Free The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America by Robert Schneck Page A

cargo cult making an airplane that could fly. Spear had used the vocabulary of technology, not its language, to build a statue that expressed the human urge for transcendence.

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    THE PRESIDENT’S VAMPIRE

    Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, May, 1866

    No matter how you feel about the current Administration,
    no one can accuse the president of being soft on vampirism.

    Was a Portuguese sailor the first “real-life” vampire in American history? Did the President of the United States intervene and save the first vampire from being hanged?
    Charles Fort gives a vivid account of the story in his 1932 book, Wild Talents : “Sometime in the year 1867, a fishing smack sailed from Boston. One of the sailors was a Portuguese, who called himself ‘James Brown.’ Two of the crew were missing, and were searched for. The captain went into the hold. He held up his lantern, and saw the body of one of these men, in the clutches of ‘Brown,’ who was sucking blood from it. Near by was the body of the other sailor. It was bloodless. ‘Brown’ was tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, but President Johnson commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. In October, 1892, the vampire was transferred from the Ohio Penitentiary to the National Asylum, Washington, D. C., and his story was re-told in the newspapers.”
    The Brooklyn Daily Eagle article that Fort based his story on was even more lurid:
    “A HUMAN VAMPIRE AND A MURDERER.”
    “The Terrible Record of a Maniac Convict-Removed to an Asylum.”
    “COLUMBUS, O., November 4—Deputy United States Marshal Williams of Cincinnati has removed James Brown, a deranged United States prisoner, from the Ohio penitentiary to the national asylum at Washington, D.C. The prisoner fought like a tiger against being removed.”
    “Twenty-five years ago he was charged with being a vampire and living on human blood. He was a Portuguese sailor and shipped on a fishing smack from Boston up the coast in 1867. During the trip two of the crew were missing and an investigation made. Brown was found one day in the hold of the ship sucking the blood from the body of one of the sailors. The other body was found at the same place and had been served in a similar manner. Brown was returned to Boston and convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged. President Johnson commuted the sentence to imprisonment for life.”

President Andrew Johnson (Library of Congress)

    “After serving fifteen years in Massachusetts he was transferred to the Ohio prison. He has committed two murders since his confinement. When being taken from the prison he believed that he was on his way to execution and resisted accordingly.“(2)
    If James Brown were alive today, he would be described as a serial killer and classified variously as organized, disorganized, mentally ill, sexually sadistic, etc., depending on the circumstances.(3) Serial killing, however, was almost unknown in America before the twentieth-century, while the history of vampirism goes back hundreds of years.
    New England was the center of belief in vampirism as a preternatural phenomenon with outbreaks recorded from the late 1700s to the late 1800s in Rhode Island, Vermont, parts of Massachusetts, and Connecticut.(4) There are also stories from New Hampshire about a scientist who made himself immortal by distilling the Elixir of Life from baby’s blood.(5)
    More mundane examples of blood drinking occurred among snowbound travelers and victims of shipwreck who were forced to survive by cannibalism. Sexual pathologies like blood fetishism were discussed (in Latin) by Dr. Richard Von Krafft-Ebing, whose Psychopathia Sexualis included contemporary European examples (“Case 48…he first had to make a cut in his arm… she would suck the wound and during the act become violently excited sexually.”(6)) Was James Brown a violent blood fetishist? Could he have believed that he was a genuine vampire?(7)
    Brown’s story has been retold in books, magazines, and