I have always been a skeptical person. Growing up I was always questioning things most people accepted on faith. Perhaps that is why I majored in chemistry and mathematics, fields where skepticism is an asset. My skeptical nature had a severe test recently. It happened at (of all places) a genealogical society meeting.
Jane and I are members of the Black Hawk Genealogical Society of Rock Island-Mercer County. Our July meeting was held at Immanuel Lutheran Cemetery in Rock Island and the subject was “Grave Witching”. I wasn’t exactly sure what that was but it didn’t sound like something I would buy into.
It turns out that “grave witching” is the technique of finding the location of a grave using the same method that is sometimes used to find water, sometimes called “dowsing”. This didn’t reassure me because when I was a kid, a neighbor hired one of those to find where to dig a well. They dug where he said and guess what? No water. He came back and dowsed again and found another spot. They dug another well. No water. They finally drilled a deep well in a different spot. I was prepared for something like this to happen on our grave search. We held a wire rod (made from a straightened clothes hanger) loosely in each hand. They had right angle bends near one end to hold on to. Holding them pointed straight ahead you walked slowly over the grave site holding them parallel to the ground and when you passed over a grave the wires crossed each other. I had been anxious to try it and to my complete surprise, it worked! Everybody in the assembly tried it and it worked for all of them. We were told if you held only one rod it would turn to the right if the body was a man and to the left if it was a woman. Trying, it, it worked but the direction it turned was not always as that indicated on the grave marker.
The next night we were talking to our neighbors Marshall and Bobbie Beals. Marshall was like me. He scoffed at the idea. We all piled in my car and went up to Hampton Cemetery and Marshall became convinced, as I had been, that the thing worked. The next night James, the Beals’ son was over and we did the same thing with him, and he came away admitting that it worked. Which shows that even a West Point graduate can be convinced. We fooled around “witching” around the neighborhood. I found where the old septic tank was in our yard, where the outhouse that we burned the summer of 1960 when we moved to Hampton, and the spot our little poodle, Peanut, was buried nearly 20 years ago. Marshall found his gas line, checking on it by crossing it in several different places. It worked every time.
Now the problem becomes not whether it works but why it works. I went to the handy, dandy, internet which usually solves all problems but for this one there was no really credible explanation. Threre was one highly controlled scientific study done in Germany in 1986 at a cost of $ 250,000. This dealt with searching for water and the Munich physicists concluded that dowsing did not work. There were several other sites out of over 3000, that described where this had been successful but they were not controlled experiments. It is an old, old technique with evidence that it was used in Europe 5000 years ago. Some say it works because disturbances on the earth that are buried disturb the earth’s magnetic field. Could things as small and simple as graves, or gas lines disturb the massive magnetic field that surrounds the earth? It seems hardly credible. Others say there is some sort of psychic field that has not been discovered yet. Even less credible.
So there we have it. It is so simple. Try it yourself. Straighten out a couple of coat hangers and you have all the equipment necessary. Then you can go “grave witching” in the cemetery or in your back yard if you prefer. You’ll be surprised. I believe Shakespeare was right when he said: “Threre are more things in heaven or earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy”.
Postscript to Hampton Grade School students: wouldn’t this be a neat topic to do next years science project on?