1938, Hoxieville, Michigan

By Stephanie Williamson

Hoxieville was a tiny Northern Michigan town in the 1930s, a place that never would have enjoyed any notoriety if it hadn’t been for Axel Morgan, the postmaster.

Axel was known throughout the county for his powers of divining. Farmers would come from miles around to hear Axel tell them where to find their lost cows or their wives’ misplaced wedding rings. He could find the best locations for well water with his dowsing rod. It was during the Depression, and many held a silent hope that Axel might also find an old safe or a pile of antique coins buried in one of their fallow fields.

Axel received visitors for his divining services out in back of the post office. There were two rusty iron lawn chairs back there – one for Axel and one for the customer. He could divine only one person at a time.

Occasionally, when the voice, which he called “It,” wasn’t speaking to him clearly enough, Axel would travel to the scene. Fair weather or foul, it was not uncommon to see Axel out in the fields – a small birdlike old man in a starched collar and bowtie, his eyes shut tight and a forked sycamore branch “dowser” in his outstretched hand.

My aunt Jeannette was 8 years old, and she couldn’t get enough of the stories about Axel Morgan, the psychic. Divining, and any other type of magic, for that matter, fascinated her. She liked to think that her dolls got up and walked around in the night. “Hogwash!” my grandfather would say.

The adult members of my family were pretty skeptical about divining. They lived 10 miles from Hoxieville, in a bigger town where people laughed at the likes of Axel Morgan.

My grandfather, a former factory foreman, was often out of work. He was a practical man who had no interest in the supernatural or spiritualism of any kind. He used whatever earthbound means available to make ends meet. For a short time, he ran a moonshine business from a still out in the woods north of town. It was said that some of the local cops were his best customers.

When my grandfather went to jail for shooting a deer out of season, they let him go home to his family on the weekends. Fresh venison, he had figured, was worth the risk. The last thing he wanted was to see his family walking down Main Street with a wagon full of handouts - those shameful yellow cans of government-issue food.

Jeanette always badgered her 13-year-old brother Bruce – my father – to take her downtown to the movies. For a few magical hours every Saturday, they would get lost in the glamorous worlds of Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire, or Gene Autry. Each week, they saved up a portion of their precious chore money for the Picture Show.

Jeanette kept her coins in a tiny red beaded pocketbook, just the right size for a little girl. It was only made out of cloth, but the green glass beads made it look beautiful and sparkly, even though lots of them had fallen off, and the metal clasp had lost much of its gold paint. She carried the little purse with her everywhere she went until one morning, when she discovered with dismay that it was missing. She frantically searched the house, the barn, the yard and the cornfield across the road.

My grandfather was afraid a vagrant might have broken into the house and taken it - one of the men who rode the freight cars from town to town, looking for work. My grandmother doubted it, though, since no food was missing from the pantry. After a few days of frustrated searching, Jeanette got it into her head that the only person who could help her was Axel Morgan.

Jeanette begged and begged to be taken to see Axel. Although he teased his sister mercilessly about her interest in “mediums, spooks and fortune-tellers,” my father was curious too. He finally helped talk my grandparents into it, saying that if nothing else, it would be a “darn funny story to tell.”

They finally gave in. My grandfather shook his head as they climbed into the rattly old Ford to drive the whole family the 10 miles to Hoxieville one summer evening. Jeanette was excited and a little scared. My father was just plain curious. My grandmother was embarrassed. The entire way there, she smiled to herself and muttered, “Well, land sakes….”

I think she was most surprised that my grandfather had given in. She suspected that it was because he was worried about the lost money, even though it couldn’t have amounted to more than 75 cents.

As they pulled up in front of the Hoxieville Post Office, they saw one of Axel’s customers: a very large woman in a flowered dress and work boots strolling out from behind the building, carrying a shotgun under her arm.

“Will you look at that,” my father said. “It’s all hillbillies out here!”

My grandmother shushed him. Jeanette giggled.

“Well, that Mr. Morgan has quite a racket going at 25 cents a customer,” my grandfather added.

Axel was seated, as usual, in his chair out back, and he sat Jeanette down across from him. His thin white hair was carefully combed, his shirt frayed at the collar but clean. Jeanette noticed that he didn’t wear socks; his thin white ankles glowed above his worn but freshly polished brown leather shoes. She twirled one of her blond pigtails as she told him all about the purse. My grandparents and my father stood behind her chair with their arms folded, watching.

Axel Morgan wrinkled his forehead and placed two bony fingers between his closed eyes.

“It says,” he began, “you live in a light-green clapboard house with a porch, painted white … When you go in the front door, there’s a stairway on the right. Go up the stairs, and two doors down, on the right, is your room….”

He kept on this way, with detailed descriptions of the inside of the house – correct to the smallest detail – to the delight of Bruce and Jeanette, and to the discomfort of my grandparents.

“It says,” he continued, waving his hands before him, as though feeling his way through the house, “there is a chest of drawers in your room. Look down behind the drawer, second from the top. It slipped behind there. It’s there, all right.”

Then he abruptly opened his pale blue eyes, smiled, and patted Jeanette on the head.

Axel was right. When they returned home, Jeanette ran to the bedroom and found the lost pocketbook just where he said it would be. My grandmother turned white. My father laughed in surprise and said, “Damn!” for which he was quickly admonished by my grandmother.

“I just knew he would find it!” Jeanette said.

My grandfather shook his head for a few minutes. Then he waved his hand in dismissal, saying, “Well, let’s just hope he really is a diviner and not snooping around in other peoples’ houses.”

Not long after that, the name of Axel Morgan became known all over the state. A young man, the heir to the Dodge automobile fortune, was lost in a boating accident on Lake Huron. On a lark, a couple of newspapermen from Detroit paid a visit to Axel Morgan. He sat in his chair, closed his eyes, and named the exact place along the shore where the heir, dead or alive, would be found.

Forty-eight hours later, the body of Danny Dodge washed up at the very location Axel had described. Nobody could explain it, but the newspapers published the story of Axel’s prediction. For a time, Axel Morgan became a celebrity and put Hoxieville on the map.

It was said that Axel Morgan worked less and less at divining in the years after his brief turn in the spotlight. When asked why, he replied that the voice just wasn’t speaking so clearly to him anymore, though it was rumored that “It” had warned him about the attack on Pearl Harbor, which had spooked even the stoic Mr. Morgan.

Today, all that remains of the legend, besides the tales passed down through families, is a plain headstone in the local cemetery with the inscription, Axel Morgan, Postmaster: 1868-1942.

Stephanie Williamson is a photographer and writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two sons. She teaches photography at City College of San Franscisco, and her writing has been recently published in Literary Mama and on her photo blog: http://swphoto.blogspot.com/.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 | Email This Post

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