Exposing Satanville

          It was a student of mine who first introduced me to the legend of Satanville. Her series of photographs focused on the roads leading to haunted places, abandoned towns, and urban legends. Some of her images were of a stretch of Cossart Road, locally known as Devil’s Road, which is infamous for its strange landmarks, ominous presence, and elusive guarded mansion. Searching online, I discovered several internet forums with tales of teenagers being chased by supernatural security vehicles, of a row of severely crooked trees (supposedly caused by the activities of the KKK) and, best of all, of a mysterious ‘Cult House,’ also known as Satanville, which is either the home of ritual Satanic sacrifice or a secret, private mental hospital for the incestuous progeny of the eccentric DuPont family. No matter the particulars, all the stories share two things: plenty of conjecture and no proof. One account of the strange happenings on the road was written by a guy who admits that he was on the road to ambush and scare other teenagers. In fact, the local police are constantly patrolling the road to discourage thrill seekers from cruising the road looking for the supposed ‘Cult House.’ The legend is self-perpetuating with the initiated luring the uninitiated onto the road at all hours of the night.
         The fact that so many different evil things are associated with Cossart Road (i.e. Satanists, the KKK, the DuPonts) suggests that none of these can be the truth. Some researchers feel that the legend of the road was touched off by the 1977 Bruce Johnson Gang murders, in which three young men were executed and “stacked like logs” in the woods off Cossart Road. I suspected the legend was far older and set off to study the historical record.
         After weeks of paging through yellowed property tax records and dusty survey maps, I discovered something promising. Although the land along Cossart Road is currently divided among maybe a dozen properties, before the 1920’s the land had been carved into nearly fifty lots, mostly clustered around the supposed location of the infamous ‘Cult House.’ This discovery encouraged me, and I began searching through the local papers of that time. What I discovered was the catastrophic decimation of what was once a peaceful little community in rural Pennsylvania.
         As the First World War was grinding toward its end, a great influenza pandemic swept the globe killing an estimated 50 million people. The first wave struck in March of 1918, followed by a much deadlier outbreak in the fall of that year.
         Borden William Bildermacher was just another struggling portrait photographer working out of a second story studio on Rittenhouse Square, when the influenza outbreak began killing thousands in the congested city of Philadelphia. Watching the climbing death toll reported in every city newspaper, Bildermacher packed his photographic equipment and fled the city for the fresh, untainted air of the countryside.
         His journey through rural Pennsylvania was documented in the journal that he kept and through the ominous photographs that he made. From October 19th through the 31st, 1918, Bildermacher traveled down Cossart Road, photographing its inhabitants in exchange for money, food, or lodging. An unknowing carrier of the influenza virus, Bildermacher unwittingly spread the disease like a Typhoid Mary, leaving a trail of infection as he worked his way westward from farm to farm. Nearly half of the exposed population became ill, and one in ten died from the disease. According to accounts of the day, an angry mob of grieving relatives “finally cornered Mr. Bildermacher and hanged him from an elm tree.”
         The incident had a devastating effect on the community. Infected households were emptied and burned, healthy townsfolk fled, entire farms were razed, and properties were consolidated and sold off. The name of the town was eradicated from maps and from signposts. The only remnant of the village is the urban legend that preserves this strange tragedy in spirit, if not in fact.
          After his death, B. W. Bildermacher’s journals and photographic equipment were sent back to Philadelphia where his assistant developed the negatives and packed it all in a cardboard box. Passed down through three generations, they were eventually donated to the Slupe-Herr Archive, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of Southeastern Pennsylvania’s rich photographic history.
          This exhibition presents photographic prints made from Bildermacher’s original plate glass negatives paired with selected poetry from his daily journal. Written in the form of a two stanza limerick, each poem seems tailored to his subject, and while what he writes about the townsfolk is assuredly fictional, the body of work somehow reflects the ominous events that were about to take place in this small rural community.

 

At Pennsbury boys-only school
Young Marcum was known as the fool
So don’t find it odd
That he played Sweeney Todd
`Cause he makes such a wonderful ghoul

A photographer placed in the play
To honor my visit today
The changes abound
Without girls around
Miss Lovette was tossed straight away




Sometimes the dead were revived
So Mary and Franklin contrived
When she breathed her last
He’d bury her fast
And pray that she hadn’t survived

In dreams came a heavenly bearer
An angel that showed him his error
He unburied his wife
To check signs of life
And discovered her sheer look of terror




The Mickles were caught in a feud
For decades with the Kinzer brood
The Kinzers had cast
A spell that had last
‘Til grief and disaster ensued

Once the curse had abated
The Mickles kin were much sedated
Where eleven had been
Now they’re just ten
The family was near decimated




Chet Hepperidge was the man’s name
A bachelor if it’s all the same
No time for romance
Awaiting the chance
To hunt the most dangerous game

And although he has a weak heart
He had some advice to impart
“Stay out of the trees
They’re hard on my knees
I’ll give you ten minutes head start”




Perched high above Lover’s Leap
Toward the edge two lovers creep
Their hearts a flutter
The man starts to stutter
“Either we jump or just peek”

“But, now is no time to be meek”
So over the edge, lovers leap
Reaching the bottom
They see the problem
The hillside just wasn’t that steep.

         This work began when a friend and fellow artist invited me to his studio to inspect a collection of four inch by five inch plate glass negatives. They had been given to him from another friend of ours, who, in turn, had received them from an acquaintance, who had originally purchased them at an estate sale. Stored in a crumbling cardboard box, this collection of nearly ninety photographs were chipped, scratched and sometime stuck together. Cleaning the negatives, I laboriously scanned them digitally in an attempt at preservation and so that I could inspect and organize them without handling the originals. For several months, I had the delight of revealing these images one-by-one. They unfolded into a wonderful mystery; just who was the photographer? Are the people that he photographed his family or his clients? When were these images taken? Who is this strange little boy?
         The joy of discovery—that moment when you form first a thousand questions—is what I, as an artist, strive to share with my audience. My early exhibits asked the audience to create their own little histories—a challenge maybe for some—but I soon discovered that a carefully constructed historical context was better at conveying certain philosophic and metaphoric ideas. The moment of discovery is preserved in the fictional history as a discovery made by myself, or, as is very often the case, by my alter ego. In this exhibit, the discovery is made by my alter ego, Mr. Bildermacher, (literally, German for picturemaker), who discovers the strange residents along Cossart Road.
         Although it was coincidental that I learned about the legend of Satanville while I was in the midst of scanning images, it seemed at the time that it was destiny. Satanville is a perfect example of a fiction arising from a mystery. One of the reasons that this urban legend persists is precisely because it has no origin. Mysteries that are explained are no longer mysteries. The construction of this Satanville back-story is, in a way, my attempt to disperse this ridiculous notion of a haunted road.
         The search for a suitable, if not believable, back-story began with the dating of the images. Through the comparison of clothing styles with catalogues of the time I was confident that the images were made after the turn of the century. Researching the period between 1900 and 1920, I came across the 1918 “Spanish” Influenza Epidemic. Because the influenza caused a mild epidemic in the spring of 1918 and a full blown pandemic occurring in the fall, I saw this catastrophe as analogous with our modern situation and thought it would make the perfect source of the mystery that surrounds Cossart Road. The introduction of a photographer as the main character is, of course, straight out of my little bag of tricks, and, with the death tolls in Philadelphia during the epidemic peaking at 1,700 in a single day, it seemed only natural that the virus would be spread from that city.
          The idea of presenting the story as a series of two stanza limericks came to me while I was researching the Influenza Epidemic. One of the remnants of that period is a children’s jump rope rhyme that spread nationwide during the epidemic: I had a bird and her name was Enza. I opened the door and In-flu-enza. This immediately reminded me of another jump rope rhyme that goes; Lizzy Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one. The theme and style of Bildermacher’s poems were, from that moment on, a forgone conclusion.