Hopkins’s authority was now established, and with a team of professional “prickers” — experts who claimed to be able, with long needles, to find the insensible spot on a witch’s body where the Devil had set his seal — he started traveling from town to town, quickly setting up shop, and after summary trials executing anywhere from one to dozens of witches. He was paid a generous fee by each village he visited, in large part determined by the number of witches he was able to deliver to the gallows. In Suffolk alone, he arrested 124 people on charges of witchcraft, and no less than 68 of them were executed.
And though most of the victims were elderly and impoverished women, men were suspect, too. In one case, a seventy-year-old clergyman, John Lowes, was arrested. His parish in Brandeston had grown weary of him, and when he refused to give up his post voluntarily, the congregation charged him with being a witch. Hopkins had him “swum” in the castle moat, then dragged him out and forced him to march back and forth across a room until, collapsing in exhaustion, he confessed to being a wizard. Among other things, he volunteered that he had sent a yellow imp to sink a ship at sea, with the loss of 14 lives. Denied the traditional church rites, Lowes had to recite his own burial service on his way to the town gallows.
As Hopkins’s persecutions grew larger, wider, and ever more bloody, an opposition slowly began to form. A Parliamentary Commission was established that endorsed witch hunts but ruled out “swimming,” one of Hopkins’s favorite tortures. A prominent vicar, the Rev. John Gaule of Great Staughton, attacked him from the pulpit, and published an indictment of his brutal methods in a tract called Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcraft. Hopkins attempted to answer Gaule’s charges in a pamphlet of his own, The Discovery of Witchcraft, but the tide had begun to turn against him — and he knew it. Taking his ill-gotten gains, Hopkins quietly retired to his home in Manningtree, where he died in his bed, of tuberculosis, in 1647.
From ghoulies and ghosties and
Long-leggety beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!”
Scottish prayer
HARBINGERS OF DEATH
In every culture and in every land there were superstitions, signs, omens that foretold the coming of death. One, for instance, was the clock that stopped, or chimed unexpectedly between the hours; the disturbance in this normal marking of time signaled that Death was keeping an eye on the house. So, too, an ordinary candle could send a message; if the melting wax slid down the shaft in a broad sheet, like a shroud, a death was imminent. And birds were often considered harbingers of doom, or psychopomps, sent to convey a spirit from this world to the next. If a bird flew in through an open window, or beat his wings against a closed shutter; if an owl hooted ceaselessly nearby; if a raven deserted its flock and cawed beside the door—all of these were unhappy portents for anyone living within.
There were also ghostly figures that haunted the world, roaming the fields, the forests, the village streets, waiting to deliver their own dreaded news. And for a mortal, just setting eyes on one of these was oftentimes enough to call forth calamity.
THE ANKOU
In Brittany, a part of western France, a fearful spectre known as the Ankou traveled the roads at night, plodding along beside a creaking cart, pulled by a team of skeletal horses. Those inside a house or tavern could sometimes hear the rattling of the cart as it slowly passed by, and they were careful not even to peer outside, lest they catch the attention of the Ankou himself. To do so was surely to die.
Tall and haggard, with long white hair, wearing black clothes and the broad-brimmed hat of the Breton farmer, the Ankou carried a scythe, honed on a human bone, over one shoulder. He walked with the stiff gait of the blind — his eye sockets empty — twisting his head and sniffing the air for those foolish enough to have ignored the curfew bells. Who he was exactly remained unclear. By some accounts, he was Cain, the first man to have killed his brother, now doomed to wander the Earth for eternity, gathering up the other human dead. By other accounts, he was the ghost of the last man to have died in the previous year, returning to find new companions in the cold ground where he now lay. By all accounts, he was, in effect, the Reaper.
Most terrifying of all was to encounter the Ankou on the roads anytime between dusk and the hour just before dawn. Anyone caught unawares would be struck from behind and knocked face-first into the ground; the dirt they tasted then was like the dirt that would be flung on the lid of their coffin, within two years at the most. Those who met up with the Ankou very late at night were even less fortunate; they would be claimed within the month — their bodies, along with so many others, thrown into the wooden cart that was, miraculously, never filled.
BLACK SHUCK
He had many names, in many different parts of the British Isles — in Norfolk he was Black Shuck, in Suffolk the Galley Trot, in Lancashire Shriker, in Yorkshire Padfoot. But the descriptions were always the same — a huge shaggy dog, black as night, with saucerlike eyes that glowed red in the dark. A descendant, it is thought, of the hound of Odin (the Norse god of war), the spectral hound was seen on the coasts, the midlands, the fens and moors. Often he was seen prowling the country roads at night, looking for unlucky travelers who should have been home for the night. Those who saw him coming, and whom the dog saw in turn, he would fix with his baleful stare as he swelled up to the size of a calf before disappearing again into the darkness. But just to have seen him was more than enough: that traveler’s days were numbered, and few.
THE WILD HUNT
Sometimes the dog was not one, but many, and sometimes the pack of baying hounds was accompanied by a pack of spectral riders led by the Devil himself. Feared throughout northern Europe, the Wild Hunt took place on stormy midwinter nights, when the Devil enjoyed a midnight ride.
For company, he kept the souls of the tormented dead, who rode with him to fetch the souls of those still living. The yelping hounds were demons, or in some accounts the spirits of unbaptized children. The hunters would gallop through the air, horns blaring, spurs jangling, and anyone they found abroad and unprotected they swept up and transported to some far distant place, to be left, abandoned and lost. The only hope for anyone who heard them coming was to fall face-down on the ground and cling for dear life to any bush or branch in reach. Looking up was ill advised; the Devil could inflict instant death, madness, or any of a host of other misfortunes on anyone who caught his eye.
There were many stories to prove the point. According to one, a farmer was once returning late from the Widecombe Fair in Devon, and he wasn’t making much progress. For one thing, he’d had too much ale, and for another the night had turned stormy and cold. With his hat pulled down, and his horse barely able to find the trail, he was plodding along through the wind and rain when his horse suddenly stopped altogether.
The farmer looked up from under his hat and saw a pack of hounds dancing around the horse’s hooves. Just ahead of him was a coal-black horse, with a huntsman all in black mounted in the saddle; the hunter’s face was concealed by a broad-brimmed hat. Slung across his saddle were the carcasses of whatever he’d killed.
The farmer, still feeling the effects of the ale, laughed and said, “Huntsman, share your spoils,” and the huntsman, glancing down, laughed too. He lifted one of the parcels off his saddle, tossed it at the farmer, then abruptly turned his horse and rode off into the darkness.
The farmer ripped the covering away from the parcel, then nearly fell from his own horse in shock. What he thought he saw there, in the brief flash of lightning from overhead, was the body of his own young son. But a second later, when he wiped the rain from his eyes and looked again, all he saw there were his own shaking hands.
Suddenly sobered, he dug his heels into the flanks of his mare and galloped the rest of the way home. He had no sooner dismounted than his wife, wailing, emerged at the door, holding in her arms the lifeless body of their infant son.
THE BANSHEE
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bsp; In Scotland and Ireland, mortals had another strange vision to fear: the banshee (or “fairy woman”), who haunted remote streams and secret pools. There, she knelt by the water, endlessly beating bloodstained shrouds against the stones, wringing them dry, and singing to herself a mournful dirge. If a traveler was brave enough to speak to her, she would tell him the names of those who were soon to die — it was their shrouds she was washing — and if he insisted, she would tell him his own fate, too.
According to legend, the banshee, in life, had been a young woman who had died before her time in childbirth. She would go on laundering the shrouds of those who were soon to join her until the day came when she would have died a natural death herself. By other accounts, the banshee was the ghost of a family member, long deceased, who would appear when another member of the clan was about to die. Bony and white, with streaming hair and blood-red eyes, she would weep and wail outside the house at night. Her keening would pierce the very walls, and her face would appear at first one window and then the next. She was looking, it was said, for the one about to die, and when she found him or her, she would beckon. And the one to whom she had done so, the one who had seen the banshee crook her fleshless finger, had no choice but to follow.
Nor was moving the clan to far-off shores any assurance of escaping the banshee. In her book on the ancient legends of Ireland, Lady Wilde (Oscar’s mother) recounted the story of the O’Grady family, who traveled to Canada, away from the “mysterious influences of the old land of their forefathers.” If they had hoped to escape “the spirit of death,” they had not gone far enough; the Ban-Sidhe, as Lady Wilde spelled it, had apparently tracked them across the seas:
“. . . one night a strange and mournful lamentation was heard outside the house. No word was uttered, only a bitter cry, as of one in deepest agony and sorrow, floated through the air.
Inquiry was made, but no one had been seen near the house at the time, though several persons distinctly heard the weird, unearthly cry, and a terror fell upon the household, as if some supernatural influence had overshadowed them.
Next day it so happened that the gentleman and his eldest son went out boating. As they did not return, however, at the usual time for dinner, some alarm was excited, and messengers were sent down to the shore to look for them. But no tidings came until, precisely at the exact hour of the night when the spirit-cry had been heard the previous evening, a crowd of men were seen approaching the house, bearing with them the dead bodies of the father and the son, who had both been drowned by the accidental upsetting of the boat, within sight of land, but not near enough for any help to reach them in time.
Thus the Ban-Sidhe had fulfilled her mission of doom, after which she disappeared, and the cry of the spirit of death was heard no more.”
THE DOPPELGANGER
The frightful image seen at the window, or staring back from the mirror, could be your own — a double, or doppelganger (from the German for “double goer”), the sight of which could foretell your own imminent demise.
Sometimes described as the soul embodied, sometimes an astral projection or aura, the double most often presented itself as a warning. Queen Elizabeth I reportedly saw a vision of herself lying on her deathbed, pale and still, soon before she died. Goethe and Shelley also claimed to have seen their doubles, and when Catherine the Great of Russia saw her own coming toward her, she took no chances and ordered her soldiers to shoot at it.
Witches, it was long accepted, could project their own doubles and set them loose to do mischief far and wide. As a result, many a woman was hanged as a witch even though it could be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was somewhere else entirely when the barn burned down, the cow died, or whatever else had happened that she was now charged with having done.
On other occasions, a double—of someone else—could be called forth or seen. One old Halloween custom has it that if a young girl lights two candles before a mirror, while eating an apple, she will see in the mirror the spectral image of her future husband, peering back at her as if from over her shoulder. If she is brave enough to venture out to a graveyard, and walk all the way around it twelve times, she will meet up with the double itself.
According to another old belief, anyone who wants to know who will pass away in the coming year has only to stand vigil near the church door on April 24, the eve of the feast day of St. Mark. At midnight, the airy doubles of all who will die file in a solemn processional into the church. If the watcher is unlucky enough to see his own image there, he knows his own time is not far off.
To this day, the fear of the double is observed, if unknowingly, in the custom of covering all the mirrors in a house where a death has just occurred. The double of anyone passing the glass, it was once thought, could be projected into the mirror and carried off by the deceased to the afterworld.
THE SHIVERING BOY
At Triermain Castle, in Northumberland, it is not so much a sight as a touch that is to be feared . . . the touch of tiny, icy fingers, and a little boy’s voice whispering, “Cold, cold, forever more.”
The boy, legend has it, lived in the fifteenth century, and had inherited the castle when his father died. The uncle who was made the boy’s ward wanted the castle for himself, so he starved the boy until he was barely alive, then abandoned him on Thirwell Common in the midst of a winter storm. The boy perished in the snow.
But he returned to the castle in death, and walks the halls, teeth chattering, a spectral six-year-old shivering with the cold. If he enters the room of someone asleep, he may simply stand whimpering by the bed . . . or he may reach out and lay an ice-cold hand on the sleeper’s brow. To feel his touch, or see his sad little figure, is a portent of trouble to come.
CORPSE CANDLES
They were fleeting lights, sometimes white, sometimes blue or green, moving mysteriously in the night. Often they were seen in churchyards, and often, too, in bogs or marshes. Because they hovered at the height of a candle held by what should have been a human hand (but wasn’t), they were called, in Wales and some other countries, “corpse candles.” To see them was to be forewarned of your own coming death.
These dancing balls of eerie light had many other names, too — will-o’-the-wisp, jack-o’-lantern, elf light, St. Elmo’s fire (when seen at sea), friar’s lantern, fetch light, and ignis fatuus, or “foolish fire.” Even today, such lights are sometimes seen, but they are thought to be created by unusual atmospheric conditions, and the ignition of gases produced by the decay of plant or animal matter. In swamps, and for that matter old churchyards, such an explanation makes some sense. But it was not an explanation known to our ancestors. To them, the corpse candles were portents, or visitors from another world, here to do mischief in this one.
Stories abound of men and women foolish enough to track the beckoning flame. Travelers thinking it might be the light of a distant shelter followed it unknowingly into abysmal swamps, losing their way and falling into dense brush and treacherous waters. Germans thought the lights were the ghosts of those who had stolen land from their neighbors; Finns called them liekkio and believed they were the spirits of children who had been buried in the woods. In some northern European lands, the lights were thought to be the spirits of ancient warriors, still guarding the treasure that had been secreted in their burial mounds. But everyone agreed that following the lights was a dangerous and often deadly idea.
Virgil surrounded by devils.
GHOSTS OF ICY CLIMES
In Scandinavia and the northern countries of Europe, the full complement of spectral figures haunted the deep woods and valley towns. Lonely, sad, but unthreatening to mortals, these apparitions merely went their own way, traveling through the cold and dark on errands they would never in any lifetime complete. Among them were the ghosts of dead farmers, still trying in vain to perform their chores; the ghosts of poor elderly couples, who could be seen sitting together in the cottage where they had once lived, feeding peat to a fire that no longer burned; the ghosts of love
rs, walking arm in arm from the churchyard at night.
But there were other ghosts, too, who were not so harmless, ghosts who displayed a peculiar malevolence toward the living, toward those who had wronged them, and anyone else who still drew breath. Among these spirits that roamed the arctic night were . . .
SENDINGS
According to the magical lore of Iceland, those skilled in the black arts could make their own ghosts — called sendings — out of human bones. These ghosts were expressly made to perform murder, and one particular story points up their terrible intent.
An attractive widow living on her own farmland was courted by many men in the village, but she wasn’t interested in marrying any of them. All of them went their way except for one, a known wizard, who took her refusal hard.
On a warm afternoon, while the widow was preparing supper for her farmhands, she got an uneasy feeling. She was in the larder, and when she turned around she saw a black shadow, with a white spot at the center, creeping slowly across the wall. She knew it was a sending, and she stabbed it — in the white circle, the only vulnerable spot — with her kitchen knife. The knife instantly disappeared, and so did the shadow. It wasn’t until the next morning when she went into the yard that she found the knife again — piercing a broken human bone.
GROUNDED GHOSTS
In Denmark, anyone who wandered into an open field or meadow was warned to keep an eye out for wooden stakes or posts driven into the ground. Ghosts that had been exorcised were pressed down into the earth and held there by a wooden stake driven through their heart. If a passerby happened to disturb the stake, the ghost, anxious to be released again, would whisper eagerly, “You pull, and I will push!”
Fallen Angels . . . and Spirits of the Dark Page 11