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Spacewarp, v. 4, issue 2, November 1948
Page 11
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After all, she confessed, didn't she? It only took two men an hour to get the confession from her. Charles Fort had a quaint attitude toward this type of thing: "The statement that somebody, operated upon by the police, or by a coroner, confessed, has the meaning that has a statement that under pressure an apple produces cider." (917)* The girl says she started these fires (remember Burgard's previous description: "Blowtorch-like") by "touching matches to the walls of the farmhouse when no one was looking." Of a remarkably similar case, Fort writes: "Possibly a dozen male susceptibles could have looked right at this pretty, young girl, and not have seen her strike a match and flip it into furniture; but no flip of a match could set wallpaper afire." (922) ".....But the chief difficulty was to explain the fire on the ceiling and the fire on the walls. I'll not experiment, but I assume that I could flip matches all day at a wall and not set wall paper afire." (924) Then there is an interesting paragraph in a UP dispatch of 29 Aug: ".....The first fire in their new home broke out about 1 p.m. Friday. 'It started in a kitchen cupboard while I was canning tomatoes,' Mrs. Willey said." Has Wonet, one wonders, also mastered the power of invisibility? Several cases cited by Fort parallel the Willey fires in practically every particular. In most of them, the blame is finally fixed (or shoved) upon a servant-girl, an adopted child, anyone who is in the household but not of the family itself. Fort has some remarks about this, also: ""Adoption![[?]] is a good deal of a disguise for getting little girls to work for not much more than nothing. It is not so much that so many poltergeist girls have been housemaids and 'adopted daughters' as that so many of them have been not in their own homes; lost and helpless youngsters, under had taskmasters, in strange surroundings." (950) Notice, also, that Wonet was NOT seen settingthe fires. She was int he same room with a fire (not an unlikely occurrence when "hundreds" of them have occurred in a month), and a matchbox is found to be "disturbed" after the excitement of extinguishing the blaze has died down. Now, one thing lacking in this case, but present in several cited by Fort, is an additional "supernatural" occurrences. Furniture moving about the rooms, spirit raps, etc., usually accompany the plague of firespots. Since the investigators at the Willey farm were likely not Forteans, they perhaps never thought to look for such things at all. There is something else -- mentioned, but not connected with the fires -- and that is Wonet's blindness. Offhand, I can think of no common disease which would produce temporary blindness except the type (whose name I cannot recall( which is equivalent to shell-shock. In other words, Wonet is high sen- *References are to page numbers in the one-volume edition of "The Books of Charles Fort", Holt &Co., 1941. 11 [[illustration text]]Ed Cox[[end illustration text]]
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After all, she confessed, didn't she? It only took two men an hour to get the confession from her. Charles Fort had a quaint attitude toward this type of thing: "The statement that somebody, operated upon by the police, or by a coroner, confessed, has the meaning that has a statement that under pressure an apple produces cider." (917)* The girl says she started these fires (remember Burgard's previous description: "Blowtorch-like") by "touching matches to the walls of the farmhouse when no one was looking." Of a remarkably similar case, Fort writes: "Possibly a dozen male susceptibles could have looked right at this pretty, young girl, and not have seen her strike a match and flip it into furniture; but no flip of a match could set wallpaper afire." (922) ".....But the chief difficulty was to explain the fire on the ceiling and the fire on the walls. I'll not experiment, but I assume that I could flip matches all day at a wall and not set wall paper afire." (924) Then there is an interesting paragraph in a UP dispatch of 29 Aug: ".....The first fire in their new home broke out about 1 p.m. Friday. 'It started in a kitchen cupboard while I was canning tomatoes,' Mrs. Willey said." Has Wonet, one wonders, also mastered the power of invisibility? Several cases cited by Fort parallel the Willey fires in practically every particular. In most of them, the blame is finally fixed (or shoved) upon a servant-girl, an adopted child, anyone who is in the household but not of the family itself. Fort has some remarks about this, also: ""Adoption![[?]] is a good deal of a disguise for getting little girls to work for not much more than nothing. It is not so much that so many poltergeist girls have been housemaids and 'adopted daughters' as that so many of them have been not in their own homes; lost and helpless youngsters, under had taskmasters, in strange surroundings." (950) Notice, also, that Wonet was NOT seen settingthe fires. She was int he same room with a fire (not an unlikely occurrence when "hundreds" of them have occurred in a month), and a matchbox is found to be "disturbed" after the excitement of extinguishing the blaze has died down. Now, one thing lacking in this case, but present in several cited by Fort, is an additional "supernatural" occurrences. Furniture moving about the rooms, spirit raps, etc., usually accompany the plague of firespots. Since the investigators at the Willey farm were likely not Forteans, they perhaps never thought to look for such things at all. There is something else -- mentioned, but not connected with the fires -- and that is Wonet's blindness. Offhand, I can think of no common disease which would produce temporary blindness except the type (whose name I cannot recall( which is equivalent to shell-shock. In other words, Wonet is high sen- *References are to page numbers in the one-volume edition of "The Books of Charles Fort", Holt &Co., 1941. 11 [[illustration text]]Ed Cox[[end illustration text]]
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