by Charles Fort
In the pockets of one of these men were found racing slips. The police explained that probably all of them were victims of a turf-feud.
It is, considering many other data, quite thinkable that, instead of refusing to tell how they had been wounded, these men were unable to tell, but that this inability was so mysterious that the hospital authorities recorded it as refusal. See the London Daily Express, April 17, and People, April 23, 1922.
In a London hospital, there is small chance for an unconventional record, and probably in no London newspaper would have been published any reporter’s notion of the lurk of an invisible and murderous thing, in a turning off Coventry Street. But, in the London Daily Mail, Sept. 26, 1923, there was an account of something like this, but far away. It was a facetious account. Murderous things always have, somewhere, been regarded humorously. Or fondly. No address was published, or probably this one would have received letters from women, wanting to marry it. The story was that, in September, 1923, there was a Mumiai scare in India. Mumiais are invisibles that grab people. They have no sense of the mystic: don’t dwell in enchanted woods, nor feel out for victims from old towers, or ruins; no valuation for midnight. In daylight, in the streets of cities, they grab people. Coolies, in the city of Lahore, believed that a Mumiai was abroad. There was a panic in Lahore, and it fed upon screams of rickshaw men, who thought that they were grabbed.
Probably the Daily Mail published this story, because of wavelets of gratification that arose from it at London breakfast tables. It is usually thought that the value of coolies is only in their willingness to work for a few cents a day: but I have a notion that they have another function; or that, if it were not for coolies, and their silly superstitions that give the rest of us some sense of superiority to keep going on, millions of the rest of us would lie down and die of chagrin. Sometime I shall develop a theory of evolution in aristocratic terms, showing that things probably made of themselves oysters and lions and hyenas, just for the thrill of gratification in being able to say that at least they weren’t elephants, or worms, or human beings. I know how it is, myself, and have compensations in thinking of silly, credulous people who believe that a dog ever said “Good morning!” and disappeared in a thin, greenish vapor.
Away back in the year 1890, the Japanese were coolies. Then they showed such talents for slaughter that now they are respected everywhere. But, in the year 1890, the Japanese were supposed to be little more than a nation of artists. A story of a panic in Japan was something to smile smugly about. I take a story from the Religio-Philosophical Journal, May 17, 1890, as copied from the newspapers. People in Japan thought that, sometimes in the streets, and sometimes in their houses, an invisible thing was attacking them. They thought that upon persons were appearing wounds, each a slash about an inch long. They thought that, at the time of an attack, little pain was felt.
Possibly a Jap, educated according to what is supposed to be an education, having his ideas as to the identity and geographical distribution of coolies, has looked over files of American newspapers, and has come upon accounts of a series of occurrences in New York City, in the winter of 1891-92, and has been amused to note the mystery that New York reporters infused into their accounts of woundings of men, in the streets of New York. The reporters told of a “vanishing man.” The assassin “disappeared marvelously.” As noted, in the New York Sun, Jan. 14, 1892, five men had been stabbed by an unknown assailant. There were other attacks. The police were blamed, and in the downtown precincts of the city, the most important order, each day, was to catch the stabber.
January 17—“Slasher captured.” The police were out to get him, and one of them got an unterrifying-looking little fellow named Dowd. It was said that he had been caught, stabbing a man.
In the mixture of all situations, it is impossible to be unable to pick out grounds for reasonably believing, or disbelieving, anything. Say that it is our preference to believe—or to accept—that it was not the “marvelously disappearing” slasher who was caught, but somebody else who would do just as well. Then we note that, twenty minutes earlier, another policeman had caught a man, who had, this policeman said, seized somebody, and was about to stab him. Or June, 1899—and two men were out to catch the “kissing bug”—and one of them caught a beetle, and the other nabbed a butterfly. The policeman of the first arrest was ignored: the captor of Dowd was made a roundsman.
Dowd pleaded not guilty. He said that he had had nothing to do with the other assaults, and had drawn a knife only in this one case, which had been a quarrel. His lawyer pleaded not guilty, but insane. He was found insane, and was sent to the asylum for insane criminals, at Auburn, N.Y.
The outrages in New York stopped. Brooklyn Eagle, March 12, 1892—dispatch from Vienna, Austria—“This city continues to be shocked by mysterious murders. The latest victim is Leopold Buchinger, who was stabbed to the heart by an undetected assassin, in one of the most public places in Vienna. This makes the list of such tragedies five in number, and there is a growing feeling of terror among the public.”
Say that it’s an old castle, hidden away in a Balkan forest—and somebody was wounded, at night—but, as if lulled by a vampire’s wings, felt no pain. This would be only an ordinarily incredible story.
In November, 1901, a woman told a policeman of Kiel, Germany, that, while walking in a street in Kiel, she learned that she had been unaccountably wounded. She had felt no pain. She could not explain.
The police probably explained. If a doctor was consulted, he probably explained learnedly.
Another woman—about thirty women—“curious and inexplicable attacks.” Then men were similarly injured. About eighty persons, openly, in the streets, were stabbed by an uncatchable—an invisible—or it may be the most fitting description to say that, upon the bodies of people of Kiel, wounds appeared. See the London Daily Mail, Dec. 7, 1901—“The extraordinary thing about the mystery is that some marvelously sharp instrument must have been used, because the victims do not seem to know that they are wounded, until several minutes after an attack.”
And yet I think that something of an explanation of these Jacks is findable in every male’s recollections of his own boyhood—the ringing of doorbells, just to torment people—stretching a string over sidewalks, to knock off hats—other, pestiferous tricks. It is not only “just for fun”; there is an engagement of the imagination in these pranks. It will be my expression that, when the more powerful and more definite imagination of an adult human similarly engages and concentrates, phenomena that will be considered beyond belief, or acceptance, by readers who do not realize of what common occurrence they are, develop.
We have had stories of series of accidents, and perhaps my suspicion that they were not mere coincidences has been regarded at least tolerantly. I have data of three automobile accidents that occurred at times not far apart; and, as to this series, I note a seeming association with minor attacks upon other automobiles, and upon people that suggests the doings of one criminal. If so, he will have to be called occult, whether we take readily to, or are much repelled by, that term.
Upon the night of April 9, 1927, Alexander Nemko and Pearl Devon were motoring through Hyde Park, London, when their car dashed down an incline, and plunged into the Serpentine. The car sank in fifteen feet of water. Though terrified and drowning, Nemko had his wits with him, so that he opened the door of the car, and dragged his companion to the surface, and, with her, swam ashore.
There was nothing in the lay of the land by which to explain. The newspapers noted that there had never been an accident here before. “The steering gear apparently failed,” was Nemko’s attempt to explain. Perhaps it is queer that right at this point, so near a body of water, the steering gear failed: but, considered by itself, as mysteries usually are considered, there is little that can be said against Nemko’s way of explaining.
Two nights later, a taxicab plunged into the Thames, at Walton. The passenger swam ashore, but the driver was, it seems, drowned. His b
ody was dredged for but was not found. The passenger, who must have been jostled past having any clear remembrance of what occurred, explained that, at the brink of the river, the rear wheels of the car had dropped into a deep rut, and that the car had jolted into the river.
Upon May 3rd—see the London Evening Standard, May 6—William Farrance and Beatrice Villes, of Linomroad, Clapham, London, were driving near Tunbridge Wells, when the car suddenly plunged toward a hedge at the left of the road. Farrance succeeded in forcing the car to the right. Again something drove it toward the hedge. Farrance was powerless to stop it, and it broke through the hedge, overturning, killing the girl.
A schoolgirl, Beryl de Meza, was shot by somebody unknown and unseen while playing in the street, near her home at Hampstead, London.
At Sheffield, there was an occurrence that was atrocious, but that may not be uncanny, but that attracts my attention because of the fiendishness of something else with which it associates. At the Soho Grinding Works, it was found, morning of April 29th, that grinding wheels had been chipped, and that belting had been stripped from pulleys. Nails had been driven, points upward, in chairs upon which the grinders sat. Tools had been thrown into motors, and currents had been turned on, causing much damage. All this looks like sabotage, malicious but scarcely “fiendish”: but in a building next door there had been doings that are so describable. Chickens had been tortured: combs cut off, legs broken, the head of one burned; others mutilated, and their injuries smeared with white paint.
London Evening Standard, May 5—“Mystery of four shooting affairs.” A boy, playing in Mitcham Park, London, was shot in the head by an air gun, it was thought, though no air gun pellet was found. At Tooting Bec-common, an “air gun pellet”—though it was not said that an air gun pellet was found—passed through the windshield of a motor car. In Stamford two men were shot by an unknown assailant. London Sunday Express, May 8—Mr. George Berlam, of Leigh-on-Sea, motoring on the road from London to Southend—he heard a report, and his windshield was splintered. In accounts of the punctured windshield, at Tooting Bec-common, the driver of the car was quoted as saying that he had heard a report, and at the same time a laugh, “though nobody was about, at the time.”
Wounds have appeared upon people. Usually the explanation is that they were stabbed. Objects have been mutilated. Windowpanes and automobile windshields have been pierced, as if by bullets, but by bullets that could not be found. Such were the doings of the “phantom sniper of Camden” (N.J.). He appeared first, in November, 1927: but the first clipping that I have, relating to him, is from the New York Evening Post, Jan. 26, 1928—a store window pierced by a bullet—the eighth reported occurrence. Later, the stories were definitely of a “phantom sniper” and his “phantom bullets.”
New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 9, 1928—Collingswood, N.J., February 8—“The ‘phantom sniper,’ if it was the work of South Jersey’s mysterious marksman, scored his most sensational attack tonight when a window in the home of William T. Turnbull was shattered by what appeared to be a charge of shot.
“Police at first believed it an attempted assassination, but, as in all the other cases, no missile was found.
“Turnbull, a Philadelphia stockbroker, and a former president of the Collingswood Borough Council, who was seated near the window, reading, was spattered with glass. He said that an automobile had stopped in front of the house a few minutes before. The absence of any grains of shot added to the mystery.”
I have sent letters of enquiry to all persons mentioned in the various reports. I have received not one answer. It may be preferable to some readers to think that there are no such persons. Still, I note that not one of these letters was dead-lettered back to me.
The attacks continued until Feb. 28, 1928. Windowpanes and windshields of automobiles were pierced by something that made no report of a gun, and that was unfindable. Something, or somebody, who was unseen, caused excitement in half a dozen towns from Philadelphia to Newark. Even if I could persuade myself that I am over-fanciful in my own notions, the seemingly veritable stories of the existence of a missile-less gun would be interesting. Authorities in Jersey towns, noting the range of the malefactor, were especially watchful of motorists: but it is my notion that he had no need for anything on wheels in which to do his traveling. I noticed a similar range, in the doings in England, in April and May, 1927.
Snipings by the “Camden phantom” were the show-off, and nobody was injured by him: but a more harmful fellow operated in Boston, beginning about Nov. 1, 1930. I think that these sportsmen, who possibly are sentimental opponents to the shooting of game birds and deer, and practice their cruelties in ways that seem to them less condemnable, divide into the unoccult, and into more imaginative fellows who have found out how to practice occultly. In Boston, a noiseless weapon was used, but, this time, in two weeks, two men and a woman were seriously injured, and bullets of small caliber were removed from their wounds. These attacks so alarmed people that policemen, armed with riot guns, lined the roads south of Boston, with orders to catch the “silent sniper.” The attacks continued until about the middle of February, 1931. Nobody was caught.
In this period (Nov. 12, 1931) a dispatch to the newspapers, from Bogota, Colombia, told of a “puzzling crime wave.” In the hospitals were forty-five persons, suffering with stab wounds. “The police were unable to explain what appeared to be a general attack, but they arrested more than 200 persons.”
Another occurrence of “phantom bullets,” in the State of New Jersey, was told of in the New York Herald, Feb. 2, 1916. Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Repp, of Glassboro, N.J., had been fired upon by “phantom bullets.” This was a special attack upon one house. There were sounds of breaking glass, and bullet holes were found in windowpanes, but nothing beyond the windowpanes was marked. It is such a circumstance as was told of in accounts of the “Camden sniper.” It is as if somebody fired, not only with a missile-less gun, or with invisible bullets, but as if with intent only to perforate windows, and with the effects controlled by, and limited by, his intent. Consequently, instead of thinking of a shooting at windowpanes, I tend simply to think that holes appeared in window glass. Nobody in the house was injured, but Mr. and Mrs. Repp were terrified and they fled. Members of the Township Committee investigated, and they reported that, though no bullets were findable, the windows “were broken much as a window usually is, when a bullet crashes through it.”
That’s the story. Of witnesses, I.C. Soddy and Howard R. Moore were mentioned. I sent letters of enquiry to all persons whose names were given, and received not one reply. There are several ways of explaining. One is that it is probable that persons who have experiences such as those told of in this book, receive so many “crank letters” that they answer none. Dear me—once upon a time, I enjoyed a sense of amusement and superiority toward “cranks.” And now here am I, a “crank,” myself. Like most writers, I have the moralist somewhere in my composition, and here I warn—take care, oh, reader, with whom you are amused, unless you enjoy laughing at yourself.
It seemed to me doubtful that a woman could go along Upper Broadway, and jab, with a hat pin, five men and a woman before being caught. There has been a gathering of suggestions of not ordinary woundings. In Lloyd’s Weekly News (London) Feb. 21, 1909, there was an account of a panic in Berlin. Many women, in the streets of the city, had been stabbed. It was said that the assailant had been seen, and he was described as “a young man, always vanishing.” If he was seen, he is another of the “uncatchables.” In this newspaper of February 23, it was said that seventy-three women had been stabbed, all except four of them not seriously.
We have had data that suggest the existence of vampires, other than humans of the type of the Portuguese sailor: but the brazen and serialized—sometimes murderous, but sometimes petty—assaults upon men and women are of a different order, and seem to me to be the work of imaginative criminals, stabbing people to make mystery, and to make a stir. I feel that I can understand their motives,
because once upon a time I was an imaginative criminal, myself. Once upon a time I was a boy. One time, when I was a boy, I caught a lot of flies. There was nothing of the criminal, nor of the malicious, in what I did, this time, but it seems to give me an understanding of the “phantom” stabbers and snipers. I painted the backs of the flies red, and turned them loose. There was an imaginative pleasure in thinking of flies, so bearing my mark, attracting attention, causing people to wonder, spreading far, appearing in distant places, so marked by me.
In some of our stories there is much suggestion that there was no “vanishing man”—that wounds appeared upon people, as appeared—or as it was said to have appeared—a wound on the head of a sailor. See back to the story told by the captain of the Brechsee. Or that wounds appeared upon people, and that the victims, examined by the police, were more or less bullied into giving some kind of description of an assailant. However, some of the stories of the “vanishing man” look as if he, too, may be. There may be several ways of doing these things. Early in the year 1907, a “vanishing man” was reported from the town of Winchester, England. I take from the Weekly Dispatch (London), Feb. 10, 1907. Women of Winchester were complaining of an “uncatchable,” who was committing petty assaults upon them, such as rapping their hands. “A mysterious feature of the affair is that the man disappears, as if by magic.”
The “phantom stabber” of Bridgeport, Conn., appeared first Feb. 20, 1925, and the last of his attacks, of which I have record, was upon June 1, 1928. That was a long time in which to operate uncaught. In the daytime, mostly, though sometimes at night, girls were stabbed: in the streets; in such public places as a department store, and the entrance of a library. Descriptions of the assailant were indefinite. In almost all instances the wounds were not serious. One of the stories, as told in the New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 27, 1927, is typical of the circumstances of publicity, or of the confidence of an assailant that he could not be caught. If my stories will be regarded as ghost stories, a novelty about them is the eeriness of crowded thoroughfares—a lurk near Coventry Street, London, and the sneak of an invisible in Broadway, New York. I expect sometime to hear of a haunted subway, during rush hours. Edgar Allan Poe would say of me that I’m no artist, and don’t know how to infuse atmosphere. One would think that I had never heard of the uncanniness of dark nights in lonely places. Some of the stories are of desperate plays for notoriety. I have a story now, not of doings in a graveyard, but in a department store. Bridgeport, Conn.—staged on a staircase, with an audience of hundreds of persons, there was a very theatrical performance. A review of this melodrama was published in the Herald Tribune—