All The President’s Vampires
The story is incredible, but it’s not totally credible
As reported in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in November of 1882, a deranged inmate, foreign-born, was being moved from an Ohio prison, a man “charged with being a vampire and living on human blood.” He had committed two murders off the East Coast and killed two more in prison.
Somewhat terribly important side note: he was spared from execution by the President of the United States, Andrew Johnson.
You may have come across this tale before as a “did you know?” tidbit online. But let’s take a deeper dive; ending in the most baffling part of this story that no one has answered.
An account in Charles Fort’s widely-read 1932 book Wild Talents, fills in more gruesome details. In 1867, the captain of the fishing smack went searching for two missing crew members in the ship’s hold, and found James Brown (not that James Brown) bent over one of the ship mate’s bodies, drinking it’s blood. Another drained lifeless body lay nearby.
James Brown was tried and sentenced to be hanged by people who don’t understand how to kill vampires.
And so President Johnson — successor to slain vampire hunter Abraham Lincoln — commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.
Editor’s note: life imprisonment for a vampire basically means forever.
He was later transferred to St. Elizabeth’s in DC where, I suppose, he still exists 150+ years later.
And that’s pretty much the end of the story. Boat vampire drinks blood, is caught, is pardoned by a basic-ass president.
How you view this tale depends a lot on which ship you want to sail on. Your news-of-the-weird clipper might find this amusing and nothing more while your conspiratorial seasted would seethe and race to check what political party Andrew Johnson was in. Crossing the ocean on a wide-eyed Princess Cruise might lead you to ponder this proof of vampires in our midst while a dismissive polyreme would assume the whole thing is made up to distract us from the issue of overfishing.
But there’s more
As it turns out, a former writer at Fortean Times (Charles Fort’s spinoff series) decided to dig into this account, and he was more diligent than his former employer’s namesake.
Robert Damon Schneck went so far as to track down a copy of the actual presidential pardon written by Andrew Johnson. Although the text of the pardon is nothing special, as Schneck points out, “this proves that James Brown existed, that he was convicted of murder, and that the President… commuted his sentence.” That’s not small potatoes when all you have to go on is a tiny article in a local newspaper and the word of Charles Fort. Establishing that this isn’t entirely made up is a Big First Step.
Schneck was able to use the information in the presidential pardon to establish where James Brown was in the prison system and when.
And working backward, Schneck came across some early reporting, court records, letters from prison, and perhaps most remarkably, the actual captain’s log from the fishing bark where the vampiric incident took place. That’s due diligence and I gotta respect it. This guy’s pulling archives from obscure maritime stacks and here I am, impressed with myself when I get a library book from out of state.
First of all, the incident didn’t take place off the East Coast as the Brooklyn Eagle reported, but in the Indian Ocean. It took place in 1866, not 1867. Most important, no crew members went missing; rather, one was murdered in broad flickin’ daylight.
Let’s get this part out in the open right away: yes, James Brown did the killing. Yes, James Brown is a murderer. He did the shitty thing.
However, James Brown’s own account gives some extenuating circumstances. Importantly, he says that he was attacked by his shipmate and that others aboard could verify this. In his letters to President Grover Cleveland pleading for clemency, he complains that no witnesses to the murder were able to testify (they were still at sea); he believed their testimony would exonerate him, or at least justify his actions as self-defense.
What this leaves us with are two radically different stories. One, a plain ol’ murder on the high seas. The other, a bodycount left by a vampire.
Leaving aside the question of whether Brown acted in self-defense, Schneck’s account is far more credible. He’s got the primary sources to back up his conclusions: that James Brown committed one murder, with a knife. Not two-to-four murders with fangs. And no blood was imbibed. All that is backed up by both the ship captain’s log and the record from Brown’s murder trial.
Don’t fret. There’s still plenty of room for conspiracy time. Read on!
How did we get from there to here?
Two hella sketchy articles surfaced in 1885, one in the Washington Evening Star and one in the Richmond Dispatch. Note the breathlessness with which the Dispatch puts to shame the Brooklyn Eagle’s attempts at tabloid journalism:
It’s a little hard to swallow this business with him murdering his own captain, since there’s an account in the captain’s log about the murder, written by the captain, who was most certainly not dead when he dropped James Brown off at an embassy for imprisonment.
There’s also no evidence for the additional murders supposedly committed in prison.
It’s possible some papers are confusing this Seaman James Brown with another James Brown. Or maybe they just made this shit up. It was the 19th century, after all. A lot of people were still on board with this “The Divine Right of Kings” business back then.
But why vampires? The Richmond Dispatch never uses that term, even if it’s going to Us Weekly levels with it’s other hyperbole. Brown was clearly “made” into a vampire long after the incident aboard his ship.
This is where we diverge greatly from Schneck’s interpretation of events. He supposed that the Mercy Brown Shitshow, which took place in Rhode Island shortly before the Brooklyn Eagle article came out, informed the vampirizing of James Brown. But other sources have found that Brown was made into a vampire by the media long before poor Mercy Brown was exhumed.
Dig The Stark County Democrat from August 1892. The Democrat was the first newspaper, so far as we can tell, to use the word “vampire” in relation to James Brown, and it did so before Mercy Brown:
I’ll venture a simple armchair explanation that anyone could have made: vampires sell newspapers. Remember: If it bleeds, it leads; if it bites the neckline, it’s a headline; if it makes fang holes, it’s above the dang fold.
If it bleeds, it leads; if it bites the neckline, it’s a headline; if it makes fang holes, it’s above the dang fold.
And let’s make no mistake — the transfer of a prisoner from Ohio to Washington should not be news in Brooklyn. To have a non-story like that land on the front page, it better have a muddafuthin’ mythical monster in it! We’ve got units to move, you Newsies!
But that’s not even the end
Because — as related by author Christopher Farnsworth — Mark Butler, former project coordinator of the Ohio History Connection, may have found the smoking coffin to what made James Brown a vampire. And get this: it’s not totally the fault of a sensational media run amok:
In his book, “The Ohio Penitentiary Annex and Noted Convicts”, Warden B.F. Dyer writes that Brown was known to have “killed a shipmate and drank his victim’s blood.” Dyer’s book was written in 1891. This means that the story of James Brown being a vampire pre-dates not only the Brooklyn Eagle article, but also pre-dates the death of Mercy Brown. In other words, James Brown was an alleged “vampire” during Mercy Brown’s lifetime…
…I think it is more likely that Dyer himself created this myth… What was Dyer’s motivation? Just as a vampire can sell newspapers, a vampire could also help sell his book. The Ohio Penitentiary had quite a tourism industry, including tours and even postcards, during its heyday. Imagine if potential visitors heard that they might catch a glimpse of a real vampire!
(bolding my own)
Did you know that the Ohio Penitentiary was a tourist trap?
Did you know you could lure tourists into a prison with suggestions that one inmate might be a real vampire?
Man, people in the 1890s REALLY needed video games.
The thread of how James Brown “became” a vampire is interesting and not unfamiliar — his won’t be the last story discussed on this blog where a long-dead person is morphed into a vampire in the public’s imagination. But But But that’s only the part of the mystery that we can explain. The biggest mind-bender remains unsolved.
LEST WE BURY THE LEDE IN NATIVE SOIL…
The biggest WTF in this tale — and the one that gets the least attention — continues to be: why did the President of the United States commute the sentence of an acknowledged murderer who had no connections, no political capital, and who wasn’t even American? It’s unimaginable — it is Wallace Shawn-level inconceivable — that today a president would commute the sentence of a foreigner convicted of murder, especially one who doesn’t come with a built-in voting bloc.
Johnson certainly played it fast and loose with the presidential pardon, but mostly that was in pursuit of healing the national rift after the American Civil War. Brown was not involved in the Civil War, not even a citizen, and as far as I know didn’t have any big donors or famed statesmen on the outside to plead his case (he purportedly paid his lawyer in whale oil). So how did he luck out?
Neither the Brooklyn Eagle, Charles Fort, nor Schneck have a good answer for this and neither do I.
Unless…
President Andrew Johnson was a god damned Renfield!
For further reading on conspiracy theories related to 1860s presidents, their children, and their successors, see my earlier blog Robert Todd Lincoln: Vampire Enabler.
POSTSCRIPT the tale of James Brown* has made the rounds on the internet a couple times, but it’s rarely told in depth. In my pompous way, I’m hoping to push back against some of that by standing on the shoulders of people who’ve actually dug into this story — Robert Damon Schneck, David Meyers, Elise Meyers Walker, James Dailey II, Christopher Farnsworth, and Mark Butler.
*For the last time, not that James Brown
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Image Sources: Brooklyn Eagle (courtesy Brooklyn Public Library), The Chronicling America project, Inside the Ohio Penitentiary, Newspapers.com, Walt Disney Pictures, Hoffberg Productions, Envato, Shutterstock
