The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America Read Online Free PDF Page A

beings. Despite the sasquatches’ seemingly physical nature, along with the stone throwing, footprints, and axe grabbing, Beck felt “they cannot be natural beings with natural bodies.” His metaphysical approach is not easy to understand, but he seems to have believed they were primitive spirits that materialized in the physical world without being real living things. Consequently, they cannot be killed or captured, but it does not follow that they’re harmless.
    “There was enough physical force present to kill more than the number of our party,” according to Beck. “If that fate had fallen on us in 1924, they probably would have found five wrangled bodies and a disheveled cabin, and strange large tracks around the area. Of course, there would have been an investigation, but a so called logical explanation would have been given.”(32)
    Since the ape-men are psychical, rather than physical, manifestations, not everyone will encounter them. The miners were especially sensitive to spiritual vibrations and Beck felt that “persons who are psychic have a degree of involvement in a sighting and help trigger the phenomenon.”(33) Other writers have proposed similar theories, and, if they’re right, perhaps Ebenezer Babson was Gloucester’s “psychic trigger.”

    Three Paranormal Sieges
    Gloucester, Kelly, and Ape Canyon are normally considered three different kinds of paranormal phenomena. The raiders’ appearance near Salem during the witch mania has made it a footnote to what could have been an unrelated event. Billy Ray Taylor’s flying saucer sighting put Kelly/Hopkinsville in the UFO literature as an early and unusual example of a close encounter of the third kind, but what if Taylor hadn’t looked into the sky and seen something he couldn’t identify? How would it be classified? (Beck might argue that the sighting itself triggered the appearance of the goblins.) Ape Canyon is considered a classic of cryptozoology, the study of unknown or “hidden” animals, but as researcher John Green points out, “There is no other report of sasquatches engaging in any elaborate form of combined activity, let alone a concerted attack on a human habitation.”(34)
    Each of these events is something of an anomaly even among anomalous events; not unique perhaps, but certainly untypical, and with some common elements. All three took place in the summer, in wooded areas, and each involved armed civilians taking refuge in buildings and defending themselves from an apparent threat by beings that did not seem wholly physical. The witnesses experienced terror, but there is no record of them suffering any injury, either directly or indirectly. In fact, the only physical contact mentioned in any of the episodes took place when one of the Kelly gargoyles touched Billy Ray Taylor’s head. Even in Ape Canyon, where the attackers’ intentions seemed murderous, they did no more actual harm than either the inquisitive goblins or musket-toting phantoms. Fred Beck makes the point that “Some accounts state I was hit in the head by a rock and knocked unconscious. This is not true.”
    It does not follow, however, that these incidents weren’t traumatic. The miners never returned to the cabin, the Suttons moved a short time later, and Babson’s mother apparently left the farm. In each story the beings were hit by gunfire without leaving bloodstains, none of them voiced pain, surprise, or anger, or had their movements impeded by injury. Beck claims that the last creature he shot may have been killed, but it fell into a canyon so there’s no way to be sure; the goblins and raiders went down too, but didn’t stay down.
    The sieges almost seem like theatrical productions. They are real and not real at the same time, with the audience experiencing genuine terror because it doesn’t know it’s witnessing a strange and pointless play.
    It has been over 300 years since the phantoms appeared in Gloucester. Little remains from that period