Though Rare, Cincinnati Has Occasionally Reported Vampires Of One Type Or Another

From Cincinnati Enquirer 22 May 1897, Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand

O ver our long history, Cincinnati has endured sea monsters , humanoid frogs , body-snatching ghouls , and ghosts of every description . But very rarely vampires.

And yet, Cincinnati has not entirely escaped the undead. In 1867, the Cincinnati Enquirer related the ordeal of an unnamed young man who engaged a room “at one of our most respectable boarding houses.” Although the room appeared entirely satisfactory, the young man found himself growing weaker and more exhausted by the day.

“For some time he could not imagine the cause of the lassitude he felt every morning, but about a week ago he discovered a small puncture on his arm, from which it was evident that blood had been drawn, and every morning thereafter he found a new puncture upon some fleshy portion of his body. He was mystified as how these punctures were made, and what made them.”

The young man resolved to remain awake and vigilant to catch the blood-sucking entity in action but, in his weakened condition, he was unable to remain alert and inevitably fell into a troubled slumber, only to drift into consciousness the next morning with a fresh puncture and an increased level of fatigue. He enlisted a companion to sit up in his room in hopes of trapping the perpetrator, but his friend also surrendered to sleep. In the morning, both young men had fresh puncture wounds and the volunteer vehemently declined to spend another night in that room.

By this time, the young man’s appearance so distressed his friends that they implored him to take rooms in another establishment but he was so fixated on solving the mystery that he ignored their pleas and continued to weaken as every stratagem failed to produce any useful information. At last, on a night when he lay abed with a lamp burning brightly, the young man was roused by a stinging sensation on his arm. He immediately grabbed at that spot, but found nothing there and could see nothing in the room.

“The old superstition of vampires at once became fixed upon his mind, and he resolved to leave the house, which he did the next morning, repairing to another part of the city. Strange to say, since his change of quarters he has not been again visited by the midnight blood-sucker, and is fast regaining his health.”

According to the Enquirer, since the young man’s story became known, previous tenants of that same room had come forward with similar reports of nocturnal blood loss that they had suppressed out of embarrassment or fear. Despite this collection of anecdotes from respectable citizens, the newspaper declined to attribute these activities to ancient folklore:

“We have no faith whatever in the superstition regarding vampires, and are inclined to think that the blood-loving visitant was more of a material than a supernatural creature.”

Nonetheless, somebody in Cincinnati apparently believed in vampires in one form or another. Perhaps the most unusual classified advertisement in the city’s history appeared in the Enquirer on 23 December 1896. The personal item reads, in its entirety:

“Vampire – State price and where to be seen.”

Just a few days before that bizarre little squib appeared in the classified section, the Enquirer reported that famers in Northern Kentucky were organizing posses to track down the vampire that was killing their animals by draining their blood. Although the newspaper and the farmers called the perpetrator a vampire, most thought it was a lynx or a ferret. Whatever it was, it frightened its canine pursuers. According to the Enquirer [21 December 1896]:

“So far all efforts to track the strange animal down have proved futile. For several days farmers have been out hunting for it with guns and dogs. Its track was discovered in several places, and the dogs given the scent, but they invariably return with their tails between their legs and a frightened expression on their faces.”

The Cincinnati Gazette [9 September 1878] reported on a peculiar circumstance out in one of the rural areas outside the Queen City. It seems that a woman had just buried her third husband. All three of her spouses noticeably wasted away before they died and there was talk in the nearby hamlet that the widow must have employed some concoction to hasten their journey into eternity. The Gazette would have none of that.

“They who have observed much of the married life of their neighbors, with a philosophic spirit, will agree that the mere circumstance that three husbands dwindled away in succession should not be received as evidence that the wife administered any medicines to effect this defect; for this would be to undervalue the womanly accomplishments. There are not a few women, who, when single exercise the little amount of fascination which is required to take captive a man, but who, after the bridal glamour in worn off, have a vampire influence, under which their husbands shrivel up and go out in a lingering way which is called a mysterious dispensation of Providence.”

In other words, many women are natural-born vampires and the fact that their husbands wither away is a sign of divine mercy.

“Such a wife is a very vampire to the man. She needs no aid from drugs to take him off. Indeed, so various are these fascinations of wives under which men droop and drop out, that the successive departures of husbands of one woman, instead of being cause to suspect the use of artificial means, testify rather to the potency of her natural gifts.”

On 22 March 1879, the Enquirer published a long and rambling tale supposedly handed down from one William Wilson, postmaster of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Postmaster Wilson allegedly encountered a vampire some twenty years previously while passing through a village named Old Town on the road home from Xenia. Wilson described this vampire as prodigiously hairy and covered in patches of dried blood, while exhibiting super-human feats of strength, speed and agility. Despite these uncanny attributes, the Yellow Springs vampire comes across as more tendentiously moralistic than horrifying.

Also less horrifying than mysterious is the apparently very talented baseball team of nearby Falmouth, Kentucky. From at least 1878 to 1884 this team, who demolished all comers, was known as the Falmouth Vampires.

The post Though Rare, Cincinnati Has Occasionally Reported Vampires Of One Type Or Another appeared first on Cincinnati Magazine .