THE PRESIDENT’S VAMPIRE
Strange-but-True Tales of the United States
ROBERT DAMON SCHNECK
Anomalist Books
San Antonio • New York
An Original Publication of ANOMALIST BOOKS
The President’s Vampire
Copyright © 2005 by Robert Damon Schneck
ISBN: 1-93366564-5
An earlier version of the chapter entitled “The President’s Vampire” appeared in Fortean Times, November 2004. “The God Machine” was first published in Fortean Times, June 2002, and a portion of “The Bridge to Body Island” appeared in Swank, February 2002. “After 18 Years, Missing Teens’ Bodies Found in Submerged Van,” March 3, 1997, is reprinted with permission of The Associated Press.
Book design by Ansen Seale
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information, go to anomalistbooks.com or write to:
Anomalist Books
5150 Broadway #108
San Antonio, TX 78209
This book is dedicated with much love,
to my parents,
Beverly and Arnold.
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 The Devil’s Militia
2 Bribing the Dead
3 The God Machine
4 The President’s Vampire
5 One Little Indian
6 A Horror in the Heights
7 The Lost Boys
8 The Bridge to Body Island
Epilogue
Notes
Appendix I: Entries in the logbook of the bark, Atlantis
Appendix II: James Brown’s letter to the President
Appendix III: How dangerous was James Brown?
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
“Unbelievable but true events that are beyond scientific understanding, beyond rational explanation. They will whet your imagination’s appetite in the startling breathtaking pages of IMPOSSIBLE –Yet It Happened!” (1)
The bottom shelf of my bookcase is devoted to a single genre (or sub-genre) of literature known as the “strange-but–true.” I have about a dozen of them there including Frank Edwards’ seminal Stranger than Science, along with his rivals and imitators; Strange Monsters and Madmen, Impossible -Yet It Happened! , “Things,” More “Things,” Ghosts Ghouls & Other Horrors, Vampires Werewolves & Ghouls, This Baffling World, No Earthly Explanation, Strange Encounters With Ghosts, Strange Guests, Strange Disappearances, Strange Unsolved Mysteries and Strangely Enough! It’s not a pretty collection, and it wouldn’t look good under glass, but their shabbiness is a testament to being read. If I understood The Velveteen Rabbit correctly, it’s the most loved toys that are left in the worst shape and the same applies to books. Every dog-eared page, cracked spine and water-damaged cover is visible evidence of being carried around in book-bags with half-eaten peanut-butter sandwiches and read at the dinner table, in the bathtub, and discreetly during math class (I missed fractions completely.) As for quality, they’re mostly hackwork, with the contents lifted from back issues of Fate magazine and laid out in the pattern set by Frank Edwards: take dozens of bizarre and/or inexplicable stories, retell them in two or three pages and top it off with a lurid title.
Some are paranormal (“The Hep Poltergeist That Dug Rock and Roll,” “Tennessee’s Horrible Wart Monster,” “Cigar in the Sky”) but there are also unexplained disappearances, natural and historical mysteries, gruesome murders, peculiar ideas (like perpetual motion, the hollow Earth) and even unusual diseases (“The Boy Who Died of Old Age”). I loved them all, and they became part of the permanent furniture of my mind.
Not everyone shared my enthusiasm. Teachers, for example, were more interested in the principle exports of Bolivia than the nine basic categories of sea serpents, an attitude that baffled me then and still does today. Also, young readers would be well advised to avoid these subjects in their schoolwork; too many papers on vampire-killing techniques, headless ghosts, or living dinosaurs in the Congo, and you’ll be taken to an office where people with soothing voices show you inkblots. Many still consider a fascination with strange subjects to be a symptom of maladjustment, and even I am considered a bit eccentric, a perception reinforced by nocturnal lemur-like habits, numerous obsessions, and several phobias.
I Digress
Strange-but-true stories have been recorded since people began writing. Ancient literature is full of wonders, and chroniclers of the period did not see the fantastic as somehow separate from subjects like politics and war. For example, Herodotus, “The Father of History,” described races of monstrous men, swarms of winged snakes, “gold-guarding Griffins,” and countless other marvels. Medieval and renaissance tales are top-heavy with miracles, and the Revs. Increase and Cotton Mather continued the collecting of “Memorable Providences” in the New World. The 19th century turned out numberless pseudoscientific and spiritualist books, along with pamphlets describing local oddities and the “true histories” sold by sideshow performers, most of whom were apparently captured after a bloody struggle in the jungles of Borneo. Cartoonist Robert L. Ripley’s popular newspaper column, “Believe It or Not!” first appeared in 1918, but for many the modern era of strange-but-true writing began a year later with the publication of Charles Hoy Fort’s The Book of the Damned.
Fort (1874-1932) was a journalist and novelist from Albany, New York, who spent most of his time in libraries copying down the anomalies reported in newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals. He was not too discriminating about sources, but the sheer quantity of data are startling, and The Book of the Damned was followed by three more; New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). Fort was interested in producing something more than entertaining collections, however, and the “damned” he referred to were those things that had been excluded or ignored by science.
Mysterious phenomena suggest that laws of nature are not fully understood, but Fort took an extreme position, writing, “I conceive of nothing in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.” In other words, everything is somewhat true, somewhat false, and always changing.
Fort was also a wag and offered waggish solutions for the mysteries he collected. How were the pyramids built? “I now have a theory that the Pyramids were built by poltergeist-girls,”(2) meaning by telekinesis. Astronomers see a dark object moving through space; it might be an asteroid but Fort suggests it could also be, “a vast, black, brooding vampire.”(3) He even had an elegant explanation for how werehyena-ism might work: ”…there is no man who is without the hyena-element in his composition, and that there is no hyena that is not at least rudimentarily human… it may be reasoned that, by no absolute transformation, but by a shift of emphasis, a man-hyena might turn into a hyena-man.”(4) In addition, Fort coined the word “teleportation” and invented a game called super-checkers.
His influence on me was indirect because the books contained sentences like “A barrier to rational thinking, in anything like a final sense, is continuity, because of which only fictitiously can anything be picked out of a nexus of all things phenomenal, to think about.” These came along often enough to be discouraging, and I drifted back to the cheap strange-but-true literature that historian T. Peter Park has described as “gee-whiz pop forteanism.”
"AN AMAZING BOOK OF FANTASTIC YET VERIFIED TRUE EVENTS..." (5)
Tracking Down the Strange
In time, the ge
e-whiz paperbacks gave way to more substantial reading and vanished beneath accumulating layers of books until they formed the trilobite stratum of my library. Works by Rupert T. Gould, Bernard Heuvelmans, and Ivan Sanderson succeeded them and strongly influenced my own approach to writing. I try to authenticate as much of the material as possible and discuss aspects of it in relationship to history, the paranormal, crime, folklore, science, or anything else that contributes to the making of a “large and fruitful disorder.” Failing that, I will settle for an interesting sprawl, but unlike Fort, anomalies are my way of discovering unfamiliar corners of reality, not evidence for overturning conventional views of it.
While looking into the history of Pedro the mummy, for instance, I expected to learn that the popular version was distorted, and possibly a hoax. There were elements of this, but research also turned up surprising aspects of folklore, science, and the things people did to survive during the Great Depression, including amateur prospecting, looting ancient sites, and carving pygmy heads out of turnips. With the discovery of a second mummy, however, Wyoming’s local oddity seems poised to go even further, jumping from the pages of Stranger than Science to the science textbooks.
Solid physical evidence is almost unknown in cases of paranormal phenomena—a void that is normally filled by speculation. Should someone read The President’s Vampire in 2105, they will probably regard my faith in the rickety findings of parapsychology with the same mixture of amusement and condescension we feel for the writer of 1905 who explained the paranormal in terms of Spiritualism and who, in turn, felt the same way about the theories based on witchcraft and demons that were current in 1804. History shows that interpretations of the paranormal fall in and out of favor, while the paranormal itself continues to flap along being whatever it is and cocking a snoot at those that would explain or control it.
Since the strange-but-true is essentially a collection of old stories, an historical approach seems more appropriate than a scientific one. For the researcher, this means digging through libraries and archives, collecting accounts, comparing them to documented facts, and whenever possible, tracking down primary sources. Sometimes these can’t be found, but the research gods are generous and reward the diligent in other ways. Books open to the right page, strangers write with information, and wonderful stories drop out of the sky like fish and frogs. While piecing together the history of the Phantom of O’Donnell Heights, for example, I found what sounded like an encounter between a Mad Gasser and a world famous opera singer.
Bulgarian-born soprano Ljuba Welitsch was the star of the Vienna State Opera and had little in common with the twitchy housewives of Mattoon, Illinois. However, in Vienna, on the morning of July 22, 1951, the maid knocked on Madame Welitsch’s bedroom door and got no response. Entering from the balcony, she discovered the room filled with chemical fumes coming from a rug by the bed. It seemed to be saturated with chloroform.
Welitsch was eventually roused and the police summoned, but before they arrived, the rug was washed and “a rare Australian bird, gift… from a director of the New York Metropolitan Opera, was dead in the room where the rug had been hung to dry.”(6) Police took the rug away for analysis.
The singer said that an intruder must have sneaked into her room, but it was only accessible from the balcony used by the maid and this was thirty feet above the ground. Welitsch had nothing to add except regret for the loss of her “poor little bird.”
Was there a mad anesthetist loose in Austria? Had a crime been attempted? Were the singer and her maid concealing something? I have no idea, but the combination of phantom intruders, sopranos, chloroform, and Mitteleuropan policemen puzzling over the remains of a dead bird suggest that something more interesting than waltzing was going on in Vienna that summer.
This is catnip to me and it’s why I love studying the strange. Once you start looking, you never know what you’ll find. Or what will find you.
1
THE DEVIL’S MILITIA
Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1692
This story is not about ghosts exactly…
In 1692, while the Devil was leading an assault on the fractious inhabitants of Salem Village, French and Indian raiders were menacing the seaport of Gloucester fifteen miles away. This was not wholly unexpected; England was at war with France and that meant attacks on the frontier settlements of New England by the French and their Iroquois and Abenaki allies. As recently as October of 1691, raiders had murdered families along the Merrimack River and in Rowley not far from Salem Village,(1) so when strange men were seen lurking in the woods around Gloucester, the people armed themselves and took refuge in the garrison. This was the sensible thing to do, a reasonable response to a situation that turned out to be unreasonable to say the least.
The invaders were bold and for two weeks there were alarms, ambushes, and pursuits, but these French and Indian raiders seemed exempt from the more serious effects of musket balls and, apparently, gravity. In fact, when the raiders vanished they left nothing behind but a bullet dug out of a hemlock tree and some footprints. A short account of the events was written a year later by Gloucester’s minister, John Emerson, and his report was included in the book Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) by Cotton Mather.
The Rev. Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was one of North America’s earliest collectors of strange-but-true stories. (Library of Congress)
Mather was one of New England’s most prominent clergymen and shared, with his equally famous father Increase, a fascination for the “Invisible World” of ghosts, witches, and devils. Today, Cotton is remembered as a fanatical witch hunter and a central figure in Salem’s witch hysteria (neither of which is true) and though the Magnalia was an “ecclesiastical history of New-England; from its first planting, in the year 1620, unto the year of Our Lord 1698,” it ranged widely and contained much more, including a description of a phantom ship that foundered off New Haven, Connecticut, and “A FAITHFUL ACCOUNT OF MANY WONDERFUL AND SURPRISING THINGS, which happened in the town of Glocester [sic], in the year 1692.”
John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a lively but very inaccurate poem about these events called The Garrison of Cape Ann. Whittier described his source as:
A wild and wondrous story,
by the younger Mather penned,
In that quaint Magnalia Christi,
with all strange and marvellous things,
Heaped up huge and undigested,
like the chaos Ovid sings.(2)
Gloucester was founded on Cape Ann in 1623, three years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. It was the first seaport on the East Coast of the United States and an important center for fishing and shipbuilding. It was also a place where wonderful and surprising things sometimes happened. As might be expected in a town that made its living from the Atlantic, these were mostly of a nautical variety: hoodoo ships, fishermen that tended their nets after they died, and numerous sea serpents. The first recorded sighting of a sea serpent in America was made at Cape Ann in the early 17th century (it “lay coiled upon a rock…”) and a many-humped specimen visited the waters off Gloucester annually in the 19th century. This inspired the artist John Ritto Penniman to paint an appropriately monstrous 19 by 9-foot canvas showing “a beautiful representation of the City and Harbour of Cape Ann, or Gloucester, and the various Boats which were engaged in the pursuit of this Monster, which is in full view.”(3) The piece was displayed in Philadelphia in 1819, but seems to have disappeared. (Another painting, Elihu Vedder’s The Lair of the Sea Serpent of 1864, shows an enormous silver snake lying on a beach, a sinister image that recalls the first sighting at Cape Ann.) At one time, the pastor of the town’s Universalist Church was the Rev. John Murray Spear, who went on to conduct one of the more eccentric experiments in the history of Spiritualism (see Chapter 3: “The God Machine”).
Gloucester also had its share of witches and whatever one chooses to call the raiders. While it’s difficult to say what they were, we do know where and when they were. They first app
eared in a remote part of east Gloucester near the present-day Rockport border, in the vicinity of modern Witham Street. This was known as the “Farms” in 1692, and was home to the Babson family: Ebenezer, a bachelor in his mid-twenties, his mother, and other assorted relations.
According to Rev. Emerson, strange things began happening around the end of June or beginning of July, when the Babsons began hearing noises at night. It sounded like “persons were going and running about [Ebenezer’s] house.”(4) Then, on July 7, the situation grew more worrisome.(5)
Ebenezer came home late that night. As he approached the house, two men came out the door and ran into a nearby stand of corn (it’s unclear whether this refers to wheat or maize). His family said that no one had been inside, but Ebenezer picked up a gun and set out after the strangers. He hadn’t gone far when the men started up from behind a log and disappeared into a little swamp saying, “The man of the house is come now, else we might have taken the house.”
The Babsons set out for the garrison, a fortified building nearby, and had presumably secured the door behind them when men were heard stamping around the building. Ebenezer ran outside with his gun and saw two men running down the hill and into a swamp.
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