When the cradle containing Mrs. McSherry’s infant son was violently rocked by invisible hands, the Voice told her, through Livingston, that the devil wanted to destroy the infant who would be his enemy; William McSherry grew up to be a Jesuit priest. In 1802, Livingston deeded thirty-five acres of land to the church, and the Voice declared that “[b]efore the end of time [it] would be a great place of prayer and fasting and praise!”18
Many believed the area was haunted and avoided it, but some local Catholics considered the land sanctified by miracles and used it as a burial ground. Two of Livingston’s oldest children and/or his two wives were already interred there, as well as an “Unknown Stranger” who is the subject of the best-known legend about the Wizard Clip.
According to the story, a man appeared at the Livingston home and was invited to spend the night. He became ill and begged for a priest, but Adam said that he did not know any, and if he did, he would not allow one in his house, so the stranger died without making his final confession; their troubles began soon after. This story first appeared in 1883 and though it is almost certainly an invention, a stranger is buried on Livingston’s property in a grave that is marked by a large freestanding cross inscribed “In Memory of the Unknown Stranger 1797,” which reminds people to pray for all souls. (When the author visited in July 2007, there were rosaries wrapped around the cross.)
In 1809, Livingston sold the farm and moved to Greenfield Township, Pennsylvania. Father Gallitzin lived twenty miles away in Loretto and often celebrated Mass at the old man’s home. There is no record of paranormal phenomena at the new location, and if the Voice revealed its identity to Livingston before his death in 1820, he kept the knowledge to himself.
As for the land, questions about its ownership were not resolved until 1922, when the Richmond Court confirmed that it belonged to the church. A small All Souls’ Chapel was built in 1923 and the place was largely forgotten until 1978, when construction began on the new pastoral center at what became known as “Priest Field.”
The Wizard’s Voice
Working on the assumption that the accounts are more or less true, the Livingstons appear to have experienced a poltergeist outbreak followed by a long-term haunting.
Those involved and their contemporaries presumably held the traditional view that poltergeists are caused by black magic, and dubbed it the Wizard Clip or the Livingston Wizard. Unlike other notorious cases, however, like the Drummer of Tedworth or Tennessee’s Bell Witch, no one was accused of witchcraft or suspected of bearing the family a grudge. Mrs. Mary Ann Taylor’s mother (born 1782) told a story in which the Wizard was the spirit of a man who committed murder to obtain the land later occupied by Livingston, while later versions portray the Wizard as the aggrieved spirit of a stranger.19 The various explanations reflect different folk beliefs and perhaps the influence of nineteenth-century Spiritualism; by the twentieth century, explanations for the poltergeist had shifted almost exclusively to living “agents.” These are individuals, or groups, that create poltergeist phenomena through unconscious psychokinesis, which is why poltergeist outbreaks are sometimes described as “haunted people” rather than haunted houses.20
Whatever caused the manifestations, the idea of the Wizard and the Voice as separate entities might be less useful than thinking of them as different phases of the same phenomenon. This idea is supported by a letter from Mrs. Livingston that appeared in the September 12, 1798, issue of the Potomak Guardian, in which she states that “the trouble still remains in the Livingston’s family, at times, in a greater or lesser degree, in spite of Priestly art.”21 The letter (presumably written with help) goes on to say that clergymen and spirits were separating her from her husband and family and trying to take her land, which could not be sold or donated without the wife’s consent.22 This is the only surviving statement by someone intimately involved, but not a pious Catholic, and suggests a very different interpretation of events.
It is a reminder that the Voice’s actions—if not its motives—were often indistinguishable from the Wizard’s; they both terrified members of the family, kept everyone awake, and stole or destroyed valuable objects. Why, for example, did the Voice take a piece of linen, keep it three weeks, and leave it folded on a bush? What if the Voice was responsible for the screaming that was supposed to come from souls in Purgatory? And did it shake Michael McSherry’s cradle and blame the devil?
Roman Catholic writers have considered this question and point to the results. The Voice taught orthodox doctrines and brought about more than fourteen conversions, while the successful exorcism of the Wizard Clip confirmed the Catholic priest’s status as a true disciple of Christ. Mrs. Livingston’s letter, however, is not the only dissenting view.
Adam and his children Henry and Eve did become devout, but a nonbeliever might wonder about his wife being driven from home, along with the six other children; according to Father Gallitzin they were “scattered away, and I believe care very little for the Church.”23 As for the physical evidence, that has been lost.
Some of the Wizard/Voice’s handiwork was given to a mission house at Conewago, Pennsylvania, including dresses “cut in small half moons, in straight rows, as tho’ machinery—cut close together—without even space that one button could cover left—cut, all over.” Another source describes “semi-circular figures an inch or two long.”24 (How it did the cutting is another mystery. Despite the snipping sounds, there is no evidence that the Wizard Clip used ordinary tools, but along with the Voice, it did set fires, produce blinding light, and scorch recognizable designs into cloth. Perhaps the cutting was done with heat like a modern laser cutter. They work quickly and leave a finished, slightly singed edge, and any odor that might result would go unnoticed in smoky eighteenth-century interiors.) Father Matthew Leken destroyed the Conewago collection in 1830, while the vest marked IHS was given to the Sisters of the Visitation in Kaskaskia, Illinois, and survived until 1844, when it was lost in a flood.
The Livingstons’ home, the “haunted house,” was in ruins by 1864 and has long since disappeared, along with the original chapel. It is now the Priest Field Pastoral Center, a small complex of modern buildings and gardens open to all Christian denominations (a concession the Voice would not have approved). There is a new All Souls’ Chapel and a path through the forest that leads to the Unknown Stranger’s grave; at the trailhead stands a rugged wooden relief carving of Adam Livingston facing a fiery cross and trampling crescents underfoot.
The last known claim of clipping was made by two young men who said that dollar bills in their wallets had been cut into half moons, but the staff believes it was a hoax and that they were connected to anti-Catholic literature found in the woods. There are vague stories about glasses or camera straps being destroyed, but strange phenomena apparently ceased long ago. It is almost two hundred years since the Wizard clipped or the Voice spoke at Priest Field, which is a peaceful place where one hears little more than bird calls, wind chimes, and the distant splashing of Opequon Creek.
The Man in Room 41 and Other Autodecapitants
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Self-decapitation is an extremely difficult, not to say dangerous, thing to attempt . . .
—W. S. GILBERT, The Mikado
Living in a downstairs apartment means getting used to unidentified noises overhead. A thump could be anything from an overweight tabby jumping off the sofa to the lady upstairs being attacked by a razor-wielding orangutan. If guests had been staying in the room directly below room 41 at the Lahr House hotel at Lafayette, Indiana, on the morning of Sunday, June 11, 1876, they might have heard the sound of a single muted crack come through the ceiling at around seven A.M. and, unless they also happened to have imaginations of almost exquisite morbidity, are unlikely to have guessed that it was the sound of a man beheading himself in a way journalists of the period could only describe as “The Most Wonderful Suicide in the History of the World.”
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Headlessness: How Some People Get That Way
Deliberate self-decapitation is rare, but there are a number of ways the head and body can become separated in the course of conventional suicides. A shotgun fired at close range can sever the neck, and explosives, of course, can blow the body apart; in 1951 an elderly farmer in Wausau, Wisconsin, detonated a stick of dynamite under his chin and was beheaded.1 In rare cases, decapitation can occur as a result of hanging, particularly if the person is heavy, the drop too long, or the line too thin or inelastic. It has even occurred during lawful executions.
When “Black Jack” Ketchum was hanged at Clayton, New Mexico, in 1901, “the half-inch rope severed his head as cleanly as if a knife had cut it.” To make matters worse, the “headless trunk” then “pitched forward toward the spectators and blood spurted upon those nearest the scaffold.”2 Even suicide by cutting the throat can result in beheading.
Around the time of Ketchum’s death, a headless body was found near Edgemont Park in East St. Louis, Illinois. A month later, in May 1901, the head was found a hundred yards away, wrapped in an old coat and with a rusty razor nearby. The coroner’s jury decided that it was suicide, which meant that when the unidentified man cut his throat, the blade passed through the cervical vertebrae (how the body came to be three hundred feet from the razor and head is another question). Some have wondered whether self-decapitation with an edged tool or weapon is possible, yet there are other examples; self-beheading with obsidian knives may have even been a part of Mayan religious rituals, which brings us to the rare cases of suicide by deliberate self-beheading or, to coin a word, “autodecapitation.”
They account for less than one in a hundred suicides and typically involve a male placing his neck on railroad tracks and waiting for the train.3 In another form of “vehicle-assisted decapitation,” one end of a rope is tied to a stationary object like a tree, and the other to the neck of the person committing suicide; he or she then drives away till the rope yanks the head off (for some reason, this has been done by a number of husbands angry at their wives).4 It resembles decapitation by hanging, but with the headless body seated at the wheel of a moving vehicle. Chainsaws and cutting machines are also employed. Mrs. Fred Sheets of Hinton, Oklahoma, in a rare example of female self-beheading, died in her husband’s butcher shop when, “in a fit of despondency . . . [she] laid her head on an automatic electric cheese slicer and severed it.”5
All of these cases involve the application of conventional objects and devices to decapitation; instruments created for the specific purpose of suicidal beheading are rare. One example reportedly existed in India:
It was half-moon shaped, with a sharp edge, was fastened at the back of the neck, chains being attached to the ends. The man who donned this instrument of death put his feet in the chains, gave a sharp jerk downward and severed his head from the body.6
As an American and a child of the Industrial Revolution, James Moon thought in terms of mechanical, not muscular, power and used it, along with the power of modern communications, to realize his ambitions.
Mr. Moon’s Busy Day and Night
In 1876, Moon was a thirty-seven-year-old farmer, blacksmith, Union Army veteran, and inventor who lived with his wife, Mary, and their six children on a farm at Farmer’s Institute, a Quaker community nine miles south of Lafayette. He taught himself blacksmithing and was an inventor interested, like many of his contemporaries, in perpetual motion, and in perfecting the sewing machine; Moon was temperate and spent his leisure time carving items out of wood with a penknife.
His father, Enoch Moon, was a minister in the Society of Friends, and James “could quote the Bible from beginning to end,” but he was also a skeptic about religion and, contrary to Quaker teachings, served in the army; the relationship between father and son was strained. Neighbors apparently regarded James Moon as unreliable, but his home life was happy and, on the evening of Friday, June 9, his wife, Mary, could not help noticing that her normally pleasant and genial husband was in particularly good spirits.
The next morning, Moon harnessed the horse to the wagon. He was a big man, with brown hair and eyes, who stood six feet, two inches and weighed 190 pounds, yet he might have needed his son’s assistance in getting a heavy trunk onto the wagon bed. When it was loaded he left for Lafayette, arriving around ten A.M. Moon tied up the horse and went into Lahr House, a landmark hotel on Main Street, to rent a “good” room for three or four days. He said he was a light sleeper who needed someplace quiet, so Moon looked at several rooms before deciding that number 41 suited him “first rate.”7 It was on the third floor at the rear of the building and he had reportedly stayed in the same room three years earlier. Moon then left to run errands.
His exact itinerary is unknown, but he bought the head of an ax with a broad, 12-inch cutting edge at Beach’s hardware store and carried it to Harding & Son’s foundry. There, Moon bought two pieces of thick iron plate from the foundry’s stock and instructed the clerk to bore holes through the plates and ax head, then bolt the three pieces together into a single unit. He explained that it was going to be part of a machine he was inventing for making fruit baskets. Like most farmers at the time, Moon had a full beard, so while the ironwork was being done he found a barbershop, emerging clean-shaven and redolent of witch hazel and bay rum.
At R. Schwegler & Brother’s drugstore, Moon bought cotton batting and a bottle containing two or three ounces of chloroform, then picked up the modified ax head (which now weighed between forty and sixty pounds), returned to his wagon, and put it inside the trunk. Two porters then wrestled the trunk and its contents up to the hotel room, with Moon making sure the box was kept upright and not dropped, for the contents “would not permit jostling.”8 He told the Lahr’s manager, Otho T. Weakley, that he “was engaged in perfecting a patent of considerable importance,”9 and, with the trunk in the room and everything arranged satisfactorily, Moon locked the door and left again.
He met some friends and was “cheerful, laughing and talking familiarly and freely with his acquaintances, giving special attention to army reminiscences.”10 Moon presumably ate dinner, and climbed the stairs to his room between eight and nine o’clock. He had a long night ahead, for he was preparing to introduce his invention to the world in a way that would give even the most ruthless publicist pause.
Moon went to his room but did not retire. The noise of hammering and pounding coming from number 41 grew so loud that other guests complained and Mr. Weakley went up to ask if he was rebuilding the room; Moon replied that he was working on an important invention and would pay for any damages. This episode might be a later addition, since the machine was held together with screws and bolts so “there would be no noise necessary in erecting it” and the only tools in Moon’s trunk were a wrench, a screwdriver, and a brace with three bits.11 Whatever the truth, the third floor was quiet by midnight and the other inmates of Lahr House went to sleep.
Sunday, June 11, proved to be oppressively hot. Temperatures made “shirt bosoms melt like butter,” and by five P.M., Lahr chambermaid Bridget Clogan’s patience was exhausted.12 She had to clean number 41, and after knocking all day without response, the sixteen-year-old Clogan went into the adjoining room, number 40, where she used a passkey to unlock the communicating door.
Her first thought might have been surprise at the presence of a large wood and metal beam in the hotel room, but any curiosity about it ended with the sight of the bloody corpse. Clogan’s screams echoed down the passage, summoning two men, Mr. Tinney of Lafayette and Mr. Lance, a traveling salesman from Cincinnati, who took in the grisly scene; they sent for the hotel clerks, who then summoned authorities.
Third-Class Lever, First-Class Beheading
“And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble.”
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, The Pit and the Pendulum
Finding Moon’s body must have be
en traumatic, yet Bridget Clogan stayed at Lahr House. She was still working there as late as 1915.13 And while hotel employees see their share of uninspiring human behavior, for the Irish-born maid everything after room 41 was probably anticlimactic.
The space itself measured just twelve by fourteen feet (one writer calls it a “cubicle”), and upon entering from the hallway, the bed—its bedclothes undisturbed—was to the right, against the north wall. Opposite that, the south wall had a row of coat hooks screwed into it and the door opening into room 40. A window with louvered shutters was in the far wall across from the hall door, and the furnishing consisted of a plain Windsor chair, table, washstand, and no decorations apart from the spindle-work wooden bed frame and a picture hanging on the wall. The machine was arranged east to west, while Moon’s body lay south to north, with his feet under the bed, the ax in his neck, and his head in a box.
Unlike the classic French guillotine, which uses a pulley, Moon’s machine was a third-class lever—that is, a lever with one end resting on a fulcrum or pivot, and the other end supporting a load.
In Moon’s device, the load [A] was the weighted ax head, and the lever [B], the seven-foot beam. The lever/beam is connected to the fulcrum [C], which was a wooden base screwed to the floor. Effort [D] is required to raise the load end six feet in the air and then, with the lever at a forty-five-degree angle from the wall and floor, it was secured in place with a double cord. Moon bolted a strong iron bracket with a hook on it into the window frame. The bracket was five feet above the floor, and one end of the double cord went through the hook in the bracket, and the other through an eyebolt screwed into the lever/beam.
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist Page 10
