Richard Shaver is known as either a crackpot or a visionary, but mainly a crackpot and citizen of Detroit, Michigan. Shaver first showed inklings of his future ways as a teenager: stealing a skull from a graveyard, breaking up his local scout troop...In 1929 he enrolled in the Wicker School of Art, where he was a nude model. He then moved up the ladder as a sort of "agent" who hired out other nude models. He was also known locally as a communist agitator and member of the John Reed Club. In the 1930s he was photographed by the Detroit News exhorting the crowd at a downtown May Day parade.
Shaver's chief legacy however is the "Shaver Mystery", the main thread of which was serialized beginning in 1945 in the legendary science-fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories. Shaver's mystery began in 1932 while he was working at the Briggs Body plant in Highland Park manning a massive welding gun. Shaver claimed to have heard the sounds of a secret torture session held in a cavern deep inside the earth broadcast through his welding gun. In a nutshell, Shaver claimed to be in psychic contact with an underground world where a race of evil devolved dwarves called Dero plotted to kidnap, rape, and eat humans.
He claimed that the salt mines under Detroit are Deros' closest point of contact with the surface world, and that he had stumbled across a top-secret wartime program to study the Deros using the auto plant as a cover. Shaver's mythology extends far beyond what can be described here, but a good summary of it can be found at the Hollow Earth Insider website. They also have a nice detailed biography of Shaver.
Detroit skyline pictured above.
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