Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. Jerome Clark

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Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark


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accounts from the period and location speak of the same phenomenon, presumably the consequence of natural or artificial water pollution.) The dreary, disturbing sight went on and on as the ship plowed through the darkness. An exhausted Robson went to bed.

      What is said to have happened next, reported in the New Orleans Daily Picayune a month later, is—to put it charitably—less certainly true. Nonetheless the tale, playing to people’s fascination with lost lands and civilizations, lives on to this day in alternative-reality literature, sometimes (as in the late Charles Berlitz’s 1984 bestseller, Atlantis: The Eighth Continent) represented as possible evidence of Atlantis. Modern writer William L. Moore observes that the area is “located on exactly the same extensive volcanic fault as the Azores—islands long associated with the Atlantis legends.”

      Loud, insistent knocking at his door roused the sleeping Robson the next morning. His second officer excitedly informed him that they were in sight of land, though charts showed nothing there, only 2,000 fathoms of water. After confirming the alert with his own eyes, Robson immediately slowed the ship for fear of collision with reefs. Soundings indicated that the sea bed beneath the Jesmond was only 300 feet (91 meters) deep, as opposed to the 12,000 feet (366 meters) of the charts.

      Some distance ahead loomed an uncharted island with smoking peaks. At 10 miles (16 kilometers), with the water growing ever more alarmingly shallow, Robson dropped anchor and boarded a boat that took him, a third officer, and a boarding party to the shore. There was no beach, he found, only an extended, apparently lifeless stretch of land littered with volcanic debris and, in the distance, mountains with ongoing volcanic activity. After landing on the island’s western edge, the men tried to enter the interior, but rocks, boulders, and steam made the going difficult, dangerous, and finally not worth the effort.

      Not knowing what else to do, the crew congregated by the shore and considered the options. One man, nervously picking at the ground with his boat hook, unearthed what looked like a flint arrowhead. This naturally generated considerable excitement. Tools were procured from the Jesmond, and frantic digging ensued. In due course the men found two huge stone walls, and between them an entrance. They made their way down into it, walking carefully through the rubble until at length they came to a massive collection of artifacts attesting to the presence of an unknown people who had once lived on or colonized the mysterious island.

      It took a day and a half to take the materials off the island and into the mother ship. They included quantities of spears, swords, tools, and vases, sometimes engraved with unrecognizable hieroglyphics-like writing. Most spectacularly, there were the remains of two bodies. One consisted of some bones and a nearly complete skull, and the other was a mummy laid in a stone sarcophagus.

      The second evening, the weather turned threatening, and Robson was forced to abandon his plan to continue looting the island of its treasures. The men returned to the ship and sailed off, with Robson expressing the hope that he and his crew would be able to revisit the island on their return trip to England.

      On April 1 the ship was safely at harbor in New Orleans. An individual identified as the Daily Picayune shipping reporter interviewed Robson at a seaside tavern. The next day the paper ran a story based on that alleged interview, asserting the claims recounted above.

      Like many other newspapers of the period, the Picayune ran dubious and fictional stories as supposed news. Many such yarns were made up in the editorial offices. Stories published on or near April Fool’s Day are particularly suspect. On the first, in fact (or perhaps in fiction), the Picayune noted casually that recently a ship arrived at New York had mentioned “having sighted a new volcanic island” at close to the same location claimed for the Robson discovery. (A New York paper, on the other hand, said nothing of such but focused on the stormy weather the ship and crew had endured in the course of their voyage.) The Picayune “interview,” of course, supposedly occurred on April 1, even if the story ran the next day.

      A rival newspaper, the Times-Democrat, remarked briefly on the arrival of the Jesmond at New Orleans on the first and mentioned it several more times over the week the ship remained in port. It also says its passage had been “ordinary.”

      Needless to say, the alleged mass of enigmatic archaeological artifacts has proved as elusive as Robson’s island. Or, possibly more to the point, just as nonexistent.

       Further Reading

      Ellis, Richard. Imagining Atlantis. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

      Moore, William L. “Captain Robson’s Lost Island.” Fate 38, 7 (July 1985): 70–75.

      In December 1893 the family moved into Hopkinsville, Christian County’s commercial center and largest town, with a reputation as a wide-open place (nicknamed “Hoptown”) with gunmen, gamblers, and prostitutes prominent among the citizenry. Reluctant to abandon his rural roots—and still troubled by the memory of a murder he had witnessed on the city’s streets when he was visiting as a small child—Eddy moved in with relatives in the country and continued to farm.

       Edgar Cayce (Mary Evans Picture Library).

      Over the next months vivid dreams featuring mystical figures and symbols haunted his nighttime imagination; in a recurring series of images, a veiled woman led him across landscape and stream. Then one day in June 1894, as he repaired a broken plow in an open field, a wave of warmth and comfort suddenly engulfed him. The last time he had encountered that sensation, the angel appeared to him. A voice then told him, “Leave the farm. Go to your mother. Everything will be all right.” He was in Hopkinsville by evening and never looked back.

       Cayce as Healer and Prophet

      Young Cayce’s first major job in Hopkinsville was at the Hopper Bookstore, a general-interest establishment and not, as skeptics would subsequently assert, an occult-oriented business. His experience there would mark the beginning of his opening to the wider world, though Cayce would remain at heart a provincial country boy whose worldview, if not one congenial to Southern fundamentalists, and literary tastes were unshakably Bible-centered.

      For a few months Cayce and his father entered into a partnership selling insurance. The 23-year-old Cayce did well at his new job until he began to suffer from debilitating headaches. On April 18, 1900, on a business trip to Elkton, 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of Hopkinsville, he sought relief from a local physician. The doctor prescribed a white powder which Cayce was to mix in water and swallow. The young man returned to his hotel room and did just that—with disastrous consequences.

      The next thing he knew, he was in bed in the Cayce family home. A family friend had found him, behaving oddly, at the Elkton train station and accompanied him on the trip to Hopkinsville. Cayce had no memory of this, and besides the amnesia, he was nearly without voice, able to speak in no more than a whisper. At first assumed to be temporary, the condition continued, even worsened, in the weeks and months ahead as physicians, family members, and his fiancée, Gertrude Evans, looked on despairingly.

      Unable to work as an insurance salesman any longer, Cayce took a job as an apprentice in a photography studio, to learn skills that would serve him well in his later professional life. When a stage hypnotist passed through town, friends urged Cayce to see if the man—Stanley “The Laugh King” Hart—might be able to cure him of his ailment. Remarkably, when Hart hypnotized Cayce, the young man spoke in a normal voice. When out of hypnosis, however, he relapsed back into the whisper. Even with posthypnotic suggestion, the laryngitis stubbornly persisted.

      Though others tried to help Cayce, things got only worse. Even brief, whispered speech grew steadily more painful. Then in the winter of 1901 Al Layne, a Hopkinsville man with a mail-order degree in osteopathy and an involvement in hypnotism, began treating him. As before, the hypnotized Cayce spoke without impediment. Again, however, posthypnotic suggestion had no effect. Then a medical


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