The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (9 page)

Likewise, the miners might have been searching the caves for Indian artifacts they could sell. Perhaps Skinny Rimmer gave Mr. Cardwell the mummy because he thought it was interesting, but not easy to dispose of, like pottery or beads. (The manufacturing of mummy heads suggests there was a local market for them. Rimmer was from Hanna and may not have known this.) That Henry Cardwell left the mummy at the morticians suggests he did not think it was valuable either. If so, they both failed to see its money making potential.

The Sideshow

The thread of the story gets lost for a while, but someone owned and displayed Pedro. Several witnesses recall seeing him or a mummy like him. One in particular noted: “The first time was in 1938 or 1939 in Casper, WY. It was in a trailer house… A 4th of July celebration or maybe the annual Natrona County Fair was going on at the time. The line into the trailer was very long. As I remember, it took about a 1/2 hour to get up to the trailer. Admission was 25 [cents]. The mummy was sitting on a table in the trailer and there was a guard at each end of the table—both armed. The line moved right along and I didn’t have much time to look the mummy over.”(23)

There are also rumors that Pedro toured colleges on the West Coast, being shown in a station wagon.(24) This stage of the mummy’s career seems to have ended in Meeteetse, in northwest Wyoming, when it came into the possession of drugstore owner Floyd Jones. He may have bought it from whomever was showing the mummy in the trailer, but like everything else associated with Pedro, there’s a story attached that “…two men had come into the bar or drugstore and offered to sell the little fellow. The druggist paid $2000.00 for the mummy and put it in a case on display in his store. The men blew the money on booze, food and women and didn’t have a dime left of it.”(25)

Mr. Harvey Wilkins, of the Big Horn Historical Society, remembers seeing Pedro at this time: “He [Mr. Wilkins] played basketball in 1945 in high school in Burlington, Wyoming. One evening, when they were to play Meeteetse, Wyoming, about 25 miles away, the coach arranged something for the whole team to get to do. They got to see the strange little dried up man in the drugstore in Meeteetse. By the door in the store was a case with the little dried man. He was about 45 [sic] inches high, the skin was still on it and the features were very plain to see. Someone or something has bashed him over the head and killed him and the blood had run down over his face and dried there.”(26)

According to Floyd Jones’ widow, Ida, Pedro was displayed in the drugstore and in Casper and Denver. Jones finally sold it for several thousand dollars in the mid-1940s, and its new owner, Ivan Goodman, made the mummy into more than a local curiosity.

It’s Educational! It’s Scientific!

Ivan P. Goodman was a natural born salesman, one of Casper’s most aggressive used car dealers,(27) a successful insurance agent, an unsuccessful candidate for mayor, and a collector. In addition to Pedro, he is said to have owned a pygmy head(28) and “a large ruby cut in a design said to be in vogue two centuries ago. Mr. Goodman believed this ruby to be one of the original crown jewels of France…”(29) Pedro and Goodman may have been fated to find each other.

Not long after the mummy’s discovery in 1932, an article entitled “Origin of Mummy Remains a Mystery” appeared in
The Casper Tribune Herald
. Directly underneath it was another called “Cars Derailed on Union Pacific Line,” which informs us that “Ivan P. Goodman of Casper was an eyewitness to the crash. ‘It was a perfect train wreck if such a thing were possible…’”

Goodman displayed the mummy in his office at the used-car lot. Lee Underbrink, a retired business man in Casper, still remembers that Al Tyler of Pittsburgh Paints and Glass made a glass case to display it,(30) but Pedro seems to have spent most of his time in a bell jar on the desk. Some of the most detailed and controversial descriptions of Pedro date from this period and now may be a good time to take a closer look at the mummy itself.

He was 6 1/2 inches tall sitting cross-legged and would have stood between 14 and 16 inches in height. Caroline Crachami, the “Sicilian Fairy,” was one of the smallest people to ever live and stood just under 20 inches tall (she is believed to have been nine or ten years old when she died). Pedro’s weight was around 12 ounces. His skin is described as bronze-colored, having a bronze-like hue, or simply, brown, and it was very wrinkled. He sat tailor-fashion with the arms crossed across the legs and the hands resting on opposite knees. It is not a relaxed position.

The top of Pedro’s head was flattened, uneven, and appeared injured (some have even described it as gelatinous looking), with several sources mentioning a fringe of grey hair that is difficult to make out in the photographs. The forehead was low, with a broad flat nose, and a wide mouth that tilted just enough to give him a slight smirk. What most impressed those who actually saw Pedro, however, was the eyes, which “seem to peer at you distinctly.” (The fact that the eyes survived drying out at all is surprising.)

George Hebbert has fond memories of the Goodman family and remembers being shown the mummy. Fifty years later, he is still struck by the way the eyes “stared at you. It made you uncomfortable…that right eye would look at you in strange ways.” Mr. Hebbert also remembers the mummy having fingernails and toenails, but acknowledges that many years have gone by and won’t swear to all the details. (He flatly denies there being any blood on its face.) Ivan Goodman also showed him something surprising that happened when Pedro was held under a reading lamp; the little figure would begin to “sweat” a liquid that George Hebbert believes was some kind of preserving fluid.(31)

The strangest description of the mummy comes from Robert E. David, who claimed that Pedro was “covered with a blonde fuzz” and had “canine teeth.” These “canine teeth” suggests a traditional sideshow attraction called the “Devil Baby,” which is a dried, infant-sized corpse, usually fake, with fangs, horns, and claws that is normally displayed inside a miniature coffin. There is a photograph of Mr. David holding a bell jar with what appears to be Pedro inside, so he probably had a close look, but no one else saw canine teeth (we will get back to this). The “blonde fuzz” is more complicated.

There is no obvious fuzz on Pedro in the photographs, but the earliest newspaper reports mention a “form of hair over its body.”(32) The presence of body hair is key to the question of whether these were the remains of an infant or a mature man. (No mention is made of Pedro’s genitals but there must have been some evidence he was male.) If the mummy was once covered with fuzz, it raises another possibility: that one of his owners removed it from everywhere but the pubic area to make the mummy look like an adult. Marco Polo describes seeing something similar done on the island of Sumatra near the end of the thirteenth century, when artificial pygmies were manufactured for export.

“You must know that in this island there is a kind of very small monkey with a face like a man’s. They take these monkeys and by means of a certain ointment, remove all their hairs except around their genitals…”

Marco Polo describes the procedure in detail, ending: “Then they put these beasts out to dry, and shape them, daubing them with camphor and other things, until they look as if they had been men. But it is a great cheat…For such tiny men as these appear to be have never been in India or in any other more savage country.”(33)

Also, as unlikely as blonde hair might seem, it will come up again.

Whatever the details, Ivan Goodman was not content with simply owning the strangest paperweight in Wyoming and began taking Pedro to museums around the country.

Little Mummy, Big City

How exactly did a used-car salesman from Casper convince the Curator of the Department of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York to become involved with a former roadside attraction? Goodman knew about selling, but he was fortunate that Dr. Harry Lionel Shapiro was interested in the relationship between environment and human stature. If Pedro turned out to be a genuine North American pygmy, it would be important to his work.

Detail of Pedro (Wyoming State Archive)

The Museum of Natural History and Dr. Shapiro had the mummy for about one week, during which time the little figure was X-rayed and examined by a physician. From March 3 to March 8, 1950, listeners to the Sunoco “Three Star Extra” radio show could follow the mummy’s progress through these “cloistered laboratories” with commentary and interviews by host Ray Henley:

“I have just talked with Dr. Shapiro. Is the creature real… or fake.[sic] To all outward appearances… it seems real… the skin is mummified in a realistic manner. The features of the legs and body look too real for comfort to the mind.

“And when samples of the creature’s hair were tested—the report came back: Human hair!

“Then the creature was placed under the X-ray machines–-and to the consternation of some persons… the X-rays showed that there was a skeleton inside.

“But to the trained eye of Dr. Shapiro…these X-rays also revealed some contradictory evidence.

“Some of the bone structure is anything but human in its arrangement. The eye sockets are not the type found in mummies [see “Anencephaly” section] The X-ray indicates there are no wrist bones between the one arm and hand which could be photographed.”(34)

“So far, however, no examination has been made of the little man’s hide… to see if it is human skin… there’s been fear of damaging the specimen.”(35)

Henley apparently arranged for the next examination at the “celebrated Chicago Natural History Museum…popularly known as the Field Museum,” which according to Cecil Main already had the mummy in its collection. Pedro was X-rayed again—the transcript suggests that Sunoco “Three Star Extra” was not satisfied with the first results—and studied for one day by Dr. Paul Martin, chief curator of the Anthropology Department, and a group of experts. These included the curator for vertebrate anatomy, a zoologist, an archeologist specializing in “ancient methods for preparing human bodies for burial,” and three anthropologists. On March 8th, Dr. Martin announced their conclusions over the air.

“Henley [sic]: And are you prepared to say what your finding is?

“Dr. Martin: Yes we are, Mr. Henle. It is an Anencephalic Anemoly [sic].

“Henle: And that in everyday language is?

“Dr. Martin: It means an infant born without the top of its skull.

“Henle: Are those things common in human nature?

“Dr. Martin: No, fortunately not. They are known to the medical world but occur very rarely. “

They go on to discuss the question of mummification. Dr. Martin explains that, “It was not mummified, but has all the outward appearances of being mummified” because “it happened to be deposited in a dry cave in a dry climate. We know from experience that human bodies laid away in caves are preserved for thousands of years.”

Dr. Martin, however did not believe that Pedro was ancient.

“Henle: However, I notice in the formal statement of your findings that the Pedro Mummy is not a prehistoric miniature man.

“Dr. Martin: That is absolutely correct. “

The formal statement says that, “X-rays show conclusively that the supposed ‘dwarf’ cannot be an adult. The development of the bones is exactly like that of a child at birth.” (There is no mention made of a missing wrist bone.)

Concerning Pedro’s age, the scientists felt that he was “…deposited probably not more than 25 years ago [around 1925]. Suggestions that it is the body of a miniature prehistoric man are fantastic. It might have been a ‘skeleton’ from someone’s family closet, probably surreptitiously deposited in the cave in which it was discovered.”(36)