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From: tindall@mercury.interpath.net (Bruce Tindall)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: CLOCK THAT KILLED ELVIS?
Date: 19 Dec 1994 22:20:02 -0500

>>: >Has anybody heard the story about the clock that killed Elvis
>>: No, but I do know what Thomas Merton and John Lennon have in common.
>OK, I'll bite.
>Who was Thomas Merton?

Thomas Merton, a/k/a Father Mary Louis, urbane and sophisticated young intellectual turned Trappist monk, best-selling author (_The Seven Storey Mountain_, etc.), poet, explorer of East Asian spirituality. In this last capacity, he was attending a worldwide conference of monks from many different cultures and traditions in Bangkok in 1968, when he was electrocuted as he got out of a shower by a malfunctioning electrical device for circulating air.

In other words, both Thomas Merton and John Lennon were killed by fans.

Because Merton was something of an antiwar activist, or more accurately a guru of parts of the antiwar movement, there were of course conspiracy theories about whether his death was an accident. J. Edgar Hoover and all that.