Ask Not for Whom the Bee Buzzes

Here's another supernatural "token" described in Florence Harris Abel's entertaining book The Beitzel Family. To the old-time Beitzels, remember, a token was what others might call an omen:

A token was the sign or signal of someone’s death, often occurring with the manifestation of the person’s image or a symbolic occurrence. Just as a ghost is often not recognized as a ghost until it is gone, so a token frequently is not recognized as a token until after the person has died. Some think that as the spirit begins to loosen itself from the earthly body, it enters the presence of persons it has known in this life. … The older generation frequently talked of seeing tokens.

Abel titles this story "The Bee in the Cupboard." One night in April 1930, in Henry J. Beitzel and Cynthia Beitzel's kitchen at Keyser's Ridge, all the family members present heard a buzzing in the cupboard, like a bee trying to free itself. Abel continues:

Upon inspection, the buzz seemed to be coming from a paper bag on the shelf, but there was nothing inside when it was opened, and the buzz had moved and came from the lower cabinet shelf.

When the cabinet doors were opened and the shelf cleared, the buzz had moved to the next shelf. When the contents were removed from that shelf, there was nothing there, and the buzz was coming from the upper cabinet shelf. When the cabinet door was opened and the contents removed, there was nothing there. The buzz had moved shelf by shelf from the bottom shelf to the space between the cabinet and the ceiling.

A check of the space again turned up nothing and the buzz had moved into the cracker tin that Granma Beitzel had given her son Henry. When the tin was opened the buzz disappeared and was never heard again.

"Soon afterward," Abel concludes, "the news arrived of Granma's death." The family then realized that the peculiar, elusive buzz had been a token.

"Granma Beitzel" was Mary Shoemaker Beitzel of Bittinger in Garrett County, whose death also was foretold by a crisis apparition at her great-nephew's bedside (a story told in my previous post). For a dying person to appear, fully formed, before a loved one as they breathe their last is a claim much documented in the records of the Society for Psychical Research. Far stranger is this buzzing sound, which leads the family on a sort of wild-goose chase to a cracker tin. Why would Granma taunt her son that way, in death? And did she have any association, in life, with bees? 

Mary Shoemaker Beitzel is buried in St. Paul's "New" Cemetery in Accident. Her epitaph: "There is rest in heaven."

Sources:

Abel, Florence Harris. The Beitzel Family. Baltimore: Gateway P, 1986. Pages 66-67. 

"Mary Elizabeth Shoemaker Beitzel." Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/61887429/mary-elizabeth-beitzel. Accessed 13 Nov. 2021.

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