We had just finished our research. The three of us were lined up on the path outside the cave, arms at our sides, staring straight ahead. Harold walked slowly towards us with his head down, pointing the sharp metal object directly at us.

I was first.

I stood there, completely still, watching the blunt instrument as it approached my solar plexus. Approximately five feet from my body, it began to turn, almost as if some invisible force was pushing it aside.

"Boy, you have a lot of energy," Harold said. "Most people’s energy field radiates out no more than afoot."

Since childhood, I’ve always had a profound amount of energy, which has gotten me into trouble from time to time. I responded with, "So what else is new?" Everyone laughed.

Harold continued to "check" my "aura" resonance. He walked toward me from the left, from behind, and on my right. The inverted L-shaped dowsing rod reacted in much the same way, turning five feet from me, no matter what direction.

"Yep. No doubt about it. You are one strong young lady," Harold said.

I felt rather invincible as Harold moved on to Barbara. She stood quietly grinning as Harold measured her energy field. The rod turned one foot away from her on three sides, but when he measured Barbara on her left, the rod barely turned.

"Oh, now that’s interesting," Barbara exclaimed. "I fell off a ladder recently and my left shoulder has been giving me lots of trouble." None of us had been aware of this incident.

Totally absorbed by the experiment, Sunny, the last to be "dowsed", was anxious not only to be tested, but to test as well. After her energy field checked out at a healthy two-foot circumference, Harold showed her how to hold the copper rod upright but tilted slightly downward in its loose brass casing so that it would take a definite force to move it left or right.

Sunny was immediately successful as a neophyte dowser. She proceeded to dowse all of us, some nearby trees, even the dog. She has since decided to become an apprentice to Harold.

For several years, the Water Center has had a keen interest in the phenomenon of Dowsing and we have had the good fortune of learning from and working with Harold McCoy, an internationally recognized expert dowser and trustee of the American Society of Dowsers. Along with his wife Gladys, who is President of the Fayetteville chapter of the American Society of Dowsers, Harold has recently founded the Ozark Research Institute, dedicated to investigating, researching and teaching the "power of thought".

Dowsing or "water witching", an ancient method of locating underground water with the use of a wooden or metal hand-held instrument, is a common practice in many cultures as well as here in the Ozark bioregion. Any elder Ozarkian will have some sort of "witching" tale to tell.

It has only been in the past decade, however, that dowsing has evolved into other realms. Not only are dowsers locating underground sources of water and minerals, they are becoming adept at locating lost objects and hidden treasures, many times from long distances by simply using a map of the given area along with a pointer and a pendulum.

The pendulum, a common tool used by most dowsers, is a small weighted object suspended from a cord or chain, held between the fingers. Allowed to swing freely, the pattern the pendulum makes -swinging in a circular motion clockwise or counterclockwise, forward or backwards, left or right - will determine the answer to any given question. The pendulum moves differently for each individual. For some, a "yes" will find the pendulum moving left and right, while for others it will move in a circular motion. Research with pendulum motion indicates that the movement can be attributed to subtle, involuntary autonomic muscle contractions of the wrist and arm in reaction to the subconscious.

Dowsers are also concerned with geopathogenic or what they call "noxious" energies which emanate from the earth’s crust that tend to negatively influence the electromagentic fields in the environment. By diverting or dispersing these negative fields through dowsing, a positive, more healthful environment will result. Dowsing has come a long way since the early days, according to Harold. Born in 1932 on Bohannon Mountain in northwest Arkansas, he learned to dowse as a small boy. "In those days when someone needed a well, you got a pick and a shovel and started digging down a hole six or eight feet across. But no farmer would be crazy enough to start digging a hole without somebody saying there was water down there, so you’d always call a water witch in. Usually it would be some old guy who would come, find a peach tree, cut a limb into a forked stick and walk around until he found a spot to dig 25 or 30 feet down for water." One day, after the water witch had finished and flipped the forked stick aside, Harold picked it up and discovered that the stick moved downward for him just as it had for the dowser.

Harold soon forgot this boyhood adventure when he joined the army. After serving as a military career officer for several decades, Major McCoy retired from the U.S. Armed Forces in 1973, returned to the Ozarks and purchased a 75-acre farm. "There were no buildings or water on the property, so 1 cut a peach tree limb, walked around and there was one spot where it really went down," Harold said. "I had a driller come out. He drilled a well and hit water exactly at the same depth that I had dowsed." Since that event, Harold’s life began to change. People began calling him to come out and dowse their place. Motivated to practice his craft out of service, Harold would never request a fee. Word of mouth traveled quickly and in no time he developed a reputation as a modern-day expert dowser.

After decades of working with hundreds of dowsers and researching their methods and records, Harold is convinced that dowsing can be explained as clairvoyance.

"Dowsing is a universal phenomenon based upon natural law," Harold said. "Dowsing based upon the power of thought. A lot of people think when you dowse, you are picking up the vibrations of the water with the help of the forked stick or dowsing rod. But it’s really the power of thought. Today dowsers can locate water long distance in a region thousands of miles away from them. Obviously, then, no dowsing sticks are involved. Dowsing is a function of the mind, rather than a physical or electrical connection between the stick and the water. We are connected to everything on earth. Once we realize this, we are unlimited by our imagination."

From his dowsing experiences, Harold has discovered that the power of thought extends to various realms of life and matter. Through the use of prayer and meditation, he concentrates on consciously raising his higher mind into what he calls the "Universal Mind," using creative imagination to serve others.

Looking me square in the face, Harold said with conviction, "With focus and the realization that anything is possible, I am able to do such things as divert underground streams of water and find lost objects." A year ago, he helped a woman in California find her lost harp. Working with his pendulum and maps, he successfully located the musical instrument without physically searching for it.

A slender man in his late 50’s with fine features and keen ability to focus his attention on the subject at hand, Harold is always eager to discuss his craft. However, whenever we visit, he will usually attempt to counter his metaphysical work with statements like, "Who would have thought I’d be involved in these things? I’m a career military man!" Both he and Gladys’s conservative appearance contradict the fact that they are cutting-edge noetic scientific explorers.

In demand and constantly traveling to speaking engagements allover the country, Harold also directs national and regional dowsing conferences and schools. His energetic and enthusiastic approach to the mysteries of life is contagious and inspiring. Harold asserts that anyone can learn to dowse. All that is necessary is a dowsing tool -a cut branch, bent wires or rods purchased from a dowsing implement supplier -and the intent to locate something. Although dowsing appears to be easy, it takes a great deal of concentration and practice.

With the tool in hand, the dowser must stand quietly, keeping in mind what it is she wants to find, perhaps a lost object or an underground source of water. Although dowsing techniques differ, a basic method involves holding the instrument upright in a loosely balanced position and walking in any direction. The rods will move either downward or turn depending on the style of tool being used, indicating the location of the water vein or object. Cross checking is accomplished by approaching the area from the other three directions.

Dowsing works beyond the five senses utilizing the principle of thought projection, Harold said. "It’s not the tool; it’s the individual and the intent. The intent is what opens it up. It comes when you ask the question with an open mind. It’s just the energy, this wonderful life force that everybody’s floating around in."

But try to empirically explain the dowsing phenomenon and you11 be in a quandary. "Ask a hundred dowsers how it works and you’ll get a hundred different answers," Harold said. "We all know it works, yet we can’t convince scientists. Compare a dowser’s log against a water driller’s log, and you’ll find the dowsers success rate at locating water to be much higher -around seventy-five percent accurate."

Dowsing theory holds that dowsers tend to locate what are called sources of "primary" or "new" water, manufactured under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure deep within the earth. Rising to the surface in columns or domes which then follow the path of least resistance, forming into underground streams and springs or feeding into deep water tables, primary water sources are prolific. For this reason, dowsed wells rarely go dry. Primary water theory directly conflicts with mainstream hydrology which suggests that the hydrologic cycle is a closed loop of evaporation, transpiration and precipitation.

In other words hydrologists claim there is no new water.

Scientists have resisted researching dowsing, perhaps because it moves beyond hard science into metaphysics, an area inhabited by philosophers and spiritual practitioners. But reams of documentation exists which reveal that dowsers have managed to locate prolific sources of water where hydrologists have utterly failed.

Harold cited one example. "Along the coast of Peru, seawater gets into the water table and you just can’t drill good fresh water wells. We have a member of ASD (the American Society of Dowsers) who goes down there periodically and finds water all the time at great depths. There’s a large brewery there which had a problem with salt water in their well but now all the water that brewery uses comes out of a dowsed well free of salt water.

Hydrologists say it’s impossible, that you can’t find salt free water there, but the dowser just does it."

Another story of dowsing prowess that Harold likes to share involved helping a small city to dowse a new well after three of the city’s wells had run dry. A local well driller had failed to locate a new source of water so out of desperation the mayor called Harold on the advice of a city council member. As they drove around, the mayor skeptically asked Harold to locate the well on city property. He also mentioned that they had spent most of the city’s funds on the well driller’s failed attempts so he wanted to find a shallow well flowing at least 10 gallons per minute. "After walking around a bit, the dowsing rod went down and indicated a big wide stream," Harold said. So I said if he’d dig a hundred feet, he’d hit at least 25 gallons per minute. I even had the mayor dowsing with the sticks and the sticks would go down right over the exact same area. But he still didn’t totally trust me, so he had a driller come out and dig a pilot hole, not even a well but an exploratory test. At ninety feet they hit a stream that would provide 50 gallons per minute. That’s when he had the big driller come."

"Dowsing is more commonplace than people realize," Harold said. "Go to any construction site, look inside the backhoe and more often than not you’ll find a couple of bent coat hangers the workers used to find buried cables or gas lines they don’t want to dig up. They’ve been taught the method but they’re not aware they are dowsing."

Dowsers are also known to "divert" underground streams. Records indicate that two methods are utilized; the first involves locating the underground stream and pounding a metal stake into the ground above it with the "intent" of diverting it either away from a site or perhaps into a dry well in need of recharging. Another method is to project a "thought form" into the underground spring, diverting it into the desired area.

Harold has experimented with water diversion through the years, beginning with his own well. "The filter on my well used to get so plugged up with minerals that I was forced to change it every week. So one day I decided to dowse it. I mentally placed a thought form, an ‘energy pipe’, all the way down the dome which feeds into my well to keep the iron and sulfur from getting into it. Now I rarely have to clean the filter. The minerals are gone." With that, Harold is evolving a new philosophy and approach to dowsing whereby he, and others who are interested, will work with "detox dowsing". Harold feels clear that through the use of pure intent projected through dowsing, he will be able to remove pollutants from vast areas of water and land.

"The Ozark Research Institute has plans to decontaminate a local lake," Harold said matter-of-factly, as if this sort of thing was done everyday. "With the assistance of a chemical engineer to measure water quality, we will test the lake to reveal what contaminants are in the water and what it would take to make it potable. A group of us will dowse it long distance on paper, using maps and meditation, as well as being physically present at the lakeshore in a group, all visualizing the same image of clean water. We are going to practice this group visualization, so that it is the exact same image for each of us. Afterward we will test the water again."

These dowsing innovations have not come easily to Harold. Intense concentration, most often precipitated through the continual practice of deep meditation, is necessary. As an avid meditator, he credits his dowsing success to his meditation practice. "I meditate all the time. To me, meditation is the key to everything. When you sit in meditation and say affirmations like, ‘we all live in an unlimited universe and I can do anything,’ you can convince yourself of this internally. Then you can do it. It’s just marvelous!"

Harold has also been known to bring healing energy to people with serious injuries and illness. He and others are researching and developing "medicinal" dowsing, based upon the holistic healing principle long held by chiropractic and Chinese medicinal practitioners - that a strong, healthy body inherently has free-flowing energetic currents -medicinal dowsers seek to treat illness by working with the patient’s "blocked" energetic field. Once the origins of the sickness is discerned, the dowser will then place a mental thought form to "flow" healing energy into the stricken region of the body. Medicinal dowsing can be practiced long distance as well, working with photographs, physiological maps, or even by utilizing nothing but pure intent. This theory underlies the mission of Harold’s Ozark Research Institute which is researching and developing medicinal dowsing.

"The purpose of the Ozark Research Institute is to determine what part mind plays in spontaneous remission or miraculous healing of disease," Harold said. "We also have plans to research the healing technique of the laying on of hands. Once we refine these techniques, we will isolate them and teach them to others."

Harold has worked with numerous individuals with critical illnesses and injuries. His success rate as a dowser is being superseded by his success rate as a healer. Rarely in physical contact with his "patients", Harold most often does his healing work from the den of his home while sitting in meditation. He prefers that those patients who tend to be skeptical of this form of healing work, patients who have been referred to him by concerned family members, are kept unaware that he is working with them. "People have a tendency to put a block up when they hear that somebody is going to try and heal them," Harold said. "They don’t do it consciously. But if I try and sneak in there and do it before they realize what has happened then it’s OK. Kids are really great. They don’t put up any blocks. But I always ask ‘permission’, from the beginning, you know, using the pendulum to check if it’s all right to work with the person." Although not a religious man, Harold is very spiritual. Before he begins any dowsing project, he always consults his "higher power" for the go-ahead.

"There’s a girl from California who I’ve been working with who had a cyst which had entered into her esophagus and embedded there," Harold said. He had received her medical records and x-rays indicating the severity of the problem. "Several days before she was scheduled to be operated on, a complex five hour affair, she called long distance and asked if I would work with her. So after we got off the phone, I sat down and visualized her in front of me, with her back to me. Feeling and working with her essence, I began to visualize the cyst shrinking, the tail retracting from the esophagus, moving back into the body. I visualized my hand loosening up the cyst and moving it away from the esophagus." Several days later when the surgeons performed the operation, they were surprised to find that the tail had indeed lost its grip on the esophagus. The cyst was easily removed in less than an hour.

"You wouldn’t believe the list of names I’m working with now," Harold said, with a hint of worry in his voice. "People call me at all hours from all over the country. I have more than a hundred names right now. I get more in than I’m working out. I sit down and work on four or five each night. It takes some focus, some doing. I’m getting behind."

In order to counter this surging need, Harold organizes seminars to teach power of mind/thought techniques. It begins, according to Harold, with learning an altruistic form of meditation.

Harold’s teaching also involves using meditation and visualization to heal the earth. "A lot of people who meditate may discover personal insights and gain peace of mind, but they are not accomplishing anything in the, outside world," Harold said. "I’m manipulating the energy due to my visualization, zeroing in on certain problems."

Thus the Ozark Research Institute has a broad spectrum of beneficial programs and projects lined up, all imbued with an ecological mission. "Everybody’s interested in healing, of course," Harold said, "but the organization is just as much interested in proving the power of the mind, when it comes to cleaning up water sources and toxic waste dumps, or fixing the damaged ozone layer."

Although Harold does not have scientific credentials, he is making sure that ORI projects involve a strong element of empiricism. "We are working with medical doctors and individuals with Ph.D.s in microbiology, chemical engineering and environmental engineering. For example, a microbiologist who teaches at the Tulsa University will be setting up experiments to see what influence the mind has on the growth of bacteria, if it can be sterilized and controlled."

Despite his new venture into holistic healing and investigating the power of thought, Harold continues to explore and refine his water dowsing technique - occasionally in conjunction with the purposes of the Water Center.

For the past fifteen years, the Water Center has been working to restore Eureka’s 66 springs to their natural pristine state. When the indigenous peoples inhabited this area, they did not build dwellings in the spring’s area. Considering the waters sacred, they would perform ceremonies, partake of the healing waters and would then leave the area to distant encampments.

When colonialists began to converge upon this land in 1879, they too discovered the healing qualities of the springs. At the turn of the century, the natural hygiene movement, which proselytized drinking copious amounts of mineralized spring water, bathing in spring water baths and eating fresh wholesome foods brought people from all over the world to the "City That Water Built", to "take the waters". Many healings of cancers, arthritis and other diseases were documented within the spa city in those early days.

It was not long before Eureka’s fragile ecosystem became overloaded by the over 80,000 residents. The springs’ healing properties, polluted with human sewage, ceased. The health seekers quit coming. Consequently, by the 1930’s, Eureka became a veritable ghost town.

A revival occurred for the little community of mostly fanning families in the early 1970’s when hippies and artists began to flock to the area in search of the good life. Out of this group of ecologically-minded citizens, the Water Center was founded with the goal to clean up Eureka’s healing springs. This was not to be an easy task. The population of Eureka fluctuates profoundly each summer. Over two-million tourists visit the mountain village of 2000 souls, drawn by its Victorian architecture and winding streets full of galleries and shops.

After working with wastewater technicians, consulting engineers, and local politicians, the Water Center came to the conclusion that the only way to return the springs to their pristine state was to either completely overhaul the city’s waste treatment system with innovative appropriate technology utilizing compost toilet/greywater systems and septic tank/holding systems or move everyone off the spring recharge zones, evicting everyone from the city within a five-mile radius.

Eviction was out of the question so, instead, the city opted to renovate the existing sewage plant and repair many of the broken sewer lines. One engineering study revealed that out of every 100,000 gallons of sewage produced in Eureka Springs, more than 50,000 gallons never reached the city’s treatment plant, due to the shifting limestone subsurface which caused this "blackwater" to leak into area wells, springs, creeks, and lakes. Even after the city invested millions of dollars into a new waste treatment facility and sewer line repair, the springs remain severely polluted.

In 1987 the Water Center decided to try a new approach to restoring the springs. We invited Harold and several of his associates from the American Society of Dowsers to come to Eureka and dowse a spring.

"It was Clear Spring that we chose to work with," Harold said. "There was no water running out of the pipe at all. It had been twenty years since it had flowed. There was a pretty steep bluff above it and it was cold, really cold, being February, and it was slippery. But we crawled way above it and dowsed to find the old channel that furnished water for that spring. When we found it, I ‘asked’ if there’d be another stream nearby that we could divert into this old channel that would eventually run out Clear Spring at the bottom. I was shown the location of the new channel and we took a piece of metal rebar and pounded it into the ground over the channel and ‘knocked’ that stream in there. I just knew it was in there. We worked our way back down the hill to look at the spring and we found there was at least five gallons per minute flow running out of the pipe. It worked!"

Since Clear Spring reservation was on city property, we felt it necessary to alert City officials about the rejuvenated spring. Several members of the Water Center met with Mayor Richard Schoeninger, who enthusiastically received the report of the efforts and endorsed further attempts. He then referred the project to the Parks Commission for their approval and further action. Because they had plans for developing a recreational facility in that area that did not include a "renewed" spring, they preferred that the rehabilitated spring remain underground rather than be brought above ground.

After further deliberation, the Commission chose to dowse two more springs. Although the original plans were to clean up the springs by diverting, through dowsing, potable water into the existing channels, the Commission was convinced that the State Health Department would never approve the springs as a source for drinking water. Instead, the Commission chose to redirect the dowsing project to one of increasing the flow of slow moving or dry springs rather than reducing the pollution.

A month later, the dowsers met with members of the Water Center and the Eureka Springs Parks Commission to rehabilitate Little Eureka Spring and Old Soldier Spring. After dowsing, flow of Little Eureka increased from approximately 5 gallons per minute to 8 gpm. Similar efforts made with Old Soldier Spring, however, were not as fruitful. Its flow was not affected.

The Parks Commission, satisfied with the results of the dowser’s efforts, endorsed future work with Eureka’s springs. In particular, they are interested in seeing Basin

Spring, one of the most visible and visited springs in town, rehabilitated.

But it was not until seven years later that we were prepared to try once again.

In 1990, the Water Center established a philanthropic project, The AquaTerra Fund, which acts as a conduit between those with prosperity, and those small but potent ecological projects in need of capitalization. Recently Olemara Peters, an Earthhealer based out of Washington state, made a seed donation to the Fund. Part of the money was allocated to the purchase of water testing equipment for a local stream team effort, and the remaining money was donated to Ozark Research Institute. Concurrently, Harold agreed to once again work with Eureka’s springs. We asked him to dowse clean water into two springs and to increase the flow to two more. We purchased water test kits to measure the presence of bacteria in the spring water and secured a device to measure the flow of gallons per minute. Harold, along with Gladys and their granddaughter, drove up to meet us.

Which brings us to the beginning of our story.

Before we got off on dowsing each other’s energy fields, we had just completed testing one of three springs that Harold had chosen from the 90 springs and seeps that permeate the 115 year-old village of Eureka Springs. Actually, "chosen" is the wrong word. Harold sat down earlier that day with a pendulum and dowsed from a list of the springs which would be the most appropriate to work. He was unfamiliar with the city’s springs system, so we were extremely pleased when he chose three springs that were of special interest to the Water Center: Sweet Spring, a beautifully landscaped spring located in the heart of the village; Onyx Spring (or "Laundry Spring" as it was known in the old days), located under a bluff in a quiet neighborhood; and Cave Spring, the cryptish looking mountain-side spring where we had experienced our energy- field encounter session. He also picked one other, Water Street Hollow Spring, but after searching the backwoods "holler" for a half-hour to no avail, we decided to concentrate our efforts on the other three.

Starting with Sweet Spring, we took a water sample and measured the flow at 7/10Qf a gallon per minute. It, along with many other springs in Eureka, had been prolific at the turn of the century, but the shifting karst, or fractured limestone, subsurface had redirected the underground streams feeding the springs through the years, eventually decreasing the flow.

Since our last dowsing encounter, Harold’s water diversion technique had decidedly changed. He took out his brass dowsing rods and walked twenty paces to an area to the west. When he discerned a vein of uncontaminated water beneath him with his dowsing tool, instead of pounding rebar into the ground, he proceeded to meditate.

He mentally attempted to divert the clean vein of water into Sweet Spring to increase the flow and to decrease the level of bacteria. Although Harold said it would take several days for the spring to "adjust" to this sort of manipulation, I went ahead and re-measured the flow. We were excited to note that it had increased slightly. Considering that we had not received any rain for over two weeks, any infiltration of rainwater seepage into the spring, causing fluctuations in flow, was out of the question.

We then traveled to the other two springs, measured pre-dowsing flow and bacteria levels. Harold and Gladys left us shortly after. He said the preliminary work was done. He wanted to go back home to meditate on the water diversion and cleansing. "I do my best work out of my own home these days," Harold said. "It’s quiet, I’m comfortable and safe, and able to really concentrate."

Several days later, I returned to measure the results. The weather had held. We had received zero precipitation, thus the flow measurements would be true. I was prepared for some profound readings.

While the flow at Cave Springs had decreased, Sweet Springs’s flow had slightly increased once again by about five-percent. The bacteria level at Onyx Spring had increased, no doubt due to the coloform being concentrated in a decreasing flow (lack of rain). But the level of bacteria had decreased at Sweet Spring.

The small success at Sweet Spring has encouraged us to continue our dowsing research. We intend to try again when Harold McCoy has returned from one of his many speaking tours and is settled quietly back in his easy chair in the den, eyes closed, pendulum in hand, and his mind one with the springs of Eureka.

 Harold McCoy - www.ozarkresearch.org