The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (3 page)

Three or four raiders approached the garrison on July 17th, but the defenders could not a get a shot at them. Richard Dolliver and Benjamin Ellary left the safety of the building to spy on the intruders and what they saw was very odd. Dolliver and Ellary claimed that “several men come out of an orchard, walking backward and forward, and striking with a stick upon John Row’s deserted house, (the noise of which was heard by others at a considerable distance;) Ellary counting them to be eleven in all…” Dolliver shot into the group “where they stood thickest” but none fell and the raiders fled the scene and were soon out of sight.(12)

The news of invasion that Ebenezer Babson carried to Gloucester Harbor eventually reached Ipswich and on July 18th help was on the way. A Major Appleton sent sixty men “for the town’s assistance under these
inexplicable alarms
which they had suffered night and day, for about a fortnight together…” Among these men was John Day, who traveled with the company from Ipswich and Gloucester to relieve the garrison. When they arrived, shots were heard coming from the nearby swamp, so they ran in the direction of the sound and Day saw a man with bushy black hair wearing a blue shirt, who came running out of the swamp and into the woods. Day chased him and got close enough to shoot, but the forest was thick and he was unable to fire. The bushy-haired man escaped and when Day “went to look for his track, he could find none, though it were a low miry place that he ran over.”(13)

The cavalry, so to speak, had arrived but the invaders did not retreat just yet and Ebenezer Babson was given one last shot at his peculiar antagonists. Sometime around July 25th, Babson was in the woods getting his cattle when he saw three of the men standing on a point of rocks that looked out on the sea.(14) One of them had a gun on his back, so Ebenezer decided to ambush the party. He crept through the bushes until he was within 40 yards of his targets, took aim, pulled the trigger and… nothing happened. Babson pulled the trigger a dozen times, but it did not fire and the three came walking towards him in a leisurely way. They did not menace Babson, they did not, in fact, “take any more notice of him, than just to give him a
look
; though he snapt his gun at them all the while they walked toward him, and by him: neither did they quicken their pace at all, but went into a parcel of bushes and he saw them no more.” After this maddeningly nonchalant exit, Babson went home, where “he snapt his gun several times, sometimes with but a few corns of powder, and yet it did not once miss fire. After this, there occurred several strange things; but now, concluding they were but spectres, they took little further notice of them.”(15)

Reverend Emerson had more examples of the invaders’ mischief, but Mather, an experienced sermonizer, may have decided that the point was made and concluded the account, saying that the statements had been “sworn before one of their majesties’ council.”(16)

The phantom marauders neatly combined two anxieties that were preying on the minds of colonial New Englanders in 1692. First, there was a fear of the supernatural that is difficult for us to fully understand, but which frightened people so badly that they hanged their neighbors on the word of hysterical girls. Then there was the threat of foreign invasion, which meant homes and farms burned, people taken hostage, and settlers tortured and killed. This suggests the entire episode was mass hysteria brought on by these fears, which sounds like a solution but explains very little.

What if the raiders were real? In that case, a group of armed men spent two weeks panicking eastern Gloucester for no obvious reason and at some risk to themselves. There was apparently nothing strange in the visitors’ appearance; the men with black hair and blue clothing may have resembled Indians the settlers knew, and hearing them speak in an” unknown tongue” would not have caused surprise. The others may have been identified as French because they looked like Europeans, wore waistcoats, and were the logical nationality for European-looking invaders in New England. However, none of the witnesses claim to have heard them speaking in French. The only intelligible statement was in English, “The man of the house is come now,” etc.

Assuming it was a genuine raiding party then:

• Why were no buildings burned, residents harmed, or property stolen? The invaders were not blamed for the disappearance of a single chicken. The same question applies if the intruders were a gang of English-speaking outlaws.

• Why weren’t the raiders seen anywhere else? All of New England was alert to the danger of invasion.

• No campfires were seen or campsites found. Could eleven men spend two weeks in the vicinity without leaving any more evidence of their presence then some tracks, a broken branch, and the bullet found on July 15th? The citizens of Gloucester were not indifferent to the question of physical evidence and preserved the bullet, “which is still to be seen.”(17)

Unreliable memories and gaps in the records may answer some of these questions, but what the invaders are supposed to have done is just as baffling as what they didn’t do. Their most purposeful actions were shooting at Ebenezer Babson twice and missing both times. Otherwise, they spent their time banging and stamping around, drawing the colonists’ fire, and being chased after. When the invaders were spied upon, they were seen walking back and forth, hitting John Row‘s house with a stick. Then there was the inexplicably blasé departure of the three figures under Ebenezer Babson’s gun.

Gloucester’s official town records “shed no light on this thorny thicket “(18) of questions but a hoax is unlikely. The townsmen would have needed some very compelling reason to deceive or suborn their elderly minister Rev. Emerson and then perjure themselves before royal officials. This was not their idea of a good joke.

New Englanders took the Dark Man seriously and if anyone needed reminding, Bridget Bishop was hanged as a witch the previous month at Salem Village. Another possibility is that the citizens feared invasion and invented the story so an armed militia might be stationed in Gloucester, but this is also improbable. The Indian War of 1675 had shown that it was not vulnerable to raids. “The isolated situation of the town, bounded on the west by a tract of country too thickly peopled to be crossed by the enemy, and, on every other side, protected by the sea, must have saved it from great apprehensions of assault, though not, perhaps, from some degree of alarm. In all this troubled period there is no record that any hostile Indian set foot on our soil…”(19) (The garrison was probably built during this unsettled period.) And, if the Gloucesterites wanted protection, why make the invaders specters?

Some find Ebenezer Babson’s apparent “monopoly of these occurrences“ to be suspicious.(20) They suggest that his visions of “ethereal French and Indians haunting his community at night”(21) started a panic, but it’s hard to see how panic could so distort the senses of Richard Dolliver and Benjamin Ellary that they were able to count eleven raiders. As for Babson himself, there’s little information to help us form an opinion beyond saying that he was one of those people that things happen to.

Born to James and Eleanor Babson in Gloucester on February 8, 1667, he never married, paid his taxes, and died young (sometime before 1696).(22) On the night they ran for the garrison, Ebenezer was living with his widowed mother, “an unmarried sister and possibly a married sister with her husband and infant son.”(23) As for his temperament, he spent most of the siege running, yelling, and shooting (or trying to shoot) the specters, which suggests he was not the phlegmatic type. Babson’s solitary encounters with the raiders are unverifiable, but consistent with other witnesses’ descriptions and he never claimed to do anything heroic. No opinions survive concerning his marksmanship.

Portrait of Ebenezer Babson, 1896 (Sandy Bay Historical Society and Museum)

The Sandy Bay Historical Society has a drawing of Ebenezer Babson that shows him as a kind of Puritan Barney Fife with a steeple-crowned hat, a Bible on his hip, and an expression of frozen terror. The unknown artist made him too old—he never saw thirty—and while Babson may have been excitable and impulsive, he was not timid. A narrow jut of land in Rockport Harbor is named Bear Skin Neck in memory of the time Babson “encountered a bear and after a struggle succeeded in killing it with a knife; he then skinned the beast and spread the pelt upon the rocks to dry. From this the spot got its name and it gave rise to a jingle… ‘Babson, Babson killed the Bear, With his knife I do declare.’”(24)

By September 1692, the phantoms had been gone two months when the Babsons found themselves under devilish attack for a second time. Ebenezer’s mother had apparently moved to Gloucester Harbor, where witches began tormenting her and a neighbor named Mary Sargent. It’s believed that Babson brought some of the hexed girls from Salem to Gloucester, hoping that their ability to see invisible witches would reveal who was responsible. Two women were accused, Elizabeth Dicer and Margaret Prince, mother of the same Isaac Prince who fired a load of swan-shot at the raiders.(25) They were arrested, taken to Salem, accused of more witchery, and jailed at Ipswich, where they spent many awful months before being released.

Gloucester escaped the worst of the witch mania and the episode of the raiders has received little attention. Unlike Salem, where explanations have been proposed ranging from sexual repression to ergotism, almost no effort has been made to explain what happened at Cape Ann. Pastor Emerson hoped that “what is written will be enough to satisfie all rational persons that Glocester was not alarumed last summer for above a fortnight together by real French and Indians, but that the devil and his agents were the cause of all the molestations which at this time befel the town.”(26) Cotton Mather was more circumspect, writing “I entirely refer it unto thy judgement (without the least offer of my own).”(27)

If early 18th century clergymen tended to regard strange phenomena as satanic, what can we say about them outside of a religious context? Do the missing footprints, apparent invulnerability to weapons, misfiring musket, and other odd elements fit in with phenomena like ghosts, psi, monsters, and UFOs?

The figures’ insubstantiality suggests that they were apparitions, but there is nothing comparable to them in ghost-lore. They looked and acted like raiders, but were unlike most of the military specters seen haunting fortresses, barracks, and old battlefields. Martial spirits tend to be stereotypical ghosts that appear in the costume of an earlier period, show little interest in onlookers, and go about their business without leaving evidence of having been there. Gloucester’s raiders looked like men of the time, interacted with a number of different people over an extended period, and left physical, if ambiguous, traces of their presence.

No phenomenon in United States history can compare to Gloucester in the number of people involved, the duration of events, or the apparent normality of the beings described. There have been other paranormal sieges but on a smaller scale.

Bluegrass Goblins

Billy Ray Taylor of Pennsylvania was staying with the Sutton family in the small community of Kelly, Kentucky, in August 1955. Around sunset on the evening of the 21st, Taylor went into the backyard for a glass of water when he saw a silvery flying saucer come down near the house. Small goblin-like figures appeared soon after. These creatures measured about three and a half feet tall and had hairless, silvery skin that gave off a greenish glow. They stood upright on two legs and had thin bodies with oversized domed heads, big wrinkled ears that came to points, almond-shaped luminous eyes, a slit mouth, and no nose. Their long skinny arms ended in hands that looked something like large bird-claws.

Unlike the Gloucester raiders, the Kelly goblins/aliens seemed more curious than aggressive. One approached the door with his hands up and was shot at. Others peered into windows and one reached down from the roof to grab Taylor’s hair as he stood on the front step. The Suttons had a twelve-gauge shotgun and a .22, and their weapons did not malfunction like Babson’s musket (or as electronics are sometimes reported to do during UFO encounters). They spent the next several hours blasting away at the invaders.

“Whenever it [the goblin] was hit, it would float or fall over and scurry for cover… The shots when striking the object [goblin] would sound as though they were hitting a bucket. The objects [goblins] made no sound…while jumping or walking or falling. The undergrowth would rustle as the objects [goblins] went through it… There was no sound of walking. The objects [goblins] were seemingly weightless as they would float down from trees more than fall from them.”(28) Elmer Sutton later told his daughter Geraldine that “they really didn’t walk, just skimmed on top of the ground, but moved their legs.“(29)