@@@@@ There was a guy in Nebraska who could 379
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There was a guy in Nebraska who could predict
tornadoes by the corns on his missing footA
legless sailor in England who was used by his
mates as a kind of human fish-finderA Japanese
double amputee who became a respected poet - not a
bad trick for a fellow who'd been illiterate at
the time of the train accident in which he lost
his arms
Of all the stories, maybe the strangest was that
of Kearney Jaffords of New Jersey, a child born
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without armsShortly after his thirteenth
birthday, this formerly well-adjusted handicapped
child became hysterical, insisting to his parents
that his arms were "hurting and buried on a farm
He said he could show them whereThey drove two
days, finishing up on a dirt road in Iowa,
somewhere between Nowhere and Nowhere in
ParticularThe kid led them into a cornfield,
took a sighting on a nearby barn with a MAIL POUCH
advertisement on the roof, and insisted that they
digThe parents did, not because they expected to
find anything but because they hoped to set the
child's mind and body at rest againThree feet
down they found two skeletonsOne was a female
child between twelve and fifteenThe other was a
man, age undeterminedThe Adair County Coroner
estimated these bodies had been in the ground
approximately twelve yearsbut of course it
could have been thirteen, which was the span of
Kearney Jaffords's lifeNeither body was ever
identifiedThe arms of the female child's
skeleton had been removedThose bones were mixed
with the bones of the unidentified man
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Fascinating as this story was, there were two
others that interested me even more, especially
when I thought of how I'd gone rooting through my
daughter's purse
I found them in an article called "They See with
What's Missing," from The North American Journal
of ParapsychologyIt chronicled the histories of
two psychics, one a woman from Phoenix, the other
a man from R?o Gallegos, ArgentinaThe woman was
missing her right hand; the man was missing his
entire right armBoth had had several successes
in helping the police find missing persons
(perhaps failures as well, but these were not set
out in the piece)
According to the article, both amputee psychics
used the same techniqueThey would be provided
with a piece of the missing person's clothes, or a
sample of his handwritingThey would shut their
eyes and visualize touching the item with the
missing hand (there was a huggermugger footnote
here about something called the Hand of Glory, aka
the Mojo H
