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

by Robert Schneck

  “[James Brown] wilfully, feloniously and of his malice aforethought an assault with a certain knife of the length of six inches and the breadth of one inch did then and there make, and him the said James Foster with the aforesaid knife which he the said James Brown then and there had and held did then and there strike, stab and wound and in and upon the said James Foster in the left side of the breast of him the said James Foster with the aforesaid knife, so as aforesaid had and held by him the said James Brown, one mortal wound of the length of one inch and of the depth of four inches did then and there inflict, of which said mortal wound so as aforesaid inflicted with the knife aforesaid, which the said James Brown so as aforesaid had and held, the said James Foster did then and there languish, and so languishing did then and there for the space of five minutes linger and then and there so languishing, on the day and year aforesaid, did then and there die…”(15)

  Soares thought Brown had hit Foster with his fist. James W. Gardner “was within a few feet of Brown when he cut Foster and helped the latter to the wheel; asking him what was the matter but he could not speak, and lived but five or six minutes.”(16) Captain Benjamin Franklin Wing had the cook put into double-irons in the fore-hold, where he later admitted to stabbing Foster with a double-edged sheath knife and throwing it overboard.(17) (See Appendix I: Entries from logbook of the bark Atlantic.)

  Brown and the witnesses were transferred to other ships and taken to Boston. He was indicted on September 11th, arraigned on October 19th, pleaded “Not Guilty” and tried in U.S. District Court on November 13, 1866, with Judges Lovell and Clifford presiding. District Attorney Hillard and Assistant District Attorney Dabney presented the government’s case, and Charles R. Train and N. St. John Green conducted the defense. (In an undated letter to President Cleveland, Brown writes that he paid his lawyer “nine barrels of oil at that time oil was worth two Dollars and seventy-five cents a gallons [sic]. See Appendix II: James Brown’s letters.) It was a short trial. The jury deliberated seventy-five minutes before finding Brown guilty. He was sentenced to death and President Johnson signed the commutation on January 3, 1867.

  Brown was taken from the Suffolk Jail to the Charlestown State Prison, a dreary granite pile where he spent the next 22 years.(18) On April 14, 1889, he was sent to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, possibly because Charlestown was being renovated. Two years later, on November 3, 1892, Brown was removed to the U.S. Government Insane Asylum in Washington, D.C. He probably spent the rest of his life there.(19)

  An interesting question arises: how was this very ordinary crime transformed into a harrowing tale of maritime guignol?

  The Transmogrification of James Brown

  Newspapers of the Gilded Age had a casual approach to facts that allowed them to publish stories that still fascinate forteans; this was the era that produced perennial favorites like the cattle-rustling airship and the pterodactyl killed by cowboys. Furthermore, November 4, 1892, was a slow news day. “A Human Vampire” appeared on the front page between the obituary of Wheaton A. Welsh, “the well known Local Public School Principal” and a shoot-out in Wyoming, suggesting someone at the Eagle might have succumbed to temptation and embellished an otherwise uninteresting news item.

  It’s possible, though unlikely, that the article is accurate and Brown committed two more murders in prison. If so, they could have inspired the copywriter to retrofit the original account and might explain why Brown was sent to an insane asylum. “A Human Vampire” does not go into details. If the murders were in Massachusetts, however, they should have appeared on Brown’s record when he was moved to Ohio (the Ohio Prison Register mentions one conviction for first-degree murder, death sentence commuted). Brown might have committed the murders after arriving in Ohio, but by 1889 he was almost fifty years old and suffering from cataracts in both eyes. So far, no evidence has been found to support the newspaper’s claim.

  Another possibility is that Brown’s story became confused, commingled, or otherwise mixed up with another Brown who was in the news that year.

  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 unt
il 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, p
ickled 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.