by Charles Fort
Dispatch, dated March 3, 1929, to the San Francisco Chronicle—clipping sent to me by Miriam Allen de Ford, of San Francisco—“Newton, N.J.—The county prosecutor’s office here is baffled by the greatest mystery in its history. For days a rain of buckshot, at intervals, has been falling in the office of the Newton garage, a small room, with one door and one window. There are no marks on the walls or ceiling, and there are no holes in the room, through which the shot could enter.”
About two years later, being not very speedy in getting around to this, I wrote to the County Prosecutor, at Newton, and received a reply, signed by Mr. George R. Vaughan—“This occurrence turned out to be a hoax, perpetrated by some local jokesters.”
There is a story, in the Charleston (S.C.) News and Courier, Nov. 12, 1886, not of bullets falling in a closed room, but, nevertheless, of unaccountable bullets—two men in a field near Walterboro, Colleton Co., S.C.—small shot falling around them. They thought that it was a discharge from a sportsman’s gun, but the rain of lead continued. They gathered specimens, which they took to the office of the Colleton Press.
Religio-Philosophical Journal, March 6, 1880—copying from the Cincinnati Inquirer—that, at Lebanon, Ohio, people of the town were in a state of excitement: that showers of birdshot were falling from the ceiling of John W. Lingo’s hardware store. A committee had been appointed, and according to its report, the phenomenon was veritable: slow-falling volleys of shot, not of the size of any sold in the store, were appearing from no detectable point of origin. There was another circumstance, and it may have had much to do with the phenomenon: about five years before, somebody, at night, had entered this store, and had been shot by Lingo, escaping without being identified.
In the R.P.J., April 24, 1880, a correspondent, J.H. Marshall, wrote, after having read of the Lingo case, of experiences of his, in the summer of 1867. Bullets fell in every room in his house, forcefully, but not with gunshot velocity—large birdshot—broad daylight—short intervals, and then falls that lasted an hour or more. Many bullets appeared, but when Marshall undertook to gather them, he could never find more than half a dozen. About the same time raps were heard.
How bullets could enter closed rooms is no more mysterious than is the how-ness of Houdini’s escape from prison cells, though, according to all that was supposed to be known of physical confinements that was impossible. In Russia, Houdini made, from a prison van, an escape that involved no expert knowledge, nor dexterity, in matters of locks. He was put into this van, and the door was soldered. He appeared outside, and the police called it an unfair contest, because, so to pass through solid walls, he must have been a spirit. Anyway, this story is told by Will Goldston, President of the Magicians’ Club (London).
I have a story of a horse that appeared in what would, to any ordinary horse, be a closed room. It makes one nervous, maybe. One glances around, and would at least not be incredulous, seeing almost any damned thing, sitting in a chair, staring at one. I’d like to have readers, who consider themselves superior to such notions, note whether they can resist just a glance. The story of the horse was told in the London Daily Mail, May 28, 1906. If anyone wants to argue that it is all fantasy and lies, I think, myself that it is more comfortable so to argue. One morning, in May, 1906, at Furnace Mill, Lambhurst, Kent, England, the miller, J.C. Playfair, went to his stable, and found horses turned around in their stalls, and one of them missing. It is common for one who has lost something, to search in all reasonable places, and then, in desperation, to look into places where not at all reasonably could the missing thing be. Adjoining the stable, was a hay room: the doorway was barely wide enough for a man to enter. Mr. Playfair, unable to find a trace of his missing horse, went to the hay room doorway, probably feeling as irrational as would somebody, who had lost an elephant, peering into a kitchen closet. The horse was in the hay room. A partition had to be knocked down to get him out.
There were other occurrences that could not be. Heavy barrels of lime, with nobody perceptibly near them, were hurled down the stairs. This was in the daytime. Though occasionally I do go slinking about, at night, with our data, mostly ours are sunlight mysteries. The mill was an isolated building, and nobody—at least nobody seeable—could approach it unseen. There were two watchdogs. A large water butt, so heavy that to move it was beyond human strength, was overthrown. Locked and bolted doors opened. I mention that the miller had a young son.
About the middle of March, 1901—that a woman was stabbed to death, in a fiction—or in a scene like an imagined scene that did not belong to what we call “reality.” The look of the story of Lavinia Farrar is that it, too, was “revised,” and by an amateurish, or negligent, or in some unknown way hampered, “author,” who, in an attempt to cover up his crime, bungled—or that this woman had been killed inexplicably, in commonplace terms, and that, later, means were taken, but awkwardly, or almost blindly, and only by way of increasing the mystery, to make the murder seem understandable in terms of common human experience.
Cambridge (England) Daily News, March 16, 1901—that Lavinia Farrar, aged seventy-two, a blind woman, “of independent means,” had been found dead on her kitchen floor, face bruised, nose broken. Near the body was a blood-stained knife, and there were drops of blood on the floor. The body was dressed, and, until the post-mortem examination, no wound to account for the death was seen. At the inquest, two doctors testified that the woman had been stabbed to the heart, but that there was no puncture in her garments of which there were four. The woman, undressed, could not have stabbed herself, and then have dressed, because death had come to her almost instantly. A knife could not have been inserted through openings in the garments, because their fastenings were along lines far apart.
A knife was on the floor, and blood was on the floor. But it seemed that this blood had not come from the woman’s wound. This wound was almost bloodless. Only one of her garments, the innermost, was blood-stained, and only slightly. There had been no robbery. The jury returned an open verdict.
Upon the evening of March 9, 1929—see the New York Times, March 10, 11, 1929—Isidor Fink, of 4 East 132nd Street, New York City, was ironing something. He was the proprietor of the Fifth Avenue Laundry. A hot iron was on the gas stove. Because of the hold-ups that were of such frequent occurrence at the time, he was afraid; the windows of his room were closed, and the door was bolted.
A woman, who heard screams and sounds as if of blows, but no sound of shots, notified the police. Policeman Albert Kattenborn went to the place, but was unable to get in. He lifted a boy through the transom. The boy unbolted the door. On the floor lay Fink, two bullet wounds in his chest, and one in his left wrist, which was powder-marked. He was dead. There was money in his pockets, and the cash register had not been touched. No weapon was found. The man had died instantly, or almost instantly.
There was a theory that the murderer had crawled through the transom. A hinge on this transom was broken, but there was no statement, as to the look of this break, as indicating recency, or not. The transom was so narrow that Policeman Kattenborn had to lift a boy through it. It would have to be thought that, having sneaked noiselessly through this transom, the murderer then, with much difficulty, left the room the same way, instead of simply unbolting the door. It might be thought that the murderer had climbed up, outside, and had fired through the transom. But Fink’s wrist was powder-burned, indicating that he had not been fired at from a distance. More than two years later, Police Commissioner Mulrooney, in a radio talk, called this murder in a closed room an “insoluble mystery.”
13
If a man was scorched, though upon his clothes there was no sign of fire, it could be that the woman of Whitley Bay, who told of having found her sister burned to death on an unscorched bed, reported accurately. If the woman confessed that she had lied, that ends the mystery, or that stimulates interest. The statement that somebody, operated upon by the police, or by a coroner, confessed, has the meaning that has a statement that under p
ressure an apple produces cider. However, this analogy breaks down. I have never heard of an apple that would, if properly pressed, yield cider, if wanted; or ginger ale, if required; or home brew all according to what was wanted.
Once upon a time, when mine was an undeveloped suspiciousness, and I’d let dogmatists pull their pedantries over my perceptions, I nevertheless collected occasional notes upon what seemed to me to be unexplained phenomena. I don’t do things mildly, and at the same time much enjoy myself in various ways: I act as if trying to make allness out of something. A search for the unexplained became an obsession. I undertook the job of going through all scientific periodicals, at least by way of indexes, published in English and French, from the year 1800, available in the libraries of New York and London. As I went along, with my little suspicions in their infancies, new subjects appeared to me—something queer about some hailstorms—the odd and the unexplained in archaeological discoveries, and in Arctic explorations. By the time I got through with the “grand tour,” as I called this search of all available periodicals, to distinguish it from special investigations, I was interested in so many subjects that had cropped up later, or that I had missed earlier, that I made the tour all over again—and then again had the same experience, and had to go touring again—and so on—until now it is my recognition that in every field of phenomena—and in later years I have multiplied my subjects by very much shifting to the newspapers—is somewhere the unexplained, or the irreconcilable, or the mysterious—in unformulable motions of all planets; volcanic eruptions, murders, hailstorms, protective colorations of insects, chemical reactions, disappearances of human beings, stars, comets, juries, diseases, cats, lampposts, newly married couples, cathode rays, hoaxes, impostures, wars, births, deaths.
Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native. There are scientific dervishes who whirl amok, brandishing startling statements; but mostly they whirl not far from their origins, and their excitements are exaggerations of old-fashioned complacencies.
Because of several cases that I have noted, the subject of fires attracted my attention. One reads hundreds of accounts of fires, and many of them are mysterious, but one’s ruling thought is that the unexplained would be renderable in terms of accidents, carelessness, or arson, if one knew all the circumstances. But keep this subject in mind, and, as in every other field of phenomena, one comes upon cases that are irreconcilables.
Glasgow News, May 20, 1878—doings in John Shattock’s farmhouse, near Bridgewater. Fires had started up unaccountably. A superintendent of police investigated and suspected a servant girl, Ann Kidner, aged twelve, because he had seen a hayrick flame, while she was passing it. Loud raps were heard. Things in the house, such as dishes and loaves of bread, moved about. The policeman ignored whatever he could not explain, and arrested the girl, accusing her of tossing lighted matches. But a magistrate freed her, saying that the evidence was insufficient.
There is a story of “devilish manifestations” in the Quebec Daily Mercury, Oct. 6, 1880. For two weeks, in the Hudson Hotel, in the town of Hudson, on the Ottawa River, furniture had been given to disorderly conduct: the beds had been especially excitable. A fire had broken out in a stall in the stable. This fire was quenched, but another fire broke out. A priest was sent for, and he sprinkled the stable with holy water. The stable burned down.
There are several recorded cases of such fires ending with the burning of buildings; but a similarity that runs through the great majority of the stories is of fires localized in special places, and not extending. They are oftenest in the presence of a girl, aged from twelve to twenty; but seldom do they occur at night, when they would be most dangerous. It is a peculiarity. See back to the case of the fires in the house in Bedford. It seems that, if those fires had been ordinary fires, the house would have burned down. The cases are of fires, in unscorched surroundings.
New Zealand Times, Dec. 9, 1886—copying from the San Francisco Bulletin, about October 14—that Willie Brough, twelve years old, who had caused excitement in the town of Turlock, Madison Co., Cal., by setting things afire, “by his glance”, had been expelled from the Turlock school, because of his freaks. His parents had cast him off, believing him to be possessed by a devil, but a farmer had taken him in and had sent him to school. “On the first day, there were five fires in the school: one in the center of the ceiling, one in the teacher’s desk, one in her wardrobe, and two on the wall. The boy discovered all, and cried from fright. The trustees met and expelled him, that night.” For another account, see the New York Herald, Oct. 16, 1886.
Setting fire to teacher’s desk, or to her wardrobe, is understandable, and would have been more understandable to me when I was twelve years old; but in terms of no known powers of mischievous youngsters, can there be an explanation of setting a ceiling, or walls, afire. It seems to me that no yarn-spinner would have thought of any such particular, or would have made his story look improbable with it, if he had thought of it. I have other accounts in which similar statements occur. This particular of fires on walls is unknown in standardized yarns of uncanny doings. If writers of subsequent accounts probably had never heard of Willie Brough, it is improbable that several of them could invent, or would invent, anything so unlikely. It seems that my reasoning is that, under some circumstances, if something is highly unlikely, it is probable. John Stuart Mill missed that.
Upon the 6th of August, 1887, in a little, two-story frame house, in Victoria Street, Woodstock, New Brunswick, occupied by Reginald C. Hoyt, his wife, four children of his own, and two nieces, fires broke out. See the New York World, Aug. 8, 1887. Within a few hours, there were about forty fires. They were fires in unscorched surroundings. They did not extend to their surroundings, because they were immediately put out, or because some unknown condition limited them. “The fires can be traced to no human agency, and even the most skeptical are staggered. Now a curtain, high up and out of reach, would burst into flames, then a bed quilt in another room: a basket of clothes on a shed, a child’s dress, hanging on a hook.”
New York Herald, Jan. 6, 1895—fires in the home of Adam Colwell, 84 Guernsey Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn—that, in twenty hours, preceding noon, January 5th, when Colwell’s frame house burned down, there had been many fires. Policemen had been sent to investigate. They had seen furniture burst into flames. Policemen and firemen had reported that the fires were of unknown origin. The fire marshal said: “It might be thought that the child, Rhoda, started two of the fires, but she cannot be considered guilty of the others, as she was being questioned, when some of them began. I do not want to be quoted as a believer in the supernatural, but I have no explanation to offer, as to the cause of the fires, or of the throwing around of the furniture.”
Colwell’s story was that, upon the afternoon of January 4th, in the presence of his wife and his step-daughter Rhoda, aged sixteen, a crash was heard. A large, empty, parlor stove had fallen to the floor. Four pictures fell from walls. Colwell had been out. Upon his return, while hearing an account of what had occurred, he smelled smoke. A bed was afire. He called a policeman, Roundsman Daly, who put out the fire, and then, because of unaccountable circumstances, remained in the house. It was said that the roundsman saw wallpaper, near the shoulder of Colwell’s son Willie start to burn. Detective Sergeant Dunn arrived. There was another fire, and a heavy lamp fell from a hook. The house burned down, and the Colwells, who were in poor circumstances, lost everything but their clothes. They were taken to the police station.
Captain Rhoades of the Greenpoint Precinct, said: “The people we arrested had nothing to do with the strange fires. The more I look into it, the deeper the mystery. So far I can attribute it to no other cause than a supernatural agency. Why, the fires broke out under the very noses of the men I sent to investigate.”
Sergeant Dunn—“There were things that happened before my eyes
that I did not believe were possible.”
New York Herald, January 7—“Policemen and firemen artfully tricked by a pretty, young girl.”
Mr. J.L. Hope, of Flushing, L.I., had called upon Captain Rhoades, telling him that Rhoda had been a housemaid in his home, where, between November 19 and December 19, four mysterious fires had occurred. “Now the Captain was sure of Rhoda’s guilt, and he told her so.” “She was frightened, and was advised to tell the truth.”
And Rhoda told what she was “advised” to tell. She “sobbed” that she had started the fires, because she did not like the neighborhood “ in which she lived, and wanted to move away: that she had knocked pictures from the walls, while her mother was in another part of the house, and had dropped burning matches into beds, continuing her trickeries after policemen, detectives, and firemen had arrived.
The Colwells were poor people, and occupied only the top floor of the house that burned down. Colwell, a carpenter, had been out of work two years, and the family was living on the small wages of his son. Insurance was not mentioned.
The police captain’s conclusion was that the fires that had seemed “supernatural” to him, were naturally accounted for, because, if when Rhoda was in Flushing, she set things afire, fires in her own home could be so explained. Rather than to start a long investigation into the origin of the fires in Flushing, the police captain gave the girl what was considered sound and wholesome advice. And—though it seems quaint, today—the girl listened to advice. “Pretty, young girls” have tricked more than policemen and firemen. Possibly a dozen male susceptibles could have looked right at this pretty, young girl, and not have seen her strike a match, and flip it into furniture; but no flip of a match could set wallpaper afire. The case is like the case of Emma Piggott. Only to one person’s motives could fires be attributed: but by no known means could she have started some of these fires.
