Ghosts, Spirits and Angels

It's been out for a few months now, but I've just become aware of a book called Ghosts, Spirits and Angels: True Tales from Kentucky & Beyond, that looks to be a real pip. I learned about it from a post made on the Phantoms and Monsters blog.

Author Thomas L. Freese (any relation to Claude H. Freese, I wonder?) is an author and storyteller whose work includes over 130 articles for magazines and newspapers such as Lexington's Chevy Chaser. His other books include Shaker Ghost Stories from Pleasant Hill, KY, Fog Swirler and 11 Other Ghost Stories, and Strange and Wonderful Things.

I know I've met Mr. Freese but I can't remember where. Some of my synapses suggest it was at the St. James Art Fair but other voices in my noggin say it may have been at a Farmer's Market in Shelbyville. My fractal memory's too fractal to pull it up right now, but I do recall he was a really sincere and nice guy.

Here's the Barnes & Noble synopsis about his new book:

Ghosts, Spirits and Angels, presenting compelling true tales and eye-witness accounts from over 75 individuals with stories set in Kentucky, plus a dozen other states and two countries! This unique panorama of paranormal and spiritual incidences is laid out by ordinary folks who happen to live in haunted houses, come up to the edge of spiritual realities and are blest to encounter angels.

Ghosts, Spirits and Angels makes a dramatic statement in spreading the net wider than just ghostly tales to bring in true accounts of the simply amazing. Lives are forever changed by these encounters in such stories as a dead friend saving a would-be author from throwing away her first book manuscript, a Kentucky girl who grows up with a witch who married into their family, angel wings that caught a skier who fell off a cliff, and the arrival of a cash-filled envelope addressed by someone's deceased mother postmarked after her death. There are also tales of shadow people from very haunted Waverly Hills TB Sanatorium, an account of Tennessee's Bell Witch, a humorous tale of a family's ghost cat, and the touching story of an angelic emergency responder, to name a few.

Joseph Smith in Louisville

Did you know that Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, spent time in Louisville? According to lds.org:

Joseph Smith, the first President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, likely preached in Louisville, Kentucky, on his way to Missouri. He stayed in the city for three days and later revisited in 1832. An Indiana covert began the first congregation in Licking River. In 1835, two missionaries baptized 22 people. The first group of Kentucky Saints to join other Church members in the West left for Missouri in September 1836. In July 1843, Church leaders Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff preached in Kentucky. Though persecution existed, some 1,170 members of the Church lived in the state in 1900.

Automobiles and road improvements caused Bradfordsville, Kentucky, to become a main gathering place for Church members. One traditional Church-sponsored activity in Bradfordsville was a July 4th fish fry with fiddle and banjo music and food for up to 200 people, including many who were not members of the Church.

According to church doctrine, when Smith was 14 years old, God and Jesus Christ both appeared to him and said that "the true Church of Jesus Christ" had not yet been established on Earth, and that they had chosen Smith to make it happen. A few years later, Smith had a visitation by an angel called Moroni, who instructed him what to do to establish The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Alfred M. Hubbard

The Alfred M. Hubbard story - what little we know of it - is one of the strangest, most mysterious tales of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, skullduggery and adventure I've heard. And of course, he's a good Kentucky boy.

As he himself told the story of his early youth, he was poor, barefoot; a self-described hillbilly from the mountains of Kentucky. Then a pair of angels appeared to him and instructed him to "build something". ("He had these visions, and he learned to trust them early on," Willis Harman, director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences later said of him.)

In 1919, he did indeed build something: he invented the "Hubbard Energy Transformer", an alleged perpetual motion device which garnered nationwide media attention. Hubbard sold half the patent for $75,000 to the Radium Chemical Company of Pittsburgh, PA, after which it was never heard of again.

During Prohibition, Hubbard worked for a gang of bootleggers and smugglers in Seattle using a cab driving company as a front. He built a "ship-to-shore communication device" which he concealed in the trunk of his taxicab, to aid him in making liquor runs over the Canadian border. By some accounts, he was caught and went to prison for 18 months, but by other accounts, he had actually been a secret government agent for the Treasury Department all along, infiltrating the smugglers for Uncle Sam. Even if true, Hubbard was possibly playing both sides of the fence as a double agent: his next gig was running security for the Mafia-run Tropicana Hotel in Vegas.

Hubbard was approached by the OSS (now the CIA) and offered a job: sneaking war munitions into the U.K. before America had formally entered World War II. Eighteen months before Pearl Harbor, Hubbard became a Canadian citizen as part of his cover, and handled millions of dollars which were laundered through the Canadian consulate and financed OSS/CIA covert operations in Europe.

According to researcher Ben Metcalfe in Vancouver Magazine, Hubbard was also involved in the Manhattan Project in some way, probably moving Uranium through Site W.

After the war, Hubbard ran a charter boat company, and was now in the habit of referring to himself as "Captain". Captain Hubbard was now a sudden millionaire somehow, and owned an island off the coast of Vancouver called Dayman Island. President Harry Truman granted him a Presidential Pardon via his Proclamation 2676.

(As if all of this isn't a highly bizarre and improbable-sounding life story already, just wait, it gets weirder...)

In 1950, Hubbard experienced another angelic visitation. The angels told him to watch for something very important to the future of all mankind, which would soon make itself known to him. The next year, he heard about Albert Hoffman's experiments with LSD, and became convinced that this was the breakthrough the angels had spoken of.

Hubbard became obsessed with LSD, and began a major campaign to promote it as the spiritual cure to all humanity's problems. He introduced thousands of prominent people to it, including Aldous Huxley, Stanley Kubrick, and - so he claimed - the Pope. Reports conflict on whether he did this strictly on his own volition, or as part of the CIA's "MK-ULTRA" mind-control LSD experiments. I'm guessing the latter. (Most of the MK-ULTRA documents were destroyed in 1973 by project chief Sidney Gottlieb and CIA Director Richard Helms.)

According to the book Acid Dreams by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Hubbard spent much of the 1960s working for Teledyne, which was a major defense subcontractor, for a secret NASA project that involved testing "psychochemical agents" on astronauts and pilots.

Somewhere along the way, Hubbard had acquired a doctorate degree from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, without having actually attended classes. He listed this doctorate as part of his credentials when he went to work for the creepy Stanford Research Institute in the early 1970s. The SRI, which also had MK-ULTRA connections, pioneered the early top-secret military research into paranormal abilities like Remote Viewing. These SRI experiments were headed by some very interesting people like Hal Puthoff, who was also working for that other fellow named Hubbard.

After a failed attempt to set up a new LSD-as-cancer-cure experimentation program in 1978, Hubbard became a hermit in a mobile home in the Arizona desert. He died August 31, 1982, at the age of 81.

What I haven't been able to determine is exactly where in Kentucky Mr. Hubbard was from. Anyone got a clue?


(Thanks to Todd Brendan Fahey, for his seminal research on 'Captain' Al Hubbard"!)