The Bye-Bye Man

[Jeff]

Robert Damon Schneck's account of the Bye-Bye Man is the centrepiece of his Fortean collection The President's Vampire, and describes events following upon dabbling with a Ouija board in Wisconsin in 1990. He introduces it this way: "This story is different from all the others in this book. First, the source is a close friend. Second, though this might sound dramatic, readers who are genuinely frightened by the paranormal or troubled by obsessive thoughts should consider skipping this chapter."

It's told first-person by "Eli." The other principles are his then girlfriend "Katherine" and his friend "John." (Their true names were changed for Schneck's retelling, but elsewhere are said to be Elliot, Jennifer and James.) John and Katherine became a couple shortly after these events, which may have some relevance to the energies described in the story.

An excerpt:

That fall, a childhood friend gave me a Ouija board that he'd found in the attic. It was an old wooden board and John and I spent hours trying to get messages, but all we ended up with was gibberish. I convinced Katherine to join me at the board but our results were no better. Then she tried it with John and they immediately started to get results.

For the next few days, the three of us spent hours on the board. The messages came from the "Spirit of the Board," an entity that had never lived and that acted as an interlocutor between other entities and us. These entities had different personalities and individual ways of moving the planchette: some used abbreviations, some were terrible spellers, and others used Latinate words with some skill. Some preferred using the pointed end of the planchette to choose letters, while others like the porthole.

The Spirit of the Board would control and introduce each of these intelligences, and for weeks we communicated with them. Like the Spirit of the Board, they claimed to not be spirits of the dead but some kinds of archetypes or free-ranging consciousnesses. Each entity had its own personality, but for the most part they concentrated on imparting New Age-type wisdom and philosophy. Since the board would only work when Katherine and John used it, I got the job of transcribing the proceedings and carefully filled notebooks full of the correspondences.

...

After weeks of this, John and I were getting bored with the eight or so entities that the Spirit of the Board would let us communicate with and their repetitious philosophy. I was determined to talk to a spirit that had lived, whose existence could be verified, and who would give us information we could check. At one point the board told us that there were indeed other entities we could communicate with but they might be dangerous, and it encouraged us to continue talking to the other entities. After some digging, we heard about a sinister entity that wanted to communicate with them. They also found out that this entity was not only a human but was still alive. John and I were eager to communicate with whoever it was but Katherine was adamantly against it. She had a history of paranormal experiences and had been sufficiently spooked by them to not even watch scary movies; she certainly had no interest in deliberately contacting something sinister. Katherine refused for a few days, but the two of us were able to wear her down and she agreed to try again. She was not happy about it but was very close to both of us and we were determined to see it through.


The balance is borrowed from a transcription posted by Gabriel of the blog Adventures in Writing:

At first, to Katherine's relief, the board simply refused to communicate with the desired entity and instead brought us the same old tiresome folks. The questions that I wrote or asked were now all about the living mind that wanted to reach us. At one point we learned that all of the other entities knew about this person and gave us a name; he was called the Bye-Bye Man. Upon seeing that name spelled out on the Oujia board, Katherine panicked and quit the board again. We tried to press on without her but nothing happened.

Katherine was now very clear; she refused to communicate with the Bye-Bye Man but we cobbled together a compromise. We would not communicate with the Bye-Bye Man directly but would try to get some piece of information about him from the other entities, something could be tracked down and verified. Now we began interrogating the spirits but they refused to cooperate until John got an idea: we would stage a strike. The Spirit of the Board was given notice that we were tired of the entities and their refusal to tell us anything about the Bye-Bye Man, so from now on we were going to be using the Parker Brother's board we'd bought for the planchette.

We tried the new board for a few days but got nothing. Even Katherine and John got nothing useful. Still, we waited a few more days before picking up the old board and discovered that the strike had worked; when we communicated with the Spirit of the Board again it agreed to tell us about the Bye-Bye Man.

The story came out in bits and pieces over several sessions. It began in Louisiana sometime in the 1920s, when an odd little boy was put in an orphanage in Algiers. Nothing is known about his parents but the boy had albinism, a genetic condition that causes a lack of pigment in the eyes, skin and hair; but it was his behavior that was strange. Maybe part of it was the physical and social isolation that can happen to children with albinism; their unusual appearance, the way they must avoid the sun and, in this case, ever worsening eyesight. He could not play games, and may have been teased or bullied by other children.

As the boy grew older, his behavior grew worse, and there were run-ins with the people who ran the orphanage. The one day he was arguing with the head nurse in her office when he attacked her with a pair of scissors, leaving her an invalid.

After this savage assault, he fled. He ran away to the train-yards and began traveling around the country by jumping freights. The viciousness he'd already shown was now unleashed, and he began carrying out random killings. His eyesight finally failed, but that did not stop the Bye-Bye Man; he created a companion for himself, sewing together pieces of his victims in something called Gloomsinger.

Gloomsinger was made from tongues and eyes and endowed with some kind of life. It acted like a hunting dog, sighting the next victim and letting out a whistle only the Bye-Bye Man could hear, which brought him to the scene. In order to keep Gloomsinger in good repair though, it was necessary to sew on new eyes and tongues regularly. The Bye-Bye Man became something of an expert at removing them, and their removal identified his handiwork. The organs were kept (along with his other belongings) in a seaman's bag he called his Sack of Gore.

At some point, he also developed a kind of telepathy and was able to sense when people were talking, or even thinking, about him. As long as they thought about the name "Bye-Bye Man," they were psychic beasons and he was able to get a bead on them and slowly track them down. He would travel hundreds of miles by rail to attack unsuspecting gossips, and talk of the murders quickly spread through the rail-yards and hobo camps.

The board also gave us some other details. The Bye-Bye Man had long hair and a tattoo on his wrist; he wore glasses that were painted black and wore a wide brimmed hat that covered his white face and something that looked like a pea-coat. And he carried the Sack of Gore. We also got a magic recipe that would help the Bye-Bye Man find us. I don't remember the details but we had to take a big green glass bottle, cork the mouth, and go out into the moonlight. Then if we quickly uncorked it and held it to our ears, we would be able to hear Gloomsinger whistling.

We also asked where the Bye-Bye Man was now. Chicago, the board said, and coming closer.

Katherine became very afraid, and refused to participate in any more sessions. I was not happy because I didn't think we'd gotten anything worth checking, and preliminary search produced nothing, John, meanwhile, thought the whole thing had been very interesting.

It looked as though the experiment was over and the Ouija board was put away. Soon after that, Katherine began waking up in a panic; she had suffered panic attacks as a teenager, but they were back and and they had always seemed to hit at 3 AM, the "soul's midnight." [This refers to the idea that deaths and suicides take place at 3 AM or between 3 and 4 AM. It would require a statistician to prove whether or not this is true, but the idea is certainly widespread. "My Grandfather was in the Merchant Navy in WWII, and he said the worst watch to be on was 3-4 AM because that's when your soul is supposed to 'at its lowest'..." I remember my grandparents (both nurses) referring to 4 am as 'Death Hour' or something like that, as it was the most common time for patients to die. They put this down to probably being in deepest sleep by that time, and that it's the coldest part of the night..." "I can also state from personal experience of signing search warrants, that the police still like to raid drug dealers at 3-4 AM as they figure they will be at a low ebb then less likely to put up resistance."]

John's work schedule had changed so we less and less of him. Without the Oujia board experiments, the focus returned to normal pursuits like work and school. One day I ran into John at the Student Union at the college, so we had a beer and talked. I was worn out because Katherine kept waking up with panic attacks at 3 AM and when I told this to John, he turned grey. He said he been waking up at the same time a feeling of uneasiness (panic attacks per se) since they stopped using the board. He chalked it up to a change in his work shift. He was taking some of vitamin supplement to regulate his sleep, so I got the name of it and bought it for Katherine in hopes that it would help her (and me) sleep.

A week or so after this meeting, I returned to Wausea to see a concert and brought Katherine with me. By this time it was winter, and we had time to kill before the show started.... I suggested a walk across the railroad bridge to a little island in the middle of the Wisconsin River, locally known as "Body Island."

...

Katherine and I were walking along the track when something got my attention. I don't remember what it was but I climbed down from the bridge to the riverbank to look, while Katherine waited on the wind swept trestle. While she was standing there, she heard a faint noise. At first she fear it was a train whistle - it is an active train bridge - but soon realized that the whistle sounded more human than locomotive. She felt the familiar sense of fear rising up inside, and when I returned she was having a full-blown panic attack. She said she hear something, but as much as I tried, I couldn't. Then she heard it again, as "if it was right over my shoulder." Still I heard nothing, and after we left the bridge Katherine suffered from panic attacks the rest of the day.

Back in Sun Prairie, we found a message from John on the answering. He sounded upset, and when I met with him, he told me a strange story.

He had come home from work, and when he arrived at his room in the boarding house, had tried to do some drawings (John's hobby is art.) He couldn't concentrate, though, and had an "uncanny feeling," so he decided to call us, not knowing that Katherine and I were out of town. Not finding any of his friends at home, he tried to reading but couldn't. By this time it was late enough for him to get some sleep, but for some reason he couldn't stand lying in bed and decided to sleep on the floor. He fell fast asleep and at some point a knock on the door woke him up.

"John," he heard Katherine say, "let's go out to breakfast!" We often stopped by to pick up John for breakfast on our way into Madison. It was a common enough thing. He got up and was looking for his clothes when he noticed that was still pitch black outside. He heard the voice again saying, "John. Let's go out for breakfast." It couldn't be us, not that early in the morning, and he was overcome by a fear so intense that he felt limp and lay back down on the floor. This time the voice, still sounding like Katherine, said, "John... open the door!" But he just lay on the floor where he could see hall light through the crack under the door and the shadow of someone standing outside. It went away but he did not sleep the rest of the night.

I told him that it couldn't have been us because we were in Wausau. He checked with the old woman and the man who lived across the hall to see if they had knocked on his door, but they all said no. The woman kept the front door locked at night, and she was the one whop opened it for visitors. No one stopped by that night.

John still wonders what would've happened if he had opened that door.

[Et in Arcadia ego]

Sounds like someone's cashing in on the 'Dead Time' myth exploited by that A & E show and one or two movies(the exorcism of Emily Rose, the new Amityville Horor remake, etc).

These urban legend engines claim that that hour marks a mockery of Jesus as he allegedly died exactly 12 hours prior, but there's several Christian resources that seem to back the claim.

http://thedivinemercy.org/message/devotions/hour.php

Also, that hour could have another source of validity from a different angle:

3 am is the end of the third watch. (Luke 12) This is the most dangerous time for the shepherd and flock because it is the time when most predator attacks on the flock would occur. The flock was asleep and quite often the (un diligent) shepherd was asleep as well.
In terms of the demonic, this is very significant. Symbology is everything to them. However, they are not original nor can they be. They can only mimic Gods creation and they are masters at it.

All that aside, the story reads like something straight out of Barker's early Books of Blood:

Gloomsinger was made from tongues and eyes and endowed with some kind of life. It acted like a hunting dog, sighting the next victim and letting out a whistle only the Bye-Bye Man could hear, which brought him to the scene. In order to keep Gloomsinger in good repair though, it was necessary to sew on new eyes and tongues regularly. The Bye-Bye Man became something of an expert at removing them, and their removal identified his handiwork. The organs were kept (along with his other belongings) in a seaman's bag he called his Sack of Gore.

Very impressive. Gets the Ladder Award:

[Searcher08]

Majorly creepy. Yeck!!!!

<Cue chilly music>

My friend had a very weird experience with doing automatic writing as a teenager. He found that he just got bland messages, nothing special.
Then one night, he said the atmosphere in the room changed - a hair standing on end feeling - and began to get a crystal clear message... from a dead Angolan girl.

She said that she had been the girlfriend of a French mercenary in the Angola civil war, who had kept her like a trophy / booty but also kept her alive and safe. At one point, he killed her. The impression was that in his mind, he thought that was the best option for her, as he believed that after he left Angola, she would just be tortured and gang-raped to death by his "colleagues".

What then happened was extra-ordinary. She told him where the guy lived. He was still alive , he was named Monsiuer X Y and living at Number nn, Rue de XYZ, MontMartre, Paris.

She then asked him to go to him and deliver a message.

My friend asked what was the message

She replied

"Love flows from the barrel of a gun"

which I think was what he said immediately before shooting her.


My friend, a young teenager then, was really freaked out and stopped all automatic writing. The story, however, was not yet over....

Many years later, my friend was in Paris. He decided to see if that address actually existed. The road in Montmartre DID exit. he went into the building and knocked not on the flat but on an adjoining flat. He asked if Monsieur X Y still lived here.

He was told, Yes, but he is away for a few weeks.

My friend said he went as white as a sheet and swiftly left, realising that could easily have ended up dead - can you imagine delivering a message from beyond the grave to a mercenary from their former lover... who they had killed....

He too sometimes wonders what would have happened if he had been able to deliver the message......

[AlicetheKurious]

Chicken horror movie.

[orz]

"Love flows from the barrel of a gun"

I'll have to send you a love letter! Straight from my heart, fucker! You know what a love letter is? It's a bullet from a fucking gun, fucker! You receive a love letter from me, and you're fucked forever!

[IanEye]

[sunny]

What a major creep-out. I had to stop reading lest I start repeating his name in my head and conjure him, sort of like saying "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice..."

[Et in Arcadia ego]

I had to stop reading lest I start repeating his name in my head and conjure him, sort of like saying "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice..."

More like,"Candyman, Candyman, Candyman..".

[Et in Arcadia ego]

That said, it makes me wonder about the point of origin of the repetitious naming as a summoning device. Before Candyman you had Bloody Mary, and I'm sure something predates that. I'm inclined to believe its (a) bunk, or (b) not powerful enough a device without a minimum number of individuals necessary for spawning an egregore, but regardless, how did the belief take root in legend?

[Joe Hillshoist]

I think the idea has been around for a very long time.

Hundreds or thousands of years.

Just tried candyman (again) and as usual nothing happened.

I don't think those sort of invocations work without some sort of "sacred space" where they take place, and some other sort of context, a story or narrative of some sort that gives some consistancy to the beliefs of the people doing it.

Just saying the words in front of a mirror, which is the way I heard the legend worked, isn't enough even if a group of people did it.

However if a group of people spent a few months or years developing a belief system that "made sense" (to them) and then practised it it might work. Possibly...

[pepsified thinker]

The times when I'm wrestling with something I've read here, trying to decide if I buy it--or, if I'm thinking about how to tell someone about something I've read here at R.I., and how to then tell them about R.I., or, well, whatever--I get to thinking we're all kinda doing a big spooky story festival here, 24-7-365.

Which isn't to say I disbelieve everything here, but sometimes that's a part of what's going on, and it's a factor in how credible (or not) some stories are for me.

[sunny]

^^I love stories. Tell me a story.

[Corvidaerex]

This is from a story arc called "Trouble Man and No No," from the web comic Achewood, a couple years ago. http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uua7HlwbP[/img]

[Et in Arcadia ego]

However if a group of people spent a few months or years developing a belief system that "made sense" (to them) and then practised it it might work. Possibly...

Joe, I'd have to say its a definite for me, no possibilities, although a considerable mass/inertia would be required for a real manifestation. This is based on my own personal experience and something I've constantly fretted over sharing here at RI. I've given Jeff the story and it seems the only explanation for what I experienced was an Egregore, but what I ran up against would have had an extremely powerful belief system behind the practitioners that utterly dwarfs anything a party of drunk kids could attempt in front of a darkened bathroom..

One day I'd really like to share what happened to me, but I don't expect hardly anyone to take me seriously. Poor Hugh would sicken with woo woo poisoning and have his hair and teeth fall out.

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Just tried candyman (again) and as usual nothing happened.