Season 07 Episode 21: Wild is the Wind

fifty three year old Episcopalian Bishop James Albert Pike. In early September nineteen sixty nine, he and his twenty eight year old wife Diane, ventured out into the Judean Desert in the West Bank. They were looking for the place where Jesus was supposedly tempted by by the Devil for

a book Pike was writing. Driving out of bethy Hem one morning, they turned off the main road onto a dirt track, believing they were heading north toward Jericho, but the track was instead taking them further east toward the Dead Sea, further into the desert. When they finally realized their mistake, the couple attempted to turn the car around,

only for it to get stuck in a rut. After an hour spent battling to free the vehicle with a faulty carjack, they were forced to accept they were now stranded. They'd already drunk the two cokes they took with them that morning and had no other liquid. With the heat steadily intensifying, their only option was to get walking in the hope of finding help before it was too late.

Not used to the desert environment, the heat fell like a great pressure that seemed to be pushing them down into the dusty ground with each step, and without water, they became rapidly dehydrated. After mercifully coming across a large, overhanging rock, they stopped to get some pressure shade, but James no longer had the strength to continue. Diane looked out into the desert toward a shady looking canyon or waddy in the distance, as a wind began to pick up,

sweeping sand into the air like a haze. She knew then that she was their only hope. If she couldn't find help before nightfall, they would most likely both die there, and so she told her husband to sit tight, then headed back out into the irrepressible heat. James watched Diane until her silhouette disappeared into the horizon, then lay back against the rock and fell asleep with exhaustion. You're listening

to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Hours later, James awoke to find the sun much lower in the sky, but the wind still blowing incessantly, feathering grains of sand over the desert floor towards him. As it tugged at his shirt and blue dust in his eyes, it almost felt like fluttering. Insistent fingers were scratching, even clawing at him.

He couldn't stand it any longer. Perhaps if he could follow his wife into that shady waddy, he could get out of the wind, find her footsteps, and walk to safety. James staggered to his feet and made it a few hundred yards into the waddy, where he found a large shaded pool of water. He took long, desperate gulps of the warm, silty liquid, then sat down again to rest. But still the wind would not leave him alone. It snaked through the canyon, tugging at his hair, ruffling his

damp cotton shirt. He knew in his head that the safest thing was to stay put and wait for Diane. He had shelter and water, but he just had to get away from that wind with a renewed sense of strength and purpose, he turned to face the wall of the canyon. Finding a solid hole to grip, he pushed up from the ground and began to climb elsewhere. Diane had been stumbling across the stony desert for hour I was barely managing to keep going in the encroaching darkness.

She later said that what prompted her to keep going was that if her body were found on the way to get help, at least people wouldn't think that the couple had committed suicide. After ten strenuous hours, first scrambling up the walls of the canyon, then stumbling along a road under construction, relief washed over Diane when finally in the distance she saw the camp of the laborers who were building the road. As she staggered into the camp, the men reached out to stop her from collapsing to

the ground. They sat her down and wrapped a blanket around her while they waited for their foreman to arrive. Having recovered somewhat, Diane was then taken to the nearest army camp, where she asked the camp's captain to help her rescue her husband, but with it now long in the night, there was little the captain could do. The search for James would have to wait until the next day. It wasn't long before the Pike's abandoned car was located just at the beginning of a waddy called Mura Barat.

A few of the men helped pull it out of the rut in no time. The engine still worked perfectly, but there was no sign of James. James Pike had risen to prominence within the Episcopal Church in large part due to his outspoken liberal views, which were both fated and hated in equal measure. In nineteen fifty eight, Pike was appointed as the fifth Bishop of California, in which capacity he was an early promoter of the acceptance of LGBT people into the church, civil rights, and the ordination

of women into the priesthood. By nineteen sixty six, Pike had grown tired of all the politics that came with his position. He left California and went to share a period of sabbatical study at Cambridge University in England with his son, Jim, one of four children from his second marriage. In early February, Jim left his father in Cambridge and returned to the US. A few days later, he fatally shot himself in the head in a New York City

hotel room just over two weeks later. Having just returned to Cambridge from attending his son's funeral, James walked into the bedroom of the apartment he and his son had shared to find two postcards that he'd never seen before lying on the floor. They were positioned at an angle of approximately one hundred and forty degrees, apparently mimicking the hands of a clock, showing the precise time that his

son had killed himself. It was just the first in a number of bizarre occurrences that led James to believe his son was trying to communicate with him from beyond the grave. In response, Pike dived deeply into a very public pursuit of various spiritualist and clairvoyant methods. He even participated in a televised seance supposedly with his dead son through the so called medium Arthur Ford in nineteen sixty six.

By nineteen sixty seven, Pike had been divorced twice and was living with his then girlfriend Marion Bergrad, when she also committed suicide. The following year, he married Diane Kennedy, whom he'd collaborated with on his book The Other Side, in which he outlined his experiences with supposed paranormal phenomena

following his son's suicide. The marriage was controversial among members of Pike's church, and three days after the wedding, Pike was barred from performing all priestly functions, and so it was with Pike free to pursue new projects, that in August nineteen sixty nine, Pike and Diane traveled to Israel to conduct research for a new book Pike wanted to write about the historical Jesus. A few days later, they

made their fateful trip into the desert. For three days, with temperatures reaching a above one hundred degrees fahrenheit, hundreds of off duty soldiers searched high and low for James, but found no sign of him. With little chance that the bishop could survive that long out in the desert, the official search was called off, while a number of Bedouin and former army scouts continued to look for him. At the end of that third day, Diane gave a

press conference to update the media on the situation. Shortly after, she received a phone call from her family in the States. They'd received word from Arthur Ford, the self described medium who'd apparently helped Pike contact his dead son. Ford said that Pike was still very much alive and sheltering in a cave close to where Diane had last seen him, but he was sick and in need of urgent medical attention.

After that, Diane was suddenly inundated by numerous self described mediums offering to help locate her husband in Tel Aviv. One so called medium swung a pendulum over a large map, then recorded the position on the map where it stopped. When they repeated the pendulum swing over a different map, miraculously, it stopped at the precise same location. Two men were despatched from Tel Aviv immediately to locate the spot, but when they got there, the place was deserted, with no

sign of Pike having ever been there. The following day, the same medium attempted a spot of automatic writing to see if that might help. Holding a pen over a piece of paper, they fell seemingly into a trance as another spirit entered their body and began to move their hand across the paper. Snapping out of the apparent trance moments later, the medium consulted the paper on which a

message was now written. It had supposedly come from infamous apparent psychic Edgar Case, who died almost twenty years earlier. The message declared that Pike was lying unconscious and close to death in a cave on a narrow ridge that was hidden by shrubs. A team of volunteers raced back out to the desert and searched for the cave to

no avail. On September fifth, five days after Pike had last been seen alive, a search volunteer close to Wadi Murabarat, came across a map, then a pair of undershorts, followed by some glasses and later a contact lens case. It was a part that had been laid out by Pike, and at the end of it, part way down Wadi Murabarat, was Pike's body, sprawled out on the floor at the bottom of a steep face. It appeared that he'd fallen from high up, having attempted to climb out of the canyon.

The next day, he was buried in Saint Peter's Protestant Cemetery in Jaffa, Israel, and it wasn't long before the rumors began that something weird had happened to Pike while he was out in the desert that it wasn't the fall that killed him, but rather he'd been driven to his death by a weird kind of madness brought on by the wind. The wind that James and Diane Pike experienced on their desert misadventure is known in Israel as the Sharav and more widely across the Mediterranean as the Soroco.

It's a wind that brings warm air from the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula, with many names, the Levante in Spain or the Camscene in Egypt. Its characterized by a temperature roughly twenty five degrees fahrenheit higher than the seasonal average, and south of the Mediterranean, the Sorocco is always dry,

with a relative humidity sometimes falling to zero. Some believe these two characteristics do something fundamental to the wind's electrical properties and to anybody unfortunate enough to be caught in

its grip. One researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem found that almost one third of Israel's population experience some kind of adverse reaction, and the Charaf blows forty three percent of the people he tested experienced unusually high concentrations of the hormone serotonin in their blood system when the wind was blowing. Serotonin causes the constriction of peripheral blood vessels, including those in the brain and ones that control sleep.

In modest concentrations, it's a natural tranquilizer, but too much serotonin produces migraines, allergic reactions, flushes, palpitations, irritability, and sleeplessness. That people might be driven to distraction, even madness by the wind is not a new theory or specific to any one part of the world. The Greek physician from the fourth century BCE, Hippocrates, was convinced that certain winds

made people in ancient Greece sick. He wrote that the west winds were worse and that people exposed to them became pale and sickly, with digestive organs that were quote frequently deranged from the phlegm that runs down into them from the head. The French Enlightenment writer, philosopher and historian Voltaire spent time in England while in exile from its native France during the seventeen twenties. He wrote that in London, when the east wind blew. A black melancholy spreads over

the whole nation. Even the animals suffer from it and have a dejected air. Men strong enough to preserve their health in this accursed wind lose their good humor. Everyone wears a grim expression and is inclined to make desperate decisions. Even claimed that it was under the influence of the East wind that the English beheaded King Charles the First

and opposed King James the Second. It hadn't crossed the mind of travel writer Nick Hunt how the wind might affect his state of mind and well being as he set out in twenty sixteen on a walking adventure across Europe to experience its various winds, a journey that became the subject of his next book, Where the Wild Winds Are. Things went as well as expected as Nick trekked across the Low Pennine Hills of northern England, experiencing Britain's only

named wind, the Helm. He continued to enjoy his wonderings as he traveled to Trieste, from where he sauntered across Slovenia, then down the coast of Croatia, enjoying chile blasts at the borer a frigid blast of air that blows across the Adriatic coast from snow covered mountains to its northeast. Then Nick arrived in Switzerland looking forward to sampling the fern, a warm, dry wind that blows down from the Alps in spring and at its most intense as the power

to bring down cable cars and derailed trains. Having mentioned his plans to a German friend, the person replied, Ah, yes, the fern. That's why everyone in Bavaria is crazy. Famed novelist Hermann Hess had even written about the fern as a boy. He said that he was afraid of even

hated that wind. Everything was going smoothly as Nick began his traverse of alpine foothills in the German speaking part of the country, until he reached the village of inert Kirchen in the Canton of Bern, where the fern began to blow. Are you sure you want to do this? It's a bit a bit windy, shouted the owner of a campsite where Nick had decided to pitch his tent for the night. After repeated attempts wrestling with the writhing

giant nylon manta, ray that his tent had become. He managed to peg it down under a lone peach tree that thrashed wildly in the howling gale all night. Nick's tent bucked and flapped, while the wind all around him bellowed like a banshee. He wrote that at some point in the next twelve hours it was as if something in his brain snapped. He struggled for breath as he packed his tent the following morning, then walked on watching

waterfalls being blown upwards. His limbs felt heavy and tired, his mind seemed clouded and foggy, and he was overcome with a sudden sense of despair. For three weeks, the wind continued to howl, and Nick's mood worsened. Even boarding a high speed train to the French speaking part of the Swiss Alps didn't seem to help. As he watched

the landscape speed by, his anxiety grew. He found accommodation with a hospitable Buddhist woman clothed in yellow robes, but still couldn't seem to relax as he collapsed into bed. He felt plagued by an inexplicable apprehension that, in his words, something had gone extremely wrong on waking. The next morning, however, Nick stepped outside to find that the fern had finally stopped. He admired a blue sky peppered with cotton wool clouds, and was charmed as he watched his host to feed

her rabbits. Then strolled contentedly down the street to buy a croissant. Instead of looking desolate and forbidding, the surrounding hillsides now seemed inviting. His dark mood had miraculously lifted. Suddenly the world was full of possibilities. Nick continued his hike down the valley with all the gloom from the previous few days having completely evaporated. Over the centuries, there's been general agreement that the wind can deeply influence our

bodies and mines. South African biologist and anthropologist Lyle Watson, author of the best selling New Age classic SuperNature, published in nineteen seventy three, spent his life trying to make sense of natural and supernatural phenomena in biological terms. He examined and wrote about the effects of the wind in some detail in his nineteen eighty four book Heaven's Breath,

A Natural History of the Wind. In it, he wrote that it's easy to imagine that in human prehistory, days with a lot of wind were dangerous, with the ability to destroy shelters, disperse warning scents, and mask the sound

of approaching predators. Lyle Watson suggested that the effect of the wind on the human body is to invoke a classic alarm reaction, increasing the production of adrenaline, speeding up metabolism, dilating blood vessels in the muscles and heart, widening the pupils, and even causing hares to stand on end with a

prickle of apprehension. A study documenting the effect of temperatures on physical fitness tests found that performances reached their efficiency when a wind blew on the subjects at about twenty five kilometers per hour or four four Any higher or lower and performances began to drop off. One American study investigating how wind affects the behavior of children in the playground found that when wind speeds rose above four six or forty four kilometers per hour, the average number of

fights that broke out doubled. As Lyle says, there is something about wind, quite apart from its cooling influence, that directly affects our well being. Lyle hypothesized that the bodies of sailors and fishers who live constantly under the strain of the wind have adapted to the constant stimulus. Conversely, many city dwellers have lost the ability to withstand it sufficiently, leading to increased incidences of heart attacks and strokes on

windy days. One study revealed that fifty percent of all strokes and myocardial infarctions happened when the wind was blowing at fourse four or five. Strangely, when the wind speed is higher, however, the effect is diminished. Reaction times can also be effected, so much so that, according to Touring Clubs SUE, a nonprofit representing the interests of motorists in Switzerland, in nineteen seventy two, traffic accidents in Geneva increased by

over fifty percent when the fern wind was in effect. Furthermore, as lyell wrights. In nineteen seventy six, the medical department of the West German Weather Station in Freiburg published the results of a four year study proving that industrial accidents during the fern wind required surgery sixteen percent more often and other medical treatment twenty percent more frequently than at

any other time. Increases in hypotension, coronary crises, migraine, and psychic disturbances both during and on the day preceding a fern wind were also reported Lyle continues, the incidence of post operative death due to both heavy bleeding and thrombosis during a fern wind has become so high that in some hospitals in Switzerland and Bavaria, major surgery is postponed whenever possible until the wind has passed, and, like something out of an Mnite Shamalan movie, even suicides and suicide

attempts sore to epidemic proportions throughout Switzerland and into Austria whenever the Witch's wind, as the fern is sometimes called touches ground. This episode was written by Dianehope and Richard McClain smith Unexplained as an av Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain

Smith Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of

your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward slash Unexplained Pod cost in e sam s