Tuesday, March 06, 2012

An Unusual Citation

I receive the Monroe Journal, the newspaper for Monroe County, Mississippi, each week by mail. It usually arrives up to a week after the actual date of the issue. In the issue which arrived today, dated February 29, 2012, there was a rather unusual article written by Emory A. Morgan whose byline is "Monroe County Historian." The article is entitled "Sixty-Five Unmarked Graves in Monroe County" and appears on page 8A. I was really hoping that the article was in the online version of the paper, but it was not. What appears in the article is not what I would classify as history. I'll let you decide on the proper term. The morning DJs on one of our local radio stations would call it "bullhockey."

Before I go on, I should say that Mr. Morgan is a grave douser. He mentions a visit to the Lann Cemetery in the county where he took one of the newspaper's reporters to prove his ability to douse graves at one point. She had told him that her grandfather had replaced some of the field stones in the cemetery with tile pots. Apparently the question is where they came from because there were no nearby Civil War engagements . The article goes on where Mr. Morgan decides that they must be burials from Franklin and Nashville where some of the Monroe County troops had been engaged in battle and that wagons had gone to retrieve the bodies and "bring them home." 

Here is where the article gets interesting. Mr. Morgan took a psychic to the cemetery on January 1. She managed to get 5 of the 65 buried there to communicate with her, according to Mr. Morgan. Some of them gave names and other information; others mostly commented on their charming characteristics. Some told how they died in the battle.

So, exactly how does one cite a revelation by a dead person to a psychic?


No comments: