Volume 11, Issue 8, page 6
no big bug. God knows what would happen!
"The upshot of the whole thing was that he
told me to come back there the next day and he
would talk to me again. So I did. Every day for
a long while after that, I went down to the
creek, and talked to this thing, and I am not
going to tell you much of what he told me because he knew the dirt on everyone who had
ever lived there. Then he told me about where
he came from. Now, I have already told you
enough to get me a ticket to Norman (State
Asylum for the Insane) and I'm saying no more."
The cleanest thing to do about this, of
course, is to call the man a nut and have a
laugh about it. But it just so happens that I
know this man. I know his family, and have
known of them for 35 years. They have never
produced eccentrics, and are all more or less
simple people, non-drinkers, good workers, and
predictable. He told me about it because he
knew of my interest in the occult. My first
thought was that he was victim to some prankster's hypnosis, but efforts to hypnotize him
failed, indicating that he is not susceptible
to hypnosis. He is a dirt farmer, and does odd
jobs as a carpenter, and has been in Blanchard
since the land allotment to the Choctaws there,
his family being on the rolls. He has no motive for concocting such a story, he is not a
chronic liar, and he is as sane as the next
fellow.
L ET'S MOVE from Blanchard down to Mexico. Not
far from Monterrey is an American who operates an "autel", or motel. I can't tell you
the city, since there are only half a dozen
motels in Northeastern Mexico, and I had to
promise confidence on his report to me. This
fellow is a Chicagoan, who has been in Mexico
15 years, operating this motel which caters to
American tourists. He is not a rube. He is an
urbane person, born to a Jewish family in Chicago, having the skepticism and worldliness of
a people who have had many years experience in
big cities. You couldn't fool him on many
things. Here is his story:
Five years ago he was standing alone in the
lobby of the motel. He was facing a window,
overlooking a street. This is a Mexican street,
which means about every other day or so the
Mexican police get out on the streets and stop
all cars, asking for contributions to some police benefit. One of these soliciting cops
turned toward the window -- he was about half a
block away -- and the motel operator says he saw
the man's mouth moving, as if speaking. As he
did so, a voice came into the lobby. It was
speaking Yiddish, which is a form of German
used by Jews. The voice said 10 words, each
word a name. They were names usually Jewish --
Cohen, Ables, Lapowski, and so on. This puzzled the motel operator, since he knew that
particular policeman and knew that he spoke
only Spanish. For a moment he thought about
going out and asking the policeman how he had
thrown his voice, but he shrugged and decided
maybe he was tired and imagined he had heard
the voice. But in the next hour, things began
shaping up. A guest comes in. Mr. Cohen from
Detroit. Then Mr. Ables from Philadelphia.
Then Mr. Lapowski hot from Mexico City. And so
on, thru the night, right down the list of
names that had somehow come into the room. "In
the first place," the motel operator told me,
"the chances of getting more than one Jewish
customer a week are small indeed. American Jews
go to Europe, not to Mexico. Next, that damned
Indian couldn't possibly speak Yiddish. And in
the third place, I had all of the names of that
night's guests before they came in."
He told me that the next day he sought out
the cop from whom he supposed the message had
come, and tried him on some Yiddish, with about
the same results you get from a Mexican when
you speak English. Then he asked him in Spanish what he had shouted at him the previous
day. The Mexican was completely blank. "No dieo nada," he said. No say nothing. He acted so
innocent that the motel operator was convinced
it was all an hallucination.
BUT TWO days later, the same thing happened
again. The same cop was out begging funds
from autos passing by, and the motel operator
was looking out the window with no one else in
the lobby, and the cop turned toward him, moved
his lips, and the names of what turned out to
be that evening's guests came into the room.
This time they were French names.
To sum it up, this thing has been going on
for years with the motel operator able to know
who is going to stop in his motel that evening
whenever the Indian cop i5 in front of his
place, soliciting funds.
And so it goes. He asked me frankly if I
thought he was nuts. The only conclusion I
could come to is that he has a certain kind of
aural intelligence that enables him to hear
things that others can't. I talked to the Indian policeman, as best I could thru an interpreter. I am familiar with Indians, and I would
bet a thousand dollars against a peanut that
this particular Indian was absolutely not
guilty of anything beyond taking pay for doing
little, which is standard on a lot of government jobs. The motel operator never had told
the cop what was going thru him, but I did. It
took some time to get thru the interpreter,
since I wouldn't hazard anything so diffuse as
this in Spanish. But the Indian finally got
the story. He seemed not at all puzzled, and
pulled a shiny gem-stone of some type out of his
pocket and said, "Maybe this. Indian magic."
That was all I was able to get out of him.
I suggested to the motel operator that the
next time it happened, after he gets the message containing the names of the guests who
would come in, he should work a trick on them
to see what happened. Inasmuch as they seemed
committed to staying in the motel, I told him
to jack up his prices from the $4.50 American
he was charging to $40.50 American, and see
what they would do. He did, and they paid the
exorbitant price without a squint or grimace.
"They are probably on an expense account from
Mars," I told him later. I have heard from him
since and he still jacks up the price on them,
which they pay, but he confesses that he would
rather get the $4.50 and have everything going
according to gravity again. "It is better to
be poor and sane, than to be rich and nuts,"
he told me recently in a letter.
P EOPLE seeing things, hearing things, knowing
things in ways contrary to what we have
been taught is natural law. There is the psychic with the outstanding talent for pictorial
hallucination who writes me: "I have always
been able to envision scenes, especially on
walls. I was hospitalized recently, and during
convalescence I once sat in the bed, looking
at the wall on which there appeared gorgeous
patterns, scenes, and the like. The doctor came
in and asked me what was wrong, why was I so
fascinated by the wall. I made the mistake of
explaining it to him. He looked at me in an
odd way, and called the nurses, who at his direction brought in a television set for me to
watch.
"Now, what I see on television is not nearly
as interesting as what I can see on a wall
thru clairvoyant hallucination, and in t h e
latter y o u have no commercials. But to be
'sane', I have to watch bum shows on T-V, most
of which I' ve already seen, when I could be
watching the extravagant pageantry of clairL^l
4.1
W
a