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

by Robert Schneck

  Thirty-seven men were finally enrolled. The plotters donned their sheets once more, keeping the pressure up with nocturnal visits intended to strengthen the company’s faith. Meanwhile, the spirits had decided to accept printed currency, so “Rogers told his followers that they must collect paper money and have it burned, in return for which they would receive a hundred fold in precious metals.“(29)

  When it came time to collect these offerings, the schoolmaster probably stood before the company and received their money. He would have made a great show of wrapping the bills (actually, paper cut to size) in a cloth and then, with a dramatic gesture, flung it into the fire to be consumed before their eyes, a perennial bit of bunco artistry known as the “handkerchief switch.”(30)

  With most of the money collected, everyone was happy; the members of the club would soon be rich and could stop attending terrifying séances, while the plotters were planning to split up several hundred pounds in gold, silver, and paper money. The only ones not sharing in the general mood were the wives, and it was a combination of their disquiet, along with a handful of dust, that brought about the plotters’ downfall.

  Rogers had invented a spooky bit of business that involved what he described as the earthly remains of their spirit collaborators. These were pulverized bits of bone that had been portioned out into envelopes and given to each man as a token of his membership in the group, along with a warning that the powder must “be preserved inviolate.”(31)

  It was probably Elizabeth Carmichael who violated it. At the age of 55, her husband, Alexander, was a model member of the second Fire Club. He was a prominent local citizen, owned a gristmill, and had given the ghosts everything they asked for.(32) Drinking and unexplained absences, however, were not part of his routine, and Mrs. Carmichael may have been looking for clues to explain this worrisome behavior when she discovered the packet of bone dust in his clothing. Fearing witchcraft, Elizabeth took the envelope to the pastor, who refused to even touch it. She returned home, and Alexander, upon either finding the envelope gone or being confronted by his wife, said that she had ruined him. Presumably there was a good deal of arguing, tears, and recriminations that night, but in the end Alexander agreed to explain what was happening, on condition that she kept the secret. Elizabeth promised and she did not denounce Rogers. This was devil’s work, though, and what kind of wife stands by while her husband risks damnation itself?

  The conspirators learned that their secret was out, but remained calm. Maybe they thought the charade would last long enough to rake in the last few pounds; they certainly gave no sign of appreciating that Nemesis, in the form of Elizabeth Carmichael, was gaining on them. Rogers’ behavior became uncharacteristically reckless at this time, suggesting either arrogance or the indifference of someone who suspects that time has run out.

  One night, when the schoolmaster was in no condition to be impersonating ghosts, he wrapped himself in bed linen and showed up at the Carmichael’s house. Elizabeth took this opportunity to spy and listened to the conversation that passed between her husband and a spirit that was evidently pie-eyed and smelled suspiciously like fermented apples. The ghost departed and Mrs. Carmichael, who may have been getting exasperated, asked her still unconvinced husband, ”Dost thou deem it proper for ghosts to wear silver shoe buckles?”(33) Given time he might have come up with a good reply to this, but the whole situation was about to change.

  The dew was heavy that night, and in the morning Carmichael examined the spot where the phantom had materialized. There were shoe prints in the moist ground that led to a fence where it looked like a horse had been tethered. A trail of hoof-prints then led him to Rogers’ house, but no one was there. The miller followed the hoofprints for another mile and a half, and when he reached the stable of the horse’s owner, found the schoolmaster. It’s not known if Ransford Rogers was still wearing the silver-buckled shoes, but he was arrested.

  The schoolmaster protested his innocence and members of the Fire Club did not lose faith. They had seen the ghosts, read the phantom letters, heard disembodied voices, and even smelled the spirits’ sulphurous odor. And, more to the point, Rogers was their only chance of getting the buried treasure, or even recovering their initial investments. One member of the club put up the fifty-pounds bail, freeing the man, but Rogers immediately fled—and was recaptured. This time Rogers made a complete confession. Nothing is known about the other plotters who seem to have made clean getaways.

  With numerous witnesses and dozens of victims, prospects looked bleak for the ersatz necromancer, but he was never put on trial. Rogers slipped away again, possibly with the connivance of men who preferred to keep their involvement with sorcerers and ghosts from becoming public knowledge. As for the club member’s “acknowledgements” to the ghosts, “The whole amount of money obtained by Rogers, in these nefarious plots, was about Five Hundred Pounds, or upwards of Thirteen Hundred Dollars; none of which was ever recovered by the unfortunate and humbugged company.”(34)

  And what about the legends of fabulous wealth hidden on Schooley’s Mountain? At least one treasure really did exist, and while it was not fabulous, it was buried. A man named Elihu Bond left a box of coins and silverware on the mountain before going off to fight in the Revolutionary War. When it was over, he came home and dug it up.

  As for Ransford Rogers, the schoolmaster learned some valuable lessons from this experience. These did not include “Crime does not pay.”

  Dr. Dady’s Magic Elixirs

  Nine years later and one state to the west, in York County, Pennsylvania, Dr. John Dady was convicted of swindling through the now familiar means of pretended spirits, magic circles, and false powders. Several accomplices accompanied him in the dock, but not “Rice Williams,” “or rather Rainsford [sic] Rogers, a New Englander.”

  Dady had come to America as a Hessian soldier. After the war, he set himself up as a minister and then became a popular local physician. Pennsylvanians remember Dady as the chief villain of the piece, but no one familiar with the history of the Morristown ghost could doubt who the real ringleader was, or that he had slipped away again.

  Rogers and his partner John Hall had been engaged in “plundering the inhabitants of the southern states by their wiles…” when they met Dr. Dady. (35) He may have led them to his neighbor, Clayton Chamberlain, and in July 1797, Rogers and Hall visited Chamberlain at his home. In the course of their conversation, Rogers mentioned that he had been born with a veil over his face, and it had given him the ability to see spirits. This veil, or caul, is a fetal membrane with a reputation for supernatural powers. Rogers could command these spirits, and that very day they had carried him from a place sixty miles away. John Hall confirmed this story and their host was intrigued. Then Rogers asked Chamberlain (in what was probably a casual, “oh, by the way” tone), if he would be interested in seeing a phantom for himself?

  He was, and they agreed to conjure one up the following day: “…they went into a field in the evening, and Williams [Rogers] drew a circle on the ground, around which he directed Hall and Chamberlain to walk in silence. A terrible screech was soon heard proceeding from a black ghost (!!!) in the woods, at a little distance from the parties, in a direction opposite to the place where Williams stood. In a few minutes a white ghost appeared, which Williams addressed in a language which those who heard him could not understand—the ghost replied in the same language! After his ghostship had gone away, Williams said that the spirit knew of a treasure which it was permitted to discover to eleven men—they must be honest, religious and sensible, and neither horse jockeys nor Irishmen.”(36)

  It’s not known what Rogers had against jockeys (maybe they weren’t respectable), but his attitude towards the Irish may go back to Morristown: “Rogers often visited an Irishman named Stevenson [and attempted] to win his confidence. Stevenson was reputed to have money close at hand. Rogers would incidentally raise the subject of witches, ghosts, and apparitions. But Stevenson was incredulous, and no progress was be
ing made in the desired direction. One evening, after a long talk on the matter, Rogers said, ‘Suppose, Mr. Stevenson, if you saw some night, a white figure gliding along, above the ground, as if it did not touch the ground or walk, but move like a mist or ghost, what would you do?’

  “’Bejabers, I would use my shelaleh on him!’ was the emphatic reply. It is said that the ghost never dared make an appearance to the disbelieving Mr. Stevenson.”(37)

  Women, of course, were also excluded.

  After the ghost made its offer, a club was set up to perform the required ceremonies. Yellow sand called “the power” was distributed in sealed paper envelopes, and messages from the white ghost began appearing on blank paper. A profitable new element had also been introduced, a chemical called “Dulcimer Elixir” that was necessary for the rituals and only available from Dr. Dady.

  The club had between thirty and thirty-nine members and fortunately many of them were wealthy because eleven ounces of elixir cost one hundred twenty-one dollars! Another club was formed 40 miles away (Rogers seemed to be setting up a franchise), and in addition to Dulcimer Elixir, they needed both “Asiatic Sand” and the fabulously expensive Deterick’s Mineral Elixir. Rogers and his wife made this from cayenne pepper and copperas, an ingredient in ink, and used it to anoint the men’s heads during ceremonies.

  Dr. Dady, however, was new at this kind of thing and soon overreached himself. When it became clear that the men were willing to pay outrageous prices, he got greedy and began charging so much the club’s officers became suspicious. Rogers, sensing danger, fled, and the remaining conspirators were soon under arrest.

  The doctor was tried and found guilty at two different trials. He received a sentence of two years in the penitentiary at Philadelphia, plus a fine of ninety dollars from York County, and two more years and an additional one hundred sixty dollars in fines from Adams County. The other conspirators were given lesser sentences. Mrs. Rogers, who seems to have turned state’s evidence, was released after the trial and presumably rejoined her husband.

  There’s no way of knowing how many Fire Clubs Rogers established or the number of men he bilked in the course of his career. New Jersey and Pennsylvania alone produced over a hundred victims and some of them, like Benoni Hathaway, were ruined. Hathaway was a Revolutionary War hero and treasurer of the Morristown club, “an office that proved disastrously expensive after the bubble burst and he was obliged to make good on the receipts for money with which Rogers had absconded.“(38) By concentrating on those respectable citizens, who were less likely to either lynch him or allow their private foolishness to become public knowledge, Rogers seems to have enjoyed a good deal of success. St. Nicholas may watch over thieves, but confidence men know that their guardian angel is named Embarrassment.

  We can only wonder if Rogers was practicing spirit-related scams before arriving in Morristown, or if his inspiration came from the stories he heard about Schooley’s Mountain. The answer is likely to remain unknown, as is the fate of the man himself, who was a schoolmaster, grifter, sorcerer, ghost impersonator, and, quite possibly, writer. As the historians, Flynn and Huegenin wrote: “The suspicion that Rogers himself was the author of an anonymous treatise entitled ‘The Morristown Ghost,’ that appeared in 1792, is well founded. In it the author, who signs himself ‘Philanthropist,’ claims a place of honor in the annals of Morris County as a public benefactor for his work in dispelling superstition and ignorance.”(39)

  3

  THE GOD MACHINE

  Lynn, Massachusetts, 1853

  During the Industrial Revolution

  some people developed extraordinary faith in technology.

  In October of 1853, on a hilltop in Lynn, Massachusetts, a group assembled to create the New Messiah. They had not come to pray to it, sing psalms, or take an otherwise passive approach to the problem; they were actually going to build Him out of metal and wood under the supervision of spirits. When the body was complete, they believed it would be infused with life to revolutionize the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.

  The spirits had given their God-building instructions through John Murray Spear, a former minister of the Universalist church and recent convert to spiritualism. Born in Boston in 1804, and baptized by his namesake John Murray (the founder of the American branch of the Universalist church), Spear has been described as a “gentle, kindly, ingenuous” man, who possessed a beautiful simplicity and an idiosyncratic mind.(1)

  With his father dead and the family poor, young John may have been apprenticed to a cobbler and worked in a cotton mill but, at the age of 24, he became a Universalist minister. By 1830, he was married and had his own church in Barnstable, Massachusetts. Universalism teaches that all souls will be saved, stresses the solidarity of mankind, and “sees the whole creation in one vast restless movement, sweeping towards the grand finality of universal holiness and universal love.”(2) These ideas were to influence the course of his life.

  Spear was an outspoken reformist on the subjects of slavery, women’s rights, and temperance and expressed views that frequently upset his congregation. By the late 1840s, he had lost the Barnstable church and was subsequently driven from churches in New Bedford and Weymouth. In 1844, after delivering an anti-slavery speech in Portland, Maine, a mob beat him senseless, leaving him an invalid for months. When he recovered, he operated a portion of the “Underground Railroad” in Boston, helping runaway slaves get to Canada, and acquired a name as the “Prisoner’s Friend” for his work in improving penitentiaries and abolishing the death penalty.

  While Spear crusaded in Boston, a strange series of events unfolded in rural New York State that would change his approach to reform. The Fox family—a father, mother and two young daughters—had moved into a farmhouse in Hydesville in December 1847, where they began hearing inexplicable sounds. Before long, the Foxes found themselves in the middle of what seemed to be full-blown poltergeist phenomena.

  Months of noise, especially knocking sounds, exhausted the family. On the night of 31 March 1848, 11-year old Kate invited the “ghost” to rap the same number of times she snapped her fingers. It did, and this display of intelligent control led to more communication. The poltergeist claimed to be the spirit of a murdered peddler, and two basic tenets of spiritualism were established: the soul survives death and the dead can communicate with the living.(3) The day that Kate began communicating with the ghost, Andrew Jackson Davis—a visionary writer and healer known as the “Seer of Poughkeepsie”—had a revelation that “a living demonstration is born” and the movement that was to become known as “Modern Spiritualism” (or simply “Spiritualism”) began.

  The Fox sisters gave public demonstrations of their mediumship and within five years spiritualism was everywhere. Amateurs experimented with spirit communication in home circles and attended séances and lectures by professional mediums. Hostesses were advised to introduce the “fascinating subject of spiritualism [at dinner parties] when conversation chances to flag over the walnuts and wine.”(4) Reformers were especially attracted to the way it challenged social and religious orthodoxies, had neither a hierarchy nor articles of faith, and offered what seemed to be limitless possibilities wherever it was applied.

  In 1851, Spear left the Universalist church and became a spiritualist. With the encouragement of his daughter Sophronia, he developed his powers as a trance medium and accepted guidance from the spirits of Emanuel Swedenborg, Oliver Dennett (who had nursed Spear after the mob attack), and Benjamin Franklin, a very popular figure at séances. Spirits led Spear on trips to faraway towns, where he was directed to cure the sick by laying on hands or making inspired prescriptions.

  That summer he received twelve messages from the late John Murray and published them as Messages from the Superior State. He followed this with a series of public demonstrations in which he entered a trance while spirits spoke through him on a wide variety of topics—including health and politics—and delivered a twelve-part lecture
on geology, a subject about which Spear claimed to be almost wholly ignorant. The speeches, however, were not well received, as it seemed to be the medium, rather than spirits, speaking.(5)

  Spear trusted these spirit advisors without reservation. Among their “projects” was an experiment in which Spear “subjected himself to the most scathing ridicule from his contemporaries by seeking to promote the influence and control of spirits through the aid of copper and zinc batteries so arranged about the person as to form an armor from which he expected extraordinary results.”(6)

  Despite his efforts, Spear’s reputation remained small, while the Fox sisters held sittings with leading citizens (including First Lady, Mrs. Franklin Pierce), and Andrew Jackson Davis became a famed lecturer and author. Spear’s fortunes promised to change, however, after a spirit-inspired journey to Rochester, New York, in 1853, when Spear’s special mission was revealed. (Rochester is also where the Foxes made their first public appearance in 1849.)

  Spear began producing automatic writing, which proclaimed him to be the earthly representative for the “Band of Electricizers.” This was a fraternity of philanthropic spirits directed by Benjamin Franklin and dedicated to elevating the human race through advanced technology. Other groups that made up the “Association of Beneficence” were the “Healthfulizers,” “Educationalizers,” “Agriculturalizers,” “Elementizers,” and “Governmentizers,” each of which would choose their own spokesmen to receive plans for promoting “Man-culture and integral reform with a view to the ultimate establishment of a divine social state on earth.” The Electricizers began speaking through Spear, transmitting “revealments” that ranged from a warning against curling the hair on the back of the head (it’s bad for the memory), to plans for electrical ships, thinking machines, and vast circular cities.(7) These would come later, though.