The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (16 page)

As the boy grew older, his behavior grew worse, and there were run-ins with the people who ran the orphanage. Then one day he was arguing with the head nurse in her office when he attacked her with a pair of desk scissors, leaving her an invalid.

After this savage assault, he fled. He ran away to the train-yards, and began traveling around the country by jumping freights. The viciousness he’d already shown was now unleashed, and he began carrying out random killings. His eyesight finally failed, but that did not stop the Bye-Bye Man; he created a companion for himself, sewing together pieces of his victims into something named Gloomsinger.

Gloomsinger was made from tongues and eyes and endowed with some kind of life. It acted like a hunting dog, sighting the next victim and letting out a whistle only the Bye-Bye Man could hear, which brought him to the scene. In order to keep Gloomsinger in good repair though, it was necessary to sew on new eyes and tongues regularly. The Bye-Bye Man became something of an expert at removing them, and their removal identified his handiwork. The organs were kept (along with his other belongings) in a seaman’s bag he called his Sack of Gore.

At some point, he also developed a kind of telepathy and was able to sense when people were talking, or even thinking, about him. As long as they thought about the name “Bye-Bye Man,” they were psychic beacons and he was able to get a bead on them and slowly track them down. He would travel hundreds of miles by rail to attack unsuspecting gossips, and talk of the murders quickly spread through the rail-yards and hobo camps.

The board also gave us some other details. The Bye-Bye Man had long hair and a tattoo on his wrist; he wore glasses that were painted black and wore a wide brimmed hat that covered his white face and something that looked like a pea-coat. And he carried the Sack of Gore. We also got a magic recipe that would help the Bye-Bye Man find us. I don’t remember the details, but we had to take a big green glass bottle, cork the mouth, and go out into the moonlight. Then if we quickly uncorked it and held it to our ears, we would be able to hear Gloomsinger whistling.

We also asked where the Bye-Bye Man was now. Chicago, the board said, and coming closer.

Katherine became very afraid, and refused to participate in any more sessions. I was not happy because I didn’t think we’d gotten anything worth checking, and preliminary searches produced nothing. John, meanwhile, thought the whole thing had been very interesting.

It looked as though the experiment was over and the Ouija board was put away. Soon after that, Katherine began waking up in a panic; she had suffered panic attacks as a teenager, but they were back and they always seemed to hit at 3
AM
, the “soul’s midnight.” [This refers to the idea that most deaths and suicides take place at 3
AM
or between 3 and 4
AM
. It would require a statistician to prove whether or not this is true, but the idea is certainly widespread. “My Grandfather was in the Merchant Navy in WWII, and he said the worst watch to be on was 3-4
AM
, because that’s when your soul was supposed to be ‘at its lowest’…”(25) ”I remember my grandparents (both nurses) referring to 4
AM
as ‘Death Hour’ or something like that, as it was the most common time for patients to die. They put this down to probably being in deepest sleep by that time, and that it’s the coldest part of the night...”(26) “I can also state from personal experience of signing search warrants, that the police still like to raid drug dealers at 3-4
AM
as they figure they will be at a low ebb then and less likely to put up resistance.”(27)]

John’s work schedule had changed so we saw less and less of him. Without the Ouija board experiments, the focus returned to normal pursuits like work and school. One day I ran into John at the Student Union at the college, so we had a beer and talked. I was worn out because Katherine kept waking up with panic attacks at 3
AM
and when I told this to John he turned grey. He said he had been waking up at the same time with a feeling of great uneasiness (not panic attacks per se) since they stopped using the board. He chalked it up to a change in his work shift. He was taking some kind of vitamin supplement to regulate his sleep, so I got the name of it and bought some for Katherine in hopes that it would help her (and me) sleep.

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.