Wild Talents (9 page)
Authors: Charles Fort
In this period (Nov. 12, 1931) a dispatch to the newspapers, from Bogota, Colombia, told of a “puzzling crime wave.” In the hospitals were forty-five persons, suffering with stab wounds. “The police were unable to explain what appeared to be a general attack, but they arrested more than 200 persons.”
Another occurrence of “phantom bullets,” in the State of New Jersey, was told of in the
New York Herald,
Feb. 2, 1916. Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Repp, of Glassboro, N.J., had been fired upon by “phantom bullets.” This was a special attack upon one house. There were sounds of breaking glass, and bullet holes were found in windowpanes, but nothing beyond the windowpanes was marked. It is such a circumstance as was told of in accounts of the “Camden sniper.” It is as if somebody fired, not only with a missile-less gun, or with invisible bullets, but as if with intent only to perforate windows, and with the effects controlled by, and limited by, his intent. Consequently, instead of thinking of a shooting at windowpanes, I tend simply to think that holes appeared in window glass. Nobody in the house was injured, but Mr. and Mrs. Repp were terrified and they fled. Members of the Township Committee investigated, and they reported that, though no bullets were findable, the windows “were broken much as a window usually is, when a bullet crashes through it.”
That’s the story. Of witnesses, I.C. Soddy and Howard R. Moore were mentioned. I sent letters of enquiry to all persons whose names were given, and received not one reply. There are several ways of explaining. One is that it is probable that persons who have experiences such as those told of in this book, receive so many “crank letters” that they answer none. Dear me—once upon a time, I enjoyed a sense of amusement and superiority toward “cranks.” And now here am I, a “crank,” myself. Like most writers, I have the moralist somewhere in my composition, and here I warn—take care, oh, reader, with whom you are amused, unless you enjoy laughing at yourself.
It seemed to me doubtful that a woman could go along Upper Broadway, and jab, with a hat pin, five men and a woman before being caught. There has been a gathering of suggestions of not ordinary woundings. In
Lloyd’s Weekly News
(London) Feb. 21, 1909, there was an account of a panic in Berlin. Many women, in the streets of the city, had been stabbed. It was said that the assailant had been seen, and he was described as “a young man, always vanishing.” If he was seen, he is another of the “uncatchables.” In this newspaper of February 23, it was said that seventy-three women had been stabbed, all except four of them not seriously.
We have had data that suggest the existence of vampires, other than humans of the type of the Portuguese sailor: but the brazen and serialized—sometimes murderous, but sometimes petty—assaults upon men and women are of a different order, and seem to me to be the work of imaginative criminals, stabbing people to make mystery, and to make a stir. I feel that I can understand their motives, because once upon a time I was an imaginative criminal, myself. Once upon a time I was a boy. One time, when I was a boy, I caught a lot of flies. There was nothing of the criminal, nor of the malicious, in what I did, this time, but it seems to give me an understanding of the “phantom” stabbers and snipers. I painted the backs of the flies red, and turned them loose. There was an imaginative pleasure in thinking of flies, so bearing my mark, attracting attention, causing people to wonder, spreading far, appearing in distant places, so marked by me.
In some of our stories there is much suggestion that there was no “vanishing man”—that wounds appeared upon people, as appeared—or as it was said to have appeared—a wound on the head of a sailor. See back to the story told by the captain of the
Brechsee.
Or that wounds appeared upon people, and that the victims, examined by the police, were more or less bullied into giving some kind of description of an assailant. However, some of the stories of the “vanishing man” look as if he, too, may be. There may be several ways of doing these things. Early in the year 1907, a “vanishing man” was reported from the town of Winchester, England. I take from the
Weekly Dispatch
(London), Feb. 10, 1907. Women of Winchester were complaining of an “uncatchable,” who was committing petty assaults upon them, such as rapping their hands. “A mysterious feature of the affair is that the man disappears, as if by magic.”
The “phantom stabber” of Bridgeport, Conn., appeared first Feb. 20, 1925, and the last of his attacks, of which I have record, was upon June 1, 1928. That was a long time in which to operate uncaught. In the daytime, mostly, though sometimes at night, girls were stabbed: in the streets; in such public places as a department store, and the entrance of a library. Descriptions of the assailant were indefinite. In almost all instances the wounds were not serious. One of the stories, as told in the
New York Herald Tribune,
Aug. 27, 1927, is typical of the circumstances of publicity, or of the confidence of an assailant that he could not be caught. If my stories will be regarded as ghost stories, a novelty about them is the eeriness of crowded thoroughfares—a lurk near Coventry Street, London, and the sneak of an invisible in Broadway, New York. I expect sometime to hear of a haunted subway, during rush hours. Edgar Allan Poe would say of me that I’m no artist, and don’t know how to infuse atmosphere. One would think that I had never heard of the uncanniness of dark nights in lonely places. Some of the stories are of desperate plays for notoriety. I have a story now, not of doings in a graveyard, but in a department store. Bridgeport, Conn.—staged on a staircase, with an audience of hundreds of persons, there was a very theatrical performance. A review of this melodrama was published in the
Herald Tribune
—
“The stabber who has terrorized Bridgeport for the last thirty months suddenly appeared this afternoon and claimed his twenty-third victim in a crowded downtown department store. The victim was Isabelle Pelskur, fourteen, 539 Main Street, messenger girl employed in the D.M. Read store. The girl was stabbed in the store where she is employed.
“The stabbing occurred at 4:58, just two minutes before closing time of the store. Already some of the store doors had been locked, and the large crowd of shoppers were being ushered from the store. The employees were leaving their counters and the victim had started up the stairs from the arcade side of the first floor to the women’s dressing room.
“The girl had scarcely ascended more than half a dozen steps when she was attacked by the assailant who lunged his sharp blade into her side, causing a severe wound.”
He got away. Nobody reported having seen him escaping. The girl could give only a “meager” description of him.
10
Relatively to the principles of modern science, werewolves cannot be. But I know of no such principle that is other than tautology or approximation. It is myth-stuff. Then, if relatively to a group of phantoms, werewolves cannot be, there are at least negative grounds for thinking that they are quite likely.
Relatively to the principles, or lack of principles, of ultra-modern science, there isn’t anything that can’t be, even though also it is not clear how anything can be.
So my acceptance, or pseudo-conclusion, is that werewolves are quite likely-unlikely.
Once upon a time, when minds were dosed with the pill-theory of matter, werewolves were said to be physically impossible. Very little globes were said to be the ultimates of matter, and were supposed to be understandable, and people thought they knew what matter is. But the pills have rolled away. Now we are told that the ultimates are waves. It is impossible to think of a wave. One has to think of something that is waving. If anybody can think of crime, virtue, or color, independent of somebody who is criminal, virtuous, or colored, that thinker—or whatever—may say that he knows what he is talking about, in denying the existence of anything, upon physical grounds. To say that the “ultimate waves” are electrical comes no closer to saying something. If there is no definition of electricity better than that of saying that it is a mode of motion, we’re not enlighteningly told that the “ultimate waves” are moving motions.
My suspicion is that we’ve got everything reversed; or that all things that have the sanction of scientists, or that are in agreement with their myths, are ghosts: and that things called “ghosts,” are, because they are not in agreement with the spooks of science, the more nearly real things. I now suspect that the spiritualists are reversedly right—that there is a ghost world—but that it is our existence—that when spirits die they become human beings.
I now have a theory that once upon a time, we were real and alive, but departed into this state that we call “existence”—that we have carried over with us from the real existence, from which we died, the ideas of Truth, and of axioms and principles and generalizations—ideas that really meant something when we were really alive, but that, of course, now, in our phantom-existence—which is demonstrable by any X-ray photograph of any of us—can have only phantom-meaning—so then our never-ending, but always-frustrated search for our lost reality. We come upon chimera and mystification, but persistently have beliefs, as retentions from an experience in which there were things to believe in. I’d not say that all of us are directly ghosts: most of us may be the descendants of the departed from a real existence, who, in our spook-world, pseudo-propagated.
Once upon a time—but in our own times—there were two alleged marvels that were sources of uncommon contempt, or amusement, to scientists: they were the transformation of elements into other elements, and the transformation of human animals into other animals.
The history of science is a record of the transformations of contempts and amusements.
I think that the idea of werewolves is most silly, degraded, and superstitious: therefore I incline toward it respectfully. It is so laughable that I am serious about this.
Marauding animals have often unaccountably appeared in, or near, human communities, in Europe and the United States. The explanation of an escape from a menagerie has, many times, been unsatisfactory, or has had nothing to base upon. I have collected notes upon these occurrences, as
teleportations,
but also there may be
lycanthropy.
Nobody has ever been finally reasonable, and it is impossible for me to be absolutely unreasonable. I can tell no yarn that is wholly a yarn, if it be my whim, or inspiration, to come out for the existence of werewolves.
What is there that absolutely sets apart the story of a man who turned into an ape, or a hyena, from the story of a caterpillar that became a butterfly? Or rascals who almost starve to death, and then learn to take on the looks of philanthropists? There are shabby young doctors and clergymen, who turn so sleek, after learning the lingo of altruists, that they have the appearance of very different animals. Or the series of portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte—and so much of his mind upon classical models—and the transformation of a haggard young man into much resemblance to the Roman Emperor Augustus.
It is a matter of common belief that men have come from animals called “lower,” not necessarily from apes, though the ape-theory seems to fit best, and is the most popular. Then why not that occasionally a human sloughs backward? Data of reversions, not of individuals, but of species, are common in biology.
I have come upon many allusions to the “leopard men” and the “hyena men” of African tribes, but the most definite story that I know of is an article by Richard Bagot, in the
Cornhill Magazine,
October, 1918, upon the alleged powers of natives of Northern Nigeria to take on the forms of lower animals. An experience attributed to Capt. Shott, D.S.O., is told of. It is said that raiding hyenas had been wounded by guntraps, and in each case had been traced to a point where the hyena tracks had ceased, and had been succeeded by human footprints, leading to a native town. A particular of the traditional werewolf story is that when a werewolf is injured, the injury appears upon a corresponding part of the human being of its origin. Bagot told of Capt. Shott’s experience, alleged experience, whatever, with “an enormous brute” that had been shot, and had made off, leaving tracks that were followed. The hunters came to a spot where they found the jaw of the animal, lying in a pool of blood. The tracks went on toward a native town. The next day a native died. His jaw had been shot away.
There have been many appearances of animals that were unexplained—anyway until I appeared upon the horizon of this field of data. It seems to me that my expressions upon
teleportations
are somewhat satisfactory in most of the cases—that is, that there is a force, distributive of forms of life and other phenomena that could switch an animal,’ say from a jungle in Madagascar to a back yard somewhere in Nebraska. But theories of mine are not so god-like as to deny any right of being for all other theories. I’d not be dogmatic and say positively that once upon a time a lemur was magically transported from Africa to Nebraska: possibly somebody in Lincoln, Nebraska, had been transformed into a lemur, or was a werelemur.
Whatever the explanation may be, the story was told, in the
New York Sun,
Nov. 12, 1931. Dr. E.R. Mathers, of Lincoln, Nebraska, had seen a strange, small animal in his yard, acting queerly. The next day he found the creature dead. The body was taken to Dr. I.H. Blake, of the University of Nebraska, who identified it as that of an African lemur, of the
Galaga
group. A lemur is a monkey-like animal, with a long snout: size about that of a monkey.
I wrote to Dr. Mathers about this, and, considerably to my surprise, because mostly my “crank” letters are very properly ignored, received an answer, dated Nov. 21, 1931. Dr. Mathers verified the story. The lemur, stuffed and mounted, is now upon exhibition in the museum of the State University at Lincoln. Where it had come from had not been learned. There was no story of an escape, anywhere that could match this appearance in a backyard. Accounts had been spread-headed with illustrations in the
Lincoln State Journal,
October 23rd, and in the
Sunday State Journal,
October 25th: but not even in some other back yard had this animal been seen, according to absence of statements. I neglected to ask whether, at the time of the appearance of the lemur, the disappearance of any resident of Lincoln was reported.
Suppose, at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, I should read a paper upon the transformation of a man into a hyena. There would be only one way of doing that. I recommend it to unrecognized geniuses, who can’t otherwise get a hearing. It would have to be a hold-up.
But, without having to pull a gun, at the meeting of the N.A.S., at New Haven, Conn., Nov. 18, 1931, Dr. Richard C. Tolman suggested that energy may be transforming into matter.
If one can’t think of a man transforming into a hyena, let one try to think of the motions of a thing turning into a thing.
My expression is that, in our existence of the hyphen, or of intermediateness between so-called opposites, there is no energy, and there is no matter: but that there is matter-energy, manifesting in different degrees of emphasis one way or the other:
That it is not thinkable that energy could turn into matter: but that it is thinkable that energy-matter could, by a difference of emphasis, turn into matter-energy—
Or that there is no man who is without the hyena-element in his composition, and that there is no hyena that is not at least rudimentarily human—or that at least it may be reasoned that, by no absolute transformation, but by a shift of emphasis, a man-hyena might turn into a hyena-man.
The year 1931—and there were everywhere, but most notably in the U.S.A., such shifts, or reversions, from the state that is called “civilization,” that there was talk of repealing laws against carrying weapons, and of the arming of citizens to protect themselves, as if such cities as New York and Chicago were frontier towns.
Out of policemen—in all except physical appearance—had come wolves that had preyed upon nocturnal women. There were chases of savages through the streets of New York City. Jackals on juries picked up bits from kills by bigger beasts, and snarled their jackal-verdicts.
New York ( Times,
June 30, 1931—“Police at Mineola hunt ape-like animal—hairy creature, about four feet tall.”
Out of judges had come swine.
County Judge W. Bernard Vause found guilty of using the mails to defraud, and sentenced to six years in Atlanta Penitentiary. Federal Judge Grover M. Moscowitz was censured by the House of Representatives. The Magistrates, who, facing charges of corruption, resigned, were Mancuso, Ewald, McQuade, Goodman, Simpson. Vitale was removed. Crater disappeared. Rosenbluth went away, for his health’s sake.
And, near Mineola, Long Island, a gorilla was reported.
The first excitement was at Lewis & Valentine’s nursery—story told by half a dozen persons—an ape that had come out of the woods, had looked them over, and had retreated. It seems that the police hadn’t heard of “mass psychology”: so they had to explain less learnedly. Several days later, they were so impressed with repeating stories that a dozen members of the Nassau County Police Department were armed with shotguns, and were assigned to ape-duty.
No circus had appeared anywhere near Mineola, about this time; and from neither any zoo, nor from anybody’s smaller menagerie, had the escape of any animal been reported. Ordinarily let nothing escape, or let nothing large, wild, and hairy appear, but let it be called an ape, anyway—and, upon the rise of an ape scare, one expects to hear of cows reported as gorillas: trees, shadows, vacancies taking on ape-forms. But—
New York Herald Tribune,
June 27th—Mrs. E.H. Tandy, of Star Cliff Drive, Malverne, reported something as if she had not heard of the ape scare. She called up the police station, saying that there was a lion in her back yard. The policeman, who incredulously received this message, waited for another policeman to return to the station, and share the joke. Both waited for the arrival of a third disbeliever. The three incredulous policemen set out, several hours after the telephone call, and by that time there wasn’t anything to disturb anybody’s conventional beliefs, in Mrs. Tandy’s back yard.
There was no marauding. All the stories were of a large and hairy animal that was appearing and disappearing—
And appearing and disappearing in the vast jungles not far from Mineola, Long Island, were skunks that were coming from lawyers. Some of them were caught and rendered inoffensive by disbarment. There was a capture of several dozen medical hyenas, who had been picking up livings in the trains of bootleggers. It could be that an occurrence, in New Jersey, was not at all special, but represented a general slump back toward a state of about simian development. There was an examination of applicants for positions in the schools of Irvington. In mathematics, no question beyond arithmetic was asked: in spelling, no unusual word was listed. One hundred and sixteen applicants took the examination, and all failed to pass. The average mark was 31.5. The creep of jungle-life stripped clothes from people. Nudists appeared in many places. And it was not until later in the year, that the staunchest opponent of disclosures spoke out, in the name of decency, or swaddling—or when Pope Pius XI refused to receive Mahatma Gandhi, unless he’d put on pants.
Upon the 29th of June, the ape-story was taken so seriously at Mineola that Police Captain Earle Comstock ordered out a dozen special motor patrols, armed with revolvers and sawed-off shotguns, with gas and ball ammunition led by Sergeant Berkley Hyde. A posse of citizens was organized, and it was joined by twenty nurserymen, who were armed with sickles, clubs, and pitchforks. Numerous footprints were found. “The prints seemed to be solely those of the hind feet, and were about the size and shape of a man’s hand, though the thumb was set farther back than would be the case with a man’s hand.” However, no ape was seen. As to prior observations, Policeman Fred Koehler, who had been assigned to investigate, reported statements by ten persons.
The animal disappeared about the last of June. Upon July 18th, it was reported again, and by persons who were out of communication with each other. It was near Huntington, L.I. A nurseryman, named Stockman, called up the police, saying that members of his family had seen an animal, resembling a gorilla, running through shrubbery. Then a farmer, named Bruno, three miles away, telephoned that he had seen a strange animal. Policemen went to both places, and found tracks, but lost them in the woods. The animal was not reported again.
And I suppose I shall get a letter from somebody in Long Island, asking me not to publish his name, unless I consider that positively necessary, but assuring me that, of all the theorists, who had tried to explain the Ape of Mineola, only I have insight and penetration—