When does outright fiction become folklore? Is there even a difference? Is a hoax always just a hoax — a prank, a prank — and lies just lies? Can they transcend, and what happens if they do?

Suppose we dumped them all into a blender, folklore, pranks and lies, and let it spin. What would we get?

In Mineral Point, WI, it’s a vampire that emerges.

The Story Begins

It’s March 30, 1981, just two days out from All Fools’ Day. A police officer on his usual patrol passes by the cemetery gates and, shining his light in, spots something. At first, the officer suspects a prankster or someone mentally ill, as they’re dressed like Dracula. But as he enters the cemetery, he fears that what’s caught in his beam isn’t quite a person at all.

The thing’s tall, over six feet, and uglier than anything the officer’s ever seen. It runs as the officer approaches, and it’s fast. The officer gives chase but has difficulty keeping up, himself a tall, athletic man. The thing navigates the dark cemetery with ease, and the officer can only watch as the creature clears the cemetery fence in a single leap, escaping into the rural Wisconsin countryside.

Over the next few days, people all over town will report seeing what has been dubbed a vampire. It leers from dark alleys, jumping out to scare passersby. The police write off these reports as nothing more than pranksters poking fun at the officer, reveling in April Fool’s tomfoolery. But the officer from the night before swears his account and the thing he saw are no jokes.

And that’s the story of the Mineral Point Vampire.

If you grew up in Wisconsin in the 80s or 90s, you probably heard a version not too dissimilar from the account above, just as I did at recess in the second grade. It’s a fairly accurate retelling of the supposed actual events.

Truth Is (Not) Stranger Than Fiction

The story was first printed in the newspapers on Thursday, April 2, 1981. Police officer Jon Pepper is the person who encountered the vampire. However, the story doesn’t quote Pepper directly, instead citing Lt. Bill Trott. The Capital Times details the encounter in an article titled “Mineral Point’s ‘Vampire’ Gives Police Dracula-Sized Headache.”

“Pepper walked up to the guy and asked what he was doing. The caped figure, standing about 6 feet 5 inches tall, said nothing and started running. Trott said Pepper chased the would-be vampire for a while but lost him as he jumped over a 4-foot tall barbed wire fence and headed toward a pasture housing several angus bulls.” – The Capital Times, April 2, 1981.

Trott adds it was too early to be an April Fool’s joke but has caught on with the town’s pranksters nonetheless. Over the next few days, Dracula could be sighted at local bars and jumping out from their alleyways to spook people. Trott says while he’s ignoring the pranksters, he is concerned that the original vampire could be someone who’s mentally ill.

“I’ve got enough other things going that I don’t need to go around chasing vampires. But if it is somebody with a problem, I’d like to catch him before he plays out his fantasy,” Trott said.

Trott continued that he’ll have extra officers stationed at the cemetery to keep a lookout.

The Wisconsin State Journal also runs an article on the vampire, in which we learn that Pepper will not be part of the additional patrol.

“I even offered to pay Jon (Pepper) overtime to stake the place out for his vampire, but he wouldn’t bite,” Trott told the Journal.

The Wisconsin State Journal article also lacks quotes from Pepper.

However, a week later, The Boscobel Dial runs a brief article where there’s finally an account of what happened in Pepper’s own words:

“I got within 15 feet and called out to him but he didn’t answer, just stood there,” Pepper said. “I’ve never seen anyone that tall before in Mineral Point. I couldn’t match his stride and I’m 6-foot-two. It’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Pepper said.

And that’s it. Eventually, the pranksters quit dressing as Dracula, and the original vampire was never caught. Jon Pepper and Lt. Bill Trott’s names only appear in the papers on subsequent retellings of the story over the years. Mineral Point stayed monster-free for decades.

The Vampire Returns

While Pepper and Trott never apprehend their capped crook — or creature — it’s not the last of the vampire. Bidding his time for 23 years, he struck again in 2004, lurking from the tree tops.

It’s March again when the police are called to investigate a dark-clad, pale individual sitting in a tree outside an apartment complex, taunting the tenants, as the website Wisconsinology details:

“When the police arrived the individual fled. An officer followed but quickly lost sight of the fast moving individual. There were tracks in the snow. The police followed the footprints to a concrete wall – where they ended.” – Wisconsinology.com.

Flash forward four years and the vampire returns yet again. This time, in his most “frightening” encounter, scaring a couple of lakeside lovers.

It begins around 10 p.m., July 11, 2008, when Brandon Heinz and Jamie Marker hear strange scratching noises coming from beneath the pier the two were fishing from, according to Lon Strickler’s Phantoms and Monsters blog:

“The couple stated that there was scratching under the wooden surface, and that they could hear splashing and something climbing up beneath them. One of the witnesses, Brandon Heinz, stood and began to stomp on the jetty thinking it was an animal and the the [sic] noise would scare it away. He reported that his stomping only drew the creature closer to them.

He shined his flashlight between the boards of the jetty to see the caped figure climbing up beneath them. He froze in horror as his girlfriend, Jamie Marker, fled the scene. When the creature approached, Heinz threw the flashlight at it and fled behind Marker to their parked car where she sat waiting for him with the doors locked. Heinz entered the car and started the motor, he could see the caped figure speeding towards them as he jammed the car in gear. The couple fled to the Mineral Point Police station to file their report.” – Phantomsandmonsters.com.

When the police arrived, they found nothing but the lover’s fishing supplies. It would seem the vampire made off with the flashlight.

So, what can be made of these two accounts? They come years after Pepper’s, and neither behaves like the 1981 vampire outside the most superficial ways. They can all jump great heights, and each enjoys a good chase. However, Pepper’s vampire wanted nothing to do with people and ran from him on sight, whereas these two later vampires are reversed, taunting and chasing after folks.

Could the Mineral Point creature have evolved? Are all three fiends entirely different entities?

Or it could be something else altogether.

Truth Is (Still Not) Stranger Than Fiction

The answer is the 2004 and 2008 sightings are total fabrications, hoaxes if you want to be generous — but grade-A bullshit, nonetheless. Despite their popularity and the multitude of websites, podcasts, individuals and more that spread the two accounts as fact, there is no truth to them at all.

In my investigation into these two accounts, I contacted Bob Weier, the police chief of the Mineral Point Police Department, and made a records request on the two sightings. As both accounts reportedly involved the police, there should be records on them — but there are none.

“We have no records of the three events you are looking for,” Weier said. “I started here in 1991, I don’t recall the two reports attached or any reports of possible vampire sightings during my employment here. We have assisted the Iowa County Sheriff’s department with numerous calls at Ludden Lake but none involving a pale faced suspect in a cape. We looked through our electronic records from March and July 2008 and found nothing remotely close to the attached reported calls.”

Shan Thomas, Curator of the Mineral Point Library Archives, corroborates Weier’s memory, or lack thereof, of the 2000s sightings.

“I can not find the source of your attachments. … One wonders why a young couple were fishing at 10 o’clock at night, but that is for another story,” said Thomas. “There is no ‘folklore’ around a vampire. That’s a bit much for Mineral Point.”

So, the question becomes, what is the origination point for these stories? It’s not entirely clear.

The 2000s reports seem to come from the now-defunct Heckler Spray website. Both reports are packaged in the website’s April 18, 2011, column “Awesome or Off-Putting: The Mineral Point Vampire”.

The column quotes a user cited only as “Derek” from the no-longer-existent Wisconsin Death Trip Discussions Facebook page. Derek’s posts are mainly in line with the above accounts, except that he says both incidents took place in 2008. Otherwise, the only difference is the creative liberties taken by every subsequent retelling of the two stories after their “author” has copied and pasted. This has resulted in, for example, the mix-up in dates.

As far as I can tell, the Heckler Spray column popularized both vampire accounts. But of course, there’s a wrinkle. Derek says the pier report is “taken off the news wire reporting out of Madison.” Another source I found from the late aughts cites the same Phantoms and Monsters blog as quoted above but says the blog originally cited an outlet called “The Daily Page.” Today, the Phantoms and Monsters blog cites this 2013 blog post by author Lyn Gibson.

The Daily Page was an actual website — the online arm of the Madison-based alternative newspaper The Isthmus before it rebranded as simply Isthmus.com.

Is it possible the pier sighting originated with The Daily Page? Weier says there are no records of the sighting, but it could have been an April Fools or other facetiously published article taken at face value by Derek. The Onion was founded in Madison, after all.

However, it’s not just these two accounts that need to be questioned.

The 1981 report may also be merely a prank. Authors and researchers Chad Lewis and Terry Fisk investigated the 1981 sighting for their book “The Wisconsin Road Guide to Haunted Locations,” reporting that many people in Mineral Point assumed Pepper was making the whole thing up. The investigators were told that Pepper and a friend enjoyed dressing up as gorillas and running about town.

And if not Pepper himself, the likelihood that he was the victim of an early April Fool’s Day prank is more likely than there having been an actual creature, right?

According to a 2022 article in The Dodgeville Chronicle, that’s precisely the case. Reportedly, one Rueben Riley confessed to being the vampire. Speaking in anonymity, a family friend revealed the truth following Riley’s death in 2017.

So, that’s that. We’ve put a lid on this vampire nonsense and can call it quits. As Thomas said, maybe vampires are a bit too much for Mineral Point.

Or maybe that statement has more truth to it than one might realize.

Gains Over Ghouls

Find Madison, WI, on a map, then draw a circle encompassing every town, village and city within an hour to an hour and a half’s drive from it. You will undoubtedly discover that most of these places are home to chili cookoffs, pottery festivals and enough concerts in the park to make a person deaf. These are the brainchildren of Chambers of Commerce and Tourism Commissions, with but one goal in mind — to snag the sweet day-tripping dollars of every bored Madisonian family on the weekend.

During the earliest parts of my career in journalism, I covered these events and attended the board meetings that birthed them into existence. It’s why I cocked an eyebrow when communicating with sources from Mineral Point.

In our correspondences, they seemed to go out of their way not to acknowledge the vampire has become part of Mineral Point’s folklore. For example, despite Thomas’ assertion there is “no folklore around a vampire,” the numerous above sources I’ve cited retelling these tales beg to differ.

As a reminder, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of folklore is:

1. Traditional customs, tales, sayings, dances, or art forms preserved among a people.
2. A branch of knowledge that deals with folklore.
3. An often unsupported notion, story, or saying that is widely circulated.

While the first definition may apply if you tilt-your-head-and-squint, the third definition, inarguably, applies to the proliferation of Mineral Point vampire stories. From my own hearing of the original 1981 encounter as a schoolboy to every instance of the digital retellings above, the vampire has become a part of Mineral Point’s lore whether the citizens like it or not.

And there’s a contingent of the city that doesn’t. Just as I cocked an eyebrow at the insistence that there is no vampiric folklore, instead choosing to use the word rumor, I was equally bemused when I was pointed towards accepted folklore, namely the Walker House and the legends of Tommyknockers.

The Walker House is Mineral Point’s famed haunted restaurant and inn. Though current proprietors Dan and Kathy Vaillancourt downplay Walker House’s haunted history, its reputation persists. Walker House is first on Food Networks’ list of the most haunted restaurants in every state — and I imagine no one balks at the potential estimated 10-20% more revenue the Walker House pulls in thanks to said haunted reputation.

Tommyknockers, too, help attract the day-trip dollar. Pendarvis is a collection of several 19th-century cabins built by Cornish immigrants to Mineral Point for lead and zinc mining. Tommyknockers were the imp-like, mine-dwelling entities that played tricks on miners. Pendarvis has embraced the Tommyknocker folklore, as have other Mineral Point festivals and events.

It could be a case of the vampire not being profitable or being too shameful for Mineral Point to want to capitalize on. A prankster followed by tavern-goers dressed as Dracula is a hard sell to the white-collar day-trippers these events aim to attract.

But other places in the state have successfully capitalized on their goofball heritage — which I love them for — so why not Mineral Point? It’s estimated that over $300 million in revenue is generated annually by haunted attractions and festivities, and the industry is only growing. With a vampire in their backyard, why doesn’t Mineral Point claim a slice of the haunted pie?

I would also be remiss to not note the similarities the vampire shares with Spring-Heeled Jack and similar leaping phantoms found in the annals of strange phenomena. Additionally, the area is in the vicinity of the famous Ridgeway Ghost, which itself shares some similarities with the vampire. Ask me, and that’s all the more fodder for a Halloween-themed event in Mineral Point.

Is it that the vampire is too real, too strange to turn into an event — its waters too murky to stake a claim on? The creature or person was never caught, nor was it ever definitively proven to be a hoax. And whatever Pepper saw spooked him enough to turn down overtime pay to patrol the cemetery again.

While the 2000s sightings are undeniably baseless — maybe with everything laid out here in mind, we need to reexamine that 1981 sighting.

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

Remember how Pepper only ever spoke once about the encounter to a newspaper? It’s an interesting detail. As a journalist, you want to get as close to the origination of a story as possible. In this case, there’s a single eyewitness. He’s a must-get interviewee. Instead, Lt. Bill Trott speaks for him in every known instance over the years but one. Why?

In 2011, Chad Lewis appeared on Coast to Coast AM and claimed the sighting and subsequent attention it got was genuinely traumatic for Pepper.

“The story always was that the police officer was so distraught over the attention that he quit the police force, moved away and never talked about the case again. Well in fact, he just moved over a couple counties and he’s with the sheriff’s department. And over the last five, ten years I’ve tried to reach him a couple dozen times, and he’s never responded. As though he really wants to put this behind him,”  Lewis said..

Assuming Lewis isn’t editorializing too much, it doesn’t sound like Pepper pulled a prank. Eventually, pranksters want to revel in the mischief and attention they’ve brought. If Pepper were trying to pull something, you’d imagine he’d either have admitted to it or told someone by now. Instead, he moved away and, apparently, still refuses to speak about it. This explains why there are so few newspaper reports with quotes from Pepper.

But suppose it was someone else pulling a prank on Pepper, and they whipped up a convincingly frightening enough costume to scare the officer into silence. The anonymous source speaking to the Dodgeville Chronicle claims a man named Rueben Riley is that person.

I believe I’ve found the Rueben Riley supposedly responsible for the prank. This is his obituary. He has ties to Mineral Point and Iowa County and died in 2017 of cancer, just as the anonymous source claims. But if this is the right Riley, he was a handsome man going by the photo accompanying his obituary. And if my math is correct, he would have been around 19 years old when Pepper saw the vampire. Unless a heavy makeup and effect job was done on him, he’s not the hideous, 6’5 monster that Pepper described as the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to him.

If I were Mr. Riley’s family, I might take offense at whomever the anonymous source is claiming him to be the monster. I wouldn’t want someone calling my deceased relative vampirically hideous, even if they genuinely were so. It’s just poor manners.

Regardless, both the anonymous source and I are merely conjecturing. Neither of us can prove Riley was or wasn’t what Pepper saw in 1981, and unfortunately, Riley cannot speak for himself on the matter.

Adding to the overall mystery is the lack of police records from 1981 concerning the sighting. I asked Weier for the 1981 records, and he said they didn’t have them — or many from 1981.

“The police department has very limited records from 1981 as it was prior to electronic storage. The only reference I found on this was newspaper articles. I’m guessing there was a report on it at the time, but I have never seen it,” Weier said.

Likewise, when Lewis was investigating the vampire, he also discovered the record missing but was given a different explanation for it.

“They told us it was all a hoax, that the story never occurred. Well luckily for us we had the newspaper articles that showed the police officer talking to the media, so we knew it happened. So, then we got a supervisor who came up and said, ‘Well, yes, it did happen, but all the records were destroyed in a fire,” Lewis said.

Missing police records, a man too handsome to be a monster, and the only witness too shocked to speak about what happened? Odd.

The End?

So, at the end of it all, what do we have? What’s come out of the blender? What even got put into it?

Mystery is marked by the nonlinear, and the Mineral Point Vampire repeatedly loops back in on itself. Supposedly sightings are still ongoing. Lewis says a couple of times in his interview on Coast to Coast that he still gets reports of people seeing something. Yet others in town claim it’s all a hoax and want nothing to do with it.

Did a prank or a monster get put in our metaphorical blender? Can we call what’s come out folklore? Certainly, some would not; I contend otherwise.

The first sighting happened — that’s a fact regardless of what Pepper saw or didn’t see; his claim of something anomalous started something. The 2000s sightings didn’t, and I’m comfortable stating that as fact. And yet, all exist as the truth online. So maybe what we have to fall back on here is just the mystery.

The mystery of just what happened on March 30, 1981. The mystery of missing police files. The mystery of why the story persists at all.

Stories are powerful things. While a vampire running about a small, rural Wisconsin city sounds silly, it doesn’t deter belief. Call it gullibility. God knows plenty of people and true believers in the paranormal are cursed with it, but there’s something tangible enough about this tale to keep it alive and evolving. Like all good stories, there’s a hint of truth in it somewhere.

Enough truth that I hope the good people of Mineral Point will seize it. There are charlatans out for internet clout and an easy buck repeating lies about the city’s history. You don’t have to do what Rhinelander, WI, has done with the Hodag and make it the city’s entire identity, but someone from Mineral Point should at least take control of the narrative. Do it justice. The story of the vampire is alive — stake it.

For example, each March hold an event for the vampire and use the funds to clean up and restore the cemetery it was seen in. Since it fled into the countryside, do a vampire hike and use it as an opportunity to teach about the local environment. Combine the city’s mining history with the vampire, as old mines have bats and Wisconsin’s bats need help.

There are countless ways Mineral Point could own its history despite the actual truth of the matter; the legend has evolved beyond that now, anyway. Don’t let a good story go to waste, Mineral Point.

But I don’t do all this research to pitch Chambers of Commerce ideas (call me). I’m trying to get to the bottom of something, do my part to blow some dust off this esoteric tome of folklore and the paranormal, despite knowing there are no real answers. At least maybe we can dig up a little bit of truth behind it.

So, for my own leanings, I believe Jon Pepper saw something that night. I don’t think he hoaxed it, nor do I think it was the late Rueben Riley.

I guess I find it more fun to think the world is full of incredible possibilities and unexplained happenings happen from time to time.

Call me gullible.