At school we were told that Canning was the dashing, interesting one. But whereas Canning had merely inhabited the above-mentioned 50 Berkeley Square before it gained its haunted reputation, Castlereagh had actually seen a ghost.
He told the story to Sir Walter Scott in Paris in 1815, describing the vision ‘with great minuteness’. According to Scott, ‘It was a naked child, which he saw slip out of the grate of a bedroom while he looked at the decaying fire. It increased at every step it advanced towards him, and again diminished in size till it went into the fireplace and disappeared. I could not tell what to make of so wild a story told by a man whose habits were equally remote from quizzing or inventing a tale of wonder.’
On August 12 1822, Castlereagh killed himself by slitting his carotid artery with a penknife. He was Leader of the House of Commons as well as Foreign Secretary at the time and, according to the Duke of Wellington, he had been ‘in a state bordering insanity’ as a result of the stress of defending in the House the repressive policies of the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, at a time of economic depression and working class unrest.
(George Canning, feeling ‘quite knocked up’ at the effort of trying to put together a ruling coalition, died in 1827.)
6. Monks and Nuns
It’s not hard to see how monks and nuns become ghostly. They have spiritual gravitas, and they look the part, with their cowls and loose robes. They are prone to being walled up alive (a practice always more likely to occur in fiction than in fact) and are unworldly to begin with – half-way to being ghosts in life, you might say. Any sexual liaison they have will necessarily be illicit and probably fraught, and on both counts the attendant emotions might endure. (In that she had engaged in a love affair, the Borley Rectory nun was an absolutely orthodox ghost.)
Any private house that had been seized from a religious order during the Reformation is ripe for a haunting. The above-mentioned Markyate Cell is a case in point. Abbey House at Cambridge is another. It was built on the site of an Augustinian Priory, and a female figure in nun’s clothes was seen there in the first half of the twentieth century.
My father, visiting Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire in the late nineteen-eighties, fell into conversation with the Abbey caretaker who told my dad as a matter of absolute certainty that a cowled figure hovered above the highest surviving arch of the monastery on certain nights. My father provided all the usual character references on behalf of this man: ‘Lovely chap; intelligent, charming and straight as a die.’
PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING
We come now to a more evolved sort of ghost than the essentially medieval ones mentioned above.
The psychical researchers of the late nineteenth century shifted their interest from objective to subjective ghosts, just as the ghost story writers would do a few years later. As already stated, Phantasms of the Living is the title of a two-volume book published in 1886 and written by Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore, all members of the Society for Psychical Research. It is a study of what were called ‘crisis apparitions’: phantasmal appearances before the living of people on the brink of death.
‘After considering over two thousand accounts of experiences that our informants regarded as inexplicable by ordinary laws,’ state the authors in their introduction, ‘we find that more than half of them are narratives of appearances or other impressions coincident either with the death of the person [seen in ghostly form] or with some critical moment in his life history.’ They add that the value of accounts of apparitions of people who died some time before – ghosts as conventionally understood – are lessened by the fact there is usually no corresponding and verifiable event that can be connected to them. The accounts can be dismissed as ‘merely morbid or casual – the random and meaningless fictions of an over-stimulated eye or brain.’
But ‘if we can prove that a great number of apparitions coincide with the death of the person seen, we may fairly say, as we do say, that chance alone cannot explain this coincidence, and that there is a causal connection between the two events.’
The cause of the visions is considered by the authors to be thought transference or telepathy – ‘the supersensory action of one mind on another’. To transmit one’s thoughts one is required to be alive, even if only just. In fact, the higher state of consciousness presumed to be associated with a ‘crisis’ state is considered more likely to trigger such projection.
This is the working assumption of most of the book, and it suited the SPR’s keenness to distance itself from the mediums whose work was concentrated in the posthumous sphere. But in spite of the upbeat word ‘living’ in the title, the book is permeated with the beautiful melancholy of a winter Sunday when the rain has set in, and two of its three authors would commit suicide. (Edmund Gurney, musician and psychologist, died of an overdose of narcotic medicine in 1888. Frank Podmore, founding member of the Fabian Society, and civil servant at the Post Office, was found dead in a pond on a golf course near Malvern in 1910).
The book is the first great statement of the SPR. It is limpidly written, and exhaustively subdivided. Visions seen by multiple ‘percipients’ are included, as are those seen in dreams or on the ‘borderland’ of dreams. There are auditory and tactile cases as well as purely visual ones. The seven hundred or so cases are differentiated from the authors’ commentary by appearing in smaller print, like the cases in a legal text book, and almost all have the strangeness that is a hallmark of the plausible. I doubt that there is a more ghostly book in the entire British Library.
I quote one auditory case in full – a ‘remarkably clear instance of the direct reproduction of the agent’s sensation in the percipient’s consciousness’, recorded by Joan R. Severn of Brantwood, Coniston:
Years ago, in Scotland, at my own home, I was in the drawing room with my mother and aunt; the latter was busy writing at a table in the middle of the room, facing my mother, who was on a sofa sewing, while I was quietly amusing myself in my own way. It was all very quiet, when suddenly I was much startled by my mother, who gave a scream and threw herself back on the sofa, putting both her hands up to cover her ears, saying, ‘Oh, there’s water rushing fast into my ears, and I’m sure either my brother, or son James, must be drowning, or both of them!’ My aunt Margaret jumped up, and was rather angry and said, ‘Catherine, I never heard such nonsense, how can you be so foolish!’ My aunt seemed vexed and ashamed it should happen before me, for I was very frightened, and remember it all so vividly. My poor mother cried, saying, ‘Oh, I know it’s true, or why would this water keep rushing into my ears?’
Alas! It proved too true, for very soon I could see people running very hard towards the bathing-place, and I remember the shudder that then ran through me, and the hope that my mother would not look out of the windows. Soon my uncle came hurrying to the house very white and distressed; all he could say was, ‘hot blankets!’, but it was too late – poor James was drowned. He was 21 years old, and my mother’s eldest child. Both the other witnesses of this scene are dead.’
[A footnote reads: ‘The narrator’s brother, James Agnew, was drowned while bathing in the River Bladnoch. The date, as we find from a copy of an inscription in Wigtown churchyard, was June 8, 1853.’]
I choose this partly because it sounds true, and partly because it is so very like the beginning of the brilliant film, Don’t Look Now (1973), directed by Nicolas Roeg from a Daphne du Maurier short story, in which a drowning is psychically apprehended.
This exhaustive chronicling of death wraiths or crisis apparitions did not make these apparitions too self-conscious to continue appearing, and the most famous one did so on June 22nd 1893. On that day, Admiral Sir George Tryon was aboard HMS Victoria, the flagship of the British Mediterranean Fleet, of which he was the commander. Sailing between Beirut and Tripoli, he signalled for the two columns of ships he was leading to turn towards each other so as to approach Tripoli in tighter formation. But he had miscalculated the gap, and a ship called HMS Camperdown rammed HMS V
ictoria, which quickly sank, killing Tryon and many of his men. As the ship went down, he is reported to have said, ‘It is entirely my fault’ – a remark that would have been of no help to anyone.
At that precise time, Admiral Tryon is said to have appeared at an ‘At Home’ given by his wife, Lady Tryon, at Eaton Square. He walked across the drawing room speaking to nobody. His wife, being distracted with the business of a hostess, did not see him but several guests did.
Admiral Tryon was right about the accident being his fault, and the question of why he gave the order he did takes up as much space in the accounts of the case as the details of the manifestation. The sceptic, incidentally, would point out that his appearance at the party coincides too neatly with the myth that a sailor’s ‘fetch’ or spirit would alert his family to his death.
It must also be admitted that people would be more likely to make up – or to believe – a crisis apparition story in those days than they would be today. Some of the cases in Phantasms of the Living arise from what is described in one as the ‘time-worn arrangement’ between friends: that ‘whichever died first would endeavour to visit the other’. That sort of arrangement isn’t so popular in 2009. Hardly anybody today has heard of a crisis apparition, but I believe the notion was still widespread in the early Seventies, when the French film, The Wages of Fear (1953) was shown on British TV…
It’s about two men employed to drive lorries carrying explosives to the scene of an oil well fire in a remote South American town. The explosives will be used to put out the fire – but there’s every chance that they’ll blow up the lorries on the way. One of the pair, having successfully accomplished his mission, celebrates by swerving about on a mountain road. This causes him to crash fatally, at which exact moment his girlfriend suddenly sits bolt upright in bed.
The day after the film was broadcast, I was kicking a tennis ball about in the suburban cul-de-sac in which I grew up, and discussing it with the kid who lived over the road, whose name was Allan. He was a year or two older than me – thirteen or thereabouts – so I expected him to be more worldly and authoritative on most subjects. Even so, I was surprised by the crispness of his diagnosis of that scene. ‘She had a telepathic hallucination. That often happens when someone you know dies.’ His own father, Ray, died shortly afterwards while at work, and my first thought on hearing the news was to wonder whether this had been communicated telepathically to Allan. All the elements were in place for the sending of a message, which is to say that Allan wasn’t in the same room as his father when he died. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask him.
A Q&A OF PHANTOMS
What is the purpose of ghosts?
It is easier to classify ghosts by the form they take (see above) than by their purpose. For example, while most white ladies are benign, some are death omens, and while most black dogs are death omens, some – like the admittedly unusually small and well-behaved black dog seen in company with the Grey Lady associated with Levens Hall in Westmorland – are harmless. You might as well ask, ‘What is the purpose of human beings?’ And some ghosts, like some humans, have no purpose. Take those raised or pursued by the spiritualists of the nineteenth century. The point of these spirits was solely to confirm that spirits existed. If they communicated a message it was, as we have seen, so that they could prove they had once been alive, or to offer their best wishes to everyone and to tell them not to worry, since being dead wasn’t half as bad as they might think. This is also true of those ghosts that appear as a result of a pact between two people: ‘Whoever dies first will appear to the other.’ As we have seen there was a fashion for these in the late nineteenth century, but there are earlier examples. Madame Beauclair, mistress of James II, and the Duchess of Mazarine, who had been the mistress of Charles II, had such an arrangement. The Duchess was the first to die, and she did appear to Madame Beauclair at St James’s Palace, albeit rather tardily after the interval of a few years.
The myriad of medieval ghosts generally did have a purpose, as already noted. Since everyone expected them to appear, appearance itself was not enough. There had to be a point. In the previously mentioned story, ‘Crewe’, by Walter de la Mare, the irritating sage, Mr Blake says, ‘And what about that further shore? It’s my belief there’s some kind of ferry plying on that river. And coming back depends on what you want to come back for.’
Taking a run at it, you might say that ghosts with a purpose from whatever period are concerned either with themselves primarily or with the percipient. The first kind, the egotistical ghosts, might walk the earth in memory of a wrong they’ve suffered or a wrong they did, or because they were buried in the wrong place. Even after the church had largely dismissed the possibility of ghosts, it conceded that spirits awaiting their destination might linger on earth. The effect of seeing this kind of introspective ghost might be profound, but that would be co-incidental. The landlord of the Gatehouse pub in Highgate, which is about a quarter of a mile from my home, and partly late-medieval, suffered a heart attack in 1947 after seeing a man-like shape moving about in the cellar. The figure communicated nothing to him except the heart attack.
The purposeful ghosts, those ghosts concerned with the percipient, might function as a death omen, give a warning, advise, encourage or instruct. In their case, the ghost story does not end with their appearance. It ends with the effect of their appearance: the conversion of Scrooge, for example. Or they might, like Hamlet’s father, seek revenge for their murder. Most stories of this latter kind are blood-thirstily orthodox, but there’s a more elliptical one in Haunted England by Christina Hole. She quotes from the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1774, which recounted the story of a fourteen year old schoolboy called John Daniel. He attended Beaminster School, which was held in part of the parish church. He was a sickly boy, and suffered from fits.
One day in May 1728, he went out for a walk and did not return. His body was found in a field, and it was assumed he’d had a fit. He was mourned over, and duly buried. About a month later, after school had finished for the day, some of the schoolboys heard the sound of a man walking about the church with heavy boots, but they could see no man. They ran out into the churchyard, from where they heard the minister preaching and psalms being sung in the church, which they knew to be empty. They then walked past an open door that gave onto their classroom (I like this flowing, filmic succession of scenes by the way) in which they saw a coffin and John Daniel sitting up in it. Several boys saw him. One of them was new to the school; he had not known John Daniel in life, but he later give an accurate description of him.
The boys reported that John Daniel had a bandaged hand, which indeed he had done at the time of his death, although this had not been widely known. One of the observers was the dead boy’s half brother. He said, ‘There sits our John’, and threw a stone at him calling, ‘Take it!’ whereupon the image disappeared.
On the strength of this, the body was disinterred and an inquest held upon it. A black mark was found about John Daniel’s neck and a verdict of ‘Strangled’ was brought in, although no-one was ever convicted of the crime.
Ghosts often try to interfere in the criminal justice, or at any rate the psychics who purport to communicate their messages do. Not long after the Portuguese police began their investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann they had accumulated two dossiers 8cm thick filled with communications from psychics.
Can Ghosts Eat?
‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ is a ghost story inset into Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Redgauntlet (1824). It tells of Steenie Steenson, a poor tenant farmer who, while still alive, visits his former landlord, the recently-deceased Sir Robert Redgauntlet, in hell, to ask for a receipt for the rent he paid him. Sir Robert, sitting before a great banquet, says, ‘Ye maun eat and drink – for we do little else here’.
There are two things to say about that. Firstly, Sir Robert makes hell sound remarkably like modern Britain and secondly, he may be trying to trap Willie, mindful of the rule of the Fat
es in Ancient Greece, which said that anyone who ate or drank in the underworld would be condemned to spend eternity there. (Hades, it will be recalled, tricked Persephone into eating pomegranate seeds, forcing her to return to hell for a season every year).
In Macbeth, Banquo’s ghost comes to the feast but does not eat. In A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Christmas past beckons Scrooge while seated before a banquet of ‘turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes…’ – none of which he touches. Nor does he drink the punch that ‘made the chamber dim with its delicious steam.’
In ‘Uncle Cornelius His Story’ (1869) by George MacDonald, Uncle Cornelius, a ‘very tall, very thin, very pale’ man who ‘was a student of all those regions of speculation in which anything to be called knowledge is impossible’, mentions that ‘the disembodied are said to be able to drink, if not eat. I must confess, however, that, although well attested, the story is to me scarcely credible. Fancy a glass of Bavarian beer lifted into the air without a visible hand, turned upside down and set empty on the table!’
However, when L.P. Hartley referred to the question of whether a ghost could eat or drink in his introduction to The Third Ghost Book, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith (1955), he wrote, ‘I can’t quote an instance, but I shouldn’t be surprised to come across a modern ghost who could do both.’
I thought I had found one in Algernon Blackwood’s story, ‘Keeping His Promise’ (1906). This concerns a young man called Field, a friend of another young man called Marriott, who arrives unannounced at Field’s rooms in Edinburgh. He is in need of food and drink, and Field serves him a brown loaf, scones and marmalade, and cocoa. Field eats ‘like an animal’, and later turns out to have been dead at the time of doing so. But it also turns out that the food remained all along in Field’s larder, and that the whole meal had been illusory.
Ghoul Brittania Page 13