Batman in Charleston

“Holy Paperboys, Batman!”

The other evening, a friend related a tale from when he was a kid, growing up in the Charleston area. This friend, a former paperboy, recalled a time when paperboys in the area were being harassed by a very odd and very creepy stalker.  After a brief archive search, I found a newspaper article about the phenomenon. 

According to the Charleston Daily Mail in its Friday, September 16, 1966 edition:

COPS FIRE WARNING

‘BATMAN’ SCARES LOCAL CHILDREN

Running out of the dark woods like one possessed of devilish intent, someone dressed in a Batman costume has been badly frightening children recently in the South Main Drive area off Piedmont Rd.

It happened before dawn today for the second consecutive day, the victim in both cases being a 14-year old boy passing papers between 4 and 5 a.m. when the night is as black as Satan’s heart.

Three weeks ago a man wearing a mask chased a paper boy down South Main and it has now reached the place, a district supervisor for the Gazette circulation department said, that it is very difficult to get boys to deliver papers there.

South Main is a dead end street. Beyond it is a patch of woods where the agile person lurks before racing forth to scare the daylights out of his victims. 

Residents of the area said this morning police were hiding there and fired two warning shots over the head of the fleeing “Batman” but he escaped.

“We’d like to know exactly what he is up to,” Sgt. Arlie Robinson of the police Juvenile Bureau said.

Residents in the South Main section said today there have been recurring reports of a prowler in the area for two years but they do not know if he is the same individual responsible for the recent incidents there.

Robinson said his department is continuing its investigation. 

This tale is pretty weird all on its own. You have someone who is dressing up as a popular television character (the old Batman show with Adam West just premiered early that year in January) lurking in a small, secluded neighborhood before dawn with seemingly the sole purpose of scaring the hell out of paperboys. But…why? And who was this ‘Batman?’

My imagination is all over the place on this one. On one hand, I kind of feel like this is probably another young person, which would be supported by the idea that the Juvenile Bureau of the Charleston PD has jurisdiction on the case. These paperboys aren’t being attacked…yet…they’re just being scared. And it does certainly seem that paperboys ARE the target, as not many others are going to be roaming a dead end street between those paper-delivery hours of 4 to 5 am.

Paperboys usually have pretty set routes, so was one kid in particular the original target? And was this simply a prank, or were there more sinister motives behind the whole thing? My friend who told the tale (and believes he may have encountered the stalker himself one night) remembers that the person behind this was eventually arrested, putting a stop to the incidents. I couldn’t find a newspaper article showing that anyone was ever arrested (gonna keep looking!), but it just seems odd that the police would be out there hiding, fire warning shots, and still let this person initially get away on a dead-end street. 

So, was it an adult, or at least someone with a plan other than some innocent fun in mind? Was this person the same one reported wearing a simple mask last month…and why Batman? To reiterate, the popular Batman show had premiered in January of that year. Being a month out from Halloween, it was probably a pretty easy costume to come by. People do weird things for no apparent reason sometimes. Despite that, I can’t help but want to look into this for some type of deeper meaning or connection…especially a supernatural one.

The first thing that comes to mind is a really-early viral marketing campaign, but I think if this was a creative way to promote the Batman show, the timing was way off, and we would have seen this happen on a nation-wide scale. To my knowledge, Batmans were NOT chasing paperboys around anywhere but Charleston, WV at the time. So, we can mark that one off the list. The second thing that popped into my mind is the similarities between a spooky Batman and the 2016 Evil Clown flap, where people from all over the country and even beyond were seeing clowns. Ranging from just hanging out in places they shouldn’t be, to reports of them actually wielding machetes and/or other weapons, these clowns were absolutely creeping people out…and there was never really a satisfactory answer as to what the hell was happening. It probably did start as a marketing stunt, but due to mass hysteria and copy-cat clowns, things were taken way too far. 

Spring-Heeled Jack

Again, the creepy clown flap was really widespread, and the Batman incident was confined to pretty much one small area in Charleston (that we know of). So, all signs really do point to just one individual being weird and creepy for some unknown reason. That scenario kind of reminds me of another individual running around a city being weird and scaring not paperboys, but women. They even sort of looked similar. Beginning in London in 1837, young women were terrorized by a figure that would come to be called Spring-Heeled Jack. Witnesses said he wore a black cloak, had clawed hands, and had eyes that ‘resembled red balls of fire.’ These attacks were often physical, and the man/creature could escape the scene by jumping very high, over fences/walls. When looking at artists’ depictions of Spring Heeled Jack, there’s quite a close resemblance of his cloak (cape) and headgear with that of our modern Batman. But unlike Batman, Spring-Heeled Jack’s his ability to move in supernatural ways, along with his 40+ year reign of terror caused many to believe he may not be of OUR world. 

There also seems to be a few similarities between Spring Heeled Jack and West Virginia’s very own mystery monster, the Mothman, especially that description of the glowing eyes! And, I think it is very important to note the date of these attacks. The first Batman sighting seems to be around August of 1966, with at least two more documented in September of that year. In just two short months, the town of Point Pleasant, WV would experience the first reported sightings of the Mothman. Was our Charleston Batman here not as a weirdo to stalk teenage paperboys, but as some sort of scout or recon entity for Mothman? 

Or, is he related to yet ANOTHER odd ‘visitor’ to West Virginia around this time? A few weeks before Mothman showed up in Point Pleasant, Indrid Cold, from the planet Lanulos, arrived outside of Parkersburg and made contact with Woodrow Derenberger, resulting in a relationship that would last Derenberger’s whole life. Cold often spoke of other beings from planets different from his that also stopped by Earth, some with more wholesome and pure intentions than others.  

Although my logical side is saying this was nothing but a boyish prank, I think I would be doing the Fortean world a huge disservice by not at least documenting some of the crazy coincidences that may lead to a tie-in between a dude dressed as Batman running around a Charleston neighborhood, and some sort of extraterrestrial or ultraterrestrial madman…the first in a line of strange, unexplained happenings from Autumn of 1966. Whatever it is, I can’t think of a better setting than wild, weird, and wonderful West Virginia!