Hi y'all. Been a few days! Call it a personal timeout, I guess. Anyway, all the political news going on (most of it uninspiring at best and depressing at worst) reminded me of a book in my collection: John Alexander's WASHINGTON REVISITED: THE GHOSTLORE OF THE NATION'S CAPITAL (1998; second edition). I'm not the only one who found this book fun; Alexander, a veteran DC journalist and radio personality, records that Amy Carter, as a fourth grader, chose the earlier edition for a school reading project, and told her classmates a White House ghost story.

One of the more offbeat stories in Alexander's book deals with a vampire who was said to hunt (nice word) in the general area (apparently in Northeast Washington) where Gallaudet University is located now. His major source for the DC Vampire tale is a 1923 Washington POST report by Gorman Hendricks.

According to Hendricks, the story begins in the 1850s at an embassy, vaguely referred to as one from an Eastern European country. One of the staff at the embassy was said to be the stereotypical handsome prince, whose most striking features were his beautiful dark eyes.



At some state function, the prince met a lovely young girl who lived in the neighborhood. He professed his love for her, and she for him--and one night, under a full moon (of course; even Alexander finds that ironic), he put her through the full vampire seduction. Her body was found the next morning. Though she was seen to be unnaturally pale, no one spotted the fang marks on her neck; they were hidden under her hair. So shocked were family and friends that they also failed to notice that the handsome prince had vanished into thin air. He was never seen in the DC area again.

The young girl was buried in a dress of white lace that, rumor had it, would have been her wedding gown, in a family burial vault. Before long, though, she was back.

The earliest reports, per Hendricks, come from the weeks or months after her death, and uniformly speak of a beautiful young girl in white who sported wolfish fangs. The first report came from a woodcutter taking a shortcut through the cemetery, who spotted her sidling into the vault; she shouldn't have been able to do that, as it had been sealed after she was placed there. The next report was more spectacular; a stable groom was found dead, drained of blood, with visible fang marks on his neck.

After that, the story gets really strange. Hendricks reported that a small posse was stationed outside the vault for some time before the vampire made her next appearance. One may take the tale with a large grain of salt; in the telling it sprouted the full Gothic panoply of stormy night, squeaky hinges, and a figure in white that slipped from the tomb through no visible aperture and disappeared into the nearby woods, presumably to make an appearance at her family's home nearby.



A further report, the next day, dramatically describes the posse, in full sunlight, entering the vault and finding the coffin open and the young girl lying in it, fangs fully visible. They panicked, and left in a rush; they mentioned putting the lid back on the coffin but did not stake the vampire, who continued to haunt the area.

Her family left the neighborhood after another death gave way to threats of violence by the neighbors, and the family mansion was left deserted for some years. By the time someone did move in, the old house was in the early stages of decay. The new family didn't stay long; they left, complaining of having seen a girl with fangs looking in a window on an upper floor. Hendricks ended his story with a full-out overwrought description of the vault where the DC vampire lay buried: ". . .the hand of time has obliterated the name. . .large sections of broken sandstone that once covered the tombs of the dead lie about the dank vault. . ."

Hendricks' 1923 article did not mention any sightings of the vampire after the turn of the twentieth century. Alexander attributes this to the fact that the capital has become such a bustling busy city, so fixated in the here and now, that no one would pay more than passing attention to a girl in white wandering the streets at night--unless she bites a congressional representative at the very least.

I'm inclined to think that she left town for a new hunting ground. A nice Victorian girl, vampire or not, would find the capital nowadays an altogether scandalous place and fear for her reputation if she remained.



But that's just me.

John Alexander's book, if you can find it, is a treasure trove of odd, comical and just plain spooky tales of DC.

And until next time, fair thee well.

Images of the Mississippi in flood lead me into some odd musicial musings:





I'm reminded, somewhat inexplicably, of contrasting versions of the 1926 song "Ol' Man River", with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, from the musical SHOW BOAT.

The song is one of the few that works outside the context of the musical, as demonstrated by Charlie Rich in 1975. Rich was always more of a blues and jazzman, marketed as country because of the accident that paired him with the legendary over-the-top producer Billy Sherill at Epic Records. Rich performed the song as a nervous, skittery, churning jazz, rather reminiscent of the river at flood stage.

But that's not the one I'm hearing on the soundtrack in my head as I watch the levees breached and the civilian brigades desperately sandbagging stretches of river while waiting for assistance from the National Guard, being called out in more than one state--at least, such as are not deployed overseas. What I hear is the bleak majesty of the incomparable Paul Robeson, for whom the song was originally written, and who sang it onscreen in the 1936 movie version of SHOW BOAT:

I gets weary an' sick o' tryin'
I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin'
But Ol' Man River, he just keeps rollin' along. . .

That voice as deep and inexorable as the great river itself, resigned to the vagaries of weather and the indifferent power the river wields against our puniest efforts.

I think the Old Man would sing like Paul Robeson, if he sang with words instead of the ominous roar of rising water.

Some herb lore from Auntie: Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) is in folk medicine also known as pleurisy root. An infusion was used in treating pleurisy (an inflammation of the lining between the lung and ribcage), pneumonia and other lung ailments.

Today I saw several places where it's begun to bloom alongside chicory and Queen Anne's Lace. Lovely rich orange color, bright alongside their lovely paleness.

And till next time, fair thee well.

Yesterday Moonstone and the gang over at the messageboard to which I contribute a little hillbilly political commentary and a lot of BS threw me a virtual Bday party. It got a little wild--the food was fantastic, the drinks were scrumptious, the flowers I could almost smell--we took a virtual tour of my home county, had a couple of virtual performances by Chippendales (oh, my!) and ended the day with fireworks.

The great thing about virtual parties is that you can party like it's 1999 (as Moon put it over at Much Ado About Nothing) or like the Soviets are gonna get us (as Miss A the Ornery, a connoisseur of eighties metal, would say) and not be hung over the next day. Nevertheless, after all the excitement, I felt like a fairly quiet day was in order today. So I finished a book (the results of which I have recorded at Gimme a Book--yes, I am indulging in a fury of shameless narcissism) and, while writing in my personal journal, ended up in a van Gogh painting.

Some background first: Last week Auntie was up to visit one day. She knew I was about to fill up my current journal and brought me a new one, a lovely hardback with what looked, to my untrained eye, like a post-Impressionist Paris. I happened to mention this at the party, and Moon, with a percipience that Madame Sadie would envy, found the very picture. (Thanks, Moon.) It turns out that this lovely place is a representation of a street scene in the Provencal city of Arles, where Vincent van Gogh lived from February 1888 to May 1889--the city where he had a violent argument with the painter Gauguin that ended with Vincent cutting off his own ear.

This lovely place was painted at a more placid time:



Looks like a good place to recuperate from one's virtual excesses. So I've shut my eyes and imagined myself sitting under that awning, alone at one of those sturdy little tables, sheltered from a gentle shower of rain--which van Gogh didn't paint in, but hey, we're in a drought here, so I daydream rain--, wearing a beret, sipping an Evian--originally it was a glass of vin ordinaire, but I'm being restrained after yesterday!--, nibbling on a delicate French pastry, alternately sketching and scribbling cryptic lines of poetry and prose in a sketchpad, and flirting with le garcon, who finds my fractured hillbilly French charming.

In short, I'm sitting in a van Gogh cafe, pretending I'm a member of what Gertrude Stein called "the lost generation."

Nice place to visit, for certain.

Moon, Pam, Nan, Laura, Krista, Chris, G, Rory, Auntie, Brenda (and all those who were virtual guests at the bash including lots of kitties), thank you, thank you, thank you. As the Rovers sang long ago, me oh me oh my, WASN'T that a party!

I've always had a weakness for the dinosaurs in the JURASSIC PARK movies.



Stan Winston, the man who made those delightfully ghoulish marvels--and also ET, the robots in the TERMINATOR franchise, and even Johnny Depp's scissorhands-- work, has died at age 62.

http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/ap/20080616/121365984000.html

I've watched documentaries about the mechanics that gave these critters life, but the most fascinating thing about them was the mind behind them.

Truly a master of his craft.

Later, and until then, fair thee well.