WELDON - Bob Walters senses dead people.
He finds them using two 20-inch lengths of thick copper wire, the last 6 or so inches of each bent in an "L" shape to form handles. Holding the rods straight out in front of him as a storm-tossed November sky provided a suitably dramatic back
drop, he marches across a cemetery in his hometown of Weldon, divining for the de ceased.
"There you are," he said, as the copper rods twisted toward each other at a 90-degree angle in his hands. "That's what happens. The rods will stay crossed until you walk off the grave area, and then they'll open back up."It's easy for onlookers to smirk - until Walters gives them a set of rods, and they do the twisting thing for them, too. That's the time when the laughter stops and the hairs on the back of the neck get up and boogie.And it gets even stranger. Not only can Walters dowse for the dearly departed, he can tell you whether they were male or female. "When you find a grave, you put one of the rods in the ground, back up and approach again with the remaining rod," he explains."If the rod you're holding swings to the left, it is a female, and if it swings to the right, it's a male. It's very accurate."What's going on here is anybody's guess. Theories range from changes in the Earth's magnetic field caused by hidden objects to some kind of invisible force unknown to science. It's nothing new, either. Dowsing for water was written about in the Middle Ages, and Walters' farmer dad used the technique to find buried drainage tile.Walters would grow up to be a telephone engineer and employed the method he calls "witching" to locate buried cables. "You can use it to find water pipes, septic tanks, anything," he said."And, you know, I always thought you ought to be able to find graves."A keen genealogist and member of the DeWitt County Genealogical Society, he read an article about doing just that in the spring issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly magazine. "I couldn't wait to get out and try it," he says.Finding marked graves in a cemetery is good practice, but Walters says the real test - and purpose - of the technique is finding unmarked graves. He's located dozens on former farmland recently acquired by the Weldon Springs St
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ate Recreation Area and has been helping park officials mark out the area.
Experts with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources don't doubt the cemetery is there - and have been mapping it - but archaeologist Harold Hassen, Ph.D, disputes the number of graves present and has serious problems digging the witching theory."The scientist in me is skeptical," says Hassen, 53. "All the studies I have read conclude this dowsing thing doesn't work."Walters smiles and offers to let his witching rods indicate another point of view. "My best retaliation against skeptics is to give them a set of rods and let them try it," he explains. "It's up to them; as for me, I'm a believer, and I'm having a ball with it."Tony Reid can be reached at 421-7977.
