Digging for Answers 7/14/2011

Digging for Answers -- DOWSING FOR GRAVES
by Randy Seaver

Welcome to the Digging for Answers column on the Graveyard Rabbit Online Journal.

This column will depend on your submission of questions about cemeteries, gravestones, burial practices, and other topics that concern a Graveyard Rabbit (other than where his next carrot is coming from!). So please send some questions to the editor, who will pass them along and keep the columnist hopping.

Question:  What is Grave Dowsing, and does it really work?
Answer: Good question! 

Dowsing is, according to a Wikipedia article on Dowsing: "...is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, gravesites and many other objects and materials... without the use of scientific apparatus."  It is also known as "divining," "doodlebugging," and "witching."

There are quite a few articles describing how Dowsing is performed.  Most of them include some type of dowsing rod with L-shaped metal rods (usually copper rods about 18 inches long).  Here are links to several articles about Grave Dowsing experiences (please read each of them for the full content and context):

*  Grave Dowsing by Julius Redmond (2009): 
"Grave dowsing can be used to verify sites of unmarked graves. Dowsing (divining) rods can be bought or constructed in the following method. I always use a very light material (1/8 aluminum) as this causes less friction on your index fingers. Any type of metal will work old coat hangers, etc. Take two pieces of metal 18” long, bend 90 degrees from end. Holding the 4” piece in each hand and the 14” piece slightly sloped downward; slowly walk the area and rods will cross as you approach a grave site. Since most Christian burials are buried facing the east, it would be more efficient to walk all cemeteries in the north to south direction. Each pass should be no more than two feet, as this would also identify any baby buried in search area."

*  Grave Dowsing by Brenda Marble:
"Dowsing is an age-old art that has been used for centuries to locate water, graves and etc. I first learned about grave dowsing from a fellow volunteer, Marian Schlicher, at the Cass County Historical Society while working on "The Cemetery Project". Since that time, I have conducted several of my own experiments and researched different theories. I still don't know that answer as to just exactly why this technique works, but I can assure you that this technique does work and has been proven. I will attempt to teach you how to dowse for graves in this article."

*  The Art of Grave Dowsing by Wendell Culberson:
 "By holding one wire out in front of me over the grave, the wire would slowly turn to the left (a female) and to the right (a male). On either side of my forefather we found a female and thus concluded his first and second wife. Next in the row we located 2 more graves, female and male, and thus concluded the old parents who died in the 1840's. None of these graves had markers but we now were sure they are buried there."

*  Grave Dowsing Uncovers Buried Stories by Nicole Zema in the Natchez (MS) Democrat newspaper (13 July 2011):
"'We think only one in four graves are marked in the cemetery,' Estes said. 'So we dowse before digging. Potter’s field is littered with burials, and there’s only one marker for a young woman. Out there you’ve got to dowse or you will run into someone, and we don’t want to disturb bones.'”

*  Grave Dowsing Reconsidered by the William E. Whittaker, Office of the State Archaeologist, University of Iowa; this is an archaeological study that concludes:
"Earlier researchers have demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that water dowsing does not work. As for grave dowsing, simple household experiments demonstrate that the fundamental principles of grave dowsing are probably incorrect. On the basis of the results from actual sites in Iowa, dowsing is, at best, only as good as common sense intuition at finding graves. One could speculate that dowsing is worse than common sense intuition, since I suspect that most cemetery caretakers have a pretty good sense of where graves are and could do better than the dowsers tested here, but I have no way of quantifying this suspicion."

*  The conclusions of the Iowa State Archaeologist report is similar to a short summary from the Wikipedia article, based on evaluation of several scientific studies, which states:

"...there is no accepted scientific rationale behind the concept and no scientific evidence that it is effective."

Conclusion:  We have a disagreement here - the scientists say that there is no scientific evidence or rationale for dowsing in general, but practitioners are convinced of the usefulness of the method and claim the usefulness of Grave Dowsing.  Your choice!

Readers - please submit questions to the Online Graveyard Rabbit Journal editor, and she will pass them along for me to dig into and answer.