In February 2009 the family of a recently buried man found his tombstone moved aside. After this occurred three more times, they called the police to find out who was disturbing their relative’s resting place. The police decided to place a hidden camera in front of the burial spot, and the resulting footage amazed onlookers.

A Chilling Mystery

“[It’s] Absurd, [and] it really gave me the creeps,” Anna Van der Meer, spokesperson for the Fryslân police, told the media. “When I saw the video I was flabbergasted. You can see the stone slide aside, almost falling to the floor. Then it comes to a halt against another gravestone of an adjacent grave, leaving the tomb open. How is that possible? I don’t know, the lid weighs around 400 kilos. Furthermore, in the video you can clearly see that the stone is standing still then unexpectedly, in the blink of an eye, it slides aside over a distance of about a yard. I have never seen anything like this in my whole career. We have no possible explanation.”

This poses quite a challenge for a mystery detective. Since I was planning a lecture tour of northern Europe, I called on my good friends at the Stitching Skepsis, the Netherlands’ group of skeptics. Jan Willem Nienhuys, secretary of the group, told me that no one in Aaslum was really afraid or concerned about what had happened, not even the priest of the church where the graveyard was located.

Since I was going to be in the Netherlands soon, I was hoping to witness the sliding of the stone firsthand, but Jan Willem explained to me that the stonecutter had taken the lid back in order to roughen the bottom part. He later secured it in place with pegs and cement, preventing any further movement. From that moment, the phenomenon stopped.

I was then able to count on the help of another good friend from the Stitching Skepsis, Gert Jan van’t Land, who got in touch with the police investigators. Unfortunately, the police refused to make available their files or any other formal information about the investigation because of the Dutch Law on the Protection of Police Information. However, Inge Oevering of the Nethe­rlands Forensic Institute told Gert Jan, contrary to what newspapers had reported, that they did not conduct any investigation into the tombstone or the tape made on the graveyard. The Dutch “CSI-investigators” therefore could not provide any insight or information on the case. Gert Jan was also able to ascertain that Paul Andriessen, a Dutch geology professor incorrectly cited in the national newspapers as having studied the videotape, never saw the recording of the moving tombstone. He had only received a telephone call from a journalist who was interested in his opinion about the case.

A Freezing Solution

What is the most likely explanation for this unusual phenomenon? Some ghoul or ghost?  According to the police officers who watched the video, the tape shows only a straight downward movement of the tombstone along the longitudinal axis of the grave and no upward movement of the tombstone, as had been reported in some media. Also, the movement occurred in the afternoon, and the tape shows sunny conditions and some melting snow or ice on the tombstone.

If the police officers in Fryslân gave a correct account of what was on the tape, the opinion of Gert Jan, who is preparing a detailed report on this event, is that the most likely explanation is unusual but not unlikely. The movement was almost certainly caused by water, under the right meteorological circumstances, entering into the crevice between the tombstone and the rectangular stone framework supporting the tombstone.

Several ingredients were needed to make the tombstone move in a straight slide along its longitudinal axis. The fact that the tombstone did not lie completely flat but at a slight angle was a prerequisite for movement by the force of gravity. The very smooth surface of both tombstone and supporting stone was the second ingredient in making the slide possible.

But the final solution lies in the fact that, as church sexton Tjerk Smits explained, every time the tombstone moved, the meteorological conditions were always the same: a cold night with temperatures below freezing, a bit of snow or ice on the tombstone, and sunny weather in the afternoon.

This all leads to the following scenario, as explained by Gert Jan:

Water from rain or melting snow entered the crevice between the tombstone and the supporting piece of granite; low temperatures formed a small layer of ice in the crevice. Since ice needs more space than water, the contact between the tombstone and the supporting pieces of granite probably diminished, [and] more and more the tombstone came to rest on a small layer of ice. The power of expansion of freezing water is considerable—in fact it was used in ancient quarries to split stones. The ice could very well have formed a bridge between the tombstone and the supporting pieces of granite keeping the tombstone in place. The afternoon sun probably heated the black tombstone, and the ice in the crevice melted. As more and more ice melted, the friction between the stones became less and less until the force of gravity won and the tombstone started to move. After [the tombstone] started to move  (it “yielded”), downward movement continued until it was halted by an adjacent gravestone. Continuing movement after a sudden start is a normal phenomenon. It is well known in mechanics that friction between moving parts is less than friction between parts that are not moving.  It can be seen in avalanches: after movement starts, it continues.

The tombstone had been constructed in October 2008. Since then, it appears it was just waiting for the right circumstances that would make movement possible.

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Gert Jan van’t Land, Jan Willem Nienhuys, and all my friends at the Stitching Skepsis for their kind help and assistance.

According to tradition, the Ark, as a physical manifestation of God, possessed extraordinary power able to evoke disasters and defeat enemies. It is thanks to the Ark, for example, that Joshua is able to part the River Jordan. It’s the Ark that destroys the walls of Jericho and allows the Hebrew people to conquer the city.

The Bible implies that the Ark was figuratively last seen in the sky. “Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the Ark of his Covenant.” Some believe that the Ark really existed and are convinced that it is hidden on Earth.

The Lost Ark

According to common interpretation by biblical scholars, the Ark was destroyed in 587 bc, when Babylonian troops led by King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. Some researchers, however, do not accept this interpretation.

“There is no report that the Ark was carried away or destroyed or hidden,” says Richard Elliot Friedman, professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia. “There is not even any comment such as ‘And then the Ark disappeared and we do not know what happened to it’ or ‘And no one knows where it is to this day.’ The most important object in the world, in the biblical view, simply ceases to be in the story.” Actually, there is a quite detailed description in the Old Testament about the Philistines (enemies of the Israelites) carrying the Ark away: “Then the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. When the Philistines took the ark of God, they brought it into the temple of Dagon and set it by Dagon” (1 Samuel 5: 1-5).

Among various hypotheses, there are those who think that the Ark was taken from the Temple before the arrival of the Babylonians. In the First Book of Kings, we read: “And it came to pass in the fifth year of king Rehoboam, that Shishak [Shoshenq I, founder of the twenty-second dynasty] king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem: And he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king’s house; he even took away all: and he took away all the shields of gold which Solomon had made” (1 Kings 14:25-26, King James Bible).

And if Shoshenq I took away the treasures, perhaps he took the Ark as well. That premise inspired George Lucas and Steven Spielberg when they wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, which popularized Indiana Jones as the adventurous archeologist engaged in finding lost relics. When Shoshenq was king, the capital of Egypt was in Bubasti on the Nile delta, which was near Tanis. In the Spielberg film, Indiana Jones finds the Ark in Tanis.

Others have imagined epic adventures in which Templar Knights found the Ark, hid it in a secret underground chamber below Solomon’s Temple, and then took it, along with many other treasures and relics, to some mysterious locale like Chartres Cathedral in France or Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland.

Perhaps more realistic is the discovery made by James Bruce, one of the earliest explorers of Africa, around 1760. Bruce found a document from which it was possible to infer a possible link between Ethiopia and the Hebrews. According to this text, the Ethiopian Queen of Saba (or Sheba) had a child by King Solomon named Menelik. According to legend, Menelik stole the Ark from the temple and took it to Ethiopia around 950 bc.

This piece of information remained relatively unknown until English journalist Graham Hancock decided to investigate it. “The idea that the Ark of the Covenant could be hidden in Ethiopia stimulated my imagination and my curiosity,” says Hancock.

In Axum, Ethiopia, there is a temple that allegedly houses the Ark. “There were many facts that needed explaining. The fact that there existed a population of Hebrews in Ethiopia practicing the Old Testament, the fact that a Christian country worshiped a pre-Christian relic, the fact that there was no other country that claimed to own the real Ark. . . . [These are] mysteries for which I wanted to find the answers,” says Hancock.

He researched the legend of the Ark for two years and wrote a 600-page book, The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant. His conclusions, however, are less than impressive. At the end of his investigation he found himself chatting with the guardian of the temple in Axum, who forbade him to enter. No one, except for the guardian, could see the Ark. And so the only proof of the existence of the Ark rested on the testimony of the guardian.

Mystery fosters curiosity, and owing to the fact that no one can see the Ark in Axum, Hancock made a fortune thanks to mere speculation. Perhaps in the temple there is a replica of the Ark built according to biblical descriptions, but not even this is certain.

An Electricity Storage Device?

Apart from the possible resting place of the Ark (assuming it really existed), another question that many have tried to answer is what this mysterious object could be. Some believe the Ark has supernatural powers; some see the Ark, the Ten Commandments, and the frequent conversations that Moses had with God as proof of ancient contact with more evolved beings, probably extraterrestrials. Erik Von Däniken, for example, was convinced that the Ark was some kind of radio receiver through which aliens passing in spaceships communicated their will to the prophet. “I seem to remember,” says Von Däniken, “that the Ark was often surrounded by flashing sparks and that Moses made use of this ‘transmitter’ whenever he needed help and advice. Moses could hear the voice of his Lord but could not see his face.”

There is no mention of flashing sparks in Exodus, and Von Däniken eventually changed his mind. He later claimed that maybe the Ark was a miniature nuclear reactor. He suggested that the machine stored water from the night dew, then green algae (chlorella) was added, and manna came out of the machine. The reaction needed to form manna was radiation.

The thought that the Ark was some kind of anachronistic technological artifact is quite appealing to some. Two British enthusiasts, Michael Blackburn and Mark Bennett, researched the topic (Fortean Times, 2006). The Bible says that those who carried the Ark had to be dressed in a specific way and that no one could touch it. In one instance, it appears that the Ark was in danger of falling from the cart, and a man named Uzzah jumped forward in order to stabilize it—he died instantly.

What if the Ark, wondered Blackburn and Bennet, was no less than a primitive electrical condenser? The description in the Bible (a wooden box covered in gold with two golden cherubs facing each other on the lid with wings outstretched and almost touching) reminds one of the Leyden Jar, a very simple device that accumulated and stored a large amount of static electricity that when discharged could deliver a very powerful jolt. “The cherubim would act as the positive and negative terminals,” say the two authors. “Using the example of the 500 gram, coffee-jar-sized Leyden Jar, and assuming that this could store a charge of approximately 200 volts, the Ark would have held the equivalent of 125 such jars, giving it a comparable, if not greater, potential voltage, as well as, more importantly, allowing for a much longer discharge time,” Blackburn and Bennet explained.

All of this is interesting speculation, even though such a hypothesis raises more questions than it answers. How did the ancient Hebrews discover the properties of static electricity? How could they electrically charge the Ark before taking it into procession? And what could be the use of a similar object, apart from producing a strong electrical discharge?

An Invention of the Ancient Egyptians?

The Ark, in fact, should be seen not as a real object but as a symbol, say modern historians of the Old Testament. “I see an enormous disparity between the historical fact and the narration of it,” says Gianantonio Borgonovo, teacher of Exegesis of the Old Testament at Catholic University in Milano, Italy. “Every narration must have a link to some historical fact, but here there is none. What I mean is that when there was the Ark nobody talked about it, now that there is no Ark everybody talks about it.”

It is a fact that no biblical-era figure writes about the Ark except for the prophet Jeremiah, “But his text had been rewritten and corrected a century later, when the Temple had already been destroyed. Another contemporary, Ezekiel, could have talked about the Ark but didn’t,” explains Borgonovo.

Borgonovo continues, “probably, there never was in Solomon’s Temple an object called ‘The Ark of the Covenant.’ It is just a highly symbolic image that, not accidentally, becomes an object of reverence for Christians, which contains the Ten Commandments, some manna, and Aaron’s staff. So, the question now becomes: Why choose the Ark as a symbol? This is a likely consequence of the Egyptian origins of the Hebrew tradition. It was Tutankhamun, in XIV century bc, who gave the most beautiful description of the Ark.”

It was the forgotten pharaohs who depicted the possible origin of the Ark’s tale on the decorated walls of the East-facing pillars of the palace of Ramses II in Luxor. There one can still see a symbolic representation of the feast of Apet, an Egyptian holiday that announced the culmination of the flooding of the Nile, on which the New Year’s harvest depended. On the wall there is a drawing that appears to show an ark carried on long poles supported by the shoulders of a group of priests. This, however, is not a box but a miniature boat carried by sedan-bearers, as in the Biblical tradition.

The link between Apet’s feast and the Ark of the Covenant is clear if one believes that ancient Egyptians used to carry their gods in procession inside the miniature boats. During Apet’s feast, then, “arks” contained small stone representations of the pantheon of Egyptian gods, just like the Ark of the Hebrews contained the stones of the Ten Commandments, symbol of the God of Israel. l

Reference

• Blackburn, Michael and Mark Bennet. Re-Engineering the Ark. Fortean Times 207, March 2006, pp. 48-55.

It’s about midnight and you are heading home. Suddenly, the street lamp above turns off without reason, and you find yourself in the dark. It is natural to experience a chill. But what would you think if street lamps kept turning off when you passed them by?

It is something that many of us have experienced, at least once. Many don’t take notice, but others do and wonder if the cause of such interference lies inside them.

“The fact that so many witnesses are making claims which seem to involve a Street Light Interference (SLI for short), that they are doing so in apparent good faith, and doing so independently of one another and without awareness, that the effect may constitute a phenomenon in its own right, these circumstances encourage us to proceed on the basis that SLI, whatever its nature, does indeed occur.” These are the words of Hilary Evans, English author, fellow researcher and friend, who in 1993 founded “Project SLIDE”.

Says Evans: “Project SLIDE was created simply as a first step towards defining and assessing the apparent phenomenon. As its name implies, it sets out to be little more than an exchange of information between those who are interested.”

The idea is that there appears to be an effect that is not consistent with our current knowledge of how people interact with the physical world, and which occurs in specific circumstances.

Four explanations for SLI have been proposed.

Delusion

“A primary question must be: does SLI occur at all, or are the alleged witnesses deluding themselves?” wonders Evans. “Until the phenomenon is scientifically tested, it is not possible to give a decisive answer to this question. However, SLI has not the ‘appeal’ of witchcraft or abductions: there is nothing like the same psychological pay-off. Individuals seeking to enhance their reputation for possessing special gifts will not find much to flatter themselves with in SLI. In short, it seems highly unlikely that all SLI experiences are delusory.”

Energy Fields

Some believe that what is causing street lamps to turn off could be some kind of “energy” emitted by the human body. Eyewitnesses report that the turning off of the lamp happened while they were tired, stressed, furious, or sad. Some others, however, think it might be some kind of static electricity produced by their body.

However, the only form of energy known to science produced by the human body comes via food and breathing and is then used by the body to walk and work. There are no other energies produced or emitted by the human body (except for body warmth, of course). Static electricity is not produced by the human body but by rubbing things, usually synthetic clothes, in a dry climate. It has nothing to do with one’s state of mind. Furthermore, the static electricity produced by a polyester jacket has no way of interacting with street lamps, usually high above street level.

Paranormal Phenomenon

Paranormal phenomenon is the least likely possibility. Science has never confirmed that the human mind can cause physical effects at a distance, which is what seems to be occurring in SLI. “However,” says Evans, “SLI does have one great advantage over most psychokinetic experiments: the subjects of the effect—the street lamps— are not easily manipulated.” The only problem is that experiments to test SLI are not easy to conduct since this appears to be a phenomenon that just happens at random and is not produced by one willing for it to happen.

Mechanical Effect

“The fact that a mechanical device is involved logically suggests that a mechanical explanation should be looked for,” says Evans. But what kind of explanation?

In order to answer this, we need first of all to determine what kind of lamps we are talking about. I asked Mario Bonomo, professor of illuminating engineering at the University of Milano, to illuminate me. “The most common ones, almost all over the world, are sodium vapor lamps. These are gas-discharge lamps that use sodium in an excited state to produce light.” There are two varieties of such lamps: low pressure and high pressure. Low pressure are those that produce the characteristic yellow light, while high pressure give a whiter light that allows colors to be recognized. Street lamps usually have low pressure bulbs.

“These bulbs take three to four minutes to light up and have a lifespan of 8,000 hours, two years approximately,” continues Bonomo. “When a bulb reaches the end of its life it shows a behavior that could explain SLI. Older lamps need a higher tension than the one they receive. This means that when they are turned on, the tension is sufficient. But when they reach their maximum luminosity, the tension required is more than what is received. This causes the lamp to turn off. Now, in order for it to light up again, the bulb needs to cool off first. And this takes a few minutes. After this, the process, known as cycling, starts again from the beginning until the bulb is substituted with a new one.”

This could explain the repeated turning on and off of the lamps. But how can we explain it when it is not just one lamp turning off but all the lamps on a street?

“There are two possible causes,” says Bonomo. “The first one is that the bulbs on that specific street are all the same age and, thus, they all get old at the same time, producing clustered but random on and off cycles. However, if street lamps in a specific street turn off all at once, then the problem lies in the central electric-control panel. There usually is one that controls all the lights in a specific block, or one every 200 square meters. A power failure or a short-circuit can cause all the lamps controlled by that panel to turn off.”

Finally, if the connection between the lamp and its socket is faulty and gets interrupted for some reason, even for a fraction of a second, the bulb turns off and then it will need a few minutes to turn on again. A contact, especially if already faulty, can be interrupted even by some minor vibration, like a kid kicking the lamp post, a large truck passing in the street, wind rocking the bulb, and so on.

The Power of Suggestion

This is all very interesting and could actually explain much of the SLI phenomenon. However, in order to understand fully what might be taking place here, it is important to consider the observer bias as well. Our mind is drawn by significant coincidences, and so we are much more likely to notice when a street light near us turns on or off than when a street light is in a steady state.

It could just be, then, that SLI is a mix of different natural factors. The normal behavior of bulbs getting older, observer bias, and maybe something else, like the fact that some specific lamps, such as those in gardens or on patios, have infrared sensors that can turn them on or off when something is moving within range. Other lamps are programmed with a timer that turns them on or off at specific hours. Some people realize this is the cause of such changes in the lights.

Evans, however, feels that there is something more in SLI and, thus, he says we should proceed as though the phenomenon exists. “For one very good reason, the fact [is] that a good many people are reporting the experience as though an actual phenomenon is involved. Certainly, people can be mistaken or deluded, and we must keep this possibility in mind. But that, too, is something that would have to be proved before we would accept it; and until such time as it is proved, it is right to respect the testimony of people who claim these experiences at first hand.”

The whole thing, however, could become really significant when the same person, at different times and with different lamps, over a consistent period of time, keeps on noticing anomalous behavior of street lamps. So far, however, nobody seems to have had this experience.

Further Reading

1. You can download for free Hilary Evans’s booklet, The SLI Effect, Assap Publications, at assap.org.

The hot, still night was illuminated by a full moon. The two shadowy figures moving along the empty road wondered if this would interfere with their mission.

“Are you sure you took everything?” asked the slender one.

“Of course!” said the shorter one, who was carrying a backpack. “I checked the inventory. I even took the infrared goggles and a telescopic steel rod.”

“Really?”

“Well . . . as a form of self-defense. You never know.”

The two reached a tall, black gate.

“It’s locked.”

“Hold this,” said the shorter one, handing the backpack to his colleague. After searching it, he took out a large ring with a dozen keys attached.

“Here they are! They assured me that with these there would be no problems.”

“We’ll see. . . .”

One at a time, the short fellow inserted the keys in the keyhole. But not one worked.

“Damn! I knew it. We should have checked first that it worked.”

The road was empty. Only one car had passed since Slender and Shorty stopped by the gate, but it did not slow down. The dark shadows hid them from the light.

“All right, if that’s the way it has to be. . . .”

Slender shined a pocket light into the keyhole. “It’s an old Wally model, there should be no problem.”

Shorty took a leather case out of his pocket and opened it. There were a dozen different lockpicks. One was chosen, and the operation started. “It should be no problem,” puffed Shorty, who was crouched on his legs while trying to pick the lock, sweat dripping from his face. “Yeah, it’s easy when you just hold the light and someone else has to do the dirty job.”

“Cut the chatter. Let’s move along.”

After a few more attempts there was a reassuring “click.” The door was open.

“Quick!” snapped Slender. “Stand up.”

“What . . . ?”

“I said quick, get inside!” Slender pushed his mate in the dark hallway and closed the gate. “Don’t say a word.”

They both hid behind a wall, holding their breath. A police car passed by without stopping.

“That was close!” sighed Slender.

Shorty protested. “Close for what? You make it seem like we are two burglars here!”

Slender smiled. “Yeah, and it’s more fun, isn’t it?”

“We are here on a scientific mission,” continued Shorty. “We are not on a secret hunt to rob lost treasures or something like that.”

Slender turned on his pocket light and did not reply. They were in a dark corridor, but down the hall a door that led to the field outside could clearly be seen. It was open when they reached it.

When they stepped outside, the pocket light was no longer needed. The moon was quite bright, but the field, full of a thousand flickering flames, was more luminous. Quite an unexpected view—surreal but almost romantic. Slender regretted he was there with Shorty and not with his girlfriend.

However, it was indisputable: a cemetery at midnight was a sight not to be missed.

Luminous Fungis and Earth Lights

The two mysterious figures in the story above are my friend and colleague Luigi Garlaschelli and myself. Actually, Luigi is not that short, but I needed an easy descriptor for him. And since he is just a little shorter than I am . . . my apologies, Gigi!

The night visits at the Major Cemetery in Pavia, Italy, took place some time ago when we decided it was time to investigate the “will o’ the wisp” phenomenon. Of course, we obtained official permission from the county administration—“scientific purposes” was the reason we gave for our requested visit. We were quite fascinated by this rare luminous phenomenon, a source of all kinds of supernatural tales.

Also known as ignis fatuus, Latin for temporary fire, will o’ the wisps are in fact said to be ghostly lights, usually seen around graveyards and marshes at night. They look like faint flames or a flickering, glowing fog, usually green, that sometimes appears to recede if approached. Folklorists have collected all kinds of legends related to these mysterious lights, including the fact that they could be some form of spirit lights or have a paranormal origin. Science, however, has precious few facts to offer.

Some have proposed that Armillaria, a parasitic kind of fungi known also as “honey fungus,” could be responsible for some of the apparitions. Some species of Armillaria are bioluminescent and may have been mistaken for will o’ the wisps.

According to another theory, the wisps are nothing more than barn owls with luminescent plumage. Hence, the possibility of them floating around reacting to other lights could explain their strange behavior.

In the 1970s, John Derr and Michael Persinger of the Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, put forth a theory that these lights may be generated piezoelectrically under a tectonic strain.

The theory suggests that the strains that move faults also cause heat in the rocks, vaporizing the water in them. Rocks and soils containing piezoelectric elements such as quartz (or silicon) may also produce electricity, which is channeled up through soils via a column of vaporized water until it reaches the surface, somehow displaying itself in the form of earth lights. If correct, this could explain why such lights can behave in an electrical and erratic—or even apparently intelligent—manner.

Persinger thinks that his theory can be used to predict the manifestation of earthquakes and, along the way, explain many UFO sightings. “When the specific equations between UFO reports (the contemporary label for luminous events) and earthquakes in the central U.S.A. between 1950 and 1980 were applied to the 19th century (earthquakes were recorded then), there were predictable peaks in the numbers of luminous events for specific years,” says Persinger.

“Although there were no reports of ‘UFOs’ in the historical newspapers, there were reports of ‘odd air ships’ and ‘phantom balloons.’ The massive ‘flap’ of 1897, through several tens of states in the southeastern U.S.A., was followed by one of the largest earthquakes in the region.”

As interesting as this theory sounds, and as interesting as it would be to discover whether UFO “flaps” of the past century have been followed by major earthquakes or not, we wanted to test a different kind of will o’ the wisp. The kind that is said to appear in the presence of freshly buried bodies.

Decaying Bodies

One of the most popular scientific explanations for ghost lights is that the oxidation of hydrogen phosphide and methane gas produced by the decay of organic material may cause glowing lights to appear in the air. And this phenomenon is said to occur more easily in the proximity of “fresh” burials.

Thus, we positioned ourselves, with video cameras rolling, in an area of the cemetery where burials had taken place that same day and a few days before. The idea was to document on film the formation of a will o’ the wisp.

Luigi had even built an aspiring pump that would allow him to “suck” the wisp inside a hermetically sealed container in order to later test its chemical composition in the lab. In fact, Luigi has now been able to replicate the lights in his laboratory at the Department of Chemistry in Pavia with the help of his colleague Paolo Boschetti.

At first, the idea was to test the “cool fire” effect. Luigi explains it this way: “According to one hypothesis, the will o’ the wisp is a sort of cold flame, inconsistent with a normal combustion of methane, as reliable eyewitnesses have reported. ‘Cool flames’ can indeed be generated if vapors of suitable organic compounds (such as ethyl ether) come in contact with a hot surface kept at temperatures around 200–300°C [392–572ºF]. These luminescent pre-combustion haloes are sufficiently cool that a hand or a piece of paper can be put in them without being burned.”

The main objection to this interesting hypothesis is that the necessary vapors are not known components of marsh gases, and the presence of surfaces at such high temperatures is difficult to find in nature.

“It is often stated that the phenomenon originates from the spontaneous combustion of gases generated underground by anaerobic fermentation processes,” continues Luigi. “These gases consist mainly of methane and carbon dioxide. Small amounts of phosphine (PH3) and diphosphine (P2H4) [self-igniting on contact with the air] would act as a ‘chemical match’ for the combustible methane.

“Although this hypothesis is one century old, the presence of PH3 in marsh gases has only recently been demonstrated. If the will o’ the wisp indeed is a hot flame, this conjecture might be correct.” If, on the contrary, a will o’ the wisp is a cool “flame,” then the cold chemiluminescence of some compound naturally occurring in marsh gases appears to be a more appealing explanation.

Luigi reconsidered a century-old experiment conducted by German chemists in which phosphine, oxygen, and an inert gas were fed through three small nozzles at the base of a vertical glass tube. By carefully adjusting the flow of the inlets, a faint flickering luminescence could be seen in the dark near the top of the tube due to the chemiluminescence of phosphine.

Luigi built the necessary equipment with a 500 mL flat-bottomed flask, in which he put some solid phosphorous acid. The flask was stoppered by a silicone septum through which a mixture of air and nitrogen was stored on water within a gas tank and fed by a needle. A second needle in the septum provided for the necessary outlet. The flask was flushed with nitrogen and put on a hot plate that was heated to 200°C (392ºF).

“It works!” shouted Luigi, probably feeling a little like Dr. Frankenstein.

The decomposition of phosphorous acid generated phosphine, and a fog formed in the flask. When the air and nitrogen stream was fed into the phosphine vapors, a faint, pale-greenish light was clearly visible in the darkness.

The success in the lab, however, was not matched by success in the field. We spent the entire night at the cemetery, but nothing happened except buzzing and biting mosquitoes. After that there have been repeated visits to cemeteries, graveyards, marshes, and the like, and Luigi has started to carry with him a very sensitive phosphine detector—a portable Draeger Xam-7000—but so far with no luck.

Being able to reproduce spooklights in a lab is one thing. But to see it up close with your own eyes in a cemetery at night is quite another. Hopes are still high, however. There never is a shortage of fresh burials, and hunting season for will o’ the wisps is always open.

Spook hills, also known as antigravity or magnetic hills, are natural places where cars in neutral gear seem to move uphill on a slightly sloping road, seemingly defying the laws of gravity. The phenomenon, found all over the world, has long kept both paranormal believers and skeptics wondering.

Some have suggested as explanation for the strange occurrence that magnetic or gravitational anomalies exist due to mysterious magnetic sources underground or secret military experiments. Magnetic causes can be ruled out easily, though, because effects are visible even on nonmagnetic materials, such as plastic balls or water poured on the ground.

The answer to this mystery is found using a simple tool. When the inclination of several such roads has been measured using spirit levels, the actual slope of the surface has consistently been found to be opposite to the apparent one. To answer the objection that gravitational anomalies would influence the level as well, my good friend and longtime colleague Luigi Garlaschelli, from the University of Pavia in Italy, also took measurements on an Italian spook hill in Montagnaga (Figure 1) from a distance (i.e., away from the stretch of road in question) using a professional surveyor’s instrument called a theodolite.

The parallelism between a plumb line hanging within the critical area and another outside of it was first checked by Garlaschelli, then height quotes were taken on graduated yardsticks. The real slope was calculated at about 1 percent of the apparent slope in the opposite direction.

The simpler explanation for spook hills, then, is that they are visual illusions in a natural environment.

A Portable Spook Hill Experiment

Recently, Garlaschelli, along with Paola Bressan, a researcher at the Department of Psychology at the University of Padua, and Monica Barracano, also of Padua, published a report on spook hills in Psychological Science, the journal of the Association for Psychological Science (previously known as the American Psychological Society).

In the article, they describe four experiments showing that this phenomenon can be reproduced in a laboratory. The researchers find that the phenomenon is due to the visual anchoring of the spooky surface to a gravity-relative eye level whose perceived direction is biased by sloping surroundings.

In the first experiment, for example, they built a tabletop model with three hinged, moveable boards (Figure 2) to investigate the case in which the critical spot is a sloping stretch of road between two other stretches that both run either uphill or downhill as one moves forward from the observation point at one end. Because their model was 2.4 meters long, devoid of visible texture, and viewed monocularly through a reduction screen, most depth cues (aerial perspective, texture gradients, and binocular cues such as disparity and convergence) were absent.

Figure 2: Schematic illustration of the tabletop model used in Experiment 1 (L is where the hole was located and in N there are a few small model trees to add to the realism of the scenery).

Sixty undergraduate students were divided into three groups of twenty subjects each, with each group seeing two or three of the eight different levels of inclination. All subjects were unaware of the actual setup and purpose of the experiment.

In the experiment, the subjects sat in front of the screen one at a time. They were asked to look into a hole and describe what they saw and then assess the slope of the three stretches on a five-point scale that ran from strongly downhill to strongly uphill. Each trial was followed by a break of about one minute, during which the hole was occluded and the model modified.

The results of the experiment showed that slants are generally underestimated. Three stretches with the same slant were seen as horizontal by all subjects, whether they were truly horizontal, downhill, or uphill. A slightly downhill stretch between two strongly downhill inclines was seen as illusorily uphill by sixteen out of twenty subjects and as illusorily horizontal by the other four. This illusory effect explains what occurs at Gravity Hill in Pennsylvania.

However, a slightly uphill stretch between two strongly uphill inclines was seen by all subjects as level, not as downhill as might be expected in light of the previous finding. This result implies that inducing an illusory downhill effect is not nearly as easy as inducing an illusory uphill effect. In a further experiment, Garlaschelli and his team found that steeper inducing slopes are required to suggest an uphill slant.

“After each observer’s task was concluded,” say Bressan and her colleagues, “we placed a small roll of tape on the misperceived slope, and the tape appeared to move against the law of gravity, producing surprise and, on occasion, reverential fear.”

Interested readers can find details on the team’s various experiments in the September 2003 (14:5) issue of Psychological Science.

Experience the Spooky Effect

“The visual (and psychological) effects obtained in our experiments were in all respects analogous to those experienced on site,” the researchers concluded. “The more than twenty natural cases of antigravity hills reported to date are all variations on a single theme. Our study shows that the phenomenon can be recreated artificially, with no intervention whatsoever of magnetic, antigravitational, or otherwise mysterious forces. The spooky effects experienced at these sites are the outcome of a visual illusion due to the inclination of a surface being judged relative to an estimated eye level that is mistakenly regarded as normal to the direction of gravity. Using miniature or even life-size reproductions of our tabletop models, it should now be easy to re-create the fascination of this challenge to gravity in amusement parks and, for twice the benefit, science museums anywhere.

If you’d like to experience a spook hill for yourself, Bressan and colleagues have prepared this list of the best known ones:

• United States: Confusion Hill, Idlewild Park, Ligonier, Pennsylvania; Gravity Hill, northwest Baltimore County, Maryland; Gravity Hill, State Route 42, Mooresville, Indiana; Gravity Hill, State Route 96, south of New Paris, Bedford County, Pennsylvania; Gravity Hill, White’s Hill, Rennick Road, La Fayette County, Wisconsin; Gravity Road, Ewing Road, Route 208, Franklin Lakes, Washington; Mystery Hill, Highway 321, Blowing Rock, North Carolina; Mystery Spot, Putney Road, Benzie County, Michigan; Spook Hill, North Wales Drive, North Avenue, Lake Wales, Florida; Spook Hill, Gapland Road, Burkittsville, Frederick County, Maryland
• Canada: Gravity Hill, McKee Road, Ledgeview Golf Course, Abbotsford, British Columbia; Magnetic Hill, Neepawa, Manitoba; Magnetic Mountain, Canada Highway, Moncton, New Brunswick
• Europe: Ariccia, Rome, Italy; Electric Brae, A719, Croy Bay, Ayr, Ayeshire, Scotland; Malveira da Serra, Road N247, Lisbon, Portugal; Martina Franca, Taranto, Italy; Montagnaga, Trento, Italy; Mount Penteli, Athens, Greece
• Other countries: Anti-Gravity Hill, Straws Lane Road, Wood-End, Victoria, Australia; Morgan Lewis Hill, St. Andrew, Barbados; Mount Halla, Cheju Do Island, South Korea.

Readers who know of other spook hills are invited to write to us with their locations.

The great fake psychics are great improvisationists. This means that a really good pseudo-psychic is able to produce phenomena under almost any circumstance. A quick mind and a good knowledge of the techniques and psychology of deception are all that is needed. Sometimes, only a quick mind is enough.

In one early test of telepathy, in 1882, pseudo-psychic G.A. Smith and his accomplice, Douglas Blackburn, were able to fool researchers of the Society for Psychical Research. In a later confession, Blackburn described how they had to think fast and frequently invent new ways of faking telepathy demonstrations. Once, for example, Smith had been swathed in blankets to prevent him from signaling Blackburn. Smith had to guess the content of a drawing that Blackburn had secretly made on a cigarette paper. When Smith exclaimed, “I have it,” and projected his right hand from beneath the blanket, Blackburn was ready. He had transferred the cigarette paper to the tube of the brass projector on the pencil he was using, and when Smith asked for a pencil, he gave him his. Under the blanket, Smith had concealed a slate coated with luminous paint, which in the dense darkness gave sufficient light to show the figure on the cigarette paper. Thus he only needed to copy the drawing.

I was lucky enough to learn the art of improvising from one of the greatest “teachers” on the subject, the Amazing Randi. I had met him only a few hours before, nearly twenty years ago, and he was already teaching me how to conduct a perfect swindle!

A Puzzle

Randi had come to Italy to help us promote CICAP, the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and he was expected to be on a talk show in Rome to discuss his work and talk about the Committee. The host, an actress called Marisa Laurito, asked him what he was going to do in front of the cameras, and he said that he planned to duplicate a drawing made by her in secret. She agreed and asked what was needed.

“Just some paper and some envelopes,” said Randi.

“Chiara,” said Marisa, addressing her secretary, “please, go and get those things from the office.”

Randi shot a glance at me and said “Massimo, maybe you should accompany her, to see if they are the right size.”

The right size? I did not know what the right size was; I had never seen him perform up close, and I could not imagine what was needed. But, as soon as I was going to open my mouth, Randi smiled and said, “Go, Massimo, please,” pushing me ahead.

I went out the door, following the woman, and a moment later, Randi came out as well and shouted at me: “Massimo! I am sorry, while you go, please throw away this junk I had in my coat.”

There was a wastebasket in Marisa’s dressing room; why did he need me to throw things away? However, he was my hero, and I was glad to help. I immediately went back to collect some scraps of paper and used train tickets, and, under his breath, Randi said to me, “When you are in the office, just get a few envelopes and sheets of paper without her seeing you, and then come back here. Now, go!”

I was quite confused, but I did as he asked. I made some gracious comments about the woman’s blue eyes while we were in the office, and a little chitchat later, I had some sheets and envelopes hidden under my jacket without her knowing it.

When we got back to Marisa’s dressing room, she and Randi were laughing at something he was telling her.

“Good, now here you are,” Randi said to the secretary. “I do not want to touch anything,” he stated, raising his hands up in the air, like a surgeon ready to operate. “Please give this stuff to Marisa.”

The girl obeyed, and Randi continued: “Now, Marisa, please go to another room, the bathroom will be fine, close yourself inside and draw whatever you like on that piece of paper. When you are done, fold the paper and seal it in one of the envelopes.”

As soon as she closed the bathroom door, Randi addressed her assistant. “Er . . . Chiara, I am sorry, could I have a glass of water? I need to take my medication.”

“Sure,” she said, and went out of the room. Now we were alone.

“Quick!” said Randi. “Give me the things you took in the office.”

Randi took one of the blank sheets of paper, folded it in thirds, and placed it in an envelope, which he sealed and then put in his jacket’s inner pocket.

I was more and more confused. “Mr. Randi,” I said, “would you please tell me what this is all about?”

“Later, now she’s coming.”

Sure enough, the door of the bathroom opened up and Marisa was out, waving her envelope. “Here it is! Now, what do we do?”

Randi looked puzzled. “Hmmm . . . you know, that envelope doesn’t convince me . . . excuse me.” He took the envelope from her, even though he had said that he was not going to touch anything. Holding it quite high, with just two fingers, as if it might be contaminated, Randi approached the window.

“Please, I won’t look. Tell me if you can see through the envelope, Marisa.”

“No, it’s quite thick. You can’t see anything.”

“Good! I do not want anyone to think that I merely saw your drawing through it. Well then, keep your envelope with you all the time now. Don’t tell anyone what you drew and then, when we are on stage, keep hold of the envelope until I have made my guess. You will agree that there is no way for me to know what’s in it.”

“Quite right!”

“Good. If you think so, just say it when we are on air. Then, if I am able to correctly guess your drawing, this will mean that I have some extraordinary ESP ability—or I will have showed you that what I do is quite indistinguishable from real ESP. Ergo, the public should always doubt these kinds of demonstrations, unless there is someone really expert in this kind of thing checking everything out.” I noticed that he did not use the word tricks. “Now, if you will excuse us, I need to get some rest before we start. I have arrived only a few hours ago from Miami and I am still jet-lagged.”

It wasn’t true, he had arrived about a week earlier, but as I would discover, he needed some time in private.

The Switch

“Mr. Randi,” I said as we were walking down the empty hall, “can you explain to me what we are doing? Why did you place an envelope in your pocket?”

“You mean this one?” he said, taking it out of his jacket.

“Yes. How can a blank sheet of paper be of some help in. . . ?”

The words died in my mouth as he opened up the envelope and I saw a drawing on it: a very simple pencil drawing showing a house and a cat!

“What the—?”

“Later. Now get in our dressing room.”

When the door closed, Randi took a good look at the drawing.

“Quite simple, isn’t it?”

“Do you mean that this one—”

“—is the drawing that Marisa drew, yes,” he finished. He was clearly amused by the look on my face. “You wonder when I took it, right? Well, there was really no need to check if the envelope could be seen through, it’s really thick and I probably looked a bit dumb to her by asking that question. But I needed to have the envelope with her drawing in my hands for just a few seconds, in order to do the switch.”

“You mean. . . ?”

“Yes, when I approached the window, I turned my back to you all for just an instant, but that was enough for me to throw her envelope inside my jacket and take out the dummy one.”

“But I didn’t see you do it!”

“Well, thank you. That was the point.”

Quite ingenious, I thought. I was soon going to learn that the best way to duplicate a drawing sealed in an envelope (and so far nobody has shown that another way exists) is to “somehow” secretly get a look at the drawing. That’s all there is to it. It doesn’t matter how: switching envelopes, looking at a reflection in a mirror, watching the pencil move on paper, have an accomplice take a peek. What matters is that you know beforehand what’s inside that envelope. Well, most of the time: Randi has been able to go even further than this, but that is another lesson.

Confusion

Now, the problem was that Marisa had in her possession an envelope containing a blank sheet of paper: what was Randi going to do?

“Well, now that I know what she drew, I need to give this back to her . . . without her realizing it.”

So he placed the drawing in another similar envelope—that’s why he had asked me to get “a few” of those—and put it back again in his jacket pocket.

“Now, we only need to wait.”

“Wait? Wait for what?”

“For the show to begin.”

“Do you mean that you are going to do the switch live on camera?”

“Of course not, but I need her to be distracted a bit more now, and so we will wait just five minutes before the show starts. She will have a thousand things to think about, and will not have much time for me.”

And that’s what he did. Five minutes before showtime, Randi knocked on Marisa’s dressing-room door just as she was coming out with all her assistants, producers, writers, coiffeur, and make-up artist all buzzing around her like she was the queen bee.

“I am sorry, Marisa” he said with a smile. “But while I was resting, I had this great idea. Let’s put your drawing in one of the bigger envelopes there on the table. This way, we can show that your drawing was really impossible to see and the effect will be much stronger.”

She had many people and distractions around her. “Yes . . . well, whatever you say. Here is my drawing, where should I put it?”

“Here,” said Randi, taking her envelope and placing it in a bigger envelope. “Now we can seal it and you can put your signature on it. This will really shock the viewers!”

“Okay, just let’s move on, we are about to start.”

She signed her name on the envelope and then took it along with her.

Resolution

We remained alone, again, in the dressing room. I stared at Randi, and said, “Now that that didn’t work, what will you do?”

“What do you mean it didn’t work?”

I was silent for a minute. “But you never had a chance. . . . When did you do the switch? It was impossible.”

Randi chuckled. “Okay, okay, I will tell you. When we got in, with all those people and the confusion, I quickly put the envelope with her drawing inside one of the bigger ones that were resting on the table. Then, when she gave me the envelope with the blank sheet—and, of course, she thought that it contained her drawing—I acted as if I was placing it inside the envelope, but, actually, I was putting it behind it. So, when I placed the whole thing on the table to have her seal and sign it, on top of all the other envelopes lying there, the thing was done: the drawing was already inside, and the envelope with the blank one was mixed with all the other envelopes. In fact, here it is.”

He took a sealed envelope from the lot and put it back in his jacket. It was later destroyed to avoid even the remotest risk of someone discovering the trick.

Of course, later on, when the show started and Randi joined Marisa on stage, all went perfectly. Marisa told the viewers how she had kept hold of the envelope the whole time, and when Randi—after much concentration, grinning, and sweating—duplicated her drawing, she was flabbergasted.

For me, that was the first important lesson I got from Randi: real tricksters rarely read magic books and magazines, they just invent their methods along the way, quickly improvising something on the spur of the moment.

I was going to find that out at my expense very soon, as we shall see in the next “lesson.”

Possibly hoping to show Doyle how easy it is to be fooled by mediums, Houdini once gave his friend an extraordinary demonstration, in his own home, in the presence of Bernard M.L. Ernst, Houdini’s friend and lawyer. Ernst’s memoirs reveal what happened that night.

Mene, mene, tekel upharsin

Houdini produced what appeared to be an ordinary slate, some eighteen inches long by fifteen inches high. In two corners of this slate, holes had been bored, and through these holes wires had been passed. These wires were several feet in length, and hooks had been fastened to the other ends of the wires. The only other accessories were four small cork balls (about three-quarters of an inch in diameter), a large ink-well filled with white ink, and a table-spoon.

Houdini passed the slate to Sir Arthur for examination. He was then requested to suspend the slate in the middle of the room, by means of the wires and hooks, leaving it free to swing in space, several feet distant from anything. In order to eliminate the possibility of electrical connections of any kind, Sir Arthur was asked to fasten the hooks over anything in the room which would hold them. He hooked one over the edge of a picture-frame, and the other on a large book, on a shelf in Houdini’s library. The slate thus swung free in space, in the center of the room, being supported by the two wires passing through the holes in its upper corners. The slate was inspected and cleaned.

Houdini now invited Sir Arthur to examine the four cork balls in the saucer. He was told to select any one he liked, and, to show that they were free from preparation, to cut it in two with his knife, thus verifying the fact that they were merely solid cork balls. This was accordingly done. Another ball was then selected, and, by means of the spoon, was placed in the white ink, where it was thoroughly stirred round and round, until its surface was equally coated with the liquid. It was then left in the ink to soak up as much liquid as possible. The remaining balls Sir Arthur took away with him for examination, at Houdini’s request.

“Have you a piece of paper in your pocket upon which you can write something?” asked Houdini to Doyle. He had a pencil.

“Sir Arthur,” continued Houdini, “I want you to go out of the house, walk anywhere you like, as far as you like in any direction; then write a question or sentence on that piece of paper; put it back in your pocket and return to the house.”

Doyle obeyed, walking three blocks and turning a corner before he wrote upon the paper. When he returned Houdini invited him to take a spoon and remove the cork ball, which had been soaking in the white ink, then to touch the ball to the left side of the slate. The ball “stuck” there, seemingly of its own volition. Slowly, it began rolling across the surface of the slate, leaving a white track as it did so. As the ball rolled, it was seen to be spelling the words: “Mene, mene, tekel upharsin,” the very same words that Doyle had written. The guests were speechless.

Houdini turned to Doyle and said: “Sir Arthur, I have devoted a lot of time and thought to this illusion; I have been working at it, on and off, all winter. I won't tell you how it was done, but I can assure you it was pure trickery. I did it by perfectly normal means. I devised it to show you what can be done along these lines. Now, I beg of you, Sir Arthur, do not jump to the conclusion that certain things you see are necessarily 'supernatural,' or the work of 'spirits,' just because you cannot explain them. This is as marvelous a demonstration as you have ever witnessed, given you under test conditions, and I can assure you that it was accomplished by trickery and by nothing else. Do, therefore, be careful in future, in endorsing phenomena just because you cannot explain them. I have given you this test to impress upon you the necessity of caution, and I sincerely hope that you will profit by it.”

“Sir Arthur,” remembered Ernst, “came to the conclusion that Houdini really accomplished the feat by psychic aid, and could not be persuaded otherwise.” Doyle’s reaction, and the refusal to consider trickery even when admitted by the trickster, was so typical, noted Houdini, that “here is little wonder in his believing in Spiritualism so implicitly.”

Berol’s Secret

The secret of the trick remained a mystery for years until magician and historian Milbourne Christopher revealed it in his book Houdini, A Pictorial Life. “Neither Doyle nor Ernst,” wrote Christopher, “could fathom this mystery. They might have been less startled had they seen Houdini’s friend Max Berol perform in Vaudeville.” Berol had been performing for years, both in Europe and America, an act in which a ball dipped in ink would spell on an isolated board the words called out by members of the audience:

“Berol did this by switching a solid cork ball for one with an iron core. A magnet at the end of a rod, manipulated by an assistant concealed behind the board, caused the ball to adhere and move-apparently under its own power. After Berol retired, Houdini purchased the equipment. An assistant in the room adjacent to Houdini’s library had opened a small panel in the wall and extended the rod with a magnet through it. The ball on the slate had an iron center, of course.

“Ernst had not remembered that when Doyle returned to the room, after writing the words outdoors, Houdini had checked to make sure the slip of paper on which Doyle wrote was folded, then immediately returned it to his friend. Before doing so, the magician had switched slips. While Doyle was busy retrieving the ball from the inkwell and taking it to the board, Houdini read the words. His conversation cued his hidden assistant. Once the message had been written on the slate, Houdini asked Doyle for the folded slip to verify his words. He opened the blank paper, pretended to read from it, then switched it for the original as he returned the paper to his friend. Later, Houdini explained this switching process during his public lectures on fraudulent mediums.”

I recently had the opportunity to travel through Europe in search of the reality behind some famous ancient legends. I was part of a team of investigators for a TV show called “Legend Detectives,” which subsequently aired in December 2005 by Discovery Channel Europe.

I was particularly interested in the legend that was scheduled for May: Count Dracula, the world’s most famous vampire. Such is the enduring power of Bram Stoker’s classic horror story, first published in 1897 and never out of print, that modern-day Transylvania in Northern Romania has become a tourist Mecca.

Fans of the fictional count flock there by the coachload persuaded that in the land of mist-shrouded mountains, they will find clues to the source of the greatest vampire of them all: the Transylvanian nobleman who left his remote homeland to spread his evil plague.

For the true believer, the boundaries between Stoker’s creation and historical fact have become blurred, like all great legends. Many people believe that the immortal count was based on a real person: a medieval Romanian warlord called Vlad Tepes, also know as “Vlad the Impaler” and “Vlad Dracula.”

Was this famous national hero the man behind the legend? That was the first question we were going to investigate during our stay in Transylvania. [1]

Son of the Devil

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was by no means the first vampire story. It was the culmination of a writing tradition of Gothic horror stories that had begun nearly eighty years earlier with “The Vampyre,” by John Polidori. (Was he a relative of mine, I wonder?) Others followed, like “Varney the Vampire” (1847), a serial that ran in magazines called “penny dreadfuls” for more than two years, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1871), which centered around a lesbian vampire.

But Dracula was a departure. In Stoker’s hands, the vampire became all-powerful, the embodiment of evil-and a creature whose immortality was bound up in a rich cocktail of blood, sex, and death.

Ironically, though the novel was first published in English in 1893, Romania’s most famous fictional resident, Count Dracula, was almost unknown there until 1992. Only with the fall of communism was Bram Stoker’s classic finally translated and published in Romania.

A view of Bran Castle, strongly promoted by the tourist board as the real ”Castle Dracula“; in reality, Vlad may have stayed here as a guest at some point during his reign, but it was certainly never his castle.

But the question remained, could Vlad Tepes have been the model for Stoker’s infamous Count?

What is known of Vlad the Impaler comes from a series of lurid stories dating back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They depict a man surrounded in corpses, a tyrant and madman, who literally drank the blood of his enemies. There are good reasons to think that Stoker was struck by this evil character and borrowed his surname, “Dracula,” because he thought it meant “son of the devil,” to create his own vampire. In fact, it meant “son of the dragon,” and this was because Vlad’s father had joined an order of knighthood called the Order of the Dragon. Dragon is written dracul in Romanian, and so Dracula literally means “son of Dracul.”

But to many Romanians, Vlad is a national hero, a saviour. They reject the tales of a psychopathic tyrant as vicious propaganda promoted by Vlad’s enemies. They honour him as the legendary king who, like Britain’s King Arthur, will one day return to save his country.

Part of the reason for this lies in places like Sigihisoara, a town built by Germans, or better, Saxons, who had moved to Transylvania to become merchants. They took hold of the region and didn't even let Romanians enter the town-they had to pay a toll first. Vlad resented this and sided with the Romanians. In his lifetime, he also fought bravely against the Turks, who had conquered parts of Europe already, and this spread panic among the Christian kings. So Vlad was considered a crusader. Europe, then, first knew him as a hero.

However, Vlad lost his battles and was defeated by the Turks, and his legacy was set by the victors. There are still many pamphlets surviving, printed by the Germans soon after his death, in which his exploits are recounted in gory detail and he is portrayed as a devil-like figure.

It’s ironic that the man whose name helped inspire one of the most famous fictional horror stories of all time, written in the nineteenth century, was also the subject of some of the very first printed horror stories in the fifteenth century. And this also shows the power of propaganda: for a brief moment, he'd been the hero of Europe; then, after his death, his enemies destroyed his reputation.

During the reign of communist dictator Nicholae Ceausescu, Vlad Dracula was again venerated as a hero. They portrayed him as a nationalist icon, a man who united and protected Romanians from their enemies, imperialist Turks and capitalist German merchants.

His brutal methods were either dismissed as enemy propaganda or, when they couldn't be explained away, as a necessary evil. In fact, Ceausescu was so enamoured of Vlad that he is even reported to have once said: “A man like me comes along only every 500 years.”

Death of a Strigoi

Having ascertained that the real figure of Vlad Tepes was only a loose inspiration for Stoker’s fiction, we wondered if local folklore provided the inspiration for his haunting descriptions of vampiric rituals.

Stories of vampires are, in fact, very old in Romania; however, they prefer to call these creatures strigoi. They are seen as ghosts, undead, immaterial things; they are usually a recently buried member of the family, who returns to haunt his relatives and drain their life forces, sometimes in dreams. In order to bring peace to the family and to the undead itself, some “rituals” need to be performed.

These are very secret practices that, I was surprised to learn, still continue today. In January 2004, one such episode became public and created a scandal.

After Petre Toma of the village of Marotinu de Sus died in a field accident in December 2003, his relatives complained that a child’s illness was to blame on Toma, since some neighbors claimed they had seen him posthumously walking in his yard. Something had to be done.

Six local men then volunteered to enact the ancient Romanian ritual for dealing with a strigoi. Just before midnight, they crept into the cemetery on the edge of the village and gathered around Toma’s grave.

It seems that the destruction of a strigoi has some parallels with the methods used by Stoker’s heroes to destroy Dracula. But rather than drive a stake through the creature’s heart, the six men dug Toma up, split his ribcage with a pitchfork, removed his heart, put stakes through the rest of his body, and sprinkled it with garlic. Then they burned the heart, put the embers in water, and shared the grim cocktail with the sick child.

The author explaining to a television crew how Vlad used stakes.

For a little while, it all seemed to have worked well. Eventually, the sick girl got better again, so the ritual must have worked, or so many in the village thought.

Local police appeared to be less understanding. After Toma’s daughter complained, they arrested the men and charged them with illegally exhuming the corpse. They were sentenced to six months in jail, but did not serve the time.

What really surprised me, however, was why Toma’s daughter was angry at her relatives. It was not because they had desecrated the body of a dead person that deserved more respect, but because she had not been invited to the ritual!

“These are very ancient practices indeed,” anthropologist Fifor Mihai, who served as a consultant during the trial, told me. “And they are about communicating with the dead, laying the dead to rest. The media and newspapers have made much of the gory aspects, but these people have been doing this sort of thing for many, many centuries, and in the past, the authorities have turned a blind eye.”

These beliefs are very different from those held by people who are Dracula fans; with them, it’s all about image, the immortality, and sexiness of vampires. But for the people in Romania, these are deeply held views, as strongly held as religious faiths. Whether that means customs such as digging up a body and removing its heart should somehow be preserved, I'm not so sure.

In the end, our investigation found Romania to be a country of striking contrasts and rich traditions. We've examined the character of Vlad Dracula, but found the evidence that Bram Stoker based his fictional vampire on him wanting. Certainly, he used the name. There are also some uncanny similarities, such as the use of stakes, Vlad’s bloodthirstiness, and his victories against the Turks, that suggest Stoker knew something about the real Dracula, but probably little more than what was given in the tour books of his day.

And today, so long as tourists want to go to Romania, and filmmakers want to make Dracula movies, that confusion between the real and fictional Draculas will continue, and for many Romanians, that’s not a bad thing.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Nigel Miller, Shaun Trevisick, and Alex Obradovich for their invaluable help in the research and documentation for this article, and Tessa Dunlop, Ronald Top, Peter Harvey, and Mick Duffield for being great partners in the investigation.

Note

1. I am of course referring to our TV investigation, for this and other questions have already been dealt with and answered by some good historical work done in the past by researchers such as Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally.

Did you know that Paul McCartney, the ex-Beatle, never actually left the band because . . . he died in 1966 and was then replaced by a lookalike? It sounds bizarre, and it is. The “Paul is dead” myth is one of the most popular myths set in the world of rock music and perhaps the most fun to follow up.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney are shown on their arrival at Palam airport, near Delhi, India, on their way to meet with their guru, The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Photo by UPPA/ZUMA Press. Copyright 1966 by UPPA [Photo via NewsCom]

It all began on October 12, 1969, when Russ Gibb, a DJ for Detroit’s underground station WKNR-FM, received a phone call by a man named “Tom,” who claimed that some Beatles records contained hidden clues suggesting that Paul McCartney had actually died.

The evidence for a conspiracy revolved around the theory that Paul had been decapitated in an automobile wreck after he left Abbey Road studios in London, where the Beatles recorded their music. Paul had apparently left upset over an argument with the other Beatles, took his Aston Martin sportscar, and perished in a horrible accident that killed him.

This accident supposedly took place at 5 a.m. on November 9, 1966, and was caused by a hitchhiker named Rita who Paul had picked up along the road.

With Paul’s death, however, a big problem arose: the Beatles were at the peak of their career and the loss of one of their members would mean the end of the show for them and for the industry behind them. Thus, somebody had the idea of never revealing Paul’s death and hiring an impostor in his place, somebody who looked like him and could play music. Some sources claimed that the imposter was an actor named William Campbell, the winner of a Paul McCartney lookalike contest and, conveniently, an orphan from Edinburgh. Of course, it didn’t hurt to assume that Campbell could write the same type of songs as McCartney and just happened to have the same voice.

The arrival of an impostor in November 1966, then, could have explained why the Beatles stopped touring that same year (it would have been too easy to spot a fake McCartney performance on stage) and started to grow moustaches (the face was almost identical, but not perfect: it needed some disguise).

However, this terrible secret generated in the remaining Beatles, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, a strong sense of guilt and induced them to insert many hints and clues to the truth in their songs and album covers.

I Buried Paul

Abbey Road cover art contains many clues to Paul McCartney’s (non)death.

What had revealed the existence of a conspiracy to the mysterious “Tom” was the publication, two weeks before his telephone call, of the Beatles’s latest album, titled Abbey Road. The album cover showed the four Beatles walking in a single file across the now-famous crosswalk at Abbey Road. This was thought to symbolize a funeral procession: John Lennon, dressed in white, represented the Church (and white is the traditional color of mourning in many Eastern cultures); Ringo, dressed in black, represented the undertaker. Paul was out of step with the other three Beatles, with his eyes closed and barefoot: in a number of societies, it appears that corpses are buried without their shoes; furthermore, Paul held a cigarette in his right hand, when everybody knew that the real McCartney was left-handed! George Harrison, last in line, was dressed in work clothes and, to many, represented the gravedigger.

On the street there is also a parked Volkswagen Beetle whose license plate shows an eerie message: “LMW 28IF,” interpreted to mean that Paul would have been twenty-eight if he had lived. The fact that Paul was actually twenty-seven years old when Abbey Road was released doesn’t seem to make much difference, for in far Eastern societies (the Beatles had quite a fascination with the Far East) an individual’s birth included the time spent in the mother’s womb. In that case, Paul would indeed have been twenty-eight.

These “revelations” quickly launched an unprecedented outbreak of hysteria in the pop world and in the media, as more and more “clues” were found in previous Beatles records.

First of all, the clue-diggers looked at Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first album that the Beatles recorded after Paul’s supposed demise. Released on June 1, 1967, the record was among the most influential in music history. The cover, another famous picture, showed the four Beatles dressed in band uniforms, gathered around a bass drum bearing the album title and with a crowd of cut-out people around them. It proved to be a goldmine for clue-diggers. Again, the spectators resembled the mourners at a funeral and the flowers in front of them not only spelled the word “Beatles,” but also a set of yellow hyacinths formed the shape of a left-handed bass guitar, McCartney’s instrument.

Paul had a right hand raised above his head: again, supposedly, in certain Far Eastern societies, this was a symbol of death. Also, while the other Beatles held bright, golden, band instruments, Paul held a black clarinet: another supposed symbol of mourning?

A doll wore a striped “Welcome the Rolling Stones” sweatshirt: on her leg there is a small model car, strongly resembling an Aston Martin that seems to be heading towards the word “Stones.” Perhaps a hint of the accident?

If you then held a flat mirror perpendicular to the center of the words “Lonely Hearts” appearing on the bass drum this hidden message appeared: “I ONE IX HE <> DIE”. “I ONE IX” is a direct reference to the supposed fatal crash day (11/9/66), “HE” refers to Paul, as the diamond that points directly to McCartney confirms, “DIE”.

In the open album jacket, the Beatles appear still in the Sgt. Pepper’s uniforms and McCartney wore an arm patch that read “OPD”: an abbreviation for “Officially Pronounced Dead”?

This was also the first album in history that included the lyrics to the songs appearing in the record, and they were published on the back cover, along with a picture of the four Beatles in their outfits. Strangely, Paul is the only one turning his back to the camera, and also strange is the fact that George’s thumb points to the opening lines of “She’s Leaving Home.” The lyric states: “Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins,” another reference to the day and time of Paul’s fatal accident?

In another song of the album, “A Day in the Life,” John sings “He blew his mind out in a car,” and in another, “Good Morning, Good Morning,” he starts by singing: “Nothing to do to save his life” (and was the title a play on the words “morning” and “mourning”?) And what about “Lovely Rita”? Was the song a reference to the girl that caused Paul’s death? Could be, since in it McCartney (or the imposter) sings: “Took her home and nearly made it.”

More clues were also found in subsequent albums. The Magical Mystery Tour cover showed the Beatles dressed in animal costumes. In the centre was a black walrus and, in certain Scandinavian countries, a walrus is considered a harbinger of death. Was the imposter dressed in the walrus skin? Apparently not, for John Lennon sings in the album the song titled “I am the Walrus.” But on the album cover, as if scribbled later, the complete title appears to be: “I am the Walrus (‘No You’re Not!’ Said Little Nicola).” So who was the walrus?

In a later Beatles release (titled simply The Beatles, the record became better known as the White Album because the cover was plain white), in a song titled “Glass Onion,” Lennon sings: “Well here’s another clue for you all, the walrus was Paul”!

On the booklet included in Magical Mystery Tour, the clues abounded: Paul is shoeless in some pictures, is the only one to wear a black flower on his lapel while the others are red, has a hand above his head in various pictures, and he even sits behind a sign stating “I Was.”

Near the end of the song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” upon careful listening, a faint voice stated something like “I buried Paul.”

You could also turn the Magical Mystery Tour album jacket upside-down and look at its reflection in the mirror: the title, detailed as stars, became the digits to a phone number. The rumor further explained that if the numbers were dialed, the listener would get the true details of Paul McCartney’s death.

On the White Album, if you listened to a strange murmuring following the song “I’m So Tired,” you couldn’t make out what it said. But, should you decide to play the record backwards the words became something like: “Paul is dead now, miss him, miss him, miss him.” Nothing compared to the chilling revelations of “Revolution No. 9,” where, after reversing the song, you could hear a voice saying: “Turn me on dead man,” and then the sound of a terrible collision, the sounds of crackling flames and a voice screaming “Let me out! Let me out!” A recreation of Paul’s terrible accident?

“My death? An exaggeration”

It seems unimaginable that the American public would believe such an unfounded rumor. However, this same generation had been raised on the idea that there may have been a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy and that the Warren Commission had actually worked to hide this fact from the public. Would it be so impossible, then, to believe that Paul McCartney’s death may have been hidden from the public?

The rumors became so noisy that Paul McCartney himself had to reassure his fans that he was still alive. In an exclusive interview with Life magazine (November 7, 1969) he stated, paraphrasing Mark Twain, that “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. However, if I was dead, I’m sure I’d be the last to know.” He also offered a number of explanations for the mysterious clues.

The OPD patch he wore on Sgt. Pepper’s actually meant “Ontario Police Department”; he wore a black flower in Magical Mystery Tour because they had run out of red ones; it was John wearing the walrus outfit and, on Abbey Road, he was barefoot only because it was a hot day.

Other “clues” had similar simpler explanations: John did not say “I buried Paul” at the end of “Strawberry Fields” but, as can be clearly heard now on a clearer take of the song in Anthology 3, he says “cranberry sauce.”

However, while it is true that most clues can be easily attributed to coincidence and wishful thinking, there are little things that must have been put there by the Beatles for some purpose, like the various “walrus” claims, the backward messages, and some other hints in the album covers. It may just be, as John Lennon said, that they only wanted to have a laugh at the expense of those critics reading cryptic messages in everything they did.

What is sadly true is the fact that Charles Manson and his “family” also believed that there were hidden messages in Beatles songs hinting at the Armageddon. He thought that the Fab Four were actually angels sent by God to reveal the secrets of the approaching apocalypse and that, in order to start the end of the world, they needed Manson’s help. This is the tragically absurd reasoning he gave for the murder of Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski, and the guests she was hosting at their house in Hollywood.

According to R. Gary Patterson, author of the well-researched The Walrus Was Paul (New York: Fireside, 1996), “Perhaps the Beatles became concerned that if they admitted to planting clues they could very well be charged in some sort of conspiracy that would indirectly link them to the Manson murders. Perhaps it would be much safer to give up the hoax and deny it ever happened. This way, the Beatles would be safe from any lawsuit implicating the band members.”

Perhaps. In a lighter vein, however, the rumor also helped to further boost the sale of the Beatles catalog and inspired a lot of cartoons and comedy skits, like one that was presented on The Ed Sullivan Show on Februrary 23, 1970, involving two angels in heaven:

Angel One: Is there any truth to the rumor that Paul McCartney is still alive?

Angel Two: I doubt it. Where do you think we get those groovy harp arrangements?

In the never-ending search for the true identity of the elusive Jack the Ripper, a recent extraordinary discovery has attracted the attention of Ripperologists worldwide. It now seems not unlikely that the murderer may have been a suspect hitherto unknown to researchers: an Irish-American quack doctor named Francis J. Tumblety.

The story begins with the discovery of a very important document known as the “Littlechild letter.” This letter, written by former Chief Inspector John G. Littlechild to the journalist George R. Sims in 1913, came to light in a small collection of Sims’s correspondence that was bought in 1993 by Stewart Evans, a police officer himself and a leading authority on the Ripper case. Evans recognized its significance immediately. Littlechild, in fact, had been in charge of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard in 1888, the year in which the Ripper killed his victims, and in that capacity, would have worked in close and regular personal contact with men like Chief Inspector Swanson, appointed by Sir Charles Warren to oversee the Ripper inquiry.

The Disquieting Dr. T.

In his letter, Inspector Littlechild writes: “. . . amongst the suspects, and to my mind a very likely one, was a Dr. T. . . . He was an American quack named Tumblety and was at one time a frequent visitor to London and on these occasions constantly brought under the notice of police, there being a large dossier concerning him at Scotland Yard. Although a 'Sycopathia Sexualis’ [sic] subject he was not known as a 'Sadist' (which the murderer unquestionably was) but his feelings toward women were remarkable and bitter in the extreme, a fact on record. Tumblety was arrested at the time of the murders in connection with unnatural offenses and charged at Marlborough Street, remanded on bail, jumped his bail, and got away to Boulogne, France. He shortly left Boulogne and was never heard of afterwards. It was believed he committed suicide but it is certain that at that time, the 'Ripper' murders came to an end.”

Francis J. Tumblety was in fact in London during that fatal autumn of 1888 and on November 16 was brought before the Marlborough Street Police Court charged with homosexual offenses. He posted bail and was ordered to appear at the Central Criminal Court, but he violated bail, fled to France, and there, under the alias Frank Townsend, boarded a steamer bound for New York.

Tumblety was a well-known suspect in 1888, but somehow his existence was missed by researchers until the surfacing of this letter.

As with all of the suspects in the case, there is no concrete evidence pointing to Tumblety, but the plethora of circumstantial evidence, as well as the letter and opinion of such a high-ranking officer, makes Tumblety the most plausible new suspect.

Very little information has been ascertained about Tumblety’s beginnings, and I will draw on the excellent work done at www.casebook.org (and based on Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey’s Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer) to draw a profile of the suspect.

Francis J. Tumblety, Jack the Ripper suspect.

His birthplace is the first of many mysteries surrounding him. He was possibly a Canadian, the son of an emigrated Irishman, born around 1833, the youngest of eleven children. His family soon moved to Rochester, New York, where neighbors and acquaintances thought him “a dirty, awkward, ignorant, uncared- for, good-for-nothing boy . . . utterly devoid of education.” He was also known to peddle pornographic literature on the canal boats of Rochester. At some point in his adolescence, he also began working at a small drugstore run by a Dr. Lispenard, who is said to have “carried on a medical business of a disreputable kind.”

Around 1850, Tumblety left Rochester, perhaps for Detroit, where he started his own practice as an Indian herb doctor. He was arrested in 1857 for attempting to abort the pregnancy of a local prostitute. It was alleged that he sold her a bottle of pills and liquid for the purpose, but after some legal haggling, Tumblety was released.

Around 1860, he left Montréal for Saint John, Nova Scotia. In September of that year, he again found trouble when a patient of his named James Portmore died while taking medicine prescribed by Tumblety. In his typical brazen fashion, Tumblety showed up at the coroner’s inquest and questioned Portmore’s widow himself as to the cause of death. The ruse didn't work, however, and Tumblety made a last-ditch attempt at freedom by fleeing the town for Calais, Maine.

It was at this time that Tumblety’s alleged hatred for women became most pronounced, as seen in the testimony of a Colonel Dunham, who was one night invited to dinner by Tumblety: “Someone asked why he had not invited some women to his dinner. His face instantly became as black as a thunder-cloud. He had a pack of cards in his hand, but he laid them down and said, almost savagely, 'No, Colonel, I don't know any such cattle, and if I did I would, as your friend, sooner give you a dose of quick poison than take you into such danger.' He then broke into a homily on the sin and folly of dissipation [promiscuity], fiercely denounced all women and especially fallen women.

“He then invited us into his office where he illustrated his lecture so to speak. One side of this room was entirely occupied with cases, outwardly resembling wardrobes. When the doors were opened quite a museum was revealed-tiers of shelves with glass jars and cases, some round and others square, filled with all sorts of anatomical specimens. The 'doctor' placed on a table a dozen or more jars containing, as he said, the matrices (uteri) of every class of women. Nearly a half of one of these cases was occupied exclusively with these specimens. . . . When he was asked why he hated women, he said that when quite a young man he fell desperately in love with a pretty girl, rather his senior, who promised to reciprocate his affection. After a brief courtship he married her. The honeymoon was not over when he noticed a disposition on the part of his wife to flirt with other men. He remonstrated, she kissed him, called him a dear jealous fool-and he believed her. Happening one day to pass in a cab through the worst part of the town he saw his wife and a man enter a gloomy- looking house. Then he learned that before her marriage his wife had been an inmate of that and many similar houses. Then he gave up all womankind.”

If any of this account is to be taken at face value, it certainly contains various elements that may have contributed to the making of a murderer.

Pursued by Scotland Yard

After a series of brushes with the law (including his being arrested in connecting with the Lincoln assassination) Tumblety wisely decided to leave America for London in the late 1860s. In the years that followed, he continued to travel across both America and Europe, returned to Liverpool in June of 1888, and once again found himself at odds with the police. He was arrested on November 7, 1888, on charges of homosexual activities.

Most interestingly, Tumblety was then charged on suspicion of the Whitechapel murders on November 12, but as we have seen, he fled to France before a trial could be held. New York officials knew of his impending arrival and had the ports watched for the suspect but to no avail. It was reported that Scotland Yard men had followed Tumblety across the Atlantic, and it is known that Inspector Andrews did follow a suspect to New York City around this time.

New York City’s Chief Inspector Byrnes soon discovered that Tumblety was lodging at 79 East Tenth Street at the home of a Mrs. McNamara, and he had him under surveillance for some days following. Byrnes could not arrest Tumblety because, in his own words, “there is no proof of his complicity in the Whitechapel murders, and the crime for which he was under bond in London is not extraditable.”

Fear and suspicion rose until, on December 5, Tumblety disappeared from his lodgings once again, eluding the New York City police, who were watching him closely. Interest gradually waned as the years dragged on, and Tumblety next appeared in Rochester in 1893, where he lived with his sister for a time. He died a decade later in 1903 in St. Louis as a man of considerable wealth and was buried in Rochester, New York.

Facts and Doubts

In conclusion, Evans and Gainey outline fifteen reasons why they believe Tumblety should be considered a top suspect in the Whitechapel murders. Among them:

• Tumblety fits many requirements of what we now know as the “serial-killer profile.” He had a supposed hatred of women and prostitutes (based on the abortion with the prostitute, his alleged failed marriage to an ex-prostitute, his collection of uteri, etc.).
• Tumblety was in London at the time.
• Tumblety may have had some anatomical knowledge, as can be inferred from his collection of wombs, his “medical” practice, and his short-term work with Dr. Lispenard in Rochester.
• He was arrested in the midst of the Autumn of Terror on suspicion of having committed the murders.
• There were no more murders after he fled England on November 24.
• Chief Inspector Littlechild, a top name in Scotland Yard, believed him a “very likely suspect,” and Littlechild was not alone in his convictions.

As convincing as all this appears, however, there are other historians who do not agree with these conclusions. First of all, although Tumblety’s homosexuality could at that time be seen as a strong element of suspicion (Littlechild wrote in his letter: “It is very strange how those given to 'Contrary sexual instinct' and 'degenerates’ are given to cruelty, even Wilde used to like to be punched about”), today things are seen differently. From what is known of serial killers today, Tumblety’s tendencies might exclude him as a suspect; homosexual serial killers, in fact, are concerned singularly with male victims and would be uninterested in female prostitutes. And, according to as noted a Ripper authority as Philip Sugden, Tumblety was fifty-six years old in 1888, far older than any of the men reportedly seen in the company of the victims, and he also seems to have been a man of much greater physical stature than the Ripper. As for evidence, there was never anything of substance that could connect Tumblety with any of the murders.

So it may be that Tumblety had nothing to do with the killings in Whitechapel. Or he may very well have been the actual killer, and new evidence may surface in the future. In truth, however, we have to deal with the fact that after a century of final solutions, the answer to the killer’s true identity may never come to light, and Jack the Ripper could forever remain a mystery.

References

• Evans, Stewart, and Paul Gainey. 1996. Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer. New York: Kodansha America.
• Rumbelow, Donald. 1988. The Complete Jack the Ripper. London: Penguin Books.
• Sudgen, Philip. 2002. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. New York: Carrol and Graff Publishers.