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Did an unknown French Canadian trapper beat Peary to the North Pole?

November 26, 2017, 6:50 pm
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Ever since April 6, 1909, history books have recorded Robert Edwin Peary as being the first person to reach the North Pole. Some scholars, however, claim that explorer Frederick Cook bested Peary by reaching the North Pole on April 21, 1908. While the Cook-versus-Peary debate has been going back and forth for over a century, it may all be a moot point-- since it's very likely that the first person to reach the North Pole was neither Cook nor Peary, but a little-known French Canadian trapper by the name of Joseph Zotique La Joie.

In the spring of 1900 a French Canadian fur trapper traveled to Washington, D.C. on a mission to prove to the scientific community that he was the first person to reach the North Pole, and had done so in 1894. This man, Joseph Z. La Joie, checked into the Hotel Raleigh on March 14 and entertained some of the world's foremost experts on Arctic exploration. Those who met with La Joie included famed polar explorer Gen. Adolphus Greely and Admiral George W. Melville who, in 1881, earned international fame for sailing over a thousand miles in the middle of the Arctic winter to recover the frozen bodies of crew members aboard the ill-fated USS Jeannette. Professor J.W. McGee of the Smithsonian Institution was also present.

Adolphus Greely


According to La Joie, he and his father departed from Montreal in December of 1886 and headed to Battleford in the Northwest Territories. After spending three years hunting and trapping the two men reached Great Bear Lake, on the Arctic Circle, in the fall of 1889. They found game to be scarce, so La Joie and his father enlisted the help of a guide named George White who directed the trappers north, to a point near Cape Brainard on Ellesmere Island, which is the northernmost point in Canada (incidentally, it was Greely who had led the expedition to explore the island in 1881).

At Cape Brainard the three trappers spoke at length with native Inuits, who told them of an old iron post left behind by polar explorers a few miles north of the cape. La Joie found the metal post, inscribed "82 degrees latitude north, 83 degrees longitude west" (in all likelihood the post had been placed there by the members of the Greely Expedition eight years earlier).

George W. Melville


The fact that La Joie accurately described this metal post to the very man who perhaps planted it lends credence to the trapper's claims; at nearly 76,000 square miles, Ellesmere is the 10th largest island on the planet (the Inuit word for the island is Quttinirpaaq, which means "top of the world") , and finding this tiny relic in the remote expanse of virgin polar desert would be infinitely more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.

Although records of the Hotel Raleigh meeting are scarce, one can only imagine how surprised Greely must have been to learn that a fur trapper with no formal education, no military or navigational training, and no credentials as an explorer had managed to find the iron post. At any rate, records show that Greely didn't call La Joie out as an imposter or a fraud, which he most certainly would have done if La Joie had failed to describe the metal post accurately.

In May of 1892 the three trappers established a camp a few miles from this site at "the junction of two immense icebergs". White suggested that the three men and their dogs separate and each take a ten days' journey in three different directions. Ten days later they were to return to camp and compare reports in order to locate the best hunting grounds. Seven days into his journey La Joie felt a tremendous jolt not unlike that of an earthquake; the ice had parted and he was adrift in the Arctic Ocean. The enormous ice raft drifted north.



Joseph La Joie spent 36 days on this drifting frozen prison. For the first three days he subsisted on fish, but when fish became scarce he had no choice but to slaughter his dogs for food. According to La Joie, he ate six of them.

The iceberg eventually touched land and he went ashore with his remaining dogs. There, he says, he encountered a "strange race" of copper-skinned natives who attacked him with clubs and arrows, but he was protected by his bulky clothing. La Joie stated that these natives did not speak the same language as the Inuits or wear the same style of clothing. He also described them as being gigantic in stature, with most of the men standing taller than six feet in height. He eventually made peace with the tribe and lived among them for five months.

One of the reasons why La Joie's North Pole claim has been dismissed is because, at the time of his trip to Washington in 1900, most experts did not accept that there was a race of natives who lived further north than the Inuits. However, in recent decades, archaeological evidence has corroborated this part of La Joie's story; a race called the Tuniit were the island's first inhabitants, and these copper-skinned natives were considerably taller than the neighboring Inuits. This race was unknown until 1925, when anthropologist Diamond Jenness discovered some of their artifacts near Cape Dorset. The fact that Joseph La Joie accurately described their appearance and culture twenty-five years earlier lends further credence to La Joie's story.

La Joie claimed that he lived among these natives for two years, during which time he hunted and explored the range of mountains on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island now known as the Challenger Mountains and Grant Land, which was the final point on land for Peary's famous 1909 expedition (the geographic North Pole, of course, is not on land but in the middle of the Arctic Ocean).

At any rate, La Loie reached this point a full 15 years before Peary, which would have earned him the record for "Farthest North" at the time. And, interestingly enough, while the true North Pole is located on open water, the geomagnetic North Pole is presently located on Ellesmere Island. We say "presently" because the Magnetic North Pole moves about 35 miles per year in the direction of Russia. In other words, in 1894, the geomagnetic North Pole would have been right where an unknown, uneducated fur trapper named Joseph La Joie said it was.

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The greatest prank of all time?

December 3, 2017, 11:30 am
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Marble quarry in Carrara, Italy


The Carrara region of Italy is famous for its marble, which has been used by artists and craftsmen since the days of the ancient Roman Empire. Some of the most famous structures in the world have been built with Carrara marble-- the Pantheon and Trajan's Column, just to name a few-- as well as many of the great artistic works of the Renaissance, such as Michaelangelo's David.

Carrara, as it turns out, may also have been the home of one of the world's greatest practical jokers, as this article from an 1891 newspaper demonstrates.


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The uncanny misfortunes of George Flower

December 7, 2017, 8:22 pm
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George Flower, a farmer from Indiana who lived during the early 20th century, was a man whose name is little remembered today. He amassed no great fortune, nor did he rise to a position of power. But his little-known story and strange legacy should be remembered as a cautionary tale about what happens when a mere mortal decides to tempt fate.

Flower's troubles began in 1902 after he purchased a strip of land in Sand Ridge, near the city of Vincennes, in order to enlarge his farm. On this strip of land was the oldest cemetery in the area, containing more than three hundred graves. Flower pulled up the headstones, using them to build a foundation for his new home. The unused headstones he threw in the Embarras River. He then plowed up the land and planted melons and potatoes.

Shortly thereafter he noticed that that, while the crops he planted on the rest of the farm flourished, the crops he had planted on the grounds of the old graveyard withered and rotted. Some of the crops were ravaged by unseen pests and insects and, try as he might, Flower could not find a logical explanation for the phenomenon.

But that was just the beginning of George Flower's troubles.

In August of 1902 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the Flower family home-- with its foundation built from the gravestones of Spencer County's earliest settlers-- was haunted. For several nights in a row the house had shaken violently until, finally, Flower grabbed his wife and children and abandoned the dwelling. Meanwhile, Flower found himself up to his neck in legal woes; descendants of those who were buried in the old cemetery threatened to sue the young farmer for desecrating the burial grounds.

With so much anger being directed at them by the locals, the Flowers couldn't help but wonder if their bad luck wasn't caused by supernatural forces, but by pranksters and neighbors hellbent at driving the family away. George returned to the farm every day, but never stayed too long; he claimed that an overwhelming sense of fear and dread overwhelmed him whenever he came back to visit.

On August 15, 1902, an event occurred that dispelled any notion of pranksters or practical jokers-- lightning struck the Flowers barn, and the ensuing fire quickly spread and obliterated every structure on the property. George and his family never returned and they lived out the remainder of their lives in quiet obscurity, but not without leaving behind as their legacy a real-life parable about why it's never a good idea to disturb the dead.
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Pierre Davis: The Hermit Prophet of Porum

December 12, 2017, 4:09 pm
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Canadian River, Oklahoma


Pierre Davis made his home in a small hut on the bank of the Canadian River, near the village of Porum in Oklahoma's Muskogee County.  He lived in solitude in this humble abode for thirty years, and during that time he never journeyed more than six miles in any direction, and then only for the most necessary of provisions.  Pierre stood six feet tall, was finely built, and had a commanding presence.  However, it was neither Pierre's hut nor his imposing physique which made him famous throughout Muskogee County; it was his hobby.  Pierre Davis' hobby was prophecy and, from what history records of the hermit, he was pretty darn good at it.

Unlike many prophets, whose predictions are vague and open to interpretation, Pierre had a specialty.  His predictions were limited to floods.  So accurate were Pierre's predictions that railroad workers from the Midland Valley Railroad consulted with the revered recluse before laying tracks and building bridges.  Three times, in the autumn of 1908, he had predicted that floods would come and each time he was proven correct; the deluge arrived precisely on the date he had named.
Pierre first made his predictions known years earlier, while workmen were completing a new Midland Valley Railroad bridge to replace the one that had been washed away.  For a long time he watched the bridge workers in silence, and the workers paid little attention to the queer old man on the river bank.  Finally, Pierre spoke to the foreman of the work crew.  "You see little water in the river bed now," said the hermit, "but in thirty days the floods will come and the bridge will be carried away."  Saying nothing more, the old recluse strode away, amid the laughs and jeers of the workmen.  Exactly twenty-nine days later the rains came and the river flooded.  On the thirtieth day, the Canadian River swept away the newly-built bridge.

The bridge was yet again rebuilt, and once more the hermit appeared just as the bridge was nearly complete.  He warned the foreman that on the 22nd of November, there would be a 14-foot rise in the river and once again the bridge would be swept away by the raging waters.  On the prescribed date, the river raged and the bridge was destroyed.

Four days later, while the workers were repairing the badly bent and battered bridge, Pierre Davis appeared, saying nothing more than "The following Sunday the bridge will again go out."  By this time, no one was surprised when the old man's prophecy came true.

The workers who at first laughed at the hermit began to defend him, as the wealthy railroad executives pushed once again for the rebuilding of the bridge which had collapsed so many times before.  Even the prophet's skeptics grew worried when word came that the bridge over the Canadian River must be built yet again; some even speculated that the land was cursed.  Were they building on a site held sacred by the Creek people?  Whether or not the old hermit was right, one thing seemed certain: Mother Nature did not want a bridge built in that particular location.

Nevertheless, the railroad executives got their way and the bridge was rebuilt once more.  On December 13, as the workers waited for the first train to cross the bridge, the elderly hermit made his final prediction.  He declared that the first train would not cross the bridge until the 15th of December.  Even some of the hermit's supporters scoffed at this prophecy, as the first train was already on its way.  However, there had been an obstruction on the tracks miles away and the train that was expected to cross the Canadian River on the 12th didn't reach the bridge until the three days later. 

Pierre Davis, the "Prophet of Porum" was seen very little after this event, and it was supposed that the old hermit had taken ill and succumbed to the ravages of time, ultimately ending up buried in a potter's field in a pauper's grave, forgotten by all, except for the mystified workmen who had been bedazzled by Pierre's precise prognostications.





Excerpted from "Hairy Men in Caves: True Stories of America's Most Colorful Hermits" by Marlin Bressi. Published by Sunbury Press, 2015.
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A haunted streetcar in Savannah

December 17, 2017, 11:26 am
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This fascinating story comes from 1893, and features a haunted electric streetcar. According to the story, every time the car passes by Laurel Grove Cemetery, the cries of a child can be heard. The story also points out that the haunted streetcar, "No. 26", had recently struck a killed a child. Spooky!


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Dowsing for Lost Graves

December 20, 2017, 7:06 pm
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Robert Schueler locating graves with dowsing rods in 1977

Dowsing, also known as divining, is the ancient practice of locating buried objects with twigs or metal rods. While the mind immediately conjures up old-time treasure hunters searching for buried loot, dowsing has traditionally been used to its greatest extent in the search for underground water. Even today, some utility workers use dowsing rods to locate buried pipes and cables-- much to the eye-rolling of "enlightened" skeptics.

Yes, the overwhelming consensus is that dowsing is a pseudoscience. The art of dowsing has never been shown to work in a controlled scientific experiment, and even famed skeptic James Randi tested the claims of numerous dowsers in the form of his now-defunct One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. Dowsers who participated in the challenge by agreeing to find buried water pipes under highly-controlled circumstances all met with utter failure.

However, there are some educated persons who maintain that dowsing really does work. After all, there are countless anecdotal reports of success while dowsing, and while some of these successes can be chalked up to luck or coincidence, there are other cases that fly in the faces of skeptics.
In these cases, some scientists have theorized that ideomotor movements are responsible for dowsing success. This is not a new theory; in 1852 a researcher named William B. Carpenter was the first to suggest that ideomotor effects were behind the movements of divining rods, pendants and pendulums used by dowsers. Carpenter and others theorize that ideomotor movements are involuntary, subconscious motor movements that are the result of subliminal expectations or prior suggestions.

In terms of divining for buried objects, dowsers hold their rods in front of them in a parallel fashion. The rods cross each other, seemingly by magic, whenever the dowser passes over the object they are trying to detect. Skeptics maintain that this occurs when the dowser knows where the object is buried, and this seems to explain why so many novice and first time dowsers report high rates of success when they bury an object in their back yard and then try to find it using divining rods. As James Randi demonstrated on numerous occasions, once the subject is "blind" to the location of the buried object, the success rate for experienced dowsers is no greater than that of the average person.

But dowsers disagree; some of Randi's subjects argued that the test had been intentionally designed to encourage failure. Some of the dowsers even blamed things such as sunspots and magnetic disturbances for their failures.

However, one inconvenient, indisputable fact still remains: Many dowsers have been so successful at finding buried objects that they have made careers out of practicing their craft.

One such man was a gravemarker salesman from Erie, Pennsylvania, named Robert Schueler (1914-1991). In 1977, Schueler-- and his divining rods-- played a key role in solving the mystery of the lost Erie County Poorhouse graveyard.

A few years earlier a real estate developer, Robert Ferrier, purchased a large lot in Erie with the intention of building an industrial park. While doing research on the property for a newspaper story about the planned industrial park, reporter Jeff Pinksi of the Erie Morning News made a startling discovery-- the land, it seemed, had once been the site of the county poorhouse. Since most poorhouses of 19th century had adjoining burial grounds, this was cause for concern.

Although most of the older residents of Erie recalled that the pauper's graves had been relocated to another local cemetery many years earlier, Pinski wasn't so sure. His investigative reporter instincts took over and he plunged headfirst into  the mystery. He was able to obtain a rare, handwritten register of the burials and Pinski eventually concluded that it was highly unlikely all of the human remains had been removed from the grounds.


Erie County Poorhouse



The register in itself would have made for a great blog post-- it contained highly personalized (and rather interesting) descriptions of the unfortunate paupers dating back to 1878. There was John H., with "out of his mind" listed as his cause of death. Another pauper, whose name has been lost to history, is described in poorhouse death records as "a perfect idiot". Another was identified only as "a disagreeable old Irishman". Many of the unknown dead were said to have died of "a general wearing out". But the most fascinating corpse was that of John M., age 94, who died "when he fell overboard while rowing with his girlfriend. He had been drinking."

Unfortunately for Jeff Pinski, no other records pertaining to the graveyard could be found, not even records from 1918, the year the poorhouse closed down and the graves were ostensibly relocated. Pinski was convinced that the plot of land purchased by Ferrier was teeming with corpses, but he had no way of proving it-- until he turned to Robert Schueler.

By this time Schueler was already a local legend of sorts when it came to finding human remains. Newspapers of the day invariably described him as an "expert grave finder", though, of course, many of so-called progressively-minded locals scoffed at the dowser's abilities. But as Schueler accurately pinpointed the precise location of grave after grave, even some of his biggest critics began to change their tune.

"To look at, you'd think it was fake," said Merle Wood, a neighborhood undertaker who had been hired to move the bodies. "But I have to believe him, because I don't have any other way to find the graves."

 A test dig confirmed Schueler's reliability as a dowser; Schueler immediately staked two locations where his divining rods crossed, and two bodies were found. He was then given free reign to "do his thing" and, by the time it was all over, 443 of the 600 suspected potter's field burials were located-- that's a success rate of nearly 74 percent. And if it was true that some of the graves had been relocated decades earlier, that would have made his success rate significantly higher.

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The 5 Most Improbable Things That Have Ever Happened

January 1, 2018, 4:57 pm
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In a classic 1991 episode of Seinfeld ("The Statue"), Elaine argues with a woman named Rava about coincidences. After Elaine mentions a "big coincidence" Rava angrily points out that there is no such thing as a small coincidence or a big coincidence-- just coincidences. "That's what a coincidence is!" Rava insists, which causes Elaine to protest: "No, there are degrees of coincidences!"

While statisticians have been debating ever since whether or not there are "degrees" of coincidence like Elaine Benes insists, most experts agree that coincidences are surprisingly common.

Mathematicians Frederick Mosteller and Persi Diaconis have defined a coincidence as a "surprising concurrence of events that are perceived as being meaningfully related", though neither (unfortunately) expressed an opinion about big coincidences and small coincidences.

History, however, presents several examples of concurrences so mathematically improbable that they seem to suggest that Elaine might have been right. These are (we believe) the five most improbable things that have ever happened.




1. Murder victim selected for jury duty... in his own murder case!





In 1919, a murder took place in Keokuk, Iowa. The victim, George Hammond, was shot and killed by John Higham. The court drew the names of jurors for the trial and one name on the list stood out from the rest like a sore thumb-- apparently, George Hammond had been selected for jury duty-- for the very murder trial in which he was the victim. (Source: Daily Gate Constitution-Democrat, Oct. 14, 1919)






2. Falling portrait coincides with politician's failing health-- three separate times.





In 1899 a London politician named Frederick Littlewood suffered a stroke in his home. On the same day, at around the very same time, a portrait of Littlewood that was hanging in the council chamber fell off the wall. Four years later, Littlewood suffered an apoplectic seizure and, once again, his portrait fell from the wall of the council chamber. A few weeks later Frederick Littlewood passed away at the age of 73. The day after his death the city council held a meeting, and during the session a framed photograph of Littlewood fell from the wall, the glass being smashed. The odds of such an event happening once are astronomical-- but the odds of such an event taking place three times is beyond comprehension. (Source: The Siler City Grit, November 5, 1913)






3. The Unsinkable Hugh Williams






On December 5, 1664, a ferryboat crossing the Menai Strait in North Wales capsized. Of the boat's eighty-one passengers, only one survived-- a man named Hugh Williams. On December 5, 1785, another ship was lost in the Menai Strait. Of the boat's sixty passengers, there was only one survivor-- a man named Hugh Williams. On October 5, 1905, a third boat met with the same disastrous fate while crossing the same stretch of water. There were twenty-five passengers on board and, once again, there was only one survivor-- a man named Hugh Williams. (Source: The Evening Kansan-Republican, Dec. 5, 1905)


4. Soldier accidentally locates grave of long-lost relative





In 1940 a National Guard sergeant named Charles W. Farmer was encamped with his outfit on the Civil War battlefield at Vicksburg, Mississippi. One dark night Sergeant Farmer stumbled over a grave marker on his way back to camp. Much to his astonishment, the inscription on the tombstone indicated that it was the grave of Lieutenant William Farmer of the 81st Illinois Regiment-- a great-uncle of Sergeant Farmer who had gone off to war and was never heard from again. (Source: Pampa Daily News, Sept. 1, 1940)



5. A payday to remember
 



A peculiar occurrence took place on February 12, 1889, inside the Army Pension Office on Canal Street in New York City. In those days, Civil War veterans stood in line at the pension office four times per year in order to receive their quarterly cash benefits. On that particular day over one hundred men stood in line, patiently waiting their turn at the window.

The first man in line gave his name to the teller at the window-- it was Wilkes. This didn't seem particularly strange to the teller, but the second man in line gave his last name as Booth. The climax was reached when the third man in line approached the window and gave his last name to the teller-- Lincoln.

If such an event had happened on any other day of the year it would be uncanny, but what made this particular coincidence so strange is that it happened on a February 12th-- Lincoln's birthday. (Source: New York World, Feb. 12, 1889)
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The Parhamites: A Tale of Jesus, Pedophilia, Sodomy and Strangulation

January 6, 2018, 6:55 pm
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Of all the religious cults in American history, few have had a reputation of debauchery like the Parhamites, a strange Pentecostal community founded by preacher Charles Fox Parham in the early years of the 20th century. While Parham is still remembered as a pioneer of American Pentecostalism (it was Parham who popularized the Pentecostal practice of "speaking in tongues", or glossolalia), most have forgotten the sensational scandals associated with Parham and his maniacally devoted followers.

As a young man in Kansas, Parham belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church and began preaching at the age of fifteen. A disagreement with church leadership led him to abandon the Methodist faith, and inspired Parham to start his own non-denominational ministry. In 1900 Parham established Bethel Bible College in Topeka. Although the school charged no tuition, the controversial and often bizarre beliefs of its founder prevented the college from flourishing. Within a few months, Parham was broke.

While preaching to a crowd in El Dorado Springs, Missouri, in 1903, a Kansas socialite named Mary Arthur told friends that she had been healed through Parham's preaching and, before long, huge crowds were clamoring to see Parham. Local newspapers praised Parham's seemingly miraculous powers of healing and the preacher soon found himself surrounded by a core group of devout followers, who would become the first Parhamites.

Parham instructed these disciples to travel throughout the Midwest and preach his message. While other leaders of religious movements encouraged followers to dress modestly, Parham instructed his followers to be stylish and trendy, knowing that it would go a long way in attracting new people to his church. The ploy worked; within a few years Parham's religious movement gained a strong foothold in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Texas and Illinois.

Charles Fox Parham


1906 was a turning point for the Parhamites. In September of that year Parham traveled to Zion City, Illinois, in an attempt to win over the disgruntled followers of a disgraced preacher by the name of John Alexander Dowie, who had founded Zion City as a base of operations for his Christian Catholic Apostolic Church.

Dowie, who was born in Scotland, had a shadowy past long before he even reached the United States. During the 1880s Dowie's church was based in Australia, and it later burned down under suspicious circumstances. It was rumored that Dowie has set the blaze himself for financial gain. After absconding with the insurance payout, he settled in San Francisco in 1888 and eked out an income by performing faith healing. He eventually found great success in Chicago and purchased a large tract of land forty miles away, which he named Zion City.

At its peak, more than 6,000 of Dowie's followers lived in Zion City under their leader's strict totalitarian rule, and deposited their life savings in the Dowie-owned Zion Bank. Dowie abandoned Zion City for Mexico in 1905, taking approximately $3 million with him. This left Dowie's followers in need of a new spiritual leader, and Charles Fox Parham was happy to oblige.

It was a decision he would live to regret.

In the fall of 1906 Parham was accused of sexual assault. Parham and one of his male disciples were also arrested on sodomy charges for "the commission of an unnatural offense". Parham claimed that he had been framed by Wilbur Voliva, a Dowie loyalist from Zion City. Parham also claimed that Dowie had planted stories in newspapers alleging that he was a homosexual who arranged orgies with minors.

These accusations produced a wave of hysteria in Zion City, where half the population still supported Dowie and half the population pledged their spiritual allegiance to Parham. But things went from bad to worse when the Parhamites began murdering each other in bizarre "exorcism" rituals.





The Demon Doctor Confesses



In September of 1907, five Parhamites were arrested in connection to the torture and death of 64-year-old Letitia Greenhaulgh of Zion City. Harold Mitchell confessed to choking the woman, but claimed that the devil made him do it-- literally.

According to Mitchell (whose wife was a high priestess in the Parhamite cult), he was "seized by demons", and when under the influence of these demons he felt an uncontrollable urge to "take a grip on the throat of a human being and crush until life is extinct". On September 21 he was arrested, along with his wife and the son and daughter of the victim.

Five Chicago enthusiasts who twisted the arm and neck of their patient too hard, in attempting to drive out a devil, are under arrest, charged with murder. They drove out life. What disposition they made of the devil is not stated. The account of the treatment by the Parhamites of their aged and crippled victim is a story of ignorant frenzy and religious mania carried to the last degree of absurdity.-- Ottawa Evening Herald, Sept. 21, 1907.




Court documents indicate that the five Parhamites had planned their actions down to the last detail. Knowing that the woman's husband was a supporter of Dowie, they lured him away from the house on a false pretext. When Mrs. Greenhaulgh was alone, the Parhamites entered her bedroom and grabbed the bedridden woman by the limbs. "Mitchell took her by the hand," the victim's son, Walter, testified, "and pulled her arm away from her body. She screamed. Oh, she screamed terribly. I jumped forward. Mitchell held me back and put his hand over my mother's mouth and stopped her cries. He said... those cries are not her cries. That is the screaming of the demons and devils as they leave her. She is all right."

Walter Greenhaulgh continued:

"They took her arms and drew them out straight. There was a cracking sound. I found out afterwards that they broke the bones. They did the same with her legs. They pulled at her head. They pinched and worked her flesh. She groaned and cried out. They said she would soon be all right."

The fervor surrounding the death of Mrs. Greenhaulgh led to an investigation by authorities, and several other suspicious deaths in Zion City were linked to the Parhamites, including the tragic death of a young boy named Frank Crowe, whose Parhamite parents had denied him medical treatment for his typhoid fever. Witnesses who were at the boy's bedside claim that he cried piteously for water, which his parents refused to provide. They told their dying son that the Lord would provide water. They later thrust their fingers down the boy's throat in order to yank out the "devils that were tormenting him". The coroner who examined the body stated that the boy's tongue had nearly been cut off, as though with a knife.

Mitchell, a self-described "demon doctor", played a leading role in many of the suspicious deaths in Zion City. Mitchell's unfortunate "patients" included a Miss Young, who was choked to death, a Miss Anderson of Gilead Avenue, Miss Payne of Enoch Avenue, and Miss Zimmerman of Gilead Avenue. Apparently, Harold Mitchell believed that Satan was fond of inhabiting the bodies of young, unmarried women.

Mitchell was also linked to the deaths of three children: Otto Schmidt, age 12, Hiram Annas, age 16, and an unidentified nine year-old-boy who died after Mitchell grabbed him by the throat.



The city's undertaker also came under fire for his role in covering up the suspicious deaths. Benjamin Hopkins, a devout Parhamite, explained to authorities that "customs in Zion are different from those in the outside world". When asked why he failed to report the deaths to the county coroner, Hopkins explained that the dead had to be remained unburied for three days, in the even that they might resurrect themselves.

On November 15, 1907, Harold Mitchell was convicted of manslaughter. The other four Parhamities who assisted in the death of Letitia Greenhaulgh, including Mitchell's high priestess wife, were acquitted.

As for the cult's founder, Charles Fox Parham, his influence and reputation waned after the Parhamite murder spree. Some of the members, such as John G. Lake and F.F. Bosworth, fled Illinois and became notable religious figures in the Pentecostal movement. Parham continued preaching in spite of his declining health. He died in Texas in 1929 at the age of 55.

In 1914 Parham's ministry merged with other Pentecostal groups, becoming the Assemblies of God, which currently boasts approximately 68 million followers worldwide.
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Haunted Alaska: The Mystery of Chirikof Island

January 9, 2018, 7:11 pm
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1945 photo of Army radio range on Chirikof Island (Kodiak Military History Museum)


Ghosts of prisoners said to haunt site of former Russian penal colony

Off the southern coast of Alaska lies the Kodiak Archipelago, a group of islands comprising over 5,000 square miles of land. Much of this land is forested and teeming with wildlife, and several of the islands are populated. At the extreme southern tip of the archipelago lies an anomaly-- a treeless, barren wasteland surrounded by treacherous seas. This desolate place is Chirikof Island, and it strikes the imagination as being the ideal place to strand blood-thirsty criminals until Mother Nature metes out her own brand of justice.

It is perhaps for this very reason that Chirikof Island was said to be the site of a 19th century Russian penal colony. Though some historians refute this idea, the legend of the lost Russian penal colony still survives to this day. And, according to legend-- and numerous eyewitness accounts-- the island is haunted by the ghosts of long-dead criminals  and exiles.

One of the first authors to write about Chirikof Island was Henry Wood Elliott, whose 1886 book "Our Arctic Province: Alaska and the Seal Islands", contains a detailed history of the islands of the Kodiak Archipelago. It was Elliott who popularized the idea of a Russian exile camp on Chirikof Island, though some historians blame the author for telling tall tales. Captain Arthur Morris, who served as the administrator of Alaska during the time of Elliott's travels, once stated: “Don’t believe a word Elliott says except about fur seals.”

Because of Morris' condemnation, few scholars took the author's claims seriously, which is unfortunate; while history might not have been Elliott's forte, the author was meticulous in his research when it came to the flora and fauna of the Alaskan islands and the customs of the native people.  Elliott was regarded as such an expert on these matters that, in 1911, he co-authored (along with Secretary of State John Hay) the first international treaty dedicated to wildlife conservation. This put him squarely in the company of men like John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, George Perkins Marsh and other prominent naturalists of the era.

So why would Henry Wood Elliott lie about the dark history of Chirikof Island?

Since Elliott's passion in life was conservation and the protection of species such as the fur seal, it's conceivable that he merely wanted to "spook" would-be hunters and poachers away from the island-- something akin to a late 19th century Scooby-Doo ploy. However, the fact that numerous credible witnesses, many of whom were ostensibly part of the fur seal trade themselves, came back from Chirikof Island with hair-raising tales of the supernatural seems to rebut this explanation.

And then there's the known and documented history of the island; in 1799 the tsar of Russia awarded the Russian-American Company a charter to manage the heretofore unpopulated island. The Russian-American Company established a small colony there, complete with a Russian Orthodox church. After most of the seals had been slaughtered the village fell into ruin; by 1867, when the Russian Empire sold Alaska to the United States, it was abandoned and remained so until 1887, when an American company established a fox breeding farm on Chirikof.

The treeless landscape of Chirikof Island





Fiendish Torture Too Horrible to Mention


Captain E.L. West of the Corwin was an experienced skipper who knew the Alaskan islands like the back of his hand. While in Seattle in April of 1908, he related his own experiences with Chirikof Island to a reporter from the Seattle Times.

"There is one island in Alaskan waters on which the foot of man, white or red, is never placed. Chirikof Island, south of the Semedi Group, is inhabited beyond doubt by the spirits of former Russian exiles, and they will permit no intrusion of their haunts by earthly inhabitants," he stated.
"The Aleut Indians, who are the most intelligent of their race, realize this fact, and neither love nor money can induce them to step foot on the island or go near it in their canoes or boats. Years ago, before Alaska was purchased, Russia made use of the island as a prison for her criminal exiles. Murderers, thieves and other convicts of the worse class were shipped there under life sentences."
According to Capt. West, the inhumanity of their keepers grew as time went on, until they became more cruel than the convicts they were guarding. "And as the exiles were there for life," the captain continued, "there was no incentive to keep them alive."

West went on to state that the guards devised unique ways to exterminate the convicts, in the interest of saving the Russian government money. The convicts were always fettered with a heavy ball and chain, and one of the favorite means of execution was to bury them alive by covering all but the head. Instead of suffocating, the convict would die of starvation.

"On still nights the pitiful shrieks and cries of anguish from the dying men tortured the ocean air for miles around," the captain added. "A few white men have had the temerity to set foot on the bleak shores of Chirikof, but they quickly left there with shattered nerves, vowing never to return. They bring skeletons of men with chain and ball bound to the ankle and wrist bones. Other skeletons are to be found there with the ribs broken... others with the skull, forehead or jaws crushed into an indistinguishable mass. There are on every hand evidences of the terrible brutality of the fiendish keepers to the helpless men in their charge-- some of them too horrible to mention."

Years earlier, Capt. West was in Goss' general store at Kodiak Island when he met a Scotsman named Philip Graham. West told him about the legend of Chirikov Island, and Graham, being an adventurer, was skeptical. A few days later the Scotsman hired a fishing schooner to take him to the island and to help him build a cabin. The crew departed and came back ten days later with provisions, only to find Graham in the icy water, swimming at full speed to meet the boat. He was so desperate to get off the island that he left all his possessions behind, and later made out an affidavit swearing to his experiences on Chirikov.




What the Scotsman Saw on the Island




According to Graham's affidavit, every night in bed he was tormented by the tramping of feet, accompanied by the rattle of chains. One night he was awakened by a ghastly sound, which he described as the sound of human flesh being beaten mercilessly by a club. Next he heard the sound of pebbles and loose earth being shoveled. He swore that he heard no moans or screams during his time on the island. But he did see things that caused his blood to run cold.

One night, after being awakened by the same mysterious sounds, he worked up his courage and stepped outside the cabin. He was drawn by the moonlight to a shallow pool of stagnant water, and, much to his astonishment, saw what appeared to be an upturned human skull. The sight was too much for Graham to bear. He ran back to his cabin, only to discover that he had been locked out.

He looked out across the island; in the moonlight he saw the dim outlines of skeletons marching in lock step. He saw other skeletons twisting their bony frames as though writhing in agony, and the sound of bones cracking permeated the night air. From the ground he caught glimpses of skulls with the necks stretched backwards, their mouths gaping open. The visions caused Graham to lose consciousness. He awoke late the next day, and refused to venture outside his cabin from that night forward.



Is the Island Cursed?



Today, the only inhabitants of Chirikof Island are hundreds of feral cattle, living ghosts of failed business enterprises. The Wikipedia entry on Chirikof Island incorrectly states that the beef industry on Chirikof began in 1925, when an Iowa farmer named Jack McCord launched an ill-fated venture known as the Chirikof Cattle Company.

In reality, the Chirikof cattle industry goes back to 1891, when a bull and three cows were shipped to the island to form a dairy herd for the fur farm operated by the Semidi Propagation Company, which was established three years earlier. The fur farm failed and the cattle were abandoned. Without natural predators, the herd grew to several hundred within a few decades. In 1931 a Montana rancher named Axel Olsen won a contract to round up and slaughter the cattle. Forty years of feral living had turned the animals into creatures with long curly hair and stringy, inedible meat.

One has to wonder why none of the natives ventured to Chirikof during these forty years in order to obtain these valuable cowhides. It would appear to any reasonable person that Chirikof was cursed.

History supports this theory. Olsen was just one of dozens of businessmen to lose money on the island, along with Jack McCord and the founders of the fur farm. McCord abandoned his dream in 1950, his fortune wiped out by scores of inexplicable shipwrecks and plane crashes that beseiged his project. In 1939 McCord and five of his men were marooned for a month on Tuginak Island after their boat, Swan, wrecked en route to Chirikof. In 1945, Louis "Bud" Thompson and Jake Gottcher departed from Chirikof Island in a plane after inspecting McCord's cattle. They never returned home, and it wasn't until 1985 when the wreckage of their plane, along with badly-decomposed human remains, were found 200 miles away in the wilderness of Kodiak Island.

Another businessman obtained a loan in 1983 and imported 600 heads of new cattle to the island. Once again, the venture was a dismal failure.


The Mad Cows of Chirikof Island


Kay Barker

Another strange story pertaining to the island is the story told by Kay Barker, an ambitious West Virginia girl who earned her fortune raising foxes on nearby Ushagat Island in the 1930s. Journalist Lloyd Weir published a profile of Barker in 1938 in which Barker stated that she only feared for her life but once in the islands of Alaska, during a trip to Chirikof Island with an Aleut companion named Mesha.

"Mesha and I had gone to the island to take pictures," said Barker. "We soon spotted a small herd but they ran as we approached. However, we found they had gone for the 'army', which advanced in charge of a big white bull... I was busy taking pictures as they got near and circled around us. Suddenly, as though at a signal from the white bull, they charged. Mesha grabbed me by the arm and we ran to the shore where we had a boat waiting." According to Barker, the feral animals were so enraged that they plunged into the water and began swimming in pursuit of the trespassers. Barker was lucky to escape Chirikof with her life.

Others who visited the island weren't so lucky. In 1908 four fur trappers were marooned on the island and later perished. The schooner, St. Paul, was dispatched to Chirikof to rescue the men. The ship never reached the island; it disappeared without a trace. A small steamer was then stocked with provisions and dispatched to rescue the marooned trappers, but a short distance at sea she became disabled and was forced to return to port at Squaw Harbor.






It is a little strange that so many scholars and historians, including the late Dr. Lydia Black, have gone out of their way to refute the idea that a Russian penal colony once existed on Chirikof Island, in spite of overwhelming physical evidence. A 1950 article from an Alaskan newspaper makes mention of the penal colony's graveyard on the island, while human bones have turned up as recently as 1981, when two cattlemen from Oregon, Thomas Cornelius and Ron Winkle, discovered two skeletons on Chirikof. The bones, described as being "green and very deteriorated" were approximately 200 years old.

"We've been told there was archaeological work done on the island in the '60s and that it had been a Russian penal colony," stated Sgt. William Nickel of the Alaska State Police in 1981. "There are quite a few graves there and bones have been found before, and it looks like that's where these came from."




Sources:
Vancouver Daily World, June 8, 1923. Page 12.
The Call-Leader (Elwood, Indiana), July 20, 1931. Page 7.
Danville (Va.) Bee, Dec. 4, 1950. Page 24.
Montana Standard, Jan. 30, 1938. Page 51.
The Ligonier (Pa.) Echo, Aug. 21, 1918. Page 7.
Pittsburgh Press, April 17, 1908. Page 3.
The Jennings (La.) Daily Times-Record, Aug. 12, 1908. Page 7.
Daily Sitka (Ak.) Sentinel, Sept. 22, 1981. Page 3.
Daily Sitka (Ak.) Sentinel, July 30, 1985. Page 6.
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The Strange Prophecy of Benrose Billman

January 15, 2018, 10:28 pm
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It was March of 1892 in the sleepy Ohio village of Doylestown, just south of Akron. The heart of the village was the hotel known as the Billman House, owned by Benrose Billman, who was a genial host and known throughout the village as an upstanding pillar of the local community.

A few weeks earlier Benrose Billman had undergone a severe sick spell, and, for several days, his life was in the balance. His health gradually improved and one day he was able to get out of bed and hobble around with the aid of a cane.

The office of the Billman House was the local hangout spot for the young men of the village, who gathered daily at the hotel to exchange gossip and check upon the health of the well-loved owner. It was on this particular March morning when Mr. Billman left his sick room and made his return to the hotel office, much to the delight of the crowd.

The crowd hanging out at the hotel that day consisted of John Mealy, William Busson, James Eitel, Fred Baysinger and Kent Young. All were strong, healthy men in the prime of their lives, and all were prominent businessmen of Doylestown. One of the members of the party made an offhand remark, which confused Mr. Billman: "It seems that Mr. Billman is going to beat us out of our proposed feast."

This caused the others to laugh and Mr. Billman demanded an explanation to the inside joke.

"Well, you see," one of the young men explained, "we've arranged a feast in your honor-- in case you didn't pull through."

To this, Benrose Billman replied:

"Boys, I'll be standing at the side of the hole when every one of you is lowered into the ground!"

When Billman made this remark it must have seemed ridiculous; the five young men were hale and hearty, while the old hotel proprietor's condition was still quite precarious. Yet Benrose Billman's frivolous prophecy came to pass exactly as he had said.

Less than a month after the comment was made, William Busson was suddenly stricken with inflammatory rheumatism and died in February of 1893. He was just 23 years of age.
Billman had recovered from his own illness just enough to attend the funeral.

On June 3, John Mealy died-- and it was Billman who made the funeral arrangements and prepared the body of the young man for burial.

On October 5, James Eitel passed away at the Billman House. Since the undertaker was out of town at the time, Billman took charge of the burial and used his carpentry skills to build the young man's coffin.

Fred Baysinger passed away on December 26, 1899, while at the South View House, after an illness of about two weeks.

The fifth and final member of the party, Kent Young, died in July of 1902 in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, at the age of 38.

As for Benrose Billman, he died in Doylestown on January 19, 1917, at the ripe old age of 83. According to his closest friends, until the day he died he blamed himself for bringing death to his five friends by way of an offhand remark.




Sources:
Akron Daily Democrat, Feb. 14, 1893.
Akron Daily Democrat, July 19, 1902.
Akron Times-Democrat, July 17, 1902.


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Haunted by his victim: The bizarre tale of Edward Unger

January 24, 2018, 2:20 pm
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Located on the east bank of the Hudson River, Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York is known throughout the country for housing some of the most violent outlaws in the world of crime. Over 600 criminals were executed at Sing Sing, and so it is not surprising that this famed prison in notoriously difficult to escape from.

And while escaping from a maximum security prison like Sing Sing is a monumental challenge in itself, a 19th century inmate named Edward Unger faced an even bigger challenge-- escaping from the ghost of his murder victim.

But the ghost that drove Unger over the brink of insanity is just one part of the story. There's also a sensational murder at the heart of this strange tale.

Once upon a time, long before Edward Unger ran a tiny saloon catering to lowlives and roughnecks who lived along the Bowery, he was a war hero. He earned a medal of honor and rose to the rank of captain during the Civil War, participating in a dozen bloody battles as a member of the 11th New York Infantry Zouaves.

Two decades later, the once honorable Captain Unger found himself scrabbling to pay the bills, eking out a pitiable existence with his seedy saloon. By Unger's account, business was not good. In October of 1886 he placed an ad in the newspaper looking for a business partner, and it was answered by a man named August Bohles.

Bohles was a handsome German fellow who had made his fortune in the Chicago stockyards butchering cattle and selling sausage. Together, Bohles and Unger hatched a scheme to make and sell sausages from inferior-quality horsemeat. Bohles put up the money for the venture and moved into Unger's house at 22 Eldridge Street, which the captain shared with a teenage son named Edward.

The horse sausage scheme fizzled and Unger was forced to sell his saloon. Tensions between the two business partners boiled over on the night of January 20, 1887, after an evening of drinking. It was a bitter cold night, and Bohles could not sleep. He growled about the cold until Unger agreed to fix a fire. Even after the fire was lit, the German butcher continued to complain. A shoving match ensued. Unger reached for the poker but Bohles yanked it from his hand, and then he grabbed a carving knife. Unger scanned the room and spotted a hammer. What happened next is a matter of debate, but the confrontation ended with Captain Unger bludgeoning the German in the head with the hammer.

"Suddenly I became possessed of a desire to kill," Unger later confessed. "I struck him with all my strength on the head. The hammer head sank out of sight in his skull. The blood and brain that flew only added to my frenzy. I struck him again after he lay dead on the sofa."

Rage soon gave way to horror when Unger realized what he had done. His first impulse was to flee the scene, which he did-- until he realized that he had to go back and dispose of the body. He would tell anyone who asked that Bohles had gone back to Germany. Unger knew that his son would soon be returning home, so he had to act quickly. He rolled the body in a cot and hid it inside his room until morning.

In the morning he bought a saw and a rubber tarp. He hacked off the German's head and suddenly became queasy when he gazed into the dead man's wide open eyes; after a few shots of whiskey his nerve returned and he finished the task. After cutting the body into smaller pieces, he stuffed the remains into Bohles' trunk, except for the head. This he wrapped in old clothing and newspapers put into a dresser drawer.

After shipping the trunk to a random address in Baltimore, Captain Unger took the bundled up head onto the Williamsburg ferry and dropped it into the river when nobody was looking. Unger says he slept easy that night, convinced that his crime would never come to light.

Captain Unger made one grave error, however; it had never occurred to him that dead meat begins to stink after a while, and it was the odor of rotting flesh that attracted the attention of agents at the Adams Express office in Baltimore, where the trunk had sat unclaimed for three days.

The chief of police ordered the trunk to be opened. Inspector Thomas Byrnes, the leading detective of the era, was put on the case.

Coincidentally, Byrnes and Unger had fought side by side during the war as members of the 11th New York Infantry. Stranger still, both men had risen to the rank of captain. Yet their respective paths led in divergent directions; Byrnes would go on to become one of most famous detectives in American history, while Unger became one of the most famous murderers in the history of the New York City.

"I was about going home on a Wednesday afternoon when I received a telegram from Chief Frye of Baltimore," Inspector Byrnes later recalled. "A headless body! That was certainly a novelty, and I became greatly interested."

Inspector Byrnes


Inspector Byrnes traced the trunk back to Westcott Express, where it was revealed that the trunk had been shipped from Bense's Liquor Store on Kent Avenue. The trunk was identified as belonging to August Bohles, and the inspector learned from a receipt that the German butcher had been residing at 22 Eldridge Street. Neighbors told the inspector that the butcher had been sharing a house with Edward Unger. Unger, coincidentally, matched the description of the man who had brought the trunk to the liquor store.

Unger, who claimed that he murdered his friend in self-defense, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years at Sing Sing.

"He acted as if a great load had been lifted from his mind," the inspector recalled, after Captain Unger had confessed his crime. But for Captain Edward Unger, his troubles were just beginning.
It was during Unger's first night at Sing Sing when the ghost of August Bohle began tormenting him. Unger was awakened from his sleep and he found his dismembered victim on the floor. Before his very eyes the ghost began to reconstruct itself from the pile of phantom body parts.

Every night for the week the apparition appeared, and each night it assembled itself in the presence of the petrified prisoner. First the severed limbs would appear on the floor of his cell, and then the fragments would begin to quiver. The body parts would crawl slowly toward each other and arrange themselves into human form. "But the head is missing," Unger claimed. "At length that, too, comes into the room, with its hair dripping with the water of the river in which it has lain. With a horrible smile on its face it places itself on the shoulders of the figure."

At this point, Unger would let out a blood-curdling shriek, and the apparition would vanish.

By the end of Unger's first week at Sing Sing, Captain Unger-- the once valiant hero of the bloody battlefields of the Civil War-- had been rendered delirious and had to be moved to the prison infirmary. In just one week he had grown frail and emaciated, and the prison physician ordered his removal to the state asylum for lunatic criminals.

A cell at Sing Sing from the 19th century


But something remarkable happened to Edward Unger before he was to be put into the state asylum.

Like the breaking of a fever, the hauntings ceased, the chills were gone, and the convicted killer was reborn-- a changed man forever. He was released from Sing Sing for good behavior in June of 1899, seven years earlier than expected. During his time in prison he was employed in the mess hall and, according to Warden Johnson, was "one of the best cooks as well as one of the best prisoners" to have ever occupied the famous penitentiary.


The change in Unger lasted for the remainder of his life, and he became something of an expert when it came to "trunk murders" and assisted detectives-- including Inspector Byrnes-- whenever a similar case cropped up in New York City.

And it did quite often, unfortunately. Because of the tremendous national publicity surrounding the murder of August Bohles, hacking their victims to bits and stuffing them in trunks to be shipped away to far-off destinations became a favorite way for killers to dispose of incriminating evidence. Although he never intended for it to happen, Captain Unger's method of murder spawned a ghastly trend in the world of crime.

While some could argue that the decapitated ghost of August Bohles was merely a hallucination brought on by guilt, the fact remains that the strange visions seen by Edward Unger played a pivotal role in turning his life around after being driven to insanity and back.

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The Unsolved Mystery of Fort Aubrey

January 27, 2018, 12:21 pm
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Out on the western plains of Kansas, a few indentations in the earth and a granite monument erected in 1906 are all that remains to mark the site of Fort Aubrey, a frontier post established by the U.S. Army more than 160 years ago to serve as the lone safe refuge for wagon trains traversing a lonesome 150-mile stretch of the Santa Fe Trail.

Fort Aubrey was also the site of one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American history; it was here that a party of 22 militiamen from Missouri met their demise in December of 1863 for reasons that have never been discovered. Not only is the cause of the tragedy a mystery, but even the names of those 22 unfortunate soldiers have been lost to history-- if they were ever even known in the first place, that is.

What is known, however, is that army records pertaining to Fort Aubrey disappeared in either 1858 or 1859, and the outpost was presumably abandoned. It wasn't until May of 1864-- one year after the unexplained deaths of the Missouri militiamen-- that the location was re-opened by the army as Camp Wynkoop.

Since official records from Fort Aubrey are nonexistent, everything that is known about the incident has been handed down through local tradition, which was preserved by a Kansas historian named Helfrich, who had heard the story from R.T. Goans, who was a member of the party that buried the dead.

According to this local tradition, three companies of cavalry left Fort Leavenworth in the fall of 1863 to escort Governor Goodwin, of the Arizona Territory, to Fort Union in New Mexico. The men safely reached their destination but became separated on their way back, with one group of cavalry seeking shelter from a blizzard in the abandoned ruins of Fort Aubrey.

Official records from Fort Leavenworth confirm that the troops who had accompanied Goodwin made their departure on September 25, 1863, and these escorts were identified as troops from Companies A and H of the regular cavalry, and troops from Company I of the Fourth Missouri Militia. Records from the Arizona State Historical Society indicate that the party was led by Maj. James A. Phillips of Kansas, with Lieut. Peter Clark, Capt. John Butcher and Capt. Daniel Rice in charge of the companies. They reached Fort Union on November 9 and left two days later, encountering a massive snowstorm at Fort Lyons, Colorado, on November 23.

During this storm many horses were lost and several men suffered severe frostbite. All three companies remained at Fort Lyons for eight days. And from that day forward there are no more records of Company I of the Fourth Missouri Militia.

Helfrich, the local historian, surmised back in 1930 that a disagreement must have taken place at Fort Lyons, causing the Missourians to split from the party and the captain whose command they were under. In other words, it was more likely than not a case of desertion. Companies A and H reported at Fort Riley on December 23.

As for the unknown fate of Company I, it is believed that they reached the abandoned outpost of Fort Aubrey on or around the first of December, setting up camp in the ruins of the fort. The weather must have gone from bad to worse; charred fragments found at the site suggest they broke up their wagons and burned them for warmth. Whether or not this is what actually happened is open to debate, but the facts show that none of the wagons belonging to Company I were ever recovered.

Yet, when morning came, all 22 of the men were dead.

Perhaps the militiamen were attacked by Indians and their wagons and provisions stolen, causing them to freeze to death. The only thing that stands in the way of this theory is that none of the 22 bodies showed any signs of physical violence. There were no bruises or cuts, nor wounds from arrows, knives or bullets.

Another possibility is that the militiamen had succumbed to a sudden illness. However, it seems highly unlikely that each and every member of the group should perish within hours, if not minutes, of each other.

R.T. Goans, who helped bury the bodies, recalled that the company was made up exclusively of Frenchmen who were in the process of becoming naturalized citizens (France had controlled Louisiana and parts of Missouri until 1762, when the French ceded the territory to Spain after the signing of the Treaty of Fontainebleau).

Because of their immigrant status, no record of their names has ever been discovered, and with no living relatives in America, there was no way to identify the bodies.

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LV coroner defies court order, refuses to release Paddock autopsy report

January 31, 2018, 4:07 pm
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In a stunning development in the Las Vegas shooting conspiracy, Clark County coroner John Fudenberg is refusing to comply with a court order calling for the release of Stephen Paddock's autopsy report.

On Tuesday the coroner was ordered by district court judge Timothy Williams to immediately make public the report.

According to The Daily Caller News Foundation, the Clark County coroner's office stated that the report would not be made public until it was "finalized". Very suspicious wording, since Paddock-- the gunman responsible for the worst mass shooting in modern American history-- was cremated on December 21, 2017.

On January 11, the coroner was fined $32,000 by another judge for refusing to release public records pertaining to the shooting.

This story comes on the heels of another important breakthrough in the Las Vegas shooting case. Earlier this week it was reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal that authorities were pursuing a second person of interest in the massacre.

For months, authorities have been adamant that Paddock had acted alone, even though numerous witnesses have come forward claiming that a second gunman was involved.

Strangely, two of these witnesses-- Danny Contreras and Kymberley Suchomel-- met with untimely deaths shortly after making social media posts of what they had seen during the October 2017 tragedy.

"I kept looking back expecting to see the gunmen- and I say MEN because there was more than one person. There was more than one gun firing. 100% more than one," wrote Suchomel, just days before her dead body was discovered.

"Feeling lcky to be alive. cant beleive i got out of concert alive! 2 men chasing me with guns. not evry 1 so lcky," tweeted Contreras after the attack.

A few days later, his body was found inside an abandoned Las Vegas house with multiple gunshot wounds. His killer has not yet been identified.

On October 16, two other survivors of the attack also died under suspicious circumstances. Dennis and Lorraine Carver, of Riverside County, California, died after their vehicle inexplicably crashed into a metal gate and burst into flames just outside of their home near Murrieta. Dennis was the owner of a commercial plumbing company in Las Vegas that had contracts with several resorts, hotels and casinos.

On that same day, October 16, Journal of the Bizarre was the first to report that David Hickey, the union boss of controversial Mandalay Bay security guard Jesus Campos, had been the target of an FBI fraud investigation in Michigan and that Hickey's home had been raided by the FBI in 2012.
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Satanic Tonic: How the Prince of Darkness Made Snakeoil Inventors Rich

February 7, 2018, 5:23 pm
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For as I long as I can remember I've always had a fascination with patent medicine. Over the years I've collected hundreds of antique bottles and advertising posters from patent medicine manufacturers, whose products claimed to cure every old-timey disease from scrofula and dropsy to apoplexy and biliousness.

Of all the forgotten remedies and cures peddled by snakeoil manufacturers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a special place in my heart is reserved for Sa-Tan-Ic Tonic, which promised to cure virtually every "stomach, kidney and liver complaint". Of course, since I'm also fascinated by demonology and the bizarre (hence the name of this website), what I really love is the advertising, which featured an enormous devil in his underwear (I think) trampling the earth.




We could spend all day discussing this aspect of Sa-Tan-Ic Tonic alone, since it raises so many questions. This must have seemed like a bold advertising gamble back in the early 20th century, when millions of Americans attended religious revivals and Bible camp meetings and most folks considered themselves good, decent Christians. You might be tempted to think that such an advertising campaign would be a terrible idea... almost as bad as Lady Doritos. But you'd be wrong. The product was a smashing success, and the creators of Sa-Tan-Ic Tonic became quite rich.

The Sa-Tan-Ic Medicine and Manufacturing Company was based out of Wichita, Kansas, and was established in the spring of 1915 by two druggists, W.W. Daniels and B.A. McGaugh. The two men already owned a thriving business, the Gehring Pharmacy, at 104 W. Douglas Ave., but Daniels and McGaugh noticed that there was a need for a product that could clean the bowels gently, unlike the harsh and potentially deadly laxatives of the era.

From this idea Sa-Tan-Ic Tonic was born. Sold under the name Satanic Tonic at first, its inventors had a difficult time keeping it on the shelves of the Gehring Pharmacy. They set up a massive display featuring six hundred bottles and offered a money-back guarantee to any customer who found the product unsatisfactory. The bottles sold quickly, with only one out of six hundred customers asking for a refund.



Demand was so high that Daniels and McGaugh quit their day jobs in order to manufacture their tonic full time. Armed with $50,000 from investors and lenders, the two druggists rented out the Butts Building in downtown Wichita and set up an office and a laboratory. They also hired two full-time salesmen as well as a chemist, W.O. Backman, formerly of the Southwest Drug Company.




But the turning point for the Sa-Tan-Ic Medicine and Manufacturing Company came when they struck up a business relationship with a Wichita printer named W.G. Smith, who was the owner of the Smith-Hobson Printing Company. Smith traded his printing plant to Daniels and McGough for stock in the company, and entered into a contract whereby he would have complete control over the printing of all Sa-Tan-Ic labels and advertising materials. The brand's distinctive packaging was W.G. Smith's brainchild.




Initially, the manufacturer sold just one product, a purifying tonic designed to cure stomach ailments, and this tonic was advertised heavily in Kansas newspapers. The following year, the manufacturer perfected and then trademarked its logo, and from that point on Sa-Tan-Ic became a household name throughout most of the Bible-thumping Midwest. Before long, Sa-Tan-Ic Medicine and Manufacturing Company expanded its offerings to include all sorts of salves and liniments, in addition to the original tonic. By 1919, Sa-Tan-Ic products could be found in most drugstores throughout the Unites States, and a contract with a drug company brought the popular remedy to pharmacies in Mexico.

Although the tonic's ingredient list was a closely-guarded secret, an FDA analysis performed in 1921 concluded that it contained vegetable oil, magnesium sulphate, cascara bark extract, salicylic acid, methyl salicylate, peppermint oil, water and a trace of alcohol.



It seemed that Sa-Tan-Ic was poised to conquer the world, which explains the evolution of the devilish logo. The original logo portrayed the Prince of Darkness as a sort of dapper gentleman. But, as the brand grew, the logo was changed in order to reflect the company's growing dominance in the heavily-saturated patent medicine market. Satan went from a well-dressed chap to something resembling a professional wrestler or bare-knuckled boxer in swimming trunks perched atop the globe. His stance almost suggests that His Unholy Majesty is ready to lunge at you and get you into a full Nelson or a tilt-a-whirl arm drag. Around this time, the phrase "For All the World" appeared in several ads, hinting at the company's global ambitions.




Before long, the Sa-Tan-Ic Medicine and Manufacturing Company had expanded its offerings to include a heavy-duty cleaner for mechanics, miners, painters and other blue-collar workers as well as Sa-Tan-Ic Gas Saver, a fuel additive that promised to give cars more power and speed, and to improve mileage by up to 40%.

As the FDA began cracking down on the manufacturers of patent medicines in the 1920s, business began to decline, but not before Daniels and McGaugh had become multi-millionaires.

As late as 1933, advertisements for the Sa-Tan-Ic Medicine and Manufacturing Company continued to appear in Kansas newspapers, though the brand's glory days were long gone. Today, there are very few alive who can still recall the demonic tonic and its distinctive packaging, though there just might be a bottle of Sa-Tan-Ic gathering dust in your local antique shop.

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Is Belgium the Most Haunted Country on Earth?

February 11, 2018, 10:25 am
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Belgian civilians being executed by Germans during WW1

From the Eighty Years' War of the 16th and 17th centuries to the two World Wars of the 20th century, Belgium's history is stained with blood and conflict. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost on Begium's infamous battlefields throughout the ages; nearly 18,000 Belgian soldiers and civilians were killed during the Rape of Belgium during the German occupation of 1914, while thousands more perished on the Flanders Fields during World War I. Just a few decades later, Nazis would slaughter nearly 25,000 Belgian Jews. Historians estimate that World War II wiped out 1.05% of this European nation's total population.

With so much tragedy and destruction in Belgium's past, it is no surprise that Belgium has long been considered by many paranormal researchers as the most haunted country in the world.

Even before the Second World War, Belgium was known for its many haunted locations. Elliott O'Donnell, the legendary Irish paranormal investigator and author, said in 1915 that "Belgium, for its size, can testify to having seen more homicides, more deeds of cruelty and rapine than any other country in Europe... these include the evil acts of the black era of the Inquisition and many others committed in such secrecy that, were it not for the grim visitants from the other world, they would never be suspected of having taken place."

O'Donnell was in Belgium during the First World War, and spent a great deal of time collecting stories from the men fighting in the trenches. During the Battle of Mons in August of 1914, O'Donnell interviewed British soldiers who had reported seeing the figure of an old woman in a bonnet and bright blue skirt who repeatedly got in their line of fire.

British infantry in the trenches of Flanders


The Bulletproof Farm Woman


"At first we thought she was a Belgian farm woman," said one of the soldiers. "But when she continued to move about under a constant hail of bullets-- some of which must have hit her-- we realized she was nothing human."

The soldiers comments were overheard by a sergeant, who said, "So you see her too, boys? It's my mother, who died twelve years ago, in her eighty-second year. I believe she's come for me."

As soon as the sergeant finished his sentence he was struck and killed by shrapnel. The woman in the blue skirt never appeared again.




Bloody Bruges

Bruges as it looks today


Bruges, the capital city of the province of West Flanders, is considered by many to be the most haunted city in the most haunted country on earth. Paranormal researchers have long noticed a strange trend here; every year, during the second week of September, paranormal and psychic phenomena seem to hit peak levels.

Some have suspected that this annual spookstorm has its roots in the era of the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish occupied Bruges during this time and remnants of old tunnels and underground dungeons can still be seen beneath some of its buildings.

A Grand Inquisitor lived in a former hotel adjacent to the historic Van Schellen Cafe and guests have reported seeing the presence of a thin, swarthy man with a pointed beard and a long, waxed mustache. Several guests have attempted to photograph this strange man, only to discover that he vanishes into thin air before his image can be captured. Others who have stayed at the hotel in the early 20th century report waking up with strange bruises covering their bodies, and are occasionally kept awake by muffled, tortured screams.

Amazingly, in spite of being an important manufacturing and transportation hub, Bruges suffered virtually no damage during World War I. Perhaps the spirit world decided that Bruges had too many ghosts already.




The Rider of Dinant


The ruins of Dinant after WWI


On the River Meuse, approximately ninety kilometers southeast of Brussels, lies the charming and scenic city of Dinant. This area has been occupied since Neolithic times. By the year 870 the town already had a church and its own bishop, Saint Perpete. During the Middle Ages, Dinant was burned to the ground  during Liège Wars, and 800 villagers were drowned in the river. It is also the scene of the Battle of Dinant in 1914, which saw over 5,000 German and French soldiers killed and nearly 700 Belgian civilians massacred.

Of the man ghosts that are said to lurk here, the most famous is the Rider of Dinant. According to legend, the female rider appears in a green riding coat, guiding her white horse on the road from Louvain to Malines. "It is a spot long reputed haunted," stated Elliott O'Donnell in 1915, adding that the phantom has a habit of spooking horses and dogs in the vicinity.

He also related the story of two female artists who were drawn to a pond in the woods by their golden retriever, who had been behaving strangely. The dog directed their attention to a part of the pond, where they saw what looked like a large sack half submerged in the water. The sack was writhing wildly, as if someone was inside of it desperately attempting to get out.

Dinant as it appears today


One of the artists observed a white face scowling at them from behind the trees and this so frightened the women that they took off running. When they reached Dinant they related their experience to the landlady of their hotel.

"Ah, it is a good thing you did not stay longer, or you would have seen something worse," she said. "No one ever goes near that pond after dusk."

The landlady explained that an old house had once stood near the pond. Every one of its owners had died under mysterious circumstances.




The Clock That Strikes Thirteen

St. Rumbold's Cathedral, Mechelen


The city of Malines (also known as Mechelen) was bombed by the Germans on August 30, 1914. Since that time there have been countless reports of a peculiar ghost who is said to peer out of the upstairs window of a house next to the St. Rumbold's Cathedral. It is the ghost of a deformed child. Inhabitants of the house have claimed to have heard the voice of a mother calling out the name "Henry". Stranger still, this disembodied voice always seems to emanate from the chimney. And, every September, those near the house claim to be able to hear a clock striking thirteen.

With so much history and bloodshed packed into its 11,787 square miles, Belgium is a must-see destination for all paranormal enthusiasts. The wandering dead of Belgium have trampled the streets and lingered in belltowers for centuries and, chances are, they will continue to so so for centuries more.
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An unsolved mystery of the Battle of Carthage

February 17, 2018, 12:09 pm
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On July 5, 1861, the Battle of Carthage was fought in Jasper County, Missouri. While this battle is lesser known than Gettysburg or Antietam, it is of considerable historical importance, since it took place the day after President Lincoln invoked the power of war in his message to Congress.
Fought between the Union army and the State Guard of Missouri, the Battle of Carthage also marks the only time in American history that a sitting governor-- Claiborne F. Jackson-- led troops into battle against the United States. Surprisingly, the Missouri State Guard pulled out a victory, in spite of taking heavy casualties.

Over the next two years, several skirmishes would take place near Carthage in the federal government's attempt to prevent Missouri from seceding from the Union. It was one of these forgotten, historically insignificant skirmishes that led to one of the most bewildering mysteries of the Civil War.

Illinois contributed more than 250,000 soldiers to the Union Army during the war. One of these soldiers was a young man by the name of John Burrington, of Company D, 46th Illinois Infantry. How and where he met his demise is a matter of conjecture, because it appears that Private Burrington died twice-- once in training camp in Illinois, and once again on a battlefield in Carthage.

The perplexing mystery didn't come to light until September of 1900 when C.J. Niehardt, a farmer from South Carthage, was plowing his field. After his plow struck a heavy object buried in the earth, Niehardt bent down to investigate. The object his plow had struck was a small gravestone with two strange inscriptions. On one side the inscription read:

John Burrington, Company D, 46th Illinois. 1862.

On the other side of the stone was an inscription reading, "A, B, C, D, E, F, G," along with a carving of a pair of clasped hands below the letters.

The farmer's find created considerable confusion; the only major fighting that had occurred in the vicinity was the first Battle of Carthage on July, 5, 1861, which saw 44 Union troops killed, and the second Battle of Carthage in October of 1863-- a minor confrontation that resulted in zero Union casualties. There was no record of a John Burrington participating in any of these conflicts.
Yet there had been handfuls of minor skirmishes in the time between these two battles. It would appear that Pvt. Burrington was just a young soldier who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a small marker had been erected at the site where he had fallen.

But then a remarkable discovery was made by a Carthage woman. Mrs. E.J. Krieder had not only been born and raised in Illinois, but she also had a brother who had fought in the same infantry regiment. She also had in her possession a roster of the 46th Illinois Infantry, which stated that John Burrington did indeed belong to Company D. But the official roster showed that he died in Amboy, Illinois, on April 2, 1862, and was buried there.

The report of the curious tombstone reached Kansas, where it caught the attention of Col. R. Dornblaser in Fredonia. Col. Dornblaser was the man who had commanded the 46th Illinois regiment during the war, and he wrote a letter back to the newspaper in Missouri that had initially reported the discovery of Burrington's grave:

"John Burrington enlisted in my regiment at Amboy, Illinois, on Nov. 10, 1861, and died at Amboy, June 6, 1862, thus living only eight months after he enlisted. It is to be presumed that, as John Burrington died at Amboy, he was buried there. It is therefore a great mystery, which I would like to have solved, how came the headstone of his grave to be found at Carthage."

The mystery presents several possibilities, none of which have any satisfactory explanation:

1. There could have been two men with same name, one who died on April 2, 1862 and another who died on June 6, 1862. This seems impossible, since both men would have been known to Col. Dornblaser, and both men would have been buried in Amboy, Illinois.

2. Burrington died in Illinois, but his gravemarker was stolen by a person or persons unknown, and taken more than 500 miles away to Carthage, Missouri, for some inexplicable reason.

3. Burrington's initial death in Illinois was misreported, and he was really killed in action in Carthage during a skirmish in 1862. But what are the odds that the soldier's death would be misreported- by army officials nonetheless-- not once, but twice?

4. Burrington died in Illinois in either April or June of 1862 and another soldier, perhaps a fugitive from the law, stole his identity. This "fake" John Burrington was later killed in Carthage and buried on Niehardt's farm.

5. The soldier who died in Carthage was not really John Burrington, but some other member of the 46th Illinois Infantry, and it was a case of mistaken identity.

In all likelihood, the true fate of Private Burrington-- and the true location of his final resting place-- will probably never be known.

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Is the Forrest Fenn treasure a hoax?

February 21, 2018, 4:58 pm
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Four men have lost their lives searching for a fabled treasure that some people claim does not exist, and there is a good chance that the "curse" of Forrest Fenn's treasure will claim additional lives before all is said and done.

Forrest Fenn, an eccentric octogenarian author, decorated Vietnam veteran, and former Santa Fe art dealer who amassed a fortune by selling art forgeries, wrote in his autobiography that a box of gold, jewels and other artifacts worth approximately $2 million is buried somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Fenn also wrote a poem that supposedly contains clues that will lead to the treasure's secret location.

According to a 2016 NPR story, the chest is an "ornate, Romanesque box" that is "10-by-10 inches and weighs about 40 pounds when loaded." Fenn, who allegedly buried the treasure after he was diagnosed with cancer, stated that the cache is "hidden in the Rocky Mountains, somewhere between Santa Fe and the Canadian border at an elevation above 5,000 feet. It's not in a mine, a graveyard or near a structure."

To date, four people are known to have died while seeking Forrest Fenn's treasure. Randy Bilyeu disappeared in January of 2016; his body was found six months later. Paris Wallace, a pastor from Grand Junction, also disappeared after telling his family that he was looking for the treasure. His car was found near the Taos Junction Bridge, while his corpse was found a couple of miles downstream. In July of 2017, Eric Ashby's body was found in the Arkansas River. Jeff Murphy, of Batavia, Illinois, was found dead in Yellowstone National Park on June 9, 2017, after falling 500 feet down a rocky chute.

Bilyeu's ex-wife has gone on record stating that she believes the Fenn Treasure is a hoax. But, as to the accusations of a hoax or a publicity stunt, Fenn replied: "The treasure chest full of gold and jewels was viewed by a hundred or more people before I hid it. There is no hoax."




This statement in itself is perhaps the best argument that Fenn's fabled treasure is indeed a hoax. Think about it-- Fenn says that 100 or so witnesses saw the 10-by-10 "ornate, Romanesque" box. But when? And where? I could show a hundred people a suitcase stuffed with gold bricks in my living room, but that doesn't rule out the possibility of a hoax if I claim that I later buried the suitcase out in the woods. Unless these hundred witnesses saw the treasure being buried, Fenn's denial holds no weight. And if a hundred people knew that a $2 million treasure was going to be buried, you could be sure that at least one of them would have staked themselves out at the 'ol Fenn homestead and tailed the eccentric curmudgeon every time he left his property.

Even if you divulged your plans to 100 of your closest relatives, you can bet that at least 1 of them would try to steal it for themselves, and if human nature has taught me anything, it's that the person who will sell you down the river for a fast buck is the last person you'd expect. In all likelihood, it wouldn't be your shady uncle Guido who once did a turn at the federal pen, it would probably be your sweet cousin Becky who goes to weekly Bible study and who saved her virginity for marriage. It might even be your own son or daughter.

Fenn as an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War


No, Forrest Fenn-- if he is telling the truth-- never would have revealed his plans to anyone in advance, no matter how close.  Therefore, it can be deduced that some houseguests simply saw an ornate 10-by-10 box that was in Fenn's possession, and that, in itself, does not disprove the possibility of a hoax.

A 2013 article from the Daily Mail states:

"Three years ago, he lay two of his most beloved pieces of jewelry in the chest: a turquoise bracelet and a Tairona and Sinu Indian necklace adorned with exotic jewels. At the bottom of the chest, in an olive jar, he placed a detailed autobiography, printed so small a reader will need a magnifying glass."

Yet the very same Daily Mail article claims that Fenn wrote his self-published autobiography, ‘The Thrill of the Chase,’ after he buried the treasure. Which is to be believed? If Fenn didn't write his autobiography until after he already buried the treasure, then how could he stick a copy of it in the treasure chest?

No, there's just too much about Forrest Fenn that seems fishy-- like the fact that Fenn was once the target of a federal investigation.


In 2009, the FBI raided his home as part of the infamous Four Corners antiquities theft probe, but Fenn was never charged with any crime, though the Casper Star-Tribune reported that agents seized part of Fenn's collection.


Sadly, three others swept up in the scandal committed suicide. The Santa Fe New Mexican reported:

Two of the defendants in the Four Corners case, James D. Redd, a 60-year-old physician in Blanding, Utah, and Steven L. Shrader, a 56-year-old salesman in Santa Fe, killed themselves shortly after they were arrested in 2009.

Elmore, who sells Indian art from his gallery on Paseo de Peralta, accuses law enforcement of being nonchalant about their raids.

"They actually took in 80 military-style people and handcuffed [Redd] and told him his life was over, that he was going to lose his practice, going to lose his entire collection," Elmore said. "They act as if no harm was done in these raids, and yet three people are dead.


Nonetheless, Fenn is a self-described "amateur archaeologist" in numerous articles; the 2013 Daily Mail article on Fenn says:

"In the mid-1980s, he bought a ranch near Santa Fe that includes the 57-acre ancient pueblo of San Lazaro, where he has spent years digging up bones, pottery and other artifacts that he keeps in a room off his garage."

Yet the same article also says:

Perhaps the biggest misconception about Fenn - whom some locals refer to as Santa Fe's Indiana Jones - is that he was a treasure hunter himself. ‘Forrest is a trader,’ said Dan Nietzel, a professional treasure hunter who has searched for Fenn's treasure. ‘He traded for these things. I think people think he went around digging all these things up.’

So, which is it? Once again, the Daily Mail contradicts its own reporting. And this appears to be a commonality in most articles written about Fenn and his famous treasure. One can never be sure if Fenn is telling the truth about anything.

To get the straight skinny on Fenn, I turned to the forums on TreasureNet, which is ground zero for serious treasure hunters, gold prospectors and metal detectorists. After perusing the entire 215-page thread exclusively devoted to the Fenn Treasure (which contains numerous posts from personal acquaintences of Fenn as well as posts from scores of professional treasure hunters), here's what caught our attention:


There is something you searchers really need to know about Forrest Fenn, the man is a very charming known for his quick wit and alluring stories, and he is a psychopath. Read the information at my site and you will see that you are dealing with a psychopath. (posted by Thrillist, 9/13/17)

Fenn and his family lied to everyone and are making money off the books and using them to attract other people with money. It's a con game, a game of sheep and wolves. Wolves get recruited and sheep get sheered. All those scam calls from india everyone is getting is thanks to Fenn. That Ringing Bells company was founded after the guy consulted with Forrest Fenn. Think Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. It's about fraud and I say this with 100 percent certainty. His whole family is in on it and has made money from these con games. (Posted by F4Fake, 9/5/17)

It should be noted (t)he People Magazine article linked earlier in this thread doesn't state Fenn is deceiving customers with art forgeries. Everyone that visits his gallery is well aware they are masterpiece reproductions by a famous forger - in fact, that is where the value is. (Posted by Ryano, 8/27/17)

Fine, what I was going to say is that I really think it's about 4 corners and digging up artifacts there. There are a lot of news articles, new and old, that link him to illegal artifact excavation in the area and the last news article related to him before the treasure hunt started was about looting in the 4 corners region and people being arrested for it. Fenn admits to bribing people in his second book to get what he wants so it's possible he would bribe people and have them dig up artifacts there for him. I think even his arrowhead collection he sold around a decade ago for over a million dollars came from there. (Posted by DaSeeker, 8/18/17)

Folks, he is just showing everyone how he made his money selling what he calls junk and his books full of half truths (as I've already proven in previous comments) were used as advertisement for whatever he was selling. This is first hand info straight from the horse's mouth. He got his start from Rex Arrowsmith who showed him tricks of the trade about selling stuff Santa Fe style and he bought Rex's business using his savings and collection of artifacts from the four corners region (see the link below for a source on this). He then sold that particular business to, Nedra Matteucci, one of his understudies. She was his best sales person but she was too pushy and people started figuring it out that he was selling junk. The guy told me to stop looking for it because nobody is ever going to find it and said he never could figure out where to hide it and if you want to get rich then to start your own business and do what he did, fill it with junk, inflate the prices, and write books about it and pretend you're and expert on whatever you are selling then buy up ads and get the media to promote your business for you (like he has done with the treasure hunt). He hinted that he got rich selling fakes to rich people and thought it was funny and I was told a lot of other info I found disturbing. Believe it or not, this is the cold hard truth. I don't lie and could never do what he has done to people. (Posted by Guanaca, 8/21/17)

Yes Forrest Fenn told me and those I was with this info...that's why it's called straight from the horse's mouth. I spent quite a bit of time with him and got to know him quite well after years of searching and corresponding with him. Here is some other stuff I was told. People started figuring out the stuff he was selling was junk and started bringing it back. He said he figured everyone needed an alabai no matter the line of work, his was always "I didn't know, I just believed them" then he said he was a rake and defined it as not quite a scoundrel. "It's not who you are, it's who they think you are" is a direct quote from him. He said they have to be able to prove it is junk. He said he wrote the books to make money and always used them as a form of advertisement and implied he never had cancer and the treasure hunt was also a ploy to get law enforcement to leave him alone and get revenge on the feds at the same time and a way of confessing and finding people he wanted to share his secret to making money with. (Posted by Guanaca, 8/23/17)

Fenn has been trying to get people to search in Yellowstone and has told people in emails that when he was younger they would all feed the bears and they are harmless and said they'd bathe in the river and some of the pools which sounds crazy because the water temps are hot enough to kill people and they are very acidic. There is that Death in Yellowstone book written in the 1990s so maybe that was his plan, lure people in the backcountry to tragedy. News articles say he had been emailing Eric Ashby before his death too so I wonder what kind of stuff he was coaxing Ashby into doing. I don't think he cares at all about the people that have died looking for it which seems strange. If he has been emailing Ashby you'd think he'd care about what happened to him if he were a normal person. Maybe there is a sinister motive here. (Posted by DaSeeker, 8/14/17)

I even met him when he signed my books in Santa Fe. Take a tip from one of the other people here and research the Dude and Roundup Motels in West Yellowstone. As far as I can tell the guy never owned them as claimed in Too Far to Walk, there is no room number 4, the sign doesn't spin as claimed, and it is not a 16 room motel as claimed in the online version of this story at bozemandailychronicle.com and it wasn't built in 1962 as he claimed, is was built in 1977 by a guy named Roger Beattie. (Posted by Guanaca, 8/13/17)


While it is still too early to formally debunk the existence of the Fenn Treasure, it seems there is ample evidence to call Fenn's credibility and character into question. After all, this is a man who made his millions by selling art forgeries and writing books chock full of factually inaccurate information and misleading claims. This is a man whose property was seized in a federal antiquities theft sting, and a man who, by some accounts, obtained his artifacts by essentially robbing graves.

Ultimately, those who invest their time and money into searching for the Fenn Treasure do so voluntarily, knowing full well the risks and dangers involved. But while hundreds of treasure hunters have sunk thousands of dollars into the pursuit of buried gold and jewels, Forrest Fenn is the only one who is laughing all the way to the bank.



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The Mystery Storm at Mobile's Old Catholic Cemetery

February 23, 2018, 9:02 pm
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For five days in 1870 rain fell continuously on the graves of the Lemoine family

The Old Catholic Cemetery in Mobile


One of the strangest meteorological mysteries in history took place in Mobile, Alabama, in 1870 at the Catholic Cemetery above Three-Mile Creek. Several witnesses, including the cemetery groundskeeper, claim that a gentle but steady rain fell continuously for five days over the cemetery.
Stranger still, the downpour was confined to just one particular area of the graveyard-- the Lemoine family plot.



It was October 29 when the rain began to fall, according to cemetery groundskeeper John Rosset. Rosset, who first noticed the strange phenomenon, brought it to the attention Louis B. Lemoine, whose father, Victor, had been laid to rest in the family plot in 1851.

One of many historic graves at the cemetery


On the evening of November 2, Louis drove out to the cemetery to witness the strange storm with his own eyes. He gave the following account to the Mobile Register:

"I drove out there last evening to satisfy myself, and, to my intense astonishment, I saw that a column of rain was coming down without ceasing, which although hardly powerful enough to lay the dust was enough to wet the hands or any article, and at times rained quite hard.

"The volume of rain fell inside of the enclosure and nowhere else, as the weather was and has been bright and clear all the time during the five days the rain has been falling on these graves. There are thirteen of my family buried in the lot upon which it has been raining.

"My mother, brother, and sister visited the spot yesterday and the day before to satisfy themselves about this matter, and declare that they too saw this wonderful phenomenon."


A family plot at the Catholic Cemetery in Mobile


During the course of this mysterious storm, over 200 residents of Mobile traveled to the cemetery to witness the event, many of whom were convinced that some sort of divine hand was responsible. Others of a less superstitious bent insisted that there had to be a perfectly logical scientific explanation for the phenomenon-- though nobody has ever been able to figure out what that explanation might be.
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Strange Medicine: The man with the leg of a chicken

February 27, 2018, 9:45 am
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Today, bone grafting is a common medical procedure that is performed every day in hospitals around the world. But long before doctors knew about things such as osteoconduction and synthetic bio-active materials like hydroxyapatite, the science of grafting bone was largely a matter of trial and error, often culminating in strange experiments that sound like something out of a gothic novel by Mary Shelley.

One truly strange medical experiment took place at the Wabash Railroad Company Hospital in Springfield, Illinois, in 1890 and was performed on a patient named John Dougherty.

John Dougherty was employed as a laborer in the Chicago railroad yards. On June 14, 1890, he was moving a pile of lumber when he tore off the skin from his left shinbone. The wound never healed; for several months Dougherty walked around with his shinbone exposed.

Unfortunately, the sore began to spread until it covered most of his left shin. After being examined by surgeons, it was concluded that "bone rot" had set in and that the only way to save Dougherty's leg was to remove the decayed portion of bone. This was done by chiseling it out. Though records fail to state whether ether, chloroform, or other primitive painkillers of the era had been used, this must have been an incredibly unpleasant procedure any way you look at it (as anyone who has ever banged their shin again a coffee table in the middle of the night can attest). The operation was deemed a success and Dougherty was sent home to recover.

However, it soon became evident that something had to be substituted to take the place of the missing bone. Surgeons had an idea-- why not use bone from a live chicken?

Wabash Railroad Hospital, Springfield, Illinois


A chicken was chloroformed and one of its legs was amputated. After removing and splitting the bone from the leg of the chicken, the raw edge was applied to the living bone in Dougherty's shin. Of course, being that chickens have smaller legs than humans, the procedure had to be repeated several times. According to the New York Times, four chickens were used in order to fill in Dougherty's missing shinbone.

In about four months Dougherty was able to walk without the help of a crutch or a cane, and in the spring of 1891 he returned to work on the Wabash Railroad.
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The Mystery of Aaron Burr's Grave

March 23, 2018, 7:25 pm
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Aaron Burr, one of the most infamous political figures in American history, is best remembered not for serving as Vice President under Thomas Jefferson, but for shooting political rival Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804.

Although the duel was illegal, Burr never faced trial for killing Hamilton (all charges against him were dropped). Nonetheless, the duel put an end to Burr's political career and controversy followed him everywhere he went for the rest of his life. Three years after the duel Burr was arrested for treason, and he was accused of conspiring with General James Wilkinson and other military leaders to establish an independent country carved out of parts of Texas and Mexico.

Burr was eventually acquitted of these charges, but his reputation never recovered. He lost his fortune in a series of bad business deals and was so broke that he fled to Europe in order to escape from his creditors. From 1808 to 1812 Burr lived in exile in England, until the British Empire forced him to leave. He attempted to go to France, but Napoleon Bonaparte turned him away. Disgraced, he returned to New York, but he was so reviled by the American public that he had to resort to using a fake last name.

Aaron Burr


In 1833, the 77-year-old former Vice President married a wealthy widow named Eliza Jumel. They lived together at the lavish Morris-Jumel Mansion in Manhattan, but the relationship soured when it became clear to Eliza that Burr was squandering her fortune on bad land speculation deals. Even worse, Burr's numerous enemies were spreading nasty rumors about Eliza; some newspapers claimed that Eliza had been a child prostitute, while others claimed that she had actually poisoned her first husband, wealthy merchant Stephen Jumel. After four months of marriage, Eliza Jumel and Aaron Burr separated (Eliza, perhaps out of spite, hired Alexander Hamilton's son to be her divorce lawyer).
Sadly, the nasty rumors followed Eliza for the remainder of her life, and she eventually went mad. She died in 1895 at the age of 90.

Eliza Jumel


As for Burr, he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1834 which left him partially paralyzed. Having lost all his friends, money and influence, he died a pauper in a filthy boardinghouse in the Staten Island village of Port Richmond on September 14, 1836. Coincidentally, it was also the very same day that his divorce from Eliza was finalized.

And this brings us to the point of the story-- the mystery of Aaron Burr's grave.

Burr was buried alongside his father at Princeton Cemetery in a grave that remained unmarked for more than two years. During that time occasional efforts were made to erect a suitable monument to mark Burr's final resting place, but these efforts invariably met with failure.

But then, one day, a gravemarker suddenly marked Burr's final resting place. It was a small yet expensive monument of New England granite and Italian marble. But who put it there has been a mystery that has evaded explanation for 180 years.

James Parton


Burr historian James Parton (1822-1891), the leading biographer of his day, wrote in 1857:

"No one in the house saw the monument erected or knew or knows anthing whatever respecting it. Nor was there any stonecutter in the vicinity competent to execute such a piece of work. No relative of Aaron Burr nor any of my numerous informants explains the mystery. The person who did the pious deed is known, however, and lives. Need I say that to woman's hand Burr owes the stone that commemorates his name?"

While Parton's words seem to hint that Eliza Jumel may have been the person who paid for Burr's tombstone, other historians refute this theory. The common consensus among modern-day historians is that the marker was paid for by one of Burr's relatives, Jonathan Edwards. But, if this was the case, why did he wait more than two years to do it? Contemporary records also indicate that the once-prosperous Edwards family was, at the time of Burr's death, in "reduced circumstances". In all likelihood, it seems unlikely that the Edwards family had the funds to purchase a slab of Italian marble and have it engraved (my own research has turned up no written mention of Edwards purchasing the monument prior to Parton's 1857 biography, Life and Times of Aaron Burr).

Today, there are proponents of both theories, but no evidence has ever been found to settle the matter conclusively.
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