Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This unnerving account of the mysterious deaths of two sisters appeared in the “Patriot News,” March 24, 1968:

A soft sigh, a stare of horror, a piercing scream and death that as yet is unexplained…that was the fate of Beverly Stephens and her sister, Patricia, who died in almost identical circumstances five years apart. Neither girl uttered a word before she died. Neither gave any sign that anything was wrong before the seizure. The only sound either made was a scream. In both cases, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation failed.

Death came almost instantly. Neither girl had a medical history of serious ailments or emotional upsets. Exhaustive autopsies that included microorganisms tests revealed no clue to what killed either girl. Their death certificates read: "Sudden death, natural." Natural, perhaps, but inexplicable. 

Beverly Stephens died in August, 1963.  She had just stepped from a swimming pool in Porterville, Calif., when she sighed, looked about her with horror, uttered a single, high-pitched scream and collapsed. She was 17. Equally inexplicable was the death of Patricia Stephens Rush, who succumbed in her home in Santa Monica, Calif. Suddenly she sat bolt upright in bed ... then came the sigh, the look of fear, the scream and death.

She was 23. What haunts the girls' parents, Everett and Ruth Stephens, who live in San Luis Obispo, Calif., is the thought that whatever killed the sisters might be a hereditary disorder afflicting the female side of the family. The Stephenses have two other daughters, Barbara, 17, and Diana, 11, in addition to sons Larry and Robert. 

The same thought weighs heavily on Staff Sgt. Robert Rush, an Army combat engineer, who had been home from Vietnam just four days when his wife, Patricia, died, leaving him with two girls, Kristen, 1, and Kimberly, 6. 

The family made appointments with Los Angeles heart specialists for the surviving girls. The parents can shed little light on the deaths of the sisters, and neither does their personal background provide a clue. The family moved to California from St. Louis shortly after World War II. By 1954, Everett Stephens was working as a correctional officer for the state, first in Salinas, then in Porterville. He now works in San Luis Obispo at the California Men's Colony. 

The Stephenses were living in Porterville when Beverly, a high school senior, died. Although the autopsy showed nothing, her parents recall that a week before her fatal seizure, Beverly had survived a similar attack.  This occurred at a dance one warm August night. The girl uttered one short, piercing scream and collapsed. Two registered nurses, who happened to be at the dance, said she wasn't breathing when they began giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She regained consciousness in a short time.

Doctors at the Porterville hospital could find nothing wrong with her. Suspecting that she was suffering from fatigue, they sent her home to bed. Beverly didn't remember a thing about what her mother still calls "the fainting spell." 

"She was perfectly normal the next day, and she went to a ball game that night," her mother recalled. "In fact, she went shopping with me the day after that." 

If Beverly had any premonition of death, she gave no sign to her family or friends. She went swimming with her younger brother, Robert, who was 13 at the time, a few days after the incident at the dance. It was Robert, now a high school senior, who described what happened to his sister at Porterville's Sunnyside Pool--the sigh, the terror-stricken look, the scream, and the frantic attempts to revive her. 

Dr. James Sargent, Tulare County autopsy surgeon, said he could find no marks on the body, no heart damage, no brain injury, nothing. Since the couple's other children seemed healthy enough, Beverly's strange death attracted little attention. There wasn't even a story about it in the local paper. All that changed recently when her sister died in almost identical circumstances. Patricia's death freshened coroner Sargent's memory of the original case: 

"Actually, you know as much about what caused the girl to die as we do," he said.  "I'm not satisfied with the explanations that were conjectured at the time. There simply was and is no theory on the subject that makes medical sense." 

One theory was that a sinus reflex had slowed the girl's heart action and ultimately killed her, but Sargent rejected that with the observation that such an explanation is a popular "medical dumping ground." 

Now the conjecture has started all over again. Like Beverly's brother, Patricia's husband, a 10-year army veteran, can't provide a clue even though he, too, was an eyewitness. Rush said he awoke about 6 a.m. to find his wife sitting upright, staring straight ahead and screaming.

He said he had the feeling that the scream was involuntary, that she was unconscious. Rush could detect no pulse. He called for an ambulance and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was too late. Patricia was dead when she reached Valley Community Hospital 27 minutes later.

Again there were tests, the autopsy, the funeral. Her badly shaken father said: "They'll never find out what caused it." 

And Dr. John P. Blanchard, the Santa Barbara coroner, as baffled as Dr. Sargent had been, was forced to agree. "In all probability," he said, "the girl's father is right." 

Dr. Blanchard's autopsy report mentioned "pulmonary edema," a sudden accumulation of fluid in the lungs. "But in truth," the doctor said, "we just don't know what happened to her.  It's an unexplained natural death. I don't even have any theories." 

Dr. Blanchard has said he would continue his post mortem studies into Patricia's death and consult the pathologist who sought to find the cause of her sister’s death.  "Obviously, there is a medical reason for both deaths," he said, "but our science isn't sophisticated enough to find the answers."

Doctors at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, where a foundation grant is financing studies of inexplicable sudden death, may look into the cases of the Stephens sisters. Although their experiments have involved laboratory animals and not humans, a team led by Dr. Stewart Woll is convinced that panic can literally switch off a healthy heart and cause sudden death.

Wolf says that many drowning victims are often found without enough water in their lungs to have drowned them, and snake bite victims are known to have succumbed to an amount of venom that ordinarily would not have been fatal. 

"In such cases, the patient just dies of a turned-off heart as a result of panic," he said. Other members of the research team mentioned the possibility that Patricia might have had a particular vivid nightmare that produced death-dealing panic. But that explanation would not account for the death of her younger sister five years earlier at the swimming pool. The Stephenses have about reconciled themselves to the conviction that the deaths of their daughters will remain a mystery.

"Naturally, we're very concerned now about our older daughters, but we're not going to dwell on it. We can't let it ruin our lives," the father said.

I don’t know what happened to the other Stephens girls, but hopefully they were more fortunate than their sisters.  Still, their lives must have been very very uneasy.

The Pilot's Return

During the 1950s, Martin Caidin was the official historian for America’s Fifth Air Force during his stint in A-2 military intelligence.  In that capacity, he had full access to military combat files.  In his book “Ghosts of the Air,” he described a story he found in one of those files that was reported from air force operations in North Africa during WWII--a story that he admitted was “flatly impossible” but that was nevertheless “witnessed, and attested to, by several hundred officers and men of the U.S. Army, and Army Air Forces, who were there.”

Unfortunately, at the time he discovered this record, it was still classified, meaning he could take notes from the document, but not remove it from the vault.  In later visits to this vault, that particular file could not be found.  In other words, there is nothing to corroborate Caidin’s incredible yarn, leaving him to sigh, “Take it as it is, because that’s what you’re going to get.”

So, the caveat is duly noted.  However, it’s such a bloody good yarn, I decided to “take it.”

Our story begins with a day of standard combat operations in the Mediterranean Sea.  Among that day’s missions was a long-range patrol of Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, which set off along the North African coast into airspace that was then controlled by the Germans.  The Lightnings encountered some of the enemy, and, inevitably, a fierce air battle ensued.  When the fighting was finally over, the Americans realized that one P-38 was not accounted for.  They were unable to make radio contact with the missing pilot.  A search found no trace of the plane in the water.  It was as if the P-38 and its pilot had simply vanished into air.  Finally, as the other Lightnings began to run low on fuel, the group was forced to return to their home base.  The one absent pilot was simply listed as “missing in action.”  They still held hope that he had just become separated from the others and would eventually return safely.

However, as the hours went on with no word from the missing fighter, everyone accepted that the worst had happened.  Just another casualty of war.  Then, the air-raid alert suddenly blasted through the base.  Radar had picked up an unknown aircraft heading toward the field.  Soon, a P-38 came into view, getting ready to land.

The defense system radioed the plane.  No answer.  Flares were sent up, as a signal for the pilot to give some response.  The plane took no notice of them.  When the P-38 was over the center of the airfield, it suddenly began shaking, and to the shock of all observers, the plane suddenly, inexplicably, began to disintegrate mid-air.

The men saw the pilot fall free from the wreck, and they frantically shouted to him to open his chute.  The parachute indeed opened, and the pilot fell gently to the ground.  As ambulances--and everyone else on the base--frantically drove to the site, it was noted that the man was not moving.

The base’s medical team reached the pilot first.  As soon as they saw the body up-close, they could only stand there in stunned disbelief.  It was impossible enough to realize that the P-38 somehow approached the base with no fuel left in its tanks, but with both engines running.  But when it was found that the pilot had flown the plane and parachuted to the ground with a bullet hole in his forehead…

The man had been killed by German fire hours before.

A report had to be made about the incident, but it was marked “Secret,” hidden away in the most obscure file possible, and everyone involved did their best to persuade themselves that what they had just seen happen…did not happen.

What else could they do?  What else could you do?

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!  Our hosts for this Friday are Goldie and Brownie!

Because why not.

A plague outbreak from over 5,000 years ago.

A case of explosive revenge.

A medieval communication network.

How angry fishermen saved the American Revolution.

A remarkable amber pendant.

The liver-eating cannibal of the Old West.

Catherine Crowe's ghost hunt.

That time when humans nearly became extinct.

A dispute over camels in British India.

Disaster hits HMS Vanguard.

A newly-discovered Etruscan burial chamber.

The underwater ruins of a medieval city.

Restoring the Cotton Genesis.

Why we blow out birthday candles.

Warnings from dead aviators.

The life of Catherine of Egmont.

A look at 18th century painter William Williams.

That time when Elvis shot up a Cadillac.

Witches!  On broomsticks!  In 1982!

The mysterious death of a Renaissance muse.

Some ancient Egyptian inscriptions have really thrown archaeologists for a loop.

Wedding pranks that did not go well at all.

A new discovery regarding Sutton Hoo.

A strange medieval burial.

The oldest building in Spitalfields.

3I/Atlas is not only very weird, it's probably very very old.

The mysteries of Custer's Last Stand.

A Polish historical symbolism painter.

The mystery of how our planet got water.

A "Delilah" gets her revenge.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a very eerie story from WWII.  In the meantime, let's welcome in Summer, medieval English style.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

On this blog, we’ve met mysterious Women in Black.  Not to mention the occasional Women in White.  So, who’s up for making the acquaintance of a Welsh Woman in Yellow?  The “Bradford Weekly Telegraph,” February 18, 1905:

A silent woman, shimmering in a bright yellow light, with gleaming eyes and up-lifted knife, is the latest ghostly form to be reported from South Wales. She has taken up her abode in a large building at Rhymney, now used as a Salvation Army barracks. The silent apparition, it is claimed, had been seen by many members of the corps, and, at the request of the Salvationists the local Wesleyan minister remained in the building through Friday night in order to investigate.

He was accompanied by two or three friends and a lady, the Salvationist Army lieutenant, and other Salvationists. The minister certainly did not see anything like what some of the others aver they saw, but he did see in the passage a body of very bright light moving to and fro. The party hoard many things during the night, such as the noisy walking and of a lady's dress rustling. 

“About half-past three," continued the minister, in describing his experiences, "my attention was called by one of the members of the Army to a face in the broken pane of the pantry window. I could not see the form of a face, but I saw something like a body of light.

“The lieutenant declared about that time that she saw apparition in the form of a woman dressed in yellow standing by my side, with a terrible look in its eyes and a knife in its band. I did not see  my undesirable companion. The Salvationist shouted out, ‘Oh, look at the knife!' and then fainted. 

“Coming to herself again, she appeared to follow the apparition with her eyes until they rested on the doorway, then she made a dash towards it, and was prevented by force from descending the cellar. 

“It occurs to me from what I saw,” adds the minister, that some enemy is using undue influence upon the Salvationists,such as hypnotism.  If it were not so, then it must be the hand of God revealing past events to the Salvationists, as well as to the world." 

In a conversation, the lieutenant informed the minister that she had been supernaturally informed that events had taken place in the house years ago, and that they would shortly be revealed to her and another lady Salvationist. The rev. gentleman has advised the Salvationists to close up the building for the present, and suggests that an exhaustive search should be made.

After a number of other sightings of the knife-wielding yellow lady, the Salvationists decided that they wished to gather someplace where life was less exciting, and cleared out of the barracks.  After that, as far as I know, the story disappeared from the newspapers.

The Case of the Parlous Parlor

"Owensboro Messenger," January 29, 1911, via Newspapers.com

Early in 1910, American newspapers breathlessly carried the story of what appeared to be a particularly shocking double homicide.  This account comes from the "Republican News Item" for January 6:

The mystery of the death of Miss Grace Elosser, of Cumberland, Md., and Charles E. Twigg, of Keyser, W. Va. her fiance, appears as deep as it did shortly after the bodies of the couple were found on the settee in the parlor of the Elosser residence on Saturday, when the mother of the dead girl went in to speak to her.

Twigg and Miss Elosser were to have been married Sunday night. It is suspected that a jealous woman rival was the poisoner, carrying out her plot in a most crafty way.

The mystery begun with the discovery on Saturday afternoon of the pretty girl and her fiance sitting together, hand in hand, on a sofa in the parlor of their home—both dead.

So swift, so instantaneous had been the action of the poison upon them that they sat as if in life.

The girl's mother went into the room, wondering only at the very long silence that she had noted between the couple. She saw her daughter and the young man sitting in apparently the most natural fashion. They were holding hands and looking into each other's eyes.

Then the mother suddenly gasped and stepped back. There was something uncanny, she saw, in the intentness of the gaze the young man and woman had fixed upon each other. There was that which gave a silent, vague alarm in the fixedness of their pose. She spoke to them. They did not answer. She went over to them. She spoke again and received no reply.  Then she put a hand on her daughter's head and spoke again.

"Grace —Grace," she said. And there was still no reply, so she gently shook her daughter by the shoulder. The mother screamed then and ran from the room. The girl's head had lolled to a side and the other woman had seen that the girl's jaw was dropped and her eyes fixed in the piteous gaping of death.

Then when others came it was found that the man, too, was dead; that both had been suddenly and absolutely stricken. The deadliest of poisons had been the medium.

This was established by the autopsy of the coroner's physician, Dr. Thomas W. Koon. They had both taken cyanide of potassium. The man had more of the poison in his system than the girl.  In the holiday season there had been several boxes of candy in the house.  But the medical examination showed conclusively that neither Miss Elosser or her fiance had eaten candy.  He had, however, in his mouth a stick of chewing gum. He had taken scarcely more than two or three bites on it. It had not been masticated into a pulp. In Miss Elosser's mouth was no chewing gum.

The strange likelihood is being considered by the authorities that the stick of chewing gum contained the deadly cyanide. Also that the young man, with the gum in his mouth, had leaned forward to kiss his sweetheart and that the kiss communicated the poison to her lips--a kiss offered in love that was deadly—the kiss of whose tragic character the ardent bestower was in all ignorance.

This is the only evidence that the authorities have so far secured to aid them in the way of solving the amazing mystery.  It has been by no means proven that the chewing gum contained the deadly poison. But it seems to be the only possible source from which the young man and his sweetheart could have taken into their systems the deadly chemical. The candy that was in the Elosser home had been partaken of by all the members of the family without ill effect. Moreover, chemical analysis showed all this confectionery to be harmless.

The tips of the tongues of both Twigg and the girl who was to have been his bride were red and inflamed, quite as if they had been burned or bitten. Cyanide, of course, takes immediate action. The mere touching of a grain of it to the tip of the tongue will cause death instantly.

The newspapers did a great deal of speculating about the tragedy.  Twigg had initially courted the dead woman's sister May before transferring his affections to Grace.  A third sister admitted that May had been "terribly broken up" about losing Charles--so much so that she stopped speaking to Grace.  Could the "scorned woman" have taken this rejection so hard that she poisoned, not just her ex-flame, but her own sister?  The first doctor at the scene of the deaths testified that he also found May Elosser unconscious with "decided symptoms of cyanide poisoning."  It took him fifteen minutes of work to revive her.  Was this evidence that she had planned the deaths of all three members of this love triangle?

Or could Charles Twigg, for some as-yet-unknown reason, have poisoned himself and the woman he was about to marry? Or was it a double suicide?

The police finally decided that there was not enough evidence to arrest anyone.  At the inquest, May admitted that she had been jealous of her sister, but vehemently denied that she could even consider murdering her.  There was no evidence of her buying poison.  The coroner's jury returned a verdict that the couple had died from cyanide poisoning, but they could not say how it had been administered.  This ambiguous verdict meant that May Elosser--the only known person with any conceivable motive to kill the pair--was left with a grim cloud of suspicion over her head.  It was looking like she would have to live with it for the rest of her life.

It was a local physician, a Dr. Littlefield, who finally provided a resolution to the case.  He had closely examined the parlor where Twigg and Elosser died.  He noted that there was a small crack in the glass of a gas stove in the room.  He also saw that when all the doors and windows were closed--as they had been when couple died—the parlor had very little air circulation.  He theorized that the couple had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and he decided to try an experiment.  He placed a cat in the parlor, made sure all the doors and windows were shut, and left the animal there overnight.

By the time he returned the next morning, the cat was dead.  An autopsy found that an accumulation of leaking gas had killed it.  A second cat was left in the room overnight.  This cat also died.  Littlefield pointed out that certain foods create hydrocyanic acid in the stomach, meaning that the traces of "poison" found in Twigg and Elosser's system could have come from natural causes.  The couple's bodies were exhumed, and the subsequent autopsy established that they had indeed died from carbon monoxide, the result of the flue of the parlor stove being choked with an over-accumulation of soot.  He felt that he had proved their deaths were simply a catastrophic accident.

Many townspeople, still stubbornly convinced of May Elosser's guilt, refused to accept that the tragedy could have such a prosaic explanation.  However, in 1913, two women living in the Elosser home were found unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning in that same parlor.  Fortunately, they were found in time to revive them.  Examination showed that they too had allowed the flue to become choked with soot.

It looked like Littlefield had been vindicated--no one had been murdered, after all.

Except those poor cats, of course.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Oh, God, the Strange Company staffers are bar-hopping again.

A case of avenged honor.

The most famous dog of the Middle Ages.

The legend of King Arthur in Greenland.

A Welsh village that became a casualty of WWII.

The rise and fall of masquerade balls.

In which science proves that stolen french fries taste better.

Two newly-discovered sermons by St. Augustine.

Ireland's "famine roads."

London's execution broadsides.

The social life of ancient Roman...latrines.

That time when Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay were roomies.

The enigma of Vermeer.

A ditch full of ancient headless human skeletons have been discovered, and archaeologists haven't a clue.

A lost WWI battalion.

A tale of a 19th century deathbed.

How America's 150th birthday party went sideways.

The mystery of the origins of language.

The folklore of "corpse roads."

Celebrating the 100th birthday of Route 66.

The Mob's arrival in Hollywood.

The stories behind two coffins.

HMS Dolphin captures a slave ship.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a murder case...that wasn't.  In the meantime, here's one of those pop songs where the original version is less well known than the covers.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

It’s time for some Mystery Blood!  The “Sacramento Bee,” August 16, 1870:

At the Juapa, at the residence of Mr. John Baldwin, one of those phenomena occurred for which it is so difficult to account. On the 15th instant, a shower of blood fell at the dwelling of Mr. B., spattering the doorstep and the surrounding grounds. There had been only an instant before a perfect calm, without a cloud in the horizon, when suddenly a whirlwind arose, scattering everything in all directions, and leaving as the result, large clots of blood in the immediate vicinity of the house. The question arises, where did this blood come from. The circumstances are altogether different from that which occurred a few months ago at Los Nietos, where it was finally agreed that it was made by vultures who had been preying upon dead carcasses upon the plains, and from the ratification of the air, in passing over that place, gave up their gorged repast.