Enriqueta Martí: Vampire, Serial Killer, Sack Lady

Enriqueta Martí, source unknown.

Following up on my popular Sack Man post, I introduce to you, readers, Enriqueta Martí, an early 20th century Catalan child abductor, pimp, hack witch doctor. She's also the most (in)famous lady Sack Man Sack Lady in Spain and--judging from the mind-boggling number of internet search engine results--cyberspace. She's inspired the worst kind of screamy, unintelligible hardcore music posted to YouTube, countless creepy "tribute" blog posts,* entries in a dozen cheapo paperbacks on serial killers, a handful of well-written and well-researched newspaper articles, and a movie (to be released sometime this year) with a pretty schlocky trailer. 

And, yes, she even has her own facebook page.**

A full profile is only a Google search away, so I won't get into the details. *** A quick caveat: If you want to be able to fall asleep tonight without special aids, I recommend avoiding an image search as quite a few scary postmortem photos pop up on the first page of results. What I find especially compelling about this Sack Lady case, and what I aim to focus on here, are: the nature of the monster, and the socio-political climate of her time and place--or rather, the outside forces contributing to the intense amount of popular interest in her macabre case. 

I admit that the distinction of Sack Lady is what originally drew my attention to Enriqueta Martí's story. And, as already illustrated, I'm clearly not the only one. There's something that sets female serial killers (or, female killers in general) apart from their male counterparts: a whole other set of anxieties and fears that trace back directly to the Monstrous Feminine. But I digress... since this post in its original form was already much too long to hold the attention of the casual blog reader, I've decided to break it up into two or three installments. 

Read the second isntallment, "Enriqueta Martí: The Nature of the Monster," here. 

Read the third installment, "Enriqueta Martí: Her Time and Place," here. 

*Oh my god, I'm toeing a fine line here, I know... 

**The page (its contents are excerpted directly from her wikipedia page) has 28 "Likes". I came close to clicking the "Like" button myself but refrained at the last minute because, really, who am I? Some kind of creep?

***Pedro Costa's 2006 article in El País is, I think, especially good. 

Humor for aficionados of the Gothic

I like to think of this as the "alternative" opening to every Gothic-novel-of-a-certain-type, and it makes me laugh. If only we could rewrite Rebecca or Frankenstein or Jane Eyre or The Castle of Otranto to start out this way... there really isn't anything stopping us, is there?

This and much more at Married To The Sea.com

Sand Dogs

Yesterday, I drove Roscoe and his BFF Leila to the dog beach in Santa Cruz for an hour of extended horse (doggie) play. 

These two get along ridiculously well. All they want to do when they're together is rough-house and chase each other and bite each other's tails and wrestle and bark and snarl and bare their teeth and chew on each other's necks and ears and basically act like rabid, wild beasts. I used to kind of poop myself every time they'd mess around like this on the beach back in the day, but I now understand that it's all fun and games. It's a little embarrassing when there's a crowd on the beach and they look on, mortified. I just roll my eyes and shrug and walk away. These two are just crazy sand dogs. 

Oh, hey, what's up?

Checking out the beach.

It was a beautiful, stormy day out on the beach. Prime Brontë weather. We got caught in a light sprinkle just as a new storm system rolled in.

Sand dogs in action.

Roscoe, especially, gets pretty crazy looking. It's the feral canine within, I guess.

Phew. Time to take a break and oggle the other dogs on the beach, clearly. 

I love all the sand art etched in to the cliffs along this beach. There's all kinds of bizarro goodness left behind by winter birds, junkies, kids, and weirdos. Here's a nice example on the northern-most cliffs. 

I decided to take a portrait of the dogs in front of it. I don't have very good voice-command with Leila, but I was able to put Roscoe into a sit-stay as I backed up to take the shot. 

That lasted just about as long as it took Leila to wander off... 

Sand dogs will be sand dogs, after all.

Introducing Mr. Coe

Roscoe indulges my Spaghetti Western fantasy by wearing this Western-themed dog collar.

Meet Mr. Coe. Mr. Ross Coe. Or just Roscoe, as named by Animal Control employees when he was originally picked up in the summer of 2010. He was rescued from a terrible hoarding situation in Arizona, and the lovely people at the AFRP drove out to claim him and two others when their time was up at the Yavapai Humane Society. I adopted him a couple of months later. 

When Roscoe first came home, he was a feral animal. Now, over a year and a half later, he's still pretty "spooky" but slowly and steadily getting better. In fact, I'd even call him a "real dog" now. Roscoe is a sneak, a weasel, and a cad. He is a treat burglar, a butter bandit, and aficionado of Ultimate Comfort. He's jealous and under-handed, but also absurdly affectionate and gentle, goofy and endearing. We love him super amounts. With a mug like the one below, it's clear he gets by with his good looks, no?

Roscoe enjoying the lower Haight, San Francisco, spring 2011

Procrastination Investigation: The unfortunate historical basis of the Sack Man.

"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.