In the spirit of Halloween, we offer this look back at a few mysterious goings on at Pacific Biological Laboratories.
Ed Ricketts was known throughout Monterey for his wide-ranging, seemingly all-encompassing mind. He delighted both in speculation and in examining the world as it was without preconception or evasion. The darker side of human nature might make him despair, as when he pondered the raw instincts that underlay human social cruelty; but he never held back from considering them as closely as he might a piece of music or lab specimen that interested him.
Ed was even interested in the origins of myths, legends, curses, and superstitions. On board the Western Flyer, he and his best friend John Steinbeck mused over “vampire bats as carriers of rabies, and their whole tie-in with the vampire tradition, so intimately related to werewolfism in the popular mind. A man with rabies, one might infer, could well be the werewolf which occurs all over the world, and vampire and werewolf very often go together. It is a fascinating speculation, and surely the unreasoning and almost instinctive fear of bats might indicate another of those memory-like patterns, some horrible recollection of the evil bats can do.”
But when a friend or acquaintance took the existence of the supernatural literally, Ed did something uncharacteristic: he shut down. “I have said that his mind had no horizons, but that is untrue,” his best friend John Steinbeck wrote. “He forbade his mind to think of metaphysical or extra-physical matters, and his mind refused to obey him.”
Ed, Steinbeck recalled, “hated all thoughts and manifestations of mysticism with an intensity which argued a basic and undefeatable belief in them. He refused to have his fortune told or his palm read even in fun. The play with a Ouija board drove him into a nervous rage. Ghost stories made him so angry that he would leave a room where one was being told.”
Unfortunately, on multiple occasions, mysteries arose that Ed was unable to ignore. Over a period of some weeks, a person or persons left lines of white flowers across the doorstep of the lab. They did this only when the lab was empty, and so must have been watching its denizens closely—a disturbing possibility on its own. But what bothered Ed more, Steinbeck recalled, was the possibility of occult intent. “Such a curse is practiced by some northern Indians to bring death to anyone who steps over the flowers,” he wrote. “But who put them there and whether that was the intention we never found out.” The possibility that it had been was enough to disturb Ed’s rest, and “the white flowers bothered him a great deal.”
Still worse was a “haunting” that took place only in Ed’s mind. “Once after his father’s death,” Steinbeck remembered, “Ed admitted to me that he had a waking nightmare that the intercom phone would ring, that he would lift the receiver and hear his father’s voice on the other end….He had dreamed of this, and it was becoming an obsession with him. I suggested that someone might play a practical joke and that it might be a good idea to disconnect the phone. This he did instantly, but he went further and removed both phones. ‘It would be worse disconnected,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stand that.'”
Fortunately, nobody ever tried to play that or a similar trick, which Steinbeck feared might have left Ed “very ill from shock.” The biologist was thus free to delve the mysteries he preferred: how colonial animals were structured, the reason that nudibranchs lacked natural predators, and a thousand more questions about intertidal life in Monterey and beyond.
Happy Halloween!
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