Enter this under things I should have begun to wonder about long before now, but. here’s Harvey’s unfinished manuscript, yet there’s no sign anywhere of all these clippings and notes and such that he repeatedly mentions in the text. How is it, then, that the manuscript was saved, but the files on which the manuscript are based apparently were not? Did he destroy them before his suicide? Were they discarded or destroyed by someone else after his death, even though the manuscript itself was stashed away in the basement? Or are they still here in the house somewhere, so well hidden that I simply have not come across them? Admittedly, I have not searched for them, but I have, since coming here, had occasion to casually peer into almost every nook or cranny where they might have been sequestered. Then again, maybe I have been anything but thorough, and my bored rummaging has been too haphazard. Regardless, I’d love to see some of his sources, if only to confirm that they exist, and to discover to what degree Harvey might be selectively reporting these incidents, thereby distorting them, to suit his needs. But, as he was saying:
The first concerns British Anglican occultist, poet, and novelist Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), who, I will note, was briefly a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (along with such Edwardian luminaries as William Butler Yeats, Florence Farr, and Maud Gonne). Shortly after the publication of her third, and final, novel The Column of Dust(Methuen; London, 1909) and while at work on Mysticism: A Studyof the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness(Methuen; London, 1911—possibly the most renowned work in a very prolific life), Underhill received a long letter from Margaret Cropper, a close acquaintance who was traveling in New England. Cropper had heard tales of “the fearsome blood oak somewhere south of Foster, in Rhode Island,” and had even visited the tree for herself. The letter in question, which has been printed in the Collected Papers of Evelyn Underhill(Longmans, Green and Co.; London, 1946, edited by Lucy Menzies), recounts a visit to the “old White [sic] farm,” and includes fairly accurate descriptions of the house, the tree, and the supposed altar stone. When the letter reached Underhill, the envelope also contained a single dried leaf, which she identified as having come from a red oak. However, only a few months later, Cropper returned to England, and Underhill notes that her friend had no memory of having sent one of the leaves to her friend. “Indeed, she found the strange tree most wholly repellent and wished to take nothing physical away from her encounter with it,” Underhill writes (ibid). The mystery was compounded when red oak leaves began to appear in Evelyn Underhill’s home with increasing regularity, and she writes of having found more than fifty of them, between the years 1909 (when the letter from Cropper arrived) and 1914, when the peculiar manifestations abruptly ceased. The leaves turned up throughout her home — beneath her bed, in a steamer trunk, in a box of correspondence that had gone unopened since June 1903, inside shoes and coat pockets, and, most bizarrely, once inside a can of plum pudding. Underhill describes the affair as “a botanical haunting, and a most unnerving, if ultimately harmless, affair.” The leaves were usually green and unwilted, though several of them “. wore the gaudy colours of autumn.” The case of Underhill’s “haunting” is also mentioned briefly in both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’sThe History of Spiritualism(Vol. II, G. H. Doran; New York, 1926) and Slater Brown’sThe Heyday of Spiritualism(Hawthorn Books; New York, 1970).
The last instance of leafy manifestations which I will here discuss is surely one of the most grisly episodes associated with the red tree. And yet it is also one of the most obscure episodes in this mystery, and my only records of it, beyond the memory of locals I have interviewed, is recorded in a pair of short articles in the always dubious pages of the Fortean magazine Fate(which has, over the decades, noted the odd goings-on associated with the tree in a number of articles)—“The Vampire Tree” (January 1982) and “Rhode Island’s Killer Oak!” (October 1983) — both penned by the same author, Patrick Baumgartner (about whom I can learn nothing, and he may have never been more than a pseudonym employed by the magazine’s editors and/or staff writers).
To summarize, according to these two articles, on January 17, 1981, a man from nearby Rice City (just south of here), a goat farmer and cheesemaker named in Fate as George Farrell, went to the Blanchard farm on business. He knew of the tree’s strange reputation, and at some point on that day, he visited it in the company of one of the landowner’s sons (the son is, by the way, the current owner of the property, though he professes no recollection of Farrell or the events described in Fate). Farrell was reportedly disappointed by what seemed a perfectly ordinary oak, and to show his contempt for the local tall tales, used a pocketknife to carve his initials into the bark, above the altar stone. Three weeks later, so both articles report, Farrell’s goats began to give extremely bitter milk. In the weeks to follow, three of the animals began to waste and finally died. Both pieces (which differ very little, and almost amount to reprints of the same article twenty-two months apart) state that the animals were summarily autop sied by a veterinarian from Coventry, who discovered that the they were each missing a “considerable quantity of blood” and that “their udders were distended, and, when opened, it was discovered that they were filled with a dark viscous material that stank of rotting vegetable matter, but, more remarkably, with the undigested acorns and leaves of a Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra).” The January ’82 article states, “The acorns of this species of oak are notoriously bitter and astringent, though they are still eaten by deer and other wildlife. The bitter flavor of the acorns is the result of high levels of the polyphenol tannin.” The veterinarian in question is never named (not even a gender is provided), and I have been unable to find anyone in the area who can tell me who he or she might have been.
The articles state that Farrell was so “angry and disturbed” by the unexplainable deaths of his goats, that he visited the Blanchards again, this time with a hatchet and three cans of gasoline, “. prepared to put an end to the demonic oak.” Fortunately, less hysterical heads prevailed, however, and he was discouraged from seeking his revenge upon the tree. However, Baumgartner’s articles state that, in his efforts to calm the man, Blanchard agreed to remove the section of bark that the goat farmer had carved his initials into, and it was reportedly then delivered to Farrell, who is said to have had it blessed (!) by a Catholic priest before he burned it to ash (in a twist reminiscent of the infamous Rhode Island vampire “epidemic”). The ashes he then buried in a sealed tin box in consecrated earth, possibly in the Greenwood Cemetery in nearby Coventry. The articles both claim that the lid of the tin box was engraved with a cross. In my interviews with locals, I have heard several variants of the story of the poisoned goats, however, in true urban-legend fashion, the details never match, and it is always attributed to the ubiquitous “friend of a friend.” Moreover, I can find no record of a goat farmer and cheesemaker named “George Farrell,” though it is possible that his name was changed by the editors of Fate(who, so far, have not replied to my inquiries for more details on the case, assuming, of course, that their files contain any additional information).
Having transcribed all that, one thing that sort of leaps out at me is the surname of the possibly pseudonymous Fate“ journalist”—Baumgartner. Anyone with even a smattering of German will see what I mean, that Baumgartner translates to “tree gardener.” Odd that Harvey missed that; it certainly would have bolstered his assertion that the name was merely anom de plume. Or, I don’t know, maybe he did catch it, but appreciated the wordplay too much to spoil it for those among his readers who’d get it on their own. Also, I wonder if I ask Blanchard about this George Farrell fellow, if he’d be any more forthcoming with me than he was with Dr. Harvey. That is, assuming that there’s something here to be forthcoming about. It all smacks of “witch trial” histrionics to me, and if not for mine and Constance’s lost picnic, that damning firsthand experience with the tree, I wouldn’t be disposed to believe a word of this, giving the tales in the typescript no more credence than I’ve given the stock-in-trade of supermarket tabloids — Elvis sightings, Nostradamus, Bible prophecies, women who claim to have been impregnated by Bigfoot, UFOs communicating via crop circles, astrology, the Bermuda Triangle, and so forth.