“Future Events Such As These”: Ed Wood and Criswell / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Fact, Fictions, and the Forbidden Predictions of the Amazing Criswell"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 10
“Future Events Such As These”: Ed Wood and Criswell
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On October 10, 1924, in Poughkeepsie,
New York, the world received Edward Davis Wood Jr., a man history would
eventually crown, somewhat unkindly, the worst film director who ever lived.
Wood deserves his own column someday, angora sweaters and all. But today
belongs to his strangest collaborator, a man who appears at the beginning and
end of Wood's “masterpiece,” Plan 9 from Outer Space,
solemnly warning the audience that future events such as these will affect them
in the future.
That man called himself a psychic.
His name was Criswell, and his one genuinely eerie prediction deserves to
outlive every joke ever made about his movie…
Jeron Criswell King, born in Princeton, Indiana, in 1907, built a career as what might fairly be called America's first celebrity television psychic, a syndicated newspaper column, a run of paperback prediction books, and his own Los Angeles program, Criswell Predicts, built his fame on the public's appetite for a confident man in heavy stage makeup telling them what tomorrow held. He claimed, repeatedly and without evidence, an 87 percent accuracy rate. The surviving record does not support that number in any way whatsoever.
Consider the competition: Criswell
predicted that by 1980 Americans would commute in cars equipped with built-in
swimming pools. He predicted Denver would be destroyed, at various points, by
either a horde of “Peeping Toms from outer space” or a sudden shift in the
Earth's magnetic poles. He predicted the world would end entirely on August 18,
1999, his own birthday, then revised the date to 2012 once 1999 came and went
without incident, helpfully outsourcing his doomsday to the Mayan calendar
instead. None of it happened. All of it was, by his own friends’ later
accounts, exactly the point.
And then, on March 10, 1963, appearing on The Jack Paar Program, Criswell made a prediction that genuinely stopped people cold eight months later. He told the audience that President Kennedy would not seek reelection in 1964 “because of something that will happen to him in November of 1963.” Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. One real, specific, correctly dated catastrophe, buried inside a career built almost entirely on built-in car swimming pools and shifting poles, is either the single most remarkable coincidence in the history of American television psychics or proof that even a stopped clock, dressed in sequins and reading cue cards, gets the darkest hour of the century right precisely once.
Vampira, his fellow Plan 9 cast
member and lifelong friend, insisted privately that Criswell flatly denied
having any real psychic ability at all, that the whole act was understood, even
if never quite said aloud, to be for the money. Other friends and associates,
by multiple accounts, believed the opposite, that whatever Criswell claimed in
private, some genuine flicker of the gift he performed so theatrically on
television was actually real. Criswell himself, depending on which interview
you trust, sometimes claimed he'd once possessed true prophetic ability and
simply lost it the moment he began charging for it, a wonderfully self-serving
explanation for a man whose entire livelihood depended on nobody checking his
math too closely.
It’s worth remembering, too, that
Criswell’s absurdity and Ed Wood’s absurdity were never separate phenomena. Plan
9 from Outer Space itself was financed by a consortium of Southern Baptist
ministers who agreed to fund it only on the condition that Wood change its
original title, the considerably more honest Grave Robbers from Outer Space,
and that he and co-star Tor Johnson submit
to baptism in a swimming pool before filming began. A fake prophet delivering
real doom-laden warnings, bankrolled by real ministers hoping to fund a dozen
films about the apostles, filmed by a director who would be voted the worst in
history twenty years later: it's hard to invent a stranger monument to American
showmanship pretending, with total sincerity, to be revelation.
Wood himself died broke in 1978, largely forgotten, his films dismissed as cheap failures rather than the cult objects they'd eventually become. The 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards crowned him “Worst Director of All Time,” a title that, improbably, resurrected his career from beyond the grave and eventually earned him a loving, Oscar-winning 1994 biopic from Tim Burton. Criswell didn't live to see any of it. Wood, characteristically, would probably have found the whole posthumous redemption arc a little anticlimactic. He always said Plan 9 was his pride and joy regardless of what anyone else thought.
Criswell died on October 4, 1982,
having outlived his own first predicted apocalypse by exactly seventeen years
and his second one not at all, since he never made it to 2012 either. Whatever
he actually believed about his own gift, he left behind one prediction specific
and correct enough that it still gets repeated, unironically, by people who've
never watched a single frame of Plan 9. That's a stranger kind of immortality
than most working psychics, honest or otherwise, ever manage to earn.
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the man who stood in front of Ed Wood’s camera and told America what tomorrow held, we're recommending the first real biography anyone's bothered to write about him...
Fact,
Fictions, and the Forbidden Predictions of the Amazing Criswell
By Edwin Lee Canfield | Headpress
Fact, Fictions, and the Forbidden
Predictions of the Amazing Criswell comes from Headpress, a small British press specializing in
cult film and outsider culture, not from any publisher on our regular affiliate
roster, so we're flagging that plainly up front. Author Edwin Lee Canfield
spent twenty years researching the book, tracking down interviews and archival
material most writers wouldn't have bothered chasing for a man best remembered
as a punchline in a famously terrible movie, and the result, published in 2023,
is the first full-length biographical treatment Criswell has ever received.
What makes the book worth your time
alongside today's post is how seriously Canfield takes a subject nobody else
has taken seriously at all. He traces Criswell's full arc, from small-town
Indiana newspaper work through his years as Mae West’s personal psychic, his
genuine but doomed ambitions for Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, and his slow fade
from television regular to has-been, with real attention to the people around
him, including his estranged wife, Halo Meadows, and Myrtle Louise Stonesifer,
described as his guiding collaborator for the rest of his life. The book
doesn't pretend Criswell was a real psychic, but it also doesn't flatten him
into a simple con man either, which is exactly the kind of nuance this column
tries to bring to figures who occupy that uncomfortable space between performer
and believer.
This is cult-film and pop-culture
history rather than anything resembling a serious parapsychological study, and
readers wanting a rigorous account of psychic fraud more broadly should look
elsewhere. But for readers who finished today's post wanting to understand how
a man with a documented record of being wrong about nearly everything managed
to become, briefly and improbably, one of the most famous psychics in America,
Canfield's book is the only place that whole strange story has ever been
properly told.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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