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Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist

Page 21

by Robert Damon Schneck


  36 Oakland (CA) Tribune, March 18, 1975.

  37 The blood that appeared on the third day contained “hemoglobin, 12.9 gm/100 ml: white blood cells (WBC), 7,200; polymorphonuclear neutrophils, 70%: lymphocytes, 37%: monocytes, 3%; platelets, 246,000/cu mm; sickle cell preparation, negative results,” Early and Lifshutz, “A Case of Stigmata,” 199.

  38 Ibid., 199–200.

  39 Mountain Democrat (Placerville, CA), July 5, 1973.

  40 Early and Lifschutz, “A Case of Stigmata,” 198.

  41 Ibid., 200.

  42 Ibid., 199.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Ibid., 200.

  45 Jet, vol. 42, no. 3 (April 13, 1972), 14–15; Daily Review (Hayward, CA), April 1, 1972.

  46 Early and Lifschutz, “A Case of Stigmata,” 200.

  47 Oakland Tribune, March 18, 1975.

  48 Oakland Tribune, April 4, 1975.

  49 Early and Lifschutz, “A Case of Stigmata,” 200.

  50 Oakland Tribune, October 7, 1977.

  51 Claudia Mair Burney, Wounded: A Love Story (Colorado Springs, CO: Cook, 2008), 133–134.

  52 “Holy Enigma,” People, April 27, 1992.

  The Four Wild Men of Dr. Dedge

  1 An Almas is a Central Asian wild man; the city might be named after Mrs. Alma Sheridan, or the combined initials of the four cities that have been Georgia’s capital: Augusta, Louisville, Milledgeville, and Atlanta.

  2 Personal communication from Judge Braswell Deen to author, November 16, 2009.

  3 Ivan Sanderson, Things (New York: Pyramid Books, 1967), 80–93.

  4 New York Times, February 10, 1883; New York Times, August 19, 1884.

  5 Atlanta Constitution, February 4, 1889.

  6 Robert Bogdan, Freak Show (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 60.

  7 Ibid.

  8 “The Wild Men of Borneo! or Modern Sampsons, Recently the Great Sensation in Boston, and Eastern Cities. The Greatest Curiosities Ever Seen By Man.” http://www.barnummuseumexhibitions.org/apps/blog/entries/show/17850627-wild-men-of-borneo.

  9 Ibid.

  10 “What is It?” or “Man Monkey.” Lithograph (circus poster) by Currier & Ives, c. 1860. Negative #67612. From the collection of the New-York Historical Society; Frederick Drimmer, Very Special People (New York: Bantam, 1973).

  11 Charles Carroll, The Negro a Beast (St. Louis, MO: American Book and Bible House, 1900), 148.

  12 Ibid., title page.

  13 Alexander Winchell, PreAdamites (Chicago: Griggs, 1881), 178.

  14 Milledgeville (GA) Statesman, June 6, 1829.

  15 The Baxley (GA) News Banner, June 9, 1938, George D. Lowe, “Rambling Remarks and Reminiscences.”

  16 Dr. Dedge vaccinated seven hundred employees of the Southern Pine Company at Waycross on January 26, 1900. Atlanta Constitution, February 1, 1900.

  17 Des Moines News, June 26, 1914. Information about Doc Brinson’s sideshow career comes from an unsourced article at the Alma Historical Society. According to the Des Moines News (June 26, 1914), Brinson was a successful businessman who “turned down innumerable offers from circus and vaudeville people, preferring his happy life on the farm.”

  18 Scott Hart, “How Circus Freaks Are Made,” Coronet (May 1946).

  19 Newark (OH) Daily Advocate, March 15, 1883.

  20 A copy exists of Dedge’s passport application, dated July 5, 1901.

  21 Lovick Pierce Anthony, A Dictionary of Dental Science (Philadelphia and New York: Lea and Febiger, 1922), 169.

  22 Atlanta Constitution, July 20, 1904.

  23 The Post Standard (NY), August 21, 1902.

  24 Lowe, “Rambling Remarks and Reminiscences.”

  25 Ibid.

  26 Atlanta Constitution, July 20, 1904. The newspaper also reported that Dr. Dedge had secured the wild man in Central America, which agrees with Bird’s account of where they met.

  27 http://www.syracuse.ny.us/parks/kirkpark.html.

  28 The Post-Standard (NY), August 21, 1902.

  29 The Post-Standard (NY), August 22, 1902.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Ibid.

  32 The Post-Standard (NY), August 23, 1902.

  33 Unsourced article from the Alma Historical Society, 62.

  34 “Discussion on the Paper of Dr. Roberts,” The Illinois Medical Journal, February 1911, 19: 221.

  35 Atlanta Constitution, July 20, 1904.

  36 Victoria and Frank Logue, Touring the Backroads of North and South Georgia (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair), 198; Atlanta Constitution, July 20, 1904.

  37 Lowe, “Rambling Remarks and Reminiscences.”

  38 Unsourced article from the Alma Historical Society, 62.

  39 Atlanta Constitution, July 20, 1904.

  40 Lowe, “Rambling Remarks and Reminiscences.”

  41 Atlanta Constitution, February 20, 1910.

  42 Ibid.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Atlanta Constitution, March 6, 1913.

  45 Ibid.

  46 Ibid.

  47 Arthur D. Little and Arthur D. Little Jr., “The Goat Man,” reprinted from Medical Mentor 4, no. 2 (April 1933), 132.

  48 Ibid., 132–133.

  49 Ibid., 133.

  50 Ibid.

  51 Ibid.

  52 http://meddersfamilyresearch.org/Charles%20J%20Medders.htm.

  53 Unsourced article from the Alma Historical Society, 62.

  54 Ibid.

  55 This source also reports that Brinson died on the same day as Dedge, August 16, 1926. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,722337,00.html. Brinson’s tombstone, however, says August 4. http://www.findagrave.com.

  56 Personal communication from Judge Braswell Deen to author, November 18, 2009.

  57 Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, Myth and Southern History: The Old South, vol. 1 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 94.

  58 Barbara Holden-Smith, “Lynching, Federalism and the Intersection of Race and Gender in the Progressive Era,” 8 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 31 (1996), 16.

  59 Ibid., 47.

  60 J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 84; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Champaign: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 49.

  61 Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 144.

  62 https://twitter.com/deen_jr.

  63 http://www.evolutionornot.com/pages/wildmanofokefenokee.html. Judge Deen’s writings are available for free download at his website (http://www.evolutionornot.com), along with audio commentaries.

  Holy Geist

  1 The land was originally in Frederick County, which became Berkeley County, Virginia. During the Civil War, West Virginia separated from Virginia and joined the Union in 1863. Livingston’s land is now in Jefferson County, West Virginia.

  2 Adam married twice. His first wife’s name has been lost, but the second might have been named Mary Ann. There are references to the second Mrs. Livingston, as the children’s stepmother, so the first wife presumably gave birth to all eight. They were Henry, Eve, George, Mary Ann, Charlotte, Agnes, Jacob, and Catherine. It is not known which wife went to Virginia. In addition, Adam’s sister inherited a smaller adjacent property and moved there with her husband, and Adam seems to have owned four slaves. None of these people appear in accounts of the poltergeist.

  3 The parents of Father Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin (1770–1840) were intimates of Voltaire. Gallitzin became a Roman Catholic at age seventeen, arrived in America in 1792, and became the first priest to receive all his training and orders in the United States. He died in 1840, and in 2005 the Church declared Gallitzin a “Servant of God.” The town of Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, was named in his honor and has several points of Fortean interest. See http://www.demetriusgallit
zin.org.

  4 Joseph Finotti, The Mystery of the Wizard Clip (Baltimore: Kelly, Piet, 1879), 85.

  5 Ibid., 127.

  6 Letter from Father Gallitzin to Mrs. Catherine C. Doll, April 11, 1839.

  7 Finotti, The Mystery of the Wizard Clip, 21.

  8 Demetrius A. Gallitzin, Gallitzin’s Letters (Loretto, PA: 1940), 221–222; A. E. Marshall, Adam Livingston: The Wizard Clip, The Voice (Kearneysville, West Virginia: Livingston Publications, 1978), 16.

  9 Gallitzin’s Letters, 221–222; Marshall, Adam Livingston, 11.

  10 The Irish peddler might have inspired the “Unknown Stranger” legend; both result in Livingston finding a priest. Finotti, The Mystery of the Wizard Clip, 91–92.

  11 In Mrs. McSherry’s account, Livingston had a dream about a robed man who would end Adam’s suffering; when he recognized Father Cahill as the man in his dream, he wept “bitterly.” Father Gallitzin states that Richard McSherry convinced a reluctant Livingston to have a priest at the house and then argued with Father Cahill until he agreed to go there.

  12 Finotti, The Mystery of the Wizard Clip, 92.

  13 Marshall, Adam Livingston, 27.

  14 There is a single reference to young children being able to see the Voice but no description of its appearance.

  15 A sixteenth-century French poltergeist (Lyon, 1525–1526) also confirmed the doctrine of Purgatory. “It has sometimes been hinted that the affair was got up to dish the Lutherans, whose views on purgatory it appeared to controvert.” Alan Gauld and A. D. Cornell, Poltergeists (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 23. In some respects, the Wizard-Voice seems like a religious version of Tennessee’s Bell Witch.

  16 Handprints burned into objects by souls in Purgatory can be seen at the Church of St. Romedius in Thaur, Austria, and the Museum of the Souls in Purgatory in the Sacro Cuore del Suffragio church in Rome, which has a collection of them.

  17 The story of the Angel is similar to the Wandering Jew, encounters with the Mormon Nephites, and some vanishing hitchhikers.

  18 Raphael Brown, The Mystery of the Wizard Clip (Wheeling, WV, Catholic Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, 1990), 31.

  19 Marshall, Adam Livingston, 31–34.

  20 Parapsychologist Raymond Bayless claimed to have identified the agent, writing: “Apparitions were said to have commonly occurred and a girl who was obviously the unwitting, inadvertent medium, suffered so from unwelcome attentions of the poltergeist that she was believed near death at one time.” Raymond Bayless, The Enigma of the Poltergeist (West Nyack, NY: Parker, 1967), 21. Bayless must have been working from a very different version of the story.

  21 Marshall, Adam Livingston, 34.

  22 In his pamphlet The Legend of the Wizard Clip and . . . The Other Story (C.O.P.E. International, 1983), James Dale Nordheim argues that the phenomena had been faked as part of a Jesuit conspiracy to acquire Livingston’s land. He also claimed the Jesuits murdered Pope Clement XIV and that the crescents had occult significance.

  23 Finotti, The Mystery of the Wizard Clip, 88.

  24 Ibid., 70–71, 104.

  The Man in Room 41 and Other Decapitants

  1 Rhinelander (WI) Daily News, March 28, 1951.

  2 Salt Lake Tribune (UT), April 27, 1901.

  3 “Characteristic Features of Deaths due to Decapitation,” abstract, American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology 26, no. 2 (2005), 198.

  4 “Vehicle Assisted Decapitation: A Case Report,” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology 33, no. 1 (2012), 73–75.

  5 Weimar Mercury (CO), June 14, 1935.

  6 Portsmouth (NH) Herald, February 5, 1901. This item appeared in many newspapers, but the source is unknown.

  7 American Practitioner, August 11, 1876.

  8 Ibid.

  9 New York Times, June 15, 1876.

  10 American Practitioner, August 11, 1876.

  11 Washington (DC) Herald, June 7, 1908; Journal and Courier, October 22, 1989.

  12 Sunday Morning Leader, June 18, 1876.

  13 Lafayette City Directory, http://bangingonthedrum.blogspot.com/2012/04/wonderful-suicide-bridget-clogan.html.

  14 http://bangingonthedrum.blogspot.com/2011_11_01_archive.html.

  15 Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 95 (June–December 1876).

  16 Journal and Courier, Lafayette, Indiana November 5, 1989.

  17 Dr. W. W. Vinnedge, “The Moon Suicide,” American Practitioner, August 11, 1876; Journal and Courier, November 19, 1989.

  18 Journal and Courier, October 29, 1989.

  19 Fort Wayne (IN) Sentinel, June 28, 1876.

  20 Journal and Courier, October 29, 1989.

  21 Sunday Morning Leader, June 18, 1876.

  22 “About the City,” a collection of articles about Moon from the Lafayette Historical Society, June 18, 1876.

  23 Dr. William Bennett and John Cribb, The American Patriots Almanac (Nashville: Nelson, 2008), 595.

  24 Sunday Morning Leader, June 25, 1876; Sunday Morning Leader, June 18, 1876.

  25 Leonard DeVries, ’Orrible Murder (New York: Taplinger, 1971), 31.

  26 Sunday Morning Leader, June 25, 1876.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Journal and Courier, November 12, 1989.

  29 Newark (OH) Daily Advocate, April 8, 1901.

  30 New York Times, April 18, 1894.

  31 Illustrated Police News, May 22, 1880, featured in DeVries, ’Orrible Murder, 146–147.

  32 Fitchburg (MA) Daily Sentinel, July 21, 1880.

  33 Journal and Courier, June 23, 1951.

  34 Journal and Courier, October 29, 1989.

  35 New York Times, February 12, 1876.

  36 American Practitioner, August 1876.

  37 Elkhart (IN) Sentinel, July 18, 1889.

  Bigfoot’s Gold: The Secret of Ape Canyon

  1 Richard W. Wrangham, Chimpanzee Cultures (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1996), 85.

  2 Cowlitz County Historical Society, History of Cowlitz County, Washington (Dallas, TX: Taylor, 1983).

  3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelso,_Washington.

  4 Cowlitz County Historical Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1 (May 1963).

  5 Cowlitz County Historical Society, 1957.0109.0003 Print, Photographic.

  6 Cowlitz County Historical Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1 (May 1963).

  7 Fred Beck, I Fought the Apeman (self-published), 1967.

  8 June Beck Perry and Virginia Beck Hanks (with help from Dorothy Beck Sturdivant), Rambling Rose of Paw-Paw Grove (1988), 133.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Lewis Spence, Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, Part 2 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2003).

  11 William Benjamin Hayden, On the Phenomena of Modern Spiritualism (Boston: Otis Clapp, 1855), 130.

  12 American Spiritual Magazine, vol. 2 (Boyle & Company, Memphis, 1876), 366.

  13 Eugene (OR) Register-Guard, July 15, 1924.

  14 Michael Perry, “The Story behind the Great Ape Hunt of 1924,” Columbia River Reader, October 15–November 14, 2009. The author of the article is Fred Beck’s grandnephew.

  15 Beck, I Fought the Apeman.

  16 Rene Dahinden or Larry Lund might have the rifle Beck used at Ape Canyon. I was unable to locate the current owner. Personal communication from Christopher L. Murphy to author, June 1, 2010.

  17 Over the years, Beck told several different versions of the ax incident.

  18 When interviewed by Roger Patterson, Beck provided more details, saying, “one of them fellas run out of a clump of bush and run down the gorge, and I shot him in the back, three shots, and I could hear the bullets hit him and see the fur fly on his back. I shot for his heart. And he stopped and just fell right over a precipice, and I heard him go doonk, zoop, down into the canyon . . . that water was really a torrent goes
down there, it’d wash anything out fall in there.” 1966 interview with Fred Beck about Bigfoot attack. http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/4552813/person/-1578396877/story/4b211d7b-cb3d-465e-8d96-5bf58388afa0?src=search.

  19 Perry and Hanks, Rambling Rose of Paw-Paw Grove, 133.

  20 Michael McLeod, Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 95.

  21 Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg, Canada), July 16, 1924.

  22 Oakland (CA) Tribune, July 17, 1924.

  23 Lebanon (OR) Daily News, June 25, 1964.

  24 Beck, I Fought the Apeman.

  25 Ibid.

  26 In 1951 a logger discovered Ape Cave, which was named after the local Boy Scout troop that explored it. They called themselves “the Apes,” apparently because of their interest in the ape-men of local Indian folklore; that seems to be the cave’s only connection to Bigfoot.

  27 Perry and Hanks, Rambling Rose of Paw-Paw Grove, 132.

  28 Personal communication from John D. Pickering to author, June 6, 2010.

  29 Perry and Hanks, Rambling Rose of Paw-Paw Grove, 133.

  30 Perry, “The Story behind the Great Ape Hunt of 1924.”

  31 Perry and Hanks, Rambling Rose of Paw-Paw Grove, 134.

  32 Ibid., 133.

  33 John Green, On the Track of Sasquatch (Surry, British Columbia, and Blaine, WA: Hancock House Publishers, Third Edition, 1994), 48.

  34 Perry and Hanks, Rambling Rose of Paw-Paw Grove, 154–156.

  35 Personal communication from John Green to author, May 27, 2010.

  36 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxq8h-ymPr0.

  37 Beck, I Fought the Apeman.

  38 Personal communication from John D. Pickering to author, June 6, 2010; Jerome Clark, Unexplained! (Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press, 1998), 335.

  39 Personal communication from Michael Perry to author, December 11, 2009.

  40 Personal communication from John Green to author, May 27, 2010.

  41 Longview Daily News (Longview, WA), June 27–28, 1964.

  42 Personal communication from Christopher L. Murphy to author, May 31, 2010.

  43 Personal communication from Christopher L. Murphy to author, June 1, 2010 [my italics].

  44 Franklin C. Jillson and Mary Jillson, Green Leaves from Whitingham, Vermont: A History of the Town (private press, 1894), 116; Walter R. Hard and Janet C. Greene, “Mischief in the Mountains,” Vermont Life (1970), 128.

 

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