Wild Talents

by Charles Fort

  New York Times, Oct. 25, 1930—that about forty automobiles had been stalled, for an hour, on the road, in Saxony, between Risa and Wurzen.

  About forty chauffeurs were probably not voiceless, in this matter; and, if the German government were experimenting with “secret rays,” that was some more of its public secrecy. In the Times, October 27, was quoted the mathematician and former Premier of France, Paul Painlevé—“No experiment thus far conducted would permit us to credit such a report, nor give any prospect of seeing it accomplished in the near future.”

  Upon May 26, 1925—see the London Daily Mail, May 28, 1925—at Andover, Hampshire, England, a corporal of the R.A.F., making a parachute practice jump, was killed by a fall of 1,900 feet from an aeroplane. There is not a datum for thinking that there was anything to this occurrence that aligns it with other occurrences told of in this chapter. But there is an association. About the time of the accident, or whatever it was that befell this man, and at the same place, Flight Sergeant Frank Lowry, and Flying Officer John Kenneth Smith, pilot, were in an aeroplane, making wireless tests. They had been in the air about fifteen minutes when Smith, having called to his companion, without hearing from him, looked around, and saw smoke coming from the back cockpit, and saw Lowry in a state of collapse.

  Lowry was dead. “Flight Lieut. Cyril Norman Ellen said that there was nothing in the machine likely to kill a man, and that Lowry must have come in contact with an electric current in the air. No similar case has been reported.”

  In the Daily Mail, Oct. 14, 1921, a writer (T. Gifford) tells of a scene of “accidents” at a point on a road in Dartmoor. This story is like the account of the series of “accidents” to automobiles, in England, in April and May, 1927, except that the “accidents” were strictly localized.

  The story told by Gifford is that one day in June, 1921, a doctor, riding on his motorcycle, with his two children in a sidecar, suddenly, at this point, on the Dartmoor road, called to the children to jump. The machine swerved, and the doctor was killed. Several weeks later, at this place, a motor coach suddenly swerved, and several passengers were thrown out. Upon Aug. 26, 1921, a Captain M.—for whom I apologize—it is not often that a Mr. X. or a Captain M. appears in these records—was, at this point on the road, thrown from his motorcycle. Interviewed by Gifford, he told, after evasions, that something described by him as “invisible hands” had seized upon his hands, forcing the machine into the turf.

  More details were published in the Daily Mail, October 17, of this year. The scene of the “accidents” was on the road, near the Dartmoor Village of Post Bridge. In the first instance, the victim was Dr. E.H. Helby, Medical Officer of Princetown Prison.

  In Light, Aug. 26, 1922, a correspondent noted another “accident” at this point. Details of the fourth “accident” were told, in the London Sunday Express, Sept. 12, 1926. The victim was traveling on his motorcycle. “He was suddenly and violently unseated from his mount, and knew no more until he regained consciousness in a cottage, to which he had been carried, after a collapse.” The injured man could not explain.

  18

  I record that, once upon a time, down from the sky came a shower of virgins.

  Of course they weren’t really virgins. I can’t accept the reality of anything in such an indeterminate existence as ours.

  See the English Mechanic, 87-436—a shower of large hailstones, at Remiremont, France, May 26, 1907. Definitely upon some of these objects were printed representations of the Virgin of the Hermits.

  It used to be the fashion, simply and brusquely to deny such a story, and call it a device of priestcraft: but the tendency of disbelievers, today, is not to be so free and monotonous with accusations, and to think that very likely unusual hailstones did fall, at Remiremont, and that out of irregularities or discolorations upon them, pious inhabitants imagined pictorial representations. I think, myself, that the imprints upon these hailstones were of imaginative origin, but in the sense that illustrations in a book are; and were not simply imagined by the inhabitants of Remiremont, any more than are some of the illustrations of some books only smudges that are so imaginatively interpreted by readers that they are taken as pictures.

  The story of the hailstones of Remiremont is unique in my records. And a statement of mine has been that our data are of the not extremely uncommon. But, early in this book, I pointed out that any two discordant colors may be harmonized by means of other colors; and there are no data, thinkable by me, that cannot be more or less suavely coordinated, if smoothly doctored; or that cannot be aligned with the ordinary, if that be desirable.

  I am a Jesuit. I shift aspects from hailstones with pictures on them, to pictures on hailstones—and go on with stories of pictures on other unlikely materials.

  According to accounts—copied from newspapers—in the Spiritual Magazine, n.s., 7-360, and in the Religio-Philosophical Journal, March 29, 1873, there was more excitement in Baden-Baden, upon March 12, 1872, than at Remiremont. Upon the morning of this day, people saw pictures that in some unaccountable way had been printed upon windowpanes of houses, with no knowledge by occupants as to how they got there. At first the representations were crosses, but then other figures appeared. The authorities of Baden ordered the windows to be washed, but the pictures were indelible. Acids were used, without effect. Two days later, crosses and death’s heads appeared upon window glass, at Rastadt.

  The epidemic broke out at Boulley, five leagues from Metz. Here, because of feeling, still intense from the Franco-Prussian War, the authorities were alarmed. Crosses and other religious emblems appeared upon windowpanes—pictures of many kinds—death’s heads, eagles, rainbows. A detail of Prussian soldiers was sent to one house to smash a window, upon which was pictured a band of French Zouaves and their flags. It was said that at night the pictures were invisible. But the soldiers did not miss their chance: they smashed a lot of windows, anyway. Next morning it looked as if there had been a battle. In the midst of havoc, the Zouaves were still flying their colors.

  This story, I should say, then became a standardized newspaper yarn. I have a collection of stories of pictures appearing upon window glass that were almost busily told in American newspapers, after March, 1872, not petering out until about the year 1890.

  But it cannot be said that all stories told in the United States, of this phenomenon, or alleged phenomenon, were echoes of the reported European occurrences, because stories, though in no such profusion as subsequently, had been told in the United States before March, 1872. New York Herald, Aug. 20, 1870—a representation of a woman’s face, appearing upon window glass, in a house in Lawrence, Mass. The occupant of the house was so pestered by crowds of sightseers that, not succeeding in washing off the picture, he removed the window sash. Human Nature, June, 1871—copied from the Chicago Times—house in Milan, Ohio, occupied by two tenants, named Horner and Ashley. On windowpanes appeared blotches, as if of water mixed with tar, or crude oil—likenesses of human faces taking form in these places. New York Times, Jan. 18, 1871—that, in Sandusky and Cincinnati, Ohio, pictures of women had appeared upon windowpanes.

  Still, it might be thought that there was one origin for all the stories, and that that was the spirit-photograph controversy, which, in the early 1870s, was a subject of intense beliefs and disbeliefs, in both Europe and America. A point that has not been taken up, in this controversy, which continues to this day, even after the fateful spread of knowledge of double exposure, is whether the human imagination can affect a photographic plate. I incline to the idea that almost all spirit-photographs have been frauds, but that a few may not have been—that no spirits were present, but that, occasionally, or very rarely, a quite spookless medium has, in a profound belief in spirits, engendered, out of visualizations, something wraith-like that has been recorded by a camera. Against the explanation that stories of pictures on windowpanes probably had origin in the spirit-photograph craze, I mention that similar stories were told centuries before photography was inven
ted. For an account of representations of crosses that appeared, not upon window glass, but upon people’s clothes, as told by Joseph Grunpech, in his book, Speculum Naturalis Coelestis, published in the year 1508, see Notes and Queries, April 2, 1892.

  “After the death of Dean Vaughan of Llandaff, there suddenly appeared on a wall of the Llandaff Cathedral, a large blotch of dampness, or minute fungi, formed into a life-like outline of the dean’s face” (Notes and Queries, Feb. 8, 1902).

  Throughout this book, my views, or preconceptions, or bigotries, are against spiritual interpretations, or assertions of the existence of spirits, as independent very long from human bodies. However, I think of the temporary detachability of mentalities from bodies, and that is much like an acceptance of the existence of spirits. My notion is that Dean Vaughan departed, going where any iceberg goes when it melts, or where any flame goes when it is extinguished: that intense visualizations of him, by a member of his congregation, may have pictorially marked the wall of the church.

  According to reports, in the London Daily Express, July 17 and 30, and in the Sunday Express, Aug. 12, 1923, it may be thought, by anybody so inclined to think, that, in England, in the summer of 1923, an artistic magician was traveling, and exercising his talents. Somebody, or something, was perhaps impressing pictures upon walls and pillars of churches. The first report was that, on the wall of Christ Church, Oxford, had appeared a portrait of the famous Oxford cleric, Dean Liddell, long dead. Other reports came from Bath, Bristol, and Uphill, Somerset. At Bath—in the old abbey of Bath—the picture was of a soldier, carrying a pack. The Abbey authorities scraped off this picture, but the portrait, at Oxford, was not touched.

  There is a description, in T.P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly (London), Sept. 11, 1926, of the portrait on the wall of Christ Church, Oxford, as seen three years later. It is described as “a faithful and unmistakable likeness of the late Dean Liddell, who died in the year 1898.” “One does not need to call in play any imaginative faculty to reconstruct the head. It is set perfectly straight upon the wall, as it might have been drawn by the hand of a master artist. Yet it is not etched; neither is it sketched, not sculptured, but it is there plain for all eyes to see.”

  And it is beginning to look as if, having started somewhat eccentrically with a story of virgins, we are making our way out of the marvelous. Now accept that there is a very ordinary witchcraft, by which, under the name of telepathy, pictures can be transferred from one mind to another, and there is reduction of the preposterousness of stories of representations on hailstones, window glass, and other materials. We are conceiving that human beings may have learned an extension of the telepathic process, so as to transfer pictures to various materials. So far as go my own experiences, I do not know that telepathy exists. I think so, according to many notes that I have taken upon vagrant impressions that come and go, when my mind is upon something else. I have often experimented. When I incline to think that there is telepathy, the experiments are convincing that there is. When I think over the same experiments, and incline against they indicate that there isn’t.

  New York Sun, Jan. 16, 1929—hundreds of persons standing, or kneeling, at night, before the door of St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church, in Keansburg, N.J. They saw, or thought they saw, on the dark, oak door, the figure of a woman, in trailing, white robes, emitting a glow. The pastor of the church, the Rev. Thomas A. Kearney, was interviewed. “I don’t believe that it is a miracle, or that it has anything to do with the supernatural. As I see it, it is unquestionably in the outline of a human figure, white-robed, and emitting light. It is rather like a very thin motion picture negative that was underexposed, and in which human outlines and detail are extremely thin. Yet it seems to be there.”

  Or pictures on hailstones—and wounds that appeared on the bodies of people. In the name of the everlasting If, which mocks the severity of every theorem in every textbook, and is not so very remote from every datum of mine, we can think that, by imaginative means, at present not understood, wounds appeared upon people in Japan, and Germany, and in a turning off Coventry Street, London, if we can accept that in some such way, pictures ever have appeared upon hailstones, windowpanes, and other places. And we can think that pictures have appeared upon hailstones, windowpanes, and other places, if we can think that wounds have appeared upon people in Japan and other places. Ave the earthworm!

  It is my method not to try to solve problems—so far as the solubility-insolubility of problems permits—in whatever narrow specializations of thought I find them stated: but, if, for instance, I come upon a mystery that the spiritualists have taken over, to have an eye for data that may have bearing, from chemical, zoological, meteorological, sociological, or entomological sources—being unable to fail, of course, because the analogue of anything electrical, or planetary, is findable in biological, ethical, or political phenomena. We shall travel far, even to unborn infants, to make hailstones reasonable.

  I have so many heresies—along with my almost incredible credulities—or pseudo-credulities, seeing that I have freed my mind of beliefs—that, mostly, I cannot trace my infidelities, or enlightenments, back to their sources. But I do remember when first I doubted the denial by conventional science of the existence of pre-natal markings. I read Dr. Weismann’s book upon this subject, and his arguments against the possibility of pre-natal markings convinced me that they are quite possible. And this conversion cost me something. Before reading Dr. Weismann, I had felt superior to peasants, or the “man in the street,” as philosophers call him, whose belief is that pregnant women, if frightened, mark their offsprings with representations of rats, spiders, or whatever; or, if having a longing for strawberries, fruitfully illustrate their progeny, and were at one time of much service to melodrama. I don’t know about the rats and the strawberries, but Dr. Weismann told of such cases as that of a woman with a remarkable and distinctive disfigurement of an ear, and of her similarly marked offspring. His argument was that thousands of women are disfigured in various ways, and that thousands of offsprings are disfigured, and that it is not strange that in one case the disfigurement of an offspring should correspond to the disfigurement of a parent. But so he argued about other remarkable cases, and left me in a state of mind that has often repeated: and that is with the idea that much mental development is in rising down to the peasants again.

  If there can be pre-natal markings of bodies, and, as I interpret Dr. Weismann’s denials, there can be, and, if they be of mental origin, my mind is open to the idea that other—and still more profoundly damned stories of strange markings—may be similarly explained. If a conventional physician is scornful, hearing of a human infant, prenatally marked, I’d like to hear his opinion of a story that I take from the London Daily Express, May 14, 1921. Kitten, born at Nice, France—white belly distinctly marked with the gray figures, 1921—the mother cat had probably been looking intently at something, such as a calendar, so dated. “Or reading a newspaper?” said scornful doctor would ask, pointing out that, if I think there are talking dogs, it is only a small “extension,” as I’d call it, to think of educated cats keeping themselves informed upon current events.

  London Sunday News, Aug. 3, 1926—“Dorothy Parrot, four-year-old child of R.S. Parrot, of Winget Mill, Georgia, was marked by a red spot on her body. Out of this spot formed three letters, R. I. C. Doctors cannot explain.”

  London Daily Express, Nov. 17, 1913—phenomena of a girl, aged twelve, of the village of Bussus-Bus-Suel, near Abbeville, France. If asked questions, answers appeared in letterings on her arms, legs, and shoulders. Also upon her body appeared pictures, such as of a ladder, a dog, a horse.

  In September, 1926, a Rumanian girl, Eleonore Zegun, was taken to London, for observation by the National Laboratory for Psychical Research. Countess Wassilko-Serecki, who had taken the girl to London, said, in an interview (London Evening Standard, Oct. 1, 1926), that she had seen the word Dracu form upon the girl’s arm. This word is the Rumanian word for the Devi
l.

  Or the Handwriting on the Wall—and why don’t I come out frankly in favor of all, or anyway a goodly number of, the yarns, or the data of the Bible? The Defender of Some of the Faith is clearly becoming my title.

  In recent years I have noted much that has impressed upon my mind the thought that religionists have taken over many phenomena, as exclusively their own—have colored and discredited with their emotional explanations—but that someday some of these occurrences will be rescued from theological interpretations and exploitations, and will be the subject matter of—

  New enlightenments and new dogmas, new progresses, delusions, freedoms, and tyrannies.

  I incline to the acceptance of many stories of miracles, but think that these miracles would have occurred, if this earth had been inhabited by atheists.

  To me, the Bible is folklore, and therefore is not pure fantasy, but comprises much that will be rehabilitated. But also to me the Bible is non-existent. This is in the sense that, except in my earlier writings, I have drawn a dead-line, for data, at the year 1800. I may, upon rare occasions, dip farther back, but my notes start in the year 1800. I shall probably raise this limit to 1850, or maybe 1900. I take for a principle that our concern is not in marvels. It is in repetitions, or sometimes in almost the commonplace. There is no desirability in going back to antiquity for data, because, unless phenomena be appearing now, they are of only historical interest. At present, there is too much history.