July 16, 2025 • 59 mins
Witching, dowsing, divining. Is it physics, subconscious movement, or straight-up hocus pocus? In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, Clay Newcomb speaks to firsthand observers, a legit water witcher, a university physics professor, and even MeatEater's own Steven Rinella to try to explain one thing: "What makes the sticks move?" Maybe it's legit but just something that can't fit into the scientific method box.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is what these people.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Everybody want to well, they don't get either. Just Quinton
or set Timmins or somebody, Yeah, to go wit you well.
And now the well drillers, now them drillers, of them
witches don't know nothing about it.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
But I wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I would if I drilled well, I would want to
witch you.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Have you ever heard of witching for water? It's an
ancient folk method for finding underground water, but people today
believe that you can also use it to find underground
utilities and a bunch of other stuff. It's long been
chalked off by science as hocus pocus, but it's still
widely used in rural America, and I'm interested in how
(00:50):
people view this. On this episode, we'll interview seven people.
A legit water witcher, a casual water witcher, a guy
who knew a legendary waterwitcher, a guy who's a huge skeptic,
a lady who paid for the services of a waterwitcher,
a guy in commercial construction, and a physicist from a
(01:11):
major university. But I'm only looking for one answer, and
it's not if water witchers can find underground water, but
I want to know what makes the sticks move because
that's the one thing that is not up for debate.
They do move, But I'll let you make the decision
(01:31):
if this is crazy folklore and unsolved physics mystery, or
perhaps we just haven't asked the right questions. But honestly,
you won't be able to make an intelligent decision until
you've tried it for yourself. I really doubt that you're
gonna want to miss this one. And hey, we've got
some sweet new massyoak yep, that's right, Massy Oak Bear
(01:54):
Grease and this country life hats coming out. Check it
out on the meat eater dot com.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
Something's going on in the rides, I just don't know
what it is.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
My name is Klay Knukem, and this is the Bear
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and
(02:34):
fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the place.
As we explore.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He kind of had a kit. I mean he had
an old tin about like what you'd say a fruitcaken. Nowadays,
and in that kit he had pill bottles, just normal
little pill bottles. He would have sulfur water and in
one and he'd have salt water in another one. He
would have good what we call good water, and he'd
(03:09):
put it in these bottles. But he didn't have him
marked he had them. He'd just had black electrical tape
around him. And whenever he'd get out and do some
water witching, he would have all these things in his pocket.
But then whenever he got round to witching, he would
have him in his hand.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
This is the voice of my neighbor Mark Findall. Mark
once told me that he was the biggest farmer in
hall Guy, Arkansas, pausing for a minute before he said,
I'm about two inches taller than my brother. Mark is
telling me a story about a water witcher named Seth
Timmins that he knew very well.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Well. He would he'd get wherever he was going, and
of course he'd had he had a big long elbow
shaped probably big around as your thumb, probably a six
inches handle, and then it ran out about eighteen inches,
just an hell complete a nighty l and he'd get
out and he would hold that up above his head
(04:09):
and it would point the direction he wanted to go
to look for water. So he'd hold that up and
then he had a long piece of I think it
was a brass that he would hold in his hand
and he'd start walking. Then he'd stop and you would
(04:30):
see this thing start bouncing up and down, and he'd
and you'd see him count and then then he'd stop. Well,
then he'd set that down and then he'd get his
He had a it was like an old big carpenter's
plumb bob on a piece of leather, and he would
hold that in his hand, out away from his body,
(04:51):
and he'd have some of that. He'd have whatever it
was he was in one of those pill bottles, and
he'd look at it and if it didn't react, and he'd
put a different pill bottle in his hand and he'd
watch it. Well, then you'd see that things start going
around in a circle, see, and and you'd see him counting,
and he'd put a rock right there where he was
(05:13):
standing and he'd say, well, right here at a one
hundred and sixty feet is good water and it'll make
about five six eight ten gallons a minute. I mean
that's he had that.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
He had that level of confidence in the specificity of
what he was going to find.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Yeah, of course you'd you'd be sitting there, and of
course there'd be the landowner and maybe two or three
neighbors and a bunch of kids bouncing around, and they'd
all have that look on their face, you know, like
you know, that look of what just happened. I don't
think I'm going to say anything, because I don't want
to make him mad or or embarrass him or you know.
But Seth, he never never bothered him, you know.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Out of the gate. I'll tell you that Seth's method
of witch and water was quite unconventional. But it's hard
to say because the origin of water witching is lost
to antiquity. But as to what it actually is, it's
an ancient trade where you use some type of rod
or forked stick to find underground water. Cave paintings in Africa,
(06:15):
believed to be eight thousand years old, depicted water witchers.
Some believe Moses in the Bible smiting the rock with
the staff in the desert and water coming out of
the rock was a form of water witching. The Greeks
wrote about waterwitching in the fifth century. The term waterwitching
is primarily a Scottish and American term, but some call
it dousing and some call it divining for water. Will
(06:39):
use all these words interchangeably. The actual name waterwitching hasn't
done it any favors in modern times, proven to be
a real marketing blunder. People used to believe the mysterious
movement of the witching sticks was supernatural. Some say the
name though, came from them using witch hazel wood. Regardless,
(07:00):
in the Middle Ages, it probably did give a witchcraft vibe,
which I'm not a fan of nor want to play
around with at all. But to add to it all, today,
waterwitching is considered a pseudoscience, and for over one hundred years,
the US Geological Survey has denied any credible evidence that
it works. In a nineteen seventeen paper, they called it
(07:22):
a favorite trick for appealing to uneducated persons, and that
quote further tests by the United States Geological Survey of
this so called witching for water, oil, and other minerals
would be a misuse of public funds. They were done
with it a long time ago, and since then many
(07:43):
controlled academic tests supposedly with expert water witchers, have proven
water witchers can't find underground stuff any better than random chance.
But I'm just not sure that these academics and these
studies got it right. I just think there's something more
(08:08):
I want to hear more about Seth Timmins.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
He was born in February of nineteen twelve in a snowstorm.
He lived between hog Guy and West Fork. He was
an only child, and back then that was a rarity.
Seth was thirty six before when he first got married,
and he said that was just a little bit young.
I mean that's he had a great sentient, great laugh,
(08:34):
you know, outgoing, loved the coffee shop, liked to hear
what was going on in the neighborhood. They were like
super diversified. You know. They had of course, they had
the milk cow, They had their chicken, had a huge garden,
had an o'sal, always had a litter pigs, butchered his
own hogs, you know, working horses, working mules. They raised mules.
(08:55):
That was their big cash crop back in the day,
was raising and selling mules down to the delta. Very
you know what you would think of a typical Arkansas
farmer of the of the era, of that era. But
yet he had season tickets to the race of back
football games. Every Saturday morning that there was a football game,
we'd see he and his wife going, probably three or
(09:17):
four hours before the football game, they'd go up there.
I mean, you know, it wasn't like they were hermits,
lived up on the hill, so and just sitting and
just listening to the stories that he would tell about
growing up, you know, before electricity. That I can always
remember him, you know, as a water witch. Some of
(09:37):
them call it doodlebugging. A lot of time people would
come he they'd want him to come witcha well, and
he never charged, but it was kind of a customary
thing that people would come and pick him up and
take him. They'd come get him and take him because
that way he wouldn't get lost. And he always got
a got a kick out of seeing.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Just leaving this area and going somewhere which today wouldn't
be a very far trip at.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
All, no, you know, considering he grew up riding in
a wagon.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Seth had an old school methodology on water witching that
he undoubtedly learned from people straight out of the eighteen hundreds.
He believed that if he held in his hand what
he was looking for, the witching sticks would find that
specific thing. He even believed that he could find natural gas.
Though the specific tactics and even theatrics vary, they all
(10:31):
hinge on a single principle that spurred my curiosity since
I was a child. Many, if not most people, when
holding these rods or a four could stick. When you
walk over water or a buried water line, or even
an underground electric line, the sticks will move like they're
being pulled by a magnet. And the way I've seen
(10:53):
it done, the witching sticks are primarily straightened out clothes
hangers or just common thin metal wire in the shape
of an elm. Despite the criticism science saying that it
isn't real, I'm telling you from personal experience, something moves
the rods. I'm trying to understand what that something is.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Yeah, you know, it's just you know, people were just
just you know, what do they say, especially if it
was new to them. They had never seen anything like that,
and a lot of old timers they'd seen water, which
is before and I think it was a lot more
common in the older days because whenever you dug a well,
you dug you physically dug a water well, and you
looked for a spot that wasn't fifty feet deep. You
(11:42):
know you found it.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
There was a little more consequence to it when you're
hand big and a well versus drilling with a big
piece of machinery. They were looking for any edge. Yeah,
I guess when you think about somebody that was want
and water, they're definitely on the landscape. We know that
there's some places are good, some places all right, someplaces
that have water, someplaces don't. There were people that thought
(12:03):
they could help you find it.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Right.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Waterwitching and its psychology begins to be understood when you
establish a fundamental fact good water isn't everywhere. This is
the voice of another family friend of ours, Ozark cattle
farmer Roger Quinton.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Like we were talking about the upper place. When I
was a kid, we didn't have no water. Still ain't
got no water on that farm. But right across fence
and they were drilled well behind his house and they
hit good water.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
They had good, sweet water.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
They went right up on the hill about one hundred
foot they drilled another well, fell into a cavern and
had good water. Two hundred foot west of there they
drilled a well and it's the nastiest sulfur in the world,
and they ain't very much of it. We had a
well two hundred and fifty foot south of that Goodwill,
and it had so much natural gas in she couldn't
(12:59):
use it. And there's places that they're in anywhere you
get across the.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Road over yonder.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
I think you can drill a thousand foot deep not
getting no water, you know, they just it won't turn
stick at all.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
And variability.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, so that's how spotty good water and bad water
is anywhere in the Ozarks.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Good water isn't everywhere, and the success of your well
can come down to a matter of feet. Some regions
of the country sit above giant underground aquifers, and water
is always at a known distance. But places like the
Ozarks are kars underlain with limestone, producing unseen fissures, sinkholes
and caverns. So why wouldn't you look for help beyond
(13:43):
what your eyes can see? Water witchers believe they could
help answer a question of great consequence, But how accurate
are they? Here's mark on seth. How how accurate was
he in helping people to your knowledge? You know what?
You would know?
Speaker 3 (14:03):
He was pretty good, I would say the guys that
were drilling the well. The well drillers, they love to
be able to pull out on am you know, pull
up somebody's house or future house and see a stake
driven out there in the pasture. They were thrilled because hey,
the pressure was off of them. Yeah. It wasn't like
the guy says, well, I've hired you to come out
(14:23):
and drill the water well and I want you to
hit water. You're fixing, fixing to spend you know, thousands
of dollars.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
All the liabilities on the water witcher who said drill here.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Yeah, because hey, the the you know, the pressure was
off of them.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Well, and if you hired a well driller today, he
essentially is doing the same job as a water witcher.
I mean he's not using any you know, tech techniques, but.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
He's maybe maybe he's using intuition. Maybe he is, uh,
you know, he's drilled thousands of well so no doubt.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
In a specific area, so he would know waters usually
in the valleys or on the hills.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Actually, and actually Seth would say I could find better
water away from a river or a creek or a
lower heats you off on the hillside.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Roger Quinton lives about five miles over the mountain from Mark,
and he's what I would call a casual water which
he grew up around it. He understands its limitations, but
which are well for family when needed. I want us
to see how commonness.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Is my great grandfather which the lot. If the water
witcher say he would settle well, and my granddad lived
to be ninety seven years old, and they they would
come get him. He never And if you you kept
telling me about those people that are professionals, there is
(15:47):
no professional. If they charge you money to which you're well,
go get you somebody else, because he don't know any
more than no boy that does it for a hobby.
But you know, I've known of it all my life.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
My dad could do it. I can do it.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Take a peach tree and put it between hands, you
walk across the stream of water. If it's good enough,
it'll it'll twist the hands. And you know you wouldn't
think they do it, but the end of that stick
will go straight down. Now, mister Timmins over there that
you talk to, Mark find all about he's I've seen
(16:26):
him work lot. He had a little different technique. He
could tell you how many feet it was deep and
all that, but it's all say principle.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
It's just what it is.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
And sometimes you know, I waged one here two years ago.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
It twists the water out on my hand.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
At ninety foot we hit thirty forty fifty gall in
a minute. We had to case it off and we
had to drive a thousand foot before we got any
more water.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
But you found that water that was close?
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Oh yeah, it was, it was, and I know what
it was there.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
There are many techniques for witching water. Roger has a
traditional and simple method using a forked peach limb, which
is a favorite type of wood. Many believe different woods
react differently, and I'll try to describe it. You cut
a green limb about as big around as your pinky.
That's the shape of the letter why. The bicycle handlebar
(17:24):
part should be about twelve to fourteen inches on each fork,
and the single rods sticking out about eight to ten inches.
You hold the stick like you're riding a bicycle, and
the single rod sticks out straight, and when it feels
like the stick is being pulled downward like by a magnet,
it's believed to indicate water. However, many people use too
(17:46):
thin metal rods bit in the shape of an al,
held parallel to each other, and as you walk, the
rod's cross indicating water beneath. But I'd like to ask
a more fundamental question, what is the mechanism behind what
makes them move? Here's Mark. So, with your knowledge of Seth,
(18:07):
did what did he feel like he was tapping into?
Do you think he felt like it was just physics.
There's just some unexplainable physics. Did he think it was supernatural?
Speaker 5 (18:16):
Like?
Speaker 1 (18:17):
What did he think it was?
Speaker 3 (18:18):
It was just it was a gift. I think he
looked at it as a.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Gift, as like a human gift.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah, and it's one of those things that it makes
absolutely no common sense, but yet you know you do it,
you know it's it's done. And Seth was not one
of these bragful, boastful tell a tall tale, you know.
He was. He was very factual. He rarely what you
(18:45):
would say, embellish on a story or anything like that.
He was. It's just it was just common to him.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
He was. Was Seth a religious person at all?
Speaker 3 (18:53):
He was, Yeah, he was a church going you know,
but he wasn't preachy.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
I asked that because I wondered, Uh, how he equated
like having this because if it was a if he
felt like and I think a lot of people did
feel like it was like a personal gift that they
could do this. How do they equate that into like
their their faith and stuff? You know that wasn't even connected.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
I don't he never really talked about it. Yeah, you know,
people woul ask him for Seth, why can't I do
this right? Well, he said, I guess you just don't
have it?
Speaker 1 (19:25):
What do you what do you make of the whole
water witching scene? So you knew a guy like Seth,
but you also carry copper witch and sticks in your
truck sometimes? What do you what do you make of it?
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Well, you know, most anybody, I've never seen really anybody
that it didn't work with. And it would be curious
to be around somebody that it did not work with.
What you know, right, what's their problem?
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Do you think it's physics? Do you think it's it's
a gift that a human has? What do you think?
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Well, I don't think it's a gimmick. You know, there's
definitely something that he's tuned to. And but Seth was
I don't know a lot more sensitive to it, in
tune to it, you know, whatever you want to say. Uh,
but oh yeah, if I was going to go out
(20:22):
here and drill a water well, I would definitely have
somebody come out with it, you know, kind of make
the odds a little bit better in your favor.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
I like that answer. It makes the odds a little
bit more in your favor. The psychology of water witching
is interesting. In many handle it like a superstition, like
let's do it just in case it can't hurt. Some
say witching sticks operate on the same principle as a
Oiji board, okay, which I don't like. I don't see
(20:53):
the connection. No, when I've ever known tries to summon
spirits while they're looking for water, and like I said,
into witchcraft and I just don't think that the devil
cares where my water line is buried. But this is
more interesting. Some experts believe the movement of the sticks
is fueled by the psychological phenomenon called the ideal motor effect,
(21:16):
where your thoughts can trigger physical movements without conscious intent,
where suggestions and expectations can trigger muscle movements which bypass
our will so the water which are subconsciously beyond his knowledge,
is moving the sticks, tricking his mind into thinking it's
happening on its own. If this is the case, I'd
(21:41):
say it's worth its own study, its own bear grease,
because I'm telling you the sticks move and your hands don't.
So is this human psychology that we're dealing with or physics?
Maybe it's both. I've got a question for Roger. What
would it like if you are just let's say, the
(22:02):
ozarks fifty years ago? Would a water witcher just have
been like a common or just somebody that could do it?
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Just I mean it would have just been like it
wasn't even funny. It wasn't even a question of whether
it works. It's just like, that's just what these people do.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Everybody want to well, they don't get either just Clinton
or Seth Timmins or somebody, Yeah, to go go with you. Well,
and now the well drillers now them drillers, So them
witches don't know nothing about it.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
But I wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
I would if I drilled well, I would want to
witch you.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Uh what do you what do you make of it?
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Like?
Speaker 1 (22:41):
What do you think? Do you think it's do you
think it's real?
Speaker 2 (22:44):
I have no idea what the physics is it of it,
or what the scientific part of it is, but I
just know it works.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
So you you think it's it is physics, though it's
not like some supernatural thing.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
No, it's just like finding a water line with two
close agents.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Roger just mentioned finding a water line with two clothes hangars,
as if that were common knowledge in America for everybody.
But that's exactly what I grew up doing. We called
it witching for a water line, and it works on
electric lines too. I've known how to do this since
I was a teenager. Am I really this deceived and
this gullible? If it is this ideometer effect, I'm just
(23:29):
telling you that it's wild. This is absolutely getting out
of control. I've been searching for the answer far too
long on Google. I am headed out of the country,
headed into the big city to find the answer. I'm
(24:06):
walking towards the University of Arkansas campus. It's been twenty
years since I've been in the physics building. I am
potentially illegally parked, and I'm going to see one of
my old professors, doctor Daniel Kineffect. He was my physics
teacher and some pretty interesting things have come up in
(24:28):
my life as an adult that now I've got to
go back and see him, and I've got some serious
questions for him that have come up in my life
that have been challenged. Waterwitching, dowsing, using divining rods. These
are things that I grew up around. Wasn't an expert,
(24:50):
but they were common and we're just accepted as something
that was real. And I've used them, used them much
of my life, even used them when I was a
landscaper to locate water lines and electric lines underground. And
the older I get, the more it feels like I'm
kind of crazy. But I want to go see doctor
(25:13):
Kennefec and ask him if there's any physics behind this
that could validate that it works, because the science I've
seen says it is not real. I've got a pair
of witch and sticks in my hand. Walking down the
sidewalking and I'm going to the physics building. Walking onto
(25:36):
the University of Arkansas campus is a trip down memory
lane as I ponder if I am one of the
uneducated people that the trickery and lies of water witching
have deceived and prayed upond, I guess it's possible but
only science can answer this question. And as we know,
physics seeks to understand the nature and properties of matter,
(25:59):
energy and their interactions like stuff bumping together. What makes
stuff move? It tells us how the physical universe works.
It will tell us why the witch and sticks move.
This should be simple. Here's doctor kinnefect, So what do
you know about dowsing, divining rods and water witch? What's
(26:22):
your knowledge of that?
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Well?
Speaker 6 (26:24):
I always heard the word dowsing. That was what I
would have heard growing up in Ireland. Divining sometimes so,
and it is true that from a physics point of view,
it's difficult to see what it is that you'd be
detecting with the rod in the water, for instance. You've
almost certainly heard the phrase that is so commonly used
(26:46):
about gravity and physics. We started with that as being
as it were, the first force in the sense that
it's what Newton had it. And now, as you may know,
we claim there are four fundamental forces in nature that
we know, and it's commonly said by physicists that gravity.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Is the weakest of them. What are the four forces?
Speaker 6 (27:01):
So we have gravity, we have electromagnetism, and then we
have the strong nuclear force, and the weakly clear force.
So those forces are both sort of hidden down in
the nucleus. We never encounter them in our kay live.
The thing is that gravity is really weak. I can't
see how it could be anything gravitation because we do
know that. Actually, while I think everybody hopefully knows that
(27:25):
gravity is caused by massive objects, right, mass is what
produces the gravitation. But now an interesting question becomes, Okay,
but what if the mass is in motion? Does that
change things? And the answer is actually, in principle it does.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
So potentially moving water could do something too.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
Yes, Yeah.
Speaker 6 (27:42):
The trouble is that the amount of water that we
have here in the Earth, it's just far too weak.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
Gravity as a weak force is kind of confusing. But
the four fundamental forces in the universe are gravity, electromagnetism,
and the strong and weak nuclear force. These forces govern
all interactions of matter in the universe period. Doctor kin
Effect says gravity would be the most likely candidate, but
(28:10):
he thinks it's highly unlikely. When you hear stuff like
this like dowsing, as a physicist, do you automatically think
this is hopeless focus?
Speaker 6 (28:21):
I mean, I'm thinking that it would be difficult for
me to see how to prove that it was true.
That would be really think Now, of course, the physicists
are all different, and yeah, you would certainly get physicists
who would be pretty dismissive to yeh, don't talk to
me about that, right, I mean, I am more open
minded in my view. I don't know because I haven't
(28:43):
studied it, right, what I know? And then an answer
to the question will why not study it? And the
answer comes back to that question. There's so much stuff
out there to study, you can't do everything.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Okay, So that's part of my deal. There's been a
lot of research on specifically dowsing for underground water, and
basically all the research that we've found has shown that
these dowsers for water had no more chance of finding
water than someone of the random chance. So, I mean,
(29:12):
that's what the academic research points to that we've found.
And I'm not really that sold on. I don't know
how to find underground natural water using dowsing rods. I
do believe that I could go out in your yard
right now and locate your electric lines. And there are thousands,
(29:36):
if not hundreds of thousands of people in the country
today plumbers and electricians that carry divining rods in their
trucks and man, the way that it was presented to
me was completely functional. I've yet to find any science
that validates it, but it would.
Speaker 6 (29:56):
It's tricky because, and here's where the skepticism comes in.
It so often happens that when you take something like
that and you bring it into the lab to study it,
it kind of evaporates. Yeah, now, why does that happen?
Is that because the person involved is essentially a fraud?
Maybe I don't know. Maybe it's not mystical, but it's
just subtle, right, And the particular thing that makes it
(30:18):
work somehow is gone when you're in the lab and
you don't know what it is. And that happens even
in the lab, right, I could give you examples.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
So that's not like laughable to you.
Speaker 6 (30:27):
You know that happens?
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah, does it really? Like you go to the lab
and it literally doesn't work in the lab, but it works,
or you go.
Speaker 6 (30:33):
To a different lab but it worked in the first
lab but not in the second lab.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Say, I would think you would say, Clay, that is
human bias and just crazy people.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
It can be.
Speaker 6 (30:42):
It can be, but there are situations where you find it. Oh,
that's because we didn't really know what was making this work.
We hadn't identified the cause of it. I mean, let
me give you a quick example. So in my field,
gravitation ways, there was a claim, this is decades ago
now in the Soviet Union then still the Soviet Union,
that they were getting a very good Q factor quality factor,
(31:03):
resonant factor with a certain crystal. And there was a
lot of skepticism from people in the West, and they
couldn't replicate it, you know, they set it up the
way that people told them they had done it, but
it wasn't work, and so people were thinking, God, these
guys are maybe fraudulent, right, And so then one of
the non Soviet groups sent a guy over there and
(31:24):
he was tasked to figure out what was going on.
And apparently he did actually figure it out, because it
turned out that to make it work, when you suspended
the crystal from a special wire, very expensive, carefully constructed wire,
but you also needed to grease the wire. And the
way that the Russians did this was pretty casual. In
(31:44):
the lab, they'd just gotten used to it. They took
the wire and they typically just rubbed it behind the
rear to get a little bit of grease on it.
And the trouble is you don't put that in the
scientific pick you know, said hey, be sure you rubbed
the wire behind the gear grease right, So nobody did
that anywhere else, but he discovered that he saw them
do it right, so he said, oh, should I do
that too? And I said, oh, you got to do
that right.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
And so this very like fundamental thing threw the whole
thing off.
Speaker 7 (32:10):
That's right.
Speaker 6 (32:10):
So if you didn't have the ear grease, it didn't work.
And so when he went back home, the group in
Scotland that's where he was from, uh, succeeded. Where the
other group's trying to replicate this approach.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Film, it just it just shows the challenges that there
are in measuring some of these things, and even motivation too.
It's like you've got bigger fish the fry in this
and so it's plausible that it's just not really been
researched enough.
Speaker 6 (32:36):
Yeah, yeah, and especially because of course there's a moving target, right,
am I really studying whether you can find water with
a wooden rod or an electric cable with a metal rod?
Those are two from a physicist point of view, boy,
those are two big, very different things.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 6 (32:51):
I would be looking for different explanations in both of
those cases.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
So it is possible that science just hasn't uncovered the
full story. It is possible that water witch in just
won't fit into the scientific method box because there are
too many variables for it to work in a controlled environment.
This could be the classic excuse for pseudoscience. Or maybe
it's true. Look back at all the things that science
(33:15):
has got wrong in the past, but also look back
at all the pseudo scientists that got a bunch of
stuff wrong. But you are not going to believe this.
Right in the middle of my interview with doctor Kenefect,
there is a knock on the door and in walks
his niece Sarah. He tells her what we're talking about,
and she says, I had a guy witch you well
(33:37):
for us just last year. Within five minutes, I'm interrogating
her about her story. Meet Sarah. You can't make this
stuff up. So I'm doing an interview with doctor Kinneffect,
my foreign physics teacher, and in walks some of his
family and they just so happened to have fairly recently.
(34:00):
Oh yes, in the last six months six months.
Speaker 5 (34:03):
So his father whiched my parents well, and we reached
out to his family when I needed a well and
his father has since passed. I actually talked to his brother,
and his brother was like, I don't have the skill,
but my brother does, so you need to go talk
to my brother. So we gave him a call. He
(34:24):
came on out for one hundred and fifty dollars, he
will witch you're well. He had truly like a stick,
the why stick off of a tree. Yeah, and then
he had his dowsing rods, which were some sort of
gold medal.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
I didn't okay, said two different things.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
So he started with the stick this why stick holding
the two ends and walked the property. He said, actually
he asked us where's the house going to be? So
we kind of told him where, and he's like, where
would you like it? And so we kind of pointed
in a direction and he started sort of triangulating, walking
across and across and across. He said he was looking
(35:05):
for faults. So he found what he says is a fault,
and then he got out his two dowsing rods and
walked like a smaller area and then he was like Okay,
right here, he says, of course he can't guarantee it,
but we had the well dug and they went down
about two hundred feet and we have about four gallons
(35:27):
per minute?
Speaker 1 (35:27):
So is that good for your area? It's not great
for my area. So it didn't work that well.
Speaker 5 (35:34):
No, my parents well is actually more like ten gallons
a minute. And so if you look online, like there's
some role places that won't certify the will if it's
less than six gallons a minute. What I was telling
some of my friends was actually like it's a good
bit of what I felt was performance art.
Speaker 7 (35:55):
Really yeah.
Speaker 5 (35:56):
He was like, well, where do you want it? And
so like he sort of walked back and forth. There's
a very very distinct ravine on one side, big mountain
on the other, and it's like, okay, like to find
a fault in that. It's like, well, there's there's a
pond on one side and then there's you know, a
ravine on the other. So like where with the where
(36:19):
with the water table be?
Speaker 1 (36:20):
So why did you why did you hire him? He
was the one I knew, I mean, but why did
you think that you needed a water witcher to find
your water? Would that just be like just something that
everybody down there does.
Speaker 8 (36:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Yeah, really, so it's just common just like, hey, if
you're gonna drill, well might as well. Is it kind
of like it's probably not really gonna work, but it might,
so it's worth taking a chance.
Speaker 8 (36:43):
Yeah, why not?
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Is that the way you felt?
Speaker 7 (36:46):
Sure?
Speaker 5 (36:46):
I mean, for one hundred and fifty bucks, It's like,
let's let's give it a shot. Let's say if it works,
we were going to dig a well around that area anywot.
So for him to come out and go, yeah, you
probably find water here, you kind of go, okay, like
is it worth like, you know, fifteen hundred dollars? Probably
not about one hundred and fifty one hundred fifty bucks.
It's like, let's figure out. Let's see what he does.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Roger Quinton told us that you shouldn't have to pay
for a water witcher. But let's not forget that this
guy which Sarah's mother's ten gallon a minute well too,
So technically he was one hundred percent on finding water.
Some say that you can find water anywhere if you're
willing to dig deep enough, But I like Sarah's attitude
(37:26):
about the whole deal. It's worth a shot. You might
be under the impression that water witchers are these mystical
hippie bearded guys wearing poenty hats. But all the water
witchers that I've ever known have been practical, down to
earth people. I'd like you to meet a water witcher,
a legit water witcher from Madison County, Arkansas, who was
(37:48):
a logger and a carpenter his whole life. I think
you'll appreciate his simple, no fluff attitude about it. I
wanted to see how he got started.
Speaker 9 (37:59):
My name Carl Holt, and the way I got starready
just being around them old guys, don't it. And that's
been forty something years ago or fifty.
Speaker 7 (38:12):
Oh.
Speaker 9 (38:12):
I watched them and they let me sometimes use their
stuff and do with the heck call of elves wooden stick.
A way back there there was an old man named
last name of Tuddle lived over where my drive for
and he's probably the first one I ever seen which
well figured out I could do it. I've done a
bunch of them up around Kingston and up on the mountain,
(38:36):
and I ate one to Yellville and doesn't.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
When you go out to a piece of property, what
would you do would you ask the landowners any questions?
Would you just start walking? Would you use some clues
that maybe you know about where water would be and
go there first? Ay?
Speaker 9 (38:55):
Usually just figured out how far they wanted it from
the house and made a circle round, and that didn't work.
Speaker 7 (39:02):
You wanted a little lighter.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
You've had quite a bit of success finding water with
the wells that have been drilled where you said there
was water.
Speaker 9 (39:11):
Yeah, they've always hit water and sometimes it's pretty deep.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yeah. How does it work in a community? How would
people know that you would witch a well for them?
Just word of mouth?
Speaker 7 (39:25):
Yeah, just word of mouth.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Do you expect anything from people when you witch well
for them?
Speaker 7 (39:29):
Nope?
Speaker 9 (39:30):
I just tell them the ain't no guarantee. Yeah, so far,
so good.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
What do you think the mechanics of water witching working
to find underground water is?
Speaker 9 (39:43):
I'm not really sure. I figure a person's got something
in their body that does it. I don't know, because
really there's no signs on it, and physically it shouldn't
be possible, but it isn't.
Speaker 7 (39:59):
It works.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Do you think about that? What you just said that
there's no science behind it, it shouldn't work. I mean, well,
are you just okay with that? Yeah, you just that
doesn't even bother you at all.
Speaker 9 (40:10):
Nah, because most people that want me to witch, well
they've talked to somebody else I've wished one for. Yeah,
they just have to trust me.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
The old man that I heard about over in hog
Guy that was a big water witcher, he believed that
it was a personal gift. So he really believed that
it was like supernatural essentially.
Speaker 7 (40:32):
Huh.
Speaker 9 (40:32):
I don't really, I don't really agree with that. I
mean because like me and people that are a lot
different people and still witch water.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Talking with Carl, you quickly see that he doesn't have
anything to prove or an ego to stroke. Waterwitching is
just a tool that he can use to help the
people in his community. You don't get a Charlattan vibe
from him at all, or any sense that this eye
doesn't one hundred percent believe everything that he says. I
(41:05):
want to hear his process. He uses a y shaped
green limb, but it's got to be alive.
Speaker 9 (41:13):
That's hard to explain. You can how you to hold
a stick like that pointing out right and you can
hold as tight as you want to, and whenever you
go over that water it's going down. If it has twists,
the bark off and the deeper it is less, it's
not as bad. But you can get one. It's pretty
(41:34):
close and it'll burn your hands trying to hold it.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Yeah, I've heard people say that.
Speaker 7 (41:41):
What causes it? I having a clue.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
What would you say to skeptics that would say that
you're subconsciously moving the stick with your hands.
Speaker 9 (41:54):
Ain't happening. You can hold it like get and it'll
still pull. Yeah, some people probably think it.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
I think people that say that a human is unconsciously
moving it with their hands they've never done it before.
Speaker 7 (42:10):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
I mean, because it's hard to deny that that thing's
moving on its own. If you've done it right, you
will you show me how you make a stick, and
I want you to show me how you do it.
Speaker 7 (42:22):
I'll get the perners and you go down there and
find one. Yeah, that's a hard.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Well, let's let's do that. Let's do that now. After
cutting a live y shaped maple limb, we walk up
to his known well where he knows there's water about
one hundred yards uphill from his house.
Speaker 7 (42:49):
Okay, all right.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
Go ahead.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
So he's holding that tight like he's squeezing that would
and it is pulling down, like it's actually twisting in
his hand. So I mean, it's actually you're like trying
to hold it tight and I won't do it. You
can't show me again back up. So it's not he's
(43:15):
not tricking himself. He's holding it as tight as he can.
And as he walks over this well, we know there's
water here. It's pulling out. He's he's not twisting that.
It's going down on its own, like something's pulling on it.
Speaker 7 (43:35):
That's worked for you for forty years longer.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
I filmed Carl Death gripping his y shaped maple limb
and saw the sticks with my own eyes twist in
his hands like a fishing pole bending under the tension
of a big catfish. It went down at least eight inches.
I'm going to post this video on my Instagram, and
I'm certain people will say that me and Carl are delusional,
(44:03):
and maybe we are. But if it's the ideo motor effect,
I want to know the physics of how micro movements
and the palms of his stationary death gripped hands can
twist the wood. A human doesn't have snake scales or
centipede legs on the palms of their hands that can
move wood. I just cannot fathom the physics of that,
(44:25):
and I saw it with my own eyes. You just
got to see it and feel it to believe it.
But please hear the nuance in what I'm saying. I
don't know if it really helps you find water, but
with all the intellect and skepticism and intelligence that I
can muster, I'm telling you I believe those sticks are
(44:46):
moving on their own. And I think that this is
a good time to hear from America's greatest skeptic and
my friend meat Eater's own Stephen Ranella.
Speaker 4 (44:59):
When I went water witch and with Clay. Oh, and
first off, I know Clay doesn't like calling it water
witching because he thinks it kind of sounds like sorcery.
But that's how I knew it as a kid, is
water witching. I'm at Waterwitch and with Clay down in
the Florida Everglades. We were down there doing a different
work project, but it came up that he was going
to do some water witching, and we happened to know
(45:21):
an area where there had been some water lines under
the ground.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
If I remember correctly of something like that.
Speaker 4 (45:28):
So we knew a test site, okay, and Clay rigged
up his witch and rod. I was very skeptical. I
remained very skeptical. But it's hard to explain something when
you're holding those wires. Something's happening. Something's happening that I
(45:49):
can't explain. Maybe it's like your pulse goes up, some
kind of electromagnetic thing in your body. I don't know,
but I would be walking along regardless of what was
going on, subserve. I would be walking along, and there
would be like unmistakable activity in the rod, in the
witch and rod, and try as I might, I just
(46:10):
couldn't figure out like what I was doing, what I
could be doing personally that would drive the movement of
the rod right, just trying to hold like as stationary
as possible, and that sucker would bend. And yeah, I
can see where people get the idea that something's happening
and it's detecting water, some kind of magnetic whatever. I
(46:33):
can't explain it, but I'll tell you a quick story.
Just the other day, we were having a conversation about ghosts. Okay,
who believes in ghosts and who doesn't believe in ghosts.
A dear friend of mine gives his ghost story, all right.
His ghost story is that one time his dog freaked
out in the middle of the night and kept staring
into a bedroom, an empty bedroom, and then wouldn't stop
(46:55):
staring in air, and then went and looked on the bed. Okay,
So he's like, therefore, or that's a ghost story. Now
when I hear that story, I'm.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Like, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (47:06):
Maybe the mouse ran through there, maybe the dog was
tripping out, like the fact that that happens. I can't
jump to that. It's like ghost like. There could be
all these other explanations. Same with the witch and rod.
The witch and rod is moving. I just can't tell
that it's not me doing it right, or like some
(47:26):
impulse in my body or some ever so slight moment,
or like your palms get sweaty. I don't know, rather
than it's detecting subsurface water or structures. But again, something's
going on in the rids. I just don't know what
it is.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
You have no idea. How satisfied it was to see
Steve holding those witch and sticks and watching them move.
His head was spinning backwards. But I now want to
introduce you to a professional who has the most practical
insight that we've heard yet.
Speaker 8 (48:01):
My name is Colin Deaton. I live in Marble, Arkansas,
in Madison County. Been in the commercial construction industry for
twenty one years doing excavation and underground utilities site work.
I would say over twenty one years in doing the
what I do for a living, I've probably witched and
confirmed the accuracy of what I've witched out thousands of times.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
Colin, would you describe yourself as like a normal person?
Speaker 3 (48:29):
It's probably debatable, but yeah, have you had.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Any history of deep mental illness or any witchcraft in
your background?
Speaker 3 (48:38):
Not?
Speaker 1 (48:38):
To my knowledge, You're like a very normal, very rational,
clean cut smart guy.
Speaker 8 (48:44):
Thank you. It's nice.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
It's not a weirdo, folks. That's what I'm trying to
tell you, normal people. Water witch.
Speaker 8 (48:58):
Well, the first time I heard about the dow was
from Grandpa father. People like that about finding water for wealth.
But I really didn't know anything about it until I
started doing it for commercial construction, locating utilities and such.
First formul I had. Benny Alvard is the first one
to tell me about it, and I kind of thought
(49:20):
it was a joke like one of the go get
the pipe stretcher thing. Here, hold these things, I'll show
you how to how to find the line. But after
doing it several times and seeing something actually get dug
up where we located it, I started to believe. And
then now I just do it every day if I
want to know where something is.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
It feels to me like there's two two categories of
people that talk about this stuff, and most media focuses
on like the folksy people that are that say they're
able to find underground natural water. But then there's this
other group of people that actually are carrying thousand rods
in their truck on a daily basis, not trying to
(50:00):
be folksy or cute.
Speaker 7 (50:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
Construction people that literally are trying to find stuff underground.
Speaker 8 (50:06):
Yeah, you see it all the time, or I do
every day. Every contractor I've ever work with does the
same thing. It's not nobody thinks it's too crazy.
Speaker 1 (50:16):
We've talked about this at length, But you can use
metal rods to find all types of underground utilities. Yep,
it's kind of weird but true. There are companies that
sell commercial witch and sticks that have handles making it
where you actually aren't even touching the rods. They spend
completely on their own. Once again, can the ideo motor
(50:37):
effect transfer through a handle into a rod. I don't
know how confident would you be right now to walk
out into my yard, which you've never been here before.
How confident are you that you could find my waterline?
Speaker 8 (50:54):
If you've got a water line go into your house
with which I would assume you do. Yeah, I could
show you where it's you I want to know.
Speaker 1 (51:00):
So you're that confident in what you do.
Speaker 8 (51:03):
It might take me a little bit, but I could
sort it out. Sometimes you want to take cues from
things you see already, just to verify, because you can
locate anything, not just water lines. Like I could locate
a tree root out there and think it's your water line.
I would have to play with it a little bit,
walk around, but then I could get confident.
Speaker 1 (51:19):
So you are using all kind of clues, like you're
not just using exactly what's in your hand. You're using exactly.
Speaker 8 (51:29):
I mean, the witch and sticks are going to cross
up if there's something underground, whether it's a water sewer,
electric communication, tree root extension, I could walk over that
cord right there, and it would cross up. It could
be an extension cord laying on the ground. Power to it,
no power to it.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
I think that's where we lose people, is you're like, now,
wait a minute. It'll cross over an electric line, a
gas line. This is where it gets really freaky. They
will cross one hundred percent of the time over a
grave or.
Speaker 8 (52:01):
A found an old foundation that's buried.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
Yes, it's it's it's picking up on something because it
is not. I mean that. What does it feel like
when they move in your hands?
Speaker 8 (52:12):
You don't really feel it? Yeah, I mean because you
have to keep your hands pretty loose on it or
they won't move if there's restriction there, So you don't
really feel it. You just kind of feel them as
they slide.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
It feels like a magnet to me. That's the way
I would describe it, like magnetism. Like making these rods cross.
This brings up an odd and confusing point. You hold
metal witching sticks loosely so they can move on their own,
But when you hold a green forked limb you can
hold it as tight as you want. Hey, boys, I
(52:43):
don't make the rules, I just know them. And this
is just wild kind of unrelated. But doctor kin Effect
told me that there is a sophisticated, high dollar instrument
that they use to measure gravity and it's able to
detect grave As I understand it, it's because of the
hollow casket creating an almost imperceivable distance in gravity. Point being,
(53:10):
there is some unusual stuff going on in the universe,
like to me. I'm not claiming to be good at it,
but I can tell you it is like gravity. There's
no question, like I don't have to summon spirits or
prey or it's like there's nothing supernatural going on here.
(53:34):
This is a force that is equivalent to gravity that
works every time, it doesn't not work sometimes. Now I'm
not saying it's always accurate.
Speaker 8 (53:43):
Yeah, Okay, to that point, I can get false positives, right,
is what I would call it. I've done that before.
Thought I was witching something, Doug, Doug, Doug didn't find it.
Maybe there's something deeper than what I was digging. I
can't explain that sometimes, but I've never a false negative,
you know, like I've never I'm hug and oh my goodness,
(54:06):
I didn't see that. I didn't think that was there. Yeah,
if there's something there I always cross up on it. Yeah,
I if I witch out of square before I dig
and I don't find anything, I'm one hundred percent confident
that there's nothing in that square.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
If the IDEO motor effect is real, then it makes
me wonder what else in my life is completely fabricated
that I'm convinced is one hundred percent real. That's a
scary question. Human perception is frail. We all know people
that live in a delusional world in some part of
their life. It's easy to see in someone else, but
(54:41):
hard to see in your own life. But to blindly
accept the idio motor effect is one hundred percent true
seems frail logic too. I'm no expert, but here's a
quote from an academic paper on the IDEO motor effect.
Despite its long history and the theoretical and port it
existing empirical evidence for the IDEO motor theory is not
(55:04):
strong enough to rule out an alternative hypothesis. End of quote.
I don't want to misrepresent the research. They believe that
it validated the effect. However, sounds to me like it's
not as straightforward as gravity. There is some presumption, and
it sounds like believing this takes some faith in something too.
(55:26):
This stuff is just hard to quantify. It's possible, though,
that the answer is deeper. I want to ask doctor
Kinneffect an existential question about knowledge. How much do you
feel like we actually know about physics because here we
(55:46):
are in twenty twenty five, where we're at the pinnacle
of human knowledge and intelligence and awareness of our universe?
Or we assume that? And do you feel like they're
more unanswered questions than when you started?
Speaker 6 (56:01):
Oh, there absolutely are more unanswered questions all the time.
In many ways, the development of science involves the creation
of questions non answers. I don't mean we're uninterested in answers.
They're great. But usually when you get an answer, you
get more questions. And that's certainly true in my field.
We are, at one sense, much higher than where we
started in terms of reaching a pinnacle.
Speaker 3 (56:23):
That's clear.
Speaker 6 (56:24):
Newton himself said, you know, I stood on the shoulders
of giants, right. He could see further than the people
before him. And we can see further than Newton could see.
But we're conscious of not being near the summit. We're
not near the pinnacle.
Speaker 1 (56:33):
Really, just your like personal engagement with physics, and you've
dedicated your career and your life to this for a
long time. Yes, does it feel like you're moving towards
something that is infinite in a way, Like even if
twenty five years from now, if we had this conversation,
(56:54):
would we be any closer to understanding everything?
Speaker 6 (56:58):
That is a good question, and I can't tell you
for sure whether we'll be closer. And it's unclear, of course,
how we would define closer, because we're approximating to something
we don't know. We don't know what the real true
laws are. We only know what our discoveries are. How
close we are to the real truth is I think
(57:20):
fundamentally unknowable. I don't mean that we can say our
ideas now seem to be better than they were before,
because I think that is fair. I mean, we have
learned a lot, But how close we are to being
as it were done is another question. And we know
that at times in the past when physicists thought they
were close to being done, they weren't.
Speaker 1 (57:41):
Water witching merges the biases and frailty of human psychology
with the great mysteries of physics exposing our inherent potential
for deception. My final conclusion or at least right now
is simply this. There is something to it, something is
moving the sticks, and I have not heard an answer
(58:03):
that completely satisfies me. So if you've got the gall
take some clothes hangers and go out in your yard
and try to find your waterline. And I'm not saying
you should get a water witcher to come to your
house if you drill a well, but it seems like
it might put the odds in your favor. So I
probably would, and maybe I'd do it for no other
(58:23):
reason than to acknowledge my limited understanding of the universe.
And after all this, I am just a little less
confident in my own perception of reality. And I think
that's good. I think it keeps us humble. It's clear
of the things modernity has given us, so much of
(58:44):
it good, but we have no idea what we've lost.
Thank you for listening to Bear Grease. Please share our
podcast with a friend this week, leave us a review
on iTunes, and be sure to check out the new
Bear Griefs merch on the media website. We've got some
sweet mossy oak bear grease hats. Keep the wild places wild,
(59:08):
because that's where the bears live.
This is what these people.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Everybody want to well, they don't get either. Just Quinton
or set Timmins or somebody, Yeah, to go wit you well.
And now the well drillers, now them drillers, of them
witches don't know nothing about it.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
But I wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I would if I drilled well, I would want to
witch you.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Have you ever heard of witching for water? It's an
ancient folk method for finding underground water, but people today
believe that you can also use it to find underground
utilities and a bunch of other stuff. It's long been
chalked off by science as hocus pocus, but it's still
widely used in rural America, and I'm interested in how
(00:50):
people view this. On this episode, we'll interview seven people.
A legit water witcher, a casual water witcher, a guy
who knew a legendary waterwitcher, a guy who's a huge skeptic,
a lady who paid for the services of a waterwitcher,
a guy in commercial construction, and a physicist from a
(01:11):
major university. But I'm only looking for one answer, and
it's not if water witchers can find underground water, but
I want to know what makes the sticks move because
that's the one thing that is not up for debate.
They do move, But I'll let you make the decision
(01:31):
if this is crazy folklore and unsolved physics mystery, or
perhaps we just haven't asked the right questions. But honestly,
you won't be able to make an intelligent decision until
you've tried it for yourself. I really doubt that you're
gonna want to miss this one. And hey, we've got
some sweet new massyoak yep, that's right, Massy Oak Bear
(01:54):
Grease and this country life hats coming out. Check it
out on the meat eater dot com.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
Something's going on in the rides, I just don't know
what it is.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
My name is Klay Knukem, and this is the Bear
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and
(02:34):
fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the place.
As we explore.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He kind of had a kit. I mean he had
an old tin about like what you'd say a fruitcaken. Nowadays,
and in that kit he had pill bottles, just normal
little pill bottles. He would have sulfur water and in
one and he'd have salt water in another one. He
would have good what we call good water, and he'd
(03:09):
put it in these bottles. But he didn't have him
marked he had them. He'd just had black electrical tape
around him. And whenever he'd get out and do some
water witching, he would have all these things in his pocket.
But then whenever he got round to witching, he would
have him in his hand.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
This is the voice of my neighbor Mark Findall. Mark
once told me that he was the biggest farmer in
hall Guy, Arkansas, pausing for a minute before he said,
I'm about two inches taller than my brother. Mark is
telling me a story about a water witcher named Seth
Timmins that he knew very well.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Well. He would he'd get wherever he was going, and
of course he'd had he had a big long elbow
shaped probably big around as your thumb, probably a six
inches handle, and then it ran out about eighteen inches,
just an hell complete a nighty l and he'd get
out and he would hold that up above his head
(04:09):
and it would point the direction he wanted to go
to look for water. So he'd hold that up and
then he had a long piece of I think it
was a brass that he would hold in his hand
and he'd start walking. Then he'd stop and you would
(04:30):
see this thing start bouncing up and down, and he'd
and you'd see him count and then then he'd stop. Well,
then he'd set that down and then he'd get his
He had a it was like an old big carpenter's
plumb bob on a piece of leather, and he would
hold that in his hand, out away from his body,
(04:51):
and he'd have some of that. He'd have whatever it
was he was in one of those pill bottles, and
he'd look at it and if it didn't react, and he'd
put a different pill bottle in his hand and he'd
watch it. Well, then you'd see that things start going
around in a circle, see, and and you'd see him counting,
and he'd put a rock right there where he was
(05:13):
standing and he'd say, well, right here at a one
hundred and sixty feet is good water and it'll make
about five six eight ten gallons a minute. I mean
that's he had that.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
He had that level of confidence in the specificity of
what he was going to find.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Yeah, of course you'd you'd be sitting there, and of
course there'd be the landowner and maybe two or three
neighbors and a bunch of kids bouncing around, and they'd
all have that look on their face, you know, like
you know, that look of what just happened. I don't
think I'm going to say anything, because I don't want
to make him mad or or embarrass him or you know.
But Seth, he never never bothered him, you know.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Out of the gate. I'll tell you that Seth's method
of witch and water was quite unconventional. But it's hard
to say because the origin of water witching is lost
to antiquity. But as to what it actually is, it's
an ancient trade where you use some type of rod
or forked stick to find underground water. Cave paintings in Africa,
(06:15):
believed to be eight thousand years old, depicted water witchers.
Some believe Moses in the Bible smiting the rock with
the staff in the desert and water coming out of
the rock was a form of water witching. The Greeks
wrote about waterwitching in the fifth century. The term waterwitching
is primarily a Scottish and American term, but some call
it dousing and some call it divining for water. Will
(06:39):
use all these words interchangeably. The actual name waterwitching hasn't
done it any favors in modern times, proven to be
a real marketing blunder. People used to believe the mysterious
movement of the witching sticks was supernatural. Some say the
name though, came from them using witch hazel wood. Regardless,
(07:00):
in the Middle Ages, it probably did give a witchcraft vibe,
which I'm not a fan of nor want to play
around with at all. But to add to it all, today,
waterwitching is considered a pseudoscience, and for over one hundred years,
the US Geological Survey has denied any credible evidence that
it works. In a nineteen seventeen paper, they called it
(07:22):
a favorite trick for appealing to uneducated persons, and that
quote further tests by the United States Geological Survey of
this so called witching for water, oil, and other minerals
would be a misuse of public funds. They were done
with it a long time ago, and since then many
(07:43):
controlled academic tests supposedly with expert water witchers, have proven
water witchers can't find underground stuff any better than random chance.
But I'm just not sure that these academics and these
studies got it right. I just think there's something more
(08:08):
I want to hear more about Seth Timmins.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
He was born in February of nineteen twelve in a snowstorm.
He lived between hog Guy and West Fork. He was
an only child, and back then that was a rarity.
Seth was thirty six before when he first got married,
and he said that was just a little bit young.
I mean that's he had a great sentient, great laugh,
(08:34):
you know, outgoing, loved the coffee shop, liked to hear
what was going on in the neighborhood. They were like
super diversified. You know. They had of course, they had
the milk cow, They had their chicken, had a huge garden,
had an o'sal, always had a litter pigs, butchered his
own hogs, you know, working horses, working mules. They raised mules.
(08:55):
That was their big cash crop back in the day,
was raising and selling mules down to the delta. Very
you know what you would think of a typical Arkansas
farmer of the of the era, of that era. But
yet he had season tickets to the race of back
football games. Every Saturday morning that there was a football game,
we'd see he and his wife going, probably three or
(09:17):
four hours before the football game, they'd go up there.
I mean, you know, it wasn't like they were hermits,
lived up on the hill, so and just sitting and
just listening to the stories that he would tell about
growing up, you know, before electricity. That I can always
remember him, you know, as a water witch. Some of
(09:37):
them call it doodlebugging. A lot of time people would
come he they'd want him to come witcha well, and
he never charged, but it was kind of a customary
thing that people would come and pick him up and
take him. They'd come get him and take him because
that way he wouldn't get lost. And he always got
a got a kick out of seeing.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Just leaving this area and going somewhere which today wouldn't
be a very far trip at.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
All, no, you know, considering he grew up riding in
a wagon.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Seth had an old school methodology on water witching that
he undoubtedly learned from people straight out of the eighteen hundreds.
He believed that if he held in his hand what
he was looking for, the witching sticks would find that
specific thing. He even believed that he could find natural gas.
Though the specific tactics and even theatrics vary, they all
(10:31):
hinge on a single principle that spurred my curiosity since
I was a child. Many, if not most people, when
holding these rods or a four could stick. When you
walk over water or a buried water line, or even
an underground electric line, the sticks will move like they're
being pulled by a magnet. And the way I've seen
(10:53):
it done, the witching sticks are primarily straightened out clothes
hangers or just common thin metal wire in the shape
of an elm. Despite the criticism science saying that it
isn't real, I'm telling you from personal experience, something moves
the rods. I'm trying to understand what that something is.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Yeah, you know, it's just you know, people were just
just you know, what do they say, especially if it
was new to them. They had never seen anything like that,
and a lot of old timers they'd seen water, which
is before and I think it was a lot more
common in the older days because whenever you dug a well,
you dug you physically dug a water well, and you
looked for a spot that wasn't fifty feet deep. You
(11:42):
know you found it.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
There was a little more consequence to it when you're
hand big and a well versus drilling with a big
piece of machinery. They were looking for any edge. Yeah,
I guess when you think about somebody that was want
and water, they're definitely on the landscape. We know that
there's some places are good, some places all right, someplaces
that have water, someplaces don't. There were people that thought
(12:03):
they could help you find it.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Right.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Waterwitching and its psychology begins to be understood when you
establish a fundamental fact good water isn't everywhere. This is
the voice of another family friend of ours, Ozark cattle
farmer Roger Quinton.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Like we were talking about the upper place. When I
was a kid, we didn't have no water. Still ain't
got no water on that farm. But right across fence
and they were drilled well behind his house and they
hit good water.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
They had good, sweet water.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
They went right up on the hill about one hundred
foot they drilled another well, fell into a cavern and
had good water. Two hundred foot west of there they
drilled a well and it's the nastiest sulfur in the world,
and they ain't very much of it. We had a
well two hundred and fifty foot south of that Goodwill,
and it had so much natural gas in she couldn't
(12:59):
use it. And there's places that they're in anywhere you
get across the.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Road over yonder.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
I think you can drill a thousand foot deep not
getting no water, you know, they just it won't turn
stick at all.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
And variability.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, so that's how spotty good water and bad water
is anywhere in the Ozarks.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Good water isn't everywhere, and the success of your well
can come down to a matter of feet. Some regions
of the country sit above giant underground aquifers, and water
is always at a known distance. But places like the
Ozarks are kars underlain with limestone, producing unseen fissures, sinkholes
and caverns. So why wouldn't you look for help beyond
(13:43):
what your eyes can see? Water witchers believe they could
help answer a question of great consequence, But how accurate
are they? Here's mark on seth. How how accurate was
he in helping people to your knowledge? You know what?
You would know?
Speaker 3 (14:03):
He was pretty good, I would say the guys that
were drilling the well. The well drillers, they love to
be able to pull out on am you know, pull
up somebody's house or future house and see a stake
driven out there in the pasture. They were thrilled because hey,
the pressure was off of them. Yeah. It wasn't like
the guy says, well, I've hired you to come out
(14:23):
and drill the water well and I want you to
hit water. You're fixing, fixing to spend you know, thousands
of dollars.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
All the liabilities on the water witcher who said drill here.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Yeah, because hey, the the you know, the pressure was
off of them.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Well, and if you hired a well driller today, he
essentially is doing the same job as a water witcher.
I mean he's not using any you know, tech techniques, but.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
He's maybe maybe he's using intuition. Maybe he is, uh,
you know, he's drilled thousands of well so no doubt.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
In a specific area, so he would know waters usually
in the valleys or on the hills.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Actually, and actually Seth would say I could find better
water away from a river or a creek or a
lower heats you off on the hillside.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Roger Quinton lives about five miles over the mountain from Mark,
and he's what I would call a casual water which
he grew up around it. He understands its limitations, but
which are well for family when needed. I want us
to see how commonness.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Is my great grandfather which the lot. If the water
witcher say he would settle well, and my granddad lived
to be ninety seven years old, and they they would
come get him. He never And if you you kept
telling me about those people that are professionals, there is
(15:47):
no professional. If they charge you money to which you're well,
go get you somebody else, because he don't know any
more than no boy that does it for a hobby.
But you know, I've known of it all my life.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
My dad could do it. I can do it.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Take a peach tree and put it between hands, you
walk across the stream of water. If it's good enough,
it'll it'll twist the hands. And you know you wouldn't
think they do it, but the end of that stick
will go straight down. Now, mister Timmins over there that
you talk to, Mark find all about he's I've seen
(16:26):
him work lot. He had a little different technique. He
could tell you how many feet it was deep and
all that, but it's all say principle.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
It's just what it is.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
And sometimes you know, I waged one here two years ago.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
It twists the water out on my hand.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
At ninety foot we hit thirty forty fifty gall in
a minute. We had to case it off and we
had to drive a thousand foot before we got any
more water.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
But you found that water that was close?
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Oh yeah, it was, it was, and I know what
it was there.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
There are many techniques for witching water. Roger has a
traditional and simple method using a forked peach limb, which
is a favorite type of wood. Many believe different woods
react differently, and I'll try to describe it. You cut
a green limb about as big around as your pinky.
That's the shape of the letter why. The bicycle handlebar
(17:24):
part should be about twelve to fourteen inches on each fork,
and the single rods sticking out about eight to ten inches.
You hold the stick like you're riding a bicycle, and
the single rod sticks out straight, and when it feels
like the stick is being pulled downward like by a magnet,
it's believed to indicate water. However, many people use too
(17:46):
thin metal rods bit in the shape of an al,
held parallel to each other, and as you walk, the
rod's cross indicating water beneath. But I'd like to ask
a more fundamental question, what is the mechanism behind what
makes them move? Here's Mark. So, with your knowledge of Seth,
(18:07):
did what did he feel like he was tapping into?
Do you think he felt like it was just physics.
There's just some unexplainable physics. Did he think it was supernatural?
Speaker 5 (18:16):
Like?
Speaker 1 (18:17):
What did he think it was?
Speaker 3 (18:18):
It was just it was a gift. I think he
looked at it as a.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Gift, as like a human gift.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah, and it's one of those things that it makes
absolutely no common sense, but yet you know you do it,
you know it's it's done. And Seth was not one
of these bragful, boastful tell a tall tale, you know.
He was. He was very factual. He rarely what you
(18:45):
would say, embellish on a story or anything like that.
He was. It's just it was just common to him.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
He was. Was Seth a religious person at all?
Speaker 3 (18:53):
He was, Yeah, he was a church going you know,
but he wasn't preachy.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
I asked that because I wondered, Uh, how he equated
like having this because if it was a if he
felt like and I think a lot of people did
feel like it was like a personal gift that they
could do this. How do they equate that into like
their their faith and stuff? You know that wasn't even connected.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
I don't he never really talked about it. Yeah, you know,
people woul ask him for Seth, why can't I do
this right? Well, he said, I guess you just don't
have it?
Speaker 1 (19:25):
What do you what do you make of the whole
water witching scene? So you knew a guy like Seth,
but you also carry copper witch and sticks in your
truck sometimes? What do you what do you make of it?
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Well, you know, most anybody, I've never seen really anybody
that it didn't work with. And it would be curious
to be around somebody that it did not work with.
What you know, right, what's their problem?
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Do you think it's physics? Do you think it's it's
a gift that a human has? What do you think?
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Well, I don't think it's a gimmick. You know, there's
definitely something that he's tuned to. And but Seth was
I don't know a lot more sensitive to it, in
tune to it, you know, whatever you want to say. Uh,
but oh yeah, if I was going to go out
(20:22):
here and drill a water well, I would definitely have
somebody come out with it, you know, kind of make
the odds a little bit better in your favor.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
I like that answer. It makes the odds a little
bit more in your favor. The psychology of water witching
is interesting. In many handle it like a superstition, like
let's do it just in case it can't hurt. Some
say witching sticks operate on the same principle as a
Oiji board, okay, which I don't like. I don't see
(20:53):
the connection. No, when I've ever known tries to summon
spirits while they're looking for water, and like I said,
into witchcraft and I just don't think that the devil
cares where my water line is buried. But this is
more interesting. Some experts believe the movement of the sticks
is fueled by the psychological phenomenon called the ideal motor effect,
(21:16):
where your thoughts can trigger physical movements without conscious intent,
where suggestions and expectations can trigger muscle movements which bypass
our will so the water which are subconsciously beyond his knowledge,
is moving the sticks, tricking his mind into thinking it's
happening on its own. If this is the case, I'd
(21:41):
say it's worth its own study, its own bear grease,
because I'm telling you the sticks move and your hands don't.
So is this human psychology that we're dealing with or physics?
Maybe it's both. I've got a question for Roger. What
would it like if you are just let's say, the
(22:02):
ozarks fifty years ago? Would a water witcher just have
been like a common or just somebody that could do it?
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Just I mean it would have just been like it
wasn't even funny. It wasn't even a question of whether
it works. It's just like, that's just what these people do.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Everybody want to well, they don't get either just Clinton
or Seth Timmins or somebody, Yeah, to go go with you. Well,
and now the well drillers now them drillers, So them
witches don't know nothing about it.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
But I wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
I would if I drilled well, I would want to
witch you.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Uh what do you what do you make of it?
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Like?
Speaker 1 (22:41):
What do you think? Do you think it's do you
think it's real?
Speaker 2 (22:44):
I have no idea what the physics is it of it,
or what the scientific part of it is, but I
just know it works.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
So you you think it's it is physics, though it's
not like some supernatural thing.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
No, it's just like finding a water line with two
close agents.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Roger just mentioned finding a water line with two clothes hangars,
as if that were common knowledge in America for everybody.
But that's exactly what I grew up doing. We called
it witching for a water line, and it works on
electric lines too. I've known how to do this since
I was a teenager. Am I really this deceived and
this gullible? If it is this ideometer effect, I'm just
(23:29):
telling you that it's wild. This is absolutely getting out
of control. I've been searching for the answer far too
long on Google. I am headed out of the country,
headed into the big city to find the answer. I'm
(24:06):
walking towards the University of Arkansas campus. It's been twenty
years since I've been in the physics building. I am
potentially illegally parked, and I'm going to see one of
my old professors, doctor Daniel Kineffect. He was my physics
teacher and some pretty interesting things have come up in
(24:28):
my life as an adult that now I've got to
go back and see him, and I've got some serious
questions for him that have come up in my life
that have been challenged. Waterwitching, dowsing, using divining rods. These
are things that I grew up around. Wasn't an expert,
(24:50):
but they were common and we're just accepted as something
that was real. And I've used them, used them much
of my life, even used them when I was a
landscaper to locate water lines and electric lines underground. And
the older I get, the more it feels like I'm
kind of crazy. But I want to go see doctor
(25:13):
Kennefec and ask him if there's any physics behind this
that could validate that it works, because the science I've
seen says it is not real. I've got a pair
of witch and sticks in my hand. Walking down the
sidewalking and I'm going to the physics building. Walking onto
(25:36):
the University of Arkansas campus is a trip down memory
lane as I ponder if I am one of the
uneducated people that the trickery and lies of water witching
have deceived and prayed upond, I guess it's possible but
only science can answer this question. And as we know,
physics seeks to understand the nature and properties of matter,
(25:59):
energy and their interactions like stuff bumping together. What makes
stuff move? It tells us how the physical universe works.
It will tell us why the witch and sticks move.
This should be simple. Here's doctor kinnefect, So what do
you know about dowsing, divining rods and water witch? What's
(26:22):
your knowledge of that?
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Well?
Speaker 6 (26:24):
I always heard the word dowsing. That was what I
would have heard growing up in Ireland. Divining sometimes so,
and it is true that from a physics point of view,
it's difficult to see what it is that you'd be
detecting with the rod in the water, for instance. You've
almost certainly heard the phrase that is so commonly used
(26:46):
about gravity and physics. We started with that as being
as it were, the first force in the sense that
it's what Newton had it. And now, as you may know,
we claim there are four fundamental forces in nature that
we know, and it's commonly said by physicists that gravity.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Is the weakest of them. What are the four forces?
Speaker 6 (27:01):
So we have gravity, we have electromagnetism, and then we
have the strong nuclear force, and the weakly clear force.
So those forces are both sort of hidden down in
the nucleus. We never encounter them in our kay live.
The thing is that gravity is really weak. I can't
see how it could be anything gravitation because we do
know that. Actually, while I think everybody hopefully knows that
(27:25):
gravity is caused by massive objects, right, mass is what
produces the gravitation. But now an interesting question becomes, Okay,
but what if the mass is in motion? Does that
change things? And the answer is actually, in principle it does.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
So potentially moving water could do something too.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
Yes, Yeah.
Speaker 6 (27:42):
The trouble is that the amount of water that we
have here in the Earth, it's just far too weak.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
Gravity as a weak force is kind of confusing. But
the four fundamental forces in the universe are gravity, electromagnetism,
and the strong and weak nuclear force. These forces govern
all interactions of matter in the universe period. Doctor kin
Effect says gravity would be the most likely candidate, but
(28:10):
he thinks it's highly unlikely. When you hear stuff like
this like dowsing, as a physicist, do you automatically think
this is hopeless focus?
Speaker 6 (28:21):
I mean, I'm thinking that it would be difficult for
me to see how to prove that it was true.
That would be really think Now, of course, the physicists
are all different, and yeah, you would certainly get physicists
who would be pretty dismissive to yeh, don't talk to
me about that, right, I mean, I am more open
minded in my view. I don't know because I haven't
(28:43):
studied it, right, what I know? And then an answer
to the question will why not study it? And the
answer comes back to that question. There's so much stuff
out there to study, you can't do everything.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Okay, So that's part of my deal. There's been a
lot of research on specifically dowsing for underground water, and
basically all the research that we've found has shown that
these dowsers for water had no more chance of finding
water than someone of the random chance. So, I mean,
(29:12):
that's what the academic research points to that we've found.
And I'm not really that sold on. I don't know
how to find underground natural water using dowsing rods. I
do believe that I could go out in your yard
right now and locate your electric lines. And there are thousands,
(29:36):
if not hundreds of thousands of people in the country
today plumbers and electricians that carry divining rods in their
trucks and man, the way that it was presented to
me was completely functional. I've yet to find any science
that validates it, but it would.
Speaker 6 (29:56):
It's tricky because, and here's where the skepticism comes in.
It so often happens that when you take something like
that and you bring it into the lab to study it,
it kind of evaporates. Yeah, now, why does that happen?
Is that because the person involved is essentially a fraud?
Maybe I don't know. Maybe it's not mystical, but it's
just subtle, right, And the particular thing that makes it
(30:18):
work somehow is gone when you're in the lab and
you don't know what it is. And that happens even
in the lab, right, I could give you examples.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
So that's not like laughable to you.
Speaker 6 (30:27):
You know that happens?
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah, does it really? Like you go to the lab
and it literally doesn't work in the lab, but it works,
or you go.
Speaker 6 (30:33):
To a different lab but it worked in the first
lab but not in the second lab.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Say, I would think you would say, Clay, that is
human bias and just crazy people.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
It can be.
Speaker 6 (30:42):
It can be, but there are situations where you find it. Oh,
that's because we didn't really know what was making this work.
We hadn't identified the cause of it. I mean, let
me give you a quick example. So in my field,
gravitation ways, there was a claim, this is decades ago
now in the Soviet Union then still the Soviet Union,
that they were getting a very good Q factor quality factor,
(31:03):
resonant factor with a certain crystal. And there was a
lot of skepticism from people in the West, and they
couldn't replicate it, you know, they set it up the
way that people told them they had done it, but
it wasn't work, and so people were thinking, God, these
guys are maybe fraudulent, right, And so then one of
the non Soviet groups sent a guy over there and
(31:24):
he was tasked to figure out what was going on.
And apparently he did actually figure it out, because it
turned out that to make it work, when you suspended
the crystal from a special wire, very expensive, carefully constructed wire,
but you also needed to grease the wire. And the
way that the Russians did this was pretty casual. In
(31:44):
the lab, they'd just gotten used to it. They took
the wire and they typically just rubbed it behind the
rear to get a little bit of grease on it.
And the trouble is you don't put that in the
scientific pick you know, said hey, be sure you rubbed
the wire behind the gear grease right, So nobody did
that anywhere else, but he discovered that he saw them
do it right, so he said, oh, should I do
that too? And I said, oh, you got to do
that right.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
And so this very like fundamental thing threw the whole
thing off.
Speaker 7 (32:10):
That's right.
Speaker 6 (32:10):
So if you didn't have the ear grease, it didn't work.
And so when he went back home, the group in
Scotland that's where he was from, uh, succeeded. Where the
other group's trying to replicate this approach.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Film, it just it just shows the challenges that there
are in measuring some of these things, and even motivation too.
It's like you've got bigger fish the fry in this
and so it's plausible that it's just not really been
researched enough.
Speaker 6 (32:36):
Yeah, yeah, and especially because of course there's a moving target, right,
am I really studying whether you can find water with
a wooden rod or an electric cable with a metal rod?
Those are two from a physicist point of view, boy,
those are two big, very different things.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 6 (32:51):
I would be looking for different explanations in both of
those cases.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
So it is possible that science just hasn't uncovered the
full story. It is possible that water witch in just
won't fit into the scientific method box because there are
too many variables for it to work in a controlled environment.
This could be the classic excuse for pseudoscience. Or maybe
it's true. Look back at all the things that science
(33:15):
has got wrong in the past, but also look back
at all the pseudo scientists that got a bunch of
stuff wrong. But you are not going to believe this.
Right in the middle of my interview with doctor Kenefect,
there is a knock on the door and in walks
his niece Sarah. He tells her what we're talking about,
and she says, I had a guy witch you well
(33:37):
for us just last year. Within five minutes, I'm interrogating
her about her story. Meet Sarah. You can't make this
stuff up. So I'm doing an interview with doctor Kinneffect,
my foreign physics teacher, and in walks some of his
family and they just so happened to have fairly recently.
(34:00):
Oh yes, in the last six months six months.
Speaker 5 (34:03):
So his father whiched my parents well, and we reached
out to his family when I needed a well and
his father has since passed. I actually talked to his brother,
and his brother was like, I don't have the skill,
but my brother does, so you need to go talk
to my brother. So we gave him a call. He
(34:24):
came on out for one hundred and fifty dollars, he
will witch you're well. He had truly like a stick,
the why stick off of a tree. Yeah, and then
he had his dowsing rods, which were some sort of
gold medal.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
I didn't okay, said two different things.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
So he started with the stick this why stick holding
the two ends and walked the property. He said, actually
he asked us where's the house going to be? So
we kind of told him where, and he's like, where
would you like it? And so we kind of pointed
in a direction and he started sort of triangulating, walking
across and across and across. He said he was looking
(35:05):
for faults. So he found what he says is a fault,
and then he got out his two dowsing rods and
walked like a smaller area and then he was like Okay,
right here, he says, of course he can't guarantee it,
but we had the well dug and they went down
about two hundred feet and we have about four gallons
(35:27):
per minute?
Speaker 1 (35:27):
So is that good for your area? It's not great
for my area. So it didn't work that well.
Speaker 5 (35:34):
No, my parents well is actually more like ten gallons
a minute. And so if you look online, like there's
some role places that won't certify the will if it's
less than six gallons a minute. What I was telling
some of my friends was actually like it's a good
bit of what I felt was performance art.
Speaker 7 (35:55):
Really yeah.
Speaker 5 (35:56):
He was like, well, where do you want it? And
so like he sort of walked back and forth. There's
a very very distinct ravine on one side, big mountain
on the other, and it's like, okay, like to find
a fault in that. It's like, well, there's there's a
pond on one side and then there's you know, a
ravine on the other. So like where with the where
(36:19):
with the water table be?
Speaker 1 (36:20):
So why did you why did you hire him? He
was the one I knew, I mean, but why did
you think that you needed a water witcher to find
your water? Would that just be like just something that
everybody down there does.
Speaker 8 (36:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Yeah, really, so it's just common just like, hey, if
you're gonna drill, well might as well. Is it kind
of like it's probably not really gonna work, but it might,
so it's worth taking a chance.
Speaker 8 (36:43):
Yeah, why not?
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Is that the way you felt?
Speaker 7 (36:46):
Sure?
Speaker 5 (36:46):
I mean, for one hundred and fifty bucks, It's like,
let's let's give it a shot. Let's say if it works,
we were going to dig a well around that area anywot.
So for him to come out and go, yeah, you
probably find water here, you kind of go, okay, like
is it worth like, you know, fifteen hundred dollars? Probably
not about one hundred and fifty one hundred fifty bucks.
It's like, let's figure out. Let's see what he does.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Roger Quinton told us that you shouldn't have to pay
for a water witcher. But let's not forget that this
guy which Sarah's mother's ten gallon a minute well too,
So technically he was one hundred percent on finding water.
Some say that you can find water anywhere if you're
willing to dig deep enough, But I like Sarah's attitude
(37:26):
about the whole deal. It's worth a shot. You might
be under the impression that water witchers are these mystical
hippie bearded guys wearing poenty hats. But all the water
witchers that I've ever known have been practical, down to
earth people. I'd like you to meet a water witcher,
a legit water witcher from Madison County, Arkansas, who was
(37:48):
a logger and a carpenter his whole life. I think
you'll appreciate his simple, no fluff attitude about it. I
wanted to see how he got started.
Speaker 9 (37:59):
My name Carl Holt, and the way I got starready
just being around them old guys, don't it. And that's
been forty something years ago or fifty.
Speaker 7 (38:12):
Oh.
Speaker 9 (38:12):
I watched them and they let me sometimes use their
stuff and do with the heck call of elves wooden stick.
A way back there there was an old man named
last name of Tuddle lived over where my drive for
and he's probably the first one I ever seen which
well figured out I could do it. I've done a
bunch of them up around Kingston and up on the mountain,
(38:36):
and I ate one to Yellville and doesn't.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
When you go out to a piece of property, what
would you do would you ask the landowners any questions?
Would you just start walking? Would you use some clues
that maybe you know about where water would be and
go there first? Ay?
Speaker 9 (38:55):
Usually just figured out how far they wanted it from
the house and made a circle round, and that didn't work.
Speaker 7 (39:02):
You wanted a little lighter.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
You've had quite a bit of success finding water with
the wells that have been drilled where you said there
was water.
Speaker 9 (39:11):
Yeah, they've always hit water and sometimes it's pretty deep.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yeah. How does it work in a community? How would
people know that you would witch a well for them?
Just word of mouth?
Speaker 7 (39:25):
Yeah, just word of mouth.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Do you expect anything from people when you witch well
for them?
Speaker 7 (39:29):
Nope?
Speaker 9 (39:30):
I just tell them the ain't no guarantee. Yeah, so far,
so good.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
What do you think the mechanics of water witching working
to find underground water is?
Speaker 9 (39:43):
I'm not really sure. I figure a person's got something
in their body that does it. I don't know, because
really there's no signs on it, and physically it shouldn't
be possible, but it isn't.
Speaker 7 (39:59):
It works.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Do you think about that? What you just said that
there's no science behind it, it shouldn't work. I mean, well,
are you just okay with that? Yeah, you just that
doesn't even bother you at all.
Speaker 9 (40:10):
Nah, because most people that want me to witch, well
they've talked to somebody else I've wished one for. Yeah,
they just have to trust me.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
The old man that I heard about over in hog
Guy that was a big water witcher, he believed that
it was a personal gift. So he really believed that
it was like supernatural essentially.
Speaker 7 (40:32):
Huh.
Speaker 9 (40:32):
I don't really, I don't really agree with that. I
mean because like me and people that are a lot
different people and still witch water.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Talking with Carl, you quickly see that he doesn't have
anything to prove or an ego to stroke. Waterwitching is
just a tool that he can use to help the
people in his community. You don't get a Charlattan vibe
from him at all, or any sense that this eye
doesn't one hundred percent believe everything that he says. I
(41:05):
want to hear his process. He uses a y shaped
green limb, but it's got to be alive.
Speaker 9 (41:13):
That's hard to explain. You can how you to hold
a stick like that pointing out right and you can
hold as tight as you want to, and whenever you
go over that water it's going down. If it has twists,
the bark off and the deeper it is less, it's
not as bad. But you can get one. It's pretty
(41:34):
close and it'll burn your hands trying to hold it.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Yeah, I've heard people say that.
Speaker 7 (41:41):
What causes it? I having a clue.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
What would you say to skeptics that would say that
you're subconsciously moving the stick with your hands.
Speaker 9 (41:54):
Ain't happening. You can hold it like get and it'll
still pull. Yeah, some people probably think it.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
I think people that say that a human is unconsciously
moving it with their hands they've never done it before.
Speaker 7 (42:10):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
I mean, because it's hard to deny that that thing's
moving on its own. If you've done it right, you
will you show me how you make a stick, and
I want you to show me how you do it.
Speaker 7 (42:22):
I'll get the perners and you go down there and
find one. Yeah, that's a hard.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Well, let's let's do that. Let's do that now. After
cutting a live y shaped maple limb, we walk up
to his known well where he knows there's water about
one hundred yards uphill from his house.
Speaker 7 (42:49):
Okay, all right.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
Go ahead.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
So he's holding that tight like he's squeezing that would
and it is pulling down, like it's actually twisting in
his hand. So I mean, it's actually you're like trying
to hold it tight and I won't do it. You
can't show me again back up. So it's not he's
(43:15):
not tricking himself. He's holding it as tight as he can.
And as he walks over this well, we know there's
water here. It's pulling out. He's he's not twisting that.
It's going down on its own, like something's pulling on it.
Speaker 7 (43:35):
That's worked for you for forty years longer.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
I filmed Carl Death gripping his y shaped maple limb
and saw the sticks with my own eyes twist in
his hands like a fishing pole bending under the tension
of a big catfish. It went down at least eight inches.
I'm going to post this video on my Instagram, and
I'm certain people will say that me and Carl are delusional,
(44:03):
and maybe we are. But if it's the ideo motor effect,
I want to know the physics of how micro movements
and the palms of his stationary death gripped hands can
twist the wood. A human doesn't have snake scales or
centipede legs on the palms of their hands that can
move wood. I just cannot fathom the physics of that,
(44:25):
and I saw it with my own eyes. You just
got to see it and feel it to believe it.
But please hear the nuance in what I'm saying. I
don't know if it really helps you find water, but
with all the intellect and skepticism and intelligence that I
can muster, I'm telling you I believe those sticks are
(44:46):
moving on their own. And I think that this is
a good time to hear from America's greatest skeptic and
my friend meat Eater's own Stephen Ranella.
Speaker 4 (44:59):
When I went water witch and with Clay. Oh, and
first off, I know Clay doesn't like calling it water
witching because he thinks it kind of sounds like sorcery.
But that's how I knew it as a kid, is
water witching. I'm at Waterwitch and with Clay down in
the Florida Everglades. We were down there doing a different
work project, but it came up that he was going
to do some water witching, and we happened to know
(45:21):
an area where there had been some water lines under
the ground.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
If I remember correctly of something like that.
Speaker 4 (45:28):
So we knew a test site, okay, and Clay rigged
up his witch and rod. I was very skeptical. I
remained very skeptical. But it's hard to explain something when
you're holding those wires. Something's happening. Something's happening that I
(45:49):
can't explain. Maybe it's like your pulse goes up, some
kind of electromagnetic thing in your body. I don't know,
but I would be walking along regardless of what was
going on, subserve. I would be walking along, and there
would be like unmistakable activity in the rod, in the
witch and rod, and try as I might, I just
(46:10):
couldn't figure out like what I was doing, what I
could be doing personally that would drive the movement of
the rod right, just trying to hold like as stationary
as possible, and that sucker would bend. And yeah, I
can see where people get the idea that something's happening
and it's detecting water, some kind of magnetic whatever. I
(46:33):
can't explain it, but I'll tell you a quick story.
Just the other day, we were having a conversation about ghosts. Okay,
who believes in ghosts and who doesn't believe in ghosts.
A dear friend of mine gives his ghost story, all right.
His ghost story is that one time his dog freaked
out in the middle of the night and kept staring
into a bedroom, an empty bedroom, and then wouldn't stop
(46:55):
staring in air, and then went and looked on the bed. Okay,
So he's like, therefore, or that's a ghost story. Now
when I hear that story, I'm.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Like, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (47:06):
Maybe the mouse ran through there, maybe the dog was
tripping out, like the fact that that happens. I can't
jump to that. It's like ghost like. There could be
all these other explanations. Same with the witch and rod.
The witch and rod is moving. I just can't tell
that it's not me doing it right, or like some
(47:26):
impulse in my body or some ever so slight moment,
or like your palms get sweaty. I don't know, rather
than it's detecting subsurface water or structures. But again, something's
going on in the rids. I just don't know what
it is.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
You have no idea. How satisfied it was to see
Steve holding those witch and sticks and watching them move.
His head was spinning backwards. But I now want to
introduce you to a professional who has the most practical
insight that we've heard yet.
Speaker 8 (48:01):
My name is Colin Deaton. I live in Marble, Arkansas,
in Madison County. Been in the commercial construction industry for
twenty one years doing excavation and underground utilities site work.
I would say over twenty one years in doing the
what I do for a living, I've probably witched and
confirmed the accuracy of what I've witched out thousands of times.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
Colin, would you describe yourself as like a normal person?
Speaker 3 (48:29):
It's probably debatable, but yeah, have you had.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Any history of deep mental illness or any witchcraft in
your background?
Speaker 3 (48:38):
Not?
Speaker 1 (48:38):
To my knowledge, You're like a very normal, very rational,
clean cut smart guy.
Speaker 8 (48:44):
Thank you. It's nice.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
It's not a weirdo, folks. That's what I'm trying to
tell you, normal people. Water witch.
Speaker 8 (48:58):
Well, the first time I heard about the dow was
from Grandpa father. People like that about finding water for wealth.
But I really didn't know anything about it until I
started doing it for commercial construction, locating utilities and such.
First formul I had. Benny Alvard is the first one
to tell me about it, and I kind of thought
(49:20):
it was a joke like one of the go get
the pipe stretcher thing. Here, hold these things, I'll show
you how to how to find the line. But after
doing it several times and seeing something actually get dug
up where we located it, I started to believe. And
then now I just do it every day if I
want to know where something is.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
It feels to me like there's two two categories of
people that talk about this stuff, and most media focuses
on like the folksy people that are that say they're
able to find underground natural water. But then there's this
other group of people that actually are carrying thousand rods
in their truck on a daily basis, not trying to
(50:00):
be folksy or cute.
Speaker 7 (50:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
Construction people that literally are trying to find stuff underground.
Speaker 8 (50:06):
Yeah, you see it all the time, or I do
every day. Every contractor I've ever work with does the
same thing. It's not nobody thinks it's too crazy.
Speaker 1 (50:16):
We've talked about this at length, But you can use
metal rods to find all types of underground utilities. Yep,
it's kind of weird but true. There are companies that
sell commercial witch and sticks that have handles making it
where you actually aren't even touching the rods. They spend
completely on their own. Once again, can the ideo motor
(50:37):
effect transfer through a handle into a rod. I don't
know how confident would you be right now to walk
out into my yard, which you've never been here before.
How confident are you that you could find my waterline?
Speaker 8 (50:54):
If you've got a water line go into your house
with which I would assume you do. Yeah, I could
show you where it's you I want to know.
Speaker 1 (51:00):
So you're that confident in what you do.
Speaker 8 (51:03):
It might take me a little bit, but I could
sort it out. Sometimes you want to take cues from
things you see already, just to verify, because you can
locate anything, not just water lines. Like I could locate
a tree root out there and think it's your water line.
I would have to play with it a little bit,
walk around, but then I could get confident.
Speaker 1 (51:19):
So you are using all kind of clues, like you're
not just using exactly what's in your hand. You're using exactly.
Speaker 8 (51:29):
I mean, the witch and sticks are going to cross
up if there's something underground, whether it's a water sewer,
electric communication, tree root extension, I could walk over that
cord right there, and it would cross up. It could
be an extension cord laying on the ground. Power to it,
no power to it.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
I think that's where we lose people, is you're like, now,
wait a minute. It'll cross over an electric line, a
gas line. This is where it gets really freaky. They
will cross one hundred percent of the time over a
grave or.
Speaker 8 (52:01):
A found an old foundation that's buried.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
Yes, it's it's it's picking up on something because it
is not. I mean that. What does it feel like
when they move in your hands?
Speaker 8 (52:12):
You don't really feel it? Yeah, I mean because you
have to keep your hands pretty loose on it or
they won't move if there's restriction there, So you don't
really feel it. You just kind of feel them as
they slide.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
It feels like a magnet to me. That's the way
I would describe it, like magnetism. Like making these rods cross.
This brings up an odd and confusing point. You hold
metal witching sticks loosely so they can move on their own,
But when you hold a green forked limb you can
hold it as tight as you want. Hey, boys, I
(52:43):
don't make the rules, I just know them. And this
is just wild kind of unrelated. But doctor kin Effect
told me that there is a sophisticated, high dollar instrument
that they use to measure gravity and it's able to
detect grave As I understand it, it's because of the
hollow casket creating an almost imperceivable distance in gravity. Point being,
(53:10):
there is some unusual stuff going on in the universe,
like to me. I'm not claiming to be good at it,
but I can tell you it is like gravity. There's
no question, like I don't have to summon spirits or
prey or it's like there's nothing supernatural going on here.
(53:34):
This is a force that is equivalent to gravity that
works every time, it doesn't not work sometimes. Now I'm
not saying it's always accurate.
Speaker 8 (53:43):
Yeah, Okay, to that point, I can get false positives, right,
is what I would call it. I've done that before.
Thought I was witching something, Doug, Doug, Doug didn't find it.
Maybe there's something deeper than what I was digging. I
can't explain that sometimes, but I've never a false negative,
you know, like I've never I'm hug and oh my goodness,
(54:06):
I didn't see that. I didn't think that was there. Yeah,
if there's something there I always cross up on it. Yeah,
I if I witch out of square before I dig
and I don't find anything, I'm one hundred percent confident
that there's nothing in that square.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
If the IDEO motor effect is real, then it makes
me wonder what else in my life is completely fabricated
that I'm convinced is one hundred percent real. That's a
scary question. Human perception is frail. We all know people
that live in a delusional world in some part of
their life. It's easy to see in someone else, but
(54:41):
hard to see in your own life. But to blindly
accept the idio motor effect is one hundred percent true
seems frail logic too. I'm no expert, but here's a
quote from an academic paper on the IDEO motor effect.
Despite its long history and the theoretical and port it
existing empirical evidence for the IDEO motor theory is not
(55:04):
strong enough to rule out an alternative hypothesis. End of quote.
I don't want to misrepresent the research. They believe that
it validated the effect. However, sounds to me like it's
not as straightforward as gravity. There is some presumption, and
it sounds like believing this takes some faith in something too.
(55:26):
This stuff is just hard to quantify. It's possible, though,
that the answer is deeper. I want to ask doctor
Kinneffect an existential question about knowledge. How much do you
feel like we actually know about physics because here we
(55:46):
are in twenty twenty five, where we're at the pinnacle
of human knowledge and intelligence and awareness of our universe?
Or we assume that? And do you feel like they're
more unanswered questions than when you started?
Speaker 6 (56:01):
Oh, there absolutely are more unanswered questions all the time.
In many ways, the development of science involves the creation
of questions non answers. I don't mean we're uninterested in answers.
They're great. But usually when you get an answer, you
get more questions. And that's certainly true in my field.
We are, at one sense, much higher than where we
started in terms of reaching a pinnacle.
Speaker 3 (56:23):
That's clear.
Speaker 6 (56:24):
Newton himself said, you know, I stood on the shoulders
of giants, right. He could see further than the people
before him. And we can see further than Newton could see.
But we're conscious of not being near the summit. We're
not near the pinnacle.
Speaker 1 (56:33):
Really, just your like personal engagement with physics, and you've
dedicated your career and your life to this for a
long time. Yes, does it feel like you're moving towards
something that is infinite in a way, Like even if
twenty five years from now, if we had this conversation,
(56:54):
would we be any closer to understanding everything?
Speaker 6 (56:58):
That is a good question, and I can't tell you
for sure whether we'll be closer. And it's unclear, of course,
how we would define closer, because we're approximating to something
we don't know. We don't know what the real true
laws are. We only know what our discoveries are. How
close we are to the real truth is I think
(57:20):
fundamentally unknowable. I don't mean that we can say our
ideas now seem to be better than they were before,
because I think that is fair. I mean, we have
learned a lot, But how close we are to being
as it were done is another question. And we know
that at times in the past when physicists thought they
were close to being done, they weren't.
Speaker 1 (57:41):
Water witching merges the biases and frailty of human psychology
with the great mysteries of physics exposing our inherent potential
for deception. My final conclusion or at least right now
is simply this. There is something to it, something is
moving the sticks, and I have not heard an answer
(58:03):
that completely satisfies me. So if you've got the gall
take some clothes hangers and go out in your yard
and try to find your waterline. And I'm not saying
you should get a water witcher to come to your
house if you drill a well, but it seems like
it might put the odds in your favor. So I
probably would, and maybe I'd do it for no other
(58:23):
reason than to acknowledge my limited understanding of the universe.
And after all this, I am just a little less
confident in my own perception of reality. And I think
that's good. I think it keeps us humble. It's clear
of the things modernity has given us, so much of
(58:44):
it good, but we have no idea what we've lost.
Thank you for listening to Bear Grease. Please share our
podcast with a friend this week, leave us a review
on iTunes, and be sure to check out the new
Bear Griefs merch on the media website. We've got some
sweet mossy oak bear grease hats. Keep the wild places wild,
(59:08):
because that's where the bears live.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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