Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (18 page)

In addition to visions and crystal gazing, Jeane would become a famous astrologer, casting horoscopes psychically rather than by doing calculations. She disapproved of mediumistic practices and does not mention Tarot, but Dixon sometimes asked people to shuffle a pack of ordinary playing cards (another gift from the gypsy fortune-teller) before doing a reading; it helped her tune in to their vibration. One witness reported that Jeane correctly diagnosed an illness by looking at a photograph; another said she cured his warts.

Though Dixon does not seem to have been particularly interested in numerology, her calendar was marked with good and bad days; five, seven, and nine were the best numbers, four and eight the worst. She might have done this for Nancy Reagan as well; chief of staff Donald Regan reported that the First Lady prepared a calendar for the president in which “[n]umerals were highlighted in green ink for good days, red ink for bad days and yellow ink for ‘iffy' days . . .”
³⁰
And Dixon never stopped making predictions.

Journalist Martha Rountree was told that she would not
live in her new house, and it burned down before she could move in. Jeane saw Marilyn Monroe committing suicide, Red China invading the Soviet Union, and giant squid becoming “an inexpensive and very healthy food source.”
³¹
One vision showed Negroes “being pushed by an underground force [Communists]” to seek “equal powers and jobs before they have the intellectual capacity and understanding to accept equal responsibility,” which makes uncomfortable reading for several reasons.
³²

Newspaper columnist Ruth Montgomery worked with Dixon to write a book about her life and predictions called
A Gift of Prophecy: The Phenomenal Jeane Dixon
(1965), which sold a remarkable three million copies and made Jeane a national figure.

Dixon became a regular on television and radio as well as a popular lecturer; at one point a Gallup poll named her the eleventh most admired woman in America. Supermarket tabloids carried annual New Year's predictions, Jeane's astrology column was syndicated, and she hired ghostwriters to produce books on everything from Jesus to cooking based on horoscope; (“I'm a Capricorn, my astrological foods . . . are beets, saffron, quince, and barley”); Ruth Montgomery was dropped.
³³

Apart from writing, Jeane also read excerpts from
A Gift of Prophecy
on a forty-five-rpm record and supplied predictions for the world's first “Horoscopes by Phone.” In 1968, Milton Bradley put out Jeane Dixon's Game of Destiny: A Card Game of Numerology and Astrology with a message on the box informing purchasers that: “All royalties received by Jeane Dixon from this game will go to the Children to Children Foundation—a medical hospital for children all over the world.”

This wasn't quite accurate. Dixon created Children to Children so that money from her psychic ventures would go to charity, yet the foundation's mission was vague and its ultimate goal was creating the Jeane Dixon Medical Center. Plans called for a gigantic, wheel-shaped complex with an airstrip, petting zoo, and eternal flame, but a scale model was all that was built, and the organization was run in an inept, self-serving way that produced the one real scandal of Dixon's career.
³⁴

Two articles in the March 1970 issue of the
Washingtonian
reported that $5,000 was collected between June 1967 and May 1972, of which 19 percent went to charitable causes, and the rest to pay salaries and publicize Dixon. She tried intimidating the
Washingtonian
's editor with her connections (“I know people who control billions, not millions”), threatened them with a $5,000,000 libel suit, and brought one for $1,000,000 that was dismissed.
³⁵
The bad publicity soon
faded, though, and she remained synonymous with precognition, not misappropriation.

As the country's best-known psychic, Dixon also became the subject of numerous urban legends. She repeatedly had to deny predicting massacres on college campuses, earthquakes, and that all women with pierced ears would die on June 4, 1968. Her name was also a shorthand way of referring to psychic predictions in general or, in one case, how people respond to alleged predictions.

Mathematics professor John Allen Paulos described a phenomenon that he christened “the Jeane Dixon Effect,” arguing that belief in prophecy occurs when “relatively few correct predictions are heralded and therefore widely remembered, while the much more numerous incorrect predictions are conveniently forgotten or de-emphasized.”
³⁶
The lady herself, however, was not concerned with mathematicians but subversives.

The Dixons' FBI file chronicles their long relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and reveals an eagerness on her part to act as a propagandist.

James and Jeane knew J. Edgar Hoover socially, and the Bureau's Washington field office “had liaison with the James
L Dixon Company, which . . . rented property to Soviet-bloc personnel.” In 1966, Jeane asked to be “furnished material by the Bureau on an extremely confidential basis, which she might utilize in her speeches,” presenting it “in such a manner that it cannot be attributed to the FBI.”
³⁷
Hoover approved the request and provided “public source background information” about groups involved in campus disturbances.
³⁸
Four years later, she wrote to the FBI that one of her tenants was operating “some sort of Communistic Press,” then phoned a few days after that, fearing for her safety.
³⁹
This became a pattern.

Jeane was scheduled to speak in Greenwood, Mississippi, on January 22, 1970, when a telegram arrived from the “Greenwood movement” informing her that the audience would be segregated and asking for “verification of delivery” of the message. She interpreted this as a threat and once again asked the FBI for protection. They suggested she contact the Greenwood police department.
⁴⁰

The file also contains information about an attempt at blackmailing Dixon, newspaper clippings about her predictions with discussions and comments by agents, material from the Children to Children Foundation, and suggestions from concerned citizens who believed “this gal [Dixon] should be checked on.”
⁴¹
(There is also a letter to Louisiana's Senator Hale Boggs that explains how the Gideon Bible's “daily Bible reading calendar” links the assassinations of
John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Rosicrucians, the Ku Klux Klan, the Masons, the Mafia, and Charlie Brown (Snoopy's owner). Dixon is mentioned repeatedly since she has “marked all of our Democrat Leaders [
sic
] for murder or bodily harm.” There are also references to a manuscript titled “PREMEDITATED MURDER BY PROPHECY, and [
sic
] Jeane L. Dixon, an alleged ‘divine' prophetess plays a major role.”
⁴²
The document is not included, but a year later, Senator Boggs's plane vanished over Alaska. Coincidence?)

James died in 1984, but Dixon kept working, supporting conservative causes, and advising the rich and powerful. In 1988, it was learned that Nancy Reagan had often consulted her, but by then the First Lady had switched to astrologer Joan Quigley, possibly because Dixon's powers seemed to diminish with age.
⁴³

Jeane Dixon died of heart failure in 1997 and her ashes were scattered over Mt. Rainier—but the story was not over.

After the 9/11 attacks, government terrorism archives were reviewed and it was discovered that President Richard M. Nixon had met with Dixon following the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. She predicted that Palestinian radicals would soon be murdering prominent American Jews, and Nixon set up a short-lived
“counterterrorism committee.”
⁴⁴
It was an odd episode, even by the standards of the Nixon administration.

Radio host Barry Farber once said: “Keeping up with Jeane Dixon is like trying to nail a custard pie to the wall!”
⁴⁵
Summarizing her life is no less difficult.

Of the countless predictions she made, some were accurate, detailed, and corroborated by witnesses.
⁴⁶
Parapsychologists never tested her abilities—God's messenger doesn't fool around with Zener cards—but describing her power in religious terms meant Dixon had to be saintly, so she invented, and maintained, an appropriate biography. As the unthreatening and “very reputable” face of phenomena that many regard with suspicion, Dixon was the Billy Graham of ESP, providing supernatural help to the elite while being admired by the general public.
⁴⁷

At a time when values were under attack, she defended patriotism, self-reliance, and religion, identifying the source of social upheavals in the “organizational geniuses of Russia” rather than failures of civil rights or the war in Vietnam.
⁴⁸
Even the trauma of a presidential assassination was turned into a celebration and this spoke to a certain innate optimism, for while Dixon often predicted horrors, in the end humankind would transcend its differences and create a utopia.

Whatever Jeane Dixon's shortcomings as a person or prophet, she holds a unique place in American history as the country's only national psychic.

—

The Jeane Dixon Museum and Library is gone. Like so many small museums, it did not survive its founder, Leo M. Bernstein, who died in August 2008. The contents were eventually packed into five hundred boxes, loaded into five moving vans, and transported to an auction house at Chevy Chase, Maryland, where they were put on display to potential buyers.

Dixon's estate went under the gavel on July 26, 2009, and though she had been dead twelve years, her appeal proved durable. It was standing room only on the auction house floor, with offers coming in via telephone and the Internet from across the country, as well as Russia, England, and Australia. Some lots were bargains; Mike the MagiCat's wardrobe “including tuxedo, overalls, kilt and beret” sold for only $60. The antique furniture, paintings, and décor brought predictably high prices, but the premier item was Jeane Dixon's crystal ball.

People came to see the sphere, just four inches in diameter, which stood on a “separate gilt-metal stand cast as four figural caryatids” and sold for $11,950. It was the third-highest price realized that day (a “secondary crystal ball”
brought in a respectable $2,800), with the overall gross exceeding all expectations, reaching $312,349.
⁴⁹

If the results happened to reach the Other Side, a petite spirit with a genius for accounting and an Adolfo hat no doubt
smiled.

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

One morning in 1981, two little girls were walking down the street of a Midwestern city, so deep in conversation that they did not notice the yellow van following them. It picked up speed, got ahead of the pair, and pulled over to the curb, where the vehicle sat idling. Older boys called vans like that “shaggin' wagons” and though the girls were vague on specifics (did “shaggin'” refer to shag carpeting?), the term provoked embarrassed giggles. Despite its bright color, they paid no attention to this one until the passenger-side window rolled down and a white-gloved hand beckoned to them.

The hand was attached to a clown. He had a chalk-white face and round red nose, with a grin painted across his mouth, and an oversized wig of curly red hair. There was a miniature derby perched on top and the clown tipped it courteously in the girls' direction—then said that he and his
companions (two more grease-painted faces appeared at the window) were lost; would the girls get into the van and help them find the circus? The clowns had more candy than they could possibly eat and would give it to them. Though young, the girls were not naïve; they wanted to see the candy first.

The van's side panel slid open with a metallic rumble and a big clown in a red polka-dotted suit climbed out; there were neither lollipops nor candy bars in his hand, but a long-bladed carving knife. The girls shrieked and sprinted away with the clown in pursuit.

—

While this scene is imaginary, it dramatizes some of the real encounters with unfunny clowns that children across America claimed to be having at the beginning of the 1980s.

In May 1981, the Fortean researcher and writer Loren Coleman was living at Cambridge, when the first reports came in of clowns trying to lure kids into their van in Brookline, Boston, and soon from East Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Canton, Randolph, and other cities near Boston. When the reports jumped to include Rhode Island as well, Coleman decided to sweep his network and wrote to all of his American associates and informants to learn if there was similar activity in their areas. He was shocked and startled by what he found—which was being totally ignored by the
national media. The eastern United States was under a full-scale invasion of “Phantom Clowns,” a phrase he decided to coin to capture the essence of them.
¹

Coleman describes what happened in his 1983 book,
Mysterious America
; it is summarized here along with information on additional sources):

• April 26–May 2, Boston, Massachusetts: Reports were made of “adults dressed as clowns . . . bothering children to and from school.” Parents were told to advise children “that they must stay away from strangers, especially ones dressed as clowns.”
  ²
  
• May 5, Brookline, Massachusetts: Two clowns were reported driving an older-model black van, with ladders on its side, no hubcaps, and a broken headlight. They tried luring children inside with candy and were sighted near an elementary school.
  
• May 6, Boston again: Clowns in a black van were harassing children at a park and a school; one clown was reported to be naked from the waist down.
  
• May 8: There were more sightings of clowns-in-vans in East Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Canton, Randolph, and other cities nearby. “Police were
  stopping vehicles with clowns delivering birthday greetings and ‘clown-a-grams,' but no child molesters were arrested.”
  ³
  
• Children at Providence, Rhode Island, begin telling psychiatric social workers about clowns.
  
• May 10–16, Kansas City, Kansas: Children claimed that a white-faced clown with a sword ordered them into a yellow van. They ran away and the clown chased them.
  ⁴
  
• May 22, Kansas City, Missouri: The mother of two sisters, age six and seven, was watching them walk to the school bus stop, when a yellow van pulled up. The driver apparently spoke to the girls, who ran home screaming, and the vehicle took off. They said that “a dark–haired man . . . wearing a clown outfit and . . . a painted face ‘with red polka dots' . . .” had brandished a knife and ordered them inside.
  ⁵
  This may be the incident a later article describes as “a confirmed sighting from at least one adult in a predominantly black neighborhood in Kansas City, MO,” which led to the stories “being viewed with some concern.”
  ⁶
  There were also reports from six different elementary schools, with police receiving calls at the
  rate of “about one a minute.”
  ⁷
  Several clowns driving vans were stopped that turned out to be entertainers heading to parties.
  
• A clinical psychologist at the Wyandotte Mental Health Center suggested this was a case of “group hysteria,” while a newspaper writer dubbed it the “Demon Clown.” Our Lady and St. Rose school distributed memos warning parents about a “Killer Clown.”
  ⁸
  
• May 24, Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri: There were reports of a “garishly painted” van, and LaTanya Johnson, a sixth-grader at Fairfax Elementary School, saw a clown “dressed in a black shirt with a devil on the front. He had candy canes down each side of his pants.”
  ⁹
  
• June 1–6: Rumors circulated in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about a clown hiding in the woods and attempted child abductions by men dressed as Spider-Man, Superman, and a gorilla. A man wearing a rabbit costume and driving a blue van reportedly raped two children; he may have also been spotted going into a tavern or, perhaps, running through a cemetery.
  
• There were also reports from Omaha, Nebraska, and Denver, Colorado.
  

Loren Coleman compares the appearance of the clowns to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the musical exterminator who cleared the city of rats and then led the children away forever. In both cases, strangers in exotic clothing appear from nowhere and threaten to carry away a community's children. The story of the Pied Piper is often interpreted as a memory of the Children's Crusade of 1212, when religious enthusiasm led to the youth of France and Germany setting out to liberate Jerusalem from the Saracens, with disastrous results. Beyond fears of child abduction, the clowns-in-vans should be considered in relationship to the pedophilia, serial killing, and satanism panic that beset Americans at the end of the twentieth century.

This chapter argues that phantom clowns did not step out of the collective imagination fully formed, and drive off in a fleet of waiting vans, but are a traditional terror required to cope with a new threat, and based, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, on memories of traumatic experiences.

The history of clowns-in-vans begins with the demand for labor created by colonizing the New World. After enslaving
Indians proved unsuccessful, Africans were shipped to North America and a system of chattel slavery was created that continued in the South until the end of the Civil War. It was maintained in modified form for another century by oppressive laws and violence that kept former slaves in a position where they could continue to be exploited. Three of the instruments used to control black populations during and after slavery are relevant to this history.

The first was an antebellum form of policing devised to thwart slave rebellions. “Every slave we own is an enemy we harbor,” went the ancient Roman proverb, and fear of insurrections haunted Southern landowners.
¹⁰
They tried to prevent slaves on different plantations from making coordinated plans by requiring them to have written permission to be abroad at night, a rule enforced by small groups of white men that patrolled the roads. The “patterollers” whipped slaves who did not have a valid pass, chased runaways, broke up meetings, and discouraged nocturnal wandering by dressing as ghosts, wearing “white robes, or sheets, and masks” and using stage props, such as “a rotating false head, which gave the appearance of all-around vision.”
¹¹

Patterolling ended with slavery, but with the war lost, and former slaves acquiring political power under the protection of federal troops, Southern whites embarked on a campaign to restore the old system. Numerous groups emerged to drive out carpetbaggers and Republicans, including paramilitaries like the White League, and clandestine
groups called Redcaps, Knights of the White Camellia, and, most important, the Ku Klux Klan.

The latter's name probably derives from the Greek word
kuklos
, “circle,” and what began as a fraternal order set up by Confederate veterans in 1865, with all the extravagant titles, ceremonies, and other trappings typical of secret societies, was soon engaged in intimidation backed by horrific violence. Like the patterollers, members of the “Hooded Order” cultivated a supernatural reputation.

White robes and conical hoods came later; the early Klansmen paraded on horseback in bizarre masks, false beards, horns, and peaked hats (“Dr. Avery had on a red gown with a blue face, with red about his mouth, and he had two horns on his cap about a foot long”
¹²
). They claimed to be the spirits of Southern soldiers killed in battle and would visit black families in order to play gruesome tricks, such as demanding a drink and seeming to swallow bucketfuls of water while emptying it into a concealed rubber bag. Sometimes they extended a skeletal hand to shake, or seemed to remove their own heads. The latter inspired stories about Klansmen being able to disassemble themselves, but they were also said to emerge from the ground at night like cicadas and had an appearance so terrifying that the sight of them could cause pregnant women to have babies that were “a perfect representation of a disguised Ku Klux” (several of these monstrous births were reported in Alabama).
¹³
What is most relevant to phantom clowns, however, is the identification of
the Klan with the medical profession, a belief that came together in the form of
night doctors
.

In 1838, a Dr. T. Stillman of Charleston, South Carolina, placed an advertisement in the Charleston Mercury, expressing his interest in buying “
fifty negroes
.”

Any person having sick negroes, considered incurable by their respective physicians and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for negroes affected with [list of conditions]. The highest cash prize will be paid upon application as above.
¹⁴

Dr. Stillman was interested in performing experiments and testing new drugs, and a system that classified blacks as property denied them “the legal right to refuse to participate.”
¹⁵
The extent of this sort of experimentation before the Civil War is unknown, but after Emancipation, there were notorious medical studies like the Tuskegee Experiment, which followed the progress of untreated syphilis in black men.
¹⁶
Women were sterilized without their knowledge or consent (a “Mississippi appendectomy”), and the general attitude, as expressed to a reporter in 1893, seems to have been that “doctors don't care for us poor black folks. They want us to cut up,
but they don't keer for us . . .”
¹⁷
Nor did death did mean an end to victimization.

Black cadavers were regularly stolen, preserved in spirits, and shipped to schools across the country. The trade was so regular that instructors had standing orders (“[a] Professor of Anatomy in a New England medical school told me . . . he had an arrangement under which he received in each session a shipment of twelve bodies of Southern Negroes. They came in barrels marked ‘turpentine' . . .”
¹⁸
From a black perspective, there was often little difference between the KKK and the AMA, and their fears of the profession were embodied in the idea of “night doctors” (also called “slab doctors,” “night witches,” “Needle Men,”
studients
, and “ku klux doctors”).

Night doctors were believed to be medical students, doctors, and corpse vendors who went out in “droves” between midnight and dawn, searching for victims. They wore masks, Klan-style hoods, white lab coats, or dark clothes for hiding in the shadows; and haunted the neighborhoods around medical buildings, colleges, and train depots (Union Station in Washington, D.C., was a favorite hunting ground). These places were especially dangerous for those who were fat or had “peculiar physical conformation . . . which renders their dissection of particular interest to medical students”; it was said that “first class hump-backed subjects” worth a reported $150.
¹⁹

When night doctors tried grabbing a person, some fought back; others believed that “shootin' 'em is no good, an' dey turn the edge of a razzar jest like a stone wall,” so the best
plan was to run.
²⁰
In 1904, a man in Washington, D.C., escaped by jumping off Long Bridge into the Potomac River, though some accounts read like urban legends.
²¹

The doctors, it was claimed, used chloroform to capture victims, as well as throwing hypodermics filled with paralyzing drugs (“flying needles”) and slapping adhesive plasters over their mouths to stifle cries. Once subdued, they were bound, gagged, blindfolded, and put into a hearselike wagon with rubber wheels, pulled by dark, rubber-shod horses, that quietly trundled captives off to the nearest hospital or college.

Night doctors were “young student doctors” who carried out gruesome medical procedures and experiments on their prisoners, for they “got their experience that way,” and then killed them. Victims were hanged from the ceiling, exposing “a laughing nerve on the bottom of the foot. When the nerve was cut the victim laughed and laughed until he laughed himself to death.”
²²
The incision also drained the blood, and was described in a secondhand account:

He said he seed 'em ketch a little girl, an' dey put sumpin' nudder yer [pointing to the front and back of his head], an den dey put a band roun' her body to keep de cirklashun from movin', an den dey strung her up, an' she was laughin' all de time, kind o' conjured like. In 'bout five minutes de blood all runned out o' her feet into a bucket, an' den she was toted off to de ‘sectin room.'
²³