Perhaps it grew out of his conviction that the healthy must help the sick. Any reluctance the Samaritans might have felt about the new doctrine, however, was overcome by a dramatic demonstration of its power.
Wilcox apparently became very sick and was unable to make the pilgrimage to the packing house. He called upon the faithful members of the band to volunteer to save his life. A woman named Nancy Dixon was the first to show her belief in the doctrine and she bared her arm for the extraction of the life-giving fluid. Wilcox sucked the blood from her arm and the effect was marvelous, for he recovered from his illness the same day. The visible manifestation of the truth of the doctrine made a great impression on the members of the band . . .4
After that they apparently stopped visiting slaughterhouses and assembled at a member’s house each week and exchange blood. During these meetings, “the sick or ailing members ask for assistance from the well ones, and these are detailed to give their blood according to their health and strength. When a member becomes very sick the well ones take turns in supplying him the life-giving fluid.”5 Chief Speers was anxious to end the practice, but there was “no law which covers the case and nothing to be done.”6 The Samaritans also argued that “they have as much right to do this when the blood is a voluntary contribution as the physicians have to transfuse blood from one person to another.”
Silas Wilcox and his disciples might have scandalized Kansas City residents and inspired headline writers to label them a “Hideous Sect” of “Human Vampires” and “A Band of Fanatics” engaged in “Horrible Practices,” but hyperbole aside, a lot of blood drinking was going on at the time.7
Sanguinary Proceedings
In 1898, Joseph Ferdinand Gueldry’s (1858–1945) painting Buveurs de Sang (The Blood Drinkers) caused a sensation at Paris’s Salon des Artistes Français. Gueldry often depicted workshops and factories, but this slaughterhouse interior shocked many viewers. A description of the canvas appears in the July 24, 1898, Brooklyn (NY) Daily Eagle:
The scene is a slaughterhouse. A powerful bull lies on the ground and the hammer that killed him is seen near the head. Blood has trickled and spattered over the vicinity. Whole beeves and sides and quarters hang on hooks about the large bare room. On the other side of the fallen animal are eight people, aged or sickly, who have assembled to drink the warm blood that pours from a rent in the animal’s throat. One butcher is hauling at a cord and another stoops over the wound and hands the red fluid to the patients. A woman on whom a father is urging a glass of the disgusting medicine—or food, however it may be regarded—turns away and presses it back, unable to look at it.
The painting, which the New York Times described as “revoltingly disgusting,” showed something that was apparently going on across the United States.8 In addition to Kansas City’s packinghouses, blood drinking was reported in Albany; New York City; Cincinnati; St. Louis; New Orleans; and Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Unlike French abattoirs, however, which retained elements of traditional butchering, American slaughterhouses were factories for killing animals and efficiently converting their bodies into meat, skin, and other marketable commodities (Henry Ford reportedly studied their disassembly methods and applied them to building cars). But even with this emphasis on speed, and the wine and sugar industry’s demand for animal blood, an unknown number of slaughterhouses made themselves freely available for blood drinking; a St. Louis butcher said, “We do not charge for it so that the very poorest can take it if they desire.”9
Blood drinkers—men, women, and children, of every age and class—arrived at the abattoir at times when animals were to be killed. Cattle from the stockyard were herded inside and driven single file down a chute to the killing floor, where a worker struck them on the head with a heavy sledgehammer. A stunned animal’s throat was then cut and “as the current of life floods from the gash the cups and vessels are held to receive it, and it drank [sic] instantly with all the warmth of healthy vital action upon it.”10
Neophytes had to become accustomed to the slaughterhouse atmosphere and swallowing hot blood, it seems to have been both palatable and digestible. Considered purely as a beverage, it was typically compared to drinking fresh milk and some developed a passion for it; one woman visited a New York City slaughterhouse every other day and downed “three full bumpers” of blood.11 A Cincinnati reporter tried a tumbler of bullock’s blood and became effusive, describing it as “the richest cream, warm, with a tart sweetness and the healthy strength of the pure wine that gladdeneth the hearts of man!”12
After draining their portion, the blood drinker might remain in the slaughterhouse for several hours “to inhale the ‘steam’ of the running blood.”13 Blood was also used externally; doctors ordered an Italian dancer to “bake her dainty ankle in bullock’s blood,” but most drank it and even developed their own set of standards.14
Some aficionados considered the blood of stunned animals to be “black and thick and lifeless” and preferred those dispatched by Jewish ritual slaughter, in which the throat is cut, claiming the results were “brightly ruddy and clear as new wine.”15 The source of the blood was also important, since there was far more to vital fluid than corpuscles and plasma.
One of the most ancient ideas about blood is that it is life and soul in material form, and its power can be transferred from one being to another, along with elements of the personality. This led to practices like drinking an enemy’s blood to acquire his strength and bravery and applied to other important bodily fluids as well (“When it came to . . . the feeding of babies, actual nutrition was not the only thing taken in through female milk . . . it was the belief that character was transmitted through breast milk”).16 These considerations presumably influenced the blood drinkers’ choice of animals.
Fowl, swine, sheep, and goats do not seem to have been used. Perhaps their blood was, respectively, too stupid, timid, slovenly, and lascivious; goat blood, in particular, was so potent that jewelers smeared it on precious stones to “soften” them before cutting. Though the ancient Greeks considered bulls’ blood a deadly poison, cattle with their robust strength were seen as the ideal source of blood; they may have also appealed to the sometimes bovine standards of late-nineteenth-century beauty.
Woman who were pale, thin, and listless, or those emaciated by consumption were reportedly transformed by blood drinking. They became “wonderfully healthy and fat” or were turned into a “radiant beauty,” though in the latter case this was accompanied by an insatiable craving for human blood.17 (Modern “vampires” also believe that blood can enhance their appearance. Julia Caples of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, claims to drink as much as a half gallon of human blood a month and states that “I feel more beautiful than any other time when I’m regularly drinking”).18
Blood was used to treat a range of ailments, including rheumatism, protracted fever, “impoverished blood,” and extreme old age, but its most important use was for “[t]uberculosis, sometimes called consumption or pthisis, [which] was the greatest killer of 19th century Americans.”19 Wrinkle seems to have been afflicted with it, as were countless others, and for those who believed in its curative powers, treating the deadliest illness with human blood must have seemed logical.
Tapping the Vein
For thousands of years, the blood of children, virgins, and, oddly, executed criminals have been the most potent remedies in the pharmacopeia. A generally incurable disease (e.g., leprosy, blindness, or, for nineteenth-century Americans, consumption) “could only be removed by a miracle . . . the pure blood of a virgin or of a child was, above all, thought to be the source of life which would abolish those diseases and engender a flourishing new life . . .”20
The Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans used blood to treat epilepsy, and Pliny the Elder provides a vivid description of how it was taken. “While the crowd looks on,” he writes, “epileptics drink the blood of gladiators, a thing horrible to see, even when
wild beasts do it in the arena. Yet, by Hercules, they think it most efficacious to suck it as it foams warm from the man himself, and together with it the very soul out of the mouths of the wounds; yet it is not even human to put the mouth to the wounds of wild beasts.”21 It was a durable belief. In 1823, Hans Christian Andersen witnessed an execution at which “I saw a poor sick man, whom his superstitious parents made drink a cup of the blood of an executed person, that he might be healed of epilepsy . . .”22
Leprosy was especially dangerous for the subjects of kings who contracted it, since the recommended treatment was bathing in human blood. “The king of Egypt was eaten away. So he bade kill the first-born of the children of Israel, in order to bathe himself in their blood.”23 When Constantine the Great had leprosy, he was prepared to bathe in children’s blood, but “the lamenting of the mothers moved the Emperor,” who was miraculously cured after being baptized. It was also seen as a way to reinvigorate decrepit monarchs.24
Louis XI, like many other kings, was suspected of bathing in blood and, when very ill, “he seeks for and tries everything, especially much children’s blood because of his illness.”25 The connection between blood baths and rejuvenation, however, reached its definitive form in the legend of Elizabeth Bathory, the “Blood Countess” of sixteenth-century Hungary.
Popular accounts claim that Bathory was extraordinarily beautiful and, as she grew older, tried preserving her appearance by murdering servant girls and bathing in their blood. There is no evidence that the countess engaged in these practices, and she was not accused of them at the time, but she was a serial killer who tortured and murdered as many as 650 girls over thirty years; perhaps folktales about restorative blood baths became attached to her as a way of comprehending the behavior of a sexual sadist. There is, however, no doubt that Bathory existed; the same cannot be said of Wilcox, the Wrinkles, or, the Samaritans.
Blood Test
Research has confirmed the existence of all the people mentioned in the story that held official positions. The Humane Society officer, T. Paul Marran, lived at 2203 Olive Street with his wife, who ran a bakery; William O. Huckett was secretary of the Kansas City Humane Society in 1890, and later became secretary of the police, while Thomas Speers was the town marshal when Kansas City was still on the frontier and served as chief of police from 1874 to 1895. Even the Children’s Home that took in the young Wrinkles was at 1115 Charlotte Street. It later became known as the Gillis Home and still operates at a different location as the Gillis Center.
The story’s principal figures, however, remain elusive.
No one named John Wrinkle, or anything comparable (e.g., “Winkle”) appears in municipal or state records. There is no proof that he died in 1890, though deaths were not systematically recorded in Missouri before 1910, nor are there documents to show that Minnie and John went to the Children’s Home; the Gillis Center’s files do not go back to 1890. Silas Wilcox was an itinerant preacher and might be expected to leave little evidence behind, but there is another difficulty.
Newspaper articles about the Samaritans appeared in Wyoming, New York, and West Virginia but not Missouri. There are no follow-up reports, and the local historical society is unable to verify any aspect of it; “such a sensational treatment would surely have been covered in the Kansas City Star newspaper, though no story has yet been located.”26
If the Kansas City blood cult is a hoax, it is a subtle one for 1890; that same year the Tombstone (AZ) Epitaph published an article about cowboys killing a giant winged reptile somewhere between Whetstone, Arizona, and the Huachuca Mountains. Though a penny-a-line journalist might have invented the story, it calls attention to the seemingly widespread and forgotten practice of blood drinking.
There were doctors who thought it might have genuine value (as noted in Dr. Gaetano De Pascale’s “On the Use of Blood as a Medicine,” which appeared in the May 5, 1866 British Medical Journal), but like shooting a pterodactyl with a Winchester rifle, blood drinking represents the intersection of two eras. It was a result of the nineteenth-century’s industrial-scale slaughterhouses existing when ancient beliefs still thrived about blood as something “potent, full of latent life, and capable of working on persons or things in contact with it.”27
AFTERWORD
Idiot Joy
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Assembling a book of strange-but-true stories is, in most respects, a pleasure for the writer. It is an excuse to dig through accordion files full of old clippings, spend days online, write to librarians and historical societies, and turn over the sofa cushions in search of material. One of the greatest rewards, however, is the way researching one story leads to the discovery of others, such as monster-hunting expedition that Teddy Roosevelt considered making to Patagonia.
An American explorer and prospector reported seeing “a huge lizard-like monster with a curved neck” swimming in a South American lake, and the former president was so intrigued that he took a “special trip of exploration to Southern Argentina and Chile in the hope of ascertaining whether there was any truth in these stories of this monster amphibian, which strongly appealed to him. He wanted nothing said about it, lest there would be ridicule if he did not succeed.”1
Then there was a Springheeled Jack–type figure nicknamed “Dracula” that terrorized residents of Baldwin, Long Island, in the summer of 1906. He was seen in trees, and police found several rude “nests” where he apparently slept. A witness described Dracula as tall, wild-eyed, and dressed in threadbare black clothing; his “hair was intensely black and he also wore a black mustache . . . his feet were incased [sic] in patent leather shoes, seemed small and that he apparently had little or no toes.”2 One hundred two years later, in 2008, a thin figure wearing a black cape and hood was spotted in a tree at Bethpage, and sightings of the “Long Island Devil” continued into 2009.
Even more puzzling is the filthy man found in the Sawyers’ family barn at Westbrook, Maine, in 1854. He was around twenty-five years old and had been surviving by eating soap grease, drinking the cow’s milk, and sleeping in a hole in the hay. Both of his feet had been crudely amputated, and he could only get about by crawling slowly on his knees, so how he even reached the Sawyers’ farm is a mystery. The man was taken to the poorhouse and lived there at least twelve years, spending summers “in a sort of wooden cage-like structure in the yard.”3 He never spoke, so his identity, where he came from, and what happened to his feet, remains unknown.
A Swedish farmer named Burson also moved about on his knees but claimed that he did so at God’s command. The visionary Burson lived and preached at the Burned-Over District of western New York State, where he reportedly persuaded two hundred people to follow his example. Called the “Knee Benders,” they went about on their knees, or all fours.4
Searching for more information about homemade beheading devices led to the story of George C. Wheeler, a young man who, in 1877, discovered a chemical for resurrecting the dead, no matter what the body’s condition. He left instructions on how to apply the reviving agent, then climbed into a machine built from springs, knives, and an ax, and was torn to bits. Wheeler was real, but the report was a hoax, and he died of consumption in 1884.5
One story being saved for the next volume concerns the murder of an occultist and his family in Detroit, Michigan, in 1929. It is a fascinating case studded with strange elements that was not included here because the man’s head was chopped off. Between the Sperry-Umberfield murders, James Moon’s suicide, and various other decapitations, Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist was in danger of becoming A Treasury of American Beheadings. There is much more to discuss, yet the subject of future books suggests closing on a personal note.
After years of researching and writing something like Mrs. Wakeman, the sensible author takes a sabbatical from lunatics, monsters, and blood cults. There are people, however, with a seemingly magnetic attraction to whatever is eccentric and anom
alous. As someone once told me, “I don’t care who my parents are; I’m a member of the Addams family.”
I am not the spokesman for those who consider every day Halloween, but I do know that what others consider bizarre often fills me with wonder and a kind of idiotic joy. That is why I began working on new stories before this book was even finished: Fortunately there is no dearth of strangeness in America.
—Robert Damon Schneck
May 2014
NOTES
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The Wee-Jee Fiends
1 Most of the names and ages that appear here are taken from the 1920 census, where Italian names are often Anglicized. Reporters spelled the names in various ways (Nagarro Moro’s name appears as both Edward and Daniel) and gave different ages.
2 Nagarro reportedly died in 1919. A different version of the story claims that Mrs. Moro wanted to remarry and that the group was trying to placate his spirit (Oakland (CA) Tribune, March 4, 1920).
3 One concerned group was Gypsies, who claimed that its fortune-telling businesses suffered from competition with the Ouija board (Oakland Tribune, September 24, 1920).
4 Oakland Tribune, February 1, 1920. The article mentions that five days earlier, a Ouija board had told two seventeen-year-old girls, Elsie Gerald and Florence Fuller, where a treasure could be found. The girls went looking for it in the frozen woods around Elk Rapids, Michigan, and were believed dead (Capital Times (WI), January 28, 1920).
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