Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist

by Robert Damon Schneck

  45 Ruth Ann Musick, The Bloody Lilac Bush, 68–69.

  46 D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1998), 25.

  47 Jillson and Jillson, Green Leaves from Whitingham, Vermont, 119.

  48 Mark Ashurst-McGee, “Moroni as Angel and as Treasure Guardian,” FARMS Review, vol. 18, no. 1 (2006), 34–100.

  49 Indiana Progress, March 16, 1870; Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions 1917–1919, vol. 20 (Published by the Society, Boston, 1920), 357.

  50 Ashurst-McGee, “Moroni as Angel and as Treasure Guardian,” 45.

  51 Law Notes 12 (E. Thompson Company, January 1907), 191.

  52 Wait v. Westfall (161 Ind. 648).

  53 Grillot de Givry, Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy (New York: Dover, 1971), 172–173.

  54 Beck, I Fought the Apeman.

  55 Ibid.

  56 Ivan Sanderson, Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (New York: Chilton, 1974), 51.

  57 Ibid., 53.

  58 Beck, I Fought the Apeman.

  59 Jack “Kewaunee” Lapseritis, The Psychic Sasquatch and Their UFO Connection (Mill Spring, NC: Wild Flower Press, 1998), 22.

  60 Richard W. Kimball, “Bigfoot Lives in the Arizona Wilds,” Chino Valley Review, December 12, 1990. http://members.tripod.com/Arizona_Bigfoot/bf1.htm.

  61 Ibid.

  62 The (Frederick, MD) News, July 30, 1892.

  63 Linda Godfrey, Hunting the American Werewolf (Madison, WI: Trails Media Group, 2006), 255–256.

  64 Ibid.

  65 Mary Granger, Drums and Shadows (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1940).

  66 Longview Washington Times (August 1963). http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/spiritlake.htm.

  67 Hans Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Plume, 1994), 350.

  Psychic in the White House

  1 The Jeane Dixon Museum and Library was at 132 North Massanutten Street, Strasburg, Virginia, http://archive.today/p9vdm, originally http://www.waysideofva.com/jdml/default.htm.

  2 Mike the MagiCat was the subject of a children’s book, Jeane Dixon’s MagiCat. Some saw Dixon’s affinity for cats as that of a witch for her familiar. President Harry S. Truman had a cat with the same name.

  3 She elaborates on the idea in Yesterday, Today and Forever (New York: Morrow, 1976). Aries is identified with Peter, Taurus with Simon, Gemini with James the Less, and so on. Pisces is both Judas Iscariot and Matthias.

  4 “In Strasburg, a Medium Well Done,” Washington Post, July 31, 2002. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2002/07/31/AR2005033107245.html.

  5 Ruth Montgomery, A Gift of Prophecy (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), 18.

  6 Dixon was a “dollar-a-year man,” a business executive who accepted a token salary for performing government service; he acquired warehouses and depots.

  7 Much of the information in this section comes from Daniel St. Albin Greene, “The Untold Story of Jeane Dixon,” National Observer, October 27, 1972.

  8 Denis Brian, Jeane Dixon: The Witnesses (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 147–148. When Daniel St. Albin Greene was researching “The Untold Story of Jeane Dixon,” he received telegrams from Dixon’s siblings stating that she had been born in 1918. He spoke to Curt Pinckert before the article was published, yet Curt had no recollection of sending a telegram and confirmed that Jeane Dixon was born Lydia Pinckert in 1904.

  9 Greene, “The Untold Story of Jeane Dixon.” “In January 1928, according to a marriage certificate on file in Santa Ana, Calif., ‘Jeane A Pinckert,’ daughter of Frank and Emma Pinckert, married Charles Zuercher, a Swiss immigrant who had come to California the same year the Pinckerts did. The document says the groom was a 37-year-old ‘superintendent,’ the bride an accountant, aged ‘22.’”

  10 Brian, Jeane Dixon: The Witnesses, 198.

  11 Montgomery, A Gift of Prophecy, 33.

  12 Ibid., 77. Four years later, Jeane claimed that James wanted her to devote herself to charitable and psychic pursuits, but she felt that working kept her grounded. Rene Noorbergen, My Life and Prophecies (New York: Morrow, 1969), 26–27.

  13 Greene, “The Untold Story of Jeane Dixon.”

  14 Harvey Katz, “The Jeane Dixon Touch (II): This Is No Way to Run a Charity,” Washingtonian (March 1970), 49.

  15 “Another merry time was had by 288 top Congressmen and government officials who thronged a white tie dinner-dance tossed by former TV glamour-girl Martha Rountree and her publisher husband, Oliver Presbrey . . . 300 chickens, 150 lobsters and platters of flaming cherries jubilee vied for attention with two dance orchestras and fortune-telling Jeane Dixon until well past curfew.” Sunday Times (Cumberland, MD), February 12, 1956.

  16 Montgomery, A Gift of Prophecy, front cover blurb.

  17 Dixon saw the statue’s face come to life in 1958 when the cathedral seemed filled with people of every race and religion in what she claimed was a vision of Vatican II. Presumably, the sculpture she referred to once stood in the Lady chapel, which was smashed by a vandal in the early 1980s and replaced in 1984 by the unusual statue that now occupies the spot. Jeane Dixon had other visions in St. Matthew’s, including a fully materialized Blessed Virgin Mary, two diabolical red boots that walked around a side altar, a vision of the zodiac that assigned astrological signs to particular apostles, and a wheel-shaped medical center.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Jack Anderson and Fred Blumenthal, “Washington’s Incredible Crystal Gazer,” Parade, May 13, 1956, 12.

  20 Brian, Jeane Dixon: The Witnesses, 191.

  21 Ibid., 60.

  22 Ibid., 192; Montgomery, A Gift of Prophecy, 11.

  23 Brian, Jeane Dixon: The Witnesses, 192.

  24 Montgomery, A Gift of Prophecy, 192–193.

  25 Mary Bringle, Jeane Dixon: Prophet or Fraud? (Gainesville, FL: Tower, 1970), 69.

  26 Montgomery, A Gift of Prophecy, 174.

  27 Ibid., 180.

  28 Gordon Lindsay, The Mystery of Jeane Dixon: Prophetess or Psychic Medium? (Dallas, TX: Christ for the Nations Institute, 1973), 29.

  29 “Miss Dixon: Door Open, But Can GOP Get In?” Gastonia Gazette, October 24, 1967.

  30 Helen Thomas: “White House Calls Book Vengeful,” Tyrone (PA) Daily Herald, May 10, 1988.

  31 Dixon, Yesterday, Today and Forever, 424.

  32 Montgomery, A Gift of Prophecy, 107.

  33 Jeane Dixon, Jeane Dixon’s Astrological Cookbook (New York: Morrow, 1976), 17. Montgomery was the first of several unhappy collaborators. She claimed that her editor and Dixon had pressured her into writing the book (“Mrs. Dixon . . . has been insisting that I write a book about her since 1960”), that the editor had removed most of the wrong predictions, and that commercial success had interfered with Dixon’s powers. Rene Noorbergen, of My Life and Prophecies, was “convinced Jeane is inspired by the devil.” Brian, Jeane Dixon: The Witnesses, 145.

  34 The model was displayed at the Jeane Dixon Museum. Circular layouts are often associated with visionaries, including Laputa, Atlantis, the City of the Sun, John Murray Spear’s circular cities, and Walt Disney’s plans for Epcot.

  35 Katz, “The Jeane Dixon Touch (II),” 51.

  36 “Dangers of Being a Nation of Number Numbskulls,” New York Times, January 23, 1989.

  37 Memorandum from unnamed special agent in the Washington field office to J. Edgar Hoover, January 28, 1966.

  38 Memorandum from Mr. Wick to M. A. Jones, February 4, 1966.

  39 Letter from Jeane L. Dixon to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, January 2, 1970.

  40 Memorandum from Mr. DeLoach to T. E. Bishop, January 13, 1970.

  41 Joe Beaird, “Psychic Jeane Dixon Was FBI Stooge,” December 27, 1999. lists.village.virginia.edu/lists___archive/sixties-1/2335.html. Letter from correspondent (name
removed) to J. Edgar Hoover, February 16, 1968.

  42 Letter from correspondent (name removed) to Sen. Hale Boggs, April 1971.

  43 According to American National Biography Online, Dixon was godmother to Senator Strom Thurmond’s son and contributed at least $30,000 to the Republican Party in the last ten years of her life.

  44 Thomas, “White House Calls Book Vengeful.” Jeane Dixon was neither the first nor last psychic to become involved with presidents and their families. Mrs. Franklin Pierce met with Maggie Fox, Mary Todd Lincoln engaged several mediums, and her husband attended at least one White House séance. More recently, Mrs. Clinton held “imaginary conversations” with the late Eleanor Roosevelt.

  45 Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, “Terror Watch: Nixon and Dixon,” Newsweek, March 23, 2005. http://www.newsweek.com/id/48973.

  46 Bringle, Jeane Dixon: Prophet or Fraud?, 136.

  47 J. Edgar Hoover, quoted in an FBI memorandum from M. A. Jones to Mr. Wick, February 4, 1966. Denis Brian’s book, Jeane Dixon: The Witnesses, might be the fairest evaluation of her record.

  48 Jeane Dixon had long been associated with Billy Graham, especially by conspiracy-minded and lunatic writers. See “Billy Graham’s Active Role in Satanic Ritual Abuse,” www.whale.to/b/sp/for1.html, and “Will Teddy Listen to the Prophet?”, Cedar Rapids (IA) Gazette, June 16, 1968.

  49 Descriptions taken from the auction catalog Sloans & Kenyon: Estate of Psychic Jeane Dixon, Sloans & Kenyon, Chevy Chase, Maryland, July 26, 2009.

  Ku Klux Klowns

  1 Loren Coleman generously explained how he discovered, researched, and named the clowns-in-vans for this book. Personal communication from Loren Coleman to author, January 10, 2014.

  2 Memo from Daniel O’Connor, investigative counselor of the Boston Public School District, to elementary and middle school principals. Quoted in Loren Coleman, Mysterious America (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983), 266.

  3 Joseph A. Citro, Weird New York (New York: Sterling Publishing, 2005), 32.

  4 Associated Press, May 23, 1981.

  5 United Press International, May 23, 1981.

  6 United Press International, May 24, 1981.

  7 Associated Press, May 23, 1981.

  8 Ibid.

  9 United Press International, May 24, 1981.

  10 Milton Meltzer, Slavery (I) (Chicago: Cowles, 1971), 189.

  11 Gladys-Marie Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 87–88.

  12 KKK Report, Georgia, 649, quoted in Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History, 123.

  13 Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History, 115–116.

  14 Charleston (SC) Mercury, October 12, 1838, 171, reprinted in Theodore D. Weld, American Slavery as It Is (New York: Arno Press, 1839).

  15 Vanessa Northington Gamble, “Under the Shadow of Tuskegee: African Americans and Health Care,” American Journal of Public Health 87, no. 11 (November 1997).

  16 Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History, 210.

  17 Nebraska State Journal, October 22, 1893.

  18 Frederick C. Waite, “Grave Robbing in New England,” Medical Library Association Bulletin 33 (1945), 272–294.

  19 Janesville (WI) Gazette, January 23, 1872.

  20 Spirit Lake Messenger, April 9, 1886.

  21 The idea of night doctors was so pervasive that on August 18, 1907, the Washington Post ran an urban legend–type story about the famed sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens. He approached a black man on the streets of Washington, D.C., and asked him to model for a statue of a soldier. The man thought St. Gaudens was a night doctor and ran away; the artist took off after him, and a policeman, thinking that St. Gaudens was chasing a thief, lit out after both. A cartoon depicts all three running down the street.

  22 Mary E. Lyons, Raw Head, Bloody Bones: African-American Tales of the Supernatural (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 47–50.

  23 Spirit Lake Beacon, April 9, 1886.

  24 Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History, 201. On p. 161 of Rev. Montague Summers’s History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926), he tells a similar story: “It was long thought by the ignorant country folk that the doctors of the hospital of Graz enjoyed the privilege of being allowed every year to exploit one human life for curative purposes. Some young man who repaired thither for toothache or any such slight ailment is seized, hung up by his feet, and tickled to death! Skilled chemists boil the body to a paste and utilize this as well as the fat and the charred bones in their drug store.” Like the doctors at Graz, night doctors had designated times to find victims. Summers’s source is Victor Fossel’s Volksmedicin und Medicinis Cher Aberglaube in Steiermark, which was published in 1886; the year the story appeared in the Spirit Lake Beacon.

  25 Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History, 210–211.

  26 Michael Newton, The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (New York: Checkmark Books, 2000), 102.

  27 BACM Research, Atlanta Child Murders: Wayne Williams FBI Files, dclxxxviii.

  28 Ibid., dclxxxix.

  29 “Atlanta Child Murders,” CNN Live Event/Special, June 10, 2010. Transcript available at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1006/10/se.01.html.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Bernard D. Headley, The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 126.

  32 http://abj.matrix.msu.edu/videofull.php?id=29-DF-1E.

  33 James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York: Holt, 1985), 87.

  34 Gamble, “Under the Shadow of Tuskegee,” 1773–1777.

  35 Valley Independent, June 5, 1981.

  36 Consider an unrelated incident of mass hysteria in Bristol, Virginia, in 2010. Amid rumors that a bloodthirsty vampire cult might ritualistically sacrifice their children to gain immortality, dozens of Wallace Middle School parents kept their kids home Friday. Washington County [Virginia] County School Superintendent Alan T. Lee said the panic grew from a wildly overblown story about an online “hit-list.” It likely began with “a ‘hate-list’ posted anonymously on a website called VampireFreaks.com” that “reportedly included everything from Barack Obama to country music to this group of middle school girls.” Concerned parents sent the information back and forth, and “Somewhere along the line ‘hate list’ became ‘hit list,’ and panic spread that a vampire cult infiltrated the Washington County public school.” Bristol (VA) Herald Courier, December 24, 2012.

  37 http://slic.njstatelib.org/new_jersey_information/digital_collections/unit_9_world_war_i_and_the_great_migration_1915_1920.

  38 Among the few clues relating to the disappearance of the “Clinton Avenue Five” was a phone call made to one of their relatives from someone claiming that the five had been arrested. This was not true, but the call originated from Union Station in Washington, D.C., which was once notorious for night doctor activity.

  39 Daily Herald (Chicago, IL), October 31, 1980.

  40 Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History, 190–191.

  41 The (Frederick, MD) News, November 2, 1995.

  42 Scott Wood, London Urban Legends (Stroud, UK: History Press, 2013), 132.

  43 Christopher Berry-Dee, The Voices of the Serial Killers (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press, 2011), 45.

  44 Jaye Fletcher, Deadly Thrills (New York: Onyx Books, 1995), 54, 77.

  45 Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It Through the Grapevine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 27.

  46 W.E.B. DuBois Institute, Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 38.

  47 Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 165.

  48 William Arens, Man-Eating Myth, 22, cited in Turner, I Heard It Through the Grapevine, 139.

  The Blood Gospel

  1 Daily Boomerang (WY),
January 27, 1890.

  2 Brooklyn (NY) Daily Eagle, January 27, 1890.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Ibid.

  8 New York Times, July 9, 1898.

  9 Galveston News, May 21, 1883.

  10 Fresno (CA) Republican, July 28, 1877.

  11 Stevens Point (WI) Daily Journal, June 9, 1883.

  12 Daily Free Press (WI), September 14, 1875.

  13 Warren (PA) Ledger, January 3, 1879.

  14 Bucks County (PA) Gazette, May 8, 1890.

  15 Daily Free Press, September 14, 1875.

  16 Robert Withers, ed., Controversies in Analytical Psychology (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2003), 64.

  17 Daily Free Press, September 14, 1875; Waterloo (IA) Courier, May 31, 1876.

  18 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/vampire-mum-of-two-i-drink-two-1943342.

  19 Stevens Point Daily Journal, June 3, 1883; Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald Numbers, Sickness and Health in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 5. Consumption was used to describe any form of wasting illness. Tuberculosis is also closely associated with vampirism in New England; see Michael E. Bell’s book Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001).

  20 “Der Arme Heinrich von Hartmann von der Aue” (Berlin, 1815), quoted in Hermann Leberecht Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice (London: Cope and Fenwick, 1909), 62.

  21 Pliny the Elder, quoted in Owsei Temkin, The Falling Sickness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

  22 Armando R. Favazza, Bodies under Siege (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 6.

  23 Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, quoted in Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 63.

  24 Hermann Leberecht Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 63.

  25 G. Daniel, Histoire de France, IX, 1755, quoted in Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 65.

  26 Personal communication to the author from David W. Jackson, Director of Archives and Education at the Jackson County (Missouri) Historical Society, June 13, 2007.