The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (21 page)

It may be that the Wisconsin group’s haphazard approach resulted in an undefined, loosely constructed being that tried to fulfill its creators’ expectations by killing anyone thinking about Gloomsinger or the Bye-Bye Man. Its appearance outside John’s room and attempt to enlist his cooperation, however, suggests that it operated under certain restrictions. Perhaps these were incorporated into its make-up from the ragbag of sources presumed to have gone into creating the story. Like the consent needed by demons, there is a tradition that evil spirits cannot cross the threshold without being invited. The invitation can be obtained through threats, coaxing, or deceptions (like imitating Katherine’s voice), but without it they are powerless. “The concept… probably evolved out of the Christian tradition that the devil cannot go where he is not welcome.”(75)

If the Wisconsin group did create a monster, what happened to it? With the end of the séances and the breaking up of the collective mind, did it fade away? Or is the Bye-Bye Man lying dormant but potentially dangerous, like a hibernating rattlesnake? Fortune wrote that the artificial elemental’s existence is “akin to that of an electric battery, it slowly leaks out by means of radiation, and unless recharged periodically, will finally weaken and die out.”(76) Does “die out” mean total extinction, or is the Bye-Bye Man (or the potential for it) floating aimlessly in whatever ether these things inhabit, waiting to be revived through the power of thought? Perhaps it will only be gone when it is entirely forgotten.

Dion Fortune and David-Neel, however, were playing by occult game rules. Our culture is generally dubious about “Fiends who materialize out of nothing and nowhere, like winged pigweed and Russian thistle.”(77) This may be just as well, as David-Neel mentions another possibility that is not pleasant to contemplate. “Tibetan magicians… relate cases in which the
tulpa
is sent to fulfil a mission, but does not come back and pursues its peregrinations as a half-conscious, dangerously mischievous puppet.”(78)

Fortunately, there is no evidence to suggest the Bye-Bye Man actually exists
–
nothing except an occasional, disturbing news story.

Odd Hat, Dark Suit

On November 6, 2001, in the small town of Florence, Montana, three grandmothers had their throats cut in the middle of the day in a beauty salon next to a five-lane highway and less than 500 feet from railroad tracks. The killer has not been caught but witnesses were able to describe him.

“Ravalli County Sheriff Perry Johnson said the sketches were the result of several interviews with people in the area who got a good look at the man who wore an odd hat and was dressed either in a dark suit or a duster-type coat.”

The
Headwater News of the Rockies
reported that “The man had no facial hair, and is in his 20s, around 6 feet tall, with a slender build.

“He was wearing a white shirt with no tie and could have been carrying something when he was seen south of town.

“Authorities also released a photo of a pair of black-rimmed sunglasses that they have determined did not belong to any of the women at the salon. It’s not known if they were left there by another customer or the killer.”(79)

The odd, neat face staring out from under the brim of the black hat on the wanted poster was not the Bye-Bye Man. If the suspect suffered from albinism, the witnesses could hardly have missed it, and there was no hint that he was blind. The victims did not have the signature mutilations, and no mention is made of the Sack of Gore or paint on the sunglasses. There’s just the crime, an odd costume, the killer’s unexplained get-away, and train tracks nearby.

Like our less cautious, bug-eating ancestors, we may have ventured too far out onto some very slender limbs here; let’s restore perspective by closing this story where it began, in America’s dairy-land.

A Walk Across the Bridge

Before writing this book I visited Wisconsin and saw some of the places and things mentioned in the story.

The Ouija board that led the sitters to “The Spirit of the Board” has not been used since the last séance and is kept locked inside a closet in a rural cabin. It is one of several vaguely supernatural objects owned by Eli, including a bar of soap from a haunted sink, a book of black magic, and a cursed monkey spear (the curse was aimed at a local anthropologist, and its effectiveness insured by poisoning his dinner).

The boarding house where John stayed in Madison is now a private residence. It’s a handsome building overlooking Lake Mendota, and the window of his former attic room can be seen on the left side of the roof.

I also walked across the railroad bridge connecting the west bank of the Wisconsin River to Barker-Stewart, “Body” Island. This is where Katherine had her experience, and while Eli described it as a pretty spot, that was in the summer. The attractions are less obvious in the tired light of a January afternoon, with scrubby trees poking out of snowdrifts along the banks and the river frozen into blue-green pavement.

The bridge itself is made up of three parts. Two open-work rectangular boxes separated by a middle section with solid metal walls that follow each other across the river on squat pontoon-shaped concrete piers. It’s not the kind of local landmark that’s likely to appear on a postcard with “Welcome Home to Wausau!” printed across the top, but the scene isn’t sinister, just gray and wintry. Maybe the place has a different feeling at night, when thoughts of murdered women and drowned lumberjacks begin asserting themselves.

I stepped from the shelter of the trees onto the bridge’s wooden walkway and immediately heard whistling, but this was the wind; there was a breeze coming off the river that caressed your face like the business end of a belt-sander. Wisconsin doesn’t let you forget it’s winter, and after fighting the temptation to experiment (what would really happen if I touched a girder with my tongue?), I continued across to the island.

There was little there. Just train tracks that disappeared into the snow and stands of tall yellow prairie grass waving in the wind. Nothing that looked like the animated contents of a butcher’s case came flopping through the snow, and no dark figures were lurking in the brush, apart from Eli who accompanied me on my visit.

Katherine, of course, never made it to Body Island. After breaking up with Eli, she had a relationship with John but it did not last. Today Katherine is married and living in another state while John is an interstate truck driver.

Not long after their experience with the Bye-Bye Man, Eli left Wisconsin. He spent several years studying the Romany people in England and Eastern Europe, met the woman who would become his wife in Bulgaria, and today they live in New York City where he works with the mentally ill. While Eli still hasn’t had a paranormal experience, he remains interested in strange phenomena and wrote out the account used here. He also showed me the bridge, boarding house, and other sites related to the story.

Visiting these places was interesting but did not provide any new insights. Was the Bye-Bye Man real, in the sense that other people are real? Was he imaginary? Or does he belong to some other category that’s difficult to define? Like most researchers, I set out to answer these questions with the confidence of Harry Angel, the doomed detective in
Falling Angel
, who tells his client, Louis Cyphre, that ”Nothing’s going to stop me from getting to the truth.”

It didn’t take long. however, before I appreciated Cyphre’s reply: “The truth, Mr. Angel, is an elusive quarry.”

EPILOGUE

Authors, especially those who write horror and science fiction, are often asked where they get their ideas. A book like this inspires similar questions, like “where do you find these things?” or “how did you come to write about such-and-such a haunting, or this-or-that ghoul?” and even “why do you spend your time on this stuff?” The first is easy to answer because weird stories are everywhere.

Books, magazines, and newspaper columns are devoted to the subject, along with radio programs, television series, countless websites, chat-rooms, and online bulletin boards. These sources collect reports from all over the world and, taken together, create the impression that the unusual is not especially uncommon. Even then, it’s reasonable to assume that there’s a lot more iceberg down there, with media accounts representing a fraction of the odd, seemingly paranormal, incidents that are actually experienced.

I have no proof, of course. Pollsters rarely ask, and anomalies don’t come up in the course of ordinary conversation. Have you ever heard a tired co-worker say that he woke up at 3
AM
with a monster sitting on his chest? I do know, however, that when people meet someone like me, with a more than casual interest in strange things, they start telling stories.

• A man sitting at a lunch counter described a light bulb in the attic of his parent’s house that answered questions. It hung from the ceiling and flickered a certain number of times for “yes” and for “no.”

• While standing on line at the corner grocery, another customer told me about a town in Rumania that was overrun by vampires. He said that the dictator, Nicolai Ceaucescu, sent in troops to restore order.

• A waiter at a coffee shop was hunting with some friends in Texas, when they saw a gigantic hairy bigfoot-type head and shoulders rise up out of the tall weeds and start towards them. The three of them ran back to the truck, and almost turned it over getting away.

• While getting my hair cut, the barber mentioned seeing a hoofed and horned devil in the Egyptian desert. It stood on a spot where army deserters had been executed.

I’ve heard more of these than I can remember; interesting, but unremarkable, accounts of ghosts, psychic phenomena, and flying saucers, along with numerous urban legends of the “and his sweater was draped across the hitchhiker’s tombstone” variety. There have also been occasional hard-to-classify oddities, including my personal favorite, something that sucked the ink out of every ballpoint pen brought into the witness’s house (and may have also been responsible for tiny puddles of ink that subsequently appeared on the floor). With the exception of the Bye-Bye Man, however, the stories in this book came from published sources.

The history of Ransford Rogers, for example, turned up accidentally while I was looking for a work from 1807 called
Authentic account of the appearance of a ghost in Queen-Ann’s County, Maryland
(
“… proved in said County court in the remarkable trial – state o
[sic]
Maryland, use of James, Fanny, Robert and Thomas Harris, versus Mary Harris, administratix of James Harris. From attested notes, taken in court at the time by one of the council”),
which I still want to read.

I learned about Newark’s missing boys from a small newspaper item that appeared on the anniversary of their disappearance in 1988. I cut it out and saved it for 16 years before using it. The clipping spent the time stored in a filing cabinet filled with articles about lizard-men, squid-things seen living in toxic waste, demonic possession as a legal defense, and the discovery of the world’s first poisonous bird in New Guinea. Clearly, there’s no shortage of wonders, but how do you decide which ones to write about?

I began by laying out a few basic guidelines. Each incident had to take place in the United States or what would become the U.S. (Gloucester’s raiders), or under the American flag (James Brown), with examples ranging from colonial times to today. As a collection of strange-but-true stories,
The President’s Vampire
could include almost any bizarre incident or episode I chose, but my objective was to find material that was unfamiliar to even the most dedicated readers of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. With that in mind, I collected what was unpublished, distorted, fragmented, incomplete, overshadowed, or buried in obscure books and silverfish-nibbled pamphlets.

This led to long lists of possible subjects most of which could not be used. In one case, my source claimed to have personal knowledge of a traffic accident involving a Navajo man and a skinwalker (shape-shifting sorcerer), but he could not be found. Other stories were discarded because they were thin stuff, like the anecdotes from the barbershop and grocery store, and I wanted something more substantial.

Take the title chapter. I was expecting to write the history of an early American serial killer and living vampire, but after doing the research, it became clear that James Brown’s reputation was largely undeserved. He was a murderer and a lunatic and apparently posed a danger to other inmates, but no evidence emerged of either blood-drinking or additional victims. Several versions of the
Eagle
’s vampire article remain in circulation, but while Brown was not responsible for decimating the crew of the
Atlantic
, his real life was gothic enough. There were the years in St. Elizabeth’s, where discipline was maintained, literally, with an iron rod, the possible connections to Mercy Brown and
Dracula
, plus some uncommon details of 19th century life, like the tattoo-by-tattoo inventory of Brown’s body, and a lawyer paid in whale oil. This capacity for illuminating odd corners of the past is one of the most attractive features of the strange-but-true.

The history (or histories) of Pedro, for example, involves economics as well as mummies. Unemployment led to the revival of amateur prospecting and the looting of ancient sites, which probably resulted in Pedro’s discovery. These activities were not unique to Wyoming, or 1932, but it was the “cruelest year” of the Great Depression and the appearance of several mummies, and possibly the carved pygmy heads, suggests that poverty made them more common. The recent discovery of another mummy also means that the story is really just beginning. DNA analysis and other techniques will doubtless raise questions that will keep scientists busy for years because once research has started, it never really ends. Which leads us back to a question I posed at the opening of this section; why do I spend my time on these things?

At one time it left me stumped. How could anyone
not
be fascinated by weird things? Years later, I understood that an occasional horror movie or “In Search of…” documentary satisfied the general public’s appetite for oddities, and that they don’t really understand an interest in the strange that goes deeper. Louis Pasteur can mess around with beakers all day and that’s fine, what with rabid dogs and everything, but searching for a vintage 1692 phantom musket ball seems to require an explanation. Why then, are certain people drawn to the bizarre?

Some have had unexplained experiences and/or see the mysterious as a source of knowledge and power. Others consider anomalies to be natural occurrences, little different than electromagnetism or tarantulas, and just as susceptible to study and rational understanding. Then there are people like me who just seem to have a natural affinity for the off-kilter. It may be genetic or the results of Mercury being in retrograde; your guess is as good as mine.

I have seen what looked like paranormal phenomena twice, and taken part in parapsychology experiments, but these were incidental to my interest in the strange-but-true as history. That is what drives the research, and research is the core of my work. Many writers consider it the dullest part of their job but for me it’s a combination of Christmas morning, piecing together a dinosaur skeleton, and playing Battleship (“Hey! You sunk my unsubstantiated conclusion!”). There are always new challenges and no way of knowing where an investigation might lead. Presumably, most people write because they have a powerful urge to tell stories, but I do it to tell everyone what I found in those stacks of books and spools of microfilm.

I can’t close this without taking the opportunity to thank you for reading… and to ask for your help. If you can answer any of the questions that appear in this book, or have any information to add, please write to me. Likewise, if you know of a local oddity, something strange and little known, I would like to hear from you.

Robert Damon Schneck

Email: [email protected]

Perhaps we can solve an old mystery or, more likely, hatch some new ones.