Vampire Books Online / The Vampire Pipe - Mountain Home maverick 1907

This little story is set down in these columns to prove that truth is, after all, more strange than fiction, and to point the moral that he who will may read more of truth, beauty, romance, adventure, or even horror, in the lives of those who live about him than in all the books of the bookish age.

This story is a story of horror. It transcends in its weird awfulness the imaginings of Poe, the terrible directness of Kipling's Bimi, the brutal essays of the Russian master, Maxim Gorky. It combines in the swift 10 minutes of its enactment the motif in the "Frankenstein Monster" of Mrs. Percy B. Shelley, and the weird folk talk of the vampire an imaginary being that sucks the blood of the living.

Walter D. Hunter, 22 years old, a young Pittsburg graduate of a school of mechanical engineering, went to Chicago to seek his fortune. He was a mechanical genius like the character of fiction who constructed the Frankenstein monster. Young Hunter invented an improved suction device for ice-making machinery. He took it to Armour & Co., and they installed it.

One portion of the machine terminated in an eight-inch vacuum pipe on the roof of the ice-making plant. This pipe had a suction pressure of 780 pounds to the square inch. It was used to draw large quantities of water a great distance to the ammonia machines that converted the fluid into ice cakes.

A few days ago the pipe became clogged. Young Hunter went to the roof to fix it. He built the machine. He, more than anyone else, knew of its power, its weaknesses. Alone on the roof, the young inventor strolled carelessly near the mouth of the mechanical monster. The suction drew him into the machine. His right leg was drawn through the eight-inch vent.

The vampire pipe swiftly sucked the red blood from the body of its creator.

A searching party of four men found the victim lying prone upon the roof. The face was white as driven snow—the body frozen. A coroner's autopsy showed the heart to be shriveled, the lungs collapsed like a pricked toy balloon, not a corpuscle of blood in the upper organs a dozen holes in the leg where the blood had been drawn from the bursting arteries. The body was shrunken to half its normal size and weight.

When the four men stumbled across the lifeless form they sought to carry it from the roof. Their combined strength was insufficient to tear the victim from the grasp of the vampire pipe.

So they smashed the machine and it gave up its victim.

There is no sweetness to this tale. Yet there is much of awe much that may be learned from it. What were the thoughts of that young man alone on the roof in the death grasp of the implement that he had devised?

What must have been his feeling when he suddenly realized that he had devoted a life study, ingenuity, patience and labor to the building up of a device for the encompassment of his own destruction? The inventor died, but the machine will still live on.

Then, and then only, did he comprehend the infinitesimal value, in this day and age, of a human life.

—Ex.