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.