2006: THE HOUSE AT 475 FELL ST.

2006 Richard Toronto

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 a while 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 a 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. Look for “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. It 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 a while 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 are 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” is 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… Rosicrucians, etc. Ed John was going to send himself through the ceiling. I’m smiling yet. The Rosicrucian couple, holding hands, was scared to death.

John Winston.  johnfw@mlode.com