He had no phone service, so I drove unannounced down a long dirt road out to his place to hear what he had to say. He recounted a strange schizophrenic tale of a lifetime of seeing spirits and hearing spirit-guide voices, which he alone could see and hear.

During the 1930s depression, he had been a itinerate hobo traveling the country on rail freight cars, that is until his spirit guide directed him to the Chicago YMCA, where as the spirit had promised, he found immediate employment as a swimming instructor. Soon, a wealthy young woman showed up with her kid brother to learn how to swim. It’s unclear whether the kid ever learned to swim, but it was fairly clear Anderson’s spirit-guide told him to marry the woman, to whom he was still lovingly married and living with out in the South Florida swamps. Other than having spent most of her adult life living in the swamp with A.T. Anderson, and providing nearly the sole financial
support for the family and various bizarre swamp excavation enterprises, she seemed completely and pleasantly sane. According to Anderson, his spirit guide instructed him to move with his new bride from Chicago to South Florida and buy a particular 100-acres of nearly worthless swampland. The spirit guide promised Anderson that he could unearth important archeological remains of ancient civilizations. So Anderson and his wife moved to Fla. and spent most of the next 45-years digging hundreds of water-filled pits in the swamp. Amidst the pits the property was littered with long-dead derelict steam shovels and rusting steam-powered dragline cranes and tractors. http://www.aberree.com/v06/n09p11.html

While he offered no compelling provenance, Mr. Anderson displayed large numbers of ancient teeth and bones from marine mammals and hominids ostensibly excavated from his swampland. The whole property seemed full of marine shells, and ancient Indian pottery shards, suggesting strongly that in the past it had been submerged under the ocean. Of particular interest were the mysterious three-times oversize hominid skulls. Mr. Anderson asserted that the giant skulls were that of an extinct race of ancient hominids. His spirit guides were the spirits of ancient dead Indians, and they advised him where to dig and what he would find.

Naturally, I was profoundly skeptical and asked if he was in constant communication with dead Indian spirit guides. He answered yes, and that he was in communication with them at that very moment. I asked if the spirits knew what lay below the surface all over his property. He said certainly they know. So I asked, “You mean I could walk out anywhere on your property with a shovel, and you could ask your dead Indian spirits what I would dig up at any place of my choosing, and then that’s what I would dig up?

To my surprise he said, “Sure. Let’s get a shovel and we can
go wherever you like. My invisible spirit guides will tell me what you will dig
up and at what depth.”

We spent the next couple of hours slopping through the swamp with me leading the way to make seemingly arbitrary selections of where to dig. In 20 of my random location selections, Mr. Anderson said if you dig there you will find nothing of interest within three-feet of the surface. Sure enough, I dug three holes that as predicted uncovered nothing, and decided it was pointless to dig where Anderson said nothing would be found. I must have selected and dug 15 test holes where a prediction of what would be found was made. He was 100% dead right in predicting what would be found in the 15 test holes randomly located hundreds of yards apart from each other. Common sense dictates that is statistically impossible.

Had Anderson “salted” has swamp with hundreds of thousands of artifacts over the last 45 years, and then remembered with a natural GPS in his brain what was buried under 4,300,000 square feet of overgrown swampland? I dug up nothing remarkable
per se, just bones, sharks’ teeth, or shards, or shells, or pieces of stone. But the 100% accuracy rate of his predictions was totally inexplicable by any science within my understanding.

When I returned home in puzzlement I was sure of several things. A.T. Anderson was weird as hell. In the not too distant past, South Florida had been submerged under the ocean. A.T. Anderson’s dead Indian spirit guides were totally invisible to nearly everyone except himself. I had no plausible conjecture to explain how Mr. Anderson seemed to know what was buried under every square foot of his 100 acres.