× Expand Illustration by Kevin McFadin

In mid-April 1938, in the trough of the Great Depression, a man registers at the Sevilla Hotel at Jefferson and Grace streets. He gives his name as Ralph Smith, and he makes a considerable impression. He’s well dressed, about 5-foot-5 and 150 pounds, with a wide forehead, gray-blue eyes, medium-brown hair and a ruddy complexion. Smith’s platinum pocket watch is studded with diamonds, and he wears three diamond rings and a large horseshoe-shaped diamond stickpin.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 20, he walks into a Jackson Ward store, asks to buy the entire place and flashes 40 $100 bills. The owner is suspicious and excuses himself to discreetly call the cops.

By the time they get there, the odd fellow is gone.

Lt. Dan Duling, Detective Sgt. L.M. Reid and fellow police officer C.C. Eddleton make inquiries. In small-town Richmond, the activities of the mysterious visitor aren’t difficult to track.

At various intervals, he approaches older women on downtown streets and gives them $100, telling one on Main Street, “Mother, take this to the bank and get it changed and go buy whatever you want.” A couple others refuse the money, thinking his behavior odd and possibly dangerous.

He also plays the stock market, buying “100 shares of Republic Steel at 14 1/2 on April 11,” according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch report, and the prior morning, he collects a $400 check from the Fenner & Beane brokerage offices.

The police detectives track him to the Sevilla late Thursday. The man admits to calling himself Ralph Smith because he can’t think of anything better. He says he doesn’t know who he really is and can’t say when or how he came to Richmond. Duling and his men take “Smith” to headquarters on a vague charge that he is “suspected of being unsound of mind.”

The police find that he’s carrying $377.20 in cash and a valuable fountain pen and pencil set, with “Dr. M.E. Brooks” engraved on the pen. The man cannot say with certainty if that’s his name or not. He holds a notion that maybe he’s a professor of psychiatry or psychology at a large university, perhaps in Spain or a Spanish-speaking land. Then he mentions Mexico and “doing something in oil.” He says he’s renting an $800-a-month apartment in New York but forgot the address. He also speaks of an uncle living in Natchez, Mississippi, and mentions New Orleans several times. He remembers passing through Danville. He appears to be in his 50s.

Interrogation efforts drive the visitor to a “stalemate of feverish laughter,” reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. A likely unhelpful police officer urges him to “think hard.” The fellow responds, after furrowing his brow, “That’s what I used to tell my students — to think hard. But thinking will drive you crazy.” And he breaks into “wild and hollow laughter.”

He apparently speaks — and how the police ascertain this isn’t detailed — fluent Spanish, Italian and French. He also mentions the American Association on Mental Deficiency.

The man admits to calling himself Ralph Smith because he can’t think of anything better.

Right then at the Jefferson is the four-day 62nd Annual Conference of the American Association on Mental Deficiency, a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health professionals. The mystery man could’ve been a member — or a patient — or he may have gone past the hotel during his meanderings and seen placards announcing the meeting.

The AAMD hadn’t heard of either Dr. M.E. Brooks or Ralph Smith. The stranger is sent for observation to the city jail’s infirmary. His picture and fingerprints are rushed overnight to the FBI. Versions of the story are transmitted to the world through The Associated Press.

Soon, Richmond police receive a telegram.

“Please let me have any information you have on Dr. Michael Erim Brooks. He left home a year ago today. Does he remember us?” The senders are his wife, Pearl, and daughter Annie Cecelia, of 1815 Southwest Broadway in Portland, Oregon.

“Sure I remember them,” the visitor is reported to say. “My daughter is a child prodigy. She is 12 years old and can surely play a violin. She has been on an amateur hour on the radio twice.”

Pearl Brooks tells the AP that her husband had left Portland for Los Angeles to give a psychology lecture. She hadn’t seen him since.

The Washington Evening Star prints the AP’s report that reveals the stranger as Brooks, a psychiatrist and friend of Aimee Semple McPherson, a Hollywood-glamorous celebrity Pentecostal preacher and founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. She and Brooks have one similarity: In the spring of 1926, McPherson had gone to Venice Beach for a swim but vanished for five weeks. She turned up at a border town, claiming she’d been kidnapped. Her disappearance had never received a satisfactory explanation.

Back in Richmond, the man identified as Brooks claims that on March 21, he went into a mental haze on a Los Angeles street corner with $25,000 in his pockets. The Times-Dispatch mentions “reports from Los Angeles” that Brooks ran something called a “Mindology Center,” and that he’s 80 years old. He credits his younger appearance to three gland operations. “I have a hard time convincing people of my age,” Brooks says, stating, “I am 81 on May 9.”

The 1930 census records Brooks’ age as 38 and his occupation as a general-practice physician.

The 1937 Portland City Directory lists Michael Brooks as a “metaphysical teacher” living in an apartment on Southwest Hall Street, not with Pearl (though nearby). He gave lectures in Portland at the Institute of Mental and Spiritual Research grouped under the attainment of “Success and Prosperity,” with subjects including “How to Tap the Source of All Supply” and “Getting Your Genie to Work for You.” By ’39, Pearl would be at the Broadway address but without Michael — and he wouldn’t be in LA, either.

Brooks is present enough of mind to retain Richmond attorney Warren Tiller, who steers the amnesiac’s release. Once sprung, Brooks cashes in what is reported as a stock account with more than $1,500. At Broad Street Station, he buys a train ticket for Los Angeles.

“More jovial than usual,” a reporter notes, Brooks pauses his departure to declare, “Richmond will not see me again, probably, but they will hear plenty about me after I leave. It is a great place and I intend to write a story about the city and its hospitality.”

There’s no evidence that he ever did. But an online search turned up a 1940 book by Michael Erim Brooks titled “Naturopathic Science or How to Doctor Yourself.” Portland’s 1940 census lists Pearl both as “head of household” and “married.”