Dr. Orville Ward Owen

Orville Ward Owen was a Detroit doctor who liked to read Shakespeare while traveling from patient to patient in the 1880s. With occult guidance from Bacon's spirit, he cut and pasted all of Shakespeare's works - (which included, in his estimation, the works of Bacon, Marlowe, Spenser, and others) - onto a long strip of canvas. He then wound that strip onto a set of spools. By cranking these spools and stopping when the spirit moved him, he discovered the "history" of Queen Elizabeth's marriage to the Earl of Leicester, and the frustrations of their legitimate son, Francis Bacon.

Owen published his findings in Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story (1893) and three more books, and then he sailed for England. In 1909, he began excavating the bed of the River Wye, near Chepstow Castle, for boxes containing Bacon's manuscripts. He never found the boxes, but he kept up the search until he died in 1924.

See:

John Michell, Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions (London: Thames & Hudson; San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984)

Virginia M. Fellows, The Shakespeare Code (Summit University Press, 2006)
-Review of the Shakespeare Code