The Elliott O’Donnell Supernatural Megapack

by Elliott O'Donnell

  This is all the information that I have been able to gather on the subject, but it is enough to, at least, suggest the church was, at one time, haunted by the phantom of a bird, but whether the earth-bound soul of a murderer taking that guise, or the spirit of an actual dead bird, it is impossible to say.

  The Ghost of an Evil Bird

  Henry Spicer, in his Strange Things Amongst Us, tells the story of a Captain Morgan, an honourable and vivacious gentleman, who, arriving in London in 18—, puts up for the night in a large, old-fashioned hotel. The room in which he slept was full of heavy, antique furniture, reminiscent of the days of King George I, one of the worst periods in modern English history for crime. Despite, however, his grimly suggestive surroundings, Captain Morgan quickly got into bed and was soon asleep. He was abruptly awakened by the sound of flapping, and, on looking up, he saw a huge black bird with outstretched wings and fiery red eyes perched on the rail at the foot of the four-poster bed.

  The creature flew at him and endeavoured to peck his eyes. Captain Morgan resisted, and after a desperate struggle succeeded in driving it to a sofa in the corner of the room, where it settled down and regarded him with great fear in its eyes. Determined to destroy it, he flung himself on the top of it, when, to his surprise and terror, it immediately crumbled into nothingness. He left the house early next morning, convinced that what he had seen was a ghost, but Mr. Spicer offers no explanation as to how one should classify the phenomenon.

  It may have been the earth-bound spirit of the criminal or viciously inclined person who had once lived there, or it may have been the phantom of an actual bird. Either alternative is feasible.

  I have heard there is an old house near Poole, in Dorset, and another in Essex, which were formerly haunted by spectral birds, and that as late as 1860 the phantasm of a bird, many times the size of a raven, was so frequently seen by the inmates of a house in Dean Street, Soho, that they eventually grew quite accustomed to it. But bird hauntings are not confined to houses, and are far more often to be met with out of doors; indeed there are very few woods, and moors, and commons that are not subjected to them. I have constantly seen the spirits of all manner of birds in the parks in Dublin and London. Greenwich Park, in particular, is full of them.

  Addendum to Birds and the Unknown

  Though their unlovely aspect and solitary mode of life may in some measure account for the prejudice and suspicion with which the owl, crow, raven, and one or two other birds have always been regarded, there are undoubtedly other and more subtle reasons for their unpopularity.

  The ancients without exception credited these birds with psychic properties.

  “Ignarres bubo dirum mortalibus omen,” said Ovid; whilst speaking of the fatal prognostications of the crow Virgil wrote:

  “Saepe sinistra cava praedixit ab ilice cornix.”

  A number of crows are stated to have fluttered about Cicero’s head on the day he was murdered.

  Pliny says, “These birds, crows and rooks, all of them keep much prattling, and are full of chat, which most men take for an unlucky sign and presage of ill-fortune.”

  Ramesay, in his work Elminthologia (1688), writes:

  “If a crow fly over the house and croak thrice, how do they fear they, or someone else in the family, shall die.”

  The bittern is also a bird of ill omen. Alluding to this bird, Bishop Hall once said:

  “If a bittern flies over this man’s head by night, he will make his will”; whilst Sir Humphry Davy wrote:

  “I know a man of very high dignity who was exceedingly moved by omens, and who never went out shooting without a bittern’s claw fastened to his button-hole by a riband, which he thought ensured him ‘good luck.’”

  Ravens and swallows both, at times, prognosticate death. In Lloyd’s Stratagems of Jerusalem (1602) he says:

  “By swallows lighting upon Pirrhus’ tents, and lighting upon the mast of Mar. Antonius’ ship, sailing after Cleopatra to Egypt, the soothsayers did prognosticate that Pirrhus should be slaine at Argos in Greece, and Mar. Antonius in Egypt.”

  He alludes to swallows following Cyrus from Persia to Scythia, from which the “wise men” foretold his death. Ravens followed Alexander the Great from India to Babylon, which was regarded by all who saw them as a fatal sign.

  “’Tis not for nought that the raven sings now on my left and, croaking, has once scraped the earth with his feet,” wrote Plautus.

  Other references to the same bird are as follows:

  “The raven himself is hoarse

  That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

  Under my battlements.” —(Macbeth.)

  “It comes o’er my memory

  As doth the raven o’er the infected house,

  Boding to all.” —(Othello.)

  “That tolls

  The sick man’s passport in her hollow beak,

  And in the shadow of the silent night

  Doth shake contagion from her sable wings.”

  —(Jew of Malta.)

  “Is it not ominous in all countries where crows

  and ravens croak upon trees?”—(Hudibras.)

  “The boding raven on her cottage sat,

  And with hoarse croakings warned us of our fate.”

  —(The Dirge.)

  “In Cornwall,” writes Mr. Hunt, in his work on popular beliefs, etc., of the West of England, “it is believed that the croaking of a raven over the house bodes evil to some of the family. The following incident, given to me by a really intelligent man, illustrates the feeling:

  “‘One day our family were much annoyed by the continual croaking of a raven over the house. Some of us believed it to be a token; others derided the idea. But one good lady, our next-door neighbour, said:

  “‘“Just mark the day, and see if something does not come of it.”

  “‘The day and hour were carefully noted. Months passed away, and unbelievers were loud in their boastings and enquiries after the token. The fifth month arrived, and with it a black-edged letter from Australia, announcing the death of one of the members of the family in that country. On comparing the dates of the death and the raven’s croak, they were found to have occurred on the same day.’”

  In an old number of Notes and Queries a correspondent relates that in Somersetshire the appearance of a single jackdaw is regarded as a sure prognostication of evil. He goes on to add that the men employed in the quarries in the Avon Gorge, Clifton, Bristol, had more than once noticed a jackdaw perched on the chain that spanned the river, prior to some catastrophe among them.

  Dead magpies were once hung over the doorways of haunted houses to keep away ghosts; it being almost universally believed that all phantasms shared the same dread of this bird. Ghosts of magpies themselves are, however, far from uncommon; on Dartmoor and Exmoor, for example, I have seen several of them, generally in the immediate vicinity of bogs or deep holes.

  Witches were much attached to this bird, and were said to often assume its shape after death.

  “Magpies,” says Mr. William Jones, in his Credulities, Past and Present,” are mysterious everywhere. A lady living near Carlstad, in Sweden, grievously offended a farm woman who came into the court of her house asking for food. The woman was told ‘to take that magpie hanging upon the wall and eat it.’ She took the bird and disappeared, with an evil glance at the lady, who had been so ill-advised as to insult a Finn, whose magical powers, it is well known, far exceed those of the gipsies.” (Other authorities corroborate this statement; and I have heard it said that the Finns can surpass even the famous tricks of the Indians.) Mr. Jones, in the same story, says: “Presently the number increased, and the lady, who at first had been amused, became troubled, and tried to drive them away by various devices. All was to no purpose. She could not move without a large company
of magpies; and they became at length so daring as to hop on her shoulder.” (This reads like hallucination. However, as I have heard of similar cases, in which there has been no doubt as to the objectivity of the phenomena, I see no reason why these magpies should not have been objective too.) “Then she took to her bed in a room with closed shutters, although even this was not an effectual protection, for the magpies kept tapping at the shutters day and night.” Mr. Jones adds: “The lady’s death is not recorded; but it is fully expected that, die when she may, all the magpies of Wermland will be present at her funeral.”

  There is a house in Great Russell Street, W.C., where the hauntings take the form of a magpie that taps at one of the windows every morning between two and three, and then appears inside the room, perched on what looks like a huge alpine stick, suspended horizontally in the air, about seven feet from the floor. The moment a sound is made the apparition vanishes. It is thought to be the spirit of a magpie that was done to death in a very cruel manner in that room many years ago. There is a story current to the effect that a lady, when visiting the British Museum one day, happened to pass some slighting remark about one of the Egyptian mummy cases (not the notorious one), and that on quitting the building she felt a sharp peck on her neck. She put up her hand to the injured part, and felt the distinct impression of a bird’s claw on it. She could see nothing, however. That night—and for every succeeding night for six weeks—she was awakened at two o’clock by the phantom of an enormous magpie that fluttered over the bed, and was clearly visible to herself and her sister. The phenomenon worried her so that she became ill, and was eventually ordered abroad. She went to Cairo and enjoyed a brief respite; the hauntings, however, began again, and this time became so persistent that she at last lost her reason, and had to be brought home and confined in a private asylum, where she shortly afterwards died. Though I cannot vouch for the truth of this story, I do think it is somewhat risky to make fun of certain of the Egyptian relics in the Museum. They may be haunted by something infinitely more alarming than the ghosts of magpies. There are many sayings respecting the magpie as a harbinger of ill luck. In Lancashire, for example, there is this rhyme:

  “One for anger, two for mirth,

  Three for a wedding, four for a birth,

  Five for rich, six for poor,

  Seven for a witch, I dare tell you no more.”

  From further north comes this couplet:

  “Magpie, magpie, chatter and flee,

  Turn up thy tail, and good luck fall me.”

  Rooks, again, are very psychic birds; they always leave their haunts near an old house shortly before a death takes place in it, because their highly developed psychic faculty of scent enables them to detect the advent of the phantom of death, of which they have the greatest horror. A rook is of great service, when investigating haunted houses, as it nearly always gives warning of the appearance of the Unknown by violent flappings of the wings, loud croaking, and other unmistakable symptoms of terror.

  Owls, though no less sensitive to superphysical influence, are not scared by it; they and bats, alone among the many kinds of animals I have tested, take up their abode in haunted localities, and with the utmost sang-froid appear to enjoy the presence of the Unknown, even in its most terrifying form.

  The owl has been associated with the darker side of the Unknown longer than any other bird.

  “Solaque, culminibus ferali carmine bubo. Saepe queri et longas in fletum ducere voces,” writes Virgil.

  Pliny, in describing this bird, says, “bubo funebris et maxime abominatus”; whilst Chaucer writes: “The owl eke that of death the bode ybringeth.”

  In the Arundel family a white owl is said to be a sure indication of death.

  That Shakespeare attached no little importance to the fatal crying of the bird may be gathered from the scene in Macbeth, when the murderer asks:

  “Didst thou not hear a noise?” and Lady Macbeth answers:

  “I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry”; and the scene in Richard III, where Richard interrupts a messenger of evil news with the words:

  “Out on ye, owls! Nothing but songs of death?”

  Gray speaks of “moping” owls; Chatterton exclaims, “Harke! the dethe owle loude dothe synge”; whilst Hogarth introduces the same bird in the murder scene of his Four Stages of Cruelty.

  Nor is the belief in the sinister prophetic properties of the owl confined to the white races; we find it everywhere—among the Red Indians. West Africans, Siamese, and Aborigines of Australia.

  In Cornwall, and in other corners of the country, the crowing of a cock at midnight was formerly regarded as indicating the passage of death over the house; also if a cock crew at a certain hour for two or three nights in succession, it was thought to be a sure sign of early death to some member of the household. In Notes and Queries a correspondent remarks that crowing hens are not uncommon, that their crow is very similar to the crow of a very young cock, and must be taken as a certain presagement of some dire calamity.

  It was generally held that in all haunted localities the ghosts would at once vanish—not to appear again till the following night—at the first crowing of the cock after midnight. I believe there is a certain amount of truth in this—at all events cocks, as I myself have proved, are invariably sensitive to the presence of the superphysical.

  The whistler is also a very psychic bird. Spenser, in his Faerie Queene (Book II, canto xii, st. 31), alludes to it thus:—

  “The whistler shrill, that whoso hears doth die”;

  whilst Sir Walter Scott refers to it in a similar sense in his Lady of the Lake.

  The yellow-hammer was formerly the object of much persecution, since it was believed that it received three drops of the devil’s blood on its feather every May morning, and never appeared without presaging ill luck. Parrots do not appear to be very susceptible to the influence of the Unknown, and indicate little or no dread of superphysical demonstrations.

  Doves, wrens, and robins are birds of good omen, and the many superstitions regarding them are all associated with good luck. Doves, I have found in particular, are very safe psychic barometers in haunted houses.

  It is almost universally held to be unlucky to kill a robin. A correspondent of Notes and Queries (Fourth Series, vol. viii, p. 505) remarks:

  “I took the following down from the mouth of a young miner:

  “‘My father killed a robin and had terrible bad luck after it. He had at that time a pig which was ready for pipping; she had a litter of seven, and they all died. When the pig was killed the two hams went bad; presently three of the family had a fever, and my father himself died of it. The neighbours said it was all through killing the robin.’”

  George Smith, in his Six Pastorals (1770), says:

  “I found a robin’s nest within our shed,

  And in the barn a wren has young ones bred;

  I never take away their nest, nor try

  To catch the old ones, lest a friend should die.

  Dick took a wren’s nest from the cottage side,

  And ere a twelvemonth pass’d his mother dy’d!”

  In Yorkshire it was once firmly believed that if a robin were killed, the cows belonging to the family of the destroyer of the bird would, for some time, only give bloody milk. At one time—and, perhaps, even now—the robin and wren, out of sheer pity, used to cover the bodies of those that died in the woods with leaves.

  Webster, in his Tragedy of Vittoria Corombona (1612), refers to this touching habit of these birds thus:

  “Call for the robin redbreast and the wren,

  Since o’er the shady groves they hover,

  And with leaves and flowers do cover

  The friendless bodies of unburied men.”

  Not so harmless is the stormy petrel, whose advent is looked
upon by sailors as a sure sign of an impending storm, accompanied by much loss of life.

  The vulture and eagle, obviously on account of their ferocious dispositions, often remain earth-bound after death, and usually select as their haunts, spots little frequented by man. From what I have heard they are by far the most malignant of all bird ghosts, and have even been known to inflict physical injury on those who have had the misfortune to pass the night within their allotted precincts.

  BYWAYS OF GHOST-LAND

  Originally published in 1911.

  CHAPTER I

  THE UNKNOWN BRAIN

  Whether all that constitutes man’s spiritual nature, that is to say, all his mind, is inseparably amalgamated with the whitish mass of soft matter enclosed in his cranium and called his brain, is a question that must, one supposes, be ever open to debate.

  One knows that this whitish substance is the centre of the nervous system and the seat of consciousness and volition, and, from the constant study of character by type or by phrenology, one may even go on to deduce with reason that in this protoplasmic substance—in each of the numerous cells into which it is divided and subdivided—are located the human faculties. Hence, it would seem that one may rationally conclude, that all man’s vital force, all that comprises his mind—i.e. the power in him that conceives, remembers, reasons, wills—is so wrapped up in the actual matter of his cerebrum as to be incapable of existing apart from it; and that as a natural sequence thereto, on the dissolution of the brain, the mind and everything pertaining to the mind dies with it—there is no future life because there is nothing left to survive.