Mysterious Underworlds in the American West (Part II)

An encounter with malevolent beings in an Arizona mine…

I don’t think I have to tell you that the American West is a big place.

Big mountains, big deserts, big volcanoes, big forests and bigger plateaus…everything is just plain big out here. And it’s not all that strange to think that there might be entire worlds hidden beneath all that vastness that are of a complementary vastitude.

The world-famous Carlsbad Caverns in southern New Mexico, for instance; or the unmapped, Tommyknocker-haunted cave systems of the mighty Rocky Mountains in Colorado. I’ve even seen a cave or two in the Pajarito Plateau, near Los Alamos, whence a cold wind issues…whispers, maybe, of a whole world somewhere beneath all that volcanic tuff, complete with its own air currents and even weather patterns.

In the first part of this two-part series on subterranean mysteries, we looked at two stories of intrepid adventurers in the Old West, explorers and archaeologists and prospectors, who stumbled upon the dead remains of lost, ancient civilizations—unguessed at and unsuspected—in lightless caverns deep beneath the rugged grandeur of the western United States.

Those stories were exciting enough…but they happened long ago, and what was discovered were the sorts of things that belong in a museum. But what if…well, what if a similar discovery was made—not a century ago, but scarcely yesterday, and not of a dead civilization, but of one that was still living, and decidedly sinister?

Screams in the Night

Now I’ve got a story for you, and it’s a real doozy.

I can’t vouch for its authenticity…but then, that’s part of the excitement of it all, isn’t it? Every fantastic, out-of-this-world story about the weird and wild west is a corker, dreamed up by drunkards and neurotics…until, that is, you see it for yourself.

This one comes courtesy of the late, great paranormal researcher Brad Steiger, who recounted it in the pages of his book Out of the Dark, in a chapter entitled “The Inner Earth Empire of Evil”—an alliterative coinage that any writer could only dream of inventing.

In this chapter, Brad Steiger relates the eerie tale of a young man, by the name of Duane Berger, who was camping one strange and still night in the Arizona desert. Accompanying Duane on this camping expedition was his friend Mark, and the two of them had set out to explore the old, deserted mines of the Copper State, and maybe relive something of Arizona’s old pioneer history.

This wasn’t in 1909, nor even 1934—this was in November of 1997, practically the day before yesterday. Keep that in mind, reader, because it means that maybe not all the ancient evils lurking under the desert Southwest have gone extinct.

As Steiger reports it, the two young men were enjoying an afternoon of exploring and photographing a deserted copper mine, and they’d even investigated the old tunnel back as far as they dared to go.

It was a good day, and a long one, and satisfied with their explorations, the two men decided to call it quits as the sun began to settle beyond the western hills. They came prepared, though; they built up a nice, blazing campfire, and satisfied their considerable appetites with a hearty repast of steaks and beans and Texas toast, all washed down with a few “long-necked beers.”

They watched the stars appear, they talked and reminisced, and they were content.

And that’s when they heard the screams in the night…female screams, as of poor, hapless women experiencing the most indescribable anguish. They weren’t the calls of coyotes, or the wails of a mountain lion—these were female cries of terror, in a lonesome and unvisited section of the great Arizonan desert.

And there was no question that they were issuing from the deserted mine.

Steiger quotes Duane on what he was thinking at the time:

“Just imagine that you and a buddy are alone out in the desert hills, that as far as you know there is no one else around for miles and miles, and then, suddenly, you start hearing these godawful female screams coming from an old deserted mine.”

The two friends went through the various stages that one often goes through when confronted with the Unknown. At first, they tried to ignore the screams…but, for obvious reasons, that wasn’t possible. Then they tried to rationalize them. They discounted the supernatural—those screams were all too real, “like a whole bunch of women were being tortured or something.”

They knew that they had spent nearly the entire day exploring that mine, and there was certainly no trace of human visitation anytime recently. Duane and Mark had run out of easy explanations for what they were hearing…and it was about then that the hairs on the back of their necks started to stand up.

Although—and by their own accounting—the two men were no one’s idea of courageous heroes, they decided they couldn’t just stand by and let whatever awful thing was happening to those women just…well, happen. They were red-blooded males, after all, and the knowledge that women were in distress was just too much for them to bear.

They hadn’t any guns with them, unfortunately; but they had, between them, a tire iron and some steak knives. Hell, it would have to do…and whoever was distressing those women better watch out, because he, or they, were about to come face to face with the righteous wrath of Duane and Mark.

The two men advanced into the tunnel…and that’s when things got weird, as they are wont to do in the weird and wild west. They had scarcely entered the abandoned mine when suddenly they beheld an eerie, greenish light—and in that light they could discern two human figures, in hooded robes, advancing to meet them.

Naturally, their first thought was that they’d stumbled upon some kind of Satanic cult, which was using the old mine as a trysting-place to perform some nefandous ritual of human sacrifice. They’d really stepped in it now…and the two menacing figures were probably set there as watchmen. But then Mark and Duane realized that the two figures were scarcely five feet tall—knee-high to a cricket, you might even say. They were midgets, pygmies…hardly a threat at all to the two lusty heroes with their six-foot-plus frames.

This wasn’t so bad, the two men thought. They might even stand a better-than-average chance of coming out of this alive. They shouted at the two figures to release the women, and they were even confident that their orders would be obeyed.

And that’s when things got really weird.

A deep, mechanical sort of voice emanated from the two figures: “The women are beyond your help! Leave at once or perish! Leave at once—or you shall join them in the caves.”

Duane shone his flashlight on one of the figures, disclosing what appeared to be a red, harlequin-like mask on the upper part of its face. The rest of that strange, eerie visage showed skin that was a pallid, sickly gray in color. Evidently, the figure didn’t like having the light in its eyes, and it muttered a curse in some language the two men didn’t comprehend.

“Next, complains Duane, ‘comes the part that no one ever believes.’ The robed figures produced some type of wandlike instrument and directed a yellow light at the two young men that held them both immobile. Next, they aimed a greenish beam against a wall of the mine shaft. The wall of solid rock seemed to melt away, allowing them to walk into the wall and disappear. Within seconds, the wall was once again nothing but hard rock.”¹

The paralytic effects of the “ray” wore off within a few seconds and, understandably, the two men beat a hasty retreat from that place of subterraneous horror. They never returned to that demon-haunted mineshaft…and who can blame them?

Steiger recounts that the man Duane would often think about those screams, and the poor women who voiced them,

“Some nights when I can hear those awful screams again in my mind, it seems to me as though we were hearing tormented souls crying out straight from hell. And I really wonder if Mark and I didn’t stumble on some ungodly, cursed opening that actually went from Hell directly up to Earth.”²

It’s a strange story, there’s no question of that. It’s also damn near impossible to verify—in what part of Arizona was this mine located? Were these two young men pulling one over on Brad Steiger? Did they dream up a weird yarn in which they were the heroes in their own horror story?

Or, just possibly…maybe everything happened exactly as they described it. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants? It really makes you wonder.

My advice—do the smart thing, and stay the hell away from abandoned mines in the American West. You just never know what’s in ’em…

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The April 5th, 1909 article in the Arizona Gazette that started it all.

Verdict: Okay, I think we’ve just about reached the point where we can take stock of all these strange stories, and try to make some sense of them.

Now, you’ll recall the amazing story that appeared in the Arizona Gazette of April 5, 1909: of the explorer G. E. Kinkaid’s tale of discovering the relics and remains of a hitherto-unknown, palaeogean civilization beneath the Grand Canyon.

It’s a great story, with all the elements of pulp adventure and excitement. In point of fact, it recalls quite a few pulp stories of the period—including, most famously, the framing sequence of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first novel, Under the Moons of Mars (1912—subsequently titled A Princess of Mars). Burroughs, the author of the famous Tarzan novels and stories, began his story of high adventure on the Red Planet among the red deserts and mesas of Arizona, where the ex-Confederate officer John Carter of Virginia is prospecting for mineral wealth.

Chased by Apaches, John Carter seeks refuge in a mysterious cave…a mysterious cave that bears the remains and relics of a strange race and civilization. Shortly thereafter, through some sort of spiritual transference, Carter is whisked off to Mars, and the rest is history.

But you can see where Burroughs might have conceived his framing sequence…after all, the newspapers were full of similar stories. And therein lies the problem. The Arizona Gazette story came and went without anyone taking even the slightest interest back east or anywhere else, for that matter. And as for the famous explorer G. E. Kinkaid, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Professor S. A. Jordan? Well, no one’s ever heard of them, and no trace or record of them can be discovered.

G. E. Kinkaid seems to have existed nowhere else than in the fertile imagination of one of the Arizona Gazette’s unnamed writers; the only other mention of him appears to be an earlier, brief notice in the paper, in the March 12, 1909 number, which describes Kinkaid’s journey down the Colorado River. Parenthetically, the notice mentions “[s]ome interesting archaeological discoveries were unearthed,” but it remains until the sensational article of a month later for this to be elaborated upon. Apparently, this earlier notice was meant to prime the Gazette’s readers for the fantastic story to come, as well as establish a little verisimilitude.

In fact, the only contemporary reference to the story is found in the April 16th Coconino Sun out of Flagstaff, which contains a brief reference to it under the headline: “Looks Like a Mulhatton Story.” Now that name might mean less than nothing to you and I, but readers of the day would have understood…Joe Mulhatton being a notorious liar famous for tricking newspapers into publishing fictitious stories, often involving—you guessed it—the discovery of caves full of the astonishing artifacts of lost civilizations.

For decades afterwards, the article and its wild claims were entirely forgotten, until rediscovered and publicized nearly a century later, apparently largely through the efforts of “ancient astronaut theorist” David Hatcher Childress. Childress even hinted darkly at a conspiracy by the Smithsonian Institution (which denies any knowledge of the cave and its artifacts), as well as the National Park Service, to obfuscate and erase all evidence of an ancient, unknown Egypto-Tibetan civilization in the caves beneath the Grand Canyon—a conspiracy that included dynamiting the cave entrance, disposing of the recovered artifacts in the Atlantic, and closing off public access to parts of the Canyon.³

No, it seems likelier that the Gazette article is just another cock-and-bull story designed to fill up blank space in the newspaper, and maybe attract some interested readership. It is, in other words, a hoax, of the kind that were so common in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century newspapers. Which is not to say that every strange tale printed in these papers was necessarily a falsehood…but, well, it’s always wise to take them with a grain of salt.

More interesting, I think, is the idea that this tale of the discovery of a cave system in the deserts of the Southwestern United States, full of the relics of a mysterious civilization, finds its echoes in the story of the WingMakers, almost a full century later. The latter is much more elaborate, of course—complete with music, and paintings, and a fleshed-out mythos and cosmology involving a time-traveling civilization from the distant future. Still, I sometimes wonder if the Egyptian Cave of the Grand Canyon is sort of the great-grandpappy of the WingMakers…?

Now, the story of J. C. Brown and the Lemurian city beneath Mt. Shasta is much more intriguing. In effect, it starts out as the same sort of hoax newspaper story as the lost Egyptians of the Grand Canyon. Brown’s story even has much in common with one of my favorite newspaper hoaxes, which was recounted by Jerome Clark in his book Unexplained!—a story that was originally published in the Houston Daily Post in 1897. This wild tale involved shipwrecked Danish sailors who discovered the wreckage of an alien spacecraft on an uncharted island in the Indian Ocean, complete with the remains of giant men.

It’s all great stuff…and it’s all clearly the invention of a bored, but very imaginative, newspaperman.

But when it comes to the story of J. C. Brown, there’s just one problem. You see, J. C. Brown did apparently exist, and evidently he really did talk a number of Stocktonians into subscribing to his expedition in 1934. And it’s all the more mysterious and baffling in that Brown in no wise seems to have profited from his weird scam or hoax—and this at the very height of the Great Depression!

In a strange twist, the thorough investigations of paranormal researcher and filmmaker Stephen Sindoni seem to have elucidated the real identity of “J. C. Brown.” Although Sindoni was unable to find any record of a such a man with the Lord Cowdray Mining Company, he did find that a geologist by the name of John Benjamin (J. B.) Body was in the company’s employ, and that this man had even traveled to Mt. Shasta in 1904 with Lord Cowdray himself.

It gets stranger. At the time of his death, apparently in 1938, Body was worth $45 million. Even so, Body’s biography between the years of 1904 and 1934 is nearly as blank and mysterious as that of his supposed alias, J. C. Brown—some evidence of prospecting trips to the oil fields of Mexico, for instance, as well as visits to his home country of England.

Sindoni’s research seems to show that Body lived in fear of his life, adopting the alias of J. C. Brown, and staying in public housing facilities to give the impression that he was a pauper. But who, or what, was he afraid of?

I confess—this one’s a mystery to me, and I have no definite verdict to give. What did J. C. Brown, or J. B. Body if that was his real name, hope to gain from organizing an expedition to Mt. Shasta, and then skipping out on the whole thing at the last minute? After all, no money exchanged hands, and Body—already a millionaire in the depths of the Great Depression—profited in no discernible way from his curious deception.

It all seems like an elaborate hoax…but to what end? I wonder about this one…and I can’t help but feel as curious about what lies beneath Mt. Shasta as those eighty hornswoggled Stocktonians in 1934.

And that brings us to the story of Duane Berger and his friend Mark, and their weird, inexplicable encounter in an old, abandoned mine somewhere in Arizona. It’s easy to chalk this one up to an overactive imagination…or dismiss it as a deliberate fabrication altogether. And maybe that’s exactly what it is—a tall tale, and nothing more.

There’s a great deal in this story, including its heavy reliance on unverifiable anecdote and the rather incredible sequence of events it recounts, that inclines me to believe that we’re dealing here with yet another hoax…even if a much less elaborate one, by far, than the ones peddled by “G. E. Kinkaid” and “J. C. Brown.” Still, it does make you wonder, and I can’t help but recall crazy Richard Shaver’s stories of lost Lemurians who survived in great caverns beneath the earth. As the story went, this ancient race had mostly degenerated into the stunted and malevolent “Dero,” which used their “ray” technology to beam horrible thoughts and nightmares into the minds of hapless surface dwellers, and were wont occasionally to abduct human women, whom they raped and tortured.

“I Remember Lemuria,” the story that launched the infamous “Shaver Mystery” in the March 1945 number of Amazing Stories.

Of course, the “Shaver Mystery,” as it was called, was nothing more than a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a paranoid schizophrenic. But then again, if the Dero are real, that’s exactly the sort of thing they’d want you to believe…and just imagine, if you will, that Duane Berger and his friend Mark told the absolute truth, and that everything they recounted in that corker of a story is exactly as it happened.

Wouldn’t that be a helluva note?

All’s I can say is this: the American West is full of incredible natural beauty and the biggest skies in the country…maybe even in the world. It’s natural to want to look up, to see the rugged, glacial mountains looming on the horizon, or the giant monsoonal thunderstorm pendant in the afternoon sky, or the mighty Milky Way strewn across the clear black dome of night. Sure, it’s easy to get swept up in all that…even easier to forget that, according to some sources, there’s a whole world of strange wonders and lost civilizations lying beneath all that scenic grandeur.

And is that such a strange thought? After all, the Hopis and other Puebloan cultures always have maintained that they once dwelt beneath the earth, and emerged in the before times through the sipapú onto the upper world—the surface world that we know. Perhaps, then, the ancient human story of the American West, and certainly the Southwest, can trace its origin back to some underground world…still hidden, still undiscovered.

So, when you’re out there exploring everything the West has to offer, do yourself a favor—keep on the lookout for a tunnel entrance or cave mouth where there oughtn’t to be one. It just might lead you to the fantastic riches of a lost civilization.

And whatever you do, keep your wits about you, have a gun or at least a tire iron and some steak knives handy, and always beware the menacing midgets of the Inner Earth Empire of Evil…

1. Out of the Dark: The Complete Guide to Beings From Beyond, Brad Steiger, Kensington Books: New York, NY (2001), p. 219.

2. Op. cit., p. 220.

3. See, for instance, Jason Colavito’s article “Archaeological Coverup?,” and “‘Looks like a Mulhatton Story’: The Origins of the Grand Canyon Egyptian Cave Myth” by Don Lago in The Ol’ Pioneer (Summer 2009).