Secret Codes in Grandma’s Diaries
The true story behind “Invaders Arrived One October Night”
I published a short story about a love-sick but shy farm boy duped by the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Here is the true story behind the fiction.
It started with a house fire.
Laura and I were visiting her hometown of Greenwich, Ohio in the aftermath of a terrible fire that destroyed her Aunt D.’s home. No one was injured in the fire, but Aunt D. lost everything, including her beloved dog.
The family had gathered together around the old kitchen table in Laura’s childhood home, combing through photo albums and donating any old photographs of Aunt D.’s children to try to rebuild her collection of memories. I could tell the evening helped Aunt D. heal a bit — regaining those pictures of her boys when they were younger, images she thought were lost forever.
As with any conversation held over old photographs, the evening took its time and meandered to that particular vacation, lingered on that time at the county fair, chuckled at that old truck — chapters revisited in the story of their family.
Laura’s father and aunts eventually talked about their parents — you know them as “Clara Davis” and “Dale Hendricks” (but those are not their real names). And about Clara’s diaries.
“I can remember she wouldn’t go to bed until she wrote a few lines in her diary,” my father-in-law said.
According to those who knew her, Clara was a diligent scribe, always capturing the events of the day in her neat, tidy handwriting.
Her diaries were leather-covered, three-ring binders filled with loose leaf paper and historical curios like newspaper clippings, show tickets, or beloved letters from friends and relatives.
She documented everything, from the mundane to the scandalous.
And she had a special way of keeping the scandalous entries a secret: encryption.
Only, she didn’t tell her children it was an encryption.
That night around the dinner table, Aunt L. (Aunt D.’s younger sister) said, “I would love reading her diaries. Sometimes I’d go get one off the shelf and say ‘Mom, can I read this?’ and she’d say ‘Yes.’ And I’d come to a part that wasn’t legible, and I’d say ‘Mom, what’s this say?’ and she’d say, ‘That’s just shorthand, don’t worry about it.’ So I didn’t. I think she used her shorthand for the curse words.”
I was fascinated. I asked if the diaries were still around. Aunt L. said they were in her attic and that she could dig them out tonight and bring them back over in the morning.
She came over the next day with a few plastic grocery bags weighed down with four large, brittle diaries.
We cleared away the breakfast dishes and gingerly peeled open Diary No. 3, written in the handwriting of 16-year old girl. The first entry was dated June 1, 1944.
Inside was a treasure trove of American history through the eyes of a teenage farm girl. Aunt L. carefully fanned through a few pages until she said, “See? There. That’s mom’s shorthand.” She rotated the diary to me.
Only, it wasn’t shorthand.
It was a cipher.
And in a stranger-than-fiction bit of serendipity, I immediately recognized it as the Pig-Pen Cipher.
Earlier that year, far from the expansive green fields and stout silos of Greenwich, OH, I sat in my gray cubicle one slow work day and went down an internet rabbit hole learning about secret codes and ciphers. I read about the Pig-Pen Cipher, also known as the Masonic Cipher, supposedly used by Revolutionary War spies and to encrypt secret messages on the gravestones of Freemasons.
The claims of its use in wartime intelligence is a bit dubious, given it’s merely a replacement cipher. Each letter of the alphabet is represented by a symbol that looks like an angle or square.
The way to encode and decode the symbols lies in the way you arrange the letters of the alphabet into what appear to be barn stalls when looked at from above — each letter was placed into a pen. Hence the name, “Pig-Pen Cipher.”
I told my wife about it over dinner that night (ah, pre-toddler conversations). And she was on board with the idea of us sending secret notes to each other via postcards. During slow times at work, I would write her a message in code, then mail it from the office.
Imagine my excitement in realizing that Laura’s grandmother used this same code method to keep her secrets safe in her teenage diary. All I had to do was figure out the order and arrangement of the letters in each “pen,” and I could unlock 65-year-old secrets. Clara’s children, now adults in their 50’s and 60’s, were equally excited to get these messages from their mother.
“SHIT” was the key.
We looked for common phrases and tried out different arrangements in the pens, but everything unlocked when my father-in-law recognized a note in the margins in a later diary that read: “Dale said, I don’t give a [XXXX].”
“That’s gotta be ‘shit’! Dad said that a lot!” We could all hear the giddiness in his voice.
I transcribed the symbols in the word to the letters S, H, I, and T, and filled in the rest of the alphabet, thus creating Clara’s Key.
The first line I translated right there at the kitchen table was a line about Clara considering dating Percy (not his real name). My father-in-law looked at his sisters and said, “Can you imagine having Percy as our dad?” They all shared that knowing laugh unique to siblings.
With their permission, I was able to take six of the nine known dairies home to Indianapolis and transcribe them for posterity, and send the family updates with what I would translate from the diaries.
It was a hobby that I kept with until late 2013 when our son was born. In reading them and transcribing what I found, I was privileged to witness the joys and turmoils of young love that would eventually be responsible for bringing the love of my life into the world: my wife, Laura.
How “Invaders” Came to Be
According to Clara’s diaries, Percy’s mother really did prevent Dale from seeing Clara at Clara’s own house. Clara really did play fiddle for years at the town and county dances. Clara kept Dale at arms-length more than how I portrayed it in the story. She even dated Percy for a while, which broke Dale’s heart. When she eventually ended things with Percy, Dale was hesitant to let his guard down. Clara had to be convinced by her mother to go to a dance in another town. Clara writes that she walked into the dance hall and froze at the sight of Dale dancing with his date and Percy dancing with his date.
On a separate occasion, Clara was riding home from a dance with her mother when their car broke down. She writes in her diary that she wished Dale would drive by when suddenly, he did. He stopped to help them out and got them on the road again, and once home, they talked until the wee hours of the morning on Clara’s front porch.
You can see how the various elements of the story came together. As for me, I had always been fascinated by the War of the Worlds radio panic. Last Halloween (2015), several news outlets published articles stating the panic very likely a fabricated story born out of the print industry trying to defame radio — its rapidly growing rival medium. According to historians, only a fraction of a fraction of listeners thought it was actually happening.
So I thought to myself, What would that evening look like for someone who fell for it all, hook, line, and sinker? What about a farm kid who found himself alone on that night, separated from his friends and family? Maybe separated from the girl he loved?
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John Essex is a professional medical editor and founder of Peak Medical Editing. He is the former Editor in Chief of two U.S.-based scientific journals — American Pharmaceutical Review and Pharmaceutical Outsourcing. When not editing medical manuscripts, he enjoys reading, writing, watching movies, and cheering for his toddler son’s potty training efforts (though not necessarily in that order, and sometimes they overlap). He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and son. You can find him on Twitter as@johnessex3.
