The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (2 page)

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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 appeared 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.

This would be the pattern of things for the better part of a month: defenders chasing invaders, invaders chasing defenders, with lots of shouting and firing of guns, but little in the way of results.

On the night of July 9th, Ebenezer was walking towards a meadow when two figures came running towards him. According to Babson, they looked like Frenchmen and since one was carrying a “bright gun” on his back, he retreated to the garrison. Inside, they heard the sounds of stamping and running once again. One or two nights later, there was also a noise like stones “being thrown against the barn”(6) (so, there must have been a barn nearby).

At this point, the entire neighborhood seems to have been sleeping in the garrison. This was probably a fortified house built on a hill, with thick walls made of stone or squared-off lumber. A second story normally projected over the lower floor of a garrison by two to three feet and “This overhang feature was designed to combat Indians who customarily attacked with fire or smoke. A loose board in the overhang could be removed in order to pour boiling water on marauders or on fires below. Each wall also had narrow slits for firearms.”(7) It also seems to have been protected by some kind of fence or a palisade built of upright logs. When settlements were in danger, citizens worked with weapons close at hand during the day, and returned to these small fortresses at night.

There is no mention of anyone else seeing the raiders until Babson and a man named John Brown were in the garrison and three of the interlopers appeared. They fired on them but “were disappointed by their running to and fro from the corn into the bushes.” This went on for the next two or three nights but, in all that time, neither Babson nor Brown were able to hit one.

The Gloucesterites, were about to have a violent confrontation with the raiders. When it was over, though, they may have wondered what they were fighting.

The men were in the garrison on July 14th, when a half-dozen invaders were sighted within “gun-shot.” One stayed behind, probably to protect the families inside, while the rest took off after them. Mather (or Emerson) says the settlers “marched” towards them, but that suggests discipline in what was, most likely, a chaotic scene.

Two of the strangers ran out of the bushes and Babson tried shooting them, but his gun did not fire. They returned to the bushes and he called to the men on the other side of the swamp saying, “Here they are! Here they are!” Running to meet the other defenders, Babson saw “three men walk softly out of the swamp by each other’s side: the middlemost having on a white waistcoat.” He got within 30 to 50 feet of the trio, fired, and they all fell down. Shouting that “he had kill’d three! He had kill’d three!” Babson ran towards the spot where they had fallen. Then things got complicated.

He had almost reached the place when “they all rose up, and one of them shot at him, and hearing the bullet whist by him, he ran behind a tree, and loaded his gun, and seeing them lye behind a log, he crept toward them again, telling his companions, ‘they were here!’ So his companions came up to him, and they all ran directly to the log with all speed; but before they got thither, they saw them start up, and run every man his way; one of them run into the corn, whom they pursued and hemm’d in: and Bapson [sic] seeing him coming toward himself, shot at him as he was getting over the fence, and saw him fall off the fence on the ground, but when he came to the spot he could not find him. So they all searched the corn; and as they were searching, they heard a great discoursing in the swamp, but could not understand what they said; for they spoke in an
unknown tongue
.”

Returning to the garrison, the men could see the invaders “skulking among the corn and bushes, but could not get a shot at them.”

The next day’s devilments began at sunrise, when one of the raiders came out of the swamp and stood close to “the fence” (the fence around the garrison?) within range of the occupants. Isaac Prince took a long gun and fired swan shot at the stranger, but it had no effect and the figure ran off.(8)

This must have been frustrating. In Whittier’s poem, one of the defenders loses patience with standard ammunitions and makes an experiment.

‘Ghosts or witches,’ said the captain,

‘thus I foil the Evil One!’

And he rammed a silver button, 

from his doublet down his gun.

The poet’s captain, however, has no more luck with a silver button than a lead ball. There is no mention of the settlers using this method against the raiders, though their descendants used buttons to bring down an occasional witch. In 1745, for example, someone in Gloucester shot a crow in the leg with a silver sleeve button and, at the same time, a local witch named Peg Wesson fell and broke her leg.(9) The doctor was called and discovered the button in Peg’s wound. In 1692, however, they needed something more practical, like reinforcements.

Babson, with his knack for running into the invaders, may not have been the best person to send for help. It was two and a half miles to Gloucester Harbor and he had only gone one-fifth that distance when he heard a gun go off. The bullet “whist” past his ear, cut off a pine bush, and lodged in a hemlock tree. Looking around, Babson saw four armed men hurrying towards him, so he ran into the bushes, shot at them, and kept running until he reached the harbor. Six men, more or less, returned with Babson and combed the woods as they went. They saw the pine-bush clipped by the bullet along with the spot “where it lodg’d in the hemlock-tree, and they took the bullet out, which is still to be seen.” The raiders’ footprints were discovered around the garrison, and while the men examined these, they saw an Indian wearing “a blue coat, and his hair ty’d up behind,” standing by a tree and watching them. The group “spake to each other” (perhaps calling each other’s attention to the stranger), and he disappeared into the swamp. They chased after, fired a shot without results, and briefly spied another figure resembling a Frenchman.(10)

A similar episode took place that day or Mather gives another version of the same story. (“July 15. Ezekiel Day being in a company with several others, who were ordered to scout the woods, when they came to a certain fresh meadow, he saw a man which he apprehended to be an Indian, cloathed in blue; and as soon as he saw him start up and run away, he shot at him; whereupon he saw another rise up a little way off, who also run with speed; which together with his companions, diligently sought after them, they could not find them.”)

In a separate incident, John Hammond was scouting the woods with several men when a figure was seen wearing “a blue shirt and white breeches, and something abut his head; but could not overtake him.”(11)