It's funny how little pieces of a puzzle come together to form a bigger picture. Small drips and drabs of information come to you and you just file 'em away, waiting for the right moment to use them. And when a sudden revelation comes to you, you have to snap at the chance and move on it quick....

...which is my esoteric way of trying to explain why Jason and I drove all night to the Six Gun Shoot 'Em Up In The Sky Theme Park (try saying that 3 times fast) in Carsondale Tennessee.

What drove me here (other than Jason's mad dash up the interstate) was the cryptic comments left in the e-mails of Gunter Mahlberg and his henchman Daniel McArthur that I posted on my site last month.. McArthur has mentioned that he was in Tennessee looking for an Indian head that had supposedly been lost in a medical school museum fire of 1866. I was hoping to get a leg up (pun intended) on Gunter so I thought I would try to find the object first. There wasn't much to go on but I was hoping to get lucky and fed the pertinent words into google.com (my favorite search engine) I got back 1,430 hits. Sigh....I started wading through the search engine hits on days when I had a free second and I finally stumbled across what they were looking for when I found this page Could Gunter be searching for the Seminole Indian war chief Osceola's severed head?

The story goes that after Chief Osceola died in 1838 his head was cut off from his body and secretly stolen by a Doctor named Frederick Weedon. Most people assumed that the head was later lost in a New York medical school fire of 1866 but that was never proven since remains were never found. One publication claims that the head was cursed and that although it caused the fire, it wasn't consumed by it and instead continues to bring misery upon whoever owns it.

I thought that if the stories were true then it certainly sounded like an object ole' Gunter would be interested in. And the simple fact that Gunter was after it made me want to get to the bottom of the 130 year old mystery. But how could I find it before the evil little mini-me got to it first and claimed it for his own?

The e-mails had mentioned a man named Keppler who had had the head until the 1930's in Franklin Tennessee. Lan used a internet phone directory database to see if there were any Keppler's left in Franklin. Her search turned up another case of information overload since there were over 800 Keppler's in Franklin and the surrounding area.

Well sometimes searching for the Freaky ain't as glamorous as I would like and this is a great example. What did I do? Simple; I just started calling every one of those Keppler's and asking them if they knew anything about a Indian head. It wasn't pretty but if I wanted to get anywhere on this case, it had to be done. Luckily Lan has one of those free internet phone systems installed so I didn't go broke getting hung up on. On days when I didn't have anything else better to do I would sit down with the Keppler list and start dialing. Trust me, it got boring real fast.

Somewhere around call number 560 or so I got lucky. One good ole' boy named Samuel said his Uncle Ted may have had something like that but he hadn't seen it in 20 years. As luck (or the curse?) would have it, Ted had dropped dead of a heart attack around 1980. The last place Sam had seen this head o' fun was at the cheesy Wild West theme park his Uncle had worked at but it had been closed since 1984. "If the bugs haven't got to it, it's probably still sitting there," Sam told me and hung up.

What's left of the Six Gun Theme Park, Carsondale Tennessee

Well that was all the encouragement I needed so I loaded up the Freakmobile, grabbed Jason, and hit the road Monday night. By Tuesday we were up in the scenic Smokey Mountains and after a few dead ends we found the entrance to the theme park. Problem was, we weren't the only ones there. A couple of vehicles sat right next to the fake saloon where the head was suppose to be. I had Jason stand look out and I headed in to find the head before the cleaning crew or whoever they were found it first.

That weasel, Gunter Mahlberg

Problem was, it wasn't a cleaning crew, it was Gunter Mahlberg. That little bastard had beaten me to the punch somehow and was one step ahead of me. I saw the head all right, I saw it sitting in a glass jar right next to Gunter as he forked over cash for it. Well Gunter didn't really scare me but the big guys around him did. There was no way I was getting anything out of there. Deciding discretion was the better part of valor I sneaked the hell out of there and Jason and I beat a hasty retreat.

The missing head of Chief Osceola?

So that's how it ends. No happy ending, no "young webmaster finds out the truth." The truth is probably sitting in the trunk of Gunter's car as he motorvates down the highway. I only hope the curse gives him a flat tire on the way home.

sources

"Does Osceola Rest in Peace?" from Strange Universe Magazine Vol. 2 Issue 12 1989

Fort Moultrie website: http://www.nps.gov/fosu/sb/osceola/

Phone Interview with Sam Keppler, Oct. 2nd, 2000