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

by Robert Schneck

  This could, in fact, explain how “Skinny” Rimmer and the unemployed miners from Hanna became incorporated into the legend.

  There are good reasons for thinking Henry Cardwell once had a mummy in his possession, but where did it come from? Eugene Bashor knew Mr. Cardwell and asked him about it: “Henry Cardwell was a close-mouthed man. When I asked him about the mummy, all he would say was that he had one once but that he had let it get away from him. When I asked him where he got it, he said, ‘In Pathfinder Dam [sic], but according to Bob Cardwell, Henry’s son, it was found in a cave in a canyon leading down into the reservoir West and North of the old Parks place ranchhouse (still standing but unoccupied). Bob Cardwell says the cave may be underwater when the lake is full.”55

  While the origin and fate of Henry Cardwell’s mummy remains a mystery, it appears that at least one of the riddles surrounding Pedro has been solved. There are a few hundred left, but it’s a start.

  6

  A HORROR IN THE HEIGHTS

  Baltimore, Maryland, 1951

  Short colorful specters like Detroit’s infamous Nain Rouge (“Red Dwarf”) are not unknown,

  but the classic phantom is a long-legged figure in black.

  It wasn’t easy getting a good night’s sleep in the summer of 1951, but it was especially difficult for the residents of O’Donnell Heights, a housing project in southwestern Baltimore.

  Americans were preoccupied with the threat of communism, Stalin’s arsenal was growing more formidable, and while U.S. troops were fighting the Red Chinese in Korea, communist sympathizers and fellow travelers at home posed a danger from within. Mrs. Mary Markward, a secret agent for the FBI, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that communists were planning to “get the Baltimore steel workers following the party line, then get the trade unions too, [then] they would have the steel industry in the palm of their hands…” Undermining Baltimore’s steel industry, the committee learned, was Bolshevism’s “No. 1 goal.”(1)

  The weather that summer did nothing to soothe nervous Baltimoreans. The city sweltered under a series of heat waves, and Philco air-conditioners (“easy terms, 65 weeks to pay”) were not seen in neighborhoods like O’Donnell Heights, where steel mill and shipyard workers lived with their families. For them, tropical heat, Reds under the beds, and the real possibility of hydrogen bombs falling out of the sky were less pressing problems, however, than the specter in their streets.

  Sometime in July, a tall, thin figure dressed in black began sprinting across the rooftops of O’Donnell Heights. It leaped on and off buildings, broke into houses, grabbed people, enticed a girl to crawl under a car, and played music in the graveyard. Groups of young men patrolled the streets, while many others sat by their windows at night, keeping a bleary-eyed watch for the “Phantom Prowler” that eluded pursuers and took refuge in nearby cemeteries. By the end of the month, police were arresting people for disorderly conduct and carrying weapons, but the gadabout phantom had disappeared and was never seen or, at least reported, again.

  Things That Go Jump in the Night

  O’Donnell Heights was only eight years old when the uncanny stranger made its appearance. Built as a housing project for defense workers at Bethlehem Steel, Martin Aircraft, and Edgewood Arsenal in 1943, it was not meant to be either beautiful or durable, and it wasn’t. Tightly spaced, two-story row houses went up on 66 acres of what had been farmland, a brickyard belonging to the Baltimore Brick Company, and part of St. Stanislaus Kostka Cemetery.(2)

  There are several burial grounds in the area: Evangelical Trinity Lutheran Congregational Cemetery, Mount Carmel, St. Matthew’s, and the Oheb Shalom Congregation Cemetery, but the phantom showed a definite preference for St. Stanislaus and often appeared in the streets nearby.

  By the time local newspapers noticed that something peculiar was happening in the Heights, the panic was almost over. Most of what we know about it comes from the back pages of Baltimore’s two rival papers, The Sun and The Evening Sun, which printed a handful of articles on the phantom between July 25th and 27th, when the sightings finally ceased. Reporters approached it as a typical “silly season” item and wrote the stories in tongue-in-cheek style, with The Sun including cartoon illustrations. No one seemed to know exactly when strange things started happening, but on July 24th, Mrs. Agnes Martin told a reporter that the phantom had been seen “for the last two or three weeks.”

  The first incident that can be assigned a definite date took place on July 19th. There was a full moon and temperatures were in the comparatively comfortable low seventies at 1AM when William Buskirk, age 20, ran into the phantom.

  “‘I was walking along the 1100 block Travers way [sic] with several of my buddies when I saw him on a roof, ‘related Mr. Buskirk…He jumped off the roof and we chased him down into the graveyard’ … ’He sure is an athlete,’ said one of the other boys. ‘You should have seen him go over that fence-just like a cat.’ (the [sic] fence bordering the graveyard in question is about 6 feet tall and trimmed with barbed wire along the top.)”(3)

  The witnesses don’t name the cemetery, but Travers Way is near St. Stanislaus.

  Hazel Jenkins claimed that the phantom grabbed her some time that same week. She saw it twice at close-range (possibly in the company of Myrtle Ellen, though Ellen might have seen the phantom independently; the article’s not clear), or Hazel may have been grabbed when the phantom tried breaking into the Jenkins home (again, unclear.) Her brother Randolph Jenkins, saw it soon after.

  “‘I saw him two nights after he tried to break into our house…He was just beginning to climb up on the roof of the Community Building. We chased him all the way to Graveyard Hill.’(The Community Building is the tallest structure in the project and at night is completely empty.)”(4)

  The Phantom of O’Donnell Heights (K.L. Keppler)

  The phantom next visited the family of Melvin Hensler, breaking into their house on July 20th, but stealing nothing. After this unnerving experience, the family went to stay with Mr. Hensler’s brother, but Mrs. Hensler returned to the house the next day and found a “potato bag left on the ironing board,” which she thought belonged to the intruder. Mr. Hensler was so exhausted from staying awake that his eyes ached and he had started talking in his sleep.

  Storms on the 23rd lowered the temperature, and the phantom may have appreciated a break in the heat wave because it was especially busy on the night of July 24th. The Evening Sun reported: “At 11:30 PM officers Robert Clark and Edward Powell were called to the O’Donnell Heights area where they were greeted by some 200 people who said they had seen the oft-reported ‘phantom.’

  “Clark said they pointed to the roof tops and someone yelled: ‘The phantom’s there!’“(5)

  The police drove around and arrested a 20-year old sailor for carrying a hammer. He was fined $5.

  A reporter from The Sun discovered thirty or forty people of all ages congregating at the back stoop of 1211 Gusryan Street, waiting for morning. He interviewed William Buskirk, Mrs. Melvin Hensler, and others who shared rumors and described their personal experiences. (The reporter also learned that Mr. Charles Pittinger was standing guard nearby with a loaded shotgun.) Jack Cromwell claimed the phantom lived in the graveyard, and Lynn Griffith of Wellsbach Way, which is adjacent to St. Stanislaus, told a story that suggested the prowler had talents that went beyond high-jumping: “One night I heard someone playing the organ in that chapel up there. It was about 1 o’clock.”(6)

  The phantom was also reportedly seen beckoning to Esther Martin from underneath an automobile and saying, “Come here, little girl.”

  Mrs. Ruth Proffitt’s son saw it “at one place at the same time another person was seeing him somewhere else. He couldn’t be both places at once, unless he had wings.”(7) There were reports that the phantom leaped on and off 20-foot tall buildings, but Regina Martin was not impressed. “We kids used to jump off these roofs all the time,” she said.(8) A 14-year old girl offered to climb onto
the roof and demonstrate, till someone reminded her about Mr. Pittinger and his .12 gauge.

  George Cook had mixed feelings about what was happening. He did not deny the reports of the phantom, just the possibility that something extraordinary was involved. In the end, he blamed the media.

  “It’s ridiculous to believe that… a man can jump from that height and not leave a mark on the ground. Yet this character does it all the time.

  “It’s my idea that when this thing is cleared up… it’ll turn out to be one of these young hoodlums who has got the idea from the movies or the so-called funny papers, and is trying to act it out. This sort of thing appeals to detective story readers who are mainly looking for excitement.”(9)

  At 1:30 in the morning of July 25th, Sgt. Emmanuel Sandler and other officers were called to an unidentified cemetery and arrested five boys, four of them teenagers, on charges of disorderly conduct. Around 10 PM that night, Patrolmen Elmer Powell and Milton Arczynski arrested Charles Kyle, Donald Keyser, and Edward Williams, all sixteen years old, on an embankment near the cemetery. Their six companions fled. Police responded to a call at 11 PM from a resident who reported footsteps on his roof, but nothing was found.

  At some point during the day, Mrs. Mildred Galines heard the sound of someone trying to break into her house and ran outside barefoot, screaming, “It’s the phantom!” It was actually police breaking down the door to serve a search-and-seizure warrant and the episode ended with Mrs. Galines and four male companions arrested on bookmaking charges.(10)

  On July 26th, the three young men who’d been arrested the night before—Kyle, Keyser, and Williams—were brought before Eastern Police Court Magistrate Emil Mallek on charges of disorderly conduct. They said they had been in the cemetery to help capture the phantom, and Mallek gave them a lecture and a fine of $10 dollars each, suspended. “If you were older,” he said, “I’d send you to jail.”(11)

  Newspaper coverage of the phantom was now exclusively humorous:

  “In broad daylight a housewife heard a knock-knock-knock on her door followed by a stentorian voice proclaiming:

  “‘I’m the phantom, let me in!’

  “Recovering almost immediately she said she peeked to see what he looked like. It was, she reported, only her insurance man, a fellow of limitless wit.”(12)

  That evening, the phantom was seen standing uncharacteristically still on the roof of a building at the intersection of O’Donnell and Gusryan Streets, the Graceland Park-O’Donnell Heights Elementary School. Patrolman Henry Roth investigated and saw that it was a ventilation pipe. Officers spent several hours that night following up sightings, including a report that the phantom was seen leaping into a yard where a particularly ferocious German Shepherd lived.

  “The dog was found undisturbed by the visit. If the phantom had really landed, police conceded, he was resting, finger nails, cape and nimble toes, all in the stomach of the beast.

  “‘I ain’t losing no sleep over this,’ announced the dog’s owner.“(13)

  The “Phantom Zone” was quiet after midnight.

  On July 27th, The Evening Sun announced that there had been no more reports, but “Police think he might be a teenager.” The phantom may have gone, but the heat was back, with high humidity and temperatures in the mid-nineties.

  Like most bizarre flaps, there was no satisfying resolution to the panic created by the Phantom of O’Donnell Heights. An unofficial version claims that armed residents finally chased it into the cemetery, where the phantom leaped into a crypt (or “sarcophagus”) and vanished for good.

  The Sun told another story:

  “Four blocks from the fear area, in a bar where tippling offered fresh courage, men had a better explanation [for where the phantom had gone].

  “‘The Phantom,’ claimed one patron, ‘has moved to Highlandtown.’

  “‘Highlandtown!’ another roared. ‘Lord help the poor phantom!’”(14)

  This anecdote has been repeated so often that its origin as a joke was forgotten, and some sources now report the phantom was last seen heading for Highlandtown, a neighborhood north of O’Donnell Heights.

  Descriptions of the phantom were fairly consistent, considering that the encounters were brief, took place in the dark, and the figure was usually moving at speed. William Buskirk said, “He was a tall thin man dressed all in black. It kind of looked like he had a cape around him.” (The phantom must have been thin to be confused with a ventilation pipe.) The only one who mentioned its face was Myrtle Ellen, who said it was horrible. She also agreed about the dark costume. The newspapers described the phantom as “black robed,” suggesting long, loose-flowing clothes. Myrtle Ellen added that “He walks like a drape and runs like a horse.”(15)

  This comparison made more sense in 1951 when “drapes” were a recent memory. They were mainly young, black, and Hispanic men who dressed in a flashy outfit called a “zoot suit.” In his novel The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison describes “drapes” in motion, which may give us some idea of what Ellen meant: “What about these three boys, coming now along the platform, tall and slender, walking with swinging shoulders… walking slowly, their shoulders swaying, their legs swinging from their hips…”(16)

  Mrs. Melvin Hensler, discoverer of the sinister potato sack, saw the phantom three times and said that during one of these sightings it looked like it had a hump on its back.

  Later descriptions of the phantom include the standard fiendish red eyes, but none of the eyewitnesses mentioned them. That detail seems to have been added when it became part of Baltimore folklore.

  Speculation

  Social scientists might describe events in O’Donnell Heights as an example of an “imaginary community threat.” This approach suggests that the 900 families living there experienced “feelings of danger persisting within a diffuse population, lasting anywhere from a few weeks to several months…[the] creation and spread of these imaginary forces are a result of rumor and sensationalistic media reports that cause a conformity of misperceptions.”(17)

  Misperceptions certainly played a part, but they don’t explain the relatively straightforward experiences described by William Buskirk and other witnesses. (I tried contacting William Buskirk, but he died in 1997. His sister-in-law told me he had a great sense of humor and while that might suggest a hoax, she also said that in the forty-six years they were related, William never mentioned the phantom. In fact, she hadn’t even heard about the incident until I contacted her.(18)) The police never denied that people were seeing something, but like George Cook, they thought it would turn out to be a “young hoodlum.” If it was, he was never caught, exposed, or confessed.

  The story must have been spread by word-of-mouth because the two local newspapers ran just six articles, two of them fillers, and these appeared as the panic ended. The only one of these that might be described as “sensationalistic” was printed in The Sun on July 25, 1951, and included the experiences described by Buskirk, Mrs. Melvin Hensler, Jack Cromwell, and others. It ended on this sober, socially scientific, note: “The question of the prowler of O’Donnell Heights… continued to be not one of the phantoms, but of real people reacting to (and possibly creating) the unknown with their imaginations.”

  Some will take the phantom’s affinity for St. Stanislaus as evidence that it was a ghost. Part of O’Donnell Heights was built on land that once belonged to St. Stanislaus, and the cemetery contains unmarked graves from the influenza epidemic of 1918. Also, bodies were dug up and reinterred when Boston Street was extended in the 1930s, but it’s hard to see why any of this would stir up a spirit in July 1951.(19) No one suggested that the phantom was a vampire either, despite wearing a cape, that “most evocative of garments” representing “concealment, darkness, the secrets and terrors of the night itself.”(20) Its alleged disappearance into a crypt, however, could indicate a different kind of subterranean connection.

  Wm. Michael Mott, author of Caverns, Cauldrons, and Concealed Creatures, suggests that enti
ties like the Phantom of O’Donnell Heights are flesh and blood beings that live underground. This may explain both their agility and their talent for making quick disappearances. ”An origin or habitat in a region of higher pressure,” he argues, “might result in a higher physical and muscular density in a life-form or being. This would equate to greater physical strength, the ability to make prodigious leaps and bounds, and a ruggedness of physiology not normally associated with those common-place creatures which have evolved or are designed to inhabit the surface of the earth.”(21)

  Other less corporeal possibilities are that the phantom was a psycho-physical thoughtform (see “The Bridge to Body Island”) or an “ultraterrestrial.” These are a class of beings proposed by author John Keel, who suggests that inhabitants from a different part of the spectrum can appear in ours and cause mischief. Another possibility is demons, and there are in fact devils specifically assigned to the raising of “uproars” like the panic in O’Donnell Heights. Elementals are another possibility, one of the “lares, genii, fauns, satyrs, wood-nymphs, foliots, fairies, Robin Goodfellows [or] trolli” from traditional folklore.(22) Goblins belong in this category and there is a fictional version of them that recalls Baltimore’s bouncing nuisance.