'Paul Is Dead' Beatles tale still has spooky ring 40 years later (Part 2 )

(Part 1 of this two-part article talked about the roots of this story. In this concluding second part, the story gets wilder and refuses to go away.)

Another part of the "Paul Is Dead" story happened innocently. Fred LaBour, then a college student, was listening to Russ Gibb’s show on the radio.

“I was driving over to Jackson, Mich., on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 12, 1969, when I tuned in Russ Gibb's great, rockin' show on what we knew as "free-form FM" radio," he told us in an email. Apparently some guy had called in just previously, pointing out odd things on Beatles album covers, as well as something at the end of ‘Strawberry Fields’ which seemed to say ‘I buried Paul.’

“Russ ran with it, wondering if something was wrong with Paul McCartney. What was going on here? Is Paul okay? Or not? It was like a good ghost story...just enough truth and coincidence to make you say, ‘Maybe there IS something here,’ and raise the hair on your neck. That's what it did to me.”

That night I joked about it with my pal Jay Cassidy and started to think, ‘What if it was true?’”

LaBour, then a writer on his college newspaper and now a member of the singing group Riders in the Sky, was asked to write a review of the new Beatles album. 

“'Abbey Road’ had just come out, and I was assigned the task of reviewing it for the paper I worked for, The Michigan Daily. Monday morning I took all my Beatles albums, lined them up across my desk, and reviewed ‘Abbey Road’ as the culmination of a ridiculous ‘plot’ which involved Paul's death, replacement in the Beatles by a guy named William Campbell, and a lot of ‘clues’ in Beatles songs, production, and album artwork. This struck me as funny, a satirical take on reviewers who read way too much into a piece of popular art.

“Fortunately John Gray, my editor, thought it was funny too,” LaBour told us. “‘You've scooped the world,’ he said, and proceeded to lay out the piece as a news story, even though it appeared on page two, the traditional home of music and film reviews.

“The story came out Tuesday morning and by week's end was around the world. Stores sold out of beer and Beatles records. You could walk down any street in Ann Arbor and hear Beatles records being abused as people tried to play them backwards. It was certainly thrilling and more than a little scary for me to be at the center of this hurricane I had innocently unleashed.” 

As the whirlwind of the “Paul Is Dead” story began to build, Andru Reeve, author of "Turn Me On, Dead Man: The Beatles and the 'Paul-Is-Dead' Hoax",  said things got even crazier. “People started doing research because people were real serious about this. There were newspapers and radio stations that gave their deejays and their writers lots of money to research this. Lots of money.”