Dulcie Brown, seated on the left, in 1972. From the Van Nuys Valley News. A happy but haunted Fortean.
Dulcie Brown was her married name, from her second marriage. I’m not confident of her maiden name; it was probably Ford, but I cannot say for certain. If I’m right, then her father was Jay Ford, her mother Hattie, or Harriett, and she herself may have gone by Beulah, or perhaps the census take got it wrong. Dulcie was born in Oregon—on 25 February 1899—but moved to California at some point. (The Fords moved from Oregon to California sometime between 1900 and 1910.) According to later reports, she finished only eighth grade, which wasn’t surprising for a girl who grew up on a farm.
As Dulcie remembered it, her father had a sense of humor. He’d grown up in Iowa—Jay Ford was from Iowa, too—and had supposedly been kept busy hunting bears for his family, who enjoyed ursine meat above all else. (Already this sounds like a fable.) Soon enough, he became an adept. In 1968, Dulcie wrote about his failsafe technique, trying to capture he father’s voice:
“I’d track that ol’ bear ’til I could see the whites of his eyes. Then I’d sneak up on him, kinda easy like. When he’d get sight of me he would lomp [sic] up on his hind legs and put his arms around me and start huggin’ me. Right then I’d start ticklin’ his belly. Then that bear would start laughin’ and I’d keep on ticklin’ him. It wasn’t long before he laughed himself to death. I tell you, that’s the best eatin’ thar is—laughin’ bear meat.”
Dulcie Brown was her married name, from her second marriage. I’m not confident of her maiden name; it was probably Ford, but I cannot say for certain. If I’m right, then her father was Jay Ford, her mother Hattie, or Harriett, and she herself may have gone by Beulah, or perhaps the census take got it wrong. Dulcie was born in Oregon—on 25 February 1899—but moved to California at some point. (The Fords moved from Oregon to California sometime between 1900 and 1910.) According to later reports, she finished only eighth grade, which wasn’t surprising for a girl who grew up on a farm.
As Dulcie remembered it, her father had a sense of humor. He’d grown up in Iowa—Jay Ford was from Iowa, too—and had supposedly been kept busy hunting bears for his family, who enjoyed ursine meat above all else. (Already this sounds like a fable.) Soon enough, he became an adept. In 1968, Dulcie wrote about his failsafe technique, trying to capture he father’s voice:
“I’d track that ol’ bear ’til I could see the whites of his eyes. Then I’d sneak up on him, kinda easy like. When he’d get sight of me he would lomp [sic] up on his hind legs and put his arms around me and start huggin’ me. Right then I’d start ticklin’ his belly. Then that bear would start laughin’ and I’d keep on ticklin’ him. It wasn’t long before he laughed himself to death. I tell you, that’s the best eatin’ thar is—laughin’ bear meat.”
The first that I can find Dulcie in the census, definitively, is 1930, when she was in her early thirties. At that time, Dulcie had made a family in Los Angeles. She had married around 1920, aged 21, a man named Benjamen [sic] Horst. According to the census, Benjamen was about the same age as Dulcie. He had been born in Russia, spoke Jewish (!), and come to America when he was very young, about two; he was naturalized. They had two daughters, Margaret born about 1926 and Beverly around 1928. Benjamen was a laborer with a wholesale hardware company. They rented their house, and did not own a radio.
Something happened to Benjamen after 1933, but I do not know what. Dulcie and Benjamen had a third daughter, Joanne, in that year. But in 1940, when the next census was taken, Dulcie had a new husband, Charles Brown (yes: Charlie Brown) and I can no longer track Benjamen. The children all kept their father’s last name, Horst—which is why I can connect Dulcie’s earlier marriage—but their mother became Dulcie Brown. Charles was about five years older than Dulcie, a house painter, though he’d had trouble with the Great Depression, working only 20 weeks in 1939, and only about 24 hours per week when he did. They rented their home in Los Angeles, which they shared with an unemployed boarder.
Brown had an interest in the fantastic and the weird—in part, perhaps, because of her own experiences. She (seems to have) read "Weird Tales" and in November 1940 the magazine published a story by her. At the time, Weird Tales was experimenting with a new feature, readers’s true tales of the weird, called “It Happened to Me.” (Fortean Ralph Rayburn Philips also contributed an essay to the series.) The magazine offered ten dollars to stories of “true psychic experiences.” Brown’s story was titled “Ghost Farm” and was set on her father’s property in California’s San Joaquin Valley, near Tulare Lake. (It’s worth noting that Jay Ford and his family lived in Leemore, California, very near Tulare Lake).
The story was a classic of the genre, reliant on old tropes. Her father’s farm was fertile—the land may have been an old lake bed, from when Tulare Lake was much larger—and he’d hired on a local Indian as a hand, “Old Skip.” He was a good worker, reserved, except when Dulcie’s father said he was going to plow up a high spot in the center of the farm, which had lain fallow because the irrigation could not reach it. Old Skip, she wrote “showed a great deal of excitement and displeasure at my father’s suggestion and departed to the reservation in high dungeon [sic].” Undaunted, her father hitched up a team and proceed to turn up a number of human skulls. Her father took up a shovel, and discovered even more. Indian skulls: men, women, and children buried together.
Old Skip returned and warned Dulcie’s father to stop his digging. He told him he was making a lot of money now, but if he kept interfering with the grave, that would change. Of course, he spoke in the ridiculous Native American pidgin of Hollywood films. Dulcie’s father laughed at the superstition, continued digging, piling up the bones, and showing them off to visitors. “It was at this time that we children began to hear strange noises about the house,” she wrote, “and there were times when one could actually see in a strange sort of way, as though the thing were a vision; that a human form was near.” They heard footsteps on the stairs, flint being struck. Dulcie’s parents ignored the sounds and forbade the children from speaking of them, but the shadowy occupants became so familiar the kids referred to them as “they.”
Her father continued to dig. Water seeped into the hole. He had to clamber down to reach the bottom. Eventually, he came to a huge flat rock. A dozen neighbors helped him lift it—as Dulcie remembered, he thought he’d come to buried treasure. But there was only another skeleton, of some man over seven feet tall. Disappointed, he refilled the hole, tossing the bones in higgledy-piggledy. But the noises in the house—those continued.
And the animals on the ranch, they began to die of strange diseases. The crops were not coming up. The buildings took on a dull gray tinge. The shade tress wilted. The following year, “there was no green thing growing on the whole ranch.” All around her father’s property were green fields, but his was blighted, and no expert could figure out why. Two years later, the family was forced to abandon the farm. And even in 1940, she wrote, it still stands vacated. She concluded, “I often wonder if that Indian horde still inhabits it and what secrets they whisper to each other as they pass through the deserted rooms, the soft padding of their feet resounding as I heard them many times.”
It was an effective enough story, especially for the time and place of publication, and one wonders if Dulcie nursed some hope to be a writer, or if she was just trying to make some pin money. Even if I assume that she was born to Jay Ford, it is not possible to disprove the story. The gaps in his history between 1900 and 1920 leave plenty of room for him to have started and abandoned a farm. Maybe it was pure invention, or maybe it reflected something she had experienced. It was not the last time she would tell a story of the weird presented as though it had happened to her.
Apparently, Brown started reading "Fate" magazine near the beginning of its run. "Fate" had been started by Ray Palmer after he was forced out of “Amazing Stories” over the Shaver mystery; begun in 1948, it became the most mainstream Fortean publication. I do not have all the issues from 1952, but apparently some time during the first part of the year, Brown wrote into "Fate" magazine, which had a permanent feature like the one Weird Tales had done for awhile; it was called “Report from the Readers.” Brown’s contribution was the story of a streetcar operator who was bit on the thumb but an out-of-control passenger. She speculated that perhaps the passenger was a modern vampire.
The Browns relocated to Fresno in the second half of the '50s. According to Dulcie, she had visited the town several times on her vacations and been favorably impressed. The move may have been prompted by Charles reaching retirement age—he would have been 62 in about 1957, and they were in Fresno no later than 1958. That year, Dulcie wrote to "PTM" (The Pacific telephone magazine) from Fresno, reminiscing about the multi-party farm line her family used in 1908, when her mother could track Dulcie’s progress on the way home from school.
Brown took pride in her retirement, and the careful management of the pension she was living on. In 1962, she was featured in Thomas Collins’s “The Golden Years” column, which was about aging gracefully. (He also wrote a book by the same name.) Dulcie told Collins that she investigated a retirement home, and it was beautiful, but there was no room for a hobby—no place for a serving machine, the flowers already planted—and so she had no interest. She was happy where she was: “The very act of waking up in the morning can be a great adventure. You can stretch and lie there and laugh inwardly as you realize you can take your own sweet time about it, not get up at all if you don’t want to.”
She found excitement easily. There are parks and museums and zoos, and the natural areas beyond the bus lines. Entertainment was easy, too: There was never greater drama on any stage than you can find in the courtrooms of the city.” Go and watch, she said. Visit police stations and fire stations, where you can admire them working. Visit your family, and your grandchildren, for a shot of elixir from the fountain of youth—but don’t stay too long. Backyards are enchanting because they can be planted. “Where on all this earth can you find greater excitement than this?,” she asked. And she loved watching the birds there, too.
It wasn’t long before Dulcie found another way to exercise her mind, and a new outlet for her writing. She became a frequent contributor to the "Fresno Bee"’s letter pages. By my count, using an online database, she had published 28 letters in the paper between May 1963 and November 1970. (I have also found letters by her to "Good Housekeeping" magazine and “Rainbook,” which offered “resources for appropriate technology.”) These covered a laundry list of topics: that there was no conflict between Darwinian evolution and belief in a divine creator; that kids these days treat there cars too roughly; that kids these days are generally good, but drive too fast; that the development of Courthouse Park should be different; that juvenile delinquency could be curtailed by youth courts and youth juries; that the wives of pensioners are overlooked in social security laws; that when people are bored they should consider sending letters to their family; that black Americans complain too much—they are no more discriminated against than whites—and they should realize their race’s gift of compassion and open sociality will be the savior of the world, but that it doesn’t mix with whites’s natural reservation and so everyone should accept it is best for the two races to live in different communities.
That teachers do great work; that citizens should prepare for the day when they will have to pay for television; that Fresno’s state fair exhibit deserved the thanks of the community; that the new mall should have included bathrooms, but it is understandable when people treat public facilities so poorly and parents seem to think the mall is a playground at which they could let their children run free; that the image of JFK should not be used in commercial products and, indeed, the best memorial to him would be good works; that there were not enough police at the mall; that Fresno’s historic courthouse should be preserved; that the city should stop paying consultants and managers, and use the ballot box to solve problems; that cats are fine pets, but she chooses not to have them because they kill the birds in her backyard; that the young should not complain about paying taxes for social security: her generation skimped and saved to give them a better world; that modern art was obscene and opposed to the beautiful; that advertisements for store should include which bus line they are on; that those calling American kids opposed to Vietnam (another country’s civil war, she said) were themselves past the draft age, and would be singing a different song if it was their butt’s on the line.
That her father told about tickling bears; that the county fair is not bad for business, and merchants should embrace the opportunity for economic growth; that the post office worked well; that the canals were filled with garbage; that an engaged citizenry should write letters to their politicians; that the schools were too restrictive, forcing kids to conform rather than adapting themselves to the individuality of the children; that America should acknowledge the passing of two socialist war-horses, Norman Thomas and Upton Sinclair (the former honored by the Fortean Society), and if only their messages had been followed the country would be in much better shape, oil, transportation, and communication controlled by the government: “Some day a new America shall rise out of the ruins of the old. And the works of these martyrs who saw the way shall be honored. Young rebels should spend time reading them and prepare themselves for a new beginning. Let all their acts be constructive, not destructive.”
At the same time, she remained connected to communities interested in the weird, the mystical. Some time, probably in the mid-1960s, she wrote to "Fate" magazine about an event that had occurred in 1964. (I have only found a reprint of the article in the book “True Ghosts 3.”) It was another case of her experiencing a haunting. Her daughter and son-in-law, still in Los Angeles, had gone out of town, and Charles and Dulcie stayed at their house, watching their cat Happy. One day, they went to the races at Hollywood Park; her husband, tired, went to bed. She hung yup his trousers, with the billfold and $57 still in a pocket. Happy woke her at 4 a.m. She let him out. Later, when Charles awoke, they realized that his billfold was missing. They turned the apartment out, but could not find it.
Six months later, they attended a spiritualist meeting. After the service, the medium gave individual readings. “When the medium got to me, she said, ‘Your father is here. He says the word ‘happy.’ He says he saw you taking care of a cat. It is not your cat and he mentions the word ‘happy’ again.” The medium asked Dulcie is she had a question for her father; she asked about the billfold. The medium said “57,” and that it would be returned soon. Two days later, her daughter telephoned. She’d found the billfold in the middle dresser drawer, right on top. There was $57 in it.
Brown ended her letter with speculation. Had there been a thief? The apartment’s key was hidden outside by the landlady because Dulcie’s daughter and son-in-law often forgot theirs; maybe someone had grabbed that; or maybe the door had not completely locked when she let out Happy. Perhaps then the thief had been bothered by a guilty conscience and returned the billfold—or been forced to by the spirit world. Or perhaps something even stranger had happened. Brown told the readers of Fate that she had “things simply disappear and reappear through what is called approbation.” Maybe, then, the spirits apported the billfold from the thief to that drawer. “Probably,” she said finally, “we never will know what really happened.”
Brown also became a member of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained. This was a Fortean organization started by Ivan Sanderson in the mid-1960s. Its publication was “Pursuit.” (As in: “Science is the pursuit of the unknown.”) According to Sanderson, Brown was member #20, which means she joined quickly—which in turn means she was tied rather tightly to the network of people interested in the esoteric and the occult, to have heard about its founding, and to have joined so quickly, and that on a restricted pension. She wrote to Sanderson in late 1968. (Her letter appeared in vol. 2, no. 1, dated January 1969.)
Sanderson had remarked that one person of his acquaintance maintained a file on mysteries surrounding wedding rings. This comment had prompted Brown to write in to him, telling her own uncanny story: “To begin with my wedding ring was silver, a pretty little band with engraving. I wore it so long that all the engraving wore off and it was just a plain silver band. Then, it began catching on things and, fearing that my finger might be injured, I took it off and laid it on a sideboard in our Los Angeles home. This was in about 1955.
"The wedding ring disappeared. I could not find it anywhere. When we moved from Los Angeles everything was carefully gone over in house and garage, many things disposed of. We were very careful to include just the things we wanted to keep to take with us. But no wedding ring showed up.
“Since moving to Fresno we moved twice and the same thing was done, everything gone over and the dispensable things done away with. No wedding ring. I had forgotten about it.
“In 1966 my husband died. This time I really got rid of things! In the garage was a certain box. It had originally been a cigar box, one of those nice little wooden deals with a clasp. When I was going with my husband back in 1932 I had decorated this box and shellacked it and he had kept it because it was the first thing I had done for him. Now, I took some small articles like nails, screws, little things like that I thought I might need and put in that box selecting them carefully one by one.
“Since then I've moved twice. I have opened that box a number of times to take out nails etc.
“About a week ago a young lady came in and asked me for a nail. I opened the little box and on top of everything WAS MY WEDDING RING.”
Dulcie Brown died 25 November 1978. She was 79 years old.
*******************
As is usual in these sketches, I do not know when Dulcie Brown first read Fort—or if she did—or how and when she discovered the Fortean Society. There is, of course, room to speculate. Brown was reading “Weird Tales” as early as 1940, and “Fate” by 1952. These could have pointed her toward Fort or the Society, especially “Fate.” And the timing would have been right, given that she is first mentioned in the Fortean Society’s magazine “Doubt,” in late 1952. Certainly she had a developed interest in the occult, the strange, in teleportation and ghosts, and she could have found grist for this mill in “Doubt.”
Judging by her appearances in the magazine, she was a member during the middle of the 1950s, from issue 38 (October 1952) until 47 (January 1955), which roughly coincides with the period just before the Browns moved to Fresno. The oldest of the children about whom I know anything would have been in her late teens when Dulcie took up with the Society, which suggests she may have had some free time on her hands. It is also possible that she met or knew some Forteans at the time; Los Angeles had a number of members, and she attended spiritualist services, where she might have come into contact with other Forteans. If there was a Los Angeles connection, that might explain her dropping away after moving to Fresno. Or perhaps she got tired of Thayer’s politics—hers seems to have leaned socialist, but without the bitter cynicism that informed his writing and the magazine’s tone. Or, maybe she continued her membership, but just didn’t appear in the magazine after 1955 because either she stopped sending in material or Thayer did not use it.
It is not easy to make sense of Brown’s Forteanism based on the credits she received in the magazine. There are six references that I think are to her—four to a D. Brown, one to a Dulcie Brown in Los Angeles (which is how I started the tracking process), and one to a DG Brown, who may have been someone else altogether. Four of the references are generic acknowledgments, tied to no particular article or clipping, though one might have touched on the subject of fluoridating the water. (Thayer was against it; I do not know Brown’s opinion.)
That leaves two other appearances by Brown in the pages of Doubt, and both recounted personal experiences, not unlike the letters she sent to “Weird Tales,” “Fate,” and “Pursuit.” On 4 June 1953, about fifty blocks of ice, some weighing as much as 25 pounds, fell on the 1400 and 1500 blocks of Long Beach Boulevard. The rain continued for about two minutes. Government officials would say the ice came from a plane that had iced up. A lot of Forteans sent in clippings. (Ironically, I have only found reports of the incident second hand.) Thayer doubted that a plane would stay over such a small area for two minutes; there must be some other explanation. Brown’s letter to him supported such speculation. She said she was in the area at the time, and saw vapor trails streaked across the sky.
Brown contributed one other report, this one the last time she would appear in the magazine, Doubt 47 (January 1955). She wrote to Thayer that there had been a strong jolt in the Los Angeles area. She had felt it herself. But no one was mentioning it, no officials trying to explain it away, and no reports in the newspapers. She said she’d felt it on 25 October 1954, around two in the afternoon. As it happens, the Long Beach Independent did report on a rash of calls about an earthquake in the area—but the phone lines to the paper and the police were jammed after 10 at night, not two. Official responses were muted: perhaps a seismological survey by an oil firm.
Despite the lack of meaty information in Doubt, it is possible to speculate a bit on Brown’s Forteanism, albeit based on writings she did after she left the Society and, indeed, after the Society itself folded. She seemed to have a mixture of radical and conventional ideas, longing for a society organized on socialist principles, but mostly disproving of cultural progressivism. (That she was opposed to the war may have said more about a lean toward pacifism than sympathy for the nascent counter-culture.) There were Forteans with straightforward socialist politics, though these were never the loudest of the group. Certainly Brown’s socialism was wedded to a deference to authority—though authority chastened in its ambitions by a well-educated, engaged citizenry, in her ideal scenario—and she displayed none of the corrosive skepticism toward all authority that Thayer saw as the mark of true Forteanism.
There is, also, her interest in “wild talents” and spirits. Fort—and Thayer—were no fans of spiritualism, but there were many Forteans who did subscribe to such views. And Fort’s writings did touch on poltergeists, to which category the Indian spirits she supposedly witnessed on her father’s farm would belong. There is a strong connection between spiritualism, socialism, and other kinds of then-radical thought (such as feminism), and Brown seems to have inserted herself into this nexus. She seemed to want a world that served the working people and the disadvantaged—and, indeed, she had come from the working class, and seems to have been financially strapped most of her life—but also one that was not pure materialism: there was a spiritual world, too, and it could interfere, for god and ill, with the world in which the living inhabited.
The Fortean Society—and certain readings of Fort—left space for such a combination of views, and for a time Brown found it in her interest to ally with a group that was also doubtful about the current political and economic arrangements and kept alive the possibility that the world was more wonderful than mainstream opinion allowed.
Something happened to Benjamen after 1933, but I do not know what. Dulcie and Benjamen had a third daughter, Joanne, in that year. But in 1940, when the next census was taken, Dulcie had a new husband, Charles Brown (yes: Charlie Brown) and I can no longer track Benjamen. The children all kept their father’s last name, Horst—which is why I can connect Dulcie’s earlier marriage—but their mother became Dulcie Brown. Charles was about five years older than Dulcie, a house painter, though he’d had trouble with the Great Depression, working only 20 weeks in 1939, and only about 24 hours per week when he did. They rented their home in Los Angeles, which they shared with an unemployed boarder.
Brown had an interest in the fantastic and the weird—in part, perhaps, because of her own experiences. She (seems to have) read "Weird Tales" and in November 1940 the magazine published a story by her. At the time, Weird Tales was experimenting with a new feature, readers’s true tales of the weird, called “It Happened to Me.” (Fortean Ralph Rayburn Philips also contributed an essay to the series.) The magazine offered ten dollars to stories of “true psychic experiences.” Brown’s story was titled “Ghost Farm” and was set on her father’s property in California’s San Joaquin Valley, near Tulare Lake. (It’s worth noting that Jay Ford and his family lived in Leemore, California, very near Tulare Lake).
The story was a classic of the genre, reliant on old tropes. Her father’s farm was fertile—the land may have been an old lake bed, from when Tulare Lake was much larger—and he’d hired on a local Indian as a hand, “Old Skip.” He was a good worker, reserved, except when Dulcie’s father said he was going to plow up a high spot in the center of the farm, which had lain fallow because the irrigation could not reach it. Old Skip, she wrote “showed a great deal of excitement and displeasure at my father’s suggestion and departed to the reservation in high dungeon [sic].” Undaunted, her father hitched up a team and proceed to turn up a number of human skulls. Her father took up a shovel, and discovered even more. Indian skulls: men, women, and children buried together.
Old Skip returned and warned Dulcie’s father to stop his digging. He told him he was making a lot of money now, but if he kept interfering with the grave, that would change. Of course, he spoke in the ridiculous Native American pidgin of Hollywood films. Dulcie’s father laughed at the superstition, continued digging, piling up the bones, and showing them off to visitors. “It was at this time that we children began to hear strange noises about the house,” she wrote, “and there were times when one could actually see in a strange sort of way, as though the thing were a vision; that a human form was near.” They heard footsteps on the stairs, flint being struck. Dulcie’s parents ignored the sounds and forbade the children from speaking of them, but the shadowy occupants became so familiar the kids referred to them as “they.”
Her father continued to dig. Water seeped into the hole. He had to clamber down to reach the bottom. Eventually, he came to a huge flat rock. A dozen neighbors helped him lift it—as Dulcie remembered, he thought he’d come to buried treasure. But there was only another skeleton, of some man over seven feet tall. Disappointed, he refilled the hole, tossing the bones in higgledy-piggledy. But the noises in the house—those continued.
And the animals on the ranch, they began to die of strange diseases. The crops were not coming up. The buildings took on a dull gray tinge. The shade tress wilted. The following year, “there was no green thing growing on the whole ranch.” All around her father’s property were green fields, but his was blighted, and no expert could figure out why. Two years later, the family was forced to abandon the farm. And even in 1940, she wrote, it still stands vacated. She concluded, “I often wonder if that Indian horde still inhabits it and what secrets they whisper to each other as they pass through the deserted rooms, the soft padding of their feet resounding as I heard them many times.”
It was an effective enough story, especially for the time and place of publication, and one wonders if Dulcie nursed some hope to be a writer, or if she was just trying to make some pin money. Even if I assume that she was born to Jay Ford, it is not possible to disprove the story. The gaps in his history between 1900 and 1920 leave plenty of room for him to have started and abandoned a farm. Maybe it was pure invention, or maybe it reflected something she had experienced. It was not the last time she would tell a story of the weird presented as though it had happened to her.
Apparently, Brown started reading "Fate" magazine near the beginning of its run. "Fate" had been started by Ray Palmer after he was forced out of “Amazing Stories” over the Shaver mystery; begun in 1948, it became the most mainstream Fortean publication. I do not have all the issues from 1952, but apparently some time during the first part of the year, Brown wrote into "Fate" magazine, which had a permanent feature like the one Weird Tales had done for awhile; it was called “Report from the Readers.” Brown’s contribution was the story of a streetcar operator who was bit on the thumb but an out-of-control passenger. She speculated that perhaps the passenger was a modern vampire.
The Browns relocated to Fresno in the second half of the '50s. According to Dulcie, she had visited the town several times on her vacations and been favorably impressed. The move may have been prompted by Charles reaching retirement age—he would have been 62 in about 1957, and they were in Fresno no later than 1958. That year, Dulcie wrote to "PTM" (The Pacific telephone magazine) from Fresno, reminiscing about the multi-party farm line her family used in 1908, when her mother could track Dulcie’s progress on the way home from school.
Brown took pride in her retirement, and the careful management of the pension she was living on. In 1962, she was featured in Thomas Collins’s “The Golden Years” column, which was about aging gracefully. (He also wrote a book by the same name.) Dulcie told Collins that she investigated a retirement home, and it was beautiful, but there was no room for a hobby—no place for a serving machine, the flowers already planted—and so she had no interest. She was happy where she was: “The very act of waking up in the morning can be a great adventure. You can stretch and lie there and laugh inwardly as you realize you can take your own sweet time about it, not get up at all if you don’t want to.”
She found excitement easily. There are parks and museums and zoos, and the natural areas beyond the bus lines. Entertainment was easy, too: There was never greater drama on any stage than you can find in the courtrooms of the city.” Go and watch, she said. Visit police stations and fire stations, where you can admire them working. Visit your family, and your grandchildren, for a shot of elixir from the fountain of youth—but don’t stay too long. Backyards are enchanting because they can be planted. “Where on all this earth can you find greater excitement than this?,” she asked. And she loved watching the birds there, too.
It wasn’t long before Dulcie found another way to exercise her mind, and a new outlet for her writing. She became a frequent contributor to the "Fresno Bee"’s letter pages. By my count, using an online database, she had published 28 letters in the paper between May 1963 and November 1970. (I have also found letters by her to "Good Housekeeping" magazine and “Rainbook,” which offered “resources for appropriate technology.”) These covered a laundry list of topics: that there was no conflict between Darwinian evolution and belief in a divine creator; that kids these days treat there cars too roughly; that kids these days are generally good, but drive too fast; that the development of Courthouse Park should be different; that juvenile delinquency could be curtailed by youth courts and youth juries; that the wives of pensioners are overlooked in social security laws; that when people are bored they should consider sending letters to their family; that black Americans complain too much—they are no more discriminated against than whites—and they should realize their race’s gift of compassion and open sociality will be the savior of the world, but that it doesn’t mix with whites’s natural reservation and so everyone should accept it is best for the two races to live in different communities.
That teachers do great work; that citizens should prepare for the day when they will have to pay for television; that Fresno’s state fair exhibit deserved the thanks of the community; that the new mall should have included bathrooms, but it is understandable when people treat public facilities so poorly and parents seem to think the mall is a playground at which they could let their children run free; that the image of JFK should not be used in commercial products and, indeed, the best memorial to him would be good works; that there were not enough police at the mall; that Fresno’s historic courthouse should be preserved; that the city should stop paying consultants and managers, and use the ballot box to solve problems; that cats are fine pets, but she chooses not to have them because they kill the birds in her backyard; that the young should not complain about paying taxes for social security: her generation skimped and saved to give them a better world; that modern art was obscene and opposed to the beautiful; that advertisements for store should include which bus line they are on; that those calling American kids opposed to Vietnam (another country’s civil war, she said) were themselves past the draft age, and would be singing a different song if it was their butt’s on the line.
That her father told about tickling bears; that the county fair is not bad for business, and merchants should embrace the opportunity for economic growth; that the post office worked well; that the canals were filled with garbage; that an engaged citizenry should write letters to their politicians; that the schools were too restrictive, forcing kids to conform rather than adapting themselves to the individuality of the children; that America should acknowledge the passing of two socialist war-horses, Norman Thomas and Upton Sinclair (the former honored by the Fortean Society), and if only their messages had been followed the country would be in much better shape, oil, transportation, and communication controlled by the government: “Some day a new America shall rise out of the ruins of the old. And the works of these martyrs who saw the way shall be honored. Young rebels should spend time reading them and prepare themselves for a new beginning. Let all their acts be constructive, not destructive.”
At the same time, she remained connected to communities interested in the weird, the mystical. Some time, probably in the mid-1960s, she wrote to "Fate" magazine about an event that had occurred in 1964. (I have only found a reprint of the article in the book “True Ghosts 3.”) It was another case of her experiencing a haunting. Her daughter and son-in-law, still in Los Angeles, had gone out of town, and Charles and Dulcie stayed at their house, watching their cat Happy. One day, they went to the races at Hollywood Park; her husband, tired, went to bed. She hung yup his trousers, with the billfold and $57 still in a pocket. Happy woke her at 4 a.m. She let him out. Later, when Charles awoke, they realized that his billfold was missing. They turned the apartment out, but could not find it.
Six months later, they attended a spiritualist meeting. After the service, the medium gave individual readings. “When the medium got to me, she said, ‘Your father is here. He says the word ‘happy.’ He says he saw you taking care of a cat. It is not your cat and he mentions the word ‘happy’ again.” The medium asked Dulcie is she had a question for her father; she asked about the billfold. The medium said “57,” and that it would be returned soon. Two days later, her daughter telephoned. She’d found the billfold in the middle dresser drawer, right on top. There was $57 in it.
Brown ended her letter with speculation. Had there been a thief? The apartment’s key was hidden outside by the landlady because Dulcie’s daughter and son-in-law often forgot theirs; maybe someone had grabbed that; or maybe the door had not completely locked when she let out Happy. Perhaps then the thief had been bothered by a guilty conscience and returned the billfold—or been forced to by the spirit world. Or perhaps something even stranger had happened. Brown told the readers of Fate that she had “things simply disappear and reappear through what is called approbation.” Maybe, then, the spirits apported the billfold from the thief to that drawer. “Probably,” she said finally, “we never will know what really happened.”
Brown also became a member of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained. This was a Fortean organization started by Ivan Sanderson in the mid-1960s. Its publication was “Pursuit.” (As in: “Science is the pursuit of the unknown.”) According to Sanderson, Brown was member #20, which means she joined quickly—which in turn means she was tied rather tightly to the network of people interested in the esoteric and the occult, to have heard about its founding, and to have joined so quickly, and that on a restricted pension. She wrote to Sanderson in late 1968. (Her letter appeared in vol. 2, no. 1, dated January 1969.)
Sanderson had remarked that one person of his acquaintance maintained a file on mysteries surrounding wedding rings. This comment had prompted Brown to write in to him, telling her own uncanny story: “To begin with my wedding ring was silver, a pretty little band with engraving. I wore it so long that all the engraving wore off and it was just a plain silver band. Then, it began catching on things and, fearing that my finger might be injured, I took it off and laid it on a sideboard in our Los Angeles home. This was in about 1955.
"The wedding ring disappeared. I could not find it anywhere. When we moved from Los Angeles everything was carefully gone over in house and garage, many things disposed of. We were very careful to include just the things we wanted to keep to take with us. But no wedding ring showed up.
“Since moving to Fresno we moved twice and the same thing was done, everything gone over and the dispensable things done away with. No wedding ring. I had forgotten about it.
“In 1966 my husband died. This time I really got rid of things! In the garage was a certain box. It had originally been a cigar box, one of those nice little wooden deals with a clasp. When I was going with my husband back in 1932 I had decorated this box and shellacked it and he had kept it because it was the first thing I had done for him. Now, I took some small articles like nails, screws, little things like that I thought I might need and put in that box selecting them carefully one by one.
“Since then I've moved twice. I have opened that box a number of times to take out nails etc.
“About a week ago a young lady came in and asked me for a nail. I opened the little box and on top of everything WAS MY WEDDING RING.”
Dulcie Brown died 25 November 1978. She was 79 years old.
*******************
As is usual in these sketches, I do not know when Dulcie Brown first read Fort—or if she did—or how and when she discovered the Fortean Society. There is, of course, room to speculate. Brown was reading “Weird Tales” as early as 1940, and “Fate” by 1952. These could have pointed her toward Fort or the Society, especially “Fate.” And the timing would have been right, given that she is first mentioned in the Fortean Society’s magazine “Doubt,” in late 1952. Certainly she had a developed interest in the occult, the strange, in teleportation and ghosts, and she could have found grist for this mill in “Doubt.”
Judging by her appearances in the magazine, she was a member during the middle of the 1950s, from issue 38 (October 1952) until 47 (January 1955), which roughly coincides with the period just before the Browns moved to Fresno. The oldest of the children about whom I know anything would have been in her late teens when Dulcie took up with the Society, which suggests she may have had some free time on her hands. It is also possible that she met or knew some Forteans at the time; Los Angeles had a number of members, and she attended spiritualist services, where she might have come into contact with other Forteans. If there was a Los Angeles connection, that might explain her dropping away after moving to Fresno. Or perhaps she got tired of Thayer’s politics—hers seems to have leaned socialist, but without the bitter cynicism that informed his writing and the magazine’s tone. Or, maybe she continued her membership, but just didn’t appear in the magazine after 1955 because either she stopped sending in material or Thayer did not use it.
It is not easy to make sense of Brown’s Forteanism based on the credits she received in the magazine. There are six references that I think are to her—four to a D. Brown, one to a Dulcie Brown in Los Angeles (which is how I started the tracking process), and one to a DG Brown, who may have been someone else altogether. Four of the references are generic acknowledgments, tied to no particular article or clipping, though one might have touched on the subject of fluoridating the water. (Thayer was against it; I do not know Brown’s opinion.)
That leaves two other appearances by Brown in the pages of Doubt, and both recounted personal experiences, not unlike the letters she sent to “Weird Tales,” “Fate,” and “Pursuit.” On 4 June 1953, about fifty blocks of ice, some weighing as much as 25 pounds, fell on the 1400 and 1500 blocks of Long Beach Boulevard. The rain continued for about two minutes. Government officials would say the ice came from a plane that had iced up. A lot of Forteans sent in clippings. (Ironically, I have only found reports of the incident second hand.) Thayer doubted that a plane would stay over such a small area for two minutes; there must be some other explanation. Brown’s letter to him supported such speculation. She said she was in the area at the time, and saw vapor trails streaked across the sky.
Brown contributed one other report, this one the last time she would appear in the magazine, Doubt 47 (January 1955). She wrote to Thayer that there had been a strong jolt in the Los Angeles area. She had felt it herself. But no one was mentioning it, no officials trying to explain it away, and no reports in the newspapers. She said she’d felt it on 25 October 1954, around two in the afternoon. As it happens, the Long Beach Independent did report on a rash of calls about an earthquake in the area—but the phone lines to the paper and the police were jammed after 10 at night, not two. Official responses were muted: perhaps a seismological survey by an oil firm.
Despite the lack of meaty information in Doubt, it is possible to speculate a bit on Brown’s Forteanism, albeit based on writings she did after she left the Society and, indeed, after the Society itself folded. She seemed to have a mixture of radical and conventional ideas, longing for a society organized on socialist principles, but mostly disproving of cultural progressivism. (That she was opposed to the war may have said more about a lean toward pacifism than sympathy for the nascent counter-culture.) There were Forteans with straightforward socialist politics, though these were never the loudest of the group. Certainly Brown’s socialism was wedded to a deference to authority—though authority chastened in its ambitions by a well-educated, engaged citizenry, in her ideal scenario—and she displayed none of the corrosive skepticism toward all authority that Thayer saw as the mark of true Forteanism.
There is, also, her interest in “wild talents” and spirits. Fort—and Thayer—were no fans of spiritualism, but there were many Forteans who did subscribe to such views. And Fort’s writings did touch on poltergeists, to which category the Indian spirits she supposedly witnessed on her father’s farm would belong. There is a strong connection between spiritualism, socialism, and other kinds of then-radical thought (such as feminism), and Brown seems to have inserted herself into this nexus. She seemed to want a world that served the working people and the disadvantaged—and, indeed, she had come from the working class, and seems to have been financially strapped most of her life—but also one that was not pure materialism: there was a spiritual world, too, and it could interfere, for god and ill, with the world in which the living inhabited.
The Fortean Society—and certain readings of Fort—left space for such a combination of views, and for a time Brown found it in her interest to ally with a group that was also doubtful about the current political and economic arrangements and kept alive the possibility that the world was more wonderful than mainstream opinion allowed.
