One damned letter. And a juicy story.
It’s not Lister. It’s Litster. Thayer got it wrong. Lots of internet sites get it wrong. Not Lister, Litster.
John Litster was born 30 April 1886 in Alva, Scotland to George Litster and Janet Romanes. Litster says his father was in government service, and when John was three, the family relocated to South Africa, where he lived for thirteen years. He attended college in Scotland, then returned to Johannesburg, working in mining until he was twenty-three. He had contracted malaria, and at that time it had developed into blackwater fever; doctors told him he needed a change of scenery. Litster chose Denver, Colorado, where he could continue to work as a mining engineer. Almost all of that history comes from Litster’s own report; I’m only confident that he was born in 1886, and that he did live in Scotland when he was about 15—at least, there’s a John Litster of that age in the 1901 Scottish census.
It’s not Lister. It’s Litster. Thayer got it wrong. Lots of internet sites get it wrong. Not Lister, Litster.
John Litster was born 30 April 1886 in Alva, Scotland to George Litster and Janet Romanes. Litster says his father was in government service, and when John was three, the family relocated to South Africa, where he lived for thirteen years. He attended college in Scotland, then returned to Johannesburg, working in mining until he was twenty-three. He had contracted malaria, and at that time it had developed into blackwater fever; doctors told him he needed a change of scenery. Litster chose Denver, Colorado, where he could continue to work as a mining engineer. Almost all of that history comes from Litster’s own report; I’m only confident that he was born in 1886, and that he did live in Scotland when he was about 15—at least, there’s a John Litster of that age in the 1901 Scottish census.
Litster did not stay still for long. Again according to his own account, he moved through Colorado—Cripple Creek, Creede, Leadville—then to southern Oregon, more mining, and a new career. His World War I registration card had him in Astoria, working as a steward for a shipping company. He was tall, blue-eyed, and dark-haired. He later recalled trying hard to get into the Great War, both as an American and a Britisher, but was denied by both countries because of his lungs; supposedly, he lost several cousins in the conflagration.
After Oregon, Litster said, he moved south, to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he changed careers again, writing advertising copy. Supposedly he was in the area for five years, which in context puts him in the region from about 1925 to 1930. (I cannot find him in the 1920 census.) He recalls making good money and publishing a book of poetry, The Golden Years in 1928. All of this comes from the same article in an Oregon newspaper published in the 1930s, after he made a Fortean amusement park. And so there may be a bit of, um, let’s call it, self-serving omissions. Because this is where the official records start to be of use, and they intimate a different story.
To understand, we have to jump ahead in time a bit, to 1939, when he published a book of poetry called Gold Hill, or Vagabond’s Testament (which I have not seen). It republiched some works which he had originally published under a pseudonym, Alva Romanes—clearly the name of his home town and his mother’s maiden name. As it happens, there were several books of poetry published by Romanes in the late 1920s: The Great Awakening (1927) and, possibly, a book called Mistakes in 1929. And in that interview, Litster writes that he published The Golden Years in 1928, that also went out under that pseudonym. So the connection is there, and the problem is not just one damned letter, but a whole damned name. The poetry was a minor success, getting quoted in a few newspapers and religious tracts.
The first of these books, The Great Awakening, was supposed to have been written when Lister was a prisoner at San Quentin. They are a mishmash of some conventionally pedantic prosody as well as a few that are a bit more searching—though none of it would qualify as good. The appendix has several letters of support, from David Starr Jordan, a judge, a DA, and San Quentin’s Warden. It is worth noting that prison reform was of some interest in the 1920s, and involved several Forteans, notably Maynard Shipley and Miriam Allen DeFord. Romanes’ book, though, stopped short of calling for any reform, only suggesting, obliquely, that prison was too harsh, depriving inmates of books and following the laws of man, which were not as just as those of Divine ones.
A search of San Quentin’s records, however, reveals no one incarcerated there by the name of John Litster, Alva Romanes, or even John Lister. So, what’s going on? Was this all a pose, Lister never actually jailed, just using the story to help his poems? Perhaps, though only 2,000 copies of the book were published, suggesting there was never a real push for publicity. (Admittedly, the publishing run is from the book itself, and could all be part of a con.) However, an Oregon encyclopedia does say that he spent time in jail during the 1920s, which suggests there is some record of his incarceration. And a broader search of the records revealed something potentially interesting. There was a Lister from England held at San Quentin from 1924 to 1927, which fits with the rest of Litster’s life story. The birth date was off by a few years—1891, instead of 1886—and the first name was different, George, not John. Could this be the same guy?
There are reasons to believe so. First, and the weakest, George also went by the name Jack Evans—Jack a diminutive of John—and the penchant for name-switching fit with his later use of a pseudonym. Second, while I could not find John Litster in the 1920 census, I could find a George Lister, living in Sausalito (just north of San Francisco), working for a railroad. I could not, however, find any other records for this Lister, before or after. (His birthplace, incidentally, is given as the United States, as are his parents’—nothing more specific than that, just the United States.) There are, of course, multiple reasons for this potential lack of records, but among them is that the identity was created de novo. Third, the records for George Litster include a physical description and pictures—which match those of later pictures of John Litster. The match is not perfect, but there is a more-than twenty-year spread between them. Finally, the poems in The Great Awakening strongly suggest the author was put behind bars for financial crimes, and George Lister—well, he committed a big one.
George Lister made off with $14,000. He had been working as a messenger for American Express railway company and, in March 1924, vanished with the money. A nationwide alert went out and he was apprehended later in the month. Lister plead guilty in May, hoping for parole; although the probation plea was unopposed, he was sentenced to 1-14 years at San Quentin. Lister admitted that he had spent the money “on cabaret girls and cafe attendants along New York’s Broadway.” The sentence ended up being just shy of three years—the 1927 discharge fitting perfectly with the 1927 publication of The Great Awakening and the rest of John Litster’s life story.
The second book—the one he called out in his later reminisces—The Golden Years is subtitled A Lyric Story of Love. And it was written about the time that Litster was falling in love—I haven’t seen the book, so can’t make the connection definitively. It is true, though, that Litster married in 1930—his wife was Mildred Forsyth, aged 36—seven years Listster’s junior (though only two years younger than George Lister). She was the daughter of John Forsyth and Mabel Hall. At least that’s what it said on the marriage certificate. Other records indicate that she was born as Julia. I cannot find her under either name in the 1920 census, though, and so am not sure what she was up to. At any rate, the certificate has Litster living in Los Angeles, Forsyth in Berkeley, and the two getting married in Alameda on 21 March 1930.
Other records complicate that story. John Litster appears twice in the 1930 census. He’s listed as living in southern Oregon, and divorced, as of April 1930—a month after he was married. That same month, he’s living with his in-laws in Berkeley. The 1930 census has a space for age at first marriage—it is not filled in for the Oregon Litster, but given as 43 in for the California Litster. Neither give any indication why he gave his home as Los Angeles on the marriage certificate. Perhaps he and Mildred divorced after only a month? It’s possible, but that juts makes the rest of the story confusing. In both cases, Litster gave his profession as writer.
The story continues murky for a couple of years. At some point, Litster purchased an old assay building in Gold Hill that had slid down a mountain over the years, leaving it cattywampus. Stories about Litster have him buying the land in the early 1920s—which is possible—and conducting thousands of experiments there—which is also possible, albeit unlikely. But there are no records of that, and he seems to have had more pressing work in the 1920s, what with his copywriting, poetry, and prison time.
His own account, at least as told in 1937, has him only taking ownership right around 1930, and having conducted no earlier experiments. He said that his San Francisco doctor told him, Because of his lungs, he needed to live in the country. So he returned to southern Oregon and found some land in Gold Hill, filing a claim on 20 acres known as the Berkeley Square mine, as well as some surrounding land, including the dilapidated assay office, slipped down the hillside toward Sardine Creek. It was a two-room building, about 12 by 30 feet. For the record, I have not found any mention of the Berkeley Square mine, except in Litster’s account.
John Litster changed careers again. He became proprietor of “The House of Mystery.”
According to his own account, he noticed that plumb lines were deflected seven-and-a-half degrees from perpendicular; that glass and other non-magnetic materials were pushed away from magnetic north; that balls thrown toward a fence did not go over but returned. He said that there was a long record of oddities associated with the place: birds refused to nest in the area, locals thought the place was hoodooed. It’s not clear that any of this is true, or that the stories predated Litster owning the proper and setting out a sign directing travelers to the mystery house. It is quite possible to explain these phenomena as optical illusions created by the shack’s crazy angles.
Litster dismissed this possibility, as did many Forteans, and others who came to the place later. Lister said that he did experiments, but over the years the number attributed to him has grown ridiculous: 14,000 is commonly reported across the internet. As a result of these experiments, the new owner did not think the physics-defying anomalies were illusions: he thought there was a force of 25 pounds pushing objects away from magnetic north. The center of this force was in the shack. He suggested at times that perhaps the mineral composition of the hill caused the deformations. John Litster alternately claimed that scientists had investigated the area, and come away confused, and that he hoped some day a scientist would investigate and explain the phenomena.
John and Mildred were tireless promoters of the vortex—despite the reports of the 1930 census from Oregon, John was decidedly not divorced. He claimed in 1937 that 35,000 people visited the house in one year, which seems like an incredibly large number. The 1940 census had him giving his primary career as owner of the attraction. By 1948, he published The House of Mystery: Located Within the Famous Circular Area, the Oregon Vortex, with Its Unique Phenomena. It was expanded in 1954 and a posthumous version was published in 1960 as Notes and Data, Relative to the Phenomena at the Area of the House of Mystery, Sardine Creek, Gold Hill, Oregon. I have only seen the last, and it is not so much an argument as a bunch of pictures showing short and tall people reversing their respective sizes depending upon where they stood. Over the years, the area of this activity expanded, a circle of varying circumferences.
I don’t know how Litster became associated with the Fortean Society, although there are hints. He is first mentioned in Doubt 14 (Spring 1946), which was about a decade-and-a-half after opening his roadside attraction, and two years before the first edition of his pamphlet. Thayer—calling the proprietor John Lister—notes that he is already a member by this point. Thayer was unimpressed by the house: he’d visited similar “crazy houses” at Coney Island and amusement parks. Other Forteans, though, were more excited, and likely they had drawn him to the Society—in particular Albert E. Page, the Santa Rosa postal carrier and expositor of the vortex atom. Thayer noted that Page had been out to Gold Hill some time before, and decided that the phenomena was caused by a vortex. Indeed, it’s likely that Page inspired Litster to call the place “The Oregon Vortex,” as he does not do so in the 1937 newspaper piece.
The immediate cause of Thayer’s article in Doubt, though, was Frederick Hehr. The maverick Bay Area physicist had just visited Gold Hill and investigated. (It’s possible that Litster and Hehr knew each other from the Bay Area, but there’s no evidence of that.) He didn’t think vortexes were responsible. Rather, he surmised that a machine had been buried below Gold Hill in prehistoric times. Maybe it was Atlantean, he suggested; maybe it was extraterrestrial. (Thayer let his feelings be known when he mentioned that Hehr was on intimate terms with beings from Venus.) All of this was before the flying saucer craze, and space beings were still understood in vaguely Theosophical ways.
Litster seems to have inspired others—and this was cause for his second, and final, appearance in Doubt. In 1941, “The Mystery Spot” opened in Santa Cruz, featuring similarly obscured sightlines and the same kinds of phenomena as Gold Hill. Then, eight years later, “Confusion Hill” opened in Piercy, California, about 250 miles to the southwest. The Litsters were not happy by the development, and sued the proprietors of Confusion Hill for an injunction and a little more than half a million dollars. In turn, the Litsters were countersued for $8,000. (The same year saw a legal battle between The Mystery Spot and “Curious Canyon”.) Thayer dismissed it all as good publicity for what were basically carnival attractions.
That attitude may be why John Litster didn’t contribute more to the Society; it may also be that Litster merely thought the Society a good source of ideas for describing his attraction. It is not clear whether he really believed in the theories he was putting forth, or whether he was just drawing on his advertising background and trying to make a living by selling a con.
John Litster died in 1959. The following year, Mildred sold the property. It continued to attract attention through the rest of the century, but has increasingly fallen on hard times.
After Oregon, Litster said, he moved south, to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he changed careers again, writing advertising copy. Supposedly he was in the area for five years, which in context puts him in the region from about 1925 to 1930. (I cannot find him in the 1920 census.) He recalls making good money and publishing a book of poetry, The Golden Years in 1928. All of this comes from the same article in an Oregon newspaper published in the 1930s, after he made a Fortean amusement park. And so there may be a bit of, um, let’s call it, self-serving omissions. Because this is where the official records start to be of use, and they intimate a different story.
To understand, we have to jump ahead in time a bit, to 1939, when he published a book of poetry called Gold Hill, or Vagabond’s Testament (which I have not seen). It republiched some works which he had originally published under a pseudonym, Alva Romanes—clearly the name of his home town and his mother’s maiden name. As it happens, there were several books of poetry published by Romanes in the late 1920s: The Great Awakening (1927) and, possibly, a book called Mistakes in 1929. And in that interview, Litster writes that he published The Golden Years in 1928, that also went out under that pseudonym. So the connection is there, and the problem is not just one damned letter, but a whole damned name. The poetry was a minor success, getting quoted in a few newspapers and religious tracts.
The first of these books, The Great Awakening, was supposed to have been written when Lister was a prisoner at San Quentin. They are a mishmash of some conventionally pedantic prosody as well as a few that are a bit more searching—though none of it would qualify as good. The appendix has several letters of support, from David Starr Jordan, a judge, a DA, and San Quentin’s Warden. It is worth noting that prison reform was of some interest in the 1920s, and involved several Forteans, notably Maynard Shipley and Miriam Allen DeFord. Romanes’ book, though, stopped short of calling for any reform, only suggesting, obliquely, that prison was too harsh, depriving inmates of books and following the laws of man, which were not as just as those of Divine ones.
A search of San Quentin’s records, however, reveals no one incarcerated there by the name of John Litster, Alva Romanes, or even John Lister. So, what’s going on? Was this all a pose, Lister never actually jailed, just using the story to help his poems? Perhaps, though only 2,000 copies of the book were published, suggesting there was never a real push for publicity. (Admittedly, the publishing run is from the book itself, and could all be part of a con.) However, an Oregon encyclopedia does say that he spent time in jail during the 1920s, which suggests there is some record of his incarceration. And a broader search of the records revealed something potentially interesting. There was a Lister from England held at San Quentin from 1924 to 1927, which fits with the rest of Litster’s life story. The birth date was off by a few years—1891, instead of 1886—and the first name was different, George, not John. Could this be the same guy?
There are reasons to believe so. First, and the weakest, George also went by the name Jack Evans—Jack a diminutive of John—and the penchant for name-switching fit with his later use of a pseudonym. Second, while I could not find John Litster in the 1920 census, I could find a George Lister, living in Sausalito (just north of San Francisco), working for a railroad. I could not, however, find any other records for this Lister, before or after. (His birthplace, incidentally, is given as the United States, as are his parents’—nothing more specific than that, just the United States.) There are, of course, multiple reasons for this potential lack of records, but among them is that the identity was created de novo. Third, the records for George Litster include a physical description and pictures—which match those of later pictures of John Litster. The match is not perfect, but there is a more-than twenty-year spread between them. Finally, the poems in The Great Awakening strongly suggest the author was put behind bars for financial crimes, and George Lister—well, he committed a big one.
George Lister made off with $14,000. He had been working as a messenger for American Express railway company and, in March 1924, vanished with the money. A nationwide alert went out and he was apprehended later in the month. Lister plead guilty in May, hoping for parole; although the probation plea was unopposed, he was sentenced to 1-14 years at San Quentin. Lister admitted that he had spent the money “on cabaret girls and cafe attendants along New York’s Broadway.” The sentence ended up being just shy of three years—the 1927 discharge fitting perfectly with the 1927 publication of The Great Awakening and the rest of John Litster’s life story.
The second book—the one he called out in his later reminisces—The Golden Years is subtitled A Lyric Story of Love. And it was written about the time that Litster was falling in love—I haven’t seen the book, so can’t make the connection definitively. It is true, though, that Litster married in 1930—his wife was Mildred Forsyth, aged 36—seven years Listster’s junior (though only two years younger than George Lister). She was the daughter of John Forsyth and Mabel Hall. At least that’s what it said on the marriage certificate. Other records indicate that she was born as Julia. I cannot find her under either name in the 1920 census, though, and so am not sure what she was up to. At any rate, the certificate has Litster living in Los Angeles, Forsyth in Berkeley, and the two getting married in Alameda on 21 March 1930.
Other records complicate that story. John Litster appears twice in the 1930 census. He’s listed as living in southern Oregon, and divorced, as of April 1930—a month after he was married. That same month, he’s living with his in-laws in Berkeley. The 1930 census has a space for age at first marriage—it is not filled in for the Oregon Litster, but given as 43 in for the California Litster. Neither give any indication why he gave his home as Los Angeles on the marriage certificate. Perhaps he and Mildred divorced after only a month? It’s possible, but that juts makes the rest of the story confusing. In both cases, Litster gave his profession as writer.
The story continues murky for a couple of years. At some point, Litster purchased an old assay building in Gold Hill that had slid down a mountain over the years, leaving it cattywampus. Stories about Litster have him buying the land in the early 1920s—which is possible—and conducting thousands of experiments there—which is also possible, albeit unlikely. But there are no records of that, and he seems to have had more pressing work in the 1920s, what with his copywriting, poetry, and prison time.
His own account, at least as told in 1937, has him only taking ownership right around 1930, and having conducted no earlier experiments. He said that his San Francisco doctor told him, Because of his lungs, he needed to live in the country. So he returned to southern Oregon and found some land in Gold Hill, filing a claim on 20 acres known as the Berkeley Square mine, as well as some surrounding land, including the dilapidated assay office, slipped down the hillside toward Sardine Creek. It was a two-room building, about 12 by 30 feet. For the record, I have not found any mention of the Berkeley Square mine, except in Litster’s account.
John Litster changed careers again. He became proprietor of “The House of Mystery.”
According to his own account, he noticed that plumb lines were deflected seven-and-a-half degrees from perpendicular; that glass and other non-magnetic materials were pushed away from magnetic north; that balls thrown toward a fence did not go over but returned. He said that there was a long record of oddities associated with the place: birds refused to nest in the area, locals thought the place was hoodooed. It’s not clear that any of this is true, or that the stories predated Litster owning the proper and setting out a sign directing travelers to the mystery house. It is quite possible to explain these phenomena as optical illusions created by the shack’s crazy angles.
Litster dismissed this possibility, as did many Forteans, and others who came to the place later. Lister said that he did experiments, but over the years the number attributed to him has grown ridiculous: 14,000 is commonly reported across the internet. As a result of these experiments, the new owner did not think the physics-defying anomalies were illusions: he thought there was a force of 25 pounds pushing objects away from magnetic north. The center of this force was in the shack. He suggested at times that perhaps the mineral composition of the hill caused the deformations. John Litster alternately claimed that scientists had investigated the area, and come away confused, and that he hoped some day a scientist would investigate and explain the phenomena.
John and Mildred were tireless promoters of the vortex—despite the reports of the 1930 census from Oregon, John was decidedly not divorced. He claimed in 1937 that 35,000 people visited the house in one year, which seems like an incredibly large number. The 1940 census had him giving his primary career as owner of the attraction. By 1948, he published The House of Mystery: Located Within the Famous Circular Area, the Oregon Vortex, with Its Unique Phenomena. It was expanded in 1954 and a posthumous version was published in 1960 as Notes and Data, Relative to the Phenomena at the Area of the House of Mystery, Sardine Creek, Gold Hill, Oregon. I have only seen the last, and it is not so much an argument as a bunch of pictures showing short and tall people reversing their respective sizes depending upon where they stood. Over the years, the area of this activity expanded, a circle of varying circumferences.
I don’t know how Litster became associated with the Fortean Society, although there are hints. He is first mentioned in Doubt 14 (Spring 1946), which was about a decade-and-a-half after opening his roadside attraction, and two years before the first edition of his pamphlet. Thayer—calling the proprietor John Lister—notes that he is already a member by this point. Thayer was unimpressed by the house: he’d visited similar “crazy houses” at Coney Island and amusement parks. Other Forteans, though, were more excited, and likely they had drawn him to the Society—in particular Albert E. Page, the Santa Rosa postal carrier and expositor of the vortex atom. Thayer noted that Page had been out to Gold Hill some time before, and decided that the phenomena was caused by a vortex. Indeed, it’s likely that Page inspired Litster to call the place “The Oregon Vortex,” as he does not do so in the 1937 newspaper piece.
The immediate cause of Thayer’s article in Doubt, though, was Frederick Hehr. The maverick Bay Area physicist had just visited Gold Hill and investigated. (It’s possible that Litster and Hehr knew each other from the Bay Area, but there’s no evidence of that.) He didn’t think vortexes were responsible. Rather, he surmised that a machine had been buried below Gold Hill in prehistoric times. Maybe it was Atlantean, he suggested; maybe it was extraterrestrial. (Thayer let his feelings be known when he mentioned that Hehr was on intimate terms with beings from Venus.) All of this was before the flying saucer craze, and space beings were still understood in vaguely Theosophical ways.
Litster seems to have inspired others—and this was cause for his second, and final, appearance in Doubt. In 1941, “The Mystery Spot” opened in Santa Cruz, featuring similarly obscured sightlines and the same kinds of phenomena as Gold Hill. Then, eight years later, “Confusion Hill” opened in Piercy, California, about 250 miles to the southwest. The Litsters were not happy by the development, and sued the proprietors of Confusion Hill for an injunction and a little more than half a million dollars. In turn, the Litsters were countersued for $8,000. (The same year saw a legal battle between The Mystery Spot and “Curious Canyon”.) Thayer dismissed it all as good publicity for what were basically carnival attractions.
That attitude may be why John Litster didn’t contribute more to the Society; it may also be that Litster merely thought the Society a good source of ideas for describing his attraction. It is not clear whether he really believed in the theories he was putting forth, or whether he was just drawing on his advertising background and trying to make a living by selling a con.
John Litster died in 1959. The following year, Mildred sold the property. It continued to attract attention through the rest of the century, but has increasingly fallen on hard times.
