The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  Determinedly the British press published whatever declassified material it could find. The articles concentrated on battles, espionage and a woman’s extraordinary bravery. But Josephine revealed to no one what she regarded as the most important of her experiences. In her book Cyanide in My Shoe (Isis) she finally told the story.

  On one of her missions she was mistakenly dropped into the wrong region, a vast distance from the Resistance group’s planned rural rendezvous. Not daring to buy food or seek help from villagers unknown to her, she walked - only at night - across open countryside. After several days, with the bulk of the journey still stretching ahead, she was close to collapse. To add to her misery, the nature of the land had changed. Instead of the clear streams from which she had earlier refreshed herself, there were now only parched courses, cracking in the summer heat. And the only food she could find was dry grass and fungi.

  In the long daylight hours she hid and tried to sleep - summoning all her willpower to start walking again when darkness fell. Oddly she began to feel she was not alone.

  One night she suddenly slowed and stopped - and was unable to go further.

  I was out in the open. It was imperative that I should not be found alive. There was only one course open to me - now was the time to take my cyanide capsule.

  But she even lacked strength to reach the poison. When she tried to take off her shoe to remove the capsule from its hiding place in the thick rubber heel she found herself paralysed. She prayed to be able to fall to the ground and die quickly.

  The incidents Josephine Butler chronicles next have taxed the credulity of many readers. But as a war heroine, and as a woman of education and intellect, she is adamant that her account is truthful.

  …And then the miracle happened. I can only call it a miracle, because it occurred to me exactly as I describe it here. I saw a cloud descending and coming towards me. It was a brilliant blue and it floated around me until I was completely encased in cloud. Then down through the cloud as if suspended from heaven a white line appeared. It was about four inches wide and came right down to touch the toe of my right foot, and my foot involuntarily moved on to it. I could move!

  The blue cloud dissipated and the stars shone out again. But compelled by the knowledge that she must stay on the white line, wherever it led, Josephine kept walking. The line led her into a barn, where she collapsed, exhausted. She slept profoundly, not waking until the following night.

  As she was leaving the barn her foot struck something soft. It was a piece of cloth, wrapping cheese, bread and an apple. She wondered whether someone had left the food for her while she was sleeping - or whether it was a forgotten lunch. Whatever the food’s provenance, it sustained her until she was united at last with her Resistance compatriots.

  ‘Mist Saved Me from Gestapo’

  I met Henry Epstein more than half a century after World War II ended. Speaking to me at his home in Umina Beach, New South Wales, Henry told an extraordinary story - insisting that a ‘strange mist’ had prevented Nazis from murdering him:

  It happened in Vienna in January 1945. A Gestapo patrol arrested me during a routine sweep of the streets. They took me to an interrogation room for questioning.

  The officer who arrested me was particularly brutal and aggressive - and I feared that I was a dead man. Most of this person’s questioning was based on the fact that my father was Jewish. Although I’d been christened in my mother’s religion, Roman Catholicism, the Nazis regarded me as a half-Jew. And now, it seemed, I was about to pay the price - either by being shipped to a concentration camp or murdered on the spot.

  The Gestapo man loudly bombarded me with queries. He asked me for my friends’ names, enquired whether I’d ever slept with an Aryan woman, and how it was that I hadn’t been incarcerated in a camp before now.

  Then, just as I was realising my situation was hopeless, an incredible thing happened.

  My whole body suddenly went limp - and the room began to fill with thick white mist.

  As if that were not enough, I heard myself begin to speak in a deep, echoing voice that was not my own. I could feel my voice-box moving, but had no idea what that voice, quite detached from me, was saying. Finally the mist lifted - and I was amazed to see the Gestapo officer sitting with his head in his hands. He looked up and in a pleading tone asked what he should do with me.

  I said, ‘Let me go home,’ and he replied, ‘Yes, yes - go away.’

  To this day I have absolutely no idea why that brutal interrogator was so terrified. But I have a strong feeling about who might have been behind it: my maternal grandmother, who had died three years earlier. Since her death I’d often thought I could feel her hovering around me as a benign spirit, and I’d have no difficulty in believing it was she who created that mist.

  Several months later, Henry Epstein recalled, his life was inexplicably saved a second time.

  At the end of the war the Russians occupied Austria. One quiet afternoon I went to the cemetery where my grandmother was buried, to visit her grave. As I entered the gates, a wind blew up out of nowhere, shaking the thick branches over my head - then everything was still again.

  Henry Epstein says his life was saved when a ‘white mist’ descended on a Gestapo interrogation room.

  I was overcome by a powerful sense that this was a supernatural warning, and that rather than go into that graveyard I should hide. I obeyed the feeling and concealed myself behind a tree.

  A few moments later a Russian patrol roared by. They’d already taken several young Austrian men prisoner. I would have been next - to be sent to a Soviet prison camp from which I might never have returned.

  Again I surmised that it was my grandmother who had saved me, this time causing the wind to shake the trees. I’m 71 now, but I still sense strongly, in times of crisis, that she is with me - an angel who has guided me through my life.

  RAF Chief ‘Spoke to Dead Pilots’

  In wars, characterised by uncertainty and tragedy, belief in the paranormal is always intense. The conviction that superior forces are helping us can sometimes extend to the top of the armed forces. A dramatic example was Lord Dowding, head of the Royal Air Force during World War II - and generally considered by historians to have been the strategist who won the Battle of Britain. Dowding, author of numerous brilliant coups against Goering’s Luftwaffe, openly confided to senior colleagues that he was receiving strategic advice from British pilots who had died while engaging German aircraft.

  Like his valiant leader Winston Churchill, Dowding correctly saw the battle against Hitler and his genocidal regime as a struggle between good and evil: a conflict which, ultimately, the Allies would ‘not be allowed to lose’.

  Defence documents declassified in the 1970s reveal that Dowding secretly received invaluable support from his wife, a ‘sensitive’ capable of remote viewing. According to his notes she succeeded several times in pinpointing enemy airbases left undetected by conventional surveillance.

  Winston Churchill himself was regarded by staff as being clairvoyant. In 1941, for example, the great British commander gave a dinner for four of his ministers at 10 Downing Street. During the soup course (and for no apparent reason) he hurled his napkin down, hurried to the kitchen and ordered the butler, cook and maid who were working there to go to the air raid shelter immediately. They obeyed. Minutes later an air raid warning sounded. One of the first bombs that fell demolished the kitchen. After the all-clear the three workers thanked the prime minister and asked how he had known a bomb would hit the kitchen. Churchill gruffly replied, ‘Just an instinct.’

  The soldiers led by US General George S. Patton knew that his abilities extended far beyond the norm. On several celebrated occasions Patton acted on seemingly baseless hunches to win sweeping victories. In his post-war memoirs Patton’s commander, Omar Bradley, confirmed the legendary general’s ability to foresee future events, describing his clairvoyant gifts as a ‘sixth sense’. Bradley describes the initially puzzlin
g occasion on which, after victoriously crossing the River Moselle with three divisions, Patton suddenly stopped the advance and realigned his men. Subordinates asked Omar Bradley what this strange behaviour could possibly mean. Bradley expressed confidence that Patton had simply ‘felt’ something - and all would be explained in due course.

  It was. The following morning the Germans unexpectedly counter-attacked. Patton was only able to repel them because he had earlier stopped to regroup.

  * * *

  Seashells in the Trees

  Skyfalls and Other

  Riddles

  * * *

  In 1985 a mass of exotic seashells perplexingly cascaded from the sky onto the English village of Dilholme. The shells, normally found in warm waters around the Philippines, half a world away, clattered noisily on house and shop roofs and were trapped in tree branches. Britain’s prestigious New Scientist magazine investigated the phenomenon but could find no explanation. The day was windless; the sky blue, cloudless and free of aircraft. How the shells appeared remains as baffling as previous skyfalls, which have comprised everything from crustaceans to manufactured metal crosses, ornaments and large oval-shaped stones encased in ice. Anomalous showers of objects from the blue have intrigued humankind for millennia. But science is no closer to finding who or what is responsible.

  IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1994 and the people of Woburn Green in Buckinghamshire, UK, could scarcely believe what they were seeing. In windless conditions, from a flawlessly blue sky, vast quantities of straw had begun to fall. Slowly.

  One awestruck witness, engineer Ken Davey, described the bizarre event to the Bucks Free Press (19 July):

  I’d just left work [at Glory Mill Papers] on Thursday when I saw the whole building was covered in straw. I realised everyone was staring up at objects descending from the sky. I looked up and saw these massive lumps, some as big as bales, gracefully floating down. It was beautiful.

  I estimated that as much as 10 tonnes must have fallen. The whole of the surrounding area was covered in it.

  There were no aircraft overhead at the time.

  As is common in such cases, no scientific specialist had the remotest idea of what the ‘cause’ had been. We do know, however, that it was not the first time bales of hay had gently floated down into the English countryside. Scientific journals of the late 19th century describe several such cases - and even the pedantic but popular magazine Family Hour devoted (in 1867) a large quantity of space to the skyfall phenomenon.

  Most events of the floating-haybale kind create a sensation that lasts a day or two and is then forgotten. Only by collecting historical records and newspaper reports from around the planet is it possible to see that each individual event is merely part of a vast and surpassingly strange phenomenon.

  The ‘Purity’ Principle

  On 16 June 1984 - 10 years before Buckinghamshire’s haybales drifted down - a service station owner near Thirsk, north Yorkshire, found hundreds of periwinkles and starfish on his garage roof. The town is 50 kilometres from the sea - but the winkles were salty and still alive. When asked for his opinion, an ichthylogist suggested that a whirlwind might be responsible. According to meteorological records, however, no whirlwinds were blowing over the area that day.

  ‘Experts’ trot out the wind theory ad nauseam. But according to New Scientist magazine, it’s a flimsy explanation anyway - weakened by the ‘purity’ of most skydrops. In falls of frogs, for example, slime, rocks and weeds are rarely deposited at the same time. ‘The levitating mechanism,’ says the magazine, ‘is either selective in what it lifts, or the objects separate in the air according to size and shape.’

  In 1877 thousands of live snakes ranging in length from 30 to 45 centimetres fell writhing on Memphis, Tennessee. The journal Scientific American judged the reptile fall inexplicable, commenting, ‘How so many snakes could exist anywhere, in such abundance, is yet a mystery.’ Even more perplexing was the stinking deluge of dead birds which fell on Baton Rouge on 16 November 1896. Local newspapers reported that avian corpses, including woodpeckers, wild ducks and others of ‘strange plumage’ cluttered the city’s streets. The Monthly Weather Review said it had never previously known an incident of this kind to occur.

  Puzzle of the Plummeting Stones

  Outbreaks of slowly descending stones, often warm or hot to the touch, were frequently described in 19th and 20th century newspapers.

  Particularly mysterious were the rockfalls on Chico, California, in November 1921. According to the San Francisco Chronicle the plague first came to official attention when J.W. Charge, a grain warehouse owner, complained to city marshal J.A. Peck that hoodlums were daily hurling rocks at his building. Peck investigated but couldn’t work out where the stones were coming from. Although he saw them fall often enough, he could detect no culprit - and finally concluded that ‘someone with a machine’ was to blame. On 8 March the ‘attack’ intensified, with rocks ranging in size from ballbearings to baseballs cascading on the warehouse. This time a party of police officers checked the premises, but over several days could find no one to arrest.

  The unpleasantness began to spread, with rocks smashing windows, damaging roofs and sometimes striking townspeople who were scouring their neighbourhoods in search of an offender. Chronicle correspondent Miriam Allen de Ford interviewed a Professor C.K. Studley, who said, ‘I do not believe these rocks are meteoric in origin. Some are so large that they could not be thrown by ordinary means.’ Writer de Ford was intrigued by the rocks. ‘I pick up many that have just fallen and find a majority to be warm to the touch and tending toward an oval shape…Today I looked up into the cloudless sky and suddenly saw a rock falling straight down from a small height, as if it had only become visible when it approached near enough. This rock hit the ground with a thud and bounced away, and I could not find it…But at another time a rock fell from the sky to land gently at my feet.’

  On 4 September 1886 similarly enigmatic stones had bounced day-long off a pavement outside the offices of the Charleston News and Courier. As would occur in Chico 36 years later, no culprit could be found. On 6 September the paper published a statement by its own editor, who testified that he had been gently brushed by the falls of warm stones at 7.30 am and again at 1.30 pm. He said they had ‘seemed to come from a point overhead and were strangely confined to an area of about 75 square feet’.

  On 29 May 1922 the Rand Daily Mail described a downpour of warm stones onto a Johannesburg pharmacy. A medium, convinced a poltergeist was responsible, said the focus of the attack was a teenage girl employed as an assistant. While police searched outside for a hoaxer the girl was sent back into the shop. Stones from somewhere (there was no hole in the ceiling) literally wafted vertically down, forming a circular pile around her. Despite the medium’s attempts at exorcism the ‘attack’ continued for several weeks.

  In the summer of 1957 Australian newspapers, followed among others by Britain’s Daily Mail, covered the poignant story of a stone-assailed Aboriginal farmworker in Pumphry, Western Australia. While scientists were theorising about ‘freak winds’, stones began to fall in the presence of the reporter and other witnesses inside the farmhouse - whose roof, also, was intact - and within the tent where the worker slept, or tried to sleep. The phenomenon drove the young man from the farm. (I describe this case at some length in Haunted: the Book of Australia’s Ghosts.)

  Tree-top Boulders Found in a Forest

  It was one of the most remarkable reports the Indianapolis Star had published since its establishment in 1903. Staff journalist Judy Hess wrote:

  Something unnatural is going on in Yellowwood State Forest.

  The mystery began a few years ago when a turkey hunter, scouting in a remote area of the 23,000-acre forest, discovered a large boulder in the top of an 80-foot-tall chestnut oak tree. What he saw wedged among its branches was a boulder about four feet wide and a foot thick.

  The boulder was eventually dubbed Gobbler’s Rock after the turkey h
unter. It sits high on a south-facing slope overlooking a ravine in western Brown county and is thought to weigh at least 400 pounds.

  After the initial sighting at Gobbler’s Rock, hikers have found two more giant sandstone boulders sitting in the top limbs of two sycamores. One boulder is nearly 45 feet off the ground and both rocks appear to weigh about 200 pounds. The trees are about 100 yards apart growing near the banks of Plum Creek in a seldom-visited part of Yellowwood State Forest.

  Known to locals as URBs, or Unexplained Resting Boulders, officials can’t explain how they got wedged into the branches in the first place. The huge rocks could not have grown upward with the trees because the saplings could not have withstood their weight. The boulders must have been placed high in the trees after their trunks were sturdy enough to support them…

  Who placed the boulders in the branches, well out of public sight? The reporter doesn’t attempt to answer that question. Speculation in the state forest continues.

  Baffled by a ‘Bleeding Sky’

  Showers of what was described as ‘human blood’ drenched a southern Indian village in the 20th century’s waning years. According to the Press Trust of India the ‘blood rain’ poured down on Alagapuram from 29 to 31 March 1985.

  ‘The samples exhibit the qualities of human blood,’ the health minister, Mr Ponmudi, told the Madras legislature. ‘We are investigating further but we have few theories about how this material could have fallen from a cloudless sky.’