THE VAMPIRE HUNTERS: The Strange Tale of Chicago’s Lake View Vampire
PATTON'S CLAIRVOYIC VARNISH FOR GLASS.
Develops a finer sight that enables a person, when looking through it,
to see objects which are invisible . . .
Specimens sent by mail on receipt of 10 cents.
Address Samuel Patton, 1297 N. Paulina-street, Chicago, Ill.
Intrigued and unnerved were the best words to describe the small crowd gathered in Judge Thalstrom’s bookshop after the quiet mechanic had passed around his business card that cool September evening in 1888. As they read the cards’ very strange details, they listened intently as Patton shared his chilling, personal tale of being stalked by a vampire in Chicago, following the killing of his own children by evil spirits.
The soft-spoken man went on to distribute small pieces of glass which had been coated with a mysterious glaze of his own invention which, he claimed, transformed ordinary glass into a kind of “spirit detection” glass through which anyone could see invisible entities—including the vampire which he claimed roamed, invisibly, the desolate corners of 19th century Chicago. Patton lived near the corner of Milwaukee and Paulina, and it was here that he labored at night, making his varnish. He told the men he had developed a sense of premonitions when he was a child growing up in rural Virginia, which had led to a lifetime of torment. Returning from the Civil War and marrying, he and his wife had five children, all of whom perished, These included the most recent of the dead, Willie, just five years old, who reportedly “came out of his grave” a week after his burial, appearing to loved ones.
Like many of the time, Patton had sought solace by attending Spiritualist seances, hoping to contact his dead children. “I had no faith in the holy books,” he stated; “I wanted facts.” In spirit photography and séance manifestations he’d found those facts, and he continued to pursue more knowledge of the spirit world wherever he might search for it.
One night, in his Paulina Street cottage, the spirit world came looking for Patton.
I felt a swinging sensation on my forehead. The letter ‘W’ was imprinted there as if with a needle. The name 'Willie Patton ' was then formed in about the style of letters that Willie had learned to make before he died. Alter that the spirits wrote messages on my forehead. I understood that the spirits had killed Willie and tortured my other children.
Patton said that, after a time, he found that these spirit visitors were “made of cones and bubbles.” One of the entities would sing as it wrote on the man’s forehead, which he’d tried to protect at night with a thick silk covering, to no avail. Night after night, Patton’s head would be pierced with some otherworldly instrument, the messages coming and coming, as the spirit’s voice sang:
Over there
Where all is prayer
I'll sit and swear.
Whoora for me, Whoora for me.
After much of this torment, said Patton, “they put a vampire on me.”
The vampire took human form, sucked at Patton’s nostrils and mouth, and followed him when he visited the graves of his children. His forehead, he claimed, began to excrete a poisonous substance, causing havoc in the lives of all who touched it. Some who did so had even committed murder, claimed Patton.
Patton’s glass varnish became a reported sensation, with many of the people of Lake View purchasing so as to be aware of vampires who might be stalking nearby. The varnish was especially popular among the community of men who worked at the Harvester Works. When they went out at night, the told their wives upon return of their colleagues’ efforts to see Patton’s vampire, which he claimed stalked the streets of the north side and the then-suburb of Lake View. Unease reigned among believers, but Patton told them they could protect themselves by sleeping feet to feet with the other members of their households, as he had met some vampires who sucked blood and energy out of the soles of victims’ feet.
When the vampire failed to appear through anyone’s treated glass, the vampire fervor began to die down. It returned, however, with a vengeance two months later when, in November, Claes Larsen went missing, failing to return home one night. The local barkeep told his wife he’d been there the night before but had been despondent, as if in fear of some impending doom. Neighbors, filled with trepidation, immediately wondered if the Lake View vampire had gotten the beleaguered man, suggesting also that the new houses being built in the area were doomed to be plagued by the vampire and by ghosts. This time, the newspapers were less gentle, sparing no expense in the mockery of the local fears. The Tribune wrote that the Lake View Historical Society was conducting interviews with locals for a paper on vampires and runaway husbands, among other jabs.
Larsen’s wife—and a good number of neighbors—were not so flippant. After a long night of fretting, Mrs. Larsen went to police to report that her husband had been accosted by a vampire. When police did little to respond rather than take a report, it was said that a local group of boys, none of them older than ten, banded together to find and destroy the creature. Calling themselves the “Vampire Hunters,” they trekked through Lincoln Park all day Sunday, searching the City Cemetery for the casket of a slumbering ghoul, egged on by their leader’s tales of St. George and the Dragon.
Nightfall had brought no capture, and Mrs. Larsen was had nearly given up hope. Then, with a creak of the door, her husband appeared on the step of their Otto Street home, hat in his hands and apologetic for his absence. After his wife’s tearful tale of the great Vampire Hunt to save him from destruction, her husband confessed that he had merely been out drinking all night and had passed out and slept off the bender all day.
While no one but Samuel Patton ever saw the Lake View vampire whose reputation briefly terrorized the people of Chicago in 1888, this would not be the last time, amazingly, that a group of children would form a vampire hunting posse. Years later, in Glasgow, a vampire frenzy would break out, causing nearly one hundred children to converge on a local cemetery, armed with rocks and sticks, searching for a vampire with iron teeth who had reportedly strangled and eaten two little boys. As the Boston Globe reported:
Swarms of grimy-faced urchins scaled the walls around the cemetery in the Gorbals slum area. A group of children, slowly growing into a crowd of hundreds, pushed through the streets to the cemetery to ‘kill the vampire.’
…Once there, they poured over grave mounds in a yelling, excited throng. Police were called in to clear the cemetery, but bands of youngsters still roamed outside the walls ‘hunting the vampire . . . .
