Ghoul Brittania

by Andrew Martin

  The Tedworth poltergeist ‘purr’d in the children’s bed like a cat’ and poured the contents of chamber pots over these beds. The children would hear scratching under their beds, ‘as if by something that had Iron Talons.’ Seven or eight ‘men-like’ shapes were seen about the house. Mr Mompesson woke to see ‘a great body with two red and glaring eyes’. (One of the the manifestations in ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’ by Sheridan Le Fanu has glaring red eyes).

  It will already be evident that there was a kind of beauty in the story of the Tedworth haunting, but whether the credit belongs to the poltergeist itself or to the prose style of Joseph Glanvill I don’t know. Certainly the word ‘hurling’ is just right for ghostliness, as is the idea of the chairs ‘walking’ around the room. The story is openended, which is also appealing. Drury admitted plaguing ‘a man in Wiltshire’, and would not call off the haunting ‘till he hath made me satisfaction for taking away my drum.’ He was tried for a witch. Glanvill writes, ‘The fellow was condemned to Transportation, and accordingly sent away; but I know not how (’tis said by raising Storms and affrighting Seamen) he made shift to come back again.’

  And on that uneasy note the story ends, but poltergeists have continued to behave in a similarly petty, obsessive-compulsive manner ever since, and there have been plenty of sequels to Tedworth.

  2. Little Burton

  There was for example the case of the poltergeist infestation at a house in Little Burton in Somerset in 1677: scratchings from under a bed, objects thrown onto beds, objects levitated. A disembodied hand and wrist manifested, as they later would in the séances of D.D. Home. In this instance, the hand held a hammer.

  3. Epworth

  In 1716 and 1717 there was poltergeist activity at Epworth Rectory in Lincolnshire, home to Samuel Wesley, father of John Wesley, among many other children. Samuel’s wife and other family members wrote of latches lifted, sounds of rattling money, smashing glass, a gobbling turkey, deep groans; bursts of knocking going on interminably. And Mrs Wesley saw a manifestation: a badger-like thing, but without a head – which is straight out of the M.R. James menagerie. The emotional energy here might have come from one of the daughters, Hetty, or marital differences between the Wesleys, arising from his Stuart sympathies and hers for William III. (They were a high-minded lot, of course, the Wesleys).

  4. Cock Lane

  The next in the sequence of famous poltergeists is the one at Cock Lane in East London. In 1759 a small house owned by a Richard Parsons, whose wife and daughter were both called Elizabeth, was let to a widower called William Kent and his sister-in-law, Fanny. When William was away for a night, Fanny, being nervous, asked young Elizabeth Parsons to share her bed. She was kept awake by what we now think of as the usual poltergeist racket, which became known in this case as ‘Fanny scratchings’.

  Meanwhile, William Kent had lent money to Richard Parsons, which Parsons was unable to repay. The two fell out. Kent moved to a different house, where Fanny died in 1760. Then the noises started up again in Cock Lane, and the Parsons family, and a servant girl of theirs, put it about that they had communicated with the poltergeist by means of codified rappings. From this they had learnt that the poltergeist was the spirit of Fanny, who wished it to be known from beyond the grave that she had been killed by William – a story to which William took great objection, not least because it was widely circulated.

  The house in Cock Lane was the Borley Rectory of its day, and it will already be apparent that it lacks the strangeness and mystery of the earlier poltergeist hauntings. It’s too soap opera-ish; the human element is too pronounced. Kent indignantly asserted that his sister-in-law had died of smallpox, and the Parsons (and their servant) were prosecuted for defaming him.

  5. Worksop

  In 1896, a sceptical researcher called Frank Podmore (of whom more below) produced a report on poltergeists for the SPR. He interviewed witnesses in the case of a house in Worksop, home of a horse dealer called Joe White. There, kitchen utensils had begun flying around. Mr White sent for a doctor and the police. The doctor and Mrs White both saw a basin rise to the kitchen ceiling before falling to the floor. It is not known whether any policeman saw anything, and the phenomena stopped when Joe White’s young lodger, Rose, left the house.

  Podmore wrote of how the levitating objects had been described as moving through the air in a manner ‘jerky, ‘twirling’, ‘turning over and over’. When they landed they remained unbroken and ‘rarely shivered’. He found the accounts of the witnesses convincing. Podmore was a sceptic, as I say, but earlier on, at another house-with-poltergeist, he himself had seen a picture frame slide along a mantlepiece. He commanded it to return ‘in the name of the Trinity’. He saw it do so, but wrote this down as an illusion.

  Overall, his position was that the co-incidence of poltergeist effects with the presence in a house of troubled young people had to be telling; that the phenomena must be tricks played by those young people. My own response to that argument would be that those young people must have combined emotional turmoil with a perfect instinct for creepiness.

  Or put it another way: poltergeists might be narrow specialists, but they are very good at what they do.

  THE MANIFESTATION

  In telling a ghost story it is quite easy to create the preliminary sense of unease, not least because the listener is usually very keen to be made uneasy. He will charitably assume that some terrific horror is coming, even though most climactic manifestations are a disappointment and do not justify the following sort of build-up, which is from Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd, a wonderfully creepy novel published in 1985, but set in the early eighteenth century:

  For those who wish the Sight of such ghosts and Apparitions I say this: it is of no long Duration, continuing for the most part only as you keep your Eyes steady (as I have done); the Timorous see merely by Glances, therefore, their Eyes always trembling at the sight of the Object, but the most Assured will fix their Look. There is this also: those who see the Daemon must draw down their eyes with their Fingers after.’

  This is why shrewd ghost story writers often withhold the manifestation, instead making do with suggestive noises and the most fleeting glimpses of something or other. An example would be ‘All Hallows’ by Walter de la Mare, which, as already mentioned, concerns a remote cathedral taken over by diabolic forces. At the climax, these forces are confined within the cathedral, while the protagonists are on the roof: ‘At that instant, a dull enormous rumble reverberated from within the building – as if a huge boulder or block of stone had been shifted or dislodged in the fabric; a peculiar grinding, nerve-wracking sound’ – and one that challenges the reader to find the most horrible matching image. In ‘At the End of the Passage’ (1887) by Rudyard Kipling, the image of the ghost is captured, as if photographically, in its victim’s eye, but the narrator does not tell us what form it takes. Mindful that the image alone was enough to kill the man, we do the rest of the work ourselves.

  This kind of ending could be regarded as a cop-out, and it is usually the resort of a writer who is desperately fleeing from…

  Six Ghosts of the Old School

  1. Headless Ghosts

  The narrator of ‘The Haunters and The Haunted’ by Edward Bulwer-Lytton dismisses a headless ghost as old hat when he says to his manservant, ‘Remember in Germany how disappointed we were at not finding a ghost in that old castle that was said to be haunted by a headless apparition?…Well, I have heard of a house in London which, I have reason to hope, is decidedly haunted.’ He means to sleep there that evening, hoping to see something ‘perhaps excessively horrible’.

  A headless man might not seem excessively horrible so much as unoriginal. In the excellent Penguin Book of Ghosts (2008) Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson state that ‘The headlessness of ghosts is a stereotype of popular ghost lore – at bottom, a shorthand way of talking about apparitions, like ghosts being dressed in white…’ They reject the idea that most h
eadless ghosts are those of people who have been decapitated by the executioner, and moreover they can prove it: ‘Sir Thomas Boleyn of Bickling Hall, Norfolk, was not beheaded yet rides round in his phantom coach with his head beneath his arm.’

  Headless-ness is associated with the riding of horses or the driving of phantom coaches. I once read, somewhere, the exhausted-sounding sentence, ‘As usual, the horseman was headless.’ Tarrant Ganville in Dorset is supposed to be haunted by William Doggett, steward in the eighteenth century of Eastbury House, the seat of Lord Melcombe. He committed suicide after being found out in a fraud, and is said to appear headless while riding on a coach pulled by headless horses and driven by a headless coachman. The question arises: How could they see where they were going? The reductio ad absurdum is reached at Whitby in Yorkshire, where a team of headless horses driven by a headless coachman are said to ride along the cliff adjacent to the ruined Abbey before toppling over the edge.

  2. Phantom Coaches

  In folklore these might symbolise the territorial arrogance of a lord of the manor when driven fast and recklessly. Sir Laurence Tanfield, a rapacious landlord at Burford and the surrounding area in Oxfordshire, was known as ‘The Wicked Lord’. The legend that grew up after his death in 1625 was that he and his wife drove in a flying coach over the roofs of the houses in Burford, which the locals found ‘a nuisance’, not least because a sighting of the coach meant death. Seven priests came to lay the ghost or ghosts. Katherine Briggs, the folklorist, reported in the 1960’s that this had been done by ‘reading them small’, using injunctions from scripture. The ghost of Lady Tanfield was thus confined to a bottle, which was thrown in the river. The coach itself was safely garaged under a certain arch of the river bridge, but it might escape if ever the river ran dry under that arch. Once the river did run dangerously low, and the water began to seethe and bubble.

  In spite of all these precautions, Sir Laurence and his coach continued to drive along a particular road in Whittington in Gloucestershire, and when, late in the nineteenth century, a man was found dead on that road, it was said that he must have caught sight of The Wicked Lord.

  In the above-mentioned Phantasms of the Living, the painfully rigorous authors find it hard to classify sightings of phantom coaches, of which there have been many, often by more than one person at a time. As we have seen, the authors of that book believed that apparitions were the result of one person communicating a sense of his or herself telepathically to another at a moment of crisis. The authors found awkward the fact that sometimes the communicants chose to convey the image of a coach as well as, or instead of, their own likeness. The presentation of this additional element is problematic, just as the sending of a large attachment with an email frequently is. How can the sending of an image of a coach be justified? What is so special about the coach? The authors reach no firm conclusion, but some accounts of coach sightings are provided, and they have the creepiness that is the keynote of that wonderful book. In one case, a vehicle passed a window absolutely silently on gravel; the coachman and the footman on the exterior of the carriage had black faces. In India, a Mr Paul Bird, resident of 39, Strand, Calcutta, ‘followed a phantom gharri for 100 yards, into the very portico of Hastings House at Alipore, while the same vehicle was watched in its approach by his wife from a window.’

  3. White Ladies etc

  White Ladies are beautiful aristocratic women dressed in white. They are wistful, hand-wringing types who perpetuate the memory of some sleight or loss suffered in their lives. They are associated with water, and there is a White Lass Beck near Thirsk in Yorkshire. The legend grew up at Longnor in Shropshire of a white lady rising from a deep pond known as the Black Pool. We have already mentioned the white lady at Pluckley in Kent, and there are at least a dozen others firmly entrenched in British folklore. There are a couple of grey ladies too. Grey ladies are white ladies that have run in the wash. Well, I’m afraid that these pious phantoms do attract flippancy. There is a Green Lady at Thorpe Hall, near Louth in Lincolnshire, and then there is the Brown Lady at Raynham Hall, Norfolk, which is one of the most famous British ghosts in that it was photographed.

  It was first seen during Christmas 1835, by a Colonel Loftus, a family guest of the Townshend family, owners of the Hall. He described her as being of noble bearing, and brown. (She was wearing a brown satin dress, that is). Oh, and she didn’t have any eyes. Other house guests said that they too had seen the figure in the same room. Colonel Loftus sketched the apparition, and an artist made a painting from the sketch, which was hung in the house. It was speculated that the ghost must be that of Dorothy Walpole, the sister of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. In about 1713 she married Charles Townshend, and he treated her badly. She may also have been the mistress of the rakehell Lord Wharton.

  A few years after the first sighting, Captain Marryat, naval commander and author of children’s historical adventures, including The Children of the New Forest, visited Raynham Hall. Like the bold young man in ‘The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth’ and a dozen other hero/idiots of ghost stories, Captain Marryat immediately plumped for the haunted room when given his choice of sleeping quarters. (Well, he had won the Royal Humane Society’s gold medal for bravery during his naval career). He and two companions were walking along the corridor from which that room lead when the Brown Lady appeared. All three saw her, and Captain Marryat did what any red-blooded Englishman would do on seeing a ghost: he took out his revolver and shot it. The bullet flew into a door and the figure disappeared.

  On September 19th, 1936, two photographers from Country Life magazine – a Captain Provand and Mr Indre Shira – were photographing the main staircase at Raynham Hall when the Brown Lady appeared on the stairs. The resulting photograph shows a transparent, vaguely human shape, more white than brown. The Brown Lady has not been seen since, fading away along with all the Captains and Colonels who could announce that they had seen her in the confident expectation of being believed.

  4. Black Dogs

  Black dogs are bad news. Winston Churchill called his depression his Black Dog. As ghosts, they are particularly East Anglian, and a sighting of them portends death. I was walking out of a gift shop in Walberswick in Suffolk having just bought a copy of Martin Newell’s story-poem, Black Suck, The Ghost Dog of Eastern England (1999), when a big black Labrador walked directly up to me. But I thought I might have earned a let off since it was carrying a yellow tennis ball in its mouth. Actually, the black dog of folklore is a shaggy beast with flaming red eyes, and generally not a Labrador. I mean, if you threw a stick for it, you’d be dead by the time you shouted ‘Fetch!’

  In his introduction to his poem, Newell writes, ‘The dog has many names. He’s known in some places as Galleytrot and in others as The Barguest or Old Snarleyow. Certain villages know him as Scarp, Trash or Rugusan. Most commonly he’s called Old Shuck or Black Shuck.’ He haunts ‘bridges, fords and the boundary lines of ancient parishes.’ He is ‘as big as a calf ’. The black dog came over with the Norsemen, being the black hound of their God Odin. Newell is interesting on the etymology of ‘Shuck’. It possibly derives from the Old English word ‘sceocca’ meaning ‘terror’ or ‘Satan’, and of course it’s similar to shock. It should perhaps be reintroduced to denote a fright that is like a shock, only worse – the kind of shock you can die of.

  5. Radiant Boys

  Radiant boys are a minor ghost genre, and I include them here partly because I like the name. Two principal ones have been recorded. The first was seen by ‘The Reverend Henry A ----’ when he was staying at Corby Castle in Cumberland in September 1803. He awoke in the middle of the night to see by his bed ‘a glimmer that suddenly increased to a bright flame’. He then perceived ‘a beautiful boy, clothed in white, with bright locks resembling gold’. The boy remained ‘some minutes’; his expression was benevolent. He then glided towards the side of the chimney and disappeared. The next morning, desperate to quit the house, the
percipient summoned his carriage with such urgency that its driver knocked down part of a wall on his approach to the front door. But Henry A--- later gave an account in writing of what he’d seen, and it appears in ‘The Night Side of Nature’ (1848), by Mrs Catherine Crowe.

  The other reason I am interested in radiant boys is that one was seen by Viscount Castlereagh. I studied Castlereagh for history ‘A’ level. His political career ran in parallel with that of George Canning. They were both brilliant lieutenants of Pitt the Younger, and both made their name as foreign secretaries, although Canning was also briefly prime minister. Castlereagh and Canning were opposed like two people in a novel, and in 1809 they fought a duel over the correct conduct of the Napoleonic War. As foreign secretary, Castlereagh was neurotic and cautious. He wanted to create a European-wide alliance against Napoleon. Canning was more cavalier, and believed that Britain’s best interests would be served by remaining aloof.