The phantoms of Jedburgh Abbey

Jedburgh Abbey is a ruined Augustinian monastery near the town of the same name in Roxburghshire, Scotland, only ten miles from the border with England.  It has quite a storied history.  It was founded in 1118 by King David I (whose father, King Malcolm III Canmore, defeated the notorious Macbeth; whether Birnam Wood ever actually came to Dunsinane is another matter entirely).  It became one of the wealthiest abbeys in the Scottish border counties, and its abbot also made the mistake of supporting William Wallace.  This was a bad combination back then.  After Wallace's tragic defeat at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298, the victorious English ransacked and pillaged the abbey. It recovered, only to be sacked several more times, and finally burned (along with nearly the entire town of Jedburgh) in 1523.

Even so -- and despite the Scottish Reformation pretty well doing away with all the Catholic monasteries in Scotland -- part of the building was still used as the parish kirk.  Finally, in 1871, it was deemed unsafe, and a new church was built; the remains of the abbey became a historical landmark, where it attracts tourists lo unto this very day.

It also is the home of a particularly terrifying pair of specters -- which, if you believe the ghost hunters, still sometimes can be seen stalking around the abbey grounds.

Jedburgh Abbey from the River by Thomas Girtin (1799) [Image is in the Public Domain]

King Alexander III of Scotland (1249-1286), whose great-great grandfather David I founded Jedburgh Abbey, had a terrible time of it even judging by medieval Scottish standards, where life was (in Thomas Hobbes's immortal words) "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."  He became king at age seven -- never a good way to start -- and his first years were dominated by a fight for power between two factions both determined to gain control over the young monarch.  He married Margaret Plantagenet, daughter of King Henry III of England, but this only served to give Henry incentive to demand fealty from Alexander, entangling Scotland in another of the long conflicts it had with its neighbor to the south.

Along the way, Alexander had what would turn out to be his only real victory; in 1263 the Scots defeated the invading force of King Haakon IV of Norway at the Battle of Largs, and in the treaty that ended the conflict, Scotland gained ownership of the Hebrides and the Isle of Man.

But after that, things started to fall apart.  Alexander's wife Margaret died in 1275, and all three of his children by her had followed their mother into the grave by 1284.  As was typical of the time, Alexander started casting around for a second wife.  His only heir was his grandchild, the daughter of his deceased eldest child Margaret who had married King Eric II of Norway, grandson of the defeated Haakon IV -- but the girl (also named Margaret) was an infant... and still lived in Norway.

Here's where it takes an even darker turn.  Alexander fell for a woman named Yolande de Dreux, the daughter of a French nobleman.  Yolande reciprocated his attention, but there was a snag -- she was already betrothed, to a French knight named Eranton de Blois.  There's no historical certainty about what happened next, but according to the legend, Yolande conspired with one of her father's henchmen, the Comte de Montbar, to get de Blois out of the way, and he did -- via a dagger in the back.

The Abbot of Jedburgh demanded an investigation, but (predictably) nothing came of it.  Yolande was engaged to marry King Alexander, and the ceremony took place in the abbey church on November 1, 1285.

Everything was going forward with the typical medieval pomp and solemnity until the door of the church flew open with a bang, and an uninvited guest strode up the aisle, wearing armor and a tattered and bloodstained cloak.  When he reached the front of the church, the king said in a furious voice, "Who are you?"

At this point the figured lifted its visor, to reveal the decaying visage of a corpse.

De Montbar collapsed to the floor, writhing, and Yolande recoiled -- because, of course, they both recognized the dead man's face.  The specter pointed at Yolande and said, "Ask her.  My curse be on you and on her, the curse of the assassin's victim, treacherously ambushed and foully slain.  Hear me well, unhappy king.  Before three months have passed, they will sing masses for your soul in Jedburgh Abbey and she will be left a widow.  She will suffer the hatred of her people and will forever be reminded of her crimes."

Three months turned out to be an underestimate, but not by much.  On March 19, 1286, the king rode out after dark to join his wife at Kinghorn in Fifeshire, and the next morning was found at the bottom of a steep, rocky embankment with his neck broken.  Pragmatic folks said his horse lost its footing in the dark and threw its rider to his death; the more imaginative said it was the curse being fulfilled.  However it was, the whole thing propelled Scotland into chaos.  Alexander's granddaughter, Margaret, "Maid of Norway," died on board ship during the crossing to Scotland in 1290, leaving no heir to the throne.  The following years of civil war and repeated invasions from England (including the one that ultimately led to the brutal execution of William Wallace) only ended in 1306 with the coronation of Robert the Bruce.

As far as the rest of the "curse," it kind of... didn't happen.  There's no indication that Yolande was hated; she returned to France, where she remarried to Arthur II, Duke of Brittany, had six children of whom five reached adulthood, and lived to age 67 (neither of those a bad accomplishment back then).  She had received land in Scotland as a dowry for her first marriage and continued to manage it from over the Channel, apparently untroubled by the sordid story that was attached to her name.

But as for Alexander, death didn't bring him any peace.  Both his ghost and de Blois's have been seen on the abbey grounds, despite the fact that even the harshest versions of the legend didn't attach anything blameworthy to either one, and the spirits of the two people who were the real bad guys (Yolande and her murderous co-conspirator de Montbar) are nowhere to be found.  I guess there's no justice to be had, even in the afterlife.

Anyhow, that's today's creepy story, appropriate given that I'm already seeing Halloween decorations in the stores around here.  It makes a good tale even though the great likelihood is that large parts of it were made up after the fact.  But if you ever get a chance to visit Jedburgh, keep an eye out for phantoms.  A medieval king with a broken neck and a bloodied corpse in armor.  Shouldn't be hard to spot.

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Pearlin Jean

Appropriate to the day, I thought I'd tell you about an interesting (and quite cordial) exchange about ghosts I got into with a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

He's an open-minded sort but definitely more likely than I am to credit tales of the paranormal, especially those having to do with hauntings.  We talked a little about some of the better-known ghostly claims, and he said, "The thing is, how could all of those stories be false?  Okay, I'm willing to admit that a lot of them are.  Maybe most.  But what you're telling me is that of all the thousands of allegedly-true ghost stories out there, one hundred percent of them are fabrications.  That seems to me to take more faith than a belief in ghosts does."

My answer was first to correct a misapprehension; I don't disbelieve all those claims.  As he points out, at least for some of them, we don't have hard evidence that they are hoaxes, because there's no hard evidence of any kind.  My position is that none of the ones I've seen meet the minimum standard that science demands.

And that's it.  If your grandmother's sister's best friend's husband's second cousin saw a ghost with her own eyes, that's all well and good.  It might be true.  It might be that she made it up, or that she was tricked by a fault in human perception (heaven knows, there are enough of those), or that whatever it was she saw has a perfectly natural, non-ghostly explanation.  That's where we have to leave it: we don't know.

But.

As skeptics, the default belief is that what you see around you has a natural scientific cause.  When something goes bump in the night, and you can't figure out what that bump was, you fall back on "well, it must have been an animal or a tree branch hitting the roof or something like that."  You don't jump to it being the ghost of the old lady who owned this house in 1850 and died after falling down the stairs unless you have some pretty damn good evidence.

There's one other issue that confounds our ability to accept tales of hauntings, and that's the unfortunate talent humans have for embellishment.  Hey, I'm a novelist, and I know all about that; there's no story that can't be made better by adding new twists and turns and details after the fact.  What this does, though, is to obscure any facts that the story does contain, and leave you with no real knowledge of where the truth ends and fiction begins.

One hallmark of a story like this -- that may have started out with bare-bones truth, but grew by accretion thereafter -- is when there are several versions of the story.  Take, for example, the Scottish legend of Pearlin Jean, in which the main characters were very real.

The central figure of the story is Robert Stewart (or Steuart) (1643-1707), 1st Baronet of Allanbank (Berwickshire).  Stewart was a nobly-connected merchant in Leith, and like a lot of rich folk of the period, when he was a young man his parents sent him to do a tour of continental Europe as part of his education.  He spent some time in Rome, but apparently while in France did another thing that young men often do, which was to have a torrid affair, in this case with a young woman named Jean (or Jeanne).

The liaison was never meant to be permanent, at least not by Stewart, and he made it clear he intended to return to Scotland to take his place in the upper crust.  But after that, things kind of went awry.

If you've read any traditional ghost stories, you can probably predict what happened next -- Jean dies, and Stewart ends up being plagued by her vengeful ghost.  But the way this happens depends on which version you read.  Here are three I found:

• Jean was a nun in the Sisters of Charity of Paris, and in fooling around with Robert had broken her vow of chastity.  She tried to follow him home but he rebuffed her, and while trying to get aboard his carriage as he was leaving Paris fell underneath and was killed when the wheel hit her in the head.  Her dying words were, "I'll be in Scotland afore ye!", perhaps after taking the low road to Loch Lomond.

• Robert left Jean in France (in this version very much alive) and made it back to Scotland, but Jean followed him, as jilted lovers in ghost stories are wont to do.  Her death in a carriage accident happened on Robert's home estate of Allanbank in Scotland.

• Jean not only followed him back to Scotland, but brought with her the baby she'd borne after their illicit hanky-panky.  Stewart killed the child, and distraught, Jean threw herself beneath the wheel of the carriage.

Afterward, the ghost -- nicknamed "Pearlin Jean" because of the dress of gray pearlin lace she wore, which in one version of the tale had been given to her by Robert Stewart -- followed her lover around, generally making his life miserable by appearing at inopportune times (although is there an opportune time for the ghost of your dead mistress to show up?), slamming doors and running up and down the staircase.  On one occasion -- at least in one iteration of the story -- Stewart got the crap scared out of him after returning home from a drive, and when he was ready to climb out of the carriage was stopped cold by an apparition of a woman in a lace dress with blood all over her face.  He was frozen in place until one of his servants came out to see what was amiss and the ghost disappeared.

Creepy tale, no doubt about that.  But what part of it is true?

Alleged ghost photograph, most likely a double exposure (1899)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Robert Stewart was a real person, that's certain enough.  As far as Pearlin Jean -- who knows?  I find it a little suspicious that Stewart is known to have married twice, and both of his wives were named Jean.  (Both of them were solidly Scottish, however, not French.)  His first marriage was to Jean Gilmour, daughter of John Gilmour of Craigmillar, and his second to Jean Cockburn, daughter of Alexander Cockburn of Langton.

But who knows?  Maybe the guy just had a thing for women named Jean.  "Hey, babe, how about a tumble?... *pauses*  Wait a minute, is your name Jean?  Oh, okay, then, let's have at it."

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that when people remembered Stewart's relationships with two (real) women named Jean, adding a third just sort of happened.

The difficulty here is that some parts of the legend are true, and of the remainder, there might be bits of it that are as well -- but which bits?  Needless to say, I'm not buying the ghostly business, and even with the tragic but non-supernatural parts -- a rich young man's dalliance with a poor and vulnerable young woman, that led to her death -- there are too many different versions to know exactly what did happen and what were later embellishments or outright fabrications.

And the problem is, a great many ghost stories are like this.  Multiple versions, and no real scientifically admissible evidence.  So my friend's comment that some of them could be true is a possibility, but figuring out after the fact which ones is very often an impossibility.

This is why with modern claims of the paranormal, I'm very much of the opinion that any reasonably coherent ones deserve exploration when they happen, rather than waiting until afterward and the inevitable human tendency toward embellishment (and outright misremembering) occurs.  I fully support groups like the excellent Society for Psychical Research -- they're committed to investigating claims from the standpoint of scientific evidence, and are unhesitating in calling a hoax a hoax.

So I'm open to being convinced.  Yes, it might take a good bit of convincing, but as with just about everything, if presented with adequate evidence I'll have no option but to accept that my default position -- that there is a natural, non-paranormal explanation -- was wrong.

But thus far, Pearlin Jean and the hundreds of other stories like it just aren't doing it for me.  Sorry if that diminishes the frisson of the season, but that's the way I see it.  On the other hand, if when you're out trick-or-treating tonight, you see the apparition of a bloody-faced woman dressed in tattered gray lace step out of the shadows -- well, good luck to you, too.

  

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The echo of evil

One of the more horrifying stories from my home state of Louisiana is the more-or-less true tale of Madame Delphine Macarty LaLaurie.

I qualify it with "more-or-less" because being gruesome, even by New Orleans gothic standards, it's certainly been embellished along the way.  Plus, as you'll see there's a supernatural twist to the whole thing, and -- at least in my not-always-so-humble opinion -- that makes it fictional by default.  But with that caveat in place, here's what we know.

Delphine was born on the 19th of March, 1787, in New Orleans, to Louis Barthélemy de Macarty (or McCarty or McCarthy or MacCarthy) and his wife, Marie-Jeanne L'Érable.  Louis's father was from Ireland, but the rest of the family was French -- as well as influential and rich.  Her uncle by marriage was the governor of the Spanish colony of Louisiana, and a cousin later became mayor of New Orleans.  Delphine married three times; first to a prominent officer in the Spanish military named Ramón de Lopez y Angulo, then to a wealthy banker named Jean Blanque, and last to a doctor, Léonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie.

Delphine Macarty LaLaurie [Image is in the Public Domain]

Until 1834, Delphine and her husband(s) showed every sign of being completely normal upper-class citizens, participating in the high society of the New Orleans French Quarter.  A few hints had gotten out about the LaLauries, especially Delphine, alleging that she mistreated slaves, but in that day and age it had to be pretty extreme before anyone would do anything about that even if it were proven true.

Eventually, it was.  And the reality turned out to be so bad that even the privileged White people of the antebellum South were revolted.

In April of 1834, a fire broke out in the kitchen of the LaLaurie mansion.  Responding to calls for help, neighbors came in to extinguish the blaze -- and found the family cook chained to the stove by her ankle.  This spurred an investigation, and the police found the family slaves in deplorable shape, showing evidence of torture and deprivation.  At first Dr. LaLaurie responded to the inquiry with derision, saying, "some people had better stay at home rather than come to others' houses to dictate laws and meddle with other people's business," but when the condition of the slaves was made public, the outrage was so strong that a mob descended on the house.  The couple fled, eventually making their way to Paris, where they lived for the rest of their lives.  Dr. LaLaurie's death is unrecorded, but Delphine's shows up in the Paris Archives, saying she died on 7 December 1849 at the age of 62.  She never publicly acknowledged any guilt over how she and her husband had treated the slaves; in fact, a letter from Paulin Blanque, her son by her second marriage, states that his mother "never had any idea about the reason for her departure from the city."

So either Dr. LaLaurie was the real villain, here, or Delphine was amoral and an accomplished liar.

Perhaps both.

Certainly the legend, though, favors the latter.  The tale of a depraved and sadistic woman had a cachet that grabbed people's attention, and the story began to grow by accretion.  The 1946 book Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans, by Jeanne deLavigne, went into explicit detail about what Delphine supposedly did -- I'll spare you the details, not only because they are downright disgusting, but because the more grotesque of the claims are entirely unsubstantiated by the records.  Now, I'm not saying the LaLauries were innocent, mind you; at the best, they were cruel, heartless people whose escape to Paris is the very definition of "getting off lightly."  But any time there's a claim like this, people always want to add to it -- and they have, throwing in enough gory details to do a slasher movie proud.

The LaLaurie house was rebuilt -- there wasn't much left but the frame after the fire and the attack by the enraged mob -- and over the years has been a private residence (the most recent owner was none other than Nicolas Cage), a music conservatory, a high school, a residence for delinquents, a bar, and a furniture store.  It's widely considered to be haunted, and features prominently on New Orleans ghost walks; some call it "the most haunted building in Louisiana," where at night you can hear the moans of the poor tortured slaves and the evil, cold laugh of the wicked Delphine, as she walks the hallways and staircases looking for new victims.

LaLaurie Mansion, 1140 Royal Street [Image licensed under the Creative Commons APK, LaLaurie Mansion, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason the topic comes up is because the home just went up for sale again -- target price, a cool $10.25 million.  So if you have a good chunk of cash and want to live in one of the most notorious haunted houses in the Deep South, here's your chance.

Predictably, I don't put much stock in the paranormal side of this, but the author of the article about the sale makes a trenchant point; ghosts or no ghosts, isn't it pretty tasteless to be using the evil reputation of the site as a way of jacking up the price?  After all, no one doubts that real human beings were treated horribly here, many of them ultimately dying of their injuries.  There's not even the relief of a just ending to fall back on; the LaLauries pretty much got off scot-free.  The article's author suggests that maybe the thing to do is turn the place into a museum chronicling the plight of slaves in the South, who even after they were nominally freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, still had to endure generations of prejudice, persecution, and injustice.  (And to our nation's enduring shame, in many places their descendants still do.)

It's a nice idea, but money will talk, as it always does.  Some rich person will buy the LaLaurie Mansion, and it'll still be featured on ghost tours, cashing in on a legacy of human suffering.  Whatever the horrible details of the story of Delphine and her husband, having a building standing in their name is still on some level celebrating them, leaving an echo of evil on the streets of the French Quarter.

I understand the argument about leaving up places with horrific historical associations as reminders, but this is a case where I think the most fitting thing is to raze the damn place and erase every last trace of Delphine LaLaurie.  She got off easy (extremely easy) in life -- perhaps eradicating her memory after death is a fitting end for someone who was judged as sadistic even by the cruel standards of her time and place.

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The strange tale of Christopher Round

When I was maybe twelve years old, the highlight of school was getting the monthly Scholastic Books sale flier.

It had dozens of books, at prices that seem ridiculous by today's standards -- on the order of $0.99 for a paperback.  Even back then, I loved scary stories, and it's through Scholastic that I got my first copies of collections of stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe.

Back then, in 1972, I saw a book in one month's flier I just had to get. It was called Haunted Houses, by Bernhardt. J. Hurwood, and at that point was a new release.  When it arrived a few weeks later, I read it eagerly, simultaneously scaring the absolute shit out of myself and running for the first time into such classic tales as the canine ghosts of Ballechin House, the screaming skulls of Calgarth, and the weirdly open-ended story of Nurse Black.

There was one story in the collection, though, that struck me as more sad than frightening.  It was titled "The Tragic Ghost of Cambridge University," and made enough of an impression that when I bumped into a reference to it yesterday on a website called "Ghosts that Haunt Seven Cambridge Colleges and the Stories Behind Them," I recognized it immediately -- and went to dig up my copy of Haunted Houses (yes, I still have it) that I hadn't looked at for something like thirty years or more.

It tells the tale of an academic fellow named Christopher Round, who was pursuing a degree in classics at Christ's College.  He was brilliant but shy, one of those sorts whom you barely notice until he says something, and then it turns out to be perceptive and interesting, much to your surprise.  This was why his classmate Philip Collier -- similar to Round in intellect, but outgoing, genial, and strikingly handsome -- outshone Round in just about every way you can imagine.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons The wub, Christ's College, Cambridge - First Court 03, CC BY-SA 3.0]

No one else in their class was even close to the same caliber, but when it came to a competition, Round always came in second.  Even after graduation (both with honors -- but guess who got first place?), the rivalry continued, because both of them were accepted as Fellows of Christ's College.

Both applied for a professorship in Greek.  Once again, Collier won, and Round was forgotten.

All through this, their interactions were at least superficially friendly.  Round wasn't the combative type in any case, and it's doubtful that Collier even realized the damage he was doing.  From the outside, it looked like a perfectly ordinary relationship -- outgoing guy and his quiet, second-fiddle sidekick.

The final straw came when Round fell in love with a woman named Mary Clifford.  Mary was high society, and beautiful, and for a time it looked like things were at last going to turn in poor Christopher Round's favor.  But fate had other plans in store.  Mary's parents took her on a trip to Italy, and while traveling she bumped into a fellow Brit who was on holiday...

... Philip Collier.

When she returned, she reluctantly told Christopher Round that she'd fallen madly in love with his rival, and in fact, had accepted a proposal of marriage.  Round was devastated, but his habit of making light of his anger and jealousy once again triumphed.  He forced a smile and wished Mary well.  Relieved that he'd taken it so easily, Mary went her way, feeling like disaster had been averted.

But only a few weeks later, Round was walking back to his flat past the Fellows' Swimming Pool when he heard a noise.  Coming from the other direction was Philip Collier -- staggering drunk.  As he watched, Collier stumbled and fell in.  Although a good swimmer while sober, Collier was flailing, and reflexively Round looked for some way to help him.  There was a long wooden pole with a hook on the end lying along the hedge, used for catching things out or pushing them along the surface of the pool, and he picked it up, intending to hook Collier's clothing and help him out.

Then he thought, "Why should I do this?"  And before he could stop himself, he struck Philip Collier in the temple with the hook, and watched as his rival sank beneath the water and drowned.

Round expected to shine now that the man who had eclipsed him his entire adult life was dead, but it didn't happen.  Instead, he was consumed with remorse.  Mary Clifford, for her part, didn't go running back to him; it's uncertain if she was so sunk in grief herself that she couldn't think of romance, or if she perhaps suspected Round's role in Collier's death.  No legal investigation was ever launched.  Collier's death was ruled as accidental, so there was no worry about a hangman's noose looming in the future.

But Christopher Round was never to be the same.  He threw himself into academics, but even without Collier there to outshine him, he was unable to stand out.  He lived the rest of his life in obscurity, and his role in his rival's death only became known because he wrote out a full confession, with instructions that it was only to be unsealed fifty years after his death.

But his sad, remorseful ghost still haunts Christ's College, especially the grassy lawn by the swimming pool where Philip Collier died.  To this day, students see his stoop-shouldered figure at night, dressed in nineteenth-century garb, walking heavily along the pool, and finally disappearing without trace behind the yew hedge.

Good story, isn't it?  It's a staple in the "true tales of hauntings in Britain" books and websites, often alongside the more famous tales I alluded to at the beginning of this.

But there's just one thing more you might want to know.

It's fiction.

I'm not saying this because I'm being my usual snarky, skeptical self.  The tale of Christopher Round and Philip Collier is the subject of a novel called A College Mystery by Alfred Ponsford Baker, published in 1918, and there is no indication anywhere in the book that Baker thought it was a true story.  Worse still, for those who want it to be real, is the fact that there doesn't seem to be a mention of the story anywhere before the publication of Baker's book.  And a thorough scouring of Christ's College records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows no one named Christopher Round or Philip Collier, not only as Fellows (which surely would have been recorded -- especially Collier, who supposedly was appointed as Professor of Greek) but even as students.

So what is conveniently left out of the account in Hurwood's Haunted Houses -- and just about every other recounting of the story of Christopher Round -- is that the whole thing comes from a work of fiction.

It's funny how the urban legend tendency works, isn't it?  Something that might have started as an up-front made-up story that no one really takes seriously grows through accretion and somehow gains the veneer of veracity.  And once that happens -- once it's told somewhere as a True Tale of the Supernatural -- few people even think to check into the story's antecedents and see if it holds any water.

Just as well.  Christopher Round's sad, ill-fated, and ultimately tortured life is better off as a fictional tale, and even the murder victim Collier doesn't come off as very praiseworthy.  Makes a good story, though -- even if the whole thing seems to have sprung from the mind of a British novelist.

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The legion of ghosts

One of the questions I get asked the most often, in the context of skepticism and critical thinking, is, "What would it take to change your mind about the paranormal?"

My answer is that all it would take is one piece of hard evidence, observed under controlled conditions by unbiased researchers, that wasn't explainable by means of known, natural causes.

This may seem overly rigorous, and nothing more than a reason to discount all claims of the supernatural and forthwith stop thinking about any of it.  But really, what else could I say?  I've seen too many instances of people trying to be fair but honestly misinterpreting the evidence, as well as people exaggerating claims, relying on nothing but personal anecdote, falling victim to confirmation bias and dart-thrower's bias, or -- worst -- simply making shit up.

The difficulty, of course, is that some of those claims (well, not the last kind, obviously) might be true.  So how could we tell?  Might I, and other hard-headed skeptics, be discounting real phenomena in an overzealous attempt to winnow out the wheat from the chaff?

Let's look at one example that has some interesting features, and see if there might be something to it -- or if, as skeptics, we have to shrug our shoulders and put it in the "we dunno, but probably not" column.

One of the first big cities I spent any time in, on my first trip to England, was the lovely old city of York.  (I started out in Blackpool, but my general attitude was that the best thing you can do in Blackpool is get the fuck out of Blackpool.  No offense to any, um, Blackpudlians in the studio audience.)  Anyhow, like many old European cities, York plays host to a lot of claims of hauntings, and one of the most curious surrounds the Treasurer's House, near York Minster Cathedral.

The site has been the home of the Chief Treasurer of York Minster since the eleventh century, but of the original structure (and the first major overhaul, done in the twelfth), all that's left is one external wall and some masonry.  However, the house, in some form, has been continuously occupied since it was built in 1091, even if its original builders wouldn't recognize the place.

The Treasurer's House, York, England [image licensed under the Creative Commons Seasider53, Treasurer's House York, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Where it gets interesting, from a paranormal perspective, is that the house was built right on top of one of the main roads used when Britain was a Roman province.  However, that's not as impressive as it sounds, when you consider how many Roman roads there are in England:

Eboracum, in the north part of England, is the Roman settlement that ultimately became the city of York. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Roman.Britain.roads, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Be that as it may, apparently the old road runs right underneath the house's foundation, and excavation in the basement uncovered four marble pedestals from pillars dating to second-century Roman occupation, one of which was left in place and the other moved to become a base for a modern column in the main hall.

So this at least provides some basis -- if, perhaps, not credence -- to an apparition seen in the house's basement multiple times, most famously in 1953, when a plumber, Harry Martindale, was called in to work on installing a central heating system.  Martindale, so the story goes, was standing on top of a ladder when he heard a noise, and turning in the direction of its apparent source saw something horrifying -- a man on horseback wearing "Roman-looking armor" coming right through the wall.  The horseman was followed by a group of men wearing helmets, green tunics over red kilts, carrying round shields and either short swords or spears.  They looked, Martindale said, tired, dirty, dejected, and miserable.  Several of them appeared to be ill or wounded, and the implements they carried (one of which was a long metal trumpet) were battered and dented.

Martindale, understandably, fell off the ladder.  The soldiers appeared to take no notice of the terrified young man in their midst.

Weirdest of all was something that Martindale noticed, and initially thought simply their short stature; looking more closely, he saw that he wasn't seeing their entire bodies, but their legs were seemingly cut off mid-calf, as if they were wading through the floor and not walking on it.  When they reached an area that had been excavated as part of the heating project, he saw that their lower legs and feet were actually there -- it looked as if they were walking on a surface forty centimeters below the floor.  They were wearing leather sandals, he said, with straps winding around their calves almost to the knee.

As he watched, they approached the wall across the room and went right through it, and one by one, vanished.

Martindale, scared out of his wits, ran up the stairs, right into the house's curator, who took one look at the white-faced young man and said, "By the look of you, you've seen the Romans!"

So, that's the core of the story.  Now, for a closer look at what we know.

First, Martindale turns out to be a pretty credible witness, as such things go.  He left the plumbing business (I would have, too), became a policeman, and died in 2014.  He told the story many times, and never changed a single detail -- and, most interestingly, refused several lucrative offers of payment for interviews and television appearances.

Second, there's the thing about the ghosts (if such they were) walking through, not on, the basement floor.  Further excavations done after Martindale's experience found the remains of the old Roman road -- forty centimeters underneath the current floor.  The ghosts, true believers say, were unaware of their current surroundings (including, fortunately, Martindale himself) and were walking on the road as it was fifteen centuries ago.

Third -- one of the criticisms of Martindale's claim is that the battle equipment and dress were wrong -- for one thing, the shields used by the Roman armies in Britain were square, not round.  But according to several sources I've seen (including the ones linked) it was discovered much later that in the fifth century, at which point the Romans were getting the snot beat out of them by the Angles and Saxons and were in the process of evacuating the entire island, York was defended by not by regular army but by a group of reserves -- who would have been dressed and armed exactly the way Martindale described, including with round shields.

Okay, so what do we conclude about all this?

Here's the difficulty.  The legend of the ghostly legion was well known by then; witness the curator's reaction.  It's unlikely that Martindale knew nothing of the house's reputation.  So as reliable as most sources consider Martindale to be, we have to admit the possibility that either (1) he made it up for reasons unknown or (2) got spooked by the stories of the haunting and let his imagination get the better of him.

On the plus side of the ledger, though, are the details of the apparitions themselves.  You'd think if someone were to make up a story about seeing ghostly Roman legionaries, they'd be the more conventional way we picture them -- shining armor, plumed helmets, and so on.  The fact that they appeared to be coming from a battle where they'd been battered to smithereens is a curious twist, but certainly consistent of what we know was happening in the north of England in the fifth century.

Also an odd feature is the thing about walking on the old road surface rather than the current basement floor, which strikes me as something no one would think to make up.  And Martindale himself was not prone to wild fancies.  He was apparently a plain-spoken, solidly blue-collar man, not college educated, and not the kind you'd think of as a spinner of strange tales.  (If I, for example, were to claim there were ghosts in my basement, my being a speculative fiction author would clearly weigh against my credibility.  We authors can come up with some bizarre stuff sometimes.  Still, I have to add that if I were to come up with a hoax-ghost-sighting story, there's no way even I would have thought of having them walk on a buried road surface.)

Still, it remains that we only have anecdotal evidence to go by.  The cellar is not open to the public (although tours are give of the rest of the house), but a CCTV was set up there to see if any ghosts, Roman or otherwise, would show up -- and so far, has captured nothing.

So you can label me "unconvinced but interested."  I'm not going to jump to a supernatural explanation until we've ruled out all the natural ones, or better yet, when we have hard, scientifically-sound evidence.  I think it was said best by, of all people, C. S. Lewis, in the person of his hard-headed skeptical character Andrew MacPhee in That Hideous Strength: "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

*************************************

Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

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

Writing through tears

I've written a number of scenes that have affected me emotionally while I was writing them.  Honestly, that's always what I'm trying to do to my readers -- grab them by the emotions and swing them around a little.  But none of them has struck me as so deeply poignant as this one, near the end of my novel The Communion of Shadows.

In it, the main character, Leandre Naquin, knows exactly when he's going to die -- on his thirtieth birthday.  The day he was born he had nearly died, but his mother made a bargain with the Angel of Death to take thirty years of her life and give them to her son.  The Angel of Death accepted the deal.  Leandre's mother dies young, and now approaching the age of thirty, he knows his own days are numbered.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons jc.winkler, Pic from the canoe on Bayou Corne, CC BY 2.0]

This scene happens the night before his thirtieth birthday, and is one of the few scenes I've written that had me writing through tears.  It's set in 1850 in southern Louisiana -- bayou country.

*************************************

Leandre thought back once again of what he’d said to the others after telling his own story, that knowing the timing of his death hadn’t changed anything, and he wondered again why he’d lied to his friends.  Everything else he’d said was scrupulously honest, at least insofar as he knew the details, but that had been an outright falsehood.  He had such a habit of blithe indifference toward everything and everyone that apparently he even had to pretend that he could shrug his shoulders at his own impending death.

He rolled over in bed, sighing harshly.  “Maman,” he whispered to the darkness, “how did you do it?  You didn’t hesitate when the Angel of Death showed up.  You were confident that you’d chosen correctly and told him you didn’t regret anything, that you were ready to go.  How can I find the same courage?”

He peered around the dark interior of his little cottage, illuminated by a beam of moonlight coming through a half-opened window.  The only sound was a soft sigh, which could have been the night breeze—or perhaps a slow breath, or the rustle of a long skirt.

He sat up, the light blanket slipping off his shoulders, ears and eyes straining.  The silence had returned.  After a moment sitting there, holding his breath, he lay back down on his side, once again trying to force himself to relax.

Then his eyes caught movement.  In the corner of the room there was a light so faint he thought at first it was a reflection of the moon’s glow.  Like everything in the dimness it had little color, just a gauzy white shimmer that could easily be dismissed as a trick of the eye.

With a sudden jolt he knew what it was.  He’d seen it before.  He was looking at the spirit of Azélie Naquin, that silent and watchful ghost he’d last seen when he was a child, standing gazing at him from the corner of his bedroom just as she was now.  His heart thudded against his ribcage, a combination of fear and longing and grief coursing through his veins.

“Maman?”  His voice sounded thin and hoarse in his own ears.

There was no change in the apparition.

Suddenly all of his defenses, all of the pretense to calmness and indifference, collapsed.  He choked out the words, “I miss you so much,” then his voice broke.  Tears flowed down his cheeks, soaked his pillow, and he drew his legs up so that he was curled up on his side, hugging his knees.  “I said Papa never recovered from your death, but I see now I never did, either.  The ache is just as real as it ever was.”

The figure in the corner moved closer, gliding like fog, and he could see the smooth outlines of his mother’s cheeks, the curl of a strand of hair behind her ear, the faint trace of a smile on her lips.  There was the scent of lavender he remembered from his earliest days, its faint sweetness bringing back memories of pressing his face into her shoulder when he was barely old enough to walk.

Still she did not speak, just gazed at him in love and pity, and he felt his heart breaking again as if she’d only died yesterday, not twenty years earlier.

“How do I do it, Maman?”  His voice cracked again, and in his own ears he sounded like the ten-year-old child he had been.  “How can I know if I made the right choice, keeping myself apart so I wouldn’t cause anyone else pain, so I can let go and die satisfied as you did?”

For the first time the ghost spoke to him, and he heard Azélie Naquin’s gentle voice, as familiar as if he had only heard it yesterday, as if the preceding twenty years hadn’t happened.  “You can’t.  You can’t know, my dear son.  No one can.  Everything you do is a choice, and it affects every other choice you will make, every other possibility you have.  No one can know if they chose correctly, because it is never given to us to see what might have happened had we chosen otherwise.”

“How can you bear it?” he shouted, his voice thick with tears.

“By knowing we all are in the same condition.  You said yesterday that millions of other men and women and children have died, and if they could pass those gates, you could.  Then you derided yourself for lying, but it wasn’t a lie.”  She reached out one hand, and caressed his cheek with a touch light as a breath.  “How many people are taken untimely by sickness or accident, who die without having prepared themselves, without making amends to the ones they’ve hurt and saying farewell to the ones they’ve loved?  You and I, we’ve been given a great gift, to be aware that our time is limited, never to think we had forever to do what we wanted.  Don’t doubt your choices.  You did what you could.  It is, in the end, all any of us can do.”

“I want to be brave.”  He hitched a sob.  “I want to be as brave as you were.  To be able to face the Angel of Death and say, ‘I’m ready.’”

“You will.  Whenever he comes for you, you will.  Because you will know, the whole time, that I am right there next to you, my hand on your shoulder, even if you don’t see me or hear me.”

“I’m so frightened.”

She smiled, the moonlight glinting from her eyes, still barely visible as a shimmering outline in the dark air.  “Anyone who can see how beautiful and terrible and complex and incomprehensible life is, and not be frightened, is a fool.”

There was silence for a time in the room.

“Sleep, my brave son.  You will do what you need to, and do it with great courage.  Do not doubt yourself.  I never have.”

The image of Azélie Naquin vanished.

Leandre said, “Maman?”  There was no response.  He brought one arm up over his eyes, as if to block out the entire world, and wept like an orphaned child.

**********************************

During the first three centuries C.E., something remarkable happened; Rome went from a superpower, controlling much of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, to being a pair of weak, unstable fragments -- the Western and Eastern Roman Empires --torn by strife and internal squabbles, beset by invasions, with leaders for whom assassination was the most likely way to die.  (The year 238 C.E. is called "the year of six emperors" -- four were killed by their own guards, one hanged himself to avoid the same fate, and one died in battle.)

How could something like this happen?  The standard answer has usually been "the barbarians," groups such as the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alans, and Huns who whittled away at the territory until there wasn't much left.  They played a role, there is no doubt of that; the Goths under their powerful leader Alaric actually sacked the city of Rome itself in the year 410.  But like with most historical events, the true answer is more complex -- and far more interesting.  In How Rome Fell, historian Adrian Goldsworthy shows how a variety of factors, including a succession of weak leaders, the growing power of the Roman army, and repeated epidemics took a nation that was thriving under emperors like Vespasian and Hadrian, finally descending into the chaos of the Dark Ages.  

If you're a student of early history, you should read Goldsworthy's book.  It's fascinating -- and sobering -- to see how hard it is to maintain order in a society, and how easy it is to lose it.

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

The ghost of Robert Schumann

Yesterday, I was driving home from work, and was listening to Symphony Hall, the classical music station on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, and the announcer said that we'd be hearing the Violin Concerto in D Minor of the brilliant and tragic composer Robert Schumann.

"And there's quite a story to go with it," he said, and proceeded to tell us how the composer had written the piece in 1853, three years before his death, for his friend and fellow musician Joseph Joachim.  Joachim, however, thought the piece too dark to have any chance at popularity, and after Schumann attempted suicide in 1854 the sheet music was deposited at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and everyone forgot about it.

In 1933, eighty years later, two women conducting a séance in London were alarmed to hear a "spirit voice" that claimed to be Schumann, and that said they were to go to the Prussian State Library to recover an "unpublished work" and see to it that it got performed.  So the women went over to Berlin, and found the music -- right where the "spirit" said it would be.

Four years later, in 1937, a copy was sent anonymously to the great conductor Yehudi Menuhin.  Impressed, and delighted to have the opportunity to stage a first performance of a piece from a composer who had been dead for 84 years, he premiered it in San Francisco in October of that year.  But the performance was interrupted by one of the two women who had "talked to Schumann," who claimed that she had a right to first performance, since she'd been in touch with the spirit world about the piece and had received that right from the dead composer himself!

We then got to hear the piece, which is indeed dark and haunting and beautiful, and you should all give it a listen.

Having been an aficionado of stories of the paranormal since I was a teen -- which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a long time ago -- it's not often that I get to hear one that I didn't know about before.  Especially, given my love for music, one involving a famous composer.  So I thought this was an intriguing tale, and when I got home I decided to look into it, and see if there was more known about the mysterious piece and its scary connection to séances and ghosts.

And -- sorry to disappoint you if you bought the whole spirit-voice thing -- there is, indeed, a lot more to the story.

Turns out that the announcer was correct that violinist Joachim, when he received the concerto, didn't like it much.  He commented in a letter that the piece showed "a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy, though certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist."  And he not only tucked it away at the Prussian State Library, he included a provision in his will (1907) that the piece should not be performed until 1956, a hundred years after Schumann's death.  So while it was forgotten, it wasn't perhaps as unknown as the radio announcer wanted us to think.

Which brings us up to the séance, and the spirit voice, and the finding of the manuscript -- conveniently leaving out the fact that the two woman who were at the séance, Jelly d'Arányi and Adila Fachiri, were sisters -- who were the grand-nieces of none other than Joseph Joachim himself!

Funny how leaving out one little detail like that makes a story seem like it admits of no other explanation than the supernatural, isn't it?  Then you find out that detail, and... well, not so much, any more.

It's hard to imagine that d'Arányi and Fachiri, who were fourteen and nineteen years old, respectively, when their great-uncle died, wouldn't have known about his will and its mysterious clause forbidding the performance of Schumann's last major work.  d'Arányi and Fachiri themselves were both violinists of some repute, so this adds to their motivation for revealing the piece, with the séance adding an extra frisson to the story, especially in the superstitious and spirit-happy 1930s.  And the forwarding of the piece to Menuhin, followed by d'Arányi's melodramatic crashing of the premiere, has all of the hallmarks of a well-crafted publicity stunt.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to discover how easy this one was to debunk.  Of course, I don't know that my explanation is correct; maybe the two sisters were visited by the ghost of Robert Schumann, who had been wandering around in the afterlife, pissed off that his last masterwork wasn't being performed.  But if you cut the story up using Ockham's Razor, you have to admit that the spirit-voices-and-séance theory doesn't make nearly as much sense as the two-sisters-pulling-a-clever-hoax theory.

A pity, really, because a good spooky story always adds something to a dark, melancholy piece of music.  I may have to go listen to Danse Macabre, The Drowned Cathedral, and Night on Bald Mountain, just to get myself back into the mood.

******************************************

Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Simon Singh's The Code Book, prompted a reader to respond, "Yes, but have you read his book on Fermat's Last Theorem?"

In this book, Singh turns his considerable writing skill toward the fascinating story of Pierre de Fermat, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who -- amongst many other contributions -- touched off over three hundred years of controversy by writing that there were no integer solutions for the equation  aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than 2, then adding, "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain," and proceeding to die before elaborating on what this "marvelous proof" might be.

The attempts to recreate Fermat's proof -- or at least find an equivalent one -- began with Fermat's contemporaries, Evariste de Gaulois, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, and John Wallis, and continued for the next three centuries to stump the greatest minds in mathematics.  It was finally proven that Fermat's conjecture was correct by Andrew Wiles in 1994.

Singh's book Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 350 Years describes the hunt for a solution and the tapestry of personalities that took on the search -- ending with a tour-de-force paper by soft-spoken British mathematician Andrew Wiles.  It's a fascinating journey, as enjoyable for a curious layperson as it is for the mathematically inclined -- and in Singh's hands, makes for a story you will thoroughly enjoy.

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

The haunting of Hinton Ampner

On her mom's side, my wife is descended from English nobility, a fact of which she reminds me periodically when I get uppity.  Her great-great grandfather, one William R. Hylton, was born in Jamaica to a family of British sugar planters, and the line (if you extend it back far enough) includes not only the Mad Baron Hylton (about whom I should write another time) but a woman named "Benedicta de Shelving," a member of the Norman gentry named "Marmaduke de Thweng," and best of all, an illegitimate daughter of King Edward IV.

One of her ancestors on the maternal side of her Hylton lineage is a Rachel (Ricketts) Johnson, who would have been (if I'm counting correctly) the aforementioned William R. Hylton's great-great grandmother.  I found out quite by accident that Rachel is related to the central figures in one of Britain's creepiest ghost stories -- the tale of the haunting of Hinton Ampner, a mansion in Hampshire.

Hinton Ampner was built in the 1620s, during the reign of James I, by one Sir Thomas Stewkeley.  Sir Thomas's great-grandson Hugh had no male heirs; his daughter, Mary, married Edward Stawell, a nobly-descended young man who was also apparently a little loose on the morals side.  Despite this, Stawell was appointed as Sir Hugh's heir.

After his father-in-law's death, Stawell apparently decided that he could get away with whatever he wanted, and he invited his wife's beautiful young sister, Honoria, to come live with them at Hinton Ampner.  Mary Stawell died shortly afterwards -- an eventuality that many of their neighbors found convenient -- and he lived there with Honoria (carrying on, sources say, in "a scandalous manner") until her death in 1754.  Stawell himself died the following year, and some claimed that the couple's demise was "divine retribution" for their having done away with an illegitimate child born to the union -- perhaps more than one.

Be that as it may, the house was purchased and then rented out to William Henry Ricketts (cousin to Carol's forebear Rachel (Ricketts) Johnson) and his wife, Mary (Jervis) Ricketts.  William was frequently away for long periods of time -- as I mentioned earlier, he and his family had ties to Jamaica, and voyages across the Atlantic were dangerous and drawn-out affairs -- but Mary was a no-nonsense, down-to-earth type who was quite up to the task of running a household (including their three children and a bevy of servants) by herself.

Whether she was up to dealing with ghosts remains to be seen.

The haunting, if such it was, started out slowly.  Mr. and Mrs. Ricketts both heard noises at night, prompting them on more than one occasion to awaken the servants for a thorough search of the house, which turned up nothing.  Then the nurse to the Ricketts's infant son saw a "man in drab clothes" walk into "the Yellow Room" -- Mary Ricketts's own bedroom.

Once again a search found no one.

Events accelerated.  Servants saw not only the apparition of the drab-clothed man, but a woman in a silk dress. "Dismal moans" were heard at night, and doors opened and quietly shut by themselves.  Mary Ricketts, at first scornful of the claims of the servants, began to experience them herself -- especially when the disturbances intensified while her husband was away in Jamaica in 1769.  She was terrified one night to hear heavy, plodding footsteps near her bed, and in the days following began to make inquiries in the neighborhood regarding the history of the house.  She found only one curious story -- an elderly man who said that a long-time friend of his, who was a carpenter, had been summoned to the house while old Sir Hugh Stewkeley was still alive to pull up some of the floorboards in the dining room.  The carpenter saw Stewkeley and his son-in-law, the depraved Edward Stawell, place something in the space underneath.  The carpenter was ordered to replace the floorboards -- and not to tell a soul what he'd seen, on pain of death.  (A threat the carpenter either didn't believe, or didn't break until Stewkeley and Stawell were both dead themselves.)

Oddly, Mary Ricketts didn't have the floorboards pried up to determine the truth of the claim.  She was apparently reluctant to ascribe the occurrences to ghosts.  But even she began to have second thoughts when the haunting continued to worsen.  A strange murmuring could be heard in several rooms in the house, which sometimes resolved itself into intelligible words. Not only did Mary hear it, but so did her brother, the famous British Navy officer Captain John Jervis, who wrote about it in his journal (a document that still exists today in a museum in London).  They also heard a tremendous "rushing sound," like a great wind, that would "fall with infinite velocity and force" upon a room, without a breath of air stirring.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Mary wrote about the entire story herself in a narrative that was given for publication to The Gentleman's Magazine by her descendants in 1872.  Throughout the tale, Mary strikes you as sane, calm, and collected, always looking for rational explanations, and not immediately leaping to the conclusion that ghosts were to blame.  One passage reads as follows:

Thoroughly convinced there were persons in the lobby before I opened the door, I asked her [Mary's servant Elizabeth Godin] if she saw no one there.  On her replying in the negative, I went out to her, examined the window that was shut, looked under the couch, the only furniture of concealment there; the chimney board was fastened, and when removed all was clear behind it.  She found the door into the lobby shut, as it was every night.  After this examination, I stood in the middle of the room, pondering with astonishment, when suddenly the door that opens into the little recess leading to the yellow apartment sounded as if played to and fro by a person standing behind it.  This was more than I could bear unmoved.  I ran into the nursery and rang the bell there that goes into the men's apartment.

I think if it'd been me, "not unmoved" would have been putting it mildly.  I think I would have fallen more into the "pissing my pants and then having a stroke" category.

Eventually, however, even Mary's stalwart patience was tried to the limit.  During his stay, her brother -- who is certainly a credible witness if anyone is -- heard groans, banging, dragging footsteps, and (on one occasion) a gunshot.  None of the noises seemed to have a corporeal source.  Jervis pressed his sister to leave the mansion, which she did in 1771.  Its owners were understandably unable to find anyone else who would rent the place, and shortly afterwards Hinton Ampner was demolished.

Okay, I know, you can't put much weight into anecdote, but this story to me has some characteristics that have the ring of truth.  I think it's the open-endedness of it that is the most persuasive, and the most creepy as well.  A lot of ghost stories have predictable endings -- the haunting ends when a skeleton is unearthed and reburied in hallowed ground, when the guilty party is arrested for a murder, when well-deserved revenge is taken against a killer.  Here, we have two seemingly reliable people recounting experiences that have no easy wrap-up.  In the end, Mary Ricketts and her family moved away, John Jervis went on to win the Battle of St. Vincent, and the haunted house itself was torn down.

So I find this a pretty cool story, even though I wouldn't call myself a true believer by any stretch.  Cool, too, that we have a family connection to the main characters; in fact, Captain John Jervis had no children of his own and chose as his heir Mary's son Edward Jervis Ricketts, who spent his childhood in Hinton Ampner, and who would be Carol's third cousin several times removed.  But whether it's true or not, and whether the explanation is supernatural or entirely rational, I still think it's a good tale to add a few extra chills to a chilly gray day in midwinter.

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Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

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

The strange tale of Christopher Round

When I was maybe twelve years old, the highlight of school was getting the monthly Scholastic Books sale flier.

It had dozens of books, at prices that seem ridiculous by today's standards -- on the order of $0.99 for a paperback.  Even back then, I loved scary stories, and it's through Scholastic that I got my first copies of collections of stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe.

Back then, in 1972, I saw a book in one month's flier I just had to get.  It was called Haunted Houses, by Bernhardt. J. Hurwood, and at that point was a new release.  When it arrived a few weeks later, I read it eagerly, simultaneously scaring the absolute shit out of myself and running for the first time into such classic tales as the canine ghosts of Ballechin House, the screaming skulls of Calgarth, and the weirdly open-ended story of Nurse Black.

There was one story in the collection, though, that struck me as more sad than frightening.  It was titled "The Tragic Ghost of Cambridge University," and made enough of an impression that when I bumped into a reference to it yesterday on a website called "Ghosts that Haunt Seven Cambridge Colleges and the Stories Behind Them," I recognized it immediately -- and went to dig up my copy of Haunted Houses (yes, I still have it) that I hadn't looked at for something like thirty years or more.

It tells the tale of an academic fellow named Christopher Round, who was pursuing a degree in classics at Christ's College.  He was brilliant but shy -- one of those sorts whom you barely notice until he says something, and then it turns out to be perceptive and interesting, much to your surprise.  This was why his classmate Philip Collier -- similar to Round in intellect, but outgoing, genial, and strikingly handsome -- outshone Round in just about every way you can imagine.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons The wub, Christ's College, Cambridge - First Court 03, CC BY-SA 3.0]

No one else in their class was even close to the same caliber, but when it came to a competition, Round always came in second.  Even after graduation (both with honors -- but guess who got first place?), the rivalry continued, because both of them were accepted as Fellows of Christ's College.

Both applied for a professorship in Greek.  Once again, Collier won, and Round was forgotten.

All through this, their interactions were at least superficially friendly.  Round wasn't the combative type in any case, and it's doubtful that Collier even realized the damage he was doing.  From the outside, it looked like a perfectly ordinary relationship -- outgoing guy and his quiet, second-fiddle sidekick.

The final straw came when Round fell in love with a woman named Mary Clifford.  Mary was high society, and beautiful, and for a time it looked like things were at last going to turn in poor Christopher Round's favor.  But fate had other plans in store.  Mary's parents took her on a trip to Italy, and while traveling she bumped into a fellow Brit who was on holiday...

... Philip Collier.

When she returned, she reluctantly told Christopher Round that she'd fallen madly in love with his rival, and in fact, had accepted a proposal of marriage.  Round was devastated, but his habit of making light of his anger and jealousy once again triumphed.  He forced a smile and wished Mary well.  Relieved that he'd taken it so easily, Mary went her way, feeling like disaster had been averted.

But only a few weeks later, Round was walking back to his flat past the Fellows' Swimming Pool when he heard a noise.  Coming from the other direction was Philip Collier -- staggering drunk.  As he watched, Collier stumbled and fell in.  Although a good swimmer while sober, Collier was flailing, and reflexively Round looked for some way to help him.  There was a long wooden pole with a hook on the end lying along the hedge, used for catching things out or pushing them along the surface of the pool, and he picked it up, intending to hook Collier's clothing and help him out.

Then he thought, "Why should I do this?"  And before he could stop himself, he struck Philip Collier in the temple with the hook, and watched as his rival sank beneath the water and drowned.

Round expected to shine now that the man who had eclipsed him his entire adult life was dead, but it didn't happen.  Instead, he was consumed with remorse.  Mary Clifford, for her part, didn't go running back to him; it's uncertain if she was so sunk in grief herself that she couldn't think of romance, or if she perhaps suspected Round's role in Collier's death.  No legal investigation was ever launched.  Collier's death was ruled as accidental, so there was no worry about a hangman's noose looming in the future.

But Christopher Round was never to be the same.  He threw himself into academics, but even without Collier there to outshine him, he was not able to stand out.  He lived the rest of his life in obscurity, and his role in his rival's death only became known because he wrote out a full confession, with instructions that it was only to be unsealed fifty years after his death.

But his sad, remorseful ghost still haunts Christ's College, especially the grassy lawn by the swimming pool where Philip Collier died.  To this day, students see his stoop-shouldered figure at night, dressed in nineteenth-century garb, walking heavily along the pool, and finally disappearing without trace behind the yew hedge.

Good story, isn't it?  It's a staple in the "true tales of hauntings in Britain" books and websites, often alongside the more famous tales I alluded to at the beginning of this.

But there's just one thing more you might want to know.

It's fiction.

I'm not saying this because I'm being my usual snarky, skeptical self.  The tale of Christopher Round and Philip Collier is the subject of a novel called A College Mystery by Alfred Ponsford Baker, published in 1918, and there is no indication anywhere in the book that Baker thought it was a true story.  Worse still, for those who want it to be real, is the fact that there doesn't seem to be a mention of the story anywhere before the publication of Baker's book.  And a thorough scouring of Christ's College records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows no one named Christopher Round or Philip Collier, not only as Fellows (which surely would have been recorded -- especially Collier, who supposedly was appointed as Professor of Greek) but even as students.

So what is conveniently left out of the account in Hurwood's Haunted Houses -- and just about every other recounting of the story of Christopher Round -- is that the whole thing comes from a work of fiction.

It's funny how the urban legend tendency works, isn't it?  Something that might have started as an up-front made-up story that no one really takes seriously grows through accretion and somehow gains the veneer of veracity.  And once that happens -- once it's told somewhere as a True Tale of the Supernatural -- few people even think to check into the story's antecedents and see if it holds any water.

Just as well.  Christopher Round's sad, ill-fated, and ultimately tortured life is better off as a fictional tale, and even the murder victim Collier doesn't come off as very praiseworthy.  Makes a good story, though -- even if the whole thing seems to have sprung from the mind of a British novelist.

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Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

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