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. Raffinnsonof 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 Sagawhich 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
[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
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.
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.
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…
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.
[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
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
Secret lovers’ trysts, a deal with the devil, a vengeful ghost, pennies from heaven, the plague and killer foxes… all have been associated with one of my favourite standing stones – Churn Milk Joan.
The stone stands around 7 feet tall on the outskirts of Midgely Moor overlooking the Calder Valley, and although it probably only dates back to around 1600 when it was erected as a boundary stone, it has been a magnet for a variety of legends and traditions.
The Awful Death of Churn Milk Joan
Joan was a young farmer’s daughter and would often make the lonely journey over the tops of Midgely Moor to deliver her churn full of milk to the villages beyond. One snowy evening, though, she encountered the devil where the stone now stands (at a crossing of paths), and he told her he was on his way to take the souls of her ailing parents. However, Joan made a bargain with the Devil – her soul in the place of her parents. Presumably Old Nick thought this a good deal, for the next morning Joan’s frozen body was found under the standing stone, surrounded by the icy milk spilt from her churn.
And that’s how the stone got its name. At least according to my favourite version of the legend.
According to Mytholmroyd poet Ted Hughes, who wrote a poem about the standing stone in his 1979 collection Remains of Elmet, Joan was done in by killer foxes. The poem, titled ‘Churn Milk Joan’, begins:
A lonely stone
Afloat in the stone heavings of emptiness
Keeps telling her tale. Foxes killed her.
I think you’re about as likely to be killed by a shark as a fox on Midgely Moor, but that’s the legend as our Ted tells it. It caused some controversy when a sculpture was commissioned for the centre of Mytholmroyd depicting a milk churn and two rather cute foxes – representing the Disneyfication of Ted Hughes and his work, according to one article in the Guardian.[i]
Churn Milk Joan: Foxy Lady (Royd Regeneration)
Other versions have poor Joan getting lost and disoriented in a blizzard, and laying down to freeze to death next to the stone that subsequently bore her name. This seems to be the most common version of the story. Indeed, a similar story is attached to the Two Lads cairns on the moors above Crag Vale.[ii]
But not all the legends are so dark. According to Samuel Fielding (writing in 1903), the name came from the custom of boundary officials taking a break at the stone and being supplied with a welcome drink of milk from Joan, who was a ‘merry buxom farmer’s wife’.[iii]
Other sources say that the stone was the location where a fam girl called Joan used to meet her lover.[iv]
Turn Turn Turn
Churn Milk Joan is said to turn round three times at midnight on New Year’s Eve when the church bells in Mytholmroyd chime for midnight. I’ve often thought of spending New Year on Midgely Moor with a video camera to record what happens as the church bells ring and the valley is lit up with fireworks…
But a night on Midgely Moor in winter is not that appealing, and I can’t help thinking that anyone who witnesses her nocturnal perambulations would not live long…
Relic of the Plague
Churn Milk Joan has a hollow on top of it, and the custom is for passers-by to take a coin out and replace it with one of their own. The common belief is that the stone was, as Hughes puts it in his poem, a ‘relic of the plague’. The idea was that during times of plague, the hollow at the top of the stone would be filled with vinegar so that any coins that exchanged hands between traders and customers could be disinfected.
It’s a nice idea, though as John Billingsley has pointed out, Joan is a bit too tall for such a purpose.[v] Robin Hood’s Pennystone – just over the moor – has a similar hollow and is a more realistic height for a ‘plague stone’.
Other legends say that the hollow was used to collect funds for Joan’s funeral, or that the stone has magical properties and produces coins magically from thin air.[vi] Or that Joan’s ghost will haunt you if you don’t leave an offering for her…[vii]
Some of the newspaper sources from the early twentieth century suggest that although the tradition of putting money into Joan’s hollow was known about, it was very rare to actually find any.[viii]
However, in the many visits I’ve paid in the last three decades, there have always been a few coppers or some silver nestling on top of her. One time when I visited to take some photos for the first edition of my book Weird Calderdale, I neglected to take some loose change with me and balked at the idea of leaving her a twenty pound note. When I went to take the photos, the camera’s battery was completely flat, despite it being fully charged when I set off… as far as I can remember, anyway.
I’m not superstitious but…after that, I always make sure I have something to drop in her little hollow to placate Joan’s ghost. The last time I visited (June 2024), instead of the usual copper, there was a pound coin – inflation even affects folklore. I naturally swapped Joan’s pound with one of my own.
I can’t help wondering if one day Joan will be card payments only…
[vi] S. Fielding, ‘Walks About Hebden Bridge’, Todmorden and District News, 22 October, 1903; ‘Country Day by Day’, Halifax Evening Courier, 20 October 1941
“For the first time he then looked back and stopped. I felt the effect of that look creep over me like the feeling must be that comes over the prey of the boa-constrictor when it first knows its doom. I trembled…”
(Mr Chester, 1868)
In the spring of 1868, Bradford was in the grip of a ghost fever. A series of bizarre letters to the local newspaper described a mysterious and ghostly red-eyed stranger who wandered round the night streets of the city muttering profundities about the state of humanity. Soon the local police were struggling to control crowds of several thousand as the city was gripped by a riotous ghost hunt mania…
The Stranger
On the Thursday 27 February 1868, a strange letter appeared in the correspondence column of the Bradford Observer. The letter was purportedly written by a Mr T. Chester and concerned the nocturnal wanderings of a mysterious old man. The old man was around five feet tall, aged about sixty with grey hair and was poorly dressed in seedy black clothes and a greasy battered old hat. His eyes were described as red hot and staring. The old man had been seen by many walking the streets of Bradford with his hands in his pockets, red eyes staring straight ahead, chin buried deep in his shirt collar. He never accosted or spoke to anyone and nobody seemed to know who he was or where he lived.
The author of the letter, Mr Chester, said that he had met the old man on many occasions and that he became intrigued by his regular nocturnal ramblings. He went so far as to ask the police if they knew anything of the Stranger (as the letter was subtitled), but drew a blank. Unfortunately, being of portly frame and a poor walker, Mr Chester was unable to keep up with the old man so was unable to follow him. He did the next best thing – he paid a shoeshine boy sixpence to do his detective work for him.
However, the boy got tired after two hours stalking the old man round the streets of Bradford and gave up. He did, though, overhear the man muttering something odd: ‘Five miles to see a clock and then to find it stopped.’
The next day, Mr Chester relates, his own son saw the Stranger at 5am on Tyrell Street. He was muttering to himself: ‘Ten drunken gentlemen, and ten children starved to death. Forty dogs surfeited with dainties and the widow’s two daughters ruined for want of bread.’
Mr Chester signed off by asking whether something should be done to stop the Stranger as he was evidently insane and might hurt someone.[i]
Pity He Marked His Own Grave
A week later, Mr Chester had another letter published in the Bradford Observer. Since the first letter appeared, he wrote, he had been overwhelmed with requests for more information about the mysterious old man, and what’s more, various offers came in to help follow the Stranger to find out who he was and where he lived.
Mr Chester eventually hired an unnamed young man who had been in training for a competitive walking competition. At 7.30 that evening in Well Street, the Stranger appeared and Mr Chester pointed him out to the amateur sleuth, who set off after him.
According to Mr Chester, he heard nothing until 8.30 the next morning when his door burst open. It was the young man, ashen faced and trembling violently. He threw himself into a chair and Chester poured him a brandy, and soon he was recovered enough to relate what had happened to him.
The young man told how he followed the shabbily dressed old man in black along Well Street, noting how he never looked from right to left, his hands always in his pockets. When the Old Man passed the Mechanic’s Institute he stopped, took his hand from his pocket and tipped his hat, saying, ‘To the kind endeavours of good labour.’ When a merchant passed the Old Man, he muttered, ‘Pity he steals; greater pity, shames not to show it.’ The Stranger then headed onto Market Street where he saw some young women being merry in their colourful clothes and mumbled, ‘Coals of fire on the head of virtue.’
The letter continues at some length to describe the Stranger’s route round Bradford and his gnomic mutterings. As he passed through the crowds of Westgate, the amateur sleuth on his tail heard him mumble, ‘Crimes for some, carelessness for others, want of duty for all.’
On passing a woman described as bloated and pimpled with bloodshot eyes, with a dirty face and a torn dishevelled dress who was staggering down the street, he muttered, ‘Two years from purity to filth; pity she was so ugly.’ When a carriage carrying elegantly dressed gentlemen and ladies on their way to a ball drove by, he uttered, ‘Pity that there is deception, but good that the breast is opaque.’
However, it was just after this that the young man lost his quarry in the crowds, and despite diligent searching, could find no trace of him. The young man returned to Market Street hoping the Old Man would pass him here once more. He waited patiently for hours, hearing the clock strike nine, ten, eleven but still no sign of the Stranger. He then returned to Well Street and waited there for a while. He was about to give up in despair, but as the clock struck midnight, the Old Man appeared again. The young man assumed he had finished his nocturnal route and was now heading home, so by following him he was sure to learn where he lived.
The Old Man headed up Church Bank, and opposite the graveyard, again reverentially raised his hat though did not say anything. Rather, he crossed the road to the cemetery and then climbed over the wall. The intrepid young man followed him. And this is when he finally came face to face with the mysterious stranger that had been haunting the streets of Bradford. According to Mr Chester’s letter, this is how the young man described his encounter in the graveyard:
For the first time he then looked back and stopped. I felt the effect of that look creep over me like the feeling must be that comes over the prey of the boa-constrictor when it first knows its doom. I trembled.
The Old Man with piercing red eyes waved his pursuer back, and he staggered against the cemetery wall, slumped down and wiped the beads of sweat from his brow. When he looked up again, the Old Man had gone.
The young man returned home to try and sleep but could not get the glowering red eyes out of his mind. Finally, he rose at 5am and on going outside, the first person he saw was the Old Man, still walking purposefully and muttering. This time the Old Man brushed past him, lamenting, ‘Pity he marked his own grave…’
The young man was now in fear of his life, assuming that the Old Man was prophesying his death and burial in the cemetery where they had confronted each other the previous night.
The letter finished by reiterating that the account was truthful, and that the Stranger was in need of investigation, before reminding us that his mysterious nighttime wanderings began every night at 7.30 on Well Street.[ii]
It was practically an invitation to a ghost hunt…
The Great Bradford Ghost Hunt
On the evening of Thursday 4 March, crowds began to gather in Well Street and nearby areas, hoping to catch a glimpse of the red-eyed ‘ghost’. Each successive night, the crowds grew bigger, and by Monday 9 March, it numbered seven or eight thousand, according to a police estimate.[iii] Most of the unruly ghost hunters were young men of ‘the lower orders’, though there were both sexes and people of respectability joining the crowds. Young lads tore up sods from the churchyard and threw them at each other and passersby and some windows were smashed. Gangs of youths ran yelling and screaming round the streets, sometimes accosting unfortunate elderly gentlemen who they thought might be the Stranger mentioned in the enigmatic letters. The papers described the scenes as being of extraordinary excitement.
The police tried in vain to get the crowd to go home, but they had lost control. They were eventually saved by the fire brigade who had been using their hoses to clean some warehouse windows. The police turned the hoses on the ghost hunters, drenching them and finally dispersing them.
However, the following night crowds began to gather again, fuelled by a rumour that the ‘real’ ghost would appear, attracting hordes of would be ghost hunters from Bradford and surrounding towns and villages. This time, though, the church gates were locked to prevent youths from running wild in the graveyard and the police manged the crowds. By the next day, the excitement had all but ceased.[iv]
Three young men, William Longbottom, John Forrest and Edward Milnes were summoned to the borough court charged with loitering on Well Street and refusing to move on when told to by the police. P.C. Bradbury told the judge how a crowd of seven or eight thousand had gathered and refused to disperse, until, that is, the firemen’s hoses were turned on them. The three young men got away with just paying costs.[v] Perhaps the judge thought that these three were police scapegoats, given that thousands of others also refuse to move on.
These kinds of ghost flashmobs occurred frequently in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Often a prankster with a scary costume might prance around at night in a spooky location or jump out on a passer-by, and this would lead to wildly exaggerated rumours of people being scared to death or the ghost possessing amazing powers. These would be picked up by the press, and copycat hoaxes would follow, as might attention-seeking fake victims. Often impromptu ghost hunts would ensue, many of them riotous and drunken in nature.
A couple of examples from London towards the end of the nineteenth century bear a remarkable similarity to the events in Bradford in 1868. In 1895, a rumour spread that a ghost was haunting a Hackney churchyard leading to thousands of ghosthunters armed with various weapons running riot in the cemetery and clambering all over the graves. There were false alarms and wild goose chases, friends hoaxing each other and wild screaming and ghost noises from frolicking ghost hunters. The scene was heightened by a violent thunderstorm as thousands dashed madly round the gravestones chasing and scaring each other.[vi]
A few years later in January 1899, one Mr James Chant wrote a letter to the local paper saying he’d seen a ghost by Islington church on Christmas Day and he was going to look for it again that evening at 8 o’clock. As with the Bradford episode, this was practically an invitation to a mass ghost hunt, and that’s exactly what ensued in the churchyard after dark. The police lost control as hundreds of ‘roughs’ conducted a ‘vulgar riot’ among the graves. Many people in the crowd found that their watch, wallet or purse was missing, and there was some speculation that the letter about the ghost had been sent by a pickpocket hoping to cause a large crowd to gather where he could ply his trade.[vii]
In any case, these ghost flashmobs and their riotous exploits usually burned themselves out after a few days, and that’s what happened in Bradford.
Epilogue
Of course, most people who read Mr Chester’s letters about the strange old man and his wanderings and gnomic pronouncements would have realised it was a joke, intended as satire. These kinds of surreal, rambling and ironic letters were rather common in the papers of the time, but the particular description of the Old Man from the graveyard and his comments on contemporary society struck a chord with the people of Bradford, and the fact that a specific location and time were mentioned (Well Street at 7.30) meant that many would be tempted to turn up and see what happened.
The press at the time assumed that because Bradfordians turned out in their thousands to see the ghost, they must have taken Mr Chester’s satirical letter literally.[viii] I’m not so sure. Judging by what happened at other similar ghost flashmobs occurring around graveyards, it seems more likely that as the talk of the mysterious stranger spread, many just turned up to have a laugh with their mates and engage in some carnivalesque tomfoolery and pranking that sometimes got out of control. The Bradford ghost hunt was, like the many other mass Victorian ghost hunts, both transgressive and carnivalesque.
As for the letter that started it all, there are some clues that the whole thing was meant as a joke. Firstly, the author is named Mr T. Chester which seems to be a play on words with ‘jester’. The second clue comes in a final letter from Mr Chester, published in the Bradford Observer on 2 April 1868.[ix]
In this missive, Mr Chester writes that he met the mysterious Old Man once again in the Park area of the city in broad daylight while he was enjoying a cigar. The Stranger appeared beside him as if out of nowhere and he was so startled, he made for a bench and sat down. The Stranger stared ahead, breathing heavily and then took out a strange looking pouch and pipe and began to smoke. The heady aroma filled the air, and the Old Man demanded that Chester speak, but he was unable to. The Old Man went on, ‘Better perhaps to be silent, for lying goes about from mouth to mouth like the exhaled air.’
Eventually, according to the letter, Chester plucked up the courage to speak and ask the Stranger who he was and why he was wandering round Bradford at night. The man replied:
Seek not to know, for direful would be your knowledge. What I am I cannot tell, what I have been – listen! A phantom, a Nemesis, a murder undiscovered; a bad deed dropped on the past and sprung into a man. I am a magician; behold!
At this point, the Old Man held up a mirror, and as Mr Chester’s eyes were drawn inextricably towards it, he saw his whole like flash before him in the glass.
…bad, bold and heinous; the good, overshadowed and dim. I trembled and tried to shut my eyes, but they would not close, and I feared I was going mad…
Finally, the Old Man said, ‘Adieu, forget it again, and again shall I appear. To everyone shall I appear, my mission is to all!’
And then the vision in the mirror vanished and when Mr Chester looked round, the Stranger was no more.
The date of this strange meeting, Mr Chester informs the reader, was the first of April.
[iv] ‘A Ghost in Yorkshire’, Liverpool Mercury, 13 March 1868, p.8; ‘A Ghost in Bradford’, Bradford Review, 14 March 1868, p.5 ; ‘The Well Street Ghost’, Bradford Observer, 19 March 1868, p.5
[v] ‘The Well Street Ghost’, Bradford Observer, 19 March 1868, p.5
[vi] ‘The Hackney Ghost’, Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 23 August 1895, p.2; ‘Hackney Ghost Hunters’, Morning Leader, 22 August 1895, p.3; ‘A Hackney Ghost’, Shields Daily Gazette, 23 August 1895, p.3; ‘The Hackney Ghost Hunt’, London Evening News, 23 August 1895, p.3; ‘The Hackney Ghost’, Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 23 August 1895, p.2
[vii] James Chant, ‘A Ghost at St Mary’s Churchyard’, Islington Gazette, 3 January 1899, p.3; ‘The Ghost Trick’, Islington Gazette, 4 January 1899, p.2; ‘Looking for a Ghost’, Echo, 1 January 1899, p.2; ‘Ghost Scare at Islington’, Globe, 4 January 1899, p.5; ‘Stupid Ghost Hoax’, Bingley Echo, 4 January 1899, p.8; ‘Waiting for a Ghost’, Westminster Gazette, 4 January 1899, p.5; ‘Islington Ghost Scare’, Islington Gazette, 5 January 1899, p.3
[viii] ‘A Ghost in Bradford’, Bradford Review, 14 March 1868, p.5
[ix] ‘The Stranger Departs This Time’, Bradford Observer, 2 April 1868, p.7
In September 1926, fear, panic and hysteria haunted the West Yorkshire city of Bradford. A giant ghostly figure in a hooded white cloak stalked the night streets terrorising the locals and then vanishing into the labyrinthine ginnels or over the rooftops. Armed mobs of vigilantes roamed the streets hunting for the Bradford Ghost, who was said to resemble a member of the Ku Klux Klan. They never caught him…
The First Sightings
The mysterious hooded figure in white first appeared in front of some young men at midnight on Grafton Street on Sunday 5 September 1926. At least this is what a young man named Walter Wheatley told the Yorkshire Observer.[i]
However, it was on Tuesday 7 May that the drama really began. The Ghost was seen by James O’Brien on Grafton Street and then by a woman walking to work at about 4.30am. The figure in white approached her along the dark street causing her to scream in terror before fleeing and eventually collapsing in a faint. Nearby residents heard the scream and looking out of their bedroom windows, according to press reports, they saw the ghostly figure standing over the prostrate woman. Some men ran to her aid, but by the time they arrived, the ghost had vanished.[ii]
The Ghost was described in the papers as a ‘giant’ of over six feet tall. He wore a white hooded gown with a conical hat that came down over his face with two slits for eyes. Many reports said that he resembled a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He would walk down the centre of the street waving his arms in the air, and it was thought that he wore running shoes or pumps so he could escape swiftly and silently if anyone gave chase to him.[iii]
Ku Klux Klan parade, Virginia 1922 – The Bradford Ghost was said to resemble a klansman
Local residents were both outraged and terrified. People were afraid to answer their door or to go out into their yards after dark. As stories of the Bradford Ghost spread, so did panic and alarm…
Wild Ghost Chases
Peak ghost hysteria was the weekend of the 10 and 11 September. On both nights crowds gathered in the Manchester Road area of the city and stayed on the streets until the early hours hunting for the ghost. Occasionally, someone would shout ‘There it is!’ and there would be a mad dash in that direction, though without success.
The ghost hunters were armed with a considerable array of weapons including pokers, axes, lead pipes, fender ends and various sticks.[iv] As well as these armed vigilantes there was an ‘army’ of small boys and a ‘mob’ of dogs patrolling the gloomy streets and narrow back alleys.[v] It was rumoured that plain clothes policemen, in particular, those that were running champions, were on the streets wearing shorts ready to give chase to the phantom.[vi]
Some of the ghost hunters set up booby traps made of pyramids of tin cans or glass jars in the dark passages hoping that the Ghost would accidentally kick them over and reveal himself. All that happened were false alarms as the vigilantes walked into the traps themselves leading to more wild ‘ghost’ chases.[vii]
At one point, someone in the mob yelled ‘It’s here’ after glimpsing a flash of white, and hordes of angry ghost hunters tore down the road in the direction of the white figure, only to find that the ghost was in fact a woman shaking the crumbs off her tablecloth. The angry vigilantes collapsed in hysterical laughter.[viii]
A man who took part in the night patrols told the press what it was like:
Shortly after midnight I took up my stand in the district where the ‘ghost’ had been seen. Soon afterwards I heard a sudden shout and saw a crowd of about a hundred rush down Caledonia Street in the wake of a man who had said he had seen the ‘hooded thing’. Police joined in the chase, and I groped my way down a dark passage into a dimly lighted yard overlooking a brewer’s dump. Here everything was in a state of excitement.
I saw him climb on to the roof and get behind a chimney.
Immediately there was a clamber for the roof, and for some minutes the police illuminated every nook and cranny, but it was all to no purpose.[ix]
There seem to have been a number of journalists among the ghost hunters, and their reports play up the spooky and horror elements in their description of Bradford’s back streets. One reporter from London wrote of Bradford’s dark passages, ‘gloomy’ and ‘sepulchral’ yards and its ‘labyrinth of alleys’.[x]
Over this hectic weekend, hundreds of armed would-be ghost busters swarmed over the ‘infected area’ (as some press reports called it), and although a few people claimed to have seen or chased the hooded giant, he was not caught.[xi]
The most common theory among the ghost hunters was that the Ghost was one of their own who was sneaking into a dark corner, putting on his white cloak and hat and terrifying a few people before disposing of the costume or stuffing it in a pocket and then joining the crowds searching the back streets.[xii]
One editorial in the Yorkshire Evening Post opined that the hoax was the ‘morbid outcome of a warped mind,’ and hoped that if he were caught, he would be beaten so mercilessly that he wouldn’t be able to lie on a white sheet, never mind wear one. This came close to happening when a man with bulging pockets attracted the attention of the vigilantes who suspected he was concealing a sheet, though he turned out to be innocent. Nevertheless, some of the women on the ghost hunt declared that if they caught the culprit, they would lynch him.[xiii]
After such a mad weekend, it seems the ghost took a short break, but not for long…
Bradford 1921 (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
Bradford Ghost Reappears
In the Bierley district of the city on the evening of Friday 17 September, tram driver Harold Fishwick heard a tapping at the glass panel of his back door. He opened it to see a white hooded figure with slits for eyes standing before him. The figure then turned and ran. Strangely, the family’s dog had not barked when the stranger knocked on the door, which was unusual.
Half an hour later, Fishwick’s neighbour, Mrs Robinson was having a bath when she heard knocking. She dressed and went downstairs to find her visiting friend Mrs Walker and Mr and Mrs Mills, the young couple she shared the house with, upset and anxious. Mrs Walker had heard the knocking too and through the glass panels of her door had seen a figure in white slowly waving his arms above his head. Mr Mills opened the door and caught a glimpse of the figure before it vanished into the night. Mrs Mills was said to have been taken ill due to the shock.
Mr Mills told another neighbour, Alfred Winch, what had happened and he elected to stay up and wait on the back steps of his house to see if the Ghost would return. At 1.30am, he was about to give up and go to bed when he saw a white figure waiting near the bottom of his garden. Mr Winch ran after the Ghost, but it broke into a swift and silent sprint and escaped into a building site.
The whole neighbourhood was said to be greatly alarmed.[xiv]
And then the Ghost was gone…
Playing The Ghost
What the people of Bradford had experienced was a rather late example of a phenomenon that was extremely common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the Ghost Panic.
These often started with a joker donning a white sheet or perhaps more elaborate scary costume and then prancing around graveyards or other spooky locations after dark or perhaps leaping out and terrifying hapless pedestrians out after dark. This odd but widespread behaviour was dubbed ‘playing the ghost’ by the press. As stories of the ‘ghost’ spread, copycat hoaxers might join in the fun, and to complicate matters further, attention-seekers would invent stories of having encountered the ghost. Each retelling would be exaggerated, and the locals would become outraged and form vigilante patrols to catch the culprit.
Many of these nocturnal ghost hunts were chaotic, rowdy or even an excuse for drunken larks and practical jokes involving flashmobs of hundreds or perhaps thousands. Sometimes innocent bystanders who were in the wrong place at the wrong time would find themselves surrounded by an angry mob suspecting they were the ghost and would be badly beaten, dumped in the nearest body of water or worse.
Epilogue
Frequently, these panics dwindled to nothing, before springing up again in a nearby area. This is exactly what happened in Bradford in 1926. In early November at Heckmondwike, about eight miles south of Bradford, a group of women were ‘scratting coal’ from a waste tip in the early hours when they saw ‘a white formless thing that made no sound as it advanced slowly towards them.’
They threw down their buckets of coal and fled in terror. When they returned later, the ghost was gone – as was their coal.[xv]
I’ve been researching and writing a book about these strange ghost hoaxes, ghost hunts and ghost panics, and in the process exhumed a number of forgotten Bradford episodes – more soon.
Interestingly, in a short article about the 1926 scare for Halloween 2020, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus told us (with no source) that the Ghost was due to reappear in 2026…[xvi]
Pity the poor octopus. They only live for a year, but they have a weird alien like intelligence that’s diffused through their arms – a different way of being clever.
Their weird appearance, though, engendered fear and loathing and monster octopus like creatures – Sea Devils – featured in a number of sensational historical newspaper accounts.
The two splendidly lurid illustrations below come from the Illustrated Police News, sometimes referred to as Britain’s worst newspaper for its graphic images of murders, catastrophes and accidents…
Encounter with a Sea Devil
The engraving below was published in the Illustrated Police News in 1873 and was supposedly based on a sketch made by a sailor on an English trading vessel. The creature was said to be 16 feet in length and grabbed a fishing boat off the coast of Japan, near Kisarazu.
The creature wrapped its tentacles round the boat, while the terrified fishermen fought it off with axes and guns, eventually killing it and displaying it in a nearby temple.[i]
The Deadly Embrace of the Devil Fish
In August 1877 some Mokaw Indians were bathing in the Sea off Vancouver Island. A young woman of eighteen swam to a more isolated beach for some privacy, but didn’t return. When her friends realised she was missing, they paddled their canoes round the bay in search of her and eventually found her the next day. They could see her through the clear water. She appeared to be sitting on the sea bed with what looked like a bag of flour behind her. In fact, her corpse was clutched in the writhing tentacles of a devil fish.
Two of the bravest men dived into the water armed with daggers and managed to cut the unfortunate woman free and kill the creature. The devil fish was described by ‘an intelligent and respectable half breed woman’ as having a head the size of a fifty pound bag of flour and twelve tentacles. This same woman saw the body of the young woman, which still had some of the creature’s suckers attached.[ii]
Epilogue
It’s pretty clear the artists illustrating these two nineteenth century accounts had never seen an octopus, but it makes me wonder whether illustrations like these inspired the Martians in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. If you wanted to use a creature from earth as inspiration for an alien creature, a cephalopod seems as good a place as any to start…
The War of the Worlds, Belgium edition, 1906
Amazing Stories reprint of War of the Worlds, 1927
[i] ‘Encounter with a Sea-Devil’, Illustrated Police News, 21 July 1873, p.2
[ii] ‘The Deadly Embrace of the Devil Fish’, Illustrated Police News, 11 May 1878, p.2
Those nefarious Russians have been up to no good, as usual. According to a recently published joint report by US current affairs show 60 Minutes, German legacy newspaper Der Spiegel and NATO apologist website The Insider, nasty Russians have been zapping our poor freedom and democracy loving spies and diplomats – and even their pets – with an evil mind ray gun causing brain damage and a plethora of other anomalous health symptoms.[i]
But have they really, though?
Havana Syndrome
The story begins in Havana, Cuba in 2017 when American diplomats began experiencing strange health complaints. These included nausea, dizziness, brain fog, headaches, ringing in the ears, difficulty sleeping and several other ‘anomalous health issues’. Many of the diplomats said the symptoms were accompanied by a weird high-pitched noise that seemed to be directional and the theory that some kind of sonic weapon was being directed at them circulated. Some of the people affected had ‘brain damage’, or MBI (Mild Brain Injury) as if they were suffering from concussion.[ii]
Soon embassy workers were being medically evacuated from embassies in Uzbekistan and China as similar symptoms emerged.[iii] In all, over a hundred cases of ‘Havana Syndrome’ (as it was dubbed) were reported by American and Canadian diplomats, spies, military officers and other staff.[iv]
What was the cause of these strange symptoms and that strange penetrating noise heard by the sufferers? Well, when in doubt, blame it on Putin. The Russians, it was claimed, had developed a mind ray (using acoustic or microwave technology) that was melting the brains of our honourable spies because they hate our freedoms. Or something.
So, what’s the evidence? Besides, of course, that Putin and the Russians are responsible for everything bad that happens?
The evidence seems to be the following:
Symptoms: tests revealed concussion-like brain damage in some of the victims – Mild Brain Injuries (MBIs). A number of other apparently inexplicable symptoms were experienced.
Evil Russians: Russians may have been in the vicinity of the alleged attacks.
Weird noises: the symptoms were often accompanied by a weird, penetrating and inexplicable noise.
So, let’s have a look at the evidence.
Brain Damage
The first point to note is that the array of symptoms associated with Havana Syndrome (headaches, nausea, insomnia, tinnitus, confusion, memory loss and so on) are all extremely common and yet we don’t assume we were being zapped by a commie mind ray every time we suffer from them. But the embassy staff in Havana and other locations were no doubt under stress as they had been warned to be vigilant against threats or attacks (including by a mysterious weapon) so will have been hypervigilant, and the idea of a sonic weapon seemed plausible to them at the time. The idea that such a weapon could be fired with such precision to people inside a building is, however, incredible.
The anxiety, stress and hypervigilance over common health symptoms would be exacerbated by the nocebo effect – the evil twin of the placebo effect. The nocebo effect means that if people are primed to expect negative effects, then they are more likely to have them.[v]
As for the apparent brain damage suffered by some of the staff that was evident in various tests, all this is consistent with the patient having suffered previous trauma (such as from accidents) or with changes to the brain caused by aging, depression, migraine or a number of other issues.[vi]
In fact, this relentless search for evidence is reminiscent of the way the witchfinder generals of old would look for marks of the Devil on poor unfortunates suspected of witchcraft. Any innocuous mark or blemish would be interpreted in the light of the prevailing obsession with outing those in league with the Devil.
Headache? Must be the Russians.
Ears ringing? Must be the Russians.
Forgetful? Must be the Russians…
You get the picture.
Ooooh, Those Russians
The evidence that various Russians were nearby when supposed mind ray attacks took place is pretty thin. One woman who was stricken by the familiar symptoms in Tbilisi, Georgia hesitatingly said she recognised an alleged Russian operative who was acting suspiciously outside her flat when shown a photo by the investigators. This was four years after the event, and given the unreliability of human perception and memory, it’s certainly plausible that she was led on in this by the investigators.[vii]
Much of the rest of the evidence implicating various shady Russian spooks is based on leaked mobile data that shows they could possibly have been in the vicinity at the time of the supposed attack. Not that they were there. Just that phone records were not inconsistent with them being there.
What’s That Sound?
However, there is an elephant in the room…or rather, a cricket. When some of the patients in Havana recorded the strange sounds that were associated with the sonic attacks, the sounds were identified as those made by bugs, and not the sort of bugs one normally associates with the shadowy world of espionage. In Havana, the sounds of crickets were interpreted in the light of the folk theory that staff were under attack by sonic rays. In other cases where no cricket sounds were present, the strange, penetrating sounds heard by patients were most likely caused by a very common complaint: tinnitus.[viii]
Phantom Attackers
The whole Havana Syndrome episode has all the signs of being a Phantom Attacker Panic. This is when a community often under stress becomes convinced that they are being assaulted by an imaginary assailant. Classic examples include the Halifax Slasher, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, the Monkey Man of Delhi and the recent scare of needle spiking in nightclubs.
In all these cases, the attacker did not exist and the supposed victims had imagined, mistaken or fabricated the injuries they received. And this is what’s happening with Havana Syndrome. Common symptoms are being misinterpreted as assaults committed by an assailant that exists only in the febrile imaginations of the supposed victims, and the irresponsible journalists and scientists who are reinforcing these views.
The Insider, which claims to be a news website contesting Russian fake news, seems more like an unhinged purveyor of anti-Russian propaganda. See their specious ‘fakespert’ section where any prominent analyst, academic or politician of the left or right who dares to question the western interpretation of world events is relegated to the status of David Icke.
I would suggest the authors of this convoluted conspiracy theory about mind-melting Russian ray guns promptly put themselves into their own ‘fakesperts’ section of their website. That’s where they belong.
There IS a syndrome at work here, though, but it’s not Havana Syndrome. It’s Russia Derangement Syndrome. Western elites are infected with a dangerously hysterical Russophobia that is just as destructive and irrational as the witchfinder generals of past times.
The date that the Insider published their report is rather ironic. April Fools’ Day
[i] Roman Dobrokhotov, Christo Grozev and Michael Weiss, ‘Unraveling Havana Syndrome: New evidence links the GRU’s assassination Unit 29155 to mysterious attacks on U.S. officials and their families’, The Insider (1 April 2024). Available at: https://theins.ru/en/politics/270425
[ii] Robert E Bartholomew and Robert W Baloh (2020) ‘Challenging the diagnosis of ‘Havana Syndrome’ as a novel clinical entity’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 2020, Vol. 113(1 )pp.7–11 DOI:10.1177/0141076819877553
[v] K.J. Petrie K. and W. Rief W. (2019) ‘Psychobiological mechanisms of
placebo and nocebo effects: pathways to improve treatments and improve side effects’, Annual Review of Psychology 70 pp.599-662 doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-102907
Paul Weatherhead 