Antique ghosts

Once upon a time, there was a man who was looking for a house to buy.  He came upon a large home on a lovely piece of land, something that most would consider a mansion, at a very cheap price.  He was interested, but (understandably) suspicious -- at that price, there had to be something wrong with it.

"What's the catch?" he asked the seller.

The owner reluctantly admitted that it had a reputation for being haunted.  Everyone who had taken up residence in the house, he said, had been visited nightly by the horrifying specter of a man in chains, whose appearance was so ghastly that it made sleep pretty much impossible.  Not only that, but even when the ghost wasn't visible, there was a palpable miasma of fear around the house.  No one, the owner said, stayed there long; some had even fallen ill from the effects of the haunting.

The prospective buyer thanked the seller for his honesty, and (to the seller's shock) said he was interested in purchasing the home anyhow.  The owner, simultaneously giving thanks for his luck and questioning the buyer's sanity, sold him the house, and in due time, the transaction was completed and the new owner moved in.

Sure enough, on the first night, the man was awakened by the rattling of chains.  Soon a hideous ghost appeared, an old man dressed in ragged clothes, chains around his waist, his face pale and glowing with a sickly light.  Unmoved, the house's new owner stood his ground, and asked the spirit what he wanted.

The specter crooked one finger as if in summons, then turned away, leading the owner outside, to a place on the property.  The ghost met the owner's eyes, pointed downward -- then vanished.

The next day, the owner contacted the local magistrates, who gave the order to dig at the place the ghost had indicated.  After an hour's hard work, they uncovered a skeleton -- still bound by chains.  Who the man had been was unknown; it was obvious the body had been in the ground for a long while.  But the house's new owner made sure that the skeleton was respectfully unearthed, its fetters removed, and given a proper burial in a cemetery.

The spirit, satisfied, was never seen again.

Sound familiar?  The bare bones (pun intended) of this tale have formed the basis of hundreds, possibly thousands, of folk legends and tales-around-the-campfire.  But what may surprise you is this particular version's provenance.

It was related as a true story about the Greek philosopher Athenodorus Cananites (74 B.C.E. - 7 C.E.) by the famous author, lawyer, historian, and polymath Pliny the Younger (61 C.E. - 113 C.E.), and is one of the very first written examples of a ghost story.  Athenodorus himself was the home-buyer who allegedly sent the spirit to its eternal rest and scored a nice house and property at a bargain-basement price in the process.  (The source is Pliny's Letter LXXXIII - To Sura.)

Athenodorus Confronts the Spectre, by Henry Justice Ford (ca. 1900) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Athenodorus Cananites was neither ignorant nor superstitious; he was a prominent Stoic, learned in a variety of fields, and in fact was one of the tutors hired to teach Octavian (later Augustus Caesar).  I don't want to overstate the case, of course.  Even scholarly Greeks and Romans of his time were steeped in the legends of gods, demigods, and spirits, and mostly bought into a worldview that many of us today would consider unscientific nonsense.  But it's interesting that two prominent figures of the Classical intelligentsia are responsible for a story of with same flavor as countless other "restless spirit finds justice and is now at peace" tales told since.

It makes me wonder, though, how all of this got started.  Once the first few ghost stories are told, you can see how people would continue telling them; they're good scary fun, and also, humans are pretty suggestible.  Once your cousin tells you the house is haunted, it's easy enough afterward to interpret every creak and thump as the footsteps of a spectral resident.

But if you go back far enough, someone has to have told the first ghost story.  What could have spurred that?  What occurrence led one of our distant ancestors to decide that Great-Aunt Bertha had come back from the dead, and was still stalking around the place?

Impossible to know, of course.  But what's certain is that just about every culture on Earth tells ghost stories.  True Believers use that as an argument for their veracity; if there was no such thing as an afterlife, they say, why the ubiquity (and commonality of themes) between ghostly tales the world over?  Me, I'm not convinced.  After all, I've written here before about the widespread occurrence of stories similar to "Little Red Riding Hood" -- and no one believes that's because there ever was a wolf dressed up like Grandma waiting to eat a little girl with a basket of goodies.

At least I hope they don't.

In any case, I thought it was an interesting story, not least because it involves two prominent historical figures.  Whether it, and others like it, have any basis in reality very much remains to be seen.  So think about this if you're ever purchasing a house, and the price is way lower than it should be.  Maybe there's a man in chains buried somewhere on the property, and you're about to be recruited by a long-dead specter to fulfill its quest for justice.

Or maybe the roof just needs replacing or something.

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"Nurse Black"

Well, folks, I'm pleased to inform you that this is a milestone: my 1,000th post on Skeptophilia.

When I first started this blog, in October 2010, I had no idea what it would become.  It was a former student who suggested I create a blog (thanks, Brad!), and the first few weeks' worth of posts got little attention.  No surprise, really; it takes a while for anything like this to gain traction.

Then I passed 500, then 5,000, then 50,000, then 500,000 hits; and now, three and a half years later, I am within shouting distance of a million lifetime hits.  So I'd just like to start out with a huge thank you to all of my faithful readers for all of your suggestions, comments, reposts, and (even) criticisms.

Here's to the next thousand posts and the next million hits.

I thought I'd have a little fun with the thousandth Skeptophilia post, just 'cuz I can, right?  So sit back, friends, while I tell you my favorite ghost story.

Despite my general reluctance to believe in ghosts -- the evidence still seems to me regrettably slim -- I love a good scary story, and have been an aficionado of books with names like Twenty True Tales of Terror since childhood.  One of the scariest ones I've ever run into can be found in its entirety in John Canning's wonderful collection 50 Great Ghost Stories, which (according to the message written into the front cover that says "October 29, 1977... Mon Cher Ami... mieux vaut tard que jamais!... Amelia") I received from a family friend as a gift three days after my 17th birthday.

I read the whole thing voraciously, as I was wont to do with such books.  But none of the stories has stuck with me like the 19th century English tale of Nurse Black.

The story comes from the (real) English theater figures of Charles Kean and his wife, Ellen, but the central characters are Ellen's sister, Ann, and her publisher husband, John Kemble Chapman.  John and Ann and their eleven children lived in London in the 1850s, but London of the time was a polluted, disgusting-smelling, crime-ridden place, so they decided to find a country home that was a healthier place to raise children.

They settled on a home in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire.  It was spacious and picturesque, and at the time already about 200 years old.  But it seemed ideal, and in due time the home was purchased, and the family moved in.

And for a while, nothing untoward happened.

It was only when the Chapmans were expecting guests that the first events occurred that were eventually to impel them to sell their house.  For wealthy individuals, John and Ann were unusual in their time in that they employed few servants.  Ann was a practical, strong-minded individual, and preferred to see to the household chores herself.  So one day, she was making up the bed in the "Oak Bedroom," a room that had been left unoccupied for guests, when she realized that she was not alone.

Standing near the window was a young woman in antiquated dress, wearing a white shawl over a silk petticoat.  The woman was looking out of the window with an eager expression, as if she were expecting someone, and did not seem to be paying any attention to Ann.  But Ann herself was seized with a sudden panic; she knew, she said afterwards, that it was not some stranger who had wandered into the house unnoticed.  "I felt," she told her brother-in-law Charles Kean, "as if I was seeing something I ought not to have seen."  So she put her hands over her eyes for a moment.

When she removed them, the figure was gone.

Ann chalked the apparition up to fatigue and nerves, and was able to convince herself for a time that she'd been a victim of her own imagination.

Then a few days later, a young woman who had been hired to look after the youngest of the Chapman children came running upstairs in hysterics, saying that she had been taking the trash out through a back room, and had seen a face staring at her through a window.  The face, she said, was of an old woman, "hideously ugly" and with "an expression of awful malignance," wearing a nightcap.

With some difficulty, Ann was able to calm down the nursery maid, convincing her that it had been a trick of the light -- until three days later, when Maria Chapman, one of Ann's older daughters, told her that she had been scared during the night when she had awakened to find a "very ugly lady wearing a cap" who was peering around the edge of her bedroom door at her.

During this entire time, John Chapman had been away on business in London, and it's to be imagined that Ann was looking forward to his return.  But before he got back, she did something that I have to say I find impressive -- with the help of their few servants, she went over the entire house from stem to stern.  Every closet, cabinet, cupboard, and corner was investigated, to see if there was any evidence of someone hiding in the house without the owners' knowledge.  They found nothing -- but as Ann was going down the staircase away from the Oak Bedroom, she heard footsteps following her.

She turned around.  The staircase was empty.

John came home a few days later, and by this time Ann was so thoroughly unnerved that she told her husband everything.  Knowing her to be steady, reliable, and intelligent, John believed what she said, and instituted a second (fruitless) search of the house.  And he was to get his own evidence shortly thereafter, as events accelerated.  Footsteps began to follow him everywhere he went -- "soft, steady, infinitely menacing."  He took to carrying a loaded pistol with him.  Then most of their servants quit when during their meal, a door opened and closed -- to admit no one.

One of the only remaining servants, a Mrs. Tewin, promised to sleep in the same room with Ann Chapman the next time John had to be away.  And this was to precipitate one final incident, that induced the Chapmans to leave.

In the middle of the night, Ann Chapman awoke to hear Mrs. Tewin moaning, "Wake me.  Wake me."  Ann ran to her bedside, and shook the servant awake.  Upon coming to full consciousness, Mrs. Tewin said she'd been dreaming, and had been aware it was a dream -- but had been unable to wake up.

In the dream, Mrs. Tewin said, she was in the Oak Bedroom.  Standing near the window was a young woman in an old-fashioned white robe, with long, disheveled dark hair.  Across the room, near the fireplace, was an ugly old woman "with an evil expression," wearing a gray nightcap over scanty, wispy hair, seated in a rocking chair.

"What have you done with the child, Emily?" the old woman asked, in a sneering, mocking voice.  "What have you done with the child?"

"Oh, I did not kill it," the girl replied.  "He was preserved, and grew up and joined a regiment and went to India."

At this point, the young woman noticed Mrs. Tewin, seemingly for the first time, and said to her, "I have never spoken to a mortal before.  But I will tell you everything.  My name is Miss Black.  This old woman is Nurse Black.  Black is not her family name, but we call her that because she has been so long in the family..."

But here, the old woman stood, and went to Mrs. Tewin and put her hand on the servant's shoulder.  The pain was excruciating, but she could not wake up.  This is when she began crying out, and called for Ann Chapman to wake her.

The next morning, Ann went into the village of Cheshunt to make inquiries, and was able to find out from an old inhabitant that many years earlier, the home had been inhabited by a Mrs. Ravenhall, who had had a niece named Emily Black.  But nothing else was recalled about them.

The Chapmans were becoming increasingly desperate to find out what was going on, and Ann (who was either incredibly courageous or else completely crazy) decided to spend a night in the Oak Bedroom, which seemed to be the epicenter of the haunting.  And late at night, she woke to see once again the figure of the young woman, this time wringing her hands and looking down at a particular spot on the floor.  The next day, she even went to the length of calling in a carpenter to pry up the floorboards at that particular spot.

Underneath was a hollowed-out space -- but it was empty.

At this point, the Chapmans had had enough, and put the house up for sale.  What happened afterwards -- who bought it, and if they had similarly uncanny experiences -- was not recorded in the story.

I think what appeals to me about this story is the open-endedness of it.  All of us have heard scary stories of the urban legend variety; the driver who picked up a beautiful hitchhiker late at night, loaned her his jacket, and afterwards finds out that she matches the description of a dead girl from the nearby village, and he finds his missing jacket folded up on her grave.  Those have always struck me as too neat, too pat, to be believable (even when I was in my much more gullible youth).  But this one has no easy tie-up, and is full of loose ends -- the Chapmans never did figure out who the ghosts were, what their story was, why they haunted the place.  Even the hollow space under the floorboards, which could have provided an easy way to give a punch line, was empty.

Now, it's not that I actually believe it, mind you.  Charles Kean, who enjoyed many a glass of brandy while scaring the absolute hell out of his friends with the tale, was a thespian, and presumably knew how to spin a good yarn, so I've no real doubt that he made it up.  But the twisty, unresolved messiness of the story has the ring of truth, I have to admit, and for me that makes it a hundred times scarier. 

Man, it should be true.

So there you have it.  One of my favorite ghost stories, in celebration of my thousandth post.  To my readers: another heartfelt thank you.  Keep reading, keep thinking, keep investigating, keep questioning.  And if tonight you hear footsteps behind you on the stairs, just say, "Emily Black, is that you?"

Maybe you'll get an answer.

Lord Dufferin and the man in the garden

For better or worse, being a skeptic doesn't mean that you don't find stories of the paranormal interesting -- nor that you can't react to them on an emotional level.

I mean, I'm the guy who thinks that television programming went into a nosedive the day The X Files was cancelled.  I am also the guy who would love to spend a night in a haunted house, but would be likely to piss my pants and then have a stroke if anything untoward happened.  So while I'd be a good guy to have on a team of ghost hunters, from a scientific and rational perspective, I'd be a bad choice from the standpoint of practical application and laundromat charges.

I still recall many of the ghost stories of my childhood.  My uncle was a grand storyteller, and had lots of tales (usually told in French) of the scary creatures of the Louisiana bayou, including the Loup-Garou (the Cajun answer to a werewolf) and Feu Follet (the "spirit fire," or will-of-the-wisp, which would steal your soul if you saw it -- unless you could cross running water before it caught you).  Later, I voraciously read Poe and Lovecraft, and dozens of books with names like True Tales of the Supernatural.

It was in one of the latter that I ran into the story of Lord Dufferin, a 19th century British statesman who spent most of his career shuttling all over the world -- from Canada to Syria to Russia to India to Burma.  His actual name was Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin, and his life coincided almost perfectly with Queen Victoria's -- she lived from 1819 to 1901, Dufferin from 1826 to 1902.

Dufferin was, by all accounts, well known in the social circuits of high society.  His biographer calls him "imaginative, sympathetic, warm-hearted, and gloriously versatile."  He also was an excellent storyteller, and there was one story he became famous for -- mostly because to his dying day, he swore that it was true.

One night, Dufferin said, he was visiting a friend who owned an estate in Ireland.  For some reason, he was unable to sleep, and after tossing and turning for a while, he finally got up and went out through a door and onto the balcony overlooking the estate gardens.

He became aware that there was a figure moving down in the garden, and as he watched, the figure got closer.  It was a man, carrying something on his back, but he was in shadow and it was impossible to tell anything about the man or his burden.  But after a moment, the man stepped out into a patch of moonlight, and looked up at Dufferin.

Dufferin recoiled.  The man was the most hideously ugly individual Dufferin had ever seen -- and the object on the man's back could be clearly seen to be a coffin.

Terrified, Dufferin retreated to his room.  The next morning, he told his host about what he'd seen, and Dufferin's friend brushed him off -- there was no one in the garden the previous evening, the friend said.  It must have been a nightmare.

Dufferin more or less forgot about the incident.  But many years later, when he was British Ambassador to France in the early 1890s, he was in Paris for a diplomatic meeting and was about to step onto an elevator when he glanced at the elevator operator, and saw that it was the same memorably ugly face as the man he remembered from his vision in the garden.  Alarmed, he backed away, and the door closed.  He was standing there, trying to make sense of what he had just seen, when there was a tremendous crash -- the elevator cable had broken, sending the elevator compartment hurtling down the shaft.  Everyone inside, including the operator, was killed.

Dufferin sought out hotel officials to ask about the elevator operator -- but the officials said that the man had just been hired that day, and no one knew anything about him.

Dufferin lived for another ten years, and enjoyed many a glass of brandy over the telling of this tale.  And you can see why; it's got all of the elements -- a terrifying vision that turns out to be a warning of danger, a scary-looking guy carrying a coffin across a garden at night, a near brush with death.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I doubt very much if the supernatural aspects of this story are true.  Human memory is a remarkably plastic thing, and I strongly suspect that most stories of precognition rely on imperfect recollection of the original premonition, be it a dream or (as in this case) a vision.  That Dufferin saw something in the garden that night is possible; that he had a nightmare is also possible.  That it was true precognition, I seriously doubt.  It is far more likely that, years later, a shock like seeing an ugly guy in an elevator, and narrowly escaping being killed when the elevator cable broke, would have conflated in his mind the incident with the earlier nightmare (or whatever it was).

But you have to admit that despite all of that, it makes a hell of a good story -- even one that a diehard skeptic might read with a cold shudder twanging up the spine.

And with that, I'll wish you all a very spooky and fun-filled Halloween.