Albert Fish a.k.a. James W. Pell, Robert Hayden, Thomas A. Sprague & Frank Howard / Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, the Moon Maniac, The BoogeyMan & Ogre of Murder Lodge

Fish supplied the following biographical information in captivity: "I was born May 19, 1870, in Washington, D.C. We lived on B Street, N.E., between Second and Third. My father was Captain Randall Fish, 32nd-degree Mason, and he is buried in the Grand Lodge grounds of the Congressional Cemetery. He was a Potomac River boat captain, running from D.C. to Marshall Hall, Virginia [sic]. My father dropped dead on October 15, 1875, in the old Pennsylvania Station where President Garfield was shot, and I was placed in St. John's Orphanage in Washington. I was there till I was nearly nine, and that's where I got started wrong. We were unmercifully whipped. I saw boys doing many things they should not have done. I sang in the choir from 1880 to 1884, soprano, at St. John's. I came to New York. I was a good painter, interiors or anything. I got an apartment and brought my mother up from Washington. We lived at 76 West 101st Street, and that's where I met my wife. After our six children were born, she left me. She took all the furniture and didn't even leave a mattress for the children to sleep on. I'm still worried about my children, you'd think they'd come to visit their old dad in jail, but they haven't."

Albert Howard Fish was born in Washington, D.C. in 1870. He came from a highly respected family. But an investigation of his pedigree showed that in his branch of the family there was considerable mental abnormality. In two generations seven people, apart from Fish himself, suffered from psychoses or were severely psychopathic personalities. One paternal uncle suffered from a “religious psychosis” and died in a state hospital. One was in Maine and the other was in California. A younger brother was feeble-minded and died of hydrocephalus. His mother was held to be “very queer” and was said to have heard things on the street and to have seen things. (One juror said after the trial: “That doesn’t mean anything. I have an aunt who does that too.”) A paternal aunt was considered “completely crazy.” A brother suffered from chronic alcoholism. A sister had “some sort of mental affliction.”

He had been given the name Hamilton after a distant ancestor, Hamilton Fish, who was Secretary of State during President Grant’s two terms of office and was often referred to as “the pillar of the administration.” This ancestor had received the name from his father, who was an intimate friend and executor of Alexander Hamilton.

​​’’My mother was placed in the U.S. Treasury in 1876. She remained there to 1885.’’

‘’I had a brother Walter H. Fish who served 5 yrs in the U.S. Navy. He had been all over the world. The tales he told on his visits home - of savages - cannibals - torture - were to me marvelous. At that time what he said impressed me greatly.’’ And that a friend, Captain John Davis, also recounted similar tales.

Fish was placed in St. John's Orphanage in Washington until he was 9 years old, during his stay in the Orphanage he, and the other kids, were whipped and Fish "saw boys doing many things that should not have done".

By 1880, Fish's mother had a government job and was able to remove Fish from the orphanage. In 1882, at age 12, he began a relationship with a telegraph boy. The youth introduced Fish to such practices as urolagnia (drinking urine) and coprophagia (eating feces). Fish began visiting public baths where he could watch other boys undress and spent a great portion of his weekends on these visits.

When he graduated at the age of 15 he changed his name to Albert Fish. In Washington DC, Fish became a prostitute to earn money. He also traveled to Europe, Brussels where his sexual escapades continue. He practiced oral perversions of the rectum of both men and women. He was extremely interested in urine.

When Fish returned to the States. He moved to New York City. When he was 24, he became a traveling house painter.

In 1898, Fish met and married a woman named Anna, nine years his junior. The couple would have six children: Albert, Anna, Gertrude, Eugene, John, and Henry. In January 1917, Fish’s wife eventually tired of his bizarre behavior and eloped with their lodger, a handyman named John Straube. Within weeks she was back, complaining that Straube beat her and begging forgiveness. Fish, at the urging of his older children, gave her a second chance. But just days after returning to the bosom of her family, Mrs. Fish smuggled her lover Straube into the house, hiding him in the basement. When Fish found out, he again ejected the pair. They later returned while he was away and cleared out all of the family’s furniture.

By all accounts Fish was a devoted and loving parent who worked hard to provide for his large family. However, the desertion by his wife seemed to trigger an escalation of his madness. His religious mania, in particular, intensified. On one occasion he spent an entire night lying on the floor wrapped in a carpet. Asked why he was doing it, Fish explained that he had been instructed to do so by John the Apostle. Another time, he climbed a hill and stood shouting at the moon over and over again, “I am Christ! I am Christ!”

While Fish was never thought to have physically attacked or abused his children, he did encourage them and their friends to paddle his buttocks with the same nail-studded paddle he used to abuse himself.

Some of the sadomasochistic practices that Fish used on himself and his victims:

Taking bits of cotton that were saturated with alcohol and stuffing them in his or the children's rectum upon which he would set them aflame.

Sticking needles into his body in the area of the rectum and scrotum. In the beginning he would take them out but after a while he was unable to take them out and they stayed there. (see x-ray)

He stuck pins under his fingernails in front of the children.

“Pop never lifted a hand to any of us. He even scolded my sister Anna when she punished her youngsters. It doesn’t seem possible that he could have murdered the little Budd girl, because he was always so kind to us while my mother, when they were still living together, was always looking out for herself. When they separated, twenty years ago, it was Pop who held the family together.” - Gertrude DeMarco, Fish’s Daughter

Mary Nicholas, Fish's 17-year-old stepdaughter described how Fish taught her and her brothers and sisters several games involving overtones of masochism and child molestation.

‘’From New York to Montana, and I have had children in every state. I’ve always managed to cover it up.’’

He felt that he was ordered by God to castrate little boys. “I had sort of an idea through Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice. It always seemed to me that I had to offer a child for sacrifice, to purge myself of iniquities, sins, and abominations in the sight of God. Such a Sodom and Gomorrah!”

Albert Fish made New York City his location of choice. Living in boarder-houses or with one of his daughters. At one point he was the superintendent of several apartment buildings. Living and working with one of his sons who was his assistant.

He worked for many different institutions. He worked in YMCA’s, in homes for tuberculosis. In all these places he made his headquarters in the basement or cellar. Often his employment was suddenly terminated because things about these children came out.

‘’In all the YMCA’s they have large swimming pools. If a man or boy wants to use this pool he must take all of his clothes off and go bare naked. You know what the girls do to see the show? They dress up in their brother's clothes. Put on a cap and then go to the Y. Quite often a boy would come out of the water and stand so close to a girl dressed in boy’s clothes she can and does touch his naked body.’’

He chose people who were either mentally handicapped or African-American as his victims, explaining that he assumed these people would not be missed when killed. Fish would later claim to have occasionally paid boys to procure other children for him.

"In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deckhand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong, China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1 to 3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go into any shop and ask for steak—chops—or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girl behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as a veal cutlet brought the highest price.

"John stayed there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys one 7 one 11. Took them to his home, stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them—tortured them—to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 year old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was Cooked and eaten except the head—bones and guts. He was Roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried and stewed. The little boy was next, and went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E 100 St. near—right side. He told me so often how good Human flesh was. I made up my mind to taste it.''

​​The elder Albert Budd was a porter for the United States Equitable Life Assurance Society.

Around 80 bone fragments were found in and around the infamous ''Wisteria Cottage'' Westchester house.

During the summer of the Budd murder, Fish was arrested three times on charges of larceny. Also having embezzled money while working in a store. But each sentence was suspended.

In 1930, Fish was arrested at least eight times with charges of vagrancy, larceny, violation of parole and sending indecent ligature through the mail. He was also picked up on numerous occasions throughout New York City and neighboring areas for having imparted the morals of minors. But no charges were ever made.

At the age of 55 he started to get hallucinations and delusions. Visions of Christ and his angels and god sending him "orders'' weren't uncommon. Castrating and tormenting little boys was one of His "orders'' Fish said. Ritualistic abuse was also common and citing Biblical texts mixed with his own words was an endless activity.

Albert Fish was a compulsive letter writer searching classified ads with hopes of finding a companion who shared his sadomasochistic fantasies.

In these letters, Fish often presented himself as a successful Hollywood producer, looking for a place to board his teenage son. He usually presented the boy as well built but mentally deficient and in need of constant discipline. He’d then go on to describe exactly how, and how often, he expected the boy to be beaten. If the landlady was agreeable (and many were, given the large sums on offer), Fish would follow up with another and then another letter, becoming ever more graphic and depraved. Eventually, he’d introduce his other obsessions into the equation suggesting that he would like to drink the woman’s urine and eat her feces.

‘’We know how to find each other out and get together. And have fun. We use the matrimonial agencies and the Wanted. And there are hundreds of other ways. We have our own language. A sort of code.’’

On an obscene letter charge, Fish was send to New York City Bellevue Hospital for his first ever psychiatric examination on December 15, 1930. He was examined by eleven psychiatrists. Found to be sane. He was released three weeks later on six months probation.

(Sources: Albert Fish In His Own Words by author John Borowski, Confessions Of A Cannibal: The Shocking True Story Of Depraved Child Killer Albert Fish by author Robert Keller, https://www.jitselemmens.com/redraveninn/serialfish.htm, Albert Fish: In Sin He Found Salvation (2007)

en.wikipedia.org