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

and landmarks like the Babson farm and the garrison vanished long ago.
    I wondered if the musket ball found in the hemlock tree, the one piece of physical evidence preserved at the time, was still around. None of the museums or historical societies in Cape Ann knows where it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. The bullet may be in a trunk in the attic of some Babson descendant, waiting to be found, wrapped, perhaps, in the pages of its own history like Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.
    While looking for the phantom’s fugitive musket ball I was not surprised to learn that another relic has survived the centuries. Mary H. Sibbalds, president of The Sandy Bay Historical Society and Museum, wrote to me saying: “I honestly believe that if anyone in the Babson family possessed what they believed to be the famous bullet, they would have given it to the SBHS. We do have the knife with which Ebenezer supposedly killed the bear of Bearskin Neck!“(35)

2
    BRIBING THE DEAD

    Morristown, New Jersey, 1788

    The story of a fake sorcerer who got rich
    by convincing imitation ghosts to hand over a non-existent fortune.

    One night, on the outskirts of Morristown, New Jersey, forty men assembled in a lonely field and began to march. A few years earlier General Washington’s Continental Army may have marched through this same field but that night they were mainly farmers who were engaged in raising something a lot more interesting than either rebellion or buckwheat. Candles threw faint trembling shadows onto the surrounding trees and illuminated the sorcerer who presided over the ritual. He stood beneath an awning, directing the procession as it followed occult pattern of circles, squares and triangles that were laid out on the ground. Most of the men were tired and the whole company was more or less drunk, but neither liquor nor fatigue could make them forget the doom that awaited any who stepped outside the protective boundaries of the diagram. Perhaps they thought a careless foot had gone astray when a column of flame burst from the earth, exploding in their ears and dazzling their eyes. Men, trees, and diagrams were briefly visible in the flash, along with something that stood outside the safety of the magic circle, something that was not of this world.
    Silence and darkness followed the eruption and the hush continued until a low groaning was heard coming from the direction of the trees. A tortured howl filled the November night and was quickly joined by a chorus of shrieks that lifted the hairs on the assembly’s necks and, no doubt, left many of the quietly terrified men wondering if there weren’t easier ways of getting rich.
    The line separating sorcerers from confidence men is not always clear. Among the Tungus people of Siberia, for example, shamans use sleight of hand in their healing rituals to make it appear that an illness has been actually, physically extracted from the patient’s body in the form of a stone. This is a deliberate deception carried out to convince sick people that they are cured and help bring about their recovery. What happened in Morristown is not an example of that sort of thing. The “sorcerer” in this case was a Yankee schoolmaster named Ransford Rogers and the sole purpose of his deception was to squeeze money out of the participants until they squeaked.
    Before taking up necromancy, Rogers was a teacher in the town of Smith’s Clove, New York. There he became acquainted with two men who had traveled from New Jersey in search of a person who could help them to find buried treasure. They believed it was hidden in a mountain twenty miles to the west of their homes in Morristown, but that any attempts to remove it were doomed to fail “for want of a person whose knowledge descended into the bowels of the earth, and who could reveal the secret things of darkness.”(1)

    The Set-Up
    Schooley’s Mountain, which was then known as “Schooler’s Mountain, is “a veritable range of