Thomas Merton's "Death Shout"

Before there was the “shower,” there was the “shout.” The great anti-war Trappist monk and writer, Thomas Merton, died suddenly and mysteriously on the afternoon of December 10, 1968, in his room in a two-story, four-bedroom cottage at a Red Cross retreat center outside Bangkok, Thailand. The standard, widely believed, story of how he died is that he was wet from a shower or a bath when he touched a defective fan that killed him by electrocution. Hugh Turley and I reveal in our book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, that the story that Merton had taken a shower originated with Merton’s secretary at his home abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Brother Patrick Hart, in 1973, almost five years after the death. Hart wrote in an authoritative voice that after giving a talk and having lunch at the main conference building where an international monastic conference was taking place, Merton returned to his cottage (a 10-15-minute walk) and “proceeded to take a shower.” That was in the postscript that he wrote for The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, a volume that he co-edited. As we explain in the book and in “New Directions Misdirection in Thomas Merton’s Death,” Brother Patrick made up the shower story out of whole cloth.

Well before that, only a few weeks after Merton’s death, a Japan-based Trappist nun by the name of Marie de la Croix, who was also an attendee at the event, had written in a 5-page paper that Merton had taken a shower, but then she said that he took a nap before he encountered the fan, so the shower would have had no connection to his supposed electrocution. Her observations are faulty in other ways, as well. She was not an immediate witness at the scene, and what she wrote has deservedly been generally ignored.

The only other early mention of a shower was in a letter, supposedly composed the day after the death by the remaining six Trappist monks at the event and sent to the Gethsemani Abbey. The letter was sent around to various interested parties by the abbey to provide some information about Merton’s death, but it seems not to have made it into the press or any publications at that time. Like Sister de la Croix, who was actually the seventh surviving Trappist at the conference, none of the Trappists was a witness to the death scene. Their letter actually has virtually no useful information, providing only speculation and conference scuttlebutt instead. They speculate that Merton might have been electrocuted by the fan and he might have died of a heart attack. They also say that Merton might have taken a shower. The letter also states, “Not long after [Merton] retired a shout was heard by others in his cottage but after a preliminary check they thought they must have imagined the cry.” The letter plants in the mind of the reader that that must have been the moment that Merton encountered the lethal fan. In fact, the only “others” in the cottage were Father Celestine Say, a Philippine Benedictine monk on the first floor with Merton and Father François de Grunne, a Belgian Benedictine, in a room directly above Fr. Say. Only Fr. de Grunne ever reported hearing any such shout.

Mott and the Death Cry

That letter first gained wide exposure when it was included as an appendix to the previously mentioned Asian Journalvolume. The purpose for including it, we may speculate, is that with its conjecture about a possible shower it complements in some small degree Br. Hart’s flat assertion that Merton did take a shower. Hart has nothing to say about the supposed death shout. It remained for Merton biographer Michael Mott to bring the shout into relative prominence. At the beginning of his narrative about the events at the cottage in his 1984 biography, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, he writes, “At some time before three o’clock Father de Grunne heard what he thought was a cry and the sound of something falling. There were noises at all hours in the area around the cottage, but this sound seemed to come from below.”

Positioning his declarative sentence about the shout right at the beginning of his narrative, like the letter by the six Trappists, he suggests to the reader that that was the instant of Merton’s fatal encounter with the fan. He also does not say that Fr. de Grunne said that he heard such a noise. Rather, he states it as a fact that Fr. de Grunne heard that noise that comports so conveniently with the thesis that that was the moment of Merton’s fatal fan encounter. One has to be particularly observant to notice that he hedges his statement a bit by saying that de Grunne thought it was a cry and the sound of something falling and that the sound seemed to come from below. He also carefully hedges on the time, getting three o’clock on the record, but by saying “some time before three o’clock” it might not have been as near to three o’clock as the reader might naturally infer.

There is one thing that you can hang your hat on in Mott’s statement, though. Fr. de Grunne is the source, and he is the only source that there ever was, for any such sound supposedly emanating from in or near Merton’s room. For its part, the Thai police report says that at 3:00 p.m. de Grunne “heard a loud noise coming from the lower story which sounded like a heavy object falling on the floor.” The sound of the falling object accords with Mott’s account as does the 3:00 p.m. time, except that the police report is more precise about it. The shout, quite noticeably, is missing, however. Whatever de Grunne might have told them, they couldn’t very well report that there was a death shout, because their official conclusion was that Merton died of heart failure and was already dead when he encountered the fan.

The U.S. State Department’s Report on the Death of an American Citizen, dated December 13, 1968, took the time of that reported noise, 3 p.m., as the time of Merton’s death and gave the cause as “Sudden Heart Failure (according to official Death Certificate)”.

A statement purported to be from the witness, Father Odo Haas, apparently ties it all up into a nice, neat bow. Haas’s document states that around 4 p.m. he and Father Egbert Donovan “met Rev. Fr. Grunne [sic] and he told us that about 3 p.m. he had heard a cry and the fall of a heavy object in or nearby the house.” It was curiosity about that sound, de Grunne said, that drew him downstairs to look into the room, whose wall was only temporary netting that one could see through where a privacy sheet was not hung, and he had seen Merton lying on the floor. The door was locked, so he was on his way to the main building to get a key.

The very influential account of Merton’s death by the biographer Mott relies heavily, without attribution, upon this Haas statement. Unfortunately for all those people who have repeated Mott’s account in one variation or another, the statement is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. First, the door was secured by an inner latch, not by a key. And what, one well might wonder, took de Grunne so long to satisfy his curiosity? De Grunne, in fact, said to other people that his reason for coming downstairs at that time was, alternatively, to ask Merton if he would like to go for a swim in the retreat’s pool or to ask him for the key for the outer door. As it happens, neither of those explanations is any better than curiosity over the noise he had heard an hour before. Fr. Say had heard de Grunne go out of the cottage and come back in earlier, so he either already had the key to the outer door, or the outer door was not locked. It was too late to go for a swim, because the conference was scheduled to resume at 4:30. It looks like de Grunne gave up on Say discovering that Merton was dead, and he finally had to go and do it.

Fr. Say Has Last Say

The biggest problem of all, though, is with that sound that de Grunne supposedly heard, and, again, it is the testimony of the best witness, Fr. Say, that reveals it. Fr. Say was about five minutes behind Merton and Fr. de Grunne as they entered the cottage after walking together from the main conference building, approaching 2 p.m. The first thing he did, he said, was to remove his habit and then go to the bathroom off the parlor that separated his room from Merton’s to brush his teeth. At that point, he heard a knock on the bathroom door, opened it, and there was Fr. de Grunne. The first thing de Grunne said to him was, “Oh, I thought you were Merton.” Then he said, “Did you hear a shout?” Say responded in the negative. In fact, he never heard the slightest sound from Merton’s room from his moment of his arrival at the cottage.

So, according to Say’s report—and he is a rock-solid witness, in stark contrast to de Grunne and the dodgy Haas and six-Trappists documents—if there was ever any “death shout” heard by de Grunne, it would have been at around 2 p.m. and not 3 p.m. Oddly, instead of at least looking into Merton’s room or knocking on Merton’s door to satisfy his supposed curiosity about the “shout,” de Grunne simply went back upstairs. Say, out of respect for Merton’s privacy, did not look in on Merton and simply returned to his room after brushing his teeth.

Had there ever actually have been any such shout or cry from Merton’s room, Fr. Say almost certainly would have heard it. As it turns out, perhaps the best evidence that there was no such noise, either from Merton’s mouth or from a falling fan (which would have hardly made any noise at all falling squarely onto Merton’s supine body where it was found) comes from de Grunne, himself. On July 6, 1969, in a letter in response to a query by John Moffitt, the poetry editor of the Jesuit America magazine who was the fourth occupant of the cottage but had gone into Bangkok sightseeing that fateful afternoon, de Grunne minimized the importance of the sound that he had supposedly heard, saying that there were lots of sounds from a nearby house and, whatever it was he heard and whenever it might have occurred, it must have come from that other house.

As a final note, Say’s observations also destroy another myth originating with the Haas document and perpetuated by Mott. When the three crime-scene witnesses—not four as reported in the Haas document and repeated by Mott (de Grunne had continued on to the main building)—the document says that Haas attempted to remove the fan from Merton’s body but received a strong electric shock from which he could not pull free until Say unplugged the fan. Say, however, said, much more plausibly, that Haas recoiled from the shock and that, when he asked him about it, Haas had said that it was not too strong. Interestingly, Br. Patrick, in that postscript in 1973 in which he introduced the shower to the Merton tragedy, like Mott mentioned the “severe” shock that Haas had received when he attempted to remove the fan, but when Br. Patrick repeated that postscript almost verbatim in the introduction to Volume 7 of The Journals of Thomas Merton entitled The Other Side of the Mountain, The End of the Journey, published in 1998, the “severe” shock had turned into a “slight” electric shock. Some lethal fan, indeed!

David Martin