The Tale of Wizard Clip

In the late 18th century, Adam Livingston and his family were bedeviled by invisible shears. Crescent-moon-shaped holes appeared in their clothing and shoes and saddles; visitors’ handkerchiefs were cut to pieces in their pockets. And once, horrifically, a whole flock of ducks walking through the Livingston front yard were neatly decapitated by unseen blades, in front of Mrs. Livingston and a host of other witnesses.

Other manifestations appeared in tales told later. “Chunks of fire rolled over the floors without apparent cause; all conceivable noises tormented their ears; their furniture banged about at the most inconvenient times; their crockery dashed to the floor and broken to atoms.”¹

What was the cause of this haunting? According to legend, the troubles began when a stranger who’d shown up at the Livingstons’ door during a storm took ill in the night. Although the Livingston family had shown him every hospitality during the previous hours, when the stranger felt himself nearing death and begged for a Catholic priest, Adam Livingston, a Lutheran, refused him.

The stranger died, was buried on the Livingston property, and the hauntings began.

Livingston requested help from several Protestant ministers, to no avail. In some versions of the story, he also begged for assistance from local folk magic practitioners. But nothing had an effect on the haunting until he had a dream of a man in robes, and a voice told him, “This is the man who will bring you relief.”² Livingston was persuaded by his wife to attend a nearby Catholic service the next Sunday, and upon seeing Father Dennis Cahill, he burst into tears and exclaimed “that is the very man I saw in my dream!”³  Father Cahill visited the house, said some prayers and sprinkled some holy water. The haunting subsided for several days, but then the clipping returned. Father Cahill visited again and celebrated Mass in the house, which ended the haunting for good. Livingston, understandably quite grateful to be freed from evil forces attacking his home, later donated around 35 acres of his farm to the Catholic Church. He also converted to Catholicism, along with his whole family.

This is the United States’ first recorded poltergeist (although the term didn’t come into use until much later, the manifestations certainly fit the definition). It’s probably America’s first recorded Catholic exorcism. And at first glance this seems like a fairly straightforward “ghostly revenge” story. But when you dive deeper into the history, you find that there are many, many versions, differing not just in small details but in huge swaths of events.

Some early documented versions of the story don’t mention the “stranger” who died in Livingston’s house at all. Bringing that in gave the story a satisfying “revenge” twist, as well as bringing it in line with traditional ghost stories (and with the ancient pre-Christian beliefs in the sacred duties of the host and the extremely bad karma awaiting those who harmed their guests, even via inaction).

Author Michael Kishbucher notes that the early versions by Protestant authors “tend to attribute the destructive activity to witchcraft. In contrast, Catholic authors ascribe the violent affair to evil spirits or ghosts. The name Wizard Clip suggests that the Livingstons and probably their Protestant neighbors initially blamed sorcery for the preternatural attacks on the Lutheran family.”⁴

And some of the later versions of the tale, from Catholic sources, add ongoing supernatural visitations AFTER the exorcism: “An Angel came in human shape and staid with them 3 days and nights, and instructed them in all points of Religion.”⁵ And a “Voice” visited the family, tutoring them in Catholic doctrine and instructing them to pray and fast. In the stories themselves the Voice is always presented as a wonderful, indeed heavenly visitation. But as Kishbucher notes, since it demanded long fasts, sometimes woke the family up in the middle of the night and insisted that they pray for three hours straight, and once loudly shamed a daughter who had not listed every single one of her sins in a verbal confession it had demanded of her, the Voice sounds in some ways almost as horrifying as the Clip.

We can, of course, never know the “true” version of these events at this late remove. Was there ever a Stranger? There is a “Stranger’s grave” marker on the land that was the Livingston farm. But ground-penetrating RADAR sweeps have been done of the area and there are no human remains at that spot. Perhaps he was buried elsewhere on the property, or perhaps the unlucky traveler was indeed simply added to the story later to make it more narratively satisfying. Was there ever a Voice? It’s not mentioned in the early versions. It could be that the extremely demanding disembodied speaker was added to the narrative later to make the tale serve as an edifying religious fable.

Was there “clipping” at all? Were the Livingstons even real? Here we’re on firmer ground—there’s extensive evidence for the existence of the Livingston family in the area at that time, and there are quite a few accounts of the strange invisible-shears attacks from those who claim to be eyewitnesses. And a Berryville newspaper from 1901 notes “There are those still living who claim to have seen some of the garments clipped by invisible shears.”⁶ (That paper also notes one of the odder peripheral elements of the Clip story—one of the early accounts was written by the Rev. Demetrious Gallitzen, who was in fact born into Russian nobility and gave it up to become a priest.)

There were some dissenters; a neighbor, Mrs. Anastasia McSherry, was one of the early witnesses whose observations were recorded, but later her sons cast doubts on her accounts and claimed that their father, mentioned as a highly involved friend of the Livingstons, had scarcely anything to do with the events. And obviously, even if clothes (and occasionally ducks) were sliced up, that is no proof that the cause was supernatural. It could have been some lighthearted prank that got out of hand, or an attempt to terrorize the Livingstons by a family member or outsider. Or mental illness could have been at work, in a perpetrator or “witness.” Some of the accounts, like that in which a bonnet tucked securely in a visitor’s pocket was sliced to ribbons, make it difficult to understand how a prankster or a disturbed person could have pulled it off. But the accounts could have shifted away from the factual as they were told and retold.

As the story morphed through time, so did its surroundings—not just in sweeping modernization, but in geographical boundary lines and names. The village where the incidents took place was at the time known as Smithfield, Virginia. When a post office came to the town, the post office was called “Middleway” since there was another Smithfield (of Smithfield ham fame!)  in Virginia, and Middleway became the name of the town. But newspapers as late as 1894 and 1901 note that the town was still often called “Wizard Clip” or just “Clip.”⁷

And while Smithfield/Middleway/Wizard Clip/Clip was shuffling through village names, it also ended up in the portion of Virginia that became West Virginia!

But through all its changes of name and state, the village now usually known as Middleway, West Virginia, retained an interest and a certain pride in its hometown haunting. The land that Adam Livingston donated to the Catholic Church is now a pastoral center known as Priest Field, which hosts retreats and events (and highlights the land’s supernatural history on its website). The village itself is tiny and unincorporated—what’s known as a “census-designated place” —so it has no mayor or town council to spread the word of its history.

But what it does have is an active historical conservation society: The Middleway Conservancy Association. If you go to the association’s website, the first thing you’ll notice is that its logo incorporates a crescent moon, like the shapes cut by the mysterious poltergeist-scissors. There’s also a picture of a historical marker put up by the West Virginia Humanities Council, recounting a brief history of the Wizard Clip.

And if you click through to the online Middleway souvenir store, you’ll find Wizard Clip art prints, t-shirts and sweatshirts, and (my favorite!) a bumper sticker that says, “Be Kind to Strangers or They May Haunt You.”