A week or so after this meeting, I returned to Wausau to see a concert and brought Katherine with me. By this time it was winter, and we had time to kill before the show started, so I took Katherine for a walk downtown. It was Sunday and most of the businesses were closed, so after hanging out at the bookshop and record shop we had run out of distractions. I suggested a walk across the railroad bridge to a little island in the middle of the Wisconsin River, locally known as “Body Island.”
The island is down-river from Big Bull Falls, and one explanation for the name comes from this being the place where bodies in the Wisconsin wash up. In the 19th century, many lumberjacks drowned while dislodging logjams, and their remains ended up here. Some say the name comes from a woman that worked at Prange Way in the 1970s. [Prange Way was a department store; today the building is the Eastbay Corporate Offices.] She used to cross the trestle bridge as a short cut on her way home until one night when she vanished. After an all-night search, she was found on the tip of the island, staring into the water. She had been stabbed and was in shock and died at the hospital; what made this murder so memorable, though, was that her sister was killed a few years later in the cemetery where this woman was buried. Despite the morbid associations, Body Island is a pretty little preserve of wild grassland and offers a nice view of the city. [Its real name is Barker Stewart Island and it is named after the lumber company that once had a mill there. A few years ago a woman was beaten to death on the shore opposite the island.]
The bridge to Body Island in Wausau, Wisconsin.(Robert Schneck)
Katherine and I were walking along the track when something got my attention. I don’t remember what it was, but I climbed down from the bridge to the riverbank to look, while Katherine waited on the wind swept trestle. While she was standing there, she heard a faint noise. At first she feared it was a train whistle—it is an active train bridge—but soon realized that the whistle sounded more human than locomotive. She felt the familiar sense of fear rising up inside, and when I returned she was having a full-blown panic attack. She said she heard something, but as much as I tried I couldn’t. Then she heard it again, as “if it was right over my shoulder.” Still, I heard nothing, and after we left the bridge Katherine suffered from panic attacks for the rest of the day.
Back in Sun Prairie, we found a message from John on the answering machine. He sounded upset, and when I met with him, he told me a strange story.
He had come home from work, and when he arrived at his room in the boarding house, had tried to do some drawings (John‘s hobby is art.) He couldn’t concentrate, though, and had an “uncanny feeling,” so he decided to call us, not knowing that Katherine and I were out of town. Not finding any of his friends at home, he tried reading but couldn’t. By this time it was late enough for him to get some sleep, but for some reason he couldn’t stand lying in bed and decided to sleep on the floor. He fell fast asleep and at some point a knock on the door woke him up.
“John,” he heard Katherine say,” let’s go out to breakfast!” We often stopped by to pick up John for breakfast on our way into Madison. It was a common enough thing. He got up and was looking for his clothes when he noticed that it was still pitch black outside. He heard the voice again saying, “John. Let’s go out for breakfast.” It couldn’t be us, not that early in the morning, and he was overcome by a fear so intense that he felt limp and lay back down on the floor. This time the voice, still sounding like Katherine, said, “John…open the door!” But he just lay on the floor where he could see hall light through the crack under the door and the shadow of someone standing outside. It went away but he did not sleep the rest of the night.
I told him that it couldn’t have been us because we were in Wausau. He checked with the old woman and the man who lived across the hall to see if they had knocked on his door, but they all said no. The woman kept the front door locked at night, and she was the one who opened it for visitors. No one stopped by that night.
John still wonders what would’ve happened if he had opened that door.
Eye on the Bye-Bye Man
That was Eli’s story.
Like most experiences of this kind, it does not have a satisfying resolution. Strange things happened, then they stopped happening, and that’s about it. Of all the strange, allegedly true, stories I’ve been told, though, this is one of the few that ever spooked me.
Some of this may have been atmosphere. I heard it late one Halloween night in a small, overheated apartment lit by jack-o-lanterns and decorated with cardboard skeletons. The room was crowded with guests, so dozens of witches and ghosts were sitting lined up along the sofa or standing in corners, silently smoking cigarettes and absorbing the story of the Bye-Bye Man. I expect that reading it on a cool flat page has less impact than a first person account heard at midnight through an eye-watering fog of tobacco, hot cider, and burning pumpkin insides, but as soon as Eli had finished, my curiosity began kicking in. What really happened? Can any of it be proven? Did the Bye-Bye Man, or someone like him, ever exist?
Eli will admit to sacrificing accuracy for effect when telling the story at Halloween (e.g., describing the Ouija board as cursed or saying that the mysterious visitor knocked at 3 AM. John didn’t actually notice the time, just that it was dark outside.) When he finally wrote it all down, Eli was recalling events that took place thirteen years earlier. Distortions and memory lapses were inevitable, he had freely retold it numerous times, and nothing could be corroborated. The notebooks were lost long ago; John is difficult to find, as his job keeps him on the road, and Katherine refuses to discuss what happened.
John’s former boarding house in Madison, Wisconsin. The attic window to the left was his room.
One of the goals of their experiment had been finding a piece of verifiable information that could not have been known to the sitters. They did not do this but I have made an attempt. There is, however, almost nothing definite for a researcher to pursue except the orphanage and (possibly) the murders.
Algiers
Algiers is a real place. It is a part of New Orleans, and though it is detached from the rest of the city and lies on the west bank of the Mississippi, a bend in the river actually puts it east of the French Quarter.
New Orleans would make an appropriate backdrop to the Bye-Bye Man’s story. Death can’t be concealed in a city where the water table is so high that bodies are interred in sprawling above-ground mausoleums, and funeral processions are accompanied by Dixieland jazz- bands. It is haunted by the ghosts of a murdered Turkish sultan, slaves, and sadistic masters and is the historical center of voodoo (or, more properly, Voduon) in North America, with two museums devoted to the subject. Offerings are still left at the reputed tombs of Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, and X’s are penciled onto them for good luck. The city is most famous for the annual grotesqueries of Mardi Gras, but there is an atmosphere of romantic decay about it that has inspired artists as diverse as Walt Disney and resident author Ann Rice. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion can be found off New Orleans Square, while Rice’s Lestat novels have made the city synonymous with decadent vampirism. But it’s not all Spanish moss, gumbo, and vaporish belles languidly fanning themselves on the veranda. New Orleans is a port and rail city, and Algiers played a role in its development.
What started out as a village dominated by enormous sugar plantations gave way to dry docks, ironworks, and warehouses when the riverfront was turned into a center for the ship repair business. In 1870, Algiers was incorporated into the city. Author Bill Sasser describes it today as “a part of New Orleans that most visitors never see. Its small Baptist churches, dangerous looking bars, dilapidated houses and vacant industrial lots are home to some of America’s worst urban poverty and crime, but good people also live honest lives there, in a culture steeped in spirituality and religion.”(28)
Vodoun is a part of that spirituality and Algiers has long been identified with magic; it is even mentioned in songs like J.B. Lenoir’s “Voodoo Boogie.”
>
I flew to Algiers, I sure had a wonderful time
I flew to Algiers, and I sure had a wonderful time
I met a voodoo woman who was changin’ a poor man’s mind(29)
The one fact in the Spirit of the Board’s story that seemed most likely to produce results was the orphanage. I contacted the Algiers Historical Society and was told that there had not been one there but there had been one in Gretna, “a couple of miles up river.”(30) The author of a history of Gretna, however, told me that she was not aware of any orphanages there either. What if it were a different kind of institution? There is a danger of casting too wide a net, but the Bye-Bye Man’s albinism, deteriorating eyesight, and erratic behavior suggested he might have been in a home for disabled children. One such home turned out to be on the border between Algiers and Plaquemine Parish, the Belle Chasse State School. This looked promising but it was founded in 1967(31) and could not have played a part in the story. (On the plus side, the school is less than a thousand feet from train tracks and the road where it’s located is said to be haunted by a creature with glowing eyes and a werewolf known as the “Rue-Ga-Rue.”(32))
My search for the orphanage or a reasonable equivalent has not been exhaustive (there are still several avenues that need investigating), but what about the crimes? Assuming the story is true, do any known murders correspond to those carried out by the Bye-bye Man? It’s possible.
The Southern Pacific’s Texas & New Orleans Railroad yard is in Algiers, and when the Bye-Bye Man fled the city it may have been on one of their trains. According to the Spirit of the Board, the murders began in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and it was around this time that mangled bodies began showing up thirteen hundred miles to the north.
The Mad Butcher
Between 1934 and 1939, an unknown killer known as “The Cleveland Torso Killer” or the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” murdered at least 16 men and women. The victims were fringe dwellers, transients, and prostitutes, who were killed by decapitation and their neatly dismembered remains left around Kingsbury Run. This is a gully running through downtown Cleveland, Ohio, that is “lined with 30-odd pairs of railroad tracks serving local factories and distant cities, bearing cargo to Pittsburgh, Chicago or Youngstown… During the Great Depression… [it] was also a favorite campsite for hoboes…”(33) Similar murders appeared in cities with rail links to Cleveland, with headless bodies found in boxcars from Youngstown, Ohio, and near the tracks in New Castle and West Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The chief investigator of the “torso” case, Detective Peter Merylo, believed that the same killer was responsible for between 40 and 50 murders. Despite many bizarre theories (including a mad scientist “attempting to graft human eyes and ears onto the tin skull of a mechanical robot” (34)) investigators believed “the Butcher rode the rails, picked his victims from among the ranks of the hobo populations with which he traveled, and carried out his murder-dismemberments in railroad cars.”(35)
The disappearance of a hobo may go unnoticed and unreported outside of hobo circles. In 1997, Salem, Oregon, Police Detective Mike Quackenbush told the The Spokesman Review: “You can kill a transient and (the body) may not surface for two weeks… The suspect, by that time, may be 20 states away.”(36) And when bodies are found, someone else may get the blame. A loosely knit organization of hoboes called the Freight Train Riders of America, for example, has been accused of committing three hundred murders a year! Headless bodies are also less likely to be identified, and several victims of the Butcher remain John and Jane Does.
Despite years of police work and a procession of odd suspects, including a “voodoo doctor” and a man who had an uncommon physical response to seeing chickens slaughtered, the killer was never found. Was it the Bye-Bye Man?
Decapitation would be in line with his interest in eyes and tongues, the head could be carried away and parts removed at leisure, but of the sixteen accepted “torso” slayings, the heads of eight were recovered. Some of these were skulls, but none of the fresher remains showed signs of mutilation beyond a severed neck. This suggests it was not the Bye-Bye Man. (A pair of scissors is the only weapon mentioned in connection with him, and they were used in a stabbing.) Finally, the first bodies appeared in Pennsylvania in 1925, a few years earlier than Eli’s story would suggest. More research may turn up murders committed at the right time and accompanied by the Bye-Bye Man’s signature mutilations, but until then, there is no evidence to show that he’s killed anyone.
Without an orphanage or evidence of murders, the story appears to be an invention. But who invented it and why? Perhaps the answers can be found in two of the popular interpretations of Ouija board phenomena discussed earlier: spirits and the sitters’ subconscious.
Spirits are credited with a wide range of moral and intellectual qualities, and their motives for creating a story like the Bye-Bye Man would reflect that; it could have been a simple prank by mischievous spirits, or something more sinister, like a case of attempted possession.
Unclean Spirits
Possession is usually defined as control of a living being by an external disembodied agent. It might be a spirit, a god, or the soul of someone who has died. There are, of course, numerous exceptions. (Corpses and animals can be taken over by spirits, and many cultures recognize possession by living, supernatural beings with bodies like the jinn of the Middle East.) The popular image of an adolescent girl floating over a mattress spewing profanities and pea soup is just one manifestation of a widespread and complex phenomenon, the main function of which is religious. Possession allows spirits to speak and act directly in this world; it remains an essential practice in ”the shamanism of the North American Indians and the aborigines of Siberia, in the devotional states of the early European saints and in the possession dances of African and New World Negro.“(37) Today, there are many Pentecostal and charismatic forms of Christian worship that actively seek possession by the Holy Spirit.
If we proceed on the assumption that spirits were involved in Wisconsin, taking part in the séances and the manifestations that followed, there is nothing to suggest they were benign. The manipulation of the sitters, the Bye-Bye Man’s gruesome story, sleep disturbances, frightening paranormal phenomena, and an overall climate of fear all point to the efforts of “evil spirits.”
“Evil spirits” is an elastic term that can be applied to anything from goblins to vampires. Here it refers to the souls of wicked people who have died, or hate-filled, malevolent intelligences that have never lived: demons, devils, and/or fallen angels. Either kind of evil spirit can cause possession but the “symptoms” may differ.
When souls of the dead are responsible, the victim may exhibit traits belonging to the deceased: their mannerisms, special knowledge, likes or dislikes, even allergic reactions. Demoniacs, the demonically possessed, display preternatural knowledge of the past, present, and future; speak and understand foreign and ancient languages unknown to the victim; are repelled by religion and everything associated with it; and are associated with some paranormal phenomena. Also, like angels dancing on the head of a pin, any number of evil spirits can possess a victim at the same time.
Jesus expelled a multitude of demons called “Legion” from the Gadarene demoniac into a herd of swine, which charged into the sea and drowned. A more recent case (not involving livestock) was an exorcism performed by Father Theophilus Riesinger on an adult woman in Earling, Iowa, in 1928. The priest successfully drove out spirits claiming to be the demon Beelzebub, along with the souls of the victim’s father, the father’s mistress, and even Judas Iscariot.(38) In life, the victim’s father had been an exceptionally evil character, who cursed her for not taking part in his depravities. The curse is believed to have resulted in her demonic possession, but this is uncommon.
Medieval and Renaissance authorities believed possession could result from witchcraft or illness, but the likeliest cause was the victim’s own sinfulness. They might be guilty of serious transgressions, as when “
in 531 Theodoric’s army had entered the capital of Auvergne …pillaged the basilica and committed several acts of abomination, which caused them… to be possessed by the devil.”(39) But the sins could also be comparatively light. The Malleus Maleficarum tells the story of “a hermit of upright and pious life” named Moses, who “engaged in a dispute with the Abbot Macharius, and [when he] went a little too far in the expression of a certain opinion, he was immediately delivered up to a terrible devil, who caused him to void his natural excrements through his mouth.”(40) A single thoughtless act might have disastrous consequences. There was a nun in fifth-century Italy, for instance, who failed to make the sign of the Cross before eating a lettuce leaf, swallowed a demon that happened to be sitting on it, and had to be exorcized.
This view of possession as a casual event, and demons as something akin to germs, is now uncommon in the west. The controversial, but widely read, author, exorcist, and former Jesuit priest, Malachi Martin (1921-1999), believed that evil spirits concentrate on perverting the will, not the body, and they must have cooperation. “At every new step,” he wrote, ”and during every moment of possession, the consent of the victim is necessary, or possession cannot be successful.”(41) This consent can be subtle, almost unconscious, or as straightforward as a signed contract between the possessed and the devil, but it must be there. (Though, the Roman Catholic Church does recognizes rare instances when “God seems sometimes to allow even the innocent to be exposed to the physical violence of the Devil.”(42)) Martin describes possession as a four-step process.
• The entry point “at which Evil Spirit enters an individual and a decision, however tenuous, is made by the victim to allow that entry.”
The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America Page 15