The last time 72 year-old widow Jodie Durocher was seen alive was on July 11, 1961 at 9 pm. The witnesses to her last moments were her fifty year old son, Dr. Robert "Robbie" Durocher, a cardiologist at Nashua Memorial Hospital; his twenty-nine year old girlfriend Mary "Bucky" Buckthorne, a one time head cardic nurse at the hospital since turned successful stripper; and Jodie’s landlady, Mrs. Pansy Kilgore, a forty-five year old woman known locally for not allowing her bad marriage to get in the way of having a good time. The visitors had all stopped by to say a quick and belated happy birthday to Jodie before heading out for a night of despicable behavior at the local Nashua City Motor Hotel. Unknown to Jodie, her visitors were an amorous trio of swingers who had met at an Easter sex party thrown by Dr. James MacDonald, the head of proctology and sexually deviant behavior at the hospital. The libidous trio had hit it off so well at the festive orgy that the three decided to continuing hitting it off privately a few weekends a month at local seedy motels and heavily foliaged public parks.
On the evening of the July 11 visit, the visitors were in a rush. They had missed their past planned weekends of mutual degradation due to Dr. "Robbie" having been out of state. The good doctor had claimed to colleagues that he had been beaver hunting in Michigan. In fact he had left New Hampshire to avoid a grand jury subpoena regarding criminal activities at the hospital. The criminal dealings went beyond the usual triple-billing of the government, or the performing of unnecessary but high margin surgeries on the comatose. Instead it involved embezzlement, drug dealing and extortion, and that was only in the candy striper department. However, a few days before the evening of July 11, Dr. Robbie had been able to return to New Hampshire with a high degree of confidence that the investigation was over. Due to a surprising accident of ill fortune, the lead witness for the state, a nurse named Rachel Mulligan, had died mysteriously. Sometime over the Fourth of July weekend, she had tripped over her own feet at the hospital’s top stairwell and then tumbled head over heels all the way down twenty-two flights. While some were suspicious of the accident-- somehow during her fall, Mulligan had entangled herself in medical gaze and had bound and gagged herself --- the police rapidly had concluded that it was an unfortunate accident. With her death, so died the investigation.
And so on this evening of July 11th the group were relaxed and happy mood, but rushed to get on with their perversions. Innocent of their plans, Jodie delayed them with a graciousness made of politeness and loneliness. Jodie had just prepared for bed by taking out her dentures and doffing her camel hair wig. The wig had been Robbie’s recent Mother’s Day gift to her. She pressed the visitors to stay, offering chamomile tea, a shot or two of whiskey and raisin biscuits. Before they could beg off, Jodie adjusted her wig onto her head and put her dentures in. But finally her Robbie put his foot down and insisted they had to go. At this, Jodie forced a smile, and slowly pulled her wig back off. The visitors then sang a velocissimo rendition of Happy Birthday and said a goodnight. It was about 9:00 pm. The last glimpse of Jodie was by Robbie. He saw his aged mother sink into her easy chair, her wig in one hand and her dentures in the other, staring at him dewy eyed as he closed the apartment door, cutting off his last vision of her alive.
The first sign of trouble was at 8:00 am the next morning. A next door tenant Mrs. Butkin was awakened by the smell of bacon-scented smoke. She assumed it was bacon fat burning in Jodie’s kitchen. Jodie was a lackadaisical cook and she burned most of the things she cooked. It was rumored she could burn water. Butkin stood in her bed, and pounded open-handed that wall which separated her apartment from Jodie’s. "Jodie,"she yelled. "Your bacon’s burning." She repeated this a few times. Hearing nothing in response, she thought of checking on Jodie. But since Ms Butkin knew that there was no such thing as a short visit with Jodie, she hesitated. Once Ms Butkin was in Jodie’s apartment, she knew that Jodie would insist they have tea and toast, and perhaps a shot or two while watching one of Jodie’s tv shows. Ms Butkin decided to lay back down in her downy comforter. She recalled falling into a deep sleep.
At 9:00 am, Mrs. Butkin was awakened by a pounding at her door. At her door was a stout, teenaged telegraph delivery-boy. Mrs. Butkin saw immediately that the telegraph was intended for Jodie and she curtly advised the heavily-acned boy to try pounding his fists on the door with the correct apartment number. The telegraph boy replied sharply in turn that he had tried the door with the correct apartment number but that there had been no answer. He further stated that he assumed that as a next door neighbor Mrs Butkin would be more than happy to sign for the telegraph, thereby relieving the boy of the duty to return all the earlier the next morning to pound some more. Mrs Butkin admitted to a reporter for the Nashua Telegraph that she was not happy about signing for a telegraph which was not her own. But in order to be rid of the boy–whom she described as "a pimply rascal, first class, with oak leave clusters"– Mrs Butkin scribbled her name to the telegraph receipt and took the telegraph. The boy had tipped his hat. That was the only tip in the transaction as Ms Butkin, being a bit muffed by the boy’s attitude, then slammed the door into his forced boyish grin.
Feeling somewhat entitled given that she had signed for the document, Ms. Butkin opened the telegraph and read it. It was from International Fruit Company of Panama. Jodie’s fruit of the month club subscription was being indefinitely suspended due to another military coup in Panama.
Mrs Butler thought about tossing the telegraph into the garbage but then she decided that she should give the telegram to Jodie. Rather than pound Jodie’s door, she decided to wait an hour or so to see if Jodie awoke. And so Mrs. Butkin had a cup of tea and watched a few game shows. Then she walked into the hallway and made her way to Jodie’s apartment door. She knocked loudly.
However, there was no answer to her knock. Mrs. Butkin frowned. Jodie was not usually a late sleeper. Mrs Butkin tried the doorknob. She snatched her hand away and held the red aching hand with her other. The door knob was so hot it had burned her hand. She rubbed the appendage and looked at the door. She saw no smoke coming from it. She touched the door. It was warm, but not hot.
Alarmed, Mrs. Butkin ran outside to find some help. She found a pair of city garbage workers on morning break sleeping in their truck. She awoke Joseph Moore, and Ben Watson, explained to them the situation and they all then rushed inside. Together, they managed to force open the door to Jodie’s apartment using a borrowed crowbar. Once the door flew open they were met with a terrible blast of oven-hot heat. The heat caused them to step back. Once it cooled, they proceeded forwards into the apartment. What they discovered inside the room defied belief.
The only portion of the apartment that was burned was the small corner in which sat the remains of Jodie’s easy chair... and of Jodie herself.
Jodie’s 150 pounds had been reduced to less than ten pounds of charred and smoking material comprised of bone splinters, and solidified fat. However, mysteriously, her wig was only lightly singed. The wig sat on top of the remaining mass of offal with wisps of white smoke filtering up from its hairs. On the surface of the mass itself were both sets of Jodie’s partial dentures, almost none the worse from the heat. The dentures looked as if they had been hand set in the middle of the mass in a macabre half-smile. Stranger still, when firefighters appeared and probed the mass, Jodie’s skull was found buried deep inside, and it seemed... shrunk to the size of a baseball by the intense heat.
Experts at local Rivier College were retained by the authorities to assist in the investigation. These experts pointed out that a temperature of 3200 degrees was necessary for such a thorough cremation. They could offer no explanation why the holocaust was limited to the one area of the apartment and why the apartment was not otherwise damaged by the intense heat. They had no clue what started the fire or why it stopped short of consuming the entire apartment, if not the entire building.
While the shrunken skull has gotten much play in the accounts of this strange fire, there is controversy about the skull. Some experts claim that Jodie’s skull was not shrunken at all. Instead, they assert that Jodie just had an unusually small skull for her size. Jodie stood four feet eight inches. Even for her diminutive size her head was considered small. Her head size was described variously by witnesses as about the size of a soft ball, or a large tomato. Photographs of Jodie confirm that she had a small head. Robbie claimed his father (who stood six feet 11 eleven inches) had been able to grip his mother’s head entirely in one of his hands. Indeed, Robbie remembered that when he and his siblings were little, his father would occasionally lift their mother off the floor in this fashion and shake her to the amusement of the children.
As for other clues to this strange fire? The remainder of the apartment showed all the signs of heat damage; from the four foot level and upwards the walls were covered with a greasy black soot. One enterprising investigator dabbed a forefinger into the oily residue and gave it the tip-of-the- tongue taste test. It tasted like ham, heavy with raisin sauce. Coincidentally, this was Jodie’s favorite dish.
Another, more strange clue was a cracked mirror. A full length mirror had cracked from the heat, leaving a vaguely humanoid shape. This aspect of the case led some investigators to claim the possibility of an alien element to the story, including the possible use of a death ray on Jodie by night-time celestial visitors whom the socially inept Jodie may have inadvertently insulted. In support of this theory, neighbors in the area reported strange lights in the sky that night. Ron MacDonald, a night watchman for a nearby tire warehouse about a quarter of a mile away claimed that he saw an eerie green light shaped like a two-man submarine over the apartment building sometime between 1 and 3 am. He had even taken a few photographs of the submarine-shaped light. However, before MacDonald could get the film developed, an agent from an unidentified governmental agency came to his house and seized the film roll. In exchange, MacDonald was left merely with a crumpled $5 dollar gift certificate to the gift shop at the J. Edgar Hoover Library.
John Gleason in his book of oddities "Not of Earth!" claims that Jodie’s death was caused by a follow-up experiment to the Philadelphia project. In this extension of that project, the military was trying to tele-transport random sleeping civilians to and from local miliary bases without waking them. Unfortunately for Jodie, the experiment had a critical failure. She was in the midst of being transported back to her apartment just when a sun spot flared. This scrambled her genetic code, and caused her to combust promptly upon being phased back into her armchair as a disorganized blob. This somewhat fantastical theory has been discredited by the fact that Gleason was hopelessly insane at the time he wrote the book. Indeed, Gleason’s original manuscript was written in his own feces. However, some university experts give credence to Gleason's theory based on the neat hand-drawn diagrams Gleason had included in the book which illustrated the theory.
What are the conventional explanations for the fire? Some experts hae pointed to Jodie’s usual nightly routine. Jodie typically would end her day by sitting in her armchair dressed in a cotton nightdress. With a mystery book in her lap, Jodie would read her book while puffing on a Cuban cigar. Usually she would also sip hard liquor from a Flinstone juice glass, generally gin, sometimes vodka, but occasionally straight grain alcohol cut with just a splash of tap water. Often she would fall asleep curled up in the chair, the book still open on her lap, the cigar burnt down to a glowing ash in her mouth and the empty glass of liquor lying spilt in her lap. Under these circumstances a fire almost certain to happen, especially given that the nightgown and arm chair were made of highly combustible materials. Robbie had often warned his mother of the danger of fire but she had dismissed his concerns as mere "namby-pampism". She continued her dangerous night ritual, sometimes adding to the danger by snacking on high flammable rice cakes sloppily dipped deep in a breakfast bowl overflowing with olive oil.
What could have burned Jodie so fiercely without causing more damage to her surroundings? Experts who investigated the case didn’t have a clue. To date, no one has stepped forward with a plausible theory accepted by all experts. As for the investigation, the case is considered closed. The cause of the fire and Jodie’s death is listed as unknown.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Strange Prophets -- Joanna Southcott
On April 12th, 1750, Joanna Southcott was born at Tally Farm, in the parish of St. Mary DeVille, in the County of Devon in Western England. The people of Devon in those days had a well-earned reputation for violent, self-centered independence bordering on what now would be considered mass narcissistic rage. Tax collection was nearly impossible in the county with the locals battering down any king’s men half-wit enough to take the job. Weddings were disfavored as contracts for mutual slavery and most lived in a state of free-love, where bed partners were rotated like staple crops. While considered hard workers, Devon laborers did not take to supervision and considered anything other than friendly advice from higher ups as an insult to their dignity. Known as loyal patriots to king and country, they did not take to open displays of either loyalty or patriotism. Instead, they considered it loyal and patriotic enough to decline from tossing rotted fruit at progressing royalty, and keeping to a minium the bleating of tongues through two-fingered salutes.
Back in the early 1700's. most of England knew the phrase " Can any good thing come out of Devon? " It was a jest of Devon’s fellow countrymen over the fact that Devon was the sole county without distinction in personages. Not a single author, painter, composer, or philosopher of note was born or raised there. There is even a question whether any had even crossed its boundaries on a dare to temporarily grace a foot on its unpleasant pastures. As for political leaders, Devon had supplied none except for Lord Hammersham, a secondary official in the Treasury Department . After mere five weeks of service, he had embezzled the queen mother’s pin money (a sum now equal to over 20 million euros) and thereafter fled to Paris. Within three months he surfaced under heavy lipstick, perfume, powder and lace, now known as Lady Hammersham.. Ultimately he opened a salon which was the talk of Paris until he himself was embezzled back into poverty by Lady Levic. She fled with the money to London, and thereafter surfaced under heavy lipstick, cologne, powder and lace as Lord Levic. The play out of this scandal lasted several years and caused Devon much grief in the jibes it allowed competiting counties. It was said that during these years no one in Devon left the county undisguised in dialect and local dress in fear of ridicule.
It was under such circumstances that Joanna grew up on a small apple tree farm. She had neither brother nor sister. As a rare only child she was greatly adored by her mother, father and their steady rotation of lovers. However, Joanna spent most of her youth alone, being typically sent outside by her amorous parents in all kinds of weather and in all seasons to amuse herself. Her favorite past time became to sit under an apple tree, and read books of religious insight, such as Jeremy Taylor’s, "On God and Man, and Sometimes Woman Also," and Frederick Birchwood’s "On the Certain and Total Damnation of the Whole Human Race, Certain Select Christians Excluded " As a result, she became very devout at an early age. Indeed, her parents claimed that her first spoken word was "Jesus" and immediately followed by her second, "Christ". The occasion of the momentous utterings was when a heavy hymn book startled poor two year old Joanna by landing near her tiny bare feet.
Joanna’s parents were poor, and generally self-educated except for about a year and a half between them of what we now call kindergarten. They kept only one book at home, the Bible, but borrowed many others, all of religious thought. Un fortunately, Joanna’s parents did not think formal education a necessity. They believed a well-educated mind was an unnecessary luxury and likely an insurmountable hindrance to social acceptance in their proudly ignorant community. Hence Joanna grew up with little formal education. But this did not hinder nor trouble her, for she knew this has been the case with very many of the world's greatest personalities from Alaric the Goth to Genghis Ghan to Attila the Hun. Despite her lack of formal education she had what her followers called "the divinely inspired intelligence of a pure heart ". Samples of such intelligence are scattered throughout her numerous writings. Further, history is replete with evidence that her reasoning power had such irrefutable persuasiveness that her opponents could only roll their eyes in wonder, smirk in awe or scratch their heads in bewildered defeat.
Joanna’s followers claim that her early life spent under the apple trees was the fulfilment of the prophetic words, " I raised thee up under the apple-trees, thereby to be my warrior in faith " (Song of Solomon). Her mother, a deeply religious woman despite her sexual license, and insatiable amorous appetite, also had said: "God had made great promises to me before she was born that she should be both a no bars fighter and a I’s-a-told-you-so’er prevailer ." These prophecies were abundantly fulfilled if one thinks of Joanna’s intellectual strength, for Joanna was a relentless, Don’t-you-walk-away- I’m-not-finished-yet debater, and a tough thinker who was utterly fearless of facts or logic. However in her private dealings with others, she was kind and demure, and rarely if ever elbowed aside the poor, lame or infirm, and only pushed or shoved through crowds to make her way. Indeed, one biographer claimed that Joanna was so sensitive in nature that she could not even be troubled to wave away a fly. There is even a pretty story told on her regarding this. It involved her famous debate with Bishop Herford in an open field in Westchester Circle. According to this story, just as the debate had begun Joanna suffered an impertinent fly landing to perch on her nose. Despite Joanna’s gentle efforts throughout the debate to dislodge her winged guest by gentle nostril flaring and snorting, and even whole face twitching and flinching, the fly would not leave its advantageous seating. Not even a nearby field full of cow pies could tempt the insect away. In the end, however, Joanna was able to win the day with the bishop without needing to batter away the, black, buzzing winged dot of God’s creation. A fanciful addition to this story has it that at the debate’s conclusion, the winged creature finally flew off and, as if in sorry penitence for its imposition, the winged annoyance then buzzed the ears of the horse pulling the defeated bishop away in his gig. This story ends colorfully with the horse allegedly startled into rearing up and then running off amuck until it fell into a nearby ravine, killing itself, the bishop and his two young charges.
Before becoming a prophetess, at an early age, as typical of girls of her generation, Joanna was sent out in to the world to earn her living in unskilled labors. She was able to obtain advantageous positions for a number of different households by working as a demi-servant. Demi-servants were specialized personal servants assigned the sole task of assisting their masters in proper daily defecation through oil and water based enemas. Joanna’s work took her across England, including to such low fiber places as Honiton, Heavitree, Okehampton, and Exeter. Her employers testified later to her unfailing honesty, upright character, and honorable conduct in all her relations with them - a testimony of questionable value given their dealings were limited to the privity where they were at the mercy of her judgment and hose.
Joanna was eighteen when the " Spirit of Truth" first became her guide and guard. She had been walking a crowded city lane on an off day, looking for nothing but exercise since her sparse wages gave her little extra to spend on purchasable enjoyment. Suddenly, she felt drawn to a nearby alley, full of drunkards, imbeciles and booksellers. Called to prayer by a skeletal half-naked mystic among the human refuse, she took his grimy hand and knelt to her knees, stopping only to pull up her skirt from the muck and evidence of close but unordered human habitation. They prayed together and as they prayed she alone saw a light descending from heaven. The light sparkled once and transformed into a dove, one with a piece of papyrus in its beak. She reached up and plucked the parchment from the mouth of the divine bird. Evidently this imprudent action exceeded the pace and timing of her expected role in this divine ritual and the mystical feathered animal squawked in outraged surprise. Perhaps forgetting its divine agency, the beaked Lord’s messenger swopped down and tried pecking her bulbous eyes. She cried out, Lord, Lord, deliver they servant! Suddenly, the Lord intervened, the bird de-ruffled its feathers, and she was allowed the paper. The bird then disappeared with a contentious squawk , leaving the divine message in her hand along with a messy reminder of its presence on her head.
The words on the parchment have become so well know in history that only great patience bears their repeating. The words stated, "Thus out of many cometh the one upon my favor doth rest – the Lord":
From then on, Joanna was the Lord’s own.
Despite the message, from 1772 to 1792 Joanna continued working as a demi-servant while she waited for the particulars of her calling to manifest. Oftentimes she lost hope thinking her vision was mere madness, or but the delusion from the working of a stuck, fattened piece of lunch laboring to down itself through her gizzard. Sometimes she thought of her whole life was wrongly guided and she thought of becoming a godless philosopher or even a follower of Joshua McHalter, a Scottish mystic. This red faced, red-breaded prophet preached the end of the world was a-neigh and that only complete poverty could save one from the predicted fire and brimstone showers of final damnation. As the willing scrape goat for the blighted generation, McHalter took the risk of damnation off his followers by pocketing their unholy lucre and burdening himself with their sinful possessions, while they awaited for final judgment, huddled in expectant wonder unsheltered outside the walls of his mansion.
Finally, in 1792 the Lord visited her in great power, to "warn her of what was coming upon the whole earth." In this year she began writing under the power of the Spirit. All of her writings were considered to have the authority of divine scripture and were all were placed in a great box (The Great Box) which was kept in the custody of one of her friends, a Margot Churlish. Her inspired writings were done in a unique manner. She would sit at a writing table in a well-lit drawing room, but then be covered in a large white lace curtain washed and laundered only in holy water. Only the broad outlines of her features could be determined. There, in this semi-privacy, whilst her disciples watched in wordless and frozen mystic wonder and delight she would scribble scribble,scribble across rough second hand parchment using a sharp quilt pen and pure black India ink. Sometimes she would write only a few minutes; others times as long as an hour. Only once did she exceed an hour, when she was inspired by the Lord into a small treatise on the financial obligations of followers. Once her inspiration was burned off her, she would put down her pen on the table, lick the envelope where the inspired parchment would be sealed for the ritual seven days, and then enclosing and sealing that recorded vision, she would give a sharp whistle towards where her senior follower sat, indicating she was done.
According to her closest disciplines thoughts which formed in her mind dropped upon the page with the rapidity of a spring cloudburst dropping phalange sized raindrops. Her prophecies all bore the signatures of at least two or more witnesses, sometimes three, or even four if literacy in the room was particularly prevalent.
In 1797 Joanna, for the first time, visited Exeter, where she made the acquaintance of the Rev. Joseph Pomeroy of St. Peter's. He was a stout, balding, man of forty-five with a mutton chop beard and a strange mixture of both strong male and female mannerisms. He had a unique and irritating habit of incessantly snapping his fingers in people’s faces doing conversation to quicken the laggard pace of their thought or speech, He became Joanna’s chief disciple and her life-long advocate in face of fierce opposition from the established clergy and the scoffers in the pews. He started a small monthly publication, called End Times, in which he published Joanna’s prophecies, editorialized on her wisdom, and entice others to follow whom he called his divine mistress of mysticism. For the first six years of his acquaintance he upheld her cause, but owing to the ridicule of his brother clergyman, Robert "Bobby" Pomeroy of St. Paul’s, he gave it up for s short period. In anger, during this breach, Joanna wrote that Pomeroy was a type of the clergy, "who doth think they shall doth save their honor by being mockers and despoilers of the doth whole; not seeking to have the truth doth cleared up, doth tried and doth proved, as I have doth commanded it. Doth, doth, doth, doth!." (Book 34, p. 39). Thus, chastised, Pompory returned to the fold, a wiser man. He would remained a believer to the very end of his life, converting to Hinduism only upon his deathbed.
In 1801 Joanna published her greatest work The Strange Effects of Faith. This treatise on faith extended over three thick volumes published simultaneously. The volumes each contained six hundred sixty-six short chapters, some of which were comprised of only two to three words and in a single instance one word. The three volumes were named like children for Joanna always considered these her divine bestowed offspring. Volume I was called Daniel Thomas , Volume II Frederick William , and the last Volume III Geraldo Petticutt. To this day church scholars still use these terms exclusively when discussing these works. Due to the sales of these works, Joanna was able to live a comfortable life.
The most controversial aspect of her controversial life was at the near end of her life and involved the birth of the Messiah Shiloh. At the age of sixty-eight, she received a revelation that she was to be the mother of a new Messiah.. At the time she received this momentous message from her Creator, Joanna lived in complete virtue and chastity with five muscular, trim, young bachelors who but for her mercy and kindness would have been homeless. They all lived in a quaint, singe-bedroom cottage, high up on a slice of English green turf, set against the a rocky shore and three-quarters surrounded by an old-world garden full of God’s mixture in wonderful disorder but plenty. In that veritable miniature of paradise to come, Joanna was prepared for the momentous event of her life - the birth of the new Messiah, to be named Shiloh. Per the revelation the child was to be fathered by the " power of the Most High " and the child was to grow to be; " a man that was to rule the nations with a rod of iron." The language of the revelation naturally caused immediate excitement and even semi-hysteria among her women followers until a further revelation clarified the meaning of rod.
To her followers, that Joanna was to be the mother of the new Messiah undoubtedly seemed the crux of her mission, and to those enamored with her writings, its only logical termination. According to Joanna the role of the new Messiah would be to establish God’s kingdom on Earth for one thousand years. What would occur after a thousand years was left open. There is no clear indication in Joanna’s writings whether Shiloh was merely Christ returned under a new name or incarnation or whether this Messiah was something else altogether. When Joanna was pressed to clarify the issue via revelation, she answered that the Lord had advised her it was an impertinent inquiry and that He was expecting his new Messiah would be given a polite greeting and hospitality no matter who showed up.
The unbelievers mocked at Joanna, claiming that it was madness to think a woman in her mid-sixties could give birth, even with her natural advantages of a wide breeder’s girth and likely chute -like birth canal. They laughed of hr divine pretensions and her relations. The derision was such that even the little ones, boys and girls of the street, joined in. Soon Joanna could not even walk in any city or sizable town without being pelted by tiny grimy hands tossing stones, rotted produce and excrement. In one incident, a group of boys–all under ten– surrounded her while she was at market on a quick trip to pick up yeast. She had been without followers or protectors and they surrounded her and with sharpened sticks, they poked her until she bleed at twenty to thirty points. Only through the intervention of a sympathetic butcher, who, noting the boys’ grimy anonymous poverty, felt free to swipe away at the boys utilizing meat cleavers in both hands.
In 1813, the Prophetess bade farewell to the quiet country retreat so dear to her, and at the command of the Spirit of God, set to go to the Great Metropolis, her name for the City of London, named by the Lord as the birthplace of Shiloh. She took up in a townhouse thought owned by a believer. Unfortunately, the believer was a renter and within a month, there were eviction proceedings instituted. Joanna’s followers tried to furnish the rent but the owner refused their offer, outraged at the use of his townhouse for the birth of some divine interloper and fearful that the faithful might at some point seize the place to enshrine it into some unspeakable Seat of Glory. When he had them all kicked out, Joanna found refuge in another townhouse, this time owned by a follower. She stayed there until the end of her pregnancy. The situation was followed by the press. Indeed, one enterprising reporter secreted his way into her house and reported his findings under a daily column entitled, Today’s Laugh. Though this reporter was repeatedly found out due to his inability to keep a straight face during afternoon prayer circles, he was able to continuously sneak back into Joanna’s closed inner circle through such inventive disguises as being a magical walking and talking lamp-post. After an extended pregnancy period of 13 months, by September 1814, Joanna’s signaled she was ready to give birth to Shiloh.
The birth of Shiloh is of great dispute. Many say he was not born at all and all that fell out during Joanna’s great labor and trembling were a large dictionary concealed in Joanna’s undergarments to mimic the state of pregnancy. Others claimed Joanna was in a pure delusion, dying at the height of her supposed arborous labors, where, before she expired, she gave laborious birth to but only a great fart. Others claim the Messiah was born and did come forth as prophesied by Joanna, fully alive at his birth, but immediately raised to heaven in his little body and great spirit, after his great Slipping Out. Per this verison, the Lord changed the timing for the new Messiah and Shiloh was thus pulled him upwards home again. The reason behind this Great Change of Plans is in dispute amongst Southcott scholars and need not delay us in closing our story on Joanna.
Upon Joanna’s death there was much angry disputing between three groups of her follower as to the proper disposal of her body. The strict constructionist of her early writings claimed that the proper disposal of her considerable remains should be by burning the body preferably on a beach, or, if need be, in a large open field, but in either case much down wind.. These advocates noted that, cremation had been favorably commented upon by Joanna in her book The Many Flavors of God." The opposing group, the loose constructionists pointed that Joanna had praised cremation only in connection with describing the proper end for her critics. As for herself, however, they argued she preferred a gentler means of body disposal such as being humbly entombed. in a large three storey, three acre, granite edifice encrusted with emeralds and diamonds. There was a third group as well, though this "group" was actually comprised of only Gerald Thanpopieni. Thanpopieni was a seven foot giant with vigorous debating skills, a complete inability to see more than one side to any question, and vocal cords amazingly resistant to lactic acid build up. He claimed that that Joanna wished to be buried in the very earth she treaded during her years of suffering and of which she took so little care of washing off from her copious body folds while alive.. While these groups debated vigorously in the parlor using open handed slapping about the body interspaced with short periods of mutual rest, a fourth group, the self-named Practicals stole the body out a back door wrapped in a large shag carpet. Even the outside mob of spectators and reporters fell for the ruse and allowed a free inspectionless pass. The Practicals swiftly brought Joanna’ remains to an abandoned beach, burned the body over a day and a half with the aid of copious amounts of whale oil and kerosene, and then with the help of two borrowed wheel barrels took the large remainer pile of burnt bone and charred dried fat to bury it in nearby St Timothy’s graveyard. Thereafter a tomb was thrown up over the grave. All this was done in three days–the Miraculous Three as church history called it. This means of disposal met the begrudging approval of the other warring groups and the church was gloriously united again in divine sanctity. This God ordained unity lasted until the great schisms of 1817, 1818, 1823, 1824, 1834, 1837, 1846, 1849,1850, 1851, 1852, 1863, 1872, 1888, 1889, 1891, 1892, 1897,1903, 1917, 1923, 1936, 1937, 1939, 1941, 1952, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1968,1971, 1972, 1976, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2007.
As for Joanna’s place in history. It remains in flux. Some call her a false prophet who lead others down a path certain for hell and damnation. Others claim that she was a poor woman mislead by mental illness into thinking she was one of God’s special offspring among a family of billions. For her followers however, she remains God’s greatest prophetess who rests now for a period but who will again in better and healthier times, return to bring with her the long awaited Shiloh...
Back in the early 1700's. most of England knew the phrase " Can any good thing come out of Devon? " It was a jest of Devon’s fellow countrymen over the fact that Devon was the sole county without distinction in personages. Not a single author, painter, composer, or philosopher of note was born or raised there. There is even a question whether any had even crossed its boundaries on a dare to temporarily grace a foot on its unpleasant pastures. As for political leaders, Devon had supplied none except for Lord Hammersham, a secondary official in the Treasury Department . After mere five weeks of service, he had embezzled the queen mother’s pin money (a sum now equal to over 20 million euros) and thereafter fled to Paris. Within three months he surfaced under heavy lipstick, perfume, powder and lace, now known as Lady Hammersham.. Ultimately he opened a salon which was the talk of Paris until he himself was embezzled back into poverty by Lady Levic. She fled with the money to London, and thereafter surfaced under heavy lipstick, cologne, powder and lace as Lord Levic. The play out of this scandal lasted several years and caused Devon much grief in the jibes it allowed competiting counties. It was said that during these years no one in Devon left the county undisguised in dialect and local dress in fear of ridicule.
It was under such circumstances that Joanna grew up on a small apple tree farm. She had neither brother nor sister. As a rare only child she was greatly adored by her mother, father and their steady rotation of lovers. However, Joanna spent most of her youth alone, being typically sent outside by her amorous parents in all kinds of weather and in all seasons to amuse herself. Her favorite past time became to sit under an apple tree, and read books of religious insight, such as Jeremy Taylor’s, "On God and Man, and Sometimes Woman Also," and Frederick Birchwood’s "On the Certain and Total Damnation of the Whole Human Race, Certain Select Christians Excluded " As a result, she became very devout at an early age. Indeed, her parents claimed that her first spoken word was "Jesus" and immediately followed by her second, "Christ". The occasion of the momentous utterings was when a heavy hymn book startled poor two year old Joanna by landing near her tiny bare feet.
Joanna’s parents were poor, and generally self-educated except for about a year and a half between them of what we now call kindergarten. They kept only one book at home, the Bible, but borrowed many others, all of religious thought. Un fortunately, Joanna’s parents did not think formal education a necessity. They believed a well-educated mind was an unnecessary luxury and likely an insurmountable hindrance to social acceptance in their proudly ignorant community. Hence Joanna grew up with little formal education. But this did not hinder nor trouble her, for she knew this has been the case with very many of the world's greatest personalities from Alaric the Goth to Genghis Ghan to Attila the Hun. Despite her lack of formal education she had what her followers called "the divinely inspired intelligence of a pure heart ". Samples of such intelligence are scattered throughout her numerous writings. Further, history is replete with evidence that her reasoning power had such irrefutable persuasiveness that her opponents could only roll their eyes in wonder, smirk in awe or scratch their heads in bewildered defeat.
Joanna’s followers claim that her early life spent under the apple trees was the fulfilment of the prophetic words, " I raised thee up under the apple-trees, thereby to be my warrior in faith " (Song of Solomon). Her mother, a deeply religious woman despite her sexual license, and insatiable amorous appetite, also had said: "God had made great promises to me before she was born that she should be both a no bars fighter and a I’s-a-told-you-so’er prevailer ." These prophecies were abundantly fulfilled if one thinks of Joanna’s intellectual strength, for Joanna was a relentless, Don’t-you-walk-away- I’m-not-finished-yet debater, and a tough thinker who was utterly fearless of facts or logic. However in her private dealings with others, she was kind and demure, and rarely if ever elbowed aside the poor, lame or infirm, and only pushed or shoved through crowds to make her way. Indeed, one biographer claimed that Joanna was so sensitive in nature that she could not even be troubled to wave away a fly. There is even a pretty story told on her regarding this. It involved her famous debate with Bishop Herford in an open field in Westchester Circle. According to this story, just as the debate had begun Joanna suffered an impertinent fly landing to perch on her nose. Despite Joanna’s gentle efforts throughout the debate to dislodge her winged guest by gentle nostril flaring and snorting, and even whole face twitching and flinching, the fly would not leave its advantageous seating. Not even a nearby field full of cow pies could tempt the insect away. In the end, however, Joanna was able to win the day with the bishop without needing to batter away the, black, buzzing winged dot of God’s creation. A fanciful addition to this story has it that at the debate’s conclusion, the winged creature finally flew off and, as if in sorry penitence for its imposition, the winged annoyance then buzzed the ears of the horse pulling the defeated bishop away in his gig. This story ends colorfully with the horse allegedly startled into rearing up and then running off amuck until it fell into a nearby ravine, killing itself, the bishop and his two young charges.
Before becoming a prophetess, at an early age, as typical of girls of her generation, Joanna was sent out in to the world to earn her living in unskilled labors. She was able to obtain advantageous positions for a number of different households by working as a demi-servant. Demi-servants were specialized personal servants assigned the sole task of assisting their masters in proper daily defecation through oil and water based enemas. Joanna’s work took her across England, including to such low fiber places as Honiton, Heavitree, Okehampton, and Exeter. Her employers testified later to her unfailing honesty, upright character, and honorable conduct in all her relations with them - a testimony of questionable value given their dealings were limited to the privity where they were at the mercy of her judgment and hose.
Joanna was eighteen when the " Spirit of Truth" first became her guide and guard. She had been walking a crowded city lane on an off day, looking for nothing but exercise since her sparse wages gave her little extra to spend on purchasable enjoyment. Suddenly, she felt drawn to a nearby alley, full of drunkards, imbeciles and booksellers. Called to prayer by a skeletal half-naked mystic among the human refuse, she took his grimy hand and knelt to her knees, stopping only to pull up her skirt from the muck and evidence of close but unordered human habitation. They prayed together and as they prayed she alone saw a light descending from heaven. The light sparkled once and transformed into a dove, one with a piece of papyrus in its beak. She reached up and plucked the parchment from the mouth of the divine bird. Evidently this imprudent action exceeded the pace and timing of her expected role in this divine ritual and the mystical feathered animal squawked in outraged surprise. Perhaps forgetting its divine agency, the beaked Lord’s messenger swopped down and tried pecking her bulbous eyes. She cried out, Lord, Lord, deliver they servant! Suddenly, the Lord intervened, the bird de-ruffled its feathers, and she was allowed the paper. The bird then disappeared with a contentious squawk , leaving the divine message in her hand along with a messy reminder of its presence on her head.
The words on the parchment have become so well know in history that only great patience bears their repeating. The words stated, "Thus out of many cometh the one upon my favor doth rest – the Lord":
From then on, Joanna was the Lord’s own.
Despite the message, from 1772 to 1792 Joanna continued working as a demi-servant while she waited for the particulars of her calling to manifest. Oftentimes she lost hope thinking her vision was mere madness, or but the delusion from the working of a stuck, fattened piece of lunch laboring to down itself through her gizzard. Sometimes she thought of her whole life was wrongly guided and she thought of becoming a godless philosopher or even a follower of Joshua McHalter, a Scottish mystic. This red faced, red-breaded prophet preached the end of the world was a-neigh and that only complete poverty could save one from the predicted fire and brimstone showers of final damnation. As the willing scrape goat for the blighted generation, McHalter took the risk of damnation off his followers by pocketing their unholy lucre and burdening himself with their sinful possessions, while they awaited for final judgment, huddled in expectant wonder unsheltered outside the walls of his mansion.
Finally, in 1792 the Lord visited her in great power, to "warn her of what was coming upon the whole earth." In this year she began writing under the power of the Spirit. All of her writings were considered to have the authority of divine scripture and were all were placed in a great box (The Great Box) which was kept in the custody of one of her friends, a Margot Churlish. Her inspired writings were done in a unique manner. She would sit at a writing table in a well-lit drawing room, but then be covered in a large white lace curtain washed and laundered only in holy water. Only the broad outlines of her features could be determined. There, in this semi-privacy, whilst her disciples watched in wordless and frozen mystic wonder and delight she would scribble scribble,scribble across rough second hand parchment using a sharp quilt pen and pure black India ink. Sometimes she would write only a few minutes; others times as long as an hour. Only once did she exceed an hour, when she was inspired by the Lord into a small treatise on the financial obligations of followers. Once her inspiration was burned off her, she would put down her pen on the table, lick the envelope where the inspired parchment would be sealed for the ritual seven days, and then enclosing and sealing that recorded vision, she would give a sharp whistle towards where her senior follower sat, indicating she was done.
According to her closest disciplines thoughts which formed in her mind dropped upon the page with the rapidity of a spring cloudburst dropping phalange sized raindrops. Her prophecies all bore the signatures of at least two or more witnesses, sometimes three, or even four if literacy in the room was particularly prevalent.
In 1797 Joanna, for the first time, visited Exeter, where she made the acquaintance of the Rev. Joseph Pomeroy of St. Peter's. He was a stout, balding, man of forty-five with a mutton chop beard and a strange mixture of both strong male and female mannerisms. He had a unique and irritating habit of incessantly snapping his fingers in people’s faces doing conversation to quicken the laggard pace of their thought or speech, He became Joanna’s chief disciple and her life-long advocate in face of fierce opposition from the established clergy and the scoffers in the pews. He started a small monthly publication, called End Times, in which he published Joanna’s prophecies, editorialized on her wisdom, and entice others to follow whom he called his divine mistress of mysticism. For the first six years of his acquaintance he upheld her cause, but owing to the ridicule of his brother clergyman, Robert "Bobby" Pomeroy of St. Paul’s, he gave it up for s short period. In anger, during this breach, Joanna wrote that Pomeroy was a type of the clergy, "who doth think they shall doth save their honor by being mockers and despoilers of the doth whole; not seeking to have the truth doth cleared up, doth tried and doth proved, as I have doth commanded it. Doth, doth, doth, doth!." (Book 34, p. 39). Thus, chastised, Pompory returned to the fold, a wiser man. He would remained a believer to the very end of his life, converting to Hinduism only upon his deathbed.
In 1801 Joanna published her greatest work The Strange Effects of Faith. This treatise on faith extended over three thick volumes published simultaneously. The volumes each contained six hundred sixty-six short chapters, some of which were comprised of only two to three words and in a single instance one word. The three volumes were named like children for Joanna always considered these her divine bestowed offspring. Volume I was called Daniel Thomas , Volume II Frederick William , and the last Volume III Geraldo Petticutt. To this day church scholars still use these terms exclusively when discussing these works. Due to the sales of these works, Joanna was able to live a comfortable life.
The most controversial aspect of her controversial life was at the near end of her life and involved the birth of the Messiah Shiloh. At the age of sixty-eight, she received a revelation that she was to be the mother of a new Messiah.. At the time she received this momentous message from her Creator, Joanna lived in complete virtue and chastity with five muscular, trim, young bachelors who but for her mercy and kindness would have been homeless. They all lived in a quaint, singe-bedroom cottage, high up on a slice of English green turf, set against the a rocky shore and three-quarters surrounded by an old-world garden full of God’s mixture in wonderful disorder but plenty. In that veritable miniature of paradise to come, Joanna was prepared for the momentous event of her life - the birth of the new Messiah, to be named Shiloh. Per the revelation the child was to be fathered by the " power of the Most High " and the child was to grow to be; " a man that was to rule the nations with a rod of iron." The language of the revelation naturally caused immediate excitement and even semi-hysteria among her women followers until a further revelation clarified the meaning of rod.
To her followers, that Joanna was to be the mother of the new Messiah undoubtedly seemed the crux of her mission, and to those enamored with her writings, its only logical termination. According to Joanna the role of the new Messiah would be to establish God’s kingdom on Earth for one thousand years. What would occur after a thousand years was left open. There is no clear indication in Joanna’s writings whether Shiloh was merely Christ returned under a new name or incarnation or whether this Messiah was something else altogether. When Joanna was pressed to clarify the issue via revelation, she answered that the Lord had advised her it was an impertinent inquiry and that He was expecting his new Messiah would be given a polite greeting and hospitality no matter who showed up.
The unbelievers mocked at Joanna, claiming that it was madness to think a woman in her mid-sixties could give birth, even with her natural advantages of a wide breeder’s girth and likely chute -like birth canal. They laughed of hr divine pretensions and her relations. The derision was such that even the little ones, boys and girls of the street, joined in. Soon Joanna could not even walk in any city or sizable town without being pelted by tiny grimy hands tossing stones, rotted produce and excrement. In one incident, a group of boys–all under ten– surrounded her while she was at market on a quick trip to pick up yeast. She had been without followers or protectors and they surrounded her and with sharpened sticks, they poked her until she bleed at twenty to thirty points. Only through the intervention of a sympathetic butcher, who, noting the boys’ grimy anonymous poverty, felt free to swipe away at the boys utilizing meat cleavers in both hands.
In 1813, the Prophetess bade farewell to the quiet country retreat so dear to her, and at the command of the Spirit of God, set to go to the Great Metropolis, her name for the City of London, named by the Lord as the birthplace of Shiloh. She took up in a townhouse thought owned by a believer. Unfortunately, the believer was a renter and within a month, there were eviction proceedings instituted. Joanna’s followers tried to furnish the rent but the owner refused their offer, outraged at the use of his townhouse for the birth of some divine interloper and fearful that the faithful might at some point seize the place to enshrine it into some unspeakable Seat of Glory. When he had them all kicked out, Joanna found refuge in another townhouse, this time owned by a follower. She stayed there until the end of her pregnancy. The situation was followed by the press. Indeed, one enterprising reporter secreted his way into her house and reported his findings under a daily column entitled, Today’s Laugh. Though this reporter was repeatedly found out due to his inability to keep a straight face during afternoon prayer circles, he was able to continuously sneak back into Joanna’s closed inner circle through such inventive disguises as being a magical walking and talking lamp-post. After an extended pregnancy period of 13 months, by September 1814, Joanna’s signaled she was ready to give birth to Shiloh.
The birth of Shiloh is of great dispute. Many say he was not born at all and all that fell out during Joanna’s great labor and trembling were a large dictionary concealed in Joanna’s undergarments to mimic the state of pregnancy. Others claimed Joanna was in a pure delusion, dying at the height of her supposed arborous labors, where, before she expired, she gave laborious birth to but only a great fart. Others claim the Messiah was born and did come forth as prophesied by Joanna, fully alive at his birth, but immediately raised to heaven in his little body and great spirit, after his great Slipping Out. Per this verison, the Lord changed the timing for the new Messiah and Shiloh was thus pulled him upwards home again. The reason behind this Great Change of Plans is in dispute amongst Southcott scholars and need not delay us in closing our story on Joanna.
Upon Joanna’s death there was much angry disputing between three groups of her follower as to the proper disposal of her body. The strict constructionist of her early writings claimed that the proper disposal of her considerable remains should be by burning the body preferably on a beach, or, if need be, in a large open field, but in either case much down wind.. These advocates noted that, cremation had been favorably commented upon by Joanna in her book The Many Flavors of God." The opposing group, the loose constructionists pointed that Joanna had praised cremation only in connection with describing the proper end for her critics. As for herself, however, they argued she preferred a gentler means of body disposal such as being humbly entombed. in a large three storey, three acre, granite edifice encrusted with emeralds and diamonds. There was a third group as well, though this "group" was actually comprised of only Gerald Thanpopieni. Thanpopieni was a seven foot giant with vigorous debating skills, a complete inability to see more than one side to any question, and vocal cords amazingly resistant to lactic acid build up. He claimed that that Joanna wished to be buried in the very earth she treaded during her years of suffering and of which she took so little care of washing off from her copious body folds while alive.. While these groups debated vigorously in the parlor using open handed slapping about the body interspaced with short periods of mutual rest, a fourth group, the self-named Practicals stole the body out a back door wrapped in a large shag carpet. Even the outside mob of spectators and reporters fell for the ruse and allowed a free inspectionless pass. The Practicals swiftly brought Joanna’ remains to an abandoned beach, burned the body over a day and a half with the aid of copious amounts of whale oil and kerosene, and then with the help of two borrowed wheel barrels took the large remainer pile of burnt bone and charred dried fat to bury it in nearby St Timothy’s graveyard. Thereafter a tomb was thrown up over the grave. All this was done in three days–the Miraculous Three as church history called it. This means of disposal met the begrudging approval of the other warring groups and the church was gloriously united again in divine sanctity. This God ordained unity lasted until the great schisms of 1817, 1818, 1823, 1824, 1834, 1837, 1846, 1849,1850, 1851, 1852, 1863, 1872, 1888, 1889, 1891, 1892, 1897,1903, 1917, 1923, 1936, 1937, 1939, 1941, 1952, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1968,1971, 1972, 1976, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2007.
As for Joanna’s place in history. It remains in flux. Some call her a false prophet who lead others down a path certain for hell and damnation. Others claim that she was a poor woman mislead by mental illness into thinking she was one of God’s special offspring among a family of billions. For her followers however, she remains God’s greatest prophetess who rests now for a period but who will again in better and healthier times, return to bring with her the long awaited Shiloh...
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Strange Disappearance-- James Worsen
It's difficult to dismiss unusual disappearances as fanciful stories when they take place in front of eyewitnesses. Here's another. This case began as a sizeable bet placed on a one man marathon, but ended in tragic mystery.
In 1873, James Worsen of Leamington Spa, England, was a simple butcher. The few sketches of him in the August 13, 1873 edition of the London Illustrated Weekly show him to be lanky in build, with crooked, irregularly spaced teeth, and an uniquely oblong face. In the pencil sketches, his skin resembles white dough sprinkled with a generous handful of raisins. These raisins were molasses-colored moles inherited through his grandmother, the so-called Mole Lady of Lord Barrington’s Royal Circus. Topping James unattractive countenance was a small divot of black hair as dense as uncut zoysia grass.
In the era in which James and his wife lived, there was no reliable birth control. Thus, fertile couples faced the grim prospect that the price to be paid for almost every act of sexual intercourse was a new mouth to feed. Since James and his wife were evidently both very fertile, and very active nocturnally, by the time of this story, their family had topped out at thirteen children, all under the age of fifteen. Like most simple laborers with large families, James was always hard pressed to make extra money through secondary employments.
Before taking the bet which lead to his disappearance, James had failed at a number of efforts to earn money. James first effort involved what was then called whore-mastering. For this effort he enlisted as his first whore his ugly but willing first cousin Thelma. Disaster struck when Thelma and her first customer fell immediately and deeply in love. They eloped instantly, taking with them James limited start-up funds, using the money to finance an extended Paris honeymoon. James then tried selling tainted meat products to the Royal Military, a lucre business for the times. His sole supportive political contact died just when the government was to ink a small contract. As a result, James lost out on the profitable opportunity to feed some regiments in Lancaster by supplying them wormy pork buttocks. Frustrated, James then turned to opium dealing. However, as is the case with most new sellers in the trade, he found inventory control to be impossible, particularly given the comings and goings of friends, relatives and tradesmen in his crowded hubble. He next tried a music and comedy act, enrolling his three youngest against their wills. It flopped when it was discovered that only two year old Henrietta could carry a tune and then only if it were Onward Britannia! sung in the key of C double sharp. His last effort involved following his grandmother into the side show trade by enlisting as a night-time freak show attraction He named himself the Mole King of Leamington Spa. To entice larger crowds he used black pitch to dab on extra "moles" and to exaggerate those which God had bestowed. At his first catwalk, a badly timed rain revealed his ruse. He avoided a near lynching by an outraged crowd of rowdies only through the friendly help of the Bearded Lady and her entourage. That ended that career.
Finally, fancying himself somewhat of an athlete, James started to take bets on how fast or how long he could run. Initially, he had great success. He earned enough extra income where a large number of his family was soon able to eat three meals a day. On the day of his disappearance, James had made a wager with a few gamblers from out of town that he could run 26 miles from Leamington Spa to Coventry.
Learning that James was very modest and particularly disliked running in front of ladies, the gamblers required that James run the miles nude during daylight. To entice James into taking the bet, they wagered a large sum. James could not say no. The terms being set, James made ready for the run. Noticing a fatal flaw in the terms, James enlisted the help of friends to aid him in keeping his modesty while winning the wager. He had friends hire four wagons which then had sheets draped from their sides almost to the ground. At the start of the race, James had these four sheet-draped wagons positioned so as to surround him. The gamblers cried foul, but James argued that the terms did not disallow the setup. The gamblers folded their arm as James dutifully undressed within the enclosure offered by his wagons. With a yip-yip of the driver of the front wagon, the wagons started off with James nestled within. On each wagon were two men: one of James’ friends as a driver, and one of the four gamblers determined to see this through.
The gamblers expected that James modesty would soon arise to terminate his run despite the curtaining sheets. The gamblers had much to encourage them. The wagoneers found it difficult to keep a uniform pace with each other. Moreover, they found it difficult to keep a pace with James himself. James always had a stutter-step style of running which was like a girlish skip. As a result, he tended to have an uneven speed. This unevenness was compounded by his frequent stops to retie his shoes, the only item he was allowed to wear. Thus, on more than one occasion, breaks appeared between the wagons and a glimpse could be had of James in his raw state. A few times, James’ astonished eyes met the eyes of inpertinetly curious ladies on the roadside, who, the modesty of the era notwithstanding, cranked and stretched their necks, glimpsing into his abode to catch him in the state of Adam. A quick drop of his luckily oversized hands to his front and back preserved his dignity whilst the wagoneers enclosed him again.
As James began to jog at a moderate pace toward Coventry, both he and his wagoneers found a perfect rhythm and speed. James became so sure of his preserved privacy, that witnesses reported he jogged for a while with arms stretched straight out at his sides and sometimes even with his hands folded on top of his sweat dampened hair. This placid period lasted a short time, and this peaceful trot came to a bizarre and unexpected end. As James turned onto Newbury Road, one of the main roads into Coventry, he found difficulty with large rocks in the road breaking his stride and rhythm. Typical for the time, the road was unpaved. Moreover, the road, due to heavy weather and heavy traffic, had deep and cris crossing wagon wheel trenches. These obstacles made the road difficult to navigate even at a walking pace. James at first deftly dodged the trenches and jutting rocks. But then, within the sight of the drivers of the two side wagons and the one rear wagon, and within the sight of all four gamblers/passengers, James then tripped on something. Some said it was a rock, others a deep trench cut. One said there was nothing at all and that perhaps James had tripped over his own shoes. In any event, James fell forward... but never hit the hard, grooved and rocky gravel. Instead, James completely vanished in mid-fall, his arms still stretched out from his sides like bony featherless wings, too late even to move them forward to brace him for a fall, his legs up behind him in mid air. As he fell, his eyes widened to the size of wafers and the thin lips of his mouth beat together rapidly. The only sound that came forth from his mouth before he disappeared was a short quick peep-peep-peep- peep. James’ friends recognized this sound immediately. Whenever James was under great stress , James would purse his lips and make this peeping sound until his nerves calmed or the immediate crisis passed.
The wagons were stopped in their grooved tracks. The spot of James’s disappearance remained within their enclosure. Once the few spectators realized what had happened they bullied their way by the wagons into the enclosed area. James was nowhere to be found. Thinking a trick had been played, for some of the speculators had taken side-bets on the run, the wagons were searched. Nothing. Due to the amount of wagering, the authorities immediately became involved. They initially thought the disappearance a prank, or some unusual pretext to defraud outside bettors. Once James extended family arrived, it became clear that James disappearance was real.
There were no clues of course. As required, a search of the area was made to no avail. The public followed the story for weeks, including a long article of the matter in London Illustrated Weekly. As is with such cases, the public’s interest soon waned and turned to other events both trivial and significant. Over time, James was declared dead, and his family went on the public poverty rolls. Ten of his children ultimately became indentured servants. Three ended up in India, one in Bermuda and the rest in South Ameria. Their ultimate fate is lost to history.
As what actually happened that fateful day? No one can say for sure. However, one investigator, Paul B’Gessia, published a book in 1978 called, “Goodbye World, Signed James” in which he claimed that James had fallen into a temporary rip in the time-space continuum. The theory gained some support when B'Gessia produced a worn pair of shoes which he claimed James had been wearing when he disappeared. B'Gessa story was that the battered shoes had fallen back out of a similar time-space rip during one of his investigative visits to the site of the disappearance. Some critics refused to accept the story. The shoes were cooincidentally B'Gessa's size and even were an exact match for the footwear he wore for the author's photograph on his book. However, many others were made believers by B'Gessia's book and the mysterious shoes. While B'Gessia's story is based on pure theory, even his harshest critics admit that his theory may be the best explanation to date...
In 1873, James Worsen of Leamington Spa, England, was a simple butcher. The few sketches of him in the August 13, 1873 edition of the London Illustrated Weekly show him to be lanky in build, with crooked, irregularly spaced teeth, and an uniquely oblong face. In the pencil sketches, his skin resembles white dough sprinkled with a generous handful of raisins. These raisins were molasses-colored moles inherited through his grandmother, the so-called Mole Lady of Lord Barrington’s Royal Circus. Topping James unattractive countenance was a small divot of black hair as dense as uncut zoysia grass.
In the era in which James and his wife lived, there was no reliable birth control. Thus, fertile couples faced the grim prospect that the price to be paid for almost every act of sexual intercourse was a new mouth to feed. Since James and his wife were evidently both very fertile, and very active nocturnally, by the time of this story, their family had topped out at thirteen children, all under the age of fifteen. Like most simple laborers with large families, James was always hard pressed to make extra money through secondary employments.
Before taking the bet which lead to his disappearance, James had failed at a number of efforts to earn money. James first effort involved what was then called whore-mastering. For this effort he enlisted as his first whore his ugly but willing first cousin Thelma. Disaster struck when Thelma and her first customer fell immediately and deeply in love. They eloped instantly, taking with them James limited start-up funds, using the money to finance an extended Paris honeymoon. James then tried selling tainted meat products to the Royal Military, a lucre business for the times. His sole supportive political contact died just when the government was to ink a small contract. As a result, James lost out on the profitable opportunity to feed some regiments in Lancaster by supplying them wormy pork buttocks. Frustrated, James then turned to opium dealing. However, as is the case with most new sellers in the trade, he found inventory control to be impossible, particularly given the comings and goings of friends, relatives and tradesmen in his crowded hubble. He next tried a music and comedy act, enrolling his three youngest against their wills. It flopped when it was discovered that only two year old Henrietta could carry a tune and then only if it were Onward Britannia! sung in the key of C double sharp. His last effort involved following his grandmother into the side show trade by enlisting as a night-time freak show attraction He named himself the Mole King of Leamington Spa. To entice larger crowds he used black pitch to dab on extra "moles" and to exaggerate those which God had bestowed. At his first catwalk, a badly timed rain revealed his ruse. He avoided a near lynching by an outraged crowd of rowdies only through the friendly help of the Bearded Lady and her entourage. That ended that career.
Finally, fancying himself somewhat of an athlete, James started to take bets on how fast or how long he could run. Initially, he had great success. He earned enough extra income where a large number of his family was soon able to eat three meals a day. On the day of his disappearance, James had made a wager with a few gamblers from out of town that he could run 26 miles from Leamington Spa to Coventry.
Learning that James was very modest and particularly disliked running in front of ladies, the gamblers required that James run the miles nude during daylight. To entice James into taking the bet, they wagered a large sum. James could not say no. The terms being set, James made ready for the run. Noticing a fatal flaw in the terms, James enlisted the help of friends to aid him in keeping his modesty while winning the wager. He had friends hire four wagons which then had sheets draped from their sides almost to the ground. At the start of the race, James had these four sheet-draped wagons positioned so as to surround him. The gamblers cried foul, but James argued that the terms did not disallow the setup. The gamblers folded their arm as James dutifully undressed within the enclosure offered by his wagons. With a yip-yip of the driver of the front wagon, the wagons started off with James nestled within. On each wagon were two men: one of James’ friends as a driver, and one of the four gamblers determined to see this through.
The gamblers expected that James modesty would soon arise to terminate his run despite the curtaining sheets. The gamblers had much to encourage them. The wagoneers found it difficult to keep a uniform pace with each other. Moreover, they found it difficult to keep a pace with James himself. James always had a stutter-step style of running which was like a girlish skip. As a result, he tended to have an uneven speed. This unevenness was compounded by his frequent stops to retie his shoes, the only item he was allowed to wear. Thus, on more than one occasion, breaks appeared between the wagons and a glimpse could be had of James in his raw state. A few times, James’ astonished eyes met the eyes of inpertinetly curious ladies on the roadside, who, the modesty of the era notwithstanding, cranked and stretched their necks, glimpsing into his abode to catch him in the state of Adam. A quick drop of his luckily oversized hands to his front and back preserved his dignity whilst the wagoneers enclosed him again.
As James began to jog at a moderate pace toward Coventry, both he and his wagoneers found a perfect rhythm and speed. James became so sure of his preserved privacy, that witnesses reported he jogged for a while with arms stretched straight out at his sides and sometimes even with his hands folded on top of his sweat dampened hair. This placid period lasted a short time, and this peaceful trot came to a bizarre and unexpected end. As James turned onto Newbury Road, one of the main roads into Coventry, he found difficulty with large rocks in the road breaking his stride and rhythm. Typical for the time, the road was unpaved. Moreover, the road, due to heavy weather and heavy traffic, had deep and cris crossing wagon wheel trenches. These obstacles made the road difficult to navigate even at a walking pace. James at first deftly dodged the trenches and jutting rocks. But then, within the sight of the drivers of the two side wagons and the one rear wagon, and within the sight of all four gamblers/passengers, James then tripped on something. Some said it was a rock, others a deep trench cut. One said there was nothing at all and that perhaps James had tripped over his own shoes. In any event, James fell forward... but never hit the hard, grooved and rocky gravel. Instead, James completely vanished in mid-fall, his arms still stretched out from his sides like bony featherless wings, too late even to move them forward to brace him for a fall, his legs up behind him in mid air. As he fell, his eyes widened to the size of wafers and the thin lips of his mouth beat together rapidly. The only sound that came forth from his mouth before he disappeared was a short quick peep-peep-peep- peep. James’ friends recognized this sound immediately. Whenever James was under great stress , James would purse his lips and make this peeping sound until his nerves calmed or the immediate crisis passed.
The wagons were stopped in their grooved tracks. The spot of James’s disappearance remained within their enclosure. Once the few spectators realized what had happened they bullied their way by the wagons into the enclosed area. James was nowhere to be found. Thinking a trick had been played, for some of the speculators had taken side-bets on the run, the wagons were searched. Nothing. Due to the amount of wagering, the authorities immediately became involved. They initially thought the disappearance a prank, or some unusual pretext to defraud outside bettors. Once James extended family arrived, it became clear that James disappearance was real.
There were no clues of course. As required, a search of the area was made to no avail. The public followed the story for weeks, including a long article of the matter in London Illustrated Weekly. As is with such cases, the public’s interest soon waned and turned to other events both trivial and significant. Over time, James was declared dead, and his family went on the public poverty rolls. Ten of his children ultimately became indentured servants. Three ended up in India, one in Bermuda and the rest in South Ameria. Their ultimate fate is lost to history.
As what actually happened that fateful day? No one can say for sure. However, one investigator, Paul B’Gessia, published a book in 1978 called, “Goodbye World, Signed James” in which he claimed that James had fallen into a temporary rip in the time-space continuum. The theory gained some support when B'Gessia produced a worn pair of shoes which he claimed James had been wearing when he disappeared. B'Gessa story was that the battered shoes had fallen back out of a similar time-space rip during one of his investigative visits to the site of the disappearance. Some critics refused to accept the story. The shoes were cooincidentally B'Gessa's size and even were an exact match for the footwear he wore for the author's photograph on his book. However, many others were made believers by B'Gessia's book and the mysterious shoes. While B'Gessia's story is based on pure theory, even his harshest critics admit that his theory may be the best explanation to date...
Friday, April 4, 2008
The Northeast Kingdom Triangle and The Fateful Date of December 11th
Between 1945 and 1955, the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont was the site of several completely unexplained disappearances. Strangely all such disappearance occurred on December 11th. Among some of these disappearances:
* On December 11, 1949, Mr. Jephet Tetford, a 55 year old bachelor pig farmer from Lower Cabot, vanished from a crowded bus full of religious enthusiasts on their way to a revival at Cabot's Reformed United Second Church of Christ . Before being picked up by the bus, Tetford had been on his way home on foot from a neighbor’s home. Tetford had spent the morning playing some cards with his neighbor who helped Tetford map out the logistics for a blind date his host had scheduled for him in the coming weeks. Tetford had with him a canvas bag in which he carried some proposed clothing for the date along with some self-help books on building lasting relationships. As the bus approached the sweaty farmer trudging along on the dusty rural Route 21A, the odds of the farmer being offered a ride were low. The driver of the bus, Henry Wallace, was off schedule. He was due to be in Lower Cabot in less than forty minutes. To make time, Wallace kept the accelerator firmly pressed to the floor. Moreover, while Wallace steered the rickety, converted school bus with one hand, Wallace used the other hand to hover over the horn on the ready for any sluggards clogging the sole northbound lane. Wallace had no plans to lift his foot off the accelerator whether for crossing wildlife or roadside pick-ups. If left to his discretion, Wallace would have passed the farmer, giving him only a good last second honk to make sure the farmer bandy-stepped off the main road onto the grassy roadside. However, at the insistence of the Christ-like passengers, who battered Wallace’s head with their floppy, paperback bibles, the bus was stopped and a good deed was reluctantly done. On the bus was 14 passengers. They all testified to seeing Tetford enter the bus, and give thanks to Wallace. Wallace grunted at Tetford, and thumbed him to the back of the bus. The passengers saw Tetford pass by and then take a seat near the rear of the bus. Each gave him a Christian greeting as he passed. Unbeknownst to the Christians on the bus, Tetford was something of the village atheist in lower Cabot. However, he had good manners and he returned their greetings with similar sentiments of Christian based cheer. Within minutes, Tetford propped his mud-caked boots on an empty seat, and was soon asleep. All of the passengers, who had gawked somewhat at their subject of Christian charity, turned face forward and began quietly reading to themselves from their bibles. When the bus finally reached its destination over an hour late, Tetford was gone. First to notice the disappearance was Wallace. Wallace was livid that he had failed to arrive on time. He was about to let the passengers have a strong lecture on the consequences of stopping to pick up non-paying, road-side stragglers when he noticed the principal source of his wrath was missing. Although Tetford’s belongings were still on the luggage rack and the crumbs of dried, brown dirt from his mud-caked boots lay on the empty seat upon which he had propped his feet, Tetford himself was gone. His disappearance caused somewhat of a religious hysteria on the bus. One of the riders suggested that Tetford had been translated Enoch like whilst in their midst. Some of the passengers took this statement to mean the farmer actually had been Enoch, only come disguised as a poor farmer to test their Christian mettle. Another of the enthusiasts wondered loudly whether the farmer had been Christ himself. Suddenly this person became certain of the idea, and he fell to his knees, babbling in tongues. Two others soon joined him. Bus driver Wallace was only able to contain the increasing hysteria by pressing on the horn until its loud squawk caused ears to ring, and all talking of any type to cease. Tetford’s family soon appeared and discounted these stories, noting that their relative was a mere man with calloused hands, perpetually weathered face, with more than his fair share of human frailties. Despite a sizable search and reward, Tetford has never been found.
* On December 11, 1950, an 19-year-old Taiwan-American art student named Paulette Wu vanished while hiking the Maple Trail into Glastonbury Mountain. She was seen by a middle-aged couple named Ben And Janis Points who had been strolling about 100 yards behind her. Before passing the couple, Wu had an extended conversation with the couple regarding her plans to study physics at MIT and then pursue a second degree in the law at Harvard. The couple thought the conversation unusual in that Wu admitted that she was a high school drop out without any means to pay for such an education. However, the chirpy and high spirited personality of Wu made it seem that anything might be possible for her. Mr. Points noted to her that he had a cousin who had graduated from MIT about 20 years back, and he suggested that maybe the cousin had continuing contacts with the institution which would be of help to her. Wu accepted the offer, and wrote her name and address on a scrap of paper so the cousin could contact her. On the paper, Wu had playfully scrawled beneath her name and address a cartoonist dome shaped UFO with the caption: “Beware: They’re real you know!” The dot to the exclamation mark was heart shaped. The couple hid their bemusement at this eccentric message. They gave a mild smile to the message. They weren't sure what to make of it as they had not been speaking of UFOs. Rather than engage Wu in an explanation, they decided to let her move on. She began walking at a quick pace but still she remained within their vision for quite a period. She was not an unattractive girl and the couple noted how cutely her black ponytail bounced off the bottom of her neck as she took exaggeratedly long strides which caused her body to go up and down like a slow operating piston. At this point they noted that she was not wearing socks, and the exposed top of her heels were red and bleeding from the rough edge of her sneaker riding over the exposed skin. In fact she was bleeding enough that the edge of the sneakers were a grotesque dark red. Mr. Points was about to call out to her to see if she needed medical attention.. But they lost sight of her when she followed the trail around a rocky outcropping known locally as Coolidge’s Profile. When the Points rounded the outcropping themselves, she was nowhere to be seen. The pen that she had used was in the middle of the trail. It was stabbed like a knife into the rocky soil. That pen was the only evidence that she had stayed on the trial past the rocky outcropping. The couple looked to both sides of the trail. While this area was heavily wooded, visibility was good due to the lack of foliage. Despite having a reasonably good view of both sides of the trail, they saw nothing. Police were ultimately called and searched for the girl. Her parents who lived in Worcester Massachusetts came and stayed a month helping in the search. They were impoverish and both were badly disabled: the mother by MS; the father by crippling spinal degeneration. Despite an extended effort, their sole child was never found. Sadly, her heart broken parents committed suicide soon after. Authorities blamed their lingering illnesses and extreme depression brought on by the loss of their child. Wu has not been seen nor heard from since.
* On December 11, 1953, 13-year old local resident John Maguire disappeared while visiting a neighbor’s Cabot farm. There is a saying that the typical Vermont boy is one part sweet Maple syrup, and nine parts tart apple cider. If so, John Maguire was a typical Vermont boy. Full of energy and active from the moment the sun snuck a ray pass the imposing Green Mountains to when it set over the mirror surface of ever-placid Lake George, John was a handful. His disappearance was state-wide news. On the day of Joey’s disappearance, John’s mother, Amanda, had taken John along on a visit to a neighboring pig farmer. The farmer was, Franklin Pierce, Jr., a retired State Senator. Pierce was partially blind and deaf and so for the past few years John’s mother would occasionally assist him. However on the day of John’s disappearance, the visit was purely social. Despite having been a state senator for close to thirty years, Peirce was extremely poor. He lived on a rusted second hand mobile home borrowed from his cousin. The home was precariously set on cement blocks and discarded imperfect granite stones. Set around the home were self-built shacks which Peirce used to store his limited farm equipment and house some of his small animals. Upon arrival at this humble farm, the mother went indoors. John, as was his nature, refused to go in. Like most Vermont boys, he loved the outdoors year round and in all weather. To keep an eye on her “Johnny”, the mother and her friend sat at a Formica table set by a window looking over where John played. According to the mother, at first John amused himself by smashing some large rocks against the farmer’s small concrete front walkway. After a few minutes of this, John picked up a small fallen branch. He tore off its few red-black dead leaves. With a penknife he carved a sharp point. The mother knew from past experience that John was likely planning to go poke the pigs. Despite that John had now walked out of her sight, the mother still felt comfortable about his whereabouts: from the noisy commotion now coming from the pig sty, she knew where and how he was occupying himself. After forty minutes it became suddenly quiet. The mother did not think it eerie. After being a whirlwind of energy, John often would suddenly run short. At such times, he would find the nearest fence post, tree stump or set of steps to sit and lean against to take a quick nap. The mother and her friend walked outside to check on John. Down at the pig sty John was nowhere to be found. There were smudged, ill-defined muddy footprints on the top of the soggy grass. John had evidently walked towards a nearby grassy field to go and poke at the friend’s horses. The mother noticed that in his wake, Joey had wrenched off metal strips on fence posts along the way. Standing at the fenced horses’ pasture, the mother saw something or someone bunched up like a ball and lying on the ground in the field near the horses. The tall grass obscured her view. Her friend, near sightless, was no assistance. She climbed over the fence and treaded through the ankle high grass towards the object. The closer she got to the area, the more the grass seemed to obscure her view. Her line of sight was repeatedly cut off by the horses which circled his object.. The closer she approached, the more the object/mound/person diminished as if it was being absorbed by the earth. Ultimately, just as she came upon the site, the horses ran off. Looking down, there was nothing but wet grass beaten down in a half moon shape. The outline of a young child, in a fetal position she later claimed.. The mother started screaming. Within the hour, local police searched the farm . Nothing was found. Within a week, flyers were posted, volunteers walked fields, rivers and lakes were dragged. No John. There was even a three part article on the disappearance in the Cabot Ledger. Still there were no leads. Despite the unusual circumstances of his disappearance, after a while, people soon forgot about John. After four years, the mother moved out of state, becoming a teacher’s assistant in Nashua, New Hampshire. She returned once more in 1967, perhaps grayer than could be blamed by the passing years. She helped dedicate the John Maguire Memorial baseball field for the junior high school. Sadly, John had dropped out of that school a month before he disappeared.. After dedicating the field, the mother never returned to Vermont. Yearly, upon the anniversary of his disappearance she sent a letter to editor to each of Vermont’s state-wide newspapers asking for a re-newed investigation, She died in 1972. Upon her death, the junior high school was closed due to declining tax revenues and John’s memorial field was paved over. Presently it is the location of a Stop and Shop.
* On December 11, 1949, Mr. Jephet Tetford, a 55 year old bachelor pig farmer from Lower Cabot, vanished from a crowded bus full of religious enthusiasts on their way to a revival at Cabot's Reformed United Second Church of Christ . Before being picked up by the bus, Tetford had been on his way home on foot from a neighbor’s home. Tetford had spent the morning playing some cards with his neighbor who helped Tetford map out the logistics for a blind date his host had scheduled for him in the coming weeks. Tetford had with him a canvas bag in which he carried some proposed clothing for the date along with some self-help books on building lasting relationships. As the bus approached the sweaty farmer trudging along on the dusty rural Route 21A, the odds of the farmer being offered a ride were low. The driver of the bus, Henry Wallace, was off schedule. He was due to be in Lower Cabot in less than forty minutes. To make time, Wallace kept the accelerator firmly pressed to the floor. Moreover, while Wallace steered the rickety, converted school bus with one hand, Wallace used the other hand to hover over the horn on the ready for any sluggards clogging the sole northbound lane. Wallace had no plans to lift his foot off the accelerator whether for crossing wildlife or roadside pick-ups. If left to his discretion, Wallace would have passed the farmer, giving him only a good last second honk to make sure the farmer bandy-stepped off the main road onto the grassy roadside. However, at the insistence of the Christ-like passengers, who battered Wallace’s head with their floppy, paperback bibles, the bus was stopped and a good deed was reluctantly done. On the bus was 14 passengers. They all testified to seeing Tetford enter the bus, and give thanks to Wallace. Wallace grunted at Tetford, and thumbed him to the back of the bus. The passengers saw Tetford pass by and then take a seat near the rear of the bus. Each gave him a Christian greeting as he passed. Unbeknownst to the Christians on the bus, Tetford was something of the village atheist in lower Cabot. However, he had good manners and he returned their greetings with similar sentiments of Christian based cheer. Within minutes, Tetford propped his mud-caked boots on an empty seat, and was soon asleep. All of the passengers, who had gawked somewhat at their subject of Christian charity, turned face forward and began quietly reading to themselves from their bibles. When the bus finally reached its destination over an hour late, Tetford was gone. First to notice the disappearance was Wallace. Wallace was livid that he had failed to arrive on time. He was about to let the passengers have a strong lecture on the consequences of stopping to pick up non-paying, road-side stragglers when he noticed the principal source of his wrath was missing. Although Tetford’s belongings were still on the luggage rack and the crumbs of dried, brown dirt from his mud-caked boots lay on the empty seat upon which he had propped his feet, Tetford himself was gone. His disappearance caused somewhat of a religious hysteria on the bus. One of the riders suggested that Tetford had been translated Enoch like whilst in their midst. Some of the passengers took this statement to mean the farmer actually had been Enoch, only come disguised as a poor farmer to test their Christian mettle. Another of the enthusiasts wondered loudly whether the farmer had been Christ himself. Suddenly this person became certain of the idea, and he fell to his knees, babbling in tongues. Two others soon joined him. Bus driver Wallace was only able to contain the increasing hysteria by pressing on the horn until its loud squawk caused ears to ring, and all talking of any type to cease. Tetford’s family soon appeared and discounted these stories, noting that their relative was a mere man with calloused hands, perpetually weathered face, with more than his fair share of human frailties. Despite a sizable search and reward, Tetford has never been found.
* On December 11, 1950, an 19-year-old Taiwan-American art student named Paulette Wu vanished while hiking the Maple Trail into Glastonbury Mountain. She was seen by a middle-aged couple named Ben And Janis Points who had been strolling about 100 yards behind her. Before passing the couple, Wu had an extended conversation with the couple regarding her plans to study physics at MIT and then pursue a second degree in the law at Harvard. The couple thought the conversation unusual in that Wu admitted that she was a high school drop out without any means to pay for such an education. However, the chirpy and high spirited personality of Wu made it seem that anything might be possible for her. Mr. Points noted to her that he had a cousin who had graduated from MIT about 20 years back, and he suggested that maybe the cousin had continuing contacts with the institution which would be of help to her. Wu accepted the offer, and wrote her name and address on a scrap of paper so the cousin could contact her. On the paper, Wu had playfully scrawled beneath her name and address a cartoonist dome shaped UFO with the caption: “Beware: They’re real you know!” The dot to the exclamation mark was heart shaped. The couple hid their bemusement at this eccentric message. They gave a mild smile to the message. They weren't sure what to make of it as they had not been speaking of UFOs. Rather than engage Wu in an explanation, they decided to let her move on. She began walking at a quick pace but still she remained within their vision for quite a period. She was not an unattractive girl and the couple noted how cutely her black ponytail bounced off the bottom of her neck as she took exaggeratedly long strides which caused her body to go up and down like a slow operating piston. At this point they noted that she was not wearing socks, and the exposed top of her heels were red and bleeding from the rough edge of her sneaker riding over the exposed skin. In fact she was bleeding enough that the edge of the sneakers were a grotesque dark red. Mr. Points was about to call out to her to see if she needed medical attention.. But they lost sight of her when she followed the trail around a rocky outcropping known locally as Coolidge’s Profile. When the Points rounded the outcropping themselves, she was nowhere to be seen. The pen that she had used was in the middle of the trail. It was stabbed like a knife into the rocky soil. That pen was the only evidence that she had stayed on the trial past the rocky outcropping. The couple looked to both sides of the trail. While this area was heavily wooded, visibility was good due to the lack of foliage. Despite having a reasonably good view of both sides of the trail, they saw nothing. Police were ultimately called and searched for the girl. Her parents who lived in Worcester Massachusetts came and stayed a month helping in the search. They were impoverish and both were badly disabled: the mother by MS; the father by crippling spinal degeneration. Despite an extended effort, their sole child was never found. Sadly, her heart broken parents committed suicide soon after. Authorities blamed their lingering illnesses and extreme depression brought on by the loss of their child. Wu has not been seen nor heard from since.
* On December 11, 1953, 13-year old local resident John Maguire disappeared while visiting a neighbor’s Cabot farm. There is a saying that the typical Vermont boy is one part sweet Maple syrup, and nine parts tart apple cider. If so, John Maguire was a typical Vermont boy. Full of energy and active from the moment the sun snuck a ray pass the imposing Green Mountains to when it set over the mirror surface of ever-placid Lake George, John was a handful. His disappearance was state-wide news. On the day of Joey’s disappearance, John’s mother, Amanda, had taken John along on a visit to a neighboring pig farmer. The farmer was, Franklin Pierce, Jr., a retired State Senator. Pierce was partially blind and deaf and so for the past few years John’s mother would occasionally assist him. However on the day of John’s disappearance, the visit was purely social. Despite having been a state senator for close to thirty years, Peirce was extremely poor. He lived on a rusted second hand mobile home borrowed from his cousin. The home was precariously set on cement blocks and discarded imperfect granite stones. Set around the home were self-built shacks which Peirce used to store his limited farm equipment and house some of his small animals. Upon arrival at this humble farm, the mother went indoors. John, as was his nature, refused to go in. Like most Vermont boys, he loved the outdoors year round and in all weather. To keep an eye on her “Johnny”, the mother and her friend sat at a Formica table set by a window looking over where John played. According to the mother, at first John amused himself by smashing some large rocks against the farmer’s small concrete front walkway. After a few minutes of this, John picked up a small fallen branch. He tore off its few red-black dead leaves. With a penknife he carved a sharp point. The mother knew from past experience that John was likely planning to go poke the pigs. Despite that John had now walked out of her sight, the mother still felt comfortable about his whereabouts: from the noisy commotion now coming from the pig sty, she knew where and how he was occupying himself. After forty minutes it became suddenly quiet. The mother did not think it eerie. After being a whirlwind of energy, John often would suddenly run short. At such times, he would find the nearest fence post, tree stump or set of steps to sit and lean against to take a quick nap. The mother and her friend walked outside to check on John. Down at the pig sty John was nowhere to be found. There were smudged, ill-defined muddy footprints on the top of the soggy grass. John had evidently walked towards a nearby grassy field to go and poke at the friend’s horses. The mother noticed that in his wake, Joey had wrenched off metal strips on fence posts along the way. Standing at the fenced horses’ pasture, the mother saw something or someone bunched up like a ball and lying on the ground in the field near the horses. The tall grass obscured her view. Her friend, near sightless, was no assistance. She climbed over the fence and treaded through the ankle high grass towards the object. The closer she got to the area, the more the grass seemed to obscure her view. Her line of sight was repeatedly cut off by the horses which circled his object.. The closer she approached, the more the object/mound/person diminished as if it was being absorbed by the earth. Ultimately, just as she came upon the site, the horses ran off. Looking down, there was nothing but wet grass beaten down in a half moon shape. The outline of a young child, in a fetal position she later claimed.. The mother started screaming. Within the hour, local police searched the farm . Nothing was found. Within a week, flyers were posted, volunteers walked fields, rivers and lakes were dragged. No John. There was even a three part article on the disappearance in the Cabot Ledger. Still there were no leads. Despite the unusual circumstances of his disappearance, after a while, people soon forgot about John. After four years, the mother moved out of state, becoming a teacher’s assistant in Nashua, New Hampshire. She returned once more in 1967, perhaps grayer than could be blamed by the passing years. She helped dedicate the John Maguire Memorial baseball field for the junior high school. Sadly, John had dropped out of that school a month before he disappeared.. After dedicating the field, the mother never returned to Vermont. Yearly, upon the anniversary of his disappearance she sent a letter to editor to each of Vermont’s state-wide newspapers asking for a re-newed investigation, She died in 1972. Upon her death, the junior high school was closed due to declining tax revenues and John’s memorial field was paved over. Presently it is the location of a Stop and Shop.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Missing Body -- Percy Bysshe Shelley
On July 8th, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet, drowned while swimming in the Bay of Spezia, near Lerici. That part of history is undisputed. What is disputed is where his body ended up after death. The location of his body has become a mystery unsolved to this day and is considered one of the greatest mysteries of English Literary History.
First, a little about our poet.
Despite being portrayed at the time of his death as a wispy, thin fellow, with pale smooth skin, small bones, diminutive frame, and womanish musculature, Shelley had become at his life’s end something of a rugged athlete. He had obtained this state by his favorite means of exercise: swimming in the cold saltwater nearest to where he might then be living. He swam in almost all types of weather, excepting strong storms and bone-icing cold weather. Unfortunately, having become perhaps too proficient at swimming, Shelley found the need to artificially add difficulty to his swimming. It began with swimming with added clothing, including at an early point, with heavy shoes. Soon, his physicality was such that even a light dressing of clothes was not enough to provide the needed strain to the muscles. By the time of Shelley’s drowning, it was Shelley’s habit of exercise to swim fully-clothed, including with heavy cloak, a full mourning suit made of the most absorbent cloth available, along with heavy gloves and a large hat. Further weight was obtained by storing sand, pebbles and even small stones into the pockets of his trousers, shirt, and coat. One dubious authority , Maria Gisborne, a family friend with a tendency towards exaggeration fulled by alcoholism, had Shelley going to the extreme of occasionally swimming with a large rock or two under his hat, with another large stone sometimes pressed between his thighs.
It is not known in what Shelley was attired when he drowned off the Bay of Spezia. It may have been, given the hot weather, he was doing his swimming completely nude. This would not have been an uncommon thing. Occasionally, Shelley would go "skinny-dipping" when the temperatures were extremely hot. Moreover, as he aged, he sometimes would skinny-dip just for general health, particularly when he struggled through a temporary bout of impotency brought on by age combined with a long stretch of opium smoking. As for this latter reason, he found nude swims in rough, white-capped waters, to be particularly invigorating to his droopy manhood. As a further benefit from these "bare bottom swims", as he called them in his diary, they were an excellent means to engender relationships with beautiful women during periods when he and his wife were separated. Shelley was a sensitive poet, quick to shed a tear at birdsong and fallen leaf. However, as all of his biographers ruefully concede, his main failing as a man was when dealing with the fairer sex: in short, he was a blunt and brutish womanizer. His hungry for women knew no fill. To feed his desire for frequent variety, he was not above using the crude method of nude public exercise to spark the libidinous attention of beautiful and eager virgins. Among his favorite targets for this effective casanovan tactic were the Rubenesque maidens who kneeled provocatively on the wet sands of the Spezian shore digging for claims. Of his success with these endeavors, there is no dispute. Historian DiGiovanni DeSquale opines that the fruits of Shelly’s exploits were the principle reason for the rapid repopulation of Northern Italy after the DiGenzio Plague.
As for knowing what occurred in the last days of Shelley one must be careful in evaluating the eyewitness accounts. No reputable scholar accepts every story. Such caution is necessary: Shelly’s compatriots were a collection of opium eaters, perverts, sensationalists, and fellow poets. As a result, his death drew more than its fair share of painters of lilies who decorated every plain fact with the pretty finery and delicate lace of bald faced lie. The best evidence reveals as follows.
On the morning of Shelly’s last day, he spent drinking mimosas and eating burnt bacon squashed between equally blackened toast. At the time it was his routine to breakfast alone on the terrace of his small apartment. His wife Mary was living thirty miles south. Six months before they had suffered yet another split . The cause this time was a olive-eyed, round bottomed, and buxom young Spanish maiden named Matilda who, when she was not posing nude for the local artistes, cooked and cleaned the Shellys' apartment in exchange for a small back room in which to sleep and store her few polleras. Without Mary’s immediate knowledge, within days of the maiden’s arrival, Shelly had changed the arrangement by adding terms more favorable to his libido. The new terms can be left to the darker side of our imaginations. Suffice to say, by the time of the morning of which we speak, the maiden laid face-down and bare bottoms up on what had been Mary’s side of the bed, sleeping off the effects of her new habit of opium eating. Shelley himself was in a celebratory mood: he had just completed his last work, "Weeping Jesus at the Well" his reply to Keats "Ode to a Nightingale" . He expected that the publication of this new work would finally make his reputation as the finest poet then living, Keats and Byron to be damned. His last written words were writ on a greasy napkin at this time, They were: "Matilda– I’m off to swim & so goodby." That napkin–presently stored in a locked box in the Tower of London–is considered one of Britain’s greatest literary treasures, behind only Shakespeare’s will, Keats letters to Fanny Browne and Marlowe’s disputed bar bill.
There was but one witness to Shelly’s last plunge into the pounding seltzer spray of stormy sea. It was Lady Wigmore, a visiting British lady who happened to be having a breakfast of lemongrass tea and peaches on her terrace. Unfortunate for history, she did so without the benefit of her eyeglasses corrective of her mild near sightedness. The distance was such that Shelley looked like a blurry stick figure. Thus it cannot be said whether that day he decided to test the musculature by his usual full array of clothing or whether he went down into the sea with his skin fully open to sea and sun. The witness saw the stick figure put chest forward and stomp through the incoming tide like he had suction cups for feet, and then, with a loud chest rattling shout given up towards the sky, the figure dived head first into a curling wave, submerged a moment within and then popped up on the far side. The strokes then began and he soon his already obscure figure disappeared against the blue-black and white caps.
The next time Shelley was seen was when he washed up on the shore of a private beach known as Selio DeLico, three days dead. He was found by a eight year old child, Mario Feilcianco. Shelley was naked, perhaps due to his entry into the waves in that condition, or due to his unclothing by three days and nights tossed in ripping and twisting storm-driven waves. His once tanned cinnamon skin was now a shiny green blue like the sea which had offered him up, and he was bloated, and swollen with gaseous rot. It took five witnesses conferring for three hours to confirm his identity sufficient for the authorities to release the body. Mary refused to look at his body, fearing the shock would burn in a memory not preferable to better days.
A grave plot in the crowded city cemetery found. Due to the rot of the body, and Shelley’s atheism, services were short and limited to friends giving their best memories of him. The body was rushed into the earth in a casket of cheap plank wood.
The mystery of Shelley’s body begins when the casket was lowered into the grave. At the time, attending the burial of the wooden casket was Lord Byron. Drunk, as was his usual state, the short, black-haired muscular bully of romantic poetry had come to the funeral with mixed motives. He had thought Shelley a weak, wilted flower of a poet, and had created numerous verses mocking Shelley’s supposed effeminacy. However, Byron secretly admired Shelley’s abilities as a lyric poet. Byron has tried the lyric poetry himself hoping to best him, but failed in his collection entitled "Lovers in Love With Love." Some reviewers thinking he authored a mock of the genre called it a success. Once they knew Byron meant to be taken seriously, they laughed so hard that Byron was driven to shame-faced exile in Greece.
For whatever reason, once the casket was lowered into the narrow grave, Byron leapt like Laertes into the narrow pit. His intentions are unknown; perhaps he wished to make some romantic gesture to spark renewed interest in his poor selling poetry. In any event, he landed on the top of the casket, lost his balance due to his club foot, slipped off, and landed in the narrow lane surrounding the cheap casket. The landing jarred the top (it had been poorly nailed, as the odor caused the job to be hastily done). The top was knocked ajar sufficient enough such that Byron, who was standing now beside the casket, could peer in. And the Lord Byron, not one to allow basic politeness and decency to keep his curiosity in check, peered closer and closer within, until his sizable head was nearly completely inside the death box. And the Lord Byron, with his famous sharp black eyes, saw what was hidden therein. The casket was stuffed with canvas bags filled with rocks, dead fish, and sand.
Shelley’s body was gone.
And despite the intervening centuries the body has never been located.
Of course, the discovery lead to all sorts of investigations, including by the local village constabulary, the national Italian authorities, and the British consulate. Due to a nearby medical college, there was thought that Shelley’s body might have been snatched as a excellent teaching tool for an anatomy class. However, the body’s deterioration excluded that possibility. Another thought was that the body was stolen to create mementoes of the poet off of his long, curly locks, his teeth, even his bones. There was precedent for this in the numerous saints whose body parts were scattered far and wide across Christian Europe to furnish its churches and chapels with a piece of saintly dried kidney or lung, or even a beached hip bone, to engender greater fervor in the presence of the divine. However, a search of local houses lead no where. Even the famous caves which lined the southern shores were searched and found empty but for scandalized bats and copious amounts of guano. One rumor was that Mary, out of spite, had the body burned on the beach the night before his scheduled burial, just beneath the apartment on whose balcony Shelly ate his breakfast and in which his amply-assed Matilda slept off her latest opium delirium. Per this story, the bitter widow wished the acidic smoke of the holocaust to curl and whirl up to the apartment, and there burn the tender sinuses of the husband stealing maid. While there is no doubt that Mary had a large fire on the beach the night before the interring, it was attended by numerous witnesses who attested that only wood was burned and the intent was to read Shelly’s poems in the flickering of the beach fire.
Over the years, many researchers have attempted to locate the body or at least its final resting place. Mark Twain claimed that Shelley’s body was stolen and then secretly buried in the Vatican by a vindictive Pope angry at Shelley for promoting atheism, sexual freedom, and moral degeneracy. Twain was to write a book on the theory, but delayed. When he was finally ready to write the tome, he died before he could even start it.
President Woodrow Wilson took an interest in the mystery and pursued it as a personal hobby including touring Europe on three occasions to do research. His conclusions were never formally published, but his extensive notes were fashioned into a book after his death by his nephew Arthur Wilson. The book, entitled "The Mystery of Shelley’s Missing Body–Solved!" sold poorly despite the prestige of the underlying presidential investigation. The conclusions of the book likely caused the poor sales. According to Arthur, his uncle had concluded that Shelley’s body had never actually been recovered, that the witnesses mistook a drowned Italian fisherman for their life long friend, and when Mary herself saw the body, she had at once grasped and gasped at their error. Rather than embarrass the officials, it was agreed that the body of the fisherman be given to his rightful family, whilst Shelley’s casket be filled with fish offal, rocks and bagged soil. This ruse allowed Mary the ability to search privately for the Shelley's body. When the body did wash ashore, as was inevitable given the tides in the area, Mary was able to mourn in privacy, quiet and afar from the shadow of the sexual interloper Mitalda. Mary then privately buried Shelly in a plot purchased from the Sisters of Mercy in Rome. The unmarked grave is said to be situated three plots down from the grave of Italian national poet Caesar DiGiavonni.
The latest researcher claiming an interest in the mystery was Louis Rysmeyer, a New York Times sports editor. His conclusions were subject of a 1973 best seller, entitled, "Solved! The Mystery of Shelley’s Missing Body" which lasted on the Times best seller list for six months. His conclusion: Shelley never drowned at all. Instead, his death was faked by conspiring friends and family, along with financially compensated Italian authorities. Shelley went into hiding in order to find peace to author his long planned epic on the founding of the British nation. Unfortunately in a cholera epidemic, he died while still in hiding, and his body was hastily burned by public authorities desperate to stem the plague. Mary forbade the revealing of this deception for reasons unknown.
In the end, despite the passing years, the extensive research, and endless theorizing, the ultimate location of Shelley's body remains a pure mystery waiting to be solved...
First, a little about our poet.
Despite being portrayed at the time of his death as a wispy, thin fellow, with pale smooth skin, small bones, diminutive frame, and womanish musculature, Shelley had become at his life’s end something of a rugged athlete. He had obtained this state by his favorite means of exercise: swimming in the cold saltwater nearest to where he might then be living. He swam in almost all types of weather, excepting strong storms and bone-icing cold weather. Unfortunately, having become perhaps too proficient at swimming, Shelley found the need to artificially add difficulty to his swimming. It began with swimming with added clothing, including at an early point, with heavy shoes. Soon, his physicality was such that even a light dressing of clothes was not enough to provide the needed strain to the muscles. By the time of Shelley’s drowning, it was Shelley’s habit of exercise to swim fully-clothed, including with heavy cloak, a full mourning suit made of the most absorbent cloth available, along with heavy gloves and a large hat. Further weight was obtained by storing sand, pebbles and even small stones into the pockets of his trousers, shirt, and coat. One dubious authority , Maria Gisborne, a family friend with a tendency towards exaggeration fulled by alcoholism, had Shelley going to the extreme of occasionally swimming with a large rock or two under his hat, with another large stone sometimes pressed between his thighs.
It is not known in what Shelley was attired when he drowned off the Bay of Spezia. It may have been, given the hot weather, he was doing his swimming completely nude. This would not have been an uncommon thing. Occasionally, Shelley would go "skinny-dipping" when the temperatures were extremely hot. Moreover, as he aged, he sometimes would skinny-dip just for general health, particularly when he struggled through a temporary bout of impotency brought on by age combined with a long stretch of opium smoking. As for this latter reason, he found nude swims in rough, white-capped waters, to be particularly invigorating to his droopy manhood. As a further benefit from these "bare bottom swims", as he called them in his diary, they were an excellent means to engender relationships with beautiful women during periods when he and his wife were separated. Shelley was a sensitive poet, quick to shed a tear at birdsong and fallen leaf. However, as all of his biographers ruefully concede, his main failing as a man was when dealing with the fairer sex: in short, he was a blunt and brutish womanizer. His hungry for women knew no fill. To feed his desire for frequent variety, he was not above using the crude method of nude public exercise to spark the libidinous attention of beautiful and eager virgins. Among his favorite targets for this effective casanovan tactic were the Rubenesque maidens who kneeled provocatively on the wet sands of the Spezian shore digging for claims. Of his success with these endeavors, there is no dispute. Historian DiGiovanni DeSquale opines that the fruits of Shelly’s exploits were the principle reason for the rapid repopulation of Northern Italy after the DiGenzio Plague.
As for knowing what occurred in the last days of Shelley one must be careful in evaluating the eyewitness accounts. No reputable scholar accepts every story. Such caution is necessary: Shelly’s compatriots were a collection of opium eaters, perverts, sensationalists, and fellow poets. As a result, his death drew more than its fair share of painters of lilies who decorated every plain fact with the pretty finery and delicate lace of bald faced lie. The best evidence reveals as follows.
On the morning of Shelly’s last day, he spent drinking mimosas and eating burnt bacon squashed between equally blackened toast. At the time it was his routine to breakfast alone on the terrace of his small apartment. His wife Mary was living thirty miles south. Six months before they had suffered yet another split . The cause this time was a olive-eyed, round bottomed, and buxom young Spanish maiden named Matilda who, when she was not posing nude for the local artistes, cooked and cleaned the Shellys' apartment in exchange for a small back room in which to sleep and store her few polleras. Without Mary’s immediate knowledge, within days of the maiden’s arrival, Shelly had changed the arrangement by adding terms more favorable to his libido. The new terms can be left to the darker side of our imaginations. Suffice to say, by the time of the morning of which we speak, the maiden laid face-down and bare bottoms up on what had been Mary’s side of the bed, sleeping off the effects of her new habit of opium eating. Shelley himself was in a celebratory mood: he had just completed his last work, "Weeping Jesus at the Well" his reply to Keats "Ode to a Nightingale" . He expected that the publication of this new work would finally make his reputation as the finest poet then living, Keats and Byron to be damned. His last written words were writ on a greasy napkin at this time, They were: "Matilda– I’m off to swim & so goodby." That napkin–presently stored in a locked box in the Tower of London–is considered one of Britain’s greatest literary treasures, behind only Shakespeare’s will, Keats letters to Fanny Browne and Marlowe’s disputed bar bill.
There was but one witness to Shelly’s last plunge into the pounding seltzer spray of stormy sea. It was Lady Wigmore, a visiting British lady who happened to be having a breakfast of lemongrass tea and peaches on her terrace. Unfortunate for history, she did so without the benefit of her eyeglasses corrective of her mild near sightedness. The distance was such that Shelley looked like a blurry stick figure. Thus it cannot be said whether that day he decided to test the musculature by his usual full array of clothing or whether he went down into the sea with his skin fully open to sea and sun. The witness saw the stick figure put chest forward and stomp through the incoming tide like he had suction cups for feet, and then, with a loud chest rattling shout given up towards the sky, the figure dived head first into a curling wave, submerged a moment within and then popped up on the far side. The strokes then began and he soon his already obscure figure disappeared against the blue-black and white caps.
The next time Shelley was seen was when he washed up on the shore of a private beach known as Selio DeLico, three days dead. He was found by a eight year old child, Mario Feilcianco. Shelley was naked, perhaps due to his entry into the waves in that condition, or due to his unclothing by three days and nights tossed in ripping and twisting storm-driven waves. His once tanned cinnamon skin was now a shiny green blue like the sea which had offered him up, and he was bloated, and swollen with gaseous rot. It took five witnesses conferring for three hours to confirm his identity sufficient for the authorities to release the body. Mary refused to look at his body, fearing the shock would burn in a memory not preferable to better days.
A grave plot in the crowded city cemetery found. Due to the rot of the body, and Shelley’s atheism, services were short and limited to friends giving their best memories of him. The body was rushed into the earth in a casket of cheap plank wood.
The mystery of Shelley’s body begins when the casket was lowered into the grave. At the time, attending the burial of the wooden casket was Lord Byron. Drunk, as was his usual state, the short, black-haired muscular bully of romantic poetry had come to the funeral with mixed motives. He had thought Shelley a weak, wilted flower of a poet, and had created numerous verses mocking Shelley’s supposed effeminacy. However, Byron secretly admired Shelley’s abilities as a lyric poet. Byron has tried the lyric poetry himself hoping to best him, but failed in his collection entitled "Lovers in Love With Love." Some reviewers thinking he authored a mock of the genre called it a success. Once they knew Byron meant to be taken seriously, they laughed so hard that Byron was driven to shame-faced exile in Greece.
For whatever reason, once the casket was lowered into the narrow grave, Byron leapt like Laertes into the narrow pit. His intentions are unknown; perhaps he wished to make some romantic gesture to spark renewed interest in his poor selling poetry. In any event, he landed on the top of the casket, lost his balance due to his club foot, slipped off, and landed in the narrow lane surrounding the cheap casket. The landing jarred the top (it had been poorly nailed, as the odor caused the job to be hastily done). The top was knocked ajar sufficient enough such that Byron, who was standing now beside the casket, could peer in. And the Lord Byron, not one to allow basic politeness and decency to keep his curiosity in check, peered closer and closer within, until his sizable head was nearly completely inside the death box. And the Lord Byron, with his famous sharp black eyes, saw what was hidden therein. The casket was stuffed with canvas bags filled with rocks, dead fish, and sand.
Shelley’s body was gone.
And despite the intervening centuries the body has never been located.
Of course, the discovery lead to all sorts of investigations, including by the local village constabulary, the national Italian authorities, and the British consulate. Due to a nearby medical college, there was thought that Shelley’s body might have been snatched as a excellent teaching tool for an anatomy class. However, the body’s deterioration excluded that possibility. Another thought was that the body was stolen to create mementoes of the poet off of his long, curly locks, his teeth, even his bones. There was precedent for this in the numerous saints whose body parts were scattered far and wide across Christian Europe to furnish its churches and chapels with a piece of saintly dried kidney or lung, or even a beached hip bone, to engender greater fervor in the presence of the divine. However, a search of local houses lead no where. Even the famous caves which lined the southern shores were searched and found empty but for scandalized bats and copious amounts of guano. One rumor was that Mary, out of spite, had the body burned on the beach the night before his scheduled burial, just beneath the apartment on whose balcony Shelly ate his breakfast and in which his amply-assed Matilda slept off her latest opium delirium. Per this story, the bitter widow wished the acidic smoke of the holocaust to curl and whirl up to the apartment, and there burn the tender sinuses of the husband stealing maid. While there is no doubt that Mary had a large fire on the beach the night before the interring, it was attended by numerous witnesses who attested that only wood was burned and the intent was to read Shelly’s poems in the flickering of the beach fire.
Over the years, many researchers have attempted to locate the body or at least its final resting place. Mark Twain claimed that Shelley’s body was stolen and then secretly buried in the Vatican by a vindictive Pope angry at Shelley for promoting atheism, sexual freedom, and moral degeneracy. Twain was to write a book on the theory, but delayed. When he was finally ready to write the tome, he died before he could even start it.
President Woodrow Wilson took an interest in the mystery and pursued it as a personal hobby including touring Europe on three occasions to do research. His conclusions were never formally published, but his extensive notes were fashioned into a book after his death by his nephew Arthur Wilson. The book, entitled "The Mystery of Shelley’s Missing Body–Solved!" sold poorly despite the prestige of the underlying presidential investigation. The conclusions of the book likely caused the poor sales. According to Arthur, his uncle had concluded that Shelley’s body had never actually been recovered, that the witnesses mistook a drowned Italian fisherman for their life long friend, and when Mary herself saw the body, she had at once grasped and gasped at their error. Rather than embarrass the officials, it was agreed that the body of the fisherman be given to his rightful family, whilst Shelley’s casket be filled with fish offal, rocks and bagged soil. This ruse allowed Mary the ability to search privately for the Shelley's body. When the body did wash ashore, as was inevitable given the tides in the area, Mary was able to mourn in privacy, quiet and afar from the shadow of the sexual interloper Mitalda. Mary then privately buried Shelly in a plot purchased from the Sisters of Mercy in Rome. The unmarked grave is said to be situated three plots down from the grave of Italian national poet Caesar DiGiavonni.
The latest researcher claiming an interest in the mystery was Louis Rysmeyer, a New York Times sports editor. His conclusions were subject of a 1973 best seller, entitled, "Solved! The Mystery of Shelley’s Missing Body" which lasted on the Times best seller list for six months. His conclusion: Shelley never drowned at all. Instead, his death was faked by conspiring friends and family, along with financially compensated Italian authorities. Shelley went into hiding in order to find peace to author his long planned epic on the founding of the British nation. Unfortunately in a cholera epidemic, he died while still in hiding, and his body was hastily burned by public authorities desperate to stem the plague. Mary forbade the revealing of this deception for reasons unknown.
In the end, despite the passing years, the extensive research, and endless theorizing, the ultimate location of Shelley's body remains a pure mystery waiting to be solved...
Friday, March 28, 2008
Mysterious Message
Remember Pearl Harbor!
The housing plat known as Green Valley, was located in easterly Owensville, Indiana, sitting snug and tight between an abandoned Texaco oil refinery and the tri-county dump. One winter morning its citizens were puzzled to awaken to a cryptic message scrawled on a sidewalk.
The message was written in colored chalk. That itself was strange. Such chalk was rare for the day. Generally, the only persons having such chalk were county forensic examiners. Even then, the examiners used the chalk only in rare cases of multiple fatalities to mark each body's location before they were moved from the scene. Since multiple homicides only became common in Indiana by the middle of the 1960's, there had been little use for the colored chalk until then.
As for the handwriting, this was crude; written by a drunk, some said; others, pointing to the strange looping P and L, blamed some drugged out and bored juvenile delinquent. There was much to this latter claim. Vandalism had been rampant in the area due to an extended teachers strike. Rather than fill their time by continuing their studies on their own, local teens zestfully filled their plentiful leisure defacing or wrecking public property. Three libraries were torched. The turf of the city’s ballpark was torn up by the tires of wild teen drivers. The mayor’s hundred year old tek wood sailboat was stolen while he was hospitalized from a car accident. The boat was secretly dissembled in a nearby park, with the wood stored for later use to fuel an illegal Thanksgiving barn fire. The teen unrest was not helped by the presence of marijuana. This noxic and toxic weed was beginning to reach these once safe neighborhoods by way of so-called "musical" acts touring from the south. Until recently, most local teens’ sole experience with drugs had been a healthful daily tablespoon of Cod Liver Oil. Given this bright-faced, chubby-checked innocence, a few tokes of this noxious weed was enough to blight out the already questionable judgment of any Indiana teen.
As for the location of the sidewalk upon which the message was scrawled? That location seemed to explain nothing. The sidewalk ran in front of Theodore Roosevelt Elementary, known affectionately by the locals as the "Ted-El". It was a quiet school, never a victim to the wave of vandalism
And as for the contents of the message? The message read simply:
'Remember Pearl Harbor!'
Numerous people commented on the message. A short but furious exchange of letters-to-the-editor were published.
But no one ever came to identify who put the message on the sidewalk -- or why. For at the time, December 7, 1939, Pearl Harbor meant nothing to anyone but a few local retired naval men; for the infamous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor never took place until two years later...to the day.
The housing plat known as Green Valley, was located in easterly Owensville, Indiana, sitting snug and tight between an abandoned Texaco oil refinery and the tri-county dump. One winter morning its citizens were puzzled to awaken to a cryptic message scrawled on a sidewalk.
The message was written in colored chalk. That itself was strange. Such chalk was rare for the day. Generally, the only persons having such chalk were county forensic examiners. Even then, the examiners used the chalk only in rare cases of multiple fatalities to mark each body's location before they were moved from the scene. Since multiple homicides only became common in Indiana by the middle of the 1960's, there had been little use for the colored chalk until then.
As for the handwriting, this was crude; written by a drunk, some said; others, pointing to the strange looping P and L, blamed some drugged out and bored juvenile delinquent. There was much to this latter claim. Vandalism had been rampant in the area due to an extended teachers strike. Rather than fill their time by continuing their studies on their own, local teens zestfully filled their plentiful leisure defacing or wrecking public property. Three libraries were torched. The turf of the city’s ballpark was torn up by the tires of wild teen drivers. The mayor’s hundred year old tek wood sailboat was stolen while he was hospitalized from a car accident. The boat was secretly dissembled in a nearby park, with the wood stored for later use to fuel an illegal Thanksgiving barn fire. The teen unrest was not helped by the presence of marijuana. This noxic and toxic weed was beginning to reach these once safe neighborhoods by way of so-called "musical" acts touring from the south. Until recently, most local teens’ sole experience with drugs had been a healthful daily tablespoon of Cod Liver Oil. Given this bright-faced, chubby-checked innocence, a few tokes of this noxious weed was enough to blight out the already questionable judgment of any Indiana teen.
As for the location of the sidewalk upon which the message was scrawled? That location seemed to explain nothing. The sidewalk ran in front of Theodore Roosevelt Elementary, known affectionately by the locals as the "Ted-El". It was a quiet school, never a victim to the wave of vandalism
And as for the contents of the message? The message read simply:
'Remember Pearl Harbor!'
Numerous people commented on the message. A short but furious exchange of letters-to-the-editor were published.
But no one ever came to identify who put the message on the sidewalk -- or why. For at the time, December 7, 1939, Pearl Harbor meant nothing to anyone but a few local retired naval men; for the infamous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor never took place until two years later...to the day.
Mysterious Disappearances--Charolette Ashmore
CHARLOTTE ASHMORE
On a warm, humid mosquito-ridden evening of July 21, 1878, a young girl named Charlotte Ashmore, six years young, skipped out of the front door of her family’s farm house near Quincy, Massachusetts. She intended to do a quick chore of getting some eggs out of the hen house for her widowed mother Amanda. Her family farm house, located on a small and humble parcel of land, was a mere half-mile from the birth place homesteads of John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Coincidentally, on her mother’s side, Charlotte was a distant relation to these American presidents. For this errand Charlotte carried a wicker basket, woven by her paternal grandmother Dora before the grandmother suffered an incapacitating injury falling off a pier. Despite that the henhouse was located more than a hop, skip and a jump away, Charlotte had told her mother before leaving that this was exactly how she planed to travel the distance. Her mother had smiled at her plucky daughter’s ambitious plan. The mother stroked the rounded, pink cheek of her child’s bright shining face. Later, the mother reported this innocent maternal touch sparked a chill and a sense of dread. Speculate as you will on the connection: It would be the last time she would see or touch her beloved and only child.
The full story of missing Charlotte is told by Boston author Winston Giggins in his privately printed pamphlet entitled Missing Charlotte, dated September 14, 1881, and subject to two other private re-printings in 1882. Collaborating the story are two a short news items in the Quincy Journal and Times, dated September 1, 1878, and September 16, 1878 under the respective titles "Missing Child" and "Public Assistance Requested". The news article lacks much of the details cited by Giggins and thus the pamphlet is the source of most of the following details.
Let us now turn back to the tale of missing Charlotte.
When after fifteen minutes little Charlotte had not returned, her mother became concerned. Before going after her only daughter, the mother was delayed by the need to turn over her ailing bed ridden mother-in-law Dora. As stated, Dora had been severely injured falling off a pier. She had been in Boston visiting friends in the fishing trade. While taking a late afternoon constitutional, she had been blinded by piercing sunlight which caused an encompassing whitish glare off her mildly cataract eyes. She strolled right off the warped wooden planks of Hancock Wharf into the choppy waves of Boston harbor, striking two exposed pier poles on her plummet to the dirty waters. While most of her injury was paralysis, part of the injury was to her brain parts controlling speech and hunger. She was rendered mute. More serious, she developed a constant ravenous appetite. By the time of this tale, Dora had been eating nearly non-stop for three years. Due to Dora’s partial paralysis and gigantic size–she had come to weigh over three hundred fifty pounds– Dora had to be turned in her bed every twenty minutes. Failure to precisely follow this procedure would lead to bed sores, infection and untimely death.
This evening Charlotte’s mother had particular difficulty turning the mother in law. Perhaps due to her need to rush the task, the mother lacked the steady concentration necessary to generate sufficient brute force to turn her mother in law. Finally, after a few more attempts than normal, Charlotte’s mother was finally able to heave her mother-in-law onto her right side. Unfortunately, precious time was further lost in the need to redress Dora with a nightcap and blanket. Both had slipped off the dozing Dora during the struggle. Finished in her task, the mother hastily tossed on a heavy cloak. She grabbed the family dog in case of trouble. But in her haste, she forgot to take a lantern and had to go back, wasting further time. By the time she went outdoors again at least a half hour had gone by since she had last seen Charlotte.
There had been heavy rains after a long drought and so the ground was thick with mud. In the lantern light Charlotte’s’ footprints were plainly visible as tiny, swallow puddles across the otherwise flat, wet mud. Holding onto the collar of the dog who jerked and strained to run ahead, the mother followed this trail for a short distance. Strangely, at about ten yards out, there appeared around the footprints of the girl deep bucket sized holes. At about twenty five yards out, the tiny footprints ended on a flat plain of solid mud. The final foot prints showed the little girl’s feet had been side by side, as if she came to stand at attention. Ringed around these last small mud imprints, in close formation, were more of these indentations, though this time much closer to her daughter’s footprints. The mother had never seen such indentations before. She saw nothing to explain them. However, her attention to these indentations was brief; she more concerned now with the tiny footprints of her daughter. Calling out the girl’s name, she released her hand from the dog’s collar. Gently she shooed him forwards. Unexpectedly, the large dog failed to gallop into the darkness in search of Charlotte.
The dog’s behavior was uncharacteristic. The dog and Charlotte had been close. The dog acted as her jealous and constant guardian. Indeed, the dog, named Empty Bottles, had been obtained by Charlotte’s father as a gift for the occasion of Charlotte’s christening. Once the father had died of alcohol poisoning two years later at a wedding party in nearby Brockton, Charlotte had come to see the dog as a living testament to her late father’s abiding love. And so the child loved the dog with a fervent, possessive love often seen between fatherless children and their pets. The dog returned the affection.
Given this closeness between Empty Bottles and Charlotte, the mother was stunned when the dog, instead of running forward into the darkness to look for Charlotte, cowered at her feet, whimpering and shaking. Its fright was such that the dog expelled a large volume of excrement. It then sat and then laid in the mixture of sewerage and inky muck, and refused to move. With her heart beating rapidly beneath her ribs and her breath becoming swallow, the mother walked on; the dog hesitated and raised itself up from the muck, then, the dog sat back down into the odorous ooze, defeated by its fears. The dog put its head between its front paws, and whined. Empty Bottles was staying put.
Placing her feet into the footprints left behind by he daughter, the mother looked upwards. It was quiet but for the whimpering of the emotionally whipped dog and the buzzing of a persistent mosquito flickering hungrily about her ears. The stars were out; what few clouds there were obscured the white faced moon and dulled the watery cream of moonlight. Quietly the distraught mother called out Charlotte’s name. With no reply, she absent mindedly turned to using just her nickname, one given to her by her late father months before he died: "Sweet" .
"Sweet," she called out.
"Sweet, Sweet"
Again and again.
Nothing.
A cloud of mosquitos swarmed her red face as it began dripping sweat. She furiously waved her hands in front of her face to disperse the biting insects. She called out again:"Sweet, Sweet!" Her voice began to crack.
There was no response.
Quickly her calls escalated into shouts and then near incoherent screams. She frantically stalked about the last footprints, her lantern raised to cast greater scope of light. Based on the ground beneath her, there were nothing to indicate Charlotte had gone onto anywhere further from her last foot prints. The only possibility was this: Charlotte must had gone up. As this strange possibility dawned in the mother’s mind, she cast an eye upward, her head tilting to one side. The partly clouded but still starry sky was above her. Suddenly she heard what she described as a heavy mechanical sound such as the grinding of gears. Along with this sound she detected a sound described thus: bump-bum, bump-bum, bump-bum. In quick succession, she felt the quivering of the earth and then saw before her still up-turned eyes the sparkling snap and pop of electricity. Then, as often is the case in these occurrences, all went black.
At around eight a.m. the next morning, Brendan Dougherty, an eighty-six year old pensioner who lived a half mile from the house came for his regular morning visit. He was a courter of Dora, his "Honey-dew" It had been his morning habit to bring Dora some flowers (in the spring and summer), or a piece of fruit (in the fall and winter, when available). He had been doing this daily for the past five years. Upon arrival at the home, Dougherty noticed the door was ajar. He opened it further, and poked his head in, making polite inquiries as to whether anyone was home. When there was no response he whistled a military tune which had become his signature tune whistled upon arrival. The warbling military air brought no response. He nudged the door open a few more inches by discretely tapping it with his foot. A gush of rude wind finished the job, blowing the door open. Putting aside his concerns for the family’s privacy, and acting on his greater concerns for their safety, he finally stepped in. The moans of Dora drew his immediate attention. He went to her room. Given Dora’s condition, it looked as if she had not been turned for hours. Knowing the routine of the household in this regard, this caused him grave concern, both for Dora’s now evident discomfort, and the whereabouts of the mother and child.
Dougherty was thin, frail, and failing in health. In an interview he had gave to author Giggins for his pamphlet, he stated that his first thought was to go for help. But Dora seemed in desperate need of immediate aid. Dougherty, a tough wiry man of some 130 pounds, was not one to shirk from duty. He bit his thin lower lip and proceeded to do the work God had set before him. Putting a bony shoulder into Dora’s doughy amorphous chest, he pushed to get initial leverage and then rounded his body so now his upper back was pressed against Dora’s partially lifted mass. He leaned further back into her body, pressing with his bony legs, creeping his feet inch by inch closer to the bed, thereby gaining greater leverage. Ultimately, with one last hard shove and with a anticipatory victorious yelp, he got her to roll over. Dora’s body rocked back and forth as her body finally settled into the rumpled sheets. Dougherty confided to author Giggins that at this juncture Dougherty felt entitled, given his labors, to take the liberty to kiss Dora high on the forehead. And so he did so. Then, as quickly as his infirmities and limited wind from his labors allowed him, he searched the house.
Ultimately his search lead him outside.
He found the mother as bare as Eve in paradise. He dressed her quickly by undressing his own shirt and wrapping her exposed humanity with the coarse cloth. He could not but help notice strange scratch marks over her. In addition there were two small puncture wounds over both eyes and in each wrist. Small amounts of watery blood oozed from the wounds. Otherwise, there seemed to be no physical manifestation of injury. Mentally, she was lost in delusions, one being that she was in the midst of a kidnap and her rescuer was her tormentor. Bed rest for over a month brought her mind back to steadiness. Despite the use of hypnosis and careful questioning by expert police detectives, she had no recollection of anything occurring after she had heard the strange noises, saw the electrical sparks and then everything went black.
As for the dog, poor timid Empty Bottles, the dog was discovered two weeks later, or at least parts of him. A headless and legless torso of a dog matching his description was dragged out of Minuteman River by boys out playing hooky for a day of fishing. Two weeks later, a nun at nearby St. Christopher’s Informatory found stashed in the facility’s trash the head of a dog. Dougherty confirmed it was Empty Bottles.
The investigation continued for a year and a half, only kept open this long due to the insistence of the Quincy mayor, a friend of Dougherty’s son. Finally, however, with no leads, the file was closed, and the case faded away from the public consciousness. Author Giggins attempted heroically to revive interest in the case by his pamphlet. While the pamphlet circulated widely despite its private printing, the authorities refused to re-open the investigation. Ultimately even Giggins moved onto other things. His claim to minor, passing fame is based on his authorship of a once authoritative treatise on military logistics. It was heavily relied upon by the German military during the First World War. As for the mother and Dora, they both faded quickly from history. The mother is believed to have remarried but was childless. The date and circumstances of her death are not known. There is a tomb stone for a Dora Ashmore in Quincy’s St. Doris Cemetery. If this is her tombstone, Dora was able to live a long life despite her incapacitating injury, dying in 1899.
On a warm, humid mosquito-ridden evening of July 21, 1878, a young girl named Charlotte Ashmore, six years young, skipped out of the front door of her family’s farm house near Quincy, Massachusetts. She intended to do a quick chore of getting some eggs out of the hen house for her widowed mother Amanda. Her family farm house, located on a small and humble parcel of land, was a mere half-mile from the birth place homesteads of John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Coincidentally, on her mother’s side, Charlotte was a distant relation to these American presidents. For this errand Charlotte carried a wicker basket, woven by her paternal grandmother Dora before the grandmother suffered an incapacitating injury falling off a pier. Despite that the henhouse was located more than a hop, skip and a jump away, Charlotte had told her mother before leaving that this was exactly how she planed to travel the distance. Her mother had smiled at her plucky daughter’s ambitious plan. The mother stroked the rounded, pink cheek of her child’s bright shining face. Later, the mother reported this innocent maternal touch sparked a chill and a sense of dread. Speculate as you will on the connection: It would be the last time she would see or touch her beloved and only child.
The full story of missing Charlotte is told by Boston author Winston Giggins in his privately printed pamphlet entitled Missing Charlotte, dated September 14, 1881, and subject to two other private re-printings in 1882. Collaborating the story are two a short news items in the Quincy Journal and Times, dated September 1, 1878, and September 16, 1878 under the respective titles "Missing Child" and "Public Assistance Requested". The news article lacks much of the details cited by Giggins and thus the pamphlet is the source of most of the following details.
Let us now turn back to the tale of missing Charlotte.
When after fifteen minutes little Charlotte had not returned, her mother became concerned. Before going after her only daughter, the mother was delayed by the need to turn over her ailing bed ridden mother-in-law Dora. As stated, Dora had been severely injured falling off a pier. She had been in Boston visiting friends in the fishing trade. While taking a late afternoon constitutional, she had been blinded by piercing sunlight which caused an encompassing whitish glare off her mildly cataract eyes. She strolled right off the warped wooden planks of Hancock Wharf into the choppy waves of Boston harbor, striking two exposed pier poles on her plummet to the dirty waters. While most of her injury was paralysis, part of the injury was to her brain parts controlling speech and hunger. She was rendered mute. More serious, she developed a constant ravenous appetite. By the time of this tale, Dora had been eating nearly non-stop for three years. Due to Dora’s partial paralysis and gigantic size–she had come to weigh over three hundred fifty pounds– Dora had to be turned in her bed every twenty minutes. Failure to precisely follow this procedure would lead to bed sores, infection and untimely death.
This evening Charlotte’s mother had particular difficulty turning the mother in law. Perhaps due to her need to rush the task, the mother lacked the steady concentration necessary to generate sufficient brute force to turn her mother in law. Finally, after a few more attempts than normal, Charlotte’s mother was finally able to heave her mother-in-law onto her right side. Unfortunately, precious time was further lost in the need to redress Dora with a nightcap and blanket. Both had slipped off the dozing Dora during the struggle. Finished in her task, the mother hastily tossed on a heavy cloak. She grabbed the family dog in case of trouble. But in her haste, she forgot to take a lantern and had to go back, wasting further time. By the time she went outdoors again at least a half hour had gone by since she had last seen Charlotte.
There had been heavy rains after a long drought and so the ground was thick with mud. In the lantern light Charlotte’s’ footprints were plainly visible as tiny, swallow puddles across the otherwise flat, wet mud. Holding onto the collar of the dog who jerked and strained to run ahead, the mother followed this trail for a short distance. Strangely, at about ten yards out, there appeared around the footprints of the girl deep bucket sized holes. At about twenty five yards out, the tiny footprints ended on a flat plain of solid mud. The final foot prints showed the little girl’s feet had been side by side, as if she came to stand at attention. Ringed around these last small mud imprints, in close formation, were more of these indentations, though this time much closer to her daughter’s footprints. The mother had never seen such indentations before. She saw nothing to explain them. However, her attention to these indentations was brief; she more concerned now with the tiny footprints of her daughter. Calling out the girl’s name, she released her hand from the dog’s collar. Gently she shooed him forwards. Unexpectedly, the large dog failed to gallop into the darkness in search of Charlotte.
The dog’s behavior was uncharacteristic. The dog and Charlotte had been close. The dog acted as her jealous and constant guardian. Indeed, the dog, named Empty Bottles, had been obtained by Charlotte’s father as a gift for the occasion of Charlotte’s christening. Once the father had died of alcohol poisoning two years later at a wedding party in nearby Brockton, Charlotte had come to see the dog as a living testament to her late father’s abiding love. And so the child loved the dog with a fervent, possessive love often seen between fatherless children and their pets. The dog returned the affection.
Given this closeness between Empty Bottles and Charlotte, the mother was stunned when the dog, instead of running forward into the darkness to look for Charlotte, cowered at her feet, whimpering and shaking. Its fright was such that the dog expelled a large volume of excrement. It then sat and then laid in the mixture of sewerage and inky muck, and refused to move. With her heart beating rapidly beneath her ribs and her breath becoming swallow, the mother walked on; the dog hesitated and raised itself up from the muck, then, the dog sat back down into the odorous ooze, defeated by its fears. The dog put its head between its front paws, and whined. Empty Bottles was staying put.
Placing her feet into the footprints left behind by he daughter, the mother looked upwards. It was quiet but for the whimpering of the emotionally whipped dog and the buzzing of a persistent mosquito flickering hungrily about her ears. The stars were out; what few clouds there were obscured the white faced moon and dulled the watery cream of moonlight. Quietly the distraught mother called out Charlotte’s name. With no reply, she absent mindedly turned to using just her nickname, one given to her by her late father months before he died: "Sweet" .
"Sweet," she called out.
"Sweet, Sweet"
Again and again.
Nothing.
A cloud of mosquitos swarmed her red face as it began dripping sweat. She furiously waved her hands in front of her face to disperse the biting insects. She called out again:"Sweet, Sweet!" Her voice began to crack.
There was no response.
Quickly her calls escalated into shouts and then near incoherent screams. She frantically stalked about the last footprints, her lantern raised to cast greater scope of light. Based on the ground beneath her, there were nothing to indicate Charlotte had gone onto anywhere further from her last foot prints. The only possibility was this: Charlotte must had gone up. As this strange possibility dawned in the mother’s mind, she cast an eye upward, her head tilting to one side. The partly clouded but still starry sky was above her. Suddenly she heard what she described as a heavy mechanical sound such as the grinding of gears. Along with this sound she detected a sound described thus: bump-bum, bump-bum, bump-bum. In quick succession, she felt the quivering of the earth and then saw before her still up-turned eyes the sparkling snap and pop of electricity. Then, as often is the case in these occurrences, all went black.
At around eight a.m. the next morning, Brendan Dougherty, an eighty-six year old pensioner who lived a half mile from the house came for his regular morning visit. He was a courter of Dora, his "Honey-dew" It had been his morning habit to bring Dora some flowers (in the spring and summer), or a piece of fruit (in the fall and winter, when available). He had been doing this daily for the past five years. Upon arrival at the home, Dougherty noticed the door was ajar. He opened it further, and poked his head in, making polite inquiries as to whether anyone was home. When there was no response he whistled a military tune which had become his signature tune whistled upon arrival. The warbling military air brought no response. He nudged the door open a few more inches by discretely tapping it with his foot. A gush of rude wind finished the job, blowing the door open. Putting aside his concerns for the family’s privacy, and acting on his greater concerns for their safety, he finally stepped in. The moans of Dora drew his immediate attention. He went to her room. Given Dora’s condition, it looked as if she had not been turned for hours. Knowing the routine of the household in this regard, this caused him grave concern, both for Dora’s now evident discomfort, and the whereabouts of the mother and child.
Dougherty was thin, frail, and failing in health. In an interview he had gave to author Giggins for his pamphlet, he stated that his first thought was to go for help. But Dora seemed in desperate need of immediate aid. Dougherty, a tough wiry man of some 130 pounds, was not one to shirk from duty. He bit his thin lower lip and proceeded to do the work God had set before him. Putting a bony shoulder into Dora’s doughy amorphous chest, he pushed to get initial leverage and then rounded his body so now his upper back was pressed against Dora’s partially lifted mass. He leaned further back into her body, pressing with his bony legs, creeping his feet inch by inch closer to the bed, thereby gaining greater leverage. Ultimately, with one last hard shove and with a anticipatory victorious yelp, he got her to roll over. Dora’s body rocked back and forth as her body finally settled into the rumpled sheets. Dougherty confided to author Giggins that at this juncture Dougherty felt entitled, given his labors, to take the liberty to kiss Dora high on the forehead. And so he did so. Then, as quickly as his infirmities and limited wind from his labors allowed him, he searched the house.
Ultimately his search lead him outside.
He found the mother as bare as Eve in paradise. He dressed her quickly by undressing his own shirt and wrapping her exposed humanity with the coarse cloth. He could not but help notice strange scratch marks over her. In addition there were two small puncture wounds over both eyes and in each wrist. Small amounts of watery blood oozed from the wounds. Otherwise, there seemed to be no physical manifestation of injury. Mentally, she was lost in delusions, one being that she was in the midst of a kidnap and her rescuer was her tormentor. Bed rest for over a month brought her mind back to steadiness. Despite the use of hypnosis and careful questioning by expert police detectives, she had no recollection of anything occurring after she had heard the strange noises, saw the electrical sparks and then everything went black.
As for the dog, poor timid Empty Bottles, the dog was discovered two weeks later, or at least parts of him. A headless and legless torso of a dog matching his description was dragged out of Minuteman River by boys out playing hooky for a day of fishing. Two weeks later, a nun at nearby St. Christopher’s Informatory found stashed in the facility’s trash the head of a dog. Dougherty confirmed it was Empty Bottles.
The investigation continued for a year and a half, only kept open this long due to the insistence of the Quincy mayor, a friend of Dougherty’s son. Finally, however, with no leads, the file was closed, and the case faded away from the public consciousness. Author Giggins attempted heroically to revive interest in the case by his pamphlet. While the pamphlet circulated widely despite its private printing, the authorities refused to re-open the investigation. Ultimately even Giggins moved onto other things. His claim to minor, passing fame is based on his authorship of a once authoritative treatise on military logistics. It was heavily relied upon by the German military during the First World War. As for the mother and Dora, they both faded quickly from history. The mother is believed to have remarried but was childless. The date and circumstances of her death are not known. There is a tomb stone for a Dora Ashmore in Quincy’s St. Doris Cemetery. If this is her tombstone, Dora was able to live a long life despite her incapacitating injury, dying in 1899.
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