The Unexplained

In 1959, Louise Miller was the librarian of the Wapakoneta Library, when it was in the building attached to Blume High School which had been changed to a 7th and 8th grade school (now a retirement residence). Louise, whom I’d year before interviewed about her youthful years as a vaudeville performer, loved books and loved me because I was a frequent patron of the library as an avid reader. The most distinctive thing about Louise Miller was her hair. She kept it in a long braid which was curled about the top of her head. Though Louise at the time was in her sixties, was mysteriously still a youthful-appearing blondish-brown. One day I asked her about her hair, and being no one else in the library at the time, she said she would tell me an unbelievable story about her hair.

“You see Jimmy, my mother and my grandmother had been born with blond hair the same way I had. What bothered me as a young girl, both my mother and my grandmother became prematurely gray, beginning in their early twenties! One day sharing this concern with premature grayness with friend who was an Irish Catholic girl, she told me to go to an Irish “White Witch” (who performs “good magic”) who lived in Glynnwood, Ohio, in Auglaize County. At first, I ignored her suggestion, but as my concern escalated into a gnawing worry, I decided I would go to see this woman.

“Going to her Glynnwood home, I nervously, slightly embarrassingly explained my concern with inheriting the premature grayness. Without hesitation the kind, old woman said she could help me! She explained she was willing to assist me because my fear was not based on pure vanity, but as I had revealed in opening conversation what bothered me most was the early graying of my mother’s hair had had a psychologically accelerating of aging effect. She asked if she could cut off a small lock of my then straw blond hair. After she had cut the lock of hair off, she asked me to return the next day and she would have something made for me which could solve my problem!

The following day I returned and she handed me the box which had on its lid the image of a cherub in the act of cutting a shaft of wheat with a sickle. She didn’t explain the image to me, just simply said if I followed her instructions with complete faith in the magic of the box, I would be cured of any graying potential of my hair!

In the magic box was the lock of my hair and in lid a Mercury mirror. My instructions were to go on “bewitching hour” of midnight to the grave of my mother, which I was to circle clockwise three times, before standing in front of gravestone and placing lock of hair atop my dominant, left hand’s life line, right hand thumb on mirror. While gazing into the mirror I was to picture myself getting older, but my hair remaining blond. Jimmy, I did as good witch had instructed, and I have never had a gray hair in my life! And as many have noticed over the years my hair has miraculously remained the same brownish-blond!”

Once when I had told this story during public speech, one of the audience had said to me, “Come on Jim, you seem like a pretty progressive guy, you really don’t believe this hocus-pocus lead to this woman’s hair never graying?” I had answered by giving the example of a young woman I had met who had come out of difficult childbirth with large white streak through her black hair!? I’d concluded to the skeptic, “If during a trauma the young woman could be psychologically manipulated for a change in hair color from black to white, why can’t the psychological effect of young woman’s belief in the box’s magic cause her hair to never gray with age?”