The Prostitute, The Prophet, and the Lost Continent
Los Angeles. December 30, 1898.
Each second was an injustice to the heart of Teresa Kerr. She, the one leaning against a pillar on the 2nd floor of City Hall. Clammy hands clutching the grip of a .32 Smith & Wesson for hours. The same kind of gun that’ll kill McKinley. A little gun for small hands. She shifts it from hand to hand underneath her cape. Tightening her fingers around it. Loosening. Hours of waiting, with nothing but a gun and her thoughts. Eyes searching the hall, every door, but one in particular, the City Engineer’s office.
4 P.M.
The thrumming growing in her ears. Pounding now. Coughing out all other sound. Tightness spreading across her chest. Her heart broken and on the brink of explosion. The anticipation growing. Too much so.
5 P.M.
George Bloom King. That was his name. He had promised her so much. His love. A life together. A way for her to escape her life. Promises mean less the further from them you get. And the more they are broken the easier it is to lie to yourself until the pain becomes too great.
Two days and he has successfully avoided all contact with Teresa. Not from lack of trying. Letters delivered and calls placed but King ignored all of her attempts. Two years! Two years they had spent together all meaning nothing to him. It meant everything to her. Like the marriage contract, they signed meant nothing. “I, George B. King, take Teresa Kerr to be my lawful, wedded wife before God, and I promise to love and protect her through life.” Nothing but ashes in their fireplace. Those waiting hours, thoughts of the past two years played through her head.
6 P.M.
“Slight, thin, flat-chested little woman with a skin as white as marble and deep sunken, burned-out blue eyes” is how the papers describe Teresa. Accentuated by tightly ringleted auburn hair.
She was born in New York to Irish immigrants in the summer of 1874 and orphaned at 10, or so she says. There were some kind of relatives living off in Ohio, again so she says, but her past is as fraught as her present. Struggling ever since to make it on her own. By her early-20s, she fell into sex work at parlor houses, brothels, and other disorderly abodes around Los Angeles.
She had lived and worked at Madame Van’s brothel on N. High Street under the name Mabel Bowen. Where in March 1897 King made her acquaintance and became smitten. Night after night he’d patronize the place, and Teresa. Weeks would go by before the ultimate consummation of the relationship as she claimed to be too sick, but that did not stop King’s infatuation from growing.
In the beginning, she managed to keep a professional distance from the eager young engineer, who had 10 years on her. After months of badgering and declarations of love, she allowed her guard to be lowered and accepted King’s proposal of marriage.
She continued on at the Madame Van’s, King unwilling to fully commit to her, claiming lack of funds to provide for them both. The life wore her down to the point she left Los Angeles for the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, New Whatcom, and Vancouver). Months passed there, King sent desperate telegrams and letters pleading for her to return. “Precious Darling” he called her, “Darling Sweetheart”, “I thought once when I was a boy that I loved, but I know now that it was nothing compared to the affection which I feel for you, which is composed of the heart’s purest affection and the ties of the closest intimacy.”
Dozens of those followed Teresa around while she continued working in the brothels up north going by the name Viola Ross unable to truly get away from that life. Until the fall of ‘98 when she found herself back in Los Angeles and back with George.
For two months it was nice. They lived together as man and wife, though under assumed names for he didn’t want anyone to know about their relationship.
Early in December fissures formed. The warnings of friends not to marry someone like Teresa. A common chippie they called her. Someone with aspirations, political aspirations, couldn’t have a prostitute for a wife.
That’s when he started laying the groundwork for getting out. Staying out late at night after playing cards. Then he came begging on his knees to get the marriage contract back, and when she handed it over promptly it went into the fire. Another night he told her she might need to go back to sex work because they were low on money. A revelation that prompted Teresa to pawn a ring and use the $5 to buy a pistol telling King that she’d rather kill herself than go back to prostitution.
Then, the day after Christmas, King kissed her goodbye and she hadn’t seen him since.
Days she spent waiting to hear from him. Pacing the floor of their boarding room. Not eating. Not sleeping. Where was he? Was he hurt? Could he have died? Did he leave me? What to do? What to do? Anxiety wrecked hours dripping away, the only salvation being the knowledge of what she came here for.
He ghosted her with the hope it would all blow over. Teresa wrote to him. No response. Called the office. No response. But one thing she couldn’t do was go back to Mrs. Van and go back into sex work.
The thoughts pulsing through her head. Three days of them. Over and over running around terrorizing her. Crippling her until now. She can’t. She just couldn’t. Not anymore. Not after all this. And that’s what drove her to City Hall. Drove her to wait for George. Drove her to holding that pistol.
7 P.M.
King exits the City Engineer’s office.
She eyes him.
Follows him down the hall.
To the steps.
“You don’t know how sick you’ve made me.” She says to him.
The gun comes up.
Santa Barbara. January 1899
Oh, how the disappointments mounted. That’s the writer's life though. A manuscript finished and time and time again it gets rejected for publication. Though many efforts were made to get it published from selling subscriptions to trying to get the local government to take out ads in the book. Anything to raise the few thousand dollars needed to publish it. Nothing worked. And the pain grew stronger and more bitter as the writer became more desperate.
Frederick Spencer Oliver was a newspaperman. Covering mostly the area around his home base in Ballard in the Santa Ynez Valley filing stories on agricultural life. For a little over a decade, the 32-year-old had been on that beat.
Born in 1866 in Washington, D.C., Frederick and his family moved to Bear Creek, California in 1868 and for the next 15 years, they bounced around between Bear Creek, Los Angeles, Oregon, Nevada, and Yreka in Northern California, before ultimately settling in Ballard.
Being an only child, his parents indulged Frederick’s lackadaisical, day-dreamed filled inner life. Which came to a head and pushed the limits of their acceptance when beginning in 1883 Frederick would first start hearing the voice that would lead him to compile his book, A Dweller on Two Planets.
The voice, that of Phylos the Esoterist, first made himself known to the 17-year-old Frederick while he was out surveying a piece of land for his father near Mt. Shasta. Driving stakes on the boundary of a mining claim, he took out a notebook to jot something down but his hand started writing something different all on its own. Suitably freaked out, he ran the couple of miles back home.
For the next year, Phylos appeared to Frederick, inside of his head, educating the teen through “mental talks” that consumed his life. Days would go by and he would be just going through the cursory motions of life, subsisting on the education Phylos provided. As it became obvious to everyone that something was up he told his parents who were a little worried but mostly curious.
They wanted to meet this Phylos, but the mystic would only materialize through Frederick who spoke the words Phylos relaid to him. Word spread and attracted others with a small, dedicated crowd forming to listen to Phylos’s lessons being channeled through the teen.
Soon Phylos instructed Frederick to start writing, transcribing what was being funneled through him, acting as amanuensis for the mystical presence. Writing backward and out of order, an arduous process that took three years to complete. Now a decade later that same manuscript lay there. Finished but unpublished though not from the lack of trying.
Efforts made over the past few years included trying to sell subscriptions to fund the publication, trying to sell ads within the book to raise the funds, and sending the only copy to a publisher in the East. Only to have them not return it for nearly a year and it nearly being lost in a train derailment and fire. Frederick stood resolute against these setbacks, “Even if at the last, efforts of Evil beings prevail for a little while, and I have to pass on, leaving another to hold open the Glorious Gates, and not see the book go forth to the world, still am I content.”
The years rolled by. Frederick got married. Got a job. Had kids. And lived a seemingly respectable life with some adherents still coming to listen to the lessons of Phylos.
One night in January 1899 while working the night editor desk at the Santa Barbara Press reading the news from around the area, Frederick’s eye gets drawn to an interview with Teresa, and something clicks inside of him.
~
The smoke wafted up from between her hands, but the sound of the shot never reached her. Then, Teresa knew something terrible happened.
King staggered back collapsing on the stairs. Teresa, not far behind, cradling his head in her hand. Disbelief and shock all over her face. Men rushed up to her taking the gun, her pleading for it back to do the job she came there to do. “It should have been me!” Hysterical now. “It should have been me!”
She had pressed the gun against her breast aiming to kill herself in front of King, one last demonstration of the pain he hath wrought upon her when he grabbed it. In the struggle, the gun fired. Tearing a deadly path through his intestines.
The authorities whisked Teresa away to a jail cell where she would remain for the next month and a half before her trial. Almost immediately word of her deed spread through the newspapers, and just as quickly people began sympathizing with the distraught 25-year-old. Reporters flocked to talk to her, being rewarded with pensive interviews of her through the bars, letting everyone know how it was all just a terrible accident, that it was supposed to have been her. That whatever King said to people while he lay dying was his last cruel stab at her. She prayed to God for him, his lies, his soul, and for her to be gone as well.
Sex workers from across the city en masse donated to her defense. The local Women’s Christian Temperance Union took a keen interest in her. Epistles of support streamed into Teresa, her legal team, and newspapers around the greater L.A. area. Most offered emotional support, sympathy, and prayers.
One letter would go further. Edwina Oliver, wife of Frederick, wrote to the Los Angeles World expressing not only her belief in Teresa’s innocence (“I don’t think the good God will suffer her to be adjudged guilty”). But to also offer Teresa a place to stay with the Olivers after her acquittal. To stay in Los Angeles would mean prostitution or suicide or both and Teresa deserved a chance to get away from that life. So Edwina strongly declared her intent, “I want her, I need her, and she needs me! Los Angeles, so fair to many, must be a vista of Hades to this poor soul-sick girl.” She pours her heart out pleading for Teresa to come live with her and her husband, “shall we not go down the Stream of Time together, both our lives the better for our companionships, and together go to One who bids all the weary to come to Him? I have found Him and to Him would I take her.”
That is a dual Him, standing for Jesus and her husband. He who possesses the spiritual and psychic gifts to uplift and save Teresa. The Oliver’s did not stop there. Pretty soon afterward, A. E. Putnam, former district attorney of Santa Barbara County turned lawyer and part-time literary agent to Frederick Oliver showed up at the door of Teresa’s lawyer. Looking very much like a regal, rural lawyer he said he represented unnamed interests from back home who were greatly interested in the case. They had ample resources to cover the cost of the defense and Putnam would offer his services to join the defense team or even take it over. But when it came time to ante up the money Putnam was nowhere to be found.
This led to Frederick, himself, showing up at Teresa’s lawyer’s office. Claiming a deep interest in the case, and “a kind of cousinly relation” to Teresa, Frederick awkwardly stood around evasively answering questions put to him and making vague allusions as to his true intentions for being there. Even adding that his mother was willing to adopt her and make her a part of the family. He would walk away empty-handed with the only clear result being that he held a fascination with Teresa Kerr and the case.
Which is when the whispers started. Putnam while in the city was showing off A Dweller on Two Planets and saying its author made a psychic connection with Teresa. She was his ‘affinity.’ You see each individual is but a half only made whole when they find their other half, their affinity. For Frederick, Teresa was that half who had traveled through celestia. From the days of Atlantis on down to now in California in Los Angeles, across reincarnations to make him whole. Uniting with her was his one chance to bring A Dweller on Two Planets to life. Maybe the only chance.
~
From the bridge of his vailx, Zalim stood. Atlantean clouds streaming by below. And there. At the limit of sight, upon the purple haze of the horizon, lay the temple of his despair. The resting place of his affinity and his child.
A Dweller on Two Planets is an interesting bit of Christian esotericism by way of Atlantis, Mt. Shasta, and Venus. It begins with the story of an Atlantean’s rise to prominence. Along the way, the protagonist drives and flies around in an aerial-submarine vessel and falling into a deadly love triangle.
Upon dying his soul gets reincarnated millennia later into that of Walter Pierson, who bears some resemblance to Frederick’s father. Both of whom were born in Washington, D.C., and moved to California shortly after the Civil War. The differences seemingly end with Pierson encountering a mystical Chinese laborer, Quong, near Mt. Shasta. Quong takes Pierson on a magical, mystical tour inside of the mountain along the way teaching Pierson the core of an otherworldly Christian philosophy. This involved transforming into Phylos and being astrally projected to Venus to meet with other ascended masters.
Back in his worldly form, Pierson would go on to meet a former alcoholic prostitute that he helped escape the life and the two of them soon married. He dedicates his life to the Christian occult arts while his wife kindly indulges this passion. The book ends with the two of them dying aboard a ship caught in a storm.
While Atlantis received most of the attention in A Dweller on Two Planets, it is another lost continent that it would have a major impact on: Lemuria.
Lemuria began as a theorized land bridge by 19th-century British ornithologist Philip Lutley Sclater that spanned South America, Africa, Madagascar, and India to account for lemur and lemur-like species roaming around those places. Due to its location in the Indian Ocean, it allowed other prominent 19th-century scientists (primarily Alfred Wallace and Ernst Haeckel) to speculate wildly on Lemuria’s role in evolutionary science with Haeckel going so far as to say it was the cradle of humanity, where the first proto-humans descended from apes.
Members of the esoteric and occult community took notice and began incorporating Lemuria into their ideas with Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Theosophy taking the lead. Blavatsky turned Lemuria into something more than just a sunken land bridge, it held it’s own race of beings, Lemurians, who exhibited all sorts of extrasensory powers but with it, Lemuria became relocated to the Pacific Ocean. Subsequent followers like Annie Bessant, Charles Leadbeater, and Rudolf Steiner took Lemuria into even more mystical and extraterrestrial territory in the early 20th century, pushing the continent so that it butted up against California.
A Dweller on Two Planets bridged that gap. Its story of “Ascended Masters” living on and within Mt. Shasta would have long-range implications as subsequent readers of Frederick’s work took his ascended masters and the fact that Lemuria was once part of California to place Lemurians at Mt. Shasta.
With the help of California-based astronomer, née amateur occultist, Edgar Lucien Larkin, who relayed Frederick’s story in his column and wrote a promotional pamphlet for the reissue of A Dweller on Two Planets, others discovered the book namely the Rosicrucians and Guy Ballard, but many others too. All of whom played upon the themes of the book like airships and UFOs, meeting strange mystics in the woods around Mt. Shasta, secret, hidden, and underground cities, and even Ballard’s cult-like right-wing spiritual-political movement, I AM Activity, derived its name from the book. Which all get attached to the subsequent mythos engulfing Mt. Shasta.
Prior to the book, Mt. Shasta was like any other mountain in California. Majestic and beautiful, yes. But nothing particularly supernatural about it. However, A Dweller on Two Planets created a safe space for others to tell their extraordinary Mt. Shasta encounters.
First came the tales of the Lemurians, elven-like, tall, and fair-haired with mullets and psychic powers, performing rituals that lit up the woods around the mountains. People would try to get close but were stopped by an invisible barrier. Though Lemurians would wander into town buying various items with gold. Campers, hikers, and hunters from the 1930s onwards reported running into these strange beings and having near-alien abduction-like encounters with them. Being whisked away to inside the mountain, shown fantastical sites, and proselytized to, all of which first appeared in the pages of A Dweller on Two Planets.
A whole host of other encounters have been reported from fairy and gnome sightings to Bigfoot sightings where a female Bigfoot gave birth and another breastfed a baby Bigfoot. UFO sightings have been rampant since the 1930s and include the airships/submarine vessels Frederick described to more classic saucer-like objects and lights in the sky.
All of which have made Mt. Shasta a renowned spiritual center. Home to Lemurians and Telos, the crystal city that lies within the mountain. Many different spiritual and New Age communities have made Mt. Shasta their home. Most that go are spiritual seekers who visit the mountain as a kind of mecca. The book would have a major impact on the history of channeling, setting much of the tone for 20th-century channelers like J. Z. Knight, and it received a nod in Shirley MacLaine’s biopic, Out on a Limb, when the book literally fell into her hands in a Singapore metaphysical bookstore.
Others would go on to steal mightily from its pages, most notably Guy and Edna Ballard and their I AM Activity Movement of the 1930s. The Ballards borrowed the story of meeting a mysterious mystic on the slopes of Mt. Shasta who then leads Guy on a trippy mystical tour. The Ballards even used the all-caps spelling of I AM, which appears throughout A Dweller on Two Planets. Using this as their origin story, they set about touring America in the 1930s to spread their alternative spiritual movement. When they were finding that a hard sell, they mixed in quasi-fascist, right-wing politics, once again stolen from someone else, this time the rhetoric of American fascist, William Dudley Pelley, mixing the spiritual message of provided by Phylos with a rabid pro-white (no people of color were allowed in I AM) and pro-American one that sparked the imagination of many, many Americans throughout the 1930s.
After the death of Guy in 1939 and their own legal trouble, I AM dwindled but former adherents would go on to form their own groups, most notably Mark Prophet’s The Summit Lighthouse organization, which morphed into the Church Universal and Triumphant, which became a major New Age group under the leadership of Prophet’s wife, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Prophet would continually use the phrasing of “I AM” in her influential prophetic teachings. One adherent being Michael Flynn who was found to have cribbed an entire speech of Prophet’s which he used to rail against demonic forces infiltrating America following the 2020 election, with the only noticeable change being him changing I AM to WE WILL.
It is all a journey that began in the pages of A Dweller on Two Planets.
Los Angeles. Valentine's Day, 1899.
In reality, the trial was over before it began. As most throughout Los Angeles had already formed an opinion on the case and on Teresa. A good trial was must-see entertainment, and this one would not disappoint. King was the son of a scion of Los Angeles, Judge Andrew Jackson King, who served in several different official capacities over the previous 50 years and founded what is now El Monte.
Hundred or so spectators, well-wishers, and reporters bloated the benches of the courtroom for the four days the trial lasted. Most were women who felt their own connection with Teresa. Crowding around her and giving her a kiss to show their support. Putnam was there. Edwina too, passing a note and flowers to the defendant.
The prosecution would argue Teresa came to City Hall intending to shoot George King. The King family paid to have the young, brilliant lawyer, Earl Rogers, aide the prosecution. He would go on to have an illustrious career as a defense attorney serving as the inspiration for Perry Mason.
They tried. King’s deathbed declaration saying she shot him on purpose was presented and witness after witness who visited King in the hospital recounted how she had threatened him before. That she was emotional, jealous, unstable, and, ultimately, dangerous.
When it came time for the defense, they managed to turn the trial into a series of emotional pleas with testimony revolving around Teresa’s psychological state at the time of the shooting. Defense witnesses discredited King’s statements and showed that they were married, he left her, and that she was the only target for the bullet. It helped that her story had never changed once. Her last letter to King was produced that laid bare her sorrows, “I was not worth the trouble, in your estimation, although I fondly hoped I was, at one time, but I find I was sadly mistaken.”
Teresa took the stand, and cried so bitterly an adjournment had to be called for hours to see her composure return. The women in the courtroom weeped right along with her.
She sat up there before the crowd. Her feet dangling inches above the floor. A girl who came from nothing. Had nothing. The only glimmer of something in her life stepped out on her and she shot him. That bullet taking the only hope she may have ever known. And that it should have been her.
It took the jury nine minutes to acquit her.
The courtroom turned pandemonium, bursting into cheers and clapping. A swarm settling in around Teresa as she nearly fainted. The jurors, all men, on their way out passed by her and shook her hand and gave their best wishes to her.
Now it would be nice if life built to some grand crescendo. A triumph. That this relief would lead to new leases, new attitudes, new opportunities. But for an ex-sex worker just acquitted of murder, it became how to survive the next day and the one after that. “What are my plans for the future? Well, to tell the truth, I have not looked into the future…’Forget’ every one tells me, but if they knew my heart they would know that such advice is useless. Time is a healer, they say, but I do not know. It may be that with the passing of time I may forget my sorrows, but it seems now as if an age would have to elapse before my mind can be medicine to forgetfulness of the past.”
Teresa spurned the offers of the Olivers. Her and Frederick would never meet, never even lay eyes on one another. But she did not slide back into prostitution. She stayed for a while with sympathetic local women and in a group home. A jeweler from Stockton, CA, who had donated money to her defense fund showed up in her life. They got married and lived together for a while, and then they weren’t. And Teresa Kerr faded back into history.
Frederick Oliver’s story would end a lot sooner. Shortly after the verdict word of his advances toward Teresa began to spread. Try as he might to deflect attention away from himself and onto others, it did not work. He found himself now the brunt of ridicule.
1899 would be a year of pain for him. First, emotional, with the rejection of his affinity, Teresa, the half that was to make him whole, and the derision that knowledge of it brought. Next, physical. In July, he suffered hemorrhages in his stomach caused by advanced cirrhosis of the liver. It took his life on November 15, 1899. Dying in Los Angeles at the age of 33. At the time, the diagnosis was delivered due to lifestyle choices either consuming too much fatty foods or too much alcohol.
Life sure is a lot harder to live than to write about. Wading through it. Responsibilities rising up all around you acting like some test to your higher ideals. And all you can do is sit there and watch them get waylaid. It’ll tell you something about yourself.
So maybe when the book that has been your life’s work keeps falling short. And the people around you keep falling short. And when you finally have found the one who was put here to make you whole only for her to be just out of reach. Well, maybe that becomes something you cannot live with. A weight too burdensome for a sober soul to bear. And for Frederick Spencer Oliver, the channeller of Phylos, the affinity to Teresa Kerr, he slipped out of this world and onto some other. A dweller on this planet no more.
