Free Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist by Robert Damon Schneck Page A

1885, Alfred and his twin brother, Edwin, on July 22, 1888 (Edwin died in infancy), and Arthur in 1891. Arthur wrote a series of reminiscences about his family’s history and life at Cowlitz County when it was still the frontier.
    He described his mother as a “real pioneer woman” who helped deliver babies and “[t]o give the reader an insight as to how rugged life was in the early years . . . Coming home from school one day about 1898, I found my brother John seated on the porch sewing up a three-inch ax cut in his knee, using a darning needle and white cotton thread. If you doubt that requires grit, try it on your own knee.” 4 School was four months a year, and a photograph taken in 1900 shows Miss Hargraves and her class from the Lower Coweeman School, with the younger boys wearing Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, the girls in pinafores, and all twenty-three students looking horribly serious except for Fred and Arthur Beck, who are smiling. 5 According to
I Fought the Apemen
, Fred was already having visions, and it is not surprising that the twelve-year-old clairvoyant stands somewhat apart from the group.
    Even ordinary childhood incidents could be mysterious for the young Beck:
    When just a boy I was in the pasture playing with my beanshooter. I had bought it with some long earned coins. It had a twisted wire handle. I lost it, and as I was crying, a kindly woman came up to me and put her arms around me. I felt warm all over. “Little boy,” she said, “don’t cry. Go home, you will find your beanshooter there.”
    I went home and found it, and as far as I knew then it was the same one. But years later I found the one I lost. It was weather beaten and the rubber was rotten.
    Another woman was invisible to everyone except Fred:
    I would be sleeping on the hard benches of the Adventist Church my folks used to attend, and I would have my head in a lady’s lap, only when I mentioned it to my folks, they said there was no one else there and took it to be a boy’s musings.
    As the Becks matured they worked in blacksmith shops and mills and at various lumber camps. Logging was “more dangerous than war,” and William, the fourth-born son, was killed in an accident in 1909. 6 At age twenty-two, Fred operated a donkey engine—a mechanical winch used for dragging heavy logs—and had his first encounter with an ape-man while working at a lumber camp near Kelso.
    One night I heard a rustling outside, and I heard something pushing its way under our tent. A tall hairy figure stood before us watching us. It scared my brother, who afterward said it was a large bear. But I have seen enough bears to know that it was no bear. There was nothing else he knew to call it. 7
    It was around this time that Beck “became immersed in spiritualism,” the popular belief that the personality survives death and that it was possible to communicate with those who have passed on.
    How he became involved is unknown, but it was typical, for “[t]hroughout his life, he espoused novel beliefs.” 8 Meetings were held, and in time Beck “created a following of folks who sometimes gathered for séances. Some of his own brothers and his sister were intrigued with this activity. They enjoyed the experiences but their spouses were chagrined.” 9
    Like Adventism and the Latter-day Saints movement, Spiritualism emerged from the religious revivals and social reform movements that “blazed” across upper and western New York State until the area was known as the “Burned-Over District.” It began at rural Hydesville in 1848 with the Fox sisters, two girls who figured out how to communicate with a spirit haunting their farmhouse; from there it spread around the world with astonishing speed. Conversing with ghosts was not unprecedented: Twenty-seven years before Hydesville, a poltergeist spoke audibly, and insultingly, to thepeople of Adams, Tennessee,