The Ghost World

CHAPTER IX

PHANTOM LIGHTS

Stories of mysterious lights suddenly illuminating the nocturnal darkness of unfrequented spots have long been current throughout the world. In the ‘Odyssey,’ when Athene was mystically present as Odysseus and Telemachus were moving the weapons out of the hall (xix. 21-50), Telemachus exclaims, ‘Father, surely a great marvel is this I behold! Meseemeth that the walls of the hall, and the fair spaces between the pillars, and the beams of pine, and the columns that run aloft, are bright as it were with flaming fire. Verily some god is within of them that hold the wide heaven.’ Odysseus answers, ‘Lo, this is the wont of the gods that possess Olympus.’ In Theocritus, when Hera sends the snakes to attack the infant Heracles, a mysterious flame shines forth. The same phenomenon occurs in the Sagas of Burut Njas, when Gunnar sings within his tomb. The brilliance of the light which attends the presence of the supernatural is indeed widely diffused, and, as Mr. Andrew Lang writes,129 ‘Philosophers may dispute whether any objective fact lies at the bottom of this belief, or whether a savage superstition has survived into Greek epic and idyll and into modern ghost stories.’

Although science has years ago explained many such phosphoric appearances as governed by certain atmospheric laws, superstitious fancy has not only attributed to them supernatural causes, but associated them with all kinds of weird and romantic tales. According to one popular notion, strange lights of this kind are the spirits of persons who, for some reason, cannot remain quiet. Thus a spectre known as the ‘Lady and the Lantern,’ has long been said to haunt the beach at St. Ives, Cornwall, in stormy weather. The story goes that a lady and her child had been saved from a wreck, but the child was swept away and drowned, and she is supposed to be hunting for its body. Similar tales are told elsewhere, but the object of search is not always the same. A light, for instance, hovers about a stone on the Cornish coast, locally designated ‘Madge Figg’s Chair,’ which is supposed to be the ghost of a wrecked lady whom Madge stripped of her jewels. In Scotland the appearance of a spectral ‘lady of the golden casket’ was attended by a phantom light, and it is also related how the ghost of a murdered woman is seen by her lover at sea, approaching in the shape of a bright light, which assumes the human form as it draws nearer. She finally calls him, and he springs into her arms, and disappears in a flash of fire.130

There is the popular legend of the ‘Radiant Boy’ – a strange boy with a shining face, who has been seen in certain Lincolnshire houses and elsewhere. This ghost was described to Mr. Baring-Gould131 by a Yorkshire farmer, who, as he was riding one night to Thirsk, suddenly saw pass by him a ‘radiant boy’ on a white horse. To quote his own words, ‘there was no sound of footfall as the boy drew nigh. He was first aware of the approach of the mysterious rider by seeing the shadow of himself and his horse flung before him on the high road. Thinking there might be a carriage with lamps, he was not alarmed till, by the shortening of the shadow, he knew that the light must be near him, and then he was surprised to hear no sound. He thereupon turned in his saddle, and at the same moment the “radiant boy” passed him. He was a child of about eleven, with a fresh bright face. “Had he any clothes on? and if so, what were they like?” I asked. But the old man could not tell. His astonishment was so great that he took no notice of particulars. The boy rode on till he came to a gate which led into a field; he stooped as if to open the gate, rode through, and all was instantly dark.’

At the commencement of the present century the little village of Black Heddon, near Stamfordham, in Northumberland, was greatly disturbed by an apparition known as ‘Silky,’ from the nature of her dress. She suddenly appeared to benighted travellers, breaking forth upon them in dazzling splendour, in the darkest and most lonely parts of the road. This spirit exercised a marvellous power over the brute creation, and once, it is said, waylaid a waggon bringing coals to a farm near Black Heddon, and fixed the team upon a bridge, since called, after her, ‘Silky’s Brig.’ Do what he could, the driver could not make the horses move a step, and there they would have stayed all night had not another farm servant come up with some mountain ash about him. It was generally supposed that Silky, who suddenly disappeared, was the troubled phantom of some person who had died miserable because she owned treasure, and was overtaken by death before she had disclosed its hiding-place.

An old barn situated near Birchen Tower, Hollinwood, which was noted for the apparition of Madame Beswick on dark and wintry nights, at times, it is said, appears to be on fire, a red glare of glowing heat being observable through the loopholes and crevices of the building. Sometimes the sight is so threatening that the neighbours will raise an alarm that the barn is in flames. But when the premises are searched, everything is in order, and nothing found wrong.132 And a Welsh romance tells how, after Howel Sele slew his cousin Glendower, and buried him in ‘a broad and blasted oak, scorched by the lightning’s vivid glare,’

Such phantom lights are not confined to land, and most of the tales of spectre ships speak of their being seen by the affrighted crews. In the ‘Salem Spectre Ship’ we are told how

They are generally dreaded as foreboding a catastrophe, and have given rise to a host of curious stories. A light is said to hover about in Sennen Cove, which is thought to be an ill-omened apparition; and a Welsh story speaks of a ghost, the ‘Cyhyraeth,’ that appears on the beach, in a light, with groanings and cries.133 Flames are reported to issue from the Eider River, and from several lakes in Germany. Where ships have been wrecked, blue lights are supposed to faintly glimmer, occasionally accompanied by the spirits of wrecked or injured persons. A notable instance is told of Sable Island,134 where, with the leaping flames, is seen the ‘Lady of Copeland’ wrecked and murdered by pirates from the Amelie transport. She has one finger missing on her hand.

Sometimes weird lights flickering in solitary places are thought to be the unhappy spirits of wicked persons who have no rest in the grave. Milton refers to this fancy in his ‘Paradise Lost’ (ix. 634):

Hence they were doomed to wander backwards and forwards carrying a light. A tradition current in Normandy says that a pale light occasionally seen by travellers is the unquiet spirit of some unfortunate woman who, as a punishment for her intrigues with a minister of the Church, is doomed to this existence. There are various versions of this story, and one formerly current in this country tells how the hovering flame – the cause of terror to many – is the soul of a priest who has been condemned to expiate his vows of perpetual chastity by thus haunting the scenes of his disobedience. Brand, quoting from an old work on ‘Lights that Lead People out of their Ways in the Night,’ informs us that the lights which are seen in churchyards and Moorish places were represented by the Popish clergy to be ‘souls come out of purgatory all in flame, to move the people to pray for their entire deliverance, by which they gulled them of much money to say mass for them, everyone thinking it might be the soul of his or her deceased relations.’

According to another explanation, it is believed on the Continent that the ghosts of those who in their lifetime were guilty of removing their neighbours’ landmarks are fated to roam hither and thither, lantern in hand, ‘sometimes impelled to replace the old boundary mark, then to move it again, constantly changing their course with their changing purpose.’ A Swedish tradition adds that such a spirit may be heard saying in a harsh, hoarse voice, ‘It is right! it is right! it is right!’ But the next moment qualms of conscience and anguish seize him, and he then exclaims, ‘It is wrong! it is wrong! it is wrong!’135 It is also said that these lights are the souls of land-measurers, who, having acted dishonestly in their business, are trying to remedy the wrong measurements they made. A German legend tells how, at the partition of the land, there arose between the villages of Alversdorf and Röst, in South Ditmarschen, great disputes. One man gave fraudulent measurements, but after his death he wandered about as a fire sprite. A flame, the height of a man, was seen dancing about till the moor dried up. Whenever it flared up higher than usual, the people would cry out, ‘Dat is de Scheelvalgt’ – that is the land-divider. There is a tale told of a certain land-measurer near Farsum, in the Netherlands, who had in his lifetime acted dishonestly when he had a piece of land to measure. He suffered himself ‘to be bribed by one or other, and then allotted to the party more than was just, for which offence he was condemned after death to wander as a burning man with a burning measuring-staff.’

Popular fancy, too, has long identified phantom lights as being the souls of unbaptized children. Because such souls cannot enter heaven, they make their abodes in forests, and in dark and lonely places, where they mourn over their hard lot. If at night they chance to meet anyone, they run up to him, and walk on before to show him the way to some water where they may be baptized. The mysterious lady, Frau Bertha, is ever attended by troops of unbaptized children, whom she takes with her when she joins the wild huntsman. One tradition relates how a Dutch parson, happening to return home later than usual, was confronted with no less than three of these fiery phenomena. Remembering them to be the souls of unbaptized children, he thoughtfully stretched out his hand, and pronounced the words of baptism over them. But, much to his unexpected surprise, in the same instant hundreds of these moving lights made their appearance, which so frightened him that, forgetting his good intentions, he ran home as fast as he could. In Ireland unbaptized children have been represented as sitting blindfolded within fairy moats, the peasantry supposing such souls ‘go into nought.’ A somewhat similar idea may be found in Longfellow’s ‘Evangeline,’ where we have introduced among the contes of an Arcadian village notary allusion to

Closely allied with the notion of phantom lights are the strange phosphoric appearances said occasionally to be seen about the dying. In Russia, the soul under certain circumstances is believed to assume the form of a flame, and such a ghostly apparition cannot be banished till the necessary prayers have been offered up.136 According to a Sussex death-omen, lights of a circular form seen in the air are significant, and it is supposed that the death of sick persons is shown by the prognostic of ‘shell-fire.’ This is a sort of lambent flame, which seems to rise from the bodies of those who are ill, and to envelope the bed. On one occasion, considerable alarm was created in a Sussex village by a pale light being observed to move over the bed of a sick person, and after flickering for some time in different parts of the room, to vanish through the window. But the difficulty was eventually explained, for the light was found to proceed from a luminous insect – the small glow-worm.137 Marsh138 relates how a pale moonlight-coloured glimmer was once seen playing round the head of a dying girl about an hour and a half before her last breath. The light proceeded from her head, and was faint and tremulous like the reflection of summer lightning, which at first those watching her mistook it to be. Another case, reported by a medical man in Ireland, was that of a consumptive patient, in whose cabin strange lights had been seen, filling the neighbourhood with alarm. To quote a further instance, from the mouth of a patient in a London hospital, some time since, the nurses observed issuing a pale bluish flame, and soon after the man died. The frightened nurses were at a loss to account for this unusual sight, but a scientific explanation of the phenomenon ascribed it to phosphoretted hydrogen, a result of incipient decomposition.139

Dante Rossetti, in his ‘Blessed Damozel,’ when he describes her as looking down from heaven towards the earth that ‘spins like a fretful image,’ whence she awaits the coming of her lover, depicts the souls mounting up to God as passing by her ‘like thin flames.’

Another form of this superstitious fancy is the corpse-candle, or ‘tomb-fire,’ which is invariably a death-warning. It sometimes appears ‘as a stately flambeau, stalking along unsupported, burning with a ghastly blue flame. Sometimes it is a plain tallow “dip” in the hand of a ghost; and when the ghost is seen distinctly, it is recognised as that of some person still living, who will now soon die140– in fact, a wraith.’ Occasionally the light issues from the person’s mouth, or nostrils. The size of the candle indicates the age of the person who is about to die, being large when it is a full-grown person whose death is foretold, small when it is a child, still smaller when an infant. When two candles together are seen, one of which is large and the other small, it is a mother and child who are to die. When the flame is white the doomed person is a woman, when red a man. A Carmarthenshire tradition relates how one evening, when the coach which runs between Llandilo and Carmarthen was passing by Golden Grove, the property of the Earl of Cawdor, three corpse-candles were observed on the surface of the water gliding down the stream which runs near the road. A few days afterwards, just as many men were drowned there. Such a light, too, has long been thought to hover near the grave of the drowned, reminding us of Moore’s lines —

and stories of such uncanny appearances have been told of nearly every village churchyard.

It should be added that, according to a popular idea, the presence of ghosts was announced, in bygone years, by an alteration in the tint of the lights which happened to be burning – an item of folk-lore alluded to in ‘Richard III.’ (Act v. sc. 3), where the tyrant exclaims as he awakens —

So in ‘Julius Cæsar,’ (Act iv. sc. 3), Brutus, on seeing the ghost of Cæsar, exclaims:

Phantom lights have also been associated with buildings, as in the case of the ancient chapel of Roslin, founded in the year 1446 by William St. Clair, Prince of Orkney. It is believed that whenever any of the founder’s descendants are about to depart this life, the chapel appears to be on fire, a weird and terrible occurrence graphically portrayed by Harold’s song in ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’:

But notwithstanding the fact that the last ‘Roslin,’ as he was called, died in 1778, and the estates passed into the possession of the Erskines, Earls of Rosslyn, the old tradition has not yet been extinguished.141 Sir Walter Scott also tells us that the death of the head of a Highland family is sometimes announced by a chain of lights, of different colours, called Dr’eug, or death of the Druid. The direction which it takes is supposed to mark the place of the funeral.142 A correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries’ gives a curious account of a house at Taunton which possessed ‘a luminous chamber,’ for, as common report said, ‘the room had a light of its own.’ As an eye-witness observed, ‘A central window was generally illuminated.’ All the other windows were dark, but from this was a wan, dreary light visible; and as the owners had deserted the place, and it had no occupant, the lighted window became a puzzle.

With the North American tribes one form of spiritual manifestation is fire; and among the Hurons, a female spirit, who was supposed to cause much of their sickness, appeared like a flame of fire. Of the New England Indians it is related that ‘they have a remarkable observation of a flame that appears before the death of an Indian, upon their wigwams, in the dead of night. Whenever this appears, there will be a death.’143 The Eskimos believe that the Inue, or powerful spirits, ‘generally have the appearance of a fire or bright light, and to see them is very dangerous, particularly as foreshadowing the death of a relation.’144

CHAPTER X

THE HEADLESS GHOST

Localities where any fatal accident has happened, or murder been committed, are frequently supposed to be haunted by that uncanny apparition known as ‘the headless ghost.’ Many curious tales are still told by the peasantry of this mysterious spectre, whose weird movements have long been the subject of comment. Sir Walter Scott, it may be remembered, speaking of the Irish dullahan, writes: ‘It puts me in mind of a spectre at Drumlanrick Castle, of no less a person than the Duchess of Queensberry – “Fair Kitty, blooming, young, and gay” – who, instead of setting fire to the world in mama’s chariot, amuses herself with wheeling her own head in a wheelbarrow through the great gallery.’

But it has often puzzled the folk-lorist why ghosts should assume this form, although the idea is by no means a modern one, for, as Dr. Tylor has pointed out,145 a people of wide celebrity are Pliny’s Blemmyæ, said ‘to be headless, and accordingly to have their mouths and eyes in their breasts – creatures over whom Prester John reigned in Asia, and who dwelt far and wide in South America.’ Stories, too, like that of St. Denis, who is said to have walked from Paris, sans tête, to the place which bears his name, show that the living, as well as the dead, occasionally managed to do without their heads – a strange peculiarity which Kornmann, in his ‘De Miraculis Vivorum,’ would attempt to account for philosophically. Princess Marie Lichtenstein, in her ‘History of Holland House,’ tells us that one room of this splendid old mansion is believed to be haunted by Lord Holland, the first of his name, and the chief builder of Holland House. To quote her words, ‘The gilt room is said to be tenanted by the solitary ghost of its just lord, who, according to tradition, issues forth at midnight from behind a secret door, and walks slowly through the scenes of former triumphs with his head in his hand. To add to this mystery, there is a tale of three spots of blood on one side of the recess whence he issues – three spots which can never be effaced.’ Such a strange act, on the part of the dead, is generally regarded as a very bad omen. The time of the headless ghost’s appearance is always midnight, and in Crofton Croker’s ‘Fairy Legends of Ireland’ it is thus described:

According to the popular opinion, there is no authority to prove that headless people are unable to speak; on the contrary, a variation of the story of ‘The Golden Mountain,’ given in a note to the ‘Kindermärchen,’ relates how a servant without a head informed the fisherman (who was to achieve the adventure) of the enchantment of the king’s daughter, and of the mode of liberating her. There is the Belludo, a Spanish ghost mentioned by Washington Irving in his ‘Tales of the Alhambra.’ It issues forth in the dead of night, and scours the avenues of the Alhambra, and the streets of Granada, in the shape of a headless horse, pursued by six hounds, with terrible yellings and howlings. It is said to be the spirit of a Moorish king, who killed his six sons, who, in revenge, hunt him in the shape of hounds at night-time.

In some cases, as it has been humorously observed, the headless ghosts of well-known persons have continued to set up their carriage after death. Thus, for years past, it has been firmly believed that Lady Anne Boleyn rides down the avenue of Blickling Park once a year, with her bloody head in her lap, sitting in a hearse-like coach drawn by four headless horses, and attended by coachmen and attendants, who have, out of compliment to their mistress, also left their heads behind them. Nor, if tradition is to be believed, is her father more at rest than she, for Sir Thomas Boleyn is said to be obliged to cross forty bridges to avoid the torments of the furies. Like his daughter, he is reported to drive about in a coach and four with headless horses, carrying his head under his arm.146 Young Lord Dacre, who is said to have been murdered at Thetford, through the contrivance of his guardian, Sir Richard Fulmerston, in 1569, by the falling of a wooden horse, purposely rendered insecure, used to prance up and down on the ghost of a headless rocking-horse.

Another romantic story is told147 of a large field at Great Melton, divided from the Yare by a plantation, along which the old Norwich road ran. ‘Close to the edge of where the road is said to have run is a deep pit or hole of water, locally reputed to be fathomless. Every night at midnight, and every day at noon, a carriage drawn by four horses, driven by headless coachmen and footmen, and containing four headless ladies in white, rises silently and dripping wet from the pool, flits stately and silently round the field, and sinks as silently into the pool again.’ The story goes that long, long ago, a bridal party driving along the old Norwich Road were accidentally upset into the deep hole, and were never seen again. Strangely enough the same story is told of fields near Bury St. Edmunds, and at Leigh, Dorsetshire.148 Another Norfolk story, amusingly told by the late Cuthbert Bede,149 informs us how, ‘on the anniversary of the death of the gentleman whose spectre he is supposed to be, his ghostship drives up to his old family mansion. He drives through the wall, carriage and horses and all, and is not seen again for a twelvemonth. He leaves, however, the traces of his visit behind him; for, in the morning, the stones of the wall through which he had ridden over-night are found to be loosened and fallen; and though the wall is constantly repaired, yet the stones are as constantly loosened.’ In the little village of Acton, Suffolk, it was currently reported not many years ago that on certain occasions the park gates were wont to fly open at midnight ‘withouten hands,’ and that a carriage drawn by four spectral horses, and accompanied by headless grooms and outriders, proceeded with great rapidity from the park to a spot called ‘the nursery corner,’ a spot where tradition affirms a very bloody engagement took place in olden times, when the Romans were governors of England.150 A similar tale is related of Caistor Castle, the seat of the Falstofs, where the headless apparition drives round the courtyard, and carries away some unearthly visitors.