Some people who believe the story is true make trips to the supposed area of Gore Orphanage in Ohio to check it out. Not only do the local folks in Ohio believe the stories, but a well-known author of books on ghosts and haunting states that “Ghost children also haunt the burnt ruins of Gore Orphanage in Medina, Ohio” (Ogden 1999). There are also local people who claim to have filmed ghostly children at the Gore Orphanage site (Petkovic 2003).

Some ghost-hunting groups have conducted investigations at the supposed site of Gore Orphanage. One group in particular has posted their investigation on their website. After giving a run-down of the legends, the author states “Regardless of which story you believe, something does seem to occur there on a regular basis. Mists and other phenomenon [sic] have been photographed near a small bridge that crosses a nearby stream on a regular basis, and lights and mists have also been seen to dance in an open field adjacent to the site” (Horodyski 2012). The ghost hunter then goes on to describe an “investigation” the team conducted on the premises. When it became dark, they headed out of the wooded area, and the author held his video camera at his side facing behind him. He captured “a bright glowing object” (Horodyski 2012). It seems the author, along with the rest of his group, believes that while some of the stories about Gore Orphanage may be dubious, their experience with this “bright glowing object” has convinced them that there must be some truth to it. The author states that “Our unearthly ‘escort’ off the property serves to convince me that something is definitely there, and that not all stories connected with the site can therefore be so readily shrugged off” (Horodyski 2012).

The first thing to find out is whether the ghost story is actually true. Was there an actual place called “Gore Orphanage”? Did it burn to the ground and take the lives of a hundred or so orphans? One would think a tragedy of that magnitude would be (pardon the pun) burned into the memory of the community in which it transpired. Since the story claims that this tragedy took place in Lorain County I began by asking the Lorain County Historical Society about it. An archivist at the historical society informed me that not only was there no fire at Gore Orphanage that killed children, but there was in fact no Gore Orphanage at all (Greenly 2010). This archivist referred me to the manager of the Lorain County Metro Parks who echoed that there was no such place as Gore Orphanage (Thompson 2010).

It’s not even clear where the name “Gore Orphanage” came from. Apparently, a Gore Orphanage Road does exist in Lorain County. That “Gore” is not referring to blood-soaked guts or anything gruesome like that but instead a surveyor’s error in the form of a thin strip of land that resembles the gore of a dress (Ellis 2003).

There is also the matter of where the “orphanage” aspect came from for Gore Orphan­age Road. It turns out there was actually an orphanage along that stretch of road at one point called the Light and Hope Orphanage. It was run by Reverend John Sprunger and his wife. It closed down after about fourteen years and there is no credible evidence that a fire there killed any children at all (Ellis 2003).

Children dying or being caught in a burning building seems to be the lynchpin of the whole story. This is the aspect of the story that has influenced people’s experiences of going to the supposed location of Gore Orphanage. The legend has it that one will hear screams of the dying children and see the spirits of children who are horribly burned. The first piece of the puzzle comes from the fact that a house called “Swift Mansion” existed there for some time. The owner, Joseph Swift, had to sell the mansion after he went broke. Swift sold it to a man named Nicholas Wilber. Wilber was married with four children. All of the children had died of diphtheria in a relatively short time. The family also took part in séances to contact spirits of the dead, maybe even their four deceased children (Ellis 2003). This explains where the story got its paranormal ghostly children aspect. That solves part of it, but not all of it.

There is still the aspect of children meeting their demise in a burning building. There is no record or evidence of an orphanage catching fire in Lorain County or all of the children dying there. However, there is the tragedy of a school called the Lake View Public School in the Cleveland suburb of Collinwood catching fire and killing many children. While there is no evidence that any place called “Gore Orphanage” in Lorain County caught fire and took a lot of children with it, this school did burn down, killing many children and some adults (Ellis 2003).

Despite claims by some amateur ghost hunters, the notoriously haunted Gore Orphanage—with its ghostly presences and horrible moans of disfigured children—does not exist. But the pieces that make up this story are based on grains of fact; elements of truth came together to make a Franken­stein’s monster of an urban legend. A surveying mistake, an orphanage that eventually went bankrupt, and the tragedies that struck the Wilber family and the Lake View Public School all came together to form one of the most popular legends in Cleveland, Ohio. In many ways, unraveling the truth behind the story is more interesting than the legend itself.

References

Ellis, Bill. 2003. Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Greenly, Eric. 2010. Personal correspondence with author, November 23.

Horodyski, Joseph M. 2012. Gore orphanage. Cleve­land Supernatural Investigations. Online at http://www.clevelandsupernatural.com/04-Gore.html; accessed August 24, 2012

Ogden, Tom. 1999. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Ghosts and Hauntings. Indianapolis: Alpha Books.

Petkovic, John. 2003. Doing a little goodwill haunting with ghost busters. Plain Dealer (October 24).

Thompson, Grant. 2010. Personal correspondence with author, November 29.

I had indeed heard of the film, a New Agey jumble of pseudoscience and mysticism about supposed links between consciousness and quantum physics, produced by followers of J.Z. Knight, a woman who claims to dispense in­formation from a 35,000-year-old ghost. In fact, I had done my best to keep it from misinforming the public when it was first released, writing a few short skeptical pieces about it.

Not wanting to get into an argument with my friend, I just let the conversation trail off. But before I did, she made an interesting comment: “To be honest I didn’t really understand a lot of it. . . . But you’re really smart—you would get it.”

She assumed that the reason she didn’t understand the film’s information was be­cause she had no background in science. I, on the other hand, did not understand the film precisely because I do have a strong background in science. When people don’t understand something they are told, there are three possibilities or root causes.

Most commonly, the person assumes, as my friend did, that the problem lies with the listener. Her (quite reasonable) assumption was that the film was comprehensible and that if she didn’t understand it, it was due to her limitations or lack of knowledge. This was a mainstream, feature-length documentary film with some famous people in it—in­cluding physicists. Surely these people would not appear on camera discussing self-evidently nonsensical ideas such as that thoughts can control reality.

Less often, the problem lies with the speaker’s inability to effectively communicate—perhaps he or she does not share the same native language as the listener, is disorganized, or has a speech impediment for example. In this case the information and message may be correct and clear, but communication does not occur because of a problem with the source.

Sometimes the problem lies neither with the listener nor with the speaker, but instead in the content. In this case, the reason that the listener doesn’t understand what is being said is that what is being said makes little or no sense by any objective measure. This is in­sidious and difficult to detect because people do not like to challenge authority on a topic they are presumably trying to become educated about—especially in public. The speaker is not talking gibberish; quite the opposite: he or she may be very eloquent. Furthermore, identifying nonsense often requires some basic understanding of the subject.

In my book Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us I discuss this phenomenon at length and refer to it as “the illusion of meaning.” As children we are taught to assume that the words we hear and read have meaning and comprehensible content. When we hear information we don’t understand, the common, default assumption is that we just don’t get it—not that the authoritative person we’re listening to is speaking nonsense. Yet as we grow older, we are sometimes faced with “information” devoid of content—grammatically correct and often impressive words that are either patently untrue, self-contradictory, or simply meaningless.

Too often we are embarrassed to admit that we don’t understand what we are told. We don’t want to appear stupid to the speaker or others in the audience. But more people should ask questions, because others may be just as confused but not want to speak up. There is no shame in not understanding something, and it’s a good lesson to remember that. Asking for clarification not only helps both the speaker and listener communicate more effectively, it is also a powerful tool in revealing bullshit.

Fuzzy thinking and fuzzy language often go hand in hand. Purveyors of pseudoscience usually use vague terms with unclear meanings and definitions. New Age healers, for example, use words and scientific-sounding phrases like “human energy field” and “vibrational frequency” without understanding (or clearly explaining) what it is that they are talking about. This is a case where skeptics should be emboldened to raise their hands and ask, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying. . . . What vibrations are you talking about? What exactly is this ‘energy field,’ and how can science detect it?”

The next time you hear something you don’t understand, ask for clarification. You don’t have to be apologetic about it, and the situation doesn’t have to be confrontational. Those with science and facts and evidence on their side will be happy to explain what they mean. If the speaker cannot explain what he is talking about in plain language—or without resorting to other, even less clear terms and concepts—that’s a warning sign that there’s confusion on both ends of the line.

This is the story of a fiery death that became a cold case—a mystery unsolved since 1847. It begins with an elderly Frenchman, whose badly burned body suggested to authorities that it may have been set afire to conceal evidence of foul play. The victim’s son and daughter-in-law were soon charged with homicide. Subsequently, an exhumation and examination of the severely burned remains led the pathologist to conclude that the case was not one of murder but of “spontaneous combustion”—a possibility discounted by modern science. Was it murder after all, or is there still some other possibility?

Scene of the ‘Crime’

Initially reported in the journal Union Médicale, the case found its way—via the Gazette Médicale—to an American medical journal (Flint 1849) and then on to a textbook on medical jurisprudence (Taylor 1883). On the morning of January 6, 1847, the body of seventy-one-year-old Monsieur Char­bonnier¹ was found lying abed “in its usual position during sleep,” yet it was afire with a small, whitish flame that had de­stroyed, almost entirely, both the deceased’s clothing and the bed clothes, as well as part of the bedstead. Surrounding materials were scorched. Monsieur Char­bonnier was de­scribed as “neither very fat, nor given to drunkenness.”

It having been quite cold for a time, when he retired Charbonnier had, “as usual, placed at his feet a heated brick.” It was also noted that he carried matches in his waistcoat pocket. He had gone to his room sometime between six and seven p.m., and, two hours later, his son and his son’s wife, having passed his door, “perceived nothing un­usual” (Flint 1849).

The authorities came to suspect the couple in Charbonnier’s death of “having first murdered him, and then burnt the body, in order to conceal all traces of the crime.” Apparently, the suspicions were founded on nothing more than that the origin of the fire was unknown and the destruction of the body severe. A Dr. Masson was ordered to examine the remains and so make a determination as to the cause of death. Masson had Charbonnier’s body exhumed (Flint 1849).

Autopsy

A medical journal (Flint 1849) reported on Dr. Masson’s examination:

The coffin was found half filled. The body was folded in a white shroud. A cravat, nearly destroyed by the fire, and a fragment of a shirt collar, remained round the neck. The hands, burnt to a cinder, were attached to the forearm merely by some carbonized tendons, which gave way at the least touch. Lastly, the thighs were so completely separated, that, had it not been for fragments of animal charcoal, the separation might have been attributed to a knife.

The journal continued:

From the examination of these facts, it was concluded that, as it was impossible to attribute the phenomena to the action of the combustibles with which the body had been in contact, they must be ascribed to a cause inherent in the individual, put in action, perhaps, by the heat of the brick applied to the feet, but which must have found a fuel in the tissues which it de­stroyed; that, in a word, it must be classed among cases of spontaneous combustion.

As a result, “This opinion of M. Masson being fully confirmed by that of M. Orfila, the accused were acquitted” (Flint 1849).

Spontaneous Human Combustion?

But if there was no evidence of homicide, does “Spontaneous Human Combustion” (the title of the medical journal article) provide a more viable alternative as a cause of death? Debate over the possibility of spontaneous human combustion (SHC) raged throughout the nineteenth century. When Charles Dickens invoked the alleged phenomenon to kill off a drunken character in his 1853 novel Bleak House, he was following a then-current belief. Early theorists, including members of the temperance movement, had suggested that alcohol-impregnated tissues were rendered highly combustible, but scientists refuted the notion by experimentation. And they pointed out that a person would die of alcohol poisoning long before imbibing enough alcohol to have even a slight effect on the body’s flammability (Lewes 1861, 398). Dickens’s novel set off a controversy.

Response came immediately from George Henry Lewes, the philosopher and critic, who upbraided Dickens for perpetuating superstition. Lewes insisted that SHC was scientifically impossible, a view shared by the great scientist Liebig (1851), who stated: “The opinion that a man can burn of himself is not founded on a knowledge of the circumstances of the death, but on the reverse of knowledge—on complete ignorance of all the causes or conditions which preceded the accident and caused it.” In short, SHC proponents were essentially engaging in a logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance: “We don’t know what caused the fire, so it must have been spontaneous human combustion.”

Thus rationalists like Lewes were seizing the scientific high ground with the question of cause, while Dickens was arguing primarily from effect, citing several cases of the alleged phenomenon. To assess the contrary views, I teamed up with forensic analyst John F. Fischer to launch a two-year investigation of the phenomenon, culminating in a two-part report in the journal of the Inter­national Association of Arson Investi­gators (Nickell and Fischer 1984) and portions of a book (Nickell with Fischer 1988). We reviewed thirty historical cases and focused on one of the most famous, that of Mary Reeser of St. Petersburg, Florida, who in 1951 was reduced to a few bones, a quantity of “grease” (i.e., human body fat), and an intact slippered foot. In our forensic investigation, we focused on both cause and effect.

We found that the correlation of bizarre fiery deaths to drunkenness was likely due to inebriated persons being more careless with fire and less able to properly respond to an accident. We also found a more significant correlation: In those incidents in which the destruction of the body was relatively minimal, the only significant fuel source appeared to have been the victim’s clothes; however, where the destruction was considerable, additional fuel sources—bedding, chair stuffing, wooden flooring, and so on—augmented the burning. Impor­tantly, materials under the body appear also to have helped to retain melted body fat (present in significant amounts even in a relatively lean individual), which volatized and burned, destroying more of the body’s tissues and yielding still more liquefied fat to continue the process known as the wick effect (Gee 1965). In case after case, we found plausible causes for the ignition, thus removing the word spontaneous from the equation (Nickell with Fischer 1988, 161–171). For example, Mary Reeser was seen just before her death wearing flammable night clothes, sitting in a large stuffed chair, smoking a cigarette, after having taken sleeping pills. She was a proverbial accident waiting to happen (Nickell with Fischer 1988, 149–157).

The Explanation

But if the death of Monsieur Charbonnier was not a case of spontaneous human combustion, was it one of murder after all? That is doubtful. Not only was there no evidence of homicide, but a fiery death, under the circumstances given, is an unlikely—though not unheard of—means of murdering someone (Taylor 1883, 719–720). No doubt the accused family members could have staged a more convincing “accident” had they wished to do so.

No, M. Charbonnier’s mode of death was not homicidal; neither was it suicidal or natural (unless a heart attack, say, was directly involved; see below). (It assuredly was not preternatural as in “spontaneous combustion.”) The most likely mode is accidental. As to the manner and cause of death, they remain unexplained but not unexplainable. Indeed, there are many credible explanations that could account for the known data, if we allow some reasonable assumptions. For example, we do not know whether there was a fireplace in the room, but bedrooms typically had such; or whether the victim was a smoker, but matches in his pocket suggest the distinct possibility; or whether he was infirm or had dementia, but he was elderly and being cared for by his son and daughter-in-law. Here are some possibilities:

1. Since Charbonnier was still wearing his clothes (indicated by the remaining fragments of cravat and shirt collar about his neck), probably because it was so cold, he might simply have been lying abed while smoking. In such circumstances it is a common cause of death for a person to fall asleep (or much less commonly to die suddenly, say from cardiac arrest), and so drop the smoking material, thus causing the bedding to smolder, with the result that the victim dies of smoke inhalation before the smoldering process ignites the gasses produced. (If ignition occurs at all, it may be an hour or more after smoldering began.) (Spitz 1993, 427–­428; Nickell 1988, 155)

2. The friction matches in M. Char­bonnier’s vest pocket might have ignited as they rubbed together while he tossed and turned in sleep. They were described as “chemical matches” (Flint 1849) and again as “Lucifer-matches” (Taylor 1883, 722)—that is, a type of friction match using white phosphorous. (These were created in 1830; safety matches were not developed until 1855 [Bellis 2010]).

3. The “heated brick” that the deceased placed at his feet for warmth might have carried, stuck to its underside, a cinder from the fireplace; this could easily have caused smoldering of the linen in which it was wrapped. This scenario is possible even though early sources inform that the brick, “before being wrapped in linen, had been slowly cooled by water thrown over it twice” (Flint 1849). The cinder could have been picked up from the hearth even after the brick was wrapped.

4. A popping, crackling fire in the fireplace might have propelled a burning cinder, or sent adrift a spark, that landed on the bed, or even on the victim’s clothing to be thus carried to the bed. Again, all that was needed was for the smoldering process to be initiated. Such an occurrence need not have been common, since the resulting phenomenon was itself rare.

Other scenarios are possible. However, I think we may conclude not only that the mode of death was accidental but that the manner of death was, generically, carelessness with fire, and the cause of death smoke inhalation.² (Remember, the victim was found in bed in the repose of sleep.) Taylor (1883, 723) concludes that the medical investigator, Masson, probably “underrated the effects which are liable to follow from an accidental ignition of the clothes.” He says of alleged SHC—that is, of severe destruction of the body in cases where the origin of the combustion is unknown—that “In the in­stances reported which are worthy of any credit, a candle, a fire, or some other ignited body has been at hand, and the accidental kindling of the clothes of the deceased was highly probable” (Taylor 1883, 719). As true as that statement was in 1883, today—given our knowledge of how the body’s fat can contribute to its own destruction by means of the wick effect—it is even more defensible.

Acknowledgments

CSI Libraries director Timothy Binga was very helpful with research, especially in tracking down an early account of this case.

Notes

1. Flint (1849) and, presumably, his source give the name only as “Ch______,” but Arnold (1995, 46) has somehow discovered the complete surname. ( Char­bonnier is a perfectly good French name, but—as one cannot help but note with irony, given that the man was largely reduced to ash—it means “charcoal-burner.”)

2. For further discussion of mode, manner, and cause of death, see Nickell and Fischer Crime Science (1999, 254–261).

References

Arnold, Larry E. 1995. Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion. New York: M. Evans and Company.

Bellis, Mary. 2010. The history of matches. Available online at http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blmatch.htm; accessed Feb. 24, 2010.

Flint, Austin, ed. 1849. Buffalo Medical Journal and Monthly Review of Medical and Surgical Science, volume 4. Buffalo, N.Y.: Jewett, Thomas & Co., 247 (citing the Gazette Médicale, which in turn quoted from the Union Médicale).

Gee, D.J. 1965. A case of ‘spontaneous combustion.’ Medicine, Science and the Law 5: 37–38.

Lewes, George Henry. 1861. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 89 (April), 385–402.

Liebig, Justus von. 1851. Familiar Letters on Chemistry, Letter no. 22. London: Taylor, Walton & Maberly.

Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1984. Spontaneous human combustion. The Fire and Arson Investigator 34: 3 (March), 4–11; 34: 4 (June), 3–8.

———. 1999. Crime Science: Methods of Forensic Detec­tion. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Ken­tucky.

Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1988. Secrets of the Supernatural. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

Spitz, Werner U., ed. 1993. Spitz and Fisher’s Medico­legal Investigation of Death, 3rd ed. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas.

Taylor, Alfred Swaine. 1883. The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, 3rd ed., vol. Ed. Thomas Stevenson. Philadelphia: H.C. Lea’s Son & Co.

There is no real misunderstanding of what people are getting at these conferences, except for when they go outside of their realms of spiritual beliefs and enter the domain of science. This particular conference is described as being more of a “continuation” of previous gatherings referred to as the “Language of the Spirit” dialogues. These meetings are professed as being an attempt “to bring understanding between Indigenous ways of knowing and Western science.”

Indigenous elders, social visionaries, ecologists, philosophers, and healers with different backgrounds from around the world are asked to help prepare for the future by taking pages out from the tribal culture system of religious belief. SEED is attempting to examine and discuss the prophecies associated with various cultures to reconcile them under one common theme by declaring that “we see this time as an unprecedented opportunity to co-create our collective future; a time when people of all traditions and races are called to come together to explore and rediscover what it means to be human.”

History of SEED

SEED was initially run as an “open university,” not for credit, but for those with a personal interest in the course material. It was not until more recently that the SEED Institute began to sponsor the event known as the Language of Spirit Conference.

This eclectic group featured physicists, elders, linguists, philosophers, authors, and even an astronaut. According to the SEED website, “The 1992 dialogue coincided with the 500th year since Columbus came to Turtle Island, and completed a cycle in which indigenous, wholistic [sic] thinking, once suppressed and disregarded, reemerged on equal footing with leading edge Western science.”

SEED considered these series of meetings to be “Science and Cosmology conferences” that helped branch out into their latest programs, one being the Wisdom from the Origins. The SEED Graduate Institute states that, “The master’s program in Sci­ence and cosmology (Fire) integrates Native science and new scientific models of wholeness, including quantum theory, general systems theory, chaos theory, and complexity theory with comparative philosophy and religion, mythology, depth psychology and cosmology.”

By no means is this a clear definition of science; however, it is an indication of what they believe it to be. There is a recurring theme of mentioning cosmology and science, whereas “cosmology” appears as the more general definition, the study of the universe. This more broad usage of cosmology by SEED incorporates philosophical and metaphysical questions that are not relevant to science. A religious cosmology, if you will, attempting to blur the lines and blend the commonalities found in various religious creation myths and brandish them as useful tools to inform our future lives as human beings. It seems they are operating under the premise that these spiritual beliefs of our ancestors gave us a better understanding of the universe or our place in it. The major concern is that there is no real standard for “knowing” or “knowledge” as described by SEED. They do acknowledge the abundance of misunderstandings surrounding the subject of the Mayan calendar. But they overlook or ignore the inaccuracies and see it as “an opportunity to educate and prepare the people for the times we are in, and to rebirth a wisdom consciousness based on the natural rhythms of the Earth.”

Under the section, “The SEED Vision for Original Education,” the following intro­ductory quote from Mark C. Taylor reflects the basis for their proposed education model, in which a claim gets made about the current state of higher education in America: “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields and publication in journals read by no other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)” (SEED Graduate Institute 2012b).

The argument that education does not work due to “fragmented thinking” serves as the motivation for this idea that we need to unify beliefs through “participatory thought.” Which is also the common motif found throughout the official website of the SEED Institute and their offered programs as described in their following vision: “What is needed is an original model of education that is coherent, cohesive and whole in itself, in which all aspects of a school are in relationship to each other. SEED is seeking funding to establish a graduate institute with such a structure, bringing together four lodges of learning in one whole: Science and Cos­mology; Ecology; Ex­pres­sive Arts; and Inte­gral Healing” (SEED Graduate Institute 2012b).

There does seem to be some genuine interest in knowledge. SEED believes that its brand of open-mindedness holds an advantage to other methodologies because, “. . . dialogue has the potential to diffuse seemingly intractable dichotomies.” But they never establish any standards of logic or reasoning. Therefore, every idea is just as good as the next according to this system. For example, they offer this almost skeptical sounding passage describing the answer to this type of “fragmentary thinking” according to physicist David Bohm, “He developed unique method of dialogue that asked participants to suspend their present assumptions and beliefs and listen deeply for the purpose of understanding, rather than to convert another to one’s point of view” (SEED Graduate Institute 2012b).

Bohm was said to have postulated that this “participatory consciousness” might be found in tribal societies. While the idea of opening a dialogue between various cultures does appeal to me, through this lens the enticing allure of pseudoscience becomes stronger and the potential for being susceptible to falsities grows. These science dialogue initiatives between Native American elders and “Western scientists” seem to introduce more uncertainty and confusion into their concepts of the universe and our place in it. The Integral Healing program that SEED provides introduces alternative modalities of healing from the Ayurvedic Institute and the Institute of Chinese Medicine teaching to view the human body as being connected with the environment in a mystical way.

A quick search on the background of some of the speakers and sponsors reveals much of the same brand of pseudoscience that is found permeating through the entire institute, its offered programs, and the Wisdoms of the Origins conference. Gregg Braden is an author known for his books attempting to bridge the gap between science and spirituality, with titles like The God Code, The Divine Matrix, and Fractal Time: The Secret of 2012. Author Barbara Marx Hub­bard has been praised by Deepak Chopra as “the voice for conscious evolution of our time.” The list of sponsors also includes the Institute for Noetic Sciences and the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine. Both of these writers and the mentioned sponsors rely on the complexities found in quantum physics to overcomplicate and maneuver around the fact that these metaphysical and philosophical notions are not science.

Sometimes people fall prey to the idea that having an answer is better than not having one at all—even if it’s the wrong one. Sometimes people simply stop searching for alternative explanations because they be­come accustomed to the pre-existing ones. When the stories are taken for what they are and examined with the frame of reference in mind of the time and place that people lived, the purpose of each tale comes into focus.

The Cheyenne have an account involving a “great pole” that gets described as being like the ones used for their sacred sun dance, except this one is significantly more impressive and large enough to hold up the entire earth. Their version of “the end of times” is expressed through the story “The Gnawing,” as originally told by Mrs. Medicine Bull (1984):

The Great White Grandfather Beaver of the North is gnawing at that pole. He has been gnawing at the bottom of it for ages and ages. More than half of the pole has already been gnawed through. When the Great White Beaver of the North gets angry, he gnaws at it faster and more furiously. Once he has gnawed all the way through, the pole will topple, and the earth will crash into bottomless nothing. That will be the end of people, of everything. The end of all ends. So we are careful not to make the Beaver angry. That’s why the Cheyenne never eat his flesh, or even touch a beaver skin. We want the world to last a little longer.

The White River Sioux have their own version told through the story, “The End of the World,” illustrated through the life of an old woman, over a thousand years old, who is sitting in a cave next to a fire working endlessly on a blanket while a black dog watches. A pot rests above the fire that the woman gets up to periodically stir, and every time she does so, the black dog pulls out some of the porcupine quills used to make the blanket: “The Sioux people used to say that if the old woman ever finishes her blanket strip, then at the very moment that she threads the last porcupine quill to complete the design, the world will come to an end” (Leading Cloud 1967).

The Brule Sioux culture incorporates a “creating power” into their story, called Remak­ing the World, in which it is revealed that the world we live in today is actually the third created version. In 1974, Leonard Crow Dog (1974) told the story to Richard Erdoes on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. After the first two unsuccessful attempts of starting a new world, the Creating Power says, “Now, if you have learned how to behave like human beings and how to live in peace with each other and with the other living things—the two-legged, the four-legged, the many-legged, the fliers, the no-legs, the green plants of this universe—then all will be well. But if you make this world bad and ugly, then I will destroy this world too, it’s up to you.”

When it comes to Native American be­liefs, the focus is often placed more heavily on the journey than the destination. Cultural stories are often used to encourage or teach others about specific behaviors or life lessons. Stories are simply a way to make learning fun. The more outlandish a story is, the more memorable it will be. But if the cultural relevance is missing from the experience the purpose becomes fragmented and that initial power of the story gets lost as well.

References

Crow Dog, Leonard. 1974. Remaking the World. Re­corded by Richard Erdoes in 1974. In American Indian Myths and Legends, selected and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 496–499.

Leading Cloud, Jenny. 1969. The End of the World. Recorded By Richard Erdoes in 1969. In American Indian Myths and Legends, selected and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 485–486.

Medicine Bull, Mrs. 1984. The Gnawing. Recorded by Richard Erdoes with the help of an interpreter. In American Indian Myths and Legends, selected and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 484–485.

SEED Graduate Institute. 2012a. Wisdom from the Origins Conference: The Mayan Calendar and Other Prophecies on the Future of Humanity. Albu­querque, New Mexico. From September 13 to September 17, 2012. Available for download on­line at http://seedgraduateinstitute.org/pdfs/brochure-for-emailing.pdf.

SEED Graduate Institute. 2012b. Source for Educa­tional Empowerment and Community Dialogue (SEED). Available online at http://www.seedgraduateinstitute.org/.