By Ardis E. Parshall

| Tribune Columnist

Jane Carrington Young lived in a home on Salt Lake City’s North Temple, on the block where the LDS Conference Center now stands. Hers was a comfortable home, as houses in Territorial Utah went, and she enjoyed the respect of her community as a wife of Mormon apostle Brigham Young Jr. and daughter of former apostle Albert Carrington. But in 1883, Jane was not a happy woman.

For at least 15 years, she had experienced peculiar sensations in her abdomen, sometimes painful but always unsettling. Some historians today think she may have suffered from a gastric ulcer, but Jane did not have the scientific knowledge to diagnose her pains that way. She had a more colorful explanation.

Photos

• 

	Join the Discussion
	Post a Comment

According to Jane, there was a lizard living inside of her. It moved freely through her stomach. When she hadn’t eaten recently, it bit her on her left side. She "could plainly hear the sound caused by the creature when it was in the act of drinking," she told her doctors.

What’s more, she remembered when the creature had come. She was suddenly awakened one night by the sensation of "some living creature running into her mouth and down her throat." She was "naturally alarmed," and had swallowed numerous substances to induce vomiting. Nothing worked to expel the creature.

At first blush, Jane sounds more than a little nutty to 21st century minds. Any schoolchild with a rudimentary understanding of anatomy and digestion knows that no creature of the complexity of a lizard could survive within the human body.

Even in Jane’s day, most knew that such a tale could not be true. According to a report, Salt Lake’s leading physicians "all, or nearly all, attributed the symptoms described by Sister Young to imagination, some going so far as to claim that no living creature could exist in the human stomach."

Even so, Jane was not insane — or at least her conviction of hosting a lizard does not demonstrate mental illness. Rather, her case is a local illustration of folklore common throughout 19th century North America and Europe. Her diagnosis had no objective, scientific validity, but was a common interpretation of unpleasant and unfamiliar bodily sensations.

The phenomenon even has a modern name, "bosom serpentry," taken from a short story published by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1843. His was the tale of a man convinced a living serpent had entered his body and taken up residence in his chest. "It gnaws me! It gnaws me!" was the victim’s steady cry. He could feel it move; he could hear it hiss.

Sound familiar?

According to folklore, such creatures crawled through the open mouths of sleepers (the sensation reported by Jane), or were swallowed in contaminated water (a fear that must have been present in Salt Lake City, where most residents drew their culinary supplies from open ditches rather than from wells).

Folklore prescribed two treatments for internal snakes, lizards, frogs and salamanders. First was to induce vomiting, a remedy Jane tried. The second was to fast for several days, then sleep with a pan of milk near one’s head — the creature would be tempted by hunger to crawl back out the way it had come.

Jane’s is not the only documented case of this folklore in early Utah — diarists from various corners of Utah, J.D.T. McAllister and Elias Hicks Blackburn among them, record being called upon by sufferers to perform Mormon healing blessings for one who had "something like a frog or lizard in his stomach" who "had fasted four days" without successfully drawing forth the creatures.

It’s easy to laugh at the credulity of our ancestors for believing in such things. Those who have found such tales in family records, though, may be relieved, even delighted, to understand that their grandparents were fully in tune with their times, sharers of common American folklore. If you have such family stories, please share them with me.

Ardis E. Parshall is a Utah historian who enjoys feedback from readers. She can be contacted at AEParshall@aol.com.