by Otto Penzler
“It’s not work I particularly want,” he added. “No real money in it, but it would be great publicity if the case went to the Supreme Court.”
“Who are you representing?”
“A bunch called Death Must Die. They’re trying to get the death penalty declared cruel and unusual punishment. Back in ’76 the justices decided it was, then later they reversed themselves and decided it wasn’t.”
“You’re attorney for an anti-death-penalty group?”
“Right. So maybe you’d better come tomorrow night instead.”
Politely I showed him to the door, all the time thinking, Wow, will Wellington Meeks be pissed!
Living all my life in Greenwood Falls, I’ve had plenty of time to check out its reputed spooks. Most have the serious defect of being nonexistent, but a few have proved to be what I call Nonpersons of Interest. I still keep an eye on them.
There’s Lizzie M’Luhan (deceased 1907), whose love for a local butcher named Gavrilo Princip ended in tragedy when his jealous wife used a cleaver to divide Lizzie more or less in two. A multilevel parking garage now sprawls over the site of the shop amid whose tripe trays and hanging hams Lizzie and Gavrilo once reveled in the throes of fornication. If you’re lucky you can spot her on Level A after midnight, her bifurcated form flitting among the parked SUVs, searching either for the man she loved or else for sirloin at 1907 prices, who knows which.
Then there’s Bennie Marx (deceased 1955). Determined to become the new Houdini at whatever risk, Bennie had some friends shackle him to the engine block of a retired 2½-ton truck and throw him into the Potomac River. The fact that he was no good at picking padlocks soon became apparent. His wraith is one of the saddest I’ve ever observed, hovering over the seething currents of Great Falls on moonlit nights and blowing bubbles that burst with the sound of sobs.
And there’s Paul Vincent Obol (deceased 1978), an equestrian who loved his mare Fleetfoot not wisely but too well. He was standing on an upended bucket in his stable, jodhpurs at half mast, engaged in an act of interspecies amour, when Fleetfoot—up to then the most docile of animals—had one of those lightning changes of mood so typical of females, and kicked him to death. Nowadays he flits through local riding schools, uttering deep sighs of rejected love.
I could cite other examples, but why bother? The point is that most of our local manifestations are losers who come back only to whine about their unhappy lives. Wellington Meeks is the great exception—a citizen whose life exuded Presbyterian work ethic and solid albeit modest success. In his day suburbs grew around railroad tracks, not highways. When he moved into Greenwood Falls in 1910, its little wooden depot was new and the future burb was mostly lush, rolling countryside populated by meditative cows rather than frenetic Washington go-getters. Meeks built himself a house near the depot for convenience in reaching D.C.’s Union Station, where—he told his housekeeper, a respectable widow who promptly told everyone else—he boarded trains for “business trips” throughout the mid-Atlantic states.
At home he dwelt in bachelor seclusion, tended by the widow, who cleaned and cooked and saw to it that his shirts and detachable collars were always the way he wanted them, stiff with starch and as uncomfortable as possible. Local people found him affable but cool. His next-door neighbor recalled that conversing with him was like playing tennis with an opponent who catches your ball and keeps it, instead of hitting it back. Curiosity about what he did for a living went unrewarded until 1927, when he died of complications following gall-bladder surgery. Then the executor of his will paid a vanity publisher to bring out his memoirs. Wisely, the editor changed the title that Meeks had chosen for his opus (“My Thirty Years of Public Service”) to one he would surely have vetoed, had he been in a condition to do so. A man so respectable could hardly have wished to be commemorated by a tome entitled I, the Hangman.
Yes, that was the secret of Wellington Meeks—his business trips all had been to penitentiaries that required his services. The new title was sufficiently striking to win the book a modest success, delighting the ladies of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who received the author’s royalties to carry on their noble though hopeless task of drying out America. Decades later, I came across a battered copy of the book in a flea market, and found it (if I may be pardoned a pun) a treasury of totally unconscious gallows humor.
Meeks believed firmly in the necessity of his profession, pointing to some truly atrocious criminals he had dispatched. Yet he acknowledged that most of his victims were simple, uneducated men who had bashed or shot somebody on a momentary impulse, and whose souls were consequently salvageable. He saw himself posted at the gateway between life and death, with a Christian duty to treat the somber ceremony over which he presided with dignity, and those he dispatched with compassion.
“Every public executioner,” he wrote, “should have always before his mind the adage There, but for the grace of God, go I. After the wrists and ankles of the condemned man have been tied, the black hood put over his head, and the stout noose properly aligned behind his left ear, a murmured word of encouragement—Tonight, brother, you sleep in Paradise—a pat on the back, or the simple word ‘Courage!’ uttered in a firm yet friendly tone, will do much to ease the Great Transition he faces.”
The smugness of such passages caused limerick writers throughout the then forty-eight states to reach for their fountain pens or uncover their manual typewriters. As one versifier put it,
Mr. Meeks I greatly admire—
Of hanging he never does tire.
He arranges the drop,
Hears the vertebrae pop,
Then goes home to his seat by the fire.
Meeks apparently began manifesting early in 1933. At any rate, that was when the weekly Greenwood Falls Standard started to report strange goings-on at 419, always in the coy jokey way that journalists have of saying, “Just kidding, folks!” There were headlines like Hangman Still Hanging Around and Merritt Street Ghost Anything but Meek. Bad jokes aside, it soon became clear that a theme ran through the dead man’s appearances. He loved the house he’d built and occupied, and when activities happened there that his Puritanical soul disapproved of, he came to scare the current occupants straight.
A lifelong Republican, his early visits resulted from the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the repeal of Prohibition. (His appearance during one of the President’s Fireside Chats garnered the headline GOP Ghost Haunts FDR Broadcast.) Any sign of inebriation, debauchery, or Democracy was guaranteed to bring his greenish ghost out of the netherworld, grimly dangling the noose by which he’d earned his living. Not the Ghost of a Cocktail for Me, Thanks, chuckled the Standard, and—after Roosevelt crushed Alf Landon in the 1936 election—Only the Dead Like Alf.
At one point in the sixties, the house was occupied by four hippies, all devotees of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll. They didn’t last long—indeed, one was so shaken by his experience with the ghost that he had to be lobotomized. I’m not sure Meeks ought to be blamed for that, however. Tests showed that the young man had ingested a near-lethal dose of LSD, so maybe that was the cause of his breakdown, and the ghost’s appearance merely the trigger.
Other occupants came and went, none staying for long. And then, beginning in the early eighties, all the manifestations ceased. A spinster schoolteacher, Miss Angela Groening, lived at 419 comfortably for almost twenty years, without ever seeing anything out of the way. She had the house painted, maintained it in perfect condition, and grew prizewinning antique roses in the garden. She was Meeks’s kind of tenant, and he wouldn’t have dreamed of disturbing her. Since Miss Groening was known to drink one glass of pale sherry every day at six p.m., people speculated that under her benign influence the ghost was, at long last, mellowing out on the subject of Prohibition. Whatever, a whole generation of local people grew up believing that the legends about the house were only that—legends.
By the turn of the millennium, the older houses in our community—once taken by
hippies and schoolteachers simply because they couldn’t afford anything newer—had become fashionably retro dwellings. They were especially favored by well-to-do, conservative people who scorned the bloated palaces of the nouveaux riches, yet wanted the convenience of a Washington suburb with easy access to the Beltway. Stephen Preston James was a perfect example of the breed, and Meeks’s midnight manifestations as a glowing face suspended over the booze locker probably were meant only to warn him and Alsatia against taking too many nightcaps.
But what the ghost might do when he found people meeting in his house, swilling liquor, denouncing his profession, and vowing to abolish it forever—well, it’s no exaggeration to say that I shuddered to think. Events soon proved that I had plenty to shudder about.
Stephen Preston James had one of those names that work equally well forward and backward, so when he called me early next morning, saying abruptly, “This is James,” I recollected his name as James Preston Stevens, and thought he wanted to get on a first-name basis.
“What can I do for you, Jim?” I inquired.
About ten minutes went by before we got this unsnarled, which did nothing to calm his already jangled nerves.
“So,” I said when things at last became clear, “I gather Wellington Meeks manifested himself at the meeting of Death Must Die.”
“Did he ever! Alsatia was almost hysterical, to say nothing of my clients and, to be perfectly honest, me. God, how I wish there was somebody I could sue.”
His wife chose to blame him for the fiasco, and issued a fatwa. “She’s taking the kids to her mother’s in Timonium, Maryland, even though that means we’ll be separated at Thanksgiving. I have three months to get rid of 419 and find an unhaunted house, or she’ll file for divorce.”
“Nasty situation.”
“I’d say so. What can I do?”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Be prepared to give a full and objective account of last night’s proceedings. You may not know this, Jim—”
“Steve.”
“Whoever you are. You may not know this, but Meeks in his memoirs boasts of executing over three hundred men and five women in the course of his long, busy career. He’s not to be trifled with. I’ll need the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts.”
“You mean I’m going to be deposed.”
“Unless we can pacify Meeks, that’s not the worst that’ll happen to you.”
When I arrived at 419 Merritt, a sharp-featured lady I recognized from the photograph was herding two whining children into a white Infiniti, in which they roared away. I entered the house—I’d never actually been inside before—to find Steve sitting in a repro Victorian parlor chair and looking like, as the saying goes, death warmed over.
“And I’m even afraid to take a drink,” he complained, after I’d shaken his flaccid hand.
“I’ve brought a recorder,” I said, displaying the palm-sized digital device and pulling up a repro Lincoln rocker to sit on. “Since you’re an attorney, I’m sure there’s no need to advise you about the protocol.”
He nodded and, after a moment’s thought, began to speak with professional lucidity, giving his name, the location, date, and time, then launching into the following narrative:
Last night sixteen people, members of the organization Death Must Die, gathered here for an informal conference with wine and cheese. White wines were more popular than red, and the munchies included hothouse grapes, Wafer-Thins, and a wheel of Brie. Thank God, my children were staying the night at friends’ houses.
Most members of the group proved to be nice sensible people whose opposition to the death penalty followed traditional lines. Some said the state shouldn’t take away a life, since if the individual is later proved innocent, it can’t return what it has taken. Others cited the dozens of cases in which DNA evidence has caused condemned men to be released from Death Row. Still others pointed to the bad company in which the United States finds itself—bracketed with Russia, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and separated from most of the civilized world. An African-American gentleman spoke scathingly about the disproportionate number of blacks who have been condemned to death.
Only one lady, a widow named Letitia (Letty) Loos, turned out to be the sort of enthusiast I’d feared might constitute the norm for Death Must Die. In a strident voice she kept repeating that each and every precious human life without a single exception is of infinite value, leading me to wonder if she included such precious lives as that of Adolf Hitler among the infinitely valuable.
None of this had much to do with the legal and constitutional question of what exactly constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, a subject almost as debatable as what constitutes truth or beauty. I had just begun trying to focus the group on the issues that might conceivably get us a hearing before the Supreme Court, when the lamps in the room grew dim. Since I am somewhat given to worst-case scenarios, my first thought was that I had a brain tumor and was going blind. Then several others commented on the phenomenon, causing me to blame the power company instead. It was only when Alsatia said there was smoke in the room that I realized the light wasn’t weakening—instead, the air was, so to speak, growing denser.
The darkening continued for several minutes, with increasing dismay among my wife, our guests, and myself. Then, from the shadowy hallway that leads to the bedrooms, appeared—shut off the goddamn recorder!
My client’s face had turned the color of fresh spackle. I jumped up, threw open a repro antique cellaret, and—Wellington Meeks or no Wellington Meeks—poured Steve a healthy shot of brandy. He swallowed it too fast, went into a choking fit, had to be pounded on the back, etc. But at last he was restored to a condition closely resembling normal, except for streaming eyes that he wiped with a monogrammed handkerchief.
“Sorry about that,” he muttered.
I assured him that his reaction was perfectly normal—indeed, he wouldn’t have been normal if he’d failed to have it. “Only psychopaths,” I told him, “are truly fearless, and that’s only because they’re wired wrong.”
He nodded, and after a second shot of brandy—this time mixed with soda, and sipped quietly and slowly—he signaled for me to turn the recorder back on. The interview (or as he called it, the deposition) continued as follows:
Out of the darkness emerged a figure more appalling than a mere nightmare—a huge shambling man wearing baggy trousers, a collarless shirt, and a dangling noose.
His hands were like the stumps of small trees, with crooked fingers for roots. His face was a head-sized lump of damp putty with holes where the eyes, nostrils, and mouth ought to have been. His whole form exuded a sickly greenish light, as if luminous bacteria had colonized his flesh. As he approached, two members of Death Must Die thrust themselves violently away, tipping over their chairs, and lay on their backs with legs working spasmodically like those of poisoned roaches, in a hapless imitation of flight.
The horror was not yet complete. The monster began to speak—and in such a voice! I’ve heard more human sounds emerge from the business end of a concrete mixer. Yet the words were clearly audible, as the thing confessed to a career of gruesome and appalling murders done merely for pleasure, giving details that caused members of the group to clamp their hands over their ears. I tried that too, but it didn’t work—his confession distilled within my brain as clearly as ever, all the way to the end. Then the monster lurched to the opposite wall, passed through it, and vanished, only to have its place taken by an elderly woman.
Or rather, hag. She too wore a noose, and her voice reminded me of a malicious child swinging on a gate with rusty hinges, back and forth, back and forth. She had been a nurse running a home for the aged and infirm, whom she murdered one by one with every incident of cruelty—she particularly favored a poison called corrosive sublimate, which I gathered was a household cleanser of times gone by. Her reward? The pathetic belongings of her victims, which often consisted of no more than old clothes and perhaps a cheap ring or two. She ended
with such a laugh as I hope never to hear again—a long cackling shriek that caused two wine goblets to shatter.
Finally, when we’d all been reduced more or less to jelly, Meeks himself emerged. He looked a bit like Herbert Hoover—double-breasted suit, stiff high collar, sparse hair slicked down and neatly parted in the middle. He carried his noose instead of wearing it, and headed straight for the widow Letty Loos. Suspending the rope before her face while she quailed and gibbered, he spoke in a cold, controlled, distant voice, a bit shrill and squeaky like some sort of primitive recording machine. He had a slight Elmer Fudd–ish speech impediment, and what he said shocked me more than anything I’d heard so far.
“I wespect you, madam, for you have murdered your husband. Unlike these other fools, you have good weason to oppose capital punishment, knowing that you too—like the monsters I’ve just shown you—deserve to die.”
So saying, he placed the glowing image of the rope around her neck, and vanished instantly, in perfect silence. The rope dissolved more slowly, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, lingering for a long minute or two while Mrs. Loos uttered squeaks and mewlings of dismay. Then she jumped up and fled into the night, followed by the other members of Death Must Die.
“A remarkable document,” I said, warmly. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard an account of a manifestation more convincingly put.”
“Easy for you to say,” Steve replied. His voice was grim. “I’m going to get sued all to hell and gone. Those people will have tame doctors swearing they’ve been traumatized for life, and what can I say? That ghosts were at fault? I’m going to be divorced and impoverished. And I’ll still be living at 419 Merritt, because when this story gets around, nobody in his right mind will buy it.”
“Now, now, now,” I said, patting his bony shoulder. “You forget that the plaintiffs will be as reluctant as you are to give testimony about what they saw last night. They won’t want to look like lunatics either.”