Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers Read online

  * Skeptics will protest here, saying that the Whore of Babylon represents a city—which is reasonable, since John says as much a few verses down. Yet the literal interpretation—that she is just a very mean, very sexy lady—is seemingly irresistible, having been adopted by everyone from Aleister Crowley to the writers of the long-running TV show Supernatural.

  Part IDAUGHTERS

  1.

  PUBERTY

  She’s very beautiful. She’s very young. Yet inside her is the power of the gods.

  —Firestarter (1984)

  One fine day, in the spring of 1892, Edwin Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island—sane, well liked, in good professional standing, “a young married man of good habits,” according to his local newspaper—ate his teenage sister’s heart.1

  Well, he drank it, actually. Mercy Brown’s heart, along with several other organs, had been carved out of her body and set on fire by her neighbors. Her body was, thank goodness, already dead at the time; in fact, she’d been dead for over two months, although witnesses swore the corpse looked fresh. Once Mercy’s heart had been reduced to ash, those ashes were stirred into water and served to Edwin. And Edwin, whom history will record as perhaps the world’s most disastrously persuadable sibling—the kind of guy who would always smell something if you stuck it under his nose and said “smell this”—gulped the mixture down.

  These are the facts we have. What I’ve been unable to find is a record of how Edwin felt about all this. I don’t know if he cried, if he gagged, if he expressed repugnance or even normal human hesitation. It’s entirely possible that he didn’t. Maybe he ate his sister with gratitude, or hope, or grim resolve. That, too, would have been within the range of expected outcomes. Because Edwin, whatever we might think of him, was not a bad man.

  In fact, none of the villagers who exhumed Mercy were bad people. They were deeply frightened people, trying to deal with something beyond their understanding. Edwin was twenty-four years old, and he was dying. He had seen his neighbors, and most of his family, die the same way—badly, in pain, drowning in their own blood. The once-large Brown family had been winnowed down to Edwin and his father, and Edwin was starting to show symptoms of the same illness.

  What Edwin thought—what he believed, with his whole soul—was that his sister’s corpse was responsible. He believed that the plague was caused by vampires, and that Mercy was one of them; that she rose from her grave at night and made him sick. He believed that she would not stop, and that, if he did not destroy her, she would sicken and kill many more people.

  The whole town believed in Mercy’s monstrousness, not just Edwin. It’s why they worked together to dig her up and burn her. Creatures like Mercy had supposedly been caught and destroyed all over the wider New England area; folklorist Michael Bell reports at least eighty confirmed “vampire” exhumations. It was a regional pastime: One memorably ghoulish account, from Manchester, Vermont, reports that “Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton. It was the month of February and good sleighing.”2

  There are a lot of questions raised by this passage—is it ever really good sleighing when there are demon vampires around?—and to be fair, they were raised even at the time. The 1890s were not ye olden times; Mercy died about thirty-three years before the publication of The Great Gatsby. Outside of a few isolated rural areas in New England, it was not at all common to believe in vampires, let alone to defile corpses as a means of warding them off.

  “The savage in man is never quite eradicated,” Henry David Thoreau wrote, all the way back in 1859. “I have just read of a family in Vermont—who, several of its members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs & heart & liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it.”3

  Newspapers, meanwhile, speculated that the villagers’ behavior might have been caused by inbreeding. Vampire slayers were Victorian hillbillies; city dwellers did the genteel nineteenth-century equivalent of humming the Deliverance theme whenever the subject came up.

  Nevertheless, in his own mind, and in the eyes of his society, Edwin was not a cannibal. He was not a man who defiled corpses. In his own extremely peculiar social context, Edwin was a hero; he ate his sister not just to save his own life, but to save the lives of everyone he knew.

  He was dead within weeks. Edwin had tuberculosis, as it turns out. So did Mercy. So did the other members of their family, and so did all those dead neighbors; it was a bacterial infection, not the foul predations of the undead, that laid waste to Exeter. And if there’s one thing we know for sure about tuberculosis, it’s that it is not measurably improved by devouring the organs of one’s fellow patients.

  So, yes, more people died in the tuberculosis epidemic that swept rural New England, and maybe some of them still blamed it on supernatural causes. But after Edwin, no one tried eating anyone again. Thus, without knowing it, nineteen-year-old Mercy Lena Brown passed into history—although it’s a grubby, neglected pocket of history, and she bears an inglorious title within it. Mercy became the lastknown corpse defiled in the great New England vampire panic; American history’s most theatrical example of the madness that ensues when a society locates the threat to its own existence in the body of a young girl.

  Blood Magic

  Mercy does not rest quietly in her grave, even now; she was eventually reincarnated as one of the most famous fictional vampires of all time. We’ll get there soon enough. But though Mercy may have been one of America’s most bizarre girl-monsters, she was by no means the first or only one. Men never seem to feel more at risk than when in the presence of a tween girl.

  “It is remarkable that…two rules—not to touch the ground and not to see the sun—are observed either separately or conjointly by girls at puberty in many parts of the world,” anthropologist James Frazer wrote in The Golden Bough.4 Girls were kept in seclusion, told to wear blinders or avert their eyes from others when in public (“that her gaze may not pollute the sky”), or sewn up in sacks with breathing holes.5 Frazer attributed all this to “the deeply engrained dread which primitive man universally entertains of menstruous blood,” a dread men felt “at all times but especially on its first appearance.”6

  Of course, Frazer, like many nineteenth-century anthropologists, has fallen out of fashion precisely because he tended to attribute his own motivations to the people he studied. The “dread” at hand here does not belong to colonized people of color, but to a British white man, and the “primitive” fear of first blood is with us to this day. Many cultures forbid women* from touching or making food during their periods. The specific variety of food varies from place to place—milk, mayonnaise, raw meat, pasta sauce, canned vegetables, sweets—but the threat is always the same: the food will spoil. Bleeding women are agents of decay. Other women report being told not to attend funerals, touch flowers (“they will wither,” Frazer says), or hold babies, who will sicken at the touch of a bleeding woman.7

  It’s not all bad. The magic within menstrual blood can be harnessed by daring or unscrupulous practitioners: in American folk magic, slipping some of your own blood into a man’s coffee or spaghetti sauce will make him eternally loyal.8 British occultist and self-proclaimed “Wickedest Man in the World” Aleister Crowley recommended it as an ingredient in the “Cake of Light,” the Eucharist used in the ceremonies of his religion, Thelema: “The best blood is of the moon, monthly,” he writes, “then the fresh blood of a child.”9 Of course, the moon’s blood flows out of vaginas every twenty-eight days or so, whereas you presumably couldn’t get a child’s blood without hurting it. Nevertheless, menstruation is still the greater taboo.

  “There is no limit to the marvellous powers attributed to females,” Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History. “For, in the first place, hailstorms, they say, whirlwinds, and lightning even, will be sca
red away by a woman uncovering her body while her monthly courses are upon her…. [The blood] is productive of the most monstrous effects, [and] there are some ravings about it of a most dreadful and unutterable nature.”10

  Specifically, a woman could kill a man by having sex with him while she was on her period, especially if it coincided with an eclipse: “Congress with a woman at such a period [is] noxious,” Pliny wrote, “and attended with fatal effects to the man.”11 Pliny is not the only guy to worry. Frazer claims that menstruating Baganda women were forbidden to touch their husbands’ possessions: “Were she to handle his weapons, he would certainly be killed in the next battle.”12 The Babylonian Talmud states that “if a menstruating woman passes between two [men], if it is at the beginning of her period she will kill one of them.”13

  Women’s blood could also kill at a distance, through contagion. Pliny wrote that dogs who lapped up menstrual blood “are seized with madness, and their bite is venomous and incurable.”14 If a pregnant woman stepped over or touched another woman’s blood, she would miscarry. There was no magic greater or darker than this; just a little bit of blood daubed on a door, Pliny wrote, and “all spells of the magicians will be neutralized.”15

  In folk belief, magic is often said to accumulate around liminal moments—points of transition, places where something is neither A nor B but both at once. Brides, for example, are vulnerable to malevolent magic because they are neither married nor unmarried; hence, our extensive array of superstitions around weddings. Midnight is the witching hour because it is neither today nor tomorrow. In ancient Greece and Rome, ghosts supposedly appeared at both midnight and noon, since noon was another hinge point in the day; it was the state of in-betweenness, not the dark, that allowed them to manifest. Adolescence is one of the most frightening and protracted forms of liminality, a time when someone is neither a child nor an adult, but can seem like either, or both. Though menstruation is always a kind of witchcraft, a girl’s first period—blood shed, simultaneously, by a woman, a child, and the moon—rips a hole in the world.

  The Fury

  Most commonly, puberty is said to summon poltergeists—defined, variously, as angry ghosts or unconsciously directed telekinetic powers. These spirits throw small objects, fill the house with noise, and shatter anything breakable; they are, in essence, temper tantrums that have detached from the subjects’ bodies and taken on a life of their own. Believers tend to have a very specific idea of whose temper tantrums they are.

  “During the last several decades of paranormal research, investigators have discovered that, in a very high percentage of poltergeist cases they encounter, there is usually a young girl present at the site who has just started her menstrual cycle,” Kenneth W. Behrendt writes in The Physics of the Paranormal.16 Infrequently, poltergeists were caused by adult women, though they, too, were usually on their periods; at any rate, “rarely has true poltergeist activity been observed in households without women.”17

  Paranormal experts have different explanations of why bleeding girls attract spirits; Penny M. Kroll of Paranormal Studies and Inquiry Canada (PSICAN) attributes poltergeists to “repressed anger, hostility and sexual tension,” stating that there are “[many] changes a girl goes through during this time period that could lead to high stress levels and potentially result in poltergeist activity.”18 Behrendt scientifically (?) observes that “the effects of hormones on red blood cells may sometimes allow the human circulatory system to project anti-mass field radiations.”19 But most often, the explanations boil down to plain old female hysteria: “Mental illness or drug/alcohol influences can seriously leave residual emotion and even patterns on an environment,” writes self-described paranormal investigator Sharon Day on her blog. “Perhaps the same thing that causes us to be weepy or angry around our period times, those wonderful hormones, [plays a] part in psychokinesis.”20

  To be an adolescent girl, apparently, is to live in a house filled with one’s own unclaimed rage. In fact, a close look at individual poltergeist cases reveals that the girls’ motivations are usually more legible—and less hormonal—than one would think. PSICAN cites the 1967 case of Annemarie Schneider, a nineteen-year-old secretary who, by her own admission, hated her job, and whose office was “mysteriously” trashed and beset with prank phone calls. (In one of the poltergeist’s more diabolical acts, it placed sixty calls in an hour just to run up her boss’s phone bill.) More troublingly, they also cite eighteen-year-old Esther Cox, the subject of one of North America’s first paranormal bestsellers.

  A near contemporary of Mercy Brown (The Great Amherst Mystery, the book based on Cox’s case, was published in 1888), Esther’s affliction began shortly after she survived an attempted rape at gunpoint. Afterward, Esther had strange attacks in the middle of the night, in which she struggled to breathe, and woke up at least once screaming, “My God! What is happening to me? I’m dying!”21 Her poltergeist stabbed her with needles, pins, and in one particularly frightening moment, with a knife. This went into the record as evidence of the paranormal, but it was also consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety attacks, dissociation, and self-mutilation, common and (by now) well-known aftereffects of sexual assault. Though, admittedly, the writing over her bed reading “Esther Cox, you are mine to kill” was unusual.

  As recently as 1984, in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, there was an all-out media frenzy surrounding Tina Resch, a fourteen-year-old girl whose home was a locus of poltergeist activity. Local papers printed a bizarre photograph of Tina ducking a floating telephone, which had supposedly hurled itself at her from across the room. Witnesses reported that the house was covered in broken glass and detritus; in Tina’s presence, lights flickered, clocks stopped, chairs and coffee cups flew across the room. Granted, none of those objects moved while the reporters were actually looking at them—to convince the poltergeist to appear, the photographer who took the flying-phone picture had agreed to point his camera at a predetermined area and avert his eyes—and granted, one secretly filmed videotape showed Tina pushing a lamp off a table, then screaming as if she’d been attacked. The case still became a national sensation. Unsolved Mysteries devoted an episode to Resch as late as 1993; the mystery was pretty well solved by that point, but the story was too good to let go.

  This is not to say that Tina was merely fame-hungry or dishonest. There were good reasons she may have wanted grown-ups to pay attention to her home. Tina had been lost in the foster system from an early age. She had been removed from school; she had no contact with peers. The Resches, who adopted her, were…well, the word used in contemporary accounts is “strict.”

  “Tina had an urge to express herself that she could not suppress,” wrote William Roll, a parapsychologist who had studied her at home in Ohio. “At home with Joan this often caused her to be ‘loud’ and brought on demands for quiet, which released torrents of loud and foul language. This would lead to a slap on the face, or when Tina became too big for Joan to handle, a beating from John.”22

  Somehow, we were more interested in finding out whether ghosts were real than we were in figuring out why an abused, isolated little girl might come up with a way to trash her parents’ house without getting in trouble for it. There are many things you can say about Tina Resch’s phone-throwing, glass-breaking, lamp-smashing poltergeist. But the most obvious thing is that it was loud.

  We want to believe Tina. We want to believe more than we want to understand, or to help. Whether we turn our daughters into vampires, poltergeists, or something else entirely, we persist in finding something corrupt and horrifying and numinous in female puberty. A little girl is less a person than she is a portal. At any moment, she can crack open and something else can come slithering through.

  What’s Gotten into Her?

  Thus, at last, we come to 1973’s The Exorcist, the primary touchstone and codifier for stories of monstrous girlhood.

  Fiction and belief are connected by a
two-way street. The horror genre undeniably draws from our urban legends and superstitions—without all those stories about menstruating girls and flying objects, we wouldn’t have Carrie or Stranger Things—but it also determines which monsters we are willing to see in the real world.

  By putting fictional monsters and real, “monstrous” women on the same continuum, I don’t mean to suggest that fiction and reality bear the same moral weight. Real people have real feelings; they endure real suffering and die real deaths. But fictional characters and real women are both made to serve the purposes of the culture; both of them are edited and reshaped into narratives that confirm our beliefs and superstitions about femininity, and go on to shape our ideas of what it means to be female.

  Few fictional stories have shaped the culture more than The Exorcist. It was the top-grossing horror movie of all time; it held that title for over forty years, from 1973 to 2017.23 Something that big doesn’t just change the course of horror, or cinema—though The Exorcist did both—it changes the basic content of the culture. Following its release, the Catholic Church experienced an “exorcism boom,” a flood of parishioners who suddenly spotted the signs of demonic possession in themselves and their loved ones. This boom is probably responsible for transforming a once-obscure medieval ritual into a cornerstone of the faith. This was a movie big enough to give the pope marching orders. It was huge.

  Which is not to say that it was beloved. Roger Ebert called the movie a “frontal assault,” saying that “[it] contains brutal shocks, almost indescribable obscenities. That it received an R rating and not the X is stupefying.”24 There were multiple reports of people passing out, vomiting, or physically injuring themselves at screenings. Christian groups claimed that The Exorcist was not only about demons, but somehow contained demons; Billy Graham famously warned his followers that “the Devil is in every frame” of this film.25 According to one urban legend, the set was cursed by Satan, who killed or injured most of the actors over the course of filming. In another, Satan was embedded in the actual film stock, so that running The Exorcist through a projector would summon him into the theater and allow him to possess members of the audience.