475 FELL ST.
© 2006 Richard Toronto
https://web.archive.org/web/20070302200 ... djohn.html
Little is known of Edward John's origin. That which was known of him by friends and acquaintances is now forgotten. His life, as we know it, began with the May 1946 issue of AMAZING STORIES magazine in a rambling, detailed letter confirming the truths of the Shaver Mystery.
The letter was postmarked San Francisco, where Edward "Ed" John shared a one bedroom apartment with his aged mother. Their modest digs were located in a row of Victorian flats on the 400 block of Fell street -- 475 to be exact.
John's incredible claim was that he believed he had found an entrance to a subterranean city, discussed in one of Shaver's stories. It all began on his remote property in Mendocino County...
"In 1931 my mother and I took up a section of land as a cattle raising homestead from the U. S. Government, and naturally, it was not a choice piece," John wrote. "As a note of interest, I had to use 30,000 rounds of ammunition, and that is perhaps why we are still here. At night I would sit up fully dressed with a rifle in my hands...In about five hours after dark, I would hear things moving outside the house, and after awhile something would try to open the door quietly, and I would wait until I saw the knob turn, then let go a clip right through the door and then pull it open and look around outside and there was nothing to be seen."
After many sleepless nights with gun in hand, Ed John began to believe something evil was out there. He witnessed other strange things. He watched two black automobiles drive down a dead end dirt road one night, and disappear!
"They were silent, smooth, no wavering of the lights, and the trail is extremely rough; in places it has hollows a yard deep, but these cars went through at 25 mph, and it would even wreck a jeep to do that, so you figure it out and let me know the answer..."
John fleshed out his yarn with a moody "...atmosphere of fear within 30 miles of the area..." He even offered help to readers who might want to confirm his story. Interest in the Shaver Mystery was keen in those days. His flat soon became a destination for truth seekers across the West Coast. And some of them actually trekked to Hopland for a closer look.
Upon publication of EJ's letter, Ray Palmer stoked the boiler with a challenge to AMAZING's readers.
"Here is a definite lead on just the sort of thing Mr. Shaver insists exists. The directions are specific, and it is possible some of our more adventurous readers who live nearby would like to do a little scouting."
With a little coaching from Ed John, they did.
AMAZING STORIES, December 1946:
"Report from one of the CHMBS" (Cave Hunters Mutual Benefit Society)..." Arrived today in Hopland, Mendocino County, California. The Redwood Highway runs through Hopland...Found the road all right. It's near the town, a rural road making a loop from the main highway back into the country west of Hopland and returning to it again some miles further north."
(Ye Editor's note: From our personal experience of the Hopland area, this does not sound correct. The road from Hopland to Clear Lake goes east, not west. Here is a satellite map of the Hopland area. If you zoom in on the town area, you will see an "East Side Road" which does loop back to Highway 101 up north. We believe the road to the elusive EJ homestead is actually Highway 175, which runs through desolate mountain canyons that fit EJ's descriptions) .
In any case, our hardy, if not confused, CHMBS member continues...
"Poor farming land...now scorched and parched. Causes me to feel weak and jittery and helpless.... Have torn up half the brush along the roadside to some distance looking for ventriloquists and hoax makers to no effect. Yes, there are voices, mostly in a strange foreign tongue... and after much effort, I believe they came from a person in the atmosphere. My car, for no reason, would stop running for awhile and then for no reason it would start again. It is true that something or somebody does not want settlers in this area--also very true there are strange phenomena... "
This letter was signed by a "C.C.C." of Burke Idaho. For being on the totally wrong road, he sure suffered mightily from EJ's evil phenomena. Or was this yet ANOTHER hoax?
AMAZING STORIES, September 1946:
MORE ABOUT MR. JOHN'S CAVE...
"Sirs: "This concerns Shaver's caves. I wrote to Mr. Johns (sic) who had a letter in AMAZING STORIES some time back concerning a cave location in Mendocino County...He answered, telling me quite a bit, and that on his last trip there with two friends, they were all blanked out for two hours and didn't know where they went or what they did or why. Also they saw wires (as nearly as we can decipher the word--RAP) which vanished when they neared them. One of them got a photo of a shadowy being but was told not to go there again."
Signed, John Preve, Jr. S2/c, USS Hart, DD 594, USNRB, San Diego.
RAP replied that he was "...using every effort to check on his caves that is available to us--and apparently many of our readers have called on him, and some of them with a skepticism that seems to have angered him..."
Yes, EJ had his share of detractors. Again in that Dec. '46 AMAZING ish we find:
"Some time ago I became interested in the story of Mr. John of San Francisco. Since then I have investigated thoroughly all the angles of the somewhat distorted tale. After some months of careful investigation, these facts remain:
1) There is no cave, in or near the locations Mr. John gives.
2)There are no phenomena existent in the Clear Lake Region. Neither natural or unnatural... "
Signed, Frank N. Grubb, Oakland, California.
These are just a few letters, but there were more.
In any case, the controversy over this remote area of Mendocino County did not end with Ed John. In 1983, the Hare Krishna sect announced plans to build a towering 445 foot temple on the very same road - Highway 175 - outside of Hopland. The clip appeared in Shavertron 17, 1983. As an aside to the Krishna temple announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle reported..." In 1980, police raided the Krishna ranch in Mendocino County and confiscated 300,000 military-type bullets, gunpowder and bullet making equipment... and automatic weapons."
Why would blissed-out Hare Krishnas need all that firepower? Ed John said he only needed 30,000 rounds. Even more bizarre, the suicidal cult minister Jim Jones had a ranch 22 miles north of Hopland.
The San Francisco Examiner's religion reporter, Les Kinsolving in 1972 broke the first stories about odd happenings at the Peoples Temple in Mendocino County's Redwood Valley. The stories recounted how Jones had brought more than 40 people "back from near death" during church services at the Mendocino Ranch. Kinsolving exposed the violent nature of the cult after witnessing Temple guards armed with .357 magnum revolvers as they escorted dozens of Bay Area followers inside the church .
It does, indeed appear that this Mendocino County area has had its share of sinister, often violent "phenomena", and for these reasons, EJ and his mother packed their bags and high-tailed it to San Francisco sometime during the Great Depression.
Safely in his new digs, Ed John's Fell Street apartment soon became a "research lab." By 1946, it was filled with the kind of equipment you'd expect from a machine shop: a lathe, drill press, hand tools, scraps of metal, electronic gadgets, vacuum tubes, and wires were scattered throughout the room; EJ even had a darkroom in there, according to eyewitness Vaughn Greene, who paid Ed John a visit after reading "the letter" in AMAZING. Just how EJ, his mother and all that equipment fit into the small apartment is also a mystery. He and Greene had their first meeting in the Johns' small kitchen.
"Ed John was an electronic genius," recalled Greene. "He built radios in the late 1940s that could pick up peoples' talking around his apartment building and on the street. He claimed sometimes to even hear their thoughts."
Apparently, Ed John was full of odd claims, said Greene. "He said he could touch a light bulb and light it. He had dozens of diagrams all over the house, and was very much into the occult -- the 'black hat' sect, I think he said. In one room he had a machine shop. He was quite a character. He even had a teletype machine. They were expensive but he had one. He was into color photography, too; not many people were at the time. He built his own color enlarger, and used a new color process that you could do in eight hours."
John's proclivity for the occult was known by other San Franciscans as well. Emma Martinelli was a member of the S.F. Interplanetary Club and was on a first name basis with the likes of flying saucer gurus George Adamski and George Hunt Williamson. She threw many "metaphysical" parties at her Gough Street flat, often with EJ in attendance.
"Ed John! There was a character," wrote Martinelli in a March, 1984 letter to Shavertron. "I felt sorry for him as he was so crippled, but he had a fine mind. I also knew his mother. She was a lovely person. The characters we had in the 40s! One night we had this big party at our place. All kinds of people there...Rosicrucian s, etc. Ed John was going to send himself through the ceiling. I'm smiling yet. The Rosicrucian couple, holding hands, was scared to death.
"Ed, in this big chair, concentrating. Nothing happened. I'd asked him about the people upstairs, what would happen to THEM when he came through. His answer, in essence, 'That's THEIR problem!' I do think John knew something about black magic. I'm exremely perceptive, and he got just so far with me on this magic stuff. I actually found myself being drawn to him psychically, but awakened in time."
John also impressed the suspicious 16 year-old Greene, who never forgot the experience. "I was skeptical of all [his claims] so he showed me some color slides of Hopland in Mendocino county. Most were average pictures, but there was one I haven't forgotten -- it was a horse walking along a dirt road....and you could see right through the horse to the hills on the other side."
Somehow their conversation turned to the tale about a giant Indian who appeared at their Mendocino County cabin. "Ed's mother verified the story about the 10 feet tall Indian," Greene added. "One day they were sitting at home, looking out the window, when they saw an Indian walk by that was at least 8 feet tall."
The mystery thickens...
Ed John was not average in appearance, either. He was a hunchback, Greene said, and short...around five feet tall. "His body was heavy set and he walked with a limp," VG recalled. " He was balding, and must have been in his fifties...
Ed John as we know him:
"According to Ed, in the 1930s he had homesteaded a small place on the old stage road, between Hopland and Lakeport in Clear Lake," Greene recounted. "Back during the Depression, people homesteaded land because there was nothing much else they could do.
"Years later, I drove over this road and found it very desolate, in steep canyons. Oddly enough, at the time I drove over this dirt road, there were signs posted around warning people not to walk off the road, as the fenced in areas had been sprayed with poison insectide."
The hoopla over EJ's Mendocino letter had barely cooled off, when another controversy emerged from 475 Fell Street. The "radio" Greene described, that could pick up conversations throughout EJ's apartment building, "even ... thoughts" appeared in an AMAZING article by one John Hatfield Hart, a friend of Greene's. Later reprinted in The Hidden World No. 12, the somewhat technical piece was titled "Building a Hidden World Receiver." Hart repeatedly referred to the originator of the device only as "the inventor," but it was undoubtedly Ed John.
"He [EJ] had dozens of diagrams all over house," Greene said. "John Hatfield Hart asked him for some. Hart was pretty proficient as a marine electrician; he worked on ships, and was hot on this stuff of John's.
"Anyway, he took some blueprints from Ed, and the radio was just one of many things he was working on. Hart showed a schematic to a Navy guy and he was amazed that it was similar to a sonar device he was working on."
Hart claimed six or seven radio sets were built and dispensed to various researchers. Best results were obtained from individuals who were "sensitives, " essentially psychic. "I was present while a woman in San Francisco described in detail some of the activities going on in the caverns below by using the set as a medium," Hart explained in his article, adding a long series of caveats for potential operators.
"The set's inventor warned me that if a steady beat tone was received in the headset, to immediately turn off the receiver, as it is a heartbeat-matching signal trying to tune into sympathy with your own pulse rate. According to him, if this signal locked into resonance with your pulse rate, the signal would slow down and your heart action would slow to a stop..."
This hints at a sinister side-effect the device had on some users. The danger was echoed by owner/operator Lewis Johannes of Seattle (read Hidden World Receiver-Part Deux--Ed), and a Texan named Vic Johnston, who planned to bring the Star Mech into the solid state age by replacing the Star Mech's vacuum tube with transistors. This was according to statements in a letter sent to Jim Pobst in 1984.
"I have corresponded with John Hart, and he told me that ... [Ed] John had come up with another such device using a pearl as a detector," Johnston wrote. "A few years before I got acquainted with John Hart, Shaver corresponded with a man who had corresponded with [Ed] John. He [Hart?--Ed] sent me all the stuff that he had received from EJ, including some photos of a cave in Mendocino County, California."
The reason Hart chose not to reveal John's name was due to a frightening incident that befell "the inventor."
"I recently contacted the inventor again and he informed me that he isn't doing anything further in this field," wrote Hart. "[He] told me of another set he had built, with a pearl used as a detector stage and the entire unit mounted inside a pocket watch case. Once assembled, this set began to operate continuously on a thought transference level, thoroughly annoying anyone in its area. The inventor tried to dismantle it and found that the watch case could not be pried open, nor could the set be destroyed with a heavy hammer. In desperation, he threw it into a roaring furnace and finally destroyed the receiver."
This is where the image of Ed John begins to fade out. There was one more letter to RAP in an early 1950s OTHER WORLDS SCIENCE STORIES magazine, and then poof; John disappeared from the scene.
"The last time I saw Ed John was in the late '40s, after the War," Greene recalled in 2006. "He was wearing a suit that day, which was weird. I'd never seen him in a suit. He was going to a science fiction convention with Emma Martinelli. There was a strong sci-fi club in Berkeley before the war, and we tried to revive it -- start another science fiction society. Martinelli really tried to push this."
Ray Palmer closed the book on EJ in the August, 1955 issue of MYSTIC MAGAZINE. A letter from an irate reader kicked it off:
"What was the final decision on Mr. Ed John's Mendocino county phenomenon? He gave two different locations (to two different magazines) as being the 'only' site of his Fortean experiences. "
RAP's slippery reply?
"Ed John's phenomenon? Can we help it if he wasn't consistent? We offered to check, and so did many readers. These many readers checked and some got negative results, others positive. Neither proved anything."
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A May, 2006 visit (by an underpaid Shavertron employee) to the house at 475 Fell St. revealed only a cyclone fence and an empty lot. A freeway off-ramp built during the 1960s was likely the cause of its demise, though rumor has it there was an "accident" and the house was demolished. The off-ramp was later torn down due to damage suffered in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Now, only trees and ivy reside at 475 Fell Street ... the fabled site where the first Star Mech was built by Ed John.
Many thanks to Jim Pobst and The Shaver Archive for research that helped make this story possible.