Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist

by Robert Damon Schneck

  Experts studied the account, evaluating the description of the creatures’ anatomy, rudimentary language, and technology, and even the amount of time they spent gathering edible plants and whether its nutritional value was adequate to sustain primates of their alleged size. Ivan Sanderson’s interview with Albert Ostman concentrated on “certain zoological or anthropological details” and the questions were loaded “with snares and abstruse technical catches . . . ,” yet for all this careful investigation, one point is passed over without comment: Ostman’s reason for being at the Toba Inlet.56 “There was allegedly a lost gold mine thereabouts and he decided to take a crack at finding it.”57 Like the miners at Ape Canyon, he might have succeeded had a group of Bigfoot not intervened.

  Beings of Earth

  In some respects, Sasquatch resemble treasure guardians. Like giants of folklore and mythology, they are enormous, throw stones, live in wildernesses, and are mixtures of animal and human traits. This hybrid quality has been characteristic of giants since the earliest times, with the “earth-born” serpent-legged Gigantes of classical mythology and the hair-covered wodewoses of medieval folklore; it continues today in the belief that contemporary giants are “ape-men.” The similarities between Sasquatch and gnomes are less obvious.

  Since miners work underground and are in contact with valuable mineral deposits, they are among those most likely to encounter gnomes: elemental spirits that appear as small, dark, malformed men dressed as miners, who are seldom seen but can be heard “knocking and hammering as if three or four smiths were at work . . .” Fred Beck and his party heard subterranean noises at Mt. St. Helens:

  . . . the same thudding, hallow thumping noise we heard at night preceding the attack, we also had heard in broad daylight, although not nearly so loud . . . like there’s a hollow drum in the earth somewhere and something is hitting it.58

  He offers no explanations for the sounds, but decades later, Jack “Kewaunee” Lapseritis, who believes Bigfoot are an alien race of wise, interdimensional nature spirits, experienced something comparable at a campsite on Oregon’s Cascade Mountains:

  “Errr-rump, errr-rump, errrrr-rump,” an eerie mechanical sound had begun . . . like that of a pumping action with a generator slipping its gears. But what was it? The muffled grinding of gears seemed to be coming from within the earth!59

  Lapseritis implies that the “errr-rumping” comes from a subterranean facility operated by aliens and guarded by Sasquatch. That repetitive underground noises should occur in what are nominally Bigfoot cases suggests some kind of affinity between ape-men and gnomes that is realized in alternative-reality circles.

  Lyle Vann, Director of the Arizona Bigfoot Center, also believes ape-men are associated with aliens, but that the Sasquatch are mining gold for extraterrestrials who use it in the electronics of their spaceships. “The creatures are nocturnal. They live in subterranean caves. The aliens use ape-men for mining because they are strong, gentle creatures.”60 (Mining even explains Bigfoot’s odor. “‘Many people think Bigfoot smells—that he has a bad smell,’ Vann said. ‘That’s not the case in Arizona. The reason is because there is not a lot of sulfur in the ground here. In California, there’s a lot of sulfur underground and it gets into the Bigfoot’s coat because Bigfoot lives underground. That is what makes them smell.’”)61

  While Vann’s ape-men have gnomish habits and occupations, the situation is reversed in a tale from the Sierra Madres in which a gnomelike child, a “hunchbacked dwarf” employed in a mine, is transformed into a treasure-guarding “Sasquatch.”

  The story is that when Mexico was first settled by the Spaniards this mine was worked by the natives, and when it was discovered how rich it was the invaders ruthlessly slaughtered every person whom they found working in the place except a lad who was employed carrying water to the miners. He fled at the approach of the Spaniards and saved his life. This boy was a hunchbacked dwarf, and when he found that all his friends and relatives had been murdered he took a horrible oath of revenge, selling his soul to the evil one for the ability to avenge himself. He was given the power to bring destruction upon any one who went into the mine to work, and it is this, which has brought destruction to those who have attempted to get the rich ore from the demon’s mine. The story had its origins centuries ago, but there is not a native of Chihuahua who does not have implicit faith in it. They still refuse steadily to work in the mine and tell of many people who have met horrible deaths in the pit.

  The demon is said to resemble a huge ape, with hairy body and long powerful arms. It is misshapen, and with deep sunken eyes is seen peering around a corner of the shaft just before it wreaks its vengeance upon the men who are toiling in the rocks and dirt.62

  The illustration shows three miners dropping tools and fleeing a Bigfoot-like “demon.”

  Apparently earth-elementals in the shape of ape-men were driving off treasure hunters long before Beck’s party escaped in Marion Smith’s Ford. It was at Ape Canyon, however, that the ancient art of magical treasure hunting intersected with the aspiring science of cryptozoology and began a long, uncomfortable association in the pages of I Fought the Apemen.

  Before we conclude this perhaps overlong discussion about monsters guarding buried treasure, there are other places where this old idea might apply.

  Mound Monsters

  In 1989–1990, writer and researcher Linda Godfrey was a reporter covering sightings of a werewolflike creature on a stretch of road at Elkhorn, Wisconsin. She christened it “the Beast of Bray Road” and went on to collect historical and contemporary eyewitness descriptions of bipedal wolves, “dog-men,” and four-footed “hell hounds” seen throughout the upper Midwest. A map was created showing the location of each encounter, and it led to an unexpected connection.

  Godfrey was reading Indian Mounds of Wisconsin, by Robert A. Birmingham and Leslie E. Eisenberg (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), when she saw a map showing the locations of “effigy mounds,” ancient earthworks laid out in the shapes of animals, men, and spirits, that caused “a few dozen lightbulbs” to go off in her head.

  Their map of Wisconsin shows major groupings of animal effigy mounds, with different types represented by tiny symbols. It suddenly occurred to me that the placement of the symbols . . . corresponded very closely to a map I had made showing the main concentration of Manwolf sightings around the state!

  I made a transparency of my map, sized to fit the one in the book and voila, the connection was undeniable. I couldn’t place sightings to exact locations of the mounds, say within a few feet or yards, in every instance, but the distribution of the two phenomena was very much the same . . . some discrepancies should be expected, since the mounds are stationary but the creatures seem to have free ability to roam. Even taking that into consideration, I still think the way the two maps coincide is remarkable. It seems more than mere coincidence, in fact.63

  She offers several possible explanations. The creatures might be guarding sacred sites, or their tendency to appear near mounds shaped like long-tailed “water panthers” could mean they are water spirits of the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) tradition. She also suggests that the mounds were built to contain spirits and did so until they “were cut open, plowed under and otherwise desecrated by settlers . . . [whereupon] the guardians may have been set free. That would explain the proximity of these creatures to the mound areas, as well as why it was so important to place mounds everywhere and go to such lengths in their construction and design.”64

  To an old-time magical treasure hunter, however, the reason would be obvious: wolf and dog monsters are standing guard over valuables buried inside the mounds The association between apparitions and hidden wealth survived well into the twentieth century, so when a woman in Sandfly, Georgia, encountered a gnome complete with “a lill tin lamp” on his head “wut gleamed in duh dahk,” the experience was frightening, yet easily explained, for “[d]ey say he’s comin roun c
uz deah’s buried treasure neah yuh.”65 If the Americans that settled Wisconsin in the early nineteenth century had monster sightings like those collected by Godfrey it may explain why so much treasure hunting went on in the mounds.

  Before chasing that idea down a rabbit hole, however, it is better to return to Ape Canyon.

  Giants in the Woods and Imagination

  The attack on the miners’ cabin was not the only strange incident at Ape Canyon. Twenty-six years later, in 1950, an experienced mountaineer and skier named Jim Carter vanished, leaving a ski trail that suggested he was desperately trying to escape from something and raising suspicions that “the mountain devils got him.”66 Thirty years after that, on May 18, 1980, Mt. St. Helens exploded.

  It was a monstrous eruption; a vast swath of countryside was pulverized, forests flattened, lakes emptied, and surrounding areas buried under millions of tons of volcanic ash. Ape Canyon lay outside the path of direct destruction, but melting snow created a torrent of mud and debris that flooded the canyon, carried off the forest, and scoured away any traces of the miners’ presence that might have survived the intervening years (though recent investigations have discovered possible fragments of their cabin). Rumors claimed that Bigfoot corpses were found during the cleanup and that they were hastily burned or whisked away, like crashed flying saucers.

  As an historical incident, Ape Canyon is a fading oddity. Most of Beck’s account is unpalatable to cryptozoologists, while his belief in the spiritual inferiority of ape-men does not appeal to mystics that want their Bigfoot to be wise, magical, and ecologically concerned. With no group claiming that their interpretation of I Fought the Apemen is correct, it can be approached without preconceptions. The magical treasure hunt interpretation is consistent with the story’s contents and changes it from something at the fringe of cryptozoology literature to a fairly representative example of buried-treasure lore. In fact, it points to another way of understanding Ape Canyon, since

  the basis for such legendary quests [treasure hunts] may lie in symbolic traditions of late antiquity . . . in which “treasures” stood for specific attainments sought on the path to wisdom and knowledge. Guardians block access to these inner treasures and can be commanded only by those who possess secret passwords and geometrical symbols . . . Later traditions may be seen as literalizations of Gnostic doctrine by those with no understanding of its symbolic significance: the treasures become “real” hoards, but access to them continues to depend upon knowing the proper magic words and geometric forms.67

  From this perspective, the search for gold in I Fought the Apemen becomes a metaphor for seeking wisdom. The creatures represent what is primitive in human nature and, because the miners do not master those aspects of themselves, they fail to attain knowledge. This idea can be applied to Bigfoot hunting in general, which then becomes a process for subduing the ape-man in oneself in order to subdue the ape-man in the woods. Perhaps that is why Fred Beck, who did not believe that Sasquatch could be caught or killed, thought that searching for them brought one to the “gates of psychicism.” On a more prosaic level, connecting monsters and hidden treasure suggests that a really thorough Bigfoot hunter’s equipment should include a metal detector and a shovel.

  I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens repays close reading. Fred Beck concedes that his theories depend on the creatures’ existence not being proven, for “[i]f someone captured one, I would have to swallow most of the content of this book.” Until that happens, though, Bigfoot will continue to wander through the mountains, forests, and swamps of North America, moving between planes of existence, mining gold for aliens, and transforming those who search for them.

  Psychic in the White House

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  History-minded tourists visit Strasburg, Virginia, for its eighteenth-century inn and Civil War battlefields, but there is a place on North Massanutten Street where cannonballs give way to crystal balls: the Jeane Dixon Museum and Library. Up one flight of stairs stands a monument to the pop prophet’s “life as a psychic, devout Catholic, humanitarian, real estate executive, presidential advisor, animal lover and devoted wife.”1

  Four large rooms are furnished with antique furniture, tapestries, stained glass, and statues from the Victorian townhouse that was her Washington, D.C., home, and there is Dixoniana everywhere. Marble-topped tables are covered with scrapbooks full of clippings and photographs, the walls are hung with framed autographed glossies from celebrities and politicians (many of whom she advised), as well as pictures of her telepathic pet, Mike the MagiCat.2 Dixon’s bed, a lacy confection that allegedly belonged to Empress Eugenie of France, has teddy bears and angels dangling from the canopy, and in the room opposite stands a red-lacquered opium-style bed that was a gift from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. New Age music adds an “ethereal ambiance,” but there is little of the unambiguously mystical on display.

  Most of this is found in a small section where triffidlike gilded candlesticks sit on a round table surrounded by twelve upright cards that explain Dixon’s syncretization of the signs of the zodiac and the Apostles; the shelves are also lined with material including pictures and articles describing her best-known prophecies.3

  Of the library’s many books, there are few about the paranormal, and these are ordinary works on Nostradamus, the Shroud of Turin, and Edgar Cayce; Dixon was not a scholar, and one should not expect anything in the way of grimoires or obscure astrological texts. Her crystal ball is displayed next to an article about health and astrology illustrated by the characters from The Simpsons, and considerable space is devoted to cat figurines, silverware, and a formidable collection of Catholic tchotchkes. There are Blessed Virgin Marys of every description, from mass-produced gimcracks to a magnificent painting of Mary, Queen of Heaven, along with several portraits of Dixon.

  A formal likeness shows her standing by a fireplace, looking saintly and slightly undead in what might be a shimmering nurse’s uniform, while the rest are saccharine, hallucinatory, or creepy.

  The woman behind these images was petite and formidable. She was vain and chatty, had a weakness for funny hats, and started each day facing east while reciting Psalm 23 before attending Mass. Dixon ate little meat, neither smoked nor drank, and according to the museum’s owner and her former banker, Leo M. Bernstein: “She was modest. She was ethereal. I didn’t look at her like a woman.”4 According to Jeane Dixon, passersby sometimes mistook her for an angel or the Virgin Mary, and she described herself as God’s messenger, a prophet in the biblical sense. She also cultivated her legend, deliberately obscuring the real woman until that inconvenient person nearly ceased to exist.

  Miss Pinckert and Mrs. Zuercher

  Dixon, according to Dixon, was born Jeane Pinckert in 1918, one of seven children of Frank Pinckert and Emma Von Graffee, German immigrants who settled in the town of Medford, Wisconsin. Herr Pinckert had a successful lumber business, and when he retired at age forty-five, the family moved to Santa Rosa, California, where Jeane grew up. She was homeschooled by her parents and a European governess, received voice and polo lessons, and learned riding from American Indians and astrology from a Jesuit priest.

  Her unusual talent first appeared as a toddler, when she asked to play with “the letter trimmed in black.” Mrs. Pinckert did not have such a letter, but one soon arrived from Germany announcing the death of a relative.5 The implications of this became clear a few years later when mother and daughter visited a gypsy camp.

  The fortune-teller inspected eight-year-old Jeane’s palm and was staggered to see a Star of David and a Half Moon, chiromantic configurations that appear once in a millennium and signify greatness as a mystic. The gypsy presented her with a crystal ball, so while other children were playing with toys in the dirt, little Jeane Pinckert was advising celebrities. A few years later, she fell in love with James Lamb Dixon, a much older man, and when he got married, twelve-year-old Jeane’s heart was
broken.

  At various times she considered becoming a nun or an actress before reconciling the two by playing Mary Magdalene in The Life of Christ at the Hollywood Bowl; it was around this time that James reentered her life.

  He had divorced and began courting Jeane, with Mrs. Pinckert acting as duenna. A pious girl, she naturally had misgivings about marrying the divorced son of a Methodist minister, but they received an ecclesiastical dispensation and were wed; Jeane doesn’t mention where or when, only that James gave her a five-carat diamond ring. The couple moved to Washington, D.C., during World War II, and Jeane Dixon, now rich and acquiring influential friends, soon made her mark.6

  It says something about the times, perhaps, that skeptics who happily pulled apart Dixon’s predictions seldom looked into her background, yet the differences between her claims and her history suggest a disconcertingly casual attitude toward truth.7

  First, she was born in 1904, not 1918. Her siblings confirmed the earlier date, but Jeane insisted on 1918 for reasons unrelated to vanity.8 Secondly, her real name was Lydia, which she also denied, allowing only that her middle initial was L, and there were ten Pinckert children, not seven. Two became famous in their own right: one an aviatrix and the other a football player, and they are the only ones Dixon ever mentions.

  The family lived in Wisconsin until about 1910, then went to Missouri. In 1912, Jeane attended La Grange School outside Carthage, and in 1919, the Pinckerts moved to San Bernardino, California, where they operated a gas station and grocery store. Two years later, Jeane went to work for the Bank of Italy in San Francisco.

  If her early life was not a constant round of genteel pursuits, it was unremarkable and might have almost been acceptable had Jeane Dixon not insisted on being a pillar of Roman Catholic propriety. The difficulty was that in 1928 she married a Swiss immigrant named Charles Zuercher and later divorced him (Zuercher died in 1940).9 Therefore, when James married Jeane (probably in San Diego in 1939), he was around forty-two and owned several Los Angeles car dealerships, while she was an attractive thirty-five-year-old divorcee who worked for him. By subtracting fourteen years from her age and never wavering from it, Jeane—or possibly Lydia—Zuercher was effectively erased.