The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (18 page)

All three participants held unconventional social, spiritual, and political opinions, enjoyed offbeat subjects, and were leading lives that traditional moralists would describe as sinful. By itself, this should not be especially attractive to demons; if it were, college campuses across the U.S. would be overrun by evil spirits (and doubtless some people believe they are). It may have been the introduction of an occult element in the form of the Ouija board, however, that transformed the situation.

Hell Bait?

Consider events from the perspective of demonic activity. Three relatively normal young people hold a series of séances. They contact spirits that have never lived and receive long dull messages. Interest wanes. At this point, the spirits drop hints about dark dangerous things too frightening to discuss. This appeals to John and Eli, but not Katherine, who must be persuaded to continue. The sitters “force” the spirits to cooperate and, with a show of great reluctance, the Spirit of the Board tells them the history of the Bye-Bye Man. This story is gruesome by itself, but in combination with the formula, “if you think about him, he will find you,” it is turned into a kind of mental invocation for summoning evil forces to the thinker.

The séances ended before establishing contact with the Bye-Bye Man but by then, to use a military analogy, the invaders had already established a bridgehead in the sitters’ territory. They proceeded to soften up resistance by disturbing the sleep of John and Katherine (who woke Eli). While the spirits’ aims are unknown, John’s experience with the mysterious caller suggests an attempt at possession—it may, in fact, have been one of the stages described by Malachi Martin. If so, it was carried out when the target was at his most vulnerable: asleep, alone, and in what might have been a disturbed emotional state (we will return to the subject of John’s frame of mind). The knocking and request that he “open the door” can be interpreted metaphorically or perhaps the physical act itself would have constituted assent.

In Katherine’s case, the paranormal inspires such terror that she seems to be a poor candidate for possession. Perhaps the demons saw in her tendency to panic, an opportunity for another kind of deviltry, and the whistling on the bridge was an attempt to frighten Katherine into jumping off or falling into the Wisconsin River. It’s safe to assume that demons have the worst possible motives for whatever they do.

John and Katherine’s experiences recall an old description of the Devil as a kind of tapeworm, a “slender incomprehensible spirit” that can “easily insinuate and wind himself into human bodies, and, cunningly couched in our bowels, vitiate our healths, terrify our souls with fearful dreams and shake our minds with furies.”(45) From the sitters’ backgrounds to the manifestations themselves, almost every aspect of the story can be interpreted in terms of evil spirits, but this requires accepting the existence of beings for which no evidence exists. Demons are hypothetical but the sitters are real; what if the people involved are the source of everything that happened, including the Spirit of the Board’s story and seemingly paranormal phenomena?

Pieces of the Bye-Bye Man

While the ultimate source of the Bye-Bye Man will probably remain unknown, we can approach the story like a scientist studying an unfamiliar animal. Different aspects of its anatomy can reveal what it does, where it came from, and what it might be related to. A closer look at parts of the Bye-Bye Man’s history could, in the same way, tell us something about its origins, deeper meanings, or historical reality.

His Name

The Bye-Bye Man’s name recalls the fiends that are said to haunt lovers’ lanes, summer camps, and dark stretches of woods. Folklorist Jan Brunvand’s collective term for these monsters and lunatics is “teenage horrors,” the most famous representative of which is “the Hook” or “Hookman.” There are many others, including a “Green Man,” “Goat Man,” “Squirrelman,” and “Bunny Man.” (The Hook was an escaped homicidal maniac who, for some reason, had been fitted with a sharp steel prosthetic hook. Accidental electrocution turned the Green Man green, and now he only goes out at night to peek into car windows. The back roads of Prince George’s County, Maryland, are frequented by an axe-swinging goat-centaur or goat-headed sasquatch called the Goat Man; the rest have similar descriptions.)

Unlike these examples, the meaning of the name “Bye-Bye Man” remains obscure. It could be a garbled version of a real name (B.B. Mann, Bobby Mann, Bubba Mann), a reference to how dangerous he is (“say good-bye”), or the kind of nickname used by hobos and criminals. In Jack Black’s 1926 autobiography,
You Can’t Win
, the author describes a world of train-hopping safecrackers, winos, and thieves who knew each other as “Gold Tooth,” “Smiler,” and the “Sanctimonious Kid.” While the meaning of “Bye-Bye Man” remains a riddle, it is the single most important part of the story.

Folklore contains many examples of secret names and their power. Rumpelstiltskin lost his claim to the princess’s baby when she learned his name, and Jewish folklore tells of miracle workers like Rabbi Judah Loew Ben Bezalel of Prague who used the secret name of God to turn a pile of clay into a living golem. Children can summon a witch called Mary Worth by looking into a mirror and repeating her name three times (which recalls John’s odd experience with a mirror).

To know the Bye-Bye Man’s name and think about it, however, is to steal away some important part of him, something that he is compelled to retrieve through murder and mutilation.

Albinism

One of the most striking features of the Bye-Bye Man himself is whiteness. He suffers from albinism, a ”Congenital absence of pigment from the skin, hair, choroid coat, and iris,“(46) that many societies regard with suspicion. White is often considered a symbol of purity and virginity, but in Chapter 42 of
Moby Dick
Herman Melville discusses how an absence of color intensifies what is frightening. He mentions white sharks, polar bears, and other examples before asking: “What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.”(47)

The Spirit of the Board did not mention the Bye-Bye Man’s race, but Louisiana has many citizens of African descent, and if albinism is difficult for whites, it presents even greater problems for blacks.

Racism was an integral part of turn-of-the-century American society, but when fair skin confers superior rank, a black person who is whiter than a white person is disorienting for everyone. Besides raising uncomfortable questions about linking status to pigmentation, the albino was not white, black, or mixed and was likely to be rejected by all three. In an article presented by the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation (NOAH) entitled “African Americans with Albinism,”(48) the attitudes and responses the condition inspires in black communities are explored: “A basic theme in many variations in [sic] that God is delivering judgment on a family with albinism and that the individual with albinism is cursed, or is the embodiment of sin... Another belief is that the person with albinism is the result of incest or inbreeding. The most common myth of today is that the non-Caucasian person with albinism must be the result of mixed marriage.”

If the Bye-Bye Man’s mother was suspected of incest or adultery, it could have broken-up the family, or led to his being put in an orphanage. It may even link his story with a series of unsolved murders that were committed “at stops along the Southern Pacific Rail Railroad line.” Michael Newton writes in
Still at Large
that “Between January1911 and April 1912, an unidentified killer (or killers) slaughtered 49 victims in the states of Louisiana and Texas, leaving police baffled. In each case, the dead were mulattos or black members of families with mulatto children. The killers were presumed, by blacks and law enforcement alike, to be dark-skinned Negroes, selecting victims on the basis of their mixed—or ‘tainted’—blood.”(49) The killer(s) could have also been of mixed race, driven to murder by self-loathing. Voduon was considered another possible motive.

Since the Bye-Bye Man’s mother had a child with albinism, she may have been among the victims of the 1911-1912 murders. That would explain how he became an orphan, and if the Bye-Bye Man were born in those years, he would have been 17-18 years old in 1929, when the Great Depression began. On the other hand, the 1911 killings were not local; they began in the towns of Rayne, Lafayette, and Crowley, more than 150 miles west of Algiers.

The Bye-Bye Man was probably regarded as cursed from birth. Like the Wandering Jew and Cain, he seems to be a perpetual traveler with special powers, an extended lifespan, and something like two of the three marks of Cain. According to rabbinical literature, Cain had a horn on his head, a Hebrew letter branded on his arm, and “leprosy” in the form of spots on his skin, “which were brightly white and which sparkled like snow.”(50) The Bye-Bye Man did not have a horn but there was an unidentified tattoo on his arm, and his skin was unnaturally pale. He is also a permanent inhabitant of the grey area between races and places where the paranormal flourishes.

Blindness

Albinism can affect vision too. The eyes look pink and the person may have astigmatism and photophobia (intolerance or fear of light), but in the Bye-Bye Man’s case, his eyesight deteriorated into blindness.

This can be interpreted symbolically as a separation from light, truth, and goodness, or as a manifestation of inner psychic light. The legendary Greek prophets Phineus and Tiresias, for example, were struck blind by the gods but also given the power of prophecy. On a more practical level, the Bye-Bye Man may wear glasses covered with paint along with a broad-brimmed hat because they provide some protection from the light. Other parts of his outfit, including the jacket that looks like a pea coat, and the sack, possibly a duffel bag, suggest a nautical appearance that recalls his port city origins. The Bye-Bye Man’s dark glasses, in association with the murders, magic, and New Orleans also suggest a possible connection to the Guede, Vodoun spirits of the dead, who wear dark glasses but have little else in common. (The Guede and their chief, Baron Samedi, are earthy, sensual spirits preoccupied with eating, drinking, smoking, and sex.)

Blind monsters have never been common. The best known is probably Polyphemus, the Cyclops in Homer’s
Odyssey
, whose single eye was put out by Odysseus, but they also appear in some horror movies. The Frankenstein monster loses his sight after receiving Ygor’s brain in
Ghost of Frankenstein
(1942), and blind zombies appear in
Return of the Living Dead
(1985) and
Tomb of the Blind Dead
(1971).

The creatures in these last two films found their victims through the senses of smell or hearing; the Bye-Bye Man’s ability to track down people thinking a specific thought seems to be unique. It has its limitations, though, or he would not need Gloomsinger.

Giving Tongue

We are given very few details about what Gloomsinger is or does. Presumably it acts like the Bye-Bye Man’s hunting dog, using its eyes to find the prey and then signaling the position to his master by whistling.

The name is mysterious (perhaps a variation of “blues singer,” which might be a link to New Orleans), and its appearance just as vague. Gloomsinger could be a humanoid thing or a shapeless mass that moves along on tongues like a train of little legs.

Popular culture may have also played a part here. Like the Frankenstein monster, Gloomsinger is made from pieces of different corpses, sutured together, and reanimated into a new being. The combination of eyes and tongues, however, has less in common with the philosophical novel of Mary Shelley than with the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft (1890-1937) created a unique “mythos” of vast inter-dimensional entities called the “Old Ones,” descriptions of which suggest the second version of Gloomsinger as seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Consider this passage from “The Dunwich Horror” (1929), in which a character, complete with rural New England accent, tries describing one:(51)

“Bigger’n a barn... all made o’ squirmin’ ropes... hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything, with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step... nothin’ solid about it - all like jelly, an’ made o’ seprit wrigglin’ ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin’ eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an’ all a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings...
an’ Gawd in heaven - that haff face on top!...”

John, incidentally, is a Lovecraft fan, and a publisher specializing in the author’s work, Arkham House, is in Sauk City, not far from Sun Prairie.

And what is Gloomsinger’s nature? Is it demonic, like the imps that served as witch’s familiars in the shapes of cats and toads, or something else? We are told that thinking of the name “Gloomsinger” is equally effective for summoning the Bye-Bye Man, which suggests that instead of being an independent being, it is an extension of its master, a detached “limb” able to move under its own power, but perishable and requiring regular maintenance.