by Joe Nickell
In fact, the earliest version of the hoax tale appeared in the December 12,1860, Wyoming County Mirror. “Everyone remembers,” stated the brief article, “that during the Silver Lake snake excitement, at Perry, the hotel there reaped a rich harvest of visitors. A correspondent of the Buf-falo Commercial says that when about two years and a half ago, the hotel was partially burned, a certain man discovered the serpent in the hotel.” This “was made of India rubber,” and supposedly “corresponded mi-nutely” with a Buffalo Republic description of the serpent. The man who discovered the rubber fake “has just got mad at the landlord and divulged the secret.” The newspaper story ended on a skeptical note: “We suppose this last game is just about as much of a ’sell’ as the original snake.”
In sum, the historical evidence diminishes as we work backward to the alleged hoax, whereas, conversely, details of the story increase the farther they are from the supposed event. Therefore it appears it was the story—rather than the serpent—that became inflated. If Walker and/or others did perpetrate a hoax, it is unlikely to have involved an elaborate contraption like Roberts described. There were hoaxes associated with the 1855 frenzy, but they were largely played out in the newspapers of the day, which treated the whole affair as great sport. For example, the Buf-falo Republic, while expressing skepticism, published a lithographic illustration of the “captured snake!” A contemporaneous report says it “brought scores of visitors from a distance” (Douglass 1955,119). In September, the Chicago Times reported that two visitors had seen the monstrous serpent harpooned and towed to shore. The newspaper jocosely reported that come nightfall the creature uprooted the tree to which it was tethered and returned to the lake. It was recaptured the next day, said the Times, whereupon it “awoke, threw its head 60 feet into the air; lurid eyes glared like balls of flame and its tongue, like flashes of forked lightning, 10-12 feet long, vibrated between its open jaws” (Douglass 1955, 119).
In the journalistic interplay of the day, accusations of hoaxing (or worse) were often made against rival newspapers, as happened with the Silver Lake brouhaha. At one point during the media uproar, the Hornellsville Tribune suggested that “if the origin of the Silver Lake Snake humbug is ever revealed, it will be discovered that some one or two in Perry village have been playing ‘nigger in the fence’ for the sole purpose and with the hopes of selfish benefit.” 8 A clergyman, the Reverend J.S. Page, pastor of the Perry Presbyterian Church, wrote to the Rochester Democrat, lamenting: “The idea is abroad that it is merely a hoax to entice visitors to Silver Lake and Perry [and that] is entirely without foundation” (Douglass 1955, 119).
Such insinuations of hoaxing probably elicited an early statement by Wyoming Times editor Gillett. On August 8, 1855, he wrote: “We assert, without fear of contradiction, that there is not a log floating on the water of Silver Lake—that nothing has been placed there to create the serpent story” and that the paper had published what was related by truthful people (“Silver Lake Serpent” 1855).
Even if there was a hoax—either a fake serpent or a journalistic scheme—that does nothing to explain the earlier sightings. At this late date we can only round up the usual lake-monster suspects. As the per-petual saga at Scotland’s Loch Ness demonstrates, “monsters” may be created by floating trees and driftwood, leaping fish, swimming otters and deer, wind slicks, and many other culprits—often seen under such illusory conditions as mirage effects and diminished visibility (Binns 1984). For example, some of the Silver Lake sightings, including the one that launched the 1855 frenzy, occurred at night—when visibility would have been relatively poor and imaginations heightened. On the 27th, two farmers working in a nearby field “saw something that appeared like a log, but three or four rods long” (emphasis added) (Silver Lake Serpent 1880,11).
Eyewitnesses typically insisted the object was a living creature, sometimes with its head above the water. A possible candidate is the otter, which “when swimming seems a very large creature” (Scott 1815). While treading water, an otter can raise its head and neck well above the surface and otherwise simulate a monstrous serpent, especially if swimming with one or two others in a line (Binns 1984,186-91). The large North Ameri-can otter (Lutra canadensis) inhabits “virtually the whole of the New World” (Chamin 1985, 6). On one of my visits to Silver Lake, I was startled while walking along a nature trail to glimpse a creature swimming in a nearby stream; it quickly vanished and I was puzzled as to its identity until, later commenting to a resident about all the wildlife I had glimpsed (woodchuck, woodpecker, squirrels, etc.), I was asked if I had seen “one of the otters” that had recently been reintroduced there.
I subsequently talked with New York State wildlife experts about ot-ters possibly being mistaken for mid-nineteenth-century “lake serpents.” Bruce Penrod, Senior Wildlife Biologist with the Department of Environ-mental Conservation, stated it was “very probable” that otters were in the Silver Lake area in 1855. And if the sightings were not hoaxes, he said, he would clearly prefer otters—or even muskrats, beavers, or swimming deer—over sea monsters as plausible explanations for such sightings.
His view was echoed by Jon Kopp, Senior Wildlife Technician with the department. Kopp had an illuminating story to tell. In 1994, he was involved in banding ducks and was sequestered in a blind on Lake Alice in Clinton County. It was dark, when suddenly he saw a huge snakelike creature making a sinuous, undulating movement, heading in his direction! As it came quite close, he saw that the “serpent” was actually a group of six or seven otters swimming in single file, diving and resurfacing to create the serpentine effect. “After seeing this,” Kopp said, “I can understand how people can see a ‘sea serpent’” (Kopp 1998).
I thought of otters especially when I studied two previously mentioned accounts of 1855 that described a pair of “serpents” estimated at twenty to forty feet in length. Possibly the witnesses in each case saw two or more otters, which, together with their wakes, gave the appearance of much longer creatures. All of the witnesses were observing from consid-erable distances—in one case through a spy glass (“Silver Lake Serpent” 1880, 19-20)—distances that could easily be overestimated, thus exaggerating the apparent size of the creature. Because otters are “great travelers,” with nomadic tendencies (Kopp 1998), it is possible that a group of them came into Silver Lake in the summer of 1855 and later moved on, thus initiating and then ending that particular rash of sightings.
The least likely explanation for the Silver Lake reports is that some exotic creature inhabited its waters. Noting that as a result of the “extravagant stories” Silver Lake “became more thoroughly advertised than it could have been by any other process,” the History of Wyoming County (1880) concluded: “It is doubted, however, whether any snake larger than those which, under certain circumstances, infest people s boots, was ever seen.” Whatever people did see, the situation was hyped in turn by the local newspaper and the antics of would-be monster hunters. People’s expectations were thus heightened, and that in turn led to misperceptions. Psychological contagion (the spreading of beliefs and/or behavior to others as by suggestion) yielded the “monster mania” that soon ran its course. It is well known that people expecting to see something could be misled by anything having a slight resemblance to it. Gould (1976) called this tendency “expectant attention” and it is the basis of many paranormal claims—apparently including sightings of the Silver Lake Serpent, a case of the tale wagging the monster.
References
Binns, Ronald. 1984. The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus.
Chamin, Paul. 1985. The Natural History of Otters. New York: Facts on File.
Douglass, Harry S. 1947. “Wyoming County,” in John Theodore Horton et al., History of Northwestern New York. New York: Lemis Historical Publishing.
———.1955. The legend of the serpent: 1855-1955. Historical Wyoming 8.4(July): 115-21.
Fielding, Todd. 1998. It came from Silver Lake. The Daily News (Batavia, N.Y.), July 25.<
br />
Gould, Rupert T. 1976. The Loch Ness Monster and Others. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 112-13.
History of Wyoming County N.Y. 1880. New York: F.W. Beers & Co.
Keel, John A. 1970. Strange Creatures from Time and Space. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 254-59.
Kimiecik, Kathy. 1988. The strange case of the Silver Lake sea serpent. New York Folklore 9.2 (summer): 10-11.
Kopp, Jon. 1998. Interview by author, Sept. 18.
The Legend of the Silver Lake Sea Serpent. 1984. Silver Lake, N.Y.: Serpent Comics and Print Shop.
MacDougall, Curtis D. 1958. Hoaxes. New York: Dover.
Mackal, Roy P. 1980. Searching for Hidden Animals. Garden City,N.Y.: Doubleday, 209-10.
Peace, Carolyn. 1976. The Silver Lake sea serpent. Buffalo Courier-Express, May 16.
Penrod, Bruce. 1998. Interview by author, Sept. 14.
Perry; New York, As It Was and Is. 1976. Perry, N.Y.: Perry Bicentennial Committee.
Pickett, Thomas J. 1998. Personal communication, Sept. 18.
Rice, Clark. 1998. Interview by author, Aug. 1.
Roberts, Frank D. 1915. History of the Town of Perry, New York. n.p. [Perry, N.Y.]: C.G. Clarke & Son, 184-203.
Scott, Sir Walter. 1815. Letter quoted in Binns 1984, 186-87.
The Silver Lake serpent. 1855. Wyoming Times, Sept. 26 (citing earlier issues of July 18-Sept. 19).
The Silver Lake Serpent: A Full Account of the Monster as Seen in the Year 1855. 1880. Castile, N.Y.: Gaines and Terry.
Silver Lake serpent revived for Jaycee festival, undated clipping ca. 1960s, vertical file, Perry Public Library.
“The True and Unembellished Tale of the Great Serpent of Silver Lake,” 1974. Song, published in Legend 1984,1.
Vogel, Charity. 1995. Perry recalls fishy tale of sea serpent. Buffalo News, July 22.
Chapter 14
Miraculous Rose Petals
It has long been common, especially within the Catholic tradition, to discover faces of holy personages in random patterns and to suggest that these are miraculous. In my book Looking for a Miracle (Nickell 1993), and in a recent article in Free Inquiry magazine (Nickell 1997), I recounted several of these, including the famous image of Jesus discovered in the skillet burns on a New Mexico tortilla in 1978. Usually, these simulacra are the result of the inkblot or picture-in-the-clouds effect: the mind’s tendency to create order out of chaos. On occasion, however, they are faked.
On Good Friday 1995, when I appeared on a special live episode of Oprah to discuss miracles, I met a daughter of Mrs. Maria Rubio, the woman who had discovered the tortilla Jesus. Afterward, as we were waiting in a limousine for a ride to the airport, I also talked with a self-styled visionary who had been on the show. She showed me a “miraculous” rose petal that bore a likeness of Jesus, one of several such items that supposedly came from the Philippines. Examining the petal with my Bausch& Lomb illuminated Coddington magnifier (a penlighted loupe), I was suspicious and asked to borrow the object for further study. (See figure 14.1.)
I subsequently examined the rose petal by viewing it with transmitted light, using a fluorescent light box and a stereomicroscope (figure 14.2. I noted that everywhere there were markings there was damage to the rose petal, resembling hatch marks made with a blunt tool (figure 14.3 In contrast, ordinary rose petals had no such markings. (See figure 14.4, top right).
Figure 14.1. Rose petal with “miraculous” portrait of Jesus.
Figure 14.2 (below). Author conducting examination of rose petal in CSICOP laboratory.
Figure 14.3. Facial markings constitute damage, resembling stylus marks.
Figure 14.4. An ordinary rose petal (top right) lacks markings, but a stylus (upper left) can be used to produce faces such as the three shown at bottom.
However, I found that faces could easily be drawn with a blunt stylus (figure 14.4, top left). I obtained dried rose petals, rejuvenating them with boiling water, then smoothing out the wrinkles on the surface of a light box and drawing the requisite pictures. They have characteristics similar to the “miraculous” one (figure 14.4, bottom).
Other imaged rose petals were shown on the Fox television network’s special, “Signs From God” (July 28, 1999). The program hyped numerous miracle claims, while more prosaic explanations were glossed over or, worse, unmentioned. When an art conservator and a botanist each demonstrated that the images on the petals had been faked—they even duplicated the effects by pressing petals with small medallions—journalist Michael Willessee became flustered. He suggested that fakery was unlikely because the “miracle” petals were not being sold, ignoring the possibility of what skeptics term “pious fraud”—deception used in an end-justifies-the-means manner to promote religious belief.
As these examples show, paranormal claims are not solved by assumptions (e.g. that rose petals have mottled patterns that could yield a facial image) but rather by investigation on a case-by-case basis.
References
Nickell, Joe. 1993. Looking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visionsand Healing Cures. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus.
———. 1997. In the eye of the beholder. Free Inquiry 17 (2): 5.
Chapter 15
Paranormal Lincoln
His guiding of the United States through its greatest crisis and his subsequent martyrdom have caused the shadow of the tall, sixteenth president to loom still larger. Called “the most mythic of all American presidents” (Cohen 1989, 7), Abraham Lincoln has long been credited with supernatural powers. These include an early mirrorvision, prophetic dreams, and spiritualistic phenomena. His ghost, some say, even haunts the White House.9
In the Looking Glass
Many people have portrayed Lincoln as a man given to belief in omens, particularly with respect to his assassination. An incident often cited in this regard occurred at his home in Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln related it to a few friends and associates, including Noah Brooks in 1864. Brooks shared it with the readers of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine the following July—three months after Lincoln’s death—recounting the president s story “as nearly as possible in his own words”:
It was just after my election in 1860, when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day, and there had been a great “Hurrah, boys!” so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my chamber. Opposite where I lay was a bureau, with a swinging-glass upon it—[and here he got up and placed furniture to illustrate the position]—and, looking in that glass, I saw myself reflected, nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, andgot up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again I saw it a second time—plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler, say five shades, than the other. I got up and the thing melted away, and I went off and, in the excitement of the hour, forgot all about it—nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home I told my wife about it, and a few days after I tried the experiment again, when [with a laugh], sure enough, the thing came again; but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife, who was worried about it some-what. She thought it was “a sign” that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should see life through the last term (Brooks 1865, 224-25).
The same story was told by Ward Hill Lamon in his book Recollections of Abraham Lincoln. Lamon was a friend of Lincoln’s, a fearless man who accompanied him to Washington for his protection, being given the special title, Marshal of the District of Columbia. In discussing the matter of the double image in the mirror, Lamon stated: “Mr. Lincoln more than once told me that he could not explain this
phenomenon” and “that he had tried to reproduce the double reflection at the Executive Mansion, but without success.” In Lamon’s account it was not Mrs. Lincoln but the president himself who thought the “ghostly” image foretold “that death would overtake him” before the end of his second term (Lamon 1995, 111-12).
In recent years, paranormalists have gotten hold of Lincoln’s anecdote and offered their own interpretations. Hans Holzer states that “What the President saw was a brief out of the body experience,’ or astral projection,” meaning “that the bonds between conscious mind and the unconscious are temporarily loosened and that the inner or true self has quickly slipped out” (Holzer 1995, 65). However, such an explanation fails to fit the evidence. Lincoln did not describe an out-of-body experience—a feeling of being outside one’s physical self—but according to Brooks (1865,225), “The President, with his usual good sense, saw nothing in all this but an optical illusion.”
The nature of this optical illusion can be deduced from the circumstances. The double image was of Lincoln’s face only, could be seen in a particular mirror but not others, and vanished and reappeared with respect to a certain vantage point. Taken together, these details are correproduces a curious effect experienced by Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and thought by Mrs. Lincoln to be an omen. roborative evidence that the mirror was to blame. An ordinary mirror can produce a slight double-image effect due to light reflecting off the front of the glass as well as off the silvering on the back. With modern mirrors this is usually not noticeable, and the shift in the image is slight in any event. But in the case of old mirrors, whose glass plates “were generally imperfect” (Cescinsky 1931), a distinct double image might be produced, like that shown in figure 15.1. (Unfortunately, the actual mirror-topped bureau Lincoln described is no longer to be found at the Lin-coln Home National Historic Site, much of the furniture having been dispersed in earlier years [Suits 1998].)