Women of Horror

Marie Catherine Laveau (September 10, 1794 – June 15, 1881) was a Louisiana Creole practitioner of Voodoo renowned in New Orleans. She was a free woman of color who cast a spell over the city. There are many, many versions of her story with very little in the way of actual fact. For the purposes of this portrait, I drew primarily from Robert Tallant's The Voodoo Queen. According to Tallant, Marie Laveau began her career as a hairdresser for white society women. She entered the finest homes in New Orleans and listened as her clients shared their deepest, darkest secrets.

By the time that she reached the status of voodoo queen in 1830, it was widely believed that she was in control of a vast network of spies, free women of color and domestic workers like she once was, who collected information about their employers for Laveau.

Her reputation as a practitioner of voodoo was cemented when she secured the freedom of a young white man accused of a violent crime. Afraid that his son would be convicted and sentenced to prison, his father approached Laveau for help. According to legend, the day that the young man's trial began Laveau entered St. Louis Cathedral and sat for three hours at the altar rail with three red peppers in her mouth. Later that night, she slipped the three peppers underneath the judge's seat. The next morning the judge found the young man innocent on all charges. In gratitude, his father bought Laveau her home on St. Ann Street where she lived until her death. 

It's virtually impossible to visit New Orleans without being confronted by Laveau. Her face peers out from portraits in tourist traps where you can buy your very own gris gris bags. Any touring company in the city will take you to the gate of the St. Louis cemetery where you can peer through for a glimpse of her crypt. What is extraordinarily difficult to find in New Orleans is any acknowledgement of the vastly complex ways race informed the legends surrounding Laveau.

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"The Black Dahlia" was a nickname given to Elizabeth Short (July 29, 1924 – c. January 15, 1947), an American woman who was the victim of a much-publicized murder in 1947. The "Black Dahlia" nickname may have been derived from a film noir murder mystery, The Blue Dahlia, released in April 1946. Short was found murdered, sliced in half at the waist, on January 15, 1947, in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, California. Her face was mutilated, her lips cut from ear-to-ear in a manner often called the "Glasgow Smile."

The brutality of the murder captivated the imagination of the tabloids and the American public at the time, and has remained an obsession among true crime aficionados like myself. This particular portrait was inspired by Steve Hodel's account of the murder, Black Dahlia Avenger, in which he suggests that his father Dr. George Hodel was responsible for the brutal murder. Hodel believes the crime to have taken place at Sowden House which was owned by his father at the time of the murder. 

The enduring appeal -- if you can call it that -- of the Black Dahlia case rests in the American obsession with the lurid. (See also: Jon Benet Ramsey.) While the case remains unsolved, the legacy of the murder lingers in popular culture: in television, in film and online.

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Lorraine Rita Warren (born January 31, 1927) is a Roman Catholic paranormal investigator, who along with her husband Ed Warren, is associated with prominent cases of haunting. Lorraine professes to be clairvoyant and a light trance medium and worked closely with her husband until his death in 2006.

The Warrens were among the very first investigators in the infamous Amityville haunting as well the Enfield poltergeist. It was in the 1970s that Lorraine Warren first achieved her status as a cult icon, as she appeared alongside her husband in their many television and radio appearances. More recently, she has re-entered the zeitgeist through Vera Farmiga's portrayal of her in The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2.

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Mae Nak Phra Khanong meaning "Lady Nak of Phra Khanong", or simply Mae Nak ("Lady Nak") or Nang Nak ("Miss Nak"), is a well-known Thai female ghost. According to local folklore the story is based on events that took place during the reign of King Rama IV.

Like so many of the stories in this series, this one begins with the tragic death of a beautiful young woman. Her name was Nak and she was deeply in love with her husband, Mak. During her pregnancy, Mak is conscripted into military service and sent to war. Nak and her child die during childbirth. Yet when Mak returns home his wife and child are waiting for him. Every neighbor who attempts to warn him that he is living with a ghost dies.

One day, as the ghost of Nak is making nam phrik she drops a lime and extends her arm below the porch to pick it up, causing Mak to realize the true nature of his wife. He runs away in the middle of the night, yet Nak continues to pursue him. Mak hides behind a Naat bush then runs to the Wat Mahabut temple, holy ground where a ghost cannot enter. Furious that her husband has left her, Nak seeks vengeance on the people of Phra Khanong. An exorcist captures her ghost, confines it to a jar, and throws it into the canal. There are competing versions of how it happens, but Nak's spirit is unknowingly released from the jar and freed. Nak is conquered again, this time by the Thai monk Somdej Toh. 

While ghosts are pervasive in virtually every culture, their place in Thai culture is particularly fascinating. Mae Nak exemplifies the ways in which Buddhism, folk religion, and the enduring belief in ghosts intersect in Thai culture. Many of the myths and legends surrounding Mae Nak endure today as she continues to inspire films, operas, and animation. Devotees continue to visit her shrine at Wat Mahabut where they leave offerings of fruit, lotuses, incense sticks and lengths of colored cloth.

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Kuchisake-onna ("Slit-Mouthed Woman") is a vengeful spirit in Japanese urban legends. She was mutilated by her husband, a samurai warrior who slashed her mouth from ear-to-ear when he discovered her infidelities. She returns as a vengeful spirit and stalks children wearing a surgical mask. According to lore, she approaches a potential child victim and asks, "Am I pretty?" If the child answers "no," she kills them with the scissors she always carries. If the child answers "yes," she pulls away her surgical mask and asks, "How about now?" If they answer no, she cuts them in half. If they answer yes, she slits their mouth like hers.

Rumors of her appearance in the streets of Nagasaki in the late 1970s created a panic throughout Japan. According to the contemporary urban legends, police are said to have upped their patrols at the time and teachers were ordered to escort their students home in large groups. Sightings in 2004 and 2007 brought the Slit-Mouthed Woman back into the public consciousness. Like Bloody Mary legends in the West, Kuchisake-onna blends together elements of youth culture, mass hysteria, and the rich tradition of Japanese horror.

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Mary I (February 18, 1516 – November 17, 1558) was the Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death. Her executions of Protestants led to the posthumous sobriquet "Bloody Mary."

As the fourth crowned monarch of the Tudor dynasty, Mary is remembered for her restoration of Roman Catholicism after her half-brother's short-lived Protestant reign. During her five-year reign, she had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake in the Marian persecutions. After her death in 1558, her re-establishment of Roman Catholicism was reversed by her younger half-sister and successor.

While there are plenty of genuinely terrifying aspects to Mary's historical reign, it's her place in American urban legend that led to her inclusion in Women of Horror. Beginning in the 1980s, an odd ritual among American teenagers emerged. They gathered in bathrooms to chant the name "Bloody Mary" thirteen times into a mirror to invoke an angry spirit. Along with Ouija boards and recovered memory syndrome, "Bloody Mary" was an essential element of the Satanic Panic of the late twentieth century.  

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The Island of Lost Dolls is a chinampa, a floating garden deep in the canals of Mexico City. Completely over-run with rotting dolls, it is consistently ranked as one of the creepiest places on Earth. The island once belonged to a man named Julián Santana Barrera. According to legend, he woke one day to find a little girl drowned in the canal. Floating near her body was a doll and Julián hung it from a tree to honor her spirit and protect his home from tragedy. 

One doll wasn't enough. Julián began to hear voices and footsteps in the dark. Driven by fear, he continued to collect dolls, many of them dismembered, and hang them from trees around the island in his increasingly desperate attempts to appease the girl's spirit. In 2011, Julián was found drowned not far from where he claimed to have found the body of the little girl nearly half a century earlier. 

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Bloody Mary of Miami is a folk devil in the shared mythology of Miami street kids. In 1993, the folklorist Lynda Edwards wrote a fascinating article for the Miami New Times entitled Myths Over Miami which recorded the folklore among homeless children in the city of Miami. Among the most powerful of their collective stories were the ones of Bloody Mary, an amalgam of other emerging Bloody Mary legends as well as the mythic La Llorona, a legendary ghost prominent among Mexican immigrant children in the US. 

According to the stories, Bloody Mary is locked in battle with angels who feed on the neon lights of the Miami skyline. She weeps black tears and made a pact with Satan to kill all children. She can be conjured by chanting her name into a mirror. While there is debate as to the veracity of Edwards' story, the many different emergent mythologies involving "Bloody Mary" are a classic example of folkloric polygenesis, the simultaneous emergence of stories sharing similar narrative elements across a wide variety of cultural contexts.

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The Blue Lady of Miami is the counterpoint to Bloody Mary in the mythology of Miami street children as described by the folklorist Lynda Edwards in Myths Over Miami. She has blue skin and lives under the sea. Many of these attributes are similar to those of Yemoja, a Yoruban goddess of the ocean. According to one of the children quoted in Edwards' article, the Blue Lady has a secret name that will stop bullets if called in times of distress:

If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: 'Hold on.'

Not all of the Women of Horror are horrible women. Some of them, like the Blue Lady and Marie Laveau, are protector-figures. They are guardians of good in the midst of evil. In the case of the Blue Lady, the evil she stands in opposition to is the violence of the streets and the loneliness of homeless shelters.

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Anneliese Michel (September 21, 1952 - July 1, 1976) was a German woman who underwent Catholic exorcism rites beginning in 1975, then died a year later. The case attracted worldwide attention because of the Catholic Church's unusual decision to employ the 400-year-old ritual of exorcism, something that had been rarely seen since the 18th Century. 

At the age of sixteen, Anneliese suffered her first seizure and was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. Over the next five years, her condition deteriorated and she began to hear voices. Both Anneliese and her family came to believe that she was possessed by demons and appealed to a local priest for exorcism. After an initial rejection from Catholic hierarchy, two local priests were granted permission from their bishop in 1975 and performed the ritual of exorcism repeatedly over the course of ten months. The exorcism was incredibly (and disturbingly) well-documented. Postmortem investigation determined that she was malnourished and dehydrated; her parents and the priests responsible were charged with negligent homicide. 

Exorcism stories are some of my favorite types of horror stories. As a teenager, Malachi Martin's account of "real life" cases of exorcism in Hostage to the Devil terrified me. As a graduate student in Christian ethics, M. Scott Pecks's People of the Lie made me more queasy than freaked. Anneliese's story inspired two films: The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Requiem. While drawing from the same source material, the films are widely different in tone and perspective. The differences exemplify the many complexities of exorcism narratives.

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Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (August 7, 1560 – August 21, 1614) was a serial killer from the Báthory family of nobility in the Kingdom of Hungary. She has been described as the most prolific female murderer to have ever lived, though the precise number of her victims is debated. Báthory and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of young women between 1585 and 1609. The highest number of victims cited during Báthory's trial was 650. Despite the evidence against Elizabeth, her family's influence kept her from facing trial. She was imprisoned in December 1609 within Csetje Castle, Upper Hungary (now in Slovakia), and held in solitary confinement in a room whose windows were walled up where she remained imprisoned until her death five years later.

The details of Báthory's crimes inspired centuries of folklore, the most common element of which was that the Countess bathed in the blood of her victims to preserve her youth and beauty. As a result, Elizabeth Báthory has emerged as something of a pop cultural counterpoint to Count Dracula. 

Nyx is the Greek goddess of the night. She stood at the beginning of creation and mothered the deities Hypnos (God of Sleep) and Thanatos, (God of Death). In Hesiod's Theogony, she is said to be born of Chaos, alongside Gaia and Eros. She appears in very little surviving mythology but is described as beautiful and so powerful she strikes fear in the heart of Zeus.

As I mention in my artist statement, Women of Horror is an experimentation in the horror genre. Consequently, the series jumps back and forth between the historic, folkloric, and mythological. I created this portrait at a halfway point in the series. Inspired by Greek funerary art, I decided to take a step back into classical antiquity while also drawing on the sumptuous Pre-Raphaelite depictions of Greek mythos. 

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The White Lady of Branch Brook Park (I) is  a "white lady" ghost said to haunt Branch Brook Park in Newark, New Jersey.  Like the emergent "Bloody Mary" legends of the 1980s and 90s, white ladies are a striking example of polygenesis. All over the world there are stories of "White ladies" -- ghostly apparitions of women dressed in white, haunting locations where they tragically died. 

There are two versions of the White Lady of Branch Brook Park's death. In this version, she is said to have died in a car accident on her way to her wedding. White lady ghosts exemplify the cross-cultural obsession with feminine purity. It's no coincidence that white ladies seem to die on their way to life events that often involve the loss of their virginity, like a high school prom or a wedding. (See also: Cabin in the Woods; Legend tripping.)

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The White Lady of Branch Brook Park (II) is  a "white lady" ghost said to haunt Branch Brook Park in Newark, New Jersey.  Like the emergent "Bloody Mary" legends of the 1980s and 90s, white ladies are a striking example of polygenesis. All over the world there are stories of "White ladies" -- ghostly apparitions of women dressed in white, haunting locations where they tragically died. 

There are two versions of the White Lady of Branch Brook Park's death. In this version, she is said to have died in a car accident on her way to her high school prom. White lady ghosts exemplify the cross-cultural obsession with feminine purity. It's no coincidence that white ladies seem to die on their way to life events that often involve the loss of their virginity, like a high school prom or a wedding. (See also: Cabin in the Woods; Legend tripping.)

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The Headless Nun is a ghost story associated with French Fort Cove in Nordin, now the City of Miramichi, New Brunswick.

According to the tale that dates back to the mid 1700s, the Headless Nun was an 18th-century resident of the area named Sister Marie Inconnue who was beheaded. Details of the story vary: in one version, a "mad trapper" cut off her head and ran into the woods with it. In another, two sailors cut off her head after she refused to divulge the location of a treasure. The story holds that Sister Marie's head was never found, resulting in her spirit forever roaming the area in search of it. 

This story contains a little bit of everything that I love in a good ghost story: a haunted forest, a lost head, and a terrifying undead nun. 

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Catherine Monvoisin, or Montvoisin, née Deshayes, known as "La Voisin" (c. 1640 – February 22, 1680), was a French fortune teller, poisoner, and an alleged sorceress, one of the central figures in the affaire des poisons, during the reign of Louis XIV. Her purported cult (Affair of the Poisons) was suspected to have killed anywhere between 1000-2500 people in Black Masses.

In 1676, the French aristocrat Madame de Brinvilles was convicted of three murders. She was alleged to have conspired with her lover in the poisoning deaths of her father and two brothers in order to secure an inheritance. She fled France after the accusations but was quickly captured, tortured, convicted, and publicly executed.

The sensational trial created an enormous moral panic over the threat of poisoning. (See also: trick or treating.) Occultists, palm readers, herbalists and fortune-tellers across Paris were accused of conspiring to murder thousands in ritual Satanic sacrifices. Many confessed under torture. The midwife Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin, or La Voisin, not only confessed but implicated some of the most important members in the court of Louis XIV, including the Duke of Luxembourg and Louis's mistress Athenais de Montespan. It was a scandal made to fit the reign of the Sun King and inspired writers of mystery and suspense like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Alexandre Dumas.

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Gesche Margarethe Gottfried, born Gesche Margarethe Timm (March 6, 1785 – April 21, 1831), was a serial killer who murdered 15 people by arsenic poisoning in Bremen and Hanover, Germany, between 1813 and 1827. She was the last person to be publicly executed in the city of Bremen. Prior to the discovery of her crimes, she was dubbed the "Angel of Bremen" for her dedicated care of her dying patients.

Gottfried was born into a poor family and had a twin brother, Johann Timm Junior. According to stories that circulated at the time of her trial, her parents displayed an intense preference for her brother when they were children. While the reasons for her crimes are widely debated, a common theory is that she suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy.  Gottfried's deathmask was made to study the facial patterns of criminal women. This is within the now obsolete field of phrenology.

It could be my criminal headshape talking, but I've long been fascinated with stories like this one. And it seems like lots of other folks are, too. Stories about Munchausen syndrome by proxy are solid gold click bait.

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Sarah Good (July 21, 1653 - July 19, 1692) was one of the first three women to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials. At the time of the accusations, Good was homeless and a social outcast in the village of Salem. She often went door-to-door begging for help and was accused of muttering curses under her breath when she was denied assistance. Stories circulated in Salem that she cast spells over and killed the livestock of villagers who refused to help her. She was accused of witchcraft on March 6, 1692 when Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Parris began to suffer extreme fits, in which their bodies appeared to convulse. When asked, "Who torments you?" the girls replied: "Tituba, Sarah Osborne, and Sarah Good."  

Thus began a truly terrifying chapter in the history of the United States. And while the Puritans are undeniably terrifying, what has always fascinated me about Salem is the power held by girls like Abigail Williams and Betty Parris. The drawings of Good's accusers included in this artwork are inspired by Jean-Martin Charcot's photographic documentation of "hysteria." Moral panics and mass hysteria are recurring themes throughout this body of work.

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