The legend of the lost sister

The difficult thing about any sort of historical research is that sometimes, the evidence you're looking for doesn't even exist.

In my own field of historical linguistics, for example, we're trying to determine what languages are related to each other (creating, as it were, a family tree for languages), figuring out word roots, identifying words borrowed from other languages, and reconstructing the ancestral language -- based only on the languages we now have access to.  There are times when there simply isn't enough information available to solve the particular puzzle you're working on.

The further back in time you go, the shakier the ground gets.  You'll see in etymological dictionaries claims like "the Proto-Indo-European word for 'settlement' or 'town' was *-weyk," but that's an inference; there aren't many Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days to verify if this is correct.  It's not just a guess, though.  It was reconstructed from the suffixes -wich and -wick you see in a lot of English place names (Norwich, Warwick), the Latin word vicus (meaning "a village in a rural area"), the Welsh gwig and Cornish guic (which mean approximately the same as the Latin does), the Greek word οἶκος (house), the Sanskrit viś and Old Church Slavonic vĭsĭ (both meaning "settlement"), and so on.  Using patterns of sound change, we can take current languages (or at least ones we have written records for) and backpedal to make an inference about what the speakers of PIE four thousand years ago might have said.

Still, it is only an inference, and the inherent unverifiability of it sometimes leaves practitioners of "hard science" scoffing and quoting Wolfgang Pauli, that such claims "aren't even wrong."  I think that's unduly harsh (but of course, given that this is basically what my master's thesis was about, it's no surprise I get a little defensive).  Even so, I think we have to be careful how hard to push a claim based on slim evidence.

That was my immediate thought when I read an article by Jay Norris, of Western Sydney University, in The Conversation.  It was about the mythology associated with my favorite naked-eye astronomical feature -- the Pleiades.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rawastrodata, The Pleiades (M45), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Norris and another astronomer, Barnaby Norris (not sure if they're related, or if it's a coincidence), have authored a paper that appeared in a book in 2022 called Advancing Cultural Astronomy which looks at a strange thing: in cultures all over the world, the Pleiades are associated with a collection of seven individuals.  They're the Seven Sisters in Greece, and also in many indigenous Australian cultures, for example.  And Norris and Norris realized two things that were very odd; first, that even on a clear night, you can only see six stars with the naked eye, not seven; and in both the Greek and Australian myth, the story involves a "lost sister" -- one of the seven who, for some reason or another, disappeared or is hidden.

So they started looking in other traditions, and found that all over the world, in cultures as unrelated as Indonesian, many Native American groups, many African cultures, the Scandinavians, and the Celts, there was the same tradition of associating the Pleiades with the number seven, and with one of the group who was lost.

They then went to the astronomical data.  They found that the stars in the Pleiades are moving relative to each other, and that a hundred thousand years ago there would have been seven stars visible to the naked eye in the cluster, but in the interim two of them moved so close together (from our perspective, at least) that they appear to be a single star unless you have a telescope.  That, they say, is the "lost sister," and is why cultures all over the world have a tradition that the group used to have seven members, but now only has six.

And this, they said, was evidence that the myth of the Pleiades is one of the oldest stories humans have told.  At least fifty thousand years old -- when the indigenous Australians migrated across a grassy valley that (when the sea level rose) became the Bay of Carpentaria -- and perhaps as much as a hundred thousand years old, when the common ancestors of all humans were still living in Africa and (presumably) shared a single cultural tradition.

It's a fascinating claim.  I have to admit that the commonalities of the myths surrounding the Pleiades in cultures all over the world are a little hard to explain otherwise.  Still, I can't say I'm a hundred percent sold.  I know from my work in reconstructive linguistics that chance similarities are weirdly common, and can lead to some seriously specious conclusions.  (Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall my rather brutal takedown a few years ago of a guy named L. M. Leteane, who used cherry-picked chance similarities between words to support his loony claim that the Pascuanese -- or Easter Islanders -- were originally from Egypt, as were the Olmecs of Central America, and both languages were descended from Bantu.)

So as far as the claim that the story of the Seven Sisters is over fifty thousand years old, count me as interested but unconvinced.  I think it's possible; it's certainly intriguing.  But to me, it's too hard to eliminate the simpler possibility, that the "loss" of one of the stars in the Pleiades was noted by many ancient cultures -- separately, and much more recently -- and became incorporated into their legends, rather than all the legends of the Pleiades and the lost sister coming from a single, very ancient ancestral story.

But it'll give you something to think about, when you see the Pleiades on the next clear night.  Whatever the origins of the myths surrounding it, it's awe-inspiring to think about our distant ancestors looking up at the same beautiful cluster of stars on a chilly, clear winter's night, and wondering what it really was -- same as we're doing today using the tools of science.

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Jenny's ancestry

I went into historical linguistics because of my fascination with origins.

It's manifested in other realms of study.  My primary interest in biology, a subject I taught for over three decades, is evolutionary genetics; I'm endlessly interested in the family tree of life, and its connections to species migration, adaptation, paleontology, and extinction.  More personally, I've been a devoted genealogist since I was a teenager, and although my hoped-for noble lineage never showed up (my ancestry is virtually all French, Scottish, and English peasants, rogues, ne'er-do-wells, and petty criminals), I still periodically add to my database of ancestors and cousins of varying degrees, which now contains over 150,000 names.

It's why when I find a curious origin story, it just makes my little nerdy heart happy.  Like when I discovered something strange about a rather terrifying legend from northern England -- the tale of Jenny Greenteeth.

Jenny Greenteeth is a story that seems to be most common in Lancashire, Cumbria, and the western parts of Yorkshire, and is about a "river hag" -- a female water spirit that specializes in grabbing people, especially children, who have strayed too close to the water, and drowning them.  She shares a lot in common with the Slavic Rusalka and French Melusine, which makes me wonder why people kept dreaming up stories about strange women lying in ponds.  (Certainly it's no basis for a system of government.)

Well, like just about everything, the legend of Jenny Greenteeth didn't come out of nowhere; even folk tales have their origin stories.  (I've written here about the absolutely charming piece of research by anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani, wherein he developed a cladistic tree for the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood.")  And Jenny Greenteeth has a bit of a surprise in store, because her name isn't because her teeth, or anything else about her, are green.

The hint comes from the fact that in some areas of Cumbria, she's still called "Ginny Grendith" -- and the last bit has nothing to do with teeth, either.  That the story evolved that way is like a folkloric version of convergent evolution; once people noticed the chance similarity between her original name and "green teeth," her last name morphed in that direction, probably because it gave her alleged appearance an extra little frisson of nastiness.  

So where does "Greenteeth" come from?  It turns out the name -- and its alternative form, Grendith -- are cousins to that of another creature from the English bestiary, the grindylow.  Like Jenny, the grindylow was a water-dweller, a small humanoid with scaly skin, big nasty pointy teeth, and long arms ending in broad hands with grasping fingers.  They, too, were said to be fond of drowning children.

It's a wonder any surviving kids in northern England who lived near water didn't become permanently phobic.

What's fascinating, though, is that the story doesn't stop there, because grindylow itself has even deeper roots.  The name is thought to have evolved from yet another mythological monster, this one much more famous: Grendel.

Grendel by J. R. Skelton (1908) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Grendel, of course, was the Big Bad in the pre-Norman English epic Beowulf, who was eventually killed by the titular hero.  In a translation by none other than J. R. R. Tolkien, Grendel is described as follows:

... the other, miscreated thing,
in man's form trod the ways of exile,
albeit he was greater than any other human thing.
Him in days of old the dwellers on earth named Grendel.

Grendel was called a sceadugenga -- a "shadow walker," a creature who came out at night.  He was a denizen of boundaries, not quite human and not quite beast, and frequented places that also were on the edge; the spaces between inhabited areas and the wilds, between lowlands and highlands... and between land and water.  He was said to be a "swamp-dweller," living in fens, and that may have been how his later descendants, the grindylow and Jenny Greenteeth, became associated with ponds and marshes.

I've always felt sorry for Grendel.  He did some bad stuff, but he was kind of just built that way.  He didn't ask to be put together from spare parts.  It's why I named a dog I had a while back Grendel.  He was a bit funny-looking too, but he always meant well.

Maybe it's just that I always root for the underdog.

Where the name Grendel came from isn't certain.  Some linguists believe it comes from gren ("grin") + dæle ("divided"), i.e. baring his teeth.  Old English gryndal meant "fierce," but whether that came from the name Grendel or the other way 'round is unknown.  Same thing for the Old Norse grindill, meaning "storm wind."  The Beowulf story has its roots in old Germanic mythology, and there's no doubt it has ties to Scandinavia, but that one may be an accidental false cognate.  Grendel could also come from the Old English grenedæl, "green lowland" -- so there might be a connection to the color green, after all.

In any case, it's an interesting, if unsettling, legend, which a curious history.  I have a pond in my back yard in which I regularly swim, and thus far I haven't been grabbed by a creepy woman with green teeth.  I'll keep my eye out, though.  You can't be too careful about these sorts of things.

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The green children

One of the strangest tales out of old England comes from the turbulent reign of King Stephen, which lasted from 1135 to 1154.

Stephen was the grandson of William the Conqueror; his mother, Adela of Normandy, was William's daughter.  When the legitimate heir to the throne, William Adelin (son of Henry I) died in the "sinking of the White Ship" in 1120, it set up a succession crisis as Henry had no other legitimate sons.  So when Henry died in 1135, Stephen seized the throne.

The problem was, Henry did have a legitimate daughter, Matilda, who basically said "Oh, hell no" (only in Norman French).  And honestly, Matilda's claim to the throne was better, according to the law of primogeniture.  But (1) Matilda was a woman, which back then was for some reason a serious problem, and (2) she was arrogant to the point of pissing off just about everyone she came into contact with.  Personality-wise, though, Stephen was not a lot better.  So they squared off against each other -- and thus began the First English Civil War.

The result was what always happens; years of back-and-forth-ing, and the ones who suffered most were the common people who just wanted to survive and put food on the table.  It wasn't helped by the fact that both Stephen and Matilda seemed to excel most at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  Both of them came close to winning outright more than once, then did something so catastrophically boneheaded that they blew their chance.  (If you want an interesting perspective on the war against the backdrop of some entertaining fiction, Ellis Peters's charming Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are set during Stephen's reign.)

Eventually, everyone got fed up with it, including the two principals.  In 1153 Stephen more or less capitulated, and agreed that if Matilda would give up her claim to the throne and cease hostilities, he'd name her son Henry (the future King Henry II) as his heir.  Treaty signed.  Stephen only lived another two years, Henry became king, and the Plantagenet dynasty was founded.

So it was a mess, and in fact is sometimes called "the Anarchy," which isn't far off the mark.  And it was from during this chaos that we have the odd story of the "Green Children of Woolpit."

Woolpit is a town in Suffolk.  Its curious name has to do with wolves, not sheep; it was originally Wulfpytt -- a pit for catching wolves.  In any case, some time during the war, when things were at their worst, two children showed up in Woolpit, a boy and a girl.  They spoke no English (or French either, for that matter), only a strange language no one in the area recognized, and refused all food except for raw beans, which they ate voraciously.

Also, their skin was green.

Naturally, this raised more than a few eyebrows, but they were taken in by one Sir Richard de Calne, a nobleman of Norman descent who lived near Woolpit.  The boy died soon afterward, but the girl lived, was baptized with the name of Agnes, and gradually learned to speak English.  She adjusted to her new life, although remained "very wanton and impudent," according to one account.  When she was able, she told her caretakers that she and her brother had come from a land where the Sun never shone, and the sky was a perpetual twilight.  Everything there was green, she said.

The place was known as "St. Martin's Land."

The brother and sister had been herding their father's cattle, she told them, and had heard the sound of cathedral bells coming from a cave in a hillside.  Curious, they entered the cave, at first losing their way, but eventually coming out near where they were found in Woolpit.

Two contemporaneous writers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, both give accounts of the Green Children, which substantially agree.  Over time the green color of Agnes's skin gradually faded until she looked more or less normal.  She eventually found work as a servant, but rose in status when she married Richard Barre, a scholar and justice who worked for both Henry II and Richard I.  The details of her later life are unknown.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rod Bacon, WoolpitSign, CC BY-SA 2.0]

So, what's going on, here?

First, it seems pretty certain that something real happened -- i.e., that it's not just a tall tale.  There are too many apparently independent references to the story to discount it entirely.  Needless to say, though, I'm not inclined to believe that they were aliens, or some of the Fair Folk, or any of the other fanciful quasi-explanations I've heard.  It's been suggested that the green color of their skin was due to hypochromic anemia (also known as chlorosis), which can be caused by chronic iron deficiency, which would explain why the coloration went away in Agnes's skin once she had a better diet.

It's also been suggested that their lack of knowledge of English was because they were Flemish.  Both Stephen and Matilda had invited in Flemish mercenaries to help them in the war, and some of these settled in England permanently.  It might be that they were the children of some of these Flemish settlers.

But.

If the cause of the green coloration really was malnourishment, the condition should have been much more widespread, because as I noted earlier, during the First English Civil War just about everyone was starving.  And hypochromic anemia doesn't really make you green, it makes your skin waxy, yellowish, and pale.  The children's green color was striking enough to merit emphasis, which suggests strongly that it was something no one who saw the children had ever seen before.  As far as their being Flemish, their guardian, Sir Richard de Calne, was a well-educated nobleman; both of the principle chroniclers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, were multilingual.  There is no way that if the children had been speaking Flemish, none of them would have recognized it, especially given how many Flemish soldiers and merchants were in England at the time.

Plus, if all the children had done was go through a cave in a hill and come out of the other side, they can't have been far from home.  We're talking Suffolk, in flat East Anglia (Suffolk's highest elevation is only 128 meters!), not the freakin' Rocky Mountains, here.  Why did both of the children think they'd been transported far away -- far enough away that they couldn't just walk back across the hill and then home?  (It's possible, of course, that they had been abused and didn't want to go home.  But still.  Surely if all they'd done was cross a few hills, someone would have recognized them as locals.)

So the prosaic, rational explanation of the story doesn't itself hold up to scrutiny.

Likewise, claims that the story of the Green Children was a moralistic tale invented as a social commentary on "the threat posed by outsiders to the unity of the Christian community," as historian Elizabeth Freeman put it. seem as far-fetched as suggestions that they were aliens.  As I said earlier, the independent accounts of the children, as well as their interactions with real historical figures, indicate that they did exist -- whoever they were, and wherever they'd come from.

So we're left with a mystery that I doubt will ever be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

Understand that I'm not advocating for any kind of paranormal explanation; whatever did happen back in twelfth-century Suffolk, I'm sure it had a rational, scientific cause.  I'm just saying we don't know what it is.  Odd to think, though, that since Richard Barre and Agnes had children, very likely there are people in Suffolk (and those with ancestry there) who descend from the surviving "Green Child."

If you're one of them, consider where that drop of your blood might have come from.  And let me know if you ever find yourself with a craving for raw beans.

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Haunted housewares

I don't own many things that are all that old.

I'm referring to human-made objects, of course.  I have a couple of Devonian-age brachiopod fossils that I collected in a nearby creek bed that are around four hundred million years old.  In general, rocks are more unusual if they're really new; I have a piece of basaltic lava rock I brought back from my trip to Iceland a couple of years ago that was part of an active flow only a few years ago.

Human-made things, though, don't usually last very long.  I don't have anything "passed down in my family" that goes back more than two generations.  I have a couple of beautiful old bookcases that belonged to my paternal grandmother, and that's about it.  As far as other antiques, the two oldest things I own are both musical instruments -- my Ivers & Pond piano, which was made in Boston in 1876, and a wooden keyed flute I got (no lie) in a used-goods store in Tallinn, Estonia, which was made in France in around 1880.  Interestingly, I got both of them super cheap.  The flute was unplayable because the middle joint had a crack, which I had repaired when I got back to the States, and the piano I got for free -- it'd been sitting in someone's garage, unplayed, for years -- so the only cost to me was hiring some piano movers, and then getting it tuned once I got it into my house.

Otherwise?  Most everything else we have is pretty recent.  We've been told our home decorating style is an apparently real thing called "Shabby Chic."  I don't know about "chic," but we've definitely got the "shabby" part locked down.  The fact that my wife and I are both Housework Impaired, combined with owning three dogs, makes it unlikely we'll ever be featured in Home Beautiful.

The reason this all comes up is that I just stumbled across a curious Japanese legend called Tsukumogami (つくも神) that says if you own an object that is over a hundred years old, it becomes a Yōkai (妖怪, literally, "strange apparition"), a sentient being imbued with its own spirit.  These spirits can be benevolent or malevolent, or sometimes maybe they just need a hug:

The Lantern Ghost, by Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1830 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Some of the objects that allegedly became Yōkai include a pair of sandals, a lute, a folding screen, a sake bottle, a gong, a vegetable grater, an umbrella, a mirror, a teakettle, and a clock.  There are lots more, though -- an eighteenth century book called Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (百器徒然袋 -- literally, "One Hundred Haunted Housewares") describes all kinds of haunted objects, including the terrifying Menreiki (面霊気), a horrible monster composed entirely of masks:

The Menreiki, from Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro [Image is in the Public Domain]

I love masks, and actually collect them, but if they start coming to life and chasing me around, I'm done.

What I find fascinating about stories like this is how specific they are.  It's not just a vague "things going bump in the night" kind of legend; this is a koto (a Japanese zither) suddenly growing a horrible face and lots of extra strings:

Koto-furunushi, from Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro [Image is in the Public Domain]

My reaction to all this is not simply my usual rationalism kicking in, wondering, "Why would people believe this when it so clearly doesn't ever happen?"  It's also considering how scary it must be for people who think the world actually works this way.  Of course, I've had the same thought about fundamentalist Christians, who think that an all-loving and compassionate God would make you burn in agony for all eternity because you occasionally look at naughty pictures on the internet.

So Tsukumogami is an interesting legend, but I'm just as happy it's not real.  If my piano suddenly became self-aware and started playing eerie melodies at one in the morning, I think I'd opt right out.  Or, worse, if it started critiquing my playing.  "Merciful heavens, Debussy would be appalled.  Maybe you should go back to playing 'Chopsticks,' or something."

I'm hard enough on my own self, thanks.  I don't need some possessed musical instrument weighing in.

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Woolly dogs

When I lived in Olympia, Washington, I knew a woman who was a professional spinner and weaver.  She made beautiful wearable items as well as decorative wall hangings, throw rugs, and blankets.

What's unusual about her is that among the many kinds of fiber she used was dog hair.  She owned three enormous (and extremely friendly and exuberant) Great Pyrenees, a breed with huge quantities of silky white hair, and she'd periodically brush their coats, wash the fur that came out, and spin it into thread.  She showed me a knit hat she'd made entirely from dog fur -- it was softer than angora.

Turns out, that region of the world has a long history of doing this.  A paper last week in Science looked at a legend amongst the Coast Salish, especially the Sto:lo, Skokomish, and Snuneymuxw tribes, of "woolly dogs" whose soft fur was spun, dyed, and woven into ceremonial rugs and cloaks that were a symbol of authority.  (My weaver friend in Washington didn't belong to this tradition -- she was from Luton, England -- although she may have gotten inspiration for it from Indigenous sources.  Or, maybe, she just owned three gigantic hairy dogs and came up with a way to use the copious fur they produced.  I'm not sure.)

In any case, the people of European descent who settled in the Northwest thought this was just a legend -- that any dogs belonging to the Coast Salish were very recent imports, possibly the descendants of dogs brought in by whalers and explorers from Japan or Russia.  In any case, the woolly dogs of the Salish had completely vanished by 1900, so it seemed like there was no way to be sure.  But there was one hard piece of evidence to study -- the pelt of a dog named Mutton who had been acquired as a puppy by an ethnographer in 1859.

Artist's rendition of what Mutton looked like [Image courtesy of Science and artist Karen Carr]

DNA analysis of Mutton's pelt showed something fascinating -- he wasn't closely related to Japanese breeds like the Akita or Shiba Inu, nor to northern European breeds like the Spitz and Samoyed.  Mutton's DNA showed his lineage had diverged from all other known dog breeds at least four thousand years ago, so very likely he and the others of his breed had been brought over from Siberia by the ancestors of the Coast Salish many millennia ago.

"It’s nice to hear Western science say this is how long you’ve had a relationship with woolly dogs," said study co-author Michael Pavel, a knowledge keeper of the Skokomish Nation.  "Often we are the subjects of research, but in this case, we were able to weave our considerable knowledge together with a Western scientific perspective."

Which is a polite way of saying, "we freakin' told you so."  Non-Indigenous American and European anthropologists have a long and sorry history of paying little attention to the cultural memories of Indigenous people, of dismissing their oral history as little more than a curiosity.  Time after time there's been vindication of the accuracy of these histories -- a recent example we looked at here at Skeptophilia is the tale, also from coastal tribes of the Northwest, that there'd been a monstrous earthquake and tsunami one midwinter night around three hundred years ago, which turned out to be right on the money.

Maybe the anthropologists are finally starting to take the traditions of Indigenous people more seriously.  One can only hope.

The ultimate story, though, is a sad one.  Christian missionaries in the Western Hemisphere generally did their damndest to eradicate any traces of Native beliefs and practices, especially ones that were involved in prestige and authority.  In the Northwest, that included forbidding the keeping of woolly dogs and the weaving of their fur into ceremonial garments.  Ultimately, the entire breed went extinct, and other than some woven pieces that have survived, knowledge of the practice itself died as well other than a cultural memory that it had once been done.

The men and women who contributed to the article in Science, though, by and large put a happier spin on it.  "All we knew was that the dogs were all gone, and [we had] just that -- stories," said Sto:lo Grand Chief Steven Point.  "Nobody knew what happened.  The woolly dog became a casualty of colonialism.  But the woolly dog is part of who we are, and it feels like a link to our past is being filled in.  It’s a good news story."

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The legend of the Bell Witch

Skeptics trying to tease apart fact from fiction in accounts of allegedly paranormal occurrences are fighting against a confluence of human tendencies, including:

• In general, our memories are way worse than we think they are.
• Some level of confirmation bias -- accepting weak or faulty evidence supporting something we already believed -- is nearly impossible to eradicate completely, even in the most rational of rationalists.
• Our sensory/perceptive apparatus is not very accurate.  We all have the unfortunate capacity for misperceiving, or failing to notice entirely, things that are going on around us.
• Recounting a tale and giving it a scary spin has way more of a cachet than telling a completely prosaic one.  If you say to your friends, "It was late at night... all was quiet... then suddenly there was a crash, and the dog started barking!  I was terrified!  I went outside..."  *dramatic pause*  "... and one of the garbage cans had fallen over," no one is going to be very impressed.  In fact, the next time you start telling a story, your friends might well suddenly realize they had pressing engagements elsewhere.
• People like making shit up.

The problem amplifies when stories are retold over and over, because all of these tendencies add up, causing the tale to grow by accretion in what amounts to a giant, free-floating game of Telephone.  By the time a few decades of this has passed, you have a legend that has taken on a life of its own, in which it is probably impossible to determine for sure which parts of it are true and which parts are not.

And there's no better example of this than the legend of the Bell Witch.

The story originates in Robertson County, Tennessee in the early nineteenth century, and centers around the Bell family, headed by John Bell, Sr.  Bell himself was real enough; he was born in 1750 in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, married a woman named Lucy Williams, and moved to Tennessee in 1804.  He and Lucy had six children -- Jesse, Betsy, Richard, John Jr., Drewry (known as Drew), and Benjamin.  John Bell, Sr. died on December 19, 1820 after suffering for four years from a neurological disorder that may have been some form of Bell's palsy (the fact that the disease carries John's name is a coincidence; it was named after the first physician to study it extensively, Charles Bell of Edinburgh, Scotland, who appears to be unrelated to John.)

Artist's sketch of Betsy Bell (1894) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The problems started in 1816, when John Sr. was working in his field and saw a strange creature that looked like a dog with a rabbit's head.  Alarmed, he picked up his shotgun and fired at it, but it disappeared.  Shortly afterward John's son Drew saw a bird perched in a tree, but as he approached it, it spread its wings and "grew to enormous size" before flying away.  One of the Bell family's slaves said he'd been attacked by a dog-like animal on the way to his cabin in the evening.  Betsy Bell saw a young girl in a green dress swinging from the limb of an oak tree -- she didn't recognize the child, and like the rabbit/dog, the girl vanished when approached.

Events accelerated.  Now sounds were heard inside the house -- chains rattling, knocking inside the walls, animal growls, the grating of teeth gnawing on the furniture.  John Sr. started showing symptoms of the progressive paralysis that would ultimately claim his life.  Sheets were pulled from the children's beds at night, their hair pulled and faces scratched.  Betsy had the worst of it -- she was repeatedly slapped at night by an unseen entity.

Artist's sketch of the Bell home (1894) [Image is in the Public Domain]

A neighbor, James Johnston, came in to help, and tried to talk to whatever it was that was causing the uproar.  A feeble voice answered, "I am a spirit; I was once very happy but have been disturbed."  When asked how it had been disturbed, it gave vague answers about Native American burial grounds, which launched Drew Bell and his friend Bennett Porter on a search for a gravesite, but they found nothing.

The spirit allegedly could quote the Bible fluently, and was aware of what was going on outside the Bell property -- it recited word-for-word a sermon given in a nearby church (the contents later verified by someone who had attended), and began recounting gossip about what was going on in other households in the area.

The story spread.  Andrew Jackson visited the Bell homestead in 1819, and is said to have "experienced the haunting himself."  One person who came to speak to the spirit asked what his grandmother would have said if there was trouble, and the spirit immediately responded in the grandmother's thick Dutch accent, "Hut tut, what has happened now?"  Another asked about his parents in England -- and later reported that the entity had visited his parents and spoken with them.

The whole episode reached its climax when one day the spirit -- now nicknamed "the Bell Witch" -- told John Bell Sr. that he was going to die in seven days, because she was going to poison him.  His neurological condition worsened steadily over the following days, and he lapsed into a coma on December 17 from which he never recovered.

After that, things seemed to settle down, although the spirit allegedly told the widowed Lucy Williams Bell that it would return in seven years.  According to the Bells' third child Richard, it did, but "they chose to ignore it and it eventually left, discouraged."

So, that's the legend.  What parts of it are true?

What's interesting here is that all of the named players in the drama are well documented in contemporary records.  There's no doubt that the Bell family and their neighbors existed.  The rest of the legend is largely the responsibility of Martin Van Buren Ingram, who in 1890 published a book called An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch, which recounts the story pretty much in the form I've described.  He claimed that he based the book on Richard Bell's diary -- which, interestingly, no one else has mentioned in any context, and doubters believe never existed at all.  The book begins with a brief description of the legend, followed by this passage:

Now, nearly seventy-five years having elapsed, the old members of the family who suffered the torments having all passed away, and the witch story still continues to be discussed as widely as the family name is known, under misconception of the facts, I have concluded that in justice to the memory of an honored ancestry, and to the public also whose minds have been abused in regard to the matter, it would be well to give the whole story to the World.

Skeptic Brian Dunning finds the delay between the events of the legend and the publication of the book a little suspicious.  "Conveniently, every person with firsthand knowledge of the Bell Witch hauntings was already dead when Ingram started his book," Dunning writes, in a wonderful piece over at Skeptoid about the alleged haunting.  "In fact, every person even with secondhand knowledge was dead."

Even the visit by Andrew Jackson is never mentioned anywhere else, and Dunning strongly suspects it never happened.

As far as the other details of the story, he thinks there's nothing to them either, other than a tale that grew by accretion -- much as I described at the beginning of this post.  "Vague stories indicate that there was a witch in the area," Dunning writes.  "All the significant facts of the story have been falsified, and the others come from a source of dubious credibility.  Since no reliable documentation of any actual events exists, there is nothing worth looking into.  I chalk up the Bell Witch as nothing more than one of many unsubstantiated folk legends, vastly embellished and popularized by an opportunistic author of historical fiction."

Ingram's retelling, though, continues to be compelling, and supposedly was one of the inspirations for the 1999 movie The Blair Witch Project.  You have to admit passages like this do provide a certain frisson:

Whether it was witchery, such as afflicted people in past centuries and the darker ages, whether some gifted fiend of hellish nature, practicing sorcery for selfish enjoyment, or some more modern science akin to that of mesmerism, or some hobgoblin native to the wilds of the country, or a disembodied soul shut out from heaven, or an evil spirit like those Paul [sic] drove out of the man into the swine, setting them mad; or a demon let loose from hell, I am unable to decide; nor has anyone yet divined its nature or cause for appearing, and I trust this description of the monster in all forms and shapes, and of many tongues, will lead experts who may come with a wiser generation, to a correct conclusion and satisfactory explanation.

Not to mention the fact that it could also be a strong contender for winning the Run-On Sentence Of The Year award.

In any case, I'm inclined to agree with Dunning.  Although the people in the story were real enough, that's more than you can say for the events that allegedly happened to them.  As creepy as the story of the Bell Witch is, there's not much more here than a tall tale that probably started from a family patriarch's mysterious illness -- and after that, the add-ons came from some combination of confirmation bias, misremembering, and the pure fun of telling a story that makes the listeners shiver.

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Fox on the run

Seems like for each of the last few years, we've said, "Well, at least next year can't be as bad as this year was!"  Then, somehow, it is.  Or worse.  As a friend of mine put it, "I'd like to find out who started this worldwide game of Jumanji and punch the shit out of him."

And of course, with so many things going wrong, people start casting about for some kind of underlying cause (other than "humans sure can be assholes sometimes").  I wasn't surprised, for example, that the extremely Reverend Pat Robertson said the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was a sign that the End Times were beginning.

Well, "not surprised" isn't exactly accurate, because I honestly thought Pat Robertson was dead.  What is he, like 124 years old?  In any case, once I realized that he's still alive, his reaction wasn't surprising, because he thinks everything is a sign of the End Times.  I have this mental image of him shuffling around his house in his bathrobe and jamming his little toe on the leg of the coffee table, and shouting, "And the Lord sayeth, 'When thou bangest thy toe on the furniture, prepare ye well, for the Four Horsemen are on their way!  Can I get an amen?"

So I suppose it's natural enough to look for a reason when things start going wrong, even though in my opinion, Pat Robertson is nuttier than squirrel shit.  But in any case, now we have another candidate for an explanation besides the End Times as predicted in the Book of Revelation:

The Japanese Killing Stone spontaneously split in half last week.

If you haven't heard of the Japanese Killing Stone, well, neither had I until I read that it had fallen apart.  Its Japanese name is Sessho-seki (which literally means "killing stone"), and it's near the town of Nasu, Tochigi Prefecture, in central Honshu.  The story is that there was a beautiful woman named Tamamo-no-Mae, who was actually a kitsune (an nine-tailed fox spirit) in disguise.  She was working for an evil daimyo (feudal lord) who was trying to overthrow the Emperor Konoe, but she was exposed as a fox spirit and killed by the warrior Miura-no-Suke, and her body turned into a stone.

But her evil influence didn't end there.  Tamamo-no-Mae's spirit was locked inside the stone but kept its capacity for inflicting harm, and anyone who touched it died.  The site of the stone is cordoned off; the Japanese government says it's because the area is volcanic and there are sulfurous fumes that could be dangerous.

Sessho-seki [Image is in the Public Domain]

To which I respond, "Sure, that's the reason.  Mmm-hmm."  I mean, really.  What am I supposed to believe?  That there are purely natural dangers caused by understood geological processes, or that the spirit of an evil nine-tailed fox woman has been trapped inside a rock that can kill you when you touch it?

I know which one sounds the most plausible to me.

Tamamo-no-Mae and Miura-no-Suke, as depicted by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1849) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So anyway, apparently people are freaking out that the rock spontaneously split in half, despite the authorities saying, "A small crack had appeared naturally some years ago, and grew deeper until finally the stone fell apart."  The idea is now that the Sessho-seki has split, it released the spirit of Tamamo-no-Mae, who will proceed to wreak havoc once again.

My response is: go ahead, Foxy Lady, do your worst.  My guess is anything you could do would pale in comparison to what's already going on in the world.  It'd be kind of an anticlimax, wouldn't it?  You wait for centuries, trapped inside a rock, concocting all sorts of evil plans, and then the rock breaks and releases you, and you explode out and start causing trouble, and... no one notices.  

Tamamo-no-Mae: Ha ha!  I am free!  I shall cause chaos wherever I go!  The weather shall go haywire!  Wars will break out!  The evil shall go unpunished!

Us:  Is that all?

Tamamo-no-Mae:  Um... what do you mean, is that all?  Isn't that bad enough?

Us (laughing bitterly):  Look around you.  You think you can do better than this?

Tamamo-no-Mae (horrified):  Oh.  Oh, my.  Okay... um... do you think you could get some Superglue and help me put this rock back together?

Us:  Yeah, it'd probably be for the best.  Can you take us with you?

Anyhow, if things start getting worse, and you're wondering what's the cause, maybe it's the depredations of an evil nine-tailed fox spirit from Japan.  And after all, the whole "End Times" thing is getting a little hackneyed, don't you think?  Especially since the evangelicals have been predicting the End Times several times a year for hundreds of years, and nothing much has happened.  Not even one Apocalyptic Horseperson, much less four.  So at least this would be a new and different reason as to why everything's so fucked up lately.

Makes as much sense as any other explanation I've heard, although there's still something to be said for "humans sure can be assholes sometimes."

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Footprints in the snow

So far this winter my upstate New York village has been lucky; despite repeated winter storms roaring through northeastern North America, we've received a mere dusting as compared to the thick blankets of snow folks have gotten pretty much all around us.  My buddy in Dieppe, New Brunswick, posted photos of the piles he and his family had to shovel to get out of their driveway, and I've seen similar pics from coastal New England, as well as south of us in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Here, though?  We've had a few really cold days, and a bit of persistent snow on the ground, but other than that, it's been pretty mild.  In fact, this morning the sun came out for a bit, and it's supposed to get well above freezing by mid-day, so what snow we have is beginning to melt -- although at this time of year I figure the comparative warmth is only a tease.

Watching the effect that the sun had on footprints I made yesterday while hauling firewood, as they widened from the clear indentations of a human wearing ridge-soled Timberland boots into diffuse, open blobs, put me in mind of one of the most peculiar legends of Merrie Old England.  Perhaps you've not heard of it; if not, you may find it an interesting tale for a chilly winter day.

Early in the morning on February 8, 1855 (so the story goes), the people of five small towns in south Devon -- Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth, and Dawlish -- woke to find a line of footprints in the snow.  The London Times of February 16 reported on the story in detail:

It appears that on Thursday night last there was a very heavy fall of snow in the neighborhood of Exeter and the south of Devon.  On the following morning, the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the tracks of some strange and mysterious animal, endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the foot-prints were to be seen in all kinds of inaccessible places -- on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and courtyards enclosed by high walls and palings, as well as in open fields.  There was hardly a garden in Lympstone where the footprints were not observed.

The track appeared more like that of a biped than a quadruped, and the steps were generally eight inches in advance of each other.  The impressions of the feet closely resembled that of a donkey's shoe, and measured from an inch and a half to (in some instances) two and a half inches across.  Here and there it appeared as if cloven, but in the generality of the steps the shoe was continuous, and, from the snow in the center remaining entire, merely showing the outer crest of the foot, it must have been convex.

The creature seems to have approached the doors of several houses and then to have retreated, but no one has been able to discover the standing or resting point of this mysterious visitor.  On Sunday last the Rev. Mr. Musgrave alluded to the subject in his sermon, and suggested the possibility of the footprints being those of a kangaroo; but this could scarcely have been the case, as they were found on both sides of the estuary of the Exe.

At present it remains a mystery, and many superstitious people in the above towns are actually afraid to go outside their doors at night.

What is oddest -- and has been reported in multiple sources from the time -- is that the perpetrator, whatever or whomever it was, seemed unperturbed by obstacles.  The line of footprints walked right up to the bank of a river, and resumed on the other side as if it had walked straight through the running water.  Walls didn't slow it down, either; witnesses say that the footprints indicated it had simply stepped over the wall, as the imprint in the snow showed no change in depth from one side to the other (as it would have if the perpetrator had climbed up one side and then jumped down).  The footprints went in more or less a straight line, with only minor deviations, apparently to glimpse into the windows of houses it passed (*shudder*).  The most conservative reports claim the line of prints extended for sixty kilometers, far too much for one person (or creature) to cover in a single night.

The snow, as it melted, accentuated the strangeness of the prints, just as it did with the bootprints in my front yard.  The resemblance to a cloven hoof, with its suggestion of the devil, became more pronounced, and the fear grew to near hysteria.  Fortunately (or unfortunately, for those of us who like to know the solutions to mysteries) the events were never repeated, and never satisfactorily explained.

A sketch of the footprints, as drawn by several people who saw them first-hand

The Devonshire footprints were credited by some as a visitation not by Satan, but by one of his uniquely English cousins -- Spring-heeled Jack.  The first reported sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in London in 1837 by a businessman walking home from work.  The gentleman described being terrified by the sudden appearance of a dark figure which had "jumped the high railings of Barnes Cemetery with ease," landing right in his path.  The businessman wasn't attacked, and was able to keep his wits sufficiently about him to describe a "muscular man, with a wild, grinning expression, long, pointed nose and ears, and protruding, glowing eyes."  

Sort of like the love child of Salvador Dali and Mr. Spock, is how I think of him.

Others were attacked, and some were not so lucky as our businessman.  A girl named Mary Stevens was attacked in Battersea, and had her clothing torn and was scratched and clawed, but survived because neighbors came to help when they heard her screams.  The following day Jack jumped in front of a coach, causing it to swerve and crash.  The coachman was severely injured, and several witnesses saw Jack escape by leaping over a nine-foot-high wall, all the while howling with insane laughter.

Several more encounters occurred during the following year, including two in which the victims were blinded temporarily by "blue-white fire" spat from Jack's mouth.

Although publicity grew, and Spring-heeled Jack became a character of folk myth, song, and the punch line to many a joke, sightings grew less frequent.  Following the footprints in the snow-covered Devonshire countryside in 1855, there was a flurry of renewed interest (*rimshot*), but the last claimed sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in Lincoln in 1877, and after that he seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

As intriguing as both stories are, all of the evidence points to pranksters (and, in the case of Mary Stevens, an unsuccessful rapist).  With the Devonshire footprints, the length of the track line is almost certainly an exaggeration, or at best a conflation of tracks from different sources -- a few of them by a hoaxer to get things going, followed by people blaming every human or animal track they see in the snow afterward on the mysterious walker.  As far as Spring-heeled Jack goes, I'm not inclined to believe in Jack's phenomenal jumping ability, except in cases where Jack jumped down off a wall -- that requires no particular skill except the agility to get up there in the first place, and after that gravity takes care of the rest.  It seems to me that a combination of nighttime, fear, a wild costume, and the witnesses' being primed by already knowing the story creates a synergy that makes their accuracy seriously in question.

The fact remains, however, that both of them are very peculiar stories.  I remember reading about the Devonshire footprints when I was a kid (I didn't find out about Spring-heeled Jack until later), and the idea of some mysterious non-human creature pacing its way across the snowy English countryside, silently crossing fields and farms and streets and rivers, peering into the windows of homes at the sleeping inhabitants, was enough to give me what the Scots call the "cauld grue."  Still does, in fact. Enough that I hope that the fitful January sun will soon eradicate my bootprints in the front yard completely -- which goes to show that even a diehard rationalist can sometimes fall prey to an irrational case of the creeps.

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Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

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

Sawney Bean and the veracity of folklore

One of the creepiest legends to come out of old Scotland is the tale of Sawney Bean (or Beane), whose cave-dwelling, cannibalistic family allegedly ran amok in South Ayrshire in the 16th century.  Bean, born Alexander Bean in East Lothian, was said to be the son of a manual laborer, but had a vicious streak from childhood that was exacerbated when in his late teens he married a woman who was worse.

The couple set up housekeeping in a deep cave in Bennane Head, a promontory between Ballantrae and Girvan on the west coast of Scotland.  There, he and his evil wife were the progenitors of quite a brood; eight sons, six daughters, and thirty-two grandchildren (many of them born to incestuous unions).  The Beans survived in their remote abode by waylaying travelers...

... and eating them.

"Sawney Beane at the Entrance of his Cave."  Note the woman in the background -- holding a severed human leg.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Local villagers knew about the disappearances, and sometimes they'd find bones and other body parts -- but in an apparent case of "How dumb exactly are you people?" it never occurred to them that the culprits were a crew of depraved cannibals living nearby.   The local law enforcement cast a suspicious eye on local innkeepers and pub owners, since they were often the last people to see the victims alive.  But eventually one lucky guy fought back against the Beans when attacked, survived (his wife, apparently, wasn't so lucky) and brought back a tale of being swarmed by men and women intent on murdering him.  King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) launched an attack on the family, sending soldiers in to destroy them and their stronghold.

The Beans were defeated, and those not killed in the skirmish were brought back to Edinburgh in chains.  The men were executed by having their hands, feet, and genitals chopped off, and allowed to bleed to death; the women were burned at the stake.  One daughter, "Black" Agnes Bean, who had escaped before the attack and attempted to settle down in Girvan under an assumed name, was eventually found out and hanged.

So that was the end of the Beans.  But the question that I'd like to ask is: is any of it true?  How would we know if it was?

One reason we might cast a skew glance at the tale is how varied the different versions of it are.  Sean Thomas wrote a piece on the Bean clan in Fortean Times, a bit of which was excerpted at the site The Spooky Isles (the original article, unfortunately, seems no longer to be available):

... from broadsheet to broadsheet, the precise dating of Sawney Bean's reign of anthropophagic terror varies wildly: sometimes the atrocities occurred during the reign of James VI [ca. early 1600s], whilst other versions claim the Beans lived centuries before.  Viewed in this light, it is arguable that the Bean story may have a basis of truth but the precise dating of events has become obscured over the years.  Perhaps the dating of the murders was brought forward by the editors and writer of the broadsheets, so as to make the story appear more relevant to the readership...  To add to the intrigue, we do know that cannibalism was not unknown in mediaeval Scotland and that Galloway was in mediaeval times a very lawless place; perhaps nothing on the scale of the Bean legend took place, but every story grows and is embroidered over time.

While the main part of the story itself doesn't involve the supernatural -- something that would lead me to doubt the whole thing -- there's a paranormal twist to the execution of Agnes Bean in Girvan:

Historically, Girvan was significant as the home of the Hairy Tree.  According to legend, the Hairy Tree was planted by Sawney Bean’s eldest daughter in the town’s Dalrymple Street.  However, when her family was arrested, the daughter was implicated in their incestuous and cannibalistic activities and was hanged by locals from the bough of the tree she herself planted.  According to local legend, one can hear the sound of a swinging corpse while standing beneath its boughs.

When you add to this the fact that there is an ongoing dispute amongst the people in Girvan regarding which tree in the town is the authentic "Hairy Tree," it does tend to make you wonder how much of the rest of it can be true.

Another suspicious factor is the similarity of the Bean story to an earlier tale from Scotland, that of "Christie Cleek."  Christie Cleek, born Andrew Christie in Perth in the mid 14th century, was driven to murder and cannibalism during the horrible famine that followed the ravages of the Black Death in the British Isles in the 1350s.  "Cleek" means "shepherd's crook" -- the tool Christie used to pull down travelers and pluck riders from their horses.  Like the Beans, Christie Cleek and his family lived in hiding, feasting on human flesh and striking fear into the hearts of the locals.  It has a different ending, though -- after the famine eased, an armed force was sent in to rid the countryside of the menace.  Everyone in the family was killed but Christie himself -- he escaped, and lived to a ripe old age under an assumed name.  The name "Christie Cleek" became a synonym in that part of Scotland for the bogeyman, useful for scaring children to the pants-wetting stage during late-night storytelling sessions around the fire.

So the inconsistencies and variations in the Bean story, plus the analogies to earlier tales, makes you wonder.  The most likely answer is that Bean himself (and possibly his savage wife) were real, but that a lot of the excesses attributed to them and their progeny were exaggerations.  About the veracity of the details, there is simply not enough hard documentation to be certain.

It's a gruesome and fascinating story.  Certainly a good one for a shiver up the spine.  It'd be nice to know if it was true, but as with most things in the distant past, it's probably not possible.  So like a lot of folklore, we have to let it be -- filed under the heading of "Who knows?"

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is apt given our recent focus on all things astronomical: Edward Brooke-Hitching's amazing The Sky Atlas.

This lovely book describes our history of trying to map out the heavens, from the earliest Chinese, Babylonian, and Native American drawings of planetary positions, constellations, and eclipses, to the modern mapping techniques that pinpoint the location of stars far too faint to see with the naked eye -- and objects that can't be seen directly at all, such as intergalactic dust clouds and black holes.  I've always loved maps, and this book combines that with my passion for astronomy into one brilliant volume.

It's also full of gorgeous illustrations showing not only the maps themselves but the astronomers who made them.  If you love looking up at the sky, or love maps, or both -- this one should be on your list for sure.

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