The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America by Robert Schneck

Author:Robert Schneck [Schneck, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Folklore & Mythology
ISBN: 1933665645
Publisher: Anomalist Books
Published: 2010-10-19T05:00:00+00:00

7

THE LOST BOYS

Newark, New Jersey, 1978

This is the story of a mass disappearance.

There’s no reason to believe it was paranormal, but somehow that makes it worse; when it’s paranormal you don’t expect a solution.

A turnepike was once a “revolving barrier furnished with spikes used to block a road.”(1) Today, the term applies to any highway with a tollgate unless it’s referring to the Turnpike, in which case it means the New Jersey Turnpike—that twelve-lane ribbon of concrete stretching 148 miles across the state from Deepwater in the southwest to West New York in the northeast. The Turnpike is the busiest road on planet Earth and the most memorable part of it, certainly the one that makes the strongest impression, is the passage through the industrial corridor of Essex County.

Here it snakes through the kind of landscape that Soviet Five Year planners used to dream about: a panorama of smokestacks, pipelines, electrical pylons, swooping concrete highways, iron bridges, and rail yards stretching from one horizon to the other. Vast machines of production and commerce dominate the scenery. There are chemical plants and petroleum refineries, fire-breathing towers and columns of smoke that hang over tank farms swollen with petrochemicals. Massive steel gantries, like stick-figure horses, stand in rows along the docks, moving mountains of cargo containers between ships, trucks and railroad flatcars, while airplanes pass overhead with metronomic regularity.

As you travel past old factory towns and through the stink of crude oil being cooked into gasoline, you come to a spot where the gritty sprawl is interrupted by skyscrapers. This is Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, and home to a quarter million people.

Newark has a bad reputation, but a stroll through the downtown may change your mind. Broad Street is lined with discount stores and crowded with shoppers, while companies like Prudential Insurance, Bell Atlantic of New Jersey, and PSEG have their offices in the towers overhead. There are fine Art Deco and Beaux Arts buildings, an excellent museum, and a dome on top of City Hall that glitters like a gold skullcap. The impressive New Jersey Performing Arts Center is nearby, along with a new sports arena. Behind these showpieces, however, is the old Newark.

It is a bleak, dangerous city of razor wire, vacant lots, rubble, and rotting housing projects whose residents live in conditions rarely seen in 21st century America.(2) This Newark has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country, unemployment that is twice the national average, and a significant number of citizen who live in poverty. The crime, drug abuse and HIV/AIDS rates are equally grim.

This didn’t happen overnight. Newark’s decline began as long ago as the 1930s or 1940s and hit bottom in July 1967, when a series of riots left the city in flames, 26 people dead, thousands under arrest, and ten million dollars worth of property destroyed. A thousand businesses were looted or burned, many never to reopen, and middle-class white residents vanished into the surrounding suburbs. Newark remains the most

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