, prayed, closed their windows to shut out poison gas, or fled from their homes expecting the world to end. Phone lines were tied up for hours. The panic was from coast to coast, but the greatest hysteria was in the southern states among the poorly educated.

Hadley Cantril (1940) conducted a study that indicated that of about six million people who listened to the broadcast, well over one million took it literally and responded in a variety of ways, some with panic. Additionally, an unknown number who were not tuned in to the show were nonetheless caught up in the excitement. More recent writers have suggested that the idea of such an intense national panic is an exaggeration (Bartholomew 2001; Boese 2002, 128). Certainly, reports that the panic resulted in death were untrue (Nilsson 2009).

I had a delightful conversation with CSI Founder Paul Kurtz (2010) about the “very scary” night of the broadcast. That night he and his sister, aged about thirteen and eleven respectively, were alone in their home in Irvington, a suburb of Newark, while their parents were out visiting friends. The youngsters were listening to the radio and became caught up in the fantastic “reporting.” Paul phoned a neighbor boy named Freddie, who was also frightened and came running over to the Kurtzes’. Paul then decided to call his father, who asked him to hold the phone while he listened to the radio himself. When Paul’s father came back on the line, he told Paul that he had determined the broadcast was a spoof because the other stations he had checked were not reporting the sensational attack. It was a lesson in critical thinking.

According to the New York Times the day after the sensational events (“Radio” 1938):

The broadcast . . . disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged communications systems. . . . In Newark, in a single block at Heddon Terrace and Hawthorne Avenue, more than twenty families rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what they believed was to be a gas raid. Some began moving household furniture. Throughout New York families left their homes, some to flee to near-by parks. Thousands of persons called the police, newspapers and radio stations here and in other cities of the United States and Canada seeking advice on protective measures against the raids.

The New Jersey State Police found it necessary to send this teletype: “Note to all receivers—WABC broadcast as drama re this section being attacked by residents of Mars. Imaginary affair” (“Radio” 1938).

At Grovers Mill

A subsequent CBS nationwide survey found, not surprisingly, that the percentage of people who were frightened by the radio play was higher in the general vicinity of the “invasion” (Cantril 1940, 147). But even so, accounts of shotgun-armed locals at or near Grovers Mill, roaming about in search of either the Martians or the militia that had supposedly been deployed (Koch 1970, 120), might be exaggerated.

Nevertheless, one resident, a seventy-six-year-old man named William Dock, posed the very next day for a New York Daily News photo. In the photo Dock is shown in a staged pose—with pipe in mouth and double-barreled shotgun ready at his shoulder—recreating his resistance to the invading Martians (Holmsten and Lubertozzi 2001, 7).

As for the shooting of the water tower, writer Howard Koch was told the story when he and his wife visited Grovers Mill while doing research for his 1970 book. Koch—who had actually written the radio play for Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre—visited the Wilson farm. Behind its “prosperous-looking farmhouse adjacent to the mill” was the windmill-cum-water-tower with “spidery” iron legs. As we shall see, Koch was dubious about the shooting story.

The Tower Shooting

According to an interview published in 2001, the owner of the tower in recent years, Catherine Shrope-Mok, said she understood that shots had been fired at the structure. However, she noted that the shooters were actually the persons (plural) who lived just across the road, “who you’d think would know better,” she remarked, “since they saw it every day.” Now across the road was the mill, and—because the elderly Mr. Dock had posed with his shotgun beside stacked feed sacks—I thought he might just have been the alleged shooter (Holmsten and Lubertozzi 2001, 7), which indeed proved to be the case (Capuzzo 2005a).

Figures 1–2. Although obscured by foliage, today the water tower at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, appears relatively intact. (Photos by Joe Nickell)

In my research (aided by CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga) I found no fewer than nine versions (or as folklorists say, variants) of the tale. Here they are, arranged from the least to the most sensational:

1. William Dock, age seventy-six, posed with his double-barreled shotgun to show a photographer for the New York Daily News (November 1, 1938) how he had stood “ready for the Martian invaders” (Nilsson 2009).

2. “. . . William Dock, a 73 [sic]-year-old farmer . . . grabbed his shotgun and went looking for the invaders. Later, Dock gladly posed for the hordes of photographers who invaded the town” (“Martian” 1978).

3. “On the night of the broadcast, a local resident, William Dock, grabbed his rabbit gun and shot at the water tank, thinking it was the aliens’ spacecraft” (Capuzzo 2005a).

4. “In Grovers Mill that night, some people mistook this water tower for a Martian ship. One resident shot at it” (Capuzzo 2005b).

5. “Some people, who had brought firearms, reportedly mistook a farmer’s water tower for a Martian Tripod and shot at it” (“The War” 2010).

6. “Some of the Grovers Mill locals actually fired shots at what they believed to be one of the Martians rising up on its giant metal legs. . . . The ones who were primarily shooting at the water tower in 1938 were in fact the neighbors from across the road” (Holmsten and Lubertozzi 2001, 7).

7. “Standing in the yard of the Grover [sic] family property, some of the residents bearing firearms mistook this tower . . . for the alien ships as they were described in the broadcast. Accordingly, they opened fire on the water tower” (Van Aken 2010).

8. “A bunch of people in the town went out looking for the aliens, and they had shotguns, rifles, and stuff. And they mistook the water tower for an alien ship and shot holes all through it” (Van Aken in Dakbowski 2010).

9. In Grovers Mill, “you can peek at what remains of the water tower that was shot to pieces by nervous residents in 1938” (“1938 Martian” 2010).

Now, the version reported by Koch in his The Panic Broadcast was told to him by the former fire chief of nearby Cranbury, whom Koch seemed to regard as something of a raconteur. The chief told one tale about a local man who was in such a hurry to flee the Martian invaders that he drove his car out of the garage without opening the garage door, shouting at his protesting wife, “We won’t be needing it anymore!” Koch interjected that “The rest of the story may be true or it may be the work,” he hinted, of the chief’s “imagination stimulated by our interest.” This bit of jokelore had the man returning home after learning he had been deceived about the invasion, whereupon his foot slipped off the brake and the car plunged through the garage’s rear wall. The punch line: “With the help of the Martians he had converted his garage into an instant carport” (Koch 1970, 121–22).

It was perhaps in this spirit that the chief had also remarked, says Koch (1970, 126), “that some shots had actually been fired at a supposed Martian”—i.e., at the water tower. It is worth noting that the previously mentioned report of men roaming about with guns also came from this years-later interview with the retired fire chief (Koch 1970, 120), who may have been elaborating on his memory of the photo of an armed William Dock.

Further Investigation

Figure 3. Philadelphia skeptic Eric Kreig poses with a historical marker about the so-called Martian invasion at Grovers Mill.

Of course neither William Dock nor anyone else at Grovers Mill would have been influenced by illustrations they had not seen. They had only the word-pictures of the broadcast, which described “a shield like affair . . . standing on legs . . . actually rearing up on a sort of metal framework . . . reaching about the trees” and “Enemy tripod machines” with “huge metal legs” (quoted in Cantril 1940, 22, 28, 33). The water tower might have looked like that to an excited person.

Today, the tower is largely hidden among trees (see figures 1 and 2), but as best as I could see on a visit to Grovers Mill (with Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking President Eric Krieg), the tower was definitely not shot to pieces.¹

But was there a shooting incident at all? To attempt to settle that matter, I sought to obtain a copy of the New York Daily News article of November 1, 1938, which accompanied the photo of shotgun-wielding William Dock. Back issues of the News were not readily available to me (either online or on microfilm at nearby libraries), but Tim Binga put me in touch with NYPL Express (a service of the New York Public Library), and they were able to find and copy the article for me. It was revealing.

Located among a spate of related articles—such as “Nazi Press Gloats over U.S. ‘Wars’ on Air”—the news story by George Dixon was headlined, “A Martian Raid Can’t Wake Up Grover’s [sic] Mill.” If that was not suggestive enough, Dixon reported that while there was panic elsewhere in the country, at the Wilson farm, the supposed site of the invasion, things were pretty quiet:

James Anderson, a tenant on the farm, said he was taking a nap when his wife shook him awake to tell him that [the] radio had just announced a “bomb or a meteor or something” had fallen on the place.

“What did you do?” a reporter asked.

“Oh,” yawned Anderson, “I just looked out the window and saw everything was about the same and went back to sleep.” (Dixon 1938)

Dixon quoted another tenant on the farm, Wyatt Fenity, who said he was not listening to the broadcast, “But you can see no Martians landed here. That old mill was built in 1776 and it’s still standing.”

The reporter’s next comments seemed to settle the matter of the alleged shooting of the tower:

William Dock, 76-year-old neighboring farmer, said he grabbed his shotgun when he heard the first “news” flash and went out looking for invaders. But he didn’t see anybody he thought needed shooting. (Dixon 1938)

Conclusions

Would someone really have mistaken a water tower that he saw just across the road every day for a Martian tripod machine? The possibility is good enough for jokelore, but I do not think it is very credible otherwise. The tale appears to have originated with a comically posed picture of an elderly, shotgun-armed William Dock as an unlikely defender of Grovers Mill, together with someone’s notion that the water tower resembled a Martian machine. Possibly, Dock became the butt of jokes, one of which may have had him shooting at the tower.

The alleged episode is now part of the folklore of the famous Martian invasion panic—what is sometimes called a hoax, although it was stated at the beginning and at three other points in the broadcast that it was a radio play (Stein 1993, 100; Boese 2002, 128). Still, Orson Welles admitted in 1955:

We weren’t as innocent as we meant to be when we did the Martian broadcast. We were fed up with the way in which everything that came over this new magic box, the radio, was being swallowed. . . . So, in a way, our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of that machine. We wanted people to understand that they shouldn’t take any opinion predigested and they shouldn’t swallow everything that came through the tap, whether it was radio or not. (Quoted in Holmsten and Lubertozzi 2001, 17–18)

The broadcast, then, was not a hoax but a satire (that is, a literary work that exposes human follies, abuses, etc., to ridicule). As is sometimes the case with satires, the pretense to truth may deceive some people, which in fact is what happened with the War of the Worlds broadcast. However, the alleged incident of locals shooting a water tower they mistook for a Martian machine apparently never happened. It may itself have originated as a bit of satire and so—mistakenly—was believed.

Acknowledgments

In addition to those mentioned in the text, I am grateful to John Massier, visual arts curator, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, for his generous assistance.

Note

1. After Eric Kreig accompanied me to Grovers Mill, another skeptic—prompted by my investigation—researched and published two articles (I am chagrined to say) in advance of mine.

References

Bartholomew, Robert E. 2001. Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.

Boese, Alex. 2002. The Museum of Hoaxes. New York: Dutton.

Cantril, Hadley. 1940. The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. New York: Harper, 1966.

Capuzzo, Jill P. 2005a. Steven Spielberg aside, Mars has attacked before. The New York Times, June 19.

———. 2005b. “Correction appended” to 2005a.

Dakbowski, Colin. 2010. Artful hoax. Gusto magazine, Buffalo News, April 23.

Dixon, George. 1938. A Martian raid can’t wake up Grover’s [sic] Mill. New York Daily News, November 1.

Gardner, Martin. 1957. Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science. New York: Dover.

Holmsten, Brian, and Alex Lubertozzi. 2001. The Complete War of the Worlds: Mars’ Invasion of Earth from H.G. Wells to Orson Welles. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks.

Koch, Howard. 1970. The Panic Broadcast: The Whole Story of Orson Welles’ Legendary Radio Show Invasion From Mars. New York: Avon.

Kurtz, Paul. 2010. Interview by Joe Nickell, April 27.

Martian invasion recounted. 1978. Lodi News-Sentinel, October 30.

Nilsson, Jeff. 2009. Are we ready for another Martian invasion? The Saturday Evening Post. Available online at http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/10/24/archives/retrospect/ready-martian-invasion.html. Accessed April 28, 2010.

1938 Martian landing site monument. 2010. Available online at http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2749. Accessed April 28, 2010.

Radio listeners in panic. 1938. The New York Times, October 31.

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

Van Aken, Sam. 2010. Quote from the didactic panel of his exhibition, “i am here today,” at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, April 23–May 28.

The War of the Worlds (radio). 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio). Accessed April 26, 2010.

For a new television series on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) called Miracle Detectives, I was invited to a home in Northern California where myriad icons, statues, and other religious effigies were “miraculously streaming oil”—“healing” oil, some claim. There I joined cohosts Randall Sullivan (whose book The Miracle Detective [2004] prompted the series) and Indre Vískontas (a neuroscientist and skeptic) (figure 1). Indre introduced me on the show by announcing: “Joe Nickell is one of the most prominent debunkers of purported miraculous or supernatural events in the country—maybe even the world.” As it happened, I had long ago suggested the case was one of pious fraud (Fernandez 2001). What would an on-site investigation reveal?

Background

The home I visited in Union City, California, belonged to a diminutive Philippine-American woman named Cora Lorenzo. There, in 1991, she hung by the front door in her living room a holy-water font she had bought on a trip to Lourdes, the French healing shrine. One November evening in 1995, Lorenzo noticed that the water had dried up. The next morning, however, which happened to be the Catholic feast of the Pentecost, the font had mysteriously been refilled with scented oil. Both her husband and twenty-four-year-old son denied that they had placed it there.

Soon, word of the “miracle” spread, and visitors—mostly the Catholic faithful—began to come in swarms. Some left their own icons and holy figurines overnight, only to retrieve them the next day drizzled with oil. Claims of healings—from headaches to rashes to arthritis—began to be reported. More visitors came from as far away as Indonesia, Australia, Holland, and Nigeria.

In 2001, the San Jose Mercury News featured the oil story but included more than a trickle of skepticism. A spokesperson for the Diocese of San Jose urged such claims be given “great caution.” Described as “a professional debunker,” I was quoted in observing that nondrying oils like olive oil could remain fresh-looking for long periods of time. (Since they do not evaporate like water, such oils have become favored for weeping-icon trickery.) I mentioned other cases of “miraculous” oily or bloody effigies that ranged from those that remain unproven and those that have been determined to be fraudulent. Moreover, although there were unverified claims of the oil samples miraculously increasing in quantity (rather like the self-replenishing jar of oil in the Old Testament [2 Kings 4: 1–7]), the Mercury News reported that this did not happen to the vial of oil the newspaper received from Cora Lorenzo (Fernandez 2001).

Figure 2. The author poses with Cora Lorenzo, whose home is famous as a shrine that pilgrims visit for “healing” oil.

Investigating on Site

When I met Lorenzo at her home on May 24, 2010, she hugged me and said she had wanted to meet me ever since I appeared on a Discovery Channel special on miracles some ten years before (figure 2). The home was filled with effigies, including statues of the Virgin and the children of Fatima, multiple copies of the image of Guadalupe and the Shroud of Turin, and other such reproductions.

Initially puzzled by the proliferation of oil, Vískontas nodded understandingly as we toured the display and I pointed out, using a magnifier, how the oil was often suspiciously placed (figure 3): it was spattered onto a mirror, placed above or outside the eyes of statuary for an unconvincing “weeping” look, separately placed (not dripped from the eyes) onto hands, and indeed was indistinguishable from careless human placement. In addition, Vískontas wondered aloud why the oil would appear not only on religious items but also on walls, door jambs, and the like.

Figure 3. The author examines an oil-weeping Madonna on the porch of the Lorenzo home. (Photos by Joe Nickell)

The Miracle Detectives segment on the case, “Mysterious Oils” (the second part of the January 5, 2011, episode), featured a forensic construction expert, Robert G. Cox, who has fifty years’ experience in building inspection. Cox’s findings matched my own. Demolishing the idea that the oil was somehow seeping into the room from outside—as by Lorenzo possibly having “leaky oil tanks in her attic” (Fernandez 2001)—Cox pointed out that the gypsum drywall was covered with enamel paint, which he observed “is a fairly dense material.” Using a pocket microscope he observed “dots” of oil, indicating it had been splattered onto the wall—similar to the spatter patterns I had noted here and there. Cox concluded the oil was therefore appearing from inside the room.

But was the oil freshly flowing as some people believed? It was never doing so, apparently, when the scene was properly observed. As the Mercury News reported nearly a decade earlier (Fernandez 2001), “During a reporter’s two visits to Lorenzo’s house, oil was present on the walls and statues, but did not flow on either occasion.” I showed Vískontas how a trickle that is already on a statue or icon could go unnoticed from one low-light vantage point, then, as the viewer moved, catch light and glint as if it had suddenly appeared. (I have been at sites where flickering candles placed before an oil icon could cause the trickles to seem to be moving—flowing—
although they were actually static.) There were no unambiguous fresh flows during the two days I was on site.

Still, we agreed to test the issue using video surveillance, although Sullivan was somewhat uneasy, feeling it amounted to “testing God.” However, he said to me, “That’s what you’re here to do is test God, so, yeah.” Lorenzo gave her permission to do whatever we wanted, so we wiped down a large oil-exhibiting statue of the Virgin, emptied the Lourdes font, and then trained a surveillance camera on each. We also placed a small statue in a plastic bag, which Vískontas and I heat-sealed to prevent tampering, and (although not shown on the program) I took custody of another that I monitored overnight in my hotel room. The next day the three of us reconvened at the Lorenzo home to check the results of our tests. Not a single trace of fresh oil had appeared anywhere, as far as we could tell—certainly not on the effigies and font we had under observation. Things were not looking very miraculous.

Healing Oil?

Nevertheless, how do we explain the reported healings? First of all, they are just that: reported. Besides, claims of “miraculous” healing are invariably predicated on being medically inexplicable, so claimants are simply engaging in a logical fallacy, argumentum ad ignorantiam (an “argument from ignorance”)—that is, drawing a conclusion based on a lack of knowledge.

In fact, there are many potential explanations. For example, some illnesses such as multiple sclerosis are known to exhibit spontaneous remission. Other reputed cures may be attributable to such factors as misdiagnosis, prior medical treatment, psychosomatic conditions, the body’s own natural healing mechanisms, and other factors. For such reasons, the international panel of physicians appointed by the Catholic Church to identify “miracles” at Lourdes, the French “healing” shrine, announced in 2008 that it would end the practice. Now the panel will only indicate that some cases are “remarkable.” And remarkable healings may happen to anyone—independent of supposedly magical oil (Nickell 2008).

Miracle Detectives examined the claim of a woman named Marlene Alberto who reported having been miraculously healed of an eye ailment. Her “symptoms suggested” that she had a macular hole in her left eye. Reportedly, doctors recommended she have surgery; she preferred not to accept the risk, instead anointing her eye with oil from the Lorenzo home, whereupon the hole surprisingly closed. The show consulted Ronald P. Gallemore, MD, PhD, who pointed out that “spontaneous closure” sometimes occurs in such cases, with the opening filling in with scar tissue as a result of the body’s own healing processes. Although such spontaneous closures are rare, they are not medically inexplicable and do not warrant the term miracle.

A Case of Deception

When we emptied the Lourdes font using a syringe, we filled some flint-glass vials with the oil—one of which I kept while two others were sent to Flora Research Laboratories for testing. Meanwhile, the show consulted David Stewart, author of Healing Oils of the Bible (2002)—which is published by an aromatherapy company and touts the inclusion of God and his creations (e.g., oil-producing plants) in health care. Stewart sniffed a sample of the Lorenzo oil and found it to have a “spiritual” quality. However, he did suggest that analysis of the oil could be significant since “God’s oils are not synthetic by definition.”

Often, the testing of substances from weeping icons is of little benefit because, presumably, a deity could use any substance it wished and, anyway, it is the question of how the substance got on the effigy in the first place that matters. For example, actual “salty tears” were reported to flow from a plaster bas-relief in Pavia, Italy, but then the owner was secretly observed applying the liquid with a water pistol (Nickell 1997). Nevertheless, in several cases tests have been revelatory. In 1913, a color print that “bled” was exposed when the substance failed tests for human blood; in 1985 a bleeding statue of the Virgin at a home in Quebec was exposed as a hoax when the blood was tested and found to be mixed with animal fat (so that when the room warmed from pilgrims’ body heat the substance would liquefy and flow realistically); and a case in Sardinia in 1995 was solved when DNA tests showed the blood was that of the statue’s owner. In yet another instance, involving a home with statues on which oil appeared in the presence of a comatose girl, the substance proved to be 80 percent vegetable oil and 20 percent chicken fat, consistent with the use of kitchen drippings (Nickell 1999).

With such cases in mind, I was happy the Lorenzo oil was to be tested. The laboratory report was instructive. While the substance was a vegetable oil, tests also revealed the presence of a glycol ether—a synthetic compound used as a fixative by the perfume industry (“in order,” Vískontas explained, “to keep elements together”). Sullivan agreed with Stewart that it was unlikely God would need to use a synthetic material.

With regard to the other evidence (especially the placement of the oil), he said to Vískontas that although he was disappointed, “You and I both agree, I think, that somebody’s putting that oil there.” That had always seemed likely to me, but now there was a preponderance of scientific evidence to that effect thanks to the Miracle Detectives investigation.

References

Fernandez, Lisa. 2001. Pilgrimage: Many doubt mysterious oil can heal pain. San Jose Mercury News (February 3).

Nickell, Joe. 1997. Those tearful icons. Free Inquiry 17(2) (Spring): 5, 7, 61.

———. 1999. Miracles or deception? The pathetic case of Audrey Santo. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 23(5) (September/October): 16–18.

———. 2008. Lourdes medical bureau rebels (author’s blog). Available online at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/lourdes_medical_bureau_rebels/; accessed April 12, 2010.

Sullivan, Randall. 2004. The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

The book gave me a chance to compare notes with Hawes and Wilson. Because I had preceded them in examining several of the “haunted” places featured on the show, I was able to contrast my findings with theirs. Our mutual cases include The Myrtles Plantation (in St. Francisville, Louisiana), the Winchester Mystery House (San Jose, California), and the St. Augustine Lighthouse (on Florida’s east coast).

The Myrtles

Located in the Louisiana bayou, The Myrtles Plantation is actively promoted by its owners as a haunted place. Indeed, says Jason, “Grant and I could barely contain ourselves. The Myrtles was known as one of the most haunted places in America. It was every paranormal investigator’s dream to check the place out” (Hawes and Wilson 2007, 137). Well, I had been there, done that—courtesy of the Discovery Channel for a documentary.

Figure 1. The Myrtles Plantation in Louisiana is billed as “America’s Most Haunted Home.” (Photo by Joe Nickell)

In February 2005, the T.A.P.S. team got off to a good start at The Myrtles. They were shown a “ghost” photo, but it had been so enhanced by a “paranormal guy” that they promptly labeled it “tampered.” But then came the incident with the lamp: In the plantation’s “slave shack” (a structure of recent vintage that never held a slave), a lamp glided eerily across a table behind the pair while they were on camera. Although they conceded that “Grant might have snagged the lamp cord with his foot and dragged it without knowing it,” the pair later decided to attribute this incident only to “a supernatural force” (Hawes and Wilson 2007, 146). Unfortunately, as reported by Television Week (Hibbard 2005, 19), “Upon close inspection, fans concluded the lamp was being pulled by its own cord. Even worse: a night-vision shot appears to show the cord extending from behind the table to Mr. Wilson’s hand.” Yet Grant maintained, “If we were looking for a sign that we were doing something worthwhile, we couldn’t have asked for a better one than the lamp.” The pair concluded, “The place was haunted” (Hawes and Wilson 2007, 146, 147).

In my own investigation at The Myrtles (including staying alone overnight there August 14–15, 2001), I had reached a very different conclusion about the place. Although its owners and staff hype the tale of a murderous slave named Chloe—a “legend” that Hawes and Wilson repeat in some detail—my research revealed Chloe to be fictitious and the tale not folklore but fakelore. Ghostly phenomena reported at the site can be explained without invoking the supernatural. For instance, a mysteriously swinging door was simply hung off center, and banging noises heard at night were attributable to a loose shutter (Nickell 2003).

Figure 2. The author visits San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House, a mansion of bizarre architecture and a legendary curse. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

Winchester Mystery House

San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House is remarkable indeed. Even after the Gothic Victorian mansion was greatly reduced in size by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, eccentric widow Sarah Winchester continued to add to the architectural wonder until her death in 1922. At that time it contained 160 rooms and included bizarre architectural details such as stairways that led nowhere. Legend holds that a Boston spirit medium had directed Mrs. Winchester to go West and build, without ceasing, a home for spirits. This was to halt an alleged curse on the Winchesters resulting from the “terrible weapon” (the repeating firearm) they had produced.

Jason and Grant retell the legend without skepticism, although the tale is unproved and exists in many contradictory versions. Neither is there any real evidence that Mrs. Winchester was herself a spiritualist. Indeed her close companion for years, Henrietta Severs, denied that she was (Rambo 1967, 8).

Visiting the mansion in July 2005, Hawes and Wilson (2007, 225–29) “didn’t find anything of a supernatural origin”—and even concluded that “odd banging sounds” were probably “the result of a plumbing problem.” Nevertheless, they and their T.A.P.S. team continued their pseudoscientific approach to ghost hunting (Hawes and Wilson 2007, 225–29). That is, they relied heavily on alleged ghost-detecting equipment that does not, in fact, detect ghosts. A reading on an electromagnetic field (EMF) meter, for instance, can be caused by faulty wiring, microwaves, solar activity, or any of a number of other non-ghostly sources. There is no credible scientific evidence that ghosts exist, let alone that they are electromagnetic—or radioactive: the T.A.P.S. team also on occasion uses a “portable Geiger counter” (Ghost 2006). Other ghost-hunting equipment is similarly useless, especially in the hands of nonscientists (Nickell 2006).

I investigated the Winchester Mansion in 2001 (with colleague Vaughn Rees) and found that temperature variations, the settling of an old structure, and other similar characteristics accounted for cold spots, odd noises, and ghostly phenomena (Nickell 2002). I have learned that people’s level of ghost experiences is approximately proportional to their psychological tendency to fantasize (Nickell 2000)—evidence for psychologist Robert A. Baker’s wise saying that there are no haunted places, “only haunted people.”

Figure 3. The St. Augustine Lighthouse is one of the most towering “haunted” places in the United States. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

St. Augustine Lighthouse

Among the tallest such structures in the United States, the St. Augustine lighthouse is claimed to feature, in the keeper’s dwelling, a girl in a red dress who suddenly vanishes and the lingering smell of cigar smoke. In the tower, various unexplained noises are often perceived (Elizabeth and Roberts 1999, 40–49).

Once again, the T.A.P.S. team lugged in the fancy equipment on which their pseudoscientific approach to ghost hunting depends. They placed a wireless audio unit up in the tower; at the bottom, a thermal camera was positioned to shoot upward “just to see what we could pick up” (Hawes and Wilson 2007, 234–35). The team claims to have seen a shadowy figure and heard a woman’s cry as they went up the stairs. Jason ran toward it but “couldn’t catch more than a glimpse of the dark figure” as he gained the stairs (2007, 236). Afterward, their “video footage clearly showed a shadow at the top of the stairs. A moment later, we heard a female voice crying for help, and saw the shadow dart to the right” (2007, 238). They concluded that the St. Augustine Lighthouse was indeed haunted.

That lighthouse was one of several I investigated for my Skeptical Inquirer article “Lighthouse Specters” (Nickell 2008). (My wife and I even stayed as “assistant keepers” at a couple of remote sites.) On March 23, 2004, I climbed the 219 steps to check out the St. Augustine Lighthouse’s tower and also explored the keeper’s house. The occasional perception of cigar smoke in the latter may have a ready explanation. There is often confusion as to the true nature of the smoke (attributed alternately to cigars, cigarettes, burning wiring, etc.), and real smoke can drift inside or its smell be carried in on people’s clothing (Nickell 2008, 24–25). The power of suggestion may be at work as well.

Apparitions at “haunted” sites are also explainable. For example, private citizens who rented the St. Augustine keeper’s dwelling (after the light was automated in 1955) sometimes woke to see a young girl at their bedside (Elizabeth and Roberts 1999, 44). Such sightings are easily explained scientifically as “waking dreams,” which occur in the state between sleep and wakefulness. Similarly, apparitions may occur when the percipient is in an altered mental state, such as daydreaming, and a mental image becomes superimposed on the visual scene (Nickell 2008, 22–23).

As to noises in the tower, there are a number of plausible explanations, beginning with the wind. Indeed, Hawes and Wilson themselves found one culprit in the form of a window “free to swing with the wind” (Hawes and Wilson 2007, 235). Temperature changes can also cause old steel to make noises as it expands and contracts (Thompson 1998, 73). One such screeching sound was interpreted as “a female voice crying for help” (Hawes and Wilson 2007, 238). (Another possibility is seagulls; the birds may “shriek” and “sound almost like humans screaming” [Vercillo 2008, 50].)

Glimpsed shadows might have an equally simple explanation. I studied the T.A.P.S. team’s St. Augustine Lighthouse video episode (Ghost 2006) with two colleagues, Tim Binga and Tom Flynn, and all of us were underwhelmed. Flynn, CFI’s video expert, summed up the evidence by stating: “These visual effects are so ambiguous that they may signify nothing at all.” He added, “The observed effect might even be the shadows of the ghost hunters themselves as they moved about, several landings below” (Flynn 2009).

* * *

As this comparison of cases shows, the approach of so-called “ghost hunters” is simply one of mystery mongering. Like claims for the paranormal in general, their assertions that certain places are haunted are based on the logical fallacy of arguing from ignorance: “We don’t know what caused such-and-such (a noise, say), so it must have been a ghost.” In fact, one cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. The problem is exacerbated by the pseudoscientific use of scientific equipment and by the distinct possibility that ghost hunters are actually causing—even if unintentionally—some of the very phenomena they are experiencing!

In contrast is the scientific investigator’s approach: begin with the phenomenon in question, try to ascertain whether it in fact happened, develop hypotheses to explain it, and seek to find the most likely explanation—keeping in mind that one cannot explain one mystery by attributing it to another.

References

Elizabeth, Norma, and Bruce Roberts. 1999. Lighthouse Ghosts: 13 Bona Fide Apparitions Standing Watch Over America’s Shores. N.p.: Crane Hill Publishers.

Flynn, Thomas. 2009. Video analysis and interview by Joe Nickell, September 1.

Ghost Hunters Season Two: Part 2 (DVD). 2006. “St Augustine Lighthouse.”

Hawes, Jason, and Grant Wilson, with Michael Jan Friedman. 2007. Ghost Hunting: True Stories of Unexplained Phenomena from the Atlantic Paranormal Society. New York: Pocket Books.

Hibbard, James. 2005. In search of ghost stories. Television Week, August 22; 1, 19.

Nickell, Joe. 2000. Haunted inns. Skeptical Inquirer 24(5) (September/October): 17–21.

———. 2002. Winchester mystery house. Skeptical Inquirer 26(5) (September/October), 20–23.

———. 2003. Haunted plantation. Skeptical Inquirer 27(5) (September/October), 12–15.

———. 2006. Ghost hunters. Skeptical Inquirer 30(5) (September/October): 23–26.

———. 2008. Lighthouse specters. Skeptical Inquirer 32(5) (September/October), 22–25.

Rambo, Ralph. 1967. Lady of Mystery. San Jose, California: The Press.

St. Augustine Lighthouse. 2009. Available online at www.staugustinelighthouse.com/abt_ghosts.php; accessed August 25, 2009.

Thompson, William O. 1998. Lighthouse Legends and Hauntings. Kennebunk, Maine: ’Scapes Me.

Vercillo, Kathryn. 2008. Ghosts of Alcatraz. Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing.

Vassula

Born to Greek Orthodox parents in Heliopolis, Egypt, on January 18, 1942, Vassula Ryden emigrated to Europe when she was fifteen. She says as a teenager she saw herself surrounded by souls of the dead, although she claims to have been indifferent to religion for a time. Following marriage, the birth of two sons, divorce, and remarriage, she claims to have begun receiving messages from her own invisible “guardian angel,” Daniel. “I almost freaked out,” she said (Ryden 2004). That occurred in late 1985 while she was living in Bangladesh. Five years later, she “regularized” her marriage in the rites of the Greek Orthodox Church, to which she still belongs (“Vassula” 2010). Nevertheless, Ryden says that God revealed to her the Sacred Heart (a Catholic symbol of Christ’s love for the human family) to show her the equality of all faiths (Ryden 2004).

In the mid-1990s, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued two notices of concern about Ryden. The first came in 1995, pointing out “several negative elements and errors.” It requested that bishops refuse to give her the opportunity to spread her questionable ideas within their dioceses and asked them not to treat her writings or speeches as “supernatural.” The following year, another notification encouraged priests to “exercise serious spiritual discernment” regarding Ryden’s messages, declaring that they must be considered merely “private meditations” and not divine revelations. However, some of her Catholic supporters observe that the church does not completely discount her teachings, and the publications of her organization, the American Association for True Life in God, have obvious Catholic trappings (“Vassula” 2010; Tokasz 2004).

The Catholic Church is skittish about such freelancers—urging caution toward supposedly supernatural phenomena (such as stigmata or weeping effigies) and any reputed visions or messages. The Church is all too aware of delusional persons and pious frauds. However, such matters are usually left to the local bishop, and investigations are typically less about science than about how a claim comports with Catholic teachings.

I determined to take an objective look at three aspects of Ryden’s purported messages (within my own areas of expertise): first, the distinctive handwriting (I am author of textbooks on writing and forgery, including Pen, Ink, and Evidence [Nickell 1990]); second, the text (I have a PhD in English, experience in examining unusual texts, and membership in the International Association of Forensic Linguists) [Nickell 2008]; and third, whether Ryden might have a fantasy-prone personality (I have studied this trait for years, especially under the direction of the late psychologist Robert A. Baker [Nickell 1997]).

Handwriting

Ryden insists that the messages she receives and writes down are not the result of spiritualistic phenomena such as channeling or automatic writing (“Vassula” 2010). However, neither phenomenon is defined as being limited to spirits of the dead; either may involve interaction with any type of alleged nonphysical beings, such as angels, deities, extraterrestrials, or the like (Guiley 2000, 25–26, 70–71). So, Ryden is by definition a channeler and an automatic writer.

Reportedly, the messages began in late November 1985 when Ryden was about to make a shopping list. Her hand suddenly began to move, seemingly without her control, to form words and drawings, initiating a phenomenon that continues to the present day. The self-styled visionary reportedly receives about four to six hours of guided-hand “dictation” each day (Carroll 1995, ix; “Vassula” 2010). From a scientific perspective, (assuming it is not deliberately contrived) such a phenomenon is attributed to the ideomotor effect, in which a participant unconsciously produces a movement. The same psychological phenomenon is responsible for the motion of dowsing rods and pendulums, Ouija-board planchette movement, table tipping, and the like (Randi 1995, 169–70).

Ryden’s messages supposedly “come through dictation by an audible voice within, then are written in a stately handwriting—distinct from her own—as she allows her hand to be guided supernaturally” (“About” 1995). Interestingly enough, the same “distinct” script that is used for messages from the angel “Daniel” is employed by “Jesus,” “Mary,” and “Yahweh” (see figure 1), rather than each entity having his or her own individual handwriting.

Figure 1. Handwriting produced by artist Vassula Ryden—supposedly “supernaturally guided”—is drawn rather than freely written. (The same mannered script is used for messages from “Yahweh,” “Jesus,” “Mary,” and her guardian angel, “Daniel.”) It contrasts with her own handwriting.

Keeping in mind that Ryden is an artist (“About” 1995), it seems noteworthy that the “guided” handwriting has the characteristics of a script that is artistically drawn rather than naturally and freely written. It is a “mannered” or affected hand, rendered in a self-consciously non-slanted style—rather like the so-called “vertical writing” that was taught in American and Canadian schools from 1890 to 1900 but was deemed too time consuming to produce practically and subsequently abandoned (Nickell 1990, 124, 126; Osborn 1978, 140). Most mainstream scripts, intended for right-handed persons to render with some speed, slope in the forward direction, as does Ryden’s ordinary handwriting. Interestingly, an alteration in slant is one of the most common ploys used for disguising handwriting (Hilton 1982, 169; Osborn 1978, 147, 149, 211). Use of this simple change can thus instantly impart a new look to an entire page. The “stately” hand also differs from Ryden’s in size (being larger than hers), another common disguise ploy (Nickell 1996, 49).

Apart from the “stately” affectation, the supposedly supernatural handwriting is essentially a formal, copybook version of Ryden’s own naturally jotted script that alternates with the “stately” hand in her notebooks. The “stately” hand avoids some of her script’s idiosyncrasies, yet it still has mostly printed capitals just like her own handwriting. On occasion, one of the copybook forms sneaks back into her natural script (replacing, for instance, her individualistic f, which has a backwardly made loop, with the standard copybook f) (see Ryden 1995, 171, 223).

Consistent with its neat, drawn appearance is the fact that the “guided” handwriting is done on lined paper, with the lines showing in some of the reproduced pages (Ryden 1995, e.g., 232–33). This is consistent with the use of eye-hand coordination. One suspects that if Ryden were prevented from seeing what was being written, the entities supposedly guiding her hand would be unable to so faithfully follow the lines! I invite Ryden to accept my invitation to perform a scientific test to refute or confirm this suspicion.

Text

On January 25, 1987, Ryden wrote:

Courage daughter, I, Jesus Christ have instructed you that the cross you bear is My Cross of Peace and Love, but to bear My precious Cross, daughter, you will have to do much self-sacrifice; be strong and bear my Cross with love; with Me you will share it and you will share My sufferings; I was pleased to hear your prayer of surrender; in surrendering to Me I will lift you to the heights and show you how I work; I will mould you, if you let Me, into a better person; you have given Me your consent to become My bride, so what [sic] more natural for a bride to follow her Spouse? I am glad you realize your worthlessness, do not fear, I love you anyway. . . . (Ryden 1995, 233–34)

Is this really a message from Jesus guiding Ryden’s hand? Not only is the handwriting the identical, mannered script that is also used for her “Daniel,” “Yahweh,” and “Mary,” but the perpetual use of semicolons is another similarity from alleged speaker to alleged speaker. All—except, appropriately, Daniel—call her “daughter” (Ryden 1995, 153, 188, 225), and they refer to themselves with the same construction: “I, Jesus,” “I, God,” “I ‘i Panayia’ ” (Greek for “Our Lady, most Holy”) (Ryden 1995, 155, 231, 293).

Ryden’s purported messages can be compared with other alleged communications from Jesus. One set of writings was “received from Jesus” by Lilian Bernas (1999), a purported stigmatic. (Stigmata are the supposedly supernaturally received wounds resembling those of Christ. However, Bernas’s wounds—which I have seen up close—appear to be consistent with self-infliction [Nickell 2007, 59–66].) In one communication with Bernas, Jesus supposedly said (Bernas 1999, 23):

My Suffering Soul—

This is your Beloved. I have come as promised to embrace you with the spirit of peace. Take this time, and have respite from the wicked assaults of the evil one. My child, you have bent, but you have not broken. This pleases your Beloved. . . .

My child—humble yourself now, and ascend the hill of your Beloved with your Beloved. . . .

Nancy Fowler, a homemaker in Conyers, Georgia, claimed for several years to be receiving messages from both Jesus and, more often, the Virgin Mary. (The latter appeared punctually on the thirteenth of each month, and I was able to attend a session [Nickell 1993, 196–97]). One message from “Jesus” instructed the faithful (Fowler 1993):

Come through My Mother on your journey back to Me. From this very cross I give the world My perfect love. I give the world, I give everyone in the world, My dear, Holy Mother. Please, if you accept My Love, then how can you reject, ignore, not honor, not love My Mother. I come through My Mother and I want you, dear children, to come through My Mother on your journey back to Me.

I choose the word “Come” intentionally, not past tense. I still come through My Mother. Graces are poured forth through My Mother, the Graces come from Me.

I am especially familiar with these two groups of writings, although they are supposedly received by clairaudience (trance hearing) rather than by automatic writing. (Therefore, errors of grammar and the like could be attributed to mistaken transcription by the percipient.)

Now, whereas Vassula Ryden’s “Jesus” frequently identifies himself as “I, Jesus,” Lilian Bernas’s Jesus persona never does, nor does the one channeled by Nancy Fowler. There are many other differences among the three sets of texts; for example, the dominant theme of each: Fowler’s is the near-deification of the Virgin Mary (an emphasis sometimes disparagingly referred to as “Mariolatry”), Bernas’s is the importance of suffering, and Ryden’s is the need for divine love and guidance.

Style also differs from channeler to channeler. Ryden’s “God” and “Jesus” (as well as “Daniel”) speak similarly, often using convoluted diction (for example, “do not leave yourself be drifted away” [144], instead of “do not let yourself drift away”); wrong prepositions (e.g., “irrespective to their deeds” [146], rather than “irrespective of”); missing prepositions (such as in “I, Yahweh will remind them in this call many events” [150], wherein “of” is missing after “call”); subject/verb agreement error (e.g., “the reasons that makes” [44]); faulty auxiliary verbs (such as “I have restored you since the time you have accepted Me” [158], the second “have” being unnecessary); incorrect verb forms (e.g., “I will progress you” [163], “I fragranced you” [34], and “Jesus flourished you” [42]); and so on.

Ryden’s messages also have occasional misspellings: for example, “God” says, “work with Me writting [sic] down My messages” (231), and he also uses the misspellings “joyfull” (138) and “analising” (101, 105). If God deigns to use the English language, should we not expect it to be rendered accurately?

Before we become invested in imagining what a deity might or might not do, we should note that Ryden’s own written text has similar faults—for example, using “sprung” when “sprang” would be correct, the misspelling “panick,” faulty subject/verb agreement (e.g., “Joy and Peace is”), and many others. At times the respective errors are eerily similar, as when “God” uses “do” for “make” (e.g., “do not get discouraged when you do errors”) just as Ryden does (e.g., “I do so many mistakes”) (see Ryden 1995, 22, 89, 93, 235).

Fantasy-Proneness

From the evidence, it looks like Ryden’s channeled automatic writings are merely emanations from a single source: her imagination. Indeed, she exhibits many traits of what is known as a “fantasy-prone” personality: sane and normal but with a propensity to fantasize, as described in a pioneering study by Sheryl C. Wilson and Theodore X. Barber (1983). Since childhood, Ryden has had various “mystical” experiences. She has encountered apparitions (such as the souls of “dead people”), had vivid or “waking” dreams (with paranormal imagery), experienced religious visions, interacted with invisible companions, received messages from higher entities, and had other experiences common to many fantasizers (Carroll 1995; Ryden 1995, xx–xxl).

Taken together, the contrived handwriting, the linguistic lapses, and the indications of fantasizing all suggest that Vassula Ryden is not in touch with supernatural entities but is simply engaging in self-deception that in turn deceives the credulous. Her automatic writings therefore are not works of revelation but simply of pious imagination.

References

About Vassula Ryden. 1995. Publisher’s book-cover text, Ryden 1995.

Bernas, Lilian. 1999. This Is the Home of the Father.... Poole, England: privately printed.

Carroll, Robert J. 1995. I am your guardian angel and my name is Daniel. In Ryden 1995, ix–xiv.

Christopher, Milbourne. 1970. ESP, Seers and Psychics: What the Occult Really Is. New York: Crowell.

Fowler, Nancy. 1990–93. Purported messages from Jesus, in Journal 1993. 3–8.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. New York: Checkmark Books.

Hilton, Ordway. 1982. Scientific Examination of Questioned Documents, revised ed. New York: Elsevier Science.

Journal of Reported Teachings and Messages of Our Lord and Our Living Mother at Conyers, Georgia, USA. 1993. (“Compiled by Our Loving Mother’s Children,” P.O. Box 309, Conyers, GA 30207), December.

Nickell, Joe. 1990. Pen, Ink, and Evidence. Reprinted New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press.

———. 1993. Looking for a Miracle. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 1996. Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

———. 1997. A study of fantasy proneness in the thirteen cases of alleged encounters in John Mack’s abduction. In The UFO Invasion, edited by Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 237–44.

———. 2007. Adventures in Paranormal Investigation. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

———. 2008. Linguist. Accessed April 3, 2010. Available online at http://www.joenickell.com/Linguist/linguist1.html.

Osborn, Albert S. 1978. Questioned Documents, second edition. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith.

Randi, James. 1995. The Supernatural A–Z. London: Brockhampton Press.

Ryden, Vassula. 1995. My Angel Daniel. Independence, MO: Trinitas.

———. 2004. Lecture at St. John Maronite Rite Catholic Church. Amherst, NY, May 31.

Tokasz, Jay. 2004. Controversial “messenger” to speak. The Buffalo News, May 31.

“Vassula Ryden.” 2010. Wikipedia. Accessed April 30, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassula_Ryden.

Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age
By Sergio Luzzatto. Metropolitan Books, 
Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2010.
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8905-9. 384 pp. Hardcover, $30.

From humble beginnings in the town of Pietrelcina, Italy, Francesco Forgione (1887–1968) went on to become Italy’s most venerated saint of the twenty-first century, known popularly as Padre (“Father”) Pio (“Pious”). His tomb draws more pilgrims than Lourdes or any other Catholic shrine. Yet the full, true story of this purported miracle worker’s rise to sainthood has long needed to be told, and Sergio Luzzatto tells it in his Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age. (First published in 2007, this is a new English translation.) As the book’s subtitle suggests, Luzzatto details Pio’s fascist (he was reportedly an admirer of Mussolini) and other connections, although in this review I concentrate on the allegedly paranormal aspects of Pio’s life.

Pio is best known for his stigmata—the supposedly supernaturally received wounds resembling the wounds of Jesus—which he first exhibited in the autumn of 1918 when the trauma of World War I caused many to hope for supernatural intervention. Suddenly, at a Capuchin monastery in southern Italy, an alter Christus (living figure of Christ) was manifest. While praying before the chapel’s crucifix, the newly ordained priest was suddenly, he claimed, inflicted with the stigmata—bleeding so profusely, he alleged, that he feared he would bleed to death.

In fact, notwithstanding the claims in uncritical biographies, Pio’s stigmata devolved—from bleeding wounds that could easily have been self-inflicted (like those of many fake stigmatists before and after, as I described in my 2001 book Real-Life X-Files) to merely discolored skin that appeared to have been irritated by the application of a caustic substance. Indeed, a bottle of carbolic acid was once discovered in the friar’s cell, and Luzzatto cites letters from Padre Pio in which Pio requests that carbolic acid, and at another time a caustic alkaloid, be secretly delivered to him. Eventually Pio began wearing fingerless gloves, supposedly to cover his stigmata out of pious humility; however, to me, the practice seems instead a shrewd move to eliminate the need to continually self-inflict wounds.

Nor were the fake stigmata the friar’s only deception. Years before, Pio had written numerous letters to his spiritual directors describing his mystical experiences; however, it is now known that he copied these words verbatim from the writings of stigmatic Gemma Galgani (1878–1903) without acknowledging they were hers. And that is not all: Pio attempted to divert suspicion from his plagiarism by asking for help in procuring copies of Galgani’s books—saying he would very much like to read them!

As to miracles attributed to Pio, the report of a Vatican emissary in 1919 cited the wildest claims then circulating among an uneducated populace. The emissary characterized as fantasy the story of a church bell that fragmented when Pio’s confreres were wronged by a superior. Likewise, it was not true that Pio instantly cured a man of a limp; nor had he caused a deaf-mute girl to regain her speech. He also did not heal a hunchback so the man could walk away “at least partly made straight.” Not a single one of Padre Pio’s miracles was genuine, the investigator determined.

Nevertheless, Padre Pio’s reputation grew unabated, and ultimately “miracles” would be found to serve as the basis for his canonization. A once-hostile Vatican had eventually become conciliatory toward him and responsive to popular 
demand—this despite evidence that suggested sexual misconduct on behalf of the adored padre and the private opinion of Pope John XXIII (recorded in his daybook) that “P.P. has shown himself to be a straw idol.”

By the time of his death in 1968, Pio’s stigmata had disappeared, but that was effectively remedied in death. Although there was no need to cover his hands and feet—and indeed Capuchin rule forbids the wearing of socks—Pio’s “father guardian,” Father Carmelo of San Giovanni in Galdo, worried that the absence of stigmata might cause a faulty rush to judgment. Carmelo therefore had Padre Pio’s hands and feet covered, as if the covering still concealed his allegedly holy gift. And so the deception continued.

In 2002, the late friar was canonized Saint Pio of Pietrelcina—not for the stigmata he was so famous for but for his healings that were, with due illogic, assumed miraculous because they were said to be inexplicable. And when his remains were exhumed for display forty years after his death, those hoping his body would be found incorrupt (a supposed sign of sanctity; see my Relics of the Christ, University Press of Kentucky, 2007), or that it would still exhibit the stigmata, were disappointed. The embalmed corpse had deteriorated sufficiently that it required a silicon mask—complete with bushy eyebrows and beard—fashioned by a London wax museum. Of the supposedly supernatural wounds there was not a trace.

The soda fountains of yesteryear-a particularly American phenomenon-were in drug stores for a reason. Introduced in pharmacies at the end of the eighteenth century and increasing in the 1830s, they were an effective means of dispensing medications: adding a small amount of flavoring along with some seltzer (effervescent water) made medicine more palatable (New Orleans, n.d.; Mariani 1994, 291). As part of my studies of snake oil and other cure-alls (Nickell 1998, 2005, 2006)-which ranged over several years and included collecting antique bottles and ephemera and visiting such sites as the Coca-Cola museum-I was struck by the fact that several famous soft drinks had originated as patent medicines, which in turn had their origin in herbal and other folk remedies (see figure 1). Pharmacists claimed the added ingredients “made medicines taste so good, people wanted them, whether they needed them or not, and that's how soft drinks evolved” (New Orleans, n.d.).

Figure 1

Advent of Soda ‘Pop'

Mineral water, including naturally carbonated water (figure 2), has long been promoted as a curative for various ailments. As early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, scientists tried to duplicate nature's carbonation process. It fell to Dr. Joseph Priestley (discoverer of oxygen) to advance the first practical process in 1772, thus helping to launch the soda-water industry. In time, flavored soda waters caught on.

Figure 2

Some early soda bottles, such as those for English ginger ale, had rounded bottoms, so they could not be stood upright. This prevented their corks from drying out and shrinking, which kept the gas pressure from causing them to “pop.”1 Later “pop” bottles had patented stoppers (again, see figure 2), including the familiar one from 1891 still used today, called the crown cork (a crimped metal cap with a cork liner) (Munsey 1970, 101–10).

Root Beer and Sarsaparilla

Two plant roots particularly, sarsaparilla and sassafras (figure 1), were early recognized for their potent flavor and presumed medicinal properties. In 1830, in his treatise on medical botany, Constantine Rafinesque described the American sassafras tree (an aromatic member of the laurel family) and its qualities, noting that “Indians use a strong decoction to purge and clear the body in the spring.” Sassafras has long been used as a tea and “home-remedy spring tonic and blood purifier” (Rafinesque 1830). (I dug the root as a boy in Kentucky, seemingly coming by my interest naturally: my great, great grandparents, Harry and Martha Murphy, were Appalachian herbalists and folk doctors.)

Sassafras was an original, major ingredient in many recipes for root beer, which was brewed in the eighteenth century as a mildly alcoholic beverage. Reportedly, in 1870 an unknown pharmacist created a formula that he billed as a cure-all and offered to the public. However, it was not actually marketed until Philadelphia pharmacist Charles Hires produced a liquid concentrate in small bottles (see figure 3), introducing it at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. By 1893 the Hires family was selling bottled versions of their carbonated drink, thus securing a place in soft drink history (“History” 2010; “Root beer” 2010). One slogan was “Join Health and Cheer/Drink Hires Rootbeer [sic]” (Munsey 1970, 274).

Figure 3

Ironically, in time, root beer's healthfulness was seriously questioned after safrol (a substance in sassafras oil) was found to cause cancer or permanent liver damage in laboratory animals. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned sassafras oil in 1960, but inventors soon discovered a process to remove the harmful substance while preserving the flavor (“History” 2010).

Another common ingredient of root beer was sarsaparilla, which was originally sold for medicinal purposes. As early as 1835, the famous religious society, the Shakers, offered in their herb catalogs a syrup of sarsaparilla touted for a variety of ailments, including digestive troubles, rheumatism, jaundice, “secondary syphilis,” and more. It contained not only sarsaparilla root but dandelion, mandrake, Indian hemp, and other roots, as well as juniper berries and additional ingredients (Miller 1998, 84–85). Among many famous brands of supposedly curative sarsaparilla were Corbett's (made by Shaker doctor Thomas Corbett), Hood's, and Ayer's (Fike 2006, 214–21).2

Like root beer, sarsaparilla evolved into a soft drink (figure 4), a flavored, carbonated concoction that was in time sold only for its taste (Sioux City Sarsaparilla is a current major brand [“Sarsaparilla” 2010]). Both drinks were original concoctions, predating colas and other popular soda drinks (“History” 2010).

Figure 4

Other plant-extract-based drinks, such as birch beer (emerging in the 1880s to compete with root beer), ginger beer, and ginger ale, have histories paralleling root beer and sarsaparilla. Because ginger has been used for centuries for medicinal purposes, ginger ale predates most of the other medicinal soft drinks. Indeed, Vernors brand, said to have originated in 1866, has been called “the first U.S. soft drink” (“Ginger ale” 2010). Then there was Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray, a celery tonic served in New York delicatessens from 1869 and sold as a bottled soda since 1886 (“Dr. Brown's” 2010).

Moxie

Among the earliest patent-medicine-turned-soft-drinks was a New England-based variety, now of limited sales but still remembered for the slang expression, “You've got a lot of Moxie”-meaning a lot of pluck or nerve. The drink was created by Dr. Augustin Thompson, who alleged that it contained extracts from a rare South American plant. Thompson claimed that the unnamed botanical was discovered by his “friend,” a Lieutenant Moxie (“Moxie” 2010). Moxie was supposedly a cure for “brain and nervous exhaustion, loss of manhood, imbecility and helplessness, softening of the brain, locomotor ataxia and insanity” (Klein 1999).

Moxie was first formulated circa 1876, but, as its present advertising notes, it has been marketed “Since 1884,” by which time Thompson was selling the bottled drink as well as a bulk syrup intended for soda fountains. Moxie was described as “a delicious blend of bitter and sweet, a drink to satisfy everyone's taste.” Its unique flavor has been attributed to a key ingredient, “Gentian Root Extractives” (“Moxie” 2010)-gentian root is an ingredient of some types of bitters: a medicinal liquor made by steeping certain botanicals in alcohol (Munsey 1970, 111–13; Balch 2002, 70). (Again, see figure 1.)

Coca-Cola

This classic soft drink originated as a patent medicine selling for five cents a glass at Jacob's pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 8, 1886. Because Atlanta and Fulton County had passed prohibition legislation, doctor and pharmacist John S. Pemberton created a non-alcoholic version of a coca wine, then-accidentally it is said-one day added carbonation. The new drink was soon marketed to other drug-store soda fountains where carbonated water was sold in the belief that it was healthful (seltzers were touted, for example, as a cure for obesity [Munsey 1970, 103]). Pemberton claimed that his Coca-Cola cured such diseases as dyspepsia and impotence (Munsey 1970, 105; “Coca-Cola” 2010). It was billed early as “The Ideal Nerve and Brain Tonic. It Cures Headache, Invigorates the System” (CNBC 2010). Pemberton also claimed the drink cured morphine addiction.

In fact, the coca leaf and kola nut (figure 1) used in the drink yielded the addictive substances cocaine and caffeine-hence the name Coca-Cola. However, in time, the small amount of cocaine was reduced and finally eliminated at the turn of the twentieth century (Mariani 1994, 291). (The current product contains only coca flavoring.) Caffeine remained, but in 1912 an amended U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act required that such “habit-forming” and “deleterious” substances in a product be listed on its label (“Coca-Cola” 2010).

Until 1894, the drink was sold exclusively at soda fountains. However, on March 12 of that year, the first Coca-Cola was sold in bottles provided by the Biedenharn Candy Company in Vicksburg, Mississippi. By 1895 the product was distributed throughout the United States and its territories. Cans of the drink were first marketed in 1955 (New Orleans, n.d.; “Coca-Cola” 2010).

Pepsi-Cola

Coca-Cola's main rival began as a carbonated soft drink first called “Brad's Drink” after its creator, Caleb Bradham of New Bern, North Carolina. At his pharmacy there in 1898, he began to concoct a fountain drink that was intended to both aid digestion and boost energy. Its main ingredients-pepsin (a digestive enzyme) and kola nuts-appear to have prompted its later name, Pepsi-Cola. Its trademark application was approved in 1903, and Bradham moved his operation to a rented warehouse where, the following year, the drink began to be shipped out in six-ounce bottles. The first logo was created in 1905, then redesigned in 1926 and 1929.

In 1931, during the Great Depression, Pepsi went bankrupt (largely due to speculation on sugar prices that fluctuated wildly in the wake of World War I) and its assets and trademark were sold. A second bankruptcy just eight years later put the company in the hands of a candy manufacturer, Loft Inc., whose retail stores had soda fountains. Loft's president, Charles Guth, was miffed at Coke's refusal to lower the price on its syrup and intended to replace Coke with Pepsi. He had his chemists reformulate the syrup formula. In 1936, Pepsi introduced a double-sized, twelve-ounce bottle for ten cents, then responded to slow sales by cutting the price to five cents. During the 1940s, a new president, Walter Mack, targeted the African American market with ethnically positive ads. In time, Pepsi became a serious rival of Coke (“Pepsi” 2010).

Dr Pepper

Another popular American soda was first served in about 1885 in Waco, Texas. A concoction created by Charles Alderton, the pharmacist in Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store, the drink was first dubbed a “Waco.” Alderton gave the recipe to the owner, Wade Morrison, who christened it Dr. Pepper (seemingly after Dr. Charles T. Pepper of Christiansburg, Virginia, where Morrison once worked as a young pharmacy clerk).

Dr. Pepper was initially sold as an energy drink and “brain tonic.” The drink was not nationally marketed until 1904. In the 1950s, the period punctuating “Dr” was dropped. This was for stylistic reasons as well as to eliminate any suggestion of a medical link to the product, which was called “The Friendly Pepper Upper.” Courts have held that Dr Pepper is not a “cola” but a distinctively flavored drink. During the early 1980s, after the Dr Pepper company became insolvent, the Federal Trade Commission blocked its acquisition by Coca-Cola; it then merged with Seven Up (to create Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc.) (“Dr Pepper” 2010).

7 UP

St. Louis businessman Charles L. Grigg launched a new soft drink just two weeks prior to the stock market crash of 1929. Originally called “Bib-label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda,” it contained lithium citrate. Lithium is an element found in many mineral springs (mineral water was often bottled and sold for its allegedly healthful properties), and it was once prescribed for many ailments, including gout, rheumatism, and kidney stones. It did little good for these problems, but it is known as a mood-stabilizing drug. In marketing his drink, Grigg used the slogan, “Takes the ‘ouch' out of grouch.” The drink's name was later changed to “7 UP”-supposedly the “7” indicated its seven-ounce bottle and the “UP” the rising bubbles from its strong carbonation (Klein 1999; “7 UP” 2010; Nickell 2005).

Like other such “health” drinks, 7 UP had problems. For example, toxic levels of lithium, which is still used to treat manic depression, are rather near its therapeutic levels (Nickell 2005). By the mid-1940s, lithium was fortunately no longer listed on the 7 UP label. Over the years the beverage has been reformulated many times: A diet version (called “Like”) was discontinued in 1969 after cyclamate sweetener was banned; the drink's high sodium content was reduced by substituting potassium citrate for sodium citrate; and 7 UP's claim to be “100% Natural” was dropped after the Center for Science in the Public Interest threatened to sue on the grounds that its high-fructose corn syrup resulted from a manufacturing process (“7 UP” 2010; Klein 1999).

* *...

As these major examples show, popular modern soft drinks evolved from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century patent medicines. Ironically, the touted medicinal effects were actually somewhere between nonexistent and dangerous, but over the years the harmful effects have been rather consistently addressed. We can now turn our attention elsewhere: to the dubious health and medical claims that continue to proliferate under the term “alternative medicine”-often old-style quackery, even if newly bottled. n

Acknowledgments

Kudos to my wife, Diana Gawen Harris, for suggesting the title “‘Pop' Culture” and to my daughter, Cherie Roycroft, for the gift of the rare Kola-Nuces bottle shown in figure 1. I am again grateful to CFI Libraries Director Timothy Binga and librarian Lisa Nolan for their valuable research assistance.

Notes

1. English poet Robert Southey in 1812 described ginger ale as “a nectar, between soda water and ginger beer, and called pop because ‘pop goes the cork' when it is drawn” (qtd. in Munsey 1970, 104–5).

2. Although sarsaparilla continues to be promoted by naturopaths and other herbalists as a curative for “a wide range of systemic problems” and is allegedly “especially useful for rheumatoid arthritis” (Naturopathic 1995, 119), peer-reviewed research generally fails to support the claims (“Sarsaparilla” 2010).

References

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

CNBC Original Productions. The Real Story Behind the Real Thing. Aired March 13, 2010. www.cnbc.com.

“Coca-Cola.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 6, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-cola.

“Dr. Brown's.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 6, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Brown's.

“Dr Pepper.” Wikipedia. Accessed March 15, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_Pepper.

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

“Ginger ale.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 7, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_ale.

“History of Rootbeer.” Accessed March 12, 2010. Available online at www.essortment.com/all/historyrootbeer_rhnc.htm.

Klein, Victor C. 1999. New Orleans Ghosts II. Metairie, LA: Lycanthrope Press.

Mariani, John F. 1994. The Dictionary of American Food and Drink. New York: Hearst Books.

Miller, Amy Bess. 1998. Shaker Medicinal Herbs: A Compendium of History, Lore, and Uses. Pownal, VT: Storey Books.

“Moxie.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 6, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie.

Munsey, Cecil. 1970. The Illustrated Guide to Collecting Bottles. New York: Hawthorn Books.

Naturopathic Handbook of Herbal Formulas, 4th ed. 1995. Ayer, MA: Herbal Research Publications.

New Orleans Pharmacy Museum. n.d. 19th Century Patent Medicines. Reprinted in Klein 1999.

Nickell, Joe. 1998. Peddling snake oil. Skeptical Briefs 8(4) (December): 1–2, 13.

---. 2005. Healing waters: Spas. Skeptical Briefs 15(3) (September): 5–7.

---. 2006. Snake oil: A guide for connoisseurs. Skeptical Briefs 16(3) (September): 7–8.

“Pepsi.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 6, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi.

Rafinesque, Constantine. 1830. Medical Flora, a Manual of the Medical Botany of the United States.... In The Magic of Herbs in Daily Living, by Richard Lucas, 71. West Nyack, NY: Parker Publishing, 1978.

“Root beer.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 6, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_beer.

“Sarsaparilla.” Wikipedia. Accessed March 12, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarsaparilla.

“Sassafras.” Wikipedia. Accessed March 12, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassafras.

“7 UP.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 6, 2010. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_up.

Although there is little justification in either the Old or the New Testament to support what would become a cult of relics in early Christianity, such a practice did develop. The earliest veneration of Christian relics can be traced to about ce 156 when Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, was martyred and his burned remains were gathered for veneration. In time, the distribution and veneration of packets of dust and tiny fragments of bone or cloth, and the like--associated with martyrs and saints--became common. At about CE 400, St. Augustine deplored the excesses and outright fraud of the relic business, disparaging "hypocrites in the garb of monks for hawking about the limbs of martyrs," adding skeptically, "if indeed of martyrs" (Encyclopedia Britannica 1978, s.v. "Relics").

Among other, later, critics was Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340-1400), whose great unfinished work The Canterbury Tales contains a satirical attack on relic mongering. An even more scathing condemnation comes from John Calvin (1509-1564), the Protestant reformer, whose Treatise on Relics is a surprisingly modern look at the Roman Catholic Church's veneration of relics. Both Chaucer and Calvin weighed in on those most quintessentially Christian relics, fragments of the reputed Holy Cross itself. Here is a summary of their views, supplemented by my own investigations and research on the cross, which according to legend was discovered in the fourth century by St. Helena.

Chaucer's 'Pardoner's Tale'

The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1386 -1400) is Geoffrey Chaucer's fictional classic compilation of stories told by traveling pilgrims, including the host of the Tabard Inn in Southwark, England, from whence said Pilgrims set out, wending their way to Canterbury Cathedral. "The Pardoner's Tale" satirizes phony relics in a classic of skepticism worthy of a brief retrospective here. The Pardoner--one who sells the church's forgiveness of sins--is a pretentious fellow, as hinted in the opening lines (in quaint Middle English):

'Lordynges,' quod he, in chirches whan I preche,

I peyne me to han an hauteyn speche,

And rynge it out as round as gooth a belle,

For I kan al by rote that I telle.

My theme is alwey oon, and ever was--

"Radix malorum est cupiditas."

That is, as I translate it (and all that follows) into modern English:

"My Lords," said he, "in churches when I preach,

I do take pains to have a haughty speech,

And ring it out as roundly as a bell,

For I know by rote all that I tell.

My theme's to be the same and always will

That 'Greed is at the root of all evil.'"

But the Pardoner is merely a hypocrite. First, he displays his letters of approval signed by the Pope. Then he brings out his reliquaries, with bits of cloth and other alleged relics, including the shoulder bone of a sheep, and declares:

"If when this bone be washed in any well,

If cow, or calf, or sheep, or ox should swell

From eaten worm, or by a snake's been stung,

Take water of that well and wash its tongue,

And it is healed forthwith; and furthermore,

Of poxes and of scabs and every sore

Shall every sheep be healed, that of this well

Drinks a draft; take heed of what I tell."

He adds that the relic-treated water will cause farm animals to multiply and will put an end to all human jealousy, including distrust of a wife's faithfulness--even if she has lain with two or three priests! Of another ruse, he admits,

"By this trick I've won, year by year,

A hundred marks since I was Pardoner.

I stand as if a cleric in my pulpit,

And when the common people down do sit,

I preach, so as you've heard me say before,

And even tell a hundred falsehoods more."

Acknowledging his hypocrisy, he states:

"Thus can I preach against the self-same vice

Which I do use, and that is avarice.

But, though I too am guilty of that sin,

Yet can I make other folk to turn

From avarice, and hurry to repent.

But that is not my principal intent."

The Pardoner then goes on to tell his tale. (It features three young rogues who set out on a drunken quest to slay evil Death. An old man directs them to a spot where they instead discover a treasure of gold coins. Unfortunately they end up killing each other out of avarice and so indeed find death.)

Finished with his morality tale, the Pardoner makes a direct pitch to his host, who rails against the fraudulent relics while indicating his own belief in the relic of the True Cross. The Pardoner begins the exchange:

"Come forth, sir host, and offer first then,

And you shall kiss the relics every one,

Yes, for fourpence! Unbuckle now your purse."

"Nay, nay," said he, "then I'd have Christ's curse!

It shall not be, however you beseech me.

You would have me kiss your old breeches,

And swear they were a relic of a saint,

Although they're stained with your own fundament!

But by the cross which Saint Helena found,

I'd like to have your bollocks in my hand

Instead of relics or reliquarium;

Let's cut them off, I'll help to carry them;

They shall be enshrined within a hog's turd."

This pardoner answered not a
word....

(The Knight helps make peace between the two men, whereupon the pilgrims "rode forth on their way.")

Now, Chaucer's own view of the True Cross is unstated, but having it endorsed by his central character, a good Christian and a man of seeming integrity, suggests that Chaucer accepts the relic allegedly found by St. Helena as authentic. Nevertheless, if he does not condemn all relics outright, Chaucer does identify and disparage fraudulent relic practices. At the time when he was writing, this was a bold stance for a writer to take. Reformist John Calvin, however, writing a century and a half later, took the matter several steps further.

Calvin on Relics

John Calvin's condemnation of relics is sweeping. In his Treatise on Relics (1543), he observes that "the desire for relics is never without superstition, and what is worse, it is usually the parent of idolatry" (Calvin 1543, 218). He is unrelenting in his withering look at relics--from the reputed Holy Blood, "exhibited in more than a hundred places" (226), to the many bogus Holy Shrouds (including today's controversial one, which was kept at Nice in Calvin's time; it wasn't transferred to Turin until 1578 [Nickell 2009, 40]).

Calvin had much to say about the pieces of the alleged True Cross--the location of which was supposed to have been miraculously revealed to St. Helena in ce 326. Calvin suggested that "if we were to collect all these pieces of the True Cross exhibited in various parts, they would form a whole ship's cargo." He also said that there were more relics of it "than three hundred men could carry!" adding: "As an explanation of this, [the relic mongers] have invented the tale, that whatever quantity of wood may be cut off this true cross, its size never decreases. This is, however, such a clumsy and silly imposture, that the most superstitious may see through it" (233).

Calvin specifically refers to the alleged fragment known as the Titulus Crucis (cross title board). Bearing the inscription "This is the King of the Jews," the Titulus--with text in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew--was ordered by Pilate to be placed on the cross (Luke 23:38). Two churches, Calvin delights in observing, lay claim to this relic. Actually, Helena supposedly divided the Titulus into three pieces, only one of which now remains--kept, as Calvin noted (234), in Rome's Church of the Holy Cross.

Modern science has validated Calvin's skepticism of the Titulus. First, the artifact contains a number of anachronisms and other problematic elements that indicate it is a probable forgery (Nickell 2004). For example, although the Hebrew (or Aramaic) letters are correctly written from right to left, so--incorrectly--are the Greek and Latin lines. Based on my research on the history of writing, as soon as I saw this error (See my drawing, figure 1), I thought it a prima facie indication of spuriousness. (See my Pen, Ink, and Evidence [Nickell 1990].)

Another paleographic error is found in the Greek line. Although it is written in mirror-image fashion from right to left, one letter--the z--is not reversed. This further emphasizes the problematic nature of the writing and suggests that the writer may not have been familiar with the ancient languages. Unless we accept the rationalizations of the Titulus's defenders (Thiede and d'Ancona 2000, 96-100), spelling errors also cast doubt on the inscription. Another doubtful feature is the letters having not just been painted but first incised into the wood--a seemingly gratuitous enhancement--whereas one would instead expect a hastily prepared placard intended to be used quickly and then discarded.

Indeed, such suspicions are confirmed via radiocarbon dating. A sample of the walnut wood ( Juglans regia) was taken from the back of the slab, cleaned to remove any contamination, and then subjected to the carbon-dating process. Control samples of varying ages were also included to confirm the accuracy of the process. The tests on the Titulus revealed that it was made between ce 980 and 1146 (Bells and Azzi 2002)--a date range incompatible with its alleged first-century origin, but consistent with the period (1144-1145) when the artifact was apparently acquired (Nickell 2007, 86-90).

The Fragments

Over the years I have encountered pieces of the alleged True Cross (figure 2), together with the pious legends of their acquisition. In my own collection are a pilgrim's token of the True Cross (reputedly made in the seventh century by mixing clay with some ash from a burned piece of the cross) and a small bronze Byzantine cross of about the same time period (Nickell 2007, 79, 93). The latter was a legacy of Constantine the Great (274-337), who made Christianity the Roman Empire's official religion after having a miraculous vision of a flaming cross in the sky--a vision, as doubtful as it is, of late vintage (Nickell 2007, 77-79).

It is another reputed vision--that of Constantine's mother, Queen Helena (later St. Helena)--to which is attributed the finding of the True Cross. In 326, nearly three centuries after the crucifixion, Helena went to Jerusalem where she allegedly discovered the site of the cross's concealment, supposedly with divine inspiration: either by heavenly signs, dreams, or the guidance of a Jew named Judas. In fact, she supposedly located, beneath rubble, three crosses--supposedly of Jesus and the two thieves crucified with him (Matthew 27:38)--but was unable to distinguish which was Jesus's own. Each cross was then tested on a mortally ill woman, and one--according to the fanciful legend--miraculously healed her, thus proving it was the Vera Crux, the True Cross.

Supposedly a portion of the cross was given to Constantine, while another was taken to Rome. The main portion remained in the custody of successive bishops of Jerusalem; it was captured by Persious in 614 but then victoriously returned in 627. Finally, in 1187 it was lost forever, after crusading Franks occupied Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, alleged fragments of the True Cross and Roman nails from the crucifixion proliferated. As early as the mid-fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem (ca. 315-386) wrote that "already the whole world is filled with fragments of the wood of the Cross." From the fifth century on, a "cult of the Cross" developed and churches were erected in the True Cross's name. In a letter, St. Paulinus of Nola (353-431) dared to explain (and Calvin would later satirize, as we have seen) the claim that, regardless of how many pieces were taken from the cross, it never diminished in size--a "fact" that has been compared with Jesus's miracle of the multiplying loaves and fishes (Cruz 1984, 39).

In Turin in 2004, I was able to view a purported piece of the True Cross, set in a cruciform reliquary (along with a purported relic of the Holy Blood). The lighted reliquary is the focal point of a relic chapel--the crypt of the Church of Maria Ausiliatrice--which contains a fabulous collection of some five thousand relics of saints, exhibited in seemingly endless panels and display cases along the walls. Included are relics alleged to be from Mary Magdalene and, more credibly, St. Francis of Assisi.

In 2009 in Genoa I saw no fewer than four pieces of the "True Cross" arrayed in an elaborate reliquary cross (figure 2). The fragments were specifically claimed to be from the True Cross--or so "tradition has it." (Translation: "This is only a handed-down tale.") Known as Croce degli Zaccaria (or "cross of the Zaccaria"), it was formerly owned by a family of that name, who were among the major merchant traders of the eastern Mediterranean when Genoa was at its commercial and political peak. The reliquary was reportedly first commissioned in the ninth century, then remade in its present form (again see figure 2) between 1260 and 1283--a gilt and bejeweled cruciform artifact now displayed in the Museum of the Treasury of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo (St. Lawrence) of Genoa (Marica 2007, 6; "Museum," n.d.).

Again, the lack of any credible provenance (its traceability to some known point)--together with the incredible proliferation of such fragments and even the suspicious neatness of these four pieces of the "True Cross"--makes the Croce degli Zaccaria a piece to be entirely skeptical of, not revered.

Conclusion

There is no credible evidence that Helena, or anyone, found Jesus's cross (with or without accompanying crosses of the two thieves) in the fourth century--or at any other time for that matter. The provenance is laughable. Even more so is the absurd tale of its miraculousness: its infinite ability to restore itself, no matter how many pieces were taken from it.

The proliferating pieces of the True Cross have been rivaled for outlandishness by many other bogus relics--such as over forty shrouds of Jesus and multiple corpses of Mary Magdalene (Nickell 2007, 40, 116). Geoffrey Chaucer and John Calvin were justifiably critical of relic hucksterism in their respective times, and we--with our modern scientific means of analysis, such as radiocarbon dating--must be no less so. n

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my many Italian friends--notably Massimo Polidoro, Luigi Garlaschelli, and Stephano Bagnasco--for helping make possible my visits to many relic sites in Italy. At the Center for Inquiry, Director of Libraries Timothy Binga assisted as usual with research. Financial assistance came from John and Mary Frantz and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, whose executive director is Barry Karr. I also want to express my gratitude to Paul Kurtz and his Prometheus Books for publishing John Calvin's Treatise on Relics and inviting me to write the introduction. To the many others who help make such investigations possible: CFI staff, donors, friends, and family--especially my wife, Diana Harris--I express my sincerest thanks.

References

Calvin, John. 1543. Treatise on Relics, trans. Count Valerian Kasinski 1854; 2nd ed. Edinburgh: John Stone, Hunter and Co., 1870, 217-18; reprinted, with an introduction by Joe Nickell, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2009, 49-112.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Ca. 1386-1400. The Canterbury Tales. Various editions, e.g., trans. by Coghill (2003) and Tuttle (2006); see also No Fear (2009) and Dunn (1952).

Coghill, Nevill, trans. 2003. Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. London: Penguin Books.

Cruz, Joan Carroll. 1984. Relics. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor.

Dunn, Charles W., ed. 1952. A Chaucer Reader: Selections from The Canterbury Tales. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Encyclopedia Britannica. 1978. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.

Marica, Patrica. 2007. Museo del Tesoro di San Lorenzo. Genoa, Italy: Sagep Edditori Srl.

"Museum of the Treasury of the Cathedral of St. Lawrence of Genoa." N.d. Four-page guide text in English, provided by the museum.

Nickell, Joe. 1990. Pen, Ink, and Evidence: A Study of Writing and Writing Materials for the Penman, Collector, and Document Detective. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

------. 2007. Relics of the Christ. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

------. 2009. Introduction to Calvin's Treatise on Relics 1543. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2009, 7-48.

No Fear: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. 2009. New York: Spark Publishing (div. of Barnes and Noble).

Thiede, Carsten Peter, and Matthew d'Ancona. 2002. The Quest for the True Cross. New York: Palgrave.

Tuttle, Peter, trans. 2006. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics.

Beautiful, exotic Tijuana—city of passion and mystery. My first investigative trip to Mexico’s fourth-largest city was in the fall of 2003, when I attended Day of the Dead festivities there and went undercover in the persona of a terminally ill cancer patient to test a fortuneteller and to search for the bogus curative, Laetrile (Nickell 2004). I returned in mid-May 2009 as a side jaunt to an extensive California trip (in which I lectured, received an award [see Hammer 2009], and went on an expedition into Bigfoot Country). This time in Tijuana, accompanied as before by Vaughn Rees, I looked into the magic of Náhuatl dances, an Olmec mystery, and the case of a dubious folk saint.

Náhuatl Dance Magic

In ancient Mesoamerica, the indigenistas used music and dance in religious ceremonies. Apparently the first expressly religious practices came from the Olmecs of the Gulf Coast, who flourished from about 1200 to 400 bc only to subsequently disappear. Olmec means “rubber people” in the ancient language known as Náhuatl (Jones and Molyneaux 2004, 91–92, 131, 133).

Náhuatl was the language of the later Aztecs and Toltecs, and it was spread by them throughout ancient Mesoamerica. It belongs to the same family of languages as Shoshonean, which is well represented among Native Americans of the United States. Significantly,

This linguistic tie supports the old tradition that the Aztecs came from the north and were late arrivals in the Valley of Mexico. Like all American Indians, the Aztecs were descended from peoples who probably crossed from Siberia to Alaska by traversing the Bering Strait. A number of relatively pure-blooded Aztecs still live in central Mexico. They are short, with round heads, dark skin, and straight black hair. Typical of American Indians, they do not differ much from the Indians of Arizona and New Mexico. (Collier’s Encyclopedia 1993, s.v. “Aztecs”)

Today, such “Aztecs”—or at least the linguistically definable Native Americans who continue to speak Náhuatl and who are known as the Nahua—represent between 800,000 and 1.5 million inhabitants of central and western Mexico (“Náhuatl” 2009; Jones and Molyneaux 2004, 131). It was such a family that Vaughn Rees and I happily encountered at the plaza on Avenida Revolucion (“Revolution Avenue”) in Tijuana. There, in native dress, they pranced and whirled in elaborate folk dances, ceremonial expressions of their cultural mythology (see figures 1 and 2).

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

The Náhuatl dances were originally created to please the gods. The dances can be seen as meditation, even prayer, in motion. The movements (expressing specific meanings) include serpent-like actions (to denote fertility), zig-zag steps (water), steps (fire), squatting to the ground (the earth and crops), and twirling in the air (the soul). “The individual dancers also work together to become one entity and reach the goal of complete attentiveness. The dancers unite to create a corporal expression to worship and communicate with their gods as they are expressed in nature” (Danza 2009).

Although today the Náhuatl religion is increasingly influenced by Catholicism (“Náhuatl” 2009), some dedicated dancers attempt to keep alive a tradition with which we can connect at the human level. I feel privileged to have been able to step back, as it were, into an earlier, more magical time, and even wonder again, with the poet Yeats: When the two become one, “how can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Olmec Mystery

At first thought, Tijuana has little to do with the Olmecs, who lived in the rich lowlands of Mexico’s Gulf Coast and created a great civilization that was at its height between 800 and 500 bc. Several farming villages grew into something more, notes Kenneth L. Feder (1996, 410), archaeologist and CSI fellow:

They became ceremonial centers where a unique constellation of art motifs and architectural patterns are seen. The motifs and patterns, called Olmec, include several common artistic and architectural elements: depictions of a half-human, half-jaguar god, the use of jade, iron ore mirrors, large earthen platforms, earthen pyramids, and huge basalt boulders carved into the likeness of human heads....

Fig. 3

It was one such giant head—one of at least seventeen known—that I recognized immediately on a Tijuana sidewalk (see figure 3). Some archaeologists have suggested that the disembodied, helmeted heads represented players of a sacred Olmec ball game (involving a heavy ball of indigenous rubber). Supposedly, these players lost, and as a consequence were decapitated (The World’s 1978, 264–265; “Olmec” 2009).

However, that notion seems fanciful, even trivial, in light of the huge amount of effort necessary to transport and carve the colossal basalt blocks. The prevailing view is that the heads represent Olmec chiefs (Feder 1996, 410). Indeed, a bronze plaque on the Tijuana monument refers to the colossal Olmec head as El Rey (“The King”).

“Ancient astronaut” theorists like Erich von Däniken have exaggerated the difficulty of moving and shaping the stones. In his one-time international best-seller Chariots of the Gods? and other books, von Däniken suggests that space aliens visited Earth in the remote past, mated with humans to produce Homo sapiens, and helped create many of antiquity’s greatest works, such as the pyramids of Egypt and the stone statues on Easter Island. In his writings von Däniken again and again misrepresents evidence to fit his “theory” (Nickell 1995, 186–189).

He writes of the Olmecs that “their beautifully helmeted giant skulls” (sic) can be “admired only on the sites where they were found, for they will never be on show in a museum” (von Däniken 1971, 93). Why? “No bridge in the country could stand their weight,” he asserts. “We can move smaller ‘monoliths’ weighing up to fifty tons with our modern lifting appliances and loaders, but when it comes to hundred-tonners like these our technology breaks down.”

In fact, von Däniken has doubled or quadrupled the actual weight of the heads. Sources place the largest ones in the twenty-five- to fifty-five-ton range (“Olmec” 2009). The boulders of basalt (a dark volcanic rock) used for the heads came from the Tuxtlas Mountains, some forty to sixty miles from the Olmec centers (Whitaker 1951, 51). States Feder (1996, 410), “The movement of this stone over such a great distance is another indicator of the ability of the Olmec chiefs to mobilize and manage the labor of a great mass of people.” The Olmecs may have dragged the boulders and floated them on large balsa rafts along coastal waters (“Olmec” 2009). They were later carved using “stone implements with much skill” (Whitaker 1951, 51).

Not only are some of the giant heads found in museums, but one was transported thousands of miles for a special exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Whitaker 1951, 51). In Tijuana, the great Olmec head provides further silent testimony against the falsehoods of the glib Erich von Däniken and his ilk.

Murderer-“Saint”

In Catholicism, certain deceased persons are officially recognized as saints, who are held to be in the glory of God in heaven and whose holiness is attested through miracles (Schreck 1984, 153–156). Among the rank-and-file faithful, however, there are also a number of popular, unofficial saints—like Argentina’s controversial “Evita” (Eva Peron, wife of dictator Juan Peron), who is reviled by anti-Peronists but sought for canonization by others crediting her with the requisite miracles (Nickell 2006, 20).

One such folk saint in northwestern Mexico, as well as now the southwestern United States, is known as Juan Soldado (“Soldier John”), the name given by his devotees to Juan Castillo Morales, from southern Mexico. In 1938 at the age of twenty-four, he was in Tijuana, serving as a private in the Mexican army (see figure 4).

Late on February 13, an eight-year-old Tijuana girl, Olga Camacho, was sent by her mother to the corner grocery for meat. When she failed to return, an all-night search for her was conducted by citizens and authorities. It culminated at noon with the discovery of the child’s raped and nearly decapitated body in an abandoned building not far from the police station. The neighbor who found her had been convinced Olga would be found safe, but that woman subsequently claimed she was directed to the site by “a vision” of the Virgin Mary (Vanderwood 2004, 5–6).

Tijuana smoldered with anger, a lynch mob was formed, and finally tensions exploded. The police station and municipal hall were torched, and fire trucks answering calls had their hoses slashed with machetes. Eventually soldiers fired on the crowd, killing one and wounding several. Newspapers dubbed that day, February 15, “Bloody Tuesday.”

However, by February 17, just over three days after the discovery of little Olga’s body, Juan Castillo Morales had been accused of the crime, taken into custody, turned over to the army, sentenced to death following a twelve-hour court martial, and transported to the municipal cemetery where he was executed. He was dispatched by a method known as Ley Fuga (“flight law”) in which he was ordered to flee for his life, then cut down by a firing squad. He was badly wounded, and an officer finally administered the coup de grace (Maher 1997; “Juan” 2009; Vanderwood 2004, 49–50).

How was Juan Castillo Morales transformed from child-rapist and murderer into “Juan Soldado” the popular saint? A rumor circulated that the little girl was actually killed by an army officer who framed Juan for the atrocity. Still later, more conspiracy theories were advanced (Maher 1997; “Juan” 2009). Meanwhile, there were unverified reports of “ghostly voices” near Juan’s burial site. As well, some spoke of “blood seeping from his grave” (“Juan” 2009) or, alternately, claimed “that a rock by the spot where he fell kept spouting blood, calling attention to his innocence” (Maher 1997) or that blood oozed “through the rocks laid [ritualistically] at the grave site” (Vanderwood 2004, 64). Such variants (as folklorists call differing versions), together with the common folk motifs (or story elements),1 are indicative of the folkloric process at work in the evolving Juan Soldado legend. (If real blood was actually “seeping up through the loosely packed soil” of Morales’s shallow grave—his coffin was reportedly “just a foot or so below the surface”—it was attributable to decomposition gases forcing blood and tissue upward [Vanderwood 2004, 64, 190]. More simply, after a rain, a rock containing red ocher—red iron oxide—could have given the appearance of blood.)

Fig. 4

In time, little shrines were built at the supposed execution and burial sites, as well as elsewhere in the area (see figure 4). Votive candles, cards, and other religious items devoted to Juan Soldado are now sold throughout the borderlands. Many people appeal to his spirit before attempting to enter the United States illegally: “Juan Soldado, ayúdame a cruzar” (“Soldier John, help me across”). Others pray to him for help with health problems, criminal troubles, and family matters (“Juan” 2009). Many attest to “miracles” he produced on their behalf. Although June 24, Mexico’s El Día de San Juan (“The day of Saint John”), actually celebrates John the Baptist whose feast day it is, cultists have appropriated it for their San Juan, Juan Soldado, and the cemetery is filled with believers and mariachis (Maher 1997).

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, understandably denies the sanctity of Juan Soldado. Before Olga’s body was discovered, Juan Castillo Morales was seen loitering in the area. He was known to police as one who reportedly made sexual overtures to girls. His common-law wife came forward to say he had returned home very late, disheveled, and spattered with blood, whereupon he broke down and confessed to the crime. Newspaper reporters invited to interview him found him unrepentant, even nonchalant. A Los Angeles paper headlined its report, “Smiling Mexican Private tells Examiner, ‘Yes I did it’” (Vanderwood 2004, 14).

If the evidence is correct and Juan indeed represents depravity rather than sanctity, how ironic is his transformation to solider-saint and even more so his purported ability to work “miracles” seemingly as real as those of any officially sanctioned saint.

Acknowledgments

In addition to Vaughn Rees, without whose tireless assistance this article would not have been possible, I wish to thank CFI librarian Lisa Nolan and Director of CFI Libraries Timothy Binga for their considerable help with research, and the entire staff of the Skeptical Inquirer for their continuing professional assistance.

Note

1. See, for example, Thompson (1955, 403–458), including motifs “The unquiet grave” (E410), “Revenant as blood” (E422.1.11.5), “Ineradicable bloodstain after bloody tragedy” (E422.1.11.5.1), and so on.

References

Danza, Azteca: Step by step. 2009. Available online at http://danzaazteca.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/
why-did-aztecs-dance/; accessed August 19, 2009.

Feder, Kenneth L. 1996. The Past in Perspective: An Introduction to Human Prehistory. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Co.

Hammer, Owen. 2009. Third annual IIG awards: Mythbusters and Nickell honored, Ben Stein lampooned. Skeptical Inquirer 33(5) (September/
October): 11–12.

Jones, David M., and Brian L. Molyneaux. 2004. Mythology of the American Nations. London: Hermes House.

Juan Soldado. 2009. Wikipedia. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Soldado; accessed May 25, 2009.

Maher, Patrick. 1997. After they shot Juan. San Diego Reader, December 4. (Refurbished January 30, 2008. Available online at http://www.sandiego
reader.com/news/2008/jan/30/after-they-shot-juan/; accessed May 25, 2009.)

Náhuatl religion. 2009. Available online at http://
www.bookrags.com/research/nahuatl-religion-eorl-09; accessed August 19, 2009.

Nickell, Joe. 2004. Mythical Mexico. Skeptical Inquirer 28(4) (July/August): 11–15.

———. 2006. Argentina mysteries. Skeptical Inquirer 30(2) (March/April): 19–22.

Nutini, Hugo G., and John M. Roberts. 1993. Bloodsucking Witchcraft: An Epistemological Study of Anthropomorphic Supernaturalism in Rural Tlaxcala. Tucson: U of Arizona Press.

Olmec. 2009. Wikipedia. Available online at http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec; accessed August 18, 2009.

Thiering, Barry, and Edgar Castle, eds. 1972. Some Trust in Chariots. Toronto: Popular Library.

Thompson. Stith. 1955. Motif-Index of Folk Literature, rev. ed., vol. 2 of 6 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Vanderwood, Paul. 2004. Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Von Däniken, Erich. 1971. Chariots of the Gods? London: Corgi.

Whitaker, Gordon. 1951. The spaceman in the tree. In Thiering and Castle 1972, 40–60.

The World’s Last Mysteries. 1978. Pleasantville, N.Y.: The Reader’s Digest Association.

As CSI’s Senior Research Fellow—a position that appears to make him the world’s only full-time professional paranormal investigator—Joe Nickell had a very busy year, utilizing his background as a stage magician, private detective, forensic-science writer, historical document consultant, and university scholar. He traveled widely as always—this time as far as Asia—conducting investigation, lecturing, and appearing in various media venues.

He investigated “miraculous” oil-streaming effigies at a home near San Francisco, and went on an expedition in search of the legendary Jersey Devil in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. He busted ghosts across the country—from Philadelphia to St. Louis to Alcatraz Island—as well as attending séances at a spiritualist village, where he also visited a psychomanteum (a chamber where one sits and by candlelight looks for spirits in a mirror). He posed as desk clerk at a “haunted” hotel to conduct an experiment regarding expectation, and also carried out other experiments in perception (for the History Channel’s popular Monster Quest series). He investigated a Fortean phenomenon (pink snow) in Buffalo, two famous “monster” cases in West Virginia, and Underground Railroad myths in New York state and Canada’s Ontario province, among many others.

In Hungary, he visited a site where a mysterious energy supposedly emanates and heals the sick. He commissioned a gypsy fortuneteller/spiritualist to do a reading on a subject who accompanied Nickell and who, unknown to the gypsy, was there under false pretenses as a test. Nickell participated as a test subject himself (unofficially) at a parapsychological laboratory, scoring high (1) in a Ganzfeld experiment, and he visited a psychic telephone network to observe and discuss their operations. He also accompanied a scholar to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences library to examine the Rohonc Codex, a book written in a mysterious, indecipherable language that Nickell made several important observations regarding.

In China, where for three weeks he was CFI’s 2010 Visiting Scholar (in an exchange program with China Research Institute for Science Popularization [CRISP]), he investigated Chinese traditional medicine, including acupuncture and cupping (undergoing both treatments at a clinic. He also investigated China’s “ape men”—both real, such as Peking Man (visiting cave fossil sites at Zhoukoudian), and legendary, such as the Yeren (China’s version of Bigfoot).

Nickell lectured at numerous conferences, including The 14th European Skeptics Congress (Budapest), James Randi’s Amaz!ng Meeting (Las Vegas), Skepticon (Springfield, Mo.), Dragon*Con (Atlanta), and the CFI Institute (Amherst, N.Y.). He lectured to several skeptic and freethought groups around the country. (In Martin, Tennessee, the UTM Freethinkers Society presented him with a “Skeptical Medal of Valor.”) He lectured on illusions of the paranormal at Beijing Normal University and at CRISP headquarters (Beijing). He also taught in an arson-investigation training program (lecturing on “Debunking Spontaneous Human Combustion”) at the New York State Academy of Fire Science. For children and young adults he performed at such venues as an elementary school (Durham, N.C., where he also performed magic) and a Science Exploration Day (University at Buffalo).

Among Nickell’s numerous filmings were several shows for Animal Planet (Lost Tapes series), the History Channel (Monster Quest), and the Oprah Winfrey Network (the new Miracle Detectives series). As a prototype online video (produced by Adam Isaak, CFI), he hosted Joe Nickell Investigates: Alcatraz (posted on YouTube). And he spent a week on location with a professional film crew producing the pilot for a possible TV series that Nickell is hoping to develop and host. In one of his most unusual appearances ever, he played a zombie in a movie The Final Night and Day (due on DVD in March), as part of his research into monsters in popular culture.

Nickell was also a guest on radio shows such as one at Portland, Oregon (where he appeared to discuss friggatriskaideckaphobia on Friday the thirteenth) and at Calgary, Canada, (on “psychic” Sylvia Browne’s appearance there), as well as on Kate Valentine’s Atlantic Coast UFOs. And he was interviewed on several podcasts, including Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Radio Freethinker, For Good Reason, Monster Talk, and others. With CFI Libraries Director Timothy Binga as his guest, he conducted CFI’s Annual Houdini Séance (posted on the CSICOP website), where once again Houdini was a no-show.

He was a subject of various print-media features, including an interview and profile in HVG magazine in Hungary. He made a photo appearance in Filmfax: The Magazine of Unusual Film, Television, & Retro Pop Culture (regarding Bigfoot). He was also quoted in numerous newspapers on such subjects as ghost hunting (USA Today and The Buffalo News), Toledo Blade (a weeping statue), The Salt Lake Tribune (the Shroud of Turin), Maryland Daily Record (fortunetelling law), and London’s Times Standard (Pet Psychics). As well, he appeared on such online sources as MSNBC, Huffington Post, AOL News, and E! Online.

Nickell’s book Real or Fake, published in 2009, continued to get great reviews, notably from Manuscripts (Fall 2010), and he produced a new book, Tracking the Man-Beasts: Sasquatch, Vampires, Zombies, and More (forthcoming from Prometheus Books, March 2011), as well as working on other books and contributing to books of others.

“In addition to his “Investigative Files” columns, feature articles, reviews, and other contributions to Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptical Briefs, Nickell continued to write weekly blogs titled “Investigative Briefs” (on a wide assortment of topics and numerous diverse formats), as well as having a Facebook fan page and a personal website (www.joenickell.com).

In other miscellaneous adventures, he was honored with a coveted tour of David Copperfield’s astonishing—private—museum of magic; continued his forensic studies (he is co-author of a forensic textbook) by undergoing fire-investigation training at an arson in-service training program (sponsored by the State of New York Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services Office of Fire Prevention and Control); and learned to break boards karate style (under the tutelage of physics teacher and skeptic Matt Lowrey). Beyond work he found time to go on a fossil hunt, participate in an archaeological dig, take lessons in blacksmithing and hand-press printing, write numerous poems (which he read at various venues) and songs, and so on and on. He seldom slept.