Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Time to saddle up those ghost horses!  The “San Francisco Chronicle,” December 30, 1931:

Horses, horses, horses. 

Three phantom black horses, galloping soundlessly with the speed of the wind, have set Berkeley agog with a mystery that has even the scientific police department of that community guessing. The horses have been seen in the Berkeley hills north of the University of California. All those who claim to have seen them agree on certain points. They are magnificent animals, and they travel with the speed of a March breeze, and always with flying manes and tails. The first report to the police went into the card index, as it is no crime, even in Berkeley, for three black horses to gallop naked through the night, and little attention was paid to it.

But when another and another resident rang in, the police began to get interested. No horses were reported missing or strayed and to keep the animals from eating choice garden plants officers on beats were ordered to impound them. Then Mrs. Mildred Dimmick, 90 Avenida drive, telephoned in that the horses were in front of her home.  This was Monday night.  Out went the best horse-catching policeman in the Berkeley department.  He came back after a while, looking a bit white.

Questioned, he said that when he got to the place where Mrs. Dimmick had seen the horses standing in the mud, there wasn’t even a hoofprint to be found.

“Horsefeathers!” said the desk sergeant, and filed a report of the happening.

A few minutes later Policeman M. L. Ingram telephoned in from a North Berkeley beat that he had seen "three shadowy forms" lurking in the shadows and when he approached them they vanished. The sergeant, with hair rising on the back of his neck, asked what the forms resembled. "Well," said Policeman Ingram, "they looked like horses--black horses.  But there aren't any tracks. I don't know what they were." 

The sergeant didn't mutter "horsefeathers" this time. Instead he took the matter up with the Inspectors' Bureau, and now every policeman in the city is trying to solve the mystery. 

Have the spirits of early California bandit mounts come back to ride, like the steed of the Headless Horseman, the trails of former days? 

Are the phantom animals real, after all, or are they just shadows of the night? Don't ask Berkeley police. Every man in the department is carrying a piece of rope and a handful of oats, and the order is to go neighing through the dark until the horses are found.

How many people have seen them? About half a dozen.

The spooky equines continued to be spotted around the Berkeley area, until a horse-whispering--or oat-eating--policeman managed to solve the mystery.  The “Chronicle” reported the denouement on January 21, 1932:

Berkeley’s solved phantom black horse mystery was solved early yesterday morning after a wild chase by an intrepid Berkeley policeman. 

Trapped in a barn on University of California property, the three horses, who gave the names of Mike, Ike and Lizzie, were lured into surrender by the officer, disguised as a bag of oats. It was Policeman M. L. Ingram of the police horse-prevention squad who unraveled the city's most intriguing mystery.

Ever since the story of the three galloping steeds was first told to the police three weeks ago Policeman Ingram has been on the lookout for them. But it was not until yesterday morning that he caught his first glimpse of them. A telephone call came from Mrs. Calvin Chapman, 1505 Hawthorne Terrace, at midnight that the three black horses sought by the authorities were in front of her house. Policeman Ingram was dispatched in a fast automobile to the scene. "Don't fail," warned the sergeant.  "The reputation of the department is at stake. We are all behind you--some farther than the others. Phone if you need field artillery." 

Policeman Ingram hurried.  With lights out and his car coasting softly, he bore down on the Chapman home. Suddenly out of the shadows of the house three black figures ran down the street. Policeman Ingram stepped on the gas and opened his siren. At the same time his spotlight bit through the darkness. Horses! Three of them.  Coal black and running like leaky faucets. The chase was on. Up one street, down the other, Ingram getting closer all the time. The horses, outguessed by the logic of a scientific policeman, scudded for home, which was a barn used by Francis Leschinsky of 2731 Hilgard avenue. As the fugitives crashed into the barn, Policeman Ingram blocked the entrance to the corral with his the car. He had them trapped!

Then it was that Ingram executed his master piece of police strategy. He hissed slightly and ground his teeth together.

Inside the stable it sounded to the three black horses like another horse outside eating oats. Five minutes, ten minutes... The policeman's jaws began to ache, but he kept at it. Another five minutes and all three came out of the barn to get their share and were taken into custody. Policeman Ingram filed a report which explains everything.

 

The corral fence was broken and the horses, which were only three of a large number stabled there, have been wandering the hills at night in job lots. 

The particular three were pals and stayed together. The reason their hoofs made no noise, as reported by startled residents, was that they were gummed thick with corral mud. And that ends the chase of the three black phantom skates of North Berkeley.  Policeman Ingram is now in line for the Croix de Cheval. the Distinguished Capture mention, and the Shakespearean citation which bears the Inscription: "All's Well That Ends Well."

I can only add that, having once lived in Berkeley, I’d love to see it return to The Land Where Cops Chase Down Phantom Horses.

The Kidnapping of a Champion

While high-profile kidnappings of animals are less frequent than human abductions, they happen more frequently than you might think. Arguably the most famous example is the unsolved disappearance of the magnificent racehorse Shergar.

As a three-year-old in 1981, he won one of the most illustrious races in the world, the Epsom Derby, by 10 lengths--a record winning margin for the event. Later that year, he was named European Horse of the Year, and was retired to stud, where his connections--as well as race fans--earnestly hoped he might duplicate his success on the racetrack in the breeding shed. He was acclaimed as one of the greatest equines of the century.

Shergar was sent to Ballymany Stud farm in his native Ireland. He was not only an intelligent horse, but gentle and good-natured, so he was adjusting well to his new routine. There was no reason to suspect he had anything but a long, placid life ahead of him.

On February 8, 1983, those expectations went horribly, shockingly wrong.

It was a blustery, icy-cold day, so Shergar was kept inside his heated stable for most of the day. After a brief run in his paddock, the horse's 58-year-old "stable boy," Jim Fitzgerald, brought Shergar back to his shed and returned to his house on the farm's grounds, locking the main door of the stable behind him, as always. All was quiet.

No one was around to see a strange car enter Ballymany's main gate, which had been left unguarded on this wickedly cold, foggy, snowy night. Fitzgerald was completely unprepared when he heard a knock on his door. His son, Bernard, opened the door. A masked stranger asked him, "Is the boss in?" Then, without warning, the intruder delivered a blow to the young man's head that left him flat on the floor. Fitzgerald rushed into the room, only to see the man pointing a pistol at him.

Other masked men--Fitzgerald later thought it was eight or so of them--suddenly entered the house, as well. The gunman told him, "We've come for Shergar, and we want £2m for him. Call the police and he's dead."

Fitzgerald was led at gunpoint to Shergar's stable. They forced him to put tack on the horse, and they led the unsuspecting animal to their waiting truck, and drove off with him.  Some of the kidnappers stayed behind, where they trained guns at Fitzgerald's family for several hours. Fitzgerald was shoved into a second vehicle and driven around for three hours before being tossed out on to the road, with a warning not to call police.

The hunt for the prized stallion began with a bizarre game of "Telephone." Fitzgerald reported the crime, not to the police, but to the stud farm's manager, Ghislain Drion. Drion then called Shergar's vet. The vet called a friend, who in his turn called the Irish Finance Minister. This official then contacted the Minister for Justice. It was not until eight hours after Shergar was taken away that anyone thought to inform law enforcement that they had a particularly weird abduction on their hands.

The crime seemed a complete mystery. No one had any clues who had committed this unprecedented and peculiarly revolting crime, let alone any indication of where Shergar could be. People claiming to be the kidnappers eventually contacted several racing journalists, as well as one of the horse's owners, the Aga Khan, to relay their ransom demands. These moves toward negotiation came to nothing. The horse's syndicate never had any intention of paying a dime, reasoning that if they had given in to the criminals' demands, no valuable racehorse in the world would be safe. The BBC and the Irish racehorse trainer Jeremy Maxwell also received anonymous phone calls claiming that Shergar had suffered an "accident" which required him to be euthanized, but authorities suspected the calls were a sick hoax.  After four days, the alleged kidnappers simply stopped calling. And no one for certain has ever seen Shergar--alive or dead--since.

The kidnapping remained an utterly cold case until 1992, when an imprisoned Irish Republican Army leader-turned-informer, Sean O'Callaghan, told the world what had happened to Shergar.

According to O'Callaghan, another IRA member, Kevin Mallon, was given the job of stealing the horse. The plan was merely to hold Shergar for a great deal of money to pay for arms and other expenses. After the ransom was paid, the horse would be returned.

The plan quickly proved disastrous. O'Callaghan said Mallon told him that Shergar, in unfamiliar surroundings and in the hands of inept thugs, became so hysterical that his kidnappers were unable to handle him. In a panic--and quite scared of this huge, dangerously high-strung creature--the terrorists lost their heads completely and machine-gunned their frenzied captive. According to O'Callaghan, this pampered, noble animal died a particularly slow, agonizing death.

The story goes that the IRA gang dug a large pit in the remote mountains near Ballinamore, about a hundred miles from Ballymany. Then, Shergar's corpse was dumped in this hasty, unmarked grave.

This depressing story is considered the most probable explanation for Shergar's disappearance, but it has never been proven. For what it's worth, the IRA has never claimed responsibility for the theft, and O'Callaghan, like many professional rats, has shown himself to be chronically unreliable.

For years after Shergar vanished, there were numerous "sightings" of him reported all over the world. To this day, there are still racetrack folk who say that his kidnappers, once they realized the impossibility of collecting a ransom, merely turned him out to live "incognito" at some private farm or another.

One would certainly like to think this is what happened.

Whatever Shergar's fate may have been, his kidnapping was one of those crimes as utterly pointless as it was cruel. The thieves themselves--whoever they were--never profited from their crime. The companies who had insured the horse refused to pay Shergar's owners, on the grounds that it was never established that the champion was dead. Only those few members of the 34-member syndicate who insured him against theft received any compensation--about $10.6 million, according to Lloyd's.

When talking to a writer for the "Daily Telegraph" in 2008, Jim Fitzgerald still became teary-eyed when remembering the horse he had known and loved so well. "Shergar was a grand horse," he said. "He deserved better."

That is all anyone can say with any certainty about the matter.

Lady, the Wonder Horse

Lady Wonder and Claudia Fonda, 1928

A horse is a horse, of course, of course, and no one can talk to a horse, of course, that is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mr. Ed...

...or an almost equally famous psychic mare.

Our story opens in 1924, when a Richmond, Virginia woman named Claudia Fonda bought a two-week-old filly she called Lady Wonder. Mrs. Fonda bottle-fed the filly, and, before long, came to think of the animal almost as her own child. Nothing unusual was noted about Lady Wonder until one day, it struck Mrs. Fonda that the horse did not wait to be called before running to her--the owner merely had to think of beckoning her over. From that time on, Mrs. Fonda studied the filly more closely, and became convinced Lady possessed unusual mental powers. In short, she credited Lady not only with human intelligence, but psychic abilities as well.

By the time Lady was two, Mrs. Fonda had worked out a system where the horse used large lettered children's blocks as a sort of simple typewriter. Fonda later designed a piano-sized device that used a double row of keys. When Lady would nudge a key with her nose, a tin card popped up bearing a number or letter, enabling the horse to solve math problems and spell out words. Even, we are told, predict the future. On one occasion, Lady spelled out the word, "engine." A minute or so later, a tractor passed by the farm. It was reported that Lady could tell married women their maiden names and correctly guess the sex of unborn babies. While she was not infallible, she picked the winners of ball games, handed out personal advice, and revealed hidden details of people's lives with often unnerving accuracy.

The fame of this unusual horse spread, particularly after she picked the winner of the Jack Dempsey/Jack Sharkey fight in 1927. Crowds of people flocked every day to the Fonda farm to quiz the "Wonder Horse"--at a price of three questions for a dollar. It is estimated that, in total, Lady drew over 150,000 visitors. (As a bonus, visitors were also greeted by the sight of Claudia's piano-playing Pomeranian, Pudgy. We are told he did a killer rendition of "The Bells of St. Mary's.") Mrs. Fonda even hired a press agent to deal with the media attention. (Before engaging the man, she first asked Lady, "Is this man honest?" When the horse answered in the affirmative, the deal was struck.)

The most famous episode in Lady's career of equine savant came in 1952. A little boy from Massachusetts, Danny Matson, had been missing for months. The investigation into his disappearance was stymied. Figuring there was nothing to lose by the effort, someone asked Lady if she knew where the child could be found. The horse spelled out the words, "Pittsfield Water Wheel." A policeman who heard of this response wondered if it could have referred to an abandoned quarry that was known as "Field and Wilde Water Pit." A search was made, and, yes, that was where Matson's body was found. A tragic ending to the story, but at least the boy's parents no longer had to live with the agony of an unsolved mystery. Unfortunately, Lady was less accurate in the case Gary Hayman, a nine-year-old who vanished from his school in Providence, Rhode Island. When the boy's mother asked the horse about her son, Lady communicated that the boy was in Kansas, "hurt," but still alive. However, some months later a skull later assumed to be Gary's was found in the woods near his home. His death was ruled accidental. [Note: Some students of the Hayman disappearance have questioned whether the skull was of the missing boy.]

Among Lady Wonder's more successful predictions were the presidential elections of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, as well as the entry of America into World War Two. (And, yes, she did pick winners of horse races.)

In 1928, pioneering parapsychologists William McDougall, Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, and Dr. Lousia E. Rhine of Duke University spent a week conducting various examinations on the now world-famous horse. For instance, J.B. Rhine wrote "Mesopotamia, Hindustan, and Carolina" on a piece of paper. While keeping the words hidden, he asked the horse what he had written. Using her "typewriter," Lady immediately picked out the correct words. By the time their testing came to an end, McDougall and the Rhines had concluded that the Lady was indeed a Wonder. The following year, the Rhines wrote a paper describing their tests for the journal "Abnormal and Social Psychology." They concluded that "There is left only the telepathic explanation, the transference of mental influence by an unknown process. Nothing was discovered that failed to accord with it, and no other hypothesis seems tenable in view of the results." Another psychologist, Thomas L. Garrett, made his own study of the horse and concluded that there was "no trickery involved."

There were, of course, many who disagreed with this analysis. They saw Lady Wonder and her owner as simply a fraudulent sideshow act. A New Jersey professor named John Scarne made his own visit to the Lady, which left him convinced that the horse was merely following subtle cues given by her owner.

He wrote, "Mrs Fonda carried a small whip in her right hand, and she cued the horse by waving it. I detected Mrs. Fonda doing it every time the horse moved the lettered blocks with the nose. This method of doing the trick might have puzzled me if I hadn't known that the placement of horse's eyes on either side of the head gave them wide backward range of peripheral vision. Therefore it offered no problem for me to detect....The shaking of the whip first time was the signal for Lady to bend her head within a couple of inches to the blocks. A second shake of the whip was the cue for Lady to continuously move her head in a bent position back and forth over the blocks. When Lady Wonder's head was just above the desired block Mrs. Fonda made the horse touch the block with her nose by shaking the whip a third time. It was as simple as that." Others responded to this debunking by pointing out that Lady often answered questions accurately when her owner did not know the correct response, or when Mrs. Fonda was not even present. Yet another researcher, a Dr. Gayle, simply conceded that he was baffled by the horse. In 1927 he told the "Richmond Times-Dispatch," "I am perfectly willing to admit that I have no idea how she arrives at the correct answers to our questions. There is no conscious trickery here, I am convinced. But I am not converted to the mind-reading theory. What's the solution of the puzzle? I don't know!"

Mrs. Fonda never wavered from her genuine belief in Lady's wild talents. She asserted that every horse would show the same abilities, if their owners would only bother to teach them the alphabet. Lady, Mrs. Fonda explained, was merely an "educated horse."

Lady Wonder at age 27

When the "educated horse" herself was asked "how she did it," she simply spelled out "Mind." She continued her placid existence as America's "psychic horse" until her death from a heart attack on March 19, 1957. It is said that Claudia Fonda never quite recovered from the loss. She followed her beloved horse into the grave two years later.

Photo credit: Paul Koudounaris