The September-October issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER contains an article about the "Vegetable Man of West Virginia." This alleged cryptid barely qualifies as a legend, having been encountered by only one person, with the incident publicized by a notorious UFO hoaxer. Still, the peculiar tale has points of interest, even though (like most "true" alien encounter stories I've come across) it reads like an attempt at science fiction by somebody who doesn't know much about science fiction. In 1968, a man named Jennings Frederick, while hunting in the West Virginia woods, claimed he was accosted by a humanoid creature about seven feet tall, with yellow eyes, pointed nose and ears, and arms "no bigger around than a quarter." It communicated, perhaps telepathically, a need for medical assistance. It then grabbed him with its long, thin fingers, pierced his skin with their "needle-like tips," and used their "suction cups" to draw his blood. Its eyes paralyzed him with a hypnotic effect. After possibly no more than a minute, the being disappeared into the surrounding woods, and Frederick heard a "humming and whistling sound" he suspected to be a spacecraft taking off.
In the drawing shown with the article, the creature looks like a grotesquely thin humanoid with wood-textured skin, a weed-like tuft on top of its head, and ears and nose like gnarled carrots.
Of course, blood-draining plants go back at least as far as H. G. Wells's classic 1894 story "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid." Numerous other authors have imitated that premise. It's not totally implausible, given the existence of carnivorous flowering plants such as Venus flytraps. Most memorably, the musical LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS presents the giant, sapient, talking (and singing) plant Audrey II, which turns out to have an extraterrestrial origin.
If we stop and think about the premise, however, bloodthirsty plants shouldn't be terribly frightening. Unlike the Vegetable Man of West Virginia, Audrey II, Wells's orchid, and other similar flowers described by SF writers are rooted in place. If you have the presence of mind not to get too close to them, they can't hurt you. They would have to either catch victims off guard, maybe by entangling them in vines, or lure them with hypnotic perfumes.
There's another flaw in the notion of hypothetical bloodthirsty vegetation, such as the West Virginia cryptid, invading from a different planet: How could the body fluids of Earth animals nourish them? Our biochemistry would surely be incompatible with theirs. Granted, though, SF writers regularly ignore this inconvenient problem. Wells himself wrote about Martians that live on the blood of Earth-human victims.
"Eripmav," a humorous story by vintage science-fiction author Damon Knight, avoids the issue by making predators and prey inhabitants of the same extraterrestrial world. On this planet, ambulatory, intelligent plants comprise the dominant species. Meat, on the other hand, grows on trees. The vegetable vampire in this story is destroyed by driving a steak (sic) through its heart.
Margaret L. Carter
Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.
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