The Vril contagion

You ready for a twisted tale?

In 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton published a novel called The Coming Race.  The plot is pretty wild, considering that science fiction/fantasy only really took off as a genre in the early twentieth century.  The story revolves around a young wealthy man who goes exploring with a friend, and they come upon what appears to be an abandoned mine shaft.  They descend into the opening using a rope, but the rope snaps and the two men fall.  The friend is killed; the narrator is stunned but largely uninjured, and finds himself in a complex of underground caves.

After blundering about for a while, he discovers -- or, more accurately, is discovered by -- a angelic humanoid who turns out to be (1) superintelligent, and (2) telepathic.  In short order they establish communication with each other.  The narrator learns that the people who live down in the caves belong to a race called the Vril-ya, that there are twelve thousand of them, and that they have harnessed an "all-permeating etheric fluid" called Vril that gives them their extraordinary powers.  The end of the story is rather predictable (although it certainly was innovative for its time).  The narrator falls in love with the Guide's daughter, Zee.  While the Guide was okay with the narrator living down there, he couldn't condone any kind of Vril-ya/human hanky-panky, so he orders his son Taë to kill the narrator.  Taë conspires to free the narrator, and Zee leads him to a tunnel that goes back to the surface.  But Zee warns him before he escapes to safety that it's only a matter of time before the Vril-ya run out of space and resources, and at that point they'll come above ground themselves -- with the purpose of conquering the surface of the planet.

The novel did quite well, and was even adapted into a successful stage play.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The whole thing reminds me of three other subterranean races -- H. G. Wells's Morlocks (from The Time Machine), the people of K'n-yan in the terrifying story by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop called "The Mound," and of course the Silurians from Doctor Who.  ("The Mound" is similar enough to Bulwer-Lytton's story that I have to wonder if the latter was the former's inspiration; but in the Lovecraft/Bishop story the narrator's lover meets with a gruesome fate because of her betrayal, because Lovecraft didn't even do equivocal endings, much less happy ones.)

Okay, so we have a strange and atmospheric novel by a nineteenth-century British author, which so far is only mildly interesting.  But of course the story doesn't end there.

Shortly after The Coming Race's publication, Bulwer-Lytton was shocked to find out that a significant number of people who read it apparently didn't know it was a work of fiction.  The first bunch were the members of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, one of the sub-branches of the Rosicrucians.  The Rosicrucians were an esoteric sect that, like many others, fell victim to squabbling and infighting that led to schisms, to the extent that at one point the number of Rosicrucian sects exceeded the number of actual Rosicrucians.  But this particular splinter group was going strong in the 1870s, and appointed Bulwer-Lytton as its "Grand Patron."  Bulwer-Lytton was horrified, and said, more or less, "But... look!  I made it all up!  See?  It says 'fiction' right here on the spine of the book!"  This, predictably, had zero effect on the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, who if they had a firm grasp on reality probably wouldn't have been Rosicrucians in the first place.

Then the whole concept of Vril got picked up and popularized by the infamous Madame Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy.  Blavatsky just loved the idea of Vril, and said that it was a real magical force that allowed for superior people to do supernatural stuff.  The underground people from Bulwer-Lytton's novel were real, too, she said; they were spiritual guides who you could get in touch with if you purchased and read all of her books and then tried hard enough.  Shortly afterward, the Scottish loony William Scott-Elliot got on board with the claim that the people of Atlantis had known all about Vril, and used it to power their aircraft.  Oh, and the Atlanteans were the ancestors of the Vril-ya, who were driven underground when Atlantis was destroyed.

Then like some weird contagion, the idea was picked up by the Thule Society, a proto-Nazi group of German occultists that flourished in Münich between World War I and World War II.  (Members included Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Karl Harrer.)  While the Thule Society -- at least what was left of them -- was disbanded after the end of World War II, the Vril concept, and its connection to a superior, super-powerful race, persists to this day in neo-Nazi circles, where it's been wound together with ideas gleaned from Norse mythology to create a poisonous, if bizarre, amalgam.

So Edward Bulwer-Lytton created a concept that, on one hand, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and on the other generated a juggernaut that pretty much obliterated his original novel.  What's wryly amusing is that this isn't the only time he wrote something that people took literally; his story The Haunted and the Haunters bears an uncanny resemblance to the legend of 50 Berkeley Square, the "most haunted house in London," which still figures prominently on "ghost walks" and antiquarian tours of the city.

Even though as a novelist, I'm a little envious of his success -- I'd be thrilled if one of my books was still being talked about a century and a half later -- I'm forced to the conclusion that Bulwer-Lytton really should have been more careful about what he wrote into his stories.

Anyhow, what we have is a fictional concept about a fictional substance utilized by a fictional race, as described in a work of fiction (not to belabor the point unduly), which nonetheless inspired numerous people over the following 150 years to believe that it was one hundred percent true.  For me, it just reinforces my sense that I have no idea what makes most people tick.  It should have just taken someone saying, "Hey, lookit, the whole thing comes from a novel, here's a copy, check it out," for the Vril-believers to say, "Ha!  Wouldja look at that?  What a goober I am," and then to run off and believe something completely different and hopefully more plausible.

But even after pretty much everyone knew that Bulwer-Lytton had made the whole thing up, there were -- and still are -- people who think it's all real.

So there you have it.  Underground angels, telepathy, and Vril.  Me, I'm dubious, but if at some point the Vril-ya start coming up out of mine shafts and want to take over the world, I guess I'll have to admit I was wrong.  On the other hand, if they do, I'm all for giving them carte blanche.  The Vril-ya couldn't do much worse than the set of incompetent, amoral wingnuts we currently have in charge.

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The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness.  Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.  Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Metro Centric, Sophie Snyder Berkeley Square, CC BY 2.0]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late eighteenth century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the upper floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttelton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition that appeared to him as a brown mist and that "generated a feeling of absolute terror."  He shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttelton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttelton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand.  The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth.  The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall.  He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" that tried to strangle Martin -- beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.  It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttelton.

Sad to say for aficionados of "true ghost stories," the likeliest explanation is that the entire thing was spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual reliability as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttelton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out, in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what's actually there.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun and amusing discussion of a very ominous topic; how the universe will end.

In The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us through all the known possibilities -- a "Big Crunch" (the Big Bang in reverse), the cheerfully-named "Heat Death" (the material of the universe spread out at uniform density and a uniform temperature of only a few degrees above absolute zero), the terrifying -- but fortunately extremely unlikely -- Vacuum Decay (where the universe tears itself apart from the inside out), and others even wilder.

The cool thing is that all of it is scientifically sound.  Mack is a brilliant theoretical astrophysicist, and her explanations take cutting-edge research and bring it to a level a layperson can understand.  And along the way, her humor shines through, bringing a touch of lightness and upbeat positivity to a subject that will take the reader to the edges of the known universe and the end of time.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness.  Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and which has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.  Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[image courtesy of photographer Sophie Ryder and the Wikimedia Commons]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late 18th century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the upper floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the 19th century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttleton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition, that appeared to him as a brown mist, and that terrified him -- he shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttleton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttleton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand. The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth. The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall. He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter, because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" which tried to strangle Martin -- beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.  It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers, and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttleton.

In my opinion, the entire thing seems to be spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual accuracy as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttleton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out, in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what it actually is.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.