Mirror Mirror: The Death of Jeffery Derosier

Some Irish superstitions hold that if you look into a mirror for long enough, you'll see a demon peeking over your shoulder. The Jewish *Talmud* says that the 'Shadim'or soul can enter through reflective surfaces, and thus it is traditional to cover all the mirrors in a house after someone has died. It was customary for mirrors to be covered with thick black fabric on All Saints' Day in traditional Catholicism. Perhaps there's something more to these superstitious beliefs? What if mirrors really can sometimes become gateways to the great beyond? The witnesses of the death of one Jeffery Derosier in 1936 would have no choice but to support this assertion...

## A Pale Facsimile

It was the evening of February 18th, 1936 - and Jeffery Derosier was lying in bed in a small ward in the War Memorial Hospital of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. He was recovering from an unspecified injury. There were four other patients sharing this ward with him, among which were Lewis Descheneau and Harvey Davenport. Derosier had an enameled table just beside his bed, on which there was a plain mirror. This mirror had a mercury back, but otherwise was naught more than a silvered piece of glass. He asked Davenport to pass him the mirror so that he could comb his hair. He looked into it for a few moments. The occupants of the ward watched, having very little else to do. Nobody could've predicted the havoc that was very shortly to come. He had only stared into the glass for a few moments, and yet something he had seen in the reflection had terrified him. His eyes were wild and his face looked pale and sickly according to the testimony of Lewis Descheneau of Brimley. He turned to Mr. Davenport and hysterically stated '*I'm going to die, Harvey. I see it in the mirror.*'

He weakly threw the mirror back onto the steel top of his table. It landed near the edge. The dying man's last words were '*You won't be able to pick it up*'. He froze for a minute before starting to cough. It was obvious to the other patients that he was about to die. As soon as the nurse arrived in the room, the light faded from Derosier's eyes and he died instantly.

Davenport was the first to try to pick the strange object up off the table, and was terrified to find that he couldn't. For a further 24 hours, the ghastly looking glass clung to the table as if its life depended on it. Hospital attendants and the doctor in charge of the ward (one Dr. FJ Moloney) found themselves unable to lift the damned mirror. This bizarre phenomenon very quickly escalated to become a local news story - plumbers, cooks, doctors and newsmen tried and failed to remove the mirror from the table's steel embrace. Some even resorted to carrying the entire table around the ward just by holding onto the lip of the mirror. Finally, Miss Adeline Knopf - a nurse from the hospital's operating room - was able to pry the thing loose with nothing less than an icepick. The mirror instantly splintered.

Dr. Moloney was asked what he thought the cause of the baffling phenomenon was, to which he asserted that he was certain that no adhesive or saliva had been used by the dying man. When he was asked if he thought the cause was in fact supernatural, however, he retorted in question of if the reporter thought he looked superstitious.

Professor Paul Harbrecht of the University of Detroit posited later that perhaps the perspiration from Derosier's hand may have reacted chemically with the mercury backing of the mirror and caused it to stick to the table. Scientists both in Detroit and Ann Arbor had a stroke of genius when they suggested that perhaps '*molecular action*' was to blame, whatever that might mean. Professor George W. Carter of Wayne University suggested that perhaps the mirror and the table were so perfectly smooth as to have expelled all the air between them. Apparently, that would've meant thatthe molecules of the table top could've exerted an attractive force on the mirror's molecules which would be strong enough to hold them together. As Charles Fort would've laughed at, a psychologist by the name of Dr. Albert M. Barrett opined that mass hypnosis could've caused the unique phenomenon. The only person to loudly voice an unscientific answer was one of the original witnesses, Harvey Davenport. He was convinced that the dying man had cast a spell on the mirror and thusly fled the hospital. He returned to his home in Rexton, Michigan - where he quickly packed a bag and left '*for some place out West*'.

## Sources

*The Herald-Press* of the 20th of February 1936

*The Detroit Free Press* of the 10th of March, 1963

*Forgotten Mysteries* by R. DeWitt Miller