The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

by Tara Moore

  I was returning from America in one of the Cunard boats. Sellar was a seaman on board, and spun for me many a yarn, ghostly and otherwise. I had lately witnessed some unaccountable spiritual manifestations in the States, and my natural scepticism on the question had, I confess, been considerably shaken—my mind was full of the subject, so that I listened with more interest than I might otherwise have done to this particular story, which greatly impressed me, not only from the man’s manner of telling it, but from its weird nature, and I never forgot it.

  Thus, when fate took me to the western crags of England in the autumn of 1877, and I came plump upon the nestling village of Porth Guerron, as most people do, before being aware of it, I recognised on the instant the feature in the landscape which marked it as the background to the legend I had heard from the lips of old Jacob.

  This was a tall isolated mass of almost inaccessible rock, standing about two hundred yards away from the western headland of the cove. I call it “isolated,” because it nearly always is so, for, except about an hour at the lowest of spring tides, in very calm weather, it is entirely cut off from the mainland. But on these occasions a narrow ridge of soft, sandy shingle is left bare, looking as if it would form an easy path to the rude promontory. Yet a little closer inspection soon shows this idea to be fallacious, inasmuch as, except by a boat, you cannot even reach the main shore end of the little causeway, jutting out as it does from the base of the sheer down cliff. Hence the Leopard’s Head, as the crag is named, is never scaled, being inaccessible except at the one spot where its rocky spurs lose themselves in the sand of the narrow connecting ridge; thus it is left to the undisputed possession of the myriad sea-birds that make it their home.

  The fishing-boats on their way to and from their anchorage in the cove always keep outside the Leopard’s Head, and are never tempted to make a short cut westward by passing between it and the main land. However high the tide or calm the sea, they avoid this narrow channel, with its treacherous, never-absent ground swell; for, apart from its natural dangers, the superstition runs to the effect that a malignant demon stretches a huge iron net across the opening. Invisible to him until his craft is entangled within its fatal meshes, the mariner who, from ignorance or hardihood, should attempt the passage will, it is declared, struggle in vain to extricate himself, and must inevitably founder. So ran the legend, as told to me by the old salt aforesaid.

  “Did he believe it?” I asked him.

  “Yes, indeed, he did,” he said; “he had good reason: he had seen the net once himself when a lad, and it was a terrible and strange business. It was the end of September, 1847, and a boat, during a heavy squall from the westward, was trying to make the cove by the short cut—and surely, just as she got betwixt the Leopard and the main land, in the Leopard’s grip as the channel is called, she seemed to kind o’ stick fast, although she had been running quite free the moment before. There was plenty of water, and she couldn’t hardly have struck on the bar or little beach-way. But, howsomever, whether she did or not, she couldn’t get through—the heavy seas broke over her of course, directly she was brought to—pooped her, in fact, and down she went with all hands, two men and a boy. The boy was my brother Isaac,” continued Jacob Sellar, looking very grave when telling me the tale; “but he was saved; that is, he was picked up in the cove senseless, but they managed to restore him to life; the other two was never found even. There’s a many curious things connected with that calamity, Sir, I can tell you,” he added, “one of which is that, it being pretty nigh dark at the time, nobody couldn’t exactly make out what did happen, ’cept that we all saw, as we stood on the beach, the net suddenly stretched across the channel, and could see that it was that as the craft got tangled in, as it brought her up, and turned her broadside on to the seas. The water was breaming at the time, you know, and this made the net plain to us, for it seemed to come up out of the sea just in front of the boat, and was sparkling all over its meshes just like silver, with the phosphorescent light.”

  “And you saw this?” I asked.

  “That I did, Sir, with these very eyes.”

  “And the boy, your brother, when he came to his senses, what had he to say about it?”

  “Ah! that’s where ’tis, you see, Sir—poor chap, he never did come rightly to his senses—it gave him such a scare as he never got over—he’s been kind o’ cracky like ever since. He’s a bit younger than I am, though elderly, you know, by this time. But he never quite got his wits back. He is harmless, don’t you know, but dazed and silly, ’specially at times.”

  “And he could never give any account of how the accident happened? How it was the boat came to grief in the Leopard’s Grip?”

  “No, Sir; he warn’t never able to tell nothing at all about it—never a word.”

  “Well,” I remarked, after a pause, “it was true the poor fellows lost their lives, anyhow, whether the devil caught them in his net or not?”

  “Yes, Sir; but another curious thing is, these two men—I remember them well—Tom Fenthall and Raymond Sass, were partners in the boat, and said to be great friends, and staunch to one another, but they were both in love with the same girl, Alice Dournelle, and it was said there had been words about her between ’em more than once, and especially just before they got lost. Another curious thing yet,” went on old Jacob, presently, “is that some of the people looking on declared that, as well as seeing the net as I have just told you, when the boat foundered, they saw one of the men get ashore on the lower rocks of the Leopard’s Head, and that he was seen standing there and waving his arms till night quite hid him.”

  “But could not they get him off?”

  “No; no boat durst go near the place in such a sea.”

  “And next morning?”

  “The next morning he was gone, been carried away again, if so be as he had ever been seen there at all—though I make no doubt he had.”

  “And the girl? What became of her?”

  “Ah! that’s the most curiousest part of it all,” said the seaman, growing graver and graver and slower and slower in his utterances; “more curious than anything I’ve told you yet, Sir; and this I’ve seen myself, too, many times before I came away to sea. Poor Alice Dournelle took on terribly when she knew her lover was drownded; for she gave the preference, it was said, to Raymond Sass. Howsomever, a couple of years afterwards she died, in a kind o’ decline, like; and she’s the phantom of Porth Guerron Cove.”

  “What? haunts the place, I suppose?” I said, smiling.

  “Yes; but you needn’t laugh, Sir. This is a fact. I tell you I’ve seen her more than a score of times; and I do hear she may be seen even now, specially in September—about the anniversary, as you may say.”

  “Well, what does one see? What did you see?”

  “Why, I’ve seen her standing in the dusk on the rocks of the Leopard, all lighted up by the phosphorus, just as if she had come out of the sea, as we saw the net that night. Well, I’ve seen her just so. I remember her by sight, when she was alive, quite well, and I’ve seen her looking just as she did then, only all lighted up, as I say. Lots of the Porth Guerron folk have seen her; and they’ll tell you so if you ever go there. My poor brother can always see her. He has a kind of gift that way. Like enough, you’d see her yourself.”

  “And what does she do?”

  “Oh! do? Why, she seems to come out of the sea, as I tell you, and stand on the rocks, and then she’ll go up higher and higher. Not seeming to clamber, but as if she was going up and up, as a spirit would, don’t you know—floating like: rising, rising, till she reaches the flattish top of the Leopard’s Head, and there she’ll stay for hours passing to and fro, breaming with the light all the time.”

  “Why, then, she makes a sort of lighthouse,” I said, still smiling; “a very useful phantom, truly.”

  “ ’Tain’t no good for you to laugh, Sir,” continued Jacob, yet more seriously, evidently not relishing my scepticism. “I tell you I’ve seen her over and over
again, as you may if you ever goes to Porth Guerron.”

  And now I was at Porth Guerron; and now, as I have said, the old salt’s story came back to my mind with a renewal of the interest it had originally created. The vexed question of how far we are permitted to have contact with the vast unseen has never ceased to interest me since my visit to the States, but a subsequent deep immersion in the stern realities of life had left me no opportunities for pursuing the subject. Here, however, was one at hand unexpectedly put before me; and, although I had attributed Jacob Sellar’s strong belief to the natural superstition of the Cornish people, there was, nevertheless, an earnestness in his manner, and an intelligence peeping out beneath his uncultured speech, which forbade one to disregard it; and since, for the present, I was a wanderer and my time all my own, some of it I determined should be spent upon the scene of the mystery. I have given but the barest outline of my talk with Sellar. It was resumed over and over again, and it elicited so many circumstantial details, that, if they were not the result of a too fervid imagination, the phantom of Porth Guerron Cove was a manifestation equal to anything I had ever heard of, and well worth investigating.

  Snug quarters at the little inn were readily obtained, and in the course of two or three days I had scraped acquaintance with many of the hearty, honest, kindly natives, including Jacob’s brother, old Isaac Sellar, the poor chap who had been “kind o’ cracky like” ever since that fatal time when he nearly lost his life in the Leopard’s Grip. He was quite a feature of the place, much respected by his fellow-villagers, and not at all incapable of work. But I was told he had periodical fits of abstraction and wandering, which seemed to lift him quite above the world, and gave him a dazed and incoherent manner; otherwise, he was a strong, fine-looking man with a long grey beard, and with quite the air of a prophet and seer, as he professed himself to be. He was also a preacher at times, when the spirit moved him; and though undoubtedly “kind o’ cracky,” he was by no means bereft of intelligence.

  All the fisher-folk were ready to talk about the phantom, and to believe in it; but I found very few after all, besides poor crazy Isaac, who admitted having seen it. In his garrulous, half-witted way, however, he was very strong on the point, throwing into it a sort of religious fervour, and they said it was the only one on which he was thoroughly sane. He confirmed many of the details given me by his brother. To wit, the spirit of Alice Dournelle was only to be seen by ordinary folk in the gloaming, and then only under conditions of tide and weather similar to those which had prevailed when her lover lost his life, now thirty years ago. About the anniversary, too, she was more frequently visible than at any other time. But he (Isaac Sellar) could see her almost whenever he liked, he said, because he had faith, and could see farther into things than most folk. He had been a dreamer and a seer all his life, he avowed; he saw many strange things, of which other people had no idea, but sometimes, when they would believe him, he could make them see strange things too. In fact, from his own account of himself, Isaac Sellar would have been considered a first-rate medium in America—he seemed endowed with all the qualifications. In answer to my inquiry if he thought he could make me see Alice Dournelle, he said he thought he could.

  “I doubt not but ye will see her yourself,” he added, after looking at me in an odd, vacant, yet penetrating manner; “ye have the eye of belief, the face of a believer. It all depends on faith, as the Scripture tells us—faith in something just beyond what ye can touch and lay hold of. If ye’ll walk in the right way, Sir, ye’ll have the gift vouchsafed ye.”

  After a pause, during which he removed his eyes from mine, and seemed to gaze into space, he continued fervently, “Ah! sweet Alice! I knew her when I was a child. She loved the lad Raymond truly. I knew that all along; he had no need to have told me. And now, she never leaves him, never strays far from him—as in life so in death.”

  “You mean,” I said, “that her spirit never strays far from the place where he was drowned?”

  “That is my meaning,” answered Isaac; “she dwells with the sea-birds among the rocks of the Leopard’s Head, and sometimes, with them, dives deep beneath the treacherous waters which encircle it; dives deep, I believe, to where he lies many a fathom down. Then when she comes up she breams with light, and waves her arms, often beckoning and pointing, and in the dusk, or by night, she will be visible even to some of those without faith: even the fool who hath said in his heart ‘there is no God,’ may see her then. But I—I can see her in all lights, at all times, as plainly as the birds with whom she skims and flies around the Head. Sometimes, too, I hear her voice mingling with their notes. Faint but clear it comes to me—a painful wailing cry that the unbeliever will tell you is naught but that of the kitty-wake and sea gulls; but I know the difference, though she speaks no word. Surely to-morrow will be, of all days, the day to look for her presence. Thirty years will then have come and gone to the very hour at nightfall when Raymond died. Early and late she will be there, and as the dawn creeps into the air ye shall see her if ye’ll come and bide by me.”

  You will think me as crazy as poor Isaac himself, when I say that I listened with deep interest to these half mystic, half prophetic, but most earnestly delivered utterances. But we have all a crazy side to our characters (politely called a weakness), and I am bound to repeat that what I had seen in the States had vastly developed this my weakness, and had left the truth of spiritualism quite a moot point in my mind. To me there was as much reason in this man’s pretensions to hold commune with the spirits of the departed as any of the mediums with whom I had come in contact; albeit he knew little of the ways in which such powers were used. Why, then, should I not place myself in his mediumistic hands, and see if he could put me en rapport with this troubled spirit from the “vasty deep,” after the manner of some of my late American experiences? I determined to do so, and it was arranged that I should meet him the following morning, between five and six, on that part of the shore commanding the nearest view of the haunted rock.

  Verily a wild-goose chase it might have appeared even to the fisher-folk of Porth Guerron, had they known our purpose when the few early movers among them saw us meet at the foot of the village, and stroll away along the lonely shore in the semi-darkness of that chill, grey, misty morning.

  A perfect calm prevailed—but heavy banks of dense sea-fog hung about the headlands, now shrouding and now slightly revealing their gloomy masses. At first the Leopard stood out gaunt and huge against the grey surroundings, but as we approached it became more and more obscure. The tardy dawn just gave enough light to indicate our whereabouts, lending a most weird aspect to the scene. When we had gone about half a mile round the western arm of the bay, Isaac, who kept in advance of me, and scarcely ever spoke, suddenly stopped, and, stretching back a hand, whispered—

  “Hold on, Sir—I saw her but now—take my hand and turn your eyes due west. See where she hovers with the sea-birds round the Leopard’s base!”

  I gazed eagerly in the direction indicated, and faintly beheld a form, which for one moment certainly did look like that of a woman clothed in silver light, rising out of the sea, but in another, like nothing but that of a fantastic wreath of mist. It was gone as rapidly as it had appeared—as rapidly as though it had been but the flashing whiteness from the outstretched pinions of the birds that by myriads soared and swooped through the heavy folds of the fog—gone as though it had been but a passing fancy, an ocular illusion, momentary, vague, and unsubstantial as the misty air itself.

  “Ye saw her, Sir, I doubt not,” then went on my guide. “Silence, patience, and faith, and ye shall see her again.”

  We had reached the utmost limits of the shingly shore, where the frowning cliffs at the western horn of the cove stretched precipitously into the sea and stopped farther progress. Fifty yards beyond this barrier began the sandy causeway connecting the mainland with the Leopard. But had the tide been out even we could not have seen it from our position; and the Leopard, when the fog lifted a little,
lay before us completely isolated. Nothing in nature could well have looked more weird and ghostly than did the scene, or more in harmony with our purpose. The day was breaking languidly, and still shedding but the faintest, palest light, whilst the restless fog-banks, swirling to and fro, might have been likened to giant spectres as they swept across the oily ocean, or clung to the towering cliffs in strange, fantastic forms. An intense chill was in the air, which was greatly increased when, every now and then, the grey mist enveloped us in its ghostly folds, shutting out everything beyond an arm’s length, and seeming to cut us off from the world of fact and light.

  During one of the densest of these visitations, I felt the rough, broad palm of Isaac close tightly on mine; and through a gap which suddenly appeared in the obscurity surrounding us I once more saw the female form in strong relief against the dark crags of the Leopard. Now there was no mistake about it. Bathed in the same translucent light, there it plainly was, floating in mid-air, as one has seen angels represented in pictures, and slowly waving one arm, half-beckoning and pointing upwards. Say it was some three hundred yards distant across the water—say that it was still vague and vapour-like, semi-transparent in parts, as the fog itself—say that I was out of my mind, or in a dream, or unduly acted on by those Transatlantic experiences and the imaginings arising therefrom, which old Isaac had rekindled: say all this, if you please; but I say distinctly that with these eyes I saw a woman’s form, palpable, unmistakable, floating upwards across the face of the cliff, pointing and beckoning. The features at such a distance, of course, could not be discerned—nor do I say that I could see any details. All was merged into the unsubstantial substance—if I may use the paradox—of silvery light; but the form and action were distinct. For two minutes or more, it may have been, the vision was so far clearly before me; nor did it dissolve into the mist, of which, I admit, it seemed composed, until the figure reached, in its slow ascent, the topmost verge of the isolated crag. Then the fog again shut it all out, and for a while held us in its weird gloom. But soon after this it lifted, a soft breeze sprang up, and the cheering rays of the morning sun restored us to warmth and reality.