The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The weeping woman

Yesterday's post, about the remarkable similarities between mythological gods and goddesses in cultures widely separated in space and time, prompted my cousin Carla, who lives in New Mexico, to ask me if I'd ever heard of La Llorona.

I responded that she sounded familiar, but I couldn't recall any details.

"It's a legend all over the Spanish-speaking parts of North, Central, and South America," she explained.  "I think there's a version in Spain, too.  Each culture has a slightly different take on her, but basically, she's the Weeping Woman' -- someone who was involved in a tragedy, and now as a ghost can be heard crying in the night.  Sometimes, rarely, seen as well.  If you hear her, you're in deep trouble.  So next time y'all come visit, if you're out for a walk at night and hear a woman crying, haul ass right outta there."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Statue of La Llorona in Xochimilco, Mexico, 23 September 2015, KatyaMSL, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International]

Like the gods I wrote about yesterday, La Llorona has astonishingly deep roots.  The 1519 Florentine Codex, one of the most important extant documents about pre-colonial Mesoamerican history and beliefs, speaks about a crying woman as a fearful portent:

The sixth omen was that many times a woman would be heard going along weeping and shouting.  She cried out loudly at night, saying, "Oh my children, we are about to go forever."  Sometimes she said, Oh my children, where am I to take you?"

There's an even earlier parallel in Aztec mythology, the goddess Cihuacōātl -- who gave birth to a son Mixcōātl but abandoned him at a crossroads.  Cihuacōātl comes back to the spot at night, hoping to find him but only finding a sacrificial knife instead.  She can be seen and heard there weeping for him.  (It ended happily enough for Mixcōātl; he was rescued, and grew up to be the god of the hunt.)

La Llorona has, like the gods I discussed yesterday, evolved a bit from her presumed roots -- although wherever you find the story, there are plenty more similarities than differences.  In a typical version, she was the wife of a rich ranchero who found out her husband was cheating on her, and in a fit of insane rage drowned their children in a river.  Immediately remorseful, she threw herself in as well, but her spirit is unable to find peace -- she now haunts the riverbank, clad in a dripping white dress, wailing miserably.

The regional differences are fascinating.  In Mexico, she's mostly considered a monstrous figure, and her sin of drowning her children unpardonable (despite her provocation).  Interestingly, the rise of feminism in Mexico has led to some women identifying with her, and considering her the victim rather than the villain -- further evidence that attitudes toward beliefs can change over time.  In Guatemala, the legend has it that La Llorona was a married woman who got pregnant from another man, and drowned the baby when it was born to avoid her husband finding out.  In Ecuador, she's a tragic figure whose lover died, and she went insane and drowned their children -- and now, her disembodied spirit searches perpetually along the riverbank for them.  In Venezuela, she's a bereft mother whose children died of a sickness, and was driven so mad by grief that she's still looking for them in the afterlife.

Carla was right, there's even a version in Spain, which I find curious if the legend has Indigenous Mesoamerican roots; a woman named Elvira (not that Elvira) who led such a tragic life that she gradually becomes a wraith-like, weeping specter.  There's no mention of children or water -- common themes in the other iterations -- so I wonder if this one is "genetically" connected to the others, or only related because of there being an image of a crying woman.

After all, there are also parallels to similar legends in other cultures, particularly the Slavic Rusalka -- a malicious water-spirit sometimes said to be the lost soul of a drowned woman, who will grab handsome young men while they're swimming and drag them to their deaths -- and the Bean Sí (usually anglicized to Banshee) of Irish mythology, a wailing woman whose cries herald the death of a family member.  Unlikely these have any direct connection to the La Llorona stories, although considering how far back the roots of cultural cross-fertilization sometimes go, I do wonder.

In any case, there's another example of the evolution of folklore for your entertainment.  Something to keep in mind if you're ever out on a dark path near a riverside, and you hear crying.  Me, I still haven't quite recovered from finding out about the Black-eyed Children (I was so traumatized by this urban legend that I wrote an entire trilogy of novels about it so you can be traumatized, too).  In fact, given all the creepy things that supposedly roam at night, maybe it's better you just stay inside your house where it's safe.

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Dark matters

A point I've made here at Skeptophilia more than once is that I don't automatically disbelieve in anyone's claim of having a paranormal or religious experience, it's just that I'm doubtful.  The reason for my doubt is that having a decent background in neurobiology, I know for a fact that our brains are (in astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy phrase) "poor data-taking devices."  We are swayed by our own biases -- put simply, what we expect to see or hear -- and are often overwhelmed by our own emotions, especially when they're powerful ones like fear or excitement.

What's alarming about this is that it doesn't honestly matter whether you're a skeptic or not; we're all prone to this.  I heard a loud noise downstairs one evening -- it was, unfortunately, shortly after I'd been watching an episode of The X Files -- and as the Man of the House bravely volunteered to go investigate.  I looked around for something with which to arm myself, and picked up a pair of fireplace tongs (prompting my wife to ask, "What're you gonna do, pinch the monster's belly fat?")  By the time I actually went downstairs, I had worked myself up into a lather imagining what fearful denizens of the netherworld might have invaded our basement.

Turned out our cat had jumped up on the counter and knocked a ceramic mug onto the floor.  I did not, for the record, pinch her belly fat with the tongs, although I certainly felt like she deserved it.

The thing is, we're all suggestible, and our imaginations make us prone both to seeing things that aren't there and misinterpreting the things that are there.  It's why we have science; scientific tools don't get freaked out and imagine they've seen a ghost.

When I taught Critical Thinking, one of my assignments was for students to use PhotoShop (or an equivalent software) to create the best fake ghost, cryptid, or UFO photo they could.  This was that year's winner.  Pretty good, isn't it?  [Image credit: Nathan Brewer, used with permission]

The reason this topic comes up is a pair of unrelated links I happened across within minutes of each other, that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

The first one is by "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb.  Knibb is a UK-based writer and ghost hunter who spends his time visiting sites of alleged hauntings with his team, then writing up their experiences.  The one I stumbled across yesterday was about their recent investigation of Royal Gunpowder Mills, Waltham Abbey, Essex.  The building, now a "Historical Site of Special Interest" maintained by the government, was (as you might guess from the name) originally an industrial complex for the manufacture of explosives.  "Hundreds of lives had passed through these grounds; some of them cut short by the very materials that gave Britain its military edge," Knibb writes.  "It’s no wonder the place has a reputation for being haunted...  Nothing stirred, but there was an eerie sense that the building’s history had left an imprint.  This was a place where weapons of war had been made, where accidents had claimed lives.  Sometimes you don’t need voices; the atmosphere says enough."

The rest of the article, which is evocative and creepy, describes what Knibb and his assistants felt, saw, and heard during the night they spent in the Mills.  One of them heard the name "Cooper" being spoken; another heard a faint "hello."  They saw the sparkle of flashing lights that, upon arrival in the room where they seemed to originate, had no material source.  More prosaic, one of their videocamera lights itself began to strobe.  There were areas where the visitors experienced chills, and one of them had a profound experience of vertigo and nausea at one point.  (To Knibb's credit, he recounts hearing a loud thud, which turned out to be the movement of a very-much-living staff member retrieving something from an upper room.  "Ruling out," Knibb observes correctly, "is as important as ruling in.")

The second link is a paper in The Journal of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion, and is called "Sensing the Darkness: Dark Therapy, Authority, and Spiritual Experience."  The gist of the paper is that there is a new trend called "Dark Therapy" where volunteers agree to spend a given amount of time in complete darkness, in search of numinous or otherwise enlightening experiences.  Other senses are allowed; in fact, one of the purposes of being in the dark, proponents say, is to heighten your other sensory experiences.  Some of these episodes are guided, and others not.  The paper recounts the experiences of twelve participants who agreed to spend a block of time between seven and fourteen days in a well-furnished room that was completely dark.

Their responses are intriguing.  The researchers (to their credit) do not weigh in on whether the experiences of the participants reflected an external truth, or were simply artifacts of the sensory deprivation and the workings of their minds.  I would encourage you to read the original paper, but just to give you the flavor, here's what one person said after her stay in the dark room:

For the first time [in the dark] there was a lot of fear.  Somehow like manifestation of fear that was coming, well, differently and sometimes it was like... sometimes sounds, sometimes some images, (. . .) some demonic visions (. . .) were appearing and finally I understood that this is all me, my projection, but that you have to go through it, but it was such realistic experiences, very realistic. (. . .) sometimes I heard something, or I had the feeling that somebody is there with me, and I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all.

What strikes me here is that like with ghost hunting, how much of what you experience is what you expected to experience?  I don't doubt that Dark Therapy might be an interesting way to learn about your own mind, and how you cope with being deprived of one of your senses, and might even result in profound enlightenment.  But there's a real danger with someone crossing over into believing that something like the "demonic visions" the volunteer experienced are manifestations of an external physical reality.  We all come primed with our preconceived notions of what's out there; when in an unfamiliar situation where our emotions are ramped up, it'd be all to easy for those mental models to magnify into something that seems convincingly real.

Like I said, it's not that I'm saying I'm certain that Ashley Knibb's scary night at Royal Gunpowder Mills, or anyone else's experiences of the holy or the demonic or the supernatural, are one hundred percent imaginary.  It's just that my generally skeptical outlook, and (especially) my training in neuroscience, makes me hesitant to accept personal anecdote as reality without any hard evidence.  I'm convincible, but it takes more than "I saw it" (or, in the dark room, "I heard/felt it").

I might find your personal anecdote intriguing, or suggestive, or even worthy of further investigation.  But to move from there into believing that some odd claim is true, I need more than that.  The human mind is simply too frail, biased, and suggestible to trust without something more to back it up.

I'll end with a quote from John Adams, then a lawyer, later President of the United States: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

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Ghost purchases

It seems like every day I'm forced to face the unfortunate fact that I don't seem to understand my fellow humans very well.

All I have to do is to get on social media or -- worse -- read the news, and over and over again I think, "Why in the hell would someone do that?"  Or say that?  Or think that?  Now, I hasten to add that it's not that I believe everyone should think like me; far from it.  It's more that a lot of the stuff people argue about are either (1) matters of fact, that have been settled by science years ago, or (2) matters of opinion -- taste in art, music, books, food, television and movies, and so forth -- despite the fact that "matters of opinion" kind of by definition means "there's no objectively right answer."  In fact, at its basis, this penchant toward fighting endlessly over everything is a good first choice for "things I completely don't understand about people."

As an aside, this is why the thing I keep seeing on social media that goes, "What is your favorite _____, and why is it _____?" is so profoundly irritating.  (The latest one I saw, just this morning: "What is your favorite science fiction novel, and why is it Dune?")  I know it's meant to be funny, but (1) I've now seen it 873,915 times, and any humor value it might have started with is long gone, and (2) my reaction every time is to say, "Who the fuck do you think you are, telling me what my favorite anything is?"

So, okay, maybe I also need to lighten up a little.

Anyhow, this sense of mystification when I look around me goes all the way from the deeply important (e.g., how anyone can still think it's safe to smoke) to the entirely banal (e.g. people who start brawls when their favorite sports team loses).  A lot of things fall somewhere in the middle, though, and that includes the article I ran into a couple of days ago showing that people will pay significantly more for a house if it's supposedly haunted.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The data, which came from the British marketing firm InventoryBase, looked at the prices people were willing to pay to purchase a house with an alleged ghost (or one that has a "bad reputation").  And far from being a detriment to selling, a sketchy past or resident specter is a genuine selling point.  Comparing sales prices to (1) the earlier purchase price for the same property, adjusted for inflation, and (2) the prices for comparable properties, InventoryBase found that the increase in value is significant.  In fact, in some cases, it's freakin' huge.

The most extreme example is the house in Rhode Island featured in the supposedly-based-upon-a-true-story movie The Conjuring, which was purchased for $439,000 (pre-movie) and sold for $1.2 million (post-movie).  It's hardly the only example.  The house in London that was the site of The Conjuring 2 is valued at £431,000 -- £100,000 more than it was appraised for in 2016.

Doesn't take a movie to make the price go up.  "The Cage," a house that was the site of a medieval prison in the village of St. Osyth in Essex, England, has been called one of the most haunted sites in Britain -- and is valued at 17% higher than comparable properties.  Even more extreme is 39 DeGrey Street in Hull, which has a 53% higher appraisal value than comparables, despite the fact that the house has a reputation for such terrifying apparitions that "no one is willing to live in it."

InventoryBase found several examples of houses that were objectively worse than nearby similar homes -- badly in need of remodeling, problems with plumbing or wiring or even structure, general shabbiness -- but they still were selling for more money because they allegedly have supernatural residents.

I read this article with a sense of bafflement.  Now, to be fair, I'd be thrilled if it turned out my house actually was haunted, primarily because it would mean that my current opinion about an afterlife was wrong.  This would require a complete reframing of my worldview, something I think I would find a fascinating challenge.  The problem is, at the same time I'm a great big coward, so the first time the ghost appeared I'd probably have a brain aneurysm, but at least then I could look forward to haunting the next resident, which could be kind of fun.

But if I was in the market for a house, it's hard for me to fathom spending tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars extra for the privilege of sharing my house with ghosts.  No, for the privilege of supposedly sharing my house with ghosts; I'm guessing in the Disclosure Statement there's no requirement for anyone to prove their house is actually haunted.  So I'd potentially be spending a year's worth of salary (or more) just for unsubstantiated bragging rights.

Anyhow, this brings me back to where I started, which is that I just don't understand my fellow humans.  A great deal of their behavior is frankly baffling to me.  Given how poorly I fit in with my blood relatives -- "black sheep of the family" doesn't even come close to describing it -- I've wondered for years if I might be a changeling.  The problem with that hypothesis is that I look exactly like my dad, so any contention that I'm not really his son is doomed to be shipwrecked on the rocks of hard evidence.

And like I said, it's not that I think my own view of the world is sacrosanct, or something.  I'm sure I'm just as weird as the next guy.  It's just that the ways I'm weird seem to be pretty different from the ways a lot of people are weird.

So maybe I shouldn't point fingers.  Other folks are weird; I'm weirdly weird.  Weird to the weirdth power.  This means that people are probably as mystified by my behavior as I am by theirs, which I guess is only fair.

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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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Home bizarre

My house is, to put not too fine a point on it, kind of a disaster area.

A friend described it as "looking like a museum run by lunatics."  Part of this is that my wife and I have dozens of interests, so we have a huge amount of random stuff.  Carol is a professional artist (you can and should check out her amazing work here), so between the pens and inks and watercolors and framing supplies -- as well as all the finished pieces -- it takes up a lot of room.  We're both amateur potters, which is a whole other set of supplies and products.  I'm a fanatical book and CD collector, and also a musician with (at last count) five flutes, three recorders, three pennywhistles, a set of bagpipes, a guitar, a djembe, a concertina, and a piano.  I collect masks, and have them hanging on walls all over the house.  Then there's the odd random stuff; just from where I'm sitting, I can see a Bigfoot statue, an antique typewriter, a gargoyle, a bronze sundial, several ceramic statues of characters from Doctor Who and Lost in Space, and a scale model of the Miller-Urey apparatus.

Our house isn't neat, but I can at least confidently assert that it's interesting.

There's also the problem that Carol and I are both housework-impaired.  This is not helped by the fact that we have three large dogs.  When we have guests coming over it's preceded by three days of panic-cleaning so we don't die of humiliation as soon as our guests walk through the front door.  On the other hand, it's a good thing we sometimes do have guests, because otherwise one day we'd go missing, and when the police came to investigate they'd find us both trapped in enormous clumps of dog hair.

We'll never make Home Beautiful, but we did make the May edition of Home Chaotic.

My work station

The reason all this comes up is a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link suggesting that the problem isn't that I have a million interests, the attention span of a fruit fly, and zero aptitude for housework.

The problem is my home needs an exorcism.

At least that's what Australian psychic Catarina Ligato would probably say.  Her vocation is "cleansing" houses of their past inhabitants, who do stuff like creating "negative energy," making rooms feel unnaturally cold, and moving your belongings around.  They can also produce odd smells, although I wonder if we'd even notice that given our aforementioned three dogs.

If Ligato checks a place out and finds it's haunted, she respectfully asks the disembodied ghosts of former residents to leave the place in peace.  She also uses a "crystal wand" and "sacred spray" to encourage their exit.

Kind of the spirit world equivalent of a mop and a can of Lysol, is how I think of it.

"Doing this work is a calling, it’s not for everyone," Ligato said.  "I know other psychics who ended up in psych wards for losing their balance.  [Working in homes] can feel a bit more positive, because you’re helping both the inhabitants and the spirits to find peace."

If you don't want to shell out the cash to hire Ligato (her minimum fee is three hundred dollars) -- or if, like me, you live halfway around the world from her -- you can always DIY it.  Burn some essential oils, she says, play some calm music, keep the windows open, and "declutter regularly."

It's this last one that would be the sticking point for us, because as I mentioned earlier, clutter is kind of our raison d'être.  I mean, I guess it'd be nice to live in a neat, clean house (not that I know first-hand what that's like), but... I like my stuff.  This is my Emotional Security Stuff.  If I were to start doing a Marie-Kondo-style culling, I'd be a little lost.  Okay, maybe I don't need an Indonesian statue of a cat playing a flute, but yeah, Marie, it kind of does spark joy.

So I think the fact that we're constantly misplacing stuff probably isn't caused by the ghosts of former inhabitants moving our belongings around, but more that (1) we have a huge amount of random things strewn everywhere, and (2) we're both kind of scatterbrained.  As far as it feeling cold sometimes -- well, it's an old house, and we do live in upstate New York, which is a four-season climate (the four seasons are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction).  I don't think I'm ready to pay Catarina Ligato to fly out from Australia to do an exorcism, entertaining as that would be.

I might give the essential oils a try, though.  I doubt it'll help with the overall cleanliness, but maybe it'll help with the doggy smell, which can get pretty intense sometimes.   Every move in the right direction is a good thing.

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Woof

I was discussing the alleged phenomenon of hauntings with a friend of mine, and he said, "There's one thing I've always wondered.  Some people believe that the souls of humans can survive after death, and become ghosts.  If humans can become ghosts, why can't other animals?"

Well, after pointing out the obvious problem that I'm not really the right person to state with authority what a soul, human or otherwise, could or could not do, I mentioned that there are many cases of supposed hauntings by animals.  The most famous of these is the haunting of Ballechin House in Scotland.

Ballechin House shortly before its demolition [Image is in the Public Domain]

Ballechin House was a beautiful manor house, built in 1806 near Grandtully, Perthshire, Scotland, on a site that had been owned by the Stuart (or Stewart or Steuart or Steward, they seemed to have spelled it a new way every time the mood took them) family since the fifteenth century.  The story goes that a scion of this family (sources point to his being the son of the man who had the house built), one Major Robert Steuart, was a bit of a wacko who had more affection for his dogs than he did for his family.  That said, he provided quarters for his sister Isabella, who was a nun -- I'm not sure why she wasn't living with her fellow sisters in a convent, but some claim that it was because she'd had an illegitimate child and gotten herself, um... de-habited?  Anyhow, she lived with them for a time, finally dying and being buried on the property.  As for Major Steuart, he apparently took enough time away from his dogs to marry and have at least one child, John.

As the Major got older, he got more and more peculiar, and finally started claiming that after he died he was going to be reincarnated as a dog.  One runs into these ideas pretty frequently today, but back then, it must have been a sore shock to his nearest and dearest.  So this partly explains why when the Major did go to that Big Kennel In The Sky, his son John rounded up all of the Major's dogs and shot them.

I say "partly" because I fail to understand how, even if you believed that the Major was going to be reincarnated as a dog, killing dogs that were currently alive and therefore presumably none of whom were actually the Major, would help.  But that's what he did.

And boy was he sorry.

Almost immediately thereafter, John Steuart and his family and servants began to experience spooky stuff.  They heard doggy noises -- panting, wagging of tails, sniffing, and the really nasty slurping sounds dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene.  (Okay, I'm assuming that they heard that last sound.  I certainly hear it enough from my own dogs.)  Steuart's wife several times felt herself being pushed by a wet canine nose, and reported being in a room and suddenly being overpowered by a strong doggy smell.

Other apparitions began -- the sighting of a ghostly nun, all dressed in gray, in the garden; doors that would open and close by themselves; and the sound of limping footsteps (the Major apparently walked with a limp).  Steuart himself was not long to worry about them, because he was killed in an accident, supposedly the day after hearing a knocking sound on the wall.  (Maybe it was a coded message from the Major that meant, "The dogs and I can't wait to see you!")

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the creator Spettro84, Ghost-BlackDog]

In the 1890s the hauntings were investigated on the urging of a certain Lord Bute -- I can't figure out whether by that time Bute was the owner of the property, or just a busybody.  Thirty-five psychics descended upon the house, which created such a cosmic convergence of woo-wooness that you just knew something was gonna happen.  And it did.  A Ouija board spelled out "Ishbel" (recall that Major Steuart's sister who was a sister was named Isabella, and recall also that this entire family seemed to have difficulty with spelling their own names).  The psychics experienced various doggy phenomena; one of the psychics, who had brought her own dog along, reported that one evening her dog began to whimper, and she looked over, and there were two disembodied dog paws resting on the bedside table.

I'd whimper, too.

In the interest of honesty, it must be recorded that the house was let several times during this period, once to a Colonel Taylor who belonged to the Society for Psychical Research, which is known for its skeptical and scientific approach toward claims of the paranormal.  And Taylor's diary, sorry to say, records that he slept in the Major's bedroom on more than one occasion and experienced nothing out of the ordinary.

Be that as it may, Ballechin House acquired the reputation of being "the most haunted house in Scotland," and by the 1920s became impossible to rent.  It fell into increasing disrepair, and finally was torn down in 1963.  I think this is a little sad -- I'd have loved to visit it.  I might even have brought my dogs. My puppy Jethro is highly alert, even if he has the IQ of a loaf of bread, and would certainly let us know if there were any other dogs present.  I see no reason why it would matter that the canine residents of the house were a bunch of dogs who, technically, were dead.  The "doggy smell" would be adequate motivation for him to bark his fool head off, as would the whole leaving-your-front-paws-on-the-nightstand thing.

So, the believers in Survival seem to, for the most part, believe that dogs have an eternal soul.  However, this opens up a troubling question.  Why stop there?  If dogs have an eternal soul, do cats?  (Several of the cats I've owned seemed to be more of cases of demonic possession, frankly.)  How about bunnies?  Or weasels?  Or worms?  Or Japanese beetles?  (I'd be willing to believe that if there are gardens in hell, there'll be Japanese beetles there to eat the roses.)  I find this a worrisome slippery slope.  It may be a cheering thought that something of Woofy's nature will survive his demise, even if he terrorizes the guests with sticking his spectral wet nose into said guests' private regions, but I'm not sure I want to be stung by ghostly yellowjackets, or have to spray my plants for ghostly aphids.  The real kind are enough of a problem.

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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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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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