A minor Fortean, by inheritance.
Augusta Peters was born around 1873 in Michigan, the second daughter of Frederika and William Peters, German emigrants. William owned a shoe shop. In 1890, her brother Erwin—later Edward—was born. All three children still lived at the family home in 1900, Augusta never going to high school—not unusual at the time. (There were two other sisters in the family as well.) By 1920, Frederika had passed, and Edward had moved out. Augusta still lived with her father, and her older sister Rose, as well as her husband, Adolph, an electrician. Adolph’s parents had also emigrated from Germany, settling in Pennsylvania, and he had served in the army in the early part of the 1900s. He was about nine years Augusta’s junior.
By 1930, she and Adolph were living alone in Detroit, with no kids. He sold boxes wholesale. Within five years, she was widowed, and moved in with her older sister Rose, who was unmarried. The last official document found about her is the 1940 census. But she did become involved with the Fortean Society briefly during the middle of the 1940s.
Sometime around 1943, Edward Peters, Augusta’s brother, passed. Apparently, he had been contributing to the Fortean Society since the third issue, and must have communicated his interest to his sister, for she chose to donate his library to the Society—or, 37 volumes of it anyway, mostly books on mysticism and comparative religion. Thayer noted that Edward belonged to “that old school of ‘seekers ager truth’” and suggested that Augusta had some of the same fascination with “those mysteries which neither science nor religion has satisfactorily answered, and, at an advanced age, continues to prosecute that search which has no end, with vigorous intellectuality and suspended judgement.” [The Fortean Society Magazine 9, winter 1944]. In honor of her donation, Thayer made her an honorary life member—which meant she did not have to pay dues but would forever belong to the Society.
Augusta took the responsibility seriously, judging by what Thayer reported, sending in clippings that appeared in issues 12-15 of Doubt [Spring 1945-Summer 1946]. Some of these were conventionally Fortean—fish found in rain puddles, for example, a strange light in the sky dismissed by authorities as Venus, butterflies arriving in San Francisco from the ocean, the movement of the magnetic South Pole, and the extreme eccentricity of Pluto’s orbit. “Run of the Mill,” as Thayer labelled such material—the parade of pallid data, a procession of the damned. She also sent in material on Atlantis.
Other bits of material, it is harder to tell—Thayer may have used to for his own pet purposes. She sent in a rash of articles on archeological discoveries, for instance—the supposition that there was a land bridge between Asia and America at one time, fossils found in Africa, and a Mastodon jaw in Michigan. These all came from the Detroit News. It is impossible, now, to reconstruct what they meant to Stetter, but Thayer used them as evidence that archeological and geological dating methods were based on theories of physics that physicists did not even agree upon—and so were unreliable. The one—slight—reason to think that Stetter and Thayer may have had different opinions on these matters is another archeological clipping. This one claimed the unearthing of Jesus’s burial urn. Thayer took it as part of a religious racket—the Jesus-was-a-myth crowd was getting too much press, and so evidence of his actual existence had to be cooked up to keep fleecing the rubes. One wonders if Stetter. seemingly more interested in the mystical and the religious did not find the story moving for some other, less secular reason.
Finally, her name appeared in Doubt 11, having sent in to Thayer Max Stirner's classic book The Ego and His Own. Stetter's interest in Stirner is unknown, but it put her in with a number of other Forteans. Thayer and many Forteans were enthusiastic about Stirner; he was an influence on Nietzsche and expressed a profound respect for the dignity of the human individual. "It is a very important book known to only a few," Thayer commented, and offered to buy all the second-hand copies, in any language.
What happened to Stetter after 1946 is unknown.
Augusta Peters was born around 1873 in Michigan, the second daughter of Frederika and William Peters, German emigrants. William owned a shoe shop. In 1890, her brother Erwin—later Edward—was born. All three children still lived at the family home in 1900, Augusta never going to high school—not unusual at the time. (There were two other sisters in the family as well.) By 1920, Frederika had passed, and Edward had moved out. Augusta still lived with her father, and her older sister Rose, as well as her husband, Adolph, an electrician. Adolph’s parents had also emigrated from Germany, settling in Pennsylvania, and he had served in the army in the early part of the 1900s. He was about nine years Augusta’s junior.
By 1930, she and Adolph were living alone in Detroit, with no kids. He sold boxes wholesale. Within five years, she was widowed, and moved in with her older sister Rose, who was unmarried. The last official document found about her is the 1940 census. But she did become involved with the Fortean Society briefly during the middle of the 1940s.
Sometime around 1943, Edward Peters, Augusta’s brother, passed. Apparently, he had been contributing to the Fortean Society since the third issue, and must have communicated his interest to his sister, for she chose to donate his library to the Society—or, 37 volumes of it anyway, mostly books on mysticism and comparative religion. Thayer noted that Edward belonged to “that old school of ‘seekers ager truth’” and suggested that Augusta had some of the same fascination with “those mysteries which neither science nor religion has satisfactorily answered, and, at an advanced age, continues to prosecute that search which has no end, with vigorous intellectuality and suspended judgement.” [The Fortean Society Magazine 9, winter 1944]. In honor of her donation, Thayer made her an honorary life member—which meant she did not have to pay dues but would forever belong to the Society.
Augusta took the responsibility seriously, judging by what Thayer reported, sending in clippings that appeared in issues 12-15 of Doubt [Spring 1945-Summer 1946]. Some of these were conventionally Fortean—fish found in rain puddles, for example, a strange light in the sky dismissed by authorities as Venus, butterflies arriving in San Francisco from the ocean, the movement of the magnetic South Pole, and the extreme eccentricity of Pluto’s orbit. “Run of the Mill,” as Thayer labelled such material—the parade of pallid data, a procession of the damned. She also sent in material on Atlantis.
Other bits of material, it is harder to tell—Thayer may have used to for his own pet purposes. She sent in a rash of articles on archeological discoveries, for instance—the supposition that there was a land bridge between Asia and America at one time, fossils found in Africa, and a Mastodon jaw in Michigan. These all came from the Detroit News. It is impossible, now, to reconstruct what they meant to Stetter, but Thayer used them as evidence that archeological and geological dating methods were based on theories of physics that physicists did not even agree upon—and so were unreliable. The one—slight—reason to think that Stetter and Thayer may have had different opinions on these matters is another archeological clipping. This one claimed the unearthing of Jesus’s burial urn. Thayer took it as part of a religious racket—the Jesus-was-a-myth crowd was getting too much press, and so evidence of his actual existence had to be cooked up to keep fleecing the rubes. One wonders if Stetter. seemingly more interested in the mystical and the religious did not find the story moving for some other, less secular reason.
Finally, her name appeared in Doubt 11, having sent in to Thayer Max Stirner's classic book The Ego and His Own. Stetter's interest in Stirner is unknown, but it put her in with a number of other Forteans. Thayer and many Forteans were enthusiastic about Stirner; he was an influence on Nietzsche and expressed a profound respect for the dignity of the human individual. "It is a very important book known to only a few," Thayer commented, and offered to buy all the second-hand copies, in any language.
What happened to Stetter after 1946 is unknown.
