The green children

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also, their skin was green.

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

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

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

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

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

So, what's going on, here?

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

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

But.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Creatures from the alongside

In C. S. Lewis's novel Perelandra, the protagonist, Elwin Ransom, goes to the planet Venus.  In Lewis's fictional universe Venus isn't the scorched, acid-soaked hell we now know it to be; it's a water world, with floating islands of lush vegetation, tame animals, and a climate like something out of paradise.

In fact, to Lewis, it is paradise; a world that hasn't fallen (in the biblical sense).  Ransom runs into a woman who appears to be the planet's only humanoid inhabitant, and she exhibits a combination of high intelligence and innocent naïveté that is Lewis's expression of the Edenic state.  Eventually another Earth person arrives -- the scientist Weston, who is (more or less) the delegate of the Evil One, playing here the role of the Serpent.  And Weston tells the woman about humanity's love for telling stories:

"That is a strange thing," she said.  "To think abut what will never happen."

"Nay, in our world we do it all the time.  We put words together to mean things that have never happened and places that never were: beautiful words, well put together.  And then we tell them to one another.  We call it stories or poetry...  It is for mirth and wonder and wisdom."

"What is the wisdom in it?"

"Because the world is made up not only of what is but of what might be.  Maleldil [God] knows both and wants us to know both."

"This is more than I ever thought of.  The other [Ransom] has already told me things which made me feel like a tree whose branches were growing wider and wider apart.  But this goes beyond all.  Stepping out of what is into what might be, and talking and making things out there, alongside the world...  This is a strange and great thing you are telling me."

It's more than a little ironic -- and given Lewis's impish sense of humor, I'm quite sure it was deliberate -- that a man whose fame came primarily from writing fictional stories identifies fictional stories as coming from the devil, within one of his fictional stories.  Me, I'm more inclined to agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."

Our propensity for telling stories is curious, and it's likely that it goes a long way back.  Considering the ubiquity of tales about gods and heroes, it seems certain that saying "Once upon a time..." has been going on since before we had written language.  It's so familiar that we lose sight of how peculiar it is; as far as we know, we are alone amongst the nine-million-odd species in Kingdom Animalia in inventing entertaining falsehoods and sharing them with the members of our tribe.

The topic of storytelling comes up because quite by accident I stumbled on Wikipedia's page called "Lists of Legendary Creatures."  It's long enough that they have individual pages for each letter of the alphabet.  It launched me down a rabbit hole that I didn't emerge from for hours. 

And there are some pretty fanciful denizens of the "alongside world."  Here are just a few examples I thought were particularly interesting:

• The Alp-luachra of Ireland.  This creature looks like a newt, and waits for someone to fall asleep by the side of the stream where it lives, then it crawls into his/her mouth and takes up residence in the stomach.  There it absorbs the "quintessence" of the food, causing the person to lose weight and have no energy.
• The Popobawa of Zanzibar, a one-eyed shadowy humanoid with a sulfurous odor and wings.  It visits houses at night where it looks for people (either gender) to ravish.
• The Erchitu, a were...ox.  In Sardinia, people who commit crimes and don't receive the more traditional forms of justice turn on the night of the full Moon into huge oxen, which then get chased around the place being poked with skewers by demons.  This is one tale I wish was true, because full Moon days in the White House and United States Congress would be really entertaining.
• The Nekomata, a cat with multiple tails that lives in the mountains regions of Japan and tricks unwary solo travelers, pretending at first to be playful and then leading them into the wilds and either losing them or else attacking them.  They apparently are quite talented musicians, though.

Nekomata (猫又) from the Hyakkai-Zukan (百怪図巻) by Sawaki Suushi (1707) [Image is in the Public Domain]

• The Gwyllgi, one of many "big evil black dog" creatures, this one from Wales.  The Gwyllgi is powerfully-built and smells bad.  If you added "has no respect for personal space" and "will chase a tennis ball for hours," this would be a decent description of my dog Guinness, but Guinness comes from Pennsylvania, not Wales, so maybe that's not a match.
• The Sânziană of Romania, who is a fairy that looks like a beautiful young woman.  Traditionally they dance in clearings in the forest each year on June 24, and are a danger to young men who see them -- any guy who spies the Sânziene will go mad with desire (and stay that way, apparently).
• The Ao-Ao, from the legends of the Guarani people of Paraguay.  The Ao-Ao is a creature that looks kind of like a sheep, but has fangs and claws, and eats people.  It is, in fact, a real baa-dass.

A statue of an Ao-Ao by Paraguayan sculptor Ramón Elias [Image is in the Public Domain]

• The Tlahuelpuchi, of the Nahua people of central Mexico.  The Tlahuelpuchi is a vampire, a human who is cursed to suck the blood of others (apparently it's very fond of babies).  When it appears, it sometimes looks human but has an eerie glow; other times, it leaves its legs behind and turns into a bird.  Either way, it's one seriously creepy legend.
• The Dokkaebi, a goblin-like creature from Korea.  It has bulging eyes and a huge, grinning mouth filled with lots of teeth, and if it meets you it challenges you to a wrestling match.  They're very powerful, but apparently they are weak on the right side, so remember that if you're ever in a wrestling match with a goblin in Korea.

So that's just the merest sampling of the creatures in the list.  I encourage you to do a deeper dive.  And myself, I think the whole thing is pretty cool -- a tribute to the inventiveness and creativity of the human mind.  I understand why (in the context of the novel) C. S. Lewis attributed storytelling to the devil, but honestly, I can't see anything wrong with it unless you're trying to convince someone it's all true.

I mean, consider a world without stories.  How impoverished would that be?  So keep telling tales.  It's part of what it means to be human.

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A perilous beauty

Ever heard of the "Bonneville Slide?"

It sounds like some obscure country line dance, but the real story is more interesting, and it comes with a connection to a curious Native legend that turns out to refer to a real historical event.

The Klickitat People have lived for centuries on both sides of the Columbia River, up into what is now Skamania and Klickitat Counties, Washington, and down into Multnomah and Clackamas Counties, Oregon.  They tell the tale of Pahto and Wy'east, the two sons of the chief of all the gods, Tyhee Saghalie.  The two young men did not get along, and fought over who would rule over which parcel of land.  Their father shot one arrow south and the other north; Pahto was given the lands around where the northern arrow landed, and Wy'east the territory surrounding where the southern arrow fell to the ground.  Tyhee Saghalie then shook the Earth and created a great bridge across the Columbia River so the two could visit each other.

But soon trouble broke out again.  Pahto and Wy'east both fell in love with the same young woman, the beautiful Loowit, and began to fight, burning villages and destroying forests and crops.  Tyhee Saghalie tried to reason with them, but to no avail.  In the end he grew angry himself and shook the Earth again, destroying the bridge; the cataclysm created a flood that washed away whole forests.  He turned all three into mountains -- Wy'east became Mount Hood, Pahto Mount Adams, and the lovely Loowit Mount Saint Helens.  But even in mountain form they never forgot either their anger or their burning love, and all three still rumble and fume to this day.

What is fascinating is that this odd story actually appears to have some basis in fact.

In around 1450 C.E., an earthquake knocked loose about a cubic kilometer of rock, soil, and debris from Table Mountain and Greenleaf Peak.  The resulting landslide -- the Bonneville Slide  -- roared down the Columbia Gorge, creating a dam and what amounted to a natural bridge something like sixty meters high across one of the biggest rivers in the world.  

Greenleaf Peak today [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eric Prado, Greenleaf Peak, Washington, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The dam couldn't last, however.  The Columbia River has a huge watershed, and the lake that built up behind the dam eventually overtopped the natural "Bridge of the Gods."  The whole thing collapsed -- probably during a second earthquake -- releasing all that pent-up river water in a giant flood.  It left behind geological evidence, both in the form of a layer of flood-damaged strata west of the slide, and the remains of drowned forests to the east, where trees had died as the dammed lake rose to fill the gorge.

Despite the reminder we got in 1980 -- with the eruption of Mount Saint Helens -- it's easy to forget how geologically active the Pacific Northwest is.  Not only is there the terrifying Cascadia Subduction Zone just offshore (about which I wrote two years ago), the other Cascade volcanoes, from Silverthrone Caldera (British Columbia) in the north to Lassen Peak (California) in the south, are still very much active.  Right in the middle is the massive Mount Rainier, visible from Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia on clear days, which is one of the most potentially destructive volcanoes in the world.  Not only is it capable of producing lava and pyroclastic flows, it's capped by huge glaciers that would melt during an eruption and generate the catastrophic mudflows called lahars.  The remnants of two historical flows from Rainier -- the Osceola and Electron Lahars -- underlie the towns of Kent, Orting, Enumclaw, Puyallup, Auburn, Buckley, and Sumner, and in some places are twenty to thirty meters deep.

The Earth can be a scary, violent place, but somehow, humans manage to survive even catastrophic natural disasters.  And, in the case of the Bridge of the Gods, to incorporate them into our stories and legends.  Our determination to live in geologically-active areas is due to two things; volcanic soils tend to be highly fertile, and we have short memories.  Fortunately, though, we couple what seems like a foolhardy willingness to take risks with a deep resilience -- allowing us to live in places like the Cascades, which are bountiful, and filled with a perilous beauty.

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When the saints go marching in

My mom was an extremely devout Roman Catholic, and I still recall her instructing me to "pray to St. Jude" when I was worried about a bad outcome.

At some point I thought to ask her, "Why St. Jude?"

"Because he's the patron saint of lost causes," she explained.

I pondered on that for a moment.  "If he's in charge of lost causes," I finally said, "wouldn't he be the worst person to pray to?  Shouldn't I be asking for help from someone with a better track record?"

My mom, who had many fine qualities but was born without a sense of humor, didn't appreciate my attempt at levity.  She took her saints seriously.

St. Jude is hardly the only Catholic saint whose story is a little on the odd side.  Consider, for example, St. Rita of Cascia, who lived in the fifteenth century in Perugia, Italy.  Rita at first seemed like she was destined to live a completely ordinary life.  She was the daughter of a moderately wealthy couple in the town of Roccaporena, and upon reaching marrying age was wedded to a nobleman named Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino.  Mancino turned out to be a nasty piece of work, and was verbally and physically abusive to poor Rita, but by her "humility, kindness, and faith" she was able to convert him to better behavior.  They had two sons, Giangiacomo Antonio and Paulo Maria, and everything was going on swimmingly until a guy named Guido Chiqui, who belonged to a rival family, stabbed Mancino to death.

Well, Rita was understandably upset, especially after all the effort she'd put in to turn her husband into a nice guy, and she was even more chagrined to find out her two sons were planning on taking revenge and murdering Chiqui, so she prayed that they be spared from doing something that would land them both in hell forever.  God obliged by making them both die of dysentery.

So be careful what you pray for, I guess.

Rita, now husbandless and childless, decided to join a convent, where she died in 1457.  She's now the patron saint of abused people.

A painting of St. Rita of Cascia from her tomb [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then there's St. Lidwina of Schiedam, a fourteenth-century Dutch woman who was injured while ice skating at age fifteen, and afterward supposedly didn't need to eat anything.  Despite this -- and the alarming and bizarre claim that she "shed skin, bones, and parts of her intestines, which her parents kept in a vase and which gave off a sweet odor" --  she lived another thirty-seven years, and upon canonization became the patron saint of chronic illnesses... and ice skaters.

Seems like if I was an ice skater, I'd want to pray to someone who hadn't nearly died doing it, but that's just me.

Then there's the third-century St. Denis, who was a Christian bishop among the Parisii, a Gaulish tribe who lived along the banks of the River Seine (and for whom Paris is named).  St. Denis went around preaching, and apparently was so well-spoken that he converted a lot of local pagans, which pissed off the local authorities.  They appealed to the Roman Emperor Decius, who gave the order to arrest Denis and his friends Rusticus and Eleutherius.  After a stint in prison, all three were beheaded with a sword on the highest hill in the area -- what is now called Montmartre.

So far, nothing too odd.  But after Denis was beheaded, his body stood up, picked up his own head, and walked three miles with it, his head preaching a sermon the whole way.  At some point evidently even holiness couldn't propel him any further and he collapsed and died (again) -- on the site where the Basilica of St. Denis currently stands.  But this is why many images of St. Denis are shown with him holding his own head:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Thesupermat, Paris - Cathédrale Notre-Dame - Portail de la Vierge - PA00086250 - 003, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Besides being the patron saint of both Paris and France as a whole, guess what else St. Denis is the patron saint of?

Headaches.

Another third-century saint who is mostly famous for how he died is St. Lawrence, who came from the town of Huesca in Spain.  He preached all over southern Europe but got himself in trouble when he was in Rome in 258 C.E. by recommending redistribution of wealth to the poor.  (If you can imagine.)  The powers that be decided Lawrence needed to go, and they came up with a nasty way to do it -- they chained him to a grill and roasted him over an open fire.  Lawrence, defiant to the end, yelled at his executioners, "You can turn me over, I'm done on this side!"  And this is why he's the patron saint of cooks... and comedians.

But the weirdest claim I've seen along these lines is an obscure seventh-century British saint, St. Rumbold of Buckingham.  Rumbold was supposedly the grandson of King Penda of Mercia, who was a prominent pagan, but his parents (names unknown) converted to Christianity.  Rumbold was born in 662 C.E. and only lived three days -- but was born able to talk.  His first words were allegedly "Christianus sum, Christianus sum, Christianus sum!" ("I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian!"), which even if you're devout must have been creepy as hell.  Afterward Rumbold  politely requested baptism, and preached several sermons before expiring.  

There are several places named after him, including St. Rumbold's Well in Buckingham:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fractal Angel, St Rumbold's Well - geograph.org.uk - 423381, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The best part of the whole story, though, is that Boxley Abbey in Kent had a famous statue of St. Rumbold, that was small and light (because, of course, he was a baby), but sometimes inexplicably would become so heavy no one could lift it.  The deal was, the monks said, that only someone who was holy and pure of heart could lift the statue.  Well, when the Dissolution of the Monasteries happened during the sixteenth century, and Boxley Abbey was abandoned and largely torn down, it was discovered that the statue was fixed to its heavy stone base by a wooden pin that could be released by a person standing unseen behind the alcove.  So, basically, one of the monks would check out whoever was trying to lift the statue, and decide if they were holy enough to pull the pin for.

Sometimes even Miracles of God need a little human assistance, apparently.

Anyhow, that's our cavalcade of holiness for the day.  Unsurprisingly, I think the whole thing is kind of weird.  I feel bad for the saints who got martyred -- no one deserves that -- and even for poor St. Rita with her life-long run of bad luck.  I don't think I'll be praying to any of them, though, however much our country could use some help from St. Jude at the moment.

Or even from talking babies and guys walking around carrying their own severed heads.

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Haunted housewares

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Moon eyes

The oral tradition presents anthropologists and historians with a difficult, sometimes insurmountable, problem; given that by definition its antecedents were not written down, there is no way to tell whether a particular legend is true, is entirely made up, or is in that gray area in between.

Sometimes corroboration of the true tales can come from odd sources -- such as the story amongst the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest of a massive earthquake and tsunami, that was later shown to be true not only by geological evidence -- but by written records from Japan.  But hard evidence of this type for legends in the oral tradition is rare, and in any case, an earthquake in the Northwest isn't exactly a far-fetched claim to begin with.

It's when the stories are more out there that it becomes harder to discern whether they're entirely mythological in nature, or whether there might be some bit of real history mixed in there somewhere.  Which brings us to the strange tale of the Moon-eyed People of the Appalachians.

Botanist, naturalist, and physician Benjamin Smith Barton, in his 1797 book New Views of the Origins of  the Tribes and Nations of America, talks about a conversation he'd had with Colonel Leonard Marbury, who had worked as an intermediary between the Cherokee and the American government.  Barton writes, "... the Cheerake [sic] tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain 'Moon-eyed-People,' who could not see in the day-time.  These wretches they expelled."  The Cherokee chief Oconostota supposedly told Tennessee governor John Sevier about them, saying they were light-skinned, had "come from across the great water," and were the ones who'd built some of the monumental earthworks in Tennessee and neighboring states. 

Soapstone carving in the Cherokee County (North Carolina) Historical Museum, believed to be a representation of the Moon-eyed People

Those two references seem to be the earliest known sources of the story with at least moderate reliability (although note that both are second-hand).  Through the nineteenth century, the legend of the Moon-eyed People -- who were light-skinned (some said albinos), small in stature, and saw better at night than during the day -- was repeated over and over, then embellished and twisted together with other legends.

One of those is the odd Welsh tale of Madoc (or Madog) ab Owain Gwynedd, who after a family conflict in around 1170 C.E. sailed away from Wales with some friends, who ultimately settled somewhere in eastern North America and intermarried with the locals.  Of course, "somewhere in eastern North America" is a pretty broad target, so this opened up the gates for a variety of claims, including that there's Welsh blood (and/or Welsh linguistic influence) in the Monacans and the Doegs of Virginia, the Tuscarora of New York, and even the Zunis of New Mexico and the Mandans of North Dakota.  This runs up against the problem that there's no good genetic or linguistic evidence supporting any of this -- despite claims of "Welsh-speaking Indians," there's pretty certainly no such tribe.  So braiding together the Moon-eyed People (for which there's no hard evidence) with the legend of Madoc ab Owain (ditto) doesn't make the case for either one any stronger.

Side note: aficionados of science fiction and fantasy will probably recognize the Madoc ab Owain legend as the basis of Madeleine L'Engle's alternately brilliant and cringy YA novel A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which has the main character, Charles Wallace Murry, time-traveling back through Madoc's line of descent in North America.  Brilliant because it weaves together all sorts of contingent histories and what-ifs with a legend that's kind of cool; the cringy part is that a major plot point revolves around a "blue-eyed Indian = good, brown-eyed Indian = bad" thing, mixed in with a heaping helping of the Noble Savage myth.  I loved the story as a kid, but now it's hard to read it without wincing.

Be that as it may, as far as the Moon-eyed People goes, what we're left with is... not much.  Even the Wikipedia article on the legend admits, "Sources disagree as to the accuracy of the stories, whether or not the stories are an authentic part of Cherokee oral tradition; whether the people existed or were mythical; whether they were indigenous peoples or early European explorers; and whether or not they built certain prehistoric structures found in the region."

So it's a curious story, but the dearth of evidence -- combined with the fact that what we have is filtered through the eyes of white Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were inclined to view Native legends as quaint at best and outright demonic at worst -- means we have to put this in the "most likely mythological" column.

On the other hand, maybe we should wait for the people over at the This Hasn't Been History For Quite Some Time Channel to get their hands on it.  I'm sure they'll have an answer at the ready.

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The monster in the mist

I thought that after writing this blog for twelve years, I'd have run into every cryptid out there. But just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about one I'd never heard of, which is especially interesting given that the thing supposedly lives in Scotland.

I've had something of a fascination with Scotland and all things Scottish for a long time, partly because of the fact that my dad's family is half of Scottish descent (he used to describe his kin as "French enough to like to drink and Scottish enough not to know when to stop").  My grandma, whose Hamilton, Allan, and Lyell ancestry came from Paisley (near Glasgow), knew lots of cheerful Scottish stories and folk songs, 95% of which were about a guy named Johnny who was smitten with a girl named Jenny, but she spurned him, so he stabbed her to death with his wee pen-knife and ended up getting hanged for it.

Big believers in happy endings, the Scots.

Anyhow, none of my grandma's stories were about the "Am Fear Liath Mòr," which roughly translates to "Big Gray Dude," who supposedly lopes about in the Cairngorms, the massive mountain range in the eastern Highlands.  He is described as extremely tall and covered with gray hair, and his presence is said to "create uneasy feelings."  Which seems to me to be putting it mildly.  If I was hiking through some lonely, rock-strewn mountains and came upon a huge hair-covered proto-hominid, my uneasy feelings would include pissing my pants and then having a stroke.  But maybe the Scots are made of sterner stuff than that, and upon seeing the Am Fear Liath Mòr simply report feeling a wee bit unsettled about the whole thing.

A couple of Scottish hikers being made to feel uneasy

The Big Gray Dude has been seen by a number of people, most notably the famous mountain climber J. Norman Collie, who in 1925 had reported the following encounter on the summit of Ben MacDhui, the highest peak in the Cairngorms:

I was returning from the cairn on the summit in the mist when I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps.  For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.  I said to myself, this is all nonsense. I listened and heard it again, but could see nothing in the mist.  As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest.  Whatever you make of it I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben MacDhui and I will not go back there myself I know.

Collie's not the only one who's had an encounter.  Mountain climber Alexander Tewnion says he was on the Coire Etchachan path on Ben MacDhui, and the thing actually "loomed up out of the mist and then charged."  Tewnion fired his revolver at it, but whether he hit it or not he couldn't say.  In any case, it didn't harm him, although it did give him a serious scare.

Periodic sightings still occur today, mostly hikers who catch a glimpse of it or find large footprints that don't seem human.  Many report feelings of "morbidity, menace, and depression" when the Am Fear Liath Mòr is nearby -- one reports suddenly being "overwhelmed by either a feeling of utter panic or a downward turning of my thoughts which made me incredibly depressed."  Scariest of all, one person driving through the Cairngorms toward Aberdeen said that the creature chased their car, keeping up with it on the twisty roads until finally they hit a straight bit and were able to speed up sufficiently to lose it.  After it gave up the chase, they said, "it stood there in the middle of the road watching us as we drove away."

Interestingly, there is a possible scientific explanation of this, that doesn't require believing in some giant humanoid hulking about in the wilds of Scotland.  Most of the sightings have taken place when it's foggy, which immediately made me think about the weird (but completely natural) phenomenon of the Brocken spectre or Brocken bow.  This occurs when filtered sunlight passes through mist from behind an observer, casting the person's (enormously enlarged) shadow on the fogbank in front of them; because the light is passing through spherical droplets of water, sometimes the shadow is also surrounded by a rainbow sheen called heilegenschein, caused by light refraction.  It's an eerie effect, and certainly has scared more than a few people.  (It's named for Brocken Mountain, the highest peak in the Harz Mountains of Germany, where it is sometimes seen.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brocken Inaglory, Solar glory and Spectre of the Brocken from GGB on 07-05-2011, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Of course, it still leaves the massive, non-human footprints and Collie's crunching noises unaccounted for.  So do with that explanation what you will.

Anyhow, that's our cryptozoological inquiry for today.  I've been to Scotland once, but never made it out of Edinburgh -- I hope to go back and visit the ancestral turf some day.  When I do, I'll be sure to get up into the Cairngorms and see if I can catch a glimpse of the Big Gray Dude.  I'll report back on how uneasy I feel afterwards.

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The wreck of the Seabird

One of the difficulties with accepting tales of the paranormal, or even ones where the paranormal isn't explicitly invoked but which fall into the "unsolved mysteries" category, is that humans just love to tell stories.

And embellish them.

Once a claim has gone through a few generations of handing down, it's often hard to tell what about it -- if anything -- is actually the truth.

Take, for example, the story of the Seabird, a sailing vessel that met a very odd fate, reminiscent of the better-documented case of the Mary Celeste.  Here's a typical version:

On a strip of land near Newport, Rhode Island, there was a little settlement known as Easton's Beach.  Only a few farmers and some fishermen and their families made their homes there.

One day in 1880, a fisherman working on his boat near shore suddenly sighted a full-rigged ship of very good size heading straight for land...  [I]t was coming steadily and directly for shore in the on-shore breeze.  He called to the other fishermen nearby and ran to the settlement above the beach to tell the rest of the people about the approaching vessel.

Soon everyone was on the beach, watching in helpless silence as the strange ship came on as though determined to wreck itself, its canvas straining and flags snapping at the mastheads.

With horror the spectators heard the grating of the hull upon the bottom as it struck.  Yet the ship still bore down, keeping straight on course as it cut a keel groove in the sandy ocean bottom.  When it finally came to rest, it was still on an even keel, with the bowsprit almost over their heads.

Then they recognized the ship.  It was the Seabird, under the able command of Captain John Husham.  It had been to Honduras, and was expected that very day in Newport.  Not a sound came from the decks.

At once the crowd went on board to explain the mystery -- but it only deepened.  Coffee still boiled on the galley stove, food for breakfast was on the table, all the navigation instruments and charts were in order.  Yet there was no trace of the crew, nor any indication of when, why, or where they had gone.  The only living thing aboard the Seabird was a mongrel dog shivering on the deck.

The sea had been calm, the breeze fine, and the Seabird had been almost exactly on course for Newport.  The crew must have left only shortly before the ship had appeared on the horizon.  But why should they have left the ship when they were so close to their home and families?  Only Heaven and a mongrel dog knew what had happened aboard the Seabird that sunny morning.

Creepy stuff, right?  And it seems like it should be easy to verify, given that "everyone" from the town witnessed the ship beach itself, and a whole "crowd" of them saw the empty decks for themselves, as well as the peculiar observation of the breakfast food laid out for the crew that indicated that whatever had caused them to vanish had just happened.  It's one of those stories that when you read it, the natural inclination is to say, "There's enough detail here that it has the ring of truth."  The name of the captain, the ship's origin and destination, all sound like stuff that would be simple to verify.  And, after all, there wasn't any wild explanation given; no explanation at all, really.  A ship shows up sans crew, with a dog as the lone survivor.

And thus, the tendency is to believe it must be true.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ronnie Robertson, Ghost Ship IMG 2744 (28440601905), CC BY-SA 2.0]

But the owner of the curious site EsoterX was not content to leave it there.  He started poking around to see what, if any, of the information in the story of the Seabird could be substantiated.  And he found that the version I related above is far from the only one, and that those details -- the same specifics that made the story sound so convincing -- vary greatly from version to version:

This is a fairly rudimentary set of facts, but as I poked into the various accounts of the Seabird, even the simplest plot points of the narrative were found to be in dispute.  The event is variously dated to 1750, 1760, and 1850...   The missing captain was one John Husham.  Or maybe not.  He might have been John Huxham, or perhaps even John Durham of Middletown, Connecticut.  The ship may have refloated itself overnight and sailed away, never to be seen again.  Or, as fairly detailed accounts have it, was salvaged and used commercially for many years after without incident.  Or, was parked in the Newport harbor, where it was later captured by the British and turned into an armed gunboat.

Even the non-human survivors vary; some versions say it was a dog and a cat, others a dog, a cat, and a parakeet.

By this time, whatever truth there may have been to the wreck of the Seabird is probably unrecoverable, tangled up in the inevitable Game of Telephone that occurs when people tell stories.  As EsoterX put it:

Much of human history is oral history, the tales we tell each other around the campfire or by the hearth, but for the past few thousand years we’ve tended to lionize the printed word, shuffling kings and their wars into history, and mysterious accounts passed from generation to generation by word of mouth into folklore.  We substantiate the reality of history by writing it down, but the further in time we creep from events, the less we understand the minds of the men that wrote them, gleaning the odd fact here and there, chuckling at their superstitions, and manipulating the warp and weave of their remembered histories to fill in those annoying plot holes that interrupt our remembered tales.

In other words, a claim like this is only as accurate as the person who tells it -- and the person who told it to them, and the one who told it to them, and on and on back into the mists of the past.  Sometimes we can learn enough from contemporaneous records to reconstruct what actually happened; but sometimes -- as in the case of the Seabird -- the truth is lost as completely as the ship's unfortunate crew members.

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