Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (10 page)

[h]e found that he could hardly understand the language of his newly found people nor could he be understood,
but finally some one met him and said, “Hello nigger.” He recognized an American white gentleman, who was later to play an important role in his life. Expressing much joy at seeing some one who could understand him, he followed his friend on a fruit steamer to South America, informing his newly found white man that he was henceforth his negro and faithful servant.
⁴⁷

Dr. Little's article provides the most detailed description of how the plates and fangs were made. The dentist

hammered out an H-shaped plate from South American silver coin and, brazing on to it two threaded knobs, proposed to embed it beneath the scalp of his servant and put taps of magnificent goat horns in the butt ends so that the horns could be screwed on and off at will. He further proposed to put Logan crowns [posts going into the root canal with attached crowns] on his servant's eye teeth and in this way attach two vicious tusks of the wild boar. These, likewise in a way that could be removed at will.
⁴⁸

The operation was performed at a log cabin on the banks “of a certain river” (probably at Pearson, Georgia) and, after Wright recovered and learned how to be a wild man, they began traveling from town to town. “Money came easy,” particularly after joining an unnamed “exposition,” and everything was going well until

[o]ne night, after closing, as the owner was sweetly dreaming of yachts and palaces, it occurred to the trainer that his wild man needed a little sight-seeing and refreshments. So, suiting the action to thought, he proceeded to administer spiritus frumenti to his man and himself, when lo and behold! his wild man became unmanageable [and] was causing a riot. The police interfered, and looking for the easiest point to control the goat man, a cop grabbed a horn and, who are we petty mortals to criticize the creator of this wonderful being that his horns were not made for rough handling, the horn came away revealing the metal tap in the butt . . . as soon as the owner heard that all was discovered he immediately gave bond for the new [
sic
] useless [exhibit] and both left the city post-haste.
⁴⁹

After leaving the sideshow, Wright worked at a sawmill, but the knobs “caused headache when overheated by the Southern sun.” He asked a blacksmith for help and, “laying his head near the anvil with the knobs lying thereon, the valiant blacksmith proceeded to trim the knobs to less inconvenient length.”
⁵⁰
This rough work caused a suppurative infection to set in, and “[p]us was easily pressed from around the knobs,” which brought Wright to the hospital.
⁵¹

Dr. Little cut through the scars and, “with patience and perseverance,” removed the silver plate intact. It was later stolen from his office, but skeptics were told that there were
“witnesses to the operation and many people who saw the plate.”

Though the article was published twenty years after the event, there is no reason for thinking it is inaccurate as far as the doctor's actions or his recounting of Wright's narrative are concerned. The latter's reliability is another question.

His initial claim of being abducted and forced to undergo surgery recalls black folklore about “night doctors,” physicians who kidnapped black people for experiments and dissection (in fact, slaves were used for medical research, and black burial grounds were plundered relentlessly to supply anatomy classes). Beyond that, the story that Wright told Dr. Little might have been assembled from a scrapbook of other wild men's experiences; he was displayed at an exposition like Perry Werks, he met Dr. Dedge by accident in Central or South America the way Calvin Bird did, and his arrest is a retelling of Bird's run-in with the police. The story seems unlikely, but it does highlight the exhibit's history of problems with the law, particularly at Valdosta, which raises another question: Why was it raided?

Police are traditionally suspicious of traveling shows and their attendant con men, gamblers, and pickpockets, but chief of police Calvin Dampier might have been warier than most. In 1902, the year Bird drunkenly fired a gun in the street, an elephant with the Harris Nickel-Plate Circus trampled its trainer to death, ran through Valdosta, then wandered into the countryside, where Chief Dampier shot it with
a borrowed Mauser. Nevertheless, the raid that ended Perry Werks's association with the show is never explained. The word suggests a more organized police operation and raises the possibility that Dr. Dedge was using the exhibit as a cover for “shoving the queer,” that is, putting counterfeit money into circulation.

Whatever the truth, his career as an exhibitor might have ended with Joe Wright's departure, but the dentist's enthusiasm for making money and indifference toward the law remained undiminished.

John Dedge and his longtime business partner Charles J. Medders had a falling-out around 1919, possibly over a plan to smuggle diamonds into the United States by sewing them inside dog hides.
⁵²
They parted company and the sixty-three-year-old Medders became a justice of the peace, opened a law office, and bought a small grocery store on Main Street (now 11th) at Alma; Dr. Dedge, however, was not satisfied. He reportedly “considered you either with him or against him” and his former associate might have known too much about various enterprises for the dentist's peace of mind.

On the night of July 10, 1920, Medders was locking up his store on Main Street when a shotgun boomed from a parked Liberty 6 coupe and “[n]ine buckshot entered his head and
neck, killing him outright.”
⁵³
The assassin's automobile was traced back to Dr. Dedge, who was arrested with two accomplices.

Over the next ten months, Dedge was tried for murder three times before being convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The sheriff denied rumors about special treatment, but “[t]here are those . . . who claimed that Dr. Dedge did install his equipment in the County jail and continued extracting and filling teeth.”
⁵⁴
He served three years and was released.

Dedge's friend W. T. “Doc” Brinson died of apoplexy at age sixty-four on August 4, 1926. Doc was put in an oversized coffin and ten pallbearers carried him to his grave at the Lott Cemetery at Waycross. John Dedge followed two weeks later; the sixty-one-year-old dentist-showman-murderer died on August 16, 1926, and is buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery at Alma.
⁵⁵

That means he was gone nine or ten years when young Braswell Deen's boss said, “There goes Dr. Dedge and his wild man”; but perhaps he said, “There goes Dr. Dedge's wild man.”

There were four Okeefenokee Wild Men, though none were apparently advertised as such. Three had the plates removed
and gave accounts of themselves that were unusual enough to be printed in newspapers, along with the names of the patients, doctors, and hospitals where the surgery was performed. The sole exception is Perry Werks. Apart from a threat to cut off his horns at St. Louis, there is nothing to suggest that the hardware was ever removed; furthermore, he lived at Waycross, just twenty-five miles from Alma, and is not excluded by age.

Werks was a young man when Dr. Dedge hired him. If he was twenty years old in 1904, then he would have been around fifty in the mid-1930s—on the old side, perhaps, for the knockabout life of a touring sideshow performer, but it was the Great Depression, when poverty and unemployment could have forced the most reluctant wild man out of retirement.

Judge Deen found an old drawing of the horned man and writes that the wild man “[l]ooked like the image . . . [with] old clothes, horns, but [I] did not see any alligator teeth.”
⁵⁶
The horns in the picture seem too far apart to have been supported by Bird's plate, which was no more than three inches long, or Werks's, which was five inches (assuming the
Illinois Medical Journal
is correct). His identity may never be known for certain, but among Dr. Dedge's wild men, Perry Werks remains the likeliest candidate.

Even a modest sideshow attraction must excite some degree of awe, fear, or wonder; the Okefenokee Wild Man did that, while confirming popular prejudices.

During slavery, blacks were portrayed as “docile, childlike people who required the care and guidance of paternalistic whites.”
⁵⁷
By the late 1880s, a generation after the Emancipation Proclamation, a new myth appeared about black men, in which they were seen as rapists preying on white women. It became one of the most pernicious aspects of racism, especially in the South, where the horrors of lynching were justified as an effective form of deterrence. (“When these black fiends keep their hands off the throats of the women of the South,” said Congressman Thomas Upton Sisson of Mississippi, “then lynching will stop . . .”
⁵⁸
) Many came to believe that “any black man was a potential rapist for all blacks were susceptible to attacks of ‘sexual madness' which compelled them to rape white women.”
⁵⁹
When Dr. Dedge attached sharp, piercing, “masculine and phallic” horns to representatives of “primitive masculinity in its purest, most primal form,” he took the concept of black man as hypersexual brute and realized it in the form of an American satyr.
⁶⁰

Like its classical forebears, the Okeefenokee Wild Man embodied “untamed nature, licence, and lust”; by caging it and charging a nickel admission, the showman made it
possible for audiences to see their fantasies about race and sex brought to life, and emerge from the experience unscathed.
⁶¹

The exhibit's popularity speaks to people's continuing fascination with wild men and, sixty years after seeing one himself, Braswell Deen Jr. rendered the experience in verse. He used the wild man as a symbol, but instead of brutality, the wilderness, or some other traditional meaning, it represents fraud.

A wild man on the streets of Alma was not the most dramatic event in Judge Deen's life. As a Marine during World War II, he took part in the invasions of Peleliu and Okinawa, and was wounded in combat. Appointed to the Georgia Court of Appeals in 1965, he spent twenty-five years on the bench, two as chief judge, and retired in 1990. Since then the “Christian, Constitution, Conservative, US Marine, Lawyer, Legislator, Judge, Arbitrator, Mediator, Author & Composer!” has directed his energies toward defending and supporting the biblical account of Creation.
⁶²

Judge Deen's books, essays, and poems include the eighty-two-line “Wild Man of the Okeefenokee!,” which describes how Dr. Dedge created his exhibit by attaching goat horns to a “low-browed Black Man” and putting “him in a cage with bars, pulled by his car while adorned.” Then

Dr. Dedge with His Good Friend Caged, the “Wild Man of Okefenokee”

Toured America as a museum attraction. They collected, much money.

Purporting to be Evolution's Exhibit A of half man and half beast,

Many who paid to view the freak, thought it weird, but also funny.

Calling the Okeefenokee Wild Man “Evolution's Exhibit A” was ballyhoo, of course, and no more serious than Barnum declaring Zip the missing link, but the judge uses it as a point of departure for exploring dubious episodes in the history of Darwinism. These include the Piltdown Man hoax, a fossilized peccary tooth once identified as belonging to a primitive human (“Nebraska Man”), and the disappearance of allegedly convincing evidence such as the fossils of Java Man. Judge Deen suggests that the foundations of evolution are shaky and compares those espousing it to

A grocery man, selling underweight butter, or, using their false scales,

Or, advertising adulterated foodstuffs . . .

Rather than science, it as an ideology, and textbooks biased

Where, only data supposedly supporting the sacred cow of evolution

Appears; non-ape ancestry notions, are disallowed.

This leads him to conclude that

Thus, goes the, true story, of this, “The Wild Man of Okefenokee!”

And, another example, of hot air evolution, hokum, for all to
see!
⁶³

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

A visitor passing through the small historic district of Middleway, West Virginia, might wonder why so many signs are decorated with scissors and crescents. There is a reason for these curious ornaments, which recall a time in the village's history when something invisible was starting fires, galloping like a horse, and relentlessly snipping away at boots and breeches. They called it the “Livingston Wizard” or “Wizard Clip,” a name that came to be applied to Middleway itself (along with “Cliptown” or “Clip”), whose residents became known as “Clippers” and that was, in all probability, the only community in the United States ever named after a poltergeist.

The name “Livingston Wizard” comes from the family that was the main object of its attention and whose prolonged
contact with the paranormal went beyond the usual noise and destruction of poltergeists, that it raises questions about how the phenomenon is perceived and even used.

In the eighteenth century, when Middleway was called Smithfield and West Virginia was part of the Virginia colony, a German immigrant named Johann Georg Liebenstein owned a large property adjacent to the settlement. Liebenstein lived in Pennsylvania, where he settled after fleeing the religious conflicts and oppressive taxes of the German Palatinate in 1723, and raised a family.
¹
His son Adam (originally John Adam), the first of eleven surviving children, was born on February 16, 1739.

Adam attended a school operated by the Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church in nearby York, learned farming and his father's trade of linen weaving. He married, had a family, and, as the eldest son, inherited the largest portion of Johann's estate in 1771. It included a loom and the 350 acres next to Smithfield, Virginia.

At some point, their name was anglicized to
Livingston
and they headed south. It is unclear who made the trip, or when, and the family suffered a series of disasters.
²
The cattle died and the barn burned down, but whether this happened before or after the move to Virginia is unclear. They might have left sometime during 1771–1772, or as late as the 1790s, but historians agree that by the 1790s, the family was living outside Smithfield.

Little is known about Adam Livingston himself. He was
Pennsylvania Dutch; spoke more German than English; and the neighbors considered him respectable, honest, and industrious. He was around fifty years old when the troubles began, and his youngest child was nearly twenty.

There are many accounts of the events that would afflict and enlighten the family, but only two are by people who knew the principals or witnessed phenomena: Mrs. Anastasia McSherry, a devoutly Roman Catholic neighbor, and Father Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin, a Russian prince and “the Apostle of the Alleghenies.”
³
They heard phantom hooves inside the Livingstons' house and described the disappearance of money, stones moving across the floor by “invisible hands,” beds bursting into flame, and “strange noises [that] terrified them at night.”
⁴
Other sources describe crockery thrown on the floor, livestock dying, and spontaneous decapitation of poultry, but the “regular and most frequent
preternatural fact
” was the cutting up of everything made from cloth and leather.
⁵
Items laid out for washing, stored inside drawers, or even on the wearer's back were likely to be destroyed.

Father Gallitzin told a story about an “old Presbyterian lady” who heard about the clipping and visited the Livingston home:

However, before entering, she took her new black silk cap off her head, wrapped it up in her silk handkerchief, and put it in her pocket, to save it from being
clipt
. After a while, she stept out again, to go to home, and having drawn the handkerchief out of her pocket and opened it, she found her cap cut up into narrow ribbons.
⁶

Some reports describe the sound of scissors at work and, since the fabric was cut and not torn, the phenomenon became known as “Wizard Clip.” Clothing was found riddled with crescent-shaped holes done “exactly with the thread, as if a tailor had done it,” while footwear was spiral-sliced, so that a boot that appeared to be whole collapsed into one long leather string. This went on for a long time—possibly years—before Livingston sought help.
⁷

He approached his minister, the Rev. Christian Streit, explained what was happening, and begged for assistance, pointing out that Christ's disciples were given authority to cast out unclean spirits. Streit allegedly replied that “that power existed only in olden times, but was done away now,” so he could not help.
⁸
An Episcopalian minister tried exorcising the Wizard but was “famously abused by the spirit” and his prayer book deposited in a chamber pot, while a Methodist retreated before a shower of stones.

Livingston also tried magic. The Pennsylvania Dutch have a traditional form of magic called powwowing or
braucherie
, and cunning men suggested herbs, the
Book of
Common Prayer
, and a “riddle, by way of catching the Devil”; these also ended up in the chamber pot.
⁹
Three men from Winchester also attempted to drive out the devil (who is not mentioned), but a large stone came out of the fireplace and whirled around on the floor for fifteen minutes, and they left.

It was an Irish peddler who spent a sleepless night listening to the Wizard racketing around the Livingstons' house, advised sending for a Roman Catholic priest, but Adam “answered quickly that he had tried so many of these fellows that he was not going to try any more of them.”
¹⁰
Whether this response was borne out of general disgust with clergymen or Lutheran suspicions about the Catholic Church, the Wizard kept clipping and Livingston finally relented.

Priests were rare in eighteenth-century Virginia and explanations for how Adam finally met one vary, but in the end, Father Dennis Cahill; Mrs. McSherry's husband, Richard; and a man named Minghini gathered at Livingston's farmhouse.
¹¹
Father Cahill was skeptical. He thought neighbors were playing tricks and hurried through the prayers, sprinkled some holy water, and was on his way out when “a sum of money which had disappeared from out of the old man's chest was by invisible hands laid on the door sill, between the priest's feet.”
¹²

These ministrations brought the Livingstons some peace, but it was not long before the poltergeist returned and Father Gallitzin attempted an exorcism. As he began, “the rattling
and rumbling as of innumerable wagons . . . filled the house,” causing the young priest to lose his nerve, so the more “truculent” Father Cahill was summoned, and he expelled the Wizard forever.
¹³
Livingston was so grateful that the family converted to Roman Catholicism, but a cessation of clipping did not mean that life would return to normal.

A blinding light began to fill their house at night, accompanied by a mysterious voice that instructed the family in the Roman Catholic faith.

The source of the Voice was invisible to all but young children, though Adam sometimes saw the sign of the cross being made by a phantom hand and arm that physically struck him when he tried grabbing them.
¹⁴
There is no description of how the Voice sounded, but it sang beautifully in Latin and English and must have spoken German as well to communicate with the Livingstons. Most assumed it was the spirit of a priest, and the Voice did claim that it had once been alive and said Livingston would learn its identity before he died.

It never taught unorthodox doctrines but emphasized the power of the Blessed Virgin and the special importance of praying for those who suffered in Purgatory. When the Voice became the Livingstons' spiritual director, these souls played
an important part in their lives, with their screams overwhelming Adam as he worked in the field and waking the family at night.
¹⁵
The Voice demanded that they spend hours in prayer to alleviate the souls' suffering, demonstrating the pain they endured by burning a handprint into a cloth; it also seared the first three letters of Jesus's name,
IHS
, in a waistcoat.
¹⁶
The Voice was not given to subtle lessons. It warned the McSherrys' daughters against vanity by shattering a mirror and illustrated the danger of last-minute repentance by making a priest's horse invisible so he could not find it, thus preventing him from reaching a dying woman in time to give her absolution.

In addition to the Voice, a second spiritual teacher visited the Livingstons in the form of a bearded old man. He was ragged and barefoot, but when Adam offered him a pair of shoes, the stranger replied that they were not needed where he came from. The “Angel” spent several days instructing the family in Catholicism, telling them that Luther and Calvin are in hell suffering increased tortures every time their teachings cause another soul to be damned. The old man finally walked through the front gate and vanished.
¹⁷

Despite a parade of wonders, Mrs. Livingston remained the self-described “Judas” of the family. Her conversion was not sincere and she challenged the Voice in different ways, such as her attempt to serve meat soup on a Friday. She locked a bowl of it in the cellar and later discovered the soup gone, replaced by an equal amount of clean water. In addition to
changing or transporting foodstuffs, the Voice interpreted dreams, saw events happening at a distance, and foretold the future, including Mrs. Livingston's death. It said she would die at home and open her eyes in hell if she did not submit to the rules of the Roman Catholic Church, and though its harassment often drove her to stay with neighbors, this prediction, like others, proved accurate.

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.”

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.