Читать книгу Real Vampires, Night Stalkers and Creatures from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 24

John Haigh was another vampire who justified his thirst for human blood by his religious fanaticism and an incredibly distorted interpretation of the Old Testament’s admonition to “drink water out of thine own cistern and running waters out of thine own well.” By some bizarre process of Haigh’s twisted mind, the Bible passages became a commandment that he should start drinking his own urine and blood.

The only child of a pious Plymouth Brethren couple, little Johnny had been a devout boy until he was sexually abused by a member of the Brethren. Later, in his confessions, Haigh said that shortly after the abuse, he began to have dreams of bloody trees and strange men offering cups of blood for him to drink.

Haigh matured to become a fairly resourceful businessman leading a very tranquil and nonviolent life until 1935 when, at the age of 25, he was imprisoned for forgery.

In 1944, the vampire had his first taste of human blood—his own. He was in an automobile crash in which he suffered a scalp wound that bled profusely. The blood flowed down his face and into his mouth, thereby creating a subsequent thirst that would lead him to the gallows.

Perhaps it was the wound’s accompanying blow to the head that had somehow deepened Haigh’s psychosis. Shortly after the incident, he had a dream that he interpreted to mean that his early religious fervor had so sapped his spiritual strength that he could only restore his rightful energies by the regular consumption of fresh human blood.

Haigh’s first taste of another human’s blood came with his murder of William Donald McSwan when the young man brought a pinball to his workshop for repair on September 9, 1944. Haigh simply got the idea that he needed blood to drink, so he hit McSwan over the head, slit his throat, caught the flow of blood in a mug, and drank it. He disposed of McSwan’s body by placing it in a tub of sulfuric acid.

The ceremonial drinking of blood inspires a sense of religious ecstasy for some fanatics.

In keeping with the religious trend of his illness, Haigh evolved a ritual that he generally followed with each of his subsequent murders. He would sever the jugular vein of his victim, then he would carefully draw off the blood, a glassful at a time. The actual drinking of the vital fluid was observed with great ceremony. Haigh later became convinced that his faith could only be sustained by the sacrifice of others and by the drinking of their blood. With a supply of sulfuric acid at hand, their corpses would be transformed into a sludge that could be poured into the sewer drain. When police investigators checked Haigh’s workshop for traces of the missing persons, some human gallstones were discovered in the sludge.

Some theorists have wondered if feelings of guilt arising from his homosexual abuse experience drove the impressionable Haigh to offer such terrible propitiation of blood sacrifice. Or, perhaps, Haigh may have mistaken the intoxication he reportedly felt from blood drinking to the “high” that comes from religious ecstasy.

As fascinating as such theories may be as attempts to cast further light on vampirism, they will never be answered in the case of John Haigh, for his further testimonies became increasingly muddled until he was sentenced to death for the murders of nine victims and delivered to the hangman on April 6, 1949.