Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (20 page)

In the United States, clowns also appeared in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, in 2000, then returned to Chicago in 2008, and outbreaks still occur from time to time.

The witches, superheroes, and other costumed figures—whose many shapes suggest an unsettled aspect of the phenomenon—have disappeared, while different forms have evolved from the original clowns-in-vans. While some are simple variations, such as black clowns, and others that are nearly unrecognizable, like the “Puppet Man” of New South Wales, Australia, who drove a van filled with life-sized animal puppets and attacked two women. The clown's descendants may even include London's “Chelsea Smilers,” who were

a group of Chelsea football fans traveling London in a van with a smiley face painted on the side. They would stop schoolchildren and ask them questions about
Chelsea football club. If the children got the questions wrong—perhaps they didn't support Chelsea or, worse, didn't like football—the gang would slice the corners of their mouth . . . then hit the child hard enough to make them scream, which widened their wounds into a “smile.”
⁴²

The combination of van, child victims, and exaggerated bloody “smiles” points to its possible origin.

Two different traditions of violent white-faced men in outlandish costumes apparently contributed to the clowns-in-vans phenomenon: the Klan/night doctors and clowns, the comic performers (they are complicated figures in their own right, with antecedents that include pagan wild men and medieval demons). This combination of elements apparently acquired a degree of reality during the clown flap.

On May 23, 1981, while clowns-in-vans were panicking children in Kansas City, a twenty-eight-year-old woman was abducted from Elmhurst, Illinois, near Chicago, and killed. She was the first of more than a dozen women murdered by the “Chicago Rippers” or “Ripper Crew,” a team of four young serial killers—Robin Gecht, the brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis, and Edward Spreitzer.

They drove around Chicago and neighboring cities in a red van, grabbing women off the street and subjecting them to rape, torture, and murder. The Rippers also amputated one or both of the victims' breasts and allegedly ate them during satanic rituals. They were finally arrested in November 1982—but why discuss the Ripper crimes here?

There are parallels between the Chicago murders and clowns-in-vans, including when they began, how they were committed, and diabolical elements, but what is less apparent are the killers' personal connections to clowns. Robin Gecht was a former employee of “Pogo” himself, John Wayne Gacy, whose 1979 confession implicated Gecht in several murders. Gacy also befriended Andrew Kokoraleis on death row at the Menard Correctional Center.
⁴³
He called the younger man “Koko,” which is a predictable reduction of the multisyllabic
Kokoraleis
but also the name of a famous cartoon character, “Koko the Clown” from Max Fleischer's
Out of the Inkwell
series (1918–1929), and “Koko the Killer Clown,” a surly dwarf who performs at Coney Island. Edward Spreitzer neither knew Gacy nor had a clownish nickname, but he did have a “big red fuzzy bush” of hair, “which stood up in all directions and he had clown lips.” One detective thought he looked like the children's show marionette Howdy Doody, while the other was “immediately reminded of Bozo the Clown.”
⁴⁴

Associates, nicknames, and appearances do not make the Chicago Rippers a physical embodiment of clowns-in-vans,
but their cannibalism calls attention to the fear of being eaten that is a fundamental part of the clowns' origins.

Some Atlantans apparently believed that scientists were turning the blood of black children into interferon, the way earlier generations thought that blacks were kidnapped, cut up, and used to manufacture castor oil. Though cadavers were regularly stolen for anatomy classes, both modern and traditional night doctor legends can be understood from another perspective; as cannibalism described in terms of medicine. “Butchering” then becomes “dissection” and instead of victims being eaten as meat, they are reduced to the more palatable and presentable form of drugs. These stories represent an unexpected result of the slave trade; the “persistence of African beliefs that whites are man-eaters.”
⁴⁵

For hundreds of years, European and later American merchants sailed along the west coast of Africa buying vast numbers of slaves for transportation across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage. The physical conditions were horrific, but in addition to heat, filth, disease, and overcrowding were psychological terrors for Africans who had never seen the ocean or a ship, and thought white sailors were evil spirits. Rumors had spread

from Senegambia to Angola that the slavers, whose appetite for human cargo had become prodigious, were insatiable cannibals . . . The white man's cannibalism explained his hunger for slaves and hence the trade.
⁴⁶

An eighteenth-century Dutch handbook advised traders to “assure the slaves . . . that they should not be afraid; that white people were not cannibals . . . ,” but sailors would threaten to devour the captives, who interpreted the forced feedings and endless lying in chains as preparation for slaughter.
⁴⁷

For African slaves, the Middle Passage meant being chained into an incomprehensible conveyance and carried away as food for supernatural white-faced cannibals in bizarre clothing. The clowns-in-vans appear to be a stylized history of this ordeal, just as the Pied Piper of Hamelin seems based on the Children's Crusade.

Clowns, however, do not just represent night doctors or slave traders but the white race in general, which, according to folklore, needs black blood to live. Their unnatural pallor suggests coldness and death, while red mouths and noses are the gore-smeared faces of predators feeding on black victims—a belief born in Africa.

For example, consider a legend from Tanzania that was “apparently quite popular during World War II”:

A victim [African] would be rendered unconscious and then hung head down in order to let the blood from the
slit jugular drain into a bucket. The fluid was then transported by a fire engine to an urban hospital, where it was converted into red capsules. These pills were taken on a regular basis by Europeans who . . . needed these potations to stay alive in Africa.
⁴⁸

Americans have been experiencing phantom panics since at least 1692, when spectral raiders menaced outlying farms at the outskirts of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Since then, there have been mysterious stabbers, snipers, gassers, wild men, and “Springheeled Jacks” (tall, thin figures that make superhuman leaps). Some of these have been reported for hundreds of years, but clowns-in-vans are a recent phenomenon, the result of a hypothetical union between black folklore and traditional clowns. The result was a modern form of phantom that spread rapidly, adapted to local conditions, and produced a number of different forms (e.g., the Chelsea Smilers).

Outbreaks of clown hysteria also provided an unusual complement to what was happening in popular culture, where the dark side of clowns, the “there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight” aspect, has assumed so much importance that the “evil clown” is one of the representative figures of contemporary horror.

Phantom clown panics still occur, but not on a nationwide scale. If they prove to be as durable as Springheeled Jack, and this theory of their origin is accurate, then Americans for generations to come will be haunted by grotesque, grease-painted, cannibal ghosts of the Middle Passage.

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The rumors circulating in Kansas City, Missouri, about a strange sect operating at the eastern part of the city had been dismissed as too fantastic to be true. At the beginning of 1890, William O. Huckett, secretary of the Humane Society, received a letter, however, that suggested it was time to investigate.

Mr. Huckett: There is somethin I think ought to be called to your attenshun at once which I think is bad for a civilized community. their is John Wrinkle and his 2 children He has been sick and he is crazy on religion. his little Minnie is 13 years old and his boy John is 11. Wrinkle has hearn that people drink blod at the sloughter houses for their health an he said he believed in the bible that preached that the well should make sacrifises for the sick.

He did blead his little boy and girl until they are recks and he did drink the blod. It has leaked out an unless something is done by you the neighbors will take the matter in their own hand and that quick too. He lives in a little piece of land near the new city limits. yours respectfully GEORGE WEST
¹

Secretary Huckett informed the chief of police, Thomas Speers, and a Humane Society officer named Marran was dispatched to the home of John Wrinkle, where he found

two emaciated children. On the bed lay Wrinkle, who was apparently in the last stages of consumption. When questioned about drinking the blood of the children he strenuously denied having done so. The children also denied it. Their bloodless appearance, however, excited the suspicion of the officer and he compelled them to show their arms. The limbs were in a terrible condition, being covered with scars inside of the elbow joint, showing plainly the effects of the bleeding. When confronted with the evidence of the truth of the accusation, Wrinkle acknowledged that he had availed himself of the opportunity, and asserted that the children had willingly given their blood to restore him to health.
²

No crime had been committed, but Minnie and John were placed in the Children's Home, while the moribund Wrinkle
could not be moved. The blood drinking that appalled Mr. Wrinkle's neighbors would not end with his approaching death, though, for he was just one of Silas Wilcox's followers.

Nothing is known about Silas Wilcox before his arrival in Kansas City in 1888 or 1889, but he was a traveling preacher who put great emphasis on helping the sick and interpreted Leviticus 17:11 (KJV), “For the life of the flesh is in the blood,” to mean that blood cures disease. His teachings attracted around twenty believers who were called “the Samaritans” and visited slaughterhouses to drink “the blood of the freshly killed beeves.”
³
At some point, however, Wilcox decided that it would be better if, instead of livestock, they drank each other's blood.

Perhaps it grew out of his conviction that the healthy must help the sick. Any reluctance the Samaritans might have felt about the new doctrine, however, was overcome by a dramatic demonstration of its power.

Wilcox apparently became very sick and was unable to make the pilgrimage to the packing house. He called upon the faithful members of the band to volunteer to save his life. A woman named Nancy Dixon was the first to show her belief in the doctrine and she bared her arm
for the extraction of the life-giving fluid. Wilcox sucked the blood from her arm and the effect was marvelous, for he recovered from his illness the same day. The visible manifestation of the truth of the doctrine made a great impression on the members of the band . . .
⁴

After that they apparently stopped visiting slaughterhouses and assembled at a member's house each week and exchange blood. During these meetings, “the sick or ailing members ask for assistance from the well ones, and these are detailed to give their blood according to their health and strength. When a member becomes very sick the well ones take turns in supplying him the life-giving fluid.”
⁵
Chief Speers was anxious to end the practice, but there was “no law which covers the case and nothing to be done.”
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The Samaritans also argued that “they have as much right to do this when the blood is a voluntary contribution as the physicians have to transfuse blood from one person to another.”

Silas Wilcox and his disciples might have scandalized Kansas City residents and inspired headline writers to label them a “Hideous Sect” of “Human Vampires” and “A Band of Fanatics” engaged in “Horrible Practices,” but hyperbole aside, a lot of blood drinking was going on at the time.
⁷

In 1898, Joseph Ferdinand Gueldry's (1858–1945) painting
Buveurs de Sang
(
The Blood Drinkers
) caused a sensation at Paris's Salon des Artistes Français. Gueldry often depicted workshops and factories, but this slaughterhouse interior shocked many viewers. A description of the canvas appears in the July 24, 1898,
Brooklyn (NY) Daily Eagle
:

The scene is a slaughterhouse. A powerful bull lies on the ground and the hammer that killed him is seen near the head. Blood has trickled and spattered over the vicinity. Whole beeves and sides and quarters hang on hooks about the large bare room. On the other side of the fallen animal are eight people, aged or sickly, who have assembled to drink the warm blood that pours from a rent in the animal's throat. One butcher is hauling at a cord and another stoops over the wound and hands the red fluid to the patients. A woman on whom a father is urging a glass of the disgusting medicine—or food, however it may be regarded—turns away and presses it back, unable to look at it.

The painting, which the
New York Times
described as “revoltingly disgusting,” showed something that was apparently going on across the United States.
⁸
In addition to Kansas
City's packinghouses, blood drinking was reported in Albany; New York City; Cincinnati; St. Louis; New Orleans; and Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Unlike French abattoirs, however, which retained elements of traditional butchering, American slaughterhouses were factories for killing animals and efficiently converting their bodies into meat, skin, and other marketable commodities (Henry Ford reportedly studied their
disassembly
methods and applied them to building cars). But even with this emphasis on speed, and the wine and sugar industry's demand for animal blood, an unknown number of slaughterhouses made themselves freely available for blood drinking; a St. Louis butcher said, “We do not charge for it so that the very poorest can take it if they desire.”
⁹

Blood drinkers—men, women, and children, of every age and class—arrived at the abattoir at times when animals were to be killed. Cattle from the stockyard were herded inside and driven single file down a chute to the killing floor, where a worker struck them on the head with a heavy sledgehammer. A stunned animal's throat was then cut and “as the current of life floods from the gash the cups and vessels are held to receive it, and it drank [
sic
] instantly with all the warmth of healthy vital action upon it.”
¹⁰

Neophytes had to become accustomed to the slaughterhouse atmosphere and swallowing hot blood, it seems to have been both palatable and digestible. Considered purely as a beverage, it was typically compared to drinking fresh
milk and some developed a passion for it; one woman visited a New York City slaughterhouse every other day and downed “three full bumpers” of blood.
¹¹
A Cincinnati reporter tried a tumbler of bullock's blood and became effusive, describing it as “the richest cream, warm, with a tart sweetness and the healthy strength of the pure wine that gladdeneth the hearts of man!”
¹²

After draining their portion, the blood drinker might remain in the slaughterhouse for several hours “to inhale the ‘steam' of the running blood.”
¹³
Blood was also used externally; doctors ordered an Italian dancer to “bake her dainty ankle in bullock's blood,” but most drank it and even developed their own set of standards.
¹⁴

Some aficionados considered the blood of stunned animals to be “black and thick and lifeless” and preferred those dispatched by Jewish ritual slaughter, in which the throat is cut, claiming the results were “brightly ruddy and clear as new wine.”
¹⁵
The source of the blood was also important, since there was far more to vital fluid than corpuscles and plasma.

One of the most ancient ideas about blood is that it is life and soul in material form, and its power can be transferred from one being to another, along with elements of the personality. This led to practices like drinking an enemy's blood to acquire his strength and bravery and applied to other important bodily fluids as well (“When it came to . . . the feeding of babies, actual nutrition was not the only thing
taken in through female milk . . . it was the belief that
character was transmitted
through breast milk”).
¹⁶
These considerations presumably influenced the blood drinkers' choice of animals.

Fowl, swine, sheep, and goats do not seem to have been used. Perhaps their blood was, respectively, too stupid, timid, slovenly, and lascivious; goat blood, in particular, was so potent that jewelers smeared it on precious stones to “soften” them before cutting. Though the ancient Greeks considered bulls' blood a deadly poison, cattle with their robust strength were seen as the ideal source of blood; they may have also appealed to the sometimes bovine standards of late-nineteenth-century beauty.

Woman who were pale, thin, and listless, or those emaciated by consumption were reportedly transformed by blood drinking. They became “wonderfully healthy and fat” or were turned into a “radiant beauty,” though in the latter case this was accompanied by an insatiable craving for human blood.
¹⁷
(Modern “vampires” also believe that blood can enhance their appearance. Julia Caples of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, claims to drink as much as a half gallon of human blood a month and states that “I feel more beautiful than any other time when I'm regularly drinking”).
¹⁸

Blood was used to treat a range of ailments, including rheumatism, protracted fever, “impoverished blood,” and extreme old age, but its most important use was for “[t]uberculosis, sometimes called consumption or pthisis, [which]
was the greatest killer of 19th century Americans.”
¹⁹
Wrinkle seems to have been afflicted with it, as were countless others, and for those who believed in its curative powers, treating the deadliest illness with human blood must have seemed logical.

For thousands of years, the blood of children, virgins, and, oddly, executed criminals have been the most potent remedies in the pharmacopeia. A generally incurable disease (e.g., leprosy, blindness, or, for nineteenth-century Americans, consumption) “could only be removed by a miracle . . . the pure blood of a virgin or of a child was, above all, thought to be the source of life which would abolish those diseases and engender a flourishing new life . . .”
²⁰

The Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans used blood to treat epilepsy, and Pliny the Elder provides a vivid description of how it was taken. “While the crowd looks on,” he writes, “epileptics drink the blood of gladiators, a thing horrible to see, even when wild beasts do it in the arena. Yet, by Hercules, they think it most efficacious to suck it as it foams warm from the man himself, and together with it the very soul out of the mouths of the wounds; yet it is not even human to put the mouth to the wounds of wild beasts.”
²¹
It was a durable belief. In 1823, Hans Christian Andersen
witnessed an execution at which “I saw a poor sick man, whom his superstitious parents made drink a cup of the blood of an executed person, that he might be healed of epilepsy . . .”
²²

Leprosy was especially dangerous for the subjects of kings who contracted it, since the recommended treatment was bathing in human blood. “The king of Egypt was eaten away. So he bade kill the first-born of the children of Israel, in order to bathe himself in their blood.”
²³
When Constantine the Great had leprosy, he was prepared to bathe in children's blood, but “the lamenting of the mothers moved the Emperor,” who was miraculously cured after being baptized. It was also seen as a way to reinvigorate decrepit monarchs.
²⁴

Louis XI, like many other kings, was suspected of bathing in blood and, when very ill, “he seeks for and tries everything, especially much children's blood because of his illness.”
²⁵
The connection between blood baths and rejuvenation, however, reached its definitive form in the legend of Elizabeth Bathory, the “Blood Countess” of sixteenth-century Hungary.

Popular accounts claim that Bathory was extraordinarily beautiful and, as she grew older, tried preserving her appearance by murdering servant girls and bathing in their blood. There is no evidence that the countess engaged in these practices, and she was not accused of them at the time, but she was a serial killer who tortured and murdered as many as 650 girls over thirty years; perhaps folktales about restorative blood baths became attached to her as a way of
comprehending the behavior of a sexual sadist. There is, however, no doubt that Bathory existed; the same cannot be said of Wilcox, the Wrinkles, or, the Samaritans.

Research has confirmed the existence of all the people mentioned in the story that held official positions. The Humane Society officer, T. Paul Marran, lived at 2203 Olive Street with his wife, who ran a bakery; William O. Huckett was secretary of the Kansas City Humane Society in 1890, and later became secretary of the police, while Thomas Speers was the town marshal when Kansas City was still on the frontier and served as chief of police from 1874 to 1895. Even the Children's Home that took in the young Wrinkles was at 1115 Charlotte Street. It later became known as the Gillis Home and still operates at a different location as the Gillis Center.