Ghost Versus Demon!

In late August 1884, two pale and trembling strangers entered the White Lion Inn in the Midlands village of Ivy Church Green. They both sank a pint of ale to steady their clearly frayed nerves, and the landlord and the regulars looked on with interest. What had terrified the two men so?

Eventually, one of the strangers revealed what had happened. They had been walking down a narrow path past a derelict church about half a mile away when they had come face to face with a ghost. It had an awful ‘death’s head’ for a face as if it had just climbed out of its grave.

A number of the regulars, perhaps emboldened by some Dutch courage, decided to go and investigate this ghost for themselves. The two strangers accompanied them as they traversed the short distance to the ruined church and took up positions outside the graveyard. Nothing would entice the two strangers or any of the others to go any closer.

A Ghostly Figure

Soon a ghostly figure appeared moving in a peculiar fashion among the tombs, holding aloft a lantern. It looked as if it were lost and trying to find its way back to the sepulchre, but then it turned towards the party from the pub and began to approach them. Some wanted to run, but most held their nerves as the phantom came closer, revealing a face both sorrowful and hideous in the pale lamp light. The figure beckoned as if it wanted the onlookers to enter the graveyard.

However, as suddenly as the ghost had appeared, the lantern went out and the figure seemed to vanish into the gloomy ruined church. No trace could be found.

Over the next few nights, the mysterious spectre appeared regularly in the graveyard, hovering around the tombs. Every night, a crowd gathered to witness the apparition, though none dared to approach it. Soon hundreds of curious onlookers were hanging around the graveyard every evening watching for the ghost, and the whole village was in a state of intense excitement.

Night of the Demon

One man, however, was brave enough to lay the ghost. Living in the village was a famous comic actor who declared that if nobody else was prepared to take on the ghost, he would. He took out a room at the White Lion Inn and all the pub regulars gathered there along with the landlord. The actor entered wrapped in a cloak, and to great effect, threw it off to reveal that he was dressed as a terrifying theatrical demon. Perhaps it was a costume left from a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, but in any case the actor was covered in red, green and yellow foil which on catching the gas light gave the impression that he was glowing hot straight from the pits of Hell. From the horns on his head to his cloven feet, the actor presented a perfectly Satanic sight. He then amused the gathered regulars with demonic ditties and dances.

The following night, the devilishly costumed actor again swaddled himself in a blanket and hid behind a tomb in the graveyard. Outside the gates, the pubs had emptied an eager mob who waited to see what would happen. Soon enough, a pale figure carrying a lantern emerged from the ruined church to the astonishment of the large crowd, many of whom believed the ghost to be real.

The ghost approached and raised its lantern only to be confronted by the actor who had thrown off his cloak and sprung from behind a tombstone to reveal a ghastly Satanic vision of terror, the coloured foil glittering in the lantern’s light as if the smouldering demon had just emerged from the infernal regions. This moment is immortalised in the wonderful drawing below from the Illustrated Police News.

The demon then put his hand firmly on the ghost’s shoulder and intoned in his best booming theatrical voice that his time had come and that he was here on behalf of his Satanic Majesty to carry him away into the inky abyss since the grave had apparently disgorged him.

The demon continued: ‘You have sold yourself to Satan so irresistibly, you must follow me and before another moon and croaking sounds of hungry vultures you will be hurled into the bottomless pit of darkness and despair.’

The ‘ghost’ seemed overcome with remorse and looked as if he was going to faint with terror, and the crowd, realising it had all been a prank, were now baying for his blood. Taking pity on the ghost, the actor caught him in his arms just as he was about to collapse and guided him through a back entrance to the churchyard and hid him in a nearby house.

Outside the crowd roared ‘Bring him out! Where is he? Hand him over! Let us tear him piecemeal!’ The mob were frantic and may well have torn him to pieces had he not been hidden.

Meanwhile, in his safe haven, the ‘ghost’ confessed to his prank. Asked why he had done it, he replied ‘Well, I can’t say exactly why I should have acted so foolishly. I didn’t give it thought. I must have had ghosts upon the brain, and imagined the people would be rather interested than otherwise.’

At this point, the actor pulled out a revolver saying that the ghost would now be turned over to the authorities. However, he begged and pleaded to be forgiven as he was a man of means and being prosecuted would lead to his ruin. In the end, a £30 bribe was agreed which was put behind the bar of the White Lion Inn to appease the thirsty ghost hunters, which indeed it did.

Playing the Ghost

So how much credence should we give to this story? There are some reasons for suspicion.

Firstly, I can’t find any evidence that the midlands village of Ivy Church Green exists. Secondly, it was reported in the Illustrated Police News which (like other newspapers of the day) was not averse to making up stories or presenting urban legends as true reports.[i] Suspiciously, many details are lacking in this account. The original account strangely  switches to a first person narrator near the end, though it’s unclear whether the narrator is the actor or someone else.

And finally, the ghost prankster getting his just deserts seems a bit too good to be true. It seems unlikely to me that a ghost hoaxer would be fooled by a theatrical devil costume, no matter how well-made – he clearly had experience in creating his own scary costume after all.

However, the bizarre hobby of dressing as a ghost and scaring unsuspecting passers-by was a common feature of nineteenth and early twentieth century life. This was often referred to as ‘playing the ghost’ and frequently caused considerable uproar. These ghost pranks would frequently lead to what I’ve called ghost flash mobs – large impromptu gatherings of probably drunk amateur ghost hunters out to have a riotous ghost hunt.[ii]

The story of the actor and the ghost has the mob waiting outside the churchyard gates and too scared to approach the ghost, but this is highly unrealistic. The ghost hunting hordes were much more likely to run amok among the gravestones, pranking each other and howling like banshees as they enjoyed some supernatural drunken fun and games. Police would often lose control as more and more curiosity seekers and revellers would turn up on subsequent nights having heard about the previous evening’s high-jinx.  For an example, see the image below of a ghost flash mob in Hackney in 1895, as depicted in the Illustrated Police News.[iii]

If a ghost hoaxer was caught, he would be extremely lucky to get away with having to buy a round of drinks at the pub. Many were beaten to a pulp and thrown into the nearest river, pond or sewer…

Epilogue

I’ve become so obsessed with these ghost hoaxing escapades that I’ve written a book about it. It’s called Phantoms of Christmas Past: Festive Ghost Hoaxes,  Ghost Hunts and Ghost Panics, it’s published by Sixth Books and will be out at the end of summer 2025 and is available to pre-order now:

There was a lot of chattering class concern about the effect of encountering a ghost hoaxer on women, who, it was feared, would be scared to death of driven irretrievably insane, such were their delicate constitutions. This perhaps explains the number of urban legends circulating in which ghost hoaxes go wrong. For more, see below…

When Ghost Hoaxes Go Bad…
Scared… to Death!

[i] ‘An authentic and remarkable ghost story’, Illustrated Police News, 9 August 1884 pp.1-2

[ii] Robert Bartholomew and Paul Weatherhead (2024) Social Panics and Phantom Attackers (Palgrave Macmillan) p.322-326

[iii] ‘Extraordinary scene in a London church yard’,  Illustrated Police News 13 August 1895 p.1

Old Mother Damnable: A Christmas Witch Story from 1734

All About our Coal Fire: Christmas Entertainments (1734) is an influential and charming comic portrayal of all the customs of Christmas. The book describes feasts, silly games, drinking and scary stories around the hearth. It was popular for many years and probably influenced Dickens.

The stories and legends in the book (such as the one summarised below) have some bizarre twists and coarse scatological humour that is of its time… So top up your glass and prepare to meet Old Mother Damnable, the witch who can give you the shits…

Old Mother Damnable

Sometime in the sixteenth century, we don’t know where,  there was an old woman named Gammar Martyn, Gammar meaning grandmother. She was known for her sour expression and ill-temper, and would sometimes be seen broomstick in hand shuffling to the market in her shabby clothes and high crowned hat, though all she seemed to buy were sheep lungs and cat food.

The local boys gave her the nickname of Old Mother Damnable, and shared stories about her and her ‘diabolical teats’ on which she suckled her devilish imps. It was said that she had been seen walking on the rooftops in the shape of a cat.

The young boys would sometimes taunt her with her nickname and pelt her with stones if their paths crossed, and for her part, Mother Damnable would lash out at them with her broomstick. If she managed to hit one the boys, he would suffer from pain in his bones for weeks.

If someone was sick, Mother Damnable was blamed. If someone got the shits, Mother Damnable was blamed. That seemed to be her speciality.

Shitting Pins and Needles

One day Old Mother Damnable was sitting by the door of her miserable cottage spinning, when the Squire rode up to her and asked where would be a good place to hunt for hares. She replied, ‘Sir, go to yonder hill and you will find that which will lead you a dance.’

The Squire followed the old woman’s directions, and sure enough a hare bounded out in front of him. The Squire gave chase for miles and miles over the hills, but eventually lost his animal and turned back exhausted.

As he passed Old Mother Damnable’s hovel, he noted that she was still spinning by the door but seemed to be all in a sweat. The Squire suspected that the hare he had been chasing had in fact been the old woman, for witches, as everyone knows, are notorious shapeshifters. He complained about how exhausted he was and how the fruitless hunt had left him feeling faint. The woman then offered him a glass of a cordial she had been brewing, and preoffered this ominous advice as the Squire drained the mysterious liquid: ‘Take care of your backside between this and home.’

The Squire rode away without giving the woman anything in return for the drink. However, before he got home he was seized with sharp griping pains in his stomach, and the next thing he knew he was shitting pins and needles – or so it felt to him.

For two weeks he suffered like this, and no doctor could help him.

The Spirit of Arse Smart

Of course, the Squire accused the old woman of witchcraft and at the next quarter sessions Gammar Martyn was found guilty and burned as a witch.

The Squire commented: ‘Though she gave me diversion in the chase, she certainly bewitched me with her spirit of arse-smart; she is plainly a witch.’

Was Old Mother Damnable really a witch? Well, her neighbours confirmed that Gammar Martyn had a long-running dispute with the Squire’s steward – about what, we don’t know. The Squire’s steward had paid a bunch of local hooligans to throw stones at the old woman and call her a witch. That’s how her reputation began. She had been sweating and agitated when seeing the Squire after his hunt because she was afraid of the consequences of her dispute with his steward. The drink she gave the Squire was in good faith.

What killed the poor woman was the coincidence of the Squire shitting pins and needles.

And that’s the story of Old Damnable.

Of course, English witches weren’t burned, they were hanged. So that part of the story can’t be true, but generally the tale reflects what happened to many a poor soul at that time in history.

I’m not sure what the moral of this legend is, but it must surely relate to power, gullibility and using the law to persecute those deemed deplorable.

Remember if you shit your breeches, clean it up and don’t hunt witches.

For more weird folklore from All About our Coal Fire, see below to find out why a ghost is like a fart…

Why is a Ghost Like a Fart?

Mystery Christmas Drones: Ghost Riders in the Sky

Sinister mystery drones are haunting American air bases in the UK. Swarms of similar drones have been flitting around military bases in New Jersey and other parts of the USA. Some say the drones are spying on sensitive areas, others say they are testing air defences. Some think it’s preparation for an all out attack by a nefarious hostile power…

And who’s responsible for these ghost riders in the sky?

You guessed it – the modern day equivalent of Emperor Ming and Davros King of the Daleks all rolled into one demonic figure: Vladimir Putin. Well, that’s the theory of somewhat ironically named ‘intelligence’ officials quoted in the media.

‘It’s a distinct possibility if not a certain probability this is all down to Russian intelligence,’ Philip Ingram, a former British military intelligence Colonel, told the Daily Mail. He supports this ‘certain probability’ by arguing that the drone activity has ‘all the hallmarks’ of an operation by the GRU – the Russian military intelligence service.

Ingram continues his insightful analysis: ‘They [Russian Intelligence] and the GRU are just a bunch of petulant little boys. They’re trying to suggest they have the ability to disrupt and influence through a level of nuisance action.’

Not only that, Russia is using these mystery drones to ‘massage Russian tyrant Putin’s bruised ego, after his failures in Ukraine.’[i]

Strange lights over RAF Lakenheath, Suffolk – what is Putin up to?

Interestingly, despite Colonel Ingram’s background in intelligence, he seems to have missed the news that Russia is winning the war in Ukraine, Ukraine has no path to victory that doesn’t involve dragging Europe and the US into a nuclear confrontation. And this seems to me an important key to the mystery.

I’m going to argue that we’re witnessing a hysterical mass panic that reflects the anxiety caused by western geopolitical schemes and the fear that these reckless adventures at regime change, colour revolutions and the wars and chaos that follow in their wake, might one day come home to roost…

When Phantoms Attack

What I think we’re witnessing in the US and the UK is a phantom attacker panic. This is when free-floating anxiety and hypervigilance over ambiguous threats leads to a hysterical over-reaction and the creation of an imaginary assailant – a mythical bogeyman in the shadows.

The Halifax Slasher episode of 1938 is a classic example. A spate of mysterious razor blade attacks terrified the community leading to widespread terror and panic, angry vigilante mobs roaming the street and a huge police investigation. The attacks multiplied and spread to other parts of the country. Soom there were slash attacks everywhere – Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham….

However, a Scotland Yard investigation revealed that the ‘victims’ of the attacks had in fact cut themselves and invented the story of the sinister attacker for a variety of motives.[ii] The Halifax Slasher didn’t exist.

There are many other similar panics where a community becomes consumed with the mistaken belief that a malignant assailant lurks in their midst. There’s the Delhi Monkey Man, the London Monster, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, the Penis Thieves of Nigeria…

However, most relevant to the mystery drones are the phantom airship scares that occurred in the early twentieth century. These steampunk flying saucers haunted the US and the UK in the anxious years leading to World War One. It was feared they were advanced German flying machines engaged in gathering intelligence or some other nefarious mission. All these episodes reflect the fears and anxieties of the times.

Phantom Airship over San Francisco 1896

Phantom attacker panics often follow a familiar pattern of four phases, so let’s see how this might apply to the mystery drone scare sweeping the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK.

Phase 1: the Latent Phase

This is the background to the panic. There is a sense of anxiety about real or imaginary threats. In the case of the mystery drones, this could be related to the fact that the US and UK governments have helped Ukraine to carry out direct attacks on Russia with Russia threatening consequences for this escalation.

Phase 2: the Breakout Phase

In the breakout phase, the media latches onto a spectacular episode which causes widespread alarm. This leads to people becoming hyper-vigilant to potential threats in their environment. In the case of the New Jersey drones, this seems to have been sightings over the US Army’s Picatinny Arsenal on 18 November. The news reports with speculation about secret testing of military drone technology or hostile foreign powers preparing for an attack caused people to study the night sky – something they would not normally do. They become hyper-vigilant, searching the night skies for threats and at the same time projecting their fears and anxieties onto what they saw.

Human perception is fallible, and many will have likely mistaken regular aircraft or stars or planets as mystery drones.

Another ironically titled British intelligence analyst, Tim McMillan, told the Daily Mail that the drones over Picatinny ‘sound exactly like Russian Orlan-10 drones’ – they have a red light on the right wing, a green one on the left and white taillights. In other words, they are practically indistinguishable from regular aircraft.[iii] Given that this is standard aircraft lighting, it seems to me more likely that people are misinterpreting normal planes for sinister drones.

Phase 3: The Peak Phase

This is the climax of the panic. Reports spread and the whole community become infected with the panic. In the case of the Halifax Slasher and similar episodes, armed vigilantes patrol the streets and business close. In terms of the drone mystery, people are encouraged by journalists to examine the night skies and send in any evidence they capture.

It also seems likely that as word of the mystery drones spread online, many hobbyists took the opportunity to engage in some mischief, adding to the panic by flying their drones at night, possibly in close proximity to sensitive military installations.

During the Peak Phase of a phantom attacker episode, the panic spreads to other areas. This is the stage we appear to be going through at the moment, with mystery drones appearing in other parts of the US and then the UK. If I’m right, this is likely to spread further as the Peak Phase plays out. There may also be vigilantes taking the law into their own hands and taking potshots at lights in the sky. And the ‘experts’ will demand that something must be done.

Phase Four: the Decline Phase

After the peak comes the decline. There is increased scepticism as the panic grows more absurd. Some in academia or the media will start to cast doubt on the events, making it less likely that new episodes get reported….

And then all is forgotten until the next panic comes along…

In the meantime, before the Great Christmas Drone Panic of 2024 blows over, I expect it to spread to other parts of the USA and the world. I predict politicians will seize the opportunity to scare monger about the bogey man with the Russian accent. Or the Chinese one. Or is it the Iranians….?

In any case, something must be done, the wise intelligence experts will argue. And when intelligence experts do stuff, we should be worried.

We’re closer to nuclear confrontation than we’ve ever been, and this is reflected in this outpouring of collective anxiety.

But it will dissipate. It always does. But don’t worry, in troubled times, we will always find some new bogeyman to scare ourselves with…

[i] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14192269/Putins-drones-spotted-Britain-nuclear-weapons.html

[ii] Bartholomew, Robert E., and Weatherhead, Paul (2024), Social Panics and Phantom Attackers: A Study of Imaginary Assailants. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan

[iii] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14192269/Putins-drones-spotted-Britain-nuclear-weapons.html

The First UFOs over Todmorden

Todmorden has a reputation as a UFO hotspot largely due to the UFO sighting of PC Alan Godfrey in November 1980. The story has everything – a mysterious death, teleporting cows, a flying saucer, a scoundrel hypnotist, alien abduction and a space dog.

For the full story, see my book Weird Calderdale.

However, I think I have found the first reported UFO over Todmorden – and it goes way back…

The Tomb of One Unknown

Stoodley Pike monument is surely the Calder Valley’s most iconic landmark, with perhaps only Wainhouse Tower giving it a run for its money. The first version of the monument was built in…. to commemorate the end of the Napoleonic Wars, though this structure collapsed in a storm on the eve of the Crimean War. The present version is rich in Masonic symbolism with its Egyptian architectural influences and dark spiral staircase in which the intrepid wanderer must feel his or her way through darkness before achieving the light of the panoramic viewing balcony.

Steve Partridge A Storm Brews Over Stoodley Pike

However, the importance of the site goes back beyond the present and previous monuments. In 1832, local poet William Law published a book of verse Wanderings of a Wanderer in which Stoodley Pike (which is actually the name of the hill on which the monument stands, not the monument itself) was referred to as ‘the tomb of one unknown’.

In the footnotes to the poem, Law relates some of the local folklore. Before the first monument was built the hill was crowned by a cairn housing the bones of an ancient king or chieftain. If any of the stones of the cairn were moved, then strange noises and mysterious door slamming would plague the locals. What is more, strange flames would be seen flitting around the stones until the landowner had put everything back to how it should be.

So – strange lights in the sky above Stoodley Pike. The poem was published in 1832, so we can assume the folklore Law described would stretch back decades, perhaps centuries before that. And there we have it – Todmorden’s skies have long been haunted by mysterious phenomena…

Artwork by Larisa Moskaleva

The London Monster

In 1790, Georgian London was haunted by a Monster. No woman was safe. Typically, he would approach a pretty young lady as she walked home and make lewd comments to her, and then he would attack her with a blade. Sometimes the blade would be attached to his knee and he would kick his victim in the buttocks or thighs until she bled. Sometimes he had a metal claw attached to his arm with which he would scratch the unfortunate lady. At other times, he would force a bouquet of flowers under his victim’s nose, and then stab her in the face with a knife hidden among the flowers.

London was in a state of hysterical panic. Many were afraid to go out at night and any man in the wrong place at the wrong time might find himself accused of being the Monster. John Julius Angerstein, a founder of Lloyds and well-known philanthropist conducted a massive poster campaign offering a reward for the Monster’s capture.

Isaac Cruikshank – Monster Cutting a Lady (1790)

The London Monster’s reign of terror was amplified by lurid newspaper reports and salacious prints. In the image above by Isaac Cruikshank, the Monster with blades attached to his knee attacks a woman with a knife – note Angerstein’s poster in the background. In the second panel, the young lady buys herself some copper knickers to frustrate any future attacks by the Monster. Above them are copper knickers of varying sizes and prices for young ladies, ladies and very fat ladies.

In the image above, two old maids are accosted by the Monster – depicted with three fire-breathing heads with a little green demon sitting on the middle one. The implication is that they are dreaming about the Monster as he was rumoured to only attack the most beautiful of women. One of ladies dashes in terror from the bed, putting her foot in the chamber pot and spilling the contents on the floor.

James Gillray The Monster Disappointed of his Afternoon’s Luncheon (1790)

The famous satirist James Gillray also featured the London Monster in some of his work. In the above print the Monster is depicted as a grotesque ogre clutching a huge knife and fork about to tuck into the behind of a young lady who he’s holding aloft by her skirts, revealing her backside. Unfortunately for the Monster, the woman is wearing a copper cooking pot strapped over her bottom, thus frustrating his appetite.

Another of Gillray’s bawdy prints highlights the concern that the investigators and monster hunters were a little overzealous in their inspection of the wounded thighs and bottoms of the young and pretty victims. The print (below) shows the Monster (depicted as politician Charles James Fox) handcuffed in the Bow Street office. A pretty young woman stands on a stool bending over with her dress pulled up over her waist displaying her stockinged leg and buttocks to grotesque caricatures of Bow Street Magistrate Sir Samson Wright who peers grotesquely at the woman’s behind.

James Gillray Swearing to the Cutting of the Monster 1790

Angerstein’s poster campaign offered a generous reward for the capture of the Monster and resulted in dozens false arrests and accusations as well as some mob violence as vigilantes went monster hunting on London’s dark streets.

German Sugar Boiler in Drag Hunts the Monster

My favourite London Monster panic anecdote is the story of the German sugar boiler who thought he might win for himself some glory and make himself £100 richer with a cunning plan to catch the Monster. He decided to dress as a woman and walk the streets waiting to be stabbed and thus secure the culprit.

He borrowed some clothes from the cook at the sugar factory where he worked, and she helped the German boiler to pass as a delicate and modest young maid. As he set off down the street, however, he stood aside to let a young couple pass, but not being used to walking in petticoats, his legs became entangled in them and he fell against the woman. The husband shouted “You damn’d drunken old whore, can’t you see?” The boiler replied, “I beg your pardon; d—n the narrow pavement.” On hearing the rough masculine voice, the wife cried “Oh, that’s the wretch who cuts the women.”

The husband grabbed the German and shouted for help, and it wasn’t long before an unruly mob arrived. As the crowd jostled and manhandled the boiler, they ripped his clothes to shreds and the more he tried to explain in broken German, the more the mob became convinced he was the Monster. Many were relieved to find that – as they suspected – the Monster was not an Englishman, but a foreigner. The German was dragged to the watchhouse where, fortunately, someone recognized him and using a watchman’s cloak to cover the last torn rags of the cook’s best underwear, he was brought safely home.

The London Monster panic fizzled out when one Rhenwick Williams was arrested, charged and after two farcical trials found guilty of being the Monster. He was very likely an unfortunate scapegoat.

Some of the Monster attacks turned out to be hoaxes, and others were thought to be the result of clumsy pickpockets slashing at pockets to get purses. It’s unclear how many, if any, of the attacks were real.

The episode is an example of a Phantom Attacker panic. A community becomes convinced that an imaginary assailant is haunting the streets and reacts with an escalating cycle of fear, hysteria and vigilantism.

For the amazing full story of the London Monster and other bizarre phantom attackers such as the Halifax Slasher, Delhi Monkey Man, The Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Satanic Cat Killers and Nigerian Penis Thieves, see my new book – coauthored with Robert Bartholomew (the world expert on such things) – Social Panics and Phantom Attackers.

Skeleton Catches Burglar… and the Viking hoaxes of Frank Cowan

In 1874, a macabre and bizarre criminal fail was widely reported in the UK press – a burglar was captured by a skeleton.

In January 1874, so the story goes, two unnamed burglars broke into a doctor’s surgery in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. While one of the men explored one part of the room with the lantern he was carrying, the other opened a closet and groped around in the dark feeling for clothing at the height of clothes hooks.

As he fumbled blindly, a ghoulish fear that he might be sticking his fingers into the jaws of a skeleton struck him. At that moment, his hand was grasped – bitten – by what felt like teeth.

The burglar gave a surprised shriek, and his companion turned his lantern on the closet. The burglar’s hand was indeed immured in the jaws of a skeleton. The jaws had been adjusted with a coil spring and held open with a thread which the hapless thief had broken when he inadvertently stuck his hand in the skull.

When he saw that his fears were indeed true and that his hand was gripped in ‘the grim and ghastly jaws of death’, overcome with terror, he fainted, pulling the skeleton down on top of him. His companion, seeing his partner in crime wrestled to the floor by this skeletal vigilante, fled.

Of course, the commotion was such that the doctor ran in and secured the robber, who was still lying in the skeleton’s bony embrace.[i]

It’s a great story, splendidly captured in an image from the Illustrated Police News.[ii]

However, although the story was widely reported in the British press, none have any details (such as the exact date, the name of the burglar or the doctor), and all the accounts are almost word for word the same. In fact, it looks like an urban legend – a   story that’s just too good to be true.

To try to get to the bottom of this, I tracked down the medical journals that many of the news reports cited as the source of the story, the Philadelphia Medical Times and the Medical and Press Circular.[iii] Frustratingly, these accounts are exactly the same as those that appeared in the British press.

The Toe of his Boot

The story of the skeleton and the burglar was also widely reported in the US, and though no names are given in American versions, some accounts have a nice epilogue to the report which was not included in British papers.

After the doctor finds the burglar sprawled on his surgery floor with the skeleton on top of him, he recognises the criminal as a man of some esteem in the local community. When the thief recovers from his swoon and realises he’s been caught, he begs and pleads most piteously to the doctor so that instead of turning him in, he orders him to get out of town and ‘showed him the door and bade him goodnight with the toe of his right boot’.[iv]

Moreover, a number of US newspapers attribute the story to Greensburg newspaper proprietor and writer Frank Cowan – a man with a reputation for pranks and hoaxes, some of which were both macabre and skeletal in nature.[v]

The Last of the Vikings

Frank Cowan was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1844. He was a man of many talents, qualifying as both a doctor and a lawyer as well as writing fiction and non-fiction. However, he was also known as a prankster, and it was his fascination with Viking mythology that was the inspiration for his best-known hoax.

Frank Cowan

The hoax took the form of a letter to the Evening Union newspaper published on 8 July 1867 from Cowan writing under the name of the fictitious Thomas C. Raffinnson of Copenhagen Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries.

The letter claimed that he had discovered the skeletal remains of an Icelandic woman along with various Viking artefacts on the banks of the Potomac river, around 15 miles north west of Washington D.C.

Nearby a runic inscription covered in lichen was found, saying in translation:

Here rests Syasy, or Suasu, the fair-haired, a person from the east of Iceland, the widow of Kjoldr, and sister of Thorgr, children of the same father….twenty-five years of age. May God make glad her soul. 1051.

Raffinnson argued that this proved that the Vikings were in North America centuries before Columbus, an idea that although widely accepted now was in Cowan’s time on the fringes of academic respectability. Furthermore, the letter suggested that the presence of this (entirely invented) Viking find provides support for the Skalholt Saga which told of the voyage of Hervadur to Vinland (the Norse word for the North American coast) and how his daughter had died at ‘White Shirt Falls’.

Raffinnson’s letter explained that the Skalholt Saga also told how even before the Vikings, the Irish had settled in North America. This, it was claimed, was now more plausible as the remains of the Icelandic woman proved the reliability of the Skalholt Saga.

The only problem was the Skalholt Saga, like Syasu the Fair-haired Viking,  was entirely a figment of Frank Cowan’s imagination.

The newspaper was in on the joke and printed the letter on the front page and it caused a media sensation. The hoax also fooled scholars and was reported in some academic journals, even after it had been revealed as a prank to boost newspaper circulation.[vi]

In 1872, Cowan started his own newspaper titled Frank Cowan’s Paper, and this seems to be where the story of the skeleton catching the burglar originated. Given Cowan’s mischievous reputation, it seems likely that he made up the story (or possibly retold an urban legend that he had heard).

Epilogue

Frank Cowan went on to write numerous books on a variety of subjects, travel the world and work as secretary to President Andrew Johnson. However, even on his deathbed he had one more macabre hoax up his sleeve. He commissioned a local carpenter to build him a Viking funeral ‘fire-ship’ which he was to be buried in under a tree on his estate. He wrote to a local paper:

I, as the last of the Vikings or Berserkers, desire my effigy or cold corpus to drift away over the mountainous billows of the Sea of Appalachia and sink in a blaze of glory in the womb of the west – which, from the pier of my departure is the cloud of smoke and soot over the city of Pittsburgh.[vii]

A flood of angry letters followed, including from a member of the clergy outraged at this ‘heathenish’ desecration of a Christian burial rite.

Cowan died aged 60 in February 1905 and was buried in a local cemetery, and not in a Viking funeral ship. He had fooled the world again.[viii]

Just as he had fooled and amused the world with his skeleton catches burglar story. The skeleton can now come out of the closet and join the Viking Princess Syasy the Fair-Haired as a character in one of Cowan’s most effective journalistic japes.

[i] ‘A burglar bitten by a skeleton’, Illustrated Police News, 26 June 1874, pp.1-2

[ii] Ibid

[iii] ‘The burglar and the skeleton’, Philadelphia Medical Times, 16 May 1874, p.528; ‘Burglars Beware’, Medical Press and Circular, 10 June 1874, p.498

[iv] ‘A burglar captured by a skeleton’, Kingston Daily Freeman, 6 December 1874, p.2

[v] ‘Captured by a skeleton’, Harrisburg Telegraph, 26 January 1874, p.1

[vi] Scott Tribble, ‘Last of the Vikings’, Western Pennsylvania History, Fall 2007, pp.48-57

[vii] Ibid

[viii] Ibid

Old Leathery Coit Rides Again… in the 1970s

Delivering newspapers on a dark winter morning in Elland in the late 1970s, a young lad had a terrifying encounter with one of Calderdale’s best known spooks – Old Leathery Coit. This forgotten ghostly adventure only came to light after I discussed Leathery Coit on BBC Radio Leeds in August. Listen to the interview here.

But first a quick recap…

According to legend, Old Leathery Coit is a headless horseman who drives a carriage pulled by headless horses from a barn behind the Fleece Inn in Elland. As midnight strikes, the barn door supposedly opens without the aid of human hands, and then an icy blast of wind whips through the streets before the phantom thunders by in the battered and bloody old leather coat that gives him his name.

Some say he’s the spirit of a traveller murdered at the notoriously riotous Fleece Inn – his indelible blood stains still visible until recent times.

The Fleece Inn, Elland

Icy wind whistles up the skirts

Even today, when an icy wind whistles up the skirts or trouser legs of the good folk of Elland, they might be heard to mutter, ‘There goes Old Leathery Coit’….

The first mention of Elland’s headless horseman in print seems to be Olde Elland by Lucy Hamerton, published in 1901. She relates two anonymous and rather vague anecdotes about supposed sightings of Old Leathery, which presumably were doing the rounds at the end of the nineteenth century.[i]

The first involved a husband and wife returning home late from visiting a sick relative. They felt the ominous rush of wind before Old Leathery whooshed by. The second sighting was by Lucy Hamerton’s uncles when they were children. They claimed they had seen Leathery and his headless horses ride past their house in Northowram. The fact they were none too afraid of this grim apparition may be cause for scepticism!

But as Kai Roberts noted in his Haunted Halifax and District, Leathery seems to be the kind of ghost that is well-known as rumour but rarely witnessed.[ii] Apart from Hamerton’s dubious and anonymous accounts, the only other reference to an actual encounter with Leathery was a vague comment in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner from 1973 that the last time anyone had seen Leathery Coit was 1966.[iii]

Because of all this, I was surprised and delighted to hear of a more recent meeting with Elland’s most distinguished phantom.

Return of Old Leathery Coit

Jon Whitehead got in touch with me after hearing my radio interview to say that his dad’s friend’s son, Andrew Johnson, had seen the ‘full apparition’ one morning on his paper round in the 70s and was badly shaken by the episode.

I got in touch with Andrew and asked him what he could remember:

It was a dark morning in the winter,  1977-9.

I was delivering a newspaper to the Fleece, and as I came around a corner to walk across the front I saw a dark figure, slightly hunched over.

It turned and walked around the opposite corner.

I ran (not sure why) toward the corner. When I followed around the same corner there was nothing there.

The figure was hunched over, and no head was visible, but unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately!) there were no headless horses.

In any case, Andrew abandoned his paper round and fled in terror. His father, caretaker at a local school, took the boy’s story seriously as he was clearly in shock.

Looking back over four decades later, Andrew takes a sceptical attitude. Although his fear and the fight or flight response he felt were real, he now thinks that he knew the story of Leathery Coit and his mind and the dark spooky atmosphere surrounding the reputedly haunted old pub did the rest. ‘I knew about the ghost so I saw one’, he told me.

The story clearly spread among Andrew’s friends and relatives and deserves its place in weird Calderdale history. Andrew is, as far as I know, the only named person to have an encounter with Leathery Coit. Even if he doesn’t now believe he saw the ghost, at the time he and his family and friends assumed that Andrew had met with Old Leathery – such was the power of the legend.

It’s interesting that the ambiguous figure Andrew saw was assumed to be Old Leathery when many of his distinguishing characteristics were absent. No headless horses or carriage. No blast of icy wind. It’s not even clear that the figure was headless or simply hunched over. But the Leathery Coit legend was closely linked to the Fleece Inn, so it’s understandable that Andrew and the people he told about his adventure would naturally think of Elland’s infamous spook.

Although no specific sightings are ever mentioned, the story of Leathery Coit appeared regularly in both local and national press from the 1930s onwards.[iv] The legend was also trotted out in local press in 1978 – around the time of Andrew’s sighting – which surely would have helped to keep Old Leathery’s name in the public mind.[v]

The sceptic in me thinks that perhaps the hunched figure Andrew saw was the silhouette of a deer at a confusing angle that nimbly disappeared before he got round the corner. Or perhaps it was just a figment of his imagination on that spooky winter morning, as Andrew himself suspected.

Or could it have been Old Leathery Coit putting his headless horses to rest before turning in after a hard night’s haunting?

Thanks to Gayle Lofthouse, Jon Whitehead and Andrew Johnson.

Image of Leathery Coit by Larisa Moskaleva

[i] Lucy Hamerton, Olde Elland (1901), p.104

[ii] Kai Roberts, Haunted Halifax and District, (The History Press: 2014), p.56

[iii] Denis Kilcommons, ‘Hallowe’en Legends to Chill Your Very Soul’, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 31 October 1973, p.7

[iv] See for example ‘Ghost Hunting at Elland’, Yorkshire Evening Post , 16 May 1933,p.9

[v] ‘Spirits Galore at the Old Fleece Inn, Elland’, Huddersfield and Holmfirth Examiner,  25 May 1978, p.26

Satie’s Vexations: Weird Musical History #14

On 21 February 1970, pianist Peter Evans sat at a piano in Watter’s Gallery, Sydney and prepared himself for a performance of French composer Erik Satie’s 1893 composition Vexations. The piece is notorious for its weird intervals and disturbing effects on both the performer and audience… and the fact that Satie gave instructions that the motif should be repeated 840 times. Depending on the speed it’s played, that’s a performance lasting somewhere between 18 and 24 hours.

Evans started well, performing the unsettling and repetitious melody, but things started to go wrong as he approached repetition number 595. He felt his mind fill with evil thoughts, and he saw animals and ‘things’ peering at him through the musical score.

‘I would not play this piece again’, he said. ‘I felt each repetition slowly wearing my mind away. I had to stop. If I hadn’t stopped I’d be a very different person today… People who play it do so at their own great peril.’

Another pianist called Linda Wilson took up the challenge when Evans abruptly stopped and played the remaining 245 repetitions without any ill effects.[i]

Cats on a Piano

I first became aware of Satie’s weird composition when I accidentally tuned in to an all-night performance of it on BBC Radio 3 in 2006. I’d been looking for some soothing music to help me drift off to sleep, rather than something that would cast its disturbing shadow over my dreams. When I awoke the next morning, it was still playing.

The score for the piece includes an enigmatic note from Satie saying ‘To play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.’

The score consists of a short single line melody. This seemingly directionless tune is then repeated but harmonised with mostly diminished chords. Then the theme is played again without the harmony. Finally, the tune is repeated with the same harmonised chords, though in different inversions. This cycle lasts about a minute. And then, repeat 840 times…

Erik Satie’s score for Vexations

But Satie wanted to keep any performers on their toes. His notation is eccentric with liberal use of double flats and scoring the B as a flattened C. The pianist has to really concentrate – it’s so unnerving and confusingly notated that it’s impossible to get used to it. As you can imagine, after a few repetitions, the confusing sharp, flat and natural symbols all begin to blur into one another.

You can hear a few minutes of it here.

To me Vexations sounds like a cat gingerly plodding over the piano keyboard, followed by two cats gingerly plodding over the piano keyboard in unison. However, some scholars think the weird melody includes arcane numerological and esoteric references, something that Satie was interested in.[ii]

It’s quite possible that Satie was expressing his feelings about his short and stormy relationship with artist Suzanne Valadon.[iii] In any case, the melody and harmonies feel dissonant and unresolved, whatever the obscure cabalistic or numerological significance hidden in the piece.

Suzanne Valadon’s self portrait and her portrait of Erik Satie

It was often assumed that Vexations would be nigh on impossible to perform. However, musicians around the world cried, ‘Hold my beer…’

Hold My Beer

One contender for the first full performance was given by Richard David Hames in 1958, who remarkably was only a 13 year old school boy at the time. It took place at Lewes Grammar School in Sussex and raised £24 for charity, though this claim to the first performance hasn’t really been confirmed.[iv]

Probably the best known confirmed early performance was organised by avant-garde composer John Cage, famed for his composition 4.33 in which the pianist sits in silence at the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Cage used a team of 10 pianists to perform Vexations in the Pocket Theatre, New York in 1963. The performance took nearly nineteen hours.[v]

She Loved Nudity

Cage organised another performance in Berlin in 1966, this time involving a relay team of six pianists. One of these, Charlotte Moorman  performed her parts with her boobs out because, well, it was the swinging sixties after all. Moorman was known as the Topless Cellist for her habit of performing in a state of undress, though sometimes on televised performances she would play cello while wearing a bra made of two mini televisions.

Charlotte ‘the Topless Cellist’ Moorman wears her TV bra

Moorman said she performed her parts of Vexations topless because she ‘loved nudity’, but it also seems John Cage had bet her $100 that she wouldn’t do it. She won the bet.[vi]

A phial of amphetamine

The first confirmed solo performance was by Richard Toop in 1967 at the Arts Lab, Drury Lane, London. Toop used 840 numbered copies of the score so that he could avoid the danger of losing count. After around sixteen hours, Toop was flagging and asked for some extra stimulant in his coffee, expecting a vitamin pill. Instead, as he found out later, he was dosed with a phial of amphetamine. ‘The effect was hair-raising’, he said. ‘My drooping eyelids rolled up like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.’ No wonder some newspaper reports commented on the performer’s glazed expression…

Richard Toop speeding through Vexations (Coventry Evening Telegraph 11 October 1967)

The performance took 24 hours, and Toop noted that even after playing the piece for so long and so many times, he still couldn’t play it from memory.[vii]

The same feeling Frankenstein must have had

Another notable performance of Satie’s piece was by Gavin Bryars and Christopher Hobbs in Leicester Polytechnic in 1971. The two pianists took it in turns to play, and while on breaks between shifts wrote each other notes to be read when they changed places. This gives a fascinating insight into what it’s like to be one of the performers.

As he played, one of the performers had the unnerving impression that there was someone standing behind him, though at that early stage in the performance, the only other person in the room was the caretaker, and he was sweeping the floor.

‘When I make a mistake’, the other wrote, ‘it’s like the end of the world. The music is unnerving because it’s impossible to get used to it – the unexpected keeps happening.’

One pianist commented on the difficulty of following the score. The disorientating use of sharps and flats meant that he was never sure he was playing the right notes and that the symbols on the score started to melt into one another. ‘It’s the same feeling Frankenstein must have had,’ he wrote.

The performance was remarkably fast, taking a mere fourteen and a half hours. Perhaps, like Richard Toop, someone had put something in their coffee…

Epilogue

Some have said Satie’s piece is an avant-garde study of boredom and frustration, others suggest it’s the musical equivalent of a zen koan. Scholars have discussed the esoteric significance of the disturbing harmonies and tangled numerological meaning hidden in its off-kilter progressions or the occult magical properties of the number 840.

But the fact is that there’s no indication Satie ever thought of having the piece published let alone performed. It’s been suggested that Satie’s comment about playing the piece 840 times is not actually an instruction, but more a kind of note to self: If you wanted to play the piece 840 times, it would require careful psychological preparation and meditation – which is perhaps what Satie meant by ‘serious immobilities’.[viii]

Could he simply have been having a joke?

I picked up a vinyl copy of a performance (pictured below). It has twenty cycles on each side, so that’s forty altogether. To listen to the equivalent of a ‘full’ performance, I’d have to play both sides of the record 21 times. I’m afraid I can barely get past the first few minutes…

Modern vinyl issue of Variations. Don’t forget to turn it over. And over. And over…

For more weird musical history:

Doris Stokes – Welcome to my World
The Grumbleweeds Take A Trip
Sects, Cults and Rock ‘n’ Roll

[i] Gavin Bryars (1983) ‘Vexations and its performers’, Contact: Journal for Contemporary Music, 26, pp.12-20 (p.13)

[ii] Robert Orledge (1988) ‘Understanding Satie’s ‘Vexations’’, Music & Letters, 79(3) pp. 386-395. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/855366

[iii] Ibid p.390

[iv] Bryars (1983) p.13

[v] Ibid

[vi] Ibid

[vii] Ibid

[viii] Steven M Whiting (2010) ‘Serious Immobilities: Musings on Satie’s “Vexations”’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft,  67(4) pp. 310-317

Doomsday Herrings and Fishy Farts

Norwegian fishermen were astonished when they landed a most strange and portentous fish on the 26 November 1597.

On one side of the 14 inch long herring was the image of two soldiers in combat wearing military helmets, with one waving a sword while being struck in the belly by the other’s lance.

Next to this image were some symbols, one of which looks like a capital A, followed by what seems to be two bushels of wheat.

On the other side of the herring in the same blood red were some letters or symbols, some familiar (M) and others not.

The strange and wonderful herring caught off Norway in 1597

A Most Strange and Wonderful Herring

The fish was taken to local magistrates and the nobility and an account was printed in Dutch before being translated into English in an anonymous pamphlet titled A Most Strange and Wonderful Herring 1598.[i]

According to the author, the herring was sent by God as a sign to turn us away from sin. It is, he says, ‘a strange and wonderful token of God’s wrath figured forth in a silly herring’.

The Fishy pamphlet

The two fighting soldiers are there to tell us that God will visit war upon us to scourge the wicked. The bushels of wheat are taken by the author to be rods for whipping sinners, representing the two scourges that the Lord will use on us – war and famine.

As to the letters on the fish, the author of the pamphlet admits defeat. He acknowledges that although some characters are familiar, others are ‘strange and not understood’.

He is certain, though, that whatever the characters stand for, it is a ‘heavy sentence against the sins of this age.’ The author sees the miraculous herring as a sign that the end of the world is near. ‘Repent,’ he tells us, ‘for the Kingdom of God is at hand’.

Did an enterprising artistically inclined Norwegian fisherman carve the pictures and letters into the fish for a prank or a money making scheme? Or were superstitious fishermen interpreting natural markings on the fish in the light of contemporary fears and anxieties? Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how accurate the drawings reproduced above are, or how they might have been embellished.

The pamphlet tells us that the doomsday herring was caught near the city of Drenton which does not appear to exist. My best guess is that the city is Trondheim which in some historical sources is rendered as Drondheim which could be plausibly if clumsily anglicised as Drenton.

However, this is not the only fishy tale about apocalyptic herring. Scandinavia has a weird history of ominous doomsday fish…

More Prophetic Fish

The early modern period was replete with accounts of strange signs and wonders related in bizarre pamphlets to a sensation hungry public. The upheavals, persecutions and conflict that came with the religious reformations of the times gave many in Europe the sense that they were living in the end of days, a feeling that has some resonance with our troubled times.[ii]

But why would God send his message on a fish, you might ask? The pamphlet suggests this is because the herring is a popular fish and one of the most commonly eaten.

Strangely, the doomsday herring was not the first portentous fish to carry God’s warning. In November 1587, king of Denmark and Norway Frederik II set his wisest experts the task of deciphering gothic script found on two herring. The best his learned men could do was suggest the characters said something along the lines that his herring fishing days were numbered.[iii]

King Frederik II – victim of doomsday herring?

In any case, everyone assumed the gothic letters meant the King was doomed. And doomed he was – he died a few months later…

In November 1587, four fish covered in letters, hieroglyphs and symbols were caught off the Danish coast. A learned theologian studied them and worked out the message from God: the world as they knew it was coming to an end, and Jesus was about to return and judge the living and the dead…[iv]

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an image of this doomsday herring. In any case, the doomsday prediction is some four centuries overdue.

Epilogue

Speaking of doomsday fish, could herring farts bring about a nuclear apocalypse? Well, throughout the 1980s the Swedish military, media and government were convinced that Soviet submarines were intruding on their waters. This was understandable after a Soviet ‘whisky class’ submarine ran aground off the country’s south coast in 1981. The press jokingly referred to it as ‘whisky on the rocks’, but it caused a major cold war diplomatic incident.

In the years following this, the Swedish navy were constantly hunting mysterious Soviet submarines in their waters, though never found any. Military equipment was picking up acoustic signals of underwater activity, and all the experts were convinced the Soviets were all over their waters. However, whenever Swedish submarines picked up one of these signals and pursued it, the source was never found.

Even after the cold war ended, the mysterious submarine activity off Sweden’s coast continued. It prompted Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt to complain to a bemused Boris Yeltsin about Russia’s nefarious submarine activity.

Eventually the military enlisted some outside scientific help to solve the mystery. And two of the scientists on the team, Magnus Wahlberg and Hakan Westerberg, happened to be experts on herring farts.[v] They knew that when herring in shoals of several square metres get spooked by a predator, or a Swedish submarine hunting phantom intruders, the collective release of fishy farts is huge.

The scientists demonstrated their theory in a top secret military backed experiment that involved squeezing herring they bought from the supermarket in a water tank to create bum bubbles from the fish

Once the fishy flatulence was recognised for what it was and ruled out, reports of invading submarines stopped.[vi]

Sweden’s military, media and political class – the best and the brightest – had been fooled by fish farts.

For the Yorkshire serial killer witch whose chicken laid a doomsday egg, see here: https://paulweatherhead.com/2024/03/19/yorkshire-serial-killer-witchs-chicken-lays-doomsday-egg/

[i] Anon, A Most Strange and Wonderful Herring…(London: John Wolfe, 1598). Available at: https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_a-most-strange-a-wonder_herring_1598/page/n7/mode/1up?view=theater

[ii] Diarmuid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 (London: Penguin, 2003), pp.550-556

[iii] ‘Prophetic Herrings’, Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring, Available at: https://www.herripedia.com/strangely-marked-herrings/

[iv] A breefe coniecturall discourse, vpon the hierographicall letters & caracters fovnd upon fower fishes taken neere Marstrand in the kingdome of Denmarke, the 28. of Nouember 1587. Treating by considerations poligraphicall, theologicall, Thalmudicall & cabalisticall. Seene and allowed.” In the digital collection Early English Books Online 2. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A07082.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.

[v] Magnus Wahlberg, and Håkan Westerberg (2003) ‘Sounds produced by herring (Clupea harengus) bubble release’, Aquatic Living Resources,16(3), pp.271-275, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0990-7440(03)00017-2

[vi] Marc Abrahams, The curious true tale of the Swedish prime minister, a Soviet submarine, and farting herring. 23 March 2014 available at: https://improbable.com/2014/03/23/the-curious-true-tale-of-the-the-swedish-prime-minister-a-soviet-submarine-and-farting-herring/

Horny Demons: Incubi and Succubi

If you lived in seventeenth century Italy and wanted to know about Demoniality – carnal relations with demons – the man to speak to was Father Lodovico Maria Sinistrari. As well as being a Franciscan monk, consultant to the Holy Inquisition and lecturer in philosophy and theology, he was the authority on demonic sex. In fact, sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, he wrote a book about it: Demoniality: Incubi and Succubi.[i]

Father Sinistrari – probably writing about sin or demon semen…

Incubi (male) and Succubi (female) are demons who are supposed to have intercourse with humans as they sleep. Typically, the victim would wake up to feel a heavy weight crushing and suffocating them as well as a feeling of paralysis.[ii] Perhaps there would be weird or terrifying visions or apparitions…

Fritz Schwimbeck My Dream, My Bad Dream (1915)

Many would nowadays put experiences like this down to sleep paralysis, the fairly common sleep disorder, but Father Sinistrari had other ideas.

The handwritten book was discovered in London in 1872 and then translated into English, and it’s certainly a strange read. It covers everything from the qualities of demonic sperm to the moral distinctions between bestiality and demoniality.

Demoniality by Father Sinistrari

Here’s one of the stories he uses to illustrate his learned tract.

Hieronyma and the Horny Demon

In Pavia, where Father Sinistrari was lecturer, there was a married woman of virtue called Hieronyma. One day she kneaded some dough and took it to the bakery to be baked. When it came back, the bread was accompanied by a large, oddly shaped cake. She told the baker it wasn’t hers, but the baker assured her it must have been ordered by someone from her household.

She ate the cake.

The next night she was awoken by a shrill voice hissing in her ear asking her if she had liked the cake. Hieronyma became scared, and began making the cross and calling on Jesus and Mary. The voice reassured her:

Be not afraid. I mean you no harm; quite the reverse. I am prepared to do anything to please you; I am captivated by your beauty, and desire nothing more than to enjoy your embraces.

She felt soft kisses on her cheek for an hour but resisted the demon and it finally left her.

The following day she called in a priest who provided her with some holy relics to protect her from the demon. These didn’t work. The incubus, for that is what it was, came and troubled her again the next night. She then went to see an exorcist, fearing she was demonically possessed. The exorcist blessed her house and demanded that the demon leave her.

But this demon was lovesick, or so he told Hieronyma, as he wept with love for her.

The incubus soon began to appear before her in the form of a handsome youth, sometimes when she was in company. He would kiss her hand and beg her to return his favours. Thankfully, only Hieronyma could see him, for he was invisible to everyone else.

As the months went by, and Hieronyma continued to refuse her demonic suitor, he became aggressive. He stole her jewellery and relics, beat her leaving her with bruises on her face and arms which appeared and then magically disappeared.

Even worse, the demon would snatch her three-year old daughter from her and place her in dangerous locations such as on the roof or in the gutter, though the child was never harmed. Furniture would be suddenly upset and plates would be smashed only to be miraculously restored.

The demon’s behaviour became more outrageous, according to Father Sinistrari. One night after coming to Hieronyma’s bed and being refused, the incubus disappeared only to return with some stones with which he built a wall surrounding the bed that almost touched the ceiling. The poor woman supposedly needed a ladder to get out of her bed. When the wall was torn down, many witnesses were said to have seen all the stones vanish.

However, the demon’s most audacious piece of mischief came when Hieronyma’s husband was entertaining some military friends. The company were about to sit down to eat when the whole table and everything on it simply vanished, as did all the pots, pans and crockery in the kitchen as well as all their bottles and glasses.

The guests were leaving when they heard a crash and returned to see the table was back, groaning with food and wine. The food was different to what had previously been there, so the guests were unwilling to try it, but when they overcame this, they found everything delicious and polished it off. It was only then that the original food miraculously appeared again, though by now everyone was too full to eat it.

Even more embarrassment followed for poor Hieronyma. She was walking past some crowds of people to hear mass, but as soon as she set foot on the church threshold, all her clothes fell to the ground before being blown away by a gust of wind leaving her stark naked before the astonished eyes of the congregation. Finally, two gallant cavaliers covered her nakedness with a cloak and escorted her home.

The incubus eventually gave up and left poor Hieronyma alone, but this was after several long years…

This tall story has both fairy tale elements (the mysterious cake) and odd dream-like elements (the vanishing food, finding oneself naked in church), as well as a kind of saucy slapstick humour, though I don’t think this was intentional.

Anyway, if you want to know more about the sex lives of Demons, read on…

Demon Semen

According to some experts on the matter, Father Sinistrari instructs us, demon semen is very thick, warm and rich. This is because the demon transforms into a succubus and extracts the sperm from a sleeping man and only the strongest men are chosen. It is this sperm that the demon uses to impregnate the woman of his choice. In other cases, the demon may animate a male corpse and use that to inseminate the object of his desire.

However, Sinistrati does not concur. His belief is that the incubus impregnates the woman – and only with her consent – with his own sperm. This is because demons are corporeal fallen angels rather than immaterial spirits. Because of this their sperm is ‘subtle’ rather than thick, and in Old Testament times liaisons between women and these fallen angels resulted in mighty giants (or the Nephalim, as they are referred to in the book of Genesis (6:1-4).

Sinistrari believed that demon-human hybrids were often bold, tall, strong, proud and wicked. Examples of people born from a demonic liaison include legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, Pliny the Elder, Plato, Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus and Merlin the wizard. And that ‘damned’ heretic, Martin Luther. Meow.

So, if demons are still consorting with human women, where are all the giants now, you might ask.

Well, Sinistrari has an answer. Demons can be aerial, aqueous, earthy and igneous. Since the great flood, the atmosphere of the earth has become much damper, so the variety of demons that fathered giants have moved to the upper atmosphere where they can no longer get up to mischief. The demons left behind father normal sized babies.

If you want to know what a demon-human hybrid looks like, according to demonologist Nicholas Remy in the sixteenth century:

It had a hooked beak, a long smooth neck, quivering eyes, a pointed tail, a strident voice, and very swift feet upon which it ran rapidly to and fro as if seeking for some hiding-place in its stable.[iii]

Woman Wailing for her Demon Lover

In his poem ‘Kubla Khan’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of ‘Woman wailing for her demon lover’, but having a demonic paramour was highly dangerous according to Sinistrari. For one thing, voluntary consorting with a demon lover would be considered witchcraft and therefore a sin.

As part of the Inquisition, Sinistrari knew a great deal about this and other sins. In fact, in order to help priests hearing confessions he had written a substantial analysis and classification of all the sins there were, with each being divided into sub-categories, and further Aristotelian sub-divisions within those.[iv]

However, Sinistrari had considerable sympathy for people like Hieronyma who were pestered by lusty demons and resisted them. He recommended a number of herbs, stones and other substances that could be placed around the bedroom to discourage an amorous demon – cardamon, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg in vessels of hot water. If you want your room to smell like a pub rather than a curry house, you could use tobacco and brandy. Or you could use diamonds or menstrual blood.

If you don’t have any of the above to hand, you might be in trouble. Sinistrari argues that when a man confesses to bestiality, the priest orders him to slaughter the animal to avoid being tempted again. Congress with an inferior creature is sinful. However, incubi and succubi are fallen angels, so in the case of sexual relations between them and humans, it’s us that are the inferior creatures. And because Sinistrari sees these lusty demons as capable of salvation, if and when the demon sees the error of his ways he is liable to kill his human lover to avoid further temptation, or so we are warned…

Epilogue: The Lancashire Connection

If you’ve got this far, you might be wondering why I’m reading seventeenth century tracts on demonology. Well, it’s because I’m doing research for a book on demonic possession in early modern Lancashire. The Lancashire witch trials are well known, but around the same time Lancashire was troubled by several bizarre cases of supposed possession by evil spirits, as attested to in a number of astonishing contemporary pamphlets. And this is the rabbit hole that led me to Father Sinistrari’s Demoniality…

Sweet dreams…

[i] Father Ludovico Sinestrari, Demoniality: Incubi and Succubi

[ii] Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopaedia of Demons and Demonology, (New York: Facts on File, 2009) p.19

[iii] Guiley, p.120

[iv] Alexandra H.M. Nagel, Tracing the mysterious facts of “Demoniality” (“De Daemonialitate”) by Ludovico M. Sinistrari and published by Isidore Liseux, (2008). Available at: https://www.academia.edu/4046753/Tracing_the_mysterious_facts_of_Demoniality_De_Daemonialitate_by_Ludovico_M_Sinistrari_and_published_by_Isidore_Liseux