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...
Monday, March 31, 2008
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.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Mysterious Disappearances-- Lake Anjikuni Village
On November 12, 1930, between 9:30 to 10:15 a.m. Joe Labelle, a Canadian fur trapper hiked in his frayed snowshoes and heavy deerskin coat. He was on his way to make his monthly visit to an Eskimo fishing village located on the pebbly shores of icy Lake Anjikuni in northwestern Canada. To make the trek bearable in the frigid cold, LaBelle had brought with him a flask filled with scotch. The flask had been a joke gift from his mother for his twenty-first birthday. His mother, a reformed alcoholic, had the flask engraved with the word "For Emergency Use Only". Labelle carried it with him everywhere and on this day Labelle made liberal use of the invigorating scotch during the long arctic journey. It helped keep the blood flowing to his freezing extremities. Soon the contents of that flask would aid him in dealing with a strange sight lying just ahead.
Used to the excited barks of the village dogs as he approached on the single snow covered trail to the village, Labelle was troubled by a unusual quiet which met him. As he entered into the village proper, the quiet continued, broken only by the crunching of his boots on the surface of the crusted snow. Labelle later reported to the NorthWest Journal writer George Savarvio that he immediately thought this silence was ominous, bizarre. Once he entered the village and saw it empty of man or animal, his stomach tightened and his heart raced. Normally, the fishing village was a noisy, lively, bustling settlement with 2,500 Eskimos and a large number of dogs and other animals. There was rarely a hour of daylight inactivity in the village: from the first flicker of the morning sun over eastern Mount Kilajomo to the sun’s glowing red-orange setting at the western Norjii straits, there was bustling throughout, with the Eskimos going and coming in their home made, storm-sturdy kayaks, while the few white visitors powered their comings and goings in their noisy, odorous diesel powered boats.
To Labelle’s dismay, as he checked on friends and acquaintances, there was no one home. Indeed, there were no signs that anyone had been home for quite some time. In his soon frantic quest to find someone, Labelle visited every single one of the scattered huts, tents, shanties, and shacks. Still there was no one. None of the assorted housing showed signs of any recent occupancy. Most strangely, he found the beloved rifles of the Eskimos abandoned just outside the entrances. When he walked a short ways down by the shore, he discovered their kayaks were tied up with badly frayed ropes and left unprotected from the elements. To abandon rifle and kayak was unthinkable. The Eskimos closely protected both, for these were the vital instruments ensuring their survival and livelihood. Upon his return to the village, LaBelle leaned against one of the few traditional igloos in the village. He opened his flask and emptied it down his raw throat.
After a completing a second thorough search of the village, there was only one last place for LaBelle to check: a large cement-block fish storehouse located a few miles outside of the village on the northern lake shore. The owner of the storehouse was a sixty-eight aged year old Fran McKenzie. A retired colonel with a flair for the inventive profanity, MacKenzie lived in a ramshackle wooden shack attached to the storehouse, nicknamed the Mack Shack. Mackenzie had been partially crippled from both arthritis and from a auto accident in the military, and so he did not venture far. If anyone could be expected to be around it would be MacKenzie. Further, the Mack Shack was the village gathering stop, where the villagers came to gossip, trade and be bemused subjects of MacKenzie’s constant stream of profanity-peppered invective. When on prior visits Labelle could not find his friends in the village, he usually came across some of them at Mack’s Shack, sitting back in one of the numerous armchairs, enjoying a laugh and a smoke, or even a taste of the acidic confection which MacKenzie brewed in a decades old still. With hopes of finding Mackenzie and his friends at the Mack Shack, Labelle set out, but not before leaving a written message alerting anyone who might come after him of his presence and of his findings.
LaBelle's hopes were crushed when, at the Mack Shack Labelle discovered no one was there as well.
The Mack Shack gave few clues. MacKenzie’s still was dismantled and the glass bottles which held some of the now evaporated brew were broken on the floor. The wooden chairs which Mackenzie set out for his customers were all missing. Labelle found Mackenzie’s whale bone and wood crutch was lying in pieces against the open door to his shack. Finally, Mackenzie’s diary was located. The diary was under his pillow and open to the date of the day before. But there was no entry. The entries for the weeks before indicated that there had been some strange lights seen in the sky. McKenzie, a brass and tacks man, made no speculation to the cause or meaning of these lights. The rest of the diary notations pertained to routine business matters, including a blow by blow account of a fist fight he had engaged in when collecting a debt. Such a fight was not unusual for MacKenzie. Despite his ailments and disability, he still had quick reflexes in his upper extremities. For a debtor foolish enough to come within MacKenzie’s arm length, his pearl hard knuckles could still crush human jaw bone. Except for the dissembled still, broken bottles and missing chairs, the rest of the Mack Shack was in its usual notorious disorder.
While looking about the Mack Shack, Labelle happened to squint out its one small window towards the east. Covering his eyes from the bright sun streaming in, he saw about four hundred yards away the red and orange flickering of a wood fire against the snow. Even at this distance he could see no one about the fire. Thinking here might be a clue where everyone had gone, Labelle set off for the fire. Upon reaching the fire, Labelle saw hanging over the diminishing flames a smoldering pot of seal fat stew, a traditional Eskimo mid morning meal. Upon Further investigation, he found ten to fifteen feet from the fire, a single pair of man’s undergarments. These were torn, and weathered and had the phrase "My Dear Benny" written in black magic marker on its hyper extended band waist. Lastly, on a nearby rock, there was a pair of round eyeglasses with thick, black rims. The rims were partially twisted and the lens were missing. Labelle instantly recognized these spectacles: these were the distinctive eyeglasses of the village’s Eskimo leader, Benitji "Benny"Atmoniji, who had died the year before from chickpox. Labelle recalled the funeral distinctly, as he attended out of respect for his friend of ten years. He recalled the chief had been buried with the trademark eyeglasses folded in his upper seal skin coat pocket along with his silver cigarette case filled with menthol Pell Mells, his favorite brand. As far as Labellee knew, the chief had only a single pair of glasses. As Labelle looked about the fire, Labelle saw that the only human footprints were his own. Now entirely frightened, Labelle decided to go for help.
Labelle hurried to the nearest telegraph office, twenty-five miles away. Upon his arrival, he sent a message to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They arrived within twenty-four hours. Upon arrival they, too, were baffled by the mass vanishing act. Under Major Theodore Lestort, an enormous search party was sent out to look for the missing villagers. Joining them was writer George Savarvio of the NorthWest Journal.
In the end, none of the villagers were found. However, the search party did unearth some rather strange findings. These findings are recorded in Savarvio’s five part article on the occurrence published in the NorthWest Journal in January 1931. Among the strange findings were the following. All the sleigh dogs belonging to the Eskimos were found wandering the surrounding area, and all were in surprisingly good condition and seemingly well fed. After an extensive hunt, another dog was found alive wandering near the Mack Shack. It had a man’s cologne sprinkled on its front coat. Its black lips were haphazardly covered in a woman’s red lipstick, and there was a woman’s necklace around its thick neck. Its hindquarters was covered in a woman’s undergarment. Labelle recognized it as Mack’s beloved dog, Juno, an eight year old Husky. Closer inspection revealed that someone had pierced the dog’s ears as if preparing them for ear rings. The only injury to the dog had been to its from where something or someone had jammed a wedding ring on the left paw. Further strangeness was found at the village’s stone Catholic chapel. The villagers had long been christianized. A priest would visit once a month to conduct Mass. When searched, the chapel was desecrated with Unitarian and Universalist symbols. Then came the most chilling surprise of all; the search party discovered that all of the Eskimos’ ancestral graves had been dug up, the bones removed and village refuse dumped into the graves. Whoever or whatever had taken all the living villagers had also dug up the dead as well, even though the icy ground around the graves was as hard as stone. The sole grave left untouched was that of one of Punckii Akkailo, the ancestral leader and alleged founder of the village. There was no snow cover to the grave. Upon inspection the soil of the grave was found warm to the touch. Investigators dithered over whether to open the grave. There was a strong Eskimo taboo regarding the opening of graves. As the day advanced, the investigators argued, and the soil cooled. Soon the soil of the grave became ice cold and hard. Still fearful of violating Eskimo tradition by opening the grave, it was decided by the authorities to leave the grave alone. The authorities closed the investigation quickly.
Within a year, the village was razed for reasons unexplained by the government. The village was no longer listed on government maps. A few commerical maps up to the mid-1950's did continue to list the village but with a parenthetical note that the village was abandoned. No current maps list the area.
Used to the excited barks of the village dogs as he approached on the single snow covered trail to the village, Labelle was troubled by a unusual quiet which met him. As he entered into the village proper, the quiet continued, broken only by the crunching of his boots on the surface of the crusted snow. Labelle later reported to the NorthWest Journal writer George Savarvio that he immediately thought this silence was ominous, bizarre. Once he entered the village and saw it empty of man or animal, his stomach tightened and his heart raced. Normally, the fishing village was a noisy, lively, bustling settlement with 2,500 Eskimos and a large number of dogs and other animals. There was rarely a hour of daylight inactivity in the village: from the first flicker of the morning sun over eastern Mount Kilajomo to the sun’s glowing red-orange setting at the western Norjii straits, there was bustling throughout, with the Eskimos going and coming in their home made, storm-sturdy kayaks, while the few white visitors powered their comings and goings in their noisy, odorous diesel powered boats.
To Labelle’s dismay, as he checked on friends and acquaintances, there was no one home. Indeed, there were no signs that anyone had been home for quite some time. In his soon frantic quest to find someone, Labelle visited every single one of the scattered huts, tents, shanties, and shacks. Still there was no one. None of the assorted housing showed signs of any recent occupancy. Most strangely, he found the beloved rifles of the Eskimos abandoned just outside the entrances. When he walked a short ways down by the shore, he discovered their kayaks were tied up with badly frayed ropes and left unprotected from the elements. To abandon rifle and kayak was unthinkable. The Eskimos closely protected both, for these were the vital instruments ensuring their survival and livelihood. Upon his return to the village, LaBelle leaned against one of the few traditional igloos in the village. He opened his flask and emptied it down his raw throat.
After a completing a second thorough search of the village, there was only one last place for LaBelle to check: a large cement-block fish storehouse located a few miles outside of the village on the northern lake shore. The owner of the storehouse was a sixty-eight aged year old Fran McKenzie. A retired colonel with a flair for the inventive profanity, MacKenzie lived in a ramshackle wooden shack attached to the storehouse, nicknamed the Mack Shack. Mackenzie had been partially crippled from both arthritis and from a auto accident in the military, and so he did not venture far. If anyone could be expected to be around it would be MacKenzie. Further, the Mack Shack was the village gathering stop, where the villagers came to gossip, trade and be bemused subjects of MacKenzie’s constant stream of profanity-peppered invective. When on prior visits Labelle could not find his friends in the village, he usually came across some of them at Mack’s Shack, sitting back in one of the numerous armchairs, enjoying a laugh and a smoke, or even a taste of the acidic confection which MacKenzie brewed in a decades old still. With hopes of finding Mackenzie and his friends at the Mack Shack, Labelle set out, but not before leaving a written message alerting anyone who might come after him of his presence and of his findings.
LaBelle's hopes were crushed when, at the Mack Shack Labelle discovered no one was there as well.
The Mack Shack gave few clues. MacKenzie’s still was dismantled and the glass bottles which held some of the now evaporated brew were broken on the floor. The wooden chairs which Mackenzie set out for his customers were all missing. Labelle found Mackenzie’s whale bone and wood crutch was lying in pieces against the open door to his shack. Finally, Mackenzie’s diary was located. The diary was under his pillow and open to the date of the day before. But there was no entry. The entries for the weeks before indicated that there had been some strange lights seen in the sky. McKenzie, a brass and tacks man, made no speculation to the cause or meaning of these lights. The rest of the diary notations pertained to routine business matters, including a blow by blow account of a fist fight he had engaged in when collecting a debt. Such a fight was not unusual for MacKenzie. Despite his ailments and disability, he still had quick reflexes in his upper extremities. For a debtor foolish enough to come within MacKenzie’s arm length, his pearl hard knuckles could still crush human jaw bone. Except for the dissembled still, broken bottles and missing chairs, the rest of the Mack Shack was in its usual notorious disorder.
While looking about the Mack Shack, Labelle happened to squint out its one small window towards the east. Covering his eyes from the bright sun streaming in, he saw about four hundred yards away the red and orange flickering of a wood fire against the snow. Even at this distance he could see no one about the fire. Thinking here might be a clue where everyone had gone, Labelle set off for the fire. Upon reaching the fire, Labelle saw hanging over the diminishing flames a smoldering pot of seal fat stew, a traditional Eskimo mid morning meal. Upon Further investigation, he found ten to fifteen feet from the fire, a single pair of man’s undergarments. These were torn, and weathered and had the phrase "My Dear Benny" written in black magic marker on its hyper extended band waist. Lastly, on a nearby rock, there was a pair of round eyeglasses with thick, black rims. The rims were partially twisted and the lens were missing. Labelle instantly recognized these spectacles: these were the distinctive eyeglasses of the village’s Eskimo leader, Benitji "Benny"Atmoniji, who had died the year before from chickpox. Labelle recalled the funeral distinctly, as he attended out of respect for his friend of ten years. He recalled the chief had been buried with the trademark eyeglasses folded in his upper seal skin coat pocket along with his silver cigarette case filled with menthol Pell Mells, his favorite brand. As far as Labellee knew, the chief had only a single pair of glasses. As Labelle looked about the fire, Labelle saw that the only human footprints were his own. Now entirely frightened, Labelle decided to go for help.
Labelle hurried to the nearest telegraph office, twenty-five miles away. Upon his arrival, he sent a message to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They arrived within twenty-four hours. Upon arrival they, too, were baffled by the mass vanishing act. Under Major Theodore Lestort, an enormous search party was sent out to look for the missing villagers. Joining them was writer George Savarvio of the NorthWest Journal.
In the end, none of the villagers were found. However, the search party did unearth some rather strange findings. These findings are recorded in Savarvio’s five part article on the occurrence published in the NorthWest Journal in January 1931. Among the strange findings were the following. All the sleigh dogs belonging to the Eskimos were found wandering the surrounding area, and all were in surprisingly good condition and seemingly well fed. After an extensive hunt, another dog was found alive wandering near the Mack Shack. It had a man’s cologne sprinkled on its front coat. Its black lips were haphazardly covered in a woman’s red lipstick, and there was a woman’s necklace around its thick neck. Its hindquarters was covered in a woman’s undergarment. Labelle recognized it as Mack’s beloved dog, Juno, an eight year old Husky. Closer inspection revealed that someone had pierced the dog’s ears as if preparing them for ear rings. The only injury to the dog had been to its from where something or someone had jammed a wedding ring on the left paw. Further strangeness was found at the village’s stone Catholic chapel. The villagers had long been christianized. A priest would visit once a month to conduct Mass. When searched, the chapel was desecrated with Unitarian and Universalist symbols. Then came the most chilling surprise of all; the search party discovered that all of the Eskimos’ ancestral graves had been dug up, the bones removed and village refuse dumped into the graves. Whoever or whatever had taken all the living villagers had also dug up the dead as well, even though the icy ground around the graves was as hard as stone. The sole grave left untouched was that of one of Punckii Akkailo, the ancestral leader and alleged founder of the village. There was no snow cover to the grave. Upon inspection the soil of the grave was found warm to the touch. Investigators dithered over whether to open the grave. There was a strong Eskimo taboo regarding the opening of graves. As the day advanced, the investigators argued, and the soil cooled. Soon the soil of the grave became ice cold and hard. Still fearful of violating Eskimo tradition by opening the grave, it was decided by the authorities to leave the grave alone. The authorities closed the investigation quickly.
Within a year, the village was razed for reasons unexplained by the government. The village was no longer listed on government maps. A few commerical maps up to the mid-1950's did continue to list the village but with a parenthetical note that the village was abandoned. No current maps list the area.
Mysterious Disappearances-- Thomas Littleton
THOMAS LITTLETON
The 1823 disappearance of Thomas Littleton, the speaker of the house for the Rhode Island General Assembly, was not witnessed directly. But two witnesses did observe him enter a Capitol Building water closet in his private office from which he never returned. The water closet was disassembled after the disappearance. There was nothing unusual to explain how a man, six foot two, 280 pounds, could enter a small private water closet, and then disappear off the face of the earth.
At the time of the disappearance, Littleton was entertaining two visitors. One was George Thurston, a skeletal state representative with a perpetually beet-red face topped with a mane of tight grey curls. Due to his temper, he was nicknamed the Mad Grey Lion. The other visitor was the squat, fat state senator Dimitri Brown, whose sole distinction was that he claimed a distant connection to the founders of Brown University, a connection which the Brown family strenuously denied and which claim made Brown the subject of a defamation lawsuit by both the university and its founders. Brown was nicknamed "No Town" Brown due to his failed attempt to incorporate a town named to honor his family name.
On the day of the occurrence, the distinguished visitors were meeting with Littleton to discuss his proposal to empower cities and towns to annually increase real property taxes without any state-imposed ceiling. Both visitors had a personal stake in the proposal: each owned extensive tracts of farmland likely subject to any new taxes. More upsetting to Brown, the City of Providence intended to substantially increase the tax on commercially developed property. Through a will contest settlement involving his cousin Robert, Brown had just obtained a sizeable parcel in Providence’s emerging financial district. Brown intended to secure the financing to erect on the spot Rhode Island’s first five story hotel. The hotel was to have such novel amenities as running water, fire exits, and coiled spring mattresses. Any new taxation would spoil Brown’s plan and financial ruin certainly would follow. In light of the visitors’ concerns, the meeting was expected to be an acrimonious one. Each visitor intended to air their grievances bluntly. Expecting possible trouble, Littleton had the General Assembly’s sergeant at arms posted just outside his office, secretly armed with a blackjack.
According to both witnesses, however, the meeting was cordial. While the visitors vigorously differed with Littleton, the meeting was conducted gentlemanly. Indeed, according to the visitors, just before Littleton excused himself, Littleton seemed ready to drop his taxation plan and adopt the "Brown Plan". This plan had been promoted by Brown for the past few weeks in ads placed in the Providence Journal. Indeed, Brown had even sent numerous letters to the editor arguing zealously in favor of the plan, claiming the plan was based on "rock bed Christian principles". To give the letters persuasive weigh, Brown had signed these letters using the name of a popular local clergyman who, oblivious to the appropriation of his good name, was on extended vacation in the Carolinas. Under Brown’s plan the need for more taxes would be eliminated by two easy steps: first, by closing all public supported poor houses and second, by offering small bonuses to poor persons willing to permanently re-locate to Massachusetts.
Whatever the mood and status of the discussion between the three, after a light lunch of quahogs and jonnycakes consumed in Littleton’s spacious office, Littleton began to complain of stomach pains. He excused himself from the visitors and in their full view stepped inside the water closet. The water closet was about thirty feet from where the visitors sat in armchairs. With a brief smile and nod, Littleton closed the water closet door. He was never seen again.
The visitors stated to investigators that initially they heard Littleton’s "presence" in the water closet. No doubt this was a discrete term, hidden within which delicacy forbids speculation. After an extended period of silence, both men called out to Littleton, asking if he were ill. There was no response. The visitors became fearful that Littleton may have had an attack. Littleton had suffered a mild heart attack a few months before and, though he recovered quickly, the health in his family’s male line was notoriously bad. Brown finally went to the water closet and called out Littleton’s name from just outside the oak door. There was no response. He jiggled the pearl knob. It was locked. Soon Thurston was at his side pounding on the door. With still no response, both called for assistance while they began battling through the door. An axe was obtained, the door’s lock was battered open, and the witnesses–now including the sergeant at arms and two constables–peered in. There was vomit indicating recent illness. But there was no sign of Littleton.
A thorough search was made of the diminutive water closet. It took little time to see no means for Littleton to have vanished. Soon, the local police, state police, and even the state militia became involved due to Littleton’s high public office. The witnesses were questioned closely with no deference to their political standing. They maintained their stories. Each witness was certain that Littleton did not exit the water closet.
Ultimately, the authorities had no choice but to accept their stories.
The Providence Journal, unsatisfied, editorialized over the authorities failure to follow through on all possibilities. Chagrined, the authorities performed a rudimentary search of the surrounding area including lakes, rivers and streams. Strangely, they did find one item of interest: one of Littleton’s wig pieces was discovered muddied, and wet in the Providence River, just one mile south from the Capitol building. There was no explanation for how it got there. With no further leads, the authorities closed their investigation.
The Littleton family lobbied over the years for a re-opening of the investigation. But it was not to be. Ultimately the Littleton family erected a memorial marker in the large Littleton family grave site. It was placed next to the pink granite marker for Littleton’s wife, Melinda. Two years before, she had died three months pregnant from a head wound suffered during the autumn hunting season. She had been outdoors when she spied hunting in the nearby woods her partially blind cousin, Theodore Doore, the son of the State’s first secretary of state. Her vigorous wave of hello was done at a distance and while wearing cotton-tail white mittens. The white blur of movement drew her quick-acting cousin’s bead and then his fire. Littleton was never the same man. When it came time to erect his marker, unlike his wife’s grand marker with ornate carvings of angels, sun bursts, and trumpets, Littleton’s family choose a marker that was small and plain. It was simply engraved with Littleton’s name, his dates of birth and death, and a single word: Murdered. The stone stood but two months. At the insistence of the prominent political families, the Littletons replaced the stone without this inflammatory word.
Over the years, the Mad Grey Lion went actually insane, and died in a poor house in the City of Warwick. He was delusional in the end, thinking himself in turn the persecuted Christ, then a caged, aging, raging lion, and lastly, a meek, mild rabbit named Barney. "No Town" Brown had a better end. Brown became one of the area’s most successfully developers. He was the chief financial backer for the Providence Wharf, a successful venture which made Brown a millionaire many times over. Once flushed with wealth, his temper eased and he concentrated on building a reputation for caring for the common welfare. He established the state’s first and only opera house, founded two hospitals, and purchased over thirty miles of coastline which he tuned over to the state for public use. While he never was able to incorporate a town with his family name, he did have a street named after his family. The street ran through what was then an exclusive residential neighborhood where only the powerful political families lived. It has since become a slum. His descendants have continued to flourish, however. Thanks to large donations over the years to Brown University’s endowment fund, two of Brown’s descendants currently sit on the university’s governing board.
And for Littleton, the missing speaker of the house? There remains an outstanding reward for any information on his whereabouts. The reward, accumulating interest these past hundred fifty plus years, remains on deposit in one of Providence’s oldest banks. It awaits collection.
The 1823 disappearance of Thomas Littleton, the speaker of the house for the Rhode Island General Assembly, was not witnessed directly. But two witnesses did observe him enter a Capitol Building water closet in his private office from which he never returned. The water closet was disassembled after the disappearance. There was nothing unusual to explain how a man, six foot two, 280 pounds, could enter a small private water closet, and then disappear off the face of the earth.
At the time of the disappearance, Littleton was entertaining two visitors. One was George Thurston, a skeletal state representative with a perpetually beet-red face topped with a mane of tight grey curls. Due to his temper, he was nicknamed the Mad Grey Lion. The other visitor was the squat, fat state senator Dimitri Brown, whose sole distinction was that he claimed a distant connection to the founders of Brown University, a connection which the Brown family strenuously denied and which claim made Brown the subject of a defamation lawsuit by both the university and its founders. Brown was nicknamed "No Town" Brown due to his failed attempt to incorporate a town named to honor his family name.
On the day of the occurrence, the distinguished visitors were meeting with Littleton to discuss his proposal to empower cities and towns to annually increase real property taxes without any state-imposed ceiling. Both visitors had a personal stake in the proposal: each owned extensive tracts of farmland likely subject to any new taxes. More upsetting to Brown, the City of Providence intended to substantially increase the tax on commercially developed property. Through a will contest settlement involving his cousin Robert, Brown had just obtained a sizeable parcel in Providence’s emerging financial district. Brown intended to secure the financing to erect on the spot Rhode Island’s first five story hotel. The hotel was to have such novel amenities as running water, fire exits, and coiled spring mattresses. Any new taxation would spoil Brown’s plan and financial ruin certainly would follow. In light of the visitors’ concerns, the meeting was expected to be an acrimonious one. Each visitor intended to air their grievances bluntly. Expecting possible trouble, Littleton had the General Assembly’s sergeant at arms posted just outside his office, secretly armed with a blackjack.
According to both witnesses, however, the meeting was cordial. While the visitors vigorously differed with Littleton, the meeting was conducted gentlemanly. Indeed, according to the visitors, just before Littleton excused himself, Littleton seemed ready to drop his taxation plan and adopt the "Brown Plan". This plan had been promoted by Brown for the past few weeks in ads placed in the Providence Journal. Indeed, Brown had even sent numerous letters to the editor arguing zealously in favor of the plan, claiming the plan was based on "rock bed Christian principles". To give the letters persuasive weigh, Brown had signed these letters using the name of a popular local clergyman who, oblivious to the appropriation of his good name, was on extended vacation in the Carolinas. Under Brown’s plan the need for more taxes would be eliminated by two easy steps: first, by closing all public supported poor houses and second, by offering small bonuses to poor persons willing to permanently re-locate to Massachusetts.
Whatever the mood and status of the discussion between the three, after a light lunch of quahogs and jonnycakes consumed in Littleton’s spacious office, Littleton began to complain of stomach pains. He excused himself from the visitors and in their full view stepped inside the water closet. The water closet was about thirty feet from where the visitors sat in armchairs. With a brief smile and nod, Littleton closed the water closet door. He was never seen again.
The visitors stated to investigators that initially they heard Littleton’s "presence" in the water closet. No doubt this was a discrete term, hidden within which delicacy forbids speculation. After an extended period of silence, both men called out to Littleton, asking if he were ill. There was no response. The visitors became fearful that Littleton may have had an attack. Littleton had suffered a mild heart attack a few months before and, though he recovered quickly, the health in his family’s male line was notoriously bad. Brown finally went to the water closet and called out Littleton’s name from just outside the oak door. There was no response. He jiggled the pearl knob. It was locked. Soon Thurston was at his side pounding on the door. With still no response, both called for assistance while they began battling through the door. An axe was obtained, the door’s lock was battered open, and the witnesses–now including the sergeant at arms and two constables–peered in. There was vomit indicating recent illness. But there was no sign of Littleton.
A thorough search was made of the diminutive water closet. It took little time to see no means for Littleton to have vanished. Soon, the local police, state police, and even the state militia became involved due to Littleton’s high public office. The witnesses were questioned closely with no deference to their political standing. They maintained their stories. Each witness was certain that Littleton did not exit the water closet.
Ultimately, the authorities had no choice but to accept their stories.
The Providence Journal, unsatisfied, editorialized over the authorities failure to follow through on all possibilities. Chagrined, the authorities performed a rudimentary search of the surrounding area including lakes, rivers and streams. Strangely, they did find one item of interest: one of Littleton’s wig pieces was discovered muddied, and wet in the Providence River, just one mile south from the Capitol building. There was no explanation for how it got there. With no further leads, the authorities closed their investigation.
The Littleton family lobbied over the years for a re-opening of the investigation. But it was not to be. Ultimately the Littleton family erected a memorial marker in the large Littleton family grave site. It was placed next to the pink granite marker for Littleton’s wife, Melinda. Two years before, she had died three months pregnant from a head wound suffered during the autumn hunting season. She had been outdoors when she spied hunting in the nearby woods her partially blind cousin, Theodore Doore, the son of the State’s first secretary of state. Her vigorous wave of hello was done at a distance and while wearing cotton-tail white mittens. The white blur of movement drew her quick-acting cousin’s bead and then his fire. Littleton was never the same man. When it came time to erect his marker, unlike his wife’s grand marker with ornate carvings of angels, sun bursts, and trumpets, Littleton’s family choose a marker that was small and plain. It was simply engraved with Littleton’s name, his dates of birth and death, and a single word: Murdered. The stone stood but two months. At the insistence of the prominent political families, the Littletons replaced the stone without this inflammatory word.
Over the years, the Mad Grey Lion went actually insane, and died in a poor house in the City of Warwick. He was delusional in the end, thinking himself in turn the persecuted Christ, then a caged, aging, raging lion, and lastly, a meek, mild rabbit named Barney. "No Town" Brown had a better end. Brown became one of the area’s most successfully developers. He was the chief financial backer for the Providence Wharf, a successful venture which made Brown a millionaire many times over. Once flushed with wealth, his temper eased and he concentrated on building a reputation for caring for the common welfare. He established the state’s first and only opera house, founded two hospitals, and purchased over thirty miles of coastline which he tuned over to the state for public use. While he never was able to incorporate a town with his family name, he did have a street named after his family. The street ran through what was then an exclusive residential neighborhood where only the powerful political families lived. It has since become a slum. His descendants have continued to flourish, however. Thanks to large donations over the years to Brown University’s endowment fund, two of Brown’s descendants currently sit on the university’s governing board.
And for Littleton, the missing speaker of the house? There remains an outstanding reward for any information on his whereabouts. The reward, accumulating interest these past hundred fifty plus years, remains on deposit in one of Providence’s oldest banks. It awaits collection.
Mysterious Disappearances -- David Lang and Oliver Laurch
DAVID LANG
Of the few persons who have popped out of existence like a burst human soap bubble, one of the most famous was Tennessee farmer, David Lang. On September 23, 1880, on the day of his wife’s 32nd birthday, Lang disappeared in sparkling daylight before astonished witnesses as he crossed a flat, obstruction-free field.
The fame of Lang's disappearance is based on the number of credible eyewitnesses to the strange event. There were six adult witnesses in all. Five out of the six were of sharp mind, and in excellent health. The five had impeccable standing in the surrounding Gallatin community. The one exception to this reputable group of witnesses was a David Ryder, a sickly, ill-tempered drunk and liar, who dodged the Civil War draft when a youth, and who continued dodging life’s responsibilities until his end. Some authorities report Ryder died fitfully at age 87 while sleeping off a drunk in his adopted daughter’s barn loft. Other authorities report Ryder died in his mid-seventies from massive hemorrhaging when his abused dachshund, Rusty, finally turned on Ryder as he slept. Regardless the manner of Ryder's death, and how despicable his life, even Ryder’s story matched that of the other witnesses.
For the skeptical among us, it is significant that each witness was well positioned and had a clear, unobstructed view of Lang's disappearance. Further each was situated in a different location and so by mere coincidence all angles of the disappearance were covered. All witnesses from their different perspectives were dead certain as to what their eyes had shown them of David’s last physical steps on earth.
Later, over the years when the witnesses recounted their tales, the witnesses remained dead earnest and unwaveringly consistent. Twice the witnesses told their stories under the pains and penalties of perjury. The first time the witnesses told their stories under oath was seven months after the event during a long, ultimately inconclusive criminal inquest into the circumstances of Lang’s disappearance. Each witness willingly and without hesitation gave affidavit to Lang’s sudden, and permanent physical disappearance. Three years later, in a lawsuit for life insurance proceeds brought by Lang’s estate against Chicago Mutual Life & Fire, each witness had walked up to the stand, and under a sworn oath to God, testified impeccably consistent with their very first statements. The newspapers of the time reported the trial. The insurance company had hired a Chicago attorney, a dyspeptic and perpetually testy Jonathan House, to put the witnesses into the crucible by subjecting them to long hours of painstaking, sometimes cold blooded-murderous cross-examination. With a sympathetic judge to House's cause, Attorney House had free rein to test the witnesses and he used that freedom to the borders of abuse. However, after five days of giving the witnesses the worse that cross-examination could offer, the Chicago lawyer collapsed into his chair defeated, his silk shirt drenched in sweat and clinging to his bulbous flesh: the witnesses could not be budged from their stories.
Now the facts.
The day and time: September 23, 1880 at about noon.
Location: the Lang farm, a poor, fitfully surviving family farm located a few miles outside of Gallatin, Tennessee.
It had been a harsh summer for the Langs. Indeed, it had been a harsh summer for all in the area. The summer had been unusual in many ways. Normally the mid-summer season for the thumb sized, biting blue horse flies was short—three weeks, at most. This season the hungry, flies swarmed man and animal, cutting and licking salty blood well into late summer. Further, despite the almanac’s prediction of heavy rains all summer, it had hardly rained at all. Most farmers saw their crops die off, their wells run dry and bank foreclosure notices nailed on their doors. Most strangely, the county had been struck by a series of childhood fevers which raised purple-blue welts and cooked the internal organs of stricken children with its heat. Twenty-five children had been killed. One of them was a three day old newborn named Ethel Reed. She was the child of Lang’s cousin, Brenda.
At the time of Lang’s disappearance, the Lang farm was occupied by thirty-three year old farmer David Lang and his family: his just-turned thirty-two year old wife, Emma, and their three children: three year old Arthur George, eight-year-old George Arthur, and eleven-year-old Sarah Leigh. In addition, an unknown number of household servants lived with them. History does not record their names. Most authorities report the servants were absent when Lang disappeared.
On the afternoon of Lang’s disappearance, the oldest children were playing a Mid-western game called Peek-a-Pose in the front yard. The youngest, Arthur George, was curled-up and napping on a wooden porch swing. Mr. and Mrs. Lang, who had been arguing about household finances indoors, finally came out of the house’s stifling heat for a breathe of open air. Mrs. Lang decided to stay on the porch,. She sat on the porch swing with her sleeping youngest child. With one hand, she lazily curled and stroked his blonde hair damp with sweat and clinging to his unusually high forehead. With the other hand, she fanned herself using an old church hymnal sheet. Mr. Lang, upset with his wife, decided to cross the sun-burnt yellow pasture to check on three sickly horses he was reluctantly keeping for his wife's detested Ohio cousins.
As Lang was crossed the pasture, he bit on a dry stalk. He looked distracted, perhaps still simmering with anger at his spouse whom he had just accused of being an unholy spendthrift. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the horse and buggy of a family' friend came into view. With the friend were two other visitors. They were coming up the lane which ran by the pasture and which then lazily curved to the front of the house. Some sources identify the family friend as Judge August Peck, others identify him simply as Attorney Peck, with no mention of the title judge or even of his first name. Accompanying Peck were the other visitors Reverend Frank Wild and his sister, Emily Wild. At the arrival of this group, the children stopped playing. The Lang children were always attentive to Peck's arrival. While Peck did not always bring toys or trinkets, he almost always remembered to bring them candy.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Lang wordlessly waved to the visitors. Lang turned to lightly jog back across the open field towards the house. At this time, also looking towards Mr. Lang were Ryder and his companion, Gerard Lesiuer. Lesiuer was a French-Canadian transplant who was to later sired two boys who grew to become representatives in the state legislature. Lang and Lesiuer were carting two barrels of supplies towards the Lang house which had been purchased on credit by Mrs Lang the day before.
All eyes happened upon Lang. The witnesses saw him stride hurriedly to reach his house in time to met the visitors as they pulled up at his house. All witnesses agree that half-way across the field, Lang suddenly seemed to trip. On what, none could say, for none of the witnesses saw anything to explain Lang’s fall. As Lang fell forward, he stretched his arms before him, the fingers of his callous farmer's hands spread wide, and his mouth agape. Despite the piecing glare of sunlight, and the distance between them, Mrs. Lang swore she saw her husband’s pale blue eyes open wide in terror. The witnesses winced and braced for Lang’s hard landing. However, Lang never came to touch the earth, for without any sound, except the gasping of the shocked witnesses, Lang disappeared in mid-fall.
Fully witnessed, without a sound, David Lang had just suddenly ceased to exist as if someone had snapped off the switch powering his existence. Understandably, Mrs. Lang screamed and fainted. The other five adult witnesses, once they recovered out of their shock, ran to the spot where they witnessed Lang's last moments on earth. Coming to the spot, they all reflexively stopped abruptly. None of them were willing to enter the actual spot, as if fearful of encountering its diabolical power. When their courage and senses partially returned, they tactilely examined the spot, first by delicately touching the earth with their feet, and then by crouching down and using their bare hands to feel the earth beneath the straw-dry grass. Beneath the trampled dead grass , there was nothing but good solid Tennessee soil. No disguised sinkholes; no hidden caves or crevices; no softness or give at all. Like the rest of the burnt field, the area contained just dead yellow-white straw-grass over a hard chalky soil.
The witnesses quickly agreed to search the field. Perhaps, they thought, they mistook David’s location. He might have fallen elsewhere, and laid unconscious injured. They tried to ignore the undisputable fact that there was no tall obscuring grass, and the entire field could be examined very easily from where they stood. But they agreed to a search to give them time to further alleviate their shock, and to think things through. Haphazardly they walked the entire field. There was, of course, nothing. By this time, Mrs. Lang had aroused from her faint, and instantly became hysterical. Peck broke off his search of the field, went to her, calmed her and escorted her and the crying children back into the house. Soon, the neighbors were called with the local authorities following after. By nightfall, there was a full lantern-lit search of the field, which search was then was expanded to the surrounding woods, and then even to a nearby shallow river. Still there was nothing. After the fruitless weeks, the search efforts were ended.
Mrs. Lang took to a sickbed with shock. After a few weeks, it was decided that she would best recover in the care of her Ohio cousins. The children remained in the area, and were bundled into the care of an Aunt Sukie, a Gallatin native, and then, when Aunt Sukie died of childbirth fever, to the Reverend Wild’s family. Except for Mrs Lang short return to Gallatin to testify in the Chicago Mutual trial, Mrs Lang remained with her Ohio relatives.. Still mostly bed ridden, she died a few years later from an unknown wasting disease.
But this does not end this strange story. Months after the occurrence, in the early spring 1881, while the Lang children were still in her Aunt Sukie’s care, Lang's children and a few friends secreted back to the site. They noticed that the grass at the site of their father's disappearance had grown in yellow and covered a circle five feet in diameter. During a second, night time visit, the children and some friends returned to the site for a impromptu memorial service. They clasped hands and circled the yellowed area which, even in face of dares and challenges, none were brave enough to enter. They read some gospel verses and sang hymns. At the conclusion, Sarah said a prayer she had written just for her father. Her prayer finished, Sarah squeezed her blue eyes tight --- she had her father’s eyes --- and quietly walked into the center of the spot. When all appeared well, she opened one eye at a time. With nothing amiss, and finding herself still safe and well on earth, she called out for her father. Slowly she repeated her call three times. As Sarah’s voice faded with her last call, the children stood quietly. The braver of them waited and hoped for a response. The more nervous of them fidgeted anxiously, hoping for continued silence.
Now, the identities of the children present that night are not known. Neither is known of what they recalled of this strange night. But according to Sarah, in an interview she gave in her fifties to an unidentified writer for the Gallatin Gazzette, this is what occurred. After she had waited a moment or two for her father to reply to her calls, finally out of black starless sky above, came the half-strangled voice of her father, faintly perceptible over the boisterous crickets of the field, pleading for help, over and over. Finally, as the children stood frozen in their fear and astonishment, Lang's weakening voice faded away into the noisy bedlam of the crickets. It was the last time his voice was ever heard. The children fled in fear. According to Sarah, when the adults heard their story, the children were strictly confined to their homes and were told they were never to return to the spot.
As for the Lange farm, it was left vacant. With the Lang farm all but abandoned, curiosity seekers came, looked, and finally looted. Ultimately the town took action against the curiosity seekers, including writer Ambrose Peirce. They were all escorted away with firm instructions not to return. Repeat offenders were given the punishment of nightstick, jail time and confiscatory fines. At some point, the town newspaper the Gallatin Gazzette posted a sizable reward for information. It went uncollected. Over the years, at various points, the field was thoroughly examined by experts. In the end, these experts ceremoniously concluded what could have been easily discovered by a mere hard stamp of a foot on the ground: the field was firm, solid earth. There were no caves, crevices, no sinkholes. And no David Lang.
When the Lang children were grown, they held a formal memorial service for their father. They put a tombstone of Vermont granite over the spot to honor their father. Vermont granite was chosen because Vermont was the home of Lang’s paternal ancestors. Almost immediately the tombstone was stolen. Replacement stones were similarly taken. Defeated, the children gave up their effort to maintain a memorial maker. Over the years, the Lang farm was condemned and taken by the county which then sold the farm to Peck for pennies on the dollar. Peck never lived there, but rented the farm out to tenement farmers. Ultimately, after Peck died from throat cancer, the farm was sold for development. To discourage curiosity seekers, references in the county records to its location were discretely deleted. Its exact location has now become lost, but some authorities claim that the general spot of Lang's disappearance is located near what is now the sixteenth hole of the Long Hollow Golf Course.
OLIVER LAURCH
Oliver Laurch was another person whose sudden popping out of existence was eyewitnessed, though in this case by a single person. His disappearance occurred Christmas Eve of 1889. While some authorities mistakenly place the disappearance in South Bend, the actual locus was Milford, Indiana.
At the time Oliver vanished, Oliver was a fourteen year old farm boy being raised by his aunt Bessie and uncle David. He came into the care of his aunt and uncle after his parents’ tragic deaths when Oliver was four. His mother had died of yellow fever, and his father, broken in his grief, had committed suicide by jumping off the Little Miami Bridge into the Ohio River. With no other relatives, this left Oliver to the care of his father’s step-sister and her husband.
The sole existing photograph of Oliver is cracked and faded into light shades of gray. It depicts him at age thirteen. He is shown as short, heavy set, with a mop of greasy black hair, almost connecting eyebrows, and tightly closed caterpillar thick lips through which protrude a set of severely protruding "buck" teeth. If the criminal records of the time are be believed, Oliver’s personal character by age fourteen had become fully entrenched and was uniformly bad. Due to Oliver’s unremittingly sordid behavior, some authorities in re-telling his disappearance omit Oliver’s personal history entirely from their stories. But the truth be told, by age fourteen Oliver had a record of being an incorrigible truant, a frequenter of prostitutes, a petty thief, and, in the weeks just before his disappearance, a suspected look out for a local bank robbery in which three people died, including a three year old child. Despite these immoral and criminal behaviors, Oliver was able to avoid the reformatory and continue to live with his aunt and uncle. Oliver's continued placement there was likely due to his aunt and uncle’s well known devout Christianity. Both were active members of their local evangelistic church: the uncle handled the church books; and the aunt was the chief organist. That Oliver’s uncle had a powerful cousin on the town council perhaps also played no little role in helping Oliver keep his freedom.
Oliver’s disappearance took place on a Christmas eve which was unusually cold. A few snowflakes were falling, and enough stuck to develop a light crust on the ground. Inside a humble home, near a large fire, Oliver and his aunt and uncle sat enjoying a Christmas Eve dinner of roast beef. Awaiting them afterwards was a rare and special after dinner treat of bananas. Joining them for company was a friend of his uncle’s, an attorney from nearby South Bend who had just been elected probate judge upon his reinstatement from a long disbarment. This visitor’s name has been variously recorded as Alan Augustus Smith, Adailaire Smith, or sometimes just as A.A. Smith. As the family and their visitor finished the roast beef, the visitor developed a thirst requiring more water. Young Oliver was asked by his aunt to go out to the water pump near the front lane to the house to fill a water pitcher. Evidently, Oliver gave heated and profane argument against this chore. Perhaps as evidence of the extent of the argument that night, investigators of Oliver’s disappearance later noted broken plates and pottery inside the home. The aunt and uncle claimed these had been broken weeks before during a revival meeting gone unruly with over-spirited glorifying to God; the visitor Smith demurred from any statement on the matter, invoking a poor memory and lack of desire to comment on conversations and events occurring within the family’s privacy. His pending judgeship allowed him the pass.
Whatever the extent of the argument, the aunt and uncle won the sustained, spirited debate. Oliver grabbed a water pitcher, and despite the cold darkness he stalked outside without a coat or even a lantern. While Oliver was away on his errand, visitor Smith took the opportunity to slip away to smoke a cigar on the front porch. The aunt and uncle, being abstentious and devout Christians, demurred from joining him. Instead they stayed inside, near the fire. The aunt softly played carols on her fiddle, and the uncle, as was his wont, whistled along as he flipped through the Book of Lamentations for his favorite verses. Suddenly, a piercing inhuman screech came from outside.
Both aunt and uncle glanced at the other and then jumped towards the door. The fiddle crashed to the floor. The uncle’s stool toppled over and the holy book tumbled out of the uncle’s lap. Only the quick reflexes of the uncle saved the holy book from tumbling sacreligiously to the dirty floor. He put the holy book on a nearby ledge and then the aunt and uncle grabbed lamps on the run. Once out on the porch, the aunt and uncle took quick notice of the prostrate body of Mr. Smith. Stiff as a six hour corpse, Mr. Smith laid out unconscious. Still stuck in a corner of his slack mouth was his lit cigar, curling and whirling white wisps of smoke in a brisk and but frigid breeze. The piercing screams diverted their attention, however. Seeing Oliver’s footprints heading towards the water pump, the uncle followed Oliver's staggered footprints in the dust-light snow, while the aunt attended to Mr. Smith.
By the evidence of the footprints, Oliver had laggardly started out to the water pump. The uncle followed the meandering path, his footfalls landing almost landing directly on top of Oliver’s footprints. The closer the uncle came to the pump, the more the screeching cries seem to fade. Suddenly, half-way to the water pump, the tracks stopped. And above, the uncle heard the quickly fading screams of a fourteen boy in great and horrid distress--Oliver.
As the uncle stood listening, the only distinct sentence the uncle could make out of the wailings and screeches coming above him was the cry: "Help! They've got me!" It was a cry of blood icing terror. Just at the moment when the last of the screams above faded away, the uncle jumped. Something had grabbed his elbow. Panting in fright, he relaxed only when he turned and saw it was the aunt, who had come running after him after all. They both looked at each other and then, slowly, to the skies. They saw starless darkness, and no Oliver. Suddenly, their fear for their own safety overwhelmed them. Too frightened to weep yet for Oliver, they quickly retraced their footsteps, crunching the snow with their huried steps, their shoulders hunched down, and the open sky heavy on their backs. They did not dare look up again until they reached the porch. From the safety of that perch, they looked again at the black sky filled with snow and listened. All they saw was the corkscrew fall of snow caught in wild whirlwinds. All they heard was wind puffing in and against their red cold ears.
When visitor Smith was revived, he gave a strange tale. He had been puffing on a newly lit cigar savoring the first few puffs, watching Oliver lollygag his way to the water pump. He had smiled at the boy: his care-free straggling reminded him of his youth spent as a drummer boy for a New York regiment in the recent Civil War. He watched as Oliver's squat figure fade into a barely perceptible slouched-shouldered outline against the dark night. Suddenly Oliver stopped short. His body straightened. He looked directly above. As Oliver did so, he lifted his arms as if to draw the water pitcher up to his shallow chest. He seemed to hug it as he continued glazing above. Suddenly Oliver screamed. Before Smith could react, Smith instantly felt an intense burning but lightless heat. He burst into a sweat, and he felt dizzy. Rather than being able to go to Oliver's aid, he found his legs weakening beneath him, his vision fading, and his body falling backwards. The next thing he knew he was being revived. He recalled nothing more.
Afterwards, when speaking afterward to investigators, the aunt and uncle agreed: the piercing sound of the frightened boy had come from above. Moreover, nothing could be seen in the black sky. There was no balloon, or other device to explain Oliver’s sudden disappearance to the night sky above. Nothing.
Oliver Larch was never seen again.
Or was he?
Decades after, Edward Frank, a researcher of oddities happened to be researching the area newspapers of the day. While Frank was looking for articles on a reported strange rainfall in the area involving blood-colored rain mixed with pieces of frogs and salt water fish, he spotted an article which perked his interest. It was a lengthy article in the South Bend Times regarding an unusual occurrence. The article was dated about three months after Oliver’s disappearance: March 26, 1880. The article reported that in Wellington, a town about three hundred fifty miles north of Milford, a dead body had been found of a young teenage boy. The appearance of the boy’s partially decomposed body was curious. His skin was colored orange; his hair was grey. Moreover, one of his eyeballs was missing from its socket. After a thorough search of his clothing, the dried, collapsed orb was mysteriously found in his back pocket, squashed between a pack of marked cards and a half-empty bottle of hair ointment. All but his two front teeth were missing. Also missing was three-quarters of his tongue. Most strangely, during autopsy, it was discovered that he was missing most of his major organs including his heart, his liver, his kidneys and three quarters of his small intestines. It was as if they had disappeared from within, for there were no cuts or other signs of injury indicating a traumatic removal. As to clues to his identity, there was only one: next to the body was a water pitcher, partially cracked, but otherwise in good shape. The local authorities did not know what to make of it. Their perplexity was not surprising: the news of Oliver’s disappearance evidently had not reached them. The unknown boy was hurriedly buried without ceremony or tombstone. According to the South Bend Times writer, the experts who examined the body refused to speculate as to the cause of death and the experts suggested that the greater public do likewise.
Of the few persons who have popped out of existence like a burst human soap bubble, one of the most famous was Tennessee farmer, David Lang. On September 23, 1880, on the day of his wife’s 32nd birthday, Lang disappeared in sparkling daylight before astonished witnesses as he crossed a flat, obstruction-free field.
The fame of Lang's disappearance is based on the number of credible eyewitnesses to the strange event. There were six adult witnesses in all. Five out of the six were of sharp mind, and in excellent health. The five had impeccable standing in the surrounding Gallatin community. The one exception to this reputable group of witnesses was a David Ryder, a sickly, ill-tempered drunk and liar, who dodged the Civil War draft when a youth, and who continued dodging life’s responsibilities until his end. Some authorities report Ryder died fitfully at age 87 while sleeping off a drunk in his adopted daughter’s barn loft. Other authorities report Ryder died in his mid-seventies from massive hemorrhaging when his abused dachshund, Rusty, finally turned on Ryder as he slept. Regardless the manner of Ryder's death, and how despicable his life, even Ryder’s story matched that of the other witnesses.
For the skeptical among us, it is significant that each witness was well positioned and had a clear, unobstructed view of Lang's disappearance. Further each was situated in a different location and so by mere coincidence all angles of the disappearance were covered. All witnesses from their different perspectives were dead certain as to what their eyes had shown them of David’s last physical steps on earth.
Later, over the years when the witnesses recounted their tales, the witnesses remained dead earnest and unwaveringly consistent. Twice the witnesses told their stories under the pains and penalties of perjury. The first time the witnesses told their stories under oath was seven months after the event during a long, ultimately inconclusive criminal inquest into the circumstances of Lang’s disappearance. Each witness willingly and without hesitation gave affidavit to Lang’s sudden, and permanent physical disappearance. Three years later, in a lawsuit for life insurance proceeds brought by Lang’s estate against Chicago Mutual Life & Fire, each witness had walked up to the stand, and under a sworn oath to God, testified impeccably consistent with their very first statements. The newspapers of the time reported the trial. The insurance company had hired a Chicago attorney, a dyspeptic and perpetually testy Jonathan House, to put the witnesses into the crucible by subjecting them to long hours of painstaking, sometimes cold blooded-murderous cross-examination. With a sympathetic judge to House's cause, Attorney House had free rein to test the witnesses and he used that freedom to the borders of abuse. However, after five days of giving the witnesses the worse that cross-examination could offer, the Chicago lawyer collapsed into his chair defeated, his silk shirt drenched in sweat and clinging to his bulbous flesh: the witnesses could not be budged from their stories.
Now the facts.
The day and time: September 23, 1880 at about noon.
Location: the Lang farm, a poor, fitfully surviving family farm located a few miles outside of Gallatin, Tennessee.
It had been a harsh summer for the Langs. Indeed, it had been a harsh summer for all in the area. The summer had been unusual in many ways. Normally the mid-summer season for the thumb sized, biting blue horse flies was short—three weeks, at most. This season the hungry, flies swarmed man and animal, cutting and licking salty blood well into late summer. Further, despite the almanac’s prediction of heavy rains all summer, it had hardly rained at all. Most farmers saw their crops die off, their wells run dry and bank foreclosure notices nailed on their doors. Most strangely, the county had been struck by a series of childhood fevers which raised purple-blue welts and cooked the internal organs of stricken children with its heat. Twenty-five children had been killed. One of them was a three day old newborn named Ethel Reed. She was the child of Lang’s cousin, Brenda.
At the time of Lang’s disappearance, the Lang farm was occupied by thirty-three year old farmer David Lang and his family: his just-turned thirty-two year old wife, Emma, and their three children: three year old Arthur George, eight-year-old George Arthur, and eleven-year-old Sarah Leigh. In addition, an unknown number of household servants lived with them. History does not record their names. Most authorities report the servants were absent when Lang disappeared.
On the afternoon of Lang’s disappearance, the oldest children were playing a Mid-western game called Peek-a-Pose in the front yard. The youngest, Arthur George, was curled-up and napping on a wooden porch swing. Mr. and Mrs. Lang, who had been arguing about household finances indoors, finally came out of the house’s stifling heat for a breathe of open air. Mrs. Lang decided to stay on the porch,. She sat on the porch swing with her sleeping youngest child. With one hand, she lazily curled and stroked his blonde hair damp with sweat and clinging to his unusually high forehead. With the other hand, she fanned herself using an old church hymnal sheet. Mr. Lang, upset with his wife, decided to cross the sun-burnt yellow pasture to check on three sickly horses he was reluctantly keeping for his wife's detested Ohio cousins.
As Lang was crossed the pasture, he bit on a dry stalk. He looked distracted, perhaps still simmering with anger at his spouse whom he had just accused of being an unholy spendthrift. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the horse and buggy of a family' friend came into view. With the friend were two other visitors. They were coming up the lane which ran by the pasture and which then lazily curved to the front of the house. Some sources identify the family friend as Judge August Peck, others identify him simply as Attorney Peck, with no mention of the title judge or even of his first name. Accompanying Peck were the other visitors Reverend Frank Wild and his sister, Emily Wild. At the arrival of this group, the children stopped playing. The Lang children were always attentive to Peck's arrival. While Peck did not always bring toys or trinkets, he almost always remembered to bring them candy.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Lang wordlessly waved to the visitors. Lang turned to lightly jog back across the open field towards the house. At this time, also looking towards Mr. Lang were Ryder and his companion, Gerard Lesiuer. Lesiuer was a French-Canadian transplant who was to later sired two boys who grew to become representatives in the state legislature. Lang and Lesiuer were carting two barrels of supplies towards the Lang house which had been purchased on credit by Mrs Lang the day before.
All eyes happened upon Lang. The witnesses saw him stride hurriedly to reach his house in time to met the visitors as they pulled up at his house. All witnesses agree that half-way across the field, Lang suddenly seemed to trip. On what, none could say, for none of the witnesses saw anything to explain Lang’s fall. As Lang fell forward, he stretched his arms before him, the fingers of his callous farmer's hands spread wide, and his mouth agape. Despite the piecing glare of sunlight, and the distance between them, Mrs. Lang swore she saw her husband’s pale blue eyes open wide in terror. The witnesses winced and braced for Lang’s hard landing. However, Lang never came to touch the earth, for without any sound, except the gasping of the shocked witnesses, Lang disappeared in mid-fall.
Fully witnessed, without a sound, David Lang had just suddenly ceased to exist as if someone had snapped off the switch powering his existence. Understandably, Mrs. Lang screamed and fainted. The other five adult witnesses, once they recovered out of their shock, ran to the spot where they witnessed Lang's last moments on earth. Coming to the spot, they all reflexively stopped abruptly. None of them were willing to enter the actual spot, as if fearful of encountering its diabolical power. When their courage and senses partially returned, they tactilely examined the spot, first by delicately touching the earth with their feet, and then by crouching down and using their bare hands to feel the earth beneath the straw-dry grass. Beneath the trampled dead grass , there was nothing but good solid Tennessee soil. No disguised sinkholes; no hidden caves or crevices; no softness or give at all. Like the rest of the burnt field, the area contained just dead yellow-white straw-grass over a hard chalky soil.
The witnesses quickly agreed to search the field. Perhaps, they thought, they mistook David’s location. He might have fallen elsewhere, and laid unconscious injured. They tried to ignore the undisputable fact that there was no tall obscuring grass, and the entire field could be examined very easily from where they stood. But they agreed to a search to give them time to further alleviate their shock, and to think things through. Haphazardly they walked the entire field. There was, of course, nothing. By this time, Mrs. Lang had aroused from her faint, and instantly became hysterical. Peck broke off his search of the field, went to her, calmed her and escorted her and the crying children back into the house. Soon, the neighbors were called with the local authorities following after. By nightfall, there was a full lantern-lit search of the field, which search was then was expanded to the surrounding woods, and then even to a nearby shallow river. Still there was nothing. After the fruitless weeks, the search efforts were ended.
Mrs. Lang took to a sickbed with shock. After a few weeks, it was decided that she would best recover in the care of her Ohio cousins. The children remained in the area, and were bundled into the care of an Aunt Sukie, a Gallatin native, and then, when Aunt Sukie died of childbirth fever, to the Reverend Wild’s family. Except for Mrs Lang short return to Gallatin to testify in the Chicago Mutual trial, Mrs Lang remained with her Ohio relatives.. Still mostly bed ridden, she died a few years later from an unknown wasting disease.
But this does not end this strange story. Months after the occurrence, in the early spring 1881, while the Lang children were still in her Aunt Sukie’s care, Lang's children and a few friends secreted back to the site. They noticed that the grass at the site of their father's disappearance had grown in yellow and covered a circle five feet in diameter. During a second, night time visit, the children and some friends returned to the site for a impromptu memorial service. They clasped hands and circled the yellowed area which, even in face of dares and challenges, none were brave enough to enter. They read some gospel verses and sang hymns. At the conclusion, Sarah said a prayer she had written just for her father. Her prayer finished, Sarah squeezed her blue eyes tight --- she had her father’s eyes --- and quietly walked into the center of the spot. When all appeared well, she opened one eye at a time. With nothing amiss, and finding herself still safe and well on earth, she called out for her father. Slowly she repeated her call three times. As Sarah’s voice faded with her last call, the children stood quietly. The braver of them waited and hoped for a response. The more nervous of them fidgeted anxiously, hoping for continued silence.
Now, the identities of the children present that night are not known. Neither is known of what they recalled of this strange night. But according to Sarah, in an interview she gave in her fifties to an unidentified writer for the Gallatin Gazzette, this is what occurred. After she had waited a moment or two for her father to reply to her calls, finally out of black starless sky above, came the half-strangled voice of her father, faintly perceptible over the boisterous crickets of the field, pleading for help, over and over. Finally, as the children stood frozen in their fear and astonishment, Lang's weakening voice faded away into the noisy bedlam of the crickets. It was the last time his voice was ever heard. The children fled in fear. According to Sarah, when the adults heard their story, the children were strictly confined to their homes and were told they were never to return to the spot.
As for the Lange farm, it was left vacant. With the Lang farm all but abandoned, curiosity seekers came, looked, and finally looted. Ultimately the town took action against the curiosity seekers, including writer Ambrose Peirce. They were all escorted away with firm instructions not to return. Repeat offenders were given the punishment of nightstick, jail time and confiscatory fines. At some point, the town newspaper the Gallatin Gazzette posted a sizable reward for information. It went uncollected. Over the years, at various points, the field was thoroughly examined by experts. In the end, these experts ceremoniously concluded what could have been easily discovered by a mere hard stamp of a foot on the ground: the field was firm, solid earth. There were no caves, crevices, no sinkholes. And no David Lang.
When the Lang children were grown, they held a formal memorial service for their father. They put a tombstone of Vermont granite over the spot to honor their father. Vermont granite was chosen because Vermont was the home of Lang’s paternal ancestors. Almost immediately the tombstone was stolen. Replacement stones were similarly taken. Defeated, the children gave up their effort to maintain a memorial maker. Over the years, the Lang farm was condemned and taken by the county which then sold the farm to Peck for pennies on the dollar. Peck never lived there, but rented the farm out to tenement farmers. Ultimately, after Peck died from throat cancer, the farm was sold for development. To discourage curiosity seekers, references in the county records to its location were discretely deleted. Its exact location has now become lost, but some authorities claim that the general spot of Lang's disappearance is located near what is now the sixteenth hole of the Long Hollow Golf Course.
OLIVER LAURCH
Oliver Laurch was another person whose sudden popping out of existence was eyewitnessed, though in this case by a single person. His disappearance occurred Christmas Eve of 1889. While some authorities mistakenly place the disappearance in South Bend, the actual locus was Milford, Indiana.
At the time Oliver vanished, Oliver was a fourteen year old farm boy being raised by his aunt Bessie and uncle David. He came into the care of his aunt and uncle after his parents’ tragic deaths when Oliver was four. His mother had died of yellow fever, and his father, broken in his grief, had committed suicide by jumping off the Little Miami Bridge into the Ohio River. With no other relatives, this left Oliver to the care of his father’s step-sister and her husband.
The sole existing photograph of Oliver is cracked and faded into light shades of gray. It depicts him at age thirteen. He is shown as short, heavy set, with a mop of greasy black hair, almost connecting eyebrows, and tightly closed caterpillar thick lips through which protrude a set of severely protruding "buck" teeth. If the criminal records of the time are be believed, Oliver’s personal character by age fourteen had become fully entrenched and was uniformly bad. Due to Oliver’s unremittingly sordid behavior, some authorities in re-telling his disappearance omit Oliver’s personal history entirely from their stories. But the truth be told, by age fourteen Oliver had a record of being an incorrigible truant, a frequenter of prostitutes, a petty thief, and, in the weeks just before his disappearance, a suspected look out for a local bank robbery in which three people died, including a three year old child. Despite these immoral and criminal behaviors, Oliver was able to avoid the reformatory and continue to live with his aunt and uncle. Oliver's continued placement there was likely due to his aunt and uncle’s well known devout Christianity. Both were active members of their local evangelistic church: the uncle handled the church books; and the aunt was the chief organist. That Oliver’s uncle had a powerful cousin on the town council perhaps also played no little role in helping Oliver keep his freedom.
Oliver’s disappearance took place on a Christmas eve which was unusually cold. A few snowflakes were falling, and enough stuck to develop a light crust on the ground. Inside a humble home, near a large fire, Oliver and his aunt and uncle sat enjoying a Christmas Eve dinner of roast beef. Awaiting them afterwards was a rare and special after dinner treat of bananas. Joining them for company was a friend of his uncle’s, an attorney from nearby South Bend who had just been elected probate judge upon his reinstatement from a long disbarment. This visitor’s name has been variously recorded as Alan Augustus Smith, Adailaire Smith, or sometimes just as A.A. Smith. As the family and their visitor finished the roast beef, the visitor developed a thirst requiring more water. Young Oliver was asked by his aunt to go out to the water pump near the front lane to the house to fill a water pitcher. Evidently, Oliver gave heated and profane argument against this chore. Perhaps as evidence of the extent of the argument that night, investigators of Oliver’s disappearance later noted broken plates and pottery inside the home. The aunt and uncle claimed these had been broken weeks before during a revival meeting gone unruly with over-spirited glorifying to God; the visitor Smith demurred from any statement on the matter, invoking a poor memory and lack of desire to comment on conversations and events occurring within the family’s privacy. His pending judgeship allowed him the pass.
Whatever the extent of the argument, the aunt and uncle won the sustained, spirited debate. Oliver grabbed a water pitcher, and despite the cold darkness he stalked outside without a coat or even a lantern. While Oliver was away on his errand, visitor Smith took the opportunity to slip away to smoke a cigar on the front porch. The aunt and uncle, being abstentious and devout Christians, demurred from joining him. Instead they stayed inside, near the fire. The aunt softly played carols on her fiddle, and the uncle, as was his wont, whistled along as he flipped through the Book of Lamentations for his favorite verses. Suddenly, a piercing inhuman screech came from outside.
Both aunt and uncle glanced at the other and then jumped towards the door. The fiddle crashed to the floor. The uncle’s stool toppled over and the holy book tumbled out of the uncle’s lap. Only the quick reflexes of the uncle saved the holy book from tumbling sacreligiously to the dirty floor. He put the holy book on a nearby ledge and then the aunt and uncle grabbed lamps on the run. Once out on the porch, the aunt and uncle took quick notice of the prostrate body of Mr. Smith. Stiff as a six hour corpse, Mr. Smith laid out unconscious. Still stuck in a corner of his slack mouth was his lit cigar, curling and whirling white wisps of smoke in a brisk and but frigid breeze. The piercing screams diverted their attention, however. Seeing Oliver’s footprints heading towards the water pump, the uncle followed Oliver's staggered footprints in the dust-light snow, while the aunt attended to Mr. Smith.
By the evidence of the footprints, Oliver had laggardly started out to the water pump. The uncle followed the meandering path, his footfalls landing almost landing directly on top of Oliver’s footprints. The closer the uncle came to the pump, the more the screeching cries seem to fade. Suddenly, half-way to the water pump, the tracks stopped. And above, the uncle heard the quickly fading screams of a fourteen boy in great and horrid distress--Oliver.
As the uncle stood listening, the only distinct sentence the uncle could make out of the wailings and screeches coming above him was the cry: "Help! They've got me!" It was a cry of blood icing terror. Just at the moment when the last of the screams above faded away, the uncle jumped. Something had grabbed his elbow. Panting in fright, he relaxed only when he turned and saw it was the aunt, who had come running after him after all. They both looked at each other and then, slowly, to the skies. They saw starless darkness, and no Oliver. Suddenly, their fear for their own safety overwhelmed them. Too frightened to weep yet for Oliver, they quickly retraced their footsteps, crunching the snow with their huried steps, their shoulders hunched down, and the open sky heavy on their backs. They did not dare look up again until they reached the porch. From the safety of that perch, they looked again at the black sky filled with snow and listened. All they saw was the corkscrew fall of snow caught in wild whirlwinds. All they heard was wind puffing in and against their red cold ears.
When visitor Smith was revived, he gave a strange tale. He had been puffing on a newly lit cigar savoring the first few puffs, watching Oliver lollygag his way to the water pump. He had smiled at the boy: his care-free straggling reminded him of his youth spent as a drummer boy for a New York regiment in the recent Civil War. He watched as Oliver's squat figure fade into a barely perceptible slouched-shouldered outline against the dark night. Suddenly Oliver stopped short. His body straightened. He looked directly above. As Oliver did so, he lifted his arms as if to draw the water pitcher up to his shallow chest. He seemed to hug it as he continued glazing above. Suddenly Oliver screamed. Before Smith could react, Smith instantly felt an intense burning but lightless heat. He burst into a sweat, and he felt dizzy. Rather than being able to go to Oliver's aid, he found his legs weakening beneath him, his vision fading, and his body falling backwards. The next thing he knew he was being revived. He recalled nothing more.
Afterwards, when speaking afterward to investigators, the aunt and uncle agreed: the piercing sound of the frightened boy had come from above. Moreover, nothing could be seen in the black sky. There was no balloon, or other device to explain Oliver’s sudden disappearance to the night sky above. Nothing.
Oliver Larch was never seen again.
Or was he?
Decades after, Edward Frank, a researcher of oddities happened to be researching the area newspapers of the day. While Frank was looking for articles on a reported strange rainfall in the area involving blood-colored rain mixed with pieces of frogs and salt water fish, he spotted an article which perked his interest. It was a lengthy article in the South Bend Times regarding an unusual occurrence. The article was dated about three months after Oliver’s disappearance: March 26, 1880. The article reported that in Wellington, a town about three hundred fifty miles north of Milford, a dead body had been found of a young teenage boy. The appearance of the boy’s partially decomposed body was curious. His skin was colored orange; his hair was grey. Moreover, one of his eyeballs was missing from its socket. After a thorough search of his clothing, the dried, collapsed orb was mysteriously found in his back pocket, squashed between a pack of marked cards and a half-empty bottle of hair ointment. All but his two front teeth were missing. Also missing was three-quarters of his tongue. Most strangely, during autopsy, it was discovered that he was missing most of his major organs including his heart, his liver, his kidneys and three quarters of his small intestines. It was as if they had disappeared from within, for there were no cuts or other signs of injury indicating a traumatic removal. As to clues to his identity, there was only one: next to the body was a water pitcher, partially cracked, but otherwise in good shape. The local authorities did not know what to make of it. Their perplexity was not surprising: the news of Oliver’s disappearance evidently had not reached them. The unknown boy was hurriedly buried without ceremony or tombstone. According to the South Bend Times writer, the experts who examined the body refused to speculate as to the cause of death and the experts suggested that the greater public do likewise.
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