by Joe Nickell
Nothing that was reliably reported in the case was beyond the abilities of a teenager to produce. The tantrums, “trances,” moved furniture, hurled objects, automatic writing, superficial scratches, and other phenomena were just the kinds of things someone of R’s age could have accomplished, just as others have done before and since. Indeed, the elements of “poltergeist phenomena,” “spirit communication,” and “demonic possession” —taken both separately and, especially, together, as one progressed to the other—suggest nothing so much as role-playing involving trickery. So does the stereotypical storybook portrayal of “the devil” throughout.
Writer Mark Opsasnik (2000) investigated the case, tracing the family’s home to Cottage City, Maryland (not Mount Rainier as once thought), and talked to R’s neighbors and childhood friends. The boy had been a very clever trickster, who had pulled pranks to frighten his mother and to fool children in the neighborhood. “There was no possession,” Opsasnik told the Washington Post. “The kid was just a prankster” (Saulny 2000).
Of course, the fact that the boy wanted to engage in such extreme antics over a period of three months does suggest that he was emotionally disturbed. Teenagers typically have problems, and R seemed to have trouble adjusting—to school, to his burgeoning sexual awareness, and to other concerns. To an extent, of course, he was challenging authority as part of his self-development, and he was no doubt enjoying the attention. But there is simply no credible evidence to suggest that the boy was possessed by demons or evil spirits.
A Catholic scholar, the Rev. Richard McBrien, who formerly chaired Notre Dame’s theology department, states that he is “exceedingly skeptical” of all alleged possession cases. He told the Philadelphia Daily News (which also interviewed me for a critical look at the subject), “Whenever I see reports of exorcisms, I never believe them.” He has concluded that “in olden times, long before there was a discipline known as psychiatry and long before medical advances . . . what caused possession was really forms of mental or physical illness” (Adamson 2000). Elsewhere, McBrien (1991) has said that the practice of exorcism—and by inference a belief in demon possession—“holds the faith up to ridicule.” Let us hope that the enlightened view, rather than the occult one, prevails.
REFERENCES
Adamson, April. 2000. Ancient rite generates modern-day skepticism. Philadelphia Daily News, 3 October.
Allen, Thomas B. 2000. Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism. Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse.com.
Baker, Robert A. 1992. Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions from Within. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
Beyerstein, Barry L. 1988. Neuropathology and the legacy of spiritual possession. Skeptical Inquirer 12, no. 3 (Spring): 248-62
Bishop, Raymond J. 1949. Typescript diary of an exorcism. 25 April (reprinted in Allen 2000, 245-91).
Christopher, Milbourne. 1970. ESP, Seers & Psychics. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
“The Exorcism.” 1991. 20/20, ABC network broadcast, 5 April.
McBrien, Richard. 1991. Interview on ABC’s Nightline, 5 April.
Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings.Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 79-82, 119-20.
————. 1998. Looking for a Miracle. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
———— . 1999. The Davenport Brothers. Skeptical Inquirer 23, no. 4 (July/Au- gust): 14-17.
Opsasnik, Mark. 2000. The haunted boy. Strange Magazine 20 (serialized on www.strangemag.com/exorcistpagel.html). Saulny, Susan. 1999. Historian exorcises
Mount Rainier’s past. Washington Post, 24 March.
Vatican updates its rules on exorcism of demons. 1999. Arizona Daily Star, 27 January.
4
The “Goatsucker” Attack
Mimicking the “cattle mutilation” hype of yesteryear, during the mid-1990s reports of a bloodthirsty beast—El Chupacabras, or “the goatsucker” —spread from Puerto Rico to Mexico and, still later, to Florida. According to the Cox News Service (April 1996), “The creature supposedly is part space alien, part vampire and part reptile, with long sharp claws, bulging eyes and a Dracula-like taste for sucking blood from neck bites.” In Puerto Rico, where the myth originated, “the creature has spawned something near hysteria.”
It reportedly attacked turkeys, goats, rabbits, dogs, cats, cows, and horses, sucking the blood from them. However, as Reuters reported, the Puerto Rico Agriculture Department dispatched a veterinarian to investigate. Officials then announced that all the animals had died under normal circumstances and that, contrary to claims, not one had been bled dry (Nickell 1996).
FIGURE 4-1 Chupacabra action figure
When the scare spread to Mexico in April of 1996, a scientific team staked out farmyards where the goatsucker had reportedly struck. Wild dogs were caught each time. A police official remarked, “I don’t know about the rest of Mexico or the rest of the world, but here the goatsuckers are just dogs.” He added: “There is just this huge psychosis. You see it everywhere, even though everywhere we go we prove that there aren’t any extraterrestrials or vampires” (Nickell 1996).
As media queries flooded into Skeptical Inquirer, I monitored the reports and developments and contacted our colleagues in Mexico City, Patricia and Mario Mendez-Acosta. They interviewed several veterinary pathologists who had conducted numerous necropsies on alleged victims of the goatsucker. Again, in every instance blood was still present in the dead animal.
Some news sources reported that a nurse who lived in a village near Mexico City had been attacked by the goatsucker. Actually, she simply fell and broke her arm, but her cries for help were misinterpreted by her grandmother. Neighbors rushing to her aid saw a black winged form; in reality, it was a flock of swallows, but thus the rumor was born. In another Mexican incident, a man who claimed he had been attacked by the goatsucker later confessed that it was a cover story for his having participated in a brawl (Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1996).
Largely through Miami’s Latino radio and television stations, the collective delusion has now spread to the Sunshine State. Prompted by local authorities and surrounded by members of the news media, a University of Miami veterinary professor, Alan Herron, cut open a dead goat to demonstrate that it had merely been bitten, not drained of its blood. Citing the bite wounds that were “suggestive of predation,” Prof. Herron concluded, “[a] pack of wild dogs did it.”
“Of course,” reported the Cox News Service, “that did little to calm the chupacabras frenzy” (Nickell 1996).
References
Los Angeles Times. 1996. 19 May.
Nickell, Joe. 1996. Goatsucker hysteria. Skeptical Inquirer 20, no. 5 (September/October): 12.
5
Undercover Among the Spirits
Investigating Camp Chesterfield
Camp Chesterfield is a notorious spiritualist enclave located in Chesterfield, Indiana. Dubbed “the Coney Island of spiritualism,” it has been the target of many exposes, most notably a book by a confessed fraudulent medium published in 1976 (Keene 1976). A quarter-century later, I decided to see if the old deceptions were still being practiced at the camp. Naturally, my visit was both unannounced and undercover.
The Background
Modern spiritualism began in 1848 with the schoolgirl pranks of Maggie and Katie Fox at Hydesville, New York. Although four decades later the sisters confessed that their “spirit” rappings had been bogus, in the meantime the craze for allegedly communicating with the dead had spread across America, Europe, and beyond. At seances held in darkened rooms and theaters, “mediums” (those who supposedly contacted spirits for others) produced such phenomena as slate writing, table tipping, and “materializations” of spirit entities.
As the number of believers and adherents grew, spiritualist camp meetings became common, and some groups established permanent spiritualist centers. Among these were the Cassadaga Lake Free Association in western New York, founded in 1879 (Lajudice and Vogt 1984). Now known as Lily Dale Assembly, it i
s the oldest and largest such center in existence. Another, the outgrowth of annual meetings that began in 1886, acquired property at Camp Chesterfield; this center opened with a group of tent dwellings and a large tent “auditorium” in 1891.
In time, many mediums were caught cheating. For example, in the 1860s, Boston “spirit” photographer William H. Mumler was exposed when some of his ethereal images were recognized as living Bostonians. In 1876, another Boston medium was undone when a reporter discovered her confederate, who had played the role of her materialized “spirit guide,” hiding in a recess (Nickell 1995, 17-38). The great magician Harry Houdini (1874-1926) spent much of the latter part of his career investigating and exposing mediumistic trickery.
At the spiritualist centers there were many scandals. For instance, one at Lily Dale in 1896 involved a “materializing medium” named Hugh Moore who was caught cheating and arrested. He subsequently jumped bail and, according to a contemporary account, “left his confederates, who helped ‘play spirits,’ unpaid” (Hyde 1896). Today, though, Lily Dale eschews such trickery and prohibits alleged physical phenomena in favor of pure “mental mediumship.”
Perhaps none of the spiritualist centers developed such an unsavory reputation as Camp Chesterfield. Even today, spiritualist friends of mine roll their eyes accusatorily whenever Chesterfield’s name is mentioned, and they are quick to point out that the camp is not chartered by the National Spiritualist Association of Churches. The introduction to an official history of Chesterfield (Chesterfield Lives 1986,6), admits that it is surprising the camp has survived, given its troubled past:
In fact, in its 100 years of recorded history, Camp Chesterfield has been “killed off” more than once! There have been cries of “fraud” and “fake” (and these were some of the nicer things we have been called!) and of course, the “exposes” came along with the regularity of a well-planned schedule. Oh yes! We have been damned and downed—but the fact remains that we must have been doing something right because: CHESTERFIELD LIVES!!
Be that as it may, the part about the exposes is certainly true. A major expose came in 1960 when two researchers—both sympathetic to spiritualism—arranged to film the supposed materialization of spirits. This was to occur under the mediumship of Edith Stillwell, who was noted for her multiple-figure spirit manifestations, and the seance was to be documented using see-in-the-dark technology. While the camera ran, luminous spectral figures took form and vanished near the medium’s cabinet, but when the infrared film was processed the researchers saw that the ghosts were actually fully human confederates dressed in luminous gauze—some were even recognizable as Chesterfield residents. They had not materialized and dematerialized, but rather came and went through a secret door that led to an adjacent apartment (Keene 1976, 40; Christopher 1970, 174).
One of the researchers, Tom O’Neill, himself a devout spiritualist, was devastated by this evidence and railed against “the frauds, fakes and fantasies of the Chesterfield Spiritualist camp!” He added: “The motion picture results of those proceedings will go down in history as the greatest recordings of fraud ever in the movement of Spiritualism. . . . The whole sordid mess is one of the bitterest pills I ever had to swallow” (Keene 1976,40; Christopher 1970,175). The other researcher, Andrija Puharich, dubbed Chesterfield “a psychic circus without equal!” (Keene 1976,41).
An even more devastating expose came in 1976 with the book The Psychic Mafia, written by former Chesterfield medium M. Lamar Keene. Saying that money was “the name of the game” at Chesterfield, Keene detailed the many tricks used by mediums there, which he dubbed “the Coney Island of Spiritualism.” He told how “apports” (said to be materialized gifts from spirits) were purchased and hidden in readiness for a seance; how chiffon became “ectoplasm” (a purported mediumistic substance); how sitters’ questions written on slips of paper called billets were secretly read and then answered; how trumpets were made to float in the air with discarnate voices speaking through them; and how other tricks were accomplished to bilk credulous sitters (Keene 1976, 95-114).
Keene also told how the billets were shrewdly retained from the various public clairvoyant message services held at Chesterfield. Kept in voluminous files beneath the cathedral, the billets—along with a medium’s own private files and those shared by fellow scam artists—provided excellent resources for future readings.
There were still other exposes of Camp Chesterfield. In 1985 a medium from Chesterfield visited Lexington, Kentucky, where he conducted dark-room materialization seances. He featured the production of apports, the floating-trumpet-with-spirit-voices feat, and something called “spirit precipitations on silk.” To produce the latter, the sitters’ “spirit guides” supposedly took ink from an open bottle and created their own small self-portraits on swatches of cloth the sitters held in their laps.
I investigated when one sitter complained, suspecting fraud. Laboratory analyses by forensic analyst John F. Fischer revealed the presence of solvent stains (shown under argon laser light). Keene gives a recipe for such productions (1976,110-111), utilizing a solvent to transfer pictures from newspapers or magazines to the materials. This recipe enabled me to create similar “precipitations” (Nickell with Fischer 1988). The prepared swatches had obviously been switched for the blank ones originally shown. With this evidence, as well as affidavits from a few seance victims, I obtained police warrants against the medium on charges of “theft by deception.” (These were only misdemeanor charges because— although the medium grossed $800 in an evening—he bilked each victim of only $40. Therefore, we could not extradite him from Indiana, and eventually had to be content with having put an end to his Kentucky seance tricks.)
Undercover
I had long wanted to visit Camp Chesterfield, and in the summer of 2001, following a trip to Kentucky to see my elderly mother and other family members, I decided to head north to Indiana to check out the notorious site (Figures 5-1 and 5-2).
FIGURE 5-1. Sign at entrance to Camp Chesterfield, dubbed “the Coney Island of Spiritualism.”
FIGURE 5-2. This scenic view of Camp Chesterfield belies its sordid history of trickery, manipulation, and fraud.
Now, skeptics have never been welcome at Chesterfield. The late Mable Riffle, a medium who ran the camp from 1909 until her death in 1961 (Chesterfield Lives 1986) dealt with them summarily. Keene re ported that when Riffle heard one couple using the “f-word” —fraud— she snarled, “We do not have that kind of talk here. Now you get your goddam ass off these hallowed grounds and don’t ever come back!” (Keene 1976, 48).
Another skeptic, a reporter named Rosie who had written a series of exposes and therefore been banned from the grounds, had the nerve to return to Chesterfield. Wearing a “fright wig,” she got into one of Riffle’s seances; when the “spirits” began talking through the trumpet, the reporter began to demean them. According to Keene (1976, 48-49), Riffle recognized Rosie’s voice immediately and went for her. “Grabbing the reporter by the back of the neck, she ushered her up a steep flight of stairs, kicking her in the rump on each step and cursing her with every profanity imaginable.” Nevertheless, the intrepid reporter returned one summer in yet another disguise. Unfortunately she was recognized again, but as Riffle grabbed her, cursing and dragging her toward the gate, some of the camp’s financial benefactors arrived. “In a flash,” says Keene, “Mable changed her tone. ‘Goodbye, Rosie dear,’ she said, smiling sweetly, ‘we’ll be seeing you again some time.’”
With these lessons in mind, I naturally did not want to be recognized at Camp Chesterfield—not out of fear for my personal safety, but so as to be able to observe unimpeded for as long as possible. In my younger years, I was a private investigator with an international detective agency. Then I simply used my own name and appearance (unless I was shadowing a particular individual extensively, in which case I sometimes made some minor adjustments such as using a reversible jacket, donning glasses, etc.). For undercover jobs, I merely wore the attire app
ropriate for a forklift driver, steelworker, tavern waiter, or other “role” (Nickell 2001).
The same is true of my several previous undercover visits to paranormal sites and gatherings (including a private spiritualistic circle, which featured table-tipping and other seances, that I infiltrated in 2000 [Nickell 2000]). Because I am often the token skeptic on television talk shows and documentaries on the paranormal, I have naturally feared I might be recognized, but I rarely made any effort to disguise myself and usually had no problem. (I was recognized at one “miracle” site in Kentucky, but the television crew accompanying me was able to shush the young man who had announced my presence in a loud voice. At the previously mentioned spiritualist circle, I went unrecognized until I appeared on the television program 48 Hours, but by then the group had disbanded. Interestingly, word was sent that I would be welcome if the circle was reactivated; supposedly I had “good vibes” !)
However, for my stint at Camp Chesterfield, I felt special measures were called for, so I decided to alter my appearance. I shaved off my mustache (for the first time in more than 30 years!), and replaced my coat-and-tie look with a tee shirt, suspenders, straw hat, and cane. I also adopted a pseudonym, “James Collins,” after the name of one of Houdini’s assistants. From July 19 to 23, “Jim,” who seemed bereft at what he said was the recent death of his mother, limped up and down the grounds and spent nights at one of the camp’s two hotels (devoid of such amenities as television and air conditioning). The results were eye-opening, involving a panoply of discredited spiritualist practices that seemed to have changed very little from when they were revealed in The Psychic Mafia.