that he stayed at the Mains of Mause all night, but left it early next morning, when David Soutar with his dog accompanied him to show him the road; but that with the assistance of the dog he murdered the drover and took his money at the place mentioned; that there was a tailor at work in his father’s house that morning when he returned after committing the murder (according to the custom at that date by which tailors went out to make up customers’ own cloth at their own houses), and that his mother being surprised at his strange appearance, asked him what he had been about, to which inquiry he made no reply; that he did not remain long in the country afterwards, but went to England and never returned. The last time he was seen he went down by the Brae of Cockridge. A man of the name of Irons, a fisherman in Blairgowrie, says that his father, who died a very old man some years ago, was present at the getting of the bones. Mr. Small, Finzyhan, when bringing his daughter home from school in Edinburgh, saw a coffin at the door of a public house near Rychalzie where he generally stopped, but he did not go in as usual, thinking that there was a death in the family. The innkeeper came out and asked him why he was passing the door, and told him the coffin contained the bones of the murdered man which had been collected, upon which he went into the house.
“The Soutars disliked much to be questioned on the subject of the Dog of Mause. Thomas Soutar, who was tenant in Easter Mause, formerly named Knowhead of Mause, and died last year upwards of eighty years of age, said that the Soutars came originally from Annandale, and that their name was Johnston; that there were three brothers who fled from that part of the country on account of their having killed a man; that they came by Soutar’s Hill, and having asked the name of the hill, were told ‘Soutar,’ upon which they said, ‘Soutar be it then,’ and took that name. One of the brothers went south and the others came north.” {155a}
The appearance of human ghosts in the form of beasts is common enough; in Shropshire they usually “come” as bulls. (See Miss Burne’s Shropshire Folklore.) They do not usually speak, like the Dog o’ Mause. M. d’Assier, a French Darwinian, explains that ghosts revert “atavistically” to lower forms of animal life! {155b}
We now, in accordance with a promise already made, give an example of the ghosts of beasts! Here an explanation by the theory that the consciousness of the beast survives death and affects with a hallucination the minds of living men and animals, will hardly pass current. But if such cases were as common and told on evidence as respectable as that which vouches for appearances of the dead, believers in these would either have to shift their ground, or to grant that
Admitted to that equal sky,
Our faithful dog may bear us company.
We omit such things as the dripping death wraith of a drowned cat who appeared to a lady, or the illused monkey who died in a Chinese house, after which he haunted it by rapping, secreting objects, and, in short, in the usual way. {155c} We adduce
PETER’S GHOST
A naval officer visited a friend in the country. Several men were sitting round the smoking-room fire when he arrived, and a fox-terrier was with them. Presently the heavy, shambling footsteps of an old dog, and the metallic shaking sound of his collar, were heard coming up stairs.
“Here’s old Peter!” said his visitor.
“_Peter’s dead_!” whispered his owner.
The sounds passed through the closed door, heard by all; they pattered into the room; the fox-terrier bristled up, growled, and pursued a viewless object across the carpet; from the hearth-rug sounded a shake, a jingle of a collar and the settling weight of a body collapsing into repose. {156}
This pleasing anecdote rests on what is called _nautical evidence_, which, for reasons inexplicable to me, was (in these matters) distrusted by Sir Walter Scott.
CHAPTER VIII
More Ghosts with a Purpose. Ticonderoga. The Beresford Ghost. Sources of Evidence. The Family Version. A New Old-Fashioned Ghost. Half-past One o’clock. Put out the Light!
The ghost in the following famous tale had a purpose. He was a Highland ghost, a Campbell, and desired vengeance on a Macniven, who murdered him. The ghost, practically, “cried Cruachan,” and tried to rouse the clan. Failing in this, owing to Inverawe’s loyalty to his oath, the ghost uttered a prophecy.
The tale is given in the words of Miss Elspeth Campbell, who collected it at Inverawe from a Highland narrator. She adds a curious supplementary tradition in the Argyle family.
TICONDEROGA
It was one evening in the summer of the year 1755 that Campbell of Inverawe {157} was on Cruachan hill side. He was startled by seeing a man coming towards him at full speed; a man ragged, bleeding, and evidently suffering agonies of terror. “The avengers of blood are on my track, Oh, save me!” the poor wretch managed to gasp out. Inverawe, filled with pity for the miserable man, swore “By the word of an Inverawe which never failed friend or foe yet” to save him.
Inverawe then led the stranger to the secret cave on Cruachan hill side.
None knew of this cave but the laird of Inverawe himself, as the secret was most carefully kept and had been handed down from father to son for many generations. The entrance was small, and no one passing would for an instant suspect it to be other than a tod’s hole, {158a} but within were fair-sized rooms, one containing a well of the purest spring water. It is said that Wallace and Bruce had made use of this cave in earlier days.
Here Inverawe left his guest. The man was so overcome by terror that he clung on to Inverawe’s plaid, {158b} imploring him not to leave him alone. Inverawe was filled with disgust at this cowardly conduct, and already almost repented having plighted his word to save such a worthless creature.
On Inverawe’s return home he found a man in a state of great excitement waiting to see him. This man informed him of the murder of his (Inverawe’s) foster-brother by one Macniven. “We have,” said he, “tracked the murderer to within a short distance of this place, and I am here to warn you in case he should seek your protection.” Inverawe turned pale and remained silent, not knowing what answer to give. The man, knowing the love that subsisted between the foster-brothers, thought this silence arose from grief alone, and left the house to pursue the search for Macniven further.
The compassion Inverawe felt for the trembling man he had left in the cave turned to hate when he thought of his beloved foster-brother murdered; but as he had plighted his word to save him, save him he must and would. As soon, therefore, as night fell he went to the cave with food, and promised to return with more the next day.
Thoroughly worn out, as soon as he reached home he retired to rest, but sleep he could not. So taking up a book he began to read. A shadow fell across the page. He looked up and saw his foster-brother standing by the bedside. But, oh, how changed! His fair hair clotted with blood; his face pale and drawn, and his garments all gory. He uttered the following words: “Inverawe, shield not the murderer; blood must flow for blood,” and then faded away out of sight.
In spite of the spirit’s commands, Inverawe remained true to his promise, and returned next day to Macniven with fresh provisions. That night his foster-brother again appeared to him uttering the same warning: “Inverawe, Inverawe, shield not the murderer; blood must flow for blood”. At daybreak Inverawe hurried off to the cave, and said to Macniven: “I can shield you no longer; you must escape as best you can”. Inverawe now hoped to receive no further visit from the vengeful spirit. In this he was disappointed, for at the usual hour the ghost appeared, and in anger said, “I have warned you once, I have warned you twice; it is too late now. We shall meet again at TICONDEROGA.”
Inverawe rose before dawn and went straight to the cave. Macniven was gone!
Inverawe saw no more of the ghost, but the adventure left him a gloomy, melancholy man. Many a time he would wander on Cruachan hill side, brooding over his vision, and people passing him would see the far-away look in his eyes, and would say one to the other: “The puir laird, he is aye thinking on him that is gone”. Only his dearest friends knew the cause of his melancholy.
In 1756 the war between the English and French in America broke out. The 42nd regiment embarked, and landed at New York in June of that year. Campbell of Inverawe was a major in the regiment. The lieut.- colonel was Francis Grant. From New York the 42nd proceeded to Albany, where the regiment remained inactive till the spring of 1757. One evening when the 42nd were still quartered at this place, Inverawe asked the colonel “if he had ever heard of a place called Ticonderoga”. {160} Colonel Grant replied he had never heard the name before. Inverawe then told his story. Most of the officers were present at the time; some were impressed, others were inclined to look upon the whole thing as a joke, but seeing how very much disturbed Inverawe was about it all, even the most unbelieving refrained from bantering him.
In 1758 an expedition was to be directed against Ticonderoga, on Lake George, a fort erected by the French. The Highlanders were to form part of this expedition. The force was under Major-General Abercromby.
Ticonderoga was called by the French St. Louis [really “Fort Carillon”], and Inverawe knew it by no other name. One of the officers told Colonel Grant that the Indian name of the place was Ticonderoga. Grant, remembering Campbell’s story, said: “For God’s sake don’t let Campbell know this, or harm will come of it”.
The troops embarked on Lake George and landed without opposition near the extremity of the lake early in July. They marched from there, through woods, upon Ticonderoga, having had one successful skirmish with the enemy, driving them back with considerable loss. Lord Howe was killed in this engagement.
On the 10th of July the assault was directed to be commenced by the picquets. {162} The Grenadiers were to follow, supported by the battalions and reserves. The Highlanders and 55th regiment formed the reserve.
In vain the troops attempted to force their way through the abbatis, they themselves being exposed to a heavy artillery and musket fire from an enemy well under cover. The Highlanders could no longer be restrained, and rushed forward from the reserve, cutting and carving their way through trees and other obstacles with their claymores. The deadly fire still continued from the fort. As no ladders had been provided for scaling the breastwork, the soldiers climbed on to one another’s shoulders, and made holes for their feet in the face of the work with their swords and bayonets, but as soon as a man reached the top he was thrown down. Captain John Campbell and a few men succeeded at last in forcing their way over the breastworks, but were immediately cut down.
After a long and desperate struggle, lasting in fact nearly four hours, General Abercromby gave orders for a retreat. The troops could hardly be prevailed upon to retire, and it was not till the order had been given for the third time that the Highlanders withdrew from the hopeless encounter. The loss sustained by the regiment was as follows: eight officers, nine sergeants and 297 men killed; seventeen officers, ten sergeants and 306 men wounded.
Inverawe, after having fought with the greatest courage, received at length his death wound. Colonel Grant hastened to the dying man’s side, who looked reproachfully at him, and said: “You deceived me; this is Ticonderoga, for I have seen him”. Inverawe never spoke again. Inverawe’s son, an officer in the same regiment, also lost his life at Ticonderoga.
On the very day that these events were happening in far-away America, two ladies, Miss Campbell of Ederein and her sister, were walking from Kilmalieu to Inveraray, and had reached the then new bridge over the Aray. One of them happened to look up at the sky. She gave a call to her sister to look also. They both of them saw in the sky what looked like a siege going on. They saw the different regiments with their colours, and recognised many of their friends among the Highlanders. They saw Inverawe and his son fall, and other men whom they knew. When they reached Inveraray they told all their friends of the vision they had just seen. They also took down the names of those they had seen fall, and the time and date of the occurrence. The well-known Danish physician, Sir William Hart, was, together with an Englishman and a servant, walking round the Castle of Inveraray. These men saw the same phenomena, and confirmed the statements made by the two ladies. Weeks after the gazette corroborated their statements in its account of the attempt made on Ticonderoga. Every detail was correct in the vision, down to the actual number of the killed and wounded.
But there was sorrow throughout Argyll long before the gazette appeared.
* * * * *
We now give the best attainable version of a yet more famous legend, “The Tyrone Ghost”.
The literary history of “The Tyrone Ghost” is curious. In 1802 Scott used the tale as the foundation of his ballad, The Eve of St. John, and referred to the tradition of a noble Irish family in a note. In 1858 the subject was discussed in Notes and Queries. A reference was given to Lyon’s privately printed Grand Juries of Westmeath from 1751. The version from that rare work, a version dated “Dublin, August, 1802,” was published in Notes and Queries of 24th July, 1858. In December, 1896, a member of the Beresford family published in The Nines (a journal of the Wiltshire regiment), the account which follows, derived from a MS. at Curraghmore, written by Lady Betty Cobbe, granddaughter of the ghost-seer, Lady Beresford. The writer in The Nines remembers Lady Betty. The account of 1802 is clearly derived from the Curraghmore MS., but omits dates; calls Sir Tristram Beresford “Sir Marcus “; leaves out the visit to Gill Hall, where the ghost appeared, and substitutes blanks for the names of persons concerned. Otherwise the differences in the two versions are mainly verbal.
THE BERESFORD GHOST
“There is at Curraghmore, the seat of Lord Waterford, in Ireland, a manuscript account of the tale, such as it was originally received and implicitly believed in by the children and grandchildren of the lady to whom Lord Tyrone is supposed to have made the supernatural appearance after death. The account was written by Lady Betty Cobbe, the youngest daughter of Marcus, Earl of Tyrone, and granddaughter of Nicola S., Lady Beresford. She lived to a good old age, in full use of all her faculties, both of body and mind. I can myself remember her, for when a boy I passed through Bath on a journey with my mother, and we went to her house there, and had luncheon. She appeared to my juvenile imagination a very appropriate person to revise and transmit such a tale, and fully adapted to do ample justice to her subject- matter. It never has been doubted in the family that she received the full particulars in early life, and that she heard the circumstances, such as they were believed to have occurred, from the nearest relatives of the two persons, the supposed actors in this mysterious interview, viz., from her own father, Lord Tyrone, who died in 1763, and from her aunt, Lady Riverston, who died in 1763 also.
“These two were both with their mother, Lady Beresford, on the day of her decease, and they, without assistance or witness, took off from their parent’s wrist the black bandage which she had always worn on all occasions and times, even at Court, as some very old persons who lived well into the eighteenth century testified, having received their information from eyewitnesses of the fact. There was an oil painting of this lady in Tyrone House, Dublin, representing her with a black ribbon bound round her wrist. This portrait disappeared in an unaccountable manner. It used to hang in one of the drawing-rooms in that mansion, with other family pictures. When Henry, Marquis of Waterford, sold the old town residence of the family and its grounds to the Government as the site of the Education Board, he directed Mr. Watkins, a dealer in pictures, and a man of considerable knowledge in works of art and vertu, to collect the pictures, etc., etc., which were best adapted for removal to Curraghmore. Mr. Watkins especially picked out this portrait, not only as a good work of art, but as one which, from its associations, deserved particular care and notice. When, however, the lot arrived at Curraghmore and was unpacked, no such picture was found; and though Mr. Watkins took great pains and exerted himself to the utmost to trace what had become of it, to this day (nearly forty years), not a hint of its existence has been received or heard of.
“John le Poer, Lord Decies, was the eldest son of Richard, Earl of Tyrone, and of Lady Dorothy Annesley, daughter of Arthur, Earl of Anglesey. He was born 1665, succeeded his father 1690, and died 14th October, 1693. He became Lord Tyrone at his father’s death, and is the ‘ghost’ of the story.
“Nicola Sophie Hamilton was the second and youngest daughter and co- heiress of Hugh, Lord Glenawley, who was also Baron Lunge in Sweden. Being a zealous Royalist, he had, together with his father, migrated to that country in 1643, and returned from it at the Restoration. He was of a good old family, and held considerable landed property in the county Tyrone, near Ballygawley. He died there in 1679. His eldest daughter and co-heiress, Arabella Susanna, married, in 1683, Sir John Macgill, of Gill Hall, in the county Down.
“Nicola S. (the second daughter) was born in 1666, and married Sir Tristram Beresford in 1687. Between that and 1693 two daughters were born, but no son to inherit the ample landed estates of his father, who most anxiously wished and hoped for an heir. It was under these circumstances, and at this period, that the manuscripts state that Lord Tyrone made his appearance after death; and all the versions of the story, without variation, attribute the same cause and reason, viz., a solemn promise mutually interchanged in early life between John le Poer, then Lord Decies, afterwards Lord Tyrone, and Nicola S. Hamilton, that whichever of the two died the first, should, if permitted, appear to the survivor for the object of declaring the approval or rejection by the Deity of the revealed religion as generally acknowledged: of which the departed one must be fully cognisant, but of which they both had in their youth entertained unfortunate doubts.
“In the month of October, 1693, Sir Tristram and Lady Beresford went on a visit to her sister, Lady Macgill, at Gill Hall, now the seat of Lord Clanwilliam, whose grandmother was eventually the heiress of Sir J. Macgill’s property. One morning Sir Tristram rose early, leaving Lady Beresford asleep, and went out for a walk before breakfast. When his wife joined the table very late, her appearance and the embarrassment of her manner attracted general attention, especially that of her husband. He made anxious inquiries as to her health, and asked her apart what had occurred to her wrist, which was tied up with black ribbon tightly bound round it. She earnestly entreated him not to inquire more then, or thereafter, as to the cause of her wearing or continuing afterwards to wear that ribbon; ‘for,’ she added, ‘you will never see me without it’. He replied, ‘Since you urge it so vehemently, I promise you not to inquire more about it’.
“After completing her hurried breakfast she made anxious inquiries as to whether the post had yet arrived. It had not yet come in; and Sir Tristram asked: ‘Why are you so particularly eager about letters to- day?’ ‘Because I expect to hear of Lord Tyrone’s death, which took place on Tuesday.’ ‘Well,’ remarked Sir Tristram, ‘I never should have put you down for a superstitious person; but I suppose that some idle dream has disturbed you.’ Shortly after, the servant brought in the letters; one was sealed with black wax. ‘It is as I expected,’ she cries; ‘he is dead.’ The letter was from Lord Tyrone’s steward to inform them that his master had died in Dublin, on Tuesday, 14th October, at 4 p.m. Sir Tristram endeavoured to console her, and begged her to restrain her grief, when she assured him that she felt relieved and easier now that she knew the actual fact. She added, ‘I can now give you a most satisfactory piece of intelligence, viz., that I am with child, and that it will be a boy’. A son was born in the following July. Sir Tristram survived its birth little more than six years. After his death Lady Beresford continued to reside with her young family at his place in the county of Derry, and seldom went from home. She hardly mingled with any neighbours or friends, excepting with Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, of Coleraine. He was the principal personage in that town, and was, by his mother, a near relative of Sir Tristram. His wife was the daughter of Robert Gorges, LL.D. (a gentleman of good old English family, and possessed of a considerable estate in the county Meath), by Jane Loftus, daughter of Sir Adam Loftus, of Rathfarnham, and sister of Lord Lisburn. They had an only son, Richard Gorges, who was in the army, and became a general officer very early in life. With the Jacksons Lady Beresford maintained a constant communication and lived on the most intimate terms, while she seemed determined to eschew all other society and to remain in her chosen retirement.
“At the conclusion of three years thus passed, one luckless day “Young Gorges” most vehemently professed his passion for her, and solicited her hand, urging his suit in a most passionate appeal, which was evidently not displeasing to the fair widow, and which, unfortunately for her, was successful. They were married in 1704. One son and two daughters were born to them, when his abandoned and dissolute conduct forced her to seek and to obtain a separation. After this had continued for four years, General Gorges pretended extreme penitence for his past misdeeds, and with the most solemn promises of amendment induced his wife to live with him again, and she became the mother of a second son. The day month after her confinement happened to be her birthday, and having recovered and feeling herself equal to some exertion, she sent for her son, Sir Marcus Beresford, then twenty years old, and her married daughter, Lady Riverston. She also invited Dr. King, the Archbishop of Dublin (who was an intimate friend), and an old clergyman who had christened her, and who had always kept up a most kindly intercourse with her during her whole life, to make up a small party to celebrate the day.
“In the early part of it Lady Beresford was engaged in a kindly conversation with her old friend the clergyman, and in the course of it said: ‘You know that I am forty-eight this day’. ‘No, indeed,’ he replied; ‘you are only forty-seven, for your mother had a dispute with me once on the very subject of your age, and I in consequence sent and consulted the registry, and can most confidently assert that you are only forty-seven this day.’ ‘You have signed my death-warrant, then,’ she cried; ‘leave me, I pray, for I have not much longer to live, but have many things of grave importance to settle before I die. Send my son and my daughter to me immediately.’ The clergyman did as he was bidden. He directed Sir Marcus and his sister to go instantly to their mother; and he sent to the archbishop and a few other friends to put them off from joining the birthday party.
“When her two children repaired to Lady Beresford, she thus addressed them: ‘I have something of deep importance to communicate to you, my dear children, before I die. You are no strangers to the intimacy and the affection which subsisted in early life between Lord Tyrone and myself. We were educated together when young, under the same roof, in the pernicious principles of Deism. Our real friends afterwards took every opportunity to convince us of our error, but their arguments were insufficient to overpower and uproot our infidelity, though they had the effect of shaking our confidence in it, and thus leaving us wavering between the two opinions. In this perplexing state of doubt we made a solemn promise one to the other, that whichever died first should, if permitted, appear to the other for the purpose of declaring what religion was the one acceptable to the Almighty. One night, years after this interchange of promises, I was sleeping with your father at Gill Hall, when I suddenly awoke and discovered Lord Tyrone sitting visibly by the side of the bed. I screamed out, and vainly endeavoured to rouse Sir Tristram. “Tell me,” I said, “Lord Tyrone, why and wherefore are you here at this time of the night?” “Have you then forgotten our promise to each other, pledged in early life? I died on Tuesday, at four o’clock. I have been permitted thus to appear in order to assure you that the revealed religion is the true and only one by which we can be saved. I am also suffered to inform you that you are with child, and will produce a son, who will marry my heiress; that Sir Tristram will not live long, when you will marry again, and you will die from the effects of childbirth in your forty- seventh year.” I begged from him some convincing sign or proof so that when the morning came I might rely upon it, and feel satisfied that his appearance had been real, and that it was not the phantom of my imagination. He caused the hangings of the bed to be drawn in an unusual way and impossible manner through an iron hook. I still was not satisfied, when he wrote his signature in my pocket-book. I wanted, however, more substantial proof of his visit, when he laid his hand, which was cold as marble, on my wrist; the sinews shrunk up, the nerves withered at the touch. “Now,” he said, “let no mortal eye, while you live, ever see that wrist,” and vanished. While I was conversing with him my thoughts were calm, but as soon as he disappeared I felt chilled with horror and dismay, a cold sweat came over me, and I again endeavoured but vainly to awaken Sir Tristram; a flood of tears came to my relief, and I fell asleep.
“‘In the morning your father got up without disturbing me; he had not noticed anything extraordinary about me or the bed-hangings. When I did arise I found a long broom in the gallery outside the bedroom door, and with great difficulty I unhooded the curtain, fearing that the position of it might excite surprise and cause inquiry. I bound up my wrist with black ribbon before I went down to breakfast, where the agitation of my mind was too visible not to attract attention. Sir Tristram made many anxious inquiries as to my health, especially as to my sprained wrist, as he conceived mine to be. I begged him to drop all questions as to the bandage, even if I continued to adopt it for any length of time. He kindly promised me not to speak of it any more, and he kept his promise faithfully. You, my son, came into the world as predicted, and your father died six years after. I then determined to abandon society and its pleasures and not mingle again with the world, hoping to avoid the dreadful predictions as to my second marriage; but, alas! in the one family with which I held constant and friendly intercourse I met the man, whom I did not regard with perfect indifference. Though I struggled to conquer by every means the passion, I at length yielded to his solicitations, and in a fatal moment for my own peace I became his wife. In a few years his conduct fully justified my demand for a separation, and I fondly hoped to escape the fatal prophecy. Under the delusion that I had passed my forty-seventh birthday, I was prevailed upon to believe in his amendment, and to pardon him. I have, however, heard from undoubted authority that I am only forty-seven this day, and I know that I am about to die. I die, however, without the dread of death, fortified as I am by the sacred precepts of Christianity and upheld by its promises. When I am gone, I wish that you, my children, should unbind this black ribbon and alone behold my wrist before I am consigned to the grave.’
“She then requested to be left that she might lie down and compose herself, and her children quitted the apartment, having desired her attendant to watch her, and if any change came on to summon them to her bedside. In an hour the bell rang, and they hastened to the call, but all was over. The two children having ordered every one to retire, knelt down by the side of the bed, when Lady Riverston unbound the black ribbon and found the wrist exactly as Lady Beresford had described it–every nerve withered, every sinew shrunk.
“Her friend, the Archbishop, had had her buried in the Cathedral of St. Patrick, in Dublin, in the Earl of Cork’s tomb, where she now lies.”
* * * * *
The writer now professes his disbelief in any spiritual presence, and explains his theory that Lady Beresford’s anxiety about Lord Tyrone deluded her by a vivid dream, during which she hurt her wrist.
Of all ghost stories the Tyrone, or Beresford Ghost, has most variants. Following Monsieur Haureau, in the Journal des Savants, I have tracked the tale, the death compact, and the wound inflicted by the ghost on the hand, or wrist, or brow, of the seer, through Henry More, and Melanchthon, and a mediaeval sermon by Eudes de Shirton, to William of Malmesbury, a range of 700 years. Mrs. Grant of Laggan has a rather recent case, and I have heard of another in the last ten years! Calmet has a case in 1625, the spectre leaves
The sable score of fingers four
on a board of wood.
Now for a modern instance of a gang of ghosts with a purpose!
When I narrated the story which follows to an eminent moral philosopher, he remarked, at a given point, “Oh, the ghost _spoke_, did she?” and displayed scepticism. The evidence, however, left him, as it leaves me, at a standstill, not convinced, but agreeably perplexed. The ghosts here are truly old-fashioned.
My story is, and must probably remain, entirely devoid of proof, as far as any kind of ghostly influence is concerned. We find ghosts appearing, and imposing a certain course of action on a living witness, for definite purposes of their own. The course of action prescribed was undeniably pursued, and apparently the purpose of the ghosts was fulfilled, but what that purpose was their agent declines to state, and conjecture is hopelessly baffled.
The documents in the affair have been published by the Society for Psychical Research (Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 547), and are here used for reference. But I think the matter will be more intelligible if I narrate it exactly as it came under my own observation. The names of persons and places are all fictitious, and are the same as those used in the documents published by the S.P.R.
HALF-PAST ONE O’CLOCK
In October, 1893, I was staying at a town which we shall call Rapingham. One night I and some kinsfolk dined with another old friend of all of us, a Dr. Ferrier. In the course of dinner he asked a propos de bottes:–
“Have you heard of the ghost in Blake Street?” a sunny, pleasant street of respectable but uninteresting antiquity in Rapingham.
We had none of us heard of the ghost, and begged the doctor to enlighten our ignorance. His story ran thus–I have it in his own writing as far as its essence goes:–
“The house,” he said, “belongs to my friends, the Applebys, who let it, as they live elsewhere. A quiet couple took it and lived in it for five years, when the husband died, and the widow went away. They made no complaint while tenants. The house stood empty for some time, and all I know personally about the matter is that I, my wife, and the children were in the dining-room one Sunday when we heard unusual noises in the drawing-room overhead. We went through the rooms but could find no cause or explanation of the disturbance, and thought no more about it.
“About six or seven years ago I let the house to a Mr. Buckley, who is still the tenant. He was unmarried, and his family consisted of his mother and sisters. They preceded him to put the place in order, and before his arrival came to me in some irritation complaining that I had let them _a haunted house_! They insisted that there were strange noises, as if heavy weights were being dragged about, or heavy footsteps pacing in the rooms and on the stairs. I said that I knew nothing about the matter. The stairs are of stone, water is only carried up to the first floor, there is an unused system of hot air pipes. {177a} Something went wrong with the water-main in the area once, but the noises lasted after it was mended.
“I think Mr. Buckley when he arrived never heard anything unusual. But one evening as he walked upstairs carrying an ink-bottle, he found his hand full of some liquid. Thinking that he had spilt the ink, he went to a window where he found his hand full of water, to account for which there was no stain on the ceiling, or anything else that he could discover. On another occasion one of the young ladies was kneeling by a trunk in an attic, alone, when water was switched over her face, as if from a wet brush. {177b} There was a small pool of water on the floor, and the wall beyond her was sprinkled.
“Time went on, and the disturbances were very rare: in fact ceased for two years till the present week, when Mrs. Claughton, a widow accompanied by two of her children, came to stay with the Buckleys. {177c} She had heard of the disturbances and the theory of hauntings– I don’t know if these things interested her or not.
“Early on Monday, 9th October, Mrs. Claughton came to consult me. Her story was this: About a quarter past one on Sunday night, or Monday morning, she was in bed with one of her children, the other sleeping in the room. She was awakened by footsteps on the stair, and supposed that a servant was coming to call her to Miss Buckley, who was ill. The steps stopped at the door, then the noise was repeated. Mrs. Claughton lit her bedroom candle, opened the door and listened. There was no one there. The clock on the landing pointed to twenty minutes past one. Mrs. Claughton went back to bed, read a book, fell asleep, and woke to find the candle still lit, but low in the socket. She heard a sigh, and saw a lady, unknown to her, her head swathed in a soft white shawl, her expression gentle and refined, her features much emaciated.
“The Appearance said, ‘Follow me,’ and Mrs. Claughton, taking the bedroom candle, rose and followed out on to the landing, and so into the adjacent drawing-room. She cannot remember opening the door, which the housemaid had locked outside, and she owns that this passage is dreamlike in her memory. Seeing that her candle was flickering out, she substituted for it a pink one taken from a chiffonier. The figure walked nearly to the window, turned three-quarters round, said ‘To-morrow!’ and was no more seen. Mrs. Claughton went back to her room, where her eldest child asked:–
“‘Who is the lady in white?’
“‘Only me, mother, go to sleep,’ she thinks she answered. After lying awake for two hours, with gas burning, she fell asleep. The pink candle from the drawing-room chiffonier was in her candlestick in the morning.
“After hearing the lady’s narrative I told her to try change of air, which she declined as cowardly. So, as she would stay on at Mr. Buckley’s, I suggested that an electric alarm communicating with Miss Buckley’s room should be rigged up, and this was done.”
Here the doctor paused, and as the events had happened within the week, we felt that we were at last on the track of a recent ghost.
“Next morning, about one, the Buckleys were aroused by a tremendous peal of the alarm; Mrs. Claughton they found in a faint. Next morning {179} she consulted me as to the whereabouts of a certain place, let me call it ‘Meresby’. I suggested the use of a postal directory; we found Meresby, a place extremely unknown to fame, in an agricultural district about five hours from London in the opposite direction from Rapingham. To this place Mrs. Claughton said she must go, in the interest and by the order of certain ghosts, whom she saw on Monday night, and whose injunctions she had taken down in a note-book. She has left Rapingham for London, and there,” said the doctor, “my story ends for the present.”
We expected it to end for good and all, but in the course of the week came a communication to the doctor in writing from Mrs. Claughton’s governess. This lady, on Mrs. Claughton’s arrival at her London house (Friday, 13th October), passed a night perturbed by sounds of weeping, “loud moans,” and “a very odd noise overhead, like some electric battery gone wrong,” in fact, much like the “warning” of a jack running down, which Old Jeffrey used to give at the Wesley’s house in Epworth. There were also heavy footsteps and thuds, as of moving weighty bodies. So far the governess.
This curious communication I read at Rapingham on Saturday, 14th October, or Sunday, 15th October. On Monday I went to town. In the course of the week I received a letter from my kinsman in Rapingham, saying that Mrs. Claughton had written to Dr. Ferrier, telling him that she had gone to Meresby on Saturday; had accomplished the bidding of the ghosts, and had lodged with one Joseph Wright, the parish clerk. Her duty had been to examine the Meresby parish registers, and to compare certain entries with information given by the ghosts and written by her in her note-book. If the entries in the parish register tallied with her notes, she was to pass the time between one o’clock and half-past one, alone, in Meresby Church, and receive a communication from the spectres. All this she said that she had done, and in evidence of her journey enclosed her half ticket to Meresby, which a dream had warned her would not be taken on her arrival. She also sent a white rose from a grave to Dr. Ferrier, a gentleman in no sympathy with the Jacobite cause, which, indeed, has no connection whatever with the matter in hand.
On hearing of this letter from Mrs. Claughton, I confess that, not knowing the lady, I remained purely sceptical. The railway company, however, vouched for the ticket. The rector of Meresby, being appealed to, knew nothing of the matter. He therefore sent for his curate and parish clerk.
“Did a lady pass part of Sunday night in the church?”
The clerk and the curate admitted that this unusual event _had_ occurred. A lady had arrived from London on Saturday evening; had lodged with Wright, the parish clerk; had asked for the parish registers; had compared them with her note-book after morning service on Sunday, and had begged leave to pass part of the night in the church. The curate in vain tried to dissuade her, and finally, washing his hands of it, had left her to Wright the clerk. To him she described a Mr. George Howard, deceased (one of the ghosts). He recognised the description, and he accompanied her to the church on a dark night, starting at one o’clock. She stayed alone, without a light, in the locked-up church from 1.20 to 1.45, when he let her out.
There now remained no doubt that Mrs. Claughton had really gone to Meresby, a long and disagreeable journey, and had been locked up in the church alone at a witching hour.
Beyond this point we have only the statements of Mrs. Claughton, made to Lord Bute, Mr. Myers and others, and published by the Society for Psychical Research. She says that after arranging the alarm bell on Monday night (October 9-10) she fell asleep reading in her dressing- gown, lying outside her bed. She wakened, and found the lady of the white shawl bending over her. Mrs. Claughton said: “Am I dreaming, or is it true?” The figure gave, as testimony to character, a piece of information. Next Mrs. Claughton saw a male ghost, “tall, dark, healthy, sixty years old,” who named himself as George Howard, buried in Meresby churchyard, Meresby being a place of which Mrs. Claughton, like most people, now heard for the first time. He gave the dates of his marriage and death, which are correct, and have been seen by Mr. Myers in Mrs. Claughton’s note-book. He bade her verify these dates at Meresby, and wait at 1.15 in the morning at the grave of Richard Harte (a person, like all of them, unknown to Mrs. Claughton) at the south-west corner of the south aisle in Meresby Church. This Mr. Harte died on 15th May, 1745, and missed many events of interest by doing so. Mr. Howard also named and described Joseph Wright, of Meresby, as a man who would help her, and he gave minute local information. Next came a phantom of a man whose name Mrs. Claughton is not free to give; {182} he seemed to be in great trouble, at first covering his face with his hands, but later removing them. These three spectres were to meet Mrs. Claughton in Meresby Church and give her information of importance on a matter concerning, apparently, the third and only unhappy appearance. After these promises and injunctions the phantoms left, and Mrs. Claughton went to the door to look at the clock. Feeling faint, she rang the alarum, when her friends came and found her in a swoon on the floor. The hour was 1.20.
What Mrs. Claughton’s children were doing all this time, and whether they were in the room or not, does not appear.
On Thursday Mrs. Claughton went to town, and her governess was perturbed, as we have seen.
On Friday night Mrs. Claughton _dreamed_ a number of things connected with her journey; a page of the notes made from this dream was shown to Mr. Myers. Thus her half ticket was not to be taken, she was to find a Mr. Francis, concerned in the private affairs of the ghosts, which needed rectifying, and so forth. These premonitions, with others, were all fulfilled. Mrs. Claughton, in the church at night, continued her conversation with the ghosts whose acquaintance she had made at Rapingham. She obtained, it seems, all the information needful to settling the mysterious matters which disturbed the male ghost who hid his face, and on Monday morning she visited the daughter of Mr. Howard in her country house in a park, “recognised the strong likeness to her father, and carried out all things desired by the dead to the full, as had been requested. . . . The wishes expressed to her were perfectly rational, reasonable and of natural importance.”
The clerk, Wright, attests the accuracy of Mrs. Claughton’s description of Mr. Howard, whom he knew, and the correspondence of her dates with those in the parish register and on the graves, which he found for her at her request. Mr. Myers, “from a very partial knowledge” of what the Meresby ghosts’ business was, thinks the reasons for not revealing this matter “entirely sufficient”. The ghosts’ messages to survivors “effected the intended results,” says Mrs. Claughton.
* * * * *
Of this story the only conceivable natural explanation is that Mrs. Claughton, to serve her private ends, paid secret preliminary visits to Meresby, “got up” there a number of minute facts, chose a haunted house at the other end of England as a first scene in her little drama, and made the rest of the troublesome journeys, not to mention the uncomfortable visit to a dark church at midnight, and did all this from a hysterical love of notoriety. This desirable boon she would probably never have obtained, even as far as it is consistent with a pseudonym, if I had not chanced to dine with Dr. Ferrier while the adventure was only beginning. As there seemed to be a chance of taking a ghost “on the half volley,” I at once communicated the first part of the tale to the Psychical Society (using pseudonyms, as here, throughout), and two years later Mrs. Claughton consented to tell the Society as much as she thinks it fair to reveal.
This, it will be confessed, is a round-about way of obtaining fame, and an ordinary person in Mrs. Claughton’s position would have gone to the Psychical Society at once, as Mark Twain meant to do when he saw the ghost which turned out to be a very ordinary person.
There I leave these ghosts, my mind being in a just balance of agnosticism. If ghosts at all, they were ghosts with a purpose. The species is now very rare.
The purpose of the ghost in the following instance was trivial, but was successfully accomplished. In place of asking people to do what it wanted, the ghost did the thing itself. Now the modern theory of ghosts, namely, that they are delusions of the senses of the seers, caused somehow by the mental action of dead or distant people, does not seem to apply in this case. The ghost produced an effect on a material object.
“PUT OUT THE LIGHT!”
The Rev. D. W. G. Gwynne, M.D., was a physician in holy orders. In 1853 he lived at P— House, near Taunton, where both he and his wife “were made uncomfortable by auditory experiences to which they could find no clue,” or, in common English, they heard mysterious noises. “During the night,” writes Dr. Gwynne, “I became aware of a draped figure passing across the foot of the bed towards the fireplace. I had the impression that the arm was raised, pointing with the hand towards the mantel-piece on which a night-light was burning. Mrs. Gwynne at the same moment seized my arm, _and the light was extinguished_! Notwithstanding, I distinctly saw the figure returning towards the door, and being under the impression that one of the servants had found her way into our room, I leaped out of bed to intercept the intruder, but found and saw nothing. I rushed to the door and endeavoured to follow the supposed intruder, and it was not until I found the door locked, as usual, that I was painfully impressed. I need hardly say that Mrs. Gwynne was in a very nervous state. She asked me what I had seen, and I told her. She had seen the same figure,” “but,” writes Mrs. Gwynne, “I distinctly _saw the hand of the figure placed over the night-light, which was at once extinguished_”. “Mrs. Gwynne also heard the rustle of the ‘tall man- like figure’s’ garments. In addition to the night-light there was moonlight in the room.”
“Other people had suffered many things in the same house, unknown to Dr. and Mrs. Gwynne, who gave up the place soon afterwards.”
In plenty of stories we hear of ghosts who draw curtains or open doors, and these apparent material effects are usually called part of the seer’s delusion. But the night-light certainly went out under the figure’s hand, and was relit by Dr. Gwynne. Either the ghost was an actual entity, not a mere hallucination of two people, or the extinction of the light was a curious coincidence. {186}
CHAPTER IX
Haunted Houses. Antiquity of Haunted Houses. Savage Cases. Ancient Egyptian Cases. Persistence in Modern Times. Impostures. Imaginary Noises. Nature of Noises. The Creaking Stair. Ghostly Effects produced by the Living but Absent. The Grocer’s Cough. Difficulty of Belief. My Gillie’s Father’s Story. “Silverton Abbey.” The Dream that Opened the Door. Abbotsford Noises. Legitimate Haunting by the Dead. The Girl in Pink. The Dog in the Haunted Room. The Lady in Black. Dogs Alarmed. The Dead Seldom Recognised. Glamis. A Border Castle. Another Class of Hauntings. A Russian Case. The Dancing Devil. The Little Hands.
Haunted houses have been familiar to man ever since he has owned a roof to cover his head. The Australian blacks possessed only shelters or “leans-to,” so in Australia the spirits do their rapping on the tree trunks; a native illustrated this by whacking a table with a book. The perched-up houses of the Dyaks are haunted by noisy routing agencies. We find them in monasteries, palaces, and crofters’ cottages all through the Middle Ages. On an ancient Egyptian papyrus we find the husband of the Lady Onkhari protesting against her habit of haunting his house, and exclaiming: “What wrong have I done,” exactly in the spirit of the “Hymn of Donald Ban,” who was “sair hadden down by a bodach” (noisy bogle) after Culloden. {188a}
The husband of Onkhari does not say _how_ she disturbed him, but the manners of Egyptian haunters, just what they remain at present, may be gathered from a magical papyrus, written in Greek. Spirits “wail and groan, or laugh dreadfully”; they cause bad dreams, terror and madness; finally, they “practice stealthy theft,” and rap and knock. The “theft” (by making objects disappear mysteriously) is often illustrated in the following tales, as are the groaning and knocking. {188b} St. Augustine speaks of hauntings as familiar occurrences, and we have a chain of similar cases from ancient Egypt to 1896. Several houses in that year were so disturbed that the inhabitants were obliged to leave them. The newspapers were full of correspondence on the subject.
The usual annoyances are apparitions (rare), flying about of objects (not very common), noises of every kind (extremely frequent), groans, screams, footsteps and fire-raising. Imposture has either been proved or made very probable in ten out of eleven cases of volatile objects between 1883 and 1895. {188c} Moreover, it is certain that the noises of haunted houses are not equally audible by all persons present, even when the sounds are at their loudest. Thus Lord St. Vincent, the great admiral, heard nothing during his stay at the house of his sister, Mrs. Ricketts, while that lady endured terrible things. After his departure she was obliged to recall him. He arrived, and slept peacefully. Next day his sister told him about the disturbances, after which he heard them as much as his neighbours, and was as unsuccessful in discovering their cause. {189}
Of course this looks as if these noises were unreal, children of the imagination. Noises being the staple of haunted houses, a few words may be devoted to them. They are usually the frou-frou or rustling sweep of a gown, footsteps, raps, thumps, groans, a sound as if all the heavy furniture was being knocked about, crashing of crockery and jingling of money. Of course, as to footsteps, people _may_ be walking about, and most of the other noises are either easily imitated, or easily produced by rats, water pipes, cracks in furniture (which the Aztecs thought ominous of death), and other natural causes. The explanation is rather more difficult when the steps pace a gallery, passing and repassing among curious inquirers, or in this instance.
THE CREAKING STAIR
A lady very well known to myself, and in literary society, lived as a girl with an antiquarian father in an old house dear to an antiquary. It was haunted, among other things, by footsteps. The old oak staircase had two creaking steps, numbers seventeen and eighteen from the top. The girl would sit on the stair, stretching out her arms, and count the steps as they passed her, one, two, three, and so on to seventeen and eighteen, _which always creaked_. {190} In this case rats and similar causes were excluded, though we may allow for “expectant attention”. But this does not generally work. When people sit up on purpose to look out for the ghost, he rarely comes; in the case of the “Lady in Black,” which we give later, when purposely waited for, she was never seen at all.
Discounting imposture, which is sometimes found, and sometimes merely fabled (as in the Tedworth story), there remains one curious circumstance. Specially ghostly noises are attributed to the living but absent.
THE GROCER’S COUGH
A man of letters was born in a small Scotch town, where his father was the intimate friend of a tradesman whom we shall call the grocer. Almost every day the grocer would come to have a chat with Mr. Mackay, and the visitor, alone of the natives, had the habit of knocking at the door before entering. One day Mr. Mackay said to his daughter, “There’s Mr. Macwilliam’s knock. Open the door.” But there was no Mr. Macwilliam! He was just leaving his house at the other end of the street. From that day Mr. Mackay always heard the grocer’s knock “a little previous,” accompanied by the grocer’s cough, which was peculiar. Then all the family heard it, including the son who later became learned. He, when he had left his village for Glasgow, reasoned himself out of the opinion that the grocer’s knock did herald and precede the grocer. But when he went home for a visit he found that he heard it just as of old. Possibly some local Sentimental Tommy watched for the grocer, played the trick and ran away. This explanation presents no difficulty, but the boy was never detected. {191}
Such anecdotes somehow do not commend themselves to the belief even of people who can believe a good deal.
But “the spirits of the living,” as the Highlanders say, have surely as good a chance to knock, or appear at a distance, as the spirits of the dead. To be sure, the living do not know (unless they are making a scientific experiment) what trouble they are giving on these occasions, but one can only infer, like St. Augustine, that probably the dead don’t know it either.
Thus,
MY GILLIE’S FATHER’S STORY
Fishing in Sutherland, I had a charming companion in the gillie. He was well educated, a great reader, the best of salmon fishers, and I never heard a man curse William, Duke of Cumberland, with more enthusiasm. His father, still alive, was second-sighted, and so, to a moderate extent and without theory, was my friend. Among other anecdotes (confirmed in writing by the old gentleman) was this:–
The father had a friend who died in the house which they both occupied. The clothes of the deceased hung on pegs in the bedroom. One night the father awoke, and saw a stranger examining and handling the clothes of the defunct. Then came a letter from the dead man’s brother, inquiring about the effects. He followed later, and was the stranger seen by my gillie’s father.
Thus the living but absent may haunt a house both noisily and by actual appearance. The learned even think, for very exquisite reasons, that “Silverton Abbey” {192} is haunted noisily by a “spirit of the living”. Here is a case:–
THE DREAM THAT KNOCKED AT THE DOOR
The following is an old but good story. The Rev. Joseph Wilkins died, an aged man, in 1800. He left this narrative, often printed; the date of the adventure is 1754, when Mr. Wilkins, aged twenty-three, was a schoolmaster in Devonshire. The dream was an ordinary dream, and did not announce death, or anything but a journey. Mr. Wilkins dreamed, in Devonshire, that he was going to London. He thought he would go by Gloucestershire and see his people. So he started, arrived at his father’s house, found the front door locked, went in by the back door, went to his parents’ room, saw his father asleep in bed and his mother awake. He said: “Mother, I am going a long journey, and have come to bid you good-bye”. She answered in a fright, “Oh dear son, thou art dead!” Mr. Wilkins wakened, and thought nothing of it. As early as a letter could come, one arrived from his father, addressing him as if he were dead, and desiring him, if by accident alive, or any one into whose hands the letter might fall, to write at once. The father then gave his reasons for alarm. Mrs. Wilkins, being awake one night, heard some one try the front door, enter by the back, then saw her son come into her room and say he was going on a long journey, with the rest of the dialogue. She then woke her husband, who said she had been dreaming, but who was alarmed enough to write the letter. No harm came of it to anybody.
The story would be better if Mr. Wilkins, junior, like Laud, had kept a nocturnal of his dreams, and published his father’s letter, with post-marks.
The story of the lady who often dreamed of a house, and when by chance she found and rented it was recognised as the ghost who had recently haunted it, is good, but is an invention!
A somewhat similar instance is that of the uproar of moving heavy objects, heard by Scott in Abbotsford on the night preceding and the night of the death of his furnisher, Mr. Bullock, in London. The story is given in Lockhart’s Life of Scott, and is too familiar for repetition.
On the whole, accepting one kind of story on the same level as the other kind, the living and absent may unconsciously produce the phenomena of haunted houses just as well as the dead, to whose alleged performances we now advance. Actual appearances, as we have said, are not common, and just as all persons do not hear the sounds, so many do not see the appearance, even when it is visible to others in the same room. As an example, take a very mild and lady-like case of haunting.
THE GIRL IN PINK
The following anecdote was told to myself, a few months after the curious event, by the three witnesses in the case. They were connections of my own, the father was a clergyman of the Anglican Church; he, his wife and their daughter, a girl of twenty, were the “percipients”. All are cheerful, sagacious people, and all, though they absolutely agreed as to the facts in their experience, professed an utter disbelief in “ghosts,” which the occurrence has not affected in any way. They usually reside in a foreign city, where there is a good deal of English society. One day they left the town to lunch with a young fellow-countryman who lived in a villa in the neighbourhood. There he was attempting to farm a small estate, with what measure of success the story does not say. His house was kept by his sister, who was present, of course, at the little luncheon party. During the meal some question was asked, or some remark was made, to which the clerical guest replied in English by a reference to “the maid-servant in pink”.
“There is no maid in pink,” said the host, and he asked both his other guests to corroborate him.
Both ladies, mother and daughter, were obliged to say that unless their eyes deceived them, they certainly _had_ seen a girl in pink attending on them, or, at least, moving about in the room. To this their entertainers earnestly replied that no such person was in their establishment, that they had no woman servant but the elderly cook and housekeeper, then present, who was neither a girl nor in pink. After luncheon the guests were taken all over the house, to convince them of the absence of the young woman whom they had seen, and assuredly there was no trace of her.
On returning to the town where they reside, they casually mentioned the circumstance as a curious illusion. The person to whom they spoke said, with some interest, “Don’t you know that a girl is said to have been murdered in that house before your friends took it, and that she is reported to be occasionally seen, dressed in pink?”
They had heard of no such matter, but the story seemed to be pretty generally known, though naturally disliked by the occupant of the house. As for the percipients, they each and all remain firm in the belief that, till convinced of the impossibility of her presence, they were certain they had seen a girl in pink, and rather a pretty girl, whose appearance suggested nothing out of the common. An obvious hypothesis is discounted, of course, by the presence of the sister of the young gentleman who farmed the estate and occupied the house.
Here is another case, mild but pertinacious.
THE DOG IN THE HAUNTED ROOM
The author’s friend, Mr. Rokeby, lives, and has lived for some twenty years, in an old house at Hammersmith. It is surrounded by a large garden, the drawing-room and dining-room are on the right and left of the entrance from the garden, on the ground floor. My friends had never been troubled by any phenomena before, and never expected to be. However, they found the house “noisy,” the windows were apt to be violently shaken at night and steps used to be heard where no steps should be. Deep long sighs were audible at all times of day. As Mrs. Rokeby approached a door, the handle would turn and the door fly open. {196} Sounds of stitching a hard material, and of dragging a heavy weight occurred in Mrs. Rokeby’s room, and her hair used to be pulled in a manner for which she could not account. “These sorts of things went on for about five years, when in October, 1875, about three o’clock in the afternoon, I was sitting” (says Mrs. Rokeby) “with three of my children in the dining-room, reading to them. I rang the bell for the parlour-maid, when the door opened, and on looking up I saw the figure of a woman come in and walk up to the side of the table, stand there a second or two, and then turn to go out again, but before reaching the door she seemed to dissolve away. She was a grey, short-looking woman, apparently dressed in grey muslin. I hardly saw the face, which seemed scarcely to be defined at all. None of the children saw her,” and Mrs. Rokeby only mentioned the affair at the time to her husband.
Two servants, in the next two months, saw the same figure, alike in dress at least, in other rooms both by daylight and candle light. They had not heard of Mrs. Rokeby’s experience, were accustomed to the noises, and were in good health. One of them was frightened, and left her place.
A brilliant light in a dark room, an icy wind and a feeling of being “watched” were other discomforts in Mrs. Rokeby’s lot. After 1876, only occasional rappings were heard, till Mr. Rokeby being absent one night in 1883, the noises broke out, “banging, thumping, the whole place shaking”. The library was the centre of these exercises, and the dog, a fine collie, was shut up in the library. Mrs. Rokeby left her room for her daughter’s, while the dog whined in terror, and the noises increased in violence. Next day the dog, when let out, rushed forth with enthusiasm, but crouched with his tail between his legs when invited to re-enter.
This was in 1883. Several years after, Mr. Rokeby was smoking, alone, in the dining-room early in the evening, when the dog began to bristle up his hair, and bark. Mr. Rokeby looked up and saw the woman in grey, with about half her figure passed through the slightly open door. He ran to the door, but she was gone, and the servants were engaged in their usual business. {198a}
Our next ghost offered many opportunities to observers.
THE LADY IN BLACK
A ghost in a haunted house is seldom observed with anything like scientific precision. The spectre in the following narrative could not be photographed, attempts being usually made in a light which required prolonged exposure. Efforts to touch it were failures, nor did it speak. On the other hand, it did lend itself, perhaps unconsciously, to one scientific experiment. The story is unromantic; the names are fictitious. {198b}
Bognor House, an eligible family residence near a large town, was built in 1860, and occupied, till his death in 1876, by Mr. S. He was twice married, and was not of temperate ways. His second wife adopted his habits, left him shortly before his death, and died at Clifton in 1878. The pair used to quarrel about some jewels which Mr. S. concealed in the flooring of a room where the ghost was never seen.
A Mr L. now took the house, but died six months later. Bognor House stood empty for four years, during which there was vague talk of hauntings. In April, 1882, the house was taken by Captain Morton. This was in April; in June Miss Rose Morton, a lady of nineteen studying medicine (and wearing spectacles), saw the first appearance. Miss Morton did not mention her experiences to her family, her mother being an invalid, and her brothers and sisters very young, but she transmitted accounts to a friend, a lady, in a kind of diary letters. These are extant, and are quoted.
Phenomena of this kind usually begin with noises, and go on to apparitions. Miss Morton one night, while preparing to go to bed, heard a noise outside, thought it was her mother, opened the door, saw a tall lady in black holding a handkerchief to her face, and followed the figure till her candle burned out. A widow’s white cuff was visible on each wrist, the whole of the face was never seen. In 1882- 84, Miss Morton saw the figure about six times; it was thrice seen, once through the window from outside, by other persons, who took it for a living being. Two boys playing in the garden ran in to ask who was the weeping lady in black.
On 29th January, 1884, Miss Morton spoke to her inmate, as the lady in black stood beside a sofa. “She only gave a slight gasp and moved towards the door. Just by the door I spoke to her again, but she seemed as if she were quite unable to speak.” {199} In May and June Miss Morton fastened strings at different heights from the stair railings to the wall, where she attached them with glue, but she twice saw the lady pass through the cords, leaving them untouched. When Miss Morton cornered the figure and tried to touch her, or pounce on her, she dodged, or disappeared. But by a curious contradiction her steps were often heard by several of the family, and when she heard the steps, Miss Morton used to go out and follow the figure. There is really no more to tell. Miss Morton’s father never saw the lady, even when she sat on a sofa for half an hour, Miss Morton watching her. Other people saw her in the garden crying, and sent messages to ask what was the matter, and who was the lady in distress. Many members of the family, boys, girls, married ladies, servants and others often saw the lady in black. In 1885 loud noises, bumps and turning of door handles were common, and though the servants were told that the lady was quite harmless, they did not always stay. The whole establishment of servants was gradually changed, but the lady still walked. She appeared more seldom in 1887-1889, and by 1892 even the light footsteps ceased. Two dogs, a retriever and a Skye terrier, showed much alarm. “Twice,” says Miss Morton, “I saw the terrier suddenly run up to the mat at the foot of the stairs in the hall, wagging its tail, and moving its back in the way dogs do when they expect to be caressed. It jumped up, fawning as it would do if a person had been standing there, but suddenly slunk away with its tail between its legs, and retreated, trembling, under a sofa.” Miss Morton’s own emotion, at first, was “a feeling of awe at something unknown, mixed with a strong desire to know more about it”. {200}
This is a pretty tame case of haunting, as was conjectured, by an unhappy revenant, the returned spirit of the second Mrs. S. Here it may be remarked that apparitions in haunted houses are very seldom recognised as those of dead persons, and, when recognised, the recognition is usually dubious. Thus, in February, 1897, Lieutenant Carr Glyn, of the Grenadiers, while reading in the outer room of the Queen’s Library in Windsor, saw a lady in black in a kind of mantilla of black lace pass from the inner room into a corner where she was lost to view. He supposed that she had gone out by a door there, and asked an attendant later who she was. There was no door round the corner, and, in the opinion of some, the lady was Queen Elizabeth! She has a traditional habit, it seems, of haunting the Library. But surely, of all people, in dress and aspect Queen Elizabeth is most easily recognised. The seer did not recognise her, and she was probably a mere casual hallucination. In old houses such traditions are common, but vague. In this connection Glamis is usually mentioned. Every one has heard of the Secret Chamber, with its mystery, and the story was known to Scott, who introduces it in The Betrothed. But we know when the Secret Chamber was built (under the Restoration), who built it, what he paid the masons, and where it is: under the Charter Room. {201} These cold facts rather take the “weird” effect off the Glamis legend.
The usual process is, given an old house, first a noise, then a hallucination, actual or pretended, then a myth to account for the hallucination. There is a castle on the border which has at least seven or eight distinct ghosts. One is the famous Radiant Boy. He has been evicted by turning his tapestried chamber into the smoking- room. For many years not one ghost has been seen except the lady with the candle, viewed by myself, but, being ignorant of the story, I thought she was one of the maids. Perhaps she was, but she went into an empty set of rooms, and did not come out again. Footsteps are apt to approach the doors of these rooms in mirk midnight, the door handle turns, and that is all.
So much for supposed hauntings by spirits of the dead.
At the opposite pole are hauntings by agencies whom nobody supposes to be ghosts of inmates of the house. The following is an extreme example, as the haunter proceeded to arson. This is not so very unusual, and, if managed by an impostor, shows insane malevolence. {202}
THE DANCING DEVIL
On 16th November, 1870, Mr. Shchapoff, a Russian squire, the narrator, came home from a visit to a country town, Iletski, and found his family in some disarray. There lived with him his mother and his wife’s mother, ladies of about sixty-nine, his wife, aged twenty, and his baby daughter. The ladies had been a good deal disturbed. On the night of the 14th, the baby was fractious, and the cook, Maria, danced and played the harmonica to divert her. The baby fell asleep, the wife and Mr. Shchapoff’s miller’s lady were engaged in conversation, when a shadow crossed the blind on the outside. They were about to go out and see who was passing, when they heard a double shuffle being executed with energy in the loft overhead. They thought Maria, the cook, was making a night of it, but found her asleep in the kitchen. The dancing went on but nobody could be found in the loft. Then raps began on the window panes, and so the miller and gardener patrolled outside. Nobody!
Raps and dancing lasted through most of the night and began again at ten in the morning. The ladies were incommoded and complained of broken sleep. Mr. Shchapoff, hearing all this, examined the miller, who admitted the facts, but attributed them to a pigeon’s nest, which he had found under the cornice. Satisfied with this rather elementary hypothesis, Mr. Shchapoff sat down to read Livingstone’s African Travels. Presently the double shuffle sounded in the loft. Mrs. Shchapoff was asleep in her bedroom, but was awakened by loud raps. The window was tapped at, deafening thumps were dealt at the outer wall, and the whole house thrilled. Mr. Shchapoff rushed out with dogs and a gun, there were no footsteps in the snow, the air was still, the full moon rode in a serene sky. Mr. Shchapoff came back, and the double shuffle was sounding merrily in the empty loft. Next day was no better, but the noises abated and ceased gradually.
Alas, Mr. Shchapoff could not leave well alone. On 20th December, to amuse a friend, he asked Maria to dance and play. Raps, in tune, began on the window panes. Next night they returned, while boots, slippers, and other objects, flew about with a hissing noise. A piece of stuff would fly up and fall with a heavy hard thud, while hard bodies fell soundless as a feather. The performances slowly died away.
On Old Year’s Night Maria danced to please them; raps began, people watching on either side of a wall heard the raps on the other side. On 8th January, Mrs. Shchapoff fainted when a large, luminous ball floated, increasing in size, from under her bed. The raps now followed her about by day, as in the case of John Wesley’s sisters. On these occasions she felt weak and somnolent. Finally Mr. Shchapoff carried his family to his town house for much-needed change of air.
Science, in the form of Dr. Shustoff, now hinted that electricity or magnetic force was at the bottom of the annoyances, a great comfort to the household, who conceived that the devil was concerned. The doctor accompanied his friends to their country house for a night, Maria was invited to oblige with a dance, and only a few taps on windows followed. The family returned to town till 21st January. No sooner was Mrs. Shchapoff in bed than knives and forks came out of a closed cupboard and flew about, occasionally sticking in the walls.
On 24th January the doctor abandoned the hypothesis of electricity, because the noises kept time to profane but not to sacred music. A Tartar hymn by a Tartar servant, an Islamite, had no accompaniment, but the Freischutz was warmly encored.
This went beyond the most intelligent spontaneous exercises of electricity. Questions were asked of the agencies, and to the interrogation, “Are you a devil?” a most deafening knock replied. “We all jumped backwards.”
Now comes a curious point. In the Wesley and Tedworth cases, the masters of the houses, like the cure of Cideville (1851), were at odds with local “cunning men”.
Mr. Shchapoff’s fiend now averred that he was “set on” by the servant of a neighbouring miller, with whom Mr. Shchapoff had a dispute about a mill pond. This man had previously said, “It will be worse; they will drag you by the hair”. And, indeed, Mrs. Shchapoff was found in tears, because her hair had been pulled. {205}
Science again intervened. A section of the Imperial Geographical Society sent Dr. Shustoff, Mr. Akutin (a Government civil engineer), and a literary gentleman, as a committee of inquiry appointed by the governor of the province. They made a number of experiments with Leyden jars, magnets, and so forth, with only negative results. Things flew about, both _from_, and _towards_ Mrs. Shchapoff. Nothing volatile was ever seen to _begin_ its motion, though, in March, 1883, objects were seen, by a policeman and six other witnesses, to fly up from a bin and out of a closed cupboard, in a house at Worksop. {206} Mr. Akutin, in Mrs. Shchapoff’s bedroom, found the noises answer questions in French and German, on contemporary politics, of which the lady of the house knew nothing. Lassalle was said to be alive, Mr. Shchapoff remarked, “What nonsense!” but Mr. Akutin corrected him. The bogey was better informed. The success of the French in the great war was predicted.
The family now moved to their town house, and the inquest continued, though the raps were only heard near the lady. A Dr. Dubinsky vowed that she made them herself, with her tongue; then, with her pulse. The doctor assailed, and finally shook the faith of Mr. Akutin, who was to furnish a report. “He bribed a servant boy to say that his mistress made the sounds herself, and then pretended that he had caught her trying to deceive us by throwing things.” Finally Mr. Akutin reported that the whole affair was a hysterical imposition by Mrs. Shchapoff. Dr. Dubinsky attended her, her health and spirits improved, and the disturbances ceased. But poor Mr. Shchapoff received an official warning not to do it again, from the governor of his province. That way lies Siberia.
“Imagine, then,” exclaims Mr. Shchapoff, “our horror, when, on our return to the country in March, the unknown force at once set to work again. And now even my wife’s presence was not essential. Thus, one day, I saw with my own eyes a heavy sofa jump off all four legs (three or four times in fact), and this when my aged mother was lying on it.” The same thing occurred to Nancy Wesley’s bed, on which she was sitting while playing cards in 1717. The picture of a lady of seventy, sitting tight to a bucking sofa, appeals to the brave.
Then the fire-raising began. A blue spark flew out of a wash-stand, into Mrs. Shchapoff’s bedroom. Luckily she was absent, and her mother, rushing forward with a water-jug, extinguished a flaming cotton dress. Bright red globular meteors now danced in the veranda. Mr. Portnoff next takes up the tale as follows, Mr. Shchapoff having been absent from home on the occasion described.
“I was sitting playing the guitar. The miller got up to leave, and was followed by Mrs. Shchapoff. Hardly had she shut the door, when I heard, as though from far off, a deep drawn wail. The voice seemed familiar to me. Overcome with an unaccountable horror I rushed to the door, and there in the passage I saw a literal pillar of fire, in the middle of which, draped in flame, stood Mrs. Shchapoff. . . . I rushed to put it out with my hands, but I found it burned them badly, as if they were sticking to burning pitch. A sort of cracking noise came from beneath the floor, which also shook and vibrated violently.” Mr. Portnoff and the miller “carried off the unconscious victim”.
Mr. Shchapoff also saw a small pink hand, like a child’s, spring from the floor, and play with Mrs. Shchapoff’s coverlet, in bed. These things were too much; the Shchapoffs fled to a cottage, and took a new country house. They had no more disturbances. Mrs. Shchapoff died in child-bed, in 1878, “a healthy, religious, quiet, affectionate woman”.
CHAPTER X
Modern Hauntings
The Shchapoff Story of a Peculiar Type. “Demoniacal Possession.” Story of Wellington Mill briefly analysed. Authorities for the Story. Letters. A Journal. The Wesley Ghost. Given Critically and Why. Note on similar Stories, such as the Drummer of Tedworth. Sir Waller Scott’s Scepticism about Nautical Evidence. Lord St. Vincent. Scott asks Where are his Letters on a Ghostly Disturbance. The Letters are now Published. Lord St. Vincent’s Ghost Story. Reflections.
Cases like that of Mrs. Shchapoff really belong to a peculiar species of haunted houses. Our ancestors, like the modern Chinese, attributed them to diabolical possession, not to an ordinary ghost of a dead person. Examples are very numerous, and have all the same “symptoms,” as Coleridge would have said, he attributing them to a contagious nervous malady of observation in the spectators. Among the most notorious is the story of Willington Mill, told by Howitt, and borrowed by Mrs. Crowe, in The Night Side of Nature. Mr. Procter, the occupant, a Quaker, vouched to Mrs. Crowe for the authenticity of Howitt’s version. (22nd July, 1847.) Other letters from seers are published, and the Society of Psychical Research lately printed Mr. Procter’s contemporary journal. A man, a woman, and a monkey were the chief apparitions. There were noises, lights, beds were heaved about: nothing was omitted. A clairvoyante was turned on, but could only say that the spectral figures, which she described, “had no brains”. After the Quakers left the house there seems to have been no more trouble. The affair lasted for fifteen years.
Familiar as it is, we now offer the old story of the hauntings at Epworth, mainly because a full view of the inhabitants, the extraordinary family of Wesley, seems necessary to an understanding of the affair. The famous and excessively superstitious John Wesley was not present on the occasion.
THE WESLEY GHOST
No ghost story is more celebrated than that of Old Jeffrey, the spirit so named by Emily Wesley, which disturbed the Rectory at Epworth, chiefly in the December of 1716 and the spring of 1717. Yet the vagueness of the human mind has led many people, especially journalists, to suppose that the haunted house was that, not of Samuel Wesley, but of his son John Wesley, the founder of the Wesleyan Methodists. For the better intelligence of the tale, we must know who the inmates of the Epworth Rectory were, and the nature of their characters and pursuits. The rector was the Rev. Samuel Wesley, born in 1662, the son of a clergyman banished from his living on “Black Bartholomew Day,” 1666. Though educated among Dissenters, Samuel Wesley converted himself to the truth as it is in the Church of England, became a “poor scholar” of Exeter College in Oxford, supported himself mainly by hack-work in literature (he was one of the editors of a penny paper called The Athenian Mercury, a sort of Answers), married Miss Susanna Annesley, a lady of good family, in 1690-91, and in 1693 was presented to the Rectory of Epworth in Lincolnshire by Mary, wife of William of Orange, to whom he had dedicated a poem on the life of Christ. The living was poor, Mr. Wesley’s family multiplied with amazing velocity, he was in debt, and unpopular. His cattle were maimed in 1705, and in 1703 his house was burned down. The Rectory House, of which a picture is given in Clarke’s Memoirs of the Wesleys, 1825, was built anew at his own expense. Mr. Wesley was in politics a strong Royalist, but having seen James II. shake “his lean arm” at the Fellows of Magdalen College, and threaten them “with the weight of a king’s right hand,” he conceived a prejudice against that monarch, and took the side of the Prince of Orange. His wife, a very pious woman and a strict disciplinarian, was a Jacobite, would not say “amen” to the prayers for “the king,” and was therefore deserted by her husband for a year or more in 1701-1702. They came together again, however, on the accession of Queen Anne.
Unpopular for his politics, hated by the Dissenters, and at odds with the “cunning men,” or local wizards against whom he had frequently preached, Mr. Wesley was certainly apt to have tricks played on him by his neighbours. His house, though surrounded by a wall, a hedge, and its own grounds, was within a few yards of the nearest dwelling in the village street.
In 1716, when the disturbances began, Mr. Wesley’s family consisted of his wife; his eldest son, Sam, aged about twenty-three, and then absent at his duties as an usher at Westminster; John, aged twelve, a boy at Westminster School; Charles, a boy of eight, away from home, and the girls, who were all at the parsonage. They were Emily, about twenty-two, Mary, Nancy and Sukey, probably about twenty-one, twenty and nineteen, and Hetty, who may have been anything between nineteen and twelve, but who comes after John in Dr. Clarke’s list, and is apparently reckoned among “the children”. {212} Then there was Patty, who may have been only nine, and little Keziah.
All except Patty were very lively young people, and Hetty, afterwards a copious poet, “was gay and sprightly, full of mirth, good-humour, and keen wit. She indulged this disposition so much that it was said to have given great uneasiness to her parents.” The servants, Robin Brown, Betty Massy and Nancy Marshall, were recent comers, but were acquitted by Mrs. Wesley of any share in the mischief. The family, though, like other people of their date, they were inclined to believe in witches and “warnings,” were not especially superstitious, and regarded the disturbances, first with some apprehension, then as a joke, and finally as a bore.
The authorities for what occurred are, first, a statement and journal by Mr. Wesley, then a series of letters of 1717 to Sam at Westminster by his mother, Emily and Sukey, next a set of written statements made by these and other witnesses to John Wesley in 1726, and last and worst, a narrative composed many years after by John Wesley for The Arminian Magazine.
The earliest document, by a few days, is the statement of Mr. Wesley, written, with a brief journal, between 21st December, 1716, and 1st January, 1717. Comparing this with Mrs. Wesley’s letter to Sam of 12th January, 1716 and Sukey’s letter of 24th January, we learn that the family for some weeks after 1st December had been “in the greatest panic imaginable,” supposing that Sam, Jack, or Charlie (who must also have been absent from home) was dead, “or by some misfortune killed”. The reason for these apprehensions was that on the night of 1st December the maid “heard at the dining-room door several dreadful groans, like a person in extremes”. They laughed at her, but for the whole of December “the groans, squeaks, tinglings and knockings were frightful enough”. The rest of the family (Mr. Wesley always excepted) “heard a strange knocking in divers places,” chiefly in the green room, or nursery, where (apparently) Hetty, Patty and Keziah lay. Emily heard the noises later than some of her sisters, perhaps a week after the original groans. She was locking up the house about ten o’clock when a sound came like the smashing and splintering of a huge piece of coal on the kitchen floor. She and Sukey went through the rooms on the ground floor, but found the dog asleep, the cat at the other end of the house, and everything in order. From her bedroom Emily heard a noise of breaking the empty bottles under the stairs, but was going to bed, when Hetty, who had been sitting on the lowest step of the garret stairs beside the nursery door, waiting for her father, was chased into the nursery by a sound as of a man passing her in a loose trailing gown. Sukey and Nancy were alarmed by loud knocks on the outside of the dining-room door and overhead. All this time Mr. Wesley heard nothing, and was not even told that anything unusual was heard. Mrs. Wesley at first held her peace lest he should think it “according to the vulgar opinion, a warning against his own death, which, indeed, we all apprehended”. Mr. Wesley only smiled when he was informed; but, by taking care to see all the girls safe in bed, sufficiently showed his opinion that the young ladies and their lovers were the ghost. Mrs. Wesley then fell back on the theory of rats, and employed a man to blow a horn as a remedy against these vermin. But this measure only aroused the emulation of the sprite, whom Emily began to call “Jeffrey”.
Not till 21st December did Mr. Wesley hear anything, then came thumpings on his bedroom wall. Unable to discover the cause, he procured a stout mastiff, which soon became demoralised by his experiences. On the morning of the 24th, about seven o’clock, Emily led Mrs. Wesley into the nursery, where she heard knocks on and under the bedstead; these sounds replied when she knocked. Something “like a badger, with no head,” says Emily; Mrs. Wesley only says, “like a badger,” ran from under the bed. On the night of the 25th there was an appalling vacarme. Mr. and Mrs. Wesley went on a tour of inspection, but only found the mastiff whining in terror. “We still heard it rattle and thunder in every room above or behind us, locked as well as open, except my study, where as yet it never came.” On the night of the 26th Mr. Wesley seems to have heard of a phenomenon already familiar to Emily–“something like the quick winding up of a jack, at the corner of the room by my bed head”. This was always followed by knocks, “hollow and loud, such as none of us could ever imitate”. Mr. Wesley went into the nursery, Hetty, Kezzy and Patty were asleep. The knocks were loud, beneath and in the room, so Mr. Wesley went below to the kitchen, struck with his stick against the rafters, and was answered “as often and as loud as I knocked”. The peculiar knock which was his own, 1-23456-7, was not successfully echoed at that time. Mr. Wesley then returned to the nursery, which was as tapageuse as ever. The children, three, were trembling in their sleep. Mr. Wesley invited the agency to an interview in his study, was answered by one knock outside, “all the rest were within,” and then came silence. Investigations outside produced no result, but the latch of the door would rise and fall, and the door itself was pushed violently back against investigators.
“I have been with Hetty,” says Emily, “when it has knocked under her, and when she has removed has followed her,” and it knocked under little Kezzy, when “she stamped with her foot, pretending to scare Patty.”
Mr. Wesley had requested an interview in his study, especially as the Jacobite goblin routed loudly “over our heads constantly, when we came to the prayers for King George and the prince”. In his study the agency pushed Mr. Wesley about, bumping him against the corner of his desk, and against his door. He would ask for a conversation, but heard only “two or three feeble squeaks, a little louder than the chirping of a bird, but not like the noise of rats, which I have often heard”.
Mr. Wesley had meant to leave home for a visit on Friday, 28th December, but the noises of the 27th were so loud that he stayed at home, inviting the Rev. Mr. Hoole, of Haxey, to view the performances. “The noises were very boisterous and disturbing this night.” Mr. Hoole says (in 1726, confirmed by Mrs. Wesley, 12th January, 1717) that there were sounds of feet, trailing gowns, raps, and a noise as of planing boards: the disturbance finally went outside the house and died away. Mr. Wesley seems to have paid his visit on the 30th, and notes, “1st January, 1717. My family have had no disturbance since I went away.”
To judge by Mr. Wesley’s letter to Sam, of 12th January, there was no trouble between the 29th of December and that date. On the 19th of January, and the 30th of the same month, Sam wrote, full of curiosity, to his father and mother. Mrs. Wesley replied (25th or 27th January), saying that no explanation could be discovered, but “it commonly was nearer Hetty than the rest”. On 24th January, Sukey said “it is now pretty quiet, but still knocks at prayers for the king.” On 11th February, Mr. Wesley, much bored by Sam’s inquiries, says, “we are all now quiet. . . . It would make a glorious penny book for Jack Dunton,” his brother-in-law, a publisher of popular literature, such as the Athenian Mercury. Emily (no date) explains the phenomena as the revenge for her father’s recent sermons “against consulting those that are called cunning men, which our people are given to, and _it had a particular spite at my father_”.
The disturbances by no means ended in the beginning of January, nor at other dates when a brief cessation made the Wesleys hope that Jeffrey had returned to his own place. Thus on 27th March, Sukey writes to Sam, remarking that as Hetty and Emily are also writing “so particularly,” she need not say much. “One thing I believe you do not know, that is, last Sunday, to my father’s no small amazement, his trencher danced upon the table a pretty while, without anybody’s stirring the table. . . . Send me some news for we are excluded from the sight or hearing of any versal thing, except Jeffery.”
The last mention of the affair, at this time, is in a letter from Emily, of 1st April, to a Mr. Berry.
“Tell my brother the sprite was with us last night, and heard by many of our family.” There are no other contemporary letters preserved, but we may note Mrs. Wesley’s opinion (25th January) that it was “beyond the power of any human being to make such strange and various noises”.
The next evidence is ten years after date, the statements taken down by Jack Wesley in 1726 (1720?). Mrs. Wesley adds to her former account that she “earnestly desired it might not disturb her” (at her devotions) “between five and six in the evening,” and it did not rout in her room at that time. Emily added that a screen was knocked at on each side as she went round to the other. Sukey mentioned the noise as, on one occasion, coming gradually from the garret stairs, outside the nursery door, up to Hetty’s bed, “who trembled strongly in her sleep. It then removed to the room overhead, where it knocked my father’s knock on the ground, as if it would beat the house down.” Nancy said that the noise used to follow her, or precede her, and once a bed, on which she sat playing cards, was lifted up under her several times to a considerable height. Robin, the servant, gave evidence that he was greatly plagued with all manner of noises and movements of objects.
John Wesley, in his account published many years after date in his Arminian Magazine, attributed the affair of 1716 to his father’s broken vow of deserting his mother till she recognised the Prince of Orange as king! He adds that the mastiff “used to tremble and creep away before the noise began”.
Some other peculiarities may be noted. All persons did not always hear the noises. It was three weeks before Mr. Wesley heard anything. “John and Kitty Maw, who lived over against us, listened several nights in the time of the disturbance, but could never hear anything.” Again, “The first time my mother ever heard any unusual noise at Epworth was long before the disturbance of old Jeffrey . . . the door and windows jarred very loud, and presently several distinct strokes, three by three, were struck. From that night it never failed to give notice in much the same manner, against any signal misfortune or illness of any belonging to the family,” writes Jack.
Once more, on 10th February, 1750, Emily (now Mrs. Harper) wrote to her brother John, “that wonderful thing called by us Jeffery, how certainly it calls on me against any extraordinary new affliction”.
This is practically all the story of Old Jeffrey. The explanations have been, trickery by servants (Priestley), contagious hallucinations (Coleridge), devilry (Southey), and trickery by Hetty Wesley (Dr. Salmon, of Trinity College, Dublin). Dr. Salmon points out that there is no evidence from Hetty; that she was a lively, humorous girl, and he conceives that she began to frighten the maids, and only reluctantly exhibited before her father against whom, however, Jeffrey developed “a particular spite”. He adds that certain circumstances were peculiar to Hetty, which, in fact, is not the case. The present editor has examined Dr. Salmon’s arguments in The Contemporary Review, and shown reason, in the evidence, for acquitting Hetty Wesley, who was never suspected by her family.
Trickery from without, by “the cunning men,” is an explanation which, at least, provides a motive, but how the thing could be managed from without remains a mystery. Sam Wesley, the friend of Pope, and Atterbury, and Lord Oxford, not unjustly said: “Wit, I fancy, might find many interpretations, but wisdom none”. {220}
As the Wesley tale is a very typical instance of a very large class, our study of it may exempt us from printing the well-known parallel case of “The Drummer of Tedworth”. Briefly, the house of Mr. Mompesson, near Ludgarshal, in Wilts, was disturbed in the usual way, for at least two years, from April, 1661, to April, 1663, or later. The noises, and copious phenomena of moving objects apparently untouched, were attributed to the unholy powers of a wandering drummer, deprived by Mr. Mompesson of his drum. A grand jury presented the drummer for trial, on a charge of witchcraft, but the petty jury would not convict, there being a want of evidence to prove threats, malum minatum, by the drummer. In 1662 the Rev. Joseph Glanvil, F.R.S., visited the house, and, in the bedroom of Mr. Mompesson’s little girls, the chief sufferers, heard and saw much the same phenomena as the elder Wesley describes in his own nursery. The “little modest girls” were aged about seven and eight. Charles II. sent some gentlemen to the house for one night, when nothing occurred, the disturbances being intermittent. Glanvil published his narrative at the time, and Mr. Pepys found it “not very convincing”. Glanvil, in consequence of his book, was so vexed by correspondents “that I have been haunted almost as bad as Mr. Mompesson’s house”. A report that imposture had been discovered, and confessed by Mr. Mompesson, was set afloat, by John Webster, in a well-known work, and may still be found in modern books. Glanvil denied it till he was “quite tired,” and Mompesson gave a formal denial in a letter dated Tedworth, 8th November, 1672. He also, with many others, swore to the facts on oath, in court, at the drummer’s trial. {221}
In the Tedworth case, as at Epworth, and in the curious Cideville case of 1851, a quarrel with “cunning men” preceded the disturbances. In Lord St. Vincent’s case, which follows, nothing of the kind is reported. As an almost universal rule children, especially girls of about twelve, are centres of the trouble; in the St. Vincent story, the children alone were exempt from annoyance.
LORD ST. VINCENT’S GHOST STORY
Sir Walter Scott, writing about the disturbances in the house occupied by Mrs. Ricketts, sister of the great admiral, Lord St. Vincent, asks: “Who has seen Lord St. Vincent’s letters?” He adds that the gallant admiral, after all, was a sailor, and implies that “what the sailor said” (if he said anything) “is not evidence”.
The fact of unaccountable disturbances which finally drove Mrs. Ricketts out of Hinton Ampner, is absolutely indisputable, though the cause of the annoyances may remain as mysterious as ever. The contemporary correspondence (including that of Lord St. Vincent, then Captain Jervis) exists, and has been edited by Mrs. Henley Jervis, grand-daughter of Mrs. Ricketts. {222}
There is only the very vaguest evidence for hauntings at Lady Hillsborough’s old house of Hinton Ampner, near Alresford, before Mr. Ricketts took it in January, 1765. He and his wife were then disturbed by footsteps, and sounds of doors opening and shutting. They put new locks on the doors lest the villagers had procured keys, but this proved of no avail. The servants talked of seeing appearances of a gentleman in drab and of a lady in silk, which Mrs. Ricketts disregarded. Her husband went to Jamaica in the autumn of 1769, and in 1771 she was so disturbed that her brother, Captain Jervis, a witness of the phenomena, insisted on her leaving the house in August. He and Mrs. Ricketts then wrote to Mr. Ricketts about the affair. In July, 1772, Mrs. Ricketts wrote a long and solemn description of her sufferings, to be given to her children.
We shall slightly abridge her statement, in which she mentions that when she left Hinton she had not one of the servants who came thither in her family, which “evinces the impossibility of a confederacy”. Her new, like her former servants, were satisfactory; Camis, her new coachman, was of a yeoman house of 400 years’ standing. It will be observed that Mrs. Ricketts was a good deal annoyed even _before_ 2nd April, 1771, the day when she dates the beginning of the worst disturbances. She believed that the agency was human–a robber or a practical joker–and but slowly and reluctantly became convinced that the “exploded” notion of an abnormal force might be correct. We learn that while Captain Jervis was not informed of the sounds he never heard them, and whereas Mrs. Ricketts heard violent noises after he went to bed on the night of his vigil, he heard nothing. “Several instances occurred where very loud noises were heard by one or two persons, when those equally near and in the same direction were not sensible of the least impression.” {223}
With this preface, Mrs. Ricketts may be allowed to tell her own tale.
“Sometime after Mr. Ricketts left me (autumn, 1769) I–then lying in the bedroom over the kitchen–heard frequently the noise of some one walking in the room within, and the rustling as of silk clothes against the door that opened into my room, sometimes so loud, and of such continuance as to break my rest. Instant search being often made, we never could discover any appearance of human or brute being. Repeatedly disturbed in the same manner, I made it my constant practice to search the room and closets within, and to secure the only door on the inside. . . . Yet this precaution did not preclude the disturbance, which continued with little interruption.”
Nobody, in short, could enter this room, except by passing through that of Mrs. Ricketts, the door of which “was always made fast by a drawn bolt”. Yet somebody kept rustling and walking in the inner room, which somebody could never be found when sought for.
In summer, 1770, Mrs. Ricketts heard someone walk to the foot of her bed in her own room, “the footsteps as distinct as ever I heard, myself perfectly awake and collected”. Nobody could be discovered in the chamber. Mrs. Ricketts boldly clung to her room, and was only now and then disturbed by “sounds of harmony,” and heavy thumps, down stairs. After this, and early in 1771, she was “frequently sensible of a hollow murmuring that seemed to possess the whole house: it was independent of wind, being equally heard on the calmest nights, and it was a sound I had never been accustomed to hear”.
On 27th February, 1771, a maid was alarmed by “groans and fluttering round her bed”: she was “the sister of an eminent grocer in Alresford”. On 2nd April, Mrs. Ricketts heard people walking in the lobby, hunted for burglars, traced the sounds to a room whence their was no outlet, and found nobody. This kind of thing went on till Mrs. Ricketts despaired of any natural explanation. After mid-summer, 1771, the trouble increased, in broad daylight, and a shrill female voice, answered by two male voices was added to the afflictions. Captain Jervis came on a visit, but was told of nothing, and never heard anything. After he went to Portsmouth, “the most deep, loud tremendous noise seemed to rush and fall with infinite velocity and force on the lobby floor adjoining my room,” accompanied by a shrill and dreadful shriek, seeming to proceed from under the spot where the rushing noise fell, and repeated three or four times.
Mrs. Ricketts’ “resolution remained firm,” but her health was impaired; she tried changing her room, without results. The disturbances pursued her. Her brother now returned. She told him nothing, and he heard nothing, but next day she unbosomed herself. Captain Jervis therefore sat up with Captain Luttrell and his own man. He was rewarded by noises which he in vain tried to pursue. “I should do great injustice to my sister” (he writes to Mr. Ricketts on 9th August, 1771), “if I did not acknowledge to have heard what I could not, after the most diligent search and serious reflection, any way account for.” Captain Jervis during a whole week slept by day, and watched, armed, by night. Even by day he was disturbed by a sound as of immense weights falling from the ceiling to the floor of his room. He finally obliged his sister to leave the house.
What occurred after Mrs. Ricketts abandoned Hinton is not very distinct. Apparently Captain Jervis’s second stay of a week, when he did hear the noises, was from 1st August to 8th August. From a statement by Mrs. Ricketts it appears that, when her brother joined his ship, the Alarm (9th August), she retired to Dame Camis’s house, that of her coachman’s mother. Thence she went, and made another attempt to live at Hinton, but was “soon after assailed by a noise I never before heard, very near me, and the terror I felt not to be described”. She therefore went to the Newbolts, and thence to the old Palace at Winton; later, on Mr. Ricketts’ return, to the Parsonage, and then to Longwood (to the _old_ house there) near Alresford.
Meanwhile, on 18th September, Lady Hillsborough’s agent lay with armed men at Hinton, and, making no discovery, offered 50 pounds (increased by Mr. Ricketts to 100 pounds) for the apprehension of the persons who caused the noises. The reward was never claimed. On 8th March, 1772, Camis wrote: “I am very sorry that we cannot find out the reason of the noise”; at other dates he mentions sporadic noises heard by his mother and another woman, including “the murmur”. A year after Mrs. Ricketts left a family named Lawrence took the house, and, according to old Lucy Camis, in 1818, Mr. Lawrence very properly threatened to dismiss any servant who spoke of the disturbances. The result of this sensible course was that the Lawrences left suddenly, at the end of the year–and the house was pulled down. Some old political papers of the Great Rebellion, and a monkey’s skull, not exhibited to any anatomist, are said to have been discovered under the floor of the lobby, or of one of the rooms. Mrs. Ricketts adds sadly, “The unbelief of Chancellor Hoadley went nearest my heart,” as he had previously a high opinion of her veracity. The Bishop of St. Asaph was incredulous, “on the ground that such means were unworthy of the Deity to employ”.
Probably a modern bishop would say that there were no noises at all, that every one who heard the sounds was under the influence of “suggestion,” caused first in Mrs. Ricketts’ own mind by vague tales of a gentleman in drab seen by the servants.
The contagion, to be sure, also reached two distinguished captains in the navy, but not till one of them was told about disturbances which had not previously disturbed him. If this explanation be true, it casts an unusual light on the human imagination. Physical science has lately invented a new theory. Disturbances of this kind are perhaps “seismic,”–caused by earthquakes! (See Professor Milne, in The Times, 21st June, 1897.)
CHAPTER XI
A Question for Physicians. Professor William James’s Opinion. Hysterical Disease? Little Hands. Domestic Arson. The Wem Case. “The Saucepan began it.” The Nurse-maid. Boots Fly Off. Investigation. Emma’s Partial Confession. Corroborative Evidence. Question of Disease Repeated. Chinese Cases. Haunted Mrs. Chang. Mr. Niu’s Female Slave. The Great Amherst Mystery. Run as a Show. Failure. Later Miracles. The Fire-raiser Arrested. Parallels. A Highland Case. A Hero of the Forty-Five. Donald na Bocan. Donald’s Hymn. Icelandic Cases. The Devil of Hjalta-stad. The Ghost at Garpsdal.
MORE HAUNTED HOUSES
A physician, as we have seen, got the better of the demon in Mrs. Shchapoff’s case, at least while the lady was under his care. Really these disturbances appear to demand the attention of medical men. If the whole phenomena are caused by imposture, the actors, or actresses, display a wonderful similarity of symptoms and an alarming taste for fire-raising. Professor William James, the well-known psychologist, mentions ten cases whose resemblances “suggest a natural type,” and we ask, is it a type of hysterical disease? {229} He chooses, among others, an instance in Dr. Nevius’s book on Demon Possession in China, and there is another in Peru. He also mentions The Great Amherst Mystery, which we give, and the Rerrick case in Scotland (1696), related by Telfer, who prints, on his margins, the names of the attesting witnesses of each event, lairds, clergymen, and farmers. At Rerrick, as in Russia, the _little hand_ was seen by Telfer himself, and the fire-raising was endless. At Amherst too, as in a pair of recent Russian cases and others, there was plenty of fire-raising. By a lucky chance an English case occurred at Wem, in Shropshire, in November, 1883. It began at a farm called the Woods, some ten miles from Shrewsbury. First a saucepan full of eggs “jumped” off the fire in the kitchen, and the tea-things, leaping from the table, were broken. Cinders “were thrown out of the fire,” and set some clothes in a blaze. A globe leaped off a lamp. A farmer, Mr. Lea, saw all the windows of the upper story “as it were on fire,” but it was no such matter. The nurse-maid ran out in a fright, to a neighbour’s, and her dress spontaneously combusted as she ran. The people attributed these and similar events, to something in the coal, or in the air, or to electricity. When the nurse-girl, Emma Davies, sat on the lap of the school mistress, Miss Maddox, her boots kept flying off, like the boot laces in The Daemon of Spraiton.
All this was printed in the London papers, and, on 15th November, The Daily Telegraph and Daily News published Emma’s confession that she wrought by sleight of hand and foot. On 17th November, Mr. Hughes went from Cambridge to investigate. For some reason investigation never begins till the fun is over. On the 9th the girl, now in a very nervous state (no wonder!) had been put under the care of a Dr. Mackey. This gentleman and Miss Turner said that things had occurred since Emma came, for which they could not account. On 13th November, however, Miss Turner, looking out of a window, spotted Emma throwing a brick, and pretending that the flight of the brick was automatic. Next day Emma confessed to her tricks, but steadfastly denied that she had cheated at Woods Farm, and Weston Lullingfield, where she had also been. Her evidence to this effect was so far confirmed by Mrs. Hampson of Woods Farm, and her servant, Priscilla Evans, when examined by Mr. Hughes. Both were “quite certain” that they saw crockery rise by itself into air off the kitchen table, when Emma was at a neighbouring farm, Mr. Lea’s. Priscilla also saw crockery come out of a cupboard, in detachments, and fly between her and Emma, usually in a slanting direction, while Emma stood by with her arms folded. Yet Priscilla was not on good terms with Emma. Unless, then, Mrs. Hampson and Priscilla fabled, it is difficult to see how Emma could move objects when she was “standing at some considerable distance, standing, in fact, in quite another farm”.
Similar evidence was given and signed by Miss Maddox, the schoolmistress, and Mr. and Mrs. Lea. On the other hand Mrs. Hampson and Priscilla believed that Emma managed the fire-raising herself. The flames were “very high and white, and the articles were very little singed”. This occurred also at Rerrick, in 1696, but Mr. Hughes attributes it to Emma’s use of paraffin, which does not apply to the Rerrick case. Paraffin smells a good deal–nothing is said about a smell of paraffin.
Only one thing is certain: Emma was at last caught in a cheat. This discredits her, but a man who cheats at cards _may_ hold a good hand by accident. In the same way, if such wonders can happen (as so much world-wide evidence declares), they _may_ have happened at Woods Farm, and Emma, “in a very nervous state,” _may_ have feigned then, or rather did feign them later.
The question for the medical faculty is: Does a decided taste for wilful fire-raising often accompany exhibitions of dancing furniture and crockery, gratuitously given by patients of hysterical temperament? This is quite a normal inquiry. Is there a nervous malady of which the symptoms are domestic arson, and amateur leger-de- main? The complaint, if it exists, is of very old standing and wide prevalence, including Russia, Scotland, New England, France, Iceland, Germany, China and Peru.
As a proof of the identity of symptoms in this malady, we give a Chinese case. The Chinese, as to diabolical possession, are precisely of the same opinion as the inspired authors of the Gospels. People are “possessed,” and, like the woman having a spirit of divination in the Acts of the Apostles, make a good thing out of it. Thus Mrs. Ku was approached by a native Christian. She became rigid and her demon, speaking through her, acknowledged the Catholic verity, and said that if Mrs. Ku were converted he would have to leave. On recovering her everyday consciousness, Mrs. Ku asked what Tsehwa, her demon, had said. The Christian told her, and perhaps she would have deserted her erroneous courses, but her fellow-villagers implored her to pay homage to the demon. They were in the habit of resorting to it for medical advice (as people do to Mrs. Piper’s demon in the United States), so Mrs. Ku decided to remain in the business. {232} The parallel to the case in the Acts is interesting.
HAUNTED MRS. CHANG
Mr. Chang, of that ilk (Chang Chang Tien-ts), was a man of fifty- seven, and a graduate in letters. The ladies of his family having accommodated a demon with a shrine in his house, Mr. Chang said he “would have none of that nonsense”. The spirit then entered into Mrs. Chang, and the usual fire-raising began all over the place. The furniture and crockery danced in the familiar way, and objects took to disappearing mysteriously, even when secured under lock and key. Mr. Chang was as unlucky as Mr. Chin. At _his_ house “doors would open of their own accord, footfalls were heard, as of persons walking in the house, although no one could be seen. Plates, bowls and the teapot would suddenly rise from the table into the air.” {233a}
Mrs. Chang now tried the off chance of there being something in Christianity, stayed with a native Christian (the narrator), and felt much better. She could enjoy her meals, and was quite a new woman. As her friend could not go home with her, Mrs. Fung, a native Christian, resided for a while at Mr. Chang’s; “comparative quiet was restored,” and Mrs. Fung retired to her family.
The symptoms returned; the native Christian was sent for, and found Mr. Chang’s establishment full of buckets of water for extinguishing the sudden fires. Mrs. Chang’s daughter-in-law was now possessed, and “drank wine in large quantities, though ordinarily she would not touch it”. She was staring and tossing her arms wildly; a service was held,