The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (8 page)

The Vampire Brown

One of New England’s most famous cases of vampirism took place a few months before Brown was moved to the asylum.

It began when the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island, was almost wiped out by tuberculosis. George T. Brown lost his wife and two daughters, and by 1892, his son, Edwin, was seriously ill. Desperate for a cure, he had the bodies exhumed and examined for signs of vampirism on March 17th of that year. Mrs. Brown and the older daughter were in reassuringly complete states of decomposition, but the remains of 19-year old Mercy raised suspicions. Blood was found in her heart and the liver had not decayed (she was only dead two months and had been buried in the middle of winter). A fire was lit in the cemetery and the two organs reduced to ashes. Edwin may have then mixed these ashes with water and drunk the concoction as a cure.(21)

Was the story of James Brown, the murderer, combined with that of Mercy Brown, the vampire? There are three points in common: both occurred in 1892,(22) have New England as settings, and feature vampires surnamed Brown. This proves nothing, but it does suggest a direction for further research.

Conclusion

James Brown was probably not a blood-drinker. He definitely did not commit the two shipboard murders attributed to him by Charles Fort or the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, and reports based on these sources are inaccurate. Later murders are possible but no evidence has turned up.

It would be interesting to know why the president commuted Brown’s death sentence, but whatever the reason, Andrew Johnson’s legacy does not include being the only President of the United States to save a vampire from hanging. And even if it did, most Americans would still think he’s Andrew Jackson.

Other questions remain. Why was Brown sent to an insane asylum? How did his story become so distorted? And, finally, if James Brown wasn’t America’s first “real-life” vampire, who was?

His file from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital contains little about illness or treatment. There are some official documents relating to Brown’s transfer and warnings that the prisoner is dangerous (See Appendix III: How dangerous was James Brown?), but most are letters from Brown to his doctor, W.W. Godding. There are also letters addressed to a female relation named Emma F. Cary and an appeal to President Grover Cleveland.

Dr. W.W. Godding (Library of Congress)

English was not Brown’s native language, yet most of his letters are reasonably well written and the penmanship is handsome. Some of them, however, make no sense. The same thoughts are repeated over and over, the handwriting is difficult to read, and sentences drift across the page in waves. These changes may have been the result of Brown’s mental state, cataracts, poor physical health, or even boredom.

The letters are in two groups, 1885-1887 and 1892, and the first thing we learn is that the original chronology was wrong. Brown spent two years as an inmate at St. Elizabeth’s before returning to Massachusetts. When he was moved to Washington in 1892, it was for the second and final time. The 1885-1887 series include Brown’s version of the murder, why he felt the trial was unjust, and many complaints to Dr. W.W. Godding about the hospital and the attendants, along with requests for supplies. (1887 was also the year Brown’s bark, the
Atlantic,
sank; see below.)

In the letter to President Cleveland, Brown claims that his problems with Foster were over food. Foster was getting less than he wanted, and Brown told him that he was getting as much as Captain Wing had allowed. Foster insisted on more provisions and:

“… James Foster said to me, I will also make you obey me I then said to him it will be a very cold day. Thereunder he struck me with a belaying pin on the back of my head. I fell on the deck when I got up he struck me again. I saw the blood running on my shirt I said to him what do you mean He then struck me third times I then stabbed him with my knife.”

In addition to claiming that the murder was self-defense, Brown stated that his trial had been unfair because the judges would not delay it until the
Atlantic
had returned from its voyage. As for the witnesses, they: “…were my enemies for they were not on deck when this occur. They had been sick all the time while they were on board of the Atlantic they could not work and the viceconsul sent them on with me. Two of them were Portuguese and they could not speak the English language. The Judge said to me he cannot postpone my trial because it is too much expense to the government and the Judge would not permit my lawyer to put any questions to those witnesses.”

Brown claimed that everyone in the courtroom saw the trial was unfair and that’s why his sentence was commuted to life.

The letters he wrote to Dr. Godding about conditions in the hospital and the behavior of attendants make harrowing reading. An undated note, presumably from January 1887, begins: “Mr. Duley beat S. Jackson with an iron rod that evening I heard Jackson said to him for God sake do not strike me any more with that iron rod.”

As for the doctor, William Whitney Godding (1831-1899) was considered a leading authority on mental illness in his time. In 1882 he published a book,
Two Hard Cases: Sketches from a Physician’s Portfolio,
which includes a psychological profile of President James Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau.

We also learn that Brown enjoyed smoking and kept two pet birds named Rosaliene and Susanna, one of which he accidentally killed.

Apparently, he either didn’t know or, at that point, didn’t care about the newspaper calling him a vampire. If Brown were well enough to understand the accusation, however, he probably would have objected. In a letter dated December 7, 1885, he complains about an article in the June 25th issue of the “evening star” (possibly the
Washington Evening Star
) that said he had killed Captain Wing.

As for his origins, Brown claimed to be born in January 1839, in Georgetown, Guyana, and that he was a native of the now defunct Republic of Colombia, an independent federation of Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador. He said that “New Grenada”—modern Colombia or Venezuela—was his home country and that suggests Brown spoke Spanish not Portuguese.

In 1904, the Superintendent of the Government Insane Asylum received a letter from the Charlestown Prison in reference to Brown. Massachusetts wished to know if James Brown was still alive and if so, whether his mental condition had improved. If he were dead, however, when and where had he been buried? Written across the top was a terse response:

“James Brown (Col) U.S. Co [obscured]

adm. Nov. 4, 92

died Dec. 15, 95

Hosp. Cemetery.”

There Seems Some Doom Over This Ship

Charles Fort wrote that James Brown’s story was re-told in other newspapers at the time. This raises an intriguing possibility.

Bram Stoker was collecting material for
Dracula
in 1892, the year that the Brown article appeared in the
Daily Eagle
. Stoker is known to have had at least one clipping from a New York paper that involved vampires. It was an account that appeared in the
New York World
, one of the yellowest of the yellow journals, concerning a mother who drank the blood of her four children.(23) Could the novelist have seen the piece about James Brown, too? Did a story about a ship where sailors disappeared one-by-one at the hands of a vampire appear in a British paper like
The Illustrated Police News
? If so, it may have inspired a section of
Dracula
.

The seventh chapter of the book describes the Count’s passage from Transylvania to England aboard the Russian schooner
Demeter
. He passes the time by feeding on the crew until no one is left alive and the vessel sinks in a storm at the port of Whitby. Stoker based this on a real shipwreck that took place in the harbor years earlier.

Furthermore, the
Demeter
and Brown’s bark the
Atlantic
suffered similar fates. In 1887, the
Atlantic
was wrecked off the coast of San Francisco, “…surrounded by the impenetrable fog and darkness, with the spars and rigging tumbling about their heads, the stout timbers crunching and splitting like matchwood, and the ceaseless roar and turmoil of the surf as it swept the wreck from one end to the other, the situation was appallingly dreadful, and many of the crew were doubtless killed outright, while others gave up in despair and became an easy prey to the remorseless waves.” Twenty-eight of the thirty-seven men onboard perished and the vessel was totally destroyed in “one of the most melancholy and disastrous wrecks of the year.”(24)

At this point, the relationship between James Brown and
Dracula
is based on nothing more than a coincidence of dates; literary historians will have to decide if it has any merit.

5

ONE LITTLE INDIAN

Wyoming, 1932

A strange-but-true classic, continued.

Extraordinary human remains have reportedly been discovered throughout the United States. They include the skeletons of men seven feet tall with horns growing out of their foreheads that were unearthed in Sayre, Pennsylvania in the 1880s(1); 75,000 to 100,000 pygmies found in an ancient cemetery in Coffee County, Tennessee, in 1876(2); and a collection of enormous skulls exhumed with bones and artifacts during a guano mining operation in Nevada’s Lovelock caves in 1911.(3) There are other stories about equally monstrous cadavers, but the bodies themselves have all been misplaced, stolen, destroyed in fires, or swept away in floods. Only two examples are known to be in museums today, the Cardiff Giant and a Lovelock Skull.

The Cardiff Giant was a deliberate hoax. It appeared to be the body of 10-foot-tall man, which was “discovered” by well diggers on a farm in Cardiff, New York, in 1889. The stone figure was naked, looked uncomfortable, had no hair, and lay in a position that allowed it to be displayed without giving offense. Various theories were advanced to explain the mystery, including that it was a gigantic petrified Indian, an ancient statue, or one of the human/angel hybrids the Bible calls
nephilim.
But it was actually the oversized brainchild of a man named George Hull.

Hull paid artisans to carve the figure out of gypsum and then treated the surface with sand and acid to simulate the effects of erosion. The statue was then buried on land belonging to one of his relatives and spent a year there, “seasoning” underground. A considerable amount of time, money, and thought went into this project; darning needles were even used to cover the figure with holes resembling pores (presumably, this involved holding a number of needles together, and striking the blunt end with a mallet). Creating the giant cost thousands of dollars, and while Hull intended to make a profit, he also hoped to cause embarrassment. Several sources describe him as an atheist and say he had argued with a certain evangelist over the meaning of
Genesis
6:4: “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”(4) Whether this part of the plan succeeded is not known, but Hull exhibited the Cardiff Giant with so much success that P.T. Barnum offered to buy it. When the offer was declined, the Great Showman had his own giant carved and put it on display.

Experts soon exposed the statue as an object of recent manufacture, but not until Hull had made a profitable return on his investment. The Cardiff Giant can now be seen at the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, New York, while Barnum’s copy resides in Farmington Hills, Michigan, at Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum.

While these are artificial objects, the Lovelock skull is an authentic skull reputed to be “almost 30 cm (1 foot tall), [that] is preserved with some related bones and artefacts at the Humboldt Museum in Winnemucca, Nevada.”(5) I asked a very patient lady at the museum about it and learned that they get many inquiries about the skull. It is not on display, and while the skull looks normal, she did point out that “giant is a relative term.”

When fantastic relics disappear or are kept in storage, it raises suspicions among the conspiracy-minded and the skeptical. The former see it as the deliberate suppression of paradigm-smashing evidence by a scientific establishment intent on concealing the truth. (Hoaxes can be displayed, but true anomalies are kept in the same Smithsonian sub-basement that contains the Ark of the Covenant, pickled Zeta-Reticulans, and certain parts of John Dillinger.) The unbelievers, meanwhile, cite lack of evidence and unreliable accounts, and conclude that the stories are fraudulent or grossly inaccurate. What, for example, can make 75,000 to 100,000 dead pygmies vanish? And why were Pennsylvania’s horned skeletons sent to the American Investigating Museum in Philadelphia, when it doesn’t seem to have existed? Was this a cover story or a hoax?

Unlike aliens, ghosts, or bigfoot, however, one of these oddities did leave physical evidence behind, albeit temporarily, in the form of a body: the Pedro Mountain mummy.

The Pedro Mountain mummy—or simply, “Pedro”—appeared to be the dried corpse of an extraordinarily small old man sitting cross-legged “like a Buddha.”(6) Like other anomalous remains, he was found accidentally, and vanished under peculiar circumstances, but not before acquiring some history. He had different owners, was seen by many witnesses, and was examined by scientists at bona-fide institutions who photographed and X-rayed the tiny body. In addition, he was the subject of a national radio broadcast. One writer has made the reasonable comment, “to tell the truth I’m a little skeptical of the mummy interpretation. It seems much too convenient that the figure has disappeared completely and is no longer available for further scientific examination.”(7) But even with these misgivings, Pedro remains a comparatively substantial proposition; this should be kept in mind when either dismissing other stories as too improbable to be believed, or falling back on conspiracy theories to explain why things disappear.

But where did Pedro come from, and where did he go? And if he was real, a real what?

The Standard Version

The most widely circulated version of the story goes like this: in 1932, two prospectors were looking for gold in the Pedro Mountains of Wyoming, when they set off dynamite and uncovered a cave. Inside they found a tiny mummy, sitting on a ledge. The mummy spent the next several years being displayed in sideshows, until a Casper businessman bought it and brought Pedro to various museums. Scientists agreed that he was real and probably the remains of an infant with a fatal birth defect. When Pedro’s owner died in 1951, the mummy disappeared, and it hasn’t been seen since. Then in 1979 an anthropologist at the University of Wyoming saw pictures of Pedro’s X-rays. He agreed with the earlier scientist’s interpretation and speculated that miniature mummies may be responsible for strongly held local beliefs in a race of pygmies. Others saw the mummy as proof that the pygmies were (or are) real.

A researcher named Eugene Bashor listed twenty different sources of information related to the Pedro Mountain mummy. Most of these describe how he was found and what happened to him but there are other sources that suggest the story may be more complicated.

The Prospectors

Their names were Cecil Main and Frank Carr. Little is known about Carr, but Main was a very young man from Alliance, Nebraska, and the two of them were looking for gold in Wyoming’s Pedro Mountains when they found the mummy in October 1932. (In November 1936, Main produced a notarized deposition describing how it happened. According to this document the mummy was found in June 1934.) They were prospecting in the low mountains that fringe the southern edge of the Pathfinder Reservoir(8) near the town of Leo, in northern Carbon County.(9) (It’s believed they were working near the site of a mining road that leads up into the mountain called “Little Man Road.”) Main and Carr were “gophering”—making shallow holes in the rock, inserting dynamite, and setting it off—when an explosion exposed the mouth of a small, natural cave that had been tightly closed with stones.(10) It was around four feet high, three feet wide, and fifteen feet deep. When Main crawled inside, he went as far back as the narrowing walls allowed, and there he found Pedro sitting on a slight ledge.

Carr does not seem to have had an interest in the mummy. It apparently belonged to Cecil Main, who brought it to the office of the state historian in Cheyenne, Mrs. Cyrus Beard, hoping that she might purchase it for the state of Wyoming. While in her possession, Pedro seems to have been examined by a doctor who believed the mummy was a premature child, possibly preserved in chemicals. Mrs. Beard declined Main’s offer because funds were not available (this was during the Great Depression) and ”there was
a lack of authentic records in support of the location of the cave and of the actual discovery
”(11) [my italics].

Eugene Bashor, working from Main’s deposition, writes that by 1936 the mummy was “owned by Homer F. Sherrill and it was located in the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.”(12)

There are variations of these stories. Some accounts claim the cave was actually a hollow chamber enclosed in solid rock, suggesting that Pedro was found like a toad in a stone. There are also rumors that three little mummies were actually discovered, but that two of them deteriorated.(13)

Main’s deposition raises important questions. First, why did he claim that it happened 21 months after they actually discovered it? The find was reported in the Casper papers in October 1932, so if this was intended to deceive anyone, it was not well done. Did he simply forget? Didn’t he save the newspaper clippings? Even if he was illiterate, this would be surprising. (Main could certainly sign his name—it’s on the deposition.)

Secondly, why couldn’t he give the location of the cave? If the prospectors had found gold, would they have been able to file a claim if they didn’t know where it was? If selling the mummy depended on this information, why couldn’t Main provide it?

Finally, Bashor could find no record of anyone named Sherrill who was associated with the Field Museum, and that institution has no record of the little mummy in their collections (though, they do have photographs). Again, these rumors are easily checked and they turn out to be false.

Main’s account (as rendered by writer Frank Edwards) is the best-known version of the story, but his unreliability in reporting basic facts should be taken into account before accepting it as true.

The Miners

Robert Cardwell told a different version of how Pedro was found. He said it also happened in 1932, when his father Henry hired striking coal miners from Hanna, Wyoming, to help bring the hay in. The ranch is near the Pathfinder Reservoir and the miners spent their spare time exploring the local caves. Inside a cave four feet high and fifteen feet deep, they found the mummy sitting “on a small shelf two feet high.”(14)

Spelunking is a thin man’s pastime and it was a miner named “Skinny” Rimmer who gave the mummy to Henry Cardwell. His wife, Winnie, refused to have it in the house, so Mr. Cardwell brought it to Casper, where he showed it to a doctor and a lawyer and left it with the funeral directors at Gay and Horstman. (“Cardwell, who was the only Republican amongst his friends, stated jokingly, ‘He must have been a Democrat, you can tell by the shape of his head.’”(15)) But did he simply abandon it? An article in
Argosy
later reported that ”Winnie Cadell [sic] of Alcova, Wyoming…loaned a ‘little demon mummy’ to a college professor. It was never returned.”(16)

More Mummies

Other pygmy mummies and the heads of pygmy mummies were allegedly found in the 1930s. A Mexican sheepherder named “Senor Martinez”(17) is said to have found a complete body and six heads near the Pathfinder Reservoir. After losing half his flock in a blizzard, however, he decided they were bad luck and buried the remains. Another version of Pedro’s discovery involves a sheepherder.

“Some years ago, either in
The True West Magazine
or the
Frontier Times
, a man wrote an article on the San Pedro Mummy. He said a sheepherder trapper had found it in a very dry cave when he was trapping the wolves and coyotes that were killing the sheep. He took it to town when he got time off and showed it around and sold it for booze to a dentist (I think) for money to buy drink for a big drunk.”(18)

A Casper attorney was said to have found a mummy near the Pathfinder Reservoir during a fishing trip, and a local orthopedist named Richard Phelps owned a pygmy head. The most improbable story is a “friend-of-a-friend” tale involving a man who found a cave near the reservoir containing 200 to 300 pygmy mummies. He brought one home but his wife made him put it back, and he spent eight hours burying the cave (entrance?). Since then, the cave is supposed to have been flooded several times.

It was also in the 1930s that several pygmy heads turned up in an eagle’s nest! “There were supposedly five of them taken from an eagle’s nest in the 1930s or thereabouts.”(19) The University of Wyoming’s collection includes the pygmy head that once belonged to Richard Phelps,(20) which is actually made from “plant fiber (a little turnip or potato head).”(21) These carved vegetables might have been made to sell as authentic mummy heads, with the story about the eagle’s nest invented to give the impression that pygmies had been carried off and devoured by birds. This suggests the person who carved them was familiar with the local folklore about little people and eagles (see The Little People below).

It might seem odd that all of Wyoming’s mummies should turn up in the 1930s. The idea that prospectors and miners could both find mummies in similar caves at the same time and in the same area is unlikely, but it is not impossible. 1932 was one of the worst years of the Great Depression. With one out of four workers unemployed, and hundreds of thousands wandering the country in search of jobs, people found themselves doing unexpected things to make money. Main and Carr might have taken up prospecting for lack of normal employment and found the mummy because they were looking in places more experienced prospectors ignored. (Harold Kirkemo wrote in “Prospecting for Gold in the United States” that “The lack of outstanding success in spite of the great increase in prospecting during the depression in the 1930s confirms the opinion of those most familiar with the occurrence of gold and the development of gold mining districts that the best chances of success lie in systematic studies of known productive areas rather than in efforts to discover gold in hitherto unproductive areas.”(22))