The “Shaver Mystery,” as it would be called, got its start in September 1943, when one “S. Shaver” of Barto, Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to the editor of Ziff-Davis’ Amazing Stories, based in Chicago and founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback as the very first magazine of “scientifiction” (soon to be renamed science fiction—SF to its devoted readership, later “sci-fi” to the less engaged). The editor of that publication was Ray Palmer, a colorful figure who had risen from the ranks of SF fandom to anointment, in June 1938, to Amazing’s helm. An accident in his youth, followed by a disastrously botched operation, left Palmer with an unfixable spinal injury. His back permanently curved, he never attained normal height (he stood no more than four feet eight inches [1.5 meters])—but his energy seemed never to flag as he lurched from one enthusiasm or promotion to the next. Palmer, one might say, had the instincts of a carnival barker. From the arrival of the Shaver letter onward, Ray Palmer and Richard Shaver would be linked forever in the lore of the outlandish.
As he liked to tell the story, Palmer overheard Amazing’s managing editor, Howard Browne, the one who actually opened the envelope, muttering something about “crackpots” as he directed the letter to the wastebasket. (According to some reports, Browne found the letter sufficiently hilarious to read aloud for the amusement of the editorial staff before he disposed of it.) Not ready to let it go at that, the intrigued Palmer retrieved it from the oblivion to which otherwise it would have been destined.
When he read it, he decided that Shaver had something—or, as the cynics have had it, spotted a potentially lucrative new promotion—and the two entered into correspondence, with Shaver pouring forth his thoughts and experiences in multi-paged, literally daily communications. Shaver said he feared that if he did not get it all down, the truth would be lost. Palmer would recall that the letters looked as if they were composed on a “toy typewriter with several keys missing.” The alphabet appeared in the January 1944 issue. Eventually, Palmer would visit the Shavers at their farm, where he allegedly had a strange and unsettling experience (see below).
Subsequently, Palmer took a 10,000-word Shaver manuscript, A Warning to Future Man, and expanded it (deleting the strong sexual content, for one thing) into the 31,000-word SF novella “I Remember Lemuria!,” published under Shaver’s by-line in the March 1945 issue. (Lemuria here was an ancient name for Earth, not the fabled Pacific lost continent.) With difficulty—or with unearthly assistance, as Shaver asserted—Palmer, preparing for what he suspected would be significantly enhanced sales, managed to push the print run from 135,000 to 185,000, this during the wartime paper scarcity. Again, in Palmer’s not automatically credible version of events, the issue sold out, and a “flood of letters began to come in that totaled, in the end, more than 50,000.” Even the hyperbolic Palmer rescinded that assertion, later characterizing the letter total as in the thousands — still impressive if true.
In his editorial in the issue, Palmer wrote that “Lemuria!” grew out of “racial memory” from 12,000 years ago. “The strange fact of the matter,” he stated, “seems to be that all over the world there are more people than we might imagine who have a firm faith in a memory of past civilizations, and remember such vital things as Mr. Shaver.” Of course, he added (capital letters in the original):
IT COULD be a hoax! IF MR. SHAVER WERE THE CLEVEREST MAN THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN! But we can’t believe this is so. The alphabet alone is too much to explain away in such a manner. We confess we are bewildered, impressed, and excited. And at the very least, we are delighted at the series of stories from the typewriter of Mr. Shaver. … But Mr. Shaver has not been the only source of a great deal of material on Lemuria since we published his first letter. We have been deluged by a storm of corroboration from all over the country.
Shaver provided a brief foreword to the story, insisting, “I know only that I remember Lemuria! Remember it with such a faithfulness that I accept with a faithfulness of a fanatic. And yet, I am not a fanatic. … What I tell you is not fiction!”
Shaver was always—no doubt necessarily—unspecific about dates (surely in the interest of obscuring his actual whereabouts in the periods in question), but the alleged experiences in which he is introduced to the reality of the Cavern World are apparently set in the late 1920s or early 1930s, though Shaver’s claim cannot be incorporated into any real-world chronology.
In the version he usually told, he had spent an evening reading Lord Byron’s Gothic dramatic poem Manfred (1816). The hero is a tormented soul who is seeking death. Shaver’s eye fell on lines like these:
Ye spirits of the unbounded Universe
Whom I have sought in darkness and in light!
Ye, who do compass Earth about, and dwell
In subtler essence! ye, to whom the tops
Of mountains inaccessible are haunts,
And Earth’s and ocean’s caves familiar things….
Finally, he dies, and as evil spirits descend to claim his soul, the ghost of Astarte, the woman he had loved in life, rescues him. Highly popular in the nineteenth century, the poetic drama inspired compositions by the heavy-duty likes of Schumann and Tchaikovsky.
In Shaver’s account, he found himself thinking that “Byron was not, strictly speaking, writing fiction;” more likely, the poet was hinting at some deep, sinister reality he could not reveal outright. After turning out the lights, he impulsively beamed a telepathic message into the ether. To his shock, an apparitional woman appeared to him on what looked like a screen. As she gazed at him with an expression of supreme assurance, he sensed that she was reading his thoughts, and then her confidence buckled. “She seemed suddenly to realize that she had made a mistake in answering my call,” Shaver would write, as her telepathic probing told her that he was not, as she presumed, one of those in the know. She vanished in an instant.1
The encounter with the apparitional woman in the night had catastrophic consequences. It tipped off evil forces to Shaver, who was quickly seen as what might be called a security risk—in other words, as one with the potential to expose their secrets. In the weeks and months that followed, inside his brain he felt dim presences weighing, judging, probing, and talking about him. In time, specific presences, both benevolent and malign, came to the fore and grew ever more tangible.
While he was employed as a welder on the assembly line at a Highland Park, Michigan, auto plant, voices began sounding clearly and audibly inside his head. It took him awhile to realize just what they were: the private, unspoken thoughts of his fellow workers. As he would write, “The welding gun was, by some freak of its coils’ field attunements, not a radio, but a teleradio, a thought augmentor of some power.” Before long, he was hearing other voices, frightening and unpleasant ones, coldly vicious and cruel. There were screams, evidently of human beings, most of them women, undergoing hideous torture. Less alarmingly, but no less mystifyingly, were references to spaceship flights—actual, not imaginary, ones.
The encounter with the apparitional woman in the night had catastrophic consequences. It tipped off evil forces to Shaver….
Unnerved, Shaver quit his job, but the torment did not end. He allegedly hit the road, wandering and taking jobs wherever he could find them, all the while undergoing persecution by underworlders, who he now believed had murdered his brother and were