The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (10 page)

The question of whether Pedro was an anencephalic infant or an adult pygmy seemed to be answered, but the X-rays created more controversy. Some believe these showed “canine” teeth and related it to legends of the pygmy’s taste for human meat (see “The Little People” below). Others saw what they considered fully developed molars, but since the mouth was closed, they could not be checked.

In addition to possible teeth, the skeleton may have shown signs of injury (fractures of the spine and collarbone) and these have been presented as evidence that Pedro was an adult member of a group that considered it shameful to die a natural death. Injuries, however, do not answer the question of whether he was an infant or a pygmy, and it is just as likely that an anencephalic child was the victim of infanticide. None of the scientists mentioned seeing pubic hair or fuzz.

At the height of Pedro’s celebrity, Goodman had a hoopla flyer printed up entitled
It’s Educational! It’s Scientific!
that promised the mummy “…will amaze and thrill you. It’s a pygmy preserved as it actually lived!” This flyer included four photographs, two X-rays, a brief history of the mummy’s discovery, and comments from scientists. According to the text, the Anthropology Department at Harvard said Pedro was rare, and the curator of the Egyptian department of Boston Museum said it resembled Egyptian specimens. One of the most widely repeated comments came from ”Dr. Henry Fairfield, noted scientist, [who] calls the creature Hesperopithecus after a form of anthropoid, which roamed the North American continent in the middle of the Pliocene period. All of them say it is the most perfect, prehistoric mummy ever discovered.”

The Field Museum’s actual opinion was very different concerning Pedro’s age and there was no one named Dr. Henry Fairfield involved in examining the mummy.

In 1922, the noted palaeontologist Dr. Henry Fairfield
Osborn
identified a fossilized tooth found in Nebraska as belonging to a primate and christened it
Hesperopithecus haroldcookii
after the discoverer Harold Cook. More fossil hunting between 1925 and 1927, however, showed that the tooth came from an ancient peccary. The error was acknowledged and Dr. Osborn remained one of the most important and respected scientists in the United States, dying in 1935, fifteen years before the mummy arrived in New York. (Also, the flyer gives the “two prospectors’” version of Pedro’s discovery, while Henry Cardwell positively identified it as the mummy given to him by the miners. To complete the confusion, when Goodman died, his obituary included something closer to the “Mexican sheepherder” version of the story.)

Pedro is also supposed to have appeared in the newspaper column,
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
, but the Ripley company has no record of this.(37)

The Mummy Vanishes

Ivan P. Goodman died after surgery for a brain tumor on November 11, 1951, in Denver, Colorado. His funeral was arranged by Gay and Horstman, the same place Henry Cardwell left his mummy, and it was around this time that Pedro vanished. There are several different versions of what happened:

1. Goodman had been feeling weak for some time before his death. According to his son, Dixon, he collapsed in the apartment of a “con-artist” in New York City who stole the mummy.(38)

2. An unnamed professor at Columbia University borrowed the mummy and never returned it. This points the finger at Dr. Shapiro, who was an adjunct professor at Columbia University from 1945 to 1970. It also recalls Mrs. Cardwell’s story of the Wyoming professor who did not return the mummy.

3. A curator of a New York museum disappeared with the mummy in his possession. This also suggests Harry Shapiro, though he never disappeared before his death in 1990.

4. Someone named Leonard Waller or Wadler either bought or stole Pedro. Nothing more is known about him or his connection with Ivan Goodman. Was he perhaps the New York “con-man”?

5. Robert B. David’s article states that Goodman’s widow, Helen, still had the mummy. This appears in the caption of a photograph showing the author holding Pedro inside the bell jar. Bashor’s list of sources includes this article, and says it was published in 1962, but no one else has suggested that the Goodman family had the mummy at that late date. Perhaps an editor unfamiliar with the story was responsible for the caption.

6. In an article published in 1982, Guy Goodman, Ivan’s grandson, expressed the belief that Pedro was in Florida.

It would be interesting to learn if Pedro’s theft was reported to the police in Casper and New York City, or if the mummy was insured. (Goodman had been in the insurance business.) Both would require the filing of formal papers and, if the theft was not reported, why not?

Pedro’s history ends in 1951 but interest in Wyoming’s pygmy mummies has continued. People that become involved in the subject tend to fall into two camps: those who believe that the mummified remains of anencephalic infants are responsible for the belief in pygmies, and those who see the bodies and legends as evidence that a pygmy race did, or does, exist.

Anencephaly

Anencephaly is the ”absence of cerebrum and cerebellum with absence of the flat bones of the skull.”(39) It occurs during the third or fourth weeks of pregnancy, when the “cephalic,” or head end of the fetus’ neural tube, fails to close and the brain, scalp, and spinal cord do not develop properly.(40) Anencephalic infants are normally still born or “born dying,”(41) and while the brain stem allows their heart to beat and lungs to breathe, they are usually unconscious and senseless.

The disorder creates striking physical defects that are consistent with the mummy. Compare the flattened, “injured,” and “gelatinous” appearance of Pedro’s head with the anencephalic who has “a large defect in the vault of the skull,… meninges, and scalp [that] exposes a soft… mass of neural tissue covered with a thin membrane continuous with the skin.” His prominent eyes can also be explained because “the optic globes may protrude due to inadequately-formed bony orbits.”(42) The cause of anencephaly is unknown but it may be due to a lack of folic acid, vitamin B9, in the mother’s diet.

Some discussions of the mummy say that anencephaly makes a newborn look old, but it would be more accurate to say that the reduced size of the head gives it seemingly adult proportions, while the drying out produced wrinkles. There is, however, another very rare disease called progeria (Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome) that causes the symptoms and appearance of decrepitude in children; even rarer is “neonatal progeria” that causes something like old age in fetuses. Conceivably, the results could be an elderly looking infant, though this is unlikely.(43) Barry Strang, owner of the Wooden Rifle Ranch where Pedro may have been found, mentioned another interesting explanation for the mummy’s appearance. He asked me if I had heard anything about the mummy being found with a little bag around his neck. I had not.

“Some people,” he explained, “say the Indians wore little bags of uranium around their neck as amulets and that the radiation from it caused babies to be born like the Pedro mummy.”(44) There is no mention of the mummies being found with objects of any description, and while this may be folklore, it’s another aspect of the story worth looking into. Wyoming received fallout from nuclear testing in Nevada and it may be that anxiety about radiation-induced birth defects has become attached to the mummies.(45)

The Little People

According to one writer, Frank Carr exclaimed upon seeing Pedro, “By golly, Cecil! Darn if it ain’t one of those pint –sized devils the Arapaho and Shoshone Indian know about—or the mummy of one.”(46) Sarah Emilia Olden’s book,
Shoshone Folklore,
includes a chapter on the Little People of Wyoming that expands on Carr’s alleged statement and tells us more about them and their ways:

“The Shoshone Indians, before they were limited to the Wind River reservation, lived many, many years ago, all through this region. It was then inhabited by a race of pigmies or nimerigars… The Arapahoes said they were of very low mentality… They were child-like and irresponsible, but remarkably gifted in qualities which enabled them to subsist under very unfavorable conditions. The pigmies were stealthy stalkers and great fighters too. The shots fired by these little people, with poisoned arrows and unerring aim, meant sure death, and picked off the intruding Shoshone rapidly. The Arapahoes say they were also cannibals. They even hunted them down, carried them to their houses hewn out of rocks in the deep canyons, and ate them. To this day the houses of these pigmies can be seen in the depths of the mountains, and many of their skeletons have been found.

“The Shoshones say they… were clad in goatskins and always carried a great quiver of arrows over their backs [pygmies are credited with making the tiny arrowheads known as “bird points.”] Not so very long ago a Shoshone actually held beheld one…he saw one of the little people being mercilessly attacked by an eagle. The Shoshone clambered over the rocks and drove the eagle away. The little fellow expressed deep gratitude, telling the Shoshone he had saved his life.”(47)

With the exception of this particular pygmy, the locals seemed to be in a situation similar to those who ”…daren’t go a-hunting, For fear of little men…”(48) Eventually the nimerigars became so troublesome that the Arapahos decided to destroy them. They drove them into a canyon with no exit, set fire to the brush, and the pygmies perished.

A number of native legends describe races of Little People in the United States. The Penobscot Indians of Maine believed in the
wanagemeswak
, which were fantastically ugly and something like paper cutouts, being ”… so thin that they can only be seen in profile; a full forward look at them shows nothing.”(49) Hawaii’s nocturnal
menehune
were great builders, and in Minnesota, Ojibwa rock art often depicts little men called the
maymaygwayshi
who lived on the cliffs, and were associated with visions and shamanism.(50)

There are many more examples, though some people may not accept their reality. In Wyoming, ”many believe that the ‘Little People’ still exist. This is especially true of the Arapahoe and Shoshoni people but also among many whites in the Pedro Mt./Casper area. It is one of our most intriguing and persistent legends and, in Wyoming, it’s bigger than bigfoot.“(51)

After Pedro

There were no new developments in the history of miniature mummies until 1979. That was the year Dr. George Gill, a physical anthropologist at the University of Wyoming, saw pictures of the X-rays that had been taken of Pedro when he was at the American Museum of Natural History twenty-nine years earlier. He wrote to Dr. Shapiro and they agreed that the mummy was probably the remains of an infant with anencephaly.

Dr. Gill speculated that people might have lived in the Pedro Mountain area who suffered a high incidence of the disorder, and that the discovery of anencephalic mummies probably contributed to strongly held local beliefs in Little People. No mummies had been discovered since the nineteen-thirties, though, and apart from an occasional newspaper article, the story seemed over.

Then television got involved.
Unsolved Mysteries
, a series about strange phenomena, aired an episode about Pedro that included comments from Dr. Gill. Not long after that, something very unexpected happened.

“After I appeared on the
Unsolved Mysteries
program in 1994,” Dr. Gill wrote, “a member of an old Wyoming family brought me a small female mummy that had been in the family for five generations. They thought it was the same as Pedro…and it was. It is perfectly mummified like Pedro, slightly smaller, sitting in the same unusual sitting position and has the same adult-like proportions.” There are more tools available now than there were in 1950, and Dr. Gill was able to give this unnamed girl, “DNA analysis, a radiocarbon date, and a complete ‘check-up’ at Denver Children’s Hospital (pathology, genetics, etc.).” The owners, however, “only allowed our study to progress a day at a time (we never had the mummy in our possession overnight).”

The family has asked to remain anonymous so they’re not available to be interviewed, but they believe a sheepherder found it (perhaps Senor Martinez?) in or near the Pedro Mountains in 1929.(52) “Like Pedro it seems to represent an anencephalic human infant who died during or before the normal birth process could occur.”(53)

I asked Dr. Gill if the mummy might be affected by the North American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)? Congress passed the act in 1990 so that Native American relics and human remains inside federally funded collections would be returned to their tribes of origin, or to culturally affiliated groups. Since the mummy is privately owned, I didn’t think NAGPRA would apply, but Dr. Gill’s answer was a surprise.

“Since we will probably never know the original land status of the find, and in light of the number of years that the family has had the mummy, I doubt that it will ever be claimed under NAGPRA.
We are not even completely sure that the little mummy is Native American (e.g. light blond hair, somewhat ambiguous DNA, etc.).”
[my italics]

We won’t know what “ambiguous” means until the full report is published, but there’s no indication it’s a pygmy. “Like Pedro, it seems to represent an anencephalic human infant who died during or before the normal birth process could occur.”