The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (14 page)

A furnace is the best way to do it. Open fires, even in a pit, are difficult to hide. They attract attention, produce quantities of foul smelling smoke, flare out of control, and take hours to do a thorough job. Teeth, bone, and hair fragments survive all but the most intense incineration, and internal organs are surprisingly durable.

In an article about spontaneous human combustion, Dr. Mark Benecke wrote: “The high temperatures of the outer parts of the burning body is not maintained internally, where fluids in the various organs and cavities help prevent their incineration…The effect is not commonly known, and even first-year medical students express surprise when shown burned corpses containing intact organs.”(38) Five cadavers quintuples the job, and if the teenagers weighed as little as 120 pounds each, that would mean 600 pounds of muscle, fat, blood, and bones would have to be destroyed. Even the most efficient modern cremation retorts (or “pathological incinerator”) would require four hours to consume this amount.(39) There would also be five outfits, ten shoes, and personal effects to dispose of, like wallets and watches as well as zippers, eyelets, and buttons. None of these have ever been found or at least recognized as related to the disappearances.

Most likely, the remains would have been partially burned before being buried in a hole large enough to hold five bodies, but “Burial is hard in cities, and in the country the grave is readily distinguishable by traces of disturbed soil. Shallow graves give up their dead. Deep ones take hours to dig, and neighbours think it odd.”(40) Then come the inevitable dog walkers and Boy Scouts who always seem to find the people that other people are trying to lose. If the bodies were dumped in the water, nothing has ever surfaced.

John Monti said that one of the boys was buried under a house and private homes can make effective cemeteries. In 1915, the skeletons of six young men were discovered in shallow graves beneath the house of Eugene Butler, a North Dakota man who had died in an insane asylum two years earlier. Stella Williamson, an elderly church treasurer from Gallitizin, Pennsylvania, died in 1980, and left a letter directing police to a trunk containing the mummified bodies of five infants wrapped in newspapers. Even apartments can be turned into morgues; English necrophile John Reginald Halliday Christie squirreled away six corpses in a tiny London flat, putting one under the floor, three in the cupboard, and two out in the garden. There is a lot of construction underway in Newark, and it’s possible that new evidence, even bodies, could turn up while digging new foundations.

It’s hard to imagine a happy resolution to the disappearances but there are also less gruesome possibilities to consider. Could they have had some kind of accident? Chuck Conte discussed this in 1998: “They could have stolen a car and gone for a joy ride. Who knows, they could have cracked up on a back road, driven into a creek or lake and sank.”(41)

This sounds improbable and raises more questions. Was a car stolen in the vicinity of Clinton and Fabyan that night? Did any of the boys know how to drive? Presumably yes, or the truck heist story would make even less sense.

It also recalls urban legends about concealed car wrecks. These typically begin with a crew out doing roadwork, when someone drops a tool, and a metallic “clang” is heard coming from an unexpected place. They look inside a pile of boulders or clump of underbrush and discover a very old car that had crashed years before with the skeletons of the passengers still sitting in the seats.

Folklorist Jan Brunvand traces this story back to a tale collected in 19th century Norway. It tells of a hunter in a remote valley who shoots an arrow at a bird, misses, and hears a metallic sound come ringing out of the trees. The arrow has struck a bell, and it leads him to a church that has been completely overgrown by forest. The building is all that remains of a town wiped out by the Black Death.(42)

Det. Conte, however, may have been remembering a more recent case, one that explained the disappearance of five Florida teenagers in 1979. They vanished as completely as the boys in Newark, and if Conte felt a little jealous, it only means that homicide detectives are human, too.

March 3, 1997

After 18 years, Missing Teens’ Bodies Found in Submerged Van

BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP) - Matthew Henrich’s mother started writing the letters to her son shortly after he disappeared nearly 18 years ago.

“Matt, I never know how to start. I don’t know whatever happened to you or even if you are alive,’’ said one of Peggy Kelly’s missives.

“We all just keep praying to God that one day, you’ll walk into the door. We have been doing everything we can to find out and always come up empty.’’

Ms. Kelly, 57, of Fort Lauderdale, sent the letters to the Social Security Administration, which promised to forward them to her son if he ever got a job and sent them a change of address.

But since July 14, 1979, it appears that Henrich’s body and those of four other teen-agers were in his van, submerged upside down in a murky drainage canal, say Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputies and relatives of the teens.

A fisherman spotted the crushed brownish-gold 1976 Dodge van last month just west of Florida’s Turnpike. It was coated with algae and full of mud. A salvage yard manager preparing to demolish the van on Friday noticed bones in the mud and called the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

Investigators found more bones, bits of clothing, jewelry, two soggy wallets, beer bottles, and a driver’s license bearing the name of one of the five who vanished that night, said sheriff’s spokesman Paul Miller.

The teens were identified as Kimberly Marie Barnes, 16, of Lake Forest; Phillip Joseph Pompi, 19, of North Miami; William R. Briscoe, 18, of Hollywood; and John Paul Simmons, 18, of Lake Forest; and Henrich, 18, of Miami Gardens.

Positive identification will take some time because the bones are intermingled and extremely decomposed, said Dr. John Thogmartin of the county medical examiner’s office.

Missing person reports were filed for each of the teens but led nowhere. The van was never reported stolen or missing. Investigators say there’s no indication of foul play.

“I never lost hope, but I suspected something was wrong,’’ the twice-widowed Ms. Kelly told the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale on Sunday. “In writing these letters, I had the impression I was communicating with my son even if I cried the whole time I wrote.’’

There were many rumors surrounding the teens’ disappearance, including that they had been spotted in Huntington Beach, California. This prompted Lisa Zakovsky, Phillip’s sister, to drive to California in 1979 where she spent 10 days searching for her brother.

“It was very hard for me because we were very, very close,’’ Ms. Zakovsky said. “I’m glad to know that Phillip’s been with God the last 17 years.’’

“It was easier to not know,’’ a visibly upset Jamie Reffett, Kimberly’s sister, said at the canal Sunday. “I could have lived with that the rest of my life.’’

Today

Nothing about the five boys has ever appeared in the National Crime Information Center or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Most of the detectives who have worked on the case are retired or have passed away. Conte died of a heart attack in 2000, at the age of 60, while lying on a beach in Costa Rica.(43) A detective remained assigned to the case, but with the weight of new cases and a lack of evidence, the disappearance couldn't be a high priority. 

The case remained open but there were no new developments until March of 2010 when Lee Evans was arrested for murder and arson. His cousin, Philander Hampton, reportedly told police that Evans had a dispute with the boys about drugs, so Hampton and Evans drove them to an abandoned house at gunpoint, locked the five teenagers inside, and burned it down. 

 This contradicts newspaper accounts of the boys’ and Evans’ movements and raises the possibility that authorities might have recovered physical evidence. As of October 2010, a trial appeared likely and, for the first time, a solution to the decades-old mystery seemed possible.

8

THE BRIDGE TO BODY ISLAND

Wisconsin, 1990

This story is different from all the others in this book.

First, the source is a close friend. Second, though this might sound dramatic, readers who are genuinely frightened by the paranormal or troubled by obsessive thoughts should consider skipping this chapter.

“Sit opposite your partner and rest your fingers lightly on the glowing planchette. Now ask your question. Concentrate very hard… and watch as the answer is revealed in the message window. Will it tell you YES…or NO? Will it give you a NUMBER… or SPELL out the answer?

“Ask any question you want. Ouija will answer.

“It’s only a game-isn’t it?”

Those are the words printed on a Ouija board box.

Though it is packaged and sold as a game, the Ouija board was developed as an improved method of “communication between the material and spirit world.”(1) Practitioners consult the boards for many reasons: to learn the future, find lost objects, or get advice, but its purpose is to talk with spirits, and it is spirits that are supposed to provide the answers. Whether this is actually what happens is a subject for debate, but it adds an element of mystery and danger to using the Ouija board that no other game can equal. You can play all the Parcheesi you want without having to worry about demonic possession, and if you throw Monopoly into a fire, it won’t scream the way Ouija supposedly does.

Most people who use the board will have a harmless, slightly spooky, experience that they will enjoy. There are stories, however, of ghostly phenomena occuring when the board is used: strange raps, apparitions, pointers moving on their own and even spelling out threats. Many of these happen during slumber parties and are reported by pre-adolescent girls who have scared each other into hysterics. (Note the sample questions printed on the box: “Will I star in my own music video?” “Does Taylor like me?” The manufacturers know who’s buying their product.) Older more sober witnesses have also had disturbing experiences and the subject of this chapter is an example of the latter. To put it into context, however, let’sbegin with the Ouija board itself.

O-U-I-J-A

The Ouija board comes in two pieces: the pointer, or “planchette” that moves, and the board that it moves across. The board is rectangular with a smooth surface and has the words “YES” and “NO” printed along the top, and the trademarked name “OUIJA, MYSTIFYING ORACLE” between them. The letters of the alphabet are arranged in two rows, followed by the numbers 0 to 9 and “GOOD BYE” at the bottom. The corners are decorated with black billowing clouds, a smiling sun, moon, star, and a séance scene.

The pointer is a heart-shaped platform with a porthole in the center. It sits on three short legs, and slides across the board choosing numbers or letters in response to questions. The letter that appears in the porthole is the one that’s supposed to be chosen, though some people, or spirits, prefer using the pointed tip of the planchette.

There have been attempts to link Ouija with ancient forms of divination, but it was developed to meet the specific needs of 19th century Spiritualism. Americans have been consulting spirits for a long time, using everything from ritual magic to bibliomancy, that is, divining with books. The Puritans, for example, practiced a form called “gospel cleromancy,” in which the questioner puts on a blindfold, opens the Bible to a random page, places the point of a pin on the text and applies the verse to their situation (the Rev. Increase Mather denounced the custom). Methods that relied on sorcerers or Bible texts, however, were unequal to the needs of Victorians, who were long-winded on both the physical and astral planes.

Orators of the period were judged by their stamina, diaries and personal correspondence were voluminous, and it was not unusual for spirits to dictate full-length books or deliver lectures on everything from geology to metaphysics. Those who attended séances did not passively receive wisdom from the Other Side, they asked questions on every conceivable subject and this created a lot of traffic between the worlds. A medium made this manageable by summoning the spirits themselves, producing written messages or rapping out responses, but demand for their services was high, as were their fees.With only so many mediums available many Spiritualists relied on a technique called “table turning.”

This was “the simplest and crudest form of communication… The usual procedure is to form a circle around the table, place hands lightly, with fingertips touching, on the leaf and, with lowered lights or in complete darkness, wait for manifestations… Apparently, there is an intelligence behind these movements. If the letters of the alphabet are called over in the dark the table, by tilting or knocking on the floor or tapping the sitter, indicates certain letters which connectedly spell out a message, often purporting to come from someone deceased.”(2) A similar system appeared at Spiritualism’s inception to communicate with the rapping poltergeist that was harassing the Fox family in Hydesville, New York, in 1848(3) , but this was not the first time that spirits rapped out responses to questions. Humbert de Birck, for example, died in Oppenheim in 1620, and strange noises were soon being heard inside his house. “The master of the house, suspecting that it was her [sic?] brother-in-law, said: ‘If you are Humbert, tap on the wall three times.’ Three taps were heard…not only at the wall, but also at the fountain.”

Table turning was dull, time consuming work; 53 letters have to be called out just to spell “hello,” but this was an ingenious era, and ways of overcoming the bottleneck in communications were soon available.

In one technique, the medium moved her finger over an alphabet printed on a board and the spirits rapped when she touched the one it wanted. This was followed by mechanical devices with names like the “Spiritscope” and “Pytho or the Thought Reader,” that combined a printed alphabet with a sliding or revolving arrow and picked out letters without audible signals from Beyond. The planchette (French, “little plank”) was invented as another tool for spirits to write out messages or draw pictures.

The original planchette was a small platform with three legs: two had rotating casters and the third was a pencil, inserted point down. The operator(s) rested their fingertips on top and waited for the spirits to start scribbling. Sometime around 1886, an unknown genius (possibly in Ohio) combined the planchette with an alphabet board and created the ”talking board.”(5)

Using one did not require special skills or talents, and with practice it became possible for sitters to receive message at a speed that approached conversation. The board worked so well that by 1886, “Its use and operation [had] taken the place of card parties.”(6)

The $1.50 Miracle

The word “Ouija” made its first official appearance on February 3, 1891, in the
Patent Office Gazette
.(7) The boards were manufactured by Charles W. Kennard’s, Kennard Novelty Company (price, $1.50), and then by the Ouija Novelty Company. In 1901, an employee of the second firm, William Fuld, was put in charge and became the most important man in the history of Ouija. In twenty-five years he would sell millions of boards and make it a household word.

“One of William Fuld’s first public relations gimmicks, as master of his company, was to reinvent the history of the talking board. He said that he himself had invented the board and that the name Ouija was a fusion of the French word “oui” for yes, and the German “ja” for yes.”(8) This doesn’t make much sense, though, and leads to the question of what does “Ouija” really mean?

The Oxford English Dictionary
repeats Fuld’s explanation, but the online Museum of Talking Boards mentions another possibility. ”Charles Kennard called the new board Ouija (pronounced wE-ja) after the Egyptian word for good luck. Ouija is not Egyptian for good luck but since the board reportedly told him it was during a session, the name stuck. Or so the story goes. It is more likely that the name came from the fabled Moroccan city Oujda (also spelled Ouijida and Oudjda). This makes sense given the period’s fondness for Middle Eastern cities and the psychic miracles of the Fakirs.”(9) Personally, I think there may be something to Kennard’s story.

The Egyptians were great believers in amulets, and along with scarabs and ankhs, carried carved representations of the
Udjatti
,(10) the Eye of the Sun, and the Eye of the Moon. The
Udjat
or
Wedjat
-eye looks like the capital letter “R“ with the upper half replaced by an eye; it “was a symbol of the power of the god of light “ used to drive away evil.”(11) “Udjatti”, “Udjat,” and “Wedjat “ all sound something like “Ouija”, and the board is decorated with the “Eyes of Heaven,” that is, the sun and moon. (On the other hand, the moon is a crescent and a star, a symbol of Islam, and point back to the Moroccan city as the original inspiration.)

Fuld died in 1927. He was supervising work being done on the roof of the Ouija board factory in Baltimore when an iron support gave way and he fell three stories to his death. The family continued to produce a variety of novelty boards until 1966, when Parker Brothers bought the company. The toy manufacturing giant still makes Ouija, and while modern boards are smaller, they glow in the dark, as does the lightweight plastic planchette.

And Yet It Moves!

There are two popular explanations for how the Ouija Board works. The first is based on a physical/mental phenomenon known as automatism.

Automatism is unconscious mental and physical activity which, in the case of Ouija boards, means the sitters are responsible for moving the planchette and producing the messages. What appears to be spirit communication is actually a conversation between different parts of the sitter’s (or sitters’) mind. The resulting material may be so alien to the participants’ notion of themselves, however, that an external source seems to be responsible.

Ouija is a form of automatic writing, a phenomenon in which “the writer does not consciously know what he is writing: this is described as ‘disassociation,’ which means that there is some temporary separation of the part of the personality engaged in the writing process from the normal state of the individual.“(12) At one time psychologists encouraged their patients to produce automatic writing as a way of gaining access to the subconscious; nevertheless spirits are often credited as being the true source of the material. One of the most famous, and prolific, examples of the phenomenon began on July 8, 1913, when Pearl Curran, a housewife in St. Louis, Missouri, allegedly received a message on her Ouija board saying, “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name.”

Worth claimed to be the spirit of a poor English woman who was born in Dorsetshire in 1649, and immigrated to the New World, where she was killed in an Indian massacre. Curran’s education was limited, but the long “collaboration” between housewife and spirit produced millions of words in the form of historical novels, plays, poems, short stories, and a monthly magazine. Six of the books were published. (“Dr. Usher, Professor of history in Washington University considers
The Sorry Tale
, a composition of 350,000 words, ‘the greatest story penned of the life and times of Christ since the Gospels were finished.’”(13))

Curran’s work is considered well written and the historical details accurate, but it remains unclear how much of it came from the author’s subconscious. According to the Museum of Talking Boards: “when push came to shove, Pearl Curran denied that the Ouija board was responsible for her prolific output. Many of her admirers refused to believe this, and maintained that Pearl had buckled under the pressures and criticisms from outsiders.”(14)

A more popular explanation for how Ouija boards work is spirits. The board was designed to improve communications between the material plane (our world) and discarnate intelligences existing on the astral plane, a higher, less physical, world composed of finer material than this one. These beings include spirits of the dead, spirits that have never lived, angels, demons, and others. The medium, or sitters, serve as a point of contact between the planes, and communication occurs via telepathy (“mind-to-mind communication of thoughts, ideas, feelings, sensations, and mental images”(15)), or through a limited form of possession, in which case the experimenter(s) cedes some control of her body to the spirits.

These entities display a wide range of moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities that can present difficulties for the operators. Spirits must be relied on to identify themselves, and can claim to be anyone from Imhotep to the sitter’s Aunt Emily. This allows lonely or mischievous spirits to indulge in masquerading and provides an opportunity for other, less innocent, beings to introduce themselves into the sitters’ lives. It is this danger of consorting with demons in sheeps’ clothing that inspires much of the criticism aimed at Ouija boards. (According to Ouija folklore, placing a pure silver coin on the board will keep evil spirits at bay, but don’t rely on it.)

Edgar Cayce, Kentucky’s famous “Sleeping Prophet,” warned against automatic writing and is supposed to have called Ouija a “dangerous toy.” While Cayce’s quote hasn’t been confirmed, the sentiment has, and other mystics share his opinion. In 1968, the “
Psychic News
, a noted English spiritualist newspaper… began a campaign demanding a ban on the sale of ouija [sic] boards.”(16) The harshest attacks, however, come from Christians who cite biblical prohibitions against divination and repeat lurid anecdotes about the board that recall anti-drug literature.