Strange World - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 1/21/25

George Noory and author Marc Hartzman discuss numerous oddities ranging from psychic dogs to displaying the embalmed. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Let's talk about Jim the Wonder Dog. Who is that?

Speaker 3 (00:09):
Jim the Wonder Dog was a English setter living in Marshall, Missouri.
This was back in the nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties,
and his owner, man named Sam van Arsdale, had adopted
him when he was six weeks old and thought like that.
He actually said, this was a quote from newspapers back then.

(00:30):
He said, this was the dumbest dog I'd ever seen.
But that impression quickly changed. They were out for on
a quail hunt and Van Arsdale, as the story goes,
he mentioned that they should go rest under a nearby
hickory tree, and he was amazed that Jim headed straight
to the hickory tree, knowing which one it was. And
he thought that's odd, so he tested them. He started

(00:52):
naming other trees, and Jim started going to those other trees,
specifically a walnut tree, a cedar tree. He even went
to a stump. He said, go to a stump, and
he did all this again, as the story goes, without
any hesitation, so van Arsdale, thinking like, wow, there's something special,
about this dog, and he had no way to account
for this, and he had scientists, biologists, psychologists coming to

(01:15):
study Jim. This became national news. The press loved it
and no one, no one could figure anything out with
this dog in terms of how it was able to
know certain things right, and it went beyond that, so
it was able to understand different languages. In fact, Van
Arsdale said it could understand any language, so whenever someone
was speaking, it would respond properly to the correct answer

(01:38):
to whever that language was asking. And it even seemed
to have psychic powers. So Jim was known to have
picked six straight winners in the Kentucky Derby, which is
pretty amazing. And they would do that, you know, van
Arsdale would basically place the name of different racehorses on
pieces of paper and Jim would go touch the winner
with a paw, you know, be presumed winning with the paw,

(02:00):
And like I said, he got six of those in
a row correct. And then parents who were expecting a child,
they would write in request asking the dogs to predict
the sex of their baby, and supposedly this went not.
You know, he did many of these and got them right,
had a lot of success with that doesn't seem like
maybe the best use of a psychic dog. But this
was what was going on, and there was a case

(02:23):
a story I thought was kind of fun that someone
tried to stump the dog. This was a gentleman who
tested the dog. He basically had three women with him
and said, you know which one of of these women
is my wife? And the dog Jim just sat perfectly still,
kind of stretched down the floor and didn't go anywhere.
The man he finally admitted that in fact, he wasn't
married at all, so he was trying to, you know,

(02:43):
pull one over on Jim, and Jim was too smart
for that, so, you know, how was he doing this?
Of course, no one really knows what exactly was going
on with Jim and how he was able to do
these amazing things. But this went on to nineteen thirty
seven when sadly Jim passed away while they were fishing trip.
It seems to have maybe been a heart attack or

(03:03):
a stroke that you know, that's all really the veterinarian
was able to say. Jim was twelve years all at
the time. Van Arsdale completely denied the use of any
signals and he was never caught using any you know,
it seems like maybe somehow he was suddenly signaling a
dog with the correct answers. But again, as the story goes,
no one ever told'm doing it, He denied it, and

(03:23):
scientists again were completely baffled by how he was doing
these things. And he's still memorialized today. A Jim the
Wonder Dog mus Him and Garden in Marshall.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Missouri tell us the story of the Phantom Barber of Pascagoula.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
This is another truly bizarre story, which is interesting because
Pasca Gula, it's the strange story. Is probably most known
for is the UFO abduction case nearly seventies, that's right.
But in nineteen forty two, in June, you know, this
was when World War II was raging, you know, in
Europe with all kinds of horrible horrors, but people that

(04:00):
had its own weird type of terror was facing. There
was this criminal who was prowling at streets at night
and he would sneak into people's homes. And it wasn't
trying to he wasn't stealing money or other valuable something
like that. He was stealing here and he became known
as the Fantom Barber and what he would do is
he would he would go into these homes and he
would cut the hair of young girls. In fact, at

(04:22):
one point he went into a convent and he cut
the locks from three different girls, and you know, they'd
wake up, but some of them were thinking they were dreaming,
because they would sense something was going on and they'd
wake up and see them as he was slipping out
the window, and they'd see that their hair was cut, Like,
oh my god, what is going on here? Why was
this guy cutting hair? And that was it. And so
the town's kind of freaking out about this, like what's

(04:43):
going on. The police, you know, were out on the
case with their bloodhounds. They offered a three hundred dollars
reward for its capture. They had volunteer officers, they were
giving guns to help catch this guy. Parents were nailing
their windows shut, sleeping with their kids to protect them
and make sure that this guy didn't cut their hair.
And finally, you know, within a few months, after at

(05:05):
least seven haircuts during the night, they finally caught this
guy named William Dolan, who was a fifty seven year
old German chemist, and he was apparently a Nazi sympathizer
who wanted to strike at the morale of American workers
who were helping with the war effort in Pascagoula. And
this was his very bizarre way of doing that. And

(05:27):
eventually he was tried for attempted murder because he finally
did go beyond cutting hair. He attacked a couple with
an iron rod overnight that summer, and for that he
was tried and convicted, sentence to ten years in prison,
but eventually shared and the hair trimmings were found in
his backyard and he denied any wrongdoing, but it seemed

(05:49):
pretty obvious that this guy was out there strangely cutting
people's hair as a fantom barber.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
You have a book called Chasing Ghosts. Tell me about that.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Well, Chasing Goes goes into really the history of our
fascination with spirits and it's supernatural, so it goes into
some of the early cultural beliefs and ghosts, but also
really hits on the spiritual as a movement, which is
really what got me into the topic, which began in
eighteen forty eight in Hyttesville, New York, with the Fox
Sisters believe they were hearing rappings that were made by

(06:22):
a ghost in the basement, and that just took off,
you know, and kind of took over the nation and
over the seas as well, with different mediums claiming that
they could speak to the dead and spirituals, and became
a huge religion still religion where people truly believe that
we communicate with the dead, we don't truly die. So
I became fascinating with what these meetings were doing and

(06:43):
how they were manifesting different voices and making you know,
you know, tables, lifts and levitates and furniture move and ectoplasm,
all these different things, and people were completely believing it.
Scientists were staying them and buying into the whole thing.
So it gets into a lot of those different stories
and covers you know, hanted places as well, and in

(07:03):
different ways that the science is used to either detect
evidence of ghosts or or show how maybe some paranormal
events might actually be explained by science. So it kind
of covers a wide range of of the paranormal.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
You're not a fan of oigi boards either, are.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
You, Well, I'd find wigi board's pretty fascinating. So I
have a story here. This was one that actually didn't
end up ringing in Chasing Ghosts. But I did put
on my website weird Historian dot com Wiji boards. So
Wiji boards basically gained popularity in the late eighteen hundreds,
and they were a way for mediums to communicate more

(07:39):
efficiently with the other side because they could have the
plan chips spell out messages from the dead before you
might have, you know, a plant chip might write out
messages on a piece of paper with a little piece
of pencil, which could take a long time. Before that,
it was you know, the wrappings and knockings, which could
take again that could be very tedious to spell longboards
because the Ouiji board was a bit more efficient. And

(08:00):
really this was this was more I think, you know,
not something scary. This was exciting for sciences. To me,
it didn't really become like this sort of evil item,
you know, fair normal thing until The Exorcist kind of
made it so in nineteen seventy three in the film,
in the book of course preceding that, but there was
a case in nineteen thirty three where the Wiji board

(08:23):
was actually apparently pretty evil. And this was a case
in Arizona where a woman, this woman who was married
and had a fifteen year old daughter she worked with.
She consulted the Wigi board and was basically told that
there was a location of a buried treasure, and so
she got her husband to go look for this buried treasure.

(08:45):
And he was out there working hard. He was supposedly
blasted away rock searching for the treasure to please his wife. Well,
he was busy looking for the treasure. She found a
cowboy to have an affair with and so that relationship
took off. She consulted the Wigi board again with her daughter,
and the Wigi board allegedly told this fifteen year old

(09:07):
girl named Maddie to kill her father, which is crazy, right,
So she was convinced that this is what she had
to do. The mother said, hey, the Wisi board cannot
be denied. You won't be arrested for doing it. It's
what the Wiensi board says to do. So the daughter
shoots her dad. Thankfully he doesn't die, he survived it.

(09:30):
But of course, you know, there's a trial. The mother
is eventually sentenced to attend a twenty five years sons
showings her two years, which is odd. She was State
Supreme Court, you know, shortened her sentence and Maddie was
sent to a state school for delinquent girls for six years.
So very strange story of a Wuiji board going terribly awry.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
In the nineteen thirties, What about the time people believe
that man bats lived on the moon? You even looked
at that.

Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah, yeah, this is a story I really loved, just
from again the Annals of Weird History. So this was
the Great Moon Hoax of eighteen thirty five. And imagine
that eighteen thirty five. You know, we didn't know a
lot about the Moon back then, right, we didn't have
the telescopes that we have now. Obviously, you know, we've
been to the Moon since then, So there was a

(10:19):
lot of unknown and there was a lot of belief
that there might be other beings on the Moon and
other plants within a solar system as well. This was
kind of, you know, not an unusual belief back then.
So The New York Sun had an editor and he
decided that he wanted to drum up some you know,
some hype about the newspaper and get some business and

(10:41):
add to the circulation. So he ran a story that
year saying that astronomer who's the famous astronomer Sir John
Frederick William Herschel had discovered man bats on the moon
and other kinds of life forms and fauna, all kinds
of floor and fauna on the moon. And this was
supposedly reprinted, this article from the supplements to the Edinburgh

(11:03):
Journal of Science. So it sounded very official, right, but
that actually the Edinburgh Journal of Science had gone out
of business years earlier. But of course no one knew
that there's no internet to look down up or anything,
so no one cared. And this editor, Richard Locke, just
ran with the story and then he completely fabricated all
these details, but he gave it that legitimacy, and he
described all these different kinds of amazing creatures that were there.

(11:27):
You know, I mentioned the man bats, of course, you know,
these men with giant wings who could fly. There was
monstrous blue unicorn with a beard. There were beavers that
walked on their hind legs but had no tales, which
is odd. And they lived in huts and they built campfires.
And there's these amazing illustrations that company these articles. Beautiful illustrations.

(11:47):
I have one on where historian dot com which which
listeners can see and so this went on for a week.
Every day the stories grew more and more detailed, adding
more things that were observed through the telescope on the moon.
And so sure you had, you know, readers of the
New York Sun and other people picking up the story
that life had been discovered on the moon. And of

(12:08):
course this is exciting, right, we're finally understanding what's there
and having actual descriptions of her from ast and and finally,
by the end of the week, word came out that
the whole thing had been fabricated, and you know, this
whole thing was just a giant hopes. But what was
interesting was that people still love the story. It was entertaining,

(12:31):
and that's kind of how people ended up just taking it.
So it didn't hurt the paper. In fact, circulation remained
up in the months that followed, so so it worked
great a lock. Even though Locke privately admitted he did this,
he publicly denied that he can cock to the whole thing,
just like because to keep up the roots as much
as possible. But yeah, kind of an amazing week in history.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
Mark who was Martin van Buchel.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
This was a very odd, eccentric character from eighteenth century London,
and he was he was kind of a quack surgeon.
He would ride around on town through London on a
spotted pony, which sounds odd because you might wonder what
would even find a spotted pony, and you don't. He
painted the spots on the pony himself. Sometimes they were purple,

(13:20):
sometimes they were black. Again just part of his eccentricity.
He also had a long flowing beard. He carried a
large just a large bone in his hand. So again
just this odd character. You can imagine going through the
streets of London and offering different medical services that He
also took an interest in anatomy, and he worked with

(13:40):
John Hunter, who was a very famous surgeon, kind of
the guy who really got us into modern surgery. He
would dig up corpses at night, drag them back into
his laboratory through the back door. It's actually the inspiration
for doctor Jucklo mister Hyde, because he would that's what
he would do. We'd dig up the corpses at night,
sneak him in the back door, study them, cut them
open four things, and kind of advance the idea of surgery.

(14:03):
And his brother would help us as well, William Hunter,
so van Bootfell, you know, was working with him and
kind of fascinating and learning from him. And then in
seventeen seventy five, his wife Mary dies and so he
decides to have her embalmed, and William Hunter helps embalm
her for him, and he's excited about having his embalmed wife.

(14:24):
She was fitted with glass eyes. She was dressed in
a white lace gown and still looking, you know, all
beautiful and death. He places her in this glass case
and exhibits her to friends in his home, and he's
welcoming visitors during the day except for Sunday. Then people
could come see his dead wife on display, which again

(14:44):
just an odd thing to do. And then this all
stops Finnie when he remarried and his new wife, Elizabeth, says,
you know, she's not excited about that. She doesn't want
her her predecessor in the house dead, you know, for
people to come visit and for her to walk by
every day or whatever she chets this year. So Buchol
SAIDs okay, fine, I'll get rid of Mary, and so

(15:05):
we give her to John Hunter, his buddy, and John
Hunter of course had this amazing museum which which is
now a Hunterey Museum in London, so this became part
of his Museum of Medical Oddities, and that lasted until
I believe the nineteen forties, Yeah, nineteen forty one, when
her body was destroyed during one of the bombing raids

(15:27):
during the war. But that body went on display basically,
you know, for more than one hundred and fifty years
or so.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
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