I have seen minds shattered against a wall like porcelain clowns. And I have seen minds for whom the shattered shards of those clowns are crude shivs for exercising the darkest of deeds of human nature. I’ve welcomed and entertained them all – even the ones shattered quite beyond repair, and those poor souls who’ve been hurled so far into the abyss that they’ll never re-emerge from it.
Sylvan Kane – from an interview with the Raleigh Sentinel, September 1922
As part of our sojourns into Everbleak’s photo album and meandering history, we have already been crossing paths with some of the characters who have walked it’s scuffed linoleum: people who may have been prominent or mundane in historical terms, but are now somehow illustrative of a certain time, theme, or point of interest.
All well and good, but there are others who also deserve recognition and celebration, just for being themselves.
Take Veronica Bancroft for example. And when I say ‘take’, I don’t mean it literally. Those who did would almost certainly find themselves gurgling blood through a slit throat, staring up at a crowd of happy-faced puppets as their life ebbed tragically away.
Veronica, on the exterior, was a normal suburban housewife from Pensacola on the Florida panhandle. She would attend church in white gloves and regularly donate to the welfare shelter next to the supermarket. Not exactly a pillar of the community, but at least a supporting strut.
But Veronica was hiding a secret. In her twenties, she had become obsessed with hand puppets. They were her friends and confidants, her masturbatory aids, and constantly spoke their funny little thoughts to her – even when they were sleeping quietly in their special box. There were clowns, bears, a spotty dog, an elephant, and a monkey: Manfred, who was their leader and spokesperson. It was he who would often tell Veronica what to do on behalf of the other, shyer puppets: like a foreman of the jury telling her that her husband was guilty (so guilty!) and that she should start slowly poisoning him with rat control strychnine in his mashed potato – which she immediately did. With fatal consequences.
But Veronica also wanted to share her puppet friends and their happy, smiling faces with the wider world. So she started performing shows with them at Sunday School, old folks homes, and municipal parades. Their act was set in a psychiatric doctor’s waiting room (constructed from a whitewashed cardboard box), where Veronica played the giant receptionist, and the puppets were the ‘patients’. Nobody ever saw the psychiatrist though. He didn’t exist in this contained little world, and was only referred to occasionally as ‘Herr Doktor’. So the action therefore centred around the making of appointments, turning up late, and arguing with the receptionist in strange, squeaky voices. When Veronica was in the midst of a real psychotic episode, however, the dialogue would become slurred and disjointed, or just get reduced to animal grunts and howls.
Sadly, not everyone was enamoured with how this ‘drama’ and it’s unscripted, unconventional dialogue came across, so audience members would sometimes fall asleep, complain and heckle. Silly them: the thin-skinned puppets abhorred even implied criticism, so would exact vicious revenge on the culprits. Mostly with a knife across their windpipe as they slept.
In her police interviews, Veronica Bancroft admitted to being present at all 14 murders, but was adamant that it was Manfred and the other puppets who had physically made the blows and incisions to the victims. She believed them to be possessed by satanic forces, and revealed that they had encouraged her to worship Lucifer too with their ‘cute little faces and funny ways’.
Bancroft resided in Everbleak Asylum’s maximum security wing until her death in 1997. During her incarceration, she was allowed to make new hand puppets in her weekly arts & crafts sessions and often put on shows for the other patients. She also wrote a recipe book for children’s parties, showing a flair for the imaginative use of frankfurters and spam. It was never published.
Gustav Rheinhold was a strange, quiet little boy from Munich. He had a penchant for dressing like a little Bavarian shit and causing chaos through the telekinetic power of his mind.
It began in the streets of his home town, where young Gustav would strut around in lederhosen, telekinetically making the dresses of women at bus stops blow up. However, he soon progressed to making dogs levitate as their owners walked them in the park, and making policemen turn mid-air cartwheels as they directed traffic at Gärtnerplatz.
To avoid Gustav being kidnapped (a very real possibility at the time) by GDR Stasi agents, his parents bought him to the USA under sponsorship from the newly formed paranormal division of the FBI (Black Rook). It was they who brought him to Everbleak in the late 60’s for testing and observation of his extraordinary abilities.
Gustav Rheinhold would later go on to head up Black Rook (1989-1996) and was responsible in the early 70’s (whilst still a child) for acts of psychological and telekinetic warfare in Vietnam.
We will visit more interesting characters and their stories in future blogs.
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