The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  When William Marion Reedy died in 1920 Patience lost one of her most influential defenders. And another sign of Patience’s sinking reputation was a hostile article by a critic called Mary Austin in the Unpartizan Review; what made it worse was that the magazine was published by Henry Holt.

  John Curran’s health began to fail, and he died in June 1922, after fourteen months of illness. Pearl, who was now thirty-nine years old, was pregnant with their first child; a girl was born six months later. Pearl had four people to support – herself, her mother, Patience Wee and her new daughter – on a dwindling income. Far from making them a fortune, Patience’s literary works had cost them money; the novels had sold poorly, and the magazine was an expensive production. Pearl was forced to accept an offer to give several lectures in Chicago; she was reluctant to do this because she had always insisted that her position as Patience’s mouthpiece brought her no profit; but there was no alternative. The death of her mother was another blow. But at this point a New York admirer, Herman Behr, came to the rescue; he not only made her an allowance of $400 a month but also paid for the publication of Patience’s poems, which appeared under the title Light From Beyond. But it failed to revive the interest of the American reading public in the Patience Worth phenomenon. In the age of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, the rambling productions of Patience Worth seemed irrelevant.

  Litvag comments: “The next three years were lonely, rather despairing ones for Pearl Curran. No longer a celebrity, largely ignored by the public . . . periodically in ill health, she was often depressed and morose”. In 1923 she allowed Patience Wee to go to California. In 1926 she married a retired doctor, Henry Rogers, many years her senior; but the marriage was unsuccessful, and ended in divorce. In 1930 Pearl moved to California, where in Los Angeles she once again acquired some degree of celebrity among a group of devoted admirers. In 1931 she married again – this time to a man to whom she had been briefly engaged when she was nineteen; she and her husband – Robert Wyman – moved to Culver City, and Patience began to dictate a new literary work, a play about Shakespeare. At séances she continued to be as garrulous and evasive as ever – the simplest question could be guaranteed to provide a five-minute answer. In 1934 Patience Wee who was eighteen married, and Patience provided a lengthy blessing, signed “Thy Mither”.

  Then in November 1937 Pearl, who was fifty-four, suddenly announced to her old friend Dotsie Smith that “Patience has just shown me the end of the road, and you will have to carry on as best you can”. She seemed to be in excellent health. But on Thanksgiving Day she caught a cold; on 3 December 1937 she died of pneumonia in a Los Angeles hospital. That was in effect the end of the Patience Worth phenomenon. Patience Wee, who by the age of twenty-seven had been twice married, died equally suddenly in 1943, after a mild heart ailment had been diagnosed; inevitably, there were those who felt that Patience had finally claimed her “daughter”.

  The last chapter of Irving Litvag’s book on Patience is entitled “Who was Patience Worth”?, but he admits almost immediately that he has no idea. Writers on the case tend to be equally divided between the two obvious theories: that Patience was a “secondary personality” of Pearl Curran, and that she was more or less what she claimed to be, a “spirit”. Both Morton Prince and Walter Franklin Prince (they were unrelated) had produced classic studies of cases of multiple personality; Morton Prince’s “Sally Beauchamp” case (described in The Dissociation of a Personality) has achieved the status of a classic; Walter Franklin Prince’s “Doris Fischer” case deserves to be equally well known, but never achieved circulation beyond the pages of the American Journal for Psychical Research (1923) and Contributions to Psychology But anyone who reads the Patience Worth case after studying Sally Beauchamp and Doris Fischer is bound to feel that they have very little in common. Most “multiple personalities” have a history of childhood abuse and misery; Pearl Curran seems to have had a normal childhood, and to have been a perfectly ordinary, unremarkable person until the coming of Patience Worth. Although it is conceivable that Pearl Curran was a case of dual personality, the clinical evidence for it is not particularly convincing.

  For those who are willing to accept the possibility of life after death, the most convincing explanation is certainly that Patience was a “spirit”. But that does not necessarily mean that she was really what she claimed to be. Anyone who has studied “spirit communication” soon recognizes that “spirits” are very seldom what they claim to be; G.K. Chesterton put in more bluntly and said that they are liars. If Patience was a seventeenth-century Quaker who was killed by Red Indians, it is difficult to understand why she was so evasive and why she failed to answer straightforward questions that might have enabled the Currans to prove that such a person really existed. Litvag’s book leaves one with the conviction that if Patience was a spirit, then it was probably the spirit of a frustrated would-be writer with a strong tendency to mythomania.

  63

  Zombies

  The Evidence for the Walking Dead

  Ever since 1932, when Bela Lugosi starred in White Zombie, the zombie legend has been a Hollywood standby, challenging the vampire, the walking mummy, and the Frankenstein monster in popularity. No one who has seen a film like King of the Zombies can ever forget the shot of a zombie marching on like a robot while someone fires bullet after bullet into its chest.

  Zombies, according to Alfred Metraux’s book, Voodoo (1959), are “people whose decease has been duly recorded and whose burial has been witnessed, but who are found a few years later . . . in a state verging on idiocy”. In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, says Metraux, “there are few, even among the educated, who do not give some credence to these macabre stories”. Understandably, such tales have met with skepticism outside Haiti.

  One of the first Western observers to record an actual incident of zombiism was the black ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston, who had trained in America under the great Franz Boas. In October 1936 a naked woman was found wandering in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley; her name was Felicia Felix-Mentor, and she had died at the age of twenty-nine and been buried. Zora Hurston went to visit her in the hospital at Gonaïves and described her as having “a blank face with dead eyes” and eyelids “white as if they had been burned with acid”.

  According to Zora Hurston, people were “zombified” if they betrayed the secrets of the Haitian secret societies. No one believed her, and Metraux writes patronizingly of “Zora Houston [sic], who is very superstitious”. Nevertheless, Metraux tells a story involving two members of “high society”. After his car broke down, one of them was invited to the home of a little white bearded man, a houngan or vodoun (voodoo) priest. Piqued by his guest’s skepticism about a wanga (magical charm), the old man asked him if he had known a certain M. Celestin – who had, in fact, been one of the visitor’s closest friends. Summoned by a whip crack, a man shambled into the room, and to his horror the visitor recognized his old friend Celestin, who had died six months earlier. When the zombie reached out for the visitor’s glass – obviously thirsty – the houngan stopped him from handing it over, saying that nothing could be more dangerous than to give or take something from the hand of a dead man. The houngan told his visitor that Celestin had died from a spell and that the magician who had killed him had sold him for twelve dollars.

  Other stories recounted by Metraux make it clear that he considers zombies to be people who have literally died and then been raised from the dead. Understandably, he rejects this as superstition. In fact, as we shall see, Zora Hurston was correct and Metraux was wrong.

  Haiti, in the West Indies, was discovered by Columbus in 1492, but it was not until two centuries later that it became a base for pirates and buccaneers. French colonists developed Haiti’s rich sugar trade, using black slaves kidnapped from Africa. The Spanish ceded Haiti (or Saint-Domingue, as it was called) to the French in 1697.

  The slaves were treated with unbelievable cruelty – for example, hung from trees with nails driven
through the ears or smeared with molasses and left to be eaten alive by ants. Another horrifying practice involved filling a slave’s anus with gunpowder and setting it alight, an act the Frenchmen often referred to as “blasting black’s ass”. In spite of the risks, slaves ran away whenever they could and hid in the mountains, until, eventually, certain mountainous regions became “no-go areas” for whites. In the 1740s a slave named Macandal, who had lost his arm in a sugar press, escaped to the mountains and taught the runaway Maroons (as the slaves were known) to use poison against their oppressors. Mass poisoning of cattle was followed by mass poisoning of the colonists. Macandal was eventually betrayed and sentenced to be burned alive (although, according to legend, he used his magical powers to escape). But from then on, the secret societies spread revolt among the black slaves. After the great revolts of the 1790s, French authority virtually collapsed, and although it was savagely restored under Napoléon, he was never able to conquer the interior of the island. A series of black emperors ruled until 1859, but the island has alternated between a state of virtual anarchy and harsh authoritarian rule ever since, both of which have nurtured the secret societies.

  Zora Hurston asserted that “zombification” was effected by means of a “quick-acting poison”. It was not until the early 1980s, however, that a young American anthropologist, Wade Davies, heard rumours that zombification was, in fact, a process involving certain known poisons, chief among which was that of the puffer fish – a delicacy dear to the Japanese, although it has to be prepared with extreme care. (More on this follows.)

  Summoned to meet a New York psychiatrist named Nathan Kline, Davies was told of two recent cases that seemed to demonstrate beyond all doubt that zombification was not a myth. In 1962 a Haitian peasant in his forties, Clairvius Narcisse, was admitted to the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in the Artibonite Valley, suffering from fever; he died two days later and was buried the next day. Eighteen years later, in 1980, a man walked up to Narcisse’s sister Angelina and identified himself as her brother, Clairvius. He asserted that he had been “zombified” by order of his brother, with whom he had been disputing about land. He had been removed from his grave and taken to work with other zombies. After two years, their master was killed and he escaped to wander the country for the next sixteen years. It was not until he heard of his brother’s death that he dared to make himself known.

  Narcisse’s identity was confirmed, and the BBC made a short film about the case. In the same year, a group of “zombies” was found wandering in the north of the country – where Narcisse had been forced to work, confirming Narcisse’s story of the escape.

  In 1976 a thirty-year-old woman named Francina Illeus, known as “Ti Femme”, was pronounced dead. Three years later she was found alive by her mother and recognized by a scar on her temple; her coffin was found to be full of rocks. She believed that she was poisoned on the orders of a jealous husband.

  In 1980 another woman, Natagette Joseph, aged sixty, was recognized as she wandered near her home village; she had “died” in 1964.

  When Davies went to Haiti to investigate, his attention focused on Datura stramonium, known in America as jimsonweed and in Haiti as zombie’s cucumber. He went to see Max Beauvoir, an expert on vodoun. He interviewed Clairvius Narcisse and confirmed his story. He also discovered that Narcisse was not simply the victim of a vengeful brother; he had been something of a Casanova and had left illegitimate children – whom he declined to support – all over the place. Davies later concluded that “zombification” is not simply a matter of malice. The secret societies had a sinister reputation, but it seemed that they were less black than they were painted and often acted as protectors of the oppressed. Zombification, it seemed, was often a punishment for flagrant wrongdoing.

  Davies’s research led him to a highly poisonous toad, the Bufo marinus, and to two varieties of puffer fish, so called because they inflate themselves with water when threatened. Both are full of deadly neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, a fatal dose of which would just cover the head of a pin. Captain Cook had suffered severely after eating the cooked liver and roe of a puffer fish. The Japanese throw away all the poisonous parts of the fish and eat the flesh raw – as sashimi – but the deadly liver is also eaten after being cleaned and boiled.

  But it was clear to Davies that the poison of the puffer fish is not the sole secret of “zombification”. In his extraordinary book The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), he describes his search for samples of zombie poison. His aim was to obtain samples and take them back to be tested in the laboratory. But although he met a number of houngans and witnessed some remarkable ceremonies – in a number of which he saw people “possessed” by spirits (so that one woman was able to place a lighted cigarette on her tongue without being burned) – his quest came to a premature end when one of his major backers died and another suffered a debilitating stroke. But his book leaves very little doubt that the secret of “zombification” is a poison that can produce all the signs of death. When the body is dug up, an antidote is administered (Davies was able to study some antidotes and concluded that the “magical” powers of the priest seem to be as important as the ingredients themselves), and then the victim is often stupefied by further drugs that reduce the subject to a level of virtual idiocy.

  A 1984 BBC programme introduced by John Tusa confirmed that “zombification” results from a poison that affects certain brain centres, reducing consciousness to a dream level.

  Wade Davies was left in no doubt about the reality of “zombification”. But his investigation into the vodoun religion also seems to have convinced him that not all the phenomena of vodoun can be explained in such naturalistic terms.

  Index

  Abdul Hamid, Sultan ref 1

  Adamski, George ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

  d’Adhémar, Countess ref 1, ref 2

  AE (George Russell) ref 1, ref 2

  “affair of the poisons” ref 1, ref 2

  Agatharchides of Cnidus ref 1

  Akhnaton, Pharaoh ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

  alchemy ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

  Albertus Magnus ref 1, ref 2

  Alexander I, Tsar ref 1, ref 2

  Alexander II, Tsar ref 1, ref 2

  Alexander III, Tsar ref 1

  Alexander, Marc ref 1

  Alexander the Great ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7

  Allen, Virginia ref 1

  Allison, Ralph ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

  Allsop, Frederick G. ref 1, ref 2

  Altamira cave paintings ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

  Alvarez, Luis and Walter ref 1

  Amherst poltergeist ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

  “Ancient Astronauts” theory ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

  Andersen, Captain Jan ref 1

  Anderson, John ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

  Anderson, Sir Robert ref 1

  Andrassy, Edward, murder of ref 1, ref 2

  Andreae, Johann Valentin ref 1

  Andrews, Richard ref 1, ref 2

  Anne, Queen of England ref 1

  Anne of Austria, Queen of France ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

  Antarctica ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

  Apollodorus ref 1

  Apollonius of Tyana ref 1

  Ardrey, Robert ref 1, ref 2 ref 3

  Aristotle ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

  Arnold, Kenneth ref 1

  Arnold, Larry ref 1

  Arnold, Kenneth ref 1, ref 2

  Arnold, Matthew ref 1

  Arthur, King ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

  Ascham, Anthony ref 1

  Ash, David ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

  Ashe, Geoffrey ref 1, ref 2

  Atlantis ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12

  Atwater, Gordon ref 1

  Aubrey, John ref 1

  Augustine, Saint ref 1

  Austen, Jane ref 1

  Australopithecus
africanus (“Dartian” man) ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

  Australopithecus robustus ref 1, ref 2

  automatic writing ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6

  Baader-Meinhof, Andreas ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

  Baader-Meinhof Gang ref 1, ref 2

  Bacon, Delia ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

  Bacon, Francis ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

  Bacon, Roger ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

  Badon, Battle of (c. AD 518) ref 1, ref 2

  Baessell, Lieut-Col Norman ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

  Bailey, Alice ref 1

  Ballestrero, Cardinal Anastasio ref 1

  Bandi, Countess Cornelia di ref 1

  Barber, Paul ref 1

  Barbet, Pierre ref 1, ref 2

  Barbados Vault ref 1

  Barker, General Ray ref 1

  Barrett, Sir William ref 1

  Basa, Teresita, murder of ref 1

  Bavent, Madeleine ref 1

  Beatis, Antonio ref 1

  Beauvoir, Simone de ref 1

  Beckett, Samuel ref 1

  Beckjord, Erik ref 1

  Begg, Paul ref 1

  Behr, Herman ref 1

  “Bell witch” ref 1, ref 2

  Bellamy, Hans Schindler ref 1

  Belle-Isle, Marshal de ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

  Ben MacDhui, Grey Man of ref 1, ref 2

  Bender, Albert K. ref 1

  Bender, Traugott ref 1

  Bennett, J.G. ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6