“Legacy, what is a legacy?/ It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see/ I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me.”
—Lin-Manuel Miranda
Kendrick Frazier, beloved editor of the Skeptical Inquirer for the past forty-five years, passed away on November 7, 2022. A forthcoming issue of SI will be devoted to Ken’s life and legacy through the words of others. In this issue, Ken gifts all of us with a recounting of his legacy in his own words. As always, they were carefully and perfectly chosen. Less than two weeks before succumbing to his recent diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia, Ken emailed me from his hospital bed: “I am thinking of writing a special editor’s column this issue that’d be a narrative report on my sudden and grave medical diagnosis. I think readers should know and I’d love to have them hear from me. … [I’d] fill it out with our previous wonderful vacation. And I could make a few observations about the uncertainties of life and the continuing value of skepticism.”
The result is what opens this, the first issue of our forty-seventh year. What Ken humbly titled “A Personal Note to Readers” is so much more. It’s a love letter—to his readers, his family, his colleagues, and skepticism itself—and, ultimately, a goodbye.
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The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) was founded in 1976 as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). The cover feature of this issue goes back to those roots of investigating paranormal claims. In his article “The Case of the Devil’s Baby of Ravenswood,” SI contributor Daniel A. Reed conducts a classic investigation into a grave marker that gives off a supposedly “otherworldly” glow in the nighttime. The headstone, located in the Appalachian city of Ravenswood, West Virginia, marks the grave of George Elwood Sharp, who perished at the age of two in 1917. As Reed tells us, natural wear during the intervening century-plus explains the supposed “devilish” look of the child’s image on the headstone’s ceramic plate. But what of that mysterious glow? Reed invites the reader to follow him on his investigation, which includes conducting an experiment with a homemade light-blocking device. Reed hopes his findings will finally “put to rest the myth that little George Elwood Sharp was some type of monster or demon.”
Also in this issue is an article by professor of biology Nathan H. Lents, whose laboratory studies the evolution of the human genome with a special focus on the genetics of human uniqueness. In “The Night Begins to Shine: The Tapetum Lucidum and Our Backward Retinas,” Lents explains why the tapetum lucidum—a structure in some vertebrates that boosts detection of light in dim conditions to compensate for the backward wiring of the inverted vertebrate retina—is evidence for evolution rather than against it as some creationists argue.
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It is with much sadness that we present you with the final issue of Skeptical Inquirer that will ever be crafted through Kendrick Frazier’s expert leadership. But Ken had faith in the future of the skeptical movement that he so lovingly helped found. His legacy will guide us all.