Lady Wonder: The Super-Intelligent Horse

23 Feb

Lady Wonder with her owner, Claudia Fonda. Photo:Horse and Man

Lady Wonder was an exceptionally talented horse. She learned how to use a system of blocks to communicate by spelling out words. She also even seemed to know things that she, or even her owners, couldn’t possibly know.

The Story of the Magnificent Lady Wonder

A poster advertising the services of Lady Wonder

During the early 1920s, Claudia Fonda of Richmond, Virginia, began to observe peculiar behavior from her horse, Lady Wonder. The horse would frequently come to her unprompted, almost as if she could communicate with Fonda telepathically and knew she was seeking her.

Convinced that there was something special about Lady Wonder, Fonda proceeded to instruct Lady to manipulate children's blocks with her nose, with the aim of forming letters and numbers.

Over time, Fonda even created a device resembling a piano with two rows of keys. When Lady nudged a lever with her snout, a tin card bearing a number or letter would emerge, allowing her to solve mathematical equations and spell words. This was the starting point for a phenomenon, as Lady wasn't simply intelligent, but also believed to have psychic abilities.

Around 150,000 people ended up seeking guidance from Lady Wonder over the years, and they'd pay a dollar each to ask her three questions.

She had a lot of successes under her belt, like telling married ladies what their maiden names were, figuring out the sex of babies before they were born, predicting when tractors would show up, knowing the date on a hidden coin, finding oil, and even calling the results of elections, horse races, ball games, and boxing matches. Her most famous win was predicting Gene Tunney's victory over Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship back in 1927.

It wasn't until more than 20 years later that Lady Wonder became famous for her most remarkable achievement. In 1952, when a boy from Massachusetts went missing, Lady was called upon as a last resort to help find him.

When asked where the boy was, Lady spelled out "Pittsfield Water Wheel", although no such place existed. Despite the initial confusion, authorities eventually realized that the letters may have been intended to spell "Field and Wilde Water Pit", which was a deserted quarry located nearby. They decided to search there and tragically discovered the boy's body.

Tests on Lady Wonder’s Abilities

The piano-like system used by Lady Wonder to communicate.

Lady Wonder's accuracy with her predictions was far from perfect, and she had her share of both believers and skeptics.

After examining the horse, professional horse trainer Edward Staib concluded that the results were "not conclusive." On the other hand, psychologist Thomas L. Garrett believed that Lady Wonder was not using any trickery to achieve her results.

A New Jersey professor named John Scarne believed that Lady's owner, Claudia Fonda, was giving her cues. Magician Milbourne Christopher also shared this view and determined that Lady Wonder was very well-trained, but not actually telepathic or clairvoyant.

Once news about Lady Wonder's accurate boxing prediction got out, a group of researchers from Duke University, led by Dr. J.B. Rhine, went to visit the farm where Lady lived.

They wanted to test Lady's abilities, so Rhine devised a simple experiment in which he wrote words on pieces of paper and asked Lady to spell them out without being able to see them. Amazingly, Lady managed to spell out most of the words correctly, even longer ones like "Mesopotamia" and "Carolina."

Some people just couldn't figure out what to think about Lady Wonder. One researcher, Dr. Gayle, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that he had no clue how Lady managed to give the right answers to their questions. He was certain that there was no deliberate deception going on, but he couldn't bring himself to believe in the idea of mind-reading. He summed up his confusion by saying, "I don't know what the answer to this puzzle is!"