Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (15 page)

For those around him, living “in the same neighborhood as Uncle Fred added excitement to a quiet community,” but Beck was not just a mystic. In 1956 he still worked at a Weyerhauser mill (producers of wood and paper) and continued there until around 1960, when his wife died and he was seventy-two years old.
³²

The attack at Ape Canyon remains a unique event, but the “Hairy Ape Hunt” that followed was not. Three years before Mt. St. Helens, Pennsylvanians were pursuing the “Gettysburg Gorilla,” and in 1931 there was a search for a short hairy creature on Long Island, New York. Ralston, Mississippi, had a
“gorilla hunt” in 1952; a posse chased a peach-eating “Booger” at Clanton, Alabama, in 1960; and carloads of armed hunters set out after Texas's “Lake Worth Monster” in 1969. Similar ad hoc expeditions have taken place around the country, but it was the development of a more systematic approach to finding ape-men that led colorful old Uncle Fred to turn his colorful old story into a book.

In British Columbia during the mid-1950s, the Swiss emigrant Rene Dahinden and journalist John Green began a long-term, open-ended search for Sasquatch. Working independently and together, they interviewed witnesses and studied footprints and physical evidence, slowly piecing together a profile of the creatures as a species of bipedal primate. Hairy giants went from a regional to a national story in 1958, when enormous tracks appeared at a road construction site outside Bluff Creek, California.

A bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew poured plaster into the prints, and the
Humboldt Times
ran a photograph of him holding the cast of what looks like the bottom of a flat, human-looking foot, sixteen inches long with potato-sized toes. The Associated Press picked up the story, and the whole country was soon aware of “Big Foot.”

Scottish-born naturalist Ivan Sanderson followed with a magazine piece, “The Strange Story of America's Abominable Snowman” (
True Magazine
, December 1959), which contains a detailed account of Crew's story and suggests that something like the Himalayan yeti lives in the Pacific
Northwest. Sanderson wrote other articles about incidents from British Columbia, including William Roe's sighting of a female Sasquatch at Mica Mountain in 1955, and the Chapman family's encounter with a Bigfoot at Ruby Creek in 1941. As the public read about these events, most for the first time, investigators reexamined old cases like Ape Canyon and visited Fred Beck, the one witness willing to discuss it.

The Irish big-game hunter Peter Byrne claims to have spoken with him as early as 1960, but Byrne's account contains unlikely errors such as Beck claiming not to know what happened to the other men who were present in 1924. (Byrne also reports that the remains of the miners' cabin were still standing in 1972.)

Six years later Beck was interviewed by Roger Patterson, a rodeo cowboy from Yakima, Washington. Patterson's search for Bigfoot began after reading Sanderson's articles, and he quizzed the old man several times about Ape Canyon, the creatures, and their footprints. He wrote it up, added some embellishments (“Tremendous boulders began pelting their cabin roof followed by loud wailing that echoed hideously off the canyon walls”), and told the story in his 1966 book
Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist?
Rene Dahinden met Beck around 1968, and John Green sometime in the late 1960s.

Green's interview did not go well. Though he believes that “something exciting” happened to the miners, “Fred Beck had told his story so often that he had established a set
pattern of things and there wasn't much use in asking further questions.”
³³
This agrees with Beck's nieces' account. They describe how at one “point Uncle Fred always closed his eyes as if to get a better look,” and at another, “Uncle Fred always sighed here and brushed his right hand over his head.”
³⁴

Decades later, John Green remembers the meeting with Beck as something out of the ordinary:

I can recall talking to Fred Beck only once and it was a long time ago, my recollections are fragmentary, but I think I would remember if he had said anything about spiritualism, the occult etc. and I do not. What I do recall is that his son took a major role in the latter part of our conversation and insisted on showing me a photograph that he said included the image of someone who was not actually there . . .
³⁵

When Beck was a very old man he appeared in a documentary describing the creatures as having “big, big shoulders and small hips, and hairy . . . they looked like they was eight, nine, feet tall.”
³⁶
The ape-men might have grown over time, but physical details were less important to Fred Beck than what Ape Canyon revealed about the creatures'
true
nature. None of the Bigfoot hunters seemed interested in that aspect of the story, however, so Beck felt “it right that I express my views at last” and tell “the real facts after 43 years of silence” in a book.
³⁷

He dictated the story to his son Ronald, who later wrote, “I was close to my father, and believe me, his account is straight and true,” but also told a friend that “the book was his [Ronald's] interpretation on his Father's story.”
³⁸
Do the contents of
I Fought the Apemen
reflect the elder Beck's beliefs?

Michael Perry, Fred's nephew, has “no doubts about Fred and his son Ronald discussing the [metaphysical] theory, but those words were written by Ron—Fred never talked like that.”
³⁹
John Green had the same response: “When I later read the
I Fought
 . . . book my reaction was that it was more the son's book than Fred's. I presume that son was Ronald . . .”
⁴⁰
By all accounts, Ronald held his father in high regard, and it is reasonable to assume that the results are a fair presentation of the elder Beck's ideas, if not his idiom. Since it is impossible to know who believed what, Fred will be referred to as the sole author. (Ronald died in September 2009, a month before work on this chapter began. Since it is impossible to know who believed what, Fred will be referred to as the sole author.)

I Fought the Apemen
is a patchwork: part memoir, part history, and part metaphysical disquisition. Its twenty-two pages are divided into five sections: “The Attack” is Beck's account of the siege, followed by a newspaper article, “Legendary
Mt. St. Helens Apemen Called Legitimate”
⁴¹
; ”Background Events” describes Fred's early mystical experiences; “Questions and Answers” offers amusing anecdotes about the miners' time in the mountains, such as shooting rats off a sack of dynamite, and useful advice like “If you boil beans in the mountains, put on a good lid and be patient.” Beck describes the ape-men as physical and spiritual beings and believes that UFOs expand consciousness by “confounding the wisdom of the proud and material minded” (he was probably familiar with the Maury Island incident, which involved doughnut-shaped UFOs that appeared sixty miles northeast of Kelso in June 1947). “Miscellaneous Selections” elaborates on events at Ape Canyon, and the booklet closes with “Theories on the Origin of Abominable Snowmen,” which describes Earth in prehistoric times, Native American folklore, other Bigfoot encounters, and reflections on esoteric beliefs and higher consciousness.

For this discussion, the crucial point about Fred's metaphysical beliefs is that ape-men are a paranormal phenomenon, a concept that would not raise an eyebrow among the Yakima but was something new for white men. What he believed requires some explanation, and even then Fred found it “hard to classify a spiritual subject and apply a system to it.”

Like many mystics, Beck sees the cosmos as consisting of many spheres, dimensions, or planes of existence. The different planes are often depicted as layers, with the physical, or
material, plane—the universe inhabited by humankind—sandwiched between higher and lower
immaterial
planes. All of them are inhabited by beings whose level of spiritual development, or consciousness, is consistent with the plane upon which they exist; beings with a primitive consciousness exist on lower levels, and those with higher consciousness in higher ones. Though the planes are separate, they overlap, and under certain circumstances nonphysical beings from other planes can manifest in the physical world.

One reason they might do this is an impulse common to all life, on every plane: the urge to evolve. This is not evolution in the sense of adapting to the environment but movement toward a higher form of consciousness, and ultimately, to the highest form of consciousness, which is human.

“Humanity,” however, is more than the Homo sapiens who exist in the material plane, for the inhabitants of higher, nonphysical planes like Vander White and the Great Spirit, are also human. Moreover, the level of a spirit's consciousness determines how it will manifest in the physical world. Highly evolved spirits take noble and beautiful human forms, while beings with primitive consciousnesses from lower planes appear in crude or monstrous shapes.

Beck thought it was the miners' activities that first attracted the Sasquatch's attention, particularly blasting with dynamite. Since the ape-men's plane of existence is close to the material world, and the division between planes is thinner in the mountains, the creatures might have been
watching the men invisibly. Curiosity and the impulse to evolve would have drawn them toward the miners' human consciousnesses and the earthly plane they inhabit.

The ape-men's manifestation seems to have been gradual, beginning with sounds and intermittent materializations that could have produced the solitary footprints in the sandbar. Perhaps the process was similar to what Col. Norbert Okolowicz and Dr. Gustave Geley witnessed at a series of séances by the Polish medium Teofil Modrzejewski.

Between 1919 and 1925, Modrzejewski, better known as “Franek Kluski” (“Frank Noodles,” a name he might have adopted because mediums were not quite respectable) produced a number of remarkable materializations during his sittings, including animals that felt solid, gave off strong smells, and interacted with the sitters and surroundings. They included a hawk, an animal like a miniature lion, and an ape-man that the participants named “Primordial Man” or “Pithecanthropus.”

Pithecanthropus first appeared in 1919 as a bundle of tangled hair accompanied by “smacking” sounds, it intrigued the sitters, which likely hastened its development. While the creatures at Mt. St. Helens stood about seven feet tall, had stout frames “more like a giant human than an ape,” and were “hairy but not shaggy,” Kluski's ape-man was something different. A photograph shows a smallish figure obscured by what looks like black gauze, but the fully realized Pithecanthropus had long, coarse, curly brown hair
with patches of gray and was strong enough to carry a fully loaded bookcase around the room. Its occasional outbursts of wild behavior could be frightening, but no one was ever threatened or harmed and the ape-man was so good-natured that it had to be discouraged from licking the sitters. Over time Pithecanthropus lost cohesion, reverted to smacking sounds, and finally vanished.

Though ape-men can be physically imposing and enormously strong, Beck considered them transients on the material plane, temporary constructs created by a “vibration of power and certain fine substances,” whose bodies do not survive the spirit's return to its own dimension. The “fine substances” of which they are composed presumably disperse, and tangible proof of their existence disappears.

The mechanics of ape-man materialization are obscure, yet their motives at Ape Canyon appear straightforward; what began with natural attraction to the miners' consciousnesses was followed by retaliation at the miners' unprovoked violence. “Our mistake,” Beck writes, “was shooting them.”

I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens
was privately printed in 1967, but few people saw it, or a later edition, and Fred Beck's mystical explorations remain “a bit of a ‘taboo' subject with conventional researchers.”
⁴²
The only firsthand written account of Ape Canyon could not be ignored, though, and a sort of compromise emerged.

Rene Dahinden is a good example of a researcher who was notably impatient with the paranormal. A story is told about
him following giant footprints that abruptly ended in the middle of a field. Someone suggested, jokingly perhaps, that the Bigfoot flew away, and Dahinden turned and left without saying a word. Nevertheless, the notoriously prickly Canadian interviewed Beck, wrote about Ape Canyon, read all of
I Fought the Apemen
, and even brought out a new edition. Like many others he probably “concluded that Fred had gone a little strange in his old age” and “
just ignored the paranormal stuff
.”
⁴³

Fred Beck died on June 1, 1972, at age eighty-three, and since then a new generation of enthusiasts has appeared for whom the history of Bigfoot began at Bluff Creek, California, in 1967, when Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin filmed a female Sasquatch. With new cases to investigate and technologies to apply, Ape Canyon is a low priority, and, as Loren Coleman points out: “[W]hat exactly happened is slowly being lost in mountain fog.”

Barring the discovery of some forgotten document it is unlikely that the fog will clear. Cryptozoologists have picked over Beck's accounts for clues about the creature's anatomy and behavior, noted the story's contradictions and inconsistencies, and almost unanimously “ignored the paranormal stuff.” Beck, a Spiritualist influenced by esoteric schools of thought, was just as removed from certain ideas as the most
scientific Bigfoot hunter, and, in the end, neither the mystic nor the cryptozoologists recognized that
I Fought the Apemen
is a magical treasure-hunting story.