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• Some dowsers believe the secret lies with magnetism, gases from decaying corpses or supernatural communication.
• "Many of the explanations given as to how dosing works were either illogical or ran contrary to fundamental principles of physics," Whittaker said.
• Whatever, says Raffaell, a frank-talking, chain-smoking 70-year-old. "I don't know how to explain it, it just happens," she said.
• To demonstrate the method, Raffaell "witched" two supposed graves of the same man

at separate cemeteries miles apart in eastern Montana. At one cemetery, Raffaell's witching sticks crossed as she slowly walked over the grave and realigned after moving past it. At the other, the sticks remained parallel as Raffael took baby steps over the grave, indicating an empty plot.
• "He ain't home," Raffaell declared at the second gravesite.
• Whittaker and professional skeptic D.J. Grothe said dowsing believers actually are experiencing the so-called ideomotor effect, a psychological phenomenon that happens when someone makes motions unconsciously.
• "Dowsing works but not in the way dowsers think," said Grothe, a former professional magician and president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a Virginia-based nonprofit that debunks supernatural claims. "The dowser himself moves the rods."
• The group has a long-standing offer of $1 million to prove dowsing is legitimate. No one has claimed the money, Grothe said.
• Many of the lost graves the women have found along the North Dakota-Montana

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