[16]

Mysterious Messenger

By Hugo Schmidt

While the last rays of a cold February sun were rapidly vanishing in the western sky, I was sitting near a large cottonwood, part of the shelterbelt around our house. This was on the farm where my parents homesteaded on the Nebraska prairies in 1904. It was near Ravenna.

By this time tomorrow I would be on my way to our new home in Grand Island. My folks were moving to the city after a number of years on the farm. Being a 14-year old boy at the time I was naturally harboring thoughts of regret after having spent many happy days there.

I stayed close to my faithful pal, Dandy, a huge Great Dane, as darkness slowly overtook the sunset. My gaze wandered up a hill to an old sod house, silhouetted faintly against the evening sky. It stood about a mile up the slope. To my left, up another hill, was an old deserted graveyard with its fence in ruins. The whole place was always a sentinel of gloom, looking out over the soddy on the other side of this lonely dip on the Nebraska plains. The sun's glare was no longer being reflected from the chimney.

The soddy, let me explain, was the home of the Mysterious Messenger -- a large ball of light at night. It had traveled across from the soddy to the graveyard and back every night since that murder a few years ago. All the members of my family had seen it hundreds of times. Our friends too. Some had tried to waylay it. Others had tried to shoot it and some had even tried to talk to it.

The light had completely mystified the neighborhood, although everyone was used to it by now. Its appearance had sent many a cold shiver up my spine. In spite of the chilly breeze I wanted to take one last look at the soddy. I had gone relatively near to the spooky place with my older brother but it had always been during the day.

I was shaking with excitement when I approached the soddy. Now it's a mystery to me how my legs ever carried me up that slope. I pushed the door open a crack. It creaked with a queer noise, as if to warn the spirits within. My heart was pounding like a sledge-hammer and Dandy crouched with his eyes fixed on me.

Ready to run at any moment I took a few deep breaths and found the courage to open the door all the way. There the hideous sight met my eyes. Others who had seen it had talked about it but I had never imagined it to be like this. I saw the whole scene immediately -- the pool of dried blood, still a dark stain on the old sunken floor, where the woman had died when her husband had shot her with a musket through an open window. He then had turned [17] the gun on himself, blasting his own soul to eternity just outside the soddy.

I held on to Dandy and looked back to see if I could get out. Yes, the door was ajar. Chilly air invaded the ghostly haunt, which had two rooms. To satisfy my curiosity I tip-toed to the crude entrance to the second room. There was a rickety staircase leading to an attic. The dim light showed broken furniture, ragged bits of clothing, and kitchen utensils hanging from the rafters in the shadows.

The four children of the dead parents had packed most things into the attic and left the house forever. The oldest son had stayed in the vicinity for a little while, but he had gone because he lost his friends. Everyone thought of him as being too odd and mysterious after the tragedy. Silence and death still lurked in every corner of the place.

Suddenly a gust of wind blew the front door shut. Dandy yelped and jumped for it, scratching frantically to get out. I was right behind him, jerked it open and we ran down the hill as fast as we could! By the time I got to our farmyard I had had time to collect my thoughts. It was dark now but I stood by the cottonwood, looking back at the haunted place, before going in to supper.

My thoughts drifted. Dandy gave a start. There was the light again! And why not? It had never failed. The Mysterious Messenger in the form of a bright ball of fire emerged slowly from the soddy's chimney. Dandy settled down to watch with me. The light dropped to the ground and headed slowly but surely down the hill toward me. I had no particular fear since this was the course it always followed before turning up the hill on the other side toward the cemetery. It reached the pasture fence several hundred yards away and disappeared down the opposite bank of the creek. It would head along the bed a few hundred feet then come into sight again farther away.

Instead the ball of light suddenly reappeared less than a hundred yards from me! Dandy leaped up with a yelp and ran into the house. I sat there, frozen. The light came to within a stone's throw of me and stopped. Was this messenger of death bidding me farewell, or was it trying to tell me something I should know after having been in the soddy?

Finally it retreated and I began to breathe again. It moved aimlessly back up the hill, like a dog searching food. At the graveyard it disappeared into the ground, just as it had always done, to pay its secret-visit to the corpse below. Did the mysterious Messenger visit the murdered or the murderer? No one knew because no one had ever dared to go close at night.

After a few moments the light reappeared and headed back toward the soddy. This time it sped across the countryside, stopped as if not knowing where to go, then fast again until it disappeared down the chimney. I went into the house for supper. The next day we moved to Grand Island.

[18]

After living in Grand Island for awhile I heard of the story of a country peddler who claimed to know what had happened there in the soddy.

He had come upon that homestead one night. Being a stranger in those parts he had not known about the fireball. He had seen this light in the soddy and had mistaken it for lamplight. All of a sudden the light moved from the soddy to the barn, leaving the house in darkness. The peddler had been confused but had headed for the barn anyway. He followed the the light inside and then came out screaming. He had seen a body hanging from a rafter.

The explanation was that a hired man who had been working for the folks there had returned from town. He came on the scene of death in the soddy. Knowing his own part in the tragedy, because the wife had been too attentive to him, the hired man went into the barn and hanged himself.

Still the question remains: Why did the light appear night after night to visit the graveyard? Was this the fiery messenger of death trying to tell the neighborhood?

I returned to the haunted homestead years later and found only a pile of rubble where the soddy had been. I was told that the light had not appeared in the last few years (this was in the late 1930s) and I was bitterly disappointed because I wanted to follow the light to the graveyard in hopes of solving the mystery. If I had been able to follow the light, would it have led me to the secret? Who knows.

* * *

A PEACEFUL KIND OF HAUNTING

By Alice Madden Dashiell

For Christmas my brother gave me one of Verne Cameron's Aurameters and I have been discovering some unusual force fields with it! Even including a ghost!

Recently some friends took me to visit a man and his wife at their ranch in the Hemet - Vail Lake area. The ranch house has a ghost named Gladys and we were going to try to locate her. Gladys had gone to work one day and died there, but she doesn't seem to know that she has gone "over". She comes home each night to rattle drawers and refrigerators in the kitchen -- getting her lunch for the following day.

So I thought of wanting to find a force field of Gladys if it or she was in the house. I went from room to room with the aurameter balanced in my hand. Nothing, until I went into a spare bedroom. There the aurameter was strongly repelled by a figure sitting in a chair. I was able to get the outline of the figure by watching the swing of the aurameter.

There was another hot spot. In the owner's bedroom we found [19] a closet where Gladys had left behind a field of magnetism with her constant use of clothes hung there. This was a different kind of energy as the aurameter pointed toward more than was repelled by the field. The owner of the house always found the curtains of the closet opened and twisted in the morning and he could not understand why -- NOW he knows!

He and his wife have seen a figure moving through the house and on Sundays they "feel" Gladys sitting at the breakfast table for coffee. Their parakeet keeps repeating "What are you doing here, George?" and the owners have never taught him the word George.

So we asked the aurameter if George was related to Gladys and it said yes -- it can be used the same as a pendulum for asking a yes or no question. She did have a son who has passed over but the owners didn't know for sure if his name was George.

What a sensitive instrument the Aurameter is! I have a semi-tropical plant in my living room. This plant and I have a good rapport as I have been talking to it -- giving it loving care and I have a feeling of it being my friend.

I thought, when holding the aurameter correctly balanced in my hand, that I wanted to find if there was a force-field around the plant. Much to my surprise one leaf that was facing my figure had a strong projection from the tip of one leaf. When I moved the aurameter around, the projection kept aiming right at the middle of me! This field extended about three to four feet out from the leaf. No where else on this place was there any indication of such a force-field.

Max Freedom Long gave the instrument its name. Verne Cameron makes them by order and has sent them all over the world for finding water and minerals.

* * *

MAYBE IT WAS AN UNDERWATER FLYING SAUCER

New Delhi, 5 Jan. 1972 -- "The 14-day war between India and Pakistan has added a new mystery of the sea -- the sinking of the Indian Navy antisubmarine frigate Khukri. During the last days of the war when the Pakistani-navy had lost about half its ships and the remainder were bottled up in Karachi by the Indian navy, the Khukri broke its wartime radio silence with a distress message. . . The only announcement by the Indian government was that the 2,000 ton Khukri had sunk after being torpedoed in the Arabian Sea. But Pakistani did not claim to have sunk it. . . Some of the ship's survivors told friends that the frigate had picked up a submarine on its sonar. Believing it to be a Pakistani sub, the Khukri's captain ordered depth bombs to be dropped. It was then the ship was torpedoed. A week after the war a Calcutta newspaper said it had a report from 'unimpeachable sources' (believed to be an Indian navy admiral) that the Khukri had been torpedoed by the American nuclear submarine Fargo. This was denied by the U.S. Embassy In New Delhi which claimed that no U.S. warships were in the Arabian Sea."