When I grew up, I renewed my interest in secret messages through investigating a number of historical mysteries as well as during ten years of research for my magnum opus, Pen, Ink, and Evidence: A Study of Writing and Writing Materials for the Penman, Collector, and Document Detective (1990). Thomas Parrish was once kind enough to pen an inscription in a copy of his excellent book, The American Code­breakers (1986), “To Joe Nickell—a cracker of all ciphers.” He gives me too much credit, but here, anyway, are abstracts of some of my interesting cases, from the trivial to the profound.

Secret Posts

One little secret message I came across in an antique store had already been revealed. It was on a postcard, penned in tiny script in the little box reserved for the postage stamp. The stamp had been carefully removed, obviously by the recipient, exposing the hidden writing. I was so taken by the find that I searched the remaining large collection of postcards in the store and found a few others—all clearly from the same sender.

The hidden-under-the-stamp messages were simply miniscule love notes. One consisted of rows of little X’s (a popular shorthand for kisses), while another asked, “Do you you still love this bad boy?” The cards, postmarked between 1911 and 1913 were addressed to a young lady at a Virginia girls’ school (Nickell 1990, 177). Charming!

Another postcard, found on a different occasion, bore a curious-looking script. However, it proved to be an innocuous message, easily read by noting the picture side of the card. It depicted a lady before a mirror and was accompanied by the printed couplet, “This message is for you my dear—/Your looking glass will make it clear” (Nickell 1990, 177). (For a discussion of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous mirror handwriting, see my “Deciphering Da Vinci’s Real Codes,” Nickell 2007).

A ‘Ju-Ju’ Message

Sometimes a message is hidden in plain sight. In researching the case of a devil-baby mummy that I encountered in a Toronto curio shop and that later proved bogus, I came across a published photo of a pair of similar creatures, their arms folded in the repose of death. A sign affixed to the creatures’ coffin proclaimed: “These shrunken mummified figures were found in a crude tomblike cave on the island of Haiti in 1740 by a party of French marines. They are supposed to be the remains of a lost tribe of ‘Ju-Ju’ or Devil Men—who, after death, followed a custom of shrinking & mummifying the dead. Are they real? We don’t know, but . . . X-Rays showed skin, horn, & hooves human!” Astonishingly, however, there was no mention of skeletons, suggesting that—like the Toronto devil-baby mummy—the figures were fabricated (Nickell 2011, 148–149).

Painted beneath the sign were these mumbo-jumbo words:

YENOH M’I DLOC!

My cryptanalytical interests were piqued, and I soon divined the meaning. Can you decipher it yourself before reading further?

I discovered that the text was the simplest form of a transposition cipher, one in which the actual letters of the secret message are rearranged in some fashion. In this in­stance, it is only necessary to read each word backward in turn to reveal a witty commentary on the creatures’ nakedness: “Honey I’m Cold!” Exclamation point indeed.

Encoded Book

Figure 1. The cryptic text in an old book soon yielded up its secrets.

In 1985 my old friend, Canadian writer and bibliophile George Fetherling, sent me copies of some pages from a small 1948 book titled SENATOR, the text of which was printed in a strange sort of code or cipher (Figure 1). George wanted to know what this intriguing work was all about—and so did I!

I set to work, immersing myself in the mysterious text. Soon, I recognized that at least some of the apparent words were indeed words, only they had been abbreviated—mostly by removing the vowels. (Thus whr=“where,” stn=“station,” etc.). Also, some consonants were dropped, particularly double ones (so that rgt=“right” and al=“all”). In addition, some common words were replaced by symbols (such as “£” for “Lodge” and @ for “and” [not for “at,” which was itself “a,” although “a” could also represent “a” itself.) Finally, some of the abbreviations were just acronyms (hence, MA=“Master at Arms”). In short, the text is a very simple form of code. (A code consists of substitutes not just for letters, as in a simple cipher, but for groups of letters, words, or even entire phrases or concepts.)

In beginning to decode the text, and reading phrases and whole clauses (“My station is at the right and front of the Cc [Chancelor?]),” I saw that it concerned a lodge, various officers, and elements of ritual and mystery. I suspected it was the product of some secret order such as the Freemasons, soon realizing that “KOP” in the text clearly referred to a similar fraternal and benevolent society, the Knights of Pythias. This was founded in 1864 in Washington, DC. (“Knights” 1960; Ken­nedy 1904). Various terms in the text are consistent with Pythian use. (Although the book lacked publishing information, and a standard bibliographic search was fruitless, for this publication CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga was later able to use online sources to confirm the KOP origin.)

The book’s title page bears a brief message of a different type. It reads:

NOITINOMDA: Sliated laiceps
rof koob eulb tlusnoc ot
dehsinomda si hturt retfa
rekees dna tneduts esolc
eht.

Can you decipher it? Quickly cover the following explanation and try your hand.

You should have little trouble, since you have already been introduced to simple transposition ciphers like this. However, instead of reading each word backward in turn, you begin with the word in all capitals (which is, of course, “admonition”), then go to the end and read the whole sentence backward. Case closed.

The Cryptograms

So far, we have looked at codes and transposition ciphers. However, the majority of the secret messages I have come across in my work as a historical investigator are what are known as simple substitution ciphers. Popularly mislabeled “codes,” these are created by replacing the letters of the original text, which is known as the “plaintext,” with substitutes—such as other letters, symbols, or the like—resulting in what is termed the “ciphertext.”

I have encountered—and deciphered—many such ciphertexts, written on postcards and greeting cards, in old sentiment albums, and elsewhere (Nickell 1990, 176–77). Solving a simple substitution cipher is usually pretty straightforward. (See Nickell 1990, 177; Gaines 1956, 69–87; also, the previously mentioned Poe and Conan Doyle stories describe the rudiments of decipherment.)

Here is one message from an old autograph album:

L5CY
1992  P42
9476h  M3ddl2  64w9
B457b49  C4
         K2965cky

If you are an experienced cryptanalyst you might want to stop here and give your skills a try.

As it happened, however, the message was accompanied by a partial “key”:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
a e i o u t r s n

In brief, numbers are substituted for certain frequently used letters (vowels, and four of the most–used consonants), while the remaining letters are unchanged. Now you will have no trouble deciphering the message.

If you solved this without the key, you probably noted that the last word was offset, and so it might be the name of a state (on the assumption that such a text in an autograph album might represent a name and address). That word, omitting the numbers, was “K——cky,” and that could only be one state. Similarly “M-ddl-” looks like the word Middle, so the cryptanalyst could begin to construct a key without having been provided one. This message reads: “Lucy Anne Poe, North Middle Town, Bourbon Co., Kentucky.”

Most such texts are similarly mundane, although they are still fun to solve and help one sharpen his or her cryptanalytical skills. However, some are of a more serious nature. Sometimes a code or cipher even promises to lead to a fabulous treasure, as in the next case.

Oak Island’s ‘Cipher Stone’

What is considered by some to be among “the great mysteries of the world” (Crooker 1978, 7), derives from a mysterious shaft on Oak Island, Nova Scotia. It was allegedly discovered in 1795 when three young men came upon a shallow depression over which, hanging from a tree limb, was an old tackle block. The trio believed some treasure lay below but they were never able to recover it. Neither has anyone since, although many have tried, only to be thwarted by water flooding the “Money Pit” (as it came to be known) by means of “pirate tunnels” and other problems. Still, zealots are convinced there is a treasure to be claimed, possibly the French crown jewel or Shakespeare’s manuscripts, even perhaps the legendary Holy Grail (Nickell 2001).

Reportedly, sometime in the early nineteenth century (different dates are given), a treasure-hunting consortium dug up a flat stone that bore a cryptic message. This “cipher stone” takes its place with other such reports—of “strange markings” carved on the old tree (Finnan 1997, 28) and even of “a tier of smooth stones . . . with figures and letters cut on them” (quoted in Crooker 1978, 24). No photo exists of any of these, and the cipher stone—assuming it actually existed—has been missing since about 1919. However, its text has allegedly been preserved, although in various forms and differing decipherments. Zoologist-turned-epigrapher Barry Fell thought the inscription was ancient Coptic, its message urging people to remember God lest they perish (Finnan 1997, 148–49).

Figure 2. A cipher, allegedly inscribed on a stone (see inset, bottom center), is only one of many bogus elements of the Oak Island treasure tale. (Illustration by Joe Nickell)

In fact, the cipher text as we now have it has been correctly deciphered—and redeciphered and verified. It is written in a simple-substitution cipher (reproduced in Crooker 1993, 23). I have reconstructed what the cipher stone might have looked like, providing my drawing as an inset to my Oak Island “treasure map” (Figure 2), based on several sources and my own visit to the island in 1999. My independent decipherment, which tallies with those of several modern investigators (Crooker 1993, 19–24), reads, “FORTY FEET BELOW TWO MILLION POUNDS ARE BURIED.” Although he is convinced there was an original inscribed stone, “mentioned in all the early accounts of the Onslow Company’s expedition,” William S. Crooker states (1993, 24): “Obviously the inscription as we know it today is a hoax—a modern invention deliberately made simple to lure potential investors. It is highly unlikely that the originators of the Money Pit left a coded message giving the amount and depth of buried treasure.”

I agree. My own longtime investigation of the Oak Island mystery, however, indicated that the “Money Pit” and “pirate tunnels” were simply natural formations. More­­over, much of the Oak Island saga—especially certain reported actions and alleged discoveries—tally with the “Secret Vault” allegory of Freemasonry. Indeed, the search for the Oak Island treasure “vault” has been carried out largely by prominent Nova Scotia Free­masons, and it appears that the whole affair is an insiders’ one linked to high-level Masonic rituals (Nickell 2001, 219–34).

The foregoing by no means exhaust my examples. The interested reader might wish to consider the mysterious inscription of the Yarmouth Stone in Nova Scotia, which I was permitted to examine in 1999 (Nickell 2001, 190–193), or the infamously un­solved Beale ciphers that tell of a treasure lost since 1817 (Nickell with Fischer 1992, 53–67), among others. More cases no doubt await.

References

Crooker, William S. 1978. The Oak Island Quest. Hantsport, N.S.: Lancelet.

———. 1993. Oak Island Gold. Halifax, N.S.: Nimbus.

Finnan, Mark. 1997. Oak Island Secrets, rev. ed. Halifax, N.S.: Formac.

Gaines, Helen Fouché. 1956. Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and Their Solution. New York: Dover.

Kennedy, William D. 1904. Pythian History. Chicago: Pythian Hist. Publ. Co.

Knights of Pythias. 1960. Encyclopedia Britannica. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 18:804.

Masonic Heirloom Edition Holy Bible. 1964. Wichita, Kansas: Heirloom Bible Publishers.

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.

———. 2001. Real-Life X-Files. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

———. 2007. Deciphering Da Vinci’s real codes. Skeptical Inquirer 31(3) (May/June): 23–25.

———. N.d. Secret Messages. Unpublished typescript; see “Cryptographer,” online at www.joenickell.com/Cryptographer/cryptographer1.html.

Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1992. Mysterious Realms: Probing Paranormal, Historical, and Forensic Enigmas. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Parrish, Thomas. 1986. The American Codebreakers: The U.S. Role in Ultra. Paperback ed. Chelsea, MI: Scarborough House, 1991.

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.

The Shaker motto was “Hands to work, and hearts to God.” Their craftwork em­bodying Shaker design was renowned for its aesthetic simplicity. They sold to the outside world furniture, brooms, nesting boxes, and myriad other craft items and marketed herbs and other goods.

In Kentucky in 1805, the Shakers founded a farming community they called Pleasant Hill. Spanning some 3,000 acres of largely rolling land, it is located about twenty-five miles southwest of Lexington. It consists now of thirty-three restored buildings where Shaker-costumed interpreters demonstrate crafts, give tours, and perform authentic Shaker songs and dance in the Meeting House. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The “haunted” Farm Deacon’s Shop at Pleasant Hill was built in 1809 and remains the oldest permanent structure there. (Pen and ink drawing by Joe Nickell.)

Enter Spirits . . .

Thomas Freese, who became one of the Pleasant Hill Singers in 1996, has collected accounts of alleged spirit encounters there, publishing them in his book, Shaker Ghost Stories from Pleasant Hill, Kentucky (Freese 2005). We met when we had tables next to each other at the Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort. I read my autographed copy of the book with the interest of one who has himself often toured, lectured, and re­searched at Shakertown at Pleasant Hill. (I even prowled the outlying grounds looking for the possible site of a reputed paper mill, only to finally determine the Shakers never had such an enterprise there.)

Freese acknowledges (2005, 3) that “a number of the sightings of Shaker spirits were assumed to be encounters with Pleasant Hill employees who were dressed in Shaker style clothing.” (This is like re-enactment soldiers being mistaken for ghosts at Gettysburg and other historic battlefields [Nickell 2012]). Other apparitions are at­tributable to the percipient being tired or in a daydream state or the like, in which imagery may well up from the unconscious and be superimposed on the visual scene (Nickell 2001).

An overnight guest had a rather common ghostly experience. She awoke at about 3 AM feeling a “heaviness” and seeing a “series of faces” that was, she said, “almost as if I was watching an old movie reel” (Freese 2005, 26–27). She is giving an excellent description of a common “waking dream” that occurs in the twilight between being fully asleep and awake. The heavy feeling is due to the body being still in the sleep mode, and the hallucinatory imagery is common to the experience (Nickell 1995, 41, 214).

A former employee who worked night security at Pleasant Hill recalled his first evening there: “I was in the Trustee’s Office and I went up to check on one of the security locks. When I went up the spiral stairs and reached the top floor, I felt something breathing down the back of my neck. But there wasn’t anyone there.” However, the man concedes that while the sensation may have been “a ghost or the boogie man,” it could also be attributed to “first-night jitters” (Freese 2005, 19).

. . . Or Not

Indeed, a maintenance worker acknowledges that many of the sounds made by old buildings have nothing to do with spirits of the dead. “Pipes will moan,” he says. “I’ve heard that.” And creaking sounds can result from an old building’s settling, from woodwork that yields knocking and popping noises due to temperature changes, and from various other causes. This could well explain the report of a man at work below the floorboards of a shop building who heard “bumps and stomping” (Freese 2005, 10, 19). It could also account for “footsteps” heard here and there (Freese 2005, 9, 20, 45).

There could be similar mundane causes for other spooky happenings: a rocking chair moving by itself (possibly caused by people walking on a rickety floor), rattling pots and pans coupled with an unaccountably open back door (due to a forceful wind), during a storm the repeated sound of something falling (thought to have been possibly “a loose shutter,” but the earwitness was too fearful to investigate), and other incidents (attributable to overactive imaginations or even the outright pranks of others) (Freese 2005, 13, 23, 25, 74).

Sheer superstition can cause someone to imagine the supernatural from the merest coincidence. For instance, when some employees visited the Shakers’ secret worship site that was being excavated by archaeologists, they were greeted with an “unusual sleet storm” that drove them to their cars then “suddenly stopped.” Freese (2005, 106) ventures, “Perhaps the Shaker spirits were restless and had not approved of the excavation?” Yet no unusual storm plagued the actual archaeologists before or after. In any case, to suppose that spirits of the dead were capable of causing a sleet storm is an exercise in magical—superstitious—thinking.

That the Shakers themselves engaged in trancelike behavior, “speaking in tongues,” and channeling “prophecy” has obviously set the stage for impressionable people to expect mystical happenings at Pleasant Hill and to interpret almost any out-of-the-ordinary occurrence accordingly. But are there really spirits of the dead at the site, or are they just expressions of our own hopes and fears?

References

Freese, Thomas. 2005. Shaker Ghost Stories from Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse.

Houran, James, and Rense Lange. 2001. Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company.

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

———. 2001. Phantoms, frauds or fantasies? In Houran and Lange, 2001, 214–223.

———. 2012. The Science of Ghosts (in press). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Figure 1. This photo of the Montauk Monster was widely circulated on the Internet, causing much speculation.

Before long, the original creature was credibly identified as a raccoon by wildlife biologist Jeff Corwin (Boyd 2008). Al­though questions remained, I gave the matter little more attention—for a time.

Case of the Missing Hair

However, when—on an investigative outing on September 19, 2009—I came across a dead raccoon by the roadside, I quickly decided it might be profitable to study the issue further. My wife, Diana, drove the getaway car while I retrieved the roadkill in busy traffic. I subsequently deposited it at a convenient wooded site she dubbed the Raccoon Body Farm (after the famous forensic site maintained by the University of Tennessee). (See Figure 2.) I monitored it to observe developments.

Figure 2. Raccoon roadkill is studied at the author’s Raccoon Body Farm. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

The experiment raised questions. The already putrid carcass decomposed quickly, and in about three days it was largely gone, leaving behind a swarming mass of maggots plus all of the raccoon’s fur (Figure 3). As I looked again at the Montauk Monster photo, I thought the creature’s fur loss needed explaining. One suggestion was mange (Radford 2009), which can produce strange-looking creatures. (Indeed, Diana and I once went in search of a Bigfoot in Pennsylvania that turned out to be a mangy bear [Nickell 2008; “Big Foot” 2008]. More recently I examined, up close, a mangy coyote mistaken for a “chupacabra” near Springfield, Missouri [Nickell 2011].) However, long familiar with mange from my boyhood days in eastern Kentucky, I did not think the Montauk Monster looked like a case of mange.

Figure 3. After three days, the decomposition is advanced, but the animal’s fur remains. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

Paleontologist and science blogger Dar­ren Naish (2008) observed that water-logged creatures often lose their fur. But what was a raccoon doing in the ocean in the first place—if it did not just die on the beach, and if it really was a raccoon?

A housefly on the creature’s back allowed photo enlargement (by colleague Tom Flynn) to be made approximately life size (assuming an upper limit for the fly as 12mm) and the carcass to be measured as about 65cm (approximately 25.6 inches) long. This is well within the range of the adult common raccoon, Procyon lotor (accord­ing to the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Mammals [Whitaker 1996, 748], which gives a length range of 24–37 inches).

Those who doubted the raccoon identification had their main arguments refuted by Darren Naish (2008). First, whereas the creature was said to be too long-legged for a raccoon, Naish observed: “Raccoons are actually surprisingly leggy”; he asserted that “claims that the limb proportions of the Montauk carcass are unlike those of raccoons are not correct.” Secondly, claims that the creature had a “beak” prompted Naish to say of raccoons: “The tendency for the soft tissues of the snout to be lost early on in decomposition immediately indicates that the ‘beak’ is just a defleshed snout region: we’re actually seeing the naked premaxillary bones. . . . The Montauk animal has lost its upper canines and incisors (you can even see the empty sockets [in one photo]). . . .”

Viking Funeral?

I recalled an earlier claim that the presence of a hairless raccoon at Montauk had been explained—and then the explanation dismissed as not credible. Reportedly, three young men had found a dead raccoon on nearby Shelter Island two weeks earlier. As a lark, they gave it a “Viking funeral”: sending it adrift on a makeshift raft (made of twigs and an inflatable toy)—containing a watermelon and cloth scraps—after setting the carcass afire. (Their prior revelry involved a “waterboarding endurance competition,” and later hijinks included a “clothespins-on-your-genitals challenge.” Many were skeptical of the trio’s story, pointing out what a circuitous fifteen-mile route the carcass would have had to travel to get to Montauk (“The Latest” 2009).

However, an investigator is not a dismisser who ignores evidence because it is inconvenient or merely because someone’s behavior does not comport with what he or she thinks someone would do in a situation. Neither is an investigator the equivalent of a newspaper’s rewrite staffer. Mysteries are solved by the use of the best, corroborative evidence, together with the principle of Occam’s razor (that the preferred hypothesis is the one that makes the fewest assumptions consistent with the evidence). It turns out there is considerable corroborative evidence for the “Viking funeral” claim.

Figure 4. A “Viking funeral” appears to account for the presence and condition of the Montauk Monster.

First, data on the surface currents and winds in the area show that the “Viking funeral” critter would likely have been pushed in the proper direction (“The Latest” 2009). Significantly, the trio provided photographs documenting their launching. The snapshots (see Figure 4) clearly show a dead raccoon—first being launched on a raft of sticks as claimed, then blazing and adrift. Also the Montauk Monster has what appears to be a strip of cloth around its right foreleg, possibly linking it to scraps of cloth used with the “Viking funeral” raccoon. (Enlarge­ment of one of the trio’s photos shows what could be a band around the raccoon’s right foreleg.) Moreover, the forelegs of the latter are in the same approximate position with respect to each other as those of the Mon­tauk Monster (“Has the Montauk” 2009). Finally, the latter’s flesh has a decidedly baked appearance, consistent with the re­ported burning.

Therefore, the best evidence thus far indicates—until perhaps better evidence comes to light—that the Montauk Monster was neither a hoax (involving either a fake latex creature or a skinned animal) nor a mangy, gone-swimming-and-drowned critter; instead, it is an identifiable raccoon whose dead body was set ablaze and adrift on a makeshift raft as part of a comically wry ritual dubbed a “Viking funeral.” The dead raccoon does seem to be achieving a kind of immortality as a result.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the research assistance of Tom Flynn and Henry Huber as well as CFI Libraries Direc­tor Timothy Binga.

References

Big Foot in the Pennsylvania wilds. 2008. Online at http://www.angelfire.com/pa2/stonemanguitars/bigfoot.html; accessed February 27, 2008.

Boyd, Aaron. 2008. Naturalists confirm Montauk Monster is relative of Rocky Raccoon. Online at http://www.hamptons.com/print.php?articleID=4474; accessed December 23, 2009.

Has the Montauk Monster mystery been solved? 2009. Online at http://gawker.com/5278112/has-the-montauk-monster-mystery-been-solved; publ. June 4, 2009; accessed December 22, 2009.

The latest Montauk Monster theory: A compleat accounting. 2009. Online at http://gawker.com/5280493/the-latest-montauk-monster-theory-a-com; accessed December 22, 2009.

Naish, Darren. 2008. What was the Montauk monster? Online at http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/08/the_montauk_monster.php; accessed October 27, 2009.

Nickell, Joe. 2008. Personal journal entry, February 24.

———. 2011. Chupacabra attack (blog post). Avail­able online at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/Chupacabra_attack/; accessed Febru­ary 17, 2012.

Radford, Benjamin. 2009. Hide the kids and wake the neighbors: The Montauk Monster returns! Skeptical Briefs 19(3) (September): 14.

Whitaker, John O. Jr. 1996. Field Guide to North American Mammals, revised ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

The term ape-man is used in two major ways: scientifically, it designates any extinct primate having structural characteristics that are intermediate between man and ape (Webster’s 1980); popularly, the term also describes any of the various legendary hairy creatures that are characterized as “human-like apes or apelike humans”—the North American Sasquatch/Bigfoot, for example (Clark and Pear 1997, 207, 467). As CFI’s visiting scholar in China during October 2010 (in an exchange program with the China Research Institute for Science Popu­larization [CRISP]), I encountered—so to speak—an example of each of these two types of ape man, which some believe are related. As we shall see, each has proved elusive in its own way.

Extinct Primates

One of my excursions out of Beijing was into the cave-pocked mountainous countryside at Zhoukoudian (Figure 1), site of a major twentieth-century paleontological find. As a boy I had been fascinated by the fossils of ape-men. These included a species discovered at this site in the 1920s, which I perused in a book given to me by my geologist uncle, Charles Cunard, titled Historical Geology (Dunbar 1949). My interest was renewed during my stay in China, and I visited the Beijing Museum of Natural History with my colleague and friend, Hu Junping. Although the “Peking Man” exhibit was closed at the time, we were able to gain ac­cess to it, and I resolved to then make a pilgrimage to Zhoukoudian.

Subsequently, at that World Heritage Site, I climbed the steep trails to the caves where Homo erectus pekinensis once lived (Figure 2), possibly making fire and using tools of chipped flint. As his name indicates, this primitive man walked erect, although his low forehead and heavy brow ridges, as well as his protruding jaws and receding chin, show his apelike character (Figure 3).

Figure 2. Caves like this at Zhoukoudian provided shelter to the primitive Homo erectus pekinensis.

In the museum at the site I gazed at the famous fossils of Peking Man—actually copies; the loss of the originals represents one of the unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century. The story begins during World War II when, for safekeeping, numerous bones and teeth and five skulls were packed in wooden crates and entrusted to the U.S. Marine Corps. They were intended to be transported to the United States, but when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the fossil treasure disappeared. According to National Geographic Traveler: Beijing (Mooney 2008),

The fate of Peking Man has been the subject of much speculation. According to one theory, the boxes went to a sea grave when the Awa Maru was sunk by the Americans in the Taiwan Strait. An underwater search of the site found nothing. Then, in 1966, a Japanese soldier “admitted” on his deathbed that he buried the bones under a tree in Ritan Park . . . at the end of the war, but they were not found there either. In 2005 the Chinese government announced a new investigation. It seems that the beguiling mystery of Peking Man continues.

(For more on Peking Man, see Feder 1996, 129, 149–150.)

Figure 3. Heavy brow ridges are among the apelike features of Peking Man. (Photos by Joe Nickell)

While Peking Man stood only about five feet tall, another early resident of what is now China (as well as India and Vietnam) was comparatively huge: an extinct genus whose name means “giant ape,” Giganto­pithecus. The species Gigantopithecus blacki represents the largest primate of all time—a Bigfoot-sized creature, perhaps, weighing over a quarter ton. The first fossilized teeth were found in a Chinese apothecary shop in 1935; further remains—mandibles and teeth—were found at Chinese excavation sites, including cave deposits. Unfortu­nately, given the absence of pelvic and leg bones, the ape’s size is only an estimate, and its mode of locomotion is disputed—although the dominant scientific view is that it walked on all fours (Napier 1973, 173–92; Daegling 2004, 13–16; Feder 1996, 71).

Yeti, et al.

Some cryptozoologists (those who study hidden or unknown animals) believe that fossil ape-men may not be extinct after all and indeed may be the source for reports of Bigfoot-like creatures. Such hairy man-beasts are found across Asia—if sightings, footprints, and other traces are to be be­lieved. They include the Siberian Mirygdy (and its eastern, often-clothed relative, the Chuchunaa), the Mongolian Alma, the Vietnamese Nguoi rung, the Malaysian Sakai, the Nepalese Teh-lma, and others (Coleman and Huyghe 1999, 110–139).

Some of these, such as the Chuchunaa, have been supposed to be Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, extinct humans who lived in Eurasia from about 250,000 to 45,000 years ago). This, even though the legendary creature’s reported height of some six feet six inches is a foot greater than that of the average Neanderthal (Coleman and Huyghe 1999, 116). Homo erectus—as represented by Peking Man and the related Java Man—has also been considered a hypothetical living fossil (Krantz 1992, 186; Napier 1972, 183, 192). Still larger reported ape-men have invited comparison with Gigantopithecus (Heuvelmans 1972, 107; Krantz 1992, 188–93).

China’s best-known man-beasts are the Yeren and the Yeti. The Yeti is the legendary wild man of the Sherpa tribespeople of the Himalayan Mountains, which includes Tibet, an autonomous region of southwestern China. Also known to western explorers and mountaineers as the Abominable Snowman, the Yeti reportedly ranges from the height of a normal man to eight feet tall. Covered with hair, it is also described as having a conical head and large feet. It is known largely through dubious sightings and photographs of its alleged footprints in snow, which fail to constitute credible evidence (Nickell 1995, 224–226).

Bernard Heuvelmans, known as the “father of cryptozoology” and author of the cryptozoological classic On the Track of Unknown Animals, suggested that Yetis might be a surviving Gigantopithecus population. Under attack from man and unable to live any longer in trees, the giant apes could have sought a safe and suitable habitat in the Himalayas, Heuvelmans hypothesized (1972, 97). Others, including anthropologist Grover Krantz (1992, 191–192), postulated that Gigantopithecus subsequently extended its range and evolved into the North American Sasquatch/Bigfoot. How­ever, there are many arguments against either possibility, including an absence of fossil record in each case and the fact that paleontologists have concluded that Gigan­topithecus became extinct about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago (Napier 1973, 178–80; Daegling 2004, 15).

The Yeren

As to the Yeren, it has existed in some version or other in the folklore of southern and central China since ancient times. Its name means “wild man,” but it has also been characterized as a “manbear,” “mountain monster,” “monkeylike” creature, “red-haired mountain man”—even a mountain “ghost” (Coleman and Clark 1999, 260; Poirier et al. 1983, 31). Perhaps the earliest reference to such a creature, dating over 2,000 years ago, is found in the poetry of Qu Yuan, which frequently mentions the Shangui (or “mountain ogres”). A Tang Dynasty (CE 618–907) historian, Li Yanshow, described a group of Hubei wild men, and a Ming Dynasty (CE 1368–1644) pharmacologist, Li Shizhen, reported on several types of wild men in his voluminous Compendium of Materia Medica. Eighteenth-century poet Yuan Mei described an entity that was “monkeylike, but not a monkey” in Shanxi Province (Topping 1981).

Searches for the Yeren have been carried out since at least the 1970s, but the adventurers and filmmakers involved have failed to see the fabled creature. Sightings by others, as well as the usual doubtful footprints and hair and fecal specimens, make up the bulk of the inconclusive evidence for the existence of the alleged creature. Neverthe­less, during my stay in China, the newspaper China Daily (Guo 2010) reported, “Search for elusive ape man continues against the odds.” The article told of a planned expedition by the newly con­stituted Wild Man Research Association, founded in Hubei and focusing on that province’s remote, mountainous area known as the Shennongjia Nature Reserve. The re­port prompted a response from an ornithologist who has long studied fauna in Shen­nongjia. He labels the search nonsense, explaining: “That location is not consistent with that of ape man. There’s a basic standard for judging whether it exists, for example, the species grouping and area of distribution. There’s no area for Wild Man’s activity in Shennongjia.” He concluded by pointing to the failed expeditions of the 1970s and 1980s (Guo 2010).

Descriptions of the Yeren are exceedingly varied. The creature is reported to range in height from as little as three feet to over nine feet. It is usually said to be covered in hair, but that varies in color from grayish-brown to brown, dark-brown to brown-red, red, and even “purple-red wavy hair,” as well as white (Clark and Pear 1997, 262; Poirier et al. 1983, 31–32). Its footprints allegedly range from very small to twenty-one inches or more, and some prints suggest claws (a nonprimate feature). The creature is thought to walk upright or upon all fours, be carnivorous or vegetarian, make bamboo nests or inhabit caves, and so on (Clark and Pear 1997, 260–265; Poirier et al. 1983).

Clearly, if the Yeren is not entirely imaginary—functioning as a sort of folkloric boogeyman—it does not have a single, simple explanation. Sightings may simply be caused by any of such animals as bears, including albino bears, and macaque monkeys, not to mention wolves, wild goats, and numerous other wildlife. Indeed, in 1980 two supposed Yeren shot by a hunter turned out to be the rare and endangered golden monkey, while bears have been suggested as the explanation for certain “manbear” re­ports, just as albino bears (a high incidence of albinism is known in Hubei province) have been put forward for “mountain ghosts.” Mange can give a mysterious ap­pearance to an ordinary creature. For example, an “Oriental Yeti” was apparently a mangy Himalayan weasel, and a Bigfoot whose story my wife and I pursued in northern Pennsylvania was most likely a black bear with mange (Nickell 2011, 61–62).

Some have suggested that the wild man is some human throwback—neither Giganto­pithecus nor Peking Man surely but possibly some oddity like those sometimes exhibited in carnival sideshows (Nickell 2005, 150–58, 202–208). A “monkey baby,” for instance, that lived in Xhin Xhan County of Hubei Province, was simply an unfortunate individual with genetic deficiencies who “walked with a shuffling gait, had a slouched back, had a low misshapen forehead, could only make sounds with no articulate speech, and grinned constantly” (Poirier et al. 1983, 30). Yeren researcher Frank E. Poirier—only a normally hairy westerner who is about five feet eleven inches tall—frightened some local children who “ran away horrified at their encounter with what they screamed to others was the Wildman in their midst” (Poirier et al. 1983, 37–38).

Of course, some Yeren sightings and other evidence may even be due to hoaxing—the work of those seeking notoriety, enjoying pranking, or hoping to boost local tourism. In any event, until a specimen is actually captured or killed, the elusive Yeren—like its nearby and western counterparts, the Yeti and Sasquatch/Bigfoot, re­spectively—will remain in the realm of myth, not in the scientific canon like Homo erectus and Gigantopithecus.

References

Clark, Jerome, and Nancy Pear. 1997. Strange and Unexplained Phenomena. New York: Visible Ink.

Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. 1999. Crypto­zoology: A to Z. The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature. New York: Fireside.

Coleman, Loren, and Patrick Huyghe. 1999. The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide. New York: Avon Books.

Daegling, David J. 2004. Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthro­pologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Dunbar, Carl O. 1949. Historical Geology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 507–509.

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

Guo Rui. 2010. Search for elusive ape man continues against the odds. China Daily (October 12).

Heuvelmans, Bernard. 1972. On the Track of Unknown Animals. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Krantz, Grover S. 1992. Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch. Boulder, Colorado: Johnson Books.

Mooney, Paul. 2008. National Geographic Traveler: Beijing. Washington, DC: National Geographic.

Napier, John. 1973. Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.

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

———. 2011. Tracking the Man-Beasts. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

Poirier, Frank E., Hu Hongxing, and Chung-Min Chen. 1983. The evidence for Wildman in Hubei province, People’s Republic of China. Cryptozoology 2 (Winter): 25–39.

Topping, Audrey. 1981. Wild men of China: Scientists stalk hairy aborigines. Science Digest (August); cited in Poirier et al. 1983, 28.

Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (2nd ed.). 1980. N.p.: William Collins Publishers, s.v. “ape-man.”

A poll in September 2008 showed interest in the celestial beings reaching a new level. Conducted by the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion, the poll of 1,700 respondents yielded 55 percent an­swering in the affirmative to the statement, “I was protected from harm by a guardian angel” (Stark 2008, 57). Christopher Bader, director of the Baylor survey, which also covered a number of other religious issues, found that response “the big shocker” in the report. He ex­plained: “If you ask whether people believe in guardian angels, a lot of people will say, ‘sure.’ But this is different. It’s experiential. It means that lots of Americans are having these lived supernatural experiences” (quoted in Van Biema 2008).

But are these experiences really supernatural? Or are they only natural, the result of misperceptions and even misreporting? A look into the phenomenon of claimed guardian-angel encounters is illuminating.

Angel Guardians

Perhaps the earliest depiction of an angelic being, or a precursor of angels, is a winged figure on an ancient Sumerian stele. The entity is pouring the water of life from a jar into the king’s cup. Other precursors may be the giant, winged, supernatural beings—part animal, part human—that guarded the temples of ancient Assyria, thus perhaps serving as models for the concept that angels are protectors. The word angel derives from the Greek angelos, “messenger”; however, in biblical accounts, the entities not only fulfilled the role of messengers (e.g., Matt. 1:20) but also were avengers (2 Sam. 24:16), protectors (Ps. 91:11), rescuers (Dan. 6:22), and more (Burn­ham 1990, 81–82; Larue 1990, 57–61; Guiley 1991, 20).

Figure 1. Guardian angel depicted in a late nineteenth-century print (author’s collection).

In modern times, angels have been seen primarily as guardians (figure 1). “Angels represent God’s personal care for each one of us,” observes Father Andrew Greeley, a priest turned sociologist-novelist (qtd. in Wood­ward et al. 1993). This “new angelology”—the belief in personal guardian angels—is manifested not only in books but in angel focus groups and workshops, as well as angel bric-a-brac, posters, greeting cards, and so on. Ac­cord­ing to Newsweek: “It may be kitsch, but there’s more to the current angel obsession than the Hallmarking of America. Like the search for extraterrestrials, the belief in angels implies that we are not alone in the universe—that someone up there likes me” (Woodward et al. 1993).

Personal encounters with angels—related as inspirational stories—fill the books on angels. One such account appears in Graham’s book (1975, 2–3). It tells of a little girl who fetches a doctor to help her ailing mother. After caring for the woman, the doctor learns that her daughter died a month before, and in the closet hangs the little girl’s coat; “It was warm and dry and could not possibly have been out in the wintry night.”

Investigating the account, I discovered that it is a very old tale, circulated in various forms, with conflicting details (Nickell 1995, 153–55). Noted folklorist Jan Brun­vand (2000, 123–36) followed up on the tale (with some assistance from me) and demonstrated that it derived from a story told by S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), a physician and writer of prose fiction. Mitchell himself referred to it as “an early [illegible] ghost tale of [mine ?]”—a seemingly tacit admission that the narrative was pure fiction (Nickell 2011).

Encounters

Most of the currently popular angel stories are personal narratives. Among these are tales of “mysterious stranger angels,” ordinary-looking people who “appear suddenly when they are needed, and disappear just as suddenly when their job is done” (Guiley 1993, 65).

This genre includes the “roadside rescue” story, which one source admits “happens so often that it is almost a cliché in angel lore.” Essentially, “In the roadside rescue, the mysterious stranger arrives to help the motorist stranded on a lonely road at night, or who is injured in an accident in an isolated spot. Or, human beings arrive just in the nick of time” (Guiley 1993, 66). One such testimonial has come from Jane M. Howard, an “angel channeler and author.” According to Guiley (1993, 66):

One night, the gas pedal in Janie’s car became stuck, and she ran off the freeway near Baltimore. She stopped the car by throwing the transmission into park. It would not restart, and she began to panic. It was ten P.M. and she was miles from the nearest exit. She prayed to the angels for help, and within minutes, a van pulled up, carrying a man and a woman.

The woman rolled down her window and told Janie not to be frightened, for they were Christians. Even so, many people would have been wary of strangers at night. But the angels gave Janie assurances, and she accepted a ride to a gas station. She discovered that the couple lived in a town near hers, and knew her family. They pulled off to help Janie, they said, because they had a daughter, and they hoped that if their daughter ever was in distress, she, too, would be aided.

Notwithstanding such mundane occurrences, often the intervention is described so as to leave little doubt that it must have been a supernatural event. One such narrative tells of a woman’s visit to an electronics store and a young man who helped her son with some technical knowledge. The woman stated (in Guiley 1993, 65):

I was just dumbfounded. The young man wished us a nice day and left the store. A couple of seconds later, I rushed out the door to thank him, but he was gone. He literally disappeared. The store is in the middle of the block, so you would still be able to see someone walking down the sidewalk. Obviously, this was not an ordinary human. I still get chills about it.

However, we must ask: Was it really only “a couple of seconds later” or could it have been several seconds—long enough for the man to have entered a waiting car or stepped into an adjacent store?

Then there are the bedside angelic encounters, such as a story told by a Louis­ville woman in Burnham’s A Book of Angels (1990, 275–76). One of the woman’s good friends had died but seemed to linger as a “presence.” Moreover, she says,

Twice I have awakened from sleep to see something mystical. I sat up in bed to convince myself I was not dreaming.

To the right of me, hovering about five feet from the floor, was a bright mass of energy, a yellow and orange ball about six inches in diameter. I closed my eyes and reopened them. I even pinched myself to make sure I was really seeing what was be­fore my eyes, and there it remained until I fell asleep again.

I was frightened. About a year later, the same thing happened under the same circumstances. However, this time I asked questions subconsciously and they were answered. They were all in reference to my friend who had left this world. And the overall summation was, I was not to fear or worry, because I was being watched over. His protection, caring, and love were continuing, though his physical being was gone.

One immediately recognizes in this account the unmistakable characteristics of a “waking dream”—a very realistic-seeming hallucination that occurs in the state between full wakefulness and sleep. Waking dreams are responsible for countless supposed visitations by angels, as well as by ghosts, extraterrestrials, demons, and other otherworldly entities that lurk in the subconscious mind (Nickell 1995, 41, 46, 117, 131, 157, 209, 214; Baker 1995, 278).

In still other cases the percipient may simply be a classic fantasizer (Nickell 1995, 40–41, 57). Children are especially well known for engaging in fantasies. Consider, for example, this anecdote related by Sophy Burnham (1990, 4):

Once my mother saw an angel. She was five years old at the time, just a little girl in her nightie, getting ready for bed, when she looked up and saw an angel standing in the bedroom door.

“Auntie!” She pointed at the figure. “Look!” but her beloved auntie could not see.

“Go to sleep, child,” she said. “There’s nothing there.” I don’t know what her angel looked like. When I asked her, my mother’s face took on a dreamy and exalted look, simultaneously nostalgic and alight. She used words like brilliance or radiance, and I have the impression of many colors. But I have no idea what she saw.

As indicated by the aunt’s inability to see it, the angel obviously resulted from a child’s imagination and is no more credible than an eyewitness account of Santa Claus, a leprechaun, or an elf.

Stress can even produce angels in crisis situations. As psychologist Robert A. Baker observes, there is a “well-known psychological fact that human beings, when subjected to extreme fear and stress, frequently hallucinate. These hallucinations, in many in­stances, take the form of helpers, aides, guides, assistants, et al., playing the role of Savior.” Adds Baker, “If the hallucinator also has religious leanings it is easy to understand how such a ‘helper’ is converted into one of the heavenly host, i.e., a guardian angel” (qtd. in Nickell 1995, 157–58).

Then there are stories that appear to fall into the category of urban legends. One of these features the Angel of Mons that supposedly came to the aid of British soldiers at that Belgian battlefield during World War I. Folklorist David Clarke, for his The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guard­ians, exhaustively investigated the story, finding it had been inspired by a fictional tale “at a time when the British people were desperate for news of a miracle” (2004, 241). Appearing in the London Evening News of September 29, 1914, “The Bow­men” by Arthur Machen dramatized the British routing of the Germans in symbolic terms of St. George and “his Agincourt bowmen.” Many read the story as true, prompting rumors of eyewitness accounts. Concludes Clarke (2004, 246):

In 1914, Britain was an imperial nation with a long tradition of success in combat that was sustained by belief in divine intervention. At Mons, the cream of the British Army narrowly escaped defeat at the hands of the Germans during the first month of the war. Many believed it was a miracle, and Arthur Machen’s story provided a perfect conduit for the creation and transmission of a reassuring modern legend that was based upon ancient precedents. His literary skills gave the story a resonance and power that would sustain it long beyond his lifetime. It was a legend that had an important and positive function during the war, sustaining hope, boosting patriotic optimism and shoring up faltering faith during the dark days of the Somme, Passchendaele and all the other disastrous battles that almost exterminated a generation of young men. Today the Angel of Mons remains one of the undying icons of that war and lives on as a symbol of the loss of innocence that was the legacy it left upon the British psyche. This legend re-emerged for a brief spell during the national crisis of 1940, at Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain. Maybe one day the angels will be needed again.

The concept of guardian angels, notes one writer (Willin 2008, 37), “was given a huge impetus” by the publication of Machen’s tale.

Photographing Angels

Thus far we have considered personal ac­counts of angels acting as guardians; however, if such accounts represent only what serious researchers disparage as “anecdotal evidence,” then what about photographic evidence—photos offered to support claims of angelic encounters? Unfortunately, the evidence is at best unconvincing, usually easily explainable. Many touted examples, for instance, are nothing more than simulacra, images perceived by the mind’s tendency to “recognize” common shapes in random patterns, like seeing pictures in inkblots, clouds, woodgrain patterns, and the like (Nickell 2007, 18).

Such images may also be faked. Consider the “Cloud Angel” photo circulated by Betty Malz, author of Angels Watching Over Me and other books. The picture Malz (1993) was kind enough to send me was accompanied by a brief narrative telling how a honeymooning couple had taken the photo from the window of their airplane. They had undergone severe turbulence that provoked them to pray for safety, whereupon the turbulence soon subsided and later the angel-shaped cloud appeared in one of their photos. It turns out, however, that the same picture has a long history—touted variously as an image of Christ taken during Hurricane Hugo (“Experts” 1990) and a “ghostly ap­parition” taken in 1971 by an “ordained spiritual minister” (Holzer 1993). Suspi­ciously, the cloud lacks the three-dimensional qualities of genuine cloud photographs as determined by a computer imaging expert (Nickell 2001, 200–03).

Much more recently, a few “angel” photos were included in the book The Para­normal Caught on Film by Melvyn Willin (2008, 36–37, 42–43, 46–47, 62–63). Alas, however, these range from the poorly documented to the suspiciously anonymous and are attributable to a variety of a photographic anomalies including reflections, simulacra, and other factors, as well as outright fakery.

As these narrative and photograph examples demonstrate, to many people guardian angels offer comfort in difficult times, while to others they are confirmation of deeply held religious or New Age beliefs. However, the evidence for their existence appears as ethereal, elusive, and doubtful as the alleged entities themselves.

Acknowledgments

As always, I appreciate the assistance of Timothy Binga, director of the Center for Inquiry Libraries.

References

Baker, Robert A. Afterward to Nickell 1995, 275–85.

Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2000. The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story! Chicago: University of Illinois.

Burnham, Sophy. 1990. A Book of Angels. New York: Ballantine Books.

CNN “Headline News.” 1993. CNN/Time/Newsweek poll cited December 18.

Clarke, David. 2004. The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians. Chichester, Eng­land: John Wiley & Sons.

Experts call “Hugo Christ” photo fake. 1990. Charle­ston, South Carolina, Evening Post (April 12).

Graham, Billy. 1975. Angels: God’s Secret Agents. Gar­den City, New York: Doubleday.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 1991. Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience. New York: Harper­Collins.

———. 1993. A radiance of angels. Fate (December): 60–68.

Holzer, Hans. 1993. America’s Restless Ghosts. Stamford, Connecticut: Longmeadow Press.

Larue, Gerald A. 1990. The Supernatural, the Occult and the Bible. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

Malz, Betty. 1993. Photograph and letter to Joe Nickell, March 17.

Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, New York: Prome­theus Books. (A portion of the material for this article was taken from this source.)

———. 2001. Real-Life X-files. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

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

———. 2011. The Doctor’s ghostly visitor: Tracking ‘The Girl in the Snow.’ Skeptical Briefs 21(2) (Summer): 5–7.

Stark, Rodney. 2008. What Americans Really Believe: New Findings from the Baylor Surveys of Religion. With Christopher Bader, et al. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press.

Van Biema, David. 2008. Guardian angels are here, say most Americans. Available online at www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1842179,00.html; accessed September 19, 2008.

Willin, Melvyn. 2008. The Paranormal Caught on Film. Cincinnati, Ohio: David & Charles.

Woodward, Kenneth L., et al. 1993. Angels. Newsweek (December 27): 54.

“Help”

Musick’s narrative, titled “Help,” relates how “Doctor Anderson” was awakened by a knock at the door “just past midnight.” He found on his doorstep a girl of twelve or thirteen who was dressed in a blue coat and carrying a white muff. She implored him to hurry to “the old Hostler place,” where her mother was desperately ill, and then she darted down the road. Anderson picked up his doctor’s bag, quickly saddled his horse, and hurried on his way until “he saw the glow of a lamp in the old Hostler house.”

Finding a bedridden woman inside, the physician put wood on the dying fire and set to work to treat her fever. When she had rallied, he told her how fortunate she was that her daughter had fetched him. “But I have no daughter,” the woman whispered. “My daughter has been dead for three years.” Anderson described to her how the girl had been dressed; the woman admitted that her daughter had had such clothing and indicated where the items were hanging.

Thereupon, relates the narrative’s final paragraph, “Doctor Anderson strode over to the closet, opened the door, and took out a blue coat and white muff. His hands trembled when he felt the coat and muff and found them still warm and damp from perspiration.”

How do we explain such an event? Well, first we remember to apply an old skeptic’s dictum: before attempting to explain something, make sure it really happened.

Another Version

As it turns out, a book by Billy Graham contains a remarkably similar story (1975, 2–3), wherein the implication is that the little girl in the tale is not a ghost but rather an angel:

Dr. S.W. Mitchell, a celebrated Philadelphia neurologist, had gone to bed after an exceptionally tiring day. Suddenly he was awakened by someone knocking on his door. Opening it he found a little girl, poorly dressed and deeply upset. She told him her mother was very sick and asked him if he would please come with her. It was a bitterly cold, snowy night, but though he was bone tired, Dr. Mitchell dressed and followed the girl. . . .

As Reader’s Digest reports the story, he found the mother desperately ill with pneumonia. After arranging for medical care, he complimented the sick woman on the intelligence and persistence of her little daughter. The woman looked at him strangely and said, “My daughter died a month ago.” She added, “Her shoes and coat are in the clothes closet there.” Dr. Mitchell, amazed and perplexed, went to the closet and opened the door. There hung the very coat worn by the little girl who had brought him to tend her mother. It was warm and dry and could not possibly have been out in the wintry night. . . .

Could the doctor have been called in the hour of desperate need by an angel who appeared as this woman’s young daughter? Was this the work of God’s angels on behalf of the sick woman?

Graham provides no documentation beyond the vague reference to Reader’s Digest, which in any event is hardly a scholarly source. In fact, I soon discovered that the tale is an old one, circulated in various forms with conflicting details. For example, as “The Girl in the Snow,” it appears in Margaret Ronan’s anthology of Strange Unsolved Mysteries. While Graham’s version is of implied recent vintage, that by Ronan is set on a “December day in 1880.” Whereas Graham states that the doctor was “awakened by someone knocking on his door,” Ronan tells us “the doorbell downstairs was ringing violently.” Absent from the Graham version is the suggestion that the little girl was a ghost, not an angel; for example, Ronan says the child looked “almost wraithlike in the whirling snow,” and that “at times she seemed to vanish into the storm. . . .” In Graham’s account, the doctor is credited with simply “arranging for medical care,” while Ronan insists Mitchell “set about at once to do what he could for her” and “by morning he felt that at last she was out of danger.” Although both versions preserve the essential element that the woman’s little girl had died a month before, Graham’s version quotes the mother as saying, “Her shoes and coat are in the clothes closet there,” while Ronan’s has her stating, “All I have left to remember her by are those clothes hanging on that peg over there.” Indeed the latter account does not describe a coat and shoes but states: “Hanging from the peg was the thin dress he had seen the child wearing, and the ragged shawl” (Ronan 1974, 99–101).

S. Weir Mitchell

Variant Tales

There are many other versions—or “variants” as folklorists say—of the proliferating tale. Of the five others I discovered, all feature the physician S. Weir Mitchell, but only two suggest the time period. Unlike the Graham (1975) and Ronan (1974) versions, which have the garments in a “clothes closet” and hanging from a peg, respectively, four of the other five variant tales say the clothes are in a “cupboard”; one has them in a “shabby chiffonier” (Edwards 1961, 52). There are differences in the clothes: Colby (1959) lists a “little dress” and “tattered shawl”; Edwards (1961) a “heavy dress,” “hightop shoes,” and “gray shawl” with a “blue glass pin”; Hurwood (1967) “all the clothes the child had worn when he saw her earlier”; Tyler (1970) that exact same wording; and Strange Stories (1976) “her shoes and [folded] shawl.”

No doubt there are still other versions of the story. Variants are a “defining characteristic of folklore,” according to distinguished folklorist Jan H. Brunvand (1978, 7), since oral transmission naturally produces differing versions of the same story. In this case, however, Brunvand notes that many of the variants are explained by writers copying others (Tyler from Hurwood, for instance) but adding details and making other changes for literary purposes (Brunvand 2000, 132). In any case, Brunvand (1981, 21) observes that when there is no certain original, the multiple versions of a tale provide “good evidence against credibility.” But was there an identifiable original of the Mitchell story?

Brunvand (2000, 123–36) followed up on the tale (with some assistance from me). Eventually he turned up a couple of versions that supposedly came from Mitchell himself. One was published in 1950 by R.W.G. Vail, then-director of the New York Historical Society:

One day in February, 1949, Dr. Philip Cook of Worcester, Mass., while on a visit to New York City, told me this story which he had heard the famous doctor and writer S. Weir Mitchell tell at a medical meeting years ago. (Dr. Mitchell died in 1914).

“I was sitting in my office late one night when I heard a knock and, going to the door, found a little girl crying, who asked me to go at once to her home to visit a very sick patient. I told her that I was practically retired and never made evening calls, but she seemed to be in such great distress that I agreed to make the call and so wrote down the name and address she gave me. So I got my bag, hat, and coat and returned to the door, but the little girl was gone. However, I had the address and so went on and made the call. When I got there, a woman came to the door in tears. I asked if there was a patient needing attention. She said that there had been—her little daughter—but that she had just died. She then invited me in. I saw the patient lying dead in her bed, and it was the little girl who had called at my office.”

Brunvand (2000, 123–36) also turned up an interesting letter from the Mitchell papers. Dated November 2, 1909, it had been written to Mitchell by physician Noel Smith of Dover, New Hampshire. It read:

S. Weir Mitchell, M.D.

My dear Doctor:—

Please pardon my intrusion upon your valuable time, but—as I should like the truthfulness, or otherwise, of what follows established, I have taken the liberty of addressing you.

A travelling man, a stranger, accosted me a few days since at one of our principal hotels, knowing that I was a physician, asking me if I believe in the supernatural, communications with the spirits of departed friends, etc.—I assured him that I had never experienced any personal observations or manifestations that would lead me to any such belief. He then related to me the following story, vouching for its authenticity.—He was a member of some organization, I think, in N.Y., and they had lectures now and then upon various topics. One evening it was announced that prominent men were present who would in turn relate their most wonderful experiences. You was [sic] the first called upon, and you stated that you could tell your most wonderful personal experience in a few words. You went on to say that you were engaged in writing late one evening in your library when somebody knocked three times upon the library door. This was thought to be very strange, as electric bells were in use. Upon opening the door, a little girl, about 12 years of age stood there, having a red cloak for an outer garment. She asked if you were Dr. Mitchell, and wished you to go at once to visit her mother professionally, as she was very ill. You informed her that you had given up general practice, but that Dr. Bennett lived diagonally across the street, and that you would direct her to his door, which you did. In a few moments the raps upon your door were repeated, and you found the girl there a second time. She could not obtain Dr. Bennett’s services, and urged you to accompany her home; and you did so. She conducted you to a poor section of the city and up a rickety flight of stairs into a tenement house. She ushered you into a room where her mother lay ill upon a bed. You prescribed for the sick lady, giving her some general directions for future guide, and assured her that it was only at the very urgent and persistent efforts of her daughter that you were prevailed upon to come to her. The woman said that that was strange: that she had no daughter—that her only daughter had just died and her body reposed in a casket in the adjoining room. You then looked into this room & viewed the remains of a girl about 12 years of age, while hanging upon the wall was a red cloak.

I am curious to know, doctor, whether you ever had any such experience, or any approach thereto. Hence these words. Let me say right here that Mrs. Smith & myself enjoyed very much the reading together the “Red City” when running in the Century Magazine.

Thanking you in advance for your reply to this inquiry. I am

Yours Sincerely

Noel Smith

The Revelation

Mitchell wrote the following at the top of Smith’s letter in his own handwriting: “One of many about an early [illegible] ghosttale of [mine?]”—a seemingly tacit admission that the ghost narrative was pure fiction.

Indeed, Mitchell must surely be alluding to this very matter when, in his novel Characteristics ([1891] 1909, 208–209), the protagonist, North, observes:

It is dangerous to tell a ghost-story nowadays. . . . A friend of mine once told one in print out of his wicked head, just for the fun of it. It was about a little dead child who rang up a doctor one night, and took him to see her dying mother. Since then he has been the prey of collectors of such marvels. Psychical societies write to him; anxious believers and disbelievers in the supernatural assail him with letters. He has written some fifty to lay this ghost. How could he predict a day when he would be taken seriously?

So there we have it: Mitchell’s oblique confession that he had simply conjured up a ghost tale, filled it with literary verisimilitude (semblance of truth), and sent it forth. Later, as Brunvand (2000, 129) notes, Mitchell was “chagrined to find the public believing that he was presenting the story as the literal truth.” Mitchell—like the Fox Sisters whose phony spirit communications spawned the modern spiritualist movement (Nickell 2007, 39)—discovered that the genie could not be put back into the bottle.

References

Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1978. The Study of American Folklore. New York: W.W. Norton.

———. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: W.W. Norton.

———. 2000. The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story! Chicago: University of Illinois.

Colby, C.B. 1959. Strangely Enough (abridged). New York: Scholastic Book Services.

Edwards, Frank. 1961. Strange People. New York: Signet.

Graham, Billy. 1975. Angels: God’s Secret Agents. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

Hurwood, Bernhardt J. 1967. Strange Talents. New York: Ace Books.

Mitchell, S. Weir. (1891) 1909. Characteristics. New York: Century.

Musick, Ruth Ann. 1965. The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

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

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

Ronan, Margaret. 1974. Strange Unsolved Mysteries. New York: Scholastic Book Services.

Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. 1976. Pleasantville, New York: The Reader’s Digest Association.

Tyler, Steven. 1970. ESP and Psychic Power. New York: Tower Publications.

During a period of twenty-two months beginning in July 1979, thirty African American children and young men in Atlanta either disappeared or were found murdered. The string of senseless killings made national and international headlines. In time, in response to public pressure, a special Atlanta Homicide Task Force was created to solve the crimes. The case even attracted then–President Ronald Reagan, who was characterized by one source as “hardly the black community’s most sensitive friend”; in fact, he pledged $1.5 million in federal funds to assist the investigation (Fido 1993, 283).

The case proved complicated, in part because the murders did not always have the same modus operandi, especially regarding manner of death. Thus, early on, detectives believed they were looking for multiple suspects (Fisher 1995, 142).

The Fiber Evidence

As the task force’s work progressed, criminalist Larry Peterson of the Georgia State Crime Laboratory began to identify distinctive fibers found on the victims’ bodies. Among these were yellowish-green nylon fibers and violet acetate fibers—in all, twenty-eight different fibers plus dog hairs were recovered.

In the meantime, the police arrested a young black man named Wayne Williams as a suspect in the homicides. Officers who had a bridge under surveillance heard a splash at about 2:00 AM on May 22, 1981, and stopped the only car that had been on the bridge at that time, which was driven by Williams. A search of his home and car provided numerous fibers similar to those found on the victims’ bodies. In addition, witnesses testified that they had seen Williams with some of the victims, and of course there was the fact that after his arrest the murders ceased.

At trial, Williams’s defense attorneys sought to discredit the fiber evidence, arguing that a particular fiber might be discovered in the vehicle or home of any of numerous people. But the prosecution challenged the jury to consider the limited number of people who would have the particular carpet that was the source of one distinctive type of fiber; out of those, they asked, how many could also be expected to have a particular bedspread that was the source of light green cotton fibers blended with violet acetate fibers? And of the few who might have the same carpet and bedspread, how many would also drive a 1970 Chevrolet station wagon as well as own a German shepherd? And so on. During the time when Williams was known to have been using a rented car, fibers that could be matched to that car’s carpeting were discovered on victims’ bodies.

The jury understood the evidence, and on February 27, 1982, they convicted Wayne Williams of the two murders for which he was tried. He was sentenced to life in prison, whereupon Atlanta’s police commissioner closed twenty-one other murder cases (Nickell and Fischer 1999).

Later that same year, at an international microscopy conference at which I was a presenter along with Larry Peterson, I was able not only to see the criminalist’s impressive presentation of the fiber evidence but to discuss it with both Peterson himself and world-famous microanalyst Walter McCrone (best known for discovering paint pigments on the Shroud of Turin). McCrone had been called on to review Peterson’s work on the Williams case and had done so favorably.

In 1998, after Williams’s lawyers argued that prosecutors had withheld evidence in the case, Georgia circuit judge Hal Craig upheld the convictions. He termed the fiber evidence “the strongest scientific link in this case.” As a result of Soledad O’Brien’s new, in-depth look at the Atlanta child murders, Williams’s guilt not only seems well established, but there is even new evidence. The DNA from two human hairs found inside one victim’s shirt excludes some 98 percent of people in the world, yet it is consistent with the DNA of Wayne Williams who, according to experts, “cannot be excluded.”

Psychic Detectives?

During the Atlanta child murders case that ended with the arrest and conviction of Wayne Williams, something of a parallel “investigation” took place. As Soledad O’Brien reported, the Atlanta Homicide Task Force was inundated with sketches of the alleged serial killer—no two alike—many of them offered by psychics. For example, my friend and fellow skeptic, the late Henry Gordon, told of appearing on a television talk show in Montreal with self-styled Ottawa intuitive Earl Curley. Curley boasted he had been called in on the child murders case by the FBI for whom he provided a composite drawing and descriptive profile, implying that his input resulted in the apprehension of Wayne Williams shortly thereafter. In fact, Gordon (1994, 24) called the FBI’s Press Information Office and was told, “Mr. Earl Curley contacted our Atlanta office (voluntarily) in 1980 and 1981. He sent in some kind of writeup of what he thought the subject would look like, and he sent in some kind of drawing. However, there was no impact on the case as a result of what he sent in.”

The psychics were merely a sideshow to the circus atmosphere that prevailed in Atlanta at the time. Along with Williams’s bold, defiant antics, “psychics were swarming around, all giving their own ‘profiles,’ many dramatically contradicting each other,” stated pioneer criminal profiler John Douglas (Douglas and Olshaker 1995, 211).

Alleged clairvoyant Dorothy Allison, in her day the most famous “police psychic” in America, traveled to Atlanta in 1980. While riding around in a limousine, Allison made numerous pronouncements about the case. Nothing she said was of any help, however, and one mother complained that the clairvoyant failed to return her only photo of her missing son. Forensic professor Walter Rowe (1994, 238) charged that Allison “provided police with 42 different names, none of which was Wayne or Williams.” Although some sources claim she did include the name Williams, the chief of police denied it, and in any case there were 6,913 persons of that surname in the Atlanta phone book at the time (Dennett 1994, 51–52).

In cases in which psychics like Allison do appear successful—aside from making generalizations or actually having inside information (as from a tip)—they are usually relying on what is called “retrofitting” (or after-the-fact matching). For instance, as a New Jersey Police captain said of Allison, her predictions “were difficult to verify when initially given.” He added, “The accuracy usually could not be verified until the investigation had come to a conclusion” (qtd. in Dennett 1994, 46). To see how this works, suppose the psychic saw water and the number seven: after the facts are in, some stream or body of water can usually be associated with the case, and the number linked to a highway, distance, number of people in a search party, or some other possible interpretation. Then again, some psychics falsely claim successes, while others have engaged in attempted bribery or impersonation of police to seek information they could pass off as mystically acquired (Nickell 1994).

Conclusions

As demonstrated by the Atlanta Child Murders case, psychics are absolutely no help whatsoever in identifying serial killers or providing any breaks in these cases. Instead, Wayne Williams was stopped and brought to justice due to diligent police work—primarily the bridge-stakeout strategy and the use of forensic science (fiber comparison and, more recently, DNA analysis). There was one other factor: a jury was able to understand and assess the evidence using critical-thinking skills.

References

Dennett, M. 1994. America’s most famous psychic sleuth: Dorothy Allison. In Nickell 1994, 42–59.

Douglas, J., and M. Olshaker. 1995. Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crimes Unit. New York: Scribner.

Fido, M. 1993. The Chronicle of Crime. New York: Carroll and Graff.

Fisher, D. 1995. Hard Evidence. New York: Dell.

Gordon, H. 1994. The man with the radar brain: Peter Hurkos. In Nickell 1994, 21–29.

Nickell, J., ed. 1994. Psychic Sleuths: ESP and Sensational Cases. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

Nickell, J., and J.F. Fischer. 1999. Crime Science: Methods of Forensic Detection. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

O’Brien, S. 2010. Atlanta Child Murders. CNN television special, first aired June 10.

Rowe, W.F. 1994. Psychic detectives: A critical examination. In Nickell 1994, 236–244.

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.

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.