Biography
Shaver claimed to have worked in a factory where, in 1932, odd things began to occur. As Bruce Lanier Wright notes, Shaver "began to notice that one of the welding guns on his job site, 'by some freak of its coil's field atunements', was allowing him to hear the thoughts of the men working around him. More frighteningly, he then received the telepathic record of a torture session conducted by malign entities in caverns deep within the earth". According to Barkun, Shaver offered inconsistent accounts of how he first learned of the hidden cavern world, but that the assembly line story was the "most common version". Shaver said he then quit his job, and became a hobo for a while.
Barkun writes that "Shaver was hospitalized briefly for psychiatric problems in 1934, but there does not appear to have been a clear diagnosis". Barkun notes that afterwards, Shaver's whereabouts and actions cannot be reliably traced until the early 1940s. In 1971, Ray Palmer reported that "Shaver had spent eight years not in the Cavern World, but in a mental institution".
Read more about this topic: Richard Sharpe Shaver
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