Weird Georgia: A Dowser at Ocmulgee Mounds
The Council House Mound being excavated in the 1930s by Dr. A.K. Kelly.
Dr. Arthur Randolph Kelly, born in Texas in 1900, became one of America’s most respected archaeologists. After receiving a PhD In anthropology from Harvard in 1929 he was hired by the Smithsonian Institute to excavate the Ocmulgee site in Macon, where he dug with up to 1,000 Works Progress Administration laborers. Kelly started the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia in 1947, and was its chairman and a professor.
A series of conversations between Dr. Kelly and Woody and Mark Williams were taped and the transcripts published as Ramblings with Kelly, edited by Mark Williams and published as LAMAR Institute Publication 7 by the LAMAR Institute in 1990.
During World War II Kelly, superintendent at Ocmulgee National Monument, was manning the museum alone one Sunday afternoon. Bored, he read the newspaper, his feet up on a desk. There had been no visitors.
Suddenly, “you know, you’re sitting there and you have a sort of eerie feeling that someone’s looking at you,” Kelly said.
Looking up, he found a “mousey looking man…very hesitant manner,” standing there. This individual had just “slipped in and didn’t say a thing.”
Kelly invited the man to speak. “And he wanted to ask me a question, and he was evidently having a little difficulty about it. And finally he sort of blurted out. He asked me if I believed in dowsing?”
Kelly said he had no experience with dowsing, but that his geologist friends believed “there wasn’t anything to it scientifically.” Why? he asked.
“I can use the dowser and find bones.”
Kelly took his feet off the desk and gave the visitor his complete attention. “You can do what?” he asked.
“I can find bones. Human bones.”
Kelly asked if he could distinguish between human and animal bones. The answer was yes.
Kelly’s face apparently betrayed his skepticism.
“I’ve done it,” the visitor said.
The stranger said he had solved “a number of murders” and found missing bodies. At a deep spring pool in south Georgia he had told police where a drowned person could be found. They dove and located the body where he had directed them. In another case the police suspected a man had been murdered and buried beneath a hay stack. “And there were a hell of a lot of hay stacks.” He literally found the body in the haystack. Finally, he had located every grave in a Colonial cemetery that had no markers.
The man asked if there were bones at Ocmulgee. Kelly had spent five years excavating the site and found many bones, but he admitted that the entire site had not been excavated, so certainly there were bones still there. The man “brightened up at that.”
“We’ve got the afternoon if you’re not busy,” the man said. “I’d like to demonstrate.”
Kelly didn’t expect further visitors and “this sounded like it might be interesting, so I said, ‘Sure, let’s go.’”
Outside the man cut off a tree branch and trimmed it to his satisfaction, and then Kelly “just let him go where he wanted to.” The archaeologist knew where he had and had not excavated, so “I really got advantage of him,” Kelly thought smugly.
For over an hour and a half the man dowsed areas that had been thoroughly excavated. “He never gave any sign” of a discovery, Kelly said. “He hadn’t bobbled once” and “was beginning to look disappointed.”
At last they entered an unexcavated section. “There’s something here,” the man announced, and 20 feet over, “There’s something here.” He placed a stick at every strike, 12 or 13 burials describing a circle about 35 feet in diameter.
“There’s something funny about these bones,” he told Kelly. “Were all of your burials fully extended?” Kelly had found bundle burials, and so had the dowser, but without actually seeing the remains.
Back at the museum, Kelly scratched his head and “tried to figure that one out.”
“Well, aren’t we going to dig and confirm this?” the man enquired.
Kelly explained that he could not without a permit, and considered how it would look if he requested a permit to excavate based on the testimony of a dowser. The visitor left a “bitterly disappointed man. He went away very sad, just shaking his head.”
Kelly never excavated the area. As he described the incident to his classes, students asked if he had considered going out at midnight with a shovel. “I was tempted,” he admitted
Years later Kelly was working the Wilbanks site, where a mound was excavated, but not the village, an area of up to 100 acres covered with two feet of alluvium sand. “I wished to hell I had that character back,” Kelly had thought. “I’d try him out again. ‘Cause this ought to be duck soup.”
The point here is that a leading archaeologist seemed to have no doubt about the accuracy of his dowsing visitor.
In the late 1970s I attended a talk Dr. Kelly gave at Macon College. I waited outside and asked about stone mounds that had been discovered at Juliette in Monroe County. He was patient with me, and confirmed my beliefs on the issue. He died several years later, in 1979.
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