The Mystical Ellis Madstone Transcript

Billboard:

[Cassette Tape Audio - Stewart Hines Speaking]

Reverend Stewart Hines: I’ll tell you about the mad stone. That I’ve heard my grandmother tell about. When I was a little boy she used to tell me, “Don’t worry about it.” When her ancestors came over in the early 1600s from Wales, England. And probably they had used this Mad Stone in Wales, England. That was an old remedy back then.

[Music enters-mysterious]

(Other Voice) Are mad dogs rabid dogs?

Reverend Stewart Hines: Yeah, rabid dogs and so forth. He would tell me about this mad stone and say that it looked kind of like a honeycomb.  

Ariel Lavery: Who are we listening to?

Austin Carter: That’s the late Reverend Stewart Hines talking to his grandson. I was given this recording by his daughter Charlotte.

Ariel Lavery: Oh really? And how did you come into contact with Charlotte?

Austin Carter: Well I’ve lived in Kentucky for most of my life, my dad grew up in a small town called Whitesville, and if you ask my wife I spend too much time on Facebook. So I was in a Whitesville history Facebook group and all of a sudden there was a post about this weird mystical stone. I had to find out more and talk to some folks who I knew in Whitesville and they hooked us up.

Ariel Lavery: Huh. As a newcomer who’s an artist and a mom, I haven’t lived in Kentucky for super long, but I’m really interested in finding out more about my new home and what this small town life is all about. So, what’s all this talk in the clip about rabid dogs, and this crazy stone that looks like a honeycomb?

Austin Carter: Well unlike the name suggests, this “mad stone” he’s talking about is a very old healing tradition passed down through his family for generations. The mad part comes from the old name for rabid animals. And the mad stone was supposed to be able to cure rabies and other diseases. Ariel, this story is kind of a legend within this family, and this stone has impacted countless lives including my own.

Ariel Lavery: Really? I’m so fascinated to hear this story and I already have so many questions!

[Podcast Theme music starts- inspirational]

Austin Carter: Well I’ll try to answer them all, but this story covers a lot of ground: the scourge of rabies, the faith of a minister, the origins of healing, and all of it centered around a mysterious rock. I’m Austin Carter.

Ariel Lavery: And I’m Ariel Lavery. 

Austin Carter: From WKMS and PRX, this is “The Mystical Ellis Mad Stone.”

Ariel Lavery: On Middle Of Everywhere. Telling big stories from the small places we call home.

Segment 1: The Ellis Family and “The New World”

Ariel Lavery: So Austin, I feel like this story has a lot going on so where are we going to start?

Austin Carter: Okay. So I think to understand the mad stone as this fascinating cultural relic that it is, and what it meant to the lives of the people who carried and used it, we’re going to have to look at it through the eyes of this family, the Ellis’. So let me start off by introducing you to the people who told me this story. 

Ariel Lavery: Sounds great.

Austin Carter: So, Charlotte Whittaker is the daughter of Reverend Hines, who we heard at the beginning and the first time I met her in Whitesville, Kentucky, she showed me a picture in an old book as she told me about the man who kind of ties this whole story together.

Charlotte Whittaker: Well it was Joseph Perkins Ellis and this is where my dad wrote in it, “my mother's grandparents.”

Ariel Lavery: So you said this man kind of ties the story together. Who is Joseph Perkins Ellis?

Austin Carter: So J.P. Ellis, as he was known, was a Baptist minister from a long line of Baptists. 

[Gospel music enters- uplifting]

Who’s family migrated from Virginia to Kentucky in the 1800s. And they eventually settled in Daviess County within a dense forest, near a place now called Old Panther Creek.

Charlotte Whittaker: Even when J.P. Ellis came to Old Panther Creek it was a wilderness out there, you know, There were buffalo out there, there were six tribes of Indians in this area.

Austin Carter: And Charlotte’s father, Reverend Hines, also heard stories of the difficulty of the Ellis family’s journey from Virginia to Kentucky.

Reverend Stewart Hines: When they left Virgina, they came by covered wagon. But I remember my dad would say, when nightfall would come, they brought their wagons, they would put them in a circle, and they’d bring the horses on the inside of the circle of the wagons. And they would bag up what dead timber they could get, and stash around the outside of the wagons and make a ring of fire. And they would run relays on this keeping the fire burning through the night, in order the panthers wouldn’t sneak through and slit the horses throats and suck the blood. That’s what they did.

Ariel Lavery: Ooh panthers sucking blood! I didn’t know that there were panthers even in Kentucky. I didn’t realize that there was such dangerous wildlife here.

Austin Carter: I know! Mountain lions as we know them now were a real threat back then. J.P. Ellis’ family didn’t have a lot to protect them from this wilderness except for their skills, a few tools and their strong Baptist faith. A faith that would lead J.P. Ellis to found 16 churches in and around Daviess County.

Austin Carter: But they did have something else that was meant to protect them. 

[Music enters- mysterious]

J.P. Ellis wrote a Biographical sketch of his family later in his life that described the journey of his ancestors from England in the early 1600s. He says, “They brought with them a stone said to be a sovereign remedy for their bites, mad dogs, etc. which they were careful to keep in the family, so from that day to this it has been safely kept and has descended in the family.”

Ariel Lavery: Wow. So the stone and the story just kept getting passed down from generation to generation.

Austin Carter: Exactly. And this was the story Charlotte’s father had heard as a boy.

Charlotte Whittaker: My Dad had always talked about it. That it’d come down through the years and it was supposed to have been like magic. I always thought it was kind of a witchcraft type thing you know.

Austin Carter: This “mad stone” was believed to cure rabies and bites of poisonous animals. A very real concern for the first Ellis’ to carry the stone. Charlotte’s friend and amateur historian Pat Gibson traced the stone back to a man named David Ellis who was an early settler to the British Colony of Jamestown.

Pat Gibson: And the story was that John Smith had recruited David Ellis, and a couple of other people to build a house for Powhattan and Powhattan was the chief of the Pamunkey Indians, and his daughter was Pocahontas.

Ariel Lavery: We’re talking about THE John Smith and Pocahontas here?

Austin Carter: The very same of Disney film fame [both hosts laugh]

You know life for those early settlers in Jamestown was difficult and their future was uncertain in those early days. And as David Ellis was setting off for this new land his father gave him something to protect him from the many dangers they had heard about on this foreign continent. 

Pat Gibson: I'm just sort of guessing that it was picked up on the ocean beach there when his father was waving goodbye to him. Well, you know, here's a stone, take care of it, and keep it in the family and it will help heal some of the diseases and things that might happen to you in the new world.

Ariel Lavery: Imagine setting out on this journey across the world to a place you’ve never even seen a photo of.  You’ve heard stories of wealth and opportunity, but also wild beasts, danger and diseases. And somehow you’re convinced to make the journey.  I would be terrified.  I don’t know if I could do it. 

Austin Carter: Yeah. I don’t know if I would have been cut out for that life either but there is something kind of alluring about setting out into the wilderness to start a new life. And without a lot to protect you, faith in God or even a healing stone would feel like armor.

Ariel Lavery:  There were so many dangerous things people could fall prey to, so why was rabies so threatening? 

[Music enters- mysterious, building wonder]

Segment 2:  The World’s Most Diabolical Virus

Monica Murphy: My name is Monica Murphy and I wrote “Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus” with my husband Bill Wasik. People have been aware and worried about rabies going back further than we can possibly know. With the very first introduction of written language, people right away start writing about rabies. The Sumerian texts mentioned rabies and penalties for owners of dogs who rampage and attack others and expose them to rabies. So this has been a preoccupation of man throughout history and one can presume, pre history going back as far as dogs and people have been living together.

Ariel Lavery:Wow, that's so interesting. To consider rabies is this huge part of our history. But today we don't really experience it the same way. I mean, I kind of thought we had pretty much defeated rabies?

Austin Carter: Well thanks to Louis Pasteur we have a rabies vaccine, but even today it’s still a very dangerous threat in some parts of the world. If you think about something recent like the coronavirus pandemic which resulted in death in the US in around 5% or less of cases, Monica’s description of what rabies is, really is truly terrifying.

Monica Murphy: The disease itself really is devastating. It's virtually 100% fatal. It has the highest case fatality rate of any infectious disease, meaning, once you have symptoms of rabies, you're going to die. And the death is not a pretty one. It is marked by hallucinations and convulsions, and all sorts of miseries not only for the sufferer but for everyone around them. It’s a horrible way to watch your loved one go. And especially because rabies disproportionately affects children. This has been just very upsetting to people throughout human history and the focus of a lot of interest in how to prevent people from dying this terrible death.

Ariel Lavery: Wow that sounds horrible. As a mom, I just can’t imagine watching my child die in this manner.

Austin Carter: Yeah, I don't think anybody wants to imagine that, and would fault people for fearing rabies and being afraid especially if you had to watch that very thing. It's really truly horrible. But going back even to ancient times, there are a variety of solutions that people come up with to try to fight rabies including mad stones.

Monica Murphy: You see therapies like the mad stone being written about and counted for centuries. You know, everything from the bathing and saltwater, to the truly weird. Pliny the Elder from the ancient times. His hair of the dog remedy gave us that phrase today, the idea that if you were to put some hairs from the dog who infected the bite, into the bite wound itself, you could prevent rabies.

Austin Carter: And just so you know, if you would prefer to just eat the dog's head out right, that might work as well according to Pliny.

Ariel Lavery: [Laughs] Oooh gross. I always wondered where the phrase “hair of the dog” comes from.

Austin Carter: I know right? And the thing that I think is so interesting about “hair of the dog” is that it speaks to a part of early science and healing that is kind of correct, that a little bit of the thing that wounded you could possibly heal you, whether it’s a tiny bit of a virus or a mimosa after a late night of drinking.

Ariel Lavery: [Laughs] Yes! So crazy how that actually works, huh? So there were all these potential treatments for rabies, some which kinda seem more suspect than others. Why was the mad stone unique? And how was it used? And why did it stick around as a source for healing for so long?

[Music enters- contemplative]

Austin Carter: Well there’s a lot of lore behind mad stones, just like with all the other rabies treatments Monica alluded to. Mad stones were supposed to come from the stomach of an animal like a deer or a cow with the most powerful stones coming from an albino or spotted deer. They couldn’t be bought or sold, though some people tried, and you couldn’t take the stone to a patient for treatment, they had to come to the stone. It would be heated or boiled with fresh milk and stuck to the bite wound and left until it fell off naturally. And this was a widely accepted treatment up until the 20th century. Even Abraham Lincoln sent his son for mad stone treatment at one point. People at the time might employ multiple natural remedies in the fight against rabies, but the mad stone was different.

Monica Murphy: There is something pretty special about the mad stone and what's special about it, it seems to sort of go beyond the weirdness and intricacies of how it's used.  The way that the Mad stones are sort of imbued with magic and value. You can imagine how valuable an object which is purported to protect you is, it's the symbolic value of that. You against the wilderness, and you've got this thing, to hold the worst case scenario at bay.

Ariel Lavery:Yeah, I can imagine that something that seems to hold these magical healing properties would be very valuable indeed.  I mean, this is life or death.  

Austin Carter: Oh yeah. In his research, Pat Gibson, found exactly that.

Pat Gibson: I found in one case where a man was offered $1,000 and a milk cow and in a calf for his mad stone. So that's a lot of money back in the 1800s.

Austin Carter: I also found an article where a Russian physician who settled in Nevada offered his stone for sale in the 1880’s for $1,500 and it was bought by a farmer who formed a stock company to buy the stone and sold around a thousand people shares for $1 a piece. And Pat also said he had found instances of people being charged as much as $5 an hour for the use of a mad stone. And the Ellis’ mad stone was so valuable to them, that J.P. Ellis mentioned it in his will.

Pat Gibson: And in the will on the ninth clause had said that he would will the stone to his family members, and the use of it and the money from it would be divided equally.

Ariel Lavery: You mentioned earlier that these mad stones were supposed to come from the belly of a beast, and Reverend Hines said his grandmother said it looked like a honeycomb.  So have you seen this thing?!

[Music enters- contemplative]

Austin Carter: Well, I can fully explain the unusual origin of this stone later. But the first time I saw it in person I really just thought it looked odd and definitely not like a normal rock but also not like something from inside an animal. It’s pinkish white and the end was pock-marked with these kind of craters and it has shallow evenly cut dark striations across the face. And the stone is probably only about an inch and a half long. But honestly I just thought it looked weird.

Ariel Lavery:  It kind of makes me wonder about the powers people attribute to odd and pretty things simply because they’re unique. It sounds like this rock was pretty unusual and maybe could  have easily had these powers attributed to it because of that?

Austin Carter: I wondered the same thing. And we’ll talk about a few reasons why people believed in these stones in a bit. But when I went to the museum to see the stone, another mystery emerged. There was an unexpected note that accompanied the stone.

[Music enters- building suspense]

Ariel Lavery: What did it say?

Austin Carter: It had the phone number for a woman named Rachel Camp, saying the stone had been used on her brother, J.W... and it worked.

Segment 3: The Healing of J.W. Camp And Natural Medicine

(Phone dial tone Audio) We’re sorry... You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error please check your number and try again…

Austin Carter: So that was what I got when I called Rachel Camp’s phone number. I had no idea how old the note was or if she or her brother were still living. So I started searching obituaries. And I found one for a woman who had been married to a J.W. Camp in the Owensboro area, and realized that he had passed away in the early 2000s. So I started posting in Facebook groups local to Daviess County. Trying to find anyone who knew J.W. Camp, or his sister Rachel, or any or their children or their family. And after a few dead end hints I finally got a name for J.W. Camp’s son. And realized he was far from KY, out west in Nevada.

Rachel Camp: My name is Ralph camp, and my father was James Wesley camp, more commonly known as J.W. In fact, I think a lot of people didn't even know he had a name to go with J.W.

Austin Carter: Ralph is seventy-seven, and his father was supposedly healed by the Ellis family's mad stone, and I wanted to find out a little bit more about his dad.

Rachel Camp: He grew up outside of Owensboro, Kentucky, on a farm. And he had one sister named Rachel and my grandmother's name, the only name I knew was Nana Belle.

Austin Carter: So I read Ralph the note I’d found at the Owensboro Museum, and I asked him what he thought about the likelihood of this occurrence and about why his family might have used the mad stone, forty years after the advent of the rabies vaccine..

Rachel Camp: My Aunt Rachel and Nana Belle were both into natural remedies. My grandmother, Nana Bell did not trust doctors. And if Aunt Rachel says that I tend to accept that. I don’t discount that. She was the one who would be involved in something like that, and would be a preserver of traditions like that. I don’t question it.

Austin Carter: So I asked Ralph why he thought his grandmother Nana Belle and his aunt Rachel had an aversion to the budding field of modern medicine in the 1920’s or 30’s when his dad might have been bitten by a rabid animal. But he didn’t really know.

Rachel Camp: I do know that Nana Belle also advocated natural herbs and natural remedies. And that's, that's about as far as I can go. (Laughs)

Ariel Lavery: Sounds like Nana Belle was an early anti-vaxxer. And it sounds like Ralph believes in the efficacy of his family’s natural remedies. You know, this story also kinda makes me think about all these natural and spiritual healing practices in contemporary day, like herbal or aromatherapy, or even healing crystals.

Austin Carter: Yeah me too. So much so that I went to one of those places in Paducah, Kentucky!

[Music enters- mystical]

Susan Edwards: We even have an angelic Stargate here. I know and almost everyone can feel it. It's basically a portal, and it's where our healing angels basically come and go.

Austin Carter: Susan Edwards owns Wildhair Studio and Rock Shop in Paducah, Kentucky. They sell everything from salt lamps and healing crystals, to aromatherapy items, essential oils and incense. They also offer psychic readings and other spiritual and sound healing services. I wondered what drew people to crystals as a source of healing and what they’re believed to do.

Susan Edwards: We focus mostly on quartz crystals and all of their varieties. The next thing about quartz is that it emits more far infrared than almost anything else on earth. When you have infrared, you can put it on a little owwey and it will create a little micro fever and jiggle the water in your cells a little bit so it can help to release toxins and and just basically heal. Now, of course we know that now here in the 21st century. Healers didn't know that thousands of years ago but they just knew quartz helped.

Austin Carter: So Susan sees all life as electrical beings that resonate and vibrate with certain frequencies. There are healthy frequencies which allow bodies to heal more easily or maintain a healthy balance just as certain frequencies might hint at disease. Or as she emphasizes, dis-ease.

Susan Edwards: Where crystals or aromatherapy or the mad stone can help as it can clear out that energetic wound so that your body can get back to balance and to health.

Austin Carter: Susan thinks that the power of the mad stone has to do with the energy surrounding it.

Susan Edwards: At some point, somebody picked it up and started using it as a healing. So now we've got the energetic fingerprints, from that, that original healer.

Austin Carter: She says we can imbue all kinds of things with energy and importance and she refers to these items as talismen..

Susan Edwards: We all use talismen. You know, my husband he's a Catholic. So he has a cross. He wears a cross every day, all day long and won't take it off. All it technically is is just a piece of metal shaped into a cross. But it has meaning for him and it makes him feel protected. And it makes him feel connected to his divinity and to God and to his history. But we all have those kinds of things that we imbue our power to.

[Music enters- mystical]

Ariel Lavery: The “energetic fingerprint” of healing is intriguing to me.  I’m still pretty suspicious about the contemporary healing crystals and all, but I totally believe that our minds can be powerful agents of healing just by believing that something else has a healing effect.  Isn’t that the definition of the placebo effect?  So, it totally makes sense that people use these sort of talisman to keep them safe and healthy.  

Austin Carter: Yeah. This idea of the talismen is really fascinating to me too. And by those standards, the Ellis family certainly saw their mad stone as something that gave them power to face a potentially deadly disease.

Ariel Lavery: It definitely seems that way. But an item that gives its owner a feeling of power or connection to something greater than themselves is not really the same as a cure for rabies. So I’m still kind of left wondering whether madstone treatments actually worked.  I mean so many people were using them, so they must have seen some kind of efficacy.  

Austin Carter: Well that kind of depends on what you want to believe. If you’re just looking for the scientific explanation then Monica has one.

Monica Murphy: Our best data from the mid 19th century suggests that if a person is bitten by a definitely rabid animal, the chances that they're going to come down with and die of rabies is probably in the 20 to 25% range. Meanwhile, you have all these animals that are presumed rabid, because they're acting vicious, they end up not being rabid at all. So the actual number of people bitten by what they perceive to be potentially rabid animals who will die of rabies is much, much lower than 20 or 25%. And because of those numbers, there was opportunity for all sorts of therapies that don't really do anything at all to flourish because they'd have a pretty good success rate.

Ariel Lavery: Okay. So scientifically speaking, the mad stone may not have been doing anything, but it still seems like there is some kind of power to it, whether it’s psychological or the “energetic fingerprint.”

Austin Carter: Yeah I agree. And so did Pat Gibson. 

Pat Gibson: If you believe in something strong enough, then maybe there is some power in that stone. I wouldn't say that it wasn't. Maybe nobody was sort of totally cured. Maybe they were through their belief in that.

Austin Carter: For J.P. Ellis and his family, part of their role in the community likely centered around the stone. J.P. Ellis could bring a sense of spiritual and physical security to those around him with his family’s mad stone and as a minister. And Pat said he relished the opportunity to help those around him in this way.

Pat Gibson: He was a person that would help all his neighbors and friends and that's the way that we sort of survived back then. 

Ariel Lavery: Times were hard back then, and whether the stone worked or not, it held power and value for those who carried it. 

[Music enters- contemplative]

I mean, even if the fear of rabies was greater than the risk, there’s something special about the mad stone that I really want to believe in.

Segment 4: The Faith of the Ellis’ and the Talismen

Charlotte Whittaker: I think now, you know, if I had a friend who had cancer could we not put it on a person and they be healed? I just can't imagine that all my ancestors believed in this so much that it still wouldn't work perhaps.

Austin Carter: Belief can be powerful for people. It can make us see miracles, push ourselves further than we would have thought possible, and give us the strength to carry on in a world that can often make you feel powerless. J. P. Ellis’ beliefs led him into the wilderness and into a life in service of his faith. 

Pat Gibson: Joseph P. Ellis had a deep belief in people. ‘Cause he helped a lot of people and established churches and congregations. Would travel long distances by horse and carriage, had church service in his own log house on Sundays.

Austin Carter: J.P. Ellis, was a beacon of his small Kentucky community. He founded churches, and preached the gospel which was the foundation of his belief. He was also the last of his family to carry the mad stone in a world without a true medical treatment for rabies.

Pat Gibson: He continued to preach until he was almost totally blind. 

[Gospel music enters- traditional American song “Down to the River to Pray”]

And then one of his family members would read the Bible for him, then he would start preaching and said, “When I saw him with his blind eyes turned toward heaven, and heard his trembling old voice plead for lost souls, I knew God had called him to preach.” And he preached right up to the very end.

Austin Carter: J.P. Ellis passed away in 1892 at the age of 81.

Austin Carter: This stone, that had helped the Ellis family brave the wilderness of the American continent for nearly 300 years at the time of Joseph P. Ellis’ death, might see its necessity decline in the next century. But it was still passed down through the family for another handful of generations. And it turns out the stone is actually quite old. About 350 million years.

Ariel Lavery: What are you saying?  You mean this magic stone is prehistoric? And not from an animal’s stomach?

Austin Carter: Well one of Pat’s other hobbies is collecting fossils, and from that he knows that the Ellis family mad stone, is actually a piece of fossilized coral from the Devonian period.

Ariel Lavery: So this living thing dies, falls to the bottom of the ocean, gets fossilized, then a few hundred million years later it washes up on a beach in England to take on this whole new existence, saving people’s lives.

Pat Gibson: Just the rock that it is the fossil, and all the actual value of it would probably be a couple of dollars. But when you think about the history of it coming through Jamestown, all of the families and descendants, it's priceless.

Austin Carter: In 1983, a cousin of Charlotte’s father donated the family mad stone to the Owensboro Museum of Science and History, marking the 13th and final generation who carried the stone.

Charlotte Whittaker: They put it in the museum where it needs to be. It needs to be protected for our children to go see or so forth. I mean, I just almost cried the first time I held it because of how special.

Austin Carter: The museum is where Charlotte’s father, Reverend Hines, first got to see the madstone he’d heard about from his grandmother.

Reverend Stewart Hines: And I got to hold it in my hand. And in doing so I had a kind of peculiar feeling of knowing how many people had really had that mad stone applied to snake bites or dog bites or whatever.

Austin Carter: Charlotte has a great granddaughter so now there are 16 generations who can trace their lineage back to David Ellis who first brought the stone from England. This little stone has affected countless lives. Remember Ralph Camp, who’s father J.W. was healed by the stone? Coincidentally, his father would go on to marry his mother, whose maiden name was, Ellis. He too had heard stories of his ancestors.

Rachel Camp: My mother's cousin did much research on the Ellis family. She was the one who discovered that Sea Captain David Ellis brought a ship from England to the new world to the colonies.

[Music etners- inspirational]

Austin Carter: And it also turned out, according to the genealogy expert in my family, my cousin Mildred, I too, am a descendant of the Ellis family.

Mildred Farmer: You can do a relationship calculator. You can take Joseph Perkins Ellis and take Austin Emerson Carte. and calculate and it tells you what the relationship is. 

Austin Carter: So did you do that? What is he to me?

Mildred Farmer: You're the third great grand nephew.

Austin Carter: He's like my third great grand uncle?

Mildred Farmer: Uncle, right.

Ariel Lavery: So, let me get this straight: both you and Ralph are descendants of the Ellis family.

Austin Carter: Yep.

Ariel Lavery: And you had no idea about this connection before you started working on this story? 

Austin Carter: Yeah, I had no idea at all. And really when I first kind of figured out this connection, it kinda blew my mind. But, on the other hand, Whitesville is a really small community. So I guess I’m not really surprised that we’re all connected.

 Ariel Lavery: Small community or not, you guys are spread across the country, had no contact with each other or even knew of each other’s existence before this, but you were all brought together because of this magic stone.

[Music continues- inspirational]

Austin Carter: I was so curious about this stone that I brought everyone I could find together to talk about it around a big table in the Whitesville Historical society: Charlotte Whittaker, Doug Reardon and Pat Gibson. This magic stone had affected us all. And we’re wrestling with this idea of how J.P. Ellis, Baptist minister, could have believed in the healing properties of a piece of fossilized coral. And Doug expresses his doubts.

Doug Reardon: Well I just can’t understand it. J.P. Ellis was a man of faith. But how could he put his faith in a rock? I don’t know. I know they didn’t have nothing but, a rock? A stone?

Austin Carter: We all acknowledge and passively agree with his skepticism, and Pat mentions some of his grandmother's beliefs about natural healing with ginseng or willow bark. But then Charlotte says her dad, who was also a minister, was a water witch.

Ariel Lavery:What’s that?

Austin Carter: It’s a person, who through using dowsing rods or a stick, or some tool,  can find the location of underground water. And immediately, Doug says.

Doug Reardon: Yeah I can do that.

Charlotte Whittaker: Well there you go.

Doug Reardon: I don’t know what it is but something makes that stick move.

Charlotte Whittaker: It came down through the family.

[Music enters- inspirational, contemplative] 

Austin Carter: And suddenly Doug’s skeptical opinion about the mad stone, has shifted into a full scale endorsement of what you can do with dowsing.

Austin Carter: And as Doug and Pat are discussing the uses for dowsing, Charlotte kind of offhandedly says something that kind of passed me by at first. But I think it rings true of every family, and of every person who looks to their history and to the past to learn about the present and where we’ve come from.

Charlotte Whittaker: Maybe we all inherited some magic. [Background conversation]

Ariel Lavery: “Maybe we’ve all inherited some magic.” I love that!

Austin Carter: Me too. 

[Music continues- inspirational, contemplative]

CREDITS:

This episode was produced by me, Austin Carter with help from my co-host Ariel Lavery. Our editor is Naomi Starobin. Additional support came from Chad Lampe. Thanks also to Bree Zender of KUNR in Las Vegas for help with the Ralph Camp interview. Marketing and sponsorship support comes from Dixie Lynn. And thanks to the Whitesville Historical Society and Whitesville Baptist Church for hosting me and my interviewees. Our theme music was composed and recorded by Time on the String sound studio in Paducah, Kentucky. Follow us on social media @middleofeverywherepod and at our website middleofeverywherepod.org. Middle of Everywhere is produced at WKMS in Murray, Kentucky with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PRX.

[Music fades]