Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Western entrance to Cadotte's Pass, 1855

Here’s a bit of random weirdness from the “St. Louis Globe Democrat,” October 19, 1865 (via Newspapers.com):

Mr. James Lumley, an old Rocky Mountain trapper, who has been stopping at the Everett House for several days, makes a most remarkable statement to us, and one which, if authenticated, will produce the greatest excitement in the scientific world. 

Mr. Lumley states that about the middle of last September he was engaged in trapping in the mountains, about seventy-five or one hundred miles above the Great Falls of the Upper Missouri, and in the neighborhood of what is known as Cadotte Pass. Just after sunset one evening he beheld a bright luminous body in the heavens, which was moving with great rapidity in an easterly direction. It was plainly visible for at least five seconds, when it suddenly separated into particles, resembling, as Mr. Lumley describes it, the bursting of a sky-rocket in the air. A few minutes later he heard a heavy explosion, which jarred the earth very perceptibly, and this was shortly after followed by a rushing sound, like a tornado sweeping through the forest. A strong wind sprang up about the same time, but as suddenly subsided. The air was also filled with a peculiar odor of a sulphurous character. 

These incidents would have made but slight impression on the mind of Mr. Lumley, but for the fact that on the ensuing day he discovered, at a distance of about two miles from his camping place, that, as far as he could see in either direction, a path had been cut through the forest, several rods wide giant trees uprooted or broken off near the ground--the tops of hills shaved off, and the earth plowed up in many places. Great and wide-spread havoc was everywhere visible. Following up this track of desolation, he soon ascertained the cause of it in the shape of an immense stone that had been driven into the side of a mountain. But now comes the most remarkable part of the story. An examination of this stone, or so much of it as was visible, showed that it had been divided into compartments and that in various places it was carved with curious hieroglyphics.

More than this, Mr. Lumley also discovered fragments of a substance resembling glass, and here and there dark stains, as though caused by liquid. He is confident that the hieroglyphics were the work of human hands, and that the stone itself, although but fragment of an immense body, must have been used for some purpose by animated beings. Strange as this story appears, Mr. Lumley relates it with so much sincerity that we are forced to accept it as true.

It is evident that the stone which he discovered was a fragment of the meteor which was visible in this section in September last. It will be remembered that it was seen in Leavenworth, in Galena, and in this city by Col. Bonneville. At Leavenworth it was seen to separate in particles or explode. 

Astronomers have long held that it is probable that the heavenly bodies are inhabited--even the comets--and it may be that the meteors are also.  Possibly meteors are used as means of conveyance by the inhabitants of other planets, in exploring space, and it may be that hereafter some future Columbus, from Mercury or Uranus, may land on this planet, by means of meteoric conveyance, and take full possession thereof--as did the Spanish navigators of the New World in 1492, and eventually drive what is known as the “human race” into a condition of the most abject servitude. It has always been a favorite theory with many that there must be a race superior to ours, and this may at some future time be demonstrated in the manner we have indicated.

That last paragraph reminds me of Charles Fort’s famous comment: “I think we’re property.”

The Strange Death of Nora Smithson

"Arizona Daily Star," January 19, 1932, via Newspapers.com

Every now and then, I find in the old newspapers some case that was little-noticed even at the time and soon forgotten, but which is so hauntingly weird, I feel it deserves a second look.  The following death mystery is one of those stories.

60-year-old Nora Smithson was one of those people who seem fated to aimlessly drift through life without leaving any kind of mark behind them.  Even her relatively few acquaintances could say little about her.  She never married, had no known living relatives, and, although she was apparently a pleasant enough woman, no real friends.  She moved from town to town, working as a cook for various families in exchange for board and lodging.  She once told one of her employers that she had money in the bank and didn’t really need to work, but being a live-in cook gave her “a family.”

In early 1932, Nora was in Tucson, working for a family named Fine.  It was apparently a congenial relationship on both sides.  Nora was an excellent cook, with an amiable disposition, and she seemed fond of the family.  Around noon on January 18, Mrs. Fine left to attend a meeting, leaving Nora alone in the house with Fine's small son.  When Mrs. Fine returned sometime after 6 p.m., she was a bit surprised to find the house unlocked and unlighted.  She was even more surprised that Nora failed to answer her calls.  In the three months that Miss Smithson had lived with the Fines, she rarely left the house during the day, and was always at home in the evenings.  When Mrs. Fine failed to locate Nora anywhere in the house, she took her son to a neighbor’s and drove to a drug store, where she called police.  She told them that she felt very uneasy about her cook’s disappearance, and wished an officer would go to her home.

When three policemen arrived at the home, Mrs. Fine told them what had happened.  She said that the only place in the house she hadn’t looked was the cellar, and she was afraid to go down there by herself.  It turned out that she had reason to be scared.  When the officers went down into the basement, they found, wedged into a corner behind the furnace, the body of Nora Smithson.  The cause of her death seemed obvious.  The upper half of her body was badly charred, although portions of her legs and her shoes were undamaged by the flames.  Although the body had been exposed to an intense heat, there was little, if any fire damage on the wall behind it.  In the extreme corner was a small web containing a spider, alive and quite undamaged.  Examination of the furnace showed that Nora could not have been burned inside of it, and no indications that she fell against it.

Ten burned matches were scattered in front of the body, and between the bent knees was a tin can containing a small quantity of a “sweetish smelling liquid.”  It is not clear if this liquid was ever identified, but it was apparently  not flammable.  A search of the basement uncovered a small bottle that contained the same sort of liquid that was in the can.  The Fines did not recognize either the bottle or the can, and had no idea what the liquid could be.  

The first assumption was that the poor woman had chosen a particularly ghastly method of suicide, but the Fines knew of no possible motive for such an act.  When Mrs. Fine last saw Nora, she was in a cheerful mood, playing cards and checkers with Fine's son, and saying that she wanted to stay in Tucson for a while, because she enjoyed the country and the mountains.

A search of Nora’s few belongings failed to provide any clues about what had happened.  No suicide note was found.  Everything in her room was tidy and well-arranged.  Two of her sweaters had been washed and dried, then spread neatly over the foot of her bed.  The kitchen showed no sign that she had begun dinner, so it was presumed that the gruesome tragedy--however it came about--happened quite some time before Mrs. Fine returned home.

So, did the police have an accident, a suicide, or a murder on their hands?  No one could say.  The coroner remarked to a reporter that at first glance, there was nothing pointing to any of the three possibilities, and nothing to disprove them.

The inquest proved to be an utterly unsatisfying affair.  The coroner’s jury reached the inevitable verdict that Nora had died from burns and carbon monoxide poisoning, but how she had come to such an end remained unknown.  The county attorney threw up his hands and said that unless new information came to light, “we can take no other stand” than that “Miss Smithson put some highly inflammable matter on her clothing and set it afire.”

It was found that Smithson had a total of about $500 in two different bank accounts, with the money going to pay her funeral expenses.  And that, as they say, seems to have been that.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Fore!

An "infatuated love" ends very badly.

An old man's attempt to marry a teenager also ends very badly.

The birth of the chili cookoff.

A hidden royal trove in Lithuania.

A visit to the Glasgow necropolis.

A visit to Old Globetown.

A bullet-proof U.S. Marshall.

How to make a career out of being a wet blanket and a killjoy.  No, I'm not talking about writing this blog. Stop that.

19th century French newspapers were a "tissue of horrors."

The Beast of Birkenshaw.

A dead Captain and his sunken ship.

That classic true-crime combo: arsenic and insurance money.

In praise of 2,000 year old wine.

Some early attempts at rainmaking.

A landlady's mysterious death.

Europe's horrible winter of 1709.

A left-handed Gandhi.

A town in England is dealing with Mystery Bananas.

Saving the dogs of interwar Britain.

The mystery metal of Atlantis.

The Texas Flapper Bandit.

Mummies and their ancient tattoos.

The London Necropolis, 1856.

What we can learn from singing lemurs.

A metal ring fell from the sky, and nobody seems to know where it came from.  Swell.

A strange Neolithic burial.

The mysterious "black books" of Norway.

The tomb of a doctor to the Pharaohs.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a cook's very peculiar death.  In the meantime, this is for everyone who's wondered, "Why doesn't she ever post Romanian folk music?"

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

“You’ll never go in the water again,” 2.0.  The Greensboro “News and Record,” August 24, 1955:

EVANSVILLE, Ind., Aug 23 (UP) —An Evansville mother has decided that a creature which grabbed her leg while she was swimming was “one of those little green men from a spaceship.” 

Mrs. Darwin Johnson read a newspaper story that a Hopkinsville, Ky., family was visited by the odd-colored creatures.  That to her satisfaction cleared up the mysterious underwater incident in the Ohio River last week. 

Mrs. Johnson had told police a “hairy paw” grabbed her leg while she was swimming near Dogtown. 

"I know it must have been one of those little green men” she said.  “I knew as soon as I read the description from Hopkinsville.” 

The Kentuckians described the green men as three feet tall “with eyes like saucers, hands like claws, and glowing all over.” They said these fellows roamed around their house Sunday night. 

Mrs. Johnson said, “We saw something in the sky coming over from the Kentucky bank just a few minutes before I was grabbed.”

So.

Jeff and the Metal Man

Accounts of UFO encounters, like poltergeist reports, tend to all sound alike after a while, so I was pleased to come across one such story which has that little something special.

On the night of October 17, 1973, Jeff Greenhaw, the Police Chief of Falkville, Alabama, received an anonymous--and slightly hysterical--call informing him that a “spaceship” had just landed in a field outside of town.

Police officers tend to be skeptical about anything that smacks of The Weird, so Jeff’s instant assumption was that he was hearing from “an idiot.”  However, he dutifully drove over to the field to investigate, and hopefully have himself a good laugh.

When he arrived, he found nothing to be humorous about.  He was confronted by a tall--over six foot--figure wearing some reflective material, like aluminum foil.  He later recalled, “It looked like his head and neck were kind of made together.  He was real bright, something like rubbing mercury on nickel, but just as smooth as glass.  Different angles give different lighting.  I don’t believe it was aluminum foil”  It moved in an odd, robotic manner that reminded Jeff of something out of “Lost in Space.”

He gave the stranger a polite greeting, but received no response.  The bemused cop took out his Polaroid camera and snapped a few photos of the figure.  As he did so, Metal Man began moving away from him.  “It wasn’t moving like you or I would move.  It’s like it had springs on its feet or something.”  It was traveling faster than he believed any human could move.  Jeff decided to “chase it down, and, if I have to, run over it.”  However, his patrol car was unable to catch up to the being.  Metal Man soon faded into the darkness.

Jeff kept the photos he had taken of the figure--one likes to keep mementos of interesting events--but almost exactly ten years later, someone (something?) broke into his house and stole them.  The service revolver and shotgun he had had in his police car on that memorable night also disappeared.  

Jeff told people about his encounter, only to find that he had turned himself into a public laughingstock.  Within weeks of his meeting with the strange creature, the town council fired him, and he subsequently kept out of sight as much as possible.  Years later, he mused, “I turned out to be a person I never dreamed I would be because of what happened…I came close to losing my sanity, but my wife and God kept me from losing my sanity…I am still a believer in life after death and at one point, I didn’t believe there was any other life source in the universe, but that really changed.”

The moral to our little tale is that if you should ever encounter tall, foil-covered robot aliens, it would probably be wisest to just ignore them.  And, yes, I do think that “Jeff and the Metal Man” would be an excellent name for a rock band.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!  Our host is the handsome Butch, former Humane Society mascot.

Just more proof that the universe is probably weirder than we can even guess, which helps explain why scientists who play know-it-all so annoy me.

In related news, we really don't know jack about the Moon.

The Buzzell shooting.

Solving a 200-year-old volcanic mystery.

The world's deadliest sniper.

The work of the brothers Grimm.

A "lost world" in the Pacific Ocean.

Possible proof that Atlantis existed.

A mysterious secret tunnel.

The editor who annoyed Ernest Hemingway.

I now have the urge to write a short horror story titled, "Tomb of the Venom Magician."

The dogs of the Salem Witch Trials.

The oldest weapons ever found in Europe.

The rise and fall of an alchemist.

The people of the Naga Hills in the early 20th century.

Guys, stop releasing lynx into the Scottish Highlands, OK?

A champagne shipwreck.

The man who thought it would be a fine thing to circumnavigate the world in a canoe.

The wages of 18th century servants.

The original rhinestone cowboy.

A case of 16th century defamation.

The UK's "dinosaur highway."

The Flaming Hand of Doom.

Why we call high prices "highway robbery."

A "lost" chapter of the Bible has been discovered.

Tipping in Victorian times.

The Squibb family murders.

Family letters reveal a bank con from a century ago.

Why you would not want to be a German Army deserter during WWII.

An undertaker's Gothic tale.

A fascinating cave system in Israel.

A brief history of curiosity cabinets.

That time when people were panicking over teddy bears.

The unique gems of the Thames.

When Jean met Rose.

Scotland's Stone Age settlements.

Reflections on work and life in the Middle Ages.

A ghost in the London Underground.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll have a metallic Close Encounter.  In the meantime, here's some Beethoven.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

One often hears tales of ghosts returning to try to "solve" their own murder, but in this case the revenant appears to have been wasting his time.  The “Logansport Reporter,” February 18, 1899:

Thornhope, a little village northwest of Logansport on the Chicago division of the Pan Handle, is all agog over a remarkable ghost story, the details of which were made public but yesterday. The most uncanny feature of the affair is the peculiar action of the ghost in binding to secrecy for a certain period the man who is the only person who has held converse with it. At last time has absolved the oath and the facts in the case have been related. In the fall of '65, John Baer, a stockbuyer, established headquarters at Thornhope and engaged extensively in the purchase and sale of stock. He was frequently known to have large sums of money in bis possession, but be scoffed at the idea of possible robbery, He lived with John Wildermuth and on Feb. 16, 1868, he prepared to go to Star City and arrange for the shipment of a carload of cattle.

He had $3,000 in cash on his person to pay for the stock, and before starting to Star City he started to walk to the residence of John Steele, a mile south of Thornhope, to procure a heavy overcoat he had left there a few days previously. That was the last ever seen of Baer. He failed to reach Steele's, and the only clew to the mysterious affair was advanced by Gabriel Fickle, a warm friend of Baer and a resident of Thornhope to this day. Fickle and others heard pistol shots shortly after Baer started for Steele's. When Baer failed to return to Wildermuth's, Fickle associated his disappearance with the shots, but a close search failed to disclose any trace of the missing man and in a few months it came to be generally believed that he was foully murdered for his money.

Two men were suspected but there was no evidence against them and no arrests were made. Near the water tank, midway between Thornhope and Steele's, was an abandoned well close to the banks of Indian Creek, and a few years after the disappearance of Baer, some school children who were fishing in the creek hooked shreds of clothing and an old boot out of the well. The circumstances of this find were given no consideration by the children's parents, but in the light of recent developments it suggests the truth of a weird and ghastly story of murder. Gabriel Fickle is responsible for the present disturbed condition of Thornhope people in his solemn avowal that he saw and talked with the ghost of John Baer on the night of February 16, 1898, the thirtieth anniversary of the disappearance of Baer.

Fickle explains his silence for the past year by declaring that he was bound to secrecy by an oath under conditions that would have driven many men stark mad. February 16, 1899 removed the seal from his lips and he unburdened himself of a strange account that cannot be disbelieved coming as it does from a man whose standing is unquestioned. His startling tale is substantially to the effect that on the night of February 16, '98, as he was returning from Royal Center to his home via the railroad he dimly descried a form approaching as he neared the old water tank. The figure was walking slowly and as Fickle approached it stopped in front of him.

Fickle crossed to the other side of the track and the figure did likewise at the same time extending a hand and exclaiming. "Why Gabe, don't you know me?" Fickle replied negatively, but put forth his hand to shake hands with the friendly stranger when to his horror he found himself grasping thin air, although in other respects the apparition was life like. Before Fickle could make an effort to speak, the spectre further frightened him by continuing, "I am the ghost of John Baer, murdered on this spot thirty years ago tonight." Fickle declares he was seized with the most abject fear. His hair stood on end, his throat was parched and strive as he would not a sound came from his lips. He tottered past the vision of the dead, but the latter followed, conjuring him not to be afraid and finally Fickle retained his courage sufficiently ask how Baer met his death. The ghost then told of the foul murder, naming as his assassins two men still living, binding Fickle to never reveal the names or tell of his meeting with the ghost until one year from that time. A request for another interview was also made but a compliance was not authoritatively imposed. The ghost detailed minutely the circumstances of the murder. The gruesome recital ended near the abandoned well, and "This is where they put me," said the ghost stepping into the opening and sinking into its black depths.

Quaking in mortal terror, Fickle ran homeward, and for days his peculiar actions occasioned comment. He was tempted to tell of his singular adventure, but the admonition to keep silent was not to be forgotten. For a year he kept the secret and then unable to longer forbear, he told of the turn he experienced in meeting Baer's ghost. On one thing only is he silent and that is in regard to the identity of the murderers. Some night soon he proposes to return to the old tank at night to find if the vision will again appear.

Every man in Thornhope believes every word of Fickle's experience. Not a man has the courage to seek an interview with the ghost and the haunted spot is shunned like the plague. Fickle is one of the most respected citizens in the village. He enjoys the confidence of everybody and is in no sense an idle talker. He is much averse to discussing the affair.

He does not believe in ghosts, is not at all superstitious but says the memory of that fateful night will haunt him to his dying day. He does not attempt to explain the occurrence, it is beyond his understanding. He is positive that the end is not yet and that he will sooner or later be impelled to visit the scene of the crime and submit to another clasp of that shadowy hand from another world.

Fickle saw the ghost at least once more, and several other Thornhope citizens also claimed to have seen Baer’s unhappy spirit, but it seems to have done exactly nothing to help avenge his death.  I suppose the moral of our story is this:  If you are ever murdered, don’t wait thirty years before telling anyone about it.