In April 1874, a doorbell rang after midnight at a nine-room mansion in Oakland, California, and no one was standing at the door. Over the three nights that followed, a Treasury officer who publicly mocked the whole idea of spirits watched his own furniture move, his front door come off its hinges, and a crowd of 500 people fill the street outside his home. Mary Ann Poll tells the story of Thomas Clarke, the investigation that called him a fool, and the fight he spent the rest of his life waging. EPISODE NOTES ● Thomas Clarke was 51, an officer with the United States Treasury Department, and a public skeptic. He told one newspaper that no one in his household believed in Spiritualism, and another that the whole affair had been a lively joke, before the third night changed his position permanently. ● The named witnesses are unusually respectable for a case of this kind: the Reverend Doctor Eells of Oakland's First Presbyterian Church, Assistant United States Treasurer William Sherman, Hawaiian Consul H.W. Severance, and San Francisco attorney Colonel J.B. Howard among them. Newspapers of the day made a point of describing them as first-class people in every way. ● Doctor Joseph Le Conte, co-founder of both the University of California and the Sierra Club, personally led the investigating committee. They interviewed 20 firsthand witnesses and produced a 360-page report concluding the events were not supernatural and suggesting a boarder had staged them. Clarke had agreed in advance to let the committee decide on release, then refused to allow the report to be published. ● Clarke answered with a 20-page pamphlet attacking the investigation and a 50-page firsthand account of what he insisted he had seen. Beginning in 1877 he published pamphlets he said were dictated to him from the spirit world through a San Francisco medium. ● His daughter Helen carried the fight forward after his death in 1884, still writing letters defending the account in 1891 and giving a full account to researcher James Hyslop in 1905. That material was published in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1913, with an inconclusive verdict. After that, the Clarke family disappears from the public record entirely. ● The mansion was demolished in the early 1970s for Interstate 980. In 1997 a reporter canvassed three surviving Victorian houses near the old address and found three residents, none of whom had heard of Thomas Clarke, each reporting phenomena of their own. SCRIPTURE 1 Corinthians 4:5 (NIV) — 'Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart.' SOURCES ● Daily Alta California, April 26 to 27, 1874 ● Oakland Daily Transcript, April 28, 1874 Sacramento Daily Union, April 29, 1874 ● Thomas B. Clarke, The Oakland Ghost and Ancient Phenomena, With a Review of the Oakland Committee (1877) ● Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (1913) ● San Francisco Chronicle / SFGate, 'The Real Story Behind Oakland's Haunted Mansion,' October 31, 1997
