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| "Que biene el Coco" Goya, Caprichos plate 3 |
Last summer, tooling around on the internet and generally procrastinating my time away, I fell down the wikipedia rabbit hole and, much to my delight, came across an entry in which some of my favorite things met: serial killers, monsters, old wives tales, and historical fact.
I'm a sucker for weirdo historical tidbits. I love spooky superstitions, fabrications, fairy tales, and "widely distributed untruths". I get particularly excited when I come across historical traces to urban myths and folk tales, and am particularly interested in investigating the grey spaces where fact and fiction converge.
El hombre del saco, or, Sack Man (also known as El Señor Sacamantecas, or, Mr. Lard Remover)* is the Spanish equivalent of the Boogie Man, and may be the most popular monster used by parents to scare their children into submission in the Spanish speaking world.**
This is how the story goes. There is a man, with a sack, who wanders through the city streets, village alleys, or country lanes (all depending on where you live, of course) at dusk. He abducts children loitering outside the home, sneaking them away in his sack. Those children are never seen again. Mr. Lard Remover, specifically, takes those children, kills them, reduces their body fat to lard, and then sells that lard back to the unsuspecting parents of the abducted children. Really, what could be more terrifying then the image of your own family sitting down to a dinner cooked with your own reduced body fat? Telling this story to kids is the perfect way to make sure they come home before sundown.
I always thought that there was some kind of hidden truth to this urban(/rural?) legend, but assumed that whatever historical fact there was to the story had been buried under centuries (if not millennia!) of intergenerational memory, slowly erased by Oblivion.
Not so! The accounts are out there, and fresh! There are a handful of documented cases of Sack Men (and women!) operating in both rural and urban areas all over Spain throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Most famous examples of such, sometimes serial, infanticidal killer boogie (wo)men are: Manuel Blanco Romasanta, killing women and children and making human lard in early 19th century Galicia (he was also a werewolf!); Enriqueta Martí, the 'Vampiress of the Carrer Ponent', pimping out children and then extracting their bodily fluids and grinding their bones to dust to make home-made medicinal remedies in early 20th century Barcelona; and Francisco Ortega, Francisco Leona, and El tonto Rodríguez (vampire, witch doctor, and village idiot, respectively!), abducting, exsanguinating (is this a verb?), and removing the bodily fat from a young boy in early 20th century Almería.
Why the exsanguination? Why the extraction of bodily fat? Sadly (horrifically), the consumption of children's blood and application of hot poultices made of the body fat of children to the chest were considered by many in 19th and 20th century Spain to be effective "home remedies" for tuberculosis. The remedies were incredibly pricey (and, of course, difficult to come by), really only available to the white collar class and the wealthy. Is it ironic that such folk medicine should only be economically accessible to the bourgeoisie and social elite? The rate of child abduction skyrocketed throughout the country during this time.
What is so disturbing? tragic? just sad? to me is that this happened so recently (historically, relatively). I can negotiate and reconcile these occurances if they were to have happened in the middle ages, even the relatively dark days of the 16th and 17th centuries.*** But these atrocities were, in some cases, being committed less than 100 years ago. Worse yet, they were being FORGOTTEN in less time than that. These killers, who started out as werewolves and vampires, have very quickly become mere bedtime boogies and meanies.
It's remarkable how quickly Oblivion can work to transform some thing(s) too horrible to live with into much more benign apparitions.
Is Spain the only country with such a ghastly folk mythology pertaining to the tuberculosis epidemic of yesteryear? Is it possible that the Sack Men of other Spanish-speaking countries were also hack folk doctors, werewolves, vampires, and village idiots? And what of those boogie monsters in the rest of the world?
Quickly running through my mental pop culture backlog, the Boogie Woogie Man from Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas is particularly compelling, what with his burlap construction, ripped at the seams, spilling maggots and worms...
We never truly believe in the Boogie Man. But maybe we should (and believe in much more).
***
Read the first installment of my Enriqueta Martí: Sack Lady series here.
Read my follow-up post on medicinal cannibalism/corpse medicine and the Sack Man here.
*Excuse my ridiculous, spur-of-the-moment translation.
**Other names include El Coco, El Tío Saín, El Silbón. Translate them yourselves!!!
***There are, certainly, accounts of Sack Men operating throughout Spain during these centuries as well, travelers who adopted? abducted? enslaved? war orphans and street urchins by the handful.
