Volume 7, Issue 7, page 10

AUTO-WRITER "HELPS" DEAD KILLER
It was on August 7, 1953, that I suddenly
found myself able to use an Ouija board and
also to speed communication by letting spirits
move a pen to write. This was at my home in
Los Angeles. Two weeks later, after nightly
practice of auto-writing, I had to visit a
manganese mine south of Blythe, Calif., which
is in desert country.

It was around 125 degrees in the sun, and
when I stopped at a small town for a cold
drink in an air-conditioned cafe, the inside
temperature of 98 seemed deliciously cool. Reluctantly, I drove on the remaining 15 miles
to Blythe. The perspiration poured off my
forehead and soon got on the lenses of my rimless glasses, over which I used snap-on dark
lenses on the desert. I kept driving while removing the glasses to wipe them dry, as I had
been doing frequently; this time, the glasses
broke and I couldn't wear them. By 5:30, when
I got to my motel room and the luxury of a
cool shower, my eyes were strained and painful. As I stripped, I noticed that the motel
had provided a copy of the local paper.

The shower helped, but I was worn out and
anxious to lie down on a towel without drying,
and to use some Murine and sleep till dinnertime. Even so, however, my curiosity got the
better of me. In the shower, I had wondered
if I could get auto-writing away from home, and
now dried my hands and held a pen over a notepad of paper. By now I had found the pen always moved to write, within a few seconds, and
I would have been perturbed and startled at
home if it failed to do so. I was pleased now
to find it starting to write as usual: "See
Page 7 of the paper".
"Don't be foolish!" I exclaimed. "I'm not
going to read anything, let alone gossip in
a local small town paper." The pen wrote:
"You'll read this and it is short."
Skeptical of the message being from a spirit prankster -- and I'd had plenty of experience
in two weeks with that type -- I reluctantly
opened the paper to Page 7 and scanned t h e
headings by squinting my eyes. Sure enough,
there was a squib about Korea that was valuable enough to make me read and clip it.
'I drove the 225 miles home next day and
found the mining engineer with whom I worked
had just left for another mine. By late afternoon, I was busy welding in the workshop next
the office and was annoyed by the phone ringing. When I answered, a man asked if a photostat of an oil field map was ready for him to
pick up. "I'm sorry but Mr. Beam left before I
arrived from Blythe, and there's no note here
about the matter."
As I was writing his name and address down,
the pen made a forceful movement downward and
to the left, as if to write (this had never
happened before and hasn't since). I was in a
hurry to get back to work, but let the pen
write. "The map is here and in the map-rack,"
the pen wrote.

It was. After I'd called the man back and
given him the news, I started for the door,
but my curiosity again caused me to sit down
and ask: "Who knows more about this office than
I do?" The pen wrote: "I am Landos. I used to
own that oil field in Baja but was stabbed in
The ABER