The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (12 page)

Mrs. Melvin Hensler, discoverer of the sinister potato sack, saw the phantom three times and said that during one of these sightings it looked like it had a hump on its back.

Later descriptions of the phantom include the standard fiendish red eyes, but none of the eyewitnesses mentioned them. That detail seems to have been added when it became part of Baltimore folklore.

Speculation

Social scientists might describe events in O’Donnell Heights as an example of an “imaginary community threat.” This approach suggests that the 900 families living there experienced “feelings of danger persisting within a diffuse population, lasting anywhere from a few weeks to several months…[the] creation and spread of these imaginary forces are a result of rumor and sensationalistic media reports that cause a conformity of misperceptions.”(17)

Misperceptions certainly played a part, but they don’t explain the relatively straightforward experiences described by William Buskirk and other witnesses. (I tried contacting William Buskirk, but he died in 1997. His sister-in-law told me he had a great sense of humor and while that might suggest a hoax, she also said that in the forty-six years they were related, William never mentioned the phantom. In fact, she hadn’t even heard about the incident until I contacted her.(18)) The police never denied that people were seeing something, but like George Cook, they thought it would turn out to be a “young hoodlum.” If it was, he was never caught, exposed, or confessed.

The story must have been spread by word-of-mouth because the two local newspapers ran just six articles, two of them fillers, and these appeared as the panic ended. The only one of these that might be described as “sensationalistic” was printed in
The Sun
on July 25, 1951, and included the experiences described by Buskirk, Mrs. Melvin Hensler, Jack Cromwell, and others. It ended on this sober, socially scientific, note: “The question of the prowler of O’Donnell Heights… continued to be not one of the phantoms, but of real people reacting to (and possibly creating) the unknown with their imaginations.”

Some will take the phantom’s affinity for St. Stanislaus as evidence that it was a ghost. Part of O’Donnell Heights was built on land that once belonged to St. Stanislaus, and the cemetery contains unmarked graves from the influenza epidemic of 1918. Also, bodies were dug up and reinterred when Boston Street was extended in the 1930s, but it’s hard to see why any of this would stir up a spirit in July 1951.(19) No one suggested that the phantom was a vampire either, despite wearing a cape, that “most evocative of garments” representing “concealment, darkness, the secrets and terrors of the night itself.”(20) Its alleged disappearance into a crypt, however, could indicate a different kind of subterranean connection.

Wm. Michael Mott, author of
Caverns, Cauldrons, and Concealed Creatures
, suggests that entities like the Phantom of O’Donnell Heights are flesh and blood beings that live underground. This may explain both their agility and their talent for making quick disappearances. ”An origin or habitat in a region of higher pressure,” he argues, “might result in a higher physical and muscular density in a life-form or being. This would equate to greater physical strength, the ability to make prodigious leaps and bounds, and a ruggedness of physiology not normally associated with those common-place creatures which have evolved or are designed to inhabit the surface of the earth.”(21)

Other less corporeal possibilities are that the phantom was a psycho-physical thoughtform (see “The Bridge to Body Island”) or an “ultraterrestrial.” These are a class of beings proposed by author John Keel, who suggests that inhabitants from a different part of the spectrum can appear in ours and cause mischief. Another possibility is demons, and there are in fact devils specifically assigned to the raising of “uproars” like the panic in O’Donnell Heights. Elementals are another possibility, one of the “lares, genii, fauns, satyrs, wood-nymphs, foliots, fairies, Robin Goodfellows [or] trolli” from traditional folklore.(22) Goblins belong in this category and there is a fictional version of them that recalls Baltimore’s bouncing nuisance.

Charles Dickens’ novel,
The Pickwick Papers
, contains several short stories, including “The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.” These are long-legged beings that appear in a cemetery on Christmas Eve to torment a gleefully misanthropic sexton named Gabriel Grub, who is digging a grave (“A coffin at Christmas! A Christmas Box. Ho! ho! ho!”). He is busy with the spade when goblins appear all around him.

“The first goblin was a most astonishing leaper, and none of the others could come near him; even in the extremity of his terror the sexton could not help observing, that while his friends were content to leap over the common-sized gravestones, the first one took the family vaults, iron railings and all, with as much ease as if they had been so many street-posts.”(23)

Grub did not undergo a Scrooge-like conversion at the end of the story, but vanished and was never seen again.

Another possibility is that the phantom was a “monster” in the classical sense, a divine warning of impending misfortune. West Virginia’s now famous “Mothman” is an example of a monster associated with disaster. Mothman was a red-eyed, winged humanoid that flew after cars and peeked into the windows of isolated houses. It haunted the area around the town of Point Pleasant where, on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River, leaving 46 people dead. The creature disappeared around the same time and has become more or less linked to the accident. Today, after several books and a feature film, a statue of Mothman stands in downtown Point Pleasant—the monster has been turned into a mascot.

O’Donnell Heights had a less dramatic fate. The neighborhood simply decayed, eaten away by poverty, crime, and neglect.

As for the phantom, it has not been sighted in Baltimore since 1951. The story, however, is revived every Halloween when newspapers print the annual roundup of local ghosts, legends, and haunted houses.

More Ectoplasmic Ectomorphs

There have been other specter-inspired panics in the United States. In September 1944, for example, Mattoon, Illinois, was the site of a two-week scare similar to the one seen in O’Donnell Heights.

It was caused by a lanky figure in black called the “Mad Gasser” that sprayed paralyzing gas into peoples’ homes, but did not make fantastic jumps when chased; it just ran away and was never caught. (For a thorough account of the Mad Gasser, see Chapter 18, “The Mad Gasser of Mattoon and his Kin,” in Loren Coleman’s
Mysterious America
, Paraview Press, 2001.) The Gasser is often cited as a classic example of “mass hysteria,” but like Gloucester in 1692, this mass hysteria left behind physical evidence, including footprints (apparently made by a pair of woman’s high-heeled shoes), a cloth soaked in noxious chemicals, a skeleton key, and a lipstick tube. Though the Gasser was something like the Phantom, Baltimore’s goblin more closely resembled the terror of Victorian England known as Springheel Jack.

Like its Yankee cousin, Springheel Jack was tall, thin, and hideous. It made superhuman leaps over walls, ran across rooftops, and easily outdistanced pursuers, but it was not necessarily considered a supernatural creature. The people of 19th century Britain were accustomed to miraculous technology and credited its phenomenal jumping to shoes fitted with metal springs. In other respects, Jack was a far more colorful proposition than anything seen in O’Donnell Heights: a fire-breathing gargoyle with clawed hands and pointed ears that wore a cloak and a tight-fitting suit of either metallic mesh or white oilskin (cloth made waterproof with oil). It had a silver helmet on its head, and to complete the ensemble, a lantern strapped to its chest. It was something of a hybrid, a medieval bogey using modern techniques to frighten people out late. Its bizarre exploits eventually became part of popular culture, and Jack appeared as a character on the stage and in several “penny dreadfuls,” the inexpensive and overwrought serial novels that were enormously popular during the period. In spite of all this exposure, or possibly because of it, Springheel Jack inspired panics all over England between 1837 and 1877.

The appearance of long-legged phantoms seems to breed a fear out of all proportion to the danger they represent. If, for example, every accusation made against the Phantom of O’Donnell Heights were true, it would have been guilty of trespassing, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, housebreaking, and making suspicious advances towards a little girl (assuming Esther Martin was a child; her age is not mentioned). This is not the kind of crime wave that normally inspires city residents to form armed patrols or keep dawn to dusk vigils, but there’s no predicting how human beings will react to the unusual.

The appearance of a Springheel Jack-type figure in the town of Mineral Point, Wisconsin, for example, did not produce a panic. Richard D. Hendricks, the premier chronicler of Badger State oddities, has looked into the case and generously contributed the following account of the Mineral Point Vampire:

“On March 30, 1981, while on a routine patrol, police officer Jon Pepper saw a caped figure lurking in a cemetery. The cop described the person as 6’ 5”, but he was seeing him in the dark, and estimated this based on tombstone height.

“‘He didn’t have makeup on his eyes or mouth and he had short hair,’ Pepper said. ‘It was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t know if he was on drugs, a mental case, or if someone was playing a joke. I’ve never seen anyone that tall before in Mineral Point.’” He gave chase, but lost his prey as the “vampire” jumped over a four-foot barbed wire fence and disappeared into a cow pasture. Pepper was a fairly young officer at the time and he took a good deal of ribbing. It was a two-day wonder, with lots of media coverage. I’ve gone through newspapers for months after the event, however, and nothing else was reported. The town had a field day with it, and “vampires” showed up in advertisements and drink specials, but alas, no new vampire.”

Hendricks continues: “Subsequently, I have heard some speculation that it was an actor, playing a role. Mineral Point is an arts community, and the well-known American Players Theatre is located in nearby Spring Green. I’ve recently heard from a second person that the event may have been a prank—a bit of theater to prank a prankster. Pepper himself was well known in Mineral Point as a prankster. I found an article that mentioned he sometimes wore a gorilla costume to scare people. Recently I learned the names of some people who may have been involved; I have yet to chase them down.

“I haven’t made up my mind, but I am leaning toward a prank that went further than anyone expected. It happened the evening of March 30—the day before April Fool’s Eve. The graveyard chase also happened the same day that President Reagan was shot. A vampire flapping around a cemetery may have been a coincidental well-timed arrival of a bit of levity the media could use to take the public’s mind off this near tragic event.”(24)

Panics, however, are not a thing of the past. As recently as February and March of 2005, Santa Fe, Argentina, was terrorized by
el Loco Tejado
, “the Rooftop Madman.” Detailed accounts have not appeared in English, but the story sounds familiar. A tall figure (2 m., or 6 ft. 6 inches tall) in a black cape, was scaling high walls and leaping from rooftop to rooftop, while frightened citizens locked themselves in at night, or patrolled the streets with clubs and machetes. The sheriff described it as an outbreak of “generalized psychosis” or “mass hysteria.”(25)

Mass hysteria is a reasonable explanation. It’s also reasonable to wonder why, when mass hysteria can take so many forms, that it often arrives as a tall, high-jumping, man in black?

7

THE LOST BOYS

Newark, New Jersey, 1978

This is the story of a mass disappearance.

There’s no reason to believe it was paranormal, but somehow that makes it worse; when it’s paranormal you don’t expect a solution.

A
turnepike
was once a “revolving barrier furnished with spikes used to block a road.”(1) Today, the term applies to any highway with a tollgate unless it’s referring to
the
Turnpike, in which case it means the New Jersey Turnpike—that twelve-lane ribbon of concrete stretching 148 miles across the state from Deepwater in the southwest to West New York in the northeast. The Turnpike is the busiest road on planet Earth and the most memorable part of it, certainly the one that makes the strongest impression, is the passage through the industrial corridor of Essex County.

Here it snakes through the kind of landscape that Soviet Five Year planners used to dream about: a panorama of smokestacks, pipelines, electrical pylons, swooping concrete highways, iron bridges, and rail yards stretching from one horizon to the other. Vast machines of production and commerce dominate the scenery. There are chemical plants and petroleum refineries, fire-breathing towers and columns of smoke that hang over tank farms swollen with petrochemicals. Massive steel gantries, like stick-figure horses, stand in rows along the docks, moving mountains of cargo containers between ships, trucks and railroad flatcars, while airplanes pass overhead with metronomic regularity.

As you travel past old factory towns and through the stink of crude oil being cooked into gasoline, you come to a spot where the gritty sprawl is interrupted by skyscrapers. This is Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, and home to a quarter million people.

Newark has a bad reputation, but a stroll through the downtown may change your mind. Broad Street is lined with discount stores and crowded with shoppers, while companies like Prudential Insurance, Bell Atlantic of New Jersey, and PSEG have their offices in the towers overhead. There are fine Art Deco and Beaux Arts buildings, an excellent museum, and a dome on top of City Hall that glitters like a gold skullcap. The impressive New Jersey Performing Arts Center is nearby, along with a new sports arena. Behind these showpieces, however, is the old Newark.

It is a bleak, dangerous city of razor wire, vacant lots, rubble, and rotting housing projects whose residents live in conditions rarely seen in 21st century America.(2) This Newark has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country, unemployment that is twice the national average, and a significant number of citizen who live in poverty. The crime, drug abuse and HIV/AIDS rates are equally grim.

This didn’t happen overnight. Newark’s decline began as long ago as the 1930s or 1940s and hit bottom in July 1967, when a series of riots left the city in flames, 26 people dead, thousands under arrest, and ten million dollars worth of property destroyed. A thousand businesses were looted or burned, many never to reopen, and middle-class white residents vanished into the surrounding suburbs. Newark remains the most segregated American city outside of the Midwest, with a population that is predominantly black and Latino.(3)

In the January 1975 issue of
Harper’s Magazine
, an article titled “The Worst American City,” by Arthur M. Louis, ranked America’s fifty largest cities. It used twenty-four categories, including crime, health care, income, parkland, etc. and determined that “The city of Newark stands without serious challenge as the worst of all. It ranked among the worst five cities in no fewer than nineteen of the twenty-four categories, and it was dead last in nine of them.” Louis concluded that “Newark, is a city that desperately needs help.”

It looked as though it was a city with nothing left to lose. Then on a summer night in 1978, five young men vanished and it managed to lose a little more.

The account that follows is based primarily on articles that appeared in the
Newark Star Ledger
and the
Times of Trenton
between 1978 and 2000. Newark police officials did not respond to requests for clarification or information, so much of what appears here is qualified with “allegedlies” and “apparentlies.”

An Otherwise Ordinary Day

Things were different in 1978. A peanut farmer was President of the United States; you listened to music on a radio, an 8-track tape, or a vinyl record (“Three Times a Lady” by the Commodores was number one); and the only way to walk down the street while talking on a phone was with a very long cord.

August 19th was sunny and hot. Temperatures reached the upper 80s that afternoon when five friends met at West Side Park to play basketball. They were all young black men: Ernest Taylor, aged 17; Randy Johnson, 16; Melvin Pittman, 17; Alvin Turner, 16; and Michael McDowell, 16. All of them lived in Newark, except McDowell, who was from East Orange. Whether or not they actually played basketball is unclear—like most of the events of that day, the details are uncertain.

At some point they met Lee Evans. Evans was 25 years old, a carpenter, and presumably a sizable presence (his nickname was “Big Man”) who the boys knew personally or by reputation. He sometimes hired teenagers to do odd jobs and enlisted all five to help him move boxes in nearby Irvington.

Evans may have wanted to start right away, but there was a change of plans; he was driving a pickup truck and dropped off some of the boys at 8
PM
, so three of them had dinner at home that evening. An hour later, two young men were seen in the truck (a witness thought one of them was McDowell.) They may have been heading towards East Orange, because sometime between 9:30 and 10:00, McDowell stopped at home to change his clothes and get a drink of water. His mother saw another person in the truck (presumably, this means sitting in the flatbed; Evans would have been in the cab), but she could not see who it was.

Irvington, East Orange, and Newark are adjoining cities, and the Big Man seems to have spent much of that Saturday driving from one to the other with the boys in tow. By 10:30, he had picked up all five, but “by that time, he decided it was too late to move the boxes and drove around in the truck before dropping the kids off at Clinton Avenue and Fabyan Place [in Newark] at 11PM.”(4) They all lived close by on Leslie Street, Beverly Street, Hawthorne Avenue, and Clinton; perhaps McDowell was planning to spend the night with one of his friends before going home.

After Evans dropped the boys off, “There was a 20-40- minute period when they were seen apart,“ said Detective Charles Conte, “two of them together then three of them together.”(5)

Corner of Clinton and Fabyan in Newark, New Jersey. (Robert Schneck)

Today the intersection of Clinton and Fabyan probably looks much the same as it did then. There are small shops, a laundromat, and a liquor store on the ground floor of a two-story apartment building. A bus stop is there, and a handsome brick building that’s been boarded up with trompe l’oeil curtained windows. The streets surrounding it are lined with old oversized wooden houses, some well maintained, others dilapidated, that sit uncomfortably close together. Many have porches on every floor, and on a hot Saturday night in August, residents must use them. There must have been open windows and people talking on their front steps that night, but even with all these potential witnesses, the boys vanished like ghosts sometime after 11:40 PM.

The Investigation

Witnesses apparently saw the boys up to the last few minutes of the night of August 19th, but not the morning of the 20th or afterwards. If they disappeared on the 20th, the next important event happened on Monday the 21st when one of the families received a collect call from Washington, D.C. The caller did not identify himself but said, “Your brother and his friends were caught in a truck heist and are being held in the Washington youth house.“(6) Published accounts do not say who received this call or how they responded.

Missing persons reports were filed but there was nothing remarkable about them as individual cases. It was only when “the reports were compiled, four by Newark police, one by East Orange police, that authorities realized that their disappearances could be linked…”(7) (The police department was experiencing a severe manpower shortage in 1978. This may explain why the disappearances were not linked sooner.)(8) Since the case involved juveniles, it was apparently the responsibility of Community and Youth Service, and in October Det. Charles Conte was assigned to “oversee and consolidate” the investigation. Like several other detectives, “Chuck” Conte would remain involved in the case for the rest of his career and into retirement. (Conte joined the force in 1966 and made detective in 1970. He worked in several different units including the Youth Aid Bureau and Homicide, and received numerous medals and commendations, including one for saving children from a burning building.) A friend who knew him in 1978 wrote, “I remember when he started investigating the case and how it kept him up at night… I also know that the case bothered him until the day he died.”(9)

Private citizens also became involved. The “residents of the Clinton Hill section circulated fliers throughout the area and neighboring states, offering a $1500 reward for any information on the whereabouts of the teens. A Montclair based organization, called the Crisis Coalition, organized search parties and also circulated fliers throughout the state.“(10) In addition, when ”a community group demanded the case get attention, the city formed a task force, the prosecutor formed an investigative team and a local citizens group mobilized.”(11)

The “Big Man,” Lee Evans, found himself a suspect. He was questioned several times and different theories were constructed around him, but Evans passed a polygraph test, presumably had an alibi, and was never charged. (December 1978, however, was an especially bad time to be hiring teenage boys who subsequently disappeared. That month the bodies of 28 young men and boys were found under the house of Chicago contractor John Wayne Gacy, who was also known for employing them.) No other suspects have been publicly named.

Police in Newark canvassed the neighborhoods, while the boys’ friends and relatives were interviewed and their rooms searched for clues. It turned out that some had marijuana and a history of minor run-ins with the law, but there was no reason to believe they were involved in the kind of crime that might end in mass murder. These were, after all, kids who moved boxes for pocket money, and the police did not suggest that their disappearance was the result of a “drug deal gone sour.” Instead, they kept looking.

The boys had not joined the military or been put in jail. They had not been admitted to a hospital or mental asylum, or run off and joined the circus. (This might sound improbably Norman Rockwell-ish, but traveling circuses do hire unskilled laborers called “roustabouts” to do the least glamorous jobs.) Police also checked political groups and religious cults; by November their investigation had reached the jungles of Guyana.

That was the month that the Reverend Jim Jones, charismatic leader of the People’s Temple, ordered his followers to commit “an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”(12) Over 900 people died in Jonestown and New Jersey police went through the lists of casualties to make sure the missing boys were not among them.

Detectives did this whenever a number of young black men turned up murdered. They sifted through the victims of the Atlanta child killings in 1979-1981 and those of Jeffrey Dahmer in 1991.

High profile cases like these, however, were exceptional, and most of the investigation consisted of following up leads that led nowhere. The call from Washington, D.C., was one of the few real clues investigators had, and while the caller was never found, the telephone was traced to the National Visitor’s Center. This was a vast granite railroad terminal, the former Union Station, but by 1978 it was a decaying and largely deserted tourist attraction that soon closed.(13) While police and civilians kept searching, the families suffered the pain peculiar to those whose loved ones are missing.

Time passed. By the fifth year citizens’ groups had done what they could and faded away. In 1986, detectives were following up a tip supplied by a psychic, the first of three occasions acknowledged by officials. Otherwise, the search for the boys had almost ceased to generate new clues.

The years rolled into decades and the case remained the responsibility of Community and Youth Services, even though the “boys” would now have been around 30 years old. It remained a missing persons case as it “cannot officially be handled as a homicide probe because no bodies have been found.”(14)