Wild Talents by Charles Fort Page A

the vampire was transferred from the Ohio Penitentiary to the National Asylum, Washington, D.C, and his story was re-told in the newspapers. See the Brooklyn Eagle, Nov. 4, 1892.
    Ottawa Free Press, Sept. 17, 1910—that, near the town of Galazanna, Portugal, a child had been found dead, in a field. The corpse was bloodless. The child had been seen last with a man named Salvarrey. He was arrested, and confessed that he was a vampire.
    See the New York Sun, April 14, 1931, for an account of the murders of nine persons, all but one of them females, which in the year 1929 terrorized the people of Düsseldorf, Germany. The murderer, Peter Kurten, was caught. At his trial, he made no defense, and described himself as a vampire.
    I have a collection of stories of children, upon whom, at night, small wounds appeared. Rather to my own wonderment, considering that I am a theorist, I have not jumped to the conclusion that these stories are data of vampires, but have thought the explanation of rat bites satisfactory enough. But, in the Yorkshire Evening Argus, March 13, 1924, I came upon a rat story that seems queer. Inquest upon the death of Martha Senior, aged sixty-eight, of New Street, Batley. “On the toes and fingers were a lot of wounds that rather suggested rat bites.” It was said that these little wounds could have had nothing to do with the woman’s death, which, according to the coroner, was from valvular heart disease. The only explanation acceptable to the coroner was that, before the police took charge of the body, the woman must have been dead considerable time, during which rats mutilated the corpse. But Mrs. Elizabeth Lake, a neighbor, testified that she had found Mrs. Senior lying on the floor, and that Mrs. Senior had told her that she was dying. This statement meant that the woman had been attacked by something, before dying. The coroner disposed of it by saying that the woman must have been dead considerable time, before the body was found, and that Mrs. Lake was mistaken in thinking that Mrs. Senior had spoken to her.
    The fun of everything, in our existence of comedy-tragedy—and I was suspicious of the story of terrorized Chinamen, as told by English reporters, because it was a story of panic that omitted the jokes—mania without the smile. Every fiendish occurrence that gnashes its circumstances, and sinks its particulars into a victim, wags a joke. In June, 1899, there was, in many parts of the U.S.A., much amusement. Something, in New York City, Washington, and Chicago, was sending people to hospitals. I don’t recommend the beating of a gong to drive away a hellish thing: but I think that that treatment is as enlightened as is giving to it a funny name. Hospitals of Ann Arbor, Mich.; Toledo, Ohio; Rochester, N.Y.; Reading, Pa.—
    “The kissing bug,” it was called.
    The story of the origin of the “kissing bug” scare-joke is that, upon the 19th of June, 1899, a Washington newspaper man, hearing of an unusual number of persons, who, at the Emergency Hospital, had applied for treatment for “bug bites,” investigated, learning of “a very noticeable number of patients,” who were suffering with swellings, mostly upon their lips, “apparently the result of insect bites.” According to Dr. L.O. Howard, writing in Popular Science Monthly, 56-31, there were six insects, in the United States, that could inflict dangerous bites, or punctures, but all of them were of uncommon occurrence. So Dr. Howard rejected the insect-explanation. In his opinion there had arisen a senseless scare, like those of former times, in southern Europe, when hosts of hysterical persons imagined that tarantulas had bitten them.
    This is “mass psychology” again—or the Taboo explanation. To the regret of my contrariness, it is impossible for me utterly to disagree with anybody. I think with Dr. Howard that the “kissing bug” scare was like the tarantula scares. But it could be that some of those people of southern