eighth wonder preview

Transcription

EIGHTH WONDER | John Michlig 1
Chapter One:
INTRODUCTION
& NOTES ON
RESOURCES
A rattle in the wood
Where a Titan strode!
His rattle drew the child
Into that solitude
Barrum, barrum, barrum.
We wandering women,
Wives for all that come,
Tried to draw him home;
And every wandering woman
Beat upon a drum.
Barrum, barrum, barrum
- The Resurrection, Astrea’s holy child, William Butler Yeats
For many years, any attempt to craft an authentic portrait of the life and career of Carl Denham
has represented a frustrating, near-futile enterprise for the would-be biographer. He was the
literal manifestation of a riddle wrapped in an enigma; the cartoonish Saturday matinee selfportrait crafted via the seminal “Carl Denham Explores” movie series is as erroneous as—though
far less malignant than—the bombastic showman character that RKO ingrained into the public
consciousness via the 1933 film, “King Kong.”
Case in point: Consider the confounding New York Times review of the Hollywood classic
penned by critic Mordaunt Hall for the March 3rd, 1933 edition of the paper, wherein he confuses
cinema and reality—he refers to Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow character as Shirley Redman,
inexplicably using the legal name of the real-life “girl in the hairy paw”—and, worse, paints Carl
Denham as a simple, callow villain by stating that actor “Robert Armstrong gives a vigorous and
compelling impersonation (emphasis mine) of Denham.” Clearly, film and reality blurred
together almost immediately after “King Kong” appeared on the nation’s theater marquees.
It was a chaotic week-before-Christmas in 1931 Manhattan. Fire destroyed the makeshift
Carl Denham Motion Picture Company offices at the Sixty-sixth and Park Avenue armory
building mere days after Denham’s arrest—an obvious torch job that remained unsolved for over
seventy years—and obliterated business and production records. This left researchers with not
much more than hearsay and innuendo to rely upon for reconstruction of the facts beyond that
which was brought out in various court proceedings. Thus was my dilemma when setting out to
reconstruct the tragic intersection of two near-mythic giants in the American canon: Carl
Denham—adventurer, pioneer film-maker, trail-blazing businessman, an ultimately reviled figure
in history; and the fantastic instrument of his downfall, a huge, heretofore unknown species of
primate captured on an island where he was monarch and brought to New York with storied
disastrous results.
A confluence of significant discoveries provided the motivation and means for filmmaker
James Mansfield and me to engage the fantastic tale of Denham and his Beast via our respective
media. The central breakthrough was, of course, Mansfield’s recovery in France of the so called
Villa Maisonneuve cache, a treasure trove of Denham’s film, files and personal effects, as well as
a curious archive of materials related to the discovery and ill-starred exhibition of the singular
marvel he advertised as “The Eighth Wonder of the World.” Mansfield’s resourcefulness and
quick action resulted in a comprehensive, cutting edge examination of the entire find through
formation of the Carl Denham Restoration Project LLC, which was in turn largely funded by a
group of notable Denham enthusiasts and a supplemental matching grant from the Los Angeles
Natural History Museum.
Through examination of photos, motion picture footage and native artifacts found in the Villa
Maisonneuve cache, redemption of sorts was granted to the work and reputation of Professor J.
L. Ellsworth, another individual cursed with infamy by the “Kong Incident.” Professor
Ellsworth, of course, caused a stir in the late 1950s by asserting his vision of a true “Skull
Island” culture as described by Carl Denham and his crew. His work—based on countless
interviews and close study of folktales, myths and artwork from islands in the Indonesian and
Micronesian regions surrounding the approximate coordinates of
the area Denham claimed to have visited—was painstakingly
documented and adhered strictly to stringent standards of
anthropological fact-gathering. Unfortunately, the Professor’s
fairly unwitting involvement in the infamous “Journey to Skull
Island” documentary effectively—and unfairly—rendered all of
his work dubious in the eyes of his colleagues and, eventually,
lumped him together with the exploitive work of the “Skull
Island” filmmakers (a duo notorious for creating flavor-of-themoment drive-in drek) as symbolic of scientific fraud in general.1
He died by his own hand in the wake of the furor, disgraced and
alone. Forty years too late to be of any consolation, his work is
marvelously vindicated by materials uncovered at Villa
Maisonneuve and is therefore cited and referenced herein.
In 1998, the grandchildren of Earl Monroe, a Denham
researcher who began his inquiries in the later 1940s, made
available to me an immense trove of notes and interview
1
Interestingly, “Journey to Skull Island” enjoys ongoing popularity on the kitsch-DVD market, while the books of Professor Ellsworth
are long out of print and nearly impossible to find.
transcriptions he’d assembled for his posthumously published book, The Real King Kong
(1959).2 Monroe’s enormous archive of raw interview transcripts—over one thousand carefully
typed and hand-annotated pages in all—reflect
firsthand recollections and impressions of dozens of
people who were either involved in or present for
events leading up to and following the fiasco of
December 18th, 1931. Monroe’s quest for
information was obsessive; he recorded interviews
with persons who worked in various capacities at
Royal Pictures (financier and distributor of the
cinematic output of the Carl Denham Motion Picture
Company), administrative personnel who were privy
to Denham’s ensuing legal obstacle course, guards
and inmates who had contact with him while he was
incarcerated, sailors who claimed to have made the
trip to “Skull Island” with Denham, countless patrons
of the “Eighth Wonder’s” opening night, and even
one of the detectives who investigated the showman’s
murder. Given the tightly insular nature of Denham’s
very few close relationships during the height of his
career, these documents are crucial to any attempt to
present a portrait of the man. Much credit and
appreciation is due Earl Monroe’s granddaughter,
Stacey Stueben, and his grandson, Robert Monroe,
for their foresight in carefully preserving the material
and their generosity in sharing it with me.
Earliest media reports of the discovery at Maisonneuve understandably fixated on the
disturbing presence of the Nazi-era swastika and eagle insignia of the German Wehrmacht,
emblazoned on crates and boxes containing Denham’s property. This led to speculation that he
somehow collaborated with Hitler’s government in exchange for funds to finance his legal
appeals. Never mind that Denham was killed in 1938, a year before Germany invaded Poland; it
seemed that no commentator wanted to miss another chance to further muddy Denham’s
tarnished reputation, and pundits enjoyed citing the rumor that one of the Führer’s favorite films
was “King Kong”—surely this meant that Denham would feel no compunction in taking money
from a star struck dictator.
It was that sort of lazy conjecture that led to another breakthrough very late in my research.
Angered by what he knew to be a wholly inaccurate portrayal of Carl Denham by the media, the
grand-nephew of Denham’s boyhood friend and chief assistant, Stephan Roman, approached me
with multiple boxes containing memos, correspondence, contracts and various other paperwork
that obviously had been “liberated” from Denham’s office before fire destroyed it in 1931.
2
Earl Monroe succumbed to cancer in 1957, before he could see a bastardized version of his nearly-complete manuscript appear in
print. The Real King Kong was published as a rather crass commercial reaction to the monster craze that swept America in the fifties, and
as such was rewritten by editors at Gowen Books and subverted to appeal to the Famous Monsters of Filmland demographic. It’s an
extremely difficult book to locate as Gowen printed very few copies, and those that did appear were recalled due to legal action by
Monroe’s widow and RKO.
EIGHTH WONDER | John Michlig In addition to some fairly startling new
information concerning Denham’s motivations
and intentions with regard to his star attraction,
the documents—unseen since 1931—provide an
intimate look at the day-to-day workings of the
Carl Denham Motion Picture Company
organization and shed new light on the role of
Stephan Roman himself in Denham’s career
before their falling out and subsequent
estrangement.
Finally, James Mansfield and I are indebted
to the Digital Cipher Institute in Washington,
D.C. and their amazing work in continually
compiling and cataloging hundreds of thousands
of World War II-era Allied and Axis documents
and communications stored at the National
Archives. In addition, the DCI takes in an
unabated flood of materials as they are uncovered
all over the world or unsealed via important
mechanisms like the Freedom of Information
Act. Carl Denham’s final mystery would likely
have remained unsolved if not for the DCI’s
ability to find and map heretofore-unperceivable
connections amongst the universe of available
Axis communiqués, documents, memoirs,
statements, and other captured data stored in
various repositories. Indeed, it was especially
enlightening to distinguish with the aid of this
incredible technology the chilling efficiency of
data traveling through networks of the Abwehr,
Waffen-SS, and a strange, ultimately sadistic pet
project of Heinrich Himmler’s called the
Ahnenerbe.
Thanks to the recent influx of information
and new technology with which to make sense of
it, we have in the end the tale of two giants, both
of them enigmatic and misunderstood. After
spending the majority of their respective careers
as kings, both are brought low by forces they
cannot control and then overwhelmed by their
fictional doppelgangers. It’s a uniquely American
tale that we are only now beginning to
understand.
Pulp Specula*on
As if the true facts of the story of Denham’s “eighth wonder” were not bizarre enough, the beast and his island home were common fodder for an enKre subgenre of wildly speculaKve “mysteries of ancient civilizaKon” literature that sprang up in the wake of a French book published in 1960 enKtled Le Ma&n des Magiciens (aka The Dawn of Magic in its 1963 BriKsh publicaKon, Morning of the Magicians a year later in the United States). Morning of the Magicians authors Louis Pauwels and physicist Jacques Bergier introduced to mainstream minds esoteric informaKon and theories about, among other phenomena: a group of huge drawings visible only from high in the sky on the plains between the towns of Nazca and Palpa, now popularly known as the Nazca Lines; alleged ongoing mutaKons of the human species; weird secret socieKes; and the occult roots of, and fringe science pracKced by, the Nazi party prior to and during World War II.
A jumping-‐off point for some of Pauwels’ and Bergier’s more fantasKc theories were comments made by rocket scienKst Willy Ley, who had escaped Germany in 1935 to become well known as one of America’s major exponents of rocket-‐powered flight and space exploraKon. In an arKcle for a 1947 issue of the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fic&on enKtled “Pseudoscience in Naziland,” Ley wrote about a club in Germany called “The Vril Society”: [This] group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschai
—“Society for Truth” —and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare Kme looking for Vril. Yes, their convicKons were founded upon [Edward] Bulwer-‐Lylon’s The Coming Race. They knew that the book was ficKon. Though Pauwels and Bergier claimed to have interviewed Ley, they could evidently learn no more from him than what he’d wrilen in the arKcle. Thus was born “The Vril Society,” or “Luminous Lodge,” a ficKonal secret cult that esotericists claim included Goring, Himmler and Hitler in its membership. Pure hogwash, but capable of selling books and alracKng TV viewers to this very day.
In the same secKon of Morning of the Magicians—
enKtled “A Few Years in the Absolute Elsewhere”—
Pauwels and Bergier manage to extrapolate from sporadic menKons of Carl Denham and Skull Island in captured Nazi files (the existence of which was first discussed by Earl Monroe in 1959’s The Real King Kong) that Hitler himself was interested in locaKng the habitat of Denham’s giant beast with the aim of capturing other specimens and breeding them in great numbers. Nazi scienKsts, we’re told in Morning of the Magicians, were instructed to spare no cost in perfecKng a technology that would create an obedient Affen Korps (literally: Ape Corps) able to repel any alack and create havoc wherever dispatched.
4
Chapter Two:
AFTERMATH
I’m very interested in the facts. I’ve found that
the facts are always a good starting point for
any nonfiction film.
- Carl Denham
It was, in the days and weeks following the
event, a news story that did not travel very far
outside of New York City.3 And even in the Big
Apple ongoing coverage of the incident, bizarre
as it was, seemed strangely muted after fortyeight hours had passed—as if to further prove,
perhaps, that the jaded denizens of Manhattan
were hardened to whatever odd twist of fate
was thrown at them, even if it involved a
rampaging giant ape.
But the headlines screamed when the sun came up on the morning after, and steadily
escalated as the presses worked continuously on extras throughout the day. It was a newsboy’s
dream: “Denham’s Ape Rampages”; “Giant Gorilla Creates Chaos”; “Beautiful Blonde in
Clutches of Savage”; “Beast Machine-Gunned Off Skyscraper.” The pictures and stories were
unbelievable, yet who could deny what was right there in black and white on every broadsheet
and tabloid in the city?
The Empire State Building cupola and “mooring mast,” just recently freed of its scaffolding
after initial construction, went back under cover for repairs before nightfall. It would be returned
to mint condition in just over two weeks,4 at which point notice of its re-emergence
conspicuously stayed off the front page and was accompanied by precious little fanfare; even the
Empire State’s prodigious mouthpiece and front man, colorful former New York mayor and one3
This was the inverse of early reporting on now-famous outlaws of the early thirties like Bonnie & Clyde, Baby Face Nelson and John
Dillinger, whose initial exploits were trumpeted by banner headlines in the Midwest while meriting small (if any) mention in newspapers on
the east and west coast—until popularized, of course, by Hoover’s emergent FBI and Hollywood.
4
It was fortunate for all involved in the mooring mast repair work that the structure did not actually contain the intricate mechanisms
necessary to deliver on the builder’s rather specious promise of providing mid-town docking for zeppelins and airships. The topmost cone
was actually set on a light trusswork ready to be lifted when the promised interior rigging was ready for installation. Repairs after the beast
took refuge there were completed at relatively low cost.
time gubernatorial candidate Al Smith, “the happy warrior,” seemed weary of fielding questions
from reporters asking when the first airship would dock on what was clearly an impractical
platform. At the same time, the observatories just below and near the top of the cupola were
averaging 2,200 paying visitors per day before the incident, which had created a gross income
(including souvenirs and refreshment sales) of $875,000 for 1931. Reopening as soon as possible
was imperative for a building that, at that point, had precious few tenants from whom to collect
rent.
And there was, of course, the matter of a smashed, bloodied body at the foot of the
skyscraper. Witnesses—and there were hundreds—watched through the night as important and
important-looking people were ushered through the tight police cordon surrounding a mound of
crimson-glistening fur. They peered beneath a canvas that covered both Denham’s beast and a
fire truck totaled by the impact of the fallen animal. They gathered in tight groups for alternately
hushed and boisterous debate over who was ultimately to blame, who would pay. A small
motorcade carrying Governor Roosevelt and his entourage eventually appeared, and the cordon
widened to accommodate his level of celebrity. He was photographed looking solemnly at the
carcass and then moved into the building’s lobby for his briefing.
The corpse was hauled away remarkably quickly—so quickly, in fact, that late-risers arriving
for their glimpse of the great dead thing were greeted with nothing more than a wet patch of
cracked street and sidewalk ringed with crimson-spattered snow. Embattled Mayor Jimmie
Walker, to no one’s surprise, made political hay of the efficiency of New York’s city services
after the crisis. The fact that Governor Roosevelt appointee Samuel Seabury was turning over
many embarrassing stones in his investigation of New York’s various government departments
did nothing to quell “Gentleman Jimmy’s” aplomb; in fact, he’d allowed Roosevelt to arrive first
and made his own entrance only after the Governor had gone inside the building, guaranteeing
maximum notice of his presence while still making a show of deference to FDR.5 He was
dressed, as always, neat as a pin and gave the impression of a man simply making a stopover on
his way to further, far more interesting social (and private) engagements.
Spent 30-08 caliber machine gun shell casings
were everywhere. They’d provided a hell of a show
the night before. From street level would be heard a
burst of machine gun fire from the Navy F-4Bs
overhead, followed a few seconds later by localized
cries and exclamations within the crowd on the
street. These yelps moved from location to location
like an audio wave as brass ejected by the fighters’
Browning machine guns cascaded from over a
quarter mile above, a strange thunder-and-lightning
rhythm that added an almost absurd wrinkle to an
already strange evening. In the months and even
years to follow these shell casings supplemented the
traditional marbles used as currency by kids on
playgrounds all over New York and New Jersey and remain sought-after collectibles today.
5
The mayor, while an inveterate patron of Broadway’s biggest attractions, did not attend Denham’s show. This led to baseless
speculation—fed by Walker’s many enemies—that the mayor knew in advance that there would be trouble.
An ensuing congressional investigation into that evening’s fiasco, only recently unsealed, led
to disciplinary charges against various links in the Navy chain of command, as stray bullets
caused property damage, injuries, and even deaths in a multi-block radius around the target
skyscraper.
Carl Denham got his moment and used it well. He exited the Empire State Building lobby as
flashbulbs strobed and reporters jostled for position, keeping up with him stride for stride. A
pencil jockey—could he have been a plant?—fed the showman the straight line he seemed to be
waiting for.
“So, Mr. Denham—the aviators got him, eh?” he asked. Denham stopped and looked in the
direction of his broken beast, pausing long enough for each photographer to frame, focus and
flash.
“No, no—it wasn’t the aviators,” he finally said. “It was Beauty, I tell you. It’s always the
Beauty that kills the Beast.”
The fact that he’d already tried this line out on a police sergeant up on the 102nd story of the
tower was unknown to the ink-stained wretches surrounding Denham, and they couldn’t have
cared less. They had their kicker and ate it up like hungry dogs. Denham’s showman’s instincts
were as yet unflustered by the evening’s unforeseen events, and, as always, he upheld his part of
the bargain.
And then, Carl Denham was gone.
Chapter Three:
SCAVENGERS
1936, Burbank, California
Behind a warehouse in the seedier section of town, Alvin Tolliver 6 raised the collar of his jacket
and lit his third cigarette. It was dark and getting colder by the minute; he knew it was too much
to expect a little respect or courtesy in addition to prompt payment, but being kept waiting on a
consistent basis still raised his ire. A guy could get mugged in a place like this.
At his feet was a cheap canvas clutch he’d lugged all the way over from RKO, filled with
what Tolliver assumed would be a new addition to some rich bastard’s film oddity collection. It’d
been easy enough to game the RKO film library records and get out every single can marked
“Carl Denham Motion Picture Company” as per the client’s wishes. The normal arrangements
were in place: one additional inside player to deal with clerical issues in exchange for a slice of
the pie; cash on delivery of goods; payment size dependant upon amount of film turned over.
Easy money, and no one gets hurt. Just that much less fodder for the furnaces and garbage scows,
eventual destinations for RKO’s excess nitrate stock.
This particular set-up was not a whole lot different than his previous errands. It was the
natural order of things—unnamed millionaire has a hankering for something no one else gets to
see and pays handsomely for the privilege. “Screen tests” of starlets willing to do anything to
make it were usually on the menu, and if the occasional unknown caught frolicking on film
suddenly makes it, some rich guy in Beverly Hills or a New York penthouse has it for their eyes
only. Tolliver felt certain that he, in his own way, played a role in making sure that an important
line would never be crossed, and normal workaday folks would never see the naked indiscretions
of America’s treasured elite celebrities. He had his place in the overall ecosystem of Hollywood.
Like beetles on the jungle floor that eat the dung of larger animals, keeping things clean while
enriching themselves. Wasn’t that something from a Denham film? he thought to himself.
In this case he’d evidently hooked into a rich guy who likes oddities of nature. Seven
hundred bucks per reel of film, he was told, as long as it was shot by Carl Denham. The “King
Kong” stuff that RKO had kept stored for years now, doing nothing but taking up space. It was
cataloged and inventoried loosely, as if they wanted it to go missing; Tolliver’s inside person had
a job too easy for a full thirty percent of the take, he thought. But that was the understanding, and
there was no use getting dishonest at this stage of the game.
The sedan rolled up at last, twenty minutes late. “John” got out, alone as usual, adjusted his
fedora as he walked and came right to the point without pleasantries (also as per usual).
“How many?” he said by way of greeting.
6
Not his real name.
“And a good evening to you as well,” Tolliver spat out sarcastically. He grabbed the clutch
and unzipped it on the ground, beckoning the man down where he could see by the glow of a
flashlight.
“Seven reels, nearly all full,” he said. “That’s $4900, which you should round up to five
grand for making me wait in this weather.”
The dark suit didn’t acknowledge him, instead looking carefully at each film can label.
“What’s this?” he said sharply.
“That’s what your guy wants. King Kong stuff. Nobody’s seen that,” Tolliver replied rapidfire fashion.
“No, this label says ‘RKO’ and ‘Cooper-Schoedsack.’ That’s not what he wants.” He flipped
the can back to a crestfallen Tolliver and went to his pocket for cash. “Six cans, one a half-reel.
Four thousand.”
“How about five hundred for the RKO can? It says ‘spiders’—that’s gotta be exciting!” The
guy thinks I’m nothing but a schnorrer, Tolliver thought.
“I don’t know or care why my guy is after the Denham stuff, but that’s all he’s interested in.
Take forty and be happy.” He handed over a stack of bills as if the transaction was complete.
Tolliver scowled and pocketed the money.
“You get more, you know the number,” dark suit said as he walked back to the sedan.
Tolliver nodded and started his long walk home. The refused film can was now dead weight
he could do without, so it went into the nearest garbage can.
Chapter Four:
THE KID
When trying to determine what people might want or might be entertained by, I often
think of my dad. He was a great guy, solid as a rock. He was a man of simple needs
and pleasures. I sometimes envy that about him.
- Carl Denham
Carl Denham’s father, Francis, gained passage to the United States as a teenager in 1890 by
working as a collier—coal tender—in the grimy hell below decks of the SS Bristol. A laborer by
vocation, he held construction jobs of one type or other from the very day he first set foot on
American soil. In 1891 he heeded a tip and traveled to Chicago to find employment at the
World’s Columbia Exposition, where an almost unbelievable amount of work would need to be
done to create what became known as “The White City” in time for opening day two years
hence. The early going at the site was a muddy quagmire, but Francis didn’t mind and had
certainly experienced worse. He thought he was in the catbird seat; besides steady work, three
good meals per day, a warm bunk and medical treatment when needed, Francis enjoyed the
camaraderie of his fellow laborers and was transfixed by what he saw being constructed all
around him against all odds and acts of nature. 7
The elder Denham’s transformative moment occurred one afternoon during a review of
damage wrought by a storm on June 13, 1892. Striding stern-faced amongst the scattered steel
and wood of the unfinished Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building were the structure’s
contractor, Francis Agnew, and a group of distinguished gentlemen. Francis happened to be
working nearby the group when he noticed a slight shift in an unstable pile of debris just to the
right of one of the visitors. Acting quickly, he reached the man in three strides and pulled him
violently away just as the timber and metal tumbled, superficially gashing Denham’s leg through
overall pants.
As family legend has it—and the tale is almost certainly embellished by Carl Denham or his
father—Francis had saved from injury or death the single most important man at the Exposition,
its chief of construction and director of works, Daniel Burnham. Denham was rewarded with a
Walt Disney’s father, Elias, also helped build the White City and shared Francis’s positive memories of the experience. Elias nearly
named his son Columbus in gratitude for the financial boon that employment at the Exposition represented for his family at the time.
7
guarantee of steady employment as well as free admission to the grounds on his off hours. He
had literally stumbled into very good fortune and his foreseeable future was secure.
While the high-minded and intelligentsia of the period wandered the White City enthralled by
its gleaming buildings and exhibits of new advances in technology, art and city planning,
Denham, like most of the “common folk,” was drawn mainly to the Exposition’s innovative
Midway Plaisance,8 a thoroughfare nearly a mile long dominated by the revolutionary Ferris
Wheel and crammed with exhibits peopled by Zulus, Turks, American Indians, and Laplanders,
just to name a few of the exotics present.9 And among Denham’s favorite haunts—recalled with a
nudge and a wink that fueled latter-day saloon tales spun by his son—was the Streets of Cairo
and its main attraction, a proto-bellydancer billed as Little Egypt who shimmied uncorseted for
gape-mouthed patrons..10
The Midway became his home away from home and he made many friends from all corners
of the world, building a large collection of picture postcards signed with the name or mark of
nearly every “exotic” working at the Fair. With construction on most of the main buildings
finished, his request to be transferred to the Midway Plaisance’s daily maintenance and
landscaping crew was honored without question or hesitation, and Francis was, to use one of his
favorite phrases, “happy as a pig in slop.”
It wasn’t until toward the end of the Expo’s storied run that Denham met and was smitten by
Beatrice Guenther, who’d traveled from Michigan with her family to experience the Columbian
Exposition. After getting her parent’s permission he took her to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and
Congress of Rough Riders of the World show—a separate admission he was happy to pay, as he
could not afford to have the scandalous veiled sirens of the adjacent Midway call out salacious
greetings to him while he squired a lady. The fact that the German Village exhibit, which
delighted Beatrice’s parents, was situated directly next door to the Streets of Cairo forced Francis
to strain his fairly low capacity for cunning to its limits in order to avoid an incident.
When the Exposition closed, Denham, completely unfettered, wasted no time in traveling to
Saginaw, Michigan, where the Guenthers lived, armed with a letter of recommendation signed by
the great Daniel Burnham himself as well as the money he’d saved after over a year’s labor in
The Midway Plaisance concept introduced at the Columbia Exposition soon became prototypical of midways in regional, state and
county fairs across America.
8
9 “There was about the Midway Plaisance a peculiar attraction for me. It presents Asiatic and African and other forms of life native to
the inhabitants of the globe. It is the world in miniature. While it is of doubtful attractiveness for morality, it certainly emphasizes the value,
as well as the progress, of our civilization. There are presented on the Midway real and typical representatives of nearly all the races of
the earth, living in their natural methods, practicing their home arts, and presenting their so-called native amusements. The denizens of
the Midway certainly present an interesting study to the ethnologist, and give the observer an opportunity to investigate these barbarous
and semi-civilized people without the unpleasant accompaniments of travel through their countries and contact with them.” – New York
senator (1899-1911) Chauncey M. Depew, The New York Times, June 19, 1893 pg. 5
The legend of Little Egypt and her danse du ventre rivals that of Carl Denham. Among the stories told: her provocative dance
helped save the World’s Fair by drawing patrons from across the nation to her performances (a common statistic holds that one in every
four Americans visited the fair); she popularized the newly-minted zipper (used as an aid for quickly wriggling free of her clothing onstage);
and Mark Twain was moved to a slight heart attack by her performance. In actual fact, as explored in the book Looking for Little Egypt by
Donna Carlton, “Little Egypt” is more likely a post-World’s Fair appellation that was attached to “hoochee coochee” dancers in general.
“Although I found many other personalities of the Midway Plaisance described, I could not locate a contemporary reference to the infamous
dancer there,” Ms. Carlton writes. “This led me to the conclusion that even if Little Egypt was actually there, she was not famous at this
point in her career and certainly not the star performer on the Midway Plaisance.”
10
Chicago. A suburban building boom was beginning, and the vast virgin white pine forests of
upper Michigan yielded an endless stream of low cost, standard-cut wood that ended the need for
hand-crafted post-and-beam frames on wooden houses. Homes were now “balloon-framed” with
walls made up of two-by-four inch “studs” nailed at sixteen-inch intervals. Along with the
introduction of drywall and even pre-fabricated house “kits” from Sears and Roebuck, home
building became a simple matter of hiring willing laborers with minimal skills. Denham set
himself up as a contractor and was soon managing multiple sites.
After a short-but-proper courtship, Denham and Beatrice married and settled outside of
Saginaw. She miscarried a daughter in 1895 and feared they were doomed to childlessness as
year after year went by without another pregnancy. Finally, to everyone’s great relief, Carl
Denham was born in September of 1899, followed by his brother, Robert, two years later.
There is very little anecdotal or written information about Beatrice Denham. She seems to
have been the central authority in the Denham household—Carl had joked to friends about his
father’s “go along to get along” strategy in family matters—and appeared to be much more
serious minded than her husband and oldest son. Beatrice’s sober outlook would be passed along
to Robert, who shared his mother’s fairly solemn demeanor and impatience with tomfoolery.
Carl Denham’s earliest, most vivid recollections of his father would be quiet evenings when
Francis would pull out a souvenir volume entitled Glimpses of the World’s Fair to point out
specific buildings he’d helped construct and maintain. On special nights, usually when Beatrice
was away on an errand or otherwise distracted, Francis would regale his sons with stories of the
strange and unusual people whose acquaintances he’d made on the Midway Plaisance that
golden year in Chicago. He accompanied his tales with hundreds of postcards depicting
everything from fur-clad Eskimos to man-eating Africans—all exotic and ferocious, and all
known to Francis by name. “I met good and bad people,” he told his sons. “But it never made
any difference whether they wore britches or a leopard skin.” Carl remembered being astounded
that such alien-looking people could have the mundane problems and concerns often depicted in
his father’s anecdotes. Could it be true that a Moorish prince had to deal with an embarrassing
dandruff problem?
As he grew up Carl was a ball of barely contained energy, always in motion and usually the
leader of any small clique he belonged to. (In today’s world he would very likely be observed
closely as a possible “sufferer” of attention deficit disorder and consequently medicated.) He and
Robert shared in common a gift for mechanical aptitude, though the younger brother seemed
better able to focus himself on one task at a time and preferred a more orderly existence than that
of his scattershot sibling. The Denham boys complimented each other nicely, however, and were
a formidable unit well known in the idyllic environs of their Saginaw neighborhood. Carl’s father
adopted a “boys will be boys” attitude toward his sons’ various exploits and misdemeanors,
while Beatrice favored a strict, firm hand and in fact represented ultimate power in the
household. The laconic Francis, busy managing multiple home building sites in Saginaw’s
rapidly growing neighborhoods, had no argument with what seemed to an effective and equitable
household arrangement.
When Carl was eleven the Denham family moved to New York. Beatrice’s parents had
passed on and Francis, weary of managing unreliable work crews and throwing up house after
mundane house, had multiple leads (not to mention the Burnham recommendation letter) on
better paying construction jobs in burgeoning Manhattan, an island which had begun to build
upward with the invention of the high rise and skyscraper. The transition went smoothly and the
family prospered in an apartment situated above 14th Street on the outer fringes of the Lower
East Side, certainly no mansion but much more comfortable than the packed tenement buildings
at the center of this rapidly growing section. Thousands of immigrants were relocating to New
York from Europe in this period, making the awkward state of being the “new kid” a short-lived
condition.11
Francis Denham had chanced to arrive in Manhattan just as theaters on Broadway were oneby-one converting to movie houses, creating constant employment for craftsmen like him who
had experience with the sort of elaborate (and utterly eclectic) ornamentation that characterized
movie palaces of that era. The “hodgepodge of classical architectural styles and design motifs in
the service of deliberate visual overstimulation” (as described by Forty-second Street historian
Anthony Bianco) took the influence of Chicago’s Columbia Exposition to gaudy extremes. When
movie impresario Samuel “Roxy” Rothapfel arrived in New York in 1913 to overhaul Harlem’s
Regent Theater, Francis was completely in his element. His temperament was much better suited
to doing the hands-on work while others worried over the logistics.
Carl did well in school despite an emerging restive nature, and he quickly learned how to
handle himself in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood that became the boys’ proving ground.
A12 potent mixture of charm, fast talk and the willingness to throw punches as a last resort earned
Carl respect among the web of cliques, gangs and extended families that made up the kid
population of his corner of the Big Apple. The unprecedented congestion of inner city New York
in the dawning decade of the 20th century turned the streets into a well-used refuge from crowded
tenement living, even in the somewhat less-dense sector that the Denhams occupied. From
before sunup to long after dark, the lanes, roads and avenues of New York were a teeming,
vibrant bazaar not unlike Francis Denham’s beloved Columbian Exposition, buzzing with
peddlers of all kinds, hollering their wares in one or more languages. It was an exciting place to
grow up, and children reveled in an unprecedented freedom to roam and explore that was
unavailable to their parents and is, sadly, impossible for their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren today.
It was a time Carl remembered fondly. He gained a reputation as the kid willing to stick his
neck out for whomever he perceived as the underdog, which Stephan Roman undoubtedly was.
Afflicted with polio as a small child—which made him “different” in a manner harder to
overcome than mere nationality, native tongue or skin hue—Stephan wore metal supportive
braces on his legs and needed crutches that slowed him considerably and earned him the
nickname “Clank” among his more unenlightened peers. Carl spied him out as a shadowy
presence on the edges of the group, a boy who would routinely bring up the rear when the kids
traveled in their normal pack formation, and one that would elect to stay close to home when the
gang went too far afield.
While he’d never known anyone physically challenged, Carl was at first more intrigued by
Stephan’s constant reading than anything else. In the summer he could be seen any time of the
day sitting on the front steps of his apartment building with his head in a pulp, newspaper, or
Tom Swift book, drowning out the steady neighborhood drone with visions of swashbucklers,
11 Seventy percent of the 550,000 children attending New York’s public schools were foreign born. “A map of the city, colored to
designate nationalities,” observed journalist and reformer Jacob Riis, “would show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra, and more
colors than any rainbow.” [SOURCE: NEW YORK: An Illustrated History, page 250]
The Jewish and Italian Districts loomed largest but were dotted by smaller clots of Lebanese, Greeks, Armenians, Poles, Swedes,
Norwegians, Turks and more than a dozen other nationalities.
12
knights, and his beloved baseball statistics. Roman would later admit that the books and
magazines that were his constant companions functioned at first to deflect invitations to join a
stickball or kick the can game, situations that he found almost unbearable. Roman was a diehard
Giants fans—scarred for life by 1908’s “Merkle Boner”—13and he became renowned for his
prodigious ability to retain statistical data for every player on the roster.
He must have been startled to have a fellow eleven year-old bound up and sit beside him on
the stoop one day, asking him about the story he was reading from the latest issue of The Argosy
and actually listening patiently as he answered. Before long, Carl would volunteer to go to the
nearby public library branch—with its harrowing three flights of stairs—to get books for Stephan
and return them after he had read them.
“Even as a kid, that guy had charisma,” Roman would later recall. “A little bit of attention
from Carl here and there, and pretty soon I could feel myself being included in the group more
and more. If Carl Denham wore a hat, everyone did. Carl thought I was all right, so everyone
else did, too.”
One afternoon Carl found Stephan in his normal position on the apartment stoop, head in a
magazine, and tossed him a pamphlet. Stephan quickly recognized it as an elevated train
timetable.
“My pop took us to the Alhambra last week,” Carl said. “I saw this movie called ‘Third
Street Elevated Train,’ and you can’t believe what an amazing ride you can get for a nickel. Let’s
go see what we can see!”
Stephan observed that Carl had already penciled in a star on the wrinkled map representing
their current location along with a carefully dashed line that delineated their route to the nearest
elevated train depot, only four blocks away. He’d given this a good deal of thought; for Carl to
sit still long enough to decipher the map and scribe even a few lines was quite an
accomplishment for the hyperactive youth. Despite his overwhelming dread at the prospect,
Stephan knew already that he would be swept along on this adventure no matter how much he
protested. He looked closer at the map and the terrifying length and width of Denham’s planned
route. He’d described a long three-quarter oval that would take them from lower Manhattan,
which was home, down past the Brooklyn Bridge and Battery Park, then swinging upward, up
past Central Park—past the Polo Grounds!—through neighborhoods and territories that they
wouldn’t dare walk through for fear of being beaten down by a gang of Irish or Germans. The
line ventured further upward, past any point he’d ever heard of, to a place on the map called
Woodlawn Cemetery, where the tracks terminated. Seeing his finger alight there, Carl said,
“That’s where we turn around and come back the way we came. Simple!”
Stephan could feel a cold sweat start in the small of his back. Carl helped him to his feet;
they were going immediately, winding their way down the street at a pace only slightly slower
than if Denham had been alone. Three stories of steps led up to the 14th Street platform, and Carl
put an arm around Stephan’s shoulder to help him get from landing to landing until at last they
saw the 3rd Avenue Downtown waiting to be boarded. Carl paid both fares, and the midmorning
With two out in the bottom of the ninth inning and the winning Giants’ run on third, nineteen year-old rookie Fred Merkle was the
base runner on first when shortstop Al Bridwell slapped the apparent winning single, scoring the man on third. Merkle ran straight to the
dugout rather than to second base in order to avoid the crowd storming the field. Cubs' second baseman Johnny Evers claimed to have
retrieved the ball and tagged second, nullifying the run. The league ordered the game replayed at the end of the season if need be. The
Cubs and Giants ended up in a first place tie, so the game was indeed “done over,” and the Cubs won the game, the pennant, and
subsequently their last World Series victory to this date.
13
ration of commuters was sparse enough that the boys could take window seats one behind the
other.
As he settled into his seat and stowed his crutch, Stephan realized that he hadn’t said a word
since they’d left his building’s stoop. Suddenly self-conscious, he began to speak but found his
mouth was dry as dust. The train lurched and began to move and he swallowed hard.
The city moved beneath them faster and faster, and they passed within feet of third-floor
apartments and their open windows. The people inside were going about the intimate business of
their day, unfazed by the carloads of humanity noisily hurtling by: Stephan saw a woman
standing in a bathrobe breast-feeding her child while staring back at him; then a black man
seated at a table with his head in his hands, a bottle in front of him; a teenager sat in his
windowsill smoking a pipe; a gentleman primped in front of a mirror, adjusting a fancy celluloid
collar. Each small tableau would freeze for a moment in Stephan’s mind as he fixed on a window
before it blurred by, replaced by another and another in rapid succession. It was intoxicating.
The train stopped at another platform and more people boarded. Now the boys had grown
men sitting next to them, but the democracy of the El protected them from comment or scolding.
They were underway again and soon reached the dramatic convergence with the 2nd Avenue line
at Chatham Square. Carl tapped him on the shoulder as they flew over the Bowery, whispering:
“This is the best part.”
Stephan turned to ask if he’d seen it in the movie when he felt his stomach continue in a
straight line even as the car veered left; as he turned to look ahead the sensation repeated itself in
reverse—they’d glided through the Coenties Slip double curve, an S-shaped ribbon of track laid
over the piers of the East River that announces the train’s upcoming arc back up Manhattan
island. For even daily travelers, the Coenties Snake was a thrill. For Stephan Roman, it was a
life-changing moment. He was finally able to speak, but Denham interrupted him with a smile,
even as he stared out into the harbor at the boats coming and going; “Yes, we’ll do it again on the
way back,” he said. Carl had taken this trip already by himself, Stephan realized, yet he
maintained the illusion that they were pioneering the adventure together. Stephan appreciated the
ruse, and never let on that he knew the truth.
It was the beginning of many such explorations via the El, and a lifelong friendship. They
began to spend time at one another’s apartment, each a familiar face to the other’s parents.
Stephan was the older of two children in an assimilated Jewish family and Carl loved to absorb
new words and exclamations heard in the household; he took schmegeggie and mazuma home to
horrify his mom (“Hey ma—a schmegeggie and his mazuma are soon parted, eh?”). Stephan
would summarize for Carl the plot of whatever pulp potboiler he’d just finished reading, often
sharing with him drawings he’d made of specific scenes.
At the Denham’s apartment, as often as he could get away with it, Carl returned the favor by
sneaking into his father’s Columbian Exhibition shoebox and telling elaborate stories to Roman
about the weird and wonderful people on the postcards. “He thought of these things right there
and then, pure improvisation,” remembered Roman. “It started at an early age.”
By the middle of 1917, Carl and Stephan were working together as printer’s assistants,
making enough money to put aside a bit every payday. Meanwhile, America began feeling the
pull of the Great War in Europe. Germany’s sinking of the Lusitania liner off southern Ireland in
1915 (“Without so much as a warning,” we were reminded by hawkish politicians and orators,
“as mandated by the 1907 Hague Convention!”) was an outrage that helped fuel a collective
righteous fury against the Kaiser—Wagner and Bach fell out of favor as “Hun music,” sauerkraut
became known as “liberty cabbage”—and young Carl was captivated by what he and a great
many of his peers saw as their opportunity to take part in a grand romantic adventure. Even the
appearance at public rallies of English and French pilots maimed and mutilated by combat could
not deter him; Denham wanted wings, and, furthermore, he wanted to be the flyboy who would
bring down the already famous Red Baron. By the middle of the year, all men ages twenty-one to
thirty would be required to register for the draft. Characteristically, Carl Denham—barely
eighteen at the time—could not and would not wait.
With his father’s tacit approval (Francis could see which way the wind was blowing and saw
military service as an inevitability), Carl volunteered for the Air Corps. Every cent he’d saved up
to that point was expended on a crisp, tailored officer’s uniform ordered from Brooks Brothers,
and, had he the funds, he surely would have purchased the matching riding crop as well.
Beatrice reacted poorly. While early volunteers were celebrated in rallies and parades, she
made clear to young Robert, already plotting his enlistment, that he would fight the Kaiser over
her dead body. His appeals to his father fell on deaf ears; Francis felt the trade-off was fair and
needed to placate Beatrice, who was becoming sickly and dependant in her middle age. Besides,
Robert was only sixteen and would not be looked upon as a shirker for waiting until his turn
came up. This was of little consolation to the younger brother. He watched as Carl and his
fellows were sent off to the Great War with citywide fanfare and pomp, treated as men in bars
and pubs as they approached their departure dates to training camps scattered across the U.S.
Stephan Roman, still feeling the effects of childhood polio, could not enlist. Besides, his job
at the print shop provided needed income for the family that they couldn’t afford to lose. Stephan
threw himself into becoming a champion war bond salesman and corresponded regularly with his
friend.
Stateside pilot training proved arguably as deadly as flying under fire. Cadets struggled with
the slippery Sopwith Pups provided for practice, instructor and student communicating during
flights via a garden hose and cider funnel. Denham was thrilled. He made an immediate
impression with his facile intelligence and intuitive relationship with machinery. Especially
surprising was his ability to somehow focus his normally flailing energy when in a cockpit,
handling the flimsy JN-4 “Jenny” trainers and Pups with smooth aplomb.
Not every pilot mastered the wire-and-canvas trainers. Denham watched in horror as a cadet
named Humphreys mashed himself and his instructor to jelly against a hillside. “They were
recovered in fragments,” he wrote to Roman. “We’re reminded often that it’s not going to be fun
and games over there.”
In May of 1918 he and his group got their orders and were dispatched by freighter to England
for additional comprehensive training by far more competent instructors. It was only a short
layover before the group was sent to Paris, France; from there they traveled by train and lorry to
Tonquin and joined the 94th Aero Squadron of the First Pursuit group.
Thus began Carl Denham’s first great adventure.
Chapter Twenty-Six:
THE GERMANS
One of the many baffling things about the Nazis is how they managed to combine
faith in ludicrous mythology and pseudo-science with running an efficient state
machine.
- Patrick French, author of Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land
It is February 19th, 1936, just a few weeks before Hitler would order troops to cross into the
demilitarized Rhineland and break the Treaty of Locarno, another belligerent step toward an
unwinnable, multifront war. Normalcy is rigidly maintained in the German resort town of
Garmisch-Partenkirchen where the Winter Olympics are in full swing;14 the infamous Berlin
Summer Olympics are months away. It’s hard to ignore, however, the gathering storm.
In Berlin, German scientist Herman Wirth entertains a small group of high-ranking Nazi
guests at his home. After small talk and cocktails, they adjourn to an improvised screening room
where Wirth has set up a projector, settling in as the machine sputters and snaps to life. The
scientist is dashing with his thick blonde hair, full mustache and military-issue white shirt and
tie. He is short of stature—just five foot four inches tall—but full of energy and oozing charm.
Wirth enjoyed a reputation as a speaker who could hold even the most jaded group spellbound as
he pontificated for hours on the meaning of spirit masks among the Alaskan Yupik tribe or the
cryptic etched inscriptions on dolmens in remote Ireland pastures. He was a master of sizing up
his audience and determining what would best move them, and today he is in fine form indeed;
seated front row center is Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer-SS.
Wirth maintains a continuous, animated narration as images of stone columns and carved
wooden edifices flicker on the screen. “And now, coming up…” –he holds one arm aloft,
readying himself—“…there! There are the remarkable and unmistakably runic impressions, right
along the colonnade.” Satisfied murmurs spread across the room, and Wirth needs to raise his
voice noticeably to maintain his narration as more ghostly, almost indistinguishable images
tumble past. “Oh, to be able to see more clearly the saga imprinted there! Indonesia, gentlemen.
Indonesia! The Indian Ocean, thousands of kilometers beyond any previous evidence of Norse
seaborne travel and settlement, we see the calling card of our forefathers!”
The Olympic Torch made its first appearance at the 1936 Winter games. However, it would be another twelve years before the
Winter Olympics would be held again.
14
On cue, visible through heavily damaged nitrate and framed in the shot only incidentally, a
strange, obviously repurposed structure is revealed. It is clearly an overturned wooden longship,
its prow partially buried. “Note the impressive keel running the length of this construct,” Wirth
says quickly, using a long wooden pointer to indicate a raised wooden seam on the roof of the
small hut or shelter. “Not a boat burial, but one of a series of sturdy buildings created with the
hulls of Viking seacraft.
“Now, to the slides,” he declares breathlessly to an assistant as the screen goes shockingwhite and film can be heard flap-flapping on the projector. Still images appear: relief carvings on
stone surfaces, undeniably Nordic in character. Over a great gate can be seen twin Thor figures,
poised to strike with their hammers an enormous gong.
“We see fragments of a record of the Northmen and their time on the island. The photography
is haphazard, nonscientific. However, we can be sure of one thing…” Satisfied murmurs spread
across the men view a pictograph depicting Norse sailors savagely cutting to pieces what appear
to be inhabitants of the island.
“…this ‘island of the skull’ fell to the Aryan sword centuries ago.”
The Society for Research into the Spiritual Roots of Germany's Ancestral Heritage—
Ahnenerbe—might have remained an obscure, crackpot occult club if not for the rise of Nazism
and its strange genesis in—and ongoing relationship with—mysticism and pseudo-science (see
sidebar). As it was, the Ahnenerbe found a champion at the highest echelon of the German
government in Heinrich Himmler, an inveterate dabbler in occultism, herbalism, homeopathy,
prehistoric Venus figures, telepathy, runes, the Bhagavadgita, the “World Ice Theory,” and the
lost kingdom of Atlantis. He was also leader of the Nazi’s dreaded SS and the second-mostpowerful man in the Third Reich.
As Peter Levenda writes in his meticulously researched book, Unholy Alliance—A History of
Nazi Involvement With the Occult:
So, how to describe the Ahnenerbe?
Imagine that the evening adult educaKon program of the New School for Social Research had suddenly become an independent government agency with a budget at big as the Defense Department, with Lyndon Larouche as president and, perhaps, [mysKc, writer, lecturer and spiritual teacher] Elizabeth Clare Prophet as the physics chairperson.
Or maybe the summer session at the University of California, Berkeley, had become militarized and all the students had immunity from prosecuKon for any crime they had commiled, or would ever commit, and could conduct any form of independent study they liked as long as they wore their black uniforms with the silver death's head insignia at all Kmes and swore an oath of personal loyalty to the dean.
Then one might have some idea of what the Ahnenerbe was, and of the type of people it first alracted to its ranks.
It was a humaniKes program. With guns.
Heinrich Himmler, obsessed as he was with the “Aryan ideal” and “scientific racism,” did not
cut an impressive physical figure to those who met him.15 With a pencil mustache, weak chin and
scholarly spectacles, he looked more like his schoolmaster father than the brutal architect of the
Third Reich’s final solution. But his unassuming appearance concealed a diabolical genius for
15
“If I looked like Himmler I would not talk about race,” a member of his staff once said.
atrocity. “He was the man who built, piece by piece and with a numbing attention to detail, the
bureaucracy of genocide,” notes Christopher Hale in Himmler’s Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to
Find the Origins of the Aryan Race.
His father, Gebhard Himmler, stressed discipline and education and was known to be
exceptionally cruel to his students. He read Norse classics to his children and maintained in his
home an “ancestor room” decorated with heirlooms, documents, pictures and collections of
Roman coins and other relics. He was interested in archeology—it had become a fad among the
German elite, to which Gebhard could only aspire—and he often visited dig sites.
Young Heinrich Himmler marched to his father’s drum. He succeeded wildly academically
but was frustrated in his quest to prove himself in battle. Gebhard made extraordinary efforts to
get Heinrich into the army (and the meat grinder that was World War One), even offering to cut
short his promising academic career. After appeals to some well-placed associates, he entered
training as a cadet. The war ended before Himmler could see action, a development that
frustrated him greatly and, combined with Germany’s humiliation at the hands of the Versailles
Treaty, undoubtedly contributed to his quest in later life to make forceful amends. Following his
father’s advice, he went on to study agriculture at the Technical High School in Munich, where
he once again did very well. He also acquired the obligatory facial scars prized by Germans of
his generation—a respectable total of five—after some initial difficulty in finding a member of
his dueling club who would take the slight-built figure seriously enough to accept a challenge. It
was during this period that Himmler became active in far-right wing organizations, and by 1924
he joined growing numbers of radicalized, disillusioned Germans in lashing out “against the
hydra of the black and red International, of Jews and Ultramontanism, of freemasons and Jesuits,
of the spirit of commerce and cowardly bourgeoisie.”
Post-war disillusionment led to the popularity and growth of occultist groups like the Thule
Society and the Artamanen League, the latter of which Himmler joined before entering Munich
Technical High School. Emerging at the turn of the century, many of these sects celebrated a
mythic German past and resurrected pagan symbolism and ceremonies; history as sword and
sorcery epic, scored by Wagner.16 One emblem in particular, the swastika, rose to prominence as
a badge of national pride and tangible connection to the legendary bloodlines of Nordic peoples
that German “race scientists” erroneously referred to as Aryans. (see sidebar)
The Artamanen League included in its roster future key Nazis like Agriculture Minister
Richard Walther Darré (who coined the phrase “Blut und Boden” – “Blood and Soil”)17, and the
future commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss. Himmler began lifelong relationships with these
men when he joined the cult, which had a utopian bent and espoused the view that German
peasantry should be sent to colonize the lands of the east, sweeping aside the “lesser Asiatic and
16 Appearing on Himmler’s reading list in February 1922 is an anti-Semitic booklet entitled Rasse und Nation (“Race and Nation”) by
Richard Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
“Blood and Soil” was a slogan used to reinforce the notion of a connection between race and land that informed Hitler’s
expansion-by-any-means ideals. Said Richard Walther Darré: “The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take as much land
in the East as is necessary to establish a harmony between the body of our Volk and the geopolitical space.” Darré’s background was in
selective animal breeding, surely a factor in his mania for pure bloodlines.
17
Jewish races.” 18 He spent this time exploring, among other works painstakingly recorded on his
reading lists, the novels of Herman Hesse. Books like Demian and Siddhartha then led him to
read and embrace the Hindu Bhagavadgītā, or “Divine Song of God.” (The works of Hesse
would later be banned in Nazi Germany.)
It was a book by Thule Society member Dietrich Eckart19 entitled Der Bolschewismus von
Moses bis Lenin (“The Bolshevism From Moses to Lenin”)—the text of which consists of
rambling, hate-filled conversations with a little-known agitator named Adolf Hitler—that brought
Himmler to the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, which became the Nazi Party.20 He
rose quickly; Hitler, once in power, appointed Himmler Reichsführer of his personal bodyguard
force in 1929, the then-inconsequential Schutzstaffel (“protection squadrons,” or SS) which
consisted of approximately three hundred men. Himmler wasted no time in expanding the scope
of his power. In March, 1933, he became police president of Munich; in April, political police
commander of Bavaria; and in 1934 organized a Hitler-endorsed precision, brutal coup against
the powerful Sturmabteilung (SA) brownshirts, a bloody housecleaning known as “The Night Of
Long Knives.” This feat earned him control over the Gestapo as prize. The grateful führer was
not finished; months later, he gave all police power to Himmler—including responsibility for
administration of concentration camps, a duty for which the highly organizational officer was
The Artamanen League’s founders extolled a “back to the fields” ethic, eschewing the evils of modern urbanism for agriculture
and “joy in healthy work.” They also dreamed of expelling all Polish migrant workers from the German countryside and proposed a future
fighting force of Wehrbauern (“defense farmers”) to protect the eastern border of Germany from Slavic invaders.
18
19 Adolf Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to Eckart, an eccentric poet and failed playwright who blamed his lack of success on Jewish
domination of culture. Esoterists who want to paint Adolf Hitler as a wielder of black magic or possessor of unholy powers make the
unlikely assertion that Eckart, a student of the occult, identified Hitler as the “antichrist” and tutored him accordingly. While claims of an
occult partnership are specious, it is true that Eckart spent a significant amount of time with Hitler and introduced him to Munich’s elite set.
Eckart also made contact with American industrialist Henry Ford—who published in 1921 a book-length compilation of anti-semetic
articles from his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, called The International Jew—and accepted cash donations from him for the
nascent Nazi Party. For his part, Ford accepted from Hitler’s emissaries the “Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle” in
1938, before the outbreak of war but still at a time when Hitler’s policies were being excoriated worldwide.
From Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler's Rise to Power 1919-1933 by James Pool and Suzanne Pool (The Dial Press,
1978), pp 111, 129:
“That Henry Ford, the famous automobile manufacturer gave money to the National Socialists directly or indirectly has
never been disputed," said Konrad Heiden, one of the first biographers of Hitler. Novelist Upton Sinclair wrote in The
Flivver King, a book about Ford, that the Nazis got forty-thousand dollars from Ford to reprint anti-Jewish pamphlets in
German translations, and that an additional $300,00 was later sent to Hitler through a grandson of the ex-Kaiser who
acted as an intermediary. The US Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, said in an interview that “certain American
industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy.” At the time of
Dodd's criticisms, the general public was aware that he was speaking of Ford because the press made a direct association
between Dodd's statements and other reports of Ford's anti-Semitism.
Eckart died in 1923—very soon, perhaps not incidentally, after relations between he and Hitler had cooled significantly due to his fairly
patronizing attitude toward the future dictator. This attitude could be no better illustrated than with words attributed to Eckart on his
deathbed: “Hitler will dance,” he said to gathered acolytes while they held vigil, “but it is I who plays the tune…Do not mourn for me for I
have influenced history more than any other German.”
Eminent German historian Michael Kater notes in Historische Zeitschrift the straight line between the Artamanen Society and the
Nazis: nearly 80 percent of the society’s members joined the Nazi party by 1927.
20
World Ice Theory
The Welteislehre or Glacial Kosmogonie—the World Ice Theory
—is a bizarre cosmological fantasy spun at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Austrian engineer, inventor and amateur astronomer Hans Hörbiger, a man who prided himself on the fact that he never performed calculaKons, believing mathemaKcs to be “decepKve.” Published in 1913, the World Ice Theory states in summary that the prime maler of the universe was ice, which threaded its way through the void, encasing the Milky Way and all planetary bodies—except Earth. GiganKc, blazing suns constantly reacted with this “space frost,” and ongoing collisions and conflagraKons formed new planets. Larger bodies like the Earth ensnared smaller moons in ever-‐decreasing orbital cycles and the eventual impacts generated floods, earthquakes and volcanic erupKons. In this way Hörbiger explains the exKncKon of dinosaurs, the biblical flood and even the destrucKon of AtlanKs. As further mythologized by mysKcs such as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the survivors of this upheaval fled to form “asylum” or “refuge” cultures in Mexico and South America—
the “Aryan master race” scalered among the conKnents, leaving evidence of their presence here, there and everywhere for modern archeologists and explorers to find. Lest we believe that the central leadership of Nazi Germany did not at the very least entertain these beliefs, there is in Hitler’s Table Talk, a remarkable volume consisKng of secret conversaKons at Hitler's headquarters from July, 1941 to November, 1944 (transcribed and preserved on MarKn Bormann’s instrucKons in his role as private secretary of the fuehrer), a quote by Hitler staKng that he was “quite well inclined to accept the cosmic theories of Hörbiger,” as well as references to his plan to build an observatory in Linz dedicated to “the three great cosmological concepKons of history—those of Ptolmy, Copernicus and Hörbiger.”
Heinrich Himmler zealously promoted the World Ice Theory. Researchers and scienKsts at the German Ministry of EducaKon and Science denounced the idea, and a member of Himmler’s staff recorded only by the surname “Polte” had acKvely solicited hosKle comments to bolster a defense of sane science. When Himmler discovered what he’d been up to, Polte was sent “on leave,” stripped of his uniform and badges, and complained in wriKng about the man’s “total lack of objecKvity.”
It’s been suggested that the real value of extensive research into the World Ice Theory by the Nazis was its supposed ability to increase weather predicKon accuracy—the Super Double Doppler Radar of the Third Reich. Any army that could avoid meteorological mishaps had an edge, and Germany’s forces had taken some hard hits from Mother Nature (the destrucKon of Rommel’s material in North Africa due to freak flooding, to name but one such disaster). Unfortunately for the Third Reich, it was Ahnenerbe-‐
sancKoned meteorologists (led by Hörbiger acolyte Dr. Hans Robert Scultetus) who, in 1941, advised Hitler that a mild Russian winter was in the offing. Reassured by this advice, Hitler delayed his main forces a mere two hundred miles from Moscow while divisions were sent to Leningrad and the Ukraine. The Russians were given the Kme they needed to regroup aier Stalin’s bloody purge of military leadership (by fall of 1938, three out of five of the Red Army’s marshals were dead, thirteen out of fiieen army commanders, 110 out of 195 divisional commanders, and 186 out of 406 brigadiers), and winter hit like an icy fist from the heavens. Six months later the Nazis had over one million dead in the frozen Russian wastelands—most never touched by Soviet bullets or arKllery, but rather snuffed out by their commanders’ faith in the “science” of Hörbiger.
well suited. By 1945 Himmler’s SS, which staffed the camps in addition to other duties,
numbered 800,000 strong.
It should be stated at this point that those who attempt to emphasize the occult origins of the
Nazi party in order to assign “magik” or occult powers to Hitler or attribute the rise of Nazism to
some supernatural intervention are simply misguided. Adolf Hitler, whether or not he took the
more mystical volkish legends seriously, was a master propagandist and leveraged these beliefs
and related primitive symbology in order to bolster his portrayal of the German people as an
ancient chosen race whose destiny lay in “reclaiming” that which Nazi-spun ancient history
instructed them was rightfully theirs.
Himmler, however, was a true believer. Now at the very pinnacle of power in Nazi Germany,
answering only to Hitler himself, he was free to give vent to his many abstruse enthusiasms. In
1935 he legitimized a group called the Ahnenerbe by making it a government-sponsored research
society (therefore protecting it against the Nazi prohibition against occult societies). In 1940, he
fully incorporated the Ahnenerbe into the SS, creating the special rank SS Ehrenführer
(“honorary commander”) for allowance of scientists and diplomats into the elite corps. This
organization would become the bureaucratic manifestation of his abiding fascination with the
Germanic ancient past combined with his mania for record-keeping and the pretense of reason.
EIGHTH WONDER | John Michlig From Thule Society to Nazi Party: The “Völkish” (folkish) Movement The march toward Nazism and its fanaKcal embrace of a “pure, Aryan race” (foolish on its face, in that there is no “Aryan race;” the term refers to a language group) arguably had its genesis in what was called the Völkisch (folkish) movement.
Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831 – 1891, born Helena Von Hahn), was the spiritualist founder of the Theosophical Society and author of the books Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science (1877), The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy (1888 – fiieen hundred pages across two volumes), and, just maybe, the copiously Ktled Posthumous Memoirs of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Dictated From the Spirit-‐World, Upon the Typewriter, Independent of all Human Contact, Under the Supervision of G.W.N. Yost, to Bring to Light the Things of Truth, and Affirm the ConKnuity of Life and the Eternal AcKvity of the Soul Immortal. Though she alracted the alenKon of many significant people while in the United States, there was no doubt that she was a fraud, and she was publicly debunked on more than one occasion.
The Secret Doctrine, her rambling epic that freely borrows from published occult fantasists contemporary to Blavatsky, relates the history of humankind thusly: Man is passing through a series of seven “root races,” consisKng of Astrals (pure spirits), Hyperboreans (sKll formless and resided at the North Pole), Lemurians (vanquished because they interbred with lesser species), Atlanteans (literal physical giants who were possessors of psychic powers and advanced technology but lost their birthright due to sexual liaisons with seducKve primiKve, half-‐animal subhumans), and finally Aryans (descendants of an 22
elite Atlantean priesthood that took refuge in the Gobi desert and then the Himalayas aier the AtlanKs cataclysm, later spreading their “seed” outward across the globe).
Enthusiasts of The Secret Doctrine all over Europe—highly educated, influenKal people—rallied under the Tibetan symbol of the swasKka. The German Theosophical Society, founded in 1896, had headquarters in Leipzig and Berlin and spawned offshoot occulKst socieKes that shared a fascinaKon with runes (simple alphabeKc symbols designed to be carved into wood, stone or metal rather than wrilen with a pen—according to Nazi party line, this was the wrilen Nordic language from a pre-‐
ChrisKan era), hated Jews, and sought a worldwide German culture. The Thule Society (Thule Gesellschai) was one such derivaKve whose members believed that the North Pole home of Blavatsky’s Hyperboreans was called Hyperborea-‐Thule (also associated with Iceland and Greenland), and somewhere there existed an entryway to a vast underground civilizaKon populated by giants. It was supposed that these Hidden Masters would make themselves known once again aier Germans had succeeded in purifying the planet.
Heinrich Himmler devoured the publicaKons and pamphlets of these socieKes and joined one, the Artamanen, whose members believed the original Aryan man was spawned somewhere behind the Himalayas.
The Thule Society became a virtual front for poliKcal acKvity, its members rioKng and stockpiling weapons to prevent the Communist takeover of Munich. Aier some significant successes, they formed a group called the German Worker’s Party, which became the NaKonal Socialist German Worker’s Party—the Nazi Party. In November, 1923, this group would make their first try for a naKonal takeover with the failed Beer Hall Putsch, led by a man who joined the group aier being sent by the German Army to spy on them: Adolf Hitler.
The Ahnenerbe was originally founded in 1933 by the obscure mystic Frederick Hielscher.
Little is known of Hielscher except that he was an associate and admirer of the intrepid Swedish
explorer Sven Hedin,21 who himself was closely associated with Karl Haushoffer, the professor
who conceived and popularized the doctrine of Lebensraum, or “living space,” another concept
with which Hitler justified his goals of invasion and conquest.
Once brought under the legitimate and lethal auspices of the SS, the Ahnenerbe mushroomed
until it contained almost fifty fully staffed research departments—including archeology,
anthropology, prehistory, and linguistics, to name but a few—all working single-mindedly
toward the goal of vindicating the Nazi ideal of Aryan superiority and worldwide presence. Of
the forty-six heads of departments, nineteen were professors and another nineteen held
doctorates. And these men of letters all donned the black uniform of the SS—indeed, they
applied the distinctive double lightning bolt insignias to their pith helmets while in the field—and
Hedin took Germany’s side in World War One and was openly supportive of Hitler and the Nazi movement. He was invited by the
Fuhrer himself to give the opening address at the Nazi Olympics of 1936. By 1945, however, Hedin was moved to write to one of his
German friends: “Im dritten Reich ist alles schief gegangen. Hitler ist allmählich verrückt geworden.” (“Everything has gone wrong in the
Third Reich. Hitler has gradually become mad.”)
21
indulged the volkisch fantasies of Heinrich Himmler perhaps as a means toward eventually
pursuing more useful science.
SS Colonel Wolfram Sievers—dramatically bearded and with Rasputin-like eyes right out of
central casting—was recruited for membership by founder Frederick Hielscher22 and tapped as
Director of the Experimental and Educational Association “Das Ahnenerbe.” Though Himmler
set the ultimate agendas for the agency, Sievers was immediate authority to a vast web of
scientists studying astronomy, anthropology, ethnology, archeology, Icelandic lore, Celtic studies,
rune symbolism, Tibetan religion, World Ice Theory, and Norse paganism—just to name a few
areas of study—focused on scientifically justifying race politics and world conquest, and proving
the historical validity of Nazi paganism.
At the time of the discovery at Villa Maisonneuve, extant records of the Ahnenerbe—
meticulous and copious in the characteristic German manner—already represented over ninety
microfilm rolls at the National Archives in Washington. Ongoing study by researchers over the
course of the sixty-plus years since the end of World War Two has turned up a great many
references to the discoveries made by Carl Denham and their potential utility to the Nazi regime
via Ahnenerbe interpretation. Obviously, the appearance of Nordic runes and artwork in
Denham’s photos and film were of particular interest to Himmler and his ilk; this fed their
delusion that Nordics/Aryans were at the root of any great civilization (as evidenced by the
sophistication of the wall and gate), and the reckoned position of “Skull Island” would give
Germany claim to a foothold in Indonesia after Versailles deprived them of Pacific and African
Colonies.
Hielscher, who was never prosecuted after the war (imprisonment by the Gestapo for his role in the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler
may have been a mitigating factor), gave evidence on behalf of SS Colonel Wolfram Sievers at the 1947 “Doctors’ Trials” in Nuremberg,
confining his testimony to political matters and intentionally absurd statements about race and ancestral tribes. After Sievers’ conviction,
Hielscher sought and received permission to accompany Sievers to the gallows in 1948 as his spiritual advisor, and said the Tibetan Bardo
Thodol prayer over him immediately prior to the consummation of the sentence. Sievers was the only Ahnenerbe scientist sentenced to
death.
22
15 DECEMBER 1935
RE:
PHOTO EVIDENCE EXAMINATION – CARL DENHAM/SKULL ISLAND
ARDOO1, ARDOO2, ARDOO3, ARDOO4, ARDOO5, and ARDOO6
Referring to your directive via letter dated 1O December 1935:
Upon careful examination of the photos recorded as ARDOO1, ARDOO2, ARDOO3, ARDOO4,
ARDOO5, and ARDOO6, It is the considered opinion of Drs. ••• and •••, upon consultation
with esteemed associate Dr. ••••, that the stone panels photographed by Carl Denham during
his exploration of “Skull Island” represent an enormous opportunity for study in the
Ahnenerbe/Anthropology Department.
1. They appear to be but a part of a larger sequence which when made whole could
explain much more about the origins and eventual fate of the Vikings depicted.
2. There is no Volkisch legend that strictly features a dominant female/chief who is
able to subdue a primitive giant, but the beast depicted is likely a product of the
mongrelization of prehistoric Hyperborians resultant of their intercourse with lower races.
3. This beast is obviously brought under control by Aryan explorers after their
arrival on the island.
4. The beast is master to the lower race depicted as residents of the island when the
Viking ship arrives. The Vikings provide the technology to create the vast and sophisticated
wall that keeps the beast at bay.
5. The wall and artwork serve also as a message across time to modern Germany.
[The] Ahnenerbe/Anthropology Department would consider it a distinct honor to be
given further scope to study this matter and report to the office of the ••••.
“HH”
“And the age?”
“Location of other panels”
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
CERTIFICATE OF TRANSLATION
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
I. Arthur L. Peterson, U.S. Civilian, AGO No. D-4152455, herby certify that I am thoroughly
conversant with the English and German languages; and that the above is a true and correct
translation of Document NO-345.
ARTHUR L. PETERSEN
HANDWRITTEN:
U.S. Civilian – AGO No. D-4152455
Chapter Twenty-Seven:
THE NORTHMEN
It’s been suggested by various ethnologists and social scientists who have studied prehistoric
architecture—particularly in island groups of the Pacific, Micronesia and Indonesia—that a
“superimposition” of more practical and less impressive structures over ancient marvels may be
fairly commonplace and resultant of changes in basic ruling structure over time.
“When you consider their technical limitations and small population, the ancient people of
Micronesia and Indonesia seem to have been among the world’s most resourceful and creative
people,” notes Dr. Alan Falk, a professor of anthropology based at the University of Oregon.
“Almost each island had their own particular motivation for startling megalithic works like the
impressive mortuary enclosures of Nandauwas at Nan Madol on the island of Pohnpei, or the
great wall we see in Carl Denham’s visual record of Pulau Batu Tengkorak. In the case of Nan
Madol, we note the emergence of a dominant chief called the saudeleur as key to the creation of
impressive artificial islets and protective sea walls.” 23
There are many aspects of Batu Tengkorak that provoke spirited debate among scientists, but
the most divisive facet of the island—beyond, of course, the crypto-zoological questions raised
by the existence of a giant primate—concerns various theories regarding the obvious Nordic
motif seen on almost every structure there.
Scandinavian sea-borne raiders, originating from what are now Norway, Sweden and
Denmark, were called “Danes” by the Anglo-Saxons; Normanni—“Northmen”—by the Franks;
“Ashmen” by the Germans (perhaps referencing their ships, which were actually made of oak);
It is ironic, given the Nordic characteristics of markings present on artwork and structures on Batu Tengkorak, that Pohnpeian oral
traditions link the demise of the saudeleur to the emergence in the 1600’s of a deity known as the Thunder God, around which was
established a new political order that effectively fragmented the central power structure necessary for mobilization of huge labor forces.
The Nordic god Thor is, of course, known as the god of thunder.
23
the Irish called them Gaill (“Foreigners”) or Lochlannaigh (“Northerners); Spanish Arabs called
them Majus (“Heathens”); Slavs, Arabs and Byzantine Greeks called then Rus or Ros, probably a
Finnish name for the Swedes. The Norseman stayed home in winter, planted in spring with his
farmer compatriots, and then, when the work was ended, went a-viking as summer approached,
raiding the Scottish Isles and Ireland. Returning home in time for late summer harvest, he would
again finish his work and return to the sea until one month into the winter. This sea raider and his
compatriots referred to themselves as vikingr,24 known in history’s annals as Vikings.
Thought of on the one hand as “coast-hugging” sailors who stayed in sight of land (much to
the dismay of the neighboring British and Irish, who they harassed during the decades that ended
the first millennium), the theory that these bold Norsemen ranged much farther and in fact landed
in North America before Spanish explorers is nonetheless not a new idea, but dates back to
Victorian times.25 More recently, excavation at the sixth century trading post of Helgõ in Sweden
yielded a small bronze Buddha-figure from Northern India, and a 1961 dig uncovered a Norse
settlement in Newfoundland.
We now know they ranged even farther. Almost unbelievably farther.
There is a school of thought that claims, rather persuasively, that Celtic achievements and
goals have been maligned because the main instruments for recording history up until the twelfth
century have been the principle victims of Viking raids: the English, French and Arabs. 26 One
might excuse a tendency to paint their invaders as bloodthirsty barbarians whose agenda aspired
to nothing higher than simple robbery; the Norse habitually raided monasteries, for instance, and
almost all documents of history were created by churchmen who viewed the raiders from the
north as a heathen scourge (in fact, Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York and Bishop of Worcester,
wrote in approximately 1014 his famous “Sermon of the Wolf,” which called the Nordic raids
God’s punishment against the Anglo-Saxons for their sins). Noble pursuits of exploration and
discovery could not be consistent with these godless brutes.
As for the Norse sailors themselves, there are few if any reliable records from the era during
which they enjoyed their greatest power. The “sagas” as recorded by Danes of the period can be
viewed as historical fiction at best. A somewhat more reliable source is the Danish historian Saxo
Grammaticus, who lived between approximately 1150 and 1220 and wrote sixteen books of
Danish history known collectively as the Gesta Danorum. Because the manuscripts were written
in Latin and are evidently free from the bias shown in English, French and Arabic texts, they
formed the basis for much of what subsequent generations of scholars knew about the Celts and
their culture. Nowhere in these texts, however, are any claims of contact with Indonesia. Indeed,
a voyage from the Norse homelands in Norway and Sweden to the Indian Ocean—in open-
The origins of the medieval term vikingr are obscure, but may be rooted in the word vik, meaning “a creek, bay or fjord.” Searaiders tended to lurk in bays and rivers mouths in order to accost passing ships.
24
25 During the Victorian era Catherine Wolf, a wealthy American, hired master craftsman William Morris (1834-1896) to design stained
glass windows depicting the discovery of “Vinland” (America) by Vikings. Intense interest in Celtic lore and legend during this period would
eventually spread to Germany, where Richard Wagner’s 1876 opera entitled Ring des Nibelungen, the story of Siegfried and his mistress,
the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, would fuel Adolf Hitler’s goal to rouse a new sense of national identity through associations with Vikings and
Wagner’s music.
Not to mention the Nazi party’s embrace of Norse folklore and culture as part and parcel of Germanic heritage, explored in the
previous chapter.
26
decked boats—would represent an almost impossibly
epic journey worthy of the highest commemoration
Crossing the Open Sea Though an auspicious arrival, the docking of possible.
Captain Magnus Andersen’s ship, The Raven, at And yet, though they could not return home with
the World’s Fair in Chicago was under-‐reported in their tale, the sea raiders from the north left their mark
the media of the day. The Fair celebrated, aier all, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of indelibly and aggressively on Batu Tengkorak, a
the New World, and here was a replica of a Viking message across the centuries delivered unwittingly and
ship proving that the Norwegian Leif Ericsson may very well have beaten Columbus to America by haphazardly by Carl Denham’s expedition.
several hundred years. “One gets the feeling that these Vikings could not
Built in Sandevord, Norway, The Raven was or would not leave the island for some reason,” posits
based on a ship excavated in a Gokstad burial mound in 1880, fortuitously encased in clay. The Professor Falk. “They seemed intent upon creating a
relic seemed to have been built around 880, and, record of their existence there. The question is, why
though its rigging had long since succumbed to the elements, nearly every other aspect of its stay as long as five years, which they seemed to have
construcKon was amazingly well-‐preserved.
done? And of course, how did they accomplish such a
T h e R a v e n ’ s t r i p f r o m N o r w a y t o journey, and why? It’s just maddening to realize that
Newfoundland took four weeks, and Captain Andersen was pleasantly surprised by the ease Denham was so single-minded in his goal to bring
with which the vessel navigated open seas. They back and profit from the giant beast that he didn’t take
sailed south to New York, then through the locks of the Great Lakes where Chicago’s four-‐term more careful note of the extraordinary anthropological
mayor, Carter Harrison, came aboard and took evidence we see in his photos.”
command for arrival at Jackson Park and the Indeed, had Denham bothered to bring back with
World’s Fair on Wednesday, July 12, 1893. The quesKon of whether Norse sailing vessels could him, for example, a single section of the longboat
span oceans had been effecKvely selled.
remains we see in some of the Batu Tengkorak stills, it
Andersen’s ship, dubbed The Viking in the American press, is sKll in Chicago. Aier the fair, would be fairly simple to determine where they were
Anderson piloted the vessel down the Mississippi built and conjecture a possible overland route through
to New Orleans and back. It was stored in the Asia or even Africa before the Danes struck out into
Field Columbian Museum unKl 1919, when it was restored and placed in Lincoln Park, covered by a the Indian Ocean. Did they stop to build ships in
roof and enclosed in a chain-‐link fence. It stood India? The Arabian Peninsula? Africa? Could they
that way unKl the 1970s, baking in the summer and freezing in the winter. The Chicago Park have found a route through the Mediterranean and Red
District could not afford a proper restoraKon, so Seas?
they sold the ship for one dollar to the American Though the evidence shows that their incredible
Scandinavian Council, which planned to raise the twelve million dollars needed to restore the journey undoubtedly occurred, few modern scientists
historic vessel. Unfortunately, no restoraKon or historians give serious credence to any notion that
resulted, and The Raven/Viking now resides at the private Good Templar Park in Geneva, Illinois, the Viking contingent was responsible for actually
under a temporary shelter.
constructing the enormous, complex architectural
features on Batu Tengkorak. They would need to have
inhabited the island for decades, and clearly they did
not. However, the Celts seemed to have considered it very important to add their runes and
iconography to nearly every archeological feature on the island during their short stay, including
the very bolt that secured the wall’s main portal.
A scrolled “hard copy” on folded bark of an entire pictograph series—in correct sequence—
was included in the materials recently made available by the grand-nephew of Denham’s
assistant, Stephan Roman. One can safely assume that the scroll was spirited from the ceremonial
longhouse where the islanders kept it for safekeeping. This document provides a rudimentary
chronicle of the period during which Nordic sailors lived on Batu Tegkorak.
“Up until now we’ve seen fragments of a ‘Viking Saga’ via Denham’s photos of runic
carvings on the few remaining stone blocks atop colonnade pillars,” relates Dr. Matt Linkwright,
professor of Anthropology at the University of Miami. “It’s been very frustrating, to say the least,
trying to see the artwork clearly. Their appearance in surviving photos is almost incidental and
usually at a harsh angle. Even in the best of photos they’re very badly eroded, often difficult to
discern, and so many panels are missing that the story being illustrated is open to wild
interpretation depending upon one’s agenda.27 It’s clear that the scroll recently uncovered is not
only from Batu Tengkorak but also represents the fullest representation of the story repeated in
stone atop the colonnade. I would conjecture that the bark copy was created by the islanders
themselves in lieu of actually repairing or preserving the stone pictographs made by the visiting
Celts. They may have eventually repelled or killed the Norse crew—there’s considerable debate
as to their fate—but they remained fascinated with this woman warrior we see over and over
again.”
The tale told in the pictograph panel is by turns instructive and exasperatingly enigmatic.
Four longboats are shown tossed about in a storm, emerging from the ordeal lost and desperate
for dry land (the fact that the story begins at that point has led some historians to theorize that
these Vikings were expelled from their homeland and choose not to depict their forced exodus).
They are led by a striking female warrior28 to landfall on the “Island of the Rock Skull.” There
ensues a fairly one-sided battle during which many of the islanders are killed, and in the end the
survivors capitulate to serve the aggressive newcomers.
Then something mystical happens: a giant beast arrives and terrifies Norsemen and islanders
alike. It strides among the village huts as if having breached the huge wall and kills several
people. The Celtic woman disrobes and faces the beast; somehow the creature is subdued and
even bows to her, and the village is saved.
“Is this a record of an actual event? I doubt it,” says Professor Falk. “Perhaps wishful
thinking or an effort to create a legend or cult by literally inscribing it in stone. This was likely
part of a survival strategy by the Celts, a way to keep the island’s inhabitants at bay and in awe
of them until they could leave. The woman we see pictured could have died soon after their
landing, for instance, and the surviving sailors subsequently created a ‘cult of personality’ around
her.”
Other experts, including anthropologist Carter Filbright, author of Spirits in Smoke and
Elixir: Meeting God Through Narcotics, take this theory one step further and attribute the
islanders’ seeming blithe acceptance of the white sailors’ presence and artwork to the mindaltering effects of herbs consumed during rites on the island. “Batu Tengkorak appears to have
been, even one thousand years ago, a place set aside for rituals and mainly occupied by a clerical
class of men,” Filbright says. “It was not at all uncommon in the Indonesian region to augment
religious ceremonies with mind-altering substances. I believe the sailors from the north found
them in a suggestible state and shrewdly took advantage of that situation.”
27 Interpretations favoring Nordic involvement in the initial construction of the architectural wonders on Batu Tegkorak would persist
during much of the period following Denham’s landing there (with the exception being the research of Professor J. L. Ellsworth). Scientists
of Hitler’s Third Reich were especially vociferous in their claims that the Indonesian inhabitants of Batu Tengkorak were essentially
“squatting” on structures designed and built by Nordic travelers hundreds of years ago (a viewpoint which is consistent with their Aryan
agenda as explored in an earlier chapter of this book).
This woman could not, in the strict sense, be called a Viking. The old Norse word vikingar, from which “Viking” is derived, is
gender-specific to males.
28
A more literal approach is taken by esoteric texts like Earl Monroe’s The Real King Kong
(1959)29 and Pauwels’ and Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians (1960). With only partial Celtic
pictograph panels available to interpret via murky photos ostensibly liberated from either
Denham or RKO Pictures (the company took possession of all visual materials as part of their
Merian C. Cooper’s deal with Denham, as discussed in a later chapter of this book), both
volumes earnestly promote the theory that the mysterious woman warrior is the basis for ensuing
sacrificial rites central to the cult of “Dewa Binatang.”
From The Real King Kong:
The Woman of Gold stayed the hand of the ferocious beast.30 The Skull Island natives venerated her for her powers, and upon her death
preserved her body in a place of honor. To satisfy the god-beast of the island, the high priests ordered a sacrifice ritual during which they
offered a virgin maiden, dressed in emulation of the Woman of Gold, when the moon turned full. For centuries these rites were observed
and the god-beast remained satiated—until, of course, Ann Darrow appeared.
This theory is repeated almost verbatim in Morning of the Magicians and any number of pulp
articles. It’s a great little hypothesis from an entertainment standpoint—simple, transcendent
across centuries, and sufficiently mystical—but it doesn’t carry much water with the vast
majority of experts in the fields of anthropology, paleontology, or even zoology. It assumes, for
one thing, some manner of ancestral memory in the giant primate circa 1931—for he was surely
not the same beast as seen in the centuries-old Norse glyphs—that activated at the sight of a fairskinned blond woman.
“A simple difference in the cosmetic appearance of potential prey does not provoke
enormous behavioral changes in known primates,” notes Dr. Sidney Jones, director of primate
studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of a paper speculating as to the
true biological and behavioral nature of Denham’s beast.31 “It would be hard to imagine this
particular primate changing his reaction or attitude toward a small, helpless organism simply
because blonde hair was involved.”
What made Anne Redman different, then?
The answer may lay in references found in numerous oral histories and folktales—recorded
by the maligned Professor J. L. Ellsworth—from the region surrounding Batu Tengkorak.
Repeated mentions of a “mercy cup” (or some derivative thereof; “mercy chalice,” “maiden’s
nectar,” “nectar of deliverance,” etc.) strongly indicate that part of the bargain struck with the
female sacrifices—who were feted and treated as royalty for a substantial period before meeting
their doom—was the assurance that they would not live long after their encounter with the beast
on the other side of the giant wall. Their groggy, disoriented state would keep them trapped in the
sacrificial basin outside the gates, and timing would have to be such that the woman was still
It should be once again noted that most—if not all—of the more far-fetched and exploitative material presented in The Real King
Kong was added by the publisher after Monroe’s death.
29
30 One hears echoes of this in the “Arabian Proverb” invented by Merian C. Cooper for “King Kong”:
And the Prophet said - - And, lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty.
And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.
31
Dr. Olivia Stoddard, Dr. Sydney Jones, The Case for Simius Ingens Calvariaensis (Ph.D diss., University of Wisconsin)
intriguingly alive and capable of movement when the beast comes for her, but mercifully dead
very, very soon after.32
Dr. Jones’s co-author, ethnological researcher Dr. Olivia Stoddard, explains: “We have
multiple testimony from persons who were on Batu Tengkorak with Denham, claiming that the
only female they saw on the island seemed drugged during their first encounter with the natives,
and was dead—without a mark on her—when they returned to attempt to take back Anne
Darrow.” Indeed, Dr. Linden’s perfunctory examination of the girl found in the ceremonial
longhouse found no injuries or trauma of any kind. “So, there is one theory that says the
unfortunate girl on the island was already ‘prepped’ for the sacrifice when Denham and company
interrupted the daytime preamble to the big event. She was already ‘dosed’—she’d drunk from
the ‘mercy cup’—and there was no turning back.”
And suddenly there is Anne Darrow. “Here was substantially a dead ringer for the mysterious
golden woman on the island runes, not to mention the blonde-tressed mummified body that
occupied a place of honor in the longhouse,” says Dr. Stoddard. “The great primate may not have
known the difference between one woman or another, but the people on the island certainly did.”
That’s one viewpoint. Then again, it might have been a matter of expediency.
“If we buy into the ‘mercy cup’ theory—and I tend to believe it, myself—then there is also
the idea that perhaps with the timing thrown off by Denham’s interruption, another sacrifice had
to be made ready in a very short amount of time,” Dr. Stoddard continues.
In 1976 Paramount produced a remake of the “King Kong” film that abandoned all pretense of having a basis in the true story of
Denham and the beast. However, the character standing in for Anne Darrow (“Dwan,” as portrayed by Jessica Lange) is made to drink a
narcotic from a cup offered by the native high priest—perhaps a small nod to the factual story in an otherwise ridiculously modern update
of the tale.
32

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adapted from an OCTELA 2016 “Rethinking Research” presentation