“They dropped me with Bubbe and Zayde and then he took her to the hospital. She was really, you know. Something was really out of whack.”
She was looking at the midnight-blue horse. The bristles of its mane and tail were ivory white. Its head was angled skyward as though in aspiration. Any kid could have seen, I thought, that it was the magic one, the one that might be able to fly.
“I mean, all girls have the horse thing around that age,” I said. “Ten eleven twelve. It’s super-common.”
“Mm-hmm,” my mother said, but it didn’t sound like she was agreeing with or even humoring me. She was pitying me. She thought that I was kidding myself, in denial.
“Because, I mean, did you know about the Skinless Horse?” I said. “Before she went into the hospital the first time?”
She set the box back down on the kitchen table. I started the teakettle. I had some Drambuie on hand. I assured her that it was not too early in the day to add a slug of the stuff to one’s cup of Earl Grey.
“Before that?” she said. “Did I know? Did I know. I mean, I . . . sensed . . .” She paused, reluctant to carry on in this vein, trucking with things that could merely be sensed. “I knew she was afraid of something I couldn’t see.”
I poured tea from the pot into her mug and doctored it to her specifications. She took a sip and then, a moment later, took another, longer sip.
“Good,” she said. She didn’t say anything else after that, and she probably would have liked to move on.
“So when you were ten,” I said, “November 1952, you packed it all up in that box.”
“Yeah.”
“It kind of looks like you never unpacked it again.”
“I never did.”
“How come?”
“Because I stopped liking horses.”
“Because you found out about the Skinless Horse?”
“No,” my mother said. She drained the cup of spiked tea. Then she opened up the flaps of the Old Crow box again and started rooting down through the crumpled flowers of Baltimore to the bottom. “Because I saw it.”
*
My grandmother was an on-air personality—star would be overstating the case—on station WAAM from around 1948 to 1952. In those years relatively few Baltimore households owned television sets. Growing up in the Baltimore area twenty years later, I rarely encountered people who had seen my grandmother on TV. From time to time when I was a kid, a former housewife of the fifties might recollect the pert, impeccably coiffed ménagère who calmly disjointed rabbits or whacked cutlets with a tenderizer while wearing pearls and a Dior dress supplied by Hutzler’s, the sponsor of La Cuisine. My mother is now my only surviving authority for channel 13’s having aired a French-language instruction program taught by my grandmother on Sunday mornings after The Christophers. And nobody ever seemed to remember Fay Beau the French Weather Maid, promising sunshine or warning of storm fronts on News at Noon in her black livery and starched white cap and apron.
To this day most of the people who remember my grandmother on television were kids at the time, my mother’s age or a little older, and what they remember is a mass of dark hair teased into a feathery cowl around a dead-white face, eyebrows like a raven’s wings, dark sleeves restlessly flapping and swooping in a dry-ice fog as my grandmother stalked the set of The Crypt of Nevermore, an antebellum Gothic fantasia of toppled columns, tilted headstones, and iron gingerbread. They remember her as “Nevermore, the Night Witch,” and they are unanimous in recalling that if you were allowed to stay up late on a Friday night during those years, and tuned in to channel 13 for the forty-five minutes before WAAM’s twelve-forty-five sign-off, my grandmother would freak you the fuck out.
Television’s first “horror host” is generally agreed to have been Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira, who emerged a couple of years afterward from some murky Hollywood borderland of cheesecake soft porn and Maya Deren–esque surrealism to introduce and heap ridicule upon Z-grade thrillers on KABC in Los Angeles. Others in other cities—Zackerley in New York, Ghoulardi in Cleveland, Marvin in Chicago—emerged toward the end of the decade, after the classic Universal horror films were packaged for television, and though they had their own gimmicks they all more or less followed the pattern laid down by Vampira: camp, innuendo, and the airing of movies ripe for mockery by the host of the show.
Nevermore, the Night Witch, wasn’t like that. She didn’t show movies; there were no horror movies licensed to be shown on television, and if there had been, the brothers who owned the station—more friends of the ubiquitous Judge Waxman—would not have seen the value in acquiring them.
“She hammed it up pretty good,” my grandfather told me. “But she played it straight, not for laughs. The accent helped. She lived in the Usher family crypt, that was the shtick. Name over the door.” He closed his eyes, and they sank into the purple shadow that surrounded them. He reran the grainy kinescope of memory. “She’s there shpatziring around the graves, she turns and looks at the camera, ‘Oh!’” His voice went half an octave up and took on a certain slinkiness. “‘I see you have dared to return!’ Right? Then she invites you in. The camera, what do you call, zooms in on the iron gate of the crypt, meanwhile she has to quick run around to the other half of the set, where it’s supposed to be the inside of the crypt. Cut to the other camera, she comes in, sits down in a chair, more like a throne, I think they got it from a church. She picks up a book and she reads. Out loud. Ghost stories. Weird tales. That type of thing. Never my cup of tea.”
The Crypt of Nevermore, broadcast live, aired weekly from October 7, 1949, the centennial of Edgar Allan Poe’s death, to October 24, 1952.
Baltimoreans who sat down at midnight on October 31, 1952, to watch the Night Witch’s presentation of Poe’s “Metzengerstein,” as promised by TV listings in the Sun, were surprised to find only a static shot of a jack-o’-lantern posed on a wooden stool in a fog of CO2. The holes of its face had been hacked in haste with some dull tool, and as its candle guttered and flared, the jack-o’-lantern displayed an expression of torment that many viewers, according to a subsequent report in the Sun, found disturbing; there were complaints. On the following Friday at midnight an old March of Time newsreel was shown. Neither The Crypt of Nevermore nor my grandmother ever returned to the air.