The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (112 page)

One of the most bizarre episodes in the entire story began in August 1916, while
The Sorry Tale
was still being dictated. In her usual circumlocutory way, Patience announced that her works would bring in a great deal of money (“a-time a later the purse shall fatten”), but that this money “be not for him who hath”. The Currans were told “ye shall seek a one, a wee bit, one who hath not”, and added “Aye, this be close, close.” And soon it became clear that what Patience meant – she seems to have been incapable of saying anything in plain words – was that the Currans, who were childless, should adopt a baby, and that this baby would be in some sense Patience’s own daughter. By “the merest accident”, a pregnant widow was located – her husband had been killed in a mill accident – and she agreed to relinquish her unborn child to the Currans. Patience seemed quite certain it would be a daughter. And one evening, as she was dictating
The Sorry Tale
, Patience broke off abruptly with the comment “This be ‘nuff’”. An hour later the Currans heard that the baby had been born. It was indeed a girl, and had red hair and brown eyes – a description Patience had formerly given of herself. On Patience’s instructions the child was called Patience Worth Wee Curran.

In that same year – 1916 – Emily Hutchings called upon the eminent literary critic William Marion Reedy, and showed him the first ten thousand words of a novel about Missouri politics and journalism. In recent years Emily had dropped out of the limelight, for it had become clear that her presence was not essential for Patience to manifest herself. Reedy was impressed by the novel, and congratulated her. A week later he probably felt like eating his words when Emily called again, and confessed that the novel had been “dictated” by the spirit of Mark Twain – then proceeded to produce several pages with the help of the ouija board. The novel was accepted, and published under the title of
Jap Herron
, and was well received – although it was generally agreed that its quality was much inferior to the works Mark Twain had produced while he was alive. An effort by Mark Twain’s publishers to suppress the novel was unsuccessful.

During this period Patience’s fame continued to grow. The Victorian novel
Hope Trueblood
met with an enthusiastic reception from many respectable journals, although the reading public found that even Patience’s “modern” style was too wordy. In England the book was issued without any indication of its “psychic” origin, and received
mixed reviews; but at least most of the critics seemed to assume that it was the first novel of an English writer. The Currans also launched
Patience Worth’s Magazine
, to make Patience’s poems and lesser writings accessible to her admirers; it was edited by Caspar Yost, and ran to ten issues.

But by 1918 there were signs that Patience’s vogue was coming to an end. In
The Atlantic Monthly
that August a writer named Agnes Repplier poured scorn on this latest fad for books written by spirits, and expressed dismay at the thought that Patience, being dead, might be on the literary scene for ever. Of Patience’s books, Miss Repplier said tartly that “they were as silly as they were dull”. In retrospect, it seems surprising that no other reputable critic had already made this assessment.

The blast of ridicule was in effect the end of Patience Worth’s period of literary celebrity; Agnes Repplier had stated that the emperor was naked, and now everybody realized that it had been obvious all along. A new book by Caspar Yost on Patience’s religion and philosophy was turned down by Henry Holt; so was a volume of Patience’s poems. Pearl Curran (who had always strenuously denied that she had any writing talent) herself wrote a short story about a Chicago salesgirl – who, significantly, is “taken over” by a secondary personality – and it was accepted by the
Saturday Evening Post
; but Pearl’s most recent biographer, Irving Litvag, admits (in
Singer in the Shadows
) that the story “never rises above the level of bad soap opera”.

When William Marion Reedy died in 1920 Patience lost one of her most influential defenders. And another sign of Patience’s sinking reputation was a hostile article by a critic called Mary Austin in the
Unpartizan Review
; what made it worse was that the magazine was published by Henry Holt.

John Curran’s health began to fail, and he died in June 1922, after fourteen months of illness. Pearl, who was now thirty-nine years old, was pregnant with their first child; a girl was born six months later. Pearl had four people to support – herself, her mother, Patience Wee and her new daughter – on a dwindling income. Far from making them a fortune, Patience’s literary works had cost them money; the novels had sold poorly, and the magazine was an expensive production. Pearl was forced to accept an offer to give several lectures in Chicago; she was reluctant to do this because she had always insisted that her position as Patience’s mouthpiece brought her no profit; but there was no alternative. The death of her mother was another blow. But at this point a New York admirer, Herman Behr, came to the rescue; he not only made
her an allowance of $400 a month but also paid for the publication of Patience’s poems, which appeared under the title
Light From Beyond.
But it failed to revive the interest of the American reading public in the Patience Worth phenomenon. In the age of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, the rambling productions of Patience Worth seemed irrelevant.

Litvag comments: “The next three years were lonely, rather despairing ones for Pearl Curran. No longer a celebrity, largely ignored by the public . . . periodically in ill health, she was often depressed and morose”. In 1923 she allowed Patience Wee to go to California. In 1926 she married a retired doctor, Henry Rogers, many years her senior; but the marriage was unsuccessful, and ended in divorce. In 1930 Pearl moved to California, where in Los Angeles she once again acquired some degree of celebrity among a group of devoted admirers. In 1931 she married again – this time to a man to whom she had been briefly engaged when she was nineteen; she and her husband – Robert Wyman – moved to Culver City, and Patience began to dictate a new literary work, a play about Shakespeare. At séances she continued to be as garrulous and evasive as ever – the simplest question could be guaranteed to provide a five-minute answer. In 1934 Patience Wee who was eighteen married, and Patience provided a lengthy blessing, signed “Thy Mither”.

Then in November 1937 Pearl, who was fifty-four, suddenly announced to her old friend Dotsie Smith that “Patience has just shown me the end of the road, and you will have to carry on as best you can”. She seemed to be in excellent health. But on Thanksgiving Day she caught a cold; on 3 December 1937 she died of pneumonia in a Los Angeles hospital. That was in effect the end of the Patience Worth phenomenon. Patience Wee, who by the age of twenty-seven had been twice married, died equally suddenly in 1943, after a mild heart ailment had been diagnosed; inevitably, there were those who felt that Patience had finally claimed her “daughter”.

The last chapter of Irving Litvag’s book on Patience is entitled “Who was Patience Worth”?, but he admits almost immediately that he has no idea. Writers on the case tend to be equally divided between the two obvious theories: that Patience was a “secondary personality” of Pearl Curran, and that she was more or less what she claimed to be, a “spirit”. Both Morton Prince and Walter Franklin Prince (they were unrelated) had produced classic studies of cases of multiple personality; Morton Prince’s “Sally Beauchamp” case (described in
The Dissociation of a Personality
) has achieved the status of a classic; Walter Franklin
Prince’s “Doris Fischer” case deserves to be equally well known, but never achieved circulation beyond the pages of the
American Journal for Psychical Research
(1923) and
Contributions to Psychology
But anyone who reads the Patience Worth case after studying Sally Beauchamp and Doris Fischer is bound to feel that they have very little in common. Most “multiple personalities” have a history of childhood abuse and misery; Pearl Curran seems to have had a normal childhood, and to have been a perfectly ordinary, unremarkable person until the coming of Patience Worth. Although it
is
conceivable that Pearl Curran was a case of dual personality, the clinical evidence for it is not particularly convincing.

For those who are willing to accept the possibility of life after death, the most convincing explanation is certainly that Patience was a “spirit”. But that does not necessarily mean that she was really what she claimed to be. Anyone who has studied “spirit communication” soon recognizes that “spirits” are very seldom what they claim to be; G.K. Chesterton put in more bluntly and said that they are liars. If Patience
was
a seventeenth-century Quaker who was killed by Red Indians, it is difficult to understand why she was so evasive and why she failed to answer straightforward questions that might have enabled the Currans to prove that such a person really existed. Litvag’s book leaves one with the conviction that if Patience was a spirit, then it was probably the spirit of a frustrated would-be writer with a strong tendency to mythomania.

63

Zombies

The Evidence for the Walking Dead

Ever since 1932, when Bela Lugosi starred in
White Zombie
, the zombie legend has been a Hollywood standby, challenging the vampire, the walking mummy, and the Frankenstein monster in popularity. No one who has seen a film like
King of the Zombies
can ever forget the shot of a zombie marching on like a robot while someone fires bullet after bullet into its chest.

Zombies, according to Alfred Metraux’s book,
Voodoo
(1959), are “people whose decease has been duly recorded and whose burial has been witnessed, but who are found a few years later . . . in a state verging on idiocy”. In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, says Metraux, “there are few, even among the educated, who do not give some credence to these macabre stories”. Understandably, such tales have met with skepticism outside Haiti.

One of the first Western observers to record an actual incident of zombiism was the black ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston, who had trained in America under the great Franz Boas. In October 1936 a naked woman was found wandering in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley; her name was Felicia Felix-Mentor, and she had died at the age of twenty-nine and been buried. Zora Hurston went to visit her in the hospital at Gonaïves and described her as having “a blank face with dead eyes” and eyelids “white as if they had been burned with acid”.

According to Zora Hurston, people were “zombified” if they betrayed the secrets of the Haitian secret societies. No one believed her, and Metraux writes patronizingly of “Zora Houston [
sic
], who is very superstitious”. Nevertheless, Metraux tells a story involving two members of “high society”. After his car broke down, one of them was invited to the home of a little white bearded man, a
houngan
or vodoun (voodoo) priest. Piqued by his guest’s skepticism about a
wanga
(magical charm), the old man asked him if he had known a certain M.
Celestin – who had, in fact, been one of the visitor’s closest friends. Summoned by a whip crack, a man shambled into the room, and to his horror the visitor recognized his old friend Celestin, who had died six months earlier. When the zombie reached out for the visitor’s glass – obviously thirsty – the
houngan
stopped him from handing it over, saying that nothing could be more dangerous than to give or take something from the hand of a dead man. The
houngan
told his visitor that Celestin had died from a spell and that the magician who had killed him had sold him for twelve dollars.

Other stories recounted by Metraux make it clear that he considers zombies to be people who have literally died and then been raised from the dead. Understandably, he rejects this as superstition. In fact, as we shall see, Zora Hurston was correct and Metraux was wrong.

Haiti, in the West Indies, was discovered by Columbus in 1492, but it was not until two centuries later that it became a base for pirates and buccaneers. French colonists developed Haiti’s rich sugar trade, using black slaves kidnapped from Africa. The Spanish ceded Haiti (or Saint-Domingue, as it was called) to the French in 1697.

The slaves were treated with unbelievable cruelty – for example, hung from trees with nails driven through the ears or smeared with molasses and left to be eaten alive by ants. Another horrifying practice involved filling a slave’s anus with gunpowder and setting it alight, an act the Frenchmen often referred to as “blasting black’s ass”. In spite of the risks, slaves ran away whenever they could and hid in the mountains, until, eventually, certain mountainous regions became “no-go areas” for whites. In the 1740s a slave named Macandal, who had lost his arm in a sugar press, escaped to the mountains and taught the runaway Maroons (as the slaves were known) to use poison against their oppressors. Mass poisoning of cattle was followed by mass poisoning of the colonists. Macandal was eventually betrayed and sentenced to be burned alive (although, according to legend, he used his magical powers to escape). But from then on, the secret societies spread revolt among the black slaves. After the great revolts of the 1790s, French authority virtually collapsed, and although it was savagely restored under Napoléon, he was never able to conquer the interior of the island. A series of black emperors ruled until 1859, but the island has alternated between a state of virtual anarchy and harsh authoritarian rule ever since, both of which have nurtured the secret societies.

Zora Hurston asserted that “zombification” was effected by means of a “quick-acting poison”. It was not until the early 1980s, however, that a young American anthropologist, Wade Davies, heard rumours that
zombification was, in fact, a process involving certain known poisons, chief among which was that of the puffer fish – a delicacy dear to the Japanese, although it has to be prepared with extreme care. (More on this follows.)