Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (17 page)

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.

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 cuz 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.

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.

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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.

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.

Washington was full of servicemen during the war, and Jeane volunteered to help entertain them with fortune-telling. She acquired a reputation for accuracy, which led to her doing readings for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944–1945. Dixon visited the White House twice, discreetly tucking the crystal ball inside the sleeve of her mink, and told the ailing FDR how long he would live, and that America should be fighting with Germany against the Soviet Union. There is no official record of the visits, and staff members did not remember her being there, but Elliott Roosevelt said his father was interested in extrasensory perception (ESP) and had discussed Dixon.
¹⁰

After the war, Jeane lived the life of a Washington matron; she shopped, had her hair done, and attended embassy cocktail parties. James placed a rose on her pillow every morning (an artificial rose is there now), but he was “a stern
taskmaster who expected her to be at his beck and call.”
¹¹
Despite that, she chose a four-story Victorian row house, which he did not want, as their home, and became secretary-treasurer of James L. Dixon Realtors. Jeane claimed that working in the office was James's way of protecting her from never-ending requests for psychic help, but there were practical reasons for being there.
¹²

She had been hired by the San Francisco bank for her “genius at figures and accounting,” and presumably continued working in a financial capacity for James's company in California.
¹³
When it came to business, she was reputedly “tougher than hell, much tougher than her husband really.”
¹⁴
Despite being employed, Dixon still gave readings at parties, and the 1950s and 1960s would prove to be her most productive period.
¹⁵

During this time she foretold the launching of Sputnik, UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld's plane crash, the deaths of three Apollo astronauts, and much else. She will always be remembered, however, as “the woman who predicted Kennedy's assassination.”
¹⁶
Space does not permit a fair evaluation of her accuracy, but the JFK prophecy is a good example of how she claimed to experience seeing into the future.

Dixon's countdown to Dallas began in 1952, in Washington, D.C., as she knelt before a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle. A radiant image of the White House appeared and the number “1960” above it;
dark clouds spread from the numerals and dripped down onto the building like “chocolate frosting on a cake” and a man stood there, “young, tall, and blue-eyed, with a shock of thick brown hair.
¹⁷
An inner voice told her that he was a Democrat, and that the President [elected in 1960] would meet with a violent death while in office.”
¹⁸
Then the vision vanished.

Four years later,
Parade
reported that “for the 1960 election, Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office, ‘though not necessarily in his first term.'”
¹⁹
When Kennedy was elected in 1960, she saw gloomy clouds and caskets over the White House.

In January 1963, Dixon said Kennedy would be dead before the end of the year.
²⁰
By April, she predicted that he'd be shot, and, in October, that he would probably die in his first term. On November 13, Dixon tried warning Kennedy that he would be assassinated if he traveled “down South.”
²¹
She told radio host Long John Nebel, “Something is going to happen to Jack this week,” and, on the twenty-second, allegedly announced, “[T]his is the day it will happen.”
²²
A shroud she saw over the White House had darkened, and she phoned Nebel to say that the president should not take part in any “political thing” in Dallas; one and a half hours later, Kennedy was dead.
²³

The funeral was held in the cathedral where Jeane first had the fatal vision. She watched on television as the president's casket was placed on a caisson and saw

John Fitzgerald Kennedy dancing an Irish jig on top of it. He was happy and gay and free! The funeral procession moved slowly down the avenue with the President continuing his merry twirling . . . I saw Uncle Sam raise both his hands, as if pronouncing a benediction, and when I glanced back at the caisson only a fleecy trail of smoke remained where the President had danced.
²⁴

(Her visions resemble nothing so much as political cartoons and were sometimes criticized for “vulgarity.”)
²⁵
Kennedy's death made Dixon's reputation, but other visions augured change for the whole human race.

Jeane was lying in bed in July 1952 when a giant snake coiled itself around her and wordlessly communicated that she must look to the east for “God's wisdom and guidance.”
²⁶
Ten years later, another vision explained why.

On the morning of February 5, 1962, she looked out her bedroom window and saw “a bright blue sky over a barren desert.” There was a pyramid, and the sun contained the patriarch Joseph, who apparently directed the actions of Queen Nefertiti and her “Pharaoh husband,” presumably Akhenaten. They approached carrying a baby wrapped in rags, and the scene changed; the infant had become a man with a cross in the air above him that “dripped over the earth.” People of every race and religion surrounded him “in worshipful adoration” and Jeane joined them till the vision ended, whereupon she presumably went downstairs and ate breakfast.
²⁷

Dixon believed that a descendant of the Egyptian royal couple was born that day to poor parents in the Middle East and that the “Child of the East” would unite humankind under a new form of Christianity before the end of the century. Several Christian writers saw the snake as Satan and the child as the Antichrist and concluded that “the devil is using her [Dixon] to deceive the multitudes and to prepare them to receive the great delusion which is to come . . .”
²⁸
By 1969, she had taken up this interpretation, possibly to deflect criticism, or having concluded that the Child of the East was not a “revelation.”

Jeane Dixon's revelations were her most important psychic experiences. They communicated the will of God and were distinguished by the clarity of their meaning, an accompanying sense of euphoria, and the inevitability of their outcome. Ordinary visions, such as those she experienced spontaneously, or while meditating or crystal gazing, were more ambiguous. Once, while attending a wedding, Dixon saw coffins behind the bride and groom and assumed the worst, yet it was the best man and groom's brother who died.

Visions could be misinterpreted, but she claimed the predictions were correct
when they were made
, “because she got
[them] . . . through mental telepathy. ‘This is the way people feel right now,' she said. But, if they should change their minds, then that would change the answer.”
²⁹
Presumably, if a general was planning an invasion, Dixon would correctly predict that war was imminent; if he changed his mind and there was no war, that didn't make her wrong.