i 4- )

STRANGE AND ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA.

- - ANOMALISTICS —

A New Horizons Monograph.

Copyright,New Horizons Research Foundation January 1985. IND5X. 1. Introduction to subject matter. 2. Strange Falls from the Sky. 3. Animals in Unexpected Places. 4. Legendary, unknown or extinct animals. 5. Spontaneous Human Combustion. 6. Strange Disappearances. 7. Apportations and Teleportations. 8. Legends and Mysteries. Rumour. Modern Urban Legends,

9. Conclusions.

mi m INTRODUCTION. The material in this monograph was the subject matter of a Conference held at the New Horizons Research Foundation on the 23rd February 1985• We have long been interested in the study of the strange phenomena that we have in the past tt called Fortean, but are now often referred to as^Anomalistics. Anomalistics may be defined as the serious and systematic study of all phenomena that fail to fit the picture of reality provided for us by common sense or by the established sciences.

The first investigator in this field of anomalistic study with a clear concept of what he was at was an American, Charles Hoy Fort. He was the first person to make a collection of stories about mysterious lights, strange falls from the sky, baffling, mysterious and anomalous events. He was certainly in the forefront of collecting UFO-type stories with his tales of mysterious airships in the skies, and he even found stories of cattle mutilations. Later, another American journalist, Robert L. Ripley of "Believe it or Not" fame did much to popularize the subject, while Ivan Sanderson, a Scottish American biologist, who founded the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, in Columbia, New Jersey, was the pioneer of investigative field work in these areas. And of recent years William Corliss, who publishes the Source Book Project, has been prominent in the field of both collecting and investigating unusual stories. We are indebted to all of these people for much of the material that appears in this monograph. Charles Fort was a Post Office supervisor who lived from 1874 - 1932. He is described as an "iconoclast, mystic and trickster, who mounted a single-handed onslaught on the accumulated lunacies of orthodox science by collecting data on baffling, mysterious and anomalous events". . He wrote four well-known books. The Book of the Damned, (1919)New Lands, (1923)7 Lo, (1931)7 and Wild Talents, (1932). These were all republished in 1941. Fort had a delightful sense of humour, and he often put forward humorous solutions to some of the phenomena he reported. He was the arch-enemy of DOGMA - not Science - as has so often been alleged. He was always maintaining that one should accept any explanation temporarily only, and one must be ready to change one's mind when the evidence pointed in a different direction. His intention was to make his readers think, without telling them what to think.

He collected a great number of stories that were of individual events, occurring only once, unique, strange, baffling. But he also collected a lot of stories that have a pattern, they occur regularly, in different countries of the world, and over long periods of time, and these are reported by many people. These are what we regard as"Classic Forteanwphenomena and they comprise many of the subjects in this monograph. Charles Fort also reported many poltergeist-type happenings which were just as incredible and unacceptable as many of the rest of his stories at the time, but today are acceptable and believable. 2

There are a set of rules for followers of Charles Fort to observe. m 1. Don't assume that the experts are never wrong. They are human and make Mistakes too. And experts out of their fields are amateurs. mi 2. Don't believe every story you hear. mi 3. Don't get emotionally involved in proving or disproving a case. Some people get emotionally involved and begin to care more about saving face than gg^ f 3 C "t S # 4. Don't hestitate to criticize a finding. There's a difference between one who doubts and one ^ who denies. 5. Don't knowingly perpetuate errors. The worst thing m you can do is knowingly pass on errors. There are genuine mysteries that may have quite ordinary solutions. ^ Fort's work was continued in England after his death by a group of people called the Fortean Society, which publishes a journal The Fortean Times, and in the U.S. by the International Fortean Organization, which publishes a journal under the name of INFO. mi These organizations are affiliated and work together in co-operation. Membership is reasonable, the objective being that all members y are contributors of any strange reports that may emanate in their own area, so there is a large world-wide network of reporters for the two journals. In earlier days there was little co-ordination or investigation; the societies saw themselves as purely reporting bodies, but of recent years a lot of effort has been made to co-ordinate, collate, follow-up and investigate reports. This has resulted in some very fine investigations having been carried out,and the results of some of them are discussed in the following papers. There is an overlap of interest, and similarity between, the types of phenomena we would list as parapsychological, and of UFO investigation, and it is important and instructive to be aware of what is happening in all these fields. We live in a world where strange and bizarre occurrences are constantly being reported. In these areas, as well as in the fields of parapsychological and UFO reports, many of these accounts are accepted, often totally uncritically, by a large proportion of the population, and it is a fascinating exercise to try and ascertain the truth of these stories.

In investigating reports of strange and anomalous events there are three strands of interest to be pursued. First of all did the event actually happen in the way it has been reported to occur? To sort out fact from fiction is in itself a fascinating study. If the accounts are not factual, it is a further exercise in investigation to ascertain how these reports continue to circulate throughout large areas of the world, and to be believed, in some cases where the real truth of the event is already known. Finally, why do people believe these stories if they are not true? There is no doubt that the study of such phenomena sheds a great deal of light on human psychology in general. Of recent years we have also become interested in the field of folklore. Professor Brunvald, Professor of Folklore at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, has made an extensive study of this subject, and again it is intriguing to find among his collection of folklore legends some stories that have been regarded as belonging iha the sphere of interest of parapsychology, in particular,the story of the "Vanishing Hitchhiker" which has long been regarded as a ghost story. Brunvand has not only done extensive research on many of these legends, tracing many of them a long way back into their history, but his writings also contain theories as to the reasons why these stories are so popular. He points out that most of these modern urban legends have roots in the collective unconscious fears and uneasinesses of the population, especially fears of dealing with new and modern technologies and experiences.

It has been a fascinating exercise to try and place these anomalous events in their proper category as far as possible, in the light of our present knowledge.

There are many other anomalous phenomena that we have not included in this series. There are many natural phenomena that we would like to research further in the future, such as the homing instincts of animals, birds, and insects. We would also at some time like to write further on various dangerous places in the world, such as the Bermuda Triangle, the Bridgewater Triangle, and similar places, but these do not belong strictly under the heading of Fortean phenomena, and will wait a future treatment. But the papers that follow come under the heading of Classic Fortean phenomena, and have puzzled many people in many countries over a long period of years. STRANGE FALLS FROM THE SKY.

From time immemorial there have been reports of strange and unusual things falling from the sky. Explanations have been advanced for many of these phenomena, but there are equally many reports for which no obvious or logical explanation has been found. Sometimes, at a later date, a possible hypothesis can be advanced, but not proven; for instance, it is now believed that the manna which fell from heaven to feed the Israelites, on their journey through the wilderness, was from a special kind of lichen that grew in the area, and was caught up in a wind and deposited on the Israelites during the course of a rainstorm.

The most frequently reported phenomenon is coloured rain or snow, and the most common colour is red - resembling blood. Three cases of red rain were reported as long ago as 214 B.C. when "a shower of blood fell in the Istriam Street"; in 181 B.C. a shower of blood in the temple courtyards, and in I69 B.C. a shower of blood fell on Rome at mid-day. These were reported by the historian Livy. In 766 A.D. in England "it rained bloud 3 dayes" followed by a plague of venomous flies (Stow's Annales of England, London, 1592). In China we read of a shower of spots of blood like raindrops all over courtyards, field stones and rooftops. This was dark red and remained for several days through several rains which did not wash it away. But as well as red rain (and sometimes snow), there have been reports of black, brown, green, blue and yellow rain, also dating back through the ages.

Possible explanations for these coloured precipitations range from the suggestion that the rain has been mixed with dust caught up from deserts (the Sahara is a favourite location) and then carried in a windstream, only to be disgorged over an unsuspecting population some hundreds of miles away, to the possibility that the colour is due to exudation from insects — butterflies, bees and so on. Suggestions have been made that the black falls are due to soot, blue ones from iron oxide in soil gathered up like the desert sand, etc. These explanations, however, do not always have much relationship to the incident itself. For instance, they do not explain why the falls can be so very localised} as Livy reported it rained on Istriam Street -- one street only. Nor do they account for the fact that in some of these falls, even after several subsequent days of rain, the colour remains. One would expect dust, for instance, to wash away.

Coloured rain, of almost every hue, along with coloured snow, continues to fall around the whole world in a fairly steady stream, and various explanations are advanced. But whether it be sand from the Sahara, powder from butterflies' wings, pollen, algae, iron oxide, bees'excrement, to name a few of the hypotheses, it is seldom that any proven explanation is found. But it is not only rain in various hues that falls from the sky. The world has been subjected to falls of a much more startling nature, and objects much more solid and bizarre than pretty rain have fallen from the skies. Again these reports emanate from all corners of the world, and have been reported over many centuries. A commonly reported fall is that of swarms of frogs or small fishes. There are many many reports of these creatures falling from the skies on to the heads of hapless and unsuspecting victims. These usually occur during rainstorms, sometimes, but not necessarily, heavy storms, and the explanation generally put forward is that the creatures have been swept up from local ponds or rivers in a kind of miniature whirlwind and deposited some miles away in a subsequent shower. This explanation calls for acceptance of the fact that the frogs are all kept together in the whirlwind and deposited en masse, because, like the rain, their arrival is usually confined to a very restricted area. The frogs and fish usually arrive apparently unharmed and are not put out by the experience. An early report of frogs falling from the sky is recorded in 1683. when one John Collinges wrote to Sir Henry Hobart,"The other piece (of news) is more strange, brought by one Gargrave, a good sober fellow that collects the hearth money. Being last week at Acle, the innkeeper told him the night before most of their houses were filled with great toades, so he gathered them up with shovels and threw them into the fire for the stench he could hardly abide in the house, the rest he threw into a yard. Next morning they were all gone. They talk how that they came down in a shower".

Perhaps frogs and fishes falling from the sky can be explained by th theory that they have been sucked up from a neighbouring pond or stream by a whirlwind, and then dropped some distance away, but what about many of the other strange objects that have been reported as dropping from the sky? There have been some interesting and perhaps amusing, reports of all kinds of vegetables falling from the sky. In April 1980 in the tiny hamlet of Dan-y-Bryn in Glamorgan, Mr. Trevor 'Williams was in his garden when he heard what he thought was a rain storm starting, but the sound was unusual1. He says "I couldn't believe my eyes — I expected hailstones, but there were peas everywhere. They were bouncing off the greenhouse and house roof in their thousands. The storm lasted several minutes and I was able to collect several jam-jars full". The local meteorological Office was contacted and the spokesman explained* author t'tively, that such events are the products of mini-whirlwinds which had lifted and carried the peas less than ten miles. The question remains unanswered as to who dries peas in heaps outdoors, and Mr. Williams says there was no one in the vicinity who was a market garden or pea stockist. Again there is the problem as to how the peas remained together in the whirlwind, and were deposited, as mentioned previously, in a small well-defined area. Also, a further puzzle, the peas were dried peas, and despite apparently being carried over some miles by moisture laden winds, were still completely dried when dumped. A further common type of fall is that of stones, or rocks; there are many many reports of this phenomenon, and indeed we had one such experience here in Canada at New Horizons headquarters. One Saturday morning in 5pring about ten years ago there was a short sharp rainshower, and afterwards it was noticed that there were a number of quite large stones that had been deposited on one side of the roadway just in front of the house and extending for about one hundred feet. The obvious explanation, of course, would seem that they had fallen from a truck, but a number of the stones were obviously not on the sidewalk, but on the front lawn as welll. The lawn had been freshly mown and the stones were very obvious. What is more, the lawn is some five or six feet higher than the road; there are ten steps up to the front door of the house and the lawn is level with the front door. The stones would have had to be elevated some five or six feet, and travel laterally some ten to twelve feet to reach the position in which they were found. Add to this the fact that this is a residential area in which trucks are not allowed except on business in the district, and that it was a Saturday morning when few trucks are moving, and the hypothesis that the stones fell from a truck is rather weak. We have several pictures of the shower. The stones were of varying shapes and sizes, some quite large, and they appeared to be granite of some sort — it was suggested they may have been 'lifted* from a stonemason's yard. This is a very typical example of the many reports of falls of stones that we find in the literature.

Many other objects have been reported as falling unexpectedly from the skies — commonly blocks of ice, often attributed to the cooling systems of airplanes, but these blocks have been falling long before airplanes were invented. Perhaps these do not arouse quite so much interest because we are familiar with hail, and people rationalise that these blocks may be large 'hailstones', but a hailstone weighing about half a ton, that fell in 1849 at Ord in Scotland, can have been no joke. More common are reports of chunks of ice weighing between two and three pounds — quite enough to cause serious injury or even death If they happen to land on someone's head at the speed at which they usually travel. Meteorologists have associated some of these falls with wind-shear conditions, and they certainly seem to be associated with abnormal weather patterns.

Some other more amusing falls are individualistic in nature; that is, they are reported only the once, and some of these may belong in the joke or hoax category. A portion of grilled halibut falling from the sky seems an extension of a reported fish fall, a fall of mashed potato may have had its origins, literally, in a faulty vent in a potato processing factory, the po^tato being whisked up in the air by the wind and deposited some distance away. A flock of Canada geese robbing a carrot field were alleged to be the culprits responsible for a fall of carrots, and later, in the same area, a fall of dead Canada geese was said to be due to the geese having been feeding on poisoned grain. Cooked food is often reported as falling from the sky, and since this is sometimes in the path of airplane flights It is often attributed to a custom of the flight crews of flinging unwanted food from the aircraft prior to landing. This is a heinous practice which should be stopped if true? but is it true? Who knows? Nobody to our knowledge has questioned aircraft crews to see if they do indeed indulge in this practice.

Very recently a farmer in Wales awoke one morning to find his fields strewn with hundreds of pieces of honeycombed metal, covering an area the size of three football pitches. Huge twisted alloy plates, painted green on one side and gray on the other, lay everywhere. Branches had been sheared off the trees, indicating "that the material had descended from the skies. Police and R.A.F.officers arrived to investigate the scene, and took away metal for analysis. There was an aerial and a chunk of metal with a serial number on it. But after two weeks investigation everyone is baffled. Nobody heard a sound that night such as would indicate the fall of such a large object. There was no plane? nothing showed up on the R.A.F. scanners. It was not part of a weather balloon, the experts said; neither was it part of a satellite because the remains would have shown some charring on re-entry into the earth's orbit, and the metal was unburnt. So far the mystery remains.

Thus we are left with our curiosity unsatisfied. In all these reported falls there are some coherent features that are common to all — the falls generally occur over a limited area — often well delineated, as the shower of blood in one Roman Street. They are almost always, when they have been observed, associated with rainstorm conditions. The general explanation given, and usually accepted, is that the matter that has fallen has been picked up by a mini-whirlwind, carried in the upper atmosphere for a distance, sometimes many miles, and then deposited when, presumably, the whirlwind has run out of power.

But this hypothesis leaves many questions still unanswered -- If these reported falls are so common, as indeed they are, why are there no reports of people seeing the objects being whirled up into the atmosphere? We have never found a single reference to this — nobody to our knowledge has reported, for instance, seeing a whole pond and its contents sucked up into the air and whirled away — ani yet for the large number of frogs and small fishes that descend later, large areas of shallow ponds have to be sucked dry. Frogs live in shallow water and q,uite large areas of pond would have to be robbed. Or should we believe that the whirlwind goes along picking up frogs here, and fishes there, gathering up from different places until it has a load, so to speak?

It is also hard to understand how all these objects, frogs, stones, peas, whatever, keep together in a whirlwind for such long distances. The forces involved must be very great; one can understand light objects, such as leaves, hay, pollen, et<. (also commonly reported) being held together, but several tons of stonesl Why do we never see these whirlwinds operating in other ways? The phenomenon may be a natural one, as opposed to supernatural, but it is certainly a strange and anomalous happening. STRANGE ANIMALS. Among the reports of Fortean phenomena that come in some of the more intriguing are the accounts of animal sightings. These fall roughly into two categories. There are reports of ordinary kinds of animals, but seen in places where they are most unlikely to be found normally, and then there are reports of as yet unknown types of animals, such as sea-serpents, lake monsters, and the like. We will deal with these in two separate sections. In this paper we will talk about the various kinds of animals that are reported outside of their usual environment. It is remarkable how frequently wild animals are reported as having been seen in totally unlikely places! A typical account follows. Two milkmen were delivering milk one morning just a few years ago in Nottingham, England. They were delivering to a bungalow just opposite to the entrance of Nottingham airport, a busy suburban district. At a distance of between fifteen and fifty yards away from them they suddenly saw a lion. It had its head down, they said, and its long tail had a bushy end. It was walking slowly away from them. They watched it walk around the edge of a field, and then called the police from the house where they were delivering the milk. The police mounted a huge search with dogs, guns, loud hailers, and a helicopter, but to no avail. The lion was not found, nor were its origins ascertained. No lion was missing from zoo, circus, or private collection, and lions are certainly not indigenous to England. During the next eight days some sixty-five sightings were reported, a fair number of which the police took seriously. However, the lion was never found; neither was there found any trace of where it might have been. Lions are meat-eaters, and one would expect the loss of pets to be reported, or the remains of eaten wild animals to be found, or maybe even droppings. But it remained a mystery.

Black cats, panthers, and pumas seem to abound in Britain, according to the reported sightings, which are too numerous to report in detail. The witnesses are always certain that what they saw was the animal they describe, and not some household pet. Some of these creatures have been sighted by people familiar with the animal in its own country, as witness a Mr. Perryman who saw a cheetah run across the road in front of his car, and recognized it, because he had had the experience of cheetahs running across the road in South Africa, and he knew the animal. Leopards have been reported on Dartmoor, panthers in Surrey, as also pumas, and a hyena in Sussex, England. Lest the reader think that wild animals only abound in England, panthers have been reported in large numbers in Australia. This is interesting indeed, as zoology experts state quite categorically that there are no "big cats" such as panthers or pumas native to the Australian bush, and every schoolchild knows that the Australian wildlife animals are marsupials. There are so many reports of these large cats in Australia that one is forced either to reject them altogether, ignoring the fact that many of them have been made by police officers and even members of parliament, or we accept the fact that there are several species or large felines roaming the Australian bush. Kangaroos and wallabies are other species that are apparently roaming unfamiliar environments. Kangaroos have been reported in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. As have also panthers. Panthers, presumably could survive in the Canadian winter, if they could find sufficient food, but a kangaroo just isn't fitted for our cold climate. So when the first kangaroo was seen it was presumed that it had been a ship's pet that had escaped at the pulp mill. It would either be caught when it came closer to homes looking for food, or would perish in the harsh winter. But it was not caught, and neither, apparently, did it perish. There have been several sightings of the kangaroo in Fredericton, and it would appear that it not only survived, but must have produced progeny! Kangaroos are seen regularly in Chicago, and in many other areas of Illinois; in fact they have been sighted since at least the turn of the century. Interestingly enough, although there are so many reported sightings, nobody seems to have caught one, or found a dead body, or any tangible evidence of their reality.

So what are we to make of these sightings? Do we take them at their face value and believe that there are large numbers of wild animals wandering around different places of the world, and far from what is regarded as their normal homes? Or is there another explanation? There may be some other possibilities. Our experience in the fields of parapsychological research and UFO investigation lead us to believe that many completely normal people from time to time, and especially if they are under any degree of emotional stress, can experience hallucinations. An hallucination of this type need not necessarily be a totally new vision, it could be that the person is looking at an ordinary cat, for instance, and in a moment of emotion sees it as a tiger, or panther. We would" emphasise that this is only a hypothesis, but this kind of hallucination is much more common than most people realize, and while it is happening it is a totally real experience for the person concerned.

Some of the stories undoubtedly belong in the realm of rumours* they are passed on from person to person? they grow in the telling, and they gain credibility. A story that started as someone seeing a "large brown animal" (which could have been a natural inhabitant of the area) will end up in a completely different form after many repetitions, and may well become a lion I There is one type of animal that is frequently sighted which is difficult to classify. We refer to the numerous reported sightings of a large black dog, often of very frightening appearance, with large red eyes, and slavering jaws. Dogs are indigenous to most areas, and so the sighting of a dog in any part of the world cannot be regarded as an unusual sight. But these are a special kind of dog, very large, very fierce, and apparently completely wild, as the person who sees them never comes close to them. Folklore contains many references to these beasts, and they seem to belong in the realms of legend rather than reality. In the eastern areas of England the creature is referred to as Black Shuck. (Shuck comes from scucca, the Anglo-Saxon for demon). It is particularly feared in Norfolk where to see the creature is to die. In Essex, however, he is more friendly, protecting travellers on their way. In the Channel Islands, on Guernsey, he was called"Tchi-coV and his howls presaged death, whereas on Jersey the appearance of'Le Tchan de Bouley"(Dog of Bouley) warned of an approaching storm. Devon was a popular haunt of the black dog, and they were Often to be seen around the lanes, gates and bridges of that county. Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles was based on the legend of the^Biack Dog of Dartmoor',' and one patrols a beat from Copplestone Cross to Downe St. Mary. There is even a hamlet called Black Dog in the same neighbourhood.

In Wales he is the Dog of Darkness, the Gwyllgi. 'This is a frightful apparition of a mastiff, with baleful breath and blazing red eyes which shine like fire in the night."

Other parts of the country have legends of the black dog —"Mauthe(| Dog*in the Isle of Man, the"Barguest"in Yorkshire, the"Trash-hound' in Lancashire, and the"Pooka"in Ireland. There is an old engraving of Cardinal Croenentius being faced by a large fierce dog with glowing eyest and to go right back to the fairy tale aspect, what about the Hans Anderson fairy tale of the soldier seeking treasure underground which is guarded by three huge dogs, one with eyes as big as saucers, one with eyes as big as a millwheel, and the third with eyes as big as the Round Tower of Copenhagen? Did Anderson base his tale on the stories he had heard of Black Dogs?

Black Dogs feature in visionary and poltergeist situations. A famous example is that of Padre Pio, who died in the late I960's, and who« biography has been published as part of the effort to have him canonized. In this biography it is related how, in the early days of his ministry, he was plagued with poltergeist type events in his cell, and how one night when gazing out through the windows of his cell he was confronted with the image of a fierce black dog with blazing red eyes, very like the one mentioned above as being seen by Cardinal Croenentius. So it would seem that many of the reported sightings of black dogs can be classified as either legendary, or hallucinatory: LEGENDARY ANIMALS.

In the previous section we talked about normal animals seen in unusual environments, and then discussed the reported sightings of black dogs, which although apparently normal animals in their usual type settings, were probably hallucinatory or legendary. There is another type of animal sighting that is regularly reported which at present is classed as legendary, or hallucinatory, but in which the animals supposedly seen ma/represent unknown or extinct species. refer to the frequently reported sightings of creatures seen in bodies of water and described as lake monsters, sea serpents, and so on, of which the most famous is"NessieV the Loch Ness Monster. Also in this category belong the sightings and traces of unknown hominoid species, familiarly known as "BigfootV "Yeti," or ISusquatch" As indicated, one group of creatures inhabits water,mostly in deep lakesr whereas the land creatures are seen in wild and uninhabited country in various parts of the world.

Controversy has raged for some time as to the reality of these various sightings, and many expeditions have been mounted to obtain further hard evidence as to the existence of these creatures,* so far without success. Perhaps the most famous of these creatures is Nessie, the "Loch Ness Monster.11 As almost everyone knows, Nessie is a lake monster alleged to be living in the waters of Loch Ness in Scotland. Loch Ness is a large, narrow, very deep freshwater lake, whose waters are cold throughout the year. It is far away from normal habitation. For many many years it has been reported that in the deep dark waters of this lake lives a large serpent-like creature. It has been sighted many times over a number of years, and in 193^- a London surgeon, R.K. Wilson, was fortunate enough to obtain a photograph of what he alleged was the monster. The picture shows a creature with a long body, and a long neck protruding from the water, with a small head on top. The picture created an enormous amount of interest, and also controversy, and of course the usual allegations that it must have been faked. Since that time Loch Ness has become quite a summer tourist attraction, many people visting the area in the hope of spotting the monster. Naturally the number of reported sightings has increased, but no one has yet succeeded in taking a better pi^cture, although a few photos have been taken at distant ranges of what could be some form of sea serpent, but they are ambiguous. Special expeditions have been mounted, in an effort to locate the creature, and submarines have been used especially equipped with sonic apparatus, all to no effect.

But Nessie is far from being the only lake monster reported. In fact it seems that almost every lake has its monster legend, and attached to this paper is a listing of 265 lake monsters which have been reported from around the world.

As well as in lakes, monsters and serpents have been reported as inhabiting the seas and oceans of the world. There are storie of a giant octopus, the "kraken",, going back to the early part of the sixteenth century. For some time after the early descriptions of these giant creatures, their existence was denied, until many years later some of the huge carcasses of the creatures were found washed up on shore, and now zoologist admit to their existence. Their bodies weigh a ton or more? their tentacles are of a length greatly surpassing twenty feetT a: they possess staring eyes ten inches in diameter. Their colour ranges from dark green to brick red. They are found in many places in the oceans of the world from the Atlantic to the Arctic, and ranging from the North Sea to the northern coast of Australia. What we do not know at this time is whether they are special varieties of giant octopus, or just incredibly old specimens of known varieties. There are a lot of questions still to be answered about the giant octopi.

There are many reports of sea serpents sighted in the seas around our coasts, and further afield. These serpents appear to be somewhat similar to the stories and pictures of the lake serpents, and perhaps they are of similar species - if they truly exist. Some of the early stories were told by Norse fishermen who said that the m onster stuck its small head and long neck out of the waters of the fiords as an omen of tragic news to follow. Today there are many reputable zoologists and scientists who are prepared to be openminded about the possibility that large animal species may yet exist in the oceans of our planet. This unknown and undiscovered animal, although living in the sea, may be mammalian in nature.

One of the first professional zoologists who had the courage to come out openly and say,"Yes, I believe that there is a large undiscovered animal in the seas, and here are reasons for my

belief"t was Professor A.C. Oudemans, director of a zoological park in Holland and member of the Royal Dutch Zoological Society. In 1892 he published a large-sized book of 592 closely printed pages called The Great Sea Serpent. This book contains two hundred reports of encounters with, or observations of, this unknown animal. It is doubtless true that some of these reports are erroneous interpretations of fact, and some are even deliberate hoaxes, but it is equally true that at least half of them are sincere and trustworthy reports of observations made by men who grew up on or near the sea, and even in bad weather knew the difference between a shark, seal, a whale and something else.

In 19^7, the Santa Clara, a Grace Line Steamship, literally ran into a 'sea monster' at 11.55 a.m. on December 30th. The sea was calm and blue with bright sunshine, and the place was 118 miles due east of Cape Lookout. The ship was crossing from New York to CartagenaJ The master of the vessel, J. Fordan, reported as fo-llows: /3

"Suddenly John Axelson, (the third mate) saw a snakelike head rear out of the sea about 30 feet off the starboard bow of the vessel. His exclamation of amazement directed the attention of the two other mates to the sea monster, and the three watched it unbelievingly as, in a moment's time, it came abeam of the bridge where theystood, and was then left astern. The creature's head appeared to be about two and a half feet across, two feet thick, and five feet long. The cylindrically shaped body was about three feet thick and the neck about one and a half feet in diameter." As the monster came abeam of the bridge it was observed that the water around the monster over an ear of thirty or forty foot square, was stained red. The visible part of the body was about thirty five feet long. It was assumed that the colour of the water was due to the creature's blood and that the stem of the ship had cut the monster in two, but as there was no observer on the other side of the vessel, there was no way of estimating what length of the body may have been left on the other side. From the time the monster was first sighted until it disappeared in the distance astern, it was thrashing about as though in agony. The monster's skin was dark brown, slick and smooth. There were no fins, hair, or protuberances on the head, neck, or visible parts of the body."

It would seem that until one of these creatures is actually caught we shall remain in doubt as to the reality of their existence, and we can only speculate as to the type of creature they really are.

As well as monsters in the seas and lakes, and apart from the strange animals discussed in a previous paper, sightings of another type of land animal are regularly reported. This also belongs in a class by itself. The creature, sightings of which are regularly reported from various parts of the world, appears to be more like a human being than an animal, a step between our allegedly ape forefathers and present-day man. ^ According to where it is sighted it is called*Bigfoot* *Yeti," "Abominable Snowman" "Susquatchf "Wildman," and so on.

One of the habitats of such creatures is the Himalayan mountains, and reports of this creature were first heard in the western world in 1887. The natives have known about the Yeti, as they call it, for hundreds of years. Colonel Waddell, A British mountaineer was trudging across a snowfield when he came upon a mystifying set of tracks. They were like the footprints of a giant man, stalking along where no one would expect to find a lone human being, least of all barefootl. Nineteen years later another explorer not only saw the Yeti tracks, but caught a glimpse of a great hairy two-legged creature. As time went on, more climbers and explorers sighted the Yeti. Sometimes it would be seen disappearing into a forest, sometimes walking across a snowfield, stopping now and then to pull up roots and shrubs. It became known popularly as the "Abominable Snowman". In 19^8 two Norwegian explorers following footprints in the snow, found themselves face to face with two of the enormous shaggy haired creatures. They tried to lasso one of them, hut the fierce beast savagely attacked and mauled one of them. They were saved by firing their rifles and frightening the creatures away. Eric Shipton, the famous explorer tracked two on one occasion and noted that when they leapt across a great crevasse they landed not on all fours as a bear would, but on one leg like a human. Many expeditions have been mounted to try and find the elusive snowman, but to no avail. Their tracks are often found in the snow of the mountains, and their behaviour^ deduced from the tracks,leads one to believe they operate more like human beings than animals. A British expedition has been able to photograph Yeti scalps preserved for hundreds of years by the lamas of a Himalayan monastry, they measured twenty-six inches round, and were covered with red bristly hair. Some Americans brought back photographs of a Yeti's hand. The hand was mummified with age, but the length of its fingers and the joints of its bones were quite different from a human hand, although the shape of the thumb was like a man's,

A creature, similar in description to the Yeti, has also been reported in the mountain provinces of China, in the Hubei Province. Scientists in China have recently formed a society to try to find and trace the development of the species which has been most often reported in the Shennongjia mountains of east-central Hubei province. A trapper in this remote region discovered that something was making off with his catch, and decided to make a trap to catch the thief. He caught the Chinese "bigfoot", a creature six feet tall, with the head and mouth of a monkey, the nose of a dog, and the eyes ears and fingers of a man, so the report goes/ According to published accounts, the trapper said the wild man looked at him "with tears in his eyes, much like a human begging for mercy". Out of pity he freed the creature.

But there have been many other sightings of the creature in this area - in May 1976 six cadres from that forest region were driving along the highway when they came upon a strange tailless creature with reddish fur. The driver kept his headlights on the creature while the others went forward to investigate. They got a good look at it from a distance of a few feet before it walked avay. It was neither a bear, nor any other animal that they had seen before. A telegram reporting the incident was sent to the Institute of Paleoanthropology and Vertebrate Paleonotology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

However, in all fairness, one has to report that in recent months there have been allegations made that the local tourist trade has been doing roaring business as a result of the alleged sightings, and that the so-called wild man is only a stumpstailed macarque monkey. Nevertheless the creature that was reported seen bears a strong resemblance to the Yeti of the Himalayas, on the other side of the mountains, and in an area where there is very little possibility of tourist trade; and certainly in the 1800's when these creatures were first reported there was no tourist trade. But these strange creatures, or relatives of them, are found in North America also. Here the local name is"SasquatchV and they are sighted in the Pacific Northwest. Because of the size of its feet it is also known by the name "Bigfoot". Anthropologist Professor Grover Krantz has spent much time chasing reports of this creature. "What people usually report" he says?"is something seven to eight feet tall, with an extremely heavy build — about eight hundred pounds -- and covered with a fairly dense coat of brown or black hair, two to four inches long. Its face has less hair, or is naked; it looks somewhat like a gorilla's face, but much longer. Its shoulders are large and high, so that the mouth and chin are below shoulder level, which is a very ape-like characteristic. But it walks on two legs in a human manner, with the walking hinge, the hip joint, about mid-height." Reports of a large hairy primate living wild in North America and other parts of the world have persisted for over a century. In Florida it is known as*Skunk Apewbecause of its overwhelming stench. It has also been reported in New England and the Great Lake states. Again;a few sightings have been reported, and many footprints found. Professor Krantz has a very large collection of plaster casts of these enormous footprints. More than one thousand sightings have been reported altogether.

So, if all these accounts are to be believed, there is a species, or maybe several subspecies of animals, living in less inhabited parts of the world, very much resembling humans, which fit in somewhere between the evolution of man from ape. But there are, of course, a lot of unanswered questions, which fascinate people like Professor Krantz. To some of these there are logical answers. After all, if one is walking in the woods one is not usually equipped to capture any wild animal one might come across. It is considered unethical to try and shoot one. It is also true that one rarely finds the bones or bodies of any animal that dies a natural death in the wild, and in discussion we mentioned that even in large cities with a big wildlife population (such as Toronto with its population of raccoons, skunks, foxes and many others) one rarely sees the body of a wild animal, unless it has been killed in a traffic mishap. And indeed, there are many people living in such cities with so much wildlife who have not, in fact, seen these animals. So it is much easierjto believe that they can escape from the sight of man in their remote habitations. One might expect to find droppings, but these decompose quite quickly and/as the creatures seem to live on grass and vegetation, again there is little trace of their presence. So we must await the capture of one of these creatures, just as we await the capture of a sea monster, before we can know exactly what kind of creature it is that is roaming our planet. & K. I I I 1l.Il. E. K k t i I I I I I

A listing of 265 lake monsters South Australia Lake Alexandrina (the 'moolgewanke'); Crystal Brook; lagoon near Mount Gambier around the world Tasmania Lake Echo; Great Lake; Jordan River; Lake Tiberias Victoria Barwon River; Lake Burrumbert; Lake Corongamilc; Eumeralla River; Euroa; reservoir at Malmsbury; Port Fairy district; Port Phillip district (the 'tunatpan'); Lake Werribee/Modewarre

BHUTAN We have not included sea monsters in this listing, because there are so many reports.1 Also, as the seas are so vast and likely to contain many life forms a northern lake never seen by man, there is a good chance that many sea monsters seen may be "new' species. Therefore monster reports from inland lakes, cut off from the sea, are potentially more exciting because of the apparent impossibility of such CANADA large creatures remaining unknown for so long. Occasionally, however, there is some overlap because some lakes are connected to the sea (especially in Alaska Lake Iliamna Scotland), and also many rivers. We have included reports from many sources, Alberta Battle River so long as we have no reason to doubt the source. But such a listing as this can British Columbia Boiling Lake; Lake Cowichan, Vancouver Island only ever be partial, because no one has a record of all the lake monsters ever (Tsinquaw); Harrison Lake; Kamloops Lake; Lake Kathlyn; Kootenay Lake; seen. Martin's Lake; Lake Okanagan (Ogopogo); Osoyoos Lake; Shuswap Lake Some lake monsters have been given names, and where we know these we (Ta-Zum-A; Sicopogo; Shuswaggi); Skaha Lake; Somenos Lake; Lake Tagai have added them in brackets. (Tag); Williams Lake Manitoba Lake Manitoba/Lake Winnipegosis/Dauphin Lake (Manipogo); Red River New Brunswick Lake Utopia AFRICA Newfoundland Lake Crescent; Dildo Pond; Gander Lake; Great Gull Lake; Lond Pond; Swangler's Cove (Maggot) Junction of Bamingui and Koukourou Rivers, Central African Republic; Lake Nova Scotia Lake Ainslie Bangweulu, Zambia; Dilolo marshes, Zaire; Dam at Grootvlei pumping station Ontario Lake of Bays; Berens Lake; Lake Deschenes/Ottawa River (also in near Vereeniging, South Africa; Ingruenfisi River, South Africa; Mamfe Pool, Quebec); Lake Erie; Lake Huron; Lake Mazinaw; Lake Meminisha; Muskrat I'pper Cross River, Cameroun; Mara River, Tanzania; Lake Mweru, Lake (Hapyxelor; Mussy); Nith River (Slimy Caspar); Lake Ontario (Metro Zaire/Zambia; Lake Nyasa, Malawi; Orange River, South Africa; Oueme Maggie); Rideau Canal; Lake Simcoe (Igopogo; Kempenfelt Kelly); Lake River, Benin; Lake Tanganyika, East Africa; Vaaldam reservoir, South Africa; Superior Lake Victoria, Tanzania/Uganda/Kenya; Swamps at sources of White Nile River. Prince Edward Island O'Keef's Lake Quebec Lake Champlain (Champ); Lake Decaire (Lizzie); Mocking Lake; Lake Pohenegamook (Ponik); St Lawrence River Saskatchewan Saskatchewan River (Powsaswop); Turtle Lake \USTRALIA Yukon Teslin Lake (also in British Columbia)

Australian Capital Territory Molonglo River ,Vir South Wales Lake Bathurst; Cowal Lake; Edward River (Tnata); Fish DENMARK River; Lake George; Hawkesbury River headwaters; Hunter River (Yaa-Loo); lagoon north of Lismore; Midgeon Lagoon near Narrandera; Murray River Christianshavn moat, Copenhagen; Farrisvannet (also in South Australia); Murrumbidgee River; Lake Paika; Lake Tala; Tuckerbil swamp near Leeton Winhcni Territory Gudgerama Creek (Mannie; the Maningrida Monster) ENGLAND {>:nrnsland near Dalby; Diamantina River (the Kuddimudra); Nerang River, Niirrai'MC Plains We know of no English lakes or rivers (except the Thames estuary) where I I i 1 I I I t t I 1 t i I I I I 1

/4//(?;r Animals

water monsters have been sighted. However, some of the traditional dragon JAPAN legends may have been based on water monsters, for example: Worm of Spindlcston Heugh (Northumberland); Pollard worm (Durham); St Leonard's Lake Chuzenji, Honshu; Lake Ikeda, Kyushu; Kuccharo Lake, Hokkaido Forest dragon (West Sussex); the Knucker (West Sussex); Bures dragon (Kussie) (Suffolk); Lambton worm (Durham); Sockburn worm (Durham); Ludham dragon (Norfolk); Walmsgate dragon (Lincolnshire); Nunnington/Loschy Hill worm (North Yorkshire); Mordiford dragon (Herefordshire); Worm of Sexhow JAVA (North Yorkshire); Dragon of Aller (Somerset); Worm of Shervage Wood (Somerset); Henham dragon (Essex), and many others.2 Sea monsters have Lake Patenggang been seen all around England's long coastline, the most recent being Morgawr (Falmouth Bay, Cornwall; see pages 27-32). MALAYA

Lake Chini FINLAND

Lake Loukusa MEXICO

Lake Catemaco

ICELAND NORWAY The Lagarflot; The Thorskafjord Bergso; Jolstravatnet; Krovatnet; Krodern; Lundevatnet; Lake Mjosa; Mosvatnet; Odegardskilen; Ormsjoen; Oyvanna; Repstadvanet; Ringsjoen; Rommen; Sandnesvatnet; Seljord, Telemark; Skodje; Lake Snasa; Sogne; Sor- IRELAND sasjoen; Sor Somna; Storevatn; Lake Suldal, Rogoland; Tinnkjodnet; Torfinnsvatnet; Tyrifjorden County Clare Lough Graney County Cork Lough Attariff County Donegal Lough Keel; Lough Muck PAPUA NEW GUINEA County Galway Lough Abisdealy; Lough Auna; Ballynahinch Lake; Lough Claddaghduff; Lough Crolan; Lough Derg; Lough Derrylea; Lough Dubh; Lake Dakataua, New Britain Lough Fadda; Lough Glendalough; Lough Gowlan; Lough Kylemore; Lough Mask; Lough Nahillion; Lough Nahooin; Lough Neagh; Lough Ree; Lough Shanakeever; Lough Waskel SCOTLAND County Kerry Lough Brin; Lough Geal; Lough Lackagh; Lough Looscaunagh County Mayo Carrowmore Lake; Glendarry Lough, Achil! Island; Lough Borders Cauldshiels Loch Nacorra Central Loch Lomond (also in Strathclyde); Loch Venachar County Monaghan Lough Major Highland Loch Alsh; Loch Arkaig; Loch Assynt; Loch na Beiste; Loch Brit• County Waterford Counfea Lough tle, Isle of Skye; Loch nan Dubhrachan, Isle of Skye; Loch Duich; Loch Eil; County Wicklow Lower Lough Bray; Lough Nahanagan Loch Hourn; Loch Linnhe; Loch Lochy; Loch Morar (Morag); Loch Ness (Nessie); Loch Oich; Loch Quoich; Loch Scavaig, Isle of Skye; Loch Shicl; Loch Treig Strathclyde Loch Awe ITALY Tayside Loch Rannoch; Loch Tay; River Tay Western Isles Loch Duvat. Isle of Eriskay; inland loch near Lcurbost, Isle of L.tke Mageiorc Lewis; Loch Suainaval, Isle of Lewis; Loch Uraval, Isle of Lewis I fL I III*- *

Atien Animals

SOUTH AMERICA Gwynedd Llyn yr Afanc, River Conwy; Llyn Cynwch; Llyn-y-Gadair; Glaslyn lake; Marchlyn Mawr Argentina mountain iake in the Esquel region, Patagonia; Lake Lacar; Lake Powys Llangorse Lake Nahuel Huapi; lake in Santa Cruz; River Tamango; White Lake, Patagonia Bolivia swamps in the forests of the Madidi Brazil Amazon River Paraguay Paraguay River, Gran Chaco

SWEDEN

Lake Bullare; Lake Fegen, Halland/Jonkoping; Lilla Kallsjo; Myllesjon; Slagnassjon, Blekinge; Lake Storsjo, Jamtland; Lake Tingstade, Gotland

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Arkansas White River California Lake Elizabeth; Lake Elsinore; Lake Folsom Connecticut Lake Pocotopang Florida St Johns River; St Lucie River Idaho Payette Lake Kentucky Herrington Lake Michigan Narrow Lake; Paint River Minnesota Great Sandy Lake Mississippi Mississippi River near Natchez Missouri Lake of the Ozarks Montana Flathead Lake; Missouri River; Lake Waterton Nebraska Alkali Lake Nevada Pyramid Lake; Walker Lake New York Black River; Mazinaw Lake; Lake of the Woods Oregon Hollow Block Lake South Dakota Lake Campbell Utah Bear Lake (also in Idaho); Utah Lake Vermont Lake Champlain (also in New York) (Champ) Wisconsin Browns Lake; Elkhart Lake; Madison Four Lakes; Lake Mendota; Lake Monona; Lake Pewaukee; Red Cedar Lake; Rock Lake; Lake Waubeau

USSR

Lake Khaiyr, Siberia; Lake Kok-kol, Kazakhstan; Lake Labynkyr, Siberia; Lake Vorota, Siberia

WALES

Pyfed Llyn Eiddwen; Llyn Farch

SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION.

"Unearthly indeed is the fate of bursting into flames without benefit of ignition from any known source" (Mysteries of the Unexplained, published by Reader's Digest).

Spontaneous human combustion is a well-documented, though relatively rare, phenomenon in which a human body ignites and burns without any known contact with an external source of heat. In some cases the damage is slight. In others the victim is reduced to ashes, and in some of the cases nearby objects escape relatively unscathed, for instance the chair or bed on which the victim was sitting or lying; sometimes even th clothes on the charred body may be undamaged or only slightly singed. Often too a single foot or leg or the tips of fingers may remain intact, although the rest of the body is consumed.

Cases of spontaneous human combustion began to appear in medical reports as far back as the 17th century, and by the twentieth century there were many accounts - over two hundred in fact — many of them very detailed, of inexplicable human combustion. In earlier times it was generally believed that the victims of this fiery fate were alcoholic, elderly and corpulent women, who were usually living alone, and were burnt indoors on winter nights, their remains having been found near an open fire. There were no witnesses, and they were usually regarded as the authors of their own fate. But there were exceptions to this, and recent research has shown that there is a fairly equal representation of the sexes, and that age of the victim ca vary between infancy to 114 years. Also many of the victims have been both abstemious and thin. Some have been burnt while near a fire, but others have ignited while they were driving, or even walking outside in surroundings where there is no external source of fire. Thus the old explanation no longer holds.

But a new explanation has not yet been formulated. Contemporary scientific and expert medical opinion rejects the theory of spontaneous human combustion but has no explanation to offer for the facts. There is no sound physiological model that can explain how a human body can possibly self-ignite or how it can burn fiercely enough to reduce to ashes. This type of consumption is only possible at the extreme temperature of 3»000 degrees Fahrenheit, the kind of temperature produced in a modern pressurized crematorium. And in this kind of heat, how is it possible that clothing, bed linen, or even one limb . can escape damage, let alone incineration? The phenomenon abounds in riddles.

One of the earliest cases recorded was in 1673; as reported in Mysteries of the Unexplained she was a "poor woman of the people" who was mysteriously consumed by fire in Paris. She had been a heavy drinker of "strong spirits" to the point of not taking any nourishment for three years. One evening she went to sleep on a straw pallet and was burned up during the night. In the morning only her head and the ends of her fingers were found; all the rest of her body was reduced to ashes. This of course would fit the earlier hypothesis about the elderly women, although if she had had no nourishment for three years she would hardly have been fat, one would think. But what kind of fire consumes the whole body, reducing it to ashes, and yet leaves the head and tips of the fingers?

The phenomenon was so well known during the 18th and 19th centuries that it featured in many of the literary works of the day. Charles Dickens disposed of a character named Krook, an evill character symbolic of all the social evils and inequities then rampant in England (was Krook the origin of the current use of the slang 'crook' for a criminal, we wonder?). Krook, as we say, was disposed of by means of spontaneous human combustion. The novel was Bleak House. In Frederick Marryat's novel Jacob Faithful the hero's mother is a victim of the same fiery fate aboard a barge on the Thames. The account reads as follows -

"The lamp fixed against the after bulkhead with a glass before it, was still alight, and I could see plainly to every corner of the cabin. Nothing was burning - not even the curtains to my mother's bed appeared to be singed ... there appeared to be a black mass in the middle of the bed. I put my hand fearfully upon it - it was a sort of unctuous pitchy cinder. I screamed with horror ... I staggered from the cabin and fell down on the deck in a state amounting almost to insanity ... She perished from what is called spontaneous combustion " The above account Marryat based closely upon a case reported in 1832 in London, and it has all the hallmarks of an authentic case. In the room the light was still burning, nothing else was burning, the bed curtains were unsinged, yet the body was reduced to a black mass. The description of the 'unctuous pitchy cinder' accords well with many other descriptions of the state of the residue after such an incident.

The deaths of Mrs. Mary Reeser of St. Petersburg, Florida, and Dr. John Irving Bentley in December 1966 were among the most well-documented and well-investigated recent cases of spontaneous human combustion, and copies of reports of these occurrences are attached to this paper. It will be noted that there were many similarities in these two cases, which reflect findings in so many of the other cases reported. The area of burning is apparently very limited - in fact, as in the case of Mrs. Reeser a slippered leg extended beyond the area of incineration was left relatively untouched. It would be interesting to know which of Dr. Bentley's legs was the survivor, his damaged left leg, or the healthy right one, but this does not seem to have been recorded. However these facts indicate a very circumscribed area of destruction. The smelly oily soot is common, but in Mrs. Reeser's case, as in the one recounted by Marryat above, the room lights are untouched. The candle wax had puddled but the wicks were undamaged in Mrs. Reeser's room.

There are too many cases reported to discuss in detail in this short article, and there are variant features in some of the accounts. Some of the reported cases may indeed not fit accurately into the category of spontaneous human combustion; there may be other explanations for some of these, but nevertheless there are a number of cases where experts are totally baffled as to an explanation, and these cases present a number of similar features. 1. The area of desturction is very limited, in some cases to a very small area. The rest of the room, and perhaps even the clothing of the victim can be left untouched. 2. The temperature required to produce such utter destruction is so high (approx. 3000°F) that it cannot be envisaged how such a temperature could be produced under the circumstances of the event.

3. There is practically no report of smoke or smell, nothing to cause alarm - in Dr. Bentley's case Mr. Goswell mentioned a 'light-blue smoke of an unusual odor' and again with Mrs. Reeser her landlady noticed a slight odor of smoke which she did not find alarming. Yet when the remains are found we hear tell of oily sooty remains, "unctuous pitchy cinder" and so on. There have been a few reports of infants as victims of spontaneous combustion, notably four month old Ricky Pruitt of Rockford, Illinois, in 1959» seventh month old Parvinder Kaur at Birmingham in 1973* and sixmonth old Lisa Tipton of Stafford in 1974. In Ricky's case although the child died of severe burns neither his bedding nor his garments were scorcftc<£» In, the case of Parvinder both the child and his baby carriage are reported to have suddenly burst into flames, whereas Lisa was found burned in an unexplained fire confined only to the room in which she was. Inexplicable indeed is the case of Waymon Wood of Greenville, South Carolina, who was found in the front seat of his closed car, burned to a crisp, the windshield of the car had bubbled and sagged from the intense heat, little remained of the body, yet the car, containing half a tank full of gas, was otherwise unaffected by the fire. Although these cases are relatively rare, one wonders if there are those who have escaped a fiery destiny, and indeed the records show that a number of fortunate people have apparently escaped from such a horrible fate. These escapes are almost as puzzling as the fatal episodes. Jack Angel in November 197^ was a travelling clothing salesman, healthy, happy and happily married. On the 12th November 197^ he parked his motorhome, which he had converted into a travelling showroom, and prepared to retire for the night. He pushed aside the racks of clothing samples, put sheets on the sofa cushions, donned his pajamas and retired. Four days later, at noon, he awoke. His right hand was burned black on both sides from the wrists to the fingers; but worse still he had a hole in his chest where he had been burned , and in addition he had burns on his legs, his groin, his ankies and his back. Neither his clothing nor the sheets were touched by the fire.

When he reached hospital he was told by the doctors that he had not been burned externally but internally. A later search revealed no signs of electrical faults — no blackness around outlet sockets, none of the hanging garments scorched or marked, no evidence whatever of fire in his motorhome. But he had been severely burned. The burning was so severe of his hand and arm that eventually the hand and forearm were amputated. Interestingly it appears that Jack Angel had initially suffered no pain; the burns had occurred during sleep and had not caused sufficient pain to awaken him. And again, as in so many cases, the characteristic odor of burning flesh was absent.

Another lucky victim was Professor James Hamilton of Nashville, Tennessee. In 1835» as reported in the Transactions of the Medical Society of Tennessee (1835) Dr. Hamilton distinctly "saw a light flame at the extent of its base of a ten cent piece or coin with a surface approaching to convexity, somewhat flattened at the top and having a complexion which nearest resemble that of quicksilver". This was on his left leg, where he had just felt a sudden stinging sensation. Dr. Hamilton, thinking quickly deprived the flame of oxygen, by cupping his hands over it, and by great good fortune the flame went out. However, his doctor when treating the site viewed the burn as being internal rather than external, and supporting this belief was the fact that although the fabric of his silk and woollen drawers next to the site of the burn had a small hole burned through, the outer pantaloons escaped with merely a slightly tinged, yellow hued discoloration on the inner layer. The flame had burned from the inside. A certain Paul Weekly in Sioux City is credited with having twice had to contend with this phenomenon in the same night. He awoke during the night in a hotel room with an itchy foot; he threw back the covers to see what was the matter and saw a blue glare leaping from his toes , which were on fire. He wrapped the hedsheets round the toes extinguishing the flames and went back to sleep. It is reported that later in the night he again woke with an itchy foot and had to repeat the performance with the bedsheets. Again this case bears a resemblance to others in that there is apparently no sensation of burning as such, and also the presence of blue or silver flames, as opposed to normally red or orange ones. In June 1980 in Toronto a thirty-one year old woman went to bed about 2.30 a.m. She awoke at her normal time about four hours later to find that during the night her thigh's^ and abdomen had developed third degree bums. Six months of agonizing skin grafts were needed to repair the damage, but nothing else in the room had burnt, her nightclothes and bed linen were untouched, and she had not felt pain enough to waken her. Presumably the fact that she normally had only four hours sleep, and therefore slept a shorter time than most people, saved her from being totally consumed.

There are other stories of people who have escaped being burned to death in this way; there is one of a young lady on a dance floor who suddenly started to burn - not herpress -- her body, and the fire was put out by bystanders. In New Jersey a young woman was cradling her child in her arms in the back seat of a car driven by her husband. Suddenly the afternoon was shattered by an 'explosion' within the lady that left one side of her neck severely burned. Her shoulder length blonde hair was unsinged, and the baby unharmed. Her physician blamed the seatbeltl What could be the possible cause or causes of this frightening phenomenon? The old idea that it was due to the intemperate habits of the victim, plus their poor physical condition, has long since been outmoded. But no logical or plausible explanation has replaced the theory, and we are left completely puzzled.

Some people have tried to tie in the phenomenon with the phenomenon of ball lightning, another strange natural occurrence that has only in recent years become accepted by the scientific community. Ball lightning is little understood, and very little is known about its behaviour. It can certainly occur in indoor situations, and there have been reports of it being responsible for very localised burns. There was a story not too long ago in British newspapers of a woman working in her kitchen when a ball of lightning entered the room and passed through the skirt of her dress, leaving a hole, but not igniting the rest of her clothing. Professor Ruchman, a Russian scientist in Leningrad in 1753 was reported killed by a ball of lightning which he created experimentally himself in his laboratory. It was said his body bore numerous burns, but his clothing remained untouched. So perhaps ball lightning could create the effect of localised burning, in some cases at least. But this does not explain the tremendous heat required to completely incinerate the body. Nor does it explain why the victim apparently does not feel pain, at least in the early stages when something could be done to put the fire out. Evidence seems to suggest, especially in those cases where the victim has escaped, that the process of incineration is not an immediate one, but rather a process of slow combustion, rather like a build-up as in a hay-stack on a hot humid summer's day. Attempts have been made to relate the phenomenon to the earth's magnetic lines, static electricity, and other natural phenomena but without any real conviction or effectivity. Spontaneous human combustion, a rare and frightening phenomenon, remains as much of a puzzle as when it was first reported some four centuries ago. THE FLAMING FATE OF DR. JOHN IRVING BENTLEY

By Larry E. Arnold remains: "All I found was a knee joint, which was atop a post in the basement," the lower leg with its foot on the "That was the oddest thing you ever seen!" bathroom floor, and the now-scattered ashes six feet —Deputy Coroner John Dec, on the Bentley case (1). below (1). Carl M. McCIoud was an involved witness: "I helped the undertaker pick up the remains and we put it * * * in a rubber bag and carried it to the car. I would say there In the bucolic community of Coudersport, county seat wasn't much of him remaining." (5) Two sources men• of Pennsylvania's northern tier county of Potter ("God's tioned Bentley's skull being intact (4,75; 5), but this was country", as bumper stickers proclaim), the tempo of life denied by all others interviewed. is measured. The pace unhurried, the routine of another walking work-day was beginning for Don E. Gosnell, a FIRE DEPARTMENT CALLED meter reader for the North Penn Gas Company. This day, December 5,1966, he would begin his duties in the The Fire Department was called, and Fire Chief John bone-chilling cold characteristic of early winter here — E. Pekarski's men responded. Fireman Fred Sallade, but more than low temperatures were soon to send chills perhaps the first to arrive, recalled: "I was told not to go through his body. in." (9) There, was no fire to fight. Paul C. Toombs, arriving soon after the initial discovery, stated seeing He opened the front door of 403 North Main Street at "just smoldering — no sparks that I recall." (6) And 9:05 a.m. and "yelled a greeting" to Dr. J. Irving Bentley, Gosnell himself saw "no fire whatsoever. . . embers only tenant on the building's first floor. "There was no around the hole." (2) Said Mrs. John Dec: "It's funny how answer," reminisced Gosnell (2), thinking this unusual. one can burn up so completely, and yet not burn the He nevertheless continued through the hall corridor and house down!" (7) descended to the basement. There, on his way to the gas meter, he sensed more of what he smelled upon entering 'Funny' indeed; and well worth investigating. Out went the structure: a "light-blue smoke of unusual odor. . .like the usual mass of correspondence seeking assistance that of starting up a new heating system (an oil film and information, which generated the accustomed lack burning), somewhat sweet." (2) In a corner of the dirt- of replies. A telephone call to John Dec revealed he floored basement was a pile of ash, approximately 14" in refused to provide any written response; "But you can come and look and decide for yourself what you think diameter and peaking to 5" high; nonchalantly, whether happened," he proposed (10). And so we accepted his out of curiosity or from habit by being a fireman, he invitation — to piece together for ourself the details of the kicked and scattered the mound. doctor's death. He returned upstairs, to look in on the semi-invalid doctor, light-blue smoke issued from the apartment's Mr. Dec and his wife graciously welcomed us and our living/bed room. Gosnell entered and peered into the research assistant, and generously donated their efforts adjoining bathroom (see Fig. 1). "A hole about two-and-a- toward our quest. Mr,. Currin, curator of the Historical half feet wide and no longer than four feet had burned Society of Potter County, opened his archives specially for us to ob.tain the pertinent newspaper article, from through the bathroom floor," he found, "exposing pipes which we learned that: leading to the lavatory and running across the ceiling of the basement." (3,1) Tangent to this hole he saw a Dr. Bentley (hj«j) suffered a broken hip six years "browned leg from the knee down — like that of a manne• ago, and his left leg was without feeling. He made his quin; ... I didn't look further!" he recalled (2). Horrified way about with the aid of a "walker" to which was by his realization, Gosnell bolted from the death room, attached a bicycle-type basket. (3) his leisurely pace altered as he "ran with a flash" down the Because of this state the doctor was attended by friends, street ("without looking either way for traffic," he remem• as he had done for others during his decades of service to bers) and into the gas company's office. "Dr. Bentley the town. Mr. and Mrs. Steven Nicholson had so visited burnt up!" he shouted to his co-workers (2). Couders• Dr. Bentley on the 4th of December, departing around 9 port had lost a physician, but would gain a mystery. p.m. that Sunday evening- They were the last people to "i can sti" remember what I saw as plain as can be — see him alive. and after I realized what I saw they couldn't pull me back Sometime during the winter's darkness, tragedy in there with a D-8 (a bulldozer)!" exclaimed Gosnell nine struck: years after his discovery. "They (his colleagues) said I The aged physician had made a heroic effort to save his was white as a ghost; what bothered me most was what I own life. Apparently a live ash from his pipe had fallen on didn't find!" (2) his night clothes, or perhaps it was the spark from a barn• What wasn't found, in essence, was Dr. Bentley (at burner type of match he used. He may have dozed off in least in an easily recognizable form). John Dec, then his bedroom chair. His pipe was carefully placed in a Deputy Coroner for Potter County, described the stand beside it. PURSUIT Fa!' 1976

3?

Chances are when he awoke his clothing, a nightgown air fans a fire's intensity. The reconstructed 'actions' of and housecoat were ablaze. Bumed spots appear on the Dr. Bentley seem incompatible with his medical training. rug between his chair and the door of the bathroom Foul play was considered, but: adjoining his bedroom. An extensive two-day investigation by Deputy ...His first thought must have been to reach water. Coroner John Dec was completed last night (Dec. 6). Mr. His walker was found tipped over, the top rim Dec said, "I'm satisfied it was accidental." Dr. Herman C. against the bathtub and the basket against the toilet. Mosch, Coroner, agreed: "There was no evidence of any In the toilet were the broken remains of what outside influence. ... No suicide. It was accidental." (8) appeared to be a water pitcher. Before the physician The remote chance that the ashes found did not repre• collapsed, or fell, he had managed to remove his sent Bentley's body was ruled out by Dec: "Well, if he's burning robe, found smoldering in the tub (3,1) living you produce the body! Where is he? Besides, he John Dec's memory followed this same pattern, with was an old man anyway." (1) differences: There's another possibility, one apparently not ...and as he dozed off the pipe must have flipped over considered by any of the previous investigators: that Dr. and lighted his clothes — because there are no Bentley became enveloped in flames, in situs, in his bath• traces of where he walked across the room (from the room. If one accepts Dec's testimony that "no traces" of bedroom to the bathroom). And that's where he fire were found in the living/bedroom, and "there was no reached for the water, where he slumped — that's evidence of flame, or nothing, anywhere but on the bath• why there's a hole in the floor. (1) room's floor — just a light-blue smoke" (1), then it is At the age of 92, the physician lacked a steady hand; reasonable to believe that the doctor, in responding to a according to The Potter Enterprise, "Mr. Dec was told 'call of nature', so to speak, journeyed the short distance that Dr. Bentley had been quite a smoker and his clothes to the toilet; there, while still supported by the walker, he were dotted with burned spots from previous incidents." or his clothes mysteriously and suddenly began to burn. (3,1) So it is possible that, as Dec noted in 1966, "he was Perhaps thinking the source to be his robe, he managed smoking pipe and its tobacco (sic) was emptied fell into to shed it; yet his body continued to burn — burn with his lap," igniting the robe and resulting in the doctor's such violence that a crematorium could not duplicate the unsuccessful 'dash' for life. same degree of destruction (11). As his body collapsed, it If one accepts the newspaper account of the "carefully could have tipped the walker against the pitcher sitting placed" pipe, however, it seems unreasonable to credit on the water tank, the vase breaking on impact inside the the doctor (his robe beginning to blaze) with neatly toilet bowl. Dr. Bentley continued to cremate, black• resetting his tobacco holder. We asked DonGosnell if he ening but not blistering the paint on the bathtub only could clarify this contradiction. He replied: "1 won't say inches away, coating the window with a sooty film (still to there's a pipe — because I didn't see any. I'm telling you be seen nine years later), and as Fireman Fred Sallade only what I saw, not what I think happened." (2) An recollected, "making a hole through the floor, and that admirable approach — for we don't care to what extent a was all." (9) writer speculates as long as he does it with the facts, for Pastor Lewis, present owner of the Bentley house, on any other basis all postulation is worthless — but one agreed to show us the scene being discussed. Although that did not resolve this dilemma. remodeling had covered the hole, in the basement could If the pipe was in place, the "barn-burner type of still be seen the charred rafters. Only three beams, on 16" match" may be to blame: the doctor striking it before centers, were burned, with only the center beam reaching for his pipe, but dropping the miniature torch on evidencing a large degree of damage. The area confined his lap in a fata! error. Even a pipe's misplaced ember by these beams through which the doctor physically fell could have fallen unnoticed as the physician prepared to was approximately six square feet. Said Sallade: "It was doze, smoldering on the garment until erupting. But if mystifying!" (9) the doctor's clothing became thus inflamed, why did he A Coroner's Certificate of Death, as filed in not remove the robe in the living/bed room rather than Pennsylvania or any other state, is to provide an accur• hobble with his walker to a source of water to quench an ate record and evaluation of a person's physical transi• intensifying fire? Surely his education made him aware tion; to this document we turned for answers to the that (1) the longer one is enveloped in flames the less Bentley mystery. The certificate provided this chance there is for survival, and (2) movement through information:

Fig. 1 (opposite): The scene of Dr. J. Irving Bentley's 1966 DEC combustion, December 5, 1966, in Coudersport, 1 2 10 Pennsylvania. His incineration, with no significant damage to surrounding objects, was "99%" complete and occurred within a maximum of 12 hours. Only one foot and lower leg remained, remainder burned Mean (Dec.) = .60 hole through floor; no other damage. (Courtesy of William Fish).

Fig. 2 (right): The Earth's geomagnetic variations for the period involving Dr. Bentley's cremation. Immediate cause of death: "asphyxiation and 90% checked, because the 'body' was found in a more- burning of body." reduced state than can be accomplished under con• Interval between onset and death: "V2 hr." trolled conditions (of a nature certainly not present in the Estimated time of death: 5 a.m. EST." Bentley household). Y.ode of disposal: "Burial" Perhaps one should treat cautiously pronouncements Was an autopsy performed? "Yes." made by official documents — How asphyxiation could huve been determined as the Other claims to reality should be suspect, too — cause of death, we do not know; no one was present at especially when inconsistencies to rationality arise. the incident, and half a leg doesn't give much evidence to During our interview with Mr. Dec, he mentioned stand on (p,»rdon the 'pun'). The "burning of the body" — another case of incineration that he encountered: a more precisely, the disintegration of the body" — contri• Volkswagen crash with flaming gasoline spewed upon its buted to death, but what caused the voracious flames three youthful male occupants. The heat of the ensuing (the ultimate cause of death)? And what of the "90%'?"A inferno was so intense that no attempt could be made to knee and one part of the leg was left," said Dec em• extricate the engulfed lads. Incineration was so complete phatically; "I wrote down 90°b (missing) on the Coroner's that no one, save the boys' mothers, could make report, but I believe it was more like 98%.... As a matter of identification — a situation which deeply perplexed Dec, fact. I'd call it 99V' (1) and which could have led to discussion of genetic and No one could offer a reason for this selection of a time cellular recognition. But the point here is this: each one's of death; it had to occur between 9 p.m. on December 4 severely charred body was still easily recognizable as and 9:05 a.m. on December 5, but "5 AM" remained an humanoid; rib cage, arms, neck, teeth and skull all quite : 'educated' guess. Tne " ,2 hr." duration for destruction distinguishable. Dr. Bentley, however, without the aid of was glaringly conspicuous: lungs exposed to flame would gasoline or other suspected accelerant, managed a far net r.sed thirty minutes to suffocate their owner. "It takes more dramatic destruction. How? 3 :o 6 hrs. for body to smolder in fire," wrote Dec in the Mr. Dec offered his solution: report's notes (basing that time on the burning clothes ...the clothing set afire — clothing will burn you up. theory); yet the certificate stated only one-half hour had It burnt like a candle; human being, the same way. elapsed — a time absolutely impossible (according to It's hard to believe it!. . : The house was tight; didn't present medical knowledge) for combustion of any inten- get no oxygen, so how in the world—? And that's sity to produce such complete physiological what puzzled all of us: How could you burn with the disintegration! house closed like that, no air inside? So it must have consumed whatever air was in there — just smotherin'. (1) AUTOPSY "PERFORMED" If so, then what caused such a massive reduction of Bentley's body — smoldering flames would not generate the necessary thermal level (for example, in the bathtub the robe, having a lower kindling point than a corpse, was On seeing that an autopsy was allegedly performed, found largely intact); why was not Gosnell acutely aware our first reaction (albeit quite optimistic) reflected hope of the lack of oxygen when he entered the doctor's apart• that the findings may provide a clue for the true cause of ment; and why did Dec detect a "sweet odor, like death. According to the newspaper, "Coroner Herman perfume" (1) in the physician's rooms, rather than the C. Mosch determined in an autopsy yesterday afternoon noxious stench characteristic of smoldering human (Dec. 6) that Dr. Bentley had not suffered a skull injury." flesh? •'3,1) How this was deduced, when the skull supposedly As Gosnell deduced: "They've got their theory — and was destroyed, mus: be a miracle of modern medicine. that's all they're promoting." (2) Theories are fine, even (Fig. 1 shows an ovoid mass upon a basement water pipe, necessary fcr the advancement of knowledge; but beneath the walker's basket support; presumed to be the theories, regardless of how speculative, must be reason• doctor's head, its location may account for the claims of able. As Robert Lyman wrote about Dr. Bentley: "no sku'i" — thus demonstrating how a photograph can The town, including a reporter,. . . reasoned that clarify conflicting verbal testimony — but the degree of its the doctor's clothing had caught on fire and that had destruction is immense.) caused his death. They did not stop to think that any Dec expressed incredulity at our request for the amount of cloth could not cremate a living person. autopsy report. On checking the death certificate with its Such a fire could kill a person but it could not reduce mention of autopsy, though, Dec confided: "From a the body to ashes. (4, 75) coroner's standpoint, that's S150. ... There's nothing to cutopsy! Ashes, yes! But how do you do that?" What• The evidence sifted, the accounts weighed; and one ever, Dr. Mosch assured us, there was "no chemical comes to the conclusion that Don Gosnell reached about analysis of ashen tissue made." (8) the Bentley burning: "So bewildering!" (2) We see two The physical remains of Dr. Bentley were buried, so alternatives; that said the death certificate. Dec commented sarcastically: (1) Dr. Bentley experienced Preternatural Combus• "1 don't know how they can bury anything like that — one tibility. ("Preternatural combustibility implies... that leg!" 11) But buried rv.s ashes were, a marker in the West a spark or a minute flame is necessary to ignite the H:l! Cemetery, Galeton, Potter County, marks Bentley's body which then undergoes incineration." [ 12,793]) :r.:errr.ent. Interestingly, the box labeled "Cremation" on Why then did his body bum up this December night the c-?a-h certificate was not checked — could not be when many times before he dropped hot ashes (at least) upon his clothing? The triggering mechanism floor in order to enter another realm of existence. And for his physiology acquiring an increased inflam• science was presented with an enigma it must one day mability would still have to be considered. explain. (2) Dr. Bentley suffered Spontaneous Human Com• (Excerpted from the chapter "I Thought I'd Just Drop bustion. ("Spontaneous Human Combustion is that In—" from the writer's forthcoming book Ablaze! The phenomenon wherein the body takes fire without an Case for, and Cases of Spontaneous Human Combus• outside source of heat and is rapidly reduced to a tions.) handful of greasy ashes. Paradoxically, inanimate objects nearby escape relatively unharmed." [12, 793]) Footnotes The event being presented certainly fits the criteria for the latter alternative. But the initiating force must still be (1) Dec, John, personal interchange; January 31,1976. isolated. Possibly the cause of Dr. Bentley's internal (2) Gosnell, Don E., personal interchange; January 31, appearing incineration was external to his body — in the 1976. Earth's upper atmosphere. Government agencies have (3) "Charred Remains of Aged Physician Found by maintained data designating geomagnetic disturbances Meter Reader — Doctor Burns To Death In Home," indicating "the arithmetic mean of the subjective classifi• The Potter Enterprise, Coudersport, Penna., 92nd cation by all observatories of each day's magnetic activ• year, no. 34, Wednesday, December 7, 1966. ity on a scale of 0 (quiet) to storm (2)." (13) Livingston (4) Lyman, Robert S., Sr., "Strange Events in the Black Gearhart found that "the onset of magnetic storms coin• Forest," The Potter Enterprise, Coudersport, cides with much human-related forteana.. . . SHC lends Penna., 1973, vol. 2, pp. 74-75. itself particularly well (to) the hypothesis that geomag• (5) McCloud, Carl D., personal communication; netic disturbances trigger such events." (14, 39) This November, 1975. writer's own research has revealed an interesting coin• (6) Toombs, Paul C, personal interchange; January 31, cidence between periods of severe magnetic flux and 1976. mysterious fires. The 1966 global geomagnetic pattern (7) Dec, Mrs. John, personal interchange; January 31, shows peaks of 1.1 on December 4 and 5 (see Fig. 2), the 1976. latter designated in the reference as a "disturbed day" (8) Mosch, Herman C, personal interchange; Novem• (D). Although this -is not approaching the severe storm ber 1, 1975. levei of 2.0, the mean for December, 1966 was 0.60, alow (9) Sallade, Fred, personal interchange; January 31, value; hence, a peaking to 1.1 could have been sufficient 1976. to cause imbalance and disruption within Bentley's physi• (10) Dec, John, personal interchange; January 24, 1976. ology (which was adjusted to a lower energy level). It (11) "I have been present. . .at crematoriums, where must also be stressed that these figures represent global they have used gas and they have used oil. And I averages — and a localized area (Coudersport, for have been present for the full 12 hours, so that I example) could well have experienced a 2.0 reading. know there was no substitution. 1 know what went in This raises the fascinating prospect for an interrela• and I know what was there when it cooled!. . .There tion between human, terrestrial and probably cosmic were no fragments I couldn't identify as human; energy patterns — a relationship for which there is not a some were very small — they had shattered in the little evidence (when an exploration for such correlation heat — but, my god, I could tell them! They were is made). Medicine will (or should) be challenged to calcined, but they weren't ashed — powdery-ashed, broaden its study of influences on human health — or as you say." Dr. Wilton Marion Krogman (interna• death. tionally recognized forensic anthropologist and expert on human cremation, on the reduction of the human body under ideal conditions), personal interchange; September 17, 1975. EPITAPH {12) Adelson, Lester, "Spontaneous Human Combus• tion and Preternatural Combustibility," Journal of The Potter Enterprise provided this epitaph for its Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, long-serving physician, Dr. Bentley: Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago, His tragic end was a contradiction of his life's vol. 12, no. 6, March-April, 1952, pp. 793-809. greatest satisfaction — "to have helped more than (13) "Solar-Geophysical Data. CRPL-F Part B," World 2CO0 babies into the world. And, when the time Data Center A for Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Na• came, to have helped an old person out of it as pain• tional Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, lessly as possible." (3,1) Boulder, Colorado. His demise may not have been contradictory to his life's (14) Gearhart, Livingston, "Geomagnetic Storms and purpose; evaluation of similar cases of human Fortean Events," Pursuit, Society for the Investiga• combustion reveals the victims often expired in apparent tion of the Unexplained, Columbia, N.J., vol. 8, no. peace, with minimal signs of anguish. Dr. Bentley may 2, April, 1975, pp. 38-40. very well have likewise experienced a painless, if (15) Other cases include Hannah Bradshaw, Dec. 31, unexpected, transition. 1770; Mrs. Pococke, 1780; Mrs. Patrick Rooney, Whatever his emotion, Dr. Bentley joined a select Dec. 25, 1885; Mr. A. M., Feb. 19, 1888; Mrs. Esther group of humans (15) who burn up and drop through the Dulin, May, 1953. PURSUIT Fall 1976 The following is a listing of further cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion as compiled by Kan T. Sanderson and primed as Appendix A of his book Muesfigofing the Unexplained (Prentice Hall. New Jersey. 1972). CASES OF SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION

DATE PLACE NAME AND CIRCUMSTANCES

17th century Courland, Germany .. Two noblemen, after a drinking bout, "died in consequence of suffocation by the flomes which issued with great violence from their stomachs."1 17th century Germanyf?). "A soldier" drank "two glasses of spirits, (and] died after an eruption of flames from his mouth"; and another case "of the same kind after a drinking-match."' 1692 Copenhagen... "A woman of the lower class"; no details given.*3 20 Feb. 1725 France... Mme Millet, no details given.*4 9 Apr. 1744 England{?)... Grace Pitt, no details given.*1 7 Feb. 1749 France... Mme de Boiseon, aged 80, no details given.*6 1763 ltaly{?)... Countess Cornelia Bandi, aged 62, no details given*7 2 March 1773 Coventry, England... Mary Clues, aged 50, found reduced to whitish ash except for a leg and thigh, between the bed and the fireplace; nothing else in the room damaged.8 Feb. 1779 France.. Mary Jauffret, no details given."* 1780 .Limerick, Ireland.. An almshouse keeper named O'Neil was wakened by a lodger who showed him the body of Mrs. Peacock who roomed on the floor above, lying "flaming and red as copper" in his room. A hole burned through the ceiling and shaped like a woman's body, showed where she had fallen through.10 3 June 1782 France. Mlle.Thuars, no details given.*" 17&J England "A young English -chambermaid" was sweeping the kitchen floor when her back burst into flame, unnoticed by her until her master came in and shouted at her; he was unable to put out the fire.'2 16 March 1802 Massachusetts.... "The body of an elderly woman evaporated and disappeared from some internal and unknown cause, in the duration of about one hour and a half... Ion the floor near the hearth] there was a sort of greasy soot and ashes, with remains of a human body, and an unusual smell in the room. All the clothes were consumed; and the grandmother was missing. . . .'1!]1J .England. An elderly gentleman, while drunk [on tincture of valerian and tincture of gum guaiacum!], rolled out of his bed "which was approximate to a fire, the flames of whichextended to his satur• ated body, and reduced it to a cinder, without materially injur• ing the bed furniture."1,1 5 Jan. 1835 Nashville, Tenn.. Mr. H., Professor of Mathematics (see text, p. 241).15 1"J36 Cesena, Italy. Countess Cornelia .Zangari, aged 62, was found on the floor of her room, reduced to a heap of ashes, except for her arms and legs and part of her head. The floor and furniture were undam• aged, but there was fine soot throughout the room and a dis• agreeable odour."1 25 Feb. 1851 Paris, France.. A house-painter, while drinking, bet that he could eat a lighted candle. "Scarcely had he placed it in his mouth, when he uttered a slight cry, and a bluish flamet was seen upon his lips.... In half an hour the head and upper portion of the chest were entirely carbonized. The fire did not cease till bones, skin, and muscles were all consumed, and nothing remained but a small heap ol ashes. . . ." " 27 Dec. 1885 Ottawa, Illinois. The remains of Mrs. Patrick Rooney — a burned piece of skull, two charred vertebrae, a few foot bones, and a pile of ashes — were found on the ground beneath a 3 x 4 foot hole in the kitchen floor; there was soot throughout the house but no other damage.1' March 1908 Blythe, England. Mary Hart, an invalid, was found burning in a chair. Her sister smothered the flames, carried her up to her bed, and then ran for help. When they returned, they found Mary reduced to ashes except for the head and several fingers. The sheets were undamaged though there was soot on the walls." The article from wh:ch these were taken lists a large number of cases, but primarily by source rather than by name of victim or date. • the time of writing, work on tracing all of these has just begun, and the above table should not — in any case ^- be looked upon as an v:r.;>i at a complete listing of all such cases. Note hereafter the persistent references to blue flames.

PURSUIT Fali 1976 1933 England.... The author Temple Thurston, recuperating from infWn?a. was found nearly consumed in his chair 30 July 1938 Norfolk Broads. England.... A young woman, paddling m a boat with her husband and chil dren, suddenly burst into llame and was quickly reduced to a pile ol ashes; her family were uninjured and the boat un damaged." 20 Sept. 1938 Chelmsford, England.... A young woman was in the middle of a dance floor when blue flames burst from her body, the flames could not be extin guished and "in minutes she was ashes, unrecognizable as a human being."'-' I'MZ BliKjiiiinyton, Illinois.... Aura Troyer, !>9, was found in tin* basement of the bank wheu- lie worked as a janitor, almost all his clothing burned oil. "It kip pened all ol a sudden" was all he said before he died." 1942 Orpington. Fulham. and Brighton. England.... Ellen K. Kelly, 83; Mrs. Annie Coleshill, 66; and Mrs. Mary Forge, 94, all died by spontaneous conflagration. No details available .w 1942 Pittsburgh, Pa Carl Brandt, 33, was found on the sidewalk, "most of his cloth• ing burned from his body.'*''' 13 Jan. 1943 Deer Isle, Maine.... Allen M. Small, 82, was found dead in his home. Fire "had burned the clothing from the upper part of the body." The car• pet beneath the body was charred but, although the room was "in confusion," nothing else was burned.-" 1 Feb. 1943 ..Lancaster, N.Y Arthur Baugard, 39, an invalid, was found burned beyond recognition in his home; there was no other fire damage.-'' 17 Oct. 1947 Liverpool, England A 10-year-old boy was found in flames. There were no signs of fire in the shop after the incident.™ 1 July 1951 St. Petersburg, Fla Mrs. Mary Reeser, age 67 (see text, p. 235).w Apr. 1953 nr. Hanover, Md Bernard Hess died of a fractured skull and internal injuries in an auto accident; when examined he was found to have suffered second- and third-degree burns over two-thirds of his body. His clothes were undamaged and there was no trace of fire in the car* 1 March 1953 Greensville, S.C Waymon Wood, aged 50, was found "crisped black" in the front seat of his closed car. "There was little left of Wood or the front seat. The heat had made the windshield bubble and sag inward, yet the half-tank of gas in the car was unaffected."•>' 1956 Pleasantville, Ohio Mrs. Cecil Rogers was "burned to a cinder." The bed was some what charred on top but nearby furniture was merel> scorched.'-' 28 Apr. 1956 Benecia, California Harold Hall, 59, was found on the kitchen floor, his chest, arms, and face charred; he was still alive but could not explain what had happened, and died shortly thereafter." Dec. 1956 Honolulu Young Sik Kim, age 78, an invalid, was found "wrapped in blue flames too hot to approach. When firemen got there 15 min• utes later, the victim.and his overstuffed chair were ashes. All that remained were Kim's undamaged feet, stil! resting on his wheelchair where he'd propped them." There was no other damage to the room.-1- 31 Jan. 1959 San Francisco Jack Larber, an elderly patient, was given a glass of milk by an orderly who then left for 5 minutes and returned to (ind the man "wrapped in blue flames. Spring, 1959 Rockford, Illinois Rickey Pruitt, aged 4 months, burst into flame and burned to death; the bedclothing and the crib were not even scorched.*1 Billy Feieisun, tiyed 30, committed suicide by carbon mon• oxide poisoning in his car. When examined he was found to have third degree burns of the back, arms, and legs; and 13 Dec. 1959 Pontiac, Michigan internal burns. His clothing was not singed, and unsinged hairs stuck up through his charred flesh.J- The charred bodies of five men were found in a car; there was no evidence of any attempt to escape from the car. Death was 24 Nov. 1960 ' Pikeville, Kentucky attributed to"fire fracture,"or internal heat — metal pellets first thought to be shotgun pellets proved to be melted metal from the car.-"1 Mrs. Mary Martin, aged 74, was heard to scream and was found seated in a kitchen chair, her clothing aflame; she died some 3 Aug. 1962 Lockland, Ohio.... hours later. The only sign of a fire was the burnt chair on which she was sitting.1'' •5 Dec. ;V63 Glen Cove, Long Island Thomas Sweizerski, aged 66, was found dead, his clothes burned oil his body. There was no other evidence of fire.41' '7 Dec. 1969 Toronto, Canada John Komar, an elderly man, died Irom extensive untreated and badly infected burns of the arms and back. He was found unconscious in his room after the landlord became worried, not having seen him for several days. There was no sign of a fire in his room.-"

PURSUIT Fall 1976 FOOTNOTES

! Lair, Pierre-Aime, "On the Combustion of the Human Body, produced by the long and immoderate use of Spirituous Liquors," Journal de Physique, an. pluv. 8, reprinted in The Emporium of Arts & Sciences, vol. I (1812), pp. 161-178. (Lair's original source, hereafter given in brackets, was the German Ephemerides, Observation 77.) * Ibid. (German Ephemerides). 3 /bid. (Jacobaeus, Transactions of Copenhagen). * Ibid. (Le Cat, memoir on spontaneous burning). s /bid. (Trans. Roy. Soc. London, 1744). * Ibid. (Le Cat). 7 Ibid. (Memoir of Bianchini, Annua/ Register,' 1763[?J). »Ibid. (Account by Mr. Wilmer, surgeon, Annua/ Register, p. 78,1774); also Phil. Trans., Vol.LXIV, 1774; and Moffitt, Jack, "Ladies in Combustion," Los Angeles Herald-Express, 14 March 1956. 9 Ibid. (Jour, de medicine, vol. 59, p. 440). 10 Moffitt, Jack, op. cit. (ref. 178). " Lair. Pierre-Aime, op. cit. (ref. 171) (Jour, de medicine, vol. 59, p. 140). « Eckert, Allan W., "The Baffling Burning Death," True, May 1964, p. 112. » Philosophical Magazine, vol. XIV (1802-03), p. 96. »Ibid., vol. XL1 (1813), pp. 462-463. n Overton, John, Transactions Med. Soc. Tennessee, 1835. •'» Mo//if f. Jack, op. cit. (ref. 178); Johnson, Walter, A Familiar Introduction to the Principles of Physical Science, Philadelphia, 1836. i; Annals of Scientific Discovery, 1851, p. 358 (from Paris Gazette des Tribunaux, 25 February 1851). 18 Eckert, Allan W., op. cit., p. 105. " Ibid. p. 105. w Unidentified newspaper clipping. Eckert, Allan W., op. cit., p. 105. "/bid. « Doubt, vol. II, no. 29, p. 26 (1942). »/bid. «Ibid. n Doubt, June 1943, p. 5 (ex Ellesworth, Maine, American). ':/bid. «/bic., S20U943), p. 302. » Eckert, Allan W., op. cit., p. 106-107. »/bid, p. 112. "Ibid, " Moffitt, Jack, op. cit. (ref. 178). 33 Eckert, Allan W.. op. cit., p. 112 (ref. 182). 3»Ibid, p. 33. «Ibid., p. 112. *> Ibid., p. 112. 37 Ibid., p. 104; and Lonergan, Tad, M.D., letters column, True, August 1964. 34 Springfield, Mass., Union, 24 November 1960. 39 Cincinnati Enquirer, 3 August 1962. «° Long Island Press, December 1963. *: Toronto Star, 17 December 1969:'

EDITOR'S NOTE 1. Sanderson mentions Countess Cornelia Bandi's death in SITU is grateful to Larry E. Arnold for allowing us to publish 1763 and Countess Ztiwjun's in 1836. These are actually the his extensively researched and well-written article The Flaming fracturing of one event — the former. Sanderson relies on Fate of Dr. John Irving Bentley in this issue of Pursuit. Mrreference. s which made a mistake. Countess Bandi had two Arnold and his colleagues are currently (and have been for over titles, and the medical literature gave her demise copious a year and a half) working on a book which discusses approx• attention in 1763-and-after. imately two hundred cases of Spontaneous Human Combus• 2. Triple case of Kelly/Coleshil^Forge in 1942: Sanderson tion and traces the phenomenon from 1976 back into B.C. This himself got confused with the Fortean calendar when he tried to work will rectify all the previous errors that have been com• adjust their system. The correct date is J950. (Cf. Kentish mitted by authors and researchers of SHC. In light of this, he Times, Jan. 20,1950, p. 5 for demise of Miss Kafe Ellen Kelly— has been kind enough to point out two errors made by Sander• not correct arrangement of her name). She claimed to have son in /nues.'igafing the Unexplained (from which Cases of touched her dress on a candle, which makes her candidacy for Spontaneous Human Combustion waB taken). We print them SHC dubious — but there are questionable aspects which don't here in order to avoid perpetuatirig further mistakes: rule it out.

PURSUIT Fall 1976 thing was all right. According to her testimony, there was nothing in Mrs. Mary Reeser's appearance or demeanor to cause any alarm. Dr. Reeser visited his mother later that evening. She was mildly depressed over the fact that she had not heard from two friends who were supposed to rent an apartment for her in anticipation of a return trip to Columbia, Pennsylvania, formerly her hometown. His mother told him that she wished to retire early and would take two sleeping pills to ensure a good night's rest. Dr. Reeser left at about 8:30 P.M. and returned to his home. The last person to sec Mrs. Reeser alive was her y SINCE 1950 landlady, Mrs. Pansy M. Carpenter, who lived in another apartment in the four-unit building (the two The 1951 death of Mrs. Mary Reeser of St. Petersburg, units between them were unoccupied). Mrs. Carpenter Florida, who was found reduced to ashes in a practically saw Mrs. Reeser briefly at about 9 P.M. She was wearing undamaged apartment, was a landmark case of sponta• her nightgown, a housecoat, and black satin slippers and neous combustion because it was the first instance was lounging in a comfortable chair smoking a ciga• where ever)- possible tool of modern scientific inves• rette. The bed covers had been turned back. Mrs. tigation was used to determine the cause of this myste• Reeser's last night was a typical summer night in rious phenomenon. Yet despite the efforts of the FBI, Florida: the sky was overcast with occasional flashes of fire officials, arson experts, and pathologists, a year after heat lightning in the distance. the incident Detective Cass Burgess of the St. Petersburg police commented as follows: When Mrs. Carpenter woke up Monday morning at 5 A.M., she noticed a slight odor of smoke but was not Our investigation has turned up nothing that could alarmed, since she attributed the smell to a water pump be singled out as proving, beyond a doubt, what in the garage that had been overheating lately. She got actually happened. The case is still open. We arc up, turned off the pump, and settled back into bed. still as far from establishing any logical cause When she got up an hour later to collect her newspaper for the death as we were when we first entered outside, she no longer smelled any smoke. Mrs. Reeser's apartment. At 8 A.M. a telegram arrived for Mrs. Reeser. Mrs. To which Police Chief J. R. Reichert added: Carpenter signed the receipt and went to her tenant's apartment to bring her the telegram. The doorknob, As far as logical explanations go, this is one of those when she placed her hand on it, was hot. Alarmed, she things that just couldn't have happened, but it did. stepped back and shouted for help. Two painters work• The case is not closed and may never be to the ing across the street ran over. One of them opened the satisfaction of all concerned. door; as he entered, he felt a blast of hot air. Thinking of And Dr. Wilton M. Krogman, a physical anthro• rescuing Mrs. Reeser, he frantically looked around but pologist at the University of Pennsylvania's School of saw no signs of her. The bed was empty. There was Medicine and a world-renowned expert on the effects some smoke, but the only fire was a small flame on a of fire on the human body, finally gave up trying to wooden beam over a partition separating the living understand what had happened. Dr. Krogman said: "I room and kitchenette. regard it as the most amazing thing I've ever seen. As I The firemen arrived, put out the small flame with a review it, the short hairs on my neck bristle with vague hand pump, and tore away part of the partition. When fear. Were I living in the Middle Ages, I'd mutter Assistant Fire Chief S. O. Griffith began his inspection something about black magic." of the premises, he could not believe his eyes. In the Here are the details of the case: Mrs. Mary Hardy middle of the floor there was a charred area roughly Reeser, an agreeable, motherly widow of 67, was living four feet in diameter, inside which he found a number in St. Petersburg, Florida, to be near to her son, Dr. of blackened chair springs and the ghastly remains of a Richard Reeser. On the evening of July 1,1951, she had human body, consisting of a charred liver attached to a remained in her sons home with one of her grandchil• piece of the spine, a shrunken skull, one foot still dren while the rest of the family went to the beach. wearing a black satin slipper, and a small pile of ashes. When they returned, they found that Mrs. Reeser had Coroner Edward T. Silk arrived to examine the body already left for her own apartment. The younger Mrs. and survey the apartment. Although deeply puzzled, he Reeser drove to her mother-in-law's to see if every• decided that the death was accidental and authorized the removal of the remains. The scooped-up ashes, the nightgown or chair by the cigarette she was smoking tiny shrunken head, and the slipper-encased foot were However, neither the gown nor the chair was particu taken by ambulance to a local hospital. larly flammable, and besides, there was not enou^ The ensuing investigation included police and fire material available in these items to produce the intend officials as well as arson experts. The facts that con• heat necessary to reduce a human body to ashes. Dr fronted them seemed inexplicable considering the great Krogman has burned cadavers with gasoline, oil, wood heat necessary to account for Mrs. Reeser's incinerated and all kinds of other agents. He has experimented wit! body. Little of the furniture, other than the chair and bones encased in flesh or stripped, both moist and dn the end table next to it, was badly damaged, but the His tests have utilized combustion apparatus ranging apartment had suffered some peculiar effects: from outdoor pyres to the most modern pressurized The ceiling, draperies and walls, from a point exactly crematorium equipment. He has demonstrated conclu• four feet above the floor, were coated with smelly, sively that it takes enormous heat to consume a body, oily soot. Below this four-foot mark there was none. and that only at over 3000°F would bone become The wall paint adjacent to the chair was faintly volatile enough to lose its shape and leave only ashes browned, but the carpet where the chair had rested "These are very great heats," he said, "that would sear, was not even burned through. A wall mirror 10 feet char, scorch or otherwise mar or affect anything and away had cracked, probably from heat. On a everything within a considerable radius.... They sav dressing table 12 feet away, two pink wax candles truth often is stranger than fiction and this case proves had puddled, but their wicks lay undamaged in their it." The remaining slippered left foot was a mystery in holders. Plastic wall outlets above the four-foot itself. It was established that Mrs. Reeser was in the mark were melted, but the fuses were not blown and habit of stretching out her left leg because of some the current was on. The baseboard electrical outlets were undamaged. An electric clock plugged into one physical discomfort in that limb. The foot was left of the fused fixtures had stopped at precisely unburned, apparently because it was outside the mys• 4:20 ... but the same clock ran perfectly when terious four-foot radius of incineration. plugged into one of the baseboard outlets. Another speculation, that the fire might have been Newspapers nearby on a table and draperies and caused by some failure in the electrical system, was also linens on the daybed close at hand—all flammable ruled out by the experts: the fuse would have blown. —were not damaged. And though the painters Finally, murder and suicide were considered. Murder and Mrs. Carpenter had felt a wave of heat was eliminated because there were no known suspects, when they opened the door, no one had noted the apartment had not been disturbed, and there was no smoke or burning odor and there were no embers or hypothesis to account for how such a murder could flames in the ashes. have been accomplished. Suicide, too, was ruled out- Faced with such a mystery, the St. Petersburg au• Mrs. Reeser was well provided for and not depressed, thorities called in the FBI. Laboratory findings showed and, again, how could she have set such a fire? that Mrs. Reeser's estimated weight of 175 pounds had Eventually Dr. Krogman admitted defeat. He re• been reduced to a total of less than 10 pounds, includingporte d to Chief Reichert: the foot and shrunken head. The final report concluded that no known chemical agents or other accelerants had I have posed the problem to myself again and again of why Mrs. Reeser could have been so thorough!) been involved in starting the fire and ended by stating destroyed, even to the bones, and yet leave nearby that the case was "unusual and improbable." objects materially unaffected. 1 always end up A top arson specialist of the National Board of rejecting it in theory but facing it in apparent fact. Underwriters was also stumped. "I can only say," he admitted, "the victim died from fire " Finally, the Nor could he understand the shrunken condition of aforementioned Dr. Krogman, an authority on dif• Mrs. Reeser's skull: ferent kinds of burns, was asked to help clarify the ... the head is not left complete in ordinary burning mystery. After checking the findings of the other cases. Certainly it does not shrivel or symmetrical!) authorities, he began eliminating possibilities. He con• reduce to a much smaller size. In presence of heat sidered lightning as a cause, but an engineer who sufficient to destroy soft tissues, the skull would specialized in the effects of lightning bolts on the human literally explode in many pieces. I... have never body flatly dismissed such a conjecture. Besides, light• known any exception to this rule. Never have 1 seen ning was not reported in the immediate neighborhood a skull so shrunken or a body so completely during the night of the accident. Another possibility consumed by heat. was that the sedatives taken by Mrs. Reeser had made (Vincent H. Gaddis, Mysterious Fires and Light*, her so drowsy that she did not notice a fire set to her pp.246-59; Michael Harrison, Fire From Heaven: A DISAPPEARING PEOPLE. Thousands of people disappear over the world in any one year; it is a happening with which we are very familiar, and unless the disappearance is of someone close to us we are not likely to be much interested. Most people who disappear do so for one of three reasons. The most common is, of course, that the person has organized his or her own disappearance for purposes of their own. They are fleeing a home situation that has become unbearable, or they have committed a crime, or are faced with scandal or financial ruin, and the objective is usually to make a new start in life and completely leave the old behind. Other people who disappear are victims of foul play, they are murdered and their bodies are never found, or they are small children who are kidnapped and their identity is lost in their new life. Finally, in a small number of cases the person is the victim of a sudden amnesia, perhaps brought on by a blow, perhaps by the onset of sudden illness. They completely forget their identity and in a daze make their way from their home environment and start life again as totally new persons in a-place far distant from their old home. Occasionally the victim of amnesia has been found only a short distance away from where they were reported missing. Sometimes this amnesia can subside as suddenly as it came, and the person will return to the old surroundings as if nothing had happened. There is a case reported of a woman who was absent from her home in this way for twenty years, and she then was found one day by her family, in her old kitchen, acting as if nothing had happened and unable to say where she had been. Subsequently it is reported that three years later she went missing again.

However, a few people throughout history have apparently vanished, literally into thin air. Some of these cases are well-documented, and appear to be genuine accounts, others may be variations of one original story which may have been genuine, but has later grown into legendary proportions. None of the above possible explanations for the disappearance seems to fit some of these reports.

A typical story is the kind one reads occasionally, in the daily newspaper. One such appeared recently in the English Sunday Express. Headlined "A Mother Vanishes" the account is given of the total disappearance of a thirty-four year old woman, Mrs. Morgan, mother of two young children. She took one of the children to school, promising to pick him up when school finished, and went on to perform a photographic assignment, just a couple of miles away. Happily married, devoted to her children, it seems unlikely that she would have walked away, taking with her only the clothes she wore. A thorough search of the district revealed nothing, and the police declared themselves baffled. 39

Also in England some years ago a thirteen year old schoolgirl, April ?abb, vanished in her Norfolk village. She had been asked to pick up a loaf of bread from the baker's shop just a short distance from her home as she returned from school. She left her friends to go into the shop, and was never seen again. She was quickly missed, as her mother had been expecting her to bring back the bread for the family tee, and a search was mounted. The baker said she had purchasa/the bread and left -- his wife was in the back, baking at the time. The neighbourhood was scoured without success, and as time went on the case created an enormous amount of interest. How could a child of that age disappear in the middle of the afternoon, in a populated village street within sight of her home, and nobody see anything unusual? Ker bicycle was found less than half a mile away. She has never been found. The police at one time charged the baker with abducting the child, but it was manifestly absurd that he could have murdered the child in broa<{ daylight in his open shop, with his wife a few feet away. The police even sifted through the ashes of the fire, but of course it is ridiculous to suggest that a body can be burned in a baker's oven without the fact being obvious to all around.

Mrs. Morgan vanished during the course of a few hours, April Fabb within a few minutes of her last being seen, but we can do better than that. There are some very striking stories in the literature of people who vanished literally in front of the eyes of the bystanders. In 1873 an English shoemaker, James Worson by name, accepted a bet from a friend to run a jogging race from Leamington to Coventry, a distance of some sixteen miles. He set out with three friends following in a cart to check his timing. After some miles, his friends saw him stumble, then pitch forward and disappear. The three men searched in panic, knowing there was no rational mm explanation for what they had seen. They failed to find any sign of him and returned to Leamington and reported to thepolice what they had seen. Despite prolonged questioning they stuck to their story, and retracted no part of it. Worson was not seen again.

Attached to this section are copies of reports of some mysterious ft disappearances of children in Sweden. These are more recent cases, and as will be seen from reading the accounts, they have been very thoroughly investigated, without result. The m children are still missing, and their fate remains unknown.

But the story of mysterious disappearances is further y complicated by reason of other factors. Some of the stories have clearly become, or orginated as what we now call modern urban legends, and some started out as the deliberate products of Liars' Clubs, and became hoaxes, perpetuated by much y ml repetition, and lack of serious investigation. Unlike the disappearances of the people in the above mentioned cases, and in the Swedish situation, these stories have been bandied about for years without much corroboration. It is fascinating to try and track some of these stories down to their source. One such well-known story is that of the disappearance of David Lang in September of 1880. David Lang was a Tennessee farmer, and on this day it is alleged he walked into his pasture to look at his horses, and with his wife and children and friend Judge August Peck looking on, he vanished. The stories relate how the stunned onlookers rushed to the spot where he was last seen but could find no trace of him. No hole in the ground, no subterranean cave was found, nothing to explain his disappearance. To add to the story, it was reported that later a circle of yellow grass grew on the spot, and occasionally his voice was heard weakly calling for help. The story has been retold many times.

Some researchers endeavoured to trace this story to its source. During the intervening years the story had received some reinforecement by the receipt of a letter by the editors of Fate magazine (a journal that specialises in this kind of account") purporting to have been written by the daughter of David Lang, Sarah Smma Lang, confirming the story itself, giving details of the family's life subsequent to the event, and saying that she herself had developed mediumistic powers and was now in spirit communication with her dead father. This gave the original story a new spurt of publicity. The investigators wrote to the public librarian in the district and received an interesting reply. The librarian, Hershel Payne stated that the story was fabricated by a man named Joe Hulhatten, who was the champion member of a Liar's Club, and who had earned the title of the biggest liar for his storiesin local contests. Mr. Payne also stated that he had personally checked census records and other material and there is no evidence of the existence of David Lang or Judge Peck. Neither can their names be found in the records of neighbouring districts. The farm apparently does not exist, at least not in the place it is said to be. Nothing about such a strange disappearance appeared in the newspapers published in the area at the time of the disappearance. Censuses were taken in the county in 1830, I850, and 1880 just three months before the event, and neither David Langs, nor August Peck's names appear. Genealogy and history books were equally lacking in information. But Joe Mulhatten was a legend in the district for his stories, and in fact the best "whoppers" were called"mulhattensi' But what about the daughter who surfaced in 1931 with her confirmatory story, and the evidence of mediumisitic communication with her father? Unfortunately she was also untraceable. Her letters had contained samples of her own handwriting (naturally), samples of alleged automatic handwriting from her father, and a book which her father had supposedly given her on her tenth birthday with an inscription, and the statement that this proved her communication with her father, as the writing in the inscription and automatic handwriting were in her father's hand. Expert appraisal of this handwriting placed it all as being the writing of the author of the letter. So it seems very likely that Emma Lang was a liar, or hoaxer, as well as the originator of the story - - perhaps she was/Hulhatten's daughter, and following in his footsteps, who knows? So this whole story of David Lang originated as a joke, told in a liars' club. But in the telling it became a kind of modern urban legend. The David Lang story has been repeated with some variations in other stories. Two striking stories are those of Oliver Lerch, of South Bend, Indiana, and Oliver Larch, or Thomas, of Wales. The story is essentially the same in each version. It is Christmas E.^ve and snowing outside, Oliver is sent on a short errand, to the woodshed, or to the well for water, and is shortly afterwards heard calling for help. The family rush outside but he has vanished,thetrail of his footprints in the snow ends abruptly, and a thin weak voice calling for help is heard above the spot where the footprints end. This voice grows weaker over succeeding days, and finally dies away. Oliver is never seen again. Once again efforts to track this story have proved to no avail. Police records, newspaper records give no hint of the happening. In Indiana it was stated there was no snow on that Christmas Eve. The story has been repeated in many books, the tale has been embroidered and added to. An original version of the story was one written by Ambrose Bierce in Charles Ashmore's Trail, published in I893. The story is essentially the same as given above, and was supposed to have happened in November I878. Bierce was of course familiar with the David Lang story, and so this may be the direct link.

Before we leave the story of mysterious disappearances there is one more that is worth relating that bears all the hallmarks of a modern legend. I am referring to the Paris Exhibition Mystery. This concerns a young lady and her mother who went to Paris in I889 to visit the Great Exhibition. They booked a room in a hotel and the young lady left her mother to rest in the room and went out by herself to see the sights. On her return to the hoetl she asked the clerk at the reception desk for the key to the room. He stared at her in surprise --"but what key, mademoiselle, I have never before seen you" the clerk called the porter to confirm his statement. The manager professed ignorance of her and her mother. tVhen she finally got to the room where she had left her mother it was empty and decorated in entirely different way from what she remembered. The story attracted a lot of attention, and the general concensus of opinion was that the mother had suddenly contracted a virulent form of small pox (or bubonic plague) while the girl was out. She had been sent to a remote hospital, where she subsequently died, and the room was redecorated hastily. The feeling was that the French authorities would not want a scare about an epidemic coming at the time of the Great Exhibition. This story, to modern eyes, bears all the hallmarks of a modern urban legend, but it also belongs in the time frame when the members of the Liars' Clubs were producing some of their most effective stories. The attraction of these stories is in the detective skills needed to try and trace the origins of the tales.

Sometimes attempts to trace the origins of these stories is a laborious affair, as in the case of the research into the disappearance of David Lang — the researchers searched through hundreds of documents, records and old newspapers in an effort to find any mention of the people involved. At other times the solution is found relatively easily. One such case which we ourselves were able to solve was that of the^Disappearing Regiment:' The story has been repeated many times since it originally appeared, and it seems no effort had been made to check the accuracy of the tale. The account is essentially as follows — the time was August 28th 1915 at Gallipoli during World War I. A group of twenty-two soldiers (New Zealanders) was stationed about one and a half miles from a place known as Kill 60, which was an area which was being fought for against the Turks. They noticed some strange cloud formations hovering over the hill, and at ground level there was another light gray cloud about eight hundred feet long, two hundred feet wide, and two hundred feet high. It seemed almost solid and hung over a sunken road in a dry creek. A British regiment was seen to be marching up the sunken road towards Hill 60. The story goes that this regiment entered the cloud at one end and was never seen to come out again at the other. The regiment was the British 4th Norfolk Regiment, and this regiment completely disappeared and the men were never seen again.

The story was retold in full detail at a recent 50th Jubilee of the ANZAC landing in New Zealand, and has had credibility among ex-soldiers ever since it happened. Of recent years the story has been taken over by Ufologists, and many have postulated that a mysterious craft from the sky came down into the mist and swept the regiment away. So the story is now found in UFO literature.

We felt that the War Records Office might have something to say about this; after all the number of men supposedly involved was several hundreds, and we were curious to know the official version this disappearance. The Fortean Society had done some research into this, in response to the publicity generated by the retelling of the story at the 50th Jubilee reunion, and they had elicited the fact that it was not the regiment of the Fourth Norfolk, but a battalion of the 5th Norfolks that went missing. They had consulted some historical accounts of the battles and discovered that a group of men from this battalion had become separated from the rest in the course of a battle when a line had broken, and they had pushed on ahead of the rest of their comrades, and had not been seen since. But the Forteans had not apparently contacted the War Records Office for final verification of their fate, and we decided to do this. Letters to the War Records Office and the Royal Norfolk Regimental Association supplied the answer. The date was, in fact, 12th August 1915t and the troops involved were men of the 163 Brigade of the 5th Norfolk, some 5th Suffolk, and 8th Hants, with the kth Norfolks held in reserve. They were attempting to take the Anafarta Ridge. They met with heavy concentrated machine gun fire which slowed down the advance except on the right, where the 5th Norfolks found resistance less strong, and they began to go forward more quickly than the rest. The commander of the 5th Norfolk was a bold self confident officer and he pressed forward followed by the best part of his battalion. The rest withdrew but Colonel Beauchamp with sixteen officers and two hundred and fifty men of the 5th Norfolk pushed on, driving the enemy before them. Nothing more was ever seen of them, they charged into the forest and were lost to sight and sound.

It was not until four years later that any trace was discovered of their whereabouts. Writing on September 23rd 1919. the Officer Commanding the Graves Registration Unit in Gallipoli says "Vile have found the 5th Norfolk -- there were one hundred and eighty in all, one hundred and twenty two Norfolks, a few Hants and Suffolk, with some Cheshires. They were scattered over an area of about one square mile at a distance of at least eight hundred yards behind the Turkish front line. Many of them had evidently been killed in a farm, as a local Turk who owns the place told us that when he came back he found the farm covered with the decomposing bodies of British soldiers which he threw into a ravine. The whole thing bears out the original theory that they did not go very far, but were mopped up one by one, all except the ones who got into the farm".

Some of the details are different from the story that has passed into legend — the date is slightly different, the numbers lost are less than the eight hundred now spoken of, but it seems likely that this is the real story. It is probable that in the mist the troops turned up a gorge in the dry river bed along which they were walking and were lost to sight as reported. It was not until the War was over that their fate became clear, and by that time the story had already become a legend. Sven though the facts are now available for everyone to find out for themselves as they have been since 1919i it seems certain that some authors will continue to report the story and the legend will not die out. It is unfortunate that there is a market and an appetite for mysterious and unexplained disappearances, along with all the other "Fortean" phenomena, and these stories are accepted as truth, quite uncritically by members of the public fed by unscrupulous writers and authors.

Typical of this type of story is one reported in The Edmonton Sunday Sun in 1982. The article starts with the question "Can flesh and bones human beings disappear, completely, from moving aircraft? Logic tells us that they cannot. But history tells us something else again". The account goes on to relate how in January 1980 two people took off from Shreveport, La., for a routine 50-minute flight to Baton Rouge in a new Cessna Conquest airplane. Shortly after takeoff the plane veered almost 180 degrees from its prefiled southeasterly course, and was moving at a height of 25,000 feet - more than 2,000 feet above its safety ceiling. Contact could not be made with the plane's occupants. Two Phantom Jets were sent up to investigate and found the plane without much difficulty -- by now it was flying at 40,000 feet. The military aircraft made good visual contact, and it appeared that there was nobody on board. The Cessna strayed, meandering, unpiloted for over two hours before finally ditching in the waters of the Atlantic off the shores of Hampton, Virginia. There are many obvious questions unasked and unanswered in this report. Di the altimeter of the plane fail? Did the pilots then ascend into the atmosphere above the level of safety and pass out from lack of oxygen? When the fighter planes came alongside had the pilots slumped to the floor from lack of oxygen and were thus not visible to those outside the airplane? These seem obvious questions to ask. Unpiloted, the plane, perhaps set on 'automatic pilot' might well meander for some distance before finally ditching when it ran out of fuel. It was not stated whether the wreckage was ever found, or even sought -- perhaps it sank into too deep water for recovery to be possible. But the newspaper account does not pose any of these questions or hazard any answers -- the report finishes with the same question asked in the beginning "Can a human being simply disappear from an air-craft in mid-air? Logic tells us that this isimpossible. The facts have another tale to tell". But I venture to say that the facts have not been examined. The story however is too good not to repeat, and I have no doubt this will become another legendary disappearance. Theq Never Cerne Back

Mysterious Disappearances in Sundslatt farm at the far end of Sweden. Part I. Sirkon Island, right in the heart of the fruit farm district By Jan-Ove Sundberg around Urshult parish, the rather (Ekopress, Sweden) and the smallest son had gone down to the barn early in the How can a person vanish morning. The mother was in the without a trace? That question kitchen, busy with their break• has been asked by despairing fast. It was cold inside the relatives, experienced police house and she decided to set a officers and an astonished pub• fire in the kitchen stove, but lic in all times and in every there was no wood in the house. country. It is estimated that She was just preparing to go out more than 100,000 people are re• to the woodshed and get some her• ported as missing every year, self, when her 13-year-old son world-wide. Most of the disap• Alvar came down the stairs. pearances are sooner or later solved by a natural explanation. But far too many people dis• Alvar had been sleeping for a long appear under inexplicable, and while this morning. He was read• very often extremely mysterious ing for his confirmation and would circumstances. They are never leave for church later on that found again. Many of these dis• morning. But he was not dressed appearances, however, are poorly up for church yet, and was wear• documented and most of them that ing a flowered shirt and blue are to be found in Fortean books jeans. His mother asked him to are nothing but fabrications by please get some wood. sensationalists. Others, un• fortunately, are seriously probed Alvar took the basket and and beyond doubt true, frighten• slipped into his clogs in the ing and lacking explanation. My hall. It was a walk of only 75 investigations concerned three feet to the woodshed, and yet, unexplained cases. somewhere along this line, or possibly from the woodshed, 13- THE BOY WHO VANISHED ON HIS WAY year-old Alvar disappeared with• TO A WOODSHED. out a trace! Neighbors, police, the Home Guard and military April 16, 1967, was a cold servicemen, clairvoyants and and windy Sunday with a bit of mediums, searched and pondered, snow in the air. On the so far in vain. When Alvar never came back In it was his wallet with a with the wood, his mother began couple of ten bills. And his bike to wonder. She called out for was standing on the farmyard. him but there was no answer. When No, most people believed it was her husband and the younger son not likely that he had run away came back from the barn after a wearing only his thin shirt and while, she asked them. They had clogs. And now the case was a not seen Alvar. The father went matter for the police. County out to the woodshed where he police commissioner Ove Hessel- found the basket--Alvar evidently gren and chief inspector Uno had been there. But where had he Logarn, from Vaxjo city, were at gone after that? His parents be• the scene of the disappearance. came worried. This was not at all Questioning and searching star• like their kind and decent boy. ted at full scale.

His parents knew that Alvar had not been too fond of the con• The police investigators firmation lectures with the au• found out that Alvar, who lived thoritative priest, but he had with his father and mother, youn• never refused to go there and he ger and elder brother in the had never played hooky. It was greyish-blue house at the far end also known that Alvar was inter• of the Sirkon Island, was much ested in birds and animals, but like all boys of his age, maybe a if he had seen something inter• little softer than most and rath• esting in the field and decided to er talented. The conditions at investigate he would have deli• home were normal. Alvar and his vered the wood first. elder brother had been quarreling as boys do, but Alvar would simply The father put on his jacket turn away from the quarrel, which and went down to the lake. Was by no means meant that he was the it possible that Alvar had run to kind that everyone picked on. the lake, slipped and fallen into The investigators were also told the almost freezing water? He was that the family had been away at not a good swimmer. But if he had a party the evening before the gone to the lake, wouldn't he disappearance. Alvar had not have come back first to get some joined them, preferring to stay warmer clothing? His father was at home and read. He went to bed convinced of that as he went early and was asleep when his searching along the lake side. parents returned home after mid• He did not find anything, nor had night. He was still sleeping when any of the neighbors seen Alvar. his mother brought juice and bis• Deeply worried, the father tele• cuits to his room. phoned the police, who arrived on the Sirkon Island an hour later. When Alvar woke up at about 9 A.M. Sunday morning, April 16th, At the same time, rumors he first of all drank up his spread about this disappearance juice and ate the biscuits. Then and neighbor after neighbor and he put on his blue jeans, the friend after friend turned up at flowered every-day shirt and his the Larsson farm offering to help socks. Dressed like that he tip• in the search. Was it possible toed down to his mother in the that Alvar simply had run away? kitchen. It was then that she That was a theory that could not asked him to get some wood for the be dismissed immediately. But stove. He took the basket and several things argued against it. slipped into his clogs—then Alvar's suit was still hanging vanished. Was it possible that a in his room on the second floor. car had pulled up, stopped and taken the boy away as he was stan• of clogs was found in Lake Asnen. ding in the woodshed? No one had But a closer examination showed seen or heard any car in the area. that they did not belong to Alvar's mother declared that he Alvar. Chief Inspector Uno Lo- would never have gone along by garn of the County police in his own free will with a stranger. Vaxjo city, at the time said to one of the major newspapers! Was Alvar surprised by anyone Several things are very strange in the woodshed? This is a theory in this affair. There are cer• that the police investigators can tain things that we have been not dismiss entirely. The posi• unable to explain. tion of the basket and other things in the woodshed might suggest this. "First," said County police But, according to the police inves• commissioner Ove Hesselgren to tigators, the theory that a stran• another major newspaper, "we are ger— a presumptive perpetrator or dealing with the Alvar case as a killer— could have been standing disappearance. There was no con• in the woodshed, or turn up there crete suspicion of a crime from at the same time as Alvar's mother the very beginning. However, we asked the boy to get some wood, is were conscious that we could not so fantastic and ill-founded that dismiss the crime theory and we it presumably lacks credibility. treated the case as if a crime had been committed. We launched Alvar's parents were question• a big search party of trained ed carefully and gave the inves• police officers, military and tigators a story which no one crowds of volunteers. We sent could find anything wrong with. for helicopters and police dogs. However, nasty rumors in the We carefully combed every inch in parish were spreading and a mound a large circle, but we never found in the farmyard was dug up by the a thing. There was not a single investigators. The boy's dead trace of the boy, and nothing body was to be found under it, the unusual found at all. But in some rumors claimed. It was not. These places the brushwood was so thick rumors and other indecent talk that we could not penetrate it. have continued from time to time, These areas we left alone." and Alvar's parents several times have been forced to seek "Also, there were swamps that medical care for nervous break• we could not venture into. I flew downs. The day after the disap• over Lake Asnen in a helicopter pearance, everyone on the island several times. The bottom was helped the police search for the clearly visible about 75 feet from boy in the very rough and hilly the shore. Unfortunately, a vio• terrain, but they found no trace lent spring storm blew up over the of the missing boy. island the day after Alvar's dis• appearance. The water rose in the To search more properly, a lake, boats drifted away and some team of* the Home Guard and mili• were tossed ashore. It was, there• tary servicemen was formed. They fore, impossible to determine if combed the island and the sur• Alvar had taken a rowing boat." roundings of Lake Asnen inch by inch, all in vain. Scoutings by Alvar was a very talented boy, police helicopters gave no re• a winner in his class. The tea• sults either. cher said, "Alvar could seem ab• sent during the lessons, but when One year after the tragic he got a question he answered it event, it was believed that the immediately . . . and correctly!" riddle had been solved» A pair Some describe him as melancholy and reserved. "Kind and helpful" nal I phoned the County police are other judgments. commissioner Ove Hesselgren in Vaxjo city to find out. One of the lines of investi• gation deals with homosexual "No, the case is not filed and we still are investigating crime. f)In 1964 a "boy was murdered in Vaxjo city. The circumstances it to a certain degree," said the indicated a homosexual murder. County police commissioner. This killer is still on the loose. Police have investigated the possi• "Over the past 10 years we bility of a connection between have received innumerable tips Alvar's disappearance 3 years later from the public and checked them and the 1964 murder. The boys all, so far with no result. We were very much alike in appearance. have received a couple of tips However, no connection between the this year too, but we have not cases was found. judged them as of any interest. Still we are checking on every All cars that passed by the one that comes in, no matter how Larsson's farm during the Sunday remote they may seem to be, and in question were checked. Only we certainly are interested in one car remains "mysterious," a receiving new ones." car which a l4-year-old boy saw turning a couple of times on the What really happened to Alvar main road to the Sirkon Island. Larsson? Was a child molester waiting for him in the woodshed This year -- 1977 — it is 10 by a curious coincidence, or did years since Alvar Larsson mys• he, like other boys involved in teriously vanished without a trace mysterious disappearances of this on Sirkon Island. Is the case kind, walk the 75-foot path into still under investigation by the the ominous place that we have no police or has it finally been better word for than the Great filed? On behalf of INFO Jour• Unknown? Theq Never Came Back

PART II Mysterious Disappearances in first he looked around the summer Sweden. cabin, then in the small forest. All in vain. Inexplicable, and By Jan-Ove Sundberg without leaving a trace, his son (Ekopress, Sweden) had suddenly disappeared in a tiny grove only 150 feet in circumfer• THE BOY WHO VANISHED IN A TINY ence. The father was terrified. GROVE. He got into his car and drove a couple of miles down the road, but On March 16, 1974, (note the Pauli was nowhere to be found. date coincidence) 13-year-old Pauli Virtanen, living in Stock• The parents waited until Sun• holm, got involved in a quarrel day afternoon to report the dis• with his younger brother, ran out appearance to the police. Pauli the door into a small grove and had run away on two earlier occa• disappeared from the face of the sions. Once he stayed away for a earth! couple of days, but on the other occasion he stayed away about a The Virtanen family had been month on Aland Island, where his looking for a summer cabin at Lake grandmother lives. As soon as the Malaren, about 3 miles north of police were alerted and took com• Strangnas city in Sodermanland mand of the case, a careful County all day Saturday. They were search started at Torparudden all very happy over the excursion Cape in Logarn on the Aspo pen• from their home in Skarholnen— a insula in Lake Malaren. suburb outside Stockholm. At about 4 P.M. they meant to return home. No one found a trace of the 17 But first they decided to visit boy, although trained police some old friends in the vicinity. dogs and military servicemen from the nearby city of Strang• nas searched. Later on, the po• Pauli and his younger brother, 100 12 lice were given men and one Petri, years old, were playing of the largest search parties indoors with a football when they ever formed in Sweden got under• suddenly started to quarrel loudly. way. The police and the mili• Their father, Erpo, told them to tary search party continued to take it easy and calm down and he search very carefully. In some grabbed Pauli by the arm. The boy places the terrain was very displayed a flash of anger, broke difficult to penetrate. "We loose, and ran out the door. Every• would need an enormous search thing happened very quickly when he party to cover every square disappeared. His companion, a fe• meter of this area, and at pres• male boxer by the name of Raisa, ent we can not give any guaran• thought Pauli wanted to play and tees that the boy is not still ran after him. Ten minutes later there," Chief Inspector Helmer the dog returned without Pauli. Eriksson, in charge of the po• The boxer is the silent witness to lice search party, told the local this still unsolved riddle. newspapers. When the dog returned without In September that year, five Pauli, the father, who thought he special investigators from the had grabbed Pauli a bit hard and State Homicide Commission were now was regretting this, was al• assigned to the case. They comb• ready out looking for his son. At ed' the investigation documents meticulously, finally offering What about the ice-covered three possible theoriesi lake, Erik Andersson asked the Chief Inspector; is it a possibil• 1. The boy could have run out ity that he could have ventured of the grove and out on the ice- out on it and drowned? covered Lake Malaren and drowned. But if that had been the case, "That is a possibility, but the body ought to have surfaced not a likely one," Inspector Kling during the summer. His father, answered. "The ice in the bay was Erpo, was also down at the lake• thick enough to carry a grown man, side shortly after the boy was and if the boy ventured further missing, and should have seen if out, he would have been seen from he had fallen into a hole in the the peninsula." He paused, then ice. added that Pauli had been descri• bed as an adventurer and had been 2. Pauli may have decided to on the run from home before. "We run away from home and since then hope to solve this case and find stayed out of sight. It is pos• him unharmed," he said. sible that he had money enough to make it. However, the police Later that same day we went to consider it strange that he had the Logarn area where Pauli Virt• not been recognized or freely anen had mysteriously disappear• returned home when school started. ed. It was a very rough terrain to venture into. The hilly area 3. The boy may have been the was full of ravines and gorges, victim of a crime. Something may and we were unable to see into have happened to him in the grove. them. We questioned some people Also he could have continued the who lived on the opposite side of 2 miles to the main road - route the bay, but no one had seen a 55 towards Stockholm - and hitch• boy on the ice at the time of the hiked a ride with a perpetrator. disappearance, with possibly one exception. One woman living 2 alone there thought that she had, About months after the mys• but her description did not fit terious disappearance of young Pauli Virtanen and she was not Pauli Virtanen, I was passing by sure that it was the actual date. the city of Strangnas on a free• We continued searching on the lance mission together with Erik peninsula for the rest of that Andersson, a private detective day, but like everyone before us friend of mine. We went to see it was in vain. Chief Inspector Kjell Kling at police headquarters in Strangnas to get a picture of the case, and Police Commissioner Paul possibly something that others Haglind at the State Homicide had overlooked. Commission in Stockholm, who is a specialist on disappearances of people, has this to say: "It is an odd disappearance," he told us. "A lot of people live "In the case of Pauli Virta• along the road of the peninsula nen, we have checked several hun• and we have questioned them all. dred tips from all over the coun• Nobody has seen the boy on that try and from Suomi-Finland, so road. It is a slight possibility far with no result. We consider that he could have passed these it very serious when children dis• cabins through the dense forest on appear. As soon as the parents both sides and reached the main have reported it, we move in imme• road, route 55, and if that is diately. In this case, the ter• the case he could be anywhere by rain of the peninsula was combed now." on several occasions with search parties and police dogs. We also party that this country has ever used helicopters and police boats seen in modern peace time. in our search. We can not ex• clude the possibility that Pauli The Wednesday of June 27, was was the victim of an accident in a calm and sunny day. The Harne- the rough terrain, nor that a fors family, living in the city of perpetrator caught up with him Falkenberg in Halland County on the somewhere along the line." Swedish west coast. Runo, his wife Mary and their twin-boys Jan-Hakan There still is a chance that and Jorgen, 13 years old, came to the boy might turn up somewhere, the world famous Rjukan in Tele- hopefully perfectly unharmed. marken County by car at 12»30 P.M. The case has many unpleasant siirr They came from the city of Kongs- ila.ritles to that of Alvar Lar- berg on their second day of the sson, and it is also surrounded major holiday. As they were having by odd circumstances connecting a picnic at Gausta Mountain, one it. of Norway's highest mountains Both of the boys disappeared which rises to a height of 5,^00 on the l6th; they were the same feet, the boys suggested that the age and they both vanished from a whole family should venture up body of land that was surrounded to the peak. by water. Both of them walked and ran just a short distance before There is a well-defined path• disappearing, and both of them way to the peak frequently used left no trace whatsoever. Another by tourists. It is about 2-J curious detail is that the area miles long and it takes about li where Pauli Virtanen disappeared hours to travel by foot. After is named Logarn, which was the last the break, the family started name of the Chief Inspector among their venture towards the peak. the police officers that investi• The twin boys ran along ahead of gated the Alvar Larsson case. If their parents and Jan-Hakan was all these oddities form a deeper the eager one. The pace was dif• mystery than I have already told ficult and Jorgen was unab]e to you, that is to say that the ex• run as fast as his brother, so planation in both of the cases is he slowed down to await his par• supernatural, I do not know, but ents. Jan-Hakan continued alone, as you look into things like dis• now running. By then the boys appearances a bit closer than had covered a third of the dis• usual, the inexplicable coincidences tance. It was somewhere along that face all Forteans always this pathway that 13-year-old Jan- crop up. I wanted to mention this, Hakan disappeared as completely as just for the record. if he had gone up in smoke I I have been told by experienced mountain climbers in Norway that PART III it is a total mystery how the boy could have disappeared on the THE BOY WHO VANISHED ON A MOUNTAIN narrow pathway towards the moun• PATH tain peak. He must have departed completely from the pathway to June 27, 1976, started with a risk falling into some ravine or happy family picnic at the Gausta among the many dangerous cliffs. Mountain in Southern Norway's most When his parents realized that impenetrable wilderness. Before Jan-Hakan had disappeared, they the day was over it would end in a searched for him along the entire tragedy that created one of the pathway, desperately calling his most baffling disappearances that name. They received no answer. ever took place in Norway, result• And now the greatest mystery that ing in the largest rescue search Norway ever saw began. At 6 P.M. the police head• who have vomited just looking over quarters at Rjukan received the the edge!" report that the Swedish boy had disappeared without a trace on The Chief Inspector of the po• Gausta Mountain. The police lice search party, Odd Asdalen of immediately scrambled as many men Rjukan headquarters was still baf• as possible. About 40 experienc- fled on July 3rd, and in a press e d mountain climbers in the res• conference he was quoted as saying: cue force and one helicopter "The boy disappeared in broad day• searched for the boy until night• light from a pathway which is about fall. They could not find him. 2i miles long and where dozens The next day the mysterious dis• of tourists walk every day. In• appearance was broadcast over the deed a mystery!" entire country by radio and TV. There is more to Gausta Moun• On Thursday, at least 300 army tain than just this tragic and troopers and volunteers were a deeply mysterious disappearance part of the police search party, which I, once again, want to give and circling the mountain peak you just for the record. The from the air were five helicopters following was, in connection from the Royal Norwegian Navy. with a report about the boy's All these enormous efforts were, disappearance, reported on June sadly to say, in vain. That eve• 29th by the Swedish newspaper ning the disappearance got even Expressen; bigger publicity on TV news and the major newspapers gave it al• "A couple of years ago, two most a whole front page. The Norwegian training airplanes Swedish boy's mysterious disap• from the Air Force crashed into pearance on Gausta Mountain touch• the northern wall of Gausta ed the Norwegian people, and po• Mountain. Both the pilots were lice were swamped with calls from killed. In the same area, an volunteers from all over the coun• American military helicopter met try in such numbers that the police the same destiny a while ago. had to refuse them! The rescue And it was just recently that work was very difficult and risky four Swedish skiers got lost on the storm-swept and dangerous there -- but they were fortunate• mountain, and the police were ly saved. Two years ago, a scared that inexperienced volun• Swedish tourist was killed by teers could be blown off the Gaus• lightning while standing on the ta peak. very peak."

Gausta Mountain is, it seems, On July 3rd, practically every a very busy area. While on an square meter had been searched expedition to search for a lake over around the Gausta Mountain by monster in that same County in police, military, and volunteers. the summer of 1977, I was told But Jan-Hakan was not found. One another strange story about Gaus• of the experienced mountain climb• ta Mountain, and other mountains ers in the search party, on June in the south of Norway. My Nor• 29tn said to the newspaper Expres- wegian friend, Mr. Arne Oygarden, sen in Sweden, "If the boy really related that there seems to be a reached the peak, a real death• sort of a "vacuum" above many of trap was waiting for him there. the mountain peaks, especially Just a short distance northeast of Gausta Mountain. Asking him to the peak, the mountain falls right be more concrete about what he down a cliff which is over 3,000 had just told me, he explained feet high. I know of many people that rumors were spreading that several military airplanes had lost their power and had "been motionless over such areas. It was just as if there was an anti- gravitational emptiness over many of the southern mountains in Nor• way. This has been suggested be• fore by many researchers, and the main question is whether it is possible that such anomalies can carry away people as well. S7>

TZLEPORTATION AND APPORTION. vTeleportation" is the word used to describe the fact that an object has disappeared, sometimes from plain view, sometimes from the place where it was last known to be, and its immediate whereabout? cannot be ascertained. "Apportatiori"is the sudden appearance of an object, again sometimes in plain view, otherwise in a place where it was clearly not a short time previously. Sometimes a teleported object reappears, either in the place from which it went missing, or in another location, sometimes it is never found again. Likewise an apported object may be one that has been previously lost, or it may be an object never seen before and whose origin cannot be determined. There are many accounts of both teleported and apported objects, especially in parapsychological literature, and these events are frequently associated with poltergeist happenings. However, as in so much of this kind of literature there is undoubtedly an element of both fraud and hoax, accounts of this intriguing phenomenon have generally been discounted and have met with sceptism and disbelief.

But as with so many of these anomalous phenomena, there are a few stories told from time to time that seem to bear witness to the authenticity of the happening. Some of the most striking of these accounts have been told us, in confidence, because the person to whom it has happened does not want to be thought crazy, and sometimes by people who have had no previous background knowledge of the subject, and are unaware of the literature, but puzzled and confused by a totally strange and perhaps frightening experience. It could be helpful to relate a few personal stories that have come our way.

Some seventeen years ago, when we were still in England, a lady wrote to us from a small town some few miles away, asking if we could explain something that had happened-to her. She had made enquiries and found out that we were interested in this type of happening. The story was simple. She was to attend a wedding, and a few weeks beforehand had purchased a new costume to wear for the occasion. On the day of the wedding she went to her closet to get out the costume to wear and it was gone. Ker immediate reaction was that it had been stolen, and the police were informed. However nothing else had been stolen, and there had been no evidence of break-in, She wore another dress and the loss remained a mystery. A few months later the family were moving to another house, and among the furniture to be moved was the closet in which the costume had been. This could not be carried down the stairs as it was too large, and so the closet was emptied and dismantled. When it was re-erected in the new house the lady concerned went to unpack and re-hang her clothing, and when she opened the door there was the costume that had vanished, hanging, intact, on a hangerJ The event was a total mystery. All the usual questions were asked; the remover's men had not found it when dismantling; they had left the closet empty when re-erecting. Eut the costume was there in the otherwise empty closet when she opened it to hang up her other clothes. A similar story was told us soon after we came to Canada. A mother was changing her child's diaper on a table; the child was playing with an advertising gramophone record that had come through the post that morning -- in fact the child had bitt it, and his teeth marks were showing. She was contemplating taking the record away, when the child threw it slightly in the air, and the mother said "it vanished right in front of my eyes - I couldn't believe it!" She hunted high and low for the record, and when her husband came from work that evening they searched again. Still they could not find it. Over the next period of time they continually wondered about the record, where it could be, and were continually on the look-out for it. It was never found. Five years passed, the original baby had grown to be a child of five or six years and a new baby had been added to the family. The room where the record vanished was gompletely redecorated, down to new carpeting, and radiators. She says the record was certainly not in the house during that period. Then, after five years, one evening when they had guests for dinner and she went to the record player to put on a record, there was the lost record, sitting on the playerl The older child denied having found it, and the younger one, had he found it, was too small to havereached to put it on theplayer. The adults all denied having found it and put it there. It was certainly the lost record she says, "it still had the baby's tooth marks on it" and she added "where had it been all those five years?" Where indeed? and perhaps in what form?

We have had many other such happenings reported to us; there was the lady who alone in her house, with the doors locked, went into her bathroom to take a shower, and when she came out of the shower she found that the bathrobe that she had worn on going into the bathroom (which she locked behind her) was now at the foot of the stairs, having apparently passed through the locked door. Another lady, whose office and car keys were on the same holder drove to her work, locked her car, unlocked her office and worked all day, and when it was time to leave could not find her key ring. After much searching she went to her car to see the key-ring sitting on the driver's seat of her locked car. Not only could she not have locked the car without the keys, but she would have been unable to enter her office without the keys. She says "When I arrived home I found a pile of objects on the table, some of them I had missed over the past few months, and others I had not been aware they were missing? ' This is sometimes a feature of these cases, especially in a poltergeist situation. When an object is "returned" it sometimes happens that other missing objects return at the same time, almost as if they have been in the same place, or are at least under a single element of control.

An interesting account was reported at the South African Parapsychological Association ir. 1973. The lady in question, with her husband and daughter, was staying in a hotel on a brief holiday. The lady, after the morning tea had been served went to the bathroom to take a bath, and after finishing called to her husband to hand her her corset, which she had left on a chair in the room the night before. It was not there. They were sure the servant who brought the tea had not taken it, as the husband had watched him put down the tea, and then closed the door behind him as he left. Also it was unreasonable to think a servant would steal a corset in that way. The window had been shut at night because of the wife's dislike of flying insects, and if someone had entered the room during the night with a duplicate key, again it seems unreasonable to suppose a corset would be stolen, but a valuable camera and other clothing and belongings left untouched. It was a total mystery.

The remaining time was spent at the hotel without further incident, and then they returned home. The daughter continues the story - they were unloading the lugguage in the garden and examining their post, while the parents went upstairs. The parents quickly returned, the mother looking stunned and speechless, and holding in her hands the missing corset. She had opened . the cupboard door to hang up their clothes, andjincredibly, the missing corset was there, lying rolled up on a shelf. To add to the mystery it had been hooked up in a special way that the mother normally used, when she was wearing it. Needless to say it had been unhooked when it went missing.

There are other stories of missing clothes; a similar story to the above happened to a family in Florida, when the husband's shorts were lost from the hotel room, and were found again hanging in his closet on his return. He had worn them at the beginning of the holiday, and his wife had washed them at the hotel in a special soap because she did not have the usual detergent. ii/hen found hanging up in the closet on their return they still smelled of this special liquid soap, thus proving to their satisfaction that the shorts had indeed been with them in Florida and not left behind by mistake.

One day, one of us, (IMO), had cause to visit a woman in the neighbourhood on a charity collecting mission. This person is a retired school teacher, in an arts faculty, and has no - interest in, or particular knowledge of this kind of phenomenon. Neither is she aware of our interest in the subject. She opened the door in some agitation, saying that she was sorry she had not the contribution ready, but she had lost a dress that she had planned to wear that evening to a special event. It was a striking red coloured dress and she had bought it a few weeks previously, and hung it in her closet, and now it was gone. She wondered if someone had stolen it, her closet was not too far from the apartment door, but as she lived alone she was always careful about opening the door, and never let strangers in. There had been no evidence of a break-in. As in the previous case it would seem unreasonable that a thief would rummage through the closet for one dress and miss an amount of silver that is in full view, plus the possibility of finding jewellery or money if dressing table drawers were searched rather than clothes closets. She was asked if she was sure she had brought the dress home from the shop -- she had the receipt. Could it have been sent for alteration? No, it had fitted perfectly. Had she sent it for cleaning? She could not think so, it was brand new and unmarked, and if she sent something for cleaning she had a special hook in the kitchen where the docket would be. She is a very meticulous lady. She was met in the street a short while after by IMO and asked "Did you ever find your dress" "No" she replied "I am still completely baffled, and find it hard to believe it happened".

It would be easy to dismiss some of these accounts as stories, or modern urban legends -- there is certainly a similarity about some of them, and we have picked similar ones from our collection to demonstrate this. But unlike modern urban legends the source of the story is there, the event has not happened to a friend of a friend, but to the person telling the story. The facts are straightforward and simply told. The objects are specific and identifiable.

But of one accepts that these mysterious disappearances and reappearances of objects do really happen, then we are up against one of the nost intriguing mysteries of the whole set of anomalies that we are studying. As the lady whose gramophone record disappeared expressed it, "VJhere have these objects been?" In what form are they transferred to one location from another? Can matter simply dissolve , or disintegrate, and re-assemble in another place? How can solid objects pass through locked doors, walls, and space itself? Did the costume, or corset, that re-materialized in the closets accompany the people when they travelled, in a dematerialized form - or did they travel independently?

There have been several reliable accounts in poltergeist situation of recent years when objects have been seen to materialize in front of the eyes of the beholders. These seem to appear, often immediately below the ceiling of a room, and then drop gently to the floor. Professor Bender had photographs of a blue vase that behaved in this manner in the famous Rosenheim poltergeist case in Germany.

To our mind this is still one of the most fascinating anomalies still to be researched. Unfortunately it is not possible at this time to do experiments, we do not know enough about the phenomenon, and would not know where to begin. There have from time to time been unconfirmed (and doubtless fictional or cautionary) stories of those who have experimented and vanished themselves, never to return. All we can do at this time is to carefully document all accounts that come our way, ask all the possible and relevant questions, and try to confirm the accuracy of such accounts. MODERN URBAN LEGENDS AND RUMOURS.

In previous papers we have mentioned the existence of what we call modern urban legends, and this may be an appropriate moment to consider this phenomenon. Professor Jan Harold Brunvand, Professor of Folklore at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, U.S.A. has done a great deal of work in this field, and has written two fascinating books that interest us greatly, The Vanishing Hitchhiker, and The Choking Doberman.

Some stories seem to be continually re-appearing in the literature, newspapers, magazines, etc, and each time they appear the location may be different, the names of the principals involved may be changed, some minor details of the circumstances may vary, but the story itself is obviously a re-hash of a previous one. Sometime these stories seem to be forgotten for a few years, and then they are renewed and circulate with surprising speed around the globe.

One that has fascinated us for the last twentyfive years or so is that of the"Vanishing Hitchhiker'.' As mentioned, the story has local variations, the names are changed each time, but the story is essentially the same. A young man, riding home alone at night on his motor cycle picks up a girl hitchhiker by the side of the road. She gives him the exact address to which she is going. He drives along, and then becomes aware-that she has vanished. He goes back to look for her, but cannot find her. In some distress he goes to the address she has given, the door is opened by an elderly lady, and when he enquires if the girl has by some chance arrived home safely before him, he is told that the girl was the daughter of the house, that she died suddenly, often in an accident, one year ago that night. He is then taken to view the grave, and in some accounts his coat, which he had thrown over the girl's shoulders to keep out the cold, is found lying-on the grave.

There are minor variations, sometimes the vehicle is a car rather than a motor cycle, but those are the essentials. i/Je began to collect these accounts many years ago, out of interest, and because they were usually reported as ghost stories. The story is always reported in the second person as having been told to the writer of the story as happening to a friend. The person to whom it happens is never the author of the story. However, the people who relate what happened to their friend are often very honest and upright people. We had a letter from a policeman in England who swore it happened to his friend, and many other people in England related it to us, as if it had just happened to their very good friends. Dr. Creighton, in the Maritimes, who has collected ghost stories for many years in the eastern provinces of Canada told us that she has had many versions of the story sent to her both from Canada and the U.S. 'We have a version of it from a Toronto man who said it happened to a friend of his in Winnipeg. We have had Sicilian, Italian, South African versions, and it has been reported as happening in China. So we were delighted to read of research done by the Fortean Society on this story, and later to read the book mentioned above by Professor Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker. From these researches we learn that the story is very widespread indeed, and goes back before the days of the motor bicycle or car. Erunvand describes this as the classic automobile legend, and says that it was known at the turn of the century both in the U.S. and abroad. Brunvand relates versions dating back to I876, 1912, and 1920 when the vehicles were horse-drawn, and he also relates a Chinese version where the "ghost" was a Chinese girl who walked with the young man, but in true Chinese fashion a step or two behind him, and then she vanished in the same way as the others. With so many versions of the story in existence it becomes clear that whether the event ever did happen on any one occasion, most of the versions going the rounds at any one time are just legends.

There are certain features common to modern urban legends, which are useful in helping identify them as such. It is always impossible to find the person to whom the event actually happened. It always happened to a friend of a friend. If you challenge the teller of the story to produce the friend, the tale always gets removed one step further away. "well, it wasn't exactly so-and-so" will be the answer, "but he/she told me that it happened to a friend of theirs, and I believe they are telling the truth". You will remember that when we were looking at the David Lang and Oliver/Lerch/Larch/Thomas disappearances one could not trace the places or people concerned. In these stories also furthers/investigation reveals that the people named in the story cannot be traced, addresses do not exist, places are not there. It is clear the story is an invention. Moreover, although the details vary from version to version, there is usuall5', if not always, a certain illogicality about the story, for instance, hitchhikers do not usually reveal the exact address to which they are going, they usually ask to be let off at the nearest corner.

Erunvand speculates that modern urban legends represent the submerged fears and concerns of the community. A long and intensive study of the literature would lead one to believe that this might well be so. A number of these legends have a very long history. In The Choking Doberman Erunvand tells the story of the dog that had been left in the house alone, and when the owners returned they found the dog choking. They rushed the dog to the vet, and returned home. The phone rang and the vet said 'get out of the house quickly, there were human fingers in the dog's throat, there must be a burglar in the house'. They went to a neighbouring house and phoned the police, who came and found a burglar crouched under the bed, bleeding badly from his hand, which had two missing fingers. There are several versions of this story going the rounds, all essentially conveying the same message. The story probably dates from the ancient Celtic fairy tale of Llewellyn and Gellert. The prince had left his huge hunting hound, Gellert, guarding his baby. '/Jhen he returned he found the dog's lips and fangs dripping with blood, and the dog acting in an uneasy manner. Llewellyn assumed the dog had.killed the baby, and proceeded to kill the dog. Later, of course, he found the baby unharmed, and nearby the body of a great wolf that had attempted to attack the child.

Many of these stories have cycles, and circulate for a period, and then seem forgotten for a few years, only to resurface and go the rounds once again. A regularly occurring story represents people's continuing anxiety about being kidnapped. For young v/omen the story is that the usual "friend of a friend'' knows a young woman who, while shopping in the department store, was injected against her knowledge and through her clothing, with a drug which caused her to become unconscious. An elderly woman then stepped forward and claimed she was a friend of the victim, and carried her out of the store, after which she was never seen again. The teller of the story then goes on to speculate that the girl is now probably a prostitute in South America. In the Thirties, as we remember the story, the victim became the inmate of a Sultan's harem in the OrientJ . Mothers fear the kidnapping of their children, and a story current in Toronto at the moment, which we have heard several times recently, has two versions. One is that mother is in a department store with the toddler, who becomes separated from her mother. A frantic search ensues, and later the child is found in the washroom with a woman who is busy bleaching the child's hair, in order to spirit it out of the store unrecognised. The other version places the mother in a park with the baby and toddler. The toddler wanders off, and the mother frantically searches for her. An older woman is sitting on a bench nearby, and the mother asks this woman to keep an eye on the baby while she looks further for the older child. The toddler is found, but when the mother reums the older woman has vanished with the baby!.

Another story that is going the rounds at this time is.that one known as the "Vanishing Grandmother". This has been told us as being a true story very recently. A family decide to vacation in Mexico (or Spain) and take the elderly, somewhat ailing, grandmother along. At a time when they are out in the country and far from any kind of help grandmother suddenly dies. V/hat to do? The formalities of dealing with a death in a foreign country, especially if the family cannot speak the language, are formidable. They decide to hurry out of the country as soon as jsssible and only report the death when they have crossed the border. However the children are not happy with dead grandmother sitting beside them in the car, so grandma is wrapped in a blanket and tied to the roof rack. On the way they stop at a wayside cafe for a light meal, and imagine their horror on looking out of the window to see their car being stolen!. (Sometimes it is just grandmother wrapped in her blanket that is stolen).

It is not difficult to understand the underlying communal concerns and fears that give rise to stories such as these.

Many of these stories that go the rounds, though, are told in a light hearted manner, and are more in the nature of jokes or cautionary tales. we would like to relate two or three of these just for fun.

One that we have remembered for many years is the story of the lady in the fast food eating place, who placing her coffee and just bought bar of chocolate on the table she is sharing with a man, is surprised and discomfited when he breaks off a piece of her chocolate and eats it. Defiantly she takes a piece, and then he does the same, and they alternately eat until it is gone. She gets up to take her tray away, and sees he has somehow acquired a doughnut. She leans over and takes a large bite out of his doughnut before leaving. Outside the restaurant she opens herjpurse only to find her own bar of chocolate there. We heard this story orginally during World War II when it was cirgarrettes that were smoked instead of a chocolate bar eaten.

The troubles of a manager of a supermarket were related to us by a so-called friend of this manager to whom this was alleged to have happened. A woman was entertaining friends for dinner and bought a turkey. She placed the turkey in the oven to cook and then remembered an errand she had to do. Her husband was watching television and she asked him to keep an eye on the bird. The husband's friend comes round, and they decide to play a joke on wife. Friend takes turkey round to his own oven to continue to cook there, and they replace the turkey with a cornish hen. The wife returns later and opens the ovem door to check on the turkey. Struck by horror at her shrunken turkey, she takes cornish hen from oven, puts it in bag, and rushes round to the supermarket to complain about her shrunken trukey, before her husband can stop herl.

There are certain features that are common to modern urban legend? that will help one to recognize a story as such. It is impossible to trace them down to their source. Erunvand says that some of them may have had an original source, where the story started, and if one is lucky, one may manage to track this down, but the local version is impossible to pin down. They represent an underlying concern and anxiety that is common, especially to the group of people who perpetuate the story, for instance, young mothers generally relate the children kidnapping story, travellers tell the vanishing grandmother story, and so on. There are certain logical questions or observations that are not answered or dealt with in the story, and the intelligent reader can pick out these discrepancies for him/ herself.

There is another class of story that goes the rounds which comes under the heading of rumour, rather than modern urban legends, although it has some of the features of the legends. Rumours are less definitive than legends, and they are generally shorter lived. The story may be of the nature of "I heard it said that" rather than "it happened to a friend of mine". However, like the legends;rumours are spread because they touch on the real uncertainties and anxieties of the times. Rumours of imminent destruction and vast explosions round the site of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant circulated like wildfire after the incident that happened at that plant in 1979. Rumours about well-known food products are common, and cause a great deal of difficulty for the people who manufacture these products. Generally these arise from an underlying concern about what might be in the product, a feeling of helplessne these days that we are at the mercy of those who prepare our food, and so on, although of course sometimes these rumours are spread by people with a real grudge against the firm concerned. A rumour can be defined as a story in general circulation without certainty as to its truth, and it generally underlines a chronic underlying anxiety of the population. Tests have shown that people who are highly anxious spread rumours much more frequently than do calm people.

We would also like to look at another group of stories in this section that do not quite belong in the above categories. These are a form of legend that has been perpetuated because it appeals to the imaginations of people, and even though evidence has been adduced to prove that the facts are somewhat different than stated, the story still lives on. We will relate some of these and tell of the investigations that have taken place.

The first one concerns the moving coffins of Barbados. We wrote an account of our findings of this story in the April 1975 issue of our journal New -Horizons. Briefly the facts are these. In the churchyard of Christ Church in Barbados there is a family vault belonging to a family named Chase, local plantations owners, and white residents in Barbados. The vault was opened in 1807, when the body of a Mrs. Goddard was placed in it." In 1808 Miss A.M. Chase was interred there, and in 1812 Miss D. Chase was also buried in the vault, 'When later in 1812 the vault was again opened to receive the body of the Honourable T. Chase the three previous coffins had apparently been moved around, and were in some disarray. On Sept. 25th 1816 an infant child was to be buried, and again, on opening the vault the coffins (which had been re-arranged tidily when the Hon. T. Chase was buried), were again found to have been moved and disturbed. Two months later, when the vault was opened to receive the body of a Mr. Brewster, and again in 1819 when a Mr. Clarke was buried, the coffins were found to be disarranged. Each time they were replaced in their original positions, and the vault sealed between each opening. The door was a massive cement slab, requiring six or seven men to move it, and it was cemented in place. The floor of the vault was sand, and no -footmarks, or disturbance of the sand was apparent after each opening. The coffins were orginally three on the floor side by side, and the others laid on top of them. Most of the coffins were of lead, but there seems to be some doubt about Mrs. Gddard'd which may have been of wood. The story goes on to relate how after these disturbances the Governor of Barbados himself put his seal on the vault, and it was left for eight months and when the vault was again re-opened the coffins were disturbed and strewn around as before. The story has been repeated endlessly in books, journals, magazine articles and newspapers, and totally accepted at its face value. We ourselves had an opportunity to visit the site in 197*+. and found that there were several facts that had never been referred to in the stories that might shed a different light on an interpretation of the events. We were surprised to discover that while the front of the vault was underground, and one had to descend several steps to the door, the level of the cemetery was several feet above the surrounding ground, so that the back of the vault was partly above ground. The back of the vault was, in fact, part of the brick wall that surrounded the churchyard. The front door and steps could be sealed with all the locks and security desired, but unless something was done at the back it would have been relatively easy then, as now, for someone to enter through the back by taking out a few bricks, and then replacing them. The brick wall appears to be the original one. We leaned to the possibility that disgruntled slaves were either disarranging the coffins to frighten their owners, or were searching for valuables that might have been buried with the dead. A theory had been put forward, however, that the disturbances had been caused by flood water during hurricanes, some of which had certainly been of a very devastating nature during this period of time. However the cemetery is at the top of a high hill, and this seems unlikely. But we did note that the vault showed signs of dampness, and in our report at the time noted that even lead coffins could float, sometimes for long distances, as witness the case of the floating coffin of the actor Charles Coghlan, which had been alleged to have floated out from its burial place in Galveston, Texas, following a hurricane, and continued to float out to sea and around the coast to Prince Edward Island, Canada, from which Charles Coghlan had come. This story of Coghlan's coffin has been an accompaniment to the Barbados Coffins story, often adduced as evidence of the power of hurricanes to move coffinsl We were indebted to Dwight Whalen, of Fate magazine, for the final nail in this coffinl Following an extensive follow-up of this story Whalen discovered that indeed the coffin of Charles Coghlan, the actor, floated out to sea following a hurricane in Texas, but it was never seen again. By coincidence another actor, named Charles Flockton, had died in Los Angeles. You will note the similarity of name. Flockton had requested that when he died his body be cremated and his ashed returned to Prince Edward Island, his birthplace as well as that of Coghlan. This was done, and a memorial to Charles Flockton exists and can be seen today. During the telling the stories became confused, and they continued and still continue to be repeated, without the facts having been checked thoroughly.

Another story that has been very interesting to track down has been the origin of what have come to be known as the "Christ in Snow" pictures, or as some reports call them "The Photos of the Gods". One of our interests is psychic photography, and from time to time people have brought us a picture, which appears to be a photograph of a bearded man, with one hand upheld in blessing, who is alleged to be the Christ. He is standing against a mixed black and v/hite background which sometimes looks like foliage, sometimes it is said to be snow. Hence the title"Christ in Snow." The pictures that we have been shown have varied in the quality of the print, and sometimes the figure is very obvious, and sometimes somewhat indistinct. But they are all obviously the same picture reproduced. The stories told us to accompany the picture varied, and tallied with the kind of reports that the Fortean Society have received with the pictures over the years. They also seem generally to fit into the modern urban legend pattern, as it was always difficult to pin down the origin of the photographs. They were taken by friends of friends and given to the person who passed them on. The old Toronto Telegram printed an article about one of these pictures some years ago under the title "Elusive Face of Jesus". According to the paper the shot was reportedly taken by a despairing woman who had lost touch with God and was seeking Him.

Members of the Fortean Society became very interested in this picture, and endeavoured to trace it back to its source. The earliest account they could find was that of a woman, Mildred Swanson, who was alleged to have taken the picture in 1920, while attempting to take a picture of her seven-year old daughter against a flower bank. The Christ picture was the result, it is said, and she named it "Jesus of the Flowerbank". The Fortean researchers then go on to quote numerous other alleged sources, varying from two girls who said they took it on a nature ramble on Box Hill, Surrey, to an author and psychic healer who claimed he took the picture in the Himalayas. Note that the picture is the same in each claim, the person's description of the background may vary, but the actual picture is the same one. They are not variants, but the same. The Fortean researchers found one reference to the possibility that a cleric had taken the picture in the trenches in 1917. but this was not possible to trace further, and it seemed that 1920 was the earliest date at which to place the picture.

Then we ourselves came into possession of another picture from someone who was given the picture dating back to training camp in 19^2 in Valcartier, Quebec. The soldier who gave the picture to this person alleged he had taken the picture himself, and unexpectedly the picture of Jesus appeared. We asked him to try and trace this for us, and to cut a long story short we finally received a letter from the person who brought this photo to us, enclosing a reproduction, exact size, of a photograph purchased by a Mrs. Ernest Smith while visiting Flanders between 1918 and 1920. The photograph was supposed to be taken between the graves on Flanders Fields, and sold by members of the Salvation Army. It is interesting to note that the Salvation Army ran the auxiliary base at the camp in Quebec from which came the picture that was recently sent to us. The recipient of the picture says "My guess is that the Sally Ann decided to put the fear of God into the soldiers, and either doctored the negative from the film, or inserted a negative of an existing print". It seems we have in this case traced a "legend"' back to its source. It seems a likely explanation that in order to console those who had lost their loved ones in Flanders Fields such pictures were circulated, but it is interesting that fifty to sixty years later these pictures should still be appearing, the same pictures but with a different story. In spite of the fact that we now know the origin of the pictures we expect we shall continue to receive copies of this picture from time to time, with a different version as to how the picture came about. This story also illustrates the amount of time and painstaking investigation needed to arrive at the truth of these interesting legends.

There are other stories the public is reluctant to part with even though it is now well known that there is no truth in them — a good example of this is the "Angels o felons" legend, again a story from the First World War. The account goes that at the height of the battle of Mons an apparition of St. George and the Bowmen of England descended in a cloud from the heavens to assist the beleagured British soldiers. It was reported that arrows were found in the bodies of dead Germans. Other versions talk of a cloud that hid the British from their German foes, and others that a cloud of Angels descended from heaven to assist in the British defence. The story had its origins in a short story written by one Arthur Machen, who wrote stories for the London Evening News. In Sept. 191^ the News carried a story by Machen entitled "The Bowmen" and it was an unprecedented success. The story was of a British soldier, who while fighting against severe odds repeats a motto which he has seen under the picture of St. George on the plates in a restaurant. Translated from the Latin it reads "Be with the English, St. George'.'. He heard a great voice and one thousand men shouting "St. George for Merry England , a long bow, and a strong bow, Heaven's Knights aid us". In front of the trench he saw a long line of shining figures, "the grey mass (i.e. Germans) were falling by thousands". Machen had numerous requests for permission to repeat the story, and in time it came to be believed to be true. As the story of the Angel of Mons it is firmly believed today, especially by many survivors of World War I and their relatives and families.

A story of the Second World War possibly originated as a result of the work that we being done to camouflage ships at sea, and then later became confused with modern science fiction. We remember during the early 19^-0's a joke going around that the experts had camouflaged a ship so expertly that they had subsequently lost it themselves. This was in the days when all kinds of experiments were being done with physical camouflage, some of this incidentally very effective. One could have the experience of walking through a field of cabbages, or turnips, and suddenly see them all get up and walk away, they were camouflaged troops on manoevres. There were a number of lighthearted jokes about this kind of experience, as one may imagine* jokes about the young couple canoodling in the middle of a field only to see all the vegetation get up an walk awayl

However in the 1950's a very fascinating story of disappearance in World War II surfaced. The story came to light in a strange and unusual manner, and the circumstances of its telling are still somewhat mysterious. A book, The Case for the UFO's was published by one Morris K. Jessup. Dr. Jessup held a degree in astro-physics and taught astronomy and mathematics at the University of Michigan and Drake University. He had erected and operated the largest reflecting telescope in the southern hemisphere, in South Africa, for the University of Michigan, and his research programme had resulted in the discovery of numerous double-stars. Dr. Jessup had also studied the sources of crude rubber in the Amazon, and participated in archaeological studies of Mayan ruins in the jungles of South America. Dr. Jessup's book, The Case for the UFOs discussed the more mysterious phenomena in the fields of astronomy, meteorology, and the history of these sciences, as well as the problems of space travel.

Shortly after the book was published in I855 Dr. Jessup received a strange letter from someone signing himself Carol Miguel Allende. The letter had been posted in Texas but bore a Pennsylvania address. The letter was awkward in its composition; there were errors in punctuation, misspelling, and frequent underlining. After commenting on other aspects of Jessup's book, the correspondent gave details about an alleged secret naval experiment that took place in October 19^3. in which a ship was rendered invisible, with disastrous results to the crew. The writer indicated that he was in the service at the time and was a witness. Jessup*s first reaction was that the letter was a hoax, or that the writer was a crackpot. Jessup wrote the writer requesting further details, and the writer responded offering to be tested under hypnosis, or truth serum, as to the veracity of his account.

Dr. Jessup was meanwhile invited to visit the Office of Naval Research and handed an annotated copy of his book, which had apparently been sent to that Department, and which had been heavily annotated in different colours of ink. Some of the annotations referred to the mysterious disappearance of the warship. Jessup was questioned about the book and told his interrogators that he had had two letters apparently from the person who had done the annotations. The officer concerned thanked Jessup and indicated that a limited number of copies of his book with the annotations would be printed, and one copy sent to him, Jessup, which did in fact, happen. The whole account of the experiment is too long to repeat here, but it was written up fully in the annotated version of Jessup's book. Basically the experiment was supposed to be based on Einstein's Unified Theory, which deals with the effects of gravity and electricity, and according to Allende, if indeed he was the my^sterious author of the annotations, the ship was caused not only to disappear, but on one occasion at least it was teleported from Philadelphia to its berth in Norfolk. Allende goes on to state that the experiment had disastrous effects on the crew, and many of the men became insane.

The story has all the hallmarks of a legend, but the question remains unanswered as to why the Navy went to the trouble and expense of reprinting the annotated book; also why they took the trouble to call in Dr. Jessup for questioning. It is not know whether the Navy investigators ever located Allende, who seems to have dropped from sight after this, or whether Jessup before his death ever contacted him again. The story certainly caught the imagination, and has been repeated several times in book form, and a film has been made of the story. It seems likely to go down in the annals of modern legends.

These stories illustrate how difficult it is to track down the sources of a story once it has become a legend. Endless patience is required, and a good background knowledge of the whole field is essential. Each story has to be dealt with separately, on its own merits. But there is truly a fascination about them, and a good deal of satisfaction when onefeels one has reached the truth behind a story. CONCLUSIONS,

Anomalistics as a field study has its own peculiar methodology which is dictated by the form of its data. The point of departure of all research in this region of enquiry is not the results of experiments but instead, consists of apontaneously arising reports. In an experimental situation it is the investigator who sets the stage. He or she arranges conditions in which a particular kind of happening will (according to knowledge already acquired) as a matter of certainty take place. From the particular characteristics of the actual outcome, the experimenter can, if the experiment has been properly designed, make inferences which in favourable cases suggest further deliberately perpetrated experiments. This sequence of events is, in fact, what schoolchildren and university students are told is'•'the scientific method*.' However, Nature, who has never been to school, and earned no college degrees, does not do things according to the book, and presents her children with a welter of other data, presented untidily and without system. It is these which provide the primary materials with which the student of anomalistics must work.

Thus the primary data of anomalistics are statements either in the press, in magazines, or by individuals in letters or in person. Usually these are unsolicited and arise spontaneously, so that the investigators have absolutely no control over the origin of the narratives. The situation is in many respects rather like that in a large area of parapsychology. That science, and it is a science (because a science is characterized by its method and not its subject matter) consists of two distinct disciplines. One discipline proceeds by formal experiments just like school-book science. The other (rightly in our opinion) deems it its duty to take full account of spontaneous happenings* En passant it may be mentioned that this divergence of emphasis (which in our opinion is dictated by reality; is reflected by a long standing schism within the ranks of parapsychologists. The past one and a half centuries has seen several swings in fashion within the subject.

Until about 1890 the study of spontaneous phenomena comprised essentially the whole of psychical research activity. From then until about 1935 the two disciplines enjoyed approximately equal respect and support. However the efforts of William McDougall and Joseph Rhine then bore fruit, and for some twenty years the experimental approach enjoyed a much greater dignity than studies in spontaneously occurring phenomena, to which was attached the epithet "anecdotal". Whether this was initially intended to minify the importance of that area of research is a matter that will not be pursued here. However it is fair to say that since that time "anecdotal" has been quite uniformly employed in a derogatory and perjoratively sense to describe all data of the spontaneous kind. While we do not wish to dwell on the subject, we think it fair to record that the word "anecdotal" was recklessly and uncritically applied to data quite undeserving of that adjective. We are referring to cases based on the mutually corroborating and testable statements of multiple witnesses. Such cases deserve more than the mean-spirited description of "anecdotal". To come to the point of our remarks. In anomalistics almost all reports are those of single witnesses or small groups of witnesses. The testing and examination of these witnesses calls for exactly the skills which are employed by investigators into the spontaneous case side of psychical research, (parapsychology), Such investigations involve »-

1. The identification of the witness as a real person with a local habitation and a name.

2. Ideally an extended interview with the witness, resulting in the investigator's notes and a signed statement from the witness. 3. If the evidence is to be worthy of record, clearing of the witness from taint of mental or excessive emotional disturbance or from the imputation of any venal motiviation, e.g. publicity, financial gain, etxi

4. Any corroborative facts. By way of comment we could say that in our experience an interview (by preferably two persons) of about two hours duration, conducted in an urbane and considerate manner without adversarial, courtroom, or inquisitorial mannerisms is almost invariably completely adequate and more for adjudicating the above points 1 through 4. In many cases where the witnesses are akready better known it is still easier to give weight to their testimony. It will be seen that the cases (Jited under Section 7, Apportations and Teleportations fall into the category of being witnessed by persons who for one or another of the reasons outlined above may be considered reliable.

The alternative to interviewed witnesses is the type of case which has been the object of intensive investigation by public authorities — doctors, hospitals, pathologists, coroners, courts of law, etc. The findings are usually of judicial or public record and we think it would in general be perverse not to take the facts as proved, even though reserving the right to differ as to interpretation. The body of data cited in Section 5, Spontaneous Human Combustion fulfills these conditions, and, we assert, may be accepted as proven facts. However the subject of testimony has other nuances. No matter how honest and intelligent the witness is, the witness may be subject to any one of various "ills the flesh is heair to". These include — optical illusion, projection of personal stresses and preoccupations into visual perceptions, actual hallucination. These are well known and possible sources of innocent error in parapsychology and also in the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOS). We think these psychological effects are most relevant to the problems raised in Section 3, Animals in unexpected places and to a lesser but significant degree in those of Section 4, Legendary, unknown or extinct animals. However a completely different state of affairs, different from the usual run of evidence in psychical research is high• lighted by Section 8, Mysteries. Rumour, Modern Urban Legends. Here the essential point is that many accounts or apparent narratives that get into theliterature of anomalistics (usually it should be said starting out elsewhere in journalistic, magazine, or other "feature" literature) cannot, in fact, be traced to a real bodily incarnate witness of the type described above. The story in question invariably is not ascribed to an ascertainable person. Often enough it is attributed as our Fortean friends say to a F.O.F. i.e. to a "Friend of a Friend" which in practice itss the same as ascribing it to that prolific but faceless author Anonl. To deal with such narratives we need not merely the techniques of the parapsychologist but also those of the critical historian and the folklorist. To cut a long story short, almost invariably in such cases, if the trail is followed with sufficient pertinacity it eventuates that the narrative is within some meaning of the word a "legend". Here we do not mean to use the term with the exact precision of the folklorists who distinguish between myth, legend, folktale, fable, fairy tale, ma'rchen,romance, tall story, etc. All we mean to say is that the narrative relates to no real witness or to any real experience; instead it is essentially a fiction with no counterpart in the real world.

Sometimes these tales are the descenints of a remote antiquity. To give an example; the disappearance of the children of Hamelin in Brunswick (in 1284 it is said} dramatically described in Robert Browning's lively poem, was the subject in recent weeks of a feature article in the Toronto newspaper Globe and Mail which solemnly noted the engraved memorial plaque in the town, and proceeded to weigh various speculations as to whether the infants had gone on the Childrens' Crusade, or had be agricultural or other apprentices carried off en bloc for forced labour. Such exegetic efforts however were, of course, totally nugatory. Any real historical research immediately reveals the tell-tale fact that a similar story is accepted as fact at several other German localities. These include Brandenburg, Lorch, and the Hartz mountains. At this stage it is clear that we are dealing not with an anomalistic event, but a memory or echo of some pre-Christian ritual or myth. The author of the newspaper article need have looked no further than the still relatively well-known book Curious Myths of the Middle Ages by S. Baring-Gould in 1866 and reprinted in 196?. This book also contains the original reference to Gelert, the original of the Choking Dobermant One of the first concerns of the anomalistic research must therefore be to discriminate between statements by actual people and legends of various types. As we have seen, legendary narratives comprise several distinct species. There is the remote descendent of the ancient myth such as that of the hound Gelert. At the other extreme is the tall tale put out quite insouciantly by the happy warriors of Liars' Clubs. In this work of discrimination it is helpful to be widely read. Also it pays to collect a large amount of material - - many many instances — so that common factors can be perceived. Finally co-operative work by several individuals or teams is highly desirable. We feel that anomalistics could not have evolved to the relatively sophisticated state in which it now finds itself without a considerable degree of international cooperation as between the Forteans in England, and the U.S.Aincluding William Corliss and ourselves, supplemented by the discoveries of Professor Brunvand in the highly relevant area of the urban legend.

As regards the present selection of anomalistic topics, it remains to be said that however amorphous and structureless a field of enquiry may appear at the outset , hard work and relentless accumulation of examples and instances does bequeath a reward. With sufficient data, provided it can be swept clean of legend, lies and innocent mistakes or mis-obersvations, patterns do emerge. If we pass therefore in brief review the topics selected for this monograph we can say as followst

Strange Falls. The data show^ambiguously that they do happen, but leaves open the question as to whether they can really be explained in terms of whirlwinds — the only naturilistic explanation that has presented itself.

Animals in unexpected places, seem as yet to be explicable in natural terms. Escapes, bad observation, illusion, hallucination and admixture of modern legends. The question of the "monsters"has however to be kept open.

Spontaneous Human Combustion is well evidenced as a real and strange phenomenon. The pattern of evidence as to the combustion starting internally in living human tissues and being accompanied by anaesthetfta or comatization is quite compelling.

The evidence for Strange Pisappearances of humans is weak and unconvincing being shot through with poor evidence as well as a marked legendary element.

Apportation and Teleportation depend on personal testimony of a different kind, and the evidence is cogent.