The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (17 page)

What started out as a village dominated by enormous sugar plantations gave way to dry docks, ironworks, and warehouses when the riverfront was turned into a center for the ship repair business. In 1870, Algiers was incorporated into the city. Author Bill Sasser describes it today as “a part of New Orleans that most visitors never see. Its small Baptist churches, dangerous looking bars, dilapidated houses and vacant industrial lots are home to some of America’s worst urban poverty and crime, but good people also live honest lives there, in a culture steeped in spirituality and religion.”(28)

Vodoun is a part of that spirituality and Algiers has long been identified with magic; it is even mentioned in songs like J.B. Lenoir’s “Voodoo Boogie.”

I flew to Algiers, I sure had a wonderful time

I flew to Algiers, and I sure had a wonderful time

I met a voodoo woman who was changin’ a poor man’s mind
(29)

The one fact in the Spirit of the Board’s story that seemed most likely to produce results was the orphanage. I contacted the Algiers Historical Society and was told that there had not been one there but there had been one in Gretna, “a couple of miles up river.”(30) The author of a history of Gretna, however, told me that she was not aware of any orphanages there either. What if it were a different kind of institution? There is a danger of casting too wide a net, but the Bye-Bye Man’s albinism, deteriorating eyesight, and erratic behavior suggested he might have been in a home for disabled children. One such home turned out to be on the border between Algiers and Plaquemine Parish, the Belle Chasse State School. This looked promising but it was founded in 1967(31) and could not have played a part in the story. (On the plus side, the school is less than a thousand feet from train tracks and the road where it’s located is said to be haunted by a creature with glowing eyes and a werewolf known as the “Rue-Ga-Rue.”(32))

My search for the orphanage or a reasonable equivalent has
not
been exhaustive (there are still several avenues that need investigating), but what about the crimes? Assuming the story is true, do any known murders correspond to those carried out by the Bye-bye Man? It’s possible.

The Southern Pacific’s Texas & New Orleans Railroad yard is in Algiers, and when the Bye-Bye Man fled the city it may have been on one of their trains. According to the Spirit of the Board, the murders began in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and it was around this time that mangled bodies began showing up thirteen hundred miles to the north.

The Mad Butcher

Between 1934 and 1939, an unknown killer known as “The Cleveland Torso Killer” or the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” murdered at least 16 men and women. The victims were fringe dwellers, transients, and prostitutes, who were killed by decapitation and their neatly dismembered remains left around Kingsbury Run. This is a gully running through downtown Cleveland, Ohio, that is “lined with 30-odd pairs of railroad tracks serving local factories and distant cities, bearing cargo to Pittsburgh, Chicago or Youngstown… During the Great Depression… [it] was also a favorite campsite for hoboes…”(33) Similar murders appeared in cities with rail links to Cleveland, with headless bodies found in boxcars from Youngstown, Ohio, and near the tracks in New Castle and West Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The chief investigator of the “torso” case, Detective Peter Merylo, believed that the same killer was responsible for between 40 and 50 murders. Despite many bizarre theories (including a mad scientist “attempting to graft human eyes and ears onto the tin skull of a mechanical robot” (34)) investigators believed “the Butcher rode the rails, picked his victims from among the ranks of the hobo populations with which he traveled, and carried out his murder-dismemberments in railroad cars.”(35)

The disappearance of a hobo may go unnoticed and unreported outside of hobo circles. In 1997, Salem, Oregon, Police Detective Mike Quackenbush told the
The Spokesman Review
: “You can kill a transient and (the body) may not surface for two weeks… The suspect, by that time, may be 20 states away.”(36) And when bodies are found, someone else may get the blame. A loosely knit organization of hoboes called the Freight Train Riders of America, for example, has been accused of committing three hundred murders a year! Headless bodies are also less likely to be identified, and several victims of the Butcher remain John and Jane Does.

Despite years of police work and a procession of odd suspects, including a “voodoo doctor” and a man who had an uncommon physical response to seeing chickens slaughtered, the killer was never found. Was it the Bye-Bye Man?

Decapitation would be in line with his interest in eyes and tongues, the head could be carried away and parts removed at leisure, but of the sixteen accepted “torso” slayings, the heads of eight were recovered. Some of these were skulls, but none of the fresher remains showed signs of mutilation beyond a severed neck. This suggests it was not the Bye-Bye Man. (A pair of scissors is the only weapon mentioned in connection with him, and they were used in a stabbing.) Finally, the first bodies appeared in Pennsylvania in 1925, a few years earlier than Eli’s story would suggest. More research may turn up murders committed at the right time and accompanied by the Bye-Bye Man’s signature mutilations, but until then, there is no evidence to show that he’s killed anyone.

Without an orphanage or evidence of murders, the story appears to be an invention. But who invented it and why? Perhaps the answers can be found in two of the popular interpretations of Ouija board phenomena discussed earlier: spirits and the sitters’ subconscious.

Spirits are credited with a wide range of moral and intellectual qualities, and their motives for creating a story like the Bye-Bye Man would reflect that; it could have been a simple prank by mischievous spirits, or something more sinister, like a case of attempted possession.

Unclean Spirits

Possession is usually defined as control of a living being by an external disembodied agent. It might be a spirit, a god, or the soul of someone who has died. There are, of course, numerous exceptions. (Corpses and animals can be taken over by spirits, and many cultures recognize possession by living, supernatural beings with bodies like the
jinn
of the Middle East.) The popular image of an adolescent girl floating over a mattress spewing profanities and pea soup is just one manifestation of a widespread and complex phenomenon, the main function of which is religious. Possession allows spirits to speak and act directly in this world; it remains an essential practice in ”the shamanism of the North American Indians and the aborigines of Siberia, in the devotional states of the early European saints and in the possession dances of African and New World Negro.“(37) Today, there are many Pentecostal and charismatic forms of Christian worship that actively seek possession by the Holy Spirit.

If we proceed on the assumption that spirits were involved in Wisconsin, taking part in the séances and the manifestations that followed, there is nothing to suggest they were benign. The manipulation of the sitters, the Bye-Bye Man’s gruesome story, sleep disturbances, frightening paranormal phenomena, and an overall climate of fear all point to the efforts of “evil spirits.”

“Evil spirits” is an elastic term that can be applied to anything from goblins to vampires. Here it refers to the souls of wicked people who have died, or hate-filled, malevolent intelligences that have never lived: demons, devils, and/or fallen angels. Either kind of evil spirit can cause possession but the “symptoms” may differ.

When souls of the dead are responsible, the victim may exhibit traits belonging to the deceased: their mannerisms, special knowledge, likes or dislikes, even allergic reactions. Demoniacs, the demonically possessed, display preternatural knowledge of the past, present, and future; speak and understand foreign and ancient languages unknown to the victim; are repelled by religion and everything associated with it; and are associated with some paranormal phenomena. Also, like angels dancing on the head of a pin, any number of evil spirits can possess a victim at the same time.

Jesus expelled a multitude of demons called “Legion” from the Gadarene demoniac into a herd of swine, which charged into the sea and drowned. A more recent case (not involving livestock) was an exorcism performed by Father Theophilus Riesinger on an adult woman in Earling, Iowa, in 1928. The priest successfully drove out spirits claiming to be the demon Beelzebub, along with the souls of the victim’s father, the father’s mistress, and even Judas Iscariot.(38) In life, the victim’s father had been an exceptionally evil character, who cursed her for not taking part in his depravities. The curse is believed to have resulted in her demonic possession, but this is uncommon.

Medieval and Renaissance authorities believed possession could result from witchcraft or illness, but the likeliest cause was the victim’s own sinfulness. They might be guilty of serious transgressions, as when “ in 531 Theodoric’s army had entered the capital of Auvergne …pillaged the basilica and committed several acts of abomination, which caused them… to be possessed by the devil.”(39) But the sins could also be comparatively light. The
Malleus Maleficarum
tells the story of “a hermit of upright and pious life” named Moses, who “engaged in a dispute with the Abbot Macharius, and [when he] went a little too far in the expression of a certain opinion, he was immediately delivered up to a terrible devil, who caused him to void his natural excrements through his mouth.”(40) A single thoughtless act might have disastrous consequences. There was a nun in fifth-century Italy, for instance, who failed to make the sign of the Cross before eating a lettuce leaf, swallowed a demon that happened to be sitting on it, and had to be exorcized.

This view of possession as a casual event, and demons as something akin to germs, is now uncommon in the west. The controversial, but widely read, author, exorcist, and former Jesuit priest, Malachi Martin (1921-1999), believed that evil spirits concentrate on perverting the will, not the body, and they must have cooperation. “At every new step,” he wrote, ”and during every moment of possession, the consent of the victim is necessary, or possession cannot be successful.”(41) This consent can be subtle, almost unconscious, or as straightforward as a signed contract between the possessed and the devil, but it must be there. (Though, the Roman Catholic Church does recognizes rare instances when “God seems sometimes to allow even the innocent to be exposed to the physical violence of the Devil.”(42)) Martin describes possession as a four-step process.

• The entry point “at which Evil Spirit enters an individual and a decision, however tenuous, is made by the victim to allow that entry.”

• Erroneous judgments “by the possessed in vital matters, as a direct result of the allowed presence of the possessing spirit and apparently in preparation for the next stage.”

• Voluntary yielding of control “by the possessed person to a force or presence he clearly feels is alien to himself and as a result of which the possessed loses control of his will, and so of his decisions and his actions.”

• Perfect possession. This is not the swearing, floating, and paranormal phenomena kind of possession, but a functioning, apparently normal condition that leaves the person devoid of humanity.(43)

It would require detailed biographies of each sitter to find evidence of the process at work, along with greater powers of discernment than mine, but aspects of their lives do suggest a vulnerability or openness to diabolical forces.

The Sitters

Eli and John both enjoy horror as entertainment, but their interest goes beyond movies, novels, and role-playing games. Both are writers, and Eli is especially prolific, producing books, stories, and plays with macabre themes. He has a degree in folklore, is well read on the subject of serial murder, took part in the Goth sub-culture, which is fascinated with death, and spent many years involved in parapsychology. This included working as the librarian at the American Society for Psychical Research and carrying out funded research into psychometry and numerous field investigations of strange phenomena.

John studies philosophy, mysticism, and the work of Joseph Campbell. He has a special interest in what might be called “fear theory,” the how and why of what makes things frightening, and a history of paranormal experiences. Growing up in a “haunted-looking” house outside Stevens Point, John once saw the face of an old woman appear in the bathroom mirror. She told him, “I am your mother!” But it was not his mother.

Katherine takes no pleasure in horror. At the time of the séances she was a radical feminist hipster “Riot Grrl” with tattoos and piercings who was studying feminist spirituality and had some unusual experiences of her own. One of these took place when she and a friend made an impromptu trip to a cabin in the countryside. No one knew they were there, but soon after they arrived, the phone rang. Her friend picked up and a voice that sounded like a little girl asked to speak to Katherine. Being in a cabin in the woods and getting a phone call from an unknown child was very weird, so they hung up. The phone began ringing again and they left.

Despite being born and raised in Wisconsin, where there are “more ghosts per square mile than any state in the nation,“(44) Eli has never seen or had a paranormal experience. He has spent long hours in graveyards, haunted houses, and Satanic churches; worked with psychics, Wiccans, and sorcerers; and in spite of all these efforts, remains supernaturally
virgo intacta
.