William Henry Harrison: President or Vampire?

When I was seven years old I memorized all of the Presidents of the United States from a dinner mat that was set in front of me at a hotel restaurant in Washington D.C. I was fascinated by the timeline and even memorized the years that each President served. There was George Washington with his powdered periwig, and James Buchanan with his stiff collar and tilted head that looked as if he might be winking at me. There were the bearded Presidents like Rutherford B. Hayes who I thought might have been a lumberjack. I also wondered why Franklin Pierce never combed his hair. Needless to say these first impressions of the Presidents coming from the mind of a seven year old boy now appear to that same individual at the age of 43 to be everlasting...yet absurd. I know now that the bearded President Hayes was never a lumberjack...or that President Buchanan was never personally winking at me, but for some reason in some corner of my warped mind I still believe that maybe, perhaps these first childish impressions might be true! Probably the most ridiculous notion crossed my mind those many years ago when Gerald Ford was President had to do with the 9th President William Henry Harrison. Was Harrison a vampire?

                                                   William Henry Harrison (1773-1841)

     There was something sinister about the portrait staring back at me through the depths of time. Maybe it was the wide upturned collar...or perhaps the dark eyebrows and the elongated nose. I couldn't quite make sense of it, but I was convinced that William Henry Harrison and Count Dracula were one and the same...or was it Bela Lugosi? It was a good thing that Harrison wasn't smiling in the portrait or his teeth would have been a dead giveaway! Of course nobody was smiling on that Presidential mat except for tricky Dick Nixon. Although I now know with some degree of certainty that Harrison was not a blood sucking vampire I am still reluctant to trace his ancestry back fearing that it might lead me to the Carpathian mountains in Romania. Anyway, what was even stranger to my 7 year old self was the fact that there was only one date in front of his portrait. The date was 1841. Every other President had at least two dates in front of their portraits, but not Harrison. Why was this? I didn't know at the time but I found out later that old Tippecanoe had caught a cold after delivering his inaugural speech in March of 1841. He died of Pneumonia within the month, the shortest Presidency to date. Pneumonia...at least that is what the history books tell us...before we all found out that Abe Lincoln was a vampire hunter.