The Ghost World

Berry Pomeroy Castle, Devonshire, was long said to be haunted by the daughter of a former baron, who bore a child to her own father, afterwards strangling the fruit of their incestuous intercourse; and all kinds of weird noises are heard at Ewshott House, Hampshire. Bagley House, near Bridport, is haunted by the ghost of a Squire Lighte, who committed suicide; and at Astwood Court, once the seat of the Culpepers, was an old oak table, removed from the side of the wainscot in 1816, respecting which tradition declares that it bore the impress of the fingers of a lady ghost who, it has been suggested, probably tired of appearing to no purpose, at last struck the table in a rage and vanished for ever. Holt Castle was supposed, in bygone years, to be haunted by a mysterious lady in black who, in the still hours of the night, occasionally walked in a certain passage near the attics. It was likewise said that the cellar had been occupied by an ill-favoured bird like a raven, which would sometimes pounce upon any person who ventured to approach a cask for drink, and, having extinguished the candle with a horrid flapping of wings, would leave its victims prostrate with fright. A solution, however, has been given to this legend that ‘would imply a little cunning selfishness on the part of the domestics who had the care of the ale and cider depôt.’266

At Althorp, the seat of Earl Spencer, is said to have appeared the ghost of a favourite groom, and Cumnor Hall, the supposed scene of the murder of Lady Amy Bobsart, was haunted by her apparition. According to Mickle —

In that Manor now no moreIs cheerful feast and sprightly ball;For, ever since that dreary hour,Have spirits haunted Cumnor Hall.The village maids, with fearful glance,Avoid the ancient moss-grown wall;Nor ever lead the merry danceAmong the groves of Cumnor Hall.Full many a traveller oft hath sighedAnd pensive wept the Countess’s fall,As, wandering onward, they espiedThe haunted towers of Cumnor Hall.

Powis Castle had once its ghost, and Cullaby Castle, Northumberland, the seat of Major A. H. Browne, is haunted. According to a correspondent,267 in the older part of the castle, which was the pele-tower of the Claverings, there was known to be a room walled up, ‘which Mrs. Browne, during her husband’s absence, had broken into;’ but the room was found to be quite empty. She says, however, that ‘she let a ghost out who is known as “The Wicked Priest.” Ever since they have been annoyed with the most unaccountable noises, which are sometimes so loud that one would think the house was being blown down. I believe the ghost has been seen – it is a priest with a shovel hat.’ The seat of the Trevelyans is haunted with the incessant wailing of a spectral child, and the ruins of Seaton Delaval Castle are said to be haunted. Churton Hall, at one time the seat of the Duke of Argyll, ‘has marked Tyneside with the ghost of the Duke’s mistress, who is locally known as “Silky.”’ ‘Tyneside,’ writes Mr. W. T. Stead, ‘abounded with stories of haunted castles; but, with the doubtful exception of Dilston, where Lady Derwentwater was said to revisit the pale glimpses of the moon to expiate the restless ambition which impelled her to drive Lord Derwentwater to the scaffold, none of them were leading actors in the tragedies of old time.’

Bisham Abbey, report says, is haunted by the ghost of Lady Hoby, who treated her son by her first husband so unmercifully, on account of his antipathy to study, that he died. As a punishment for her unnatural cruelty she glides through a certain chamber, in the act of washing blood-stains from her hands. One of the rooms at Combermere Abbey, Cheshire, formerly known as the ‘Coved Saloon,’ is tenanted by the ghost of a little girl, the sister of Lord Cotton, who had died when fourteen years old.268 Then there was the famous ‘Sampford Peverell’ ghost, which created much interest at the commencement of the present century,269 and Rainham, the seat of the Marquis Townshend, in Norfolk, has long been haunted by the ‘Brown Lady.’ At Oulton House, Suffolk, at midnight, a wild huntsman with his hounds, accompanied by a lady carrying a poisoned cup, is said to take his ghostly walk; and Clegg Hall, Lancashire, long had its restless spirits, and the laying of these ‘Clegg Hall boggarts,’ as they were called, is described elsewhere. At Samlesbury Hall, near Blackburn, a lady in white attended by a handsome knight is seen at night;270 and a headless lady walked about Walton Abbey. Hermitage Castle, one of the most famous of the Border keeps in the days of its splendour, has for years past been haunted, and has been described as —

Haunted Hermitage,Where long by spells mysterious bound,They pace their round with lifeless smile,And shake with restless foot the guilty pile.Till sink the mouldering towers beneath the burdened ground.

The story goes that Lord Soulis, ‘the evil hero of Hermitage,’ made a compact with the devil, who appeared to him in the shape of a spirit wearing a red cap, which gained its hue from the blood of human victims in which it was steeped. Lord Soulis sold himself to the demon, and in return he could summon his familiar whenever he chose to rap thrice on an iron chest, on condition that he never looked in the direction of the spirit. Once, however, he forgot or ignored this condition, and his doom was sealed. But even then Lord Soulis kept the letter of the compact. Lord Soulis was protected by an unholy charm against any injury from rope or steel; hence cords could not bind him, and steel could not slay him. When, at last, he was delivered over to his enemies it was found necessary to adopt the ingenious and effective expedient of rolling him up in a sheet of lead and boiling him to death:

On a circle of stones they placed the pot,On a circle of stones but barely nine;They heated it red and fiery hot,And the burnished brass did glimmer and shine.They rolled him up in a sheet of lead —A sheet of lead for a funeral pall;They plunged him into the cauldron red,And melted him, body, lead, bones and all.

This was the end of Lord Soulis’s body, but his spirit still lingers on the scene. Once every seven years he keeps tryst with Red Cap on the scene of his former devilries:

And still when seven years are o’erIs heard the jarring sound,When hollow opes the charmèd doorOf chamber underground.271

Hugh Miller, in his ‘Schools and Schoolmasters,’ says that, while working as a stonemason in a remote part of Scotland, he visited the ruins of Craighouse, a grey fantastic rag of a castle, which the people of the neighbourhood firmly believed to be haunted by its goblin – a miserable-looking, grey-headed, grey-bearded old man, who might be seen, late in evening and early in the morning, peering out through a narrow slit or shot-hole at the chance passenger. He further adds that he met with a sunburnt herd-boy who was tending his cattle under the shadow of the old castle wall. He asked the lad whose apparition he thought it was that could continue to haunt a building whose last inhabitant had long been forgotten. ‘Oh, they’re saying,’ was the reply, ‘it’s the spirit of the man who was killed on the foundation-stone, soon after it was laid, and then built intil the wa’ by the masons that he might keep the Castle by coming back again; and they’re saying that a’ varra auld hooses i’ the country had murderit men builded intil them i’ that way, and that all o’ them hev their bogie!’

Among Irish haunted houses may be noticed the castle of Dunseverick, in Antrim, which is believed to be still inhabited by the spirit of a chief, who there atones for a horrid crime; while the castles of Dunluce, of Magrath, and many others are similarly peopled by the wicked dead. In the abbey of Clare the ghost of a sinful abbot walks, and will continue to do so until his sin has been atoned for by the prayers he unceasingly mutters in his tireless march up and down the aisles of the ruined nave.

The ‘Cedar Room’ at Ashley Hall, Cheshire, was said to be tenanted by the figure of a white lady, reminding us of similar so-called apparitions at Skipsea and Blenkinsopp Castles. At Burton Agnes Hall, the family seat of Sir Henry Somerville Boynton, there is a spirit of a lady which haunts the ancient mansion, known in the neighbourhood as ‘Awd Nance.’ The skull of this lady is preserved at the Hall, and so long as it is left quietly in its resting-place all goes well, but should any attempt be made to remove it, all kinds of unearthly noises are raised in the house, and last until it is restored.272 Denton Hall has for many years past attracted interest from being inhabited by a spirit known by the names of ‘Old Barbery’ and ‘Silky,’ and Waddow Hall, Yorkshire, is haunted by a phantom called ‘Peg O’Nell.’ Bridge End House, Burnley, was said to have its ghost; Crook Hall, near Durham, has its ‘White Ladie;’ South Biddick Hall, its shadowy tenant, ‘Madam Lambton;’ and Netherby Hall, a ‘Rustling Lady’ who walks along a retired passage in that mansion, her dress rustling as she moves along.273 There was the famous Willington Mill, alluded to in the previous chapter, which some years ago became notorious in the North of England, having been haunted, it is said, by a priest and a grey lady who amused themselves at their victims’ expense by all kinds of strange acts.274 A correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries’ (4th S. x. 490) referring to the Willington ghost says: ‘The steam flour mill, with the house, was in the occupation then of Messrs. Proctor and Unthank; the house was separated from the mill by a space of a few feet, so that no tricks could be played from the mill. The partners alternately lived in the house. A relation of mine asked one of those gentlemen if there was any truth as to the current rumours. He remarked, “Well, we don’t like to speak of it; my partner certainly cannot live comfortably in the house, from some unexplained cause, but as to myself and family we are never disturbed.”’

Several parsonages have had their ghosts. Southey, in his ‘Life of Wesley,’ speaking of Epworth parsonage, which appears to have been haunted in the most strange manner, and alluding to the mysterious disturbances that happened in it, says: ‘An author who, in this age, relates such a story, and treats it as not utterly incredible and absurd, must expect to be ridiculed, but the testimony upon which it rests is far too strong to be set aside because of the strangeness of the relation.’ In the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ is recorded an account of an apparition that appeared at Souldern Rectory, Oxfordshire, to the Rev. Mr. Shaw, who had always ridiculed the idea of ghosts, announcing to him that his death would be very soon, and very sudden. Suffice it to say that shortly afterwards he was seized with an apoplectic fit while reading the service in church, and died almost immediately. This strange affair is noticed in the register of Brisly Church, Norfolk, under December 12, 1706: ‘I, Robert Withers, M.A., Vicar of Gately, do insert here a story which I had from undoubted hands, for I have all the moral certainty of the truth of it possible.’

The old parsonage at Market, or East, Lavington, near Devizes – now pulled down – was reputed to be haunted by a lady supposed to have been murdered, and, it has been said, a child came also to an untimely end in the house. Previous to 1818, a correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries’ (5 S. i. 273) says: ‘A witness states his father occupied the house, and writes “that in that year on Feast Day, being left alone in the house, I went up to my room. It was the one with marks of blood on the floor. I distinctly saw a white figure glide into the room. It went round by the washstand by the bed, and there disappeared.”’ It may be added that part of the road leading from Market Lavington to Easterton, which skirts the grounds of Fiddington House, used to be looked upon as haunted by a lady, who was known as the ‘Easterton Ghost.’ In 1869, a wall was built round the road-side of the pond; and, close to the spot where the lady was seen, two skeletons were disturbed – one of a woman, the other of a child. The bones were buried in the churchyard, and no ghost, it is said, has been seen since.

Occasionally, churches have been haunted. The famous phantom nun of Holy Trinity Church, Micklegate, York, has excited a good deal of interest – an account of which is given by Mr. Baring-Gould in his ‘Yorkshire Oddities.’ The story goes that during the suppression of religious houses before the Reformation, a party of soldiers came to sack the convent attached to the church. But having forced an entry they were confronted by the abbess, a lady of great courage and devotion, who declared that they should only pass it over her body, and that should they slay her and succeed in their errand of destruction, her spirit would haunt the place until the time came that their sacrilegious work was expiated by the rebuilding of the holy house. Many accounts have been published of this apparition, the following being from the ‘Ripon and Richmond Chronicle’ (May 6, 1876): ‘In the middle of the service,’ writes a correspondent, ‘my eyes, which had hardly once moved from the left or north side of the [east] window, were attracted by a bright light, formed like a female, robed and hooded, passing from north to south with a rapid gliding motion outside the church, apparently at some distance. There are four divisions in the window, all of stained glass, but at the edge of each runs a rim of plain transparent glass, about two inches wide, and adjoining the stone-work. Through this rim especially could be seen what looked like a form transparent, but yet thick (if such a term can be used) with light. The robe was long and trailed. About half an hour later it again passed from north to south, and, having remained about ten seconds only, returned with what I believe to have been the figure of a young child, and stopped at the last pane but one, and then vanished. I did not see the child again, but a few seconds afterwards the woman reappeared, and completed the passage behind the last pane very rapidly.’ It is said to appear very frequently on Trinity Sunday, and to bring two other figures on to the scene, another female, called the nurse, and the child. Likewise, on one of the windows of the Abbey Church, Whitby, was occasionally seen —

The very form of Hilda fair,Hovering upon the sunny air.

According to a correspondent of the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ a ghost appeared for several years, but very seldom, only in the church porch at Kilncote, Leicestershire. Folk-lore tells us that ghosts are occasionally seen in the church porch, and, in years gone, it was customary for young people to sit and watch here on St. Mark’s Eve, from 11 at night till 1 o’clock in the morning. In the third year, for the ceremony had to be gone through three times, it was supposed the ghosts of all those about to die in the course of the ensuing year would pass into the church. It is to this piece of superstition that James Montgomery refers in his ‘Vigil of St. Mark’:

‘’Tis now,’ replied the village belle,‘St. Mark’s mysterious Eve;And all that old traditions tellI tremblingly believe.‘How, when the midnight signal tolls,Along the churchyard greenA mournful train of sentenced soulsIn winding sheets are seen.‘The ghosts of all whom death shall doomWithin the coming year,In pale procession walk the gloom,Amid the silence drear.’

A strange illustration of this superstition is found among the Hollis manuscripts in the Lansdowne collection. The writer, Gervase Hollis, of Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire, was a colonel in the service of Charles I., and he professes to have received the tale from Mr. Liveman Rampaine, minister of God’s word at Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire, who was household chaplain to Sir Thomas Munson of Burton, in Lincoln, at the time of the incident.275

A curious and somewhat unique advertisement of a haunted house appeared some years ago, and ran thus: ‘To be sold, an ancient Gothic mansion, known as Beckington Castle, ten miles from Bath, and two from Frome. The mansion has been closed for some years, having been the subject of proceedings in Chancery. There are legends of haunted rooms, miles of subterranean passages, &c., affording a fine field of research and speculation to lovers of the romantic.’ It was no doubt true of the ghost of this, as of most other haunted houses —

We meet them on the door-way, on the stair,Along the passages they come and go,Impalpable impressions on the air,A sense of something moving to and fro.

CHAPTER XXIV

HAUNTED LOCALITIES

Spirits in most countries are supposed to haunt all kinds of places, and not to confine themselves to any one locality. Local traditions show how the most unlikely spots, which can boast of little or no romance, are supposed to be frequented by ghosts; the wayfarer along some country road having oftentimes been confronted by an uncanny apparition.

Indeed, the superstitious fear of places being haunted by ghosts not only led to the abandonment but even destruction of many a dwelling-place, a practice which, amongst uncultured tribes, not only ‘served as a check to material prosperity, but became an obstacle to progress.’276 But even in civilised countries the same antipathy to a haunted house is often found, and the ghostly tenant is allowed uninterrupted possession owing to the dread his presence inspires. The Hottentots deserted the house after a decease,277 and the Seminoles at once removed from the dwelling where death had occurred, and from the neighbourhood where the body was buried. Among the South Slavonians and Bohemians, the bereaved family, returning from the grave, pelted the ghost of their deceased relative with sticks, stones, and hot coals. And the Tschuwasche, a tribe in Finland, opened fire on it as soon as the coffin was outside the house. In Old Calabar, it was usual for a son to leave his father’s house for two years, after which time it was considered safe to return. If a Kaffir or Maori died before he could be carried out, the house was tabooed and deserted.278 The Ojibways pulled down the house in which anyone had died, and chose another one to live in as far off as possible. Even with the death of an infant the same fear was manifested. One day, when a friend visited a neighbour whose child was sick, he was not a little surprised to find, on his return in the evening, that the house had disappeared and all its inhabitants gone. Among the Abipones of Paraguay, when anyone’s life is despaired of, the house is immediately forsaken by his fellow inmates, and the New England tribes would never live in a wigwam in which any person had died, but would immediately pull it down.

If a deceased Creek Indian ‘has been a man of eminent character, the family immediately remove from the house in which he is buried, and erect a new one, with a belief that where the bones of their dead are deposited, the place is always attended by goblins.’279 The Kamtchadales frequently remove from their dwelling when anyone has died, and among the Lepchas the house where there has been a death ‘is almost always forsaken by the surviving inmates.’280 Occasionally, it would seem, the desertion is more complete. After a death, for instance, the Boobies of Fernando Po forsake the village in which it occurred, and of the Bechuanas we read that ‘on the death of Mallahawan … the town [Lattakoo] was removed, according to the custom of the country.’281

Ghosts are supposed to find pleasure in revisiting the places where they have experienced joy, or sorrow and pain, and to wander round the spot where they died, and hence all kinds of precautions have been adopted to prevent their returning. In Europe, sometimes, ‘steps were taken to barricade the house against him. Thus, in some parts of Russia and East Prussia, an axe or a lock is laid on the threshold, or a knife is hung over the door, and in Germany as soon as the coffin is carried out of the house all the doors and windows are shut.’282 And conversely, it is a common custom in many parts of England to unfasten every bolt and lock in the house that the spirit of the dying man may freely escape.

But, as Mr. Frazer shows in his interesting paper on the ‘Primitive Ghost,’ our ancestors knew how to outwit the ghost in its endeavour to find its way back to the house it left at death. Thus the practice of closing the eyes of the dead, he suggests, originated in ‘blindfolding the dead that he might not see the way by which he was carried to his last home. At the grave, where he was to rest for ever, there was no motive for concealment; hence the Romans, and apparently the Siamese, opened the eyes of the dead man at the funeral pyre. And the idea that if the eyes of the dead be not closed, his ghost will return to fetch away another of the household, still exists in Germany, Bohemia, and England.’ With the same object the coffin was carried out of the house by a hole purposely made in the wall, which was stopped up as soon as the body had passed through, so that, when the ghost strolled back from the grave, he found there was no thoroughfare – a device shared equally by Greenlanders, Hottentots, Bechuanas, Samoieds, Ojibways, Algonquins, Laosians, Hindoos, Tibetans, Siamese, Chinese, and Fijians. These ‘doors of the dead’ are still to be seen in a village near Amsterdam, and they were common in some towns of Central Italy. A trace of the same custom survives in Thüringen, where there is a belief that the ghost of a man who has been hanged will return to the house if not taken out by a window instead of a door. Similarly, for the purpose of misleading the dead, the Bohemians put on masks, that the dead might not know and therefore might not follow them, and it is a matter of conjecture whether mourning customs may not have sprung from ‘the desire to disguise and therefore to protect the living from the dead.’

Among further methods in use for frustrating the return of the dead, may be noticed the objection to utter the names of deceased persons – a superstition which Mr. Frazer shows has modified whole languages. Thus, ‘among the Australians, Tasmanians, and Abipones, if the name of a deceased person happened to be a common name, e.g. the name of an animal or plant, this name was abolished, and a new one substituted for it. During the residence of the Jesuit Missionary Dobritzhoffer amongst the Abipones, the name for tiger was thus changed three times. Amongst the Indians of Columbia, near relatives of a deceased person often change their names, under the impression that the ghost will return if he hears the familiar names.’283

The Sandwich Islanders say the spirit of the departed hovers about the place of its former resort, and in the country north of the Zambesi ‘all believe that the souls of the departed still mingle among the living, and partake in some way of the food they consume.’ In the Aleutian Islands, it is said that ‘the invisible souls or shades of the departed wander about among their children.’

But one of the most favourite haunts of departed spirits is said to be burial-grounds, and especially their own graves, reminding us of Puck’s words in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (Act v. sc. 2):

Now it is the time of night,That the graves all gaping wide,Everyone lets forth his sprite,In the church-way paths to glide.

‘The belief in ghosts,’ writes Thorpe,284 ‘was deeply impressed on the minds of the heathen Northmen, a belief closely connected with their ideas of the state after death. The soul, they believed, returned to the place whence it sprang, while the body, and the grosser life bound to it, passed to the abode of Hel or Death. Herewith was naturally combined the belief that the soul of the departed might, from its heavenly home, revisit the earth, there at night-time to unite itself in the grave-mound with the corporeal shadow released from Hel. Thus the dead could show themselves in the open grave-mounds in the same form which they had in life.’

Indeed, it has been the current opinion for centuries that places of burial are haunted with spectres and apparitions. Ovid speaks of ghosts coming out of their sepulchres and wandering about, and Virgil,285 too, quoting the popular opinion of his day, tells us how ‘Mœris could call the ghosts out of their tombs.’ In short, the idea of the ghost remaining near the corpse is of world-wide prevalence, and, as Dr. Tylor remarks,286 ‘through all the changes of religious thought from first to last in the course of human history, the hovering ghosts of the dead make the midnight burial-ground a place where man’s flesh creeps with terror.’ We may further compare Hamlet’s words (Act iii. sc. 2):

’Tis now the very witching time of night,When church-yards yawn.

And Puck also tells how, at the approach of Aurora, ‘ghosts, wandering here and there, troop home to churchyards.’ Tracing this superstition amongst uncultured tribes, we find the soul of the North American hovering about its burial-place, and among the Costa Ricans the spirits of the dead are believed to remain near their bodies for a year. The Dayak’s burial-place is frequented by ghosts, and the explorer Swan tells us that when he was with the North-Western Indians, he was not allowed to attend a funeral for fear of his offending the spirits hovering about. From the same authority we learn how at Stony Point, on the north-west coast of America, a burial-place of the Indians was considered to be haunted by spirits, and on this account no Indian ever ventured there.287 This dread of burial-grounds still retains a persistent hold, and is one of those survivals of primitive belief which has given rise to a host of strange superstitious practices.