The Ghost World

It was a popular belief in years gone by, that it was dangerous to listen long to the weirdly fascinating influence of phantom music, or, as it was sometimes called, ‘diabolic music,’ as it was employed by evil-disposed spirits for the purpose of accomplishing some wicked design. Tradition tells how certain weird music was long since heard in an old mansion in Schleswig Holstein. The story goes that at a wedding there was a certain young lady present, who was the most enthusiastic dancer far and near, and who, in spite of having danced all the evening, petulantly exclaimed, ‘If the devil himself were to call me out, I would not refuse him.’ Suddenly the door of the ball-room flew open, and a stranger entered and invited her to dance. Round and round they whirled unceasingly, faster and faster, until, to the horror of all present, she fell down dead. Every year afterwards, on the same day as this tragic event happened, exactly at midnight, the mansion long resounded with diabolic music, the lady haunting the scene of her fearful death. There are numerous versions of this story, and one current in Denmark is known as ‘The Indefatigable Fiddler.’ It appears that on a certain Sunday evening, some young people were merrymaking, when it was decided to have a little dancing. In the midst of an animated discussion as to how they could procure a musician, one of the party boastingly said, ‘Now, that leave to me. I will bring you a musician, even if it should be the devil himself.’ Thereupon he left the house, and had not gone far when he met a poverty-looking man with a fiddle under his arm, who, for a certain sum, agreed to play. Soon the young people, spellbound by the fiddler’s music, were frantically dancing up and down the room unable to stop, and in spite of their entreaties he continued playing. They must have soon died of exhaustion, had not the parish priest arrived at the farmhouse, and expelled the fiddler by certain mystic words. Sometimes, it is said, the sound of music, such as harp-playing, is heard in the most sequestered spots, and is attributed to supernatural agency. The Welsh peasantry thought it proceeded from the fairies, who were supposed to be specially fond of this instrument; but such music had this peculiarity – no one could ever learn the tune.

Cortachy Castle, the seat of the Earl of Airlie, has long had its mysterious drummer; and whenever the sound of his drum is heard, it betokens the speedy death of a member of the Ogilvie family. The story goes that ‘either the drummer, or some officer whose emissary he was, had excited the jealousy of a former Lord Airlie, and that in consequence he was put to death by being thrust into his own drum and flung from the window of the tower, in which is situated the chamber where his music is apparently chiefly heard. It is said that he threatened to haunt the family if his life were taken,’ a promise which he has fulfilled.338 With this strange warning may be compared the amusing story popularly known as ‘The Drummer of Tedworth,’ in which the ghost or evil spirit of a drummer, or the ghost of a drum, performed the principal part in this mysterious drama for ‘two entire years.’ The story, as succinctly given by George Cruikshank,339 goes that in March 1661, Mr. Monpesson, a magistrate, caused a vagrant drummer to be arrested, who had been annoying the country by noisy demands for charity, and had ordered his drum to be taken from him, and left in the bailiff’s house. About the middle of the following April, when Mr. Monpesson was preparing for a journey to London, the bailiff sent the drum to his house. But on his return home, he was informed that noises had been heard, and then he heard the noises himself, which were a ‘thumping and drumming,’ accompanied by ‘a strange noise and hollow sound.’ The sign of it when it came was like a hurling in the air over the house, and at its going off, the beating of a drum, like that of the ‘breaking up of a guard.’ After a month’s disturbance outside the house, it came into the room where the drum lay. For an hour together it would beat ‘Roundheads and Cockolds,’ the ‘tattoo,’ and several other points of war as well as any drummer. Upon one occasion, when many were present, a gentleman said, ‘Satan, if the drummer set thee to work, give three knocks,’ which it did at once. And for further trial, he bid it for confirmation, if it were the drummer, to give five knocks and no more that night, which it did, and left the house quiet all the night after. ‘But,’ as George Cruikshank observes, ‘strange as it certainly was, is it not still more strange that educated gentlemen, and even clergymen, as in this case, also should believe that the Almighty would suffer an evil spirit to disturb and affright a whole innocent family, because the head of that family had, in his capacity as magistrate, thought it his duty to take away a drum from no doubt a drunken drummer, who, by his noisy conduct, had become a nuisance to the neighbourhood?’

In many parts of the country, phantom bells are supposed to be heard ringing their ghostly peals. Near Blackpool, about two miles out at sea, there once stood, tradition says, the church and cemetery of Kilmigrol, long ago submerged. Even now, in rough weather, the melancholy chimes of the bells may be heard sounding over the restless waters. A similar story is told of Jersey. According to a local legend, many years ago, ‘the twelve parish churches in that island possessed each a valuable peal of bells, but during a long civil war the bells were sold to defray the expenses of the troops. The bells were sent to France, but on the passage the ship foundered, and everything was lost. Since then, during a storm, these bells always ring at sea, and to this day the fishermen of St. Ouen’s Bay, before embarking, go to the edge of the water to listen if they can hear the bells; if so, nothing will induce them to leave the shore.’ With this story may be compared one told of Whitby Abbey, which was suppressed in 1539. The bells were sold, and placed on board to be conveyed to London. But, as soon as the vessel had moved out into the bay it sank, and beneath the waters the bells may occasionally be heard, a legend which has been thus poetically described:

Up from the heart of the oceanThe mellow music peals,Where the sunlight makes its golden path,And the seamew flits and wheels.For many a chequered century,Untired by flying time,The bells no human fingers touchHave rung their hidden chime.

To this day the tower of Forrabury Church, Cornwall, or, as it has been called by Mr. Hawker, ‘the silent tower of Bottreaux,’ remains without bells. It appears the bells were cast and shipped for Forrabury, but as the ship neared the shore, the captain swore and used profane language, whereupon the vessel sank beneath a sudden swell of the ocean. As it went down, the bells were heard tolling with a muffled peal; and ever since, when storms are at hand, their phantom sound is still audible from beneath the waves:

Still when the storm of Bottreaux’s wavesIs waking in his weedy caves,Those bells that sullen surges hide,Peal their deep tones beneath the tide —‘Come to thy God in time,’Thus saith the ocean chime;‘Storm, whirlpool, billow past,Come to thy God at last.’

Legends of this kind remind us of Southey’s ballad of the ‘Inchcape Bell,’ founded on a tragic legend. The abbots of Aberbrothock (Arbroath) fixed a bell on a rock, as a kindly warning to sailors, that obstruction having long been considered the chief difficulty in the navigation of the Firth of Forth. The bell was so fastened as to be rung by the agitation of the waves, but one day, Sir Ralph the Rover ‘cut the bell from the Inchcape float,’ and down sank the bell with a gurgling sound. Afterwards,

Sir Ralph the Rover sailed away,He scoured the sea for many a day,And now grown rich with plundered store,He steers his course for Scotland’s shore.

But the night is dark and hazy, and —

They hear no sound, the swell is strong,Though the wind hath fallen they drift along,Till the vessel strikes with a shivering shock.‘O Christ! It is the Inchcape rock!’

But it is too late – the ship is doomed:

Sir Ralph the Rover tore his hair;He cursed himself in his despair.The waves rush in on every side;The ship is sinking beneath the tide.But even in his dying fearOne dreadful sound could the rover hear,A sound as if with the Inchcape bell,The devil below was ringing his knell.

Indeed, there are all kinds of whimsical stories current of phantom bells, and according to a tradition at Tunstall, in Norfolk, the parson and churchwardens disputed for the possession of some bells which had become useless because the tower was burnt. But, during their altercation, the arch-fiend quickly travelled off with the bells, and being pursued by the parson, who began to exorcise in Latin, he dived into the earth with his ponderous burden, and the place where he disappeared is a boggy pool of water, called ‘Hell Hole.’ Notwithstanding the aversion of the powers of darkness to such sounds, even these bells are occasionally permitted to favour their native place with a ghostly peal. Similarly, at Fisherty Brow, near Lonsdale, there is a sort of hollow where, as the legend runs, a church, parson, and congregation were swallowed up. On a Sunday morning the bells may be heard ringing a phantom peal by anyone who puts his ear to the ground.

Occasionally, it is said, phantom music, by way of warning, is heard just before a death, instances of which are numerous.

Samuel Foote, in the year 1740, while visiting at his father’s house in Truro, was kept awake by sounds of sweet music. His uncle was at about the same time murdered by assassins. This strange occurrence is thus told by Mr. Ingram.340 Foote’s maternal uncles were Sir John Goodere and Captain Goodere, a naval officer. In 1740 the two brothers dined at a friend’s house near Bristol. For a long time they had been on bad terms, owing to certain money transactions, but at the dinner-table a reconciliation was, to all appearance, arrived at between them. But, on his return home, Sir John was waylaid by some men from his brother’s vessel, acting by his brother’s authority, carried on board, and deliberately strangled, Captain Goodere not only unconcernedly looking on, but furnishing the rope with which the crime was committed. The strangest part of this terrible tale, however, remains to be told. On the night the murder was perpetrated, Foote arrived at his father’s house in Truro, and he used to relate how he was kept awake for some time by the softest and sweetest strains of music he had ever heard. At first he tried to fancy it was a serenade got up by some of the family to welcome him home, but not being able to discover any trace of the musicians, he came to the conclusion that he was deceived by his own imagination. He shortly afterwards learnt that the murder had been consummated at the same hour of the same night as he had been haunted by the mysterious sounds.

CHAPTER XXXI

PHANTOM SOUNDS

The deceptiveness of sound in olden times was very little understood, and hence originated, in most countries, a host of traditionary tales descriptive of sundry mysterious noises which were generally attributed to supernatural agencies. Hence, it is impossible to say how many a ghost story would long ago have found a satisfactory solution if only attention had been paid to the properties of sound. But by disregarding the laws which regulate the conditions upon which sound is oftentimes more or less audible, the imagination has frequently conjured up the most fantastic reasons for some mysterious rumbling which has suddenly trespassed on the silence of the night. Thus, Dr. Tyndall has proved how the atmosphere is occasionally in an unusual degree more transparent or opaque to sound as well as to light, and supported this theory by referring to the audibility of fog-signals, which vary according to the state of the weather. Facts of this kind are of the utmost importance in accounting, it may be, for some apparently inexplicable sound. It is sometimes forgotten, too, that sounds are far more audible at night time than during the day, and what would fail to attract notice, even if heard during the hours of sunlight, would probably be treated in a different aspect when once the darkness of evening had set in. There is perhaps no superstition so deeply rooted in the popular mind as the belief in what are generally termed ‘death-warnings’; the common opinion being that death announces its approach by certain mysterious noises, a powerful illustration of which occurs in ‘Macbeth’ (Act ii. sc. 3), where Lennox graphically describes how, on the awful night in which Duncan is murdered —

Our chimneys were blown down: and, as they sayLamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death:And prophesying, with accents terrible,Of dire combustion, and confused events,New hatch’d to the woeful time.

Modern folk-lore holds either that a knocking or rumbling in the floor is an omen of death about to happen, or that dying persons themselves announce their dissolution to their friends in such strange sounds.341

In recent years one of the most interesting instances of a phantom voice occurred in connection with the death of Mr. George Smith, the well-known Assyriologist. This eminent scholar died at Aleppo, on August 19, 1876, at about six o’clock in the afternoon. On the same day, and at about the same time, as Dr. Delitzsch – a friend and fellow-worker of Mr. Smith – was passing within a stone’s throw of the house in which he had lived when in London, he suddenly heard his own name uttered aloud ‘in a most piercing cry,’ which a contemporary record of the time said ‘thrilled him to the marrow.’ The fact impressed Dr. Delitzsch so much that he looked at his watch, made a note of the hour, and recorded the fact in his note-book, this being one of those straightforward and unimpeachable coincidences which, even to an opponent, is difficult to explain.

There can be no doubt that many of the unearthly noises heard near and in lonely houses on the coast were produced by an illicit class of spirits, that is, through the agency of smugglers, ‘in order to alarm and drive all others but their accomplices from their haunts.’ Thus, in a house at Rottingdean, Sussex, all kinds of strange noises were heard night after night, when suddenly they ceased. Soon afterwards one of a gang of smugglers confessed to their having made a secret passage from the beach close by the house, and that, wishing to induce the occupiers to abandon it, they had rolled at the dead of night tub after tub of spirits up the passage, and so had caused it to be reported that the place was haunted.342 George Cruikshank tells how, in the wine cellar of a house somewhere near Blackheath, there were sometimes heard strange noises in the evening and at night-time, such as knocking, groaning, footsteps, &c. The master of the house at last determined ‘to lay the ghost’ if possible, and one evening, when these noises had been heard, went with his servants to the cellar, where they discovered an under-gardener in a drunken state. It seems that he had tunnelled a hole from the tool-house through the wall into the cellar.

In numerous cases, too, there can be no doubt that strange noises heard in the silent hours of the night have been due to some cleverly-devised trick for the purpose, in many cases, of keeping the house uninhabited, and thereby benefiting, it may be, some impecunious care-taker. A story is told of a ghost – which turned out to be the trick of a Franciscan friar – that answered questions by knocking in the Catholic church of Orleans, and demanded the removal of the provost’s Lutheran wife, who had been buried there.343 But one of the most eccentric instances of spiritual antics was the noises said to have been heard at Epworth Parsonage in the time of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, these sounds having consisted of ‘knockings’ and ‘groanings,’ of ‘footsteps,’ and ‘rustling of silk trailing along,’ ‘clattering of the iron casement,’ and ‘clattering of the warming pan,’ and all sorts of frightful noises, which frightened even a big dog, a large mastiff, who used, at first, when he heard the noises, ‘to bark, and leap, and snap on one side and the other, and that frequently before anyone in the room heard the noises at all; but after two or three days he used to creep away before the noise began, and by this the family knew it was at hand.’ Mr. Wesley at one time thought it was rats, and sent for a horn to blow them away. But this made matters worse, for after the horn was blown the noise came in the daytime as well. Some of the Wesley family believed it to be supernatural hauntings, and explained the cause of it thus: at morning and evening prayers, ‘when the Rev. Samuel Wesley commenced prayer for the king, a knocking began all round the room, and a thundering knock attended the Amen.’ Mr. Wesley observed that his wife did not say ‘Amen’ to the prayer for the king, but Mrs. Wesley added she could not, for she did not believe that the Prince of Orange was king.344 Ewshott House, Hampshire, was disturbed by equally strange sounds, and Glamis Castle, with its secret room, has long been famous for the mysterious noises, knocking, and hammering heard at night-time, which a lady once remarked reminded her of the erection of a scaffold.

The miscreant ghosts of wicked people are supposed to make all kinds of unearthly noises, for as they cannot enjoy peace in their graves, they delight in annoying the occupants of their mortal haunts. Lowther Hall, the residence of the ‘bad Lord Lonsdale,’ was disturbed by such uncanny sounds that neither men nor animals were permitted to rest, and many of the ghost stories told of our old country houses describe the peculiar noises made by their ghostly tenants. The mother of the premier, George Canning, used to tell her experiences of a haunted house in Plymouth, where she stayed during a theatrical engagement. Having learnt from a Mr. Bernard, who was connected with the theatre, that he could obtain comfortable apartments for her at a moderate price, she accepted his offer. ‘There is,’ said he, ‘a house belonging to our carpenter that is reported to be haunted, and nobody will live in it. If you like to have it you may, and for nothing, I believe, for he is so anxious to get a tenant; only you must not let it be known that you do not pay any rent for it.’ It turned out as Mr. Bernard had informed her, for night after night she heard all such noises as are wont to proceed from a workshop, although, on examining every part of the house herself, she found nothing to account for this extraordinary series of noises.

Occasionally, it is said, before the perpetration of any dreadful crime, as murder, a supernatural sound is heard. A murder was committed, for instance, at Cottertown, of Auchanasie, near Keith, on January 11, 1797, in connection with which the following facts have been recorded: ‘On the day on which the deed was done, two men, strangers to the district, called at a farmhouse about three miles from the house in which lived the old folk that were murdered. Shortly before the tragic act was committed, a sound was heard passing along the road the two men were seen to take, in the direction of the place at which the murder was perpetrated. So loud and extraordinary was the noise that the people left their houses to see what it was that was passing. To the amazement of every one, nothing was to be seen, though it was moonlight, and moonlight so bright that it aroused attention. All believed something dreadful was to happen, and some proposed to follow the sound. About the time this discussion was going on, a blaze of fire arose on the hill of Auchanasie. The foul deed had been accomplished, and the cottage set on fire. By next day all knew of what the mysterious sound had been the forerunner.’345 At Wheal Vor Mine an unaccountable noise has been generally supposed to be a warning. On Barry Island, near Cardiff, it is said that certain ghostly noises were formerly heard in it – sounds resembling the clanking of chains, hammering of iron, and blowing of bellows, and which were supposed to be made by the fiends whom Merlin had set to work to frame the wall of crags to surround Carmarthen.

The following extract from Lockhart’s ‘Life of Sir Walter Scott’ records a strange noise which was heard while the new house at Abbotsford was being built, the novelist living in an older part, close adjoining: ‘Walter Scott to Daniel Terry, April 30, 1818… The exposed state of my house has led to a mysterious disturbance. The night before last we were awakened by a violent noise, like drawing heavy boards along the new part of the house. I fancied something had fallen, and thought no more about it; this was about two in the morning. Last night, at the same witching hour, the very same noise occurred. Mrs. S., as you know, is rather timbersome, so up I got, with Beardie’s broad sword under my arm —

Bolt upright,And ready to fight.

But nothing was out of order, neither can I discover what occasioned the disturbance.’ Mr. Lockhart adds: ‘On the morning that Mr. Terry received the foregoing letter in London, Mr. William Erskine was breakfasting with him, and the chief subject of their conversation was the sudden death of George Bullock, which had occurred on the same night, and nearly as they could ascertain at the very hour when Scott was aroused from his sleep by the “mysterious disturbance” here described. This coincidence, when Scott received Erskine’s minute detail of what had happened in Tenterdon Street (that is, the death of Bullock, who had the charge of furnishing the new rooms at Abbotsford), made a much stronger impression on his mind than might be gathered from the tone of an ensuing communication.’ It seems that Bullock had been at Abbotsford, and made himself a great favourite with old and young. Sir Walter Scott, a week or two afterwards, wrote thus to Terry: ‘Were you not struck with the fantastical coincidence of our nocturnal disturbances at Abbotsford, with the melancholy event that followed? I protest to you the noise resembled half a dozen men at work, putting up boards and furniture, and nothing can be more certain than that there was nobody on the premises at the time. With a few additional touches, the story would figure in Glanville or Aubrey’s collection. In the meantime you may set it down, with poor Dubisson’s warnings, as a remarkable coincidence coming under your own observation.’

In a paper by Mrs. Edwards, in ‘Macmillan’s Magazine,’ entitled ‘The Mystery of Pezazi,’ an account is given of constant disturbing sounds of nocturnal tree-felling heard near a bungalow in Ceylon, where examination proved that no trees had been felled. Mrs. Edwards, her husband, and their servants were on several occasions disturbed by these sounds, which were unmistakable and distinct. The Singhalese attribute these noises to a Pezazi, or spirit. A description of precisely the same disturbances occurs, writes Mr. Andrew Lang,346 in Sahagun’s account of the superstitions of the Aztecs, and it seems that the Galapagos Islands, ‘suthard of the line,’ were haunted by the midnight axe. ‘De Quincey,’ adds Mr. Lang, ‘who certainly had not heard the Ceylon story, and who probably would have mentioned Sahagun’s had he known it, describes the effect produced by the midnight axe on the nerves of his brother, Pink: “So it was, and attested by generations of sea-vagabonds, that every night, duly as the sun went down and the twilight began to prevail, a sound arose – audible to other islands, and to every ship lying quietly at anchor in that neighbourhood – of a woodcutter’s axe… The close of the story was that after, I suppose, ten or twelve minutes of hacking and hewing, a horrid crash was heard, announcing that the tree, if tree it were, that never yet was made visible to daylight search, had yielded to the old woodman’s persecution… The woodcutter’s axe began to intermit about the earliest approach of dawn, and as light strengthened it ceased entirely, after poor Pink’s ghostly panic grew insupportable.”’

Among the American Indians all the sounds that issued from caverns were thought to be produced by their spiritual inhabitants. The Sonora Indians say that departed souls dwell among the caves and nooks of their cliffs, and that echoes often heard there are their voices. Similarly, when explosions were heard, caused by the sulphurous gas from the rocks around the head-waters of Lake Ontario, the superstitious Indians attributed them to the breathing of the Manitous.347 The modern Dayaks, Siamese, and Singhalese agree with the Esths as to noises being caused by spirits. European folk-lore has long ascribed most of the unexplained noises to the agency of spirits, and to this day Franconian damsels go to a tree on St. Thomas’s Day, knock three times, and listen for the indwelling spirit to inform them from raps within what kind of husbands they are to have. Hence the night is known as ‘Little Knocker’s Night.’ There is the Poltergeist of the German, a mischievous spirit, who wanders about the house at night making all kinds of strange noises.