(1110s–present)
Although the man who lent his name to the world’s most famous vampire was not a vampire himself, he was surely just as bloodthirsty. Vlad Dracula, who inspired Bram Stoker to name his infamous character Count Dracula, was a fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia, which is now part of Romania. Vlad made a name for himself as a ruthless warrior who fought with great success against the Turks, who planned to conquer Europe.
Vlad, also known as Vlad Tepes (tepes means “impaler” in Romanian), was, as his nickname implies, a man of sadistic temperament whose greatest pleasure derived from impaling his enemies on pointed stakes. Vlad subjected an estimated 100,000 people to impalement during the course of his lifetime.
By the early 1730s, Vlad’s enemies, the Turks, had been driven out of Serbia, and the Austrians occupied Belgrade. The Austrians soon became aware of a strange superstition among the peasantry; they dug up corpses and beheaded them, alleging that they were vampires, or upirs.
Vlad Dracula, aka Vlad the Impaler
The Undead
Tales of the “living dead” have been told in Eastern Europe since the days of ancient Greece. The Greeks called the bloodthirsty creature a lamia or empusa and seemed to identify it with a witch. Lamiae were not just blood drinkers, though, but also cannibals.
Tales of “undead” creatures—known as vrykolakas—persisted in Greece down through the centuries, and on January 1, 1701, a French botanist named Pitton de Tornefort visited the island of Mykonos, where he witnessed a gruesome scene of dissection. An unnamed peasant, of sullen and quarrelsome disposition, was murdered in the fields by persons unknown. Two days after his burial, his ghost was reported wandering around at night, overturning furniture and “playing a thousand roguish tricks.” Ten days after his burial, a Mass was said to “drive out the demon” believed to be in the corpse, after which the body was disinterred and the local butcher given the task of tearing out the heart. But even after the villagers burned the heart at the seashore, the ghosts continued to cause problems until they finally burnt the corpse on a pyre.
The ancient Greeks believed that the lamia, shown at right in a painting by John William Waterhouse, was a vampire who stole little children to drink their blood. She was portrayed as a snakelike creature with a female head and breasts.
The problem of the vampire can be stated simply: any rational person will agree that the notion that vampires actually exist has to be pure superstition. There has to be some simpler, more sensible, explanation.
But this view is contradicted by a number of early accounts written with such an air of sobriety and authority that it is difficult to dismiss them as pure fantasy. For example, an early eighteenth-century report about an undead Serbian, known as Visum et Repertum (“Seen and Discovered”), is signed by no fewer than five Austrian officers, three of them doctors:
After it had been reported in the village of Medvegia [near Belgrade] that so-called vampires had killed some people by sucking their blood, I was, by high decree of a local Honorable Supreme Command, sent there to investigate the matter thoroughly. What I learned was as follows: About five years ago, a local haiduk called Arnod Paole broke his neck in a fall from a hay wagon. In 20 or 30 days after his death, some people complained that they were being bothered by this same Arnold Paole; and in fact, four people were killed by him. In order to end this evil, they dug up Arnold Paole 40 days after his death—this on the advice of their Hadnack [a bureaucrat], who had been present at such events before; and they found that he was quite complete and undecayed, and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears; that the shirt, the covering, and the coffin were completely bloody; that the old nails on his hands and feet, along with the skin, had fallen off, and that new ones had grown. And since they saw from this that he was a true vampire, they drove a stake through his heart—according to their custom—whereupon he gave an audible groan and bled copiously. Thereupon they burned the body to ashes the same day and threw these into the grave. . . . these same people also say that all those who have been tormented and killed by vampires must themselves become vampires.
Signed: L.S. Johannes Fluchinger, Regimental Medical Officer of the Foot Regiment of the Honorable B. Furstenbusch.
L.S. J. H. Siegel, Medical Officer of the Honorable Morall Regiment.
L.S. Johann Friedrich Baumgarten, Medical Officer of the Foot Regiment of the Honorable B. Furstenbusch.
As we study this strange account, an obvious temptation is to dismiss it as peasant superstition. Yet this is no secondhand tale of absurd horrors; the three doctors were officers in the army of Charles VI, Emperor of Austria. Although some critics explain away the details of the case as ignorance about the process of decomposition, these doctors were thoroughly familiar with corpses, having fought the Turks from 1714 to 1718.
Do the spirits of the dead leave their graves to kill the living? In eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, the answer wold be yes. This era saw a rise in the belief in vampires, not just among superstitious peasants but also highly educated doctors, such as those who examined the corpse of Arnold Paole.
A brief sketch of the historical background may clarify the emergence of vampires in the first half of the eighteenth century. For more than 400 years, the Turks had dominated Eastern Europe, marching in and out of Transylvania, Wallachia, and Hungary, and even conquering Constantinople in 1453. Don John of Austria defeated them at the great sea battle of Lepanto (1571), but it was their failure to capture Vienna after a siege in 1683 that caused the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Four hundred and twenty years later, in 1897, Bram Stoker immortalized Vlad the Impaler as the sinister Count Dracula, no longer a sadistic maniac but a drinker of blood.
A fifteenth-century woodcut, above, depicts Vlad the Impaler enjoying a feast in the midst of a “forest” of impaled bodies. Although Bram Stoker took Vlad’s name for his vampire character, he made his character far less brutal. He lived in a crumbling ruin of a castle and slept in a coffin, but Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula in the 1931 film version of Stoker’s novel, Dracula, at left, was sophisticated—even seductive—a far cry from the monstrous killers of historical accounts of vampires.
Twenty years after the Turks left Eastern Europe, gruesome tales of disinterments astonished Western Europe. Still more alarming, many of the accounts were firsthand.
The official account of what happened when respected townspeople of the Serbian village of Kisilova, Serbia, exhumed the body of suspected vampire Peter Plogojowitz dates from 1725. An official reported:
After a subject by the name of Peter Plogojowitz had died, 10 weeks past—he lived in the village of Kisilova, in the Rahm district [of Serbia]—and had been buried according to the Raetzian custom, it was revealed that in this same village of Kisilova, within a week, nine people, both young and old, died also, after suffering a 24-hour illness. And they said publicly, while they were yet alive, but on their deathbed, that the above-mentioned Peter Plogojowitz, who had died 10 weeks earlier, had come to them in their sleep, laid himself on them, and throttled them, so that they would have to give up the ghost.
I went to the village of Kisilova . . . and viewed the body of Peter Plogojowitz, just exhumed, finding that I did not detect the slightest odor that is otherwise characteristic of the dead, and the body—except for the nose, which was somehow sunken—was completely fresh. The hair and the beard—even the nails, of which the old ones had fallen away—had grown on him; the old skin, which was somewhat whitish, had peeled away, and a new fresh one had emerged under it. The face, hands, and feet, and the whole body, could not have been more complete in his lifetime. Not without astonishment, I saw some fresh blood in his mouth, which according to the common observation, he had sucked from the people killed by him. In short, all the indications were present (as remarked above) as such people are supposed to have. All the people sharpened a stake and pierced the heart, and not only did much blood, completely fresh, flow also through his ears and mouth, Finally, according to their usual practice, they burned the aforementioned body, in hoc casu, to ashes.
Signed: Imperial Provisor, Gradisk District
Here again a respectable official vouches for the fact that the corpse looked remarkably fresh and had fresh blood in the mouth.
So it seems clear that the vampire is not a physical body that clambers out of its grave—as in Dracula—but some sort of ghost or spectral “projection.” What the villagers allege is that the body has been taken over by a demonic entity, which attacks the living and somehow drains their vitality—not the Dracula-like vampire who sinks his pointed fangs into the victim’s flesh. The corpse that is the home of the demonic entity then flourishes in the grave and even continues to grow new skin and nails.
According to some stories of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, the vampire’s body, thriving even after death, may have remained in a coffin while its spirit or projection stalked its living victims. A fear of premature burial may have exacerbated the fear of vampires.
On September 21, 1591, a well-to-do shoemaker of Breslau, in Silesia—one account gives his name as Weinrichius—cut his throat with a knife and soon after died from the wound. Because suicide was regarded as a mortal sin, his wife tried to conceal it and announced that her husband had died of a stroke. She admitted the truth to one old woman, who washed the body and bound up the throat so skillfully that the wound was invisible. A priest who came to comfort the widow was taken to view the corpse and noticed nothing suspicious. They buried the shoemaker on the following day, September 22.
Perhaps because of this unseemly haste and the refusal of the wife to allow neighbors to view the body, a rumor sprang up that the shoemaker had committed suicide. After this, townspeople began to see his ghost in the town. Soon it was climbing into bed with people and squeezing them so hard that it left the marks of its fingers on their flesh. This finally became such a nuisance that in the year following the burial, on April 18, 1592, the council ordered the grave opened. The body was complete and undamaged by decay but “blown up like a drum.” The skin had peeled away from the feet, and another layer had grown, “much purer and stronger than the first.” He had a “mole like a rose” on his big toe—which was interpreted as a witch’s mark—and there was no smell of decay, except in the shroud itself. Even the wound in the throat was undecayed. The corpse was laid under a gallows, but the ghost continued to appear. By May 7 it had grown “much fuller of flesh.” Finally the council ordered that the corpse be beheaded and dismembered. When the body was opened up, the heart was found to be “as good as that of a freshly slaughtered calf.” Finally, the city folk burned the body on a huge bonfire of wood and pitch and threw the ashes into the river. After this, the ghost ceased to appear.
The Gateway to Breslau, now part of Poland. It was in the houses here that the revenant shoemaker of Breslau appeared to his sleeping victims.
There are even earlier accounts of the walking dead. French vampire expert Jean Marigny remarks:
Well before the eighteenth century, the epoch when the word “vampire” first appeared, people believed in Europe that the dead were able to rise from their graves to suck the blood of the living. The oldest chronicles in Latin mention manifestations of this type, and their authors, instead of employing the word vampire (which did not yet exist) utilized a term just as explicit, the word sanguisugae (Latin for “leech,” or “bloodsucker”). The oldest of these chronicles date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and, contrary to what one might expect, are not set in remote parts of Europe, but in England and Scotland.
Marigny goes on to cite four cases described by twelfth-century chronicler William of Newburgh, author of Historic Rerum Anglicarum. The first, “of the extraordinary happening when a dead man wandered abroad out of his grave,” describes a case recounted a local archdeacon described to the chronicler: In Buckinghamshire, a man returned from the grave the night after his burial and attacked his wife. When he attacked again the following night, the wife asked various neighbors to spend the evening with her, and their shouts drove the ghost away. Then the ghost began to create a general disturbance in town, attacking animals and alarming people. That he was a ghost, and not a physical body, is proved by the comment that some people could see him while others could not (although they “perceptibly felt his horrible presence”). The archdeacon consulted the bishop, Hugh of Lincoln, whose learned advisers suggested that the body should be dug up and burned to ashes. Hugh of Lincoln felt this would be “undesirable” and instead wrote out a charter of absolution. When the tomb was opened, the body proved to be “uncorrupt,” just as on the day it was buried. The absolution was placed on his chest and the grave closed again; after that, the ghost ceased to wander abroad.
Odoriferous Ghosts
Another of William of Newburgh’s accounts sounds slightly more like the traditional vampire in that the ghost—of a wealthy man who had died at Berwick on Tweed—gave off an odor of decomposition that affected the air and caused plague. The body was exhumed (it is not recorded whether it was undecayed) and burned.
Smell also gave up the ghost of Alnwick Castle. In this story a dissolute lord in Northumberland spied on his wife’s adultery by lying atop the “roof” that covered her four-poster bed. The sight of his wife and her lover “clipping at clicker” so incensed him that he fell and injured himself, dying a few days later without absolution. He returned as a ghost to haunt the district, his stench causing a plague that killed many people. When the corpse was exhumed, it proved to be “gorged and swollen with a frightful corpulence”; when attacked with a spade, there gushed out such a stream of blood “that they realized that this leech had battened on the blood of many poor folk.” The body was cremated and the haunting ceased.
The Haunted Abbey
A priest, chaplain of a lady of rank, at Melrose Abbey, whose life had been far from blameless, is the center of another tale from William of Newburgh. After his death, his ghost of the chaplain haunted the cloister and appeared in the bedchamber of the lady. Officials finally had the body exhumed and burned.
This and the other cases told by William of Newburgh took place long before Western Europe heard tales of vampires. But the talk of sanguisugae creating a disturbance suggests that they have much in common with poltergeists, or noisy ghosts, which have been widely chronicled down the ages. And the poltergeist is basically a type of earthbound spirit, a dead person who is not aware that he is dead.
Melrose Abbey, burial place—and haunting grounds—of a thirteenth-century priest
(1520–1630)
Do werewolves exist? Here, as in the case of its celebrated cousin the vampire, we have many impressive accounts that attest to their existence.
In the 110 years between 1520 and 1630, there are no fewer than 30,000 reports of lycanthropy (lycos means “wolf,” anthropos means “man”) in central France alone, where they were called loups-garous. There are also reports from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Russia, Spain, and Sweden, so it is difficult to dismiss the belief in werewolves, as Rossell Hope Robbins does in his Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, as a sign of superstition or madness.
The bloodthirsty lycanthrope
Pierre Gandillon
A typical case is that of Benoit Bidel who lived at Naizan in the Jura region of France In 1598 the 16-year-old Bidel was found dying from a stab wound. He claimed that he had climbed a tree to pick fruit when a wolf attacked his sister, who was down below. Bidel tried to fight off the wolf with a knife, but he claimed that the wolf snatched the knife from him—with human hands—and stabbed him. The boy then died. A search was made of the area and a girl named Pernette Gandillon was found. Deciding that she might be the werewolf, the townspeople killed her. Then someone remembered that her brother Pierre was scarred with scratches; he was arrested, together with his other sister, Antoinette, and his son, Georges. All three confessed to being werewolves. Judge Henri Boguet, author of Discourse on Sorcerers, visited the Gandillons in jail and said that they ran around on all fours. They confessed that they had turned themselves into wolves with the aid of a witch’s salve, and that they had attended “sabbats.” All three were sentenced to death and burned.
The forest primeval of Jura, France, where young Benoit Bidel and his sister were attacked by a werewolf
Rossell Hope Robbins takes the commonsense view that all three Gandillons were insane. But Nevill Drury and Stephen Skinner suggest an interesting possibility in The Search for Abraxas (1971). Discussing Carlos Castaneda and his Don Juan books, they note that Castaneda described how the “sorcerer” Don Juan had taught him to make a paste of the root of the datura plant, also called devil’s weed, and how, when he rubbed it on his body, he felt he was flying at great speed through the air. Is it possible, ask the authors, that the witches’ salves of past centuries were made of a similar substance that produced a similar hallucination? (In fact, Lord Lytton had already made such a suggestion in his occult novel A Strange Story.) Of course much of Castaneda’s work has been discredited after astute critics noticed that his books were full of factual contradictions, especially regarding dates; yet this particular suggestion remains plausible.
Could devil’s weed (Datura stramonium)—which has strong narcotic and potentially fatal effects—be the source of lycanthropic madness?
The Witchcraft Connection
In studying the reports of werewolves, one thing becomes clear: the beast was very closely bound up with witchcraft. The Gandillon family, whether they were insane or not, believed that they had attended witches’ sabbaths and that they could turn themselves into wolves by means of a salve. They believed that their powers came ultimately from the Devil. It is interesting to note that Pierre Gandillon fell into a trance on Maundy Thursday (a Christian holy day celebrating the Last Supper). When he had recovered, Gandillon claimed he had attended a sabbath of werewolves. He believed, then, that he attended these sabbaths in the spirit, rather than in the flesh, a belief that ties in with theories of astral bodies. Indeed, according to the nineteenth-century French magician Eliphas Levi, a werewolf is simply the astral body of the sorcerer projected into the shape of a wolf.
This 1508 German woodcut depicts a witches’ sabbath, or sabbat. During the nocturnal gathering, the attendants allegedly rode goats and consumed a stew of human flesh.
It is undoubtedly true that many so-called werewolves were people who suffered from delusions. In 1603 a teenage boy named Jean Grenier claimed to some girls that he was a werewolf; when he was arrested, he implicated his father and a neighbor. In fact children had been attacked in the area. But the parliament of Bordeaux accepted the father’s explanation that his son was an imbecile; Jean was placed in custody in a monastery, where he died a few years later.
Peter Stubbe: The Werewolf of Cologne
In other cases the explanation may be less simple. In the late sixteenth century the case of a werewolf named Peter Stubbe caused a great stir all over Europe. There had been many wolf attacks in the Cologne area. After a wolf attacked a group of children, nearly tearing the throat out of one of them, a hunt was organized. The wolf vanished, but the hunters found a man—Peter Stubbe—walking toward Cologne in the area where the wolf had apparently vanished. Under torture Stubbe confessed. He claimed that he was a witch and that the Devil had given him a magic belt (which was never found) that enabled him to transform into a werewolf. He admitted to incest with his sister and daughter, with whom he had had a child. He claimed that he had killed many children, as well as large numbers of sheep, lambs, and goats, over a period of 25 years. After his confession, authorities tortured and decapitated him.
Even by the violent standards of his day, Stubbe’s execution was excessively brutal. His condemners tied him to a wheel, and then, wielding red-hot pincers, they tore flesh from 10 places on his body. Next they tore flesh from his arms and legs. They then hammered him with the blunt side of an axe head until his limbs broke—this would prevent him from returning from the grave. Stubbe was finally beheaded and his body burned on a pyre. His severed head was then displayed as part of a grotesque tableau. Authorities ordered a pole be erected with Stubbe’s head placed upon a wolf figure, which stood on the torture wheel.
Executioners also strangled and burned Stubbe’s daughter and sister.
A contemporary woodcut shows the execution of Peter Stubbe in 1589 near Cologne. It shows the sequence of punishment from the tearing of flesh, to the placing of his severed head atop a pole.
Actual Transformation?
Could an obsession with shape-shifting and wolves cause actual physical changes? William Seabrook has a remarkable description of how a Russian émigré woman meditated on hexagram 49 from the I Ching, whose meaning is associated with an animal’s fur and with molting. She imagined herself to be a wolf in the snow, then began to make baying noises and slaver at the mouth. When one of the witnesses attempted to wake her up, she leapt at his throat and tried to bite it.
Sex often lies at the heart of stories of witchcraft. In 1662 a Scottish farmer’s wife, Isobel Gowdie, startled and shocked the elders of the neighboring church in Auldearne (near Inverness) when she suddenly confessed that for 16 years she had been a witch, attended sabbaths, and had sexual intercourse with the Devil. A pretty, redheaded girl at the time of her marriage, she had obviously become increasingly disillusioned with her husband, who is said to have been stupid and boorish. Gowdie said that she left a broomstick in bed beside him when she attended covens (she was the first to use the word). Witches, she said, had the power to change themselves into animals or birds—a cat, a hare, a crow—or a wolf.
The Gray Devil
According to Gowdie—who made four confessions between April and her trial—she encountered the Devil, a man dressed in gray, when she was traveling between two farms. She promised herself to him and agreed to meet him at the church in Auldearne. There a woman called Margaret Brodie held her while the Devil sucked blood from her shoulder, making a Devil’s mark, and baptized her. She described the Devil as a big, black, hairy man, who came to her a few days later and copulated with her. He would copulate freely with all the female witches of the coven, who thoroughly enjoyed it.
Sometimes the Devil changed himself into an animal, such as a deer or bull or goat, before he copulated. His sperm, she said, was freezing cold.
The odd thing about the Gowdie case is that no one had accused her of witchcraft; she had no reason to come forward and confess. Even stranger, women she mentioned often confirmed what she said in detail.
A fifteenth-century illustration of a witches’ sabbath shows several practitioners of witchcraft paying homage to a horned goat. The goat is often associated with satanic rituals. The reason may come directly from Matthew 25:33, which describes the judgment: “And before him shall be gathered all nations; and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.”
Gilles Garnier, executed as a werewolf in 1574, seems to have attacked children while assuming either the shape of a man or a wolf. The charge, drawn up at Dole, alleged that he had seized a 12-year-old girl and killed her in a vineyard with his hands and teeth, and then, with his teeth, dragged her along the ground into the wood at La Serre, where he ate most of her. He so enjoyed it that he took pieces of the girl’s body home to his wife.
Garnier also killed a 12-year-old boy in a wood and was about to eat the flesh (“although it was a Friday”) when some men interrupted him. They testified that he was in human form—a fact that Garnier did not dispute. But he insisted that he was in the shape of a wolf when he strangled the boy and, with his fangs, tore off the child’s leg.
Garnier also attacked a 10-year-old girl—again wearing his wolf shape—but was forced to flee when interrupted; she died of her wounds. On this occasion, the peasants who interrupted Garnier saw him as a wolf, but nevertheless thought that they recognized Garnier’s face. He was sentenced to be burned alive.
Some people accused as werewolves were reported to assume the posture—but not always the physical characteristics—of wolves when they committed their grisly deeds.
The Witch Trials
One possible explanation for Stubbe and Garnier is that they confessed to a great deal of nonsense under torture. But it is surely more significant that the great majority of werewolf reports date from the same period as the witchcraft trials in Europe and that many “werewolves,” like the Gandillons, confessed to being witches. A study of witchcraft trials leaves little doubt that the majority of cases were miscarriages of justice.
In cases of vampirism, it seems a reasonable assumption that the vampire is a so-called “hungry ghost” or earthbound spirit; in cases of lycanthropy, it seems clear that individuals with a taste for sorcery or witchcraft attempted to invoke spirits in order to change into a wolf. In effect, such individuals were inviting the spirits to possess them.
And, as in the case of vampirism, there seem to be powerful sexual undertones in many werewolf legends. Many modern sex killers—for example, the child murderer Albert Fish and the necrophile Ed Gein—have behaved very much like the traditional idea of the werewolf.
But could invocations cause actual physical changes? In the Gandillon case, the 16-year-old victim, Benoit Bidel, said that the wolf had human hands; in the Garnier case, Garnier confessed to strangling a young boy. And peasants who interrupted Garnier as he was attacking a 10-year-old girl said they thought they recognized his face. It certainly sounds as if the “wolf” remained in many respects human—rather like the upright beast into which Lon Chaney is transformed in the film The Wolf Man.
Transforming Possession
In his classic work Man into Wolf, the Jungian psychologist Robert Eisler suggests that early humans had to transform from herbivorous apes into carnivores struggling for supremacy with other carnivores, and that in the course of this battle, humans deliberately acquired something of the ferocity of wild animals. Some serial killers, such as the Yorkshire Ripper, have believed themselves possessed by the Devil. Isn’t it possible that lycanthropy, like vampirism, should be understood as a special case of ferocious demonic possession?
Poltergeists and Possession by the Dead
(1660–present)
The poltergeist, or “noisy ghost,” is one of the most baffling phenomena in the realm of the paranormal. Poltergeists cause objects to fly through the air, doors to open and close, pools of water to appear from nowhere, and more. And they are by no means a rarity; at this very moment some case of poltergeist activity is probably going on within a dozen miles of you.
One of the earliest known cases was recorded in a chronicle called the Annales Fuldenses and dates to 858 CE. The disturbance took place in a farmhouse at Bingen, on the Rhine River; the chronicle describes an “evil spirit” that threw stones and made the walls shake as if men were striking them with hammers. Stone throwing is one of the most typical of poltergeist activities. The poltergeist also caused fires—another favorite activity.
A spirit keeps a watchful eye.
The Adolescent Link
It was only after the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 that the poltergeist was carefully studied. Researchers observed that in the majority of cases there were adolescent children present in the houses where such occurrences took place; it seemed a reasonable assumption that the children were somehow the “cause” of the outbreak. And in the age of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the famous psychoanalyst, the most widely held theory was that the poltergeist is some kind of “unconscious” manifestation of adolescent sexual energies; but no one has offered a theory as to how this occurs.
A researcher observes a subject during an experiment with levitation at the Society for Psychical Research near the turn of the twentieth century. The society is still a thriving organization.
In England one of the most spectacular cases is also one of the earliest to be thoroughly recorded: the so-called phantom drummer of Tedworth. It took place in the home of a magistrate named John Mompesson in March 1661. Trouble started when the whole household was kept awake all night by loud drumming noises.
Soon before this, Mompesson arrested a vagrant named William Drury, who attracted attention in the street by beating a drum. Mompesson confiscated the drum, despite Drury’s appeals. Drury escaped from custody—he was being held for possessing forged papers—without his drum. It was after this that the disturbances in Mompesson’s household began. They continued for two years. The “spirit” also slammed doors, made panting noises like a dog, scratching noises like huge rats, and purring noises like a cat. It also developed a voice and shouted, “A witch, a witch!” It emptied ashes and chamber pots into the children’s beds, and caused various objects to fly through the air. In 1663 Drury, imprisoned again for stealing a pig, admitted to a visitor that he was responsible for the disturbances, and said they would continue until Mompesson gave him satisfaction for taking away his drum. But the phenomena finally faded away.
The Cock Lane Ghost
The famous poltergeist case known as the Cock Lane ghost ended with an innocent man going to prison for two years. The focus of the Cock Lane disturbances was 10-year-old Elizabeth Parsons, daughter of a clerk named Richard Parsons. The Parsons family had two lodgers: William Kent, a retired innkeeper, and his common-law wife, Fanny Lynes, whose sister Elizabeth had been Kent’s previous wife.
One night when Kent was away Fanny asked Elizabeth to sleep with her to keep her company. During the night scratching and rapping noises from behind the wainscot kept the woman and child awake. Soon after this Fanny died of smallpox, and Kent moved elsewhere. But the strange rappings continued, and a clergyman named Moore tried to communicate with the spirit using a code of one rap for “yes,” two for “no.” By this means the spirit identified itself as Fanny Lynes and accused her ex-husband of poisoning her with arsenic.
Cock Lane, London, 1760
Parsons was unfortunately unaware that poltergeists tell lies more often than not. Nor was he displeased to hear that Kent was a murderer, for he was nursing a grudge against him. Kent had lent Parsons money, which Parsons had failed to repay, and was now suing him. So Parsons overlooked the fact that the knockings began before the death of Fanny Lynes and made no attempt to keep the revelations secret.
When Kent heard that he was being accused of murder by a spirit, he went back to the house in Cock Lane to hear it for himself. When the raps again accused him of murder, he shouted angrily, “Thou art a lying spirit!”
A committee, which included famed author Dr. Samuel Johnson, came to investigate. The spirit preferred to remain silent, convincing Johnson that it was a fraud. Kent then decided to prosecute for libel. The burden of proof lay with Elizabeth’s father, who was for legal purposes the accuser. Elizabeth was told that if the ghost did not manifest itself her mother and father would be thrown into prison, and so, naturally, she made sure something happened. But servants peering through a crack saw her making the raps with a wooden board. She was denounced as a trickster, and after a trial, Parsons was sentenced to two years in prison. The populace proved distinctly sympathetic, even taking up a collection for him while he suffered in the pillory.
America’s most famous poltergeist case occurred on the farm of John Bell, a Tennessee pioneer who had built a fine log house for himself and his growing family in Robertson County, settling in the Red River community, which is today called Adams, Tennessee. By 1817, the year the haunting began, John and his wife, Lucy, had nine children. For three years, the Bell family lived in torment and fear, haunted by a malevolent spirit. The case of the Bell Witch, as the story came to be known, is unusual—in fact, unique—in that the poltergeist caused the death of its victim.
Although the Bells razed the original log house in which the Bell Witch hauntings occurred, one of the plantation’s original log structures still stands in Adams, Tennessee. It was used as an outbuilding.
The Bell Witch
The disturbances began in 1817, when John encountered a strange-looking animal in his cornfield. The creature, which had the head of a rabbit and the body of a dog, disappeared after John took a few shots at it. But that evening Bell and his family began hearing beating noises on the outside walls of their log house. Although no source could be found, the beating and thumping noises grew more frequent and increased their intensity. Then they were joined by knocks coming from the walls.
Soon invisible hands began pulling bedclothes off the beds; choking noises came from a human throat. Stones were thrown. The spirit frequently targeted Betsy, the younger of the two Bell daughters, slapping her and pulling her hair. After about a year the ghost developed a voice—a strange asthmatic croak. (Poltergeists sound like humans talking mechanically—it is as if the entity has to use an unfamiliar medium.) After such manifestations Betsy was usually exhausted—she seemed to be the source of the poltergeist’s energy.
A sign in Robertson County introduces visitors to the Bell Witch.
Killer Kate
Although almost every member of the Bell family suffered from the sinister spirit’s visitation, John Bell came under particular attack. The same year that the hauntings began, he developed a strange ailment; his jaw stiffened and his tongue swelled. The poltergeist, which had now developed a normal voice, identified itself first as an Indian and then as a witch named Old Kate Batts. Kate, as the Bell Witch is most often known, declared that she would torment John until he died, which she then proceeded to do. She pulled off his shoes, hit him in the face, and caused violent physical convulsions. All this continued until one day he was found in his bed in a deep stupor. The witch claimed that she had given him a dose of a medicine that would kill him. And when Bell did in fact die, on December 20, 1820, the witch filled the house with shrieks of triumph.
After John’s funeral, the disturbances all but ceased. But Kate made another appearance in April 1821, to visit John’s widow, Lucy, and promised that she would visit again in seven years. In 1828 Kate was back for a three-week visit. Before she left she made an oath to visit Lucy’s descendants in 107 years time. Although Dr. Charles Bailey Bell of Nashville, the closest living direct descendant of John Bell in the year 1935, had published a book about the Bell Witch the year before the promised visitation, Kate was never heard from again.
The death of John Bell
A series of poltergeist disturbances started the extraordinary nineteenth-century craze known as Spiritualism. The first began with typical knocking noises in the home of the Fox family in Hydesville, New York, in 1848. Two daughters—Margaret, 15, and Kate, 12—were obviously the focus. A neighbor who questioned the spirit (using the usual code: one knock for “yes,” two for “no”) was told that the spirit was a peddler who had been murdered in the house. (Many years later, human bones and a peddler’s box were found buried in the cellar.) The notoriety of the case caused many Americans to take up Spiritualism. Participants in séances would sit around a table in the dark with clasped hands and ask for spirits to manifest themselves. The Hydesville spirit finally delivered a message and sparked a new era in spirit communication. Spiritualism swept across the United States, then across Europe. Even Queen Victoria took it up.
The Fox sisters. From left: Margaret, Kate, and Leah. Forty years after the sisters gained fame as mediums, Margaret would confess that they were frauds. But during the early 1850s their public séances drew a wide audience, including such notables as Sojourner Truth, James Fenimore Cooper, and Horace Greeley,
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, shown above with five of their nine children in 1846, found Spiritualism fascinating. They are said to have even participated in séances.
In the mid-1800s many religious leaders equated Spiritualism with witchcraft.
In the early 1850s a French educator named Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail became caught up in the new Spiritualist craze, particularly spirit rapping. As it turned out, two daughters of a friend of his proved to be proficient in another method of spirit communication, automatic writing. With this method a person “automatically” writes messages that are supposedly coming directly from a spirit. Rivail asked the spirits all kinds of questions and received unusually constructive and serious answers. In due course Rivail published these as The Spirits’ Book, under the pseudonym Allan Kardec, which became for a while a kind of bible of Spiritualism, although there was later a split within the movement. Eventually many influential Spiritualists came to reject Kardec’s belief in reincarnation.
Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, better known as Allan Kardec
Allan Kardec
In 1860 a series of violent disturbances—the usual window smashing and furniture throwing of poltergeist hauntings—occurred in a house in the Rue des Noyers, Paris. When Kardec visited the house to investigate the event, he asked to speak to the spirit responsible, and an entity that claimed to be a junk dealer declared that it had used the “electrical energy” of a servant girl in the house to cause the disturbances. The girl, it said, was quite unaware of this—in fact, she was the most terrified of them all. The spirit had been doing these things merely to amuse itself.
Kardec was convinced that poltergeists were “earthbound spirits,” dead people who for various reasons have been unable to advance beyond the purely material plane. Kardec insisted that most human beings can be unconsciously influenced by spirits, because they can wander freely in and out of our bodies and minds. Psychical investigator Carl Wickland, whose Thirty Years Among the Dead is a classic, declared that “these earthbound spirits are the supposed devils of all ages; devils of human origin. The influence of these discarnate entities is the cause of many of the inexplicable and obscure events of Earth life and of a large part of the world’s misery.” Wickland states that these entities are attracted to the magnetic light emanating from mortals; they attach themselves to these auras, finding an avenue of expression through influencing, obsessing, or possessing their victims.
Allan Kardec’s grave in Paris draws Spiritualists from all around the world.
Making Contact
Many people believe that poltergeist and earthbound spirits can easily be contacted by means of a Ouija board, a smooth tabletop with letters arranged in a semicircle. Participants place their fingers on an upturned glass, which moves of its own accord from letter to letter, spelling words. But beware—anyone who has ever tried it will have noticed that the spirits seldom tell the truth.
(1863–1939)
Borley Rectory in Suffolk, has become known as “The Most Haunted House in England.” Constructed in 1862 by the Rev. Henry D. E. Bull, the rambling Victorian-era brick rectory replaced a Georgian built by Bull’s predecessor, which itself stood on the grounds of an earlier structure (although the legend that a Benedictine abbey occupied the site proved to be groundless). The house was a quiet one, except for the taps of a few unexplained footsteps a year after it was built, until 1900. That summer the four daughters of the current rector saw what they thought was the ghost of a nun about 40 yards from the house. It was the first sighting in what became nearly 40 years of hauntings.
The Rev. Harry Bull
Ghostly Tenants
After the Rev. Henry Bull’s death in 1892, his son, the Reverend Harry Bull, had taken over his father’s duties. The younger Bull was interested in psychical research and claimed that he saw many ghosts in the building. His daughter claimed that Bull had seen a phantom coach and that one day in the garden, the family dog had howled with terror while looking toward a pair of legs visible under a fruit tree. Bull assumed that the person was a poacher and followed the legs as they walked toward a postern gate. At that point Bull realized that the “poacher” was incomplete: the legs—which were attached to no body—disappeared through the gate without opening it.
Rev. Harry Bull and his daughters on the rectory lawn
Smith Moves In
Harry Bull died in 1927, and the rectory was empty until 1928, when the Rev. Guy Smith and his wife moved in.
One stormy night, Smith was disturbed by the furious ringing of his doorbell; when he got to the door, no one was there. Later the bell rang again—a peal so prolonged that Smith reached the door before it stopped—again, there was no one. Then the Smiths began hearing slippered footsteps and the sound of small pebbles being thrown. Lights switched on. One day Mrs. Smith saw a horse-drawn coach in the drive. Mr. Smith heard a voice whisper, “Don’t, Carlos, don’t,” as he walked into the chapel. The Smiths decided to contact the Daily Mirror newspaper, which asked famed British ghost hunter Harry Price to investigate. The Smiths told Price their story and gave him every facility. But within nine months, they had had enough of the place—perhaps because its plumbing left much to be desired—and moved to Norfolk.
At right, the Daily Mirror from July 10, 1929. Above, Rev. Smith and reporter V. C. Wall inspect the summerhouse after Smith reported the “ghost” to the newspaper.
Marianne Foyster
New Tenants, New Specters
In October 1930 the Reverend L. A. Foyster, and his much younger wife, Marianne, took over the rectory. The Foyster incumbency saw the most spectacular exhibitions of the Borley poltergeist. Foyster kept a diary of the disturbances. Bells were rung, bricks thrown, footsteps heard, and water poured onto the couple when they were in bed. Foyster was even awakened by a violent blow on the head from his own hairbrush. The two saw a number of apparitions, including a nun and a clergyman, who was identified as the Rev. Henry Bull, the builder of the rectory. Writing appeared on the walls, asking for a mass to be said, and asking for “light.”
There is much independent confirmation of all these events. Guy L’Estrange, a justice of the peace visited Borley at the invitation of the Foysters and wrote a lengthy account of his stay. The Foysters were telling L’Estrange about mysterious fires that kept breaking out in locked rooms when there was a loud crash in the hall. When the three went to investigate, they found it littered with broken crockery. Then bottles began flying about. L’Estrange notes that they seemed to appear suddenly in midair, although they had to come from a locked storage shed outside. All the bells began to ring, making a deafening clamor—yet all of the bell wires had been cut. L’Estrange shouted: “If some invisible person is present, please stop ringing for a moment.” Instantly the bells stopped—stopped dead, as if each clapper had been grabbed by an unseen hand.
In bed L’Estrange felt the room’s temperature drop to icy cold and saw a shape materializing from a patch of luminosity. He walked toward it, and thought he felt something trying to push him back. He spoke to it, and it slowly vanished. In 1935, the Foysters decided they had had enough, and moved from the rectory.
The stairway in the main hall of the rectory, where more than one mysterious manifestation took place
The Haunted Rectory Burns
Harry Price rented the rectory in 1937 and arranged for a team of investigators to visit the house. But the major phenomena had ceased. Even so the chief investigator, Sidney Glanville, a retired engineer, became completely convinced of the reality of the haunting.
In March 1938 the team was experimenting with a planchette—a small heart-shaped or triangular board on castors that, when touched lightly with the fingers, produces messages. The board produced a message that fire would destroy Borley. And it did just that, reducing the rectory to ruins in February 1939. Yet the phenomena continued. A Cambridge team investigating the ruins heard footsteps, saw patches of light, and recorded sudden sharp drops in temperature.
In August 1943, Price decided to try digging in the cellars at Borley—which a planchette message had advised. He found a cream jug, which had also been referred to by the planchette, and some fragments of a human skull. The jawbone showed signs of a deep-seated abscess—investigator Peter Underwood speculates that this is why the phantom nun always looked miserable.
Borley, falling into ruins after the disastrous fire
Patience Worth: The Ghost Who Wrote Novels
(1913–1939)
On August 1, 1912, Emily Grant Hutchings and Pearl Lenore Curran, both of whom were married to successful businessmen, spent the afternoon at another friend’s home in Saint Louis, Missouri. Hutchings had just bought a ouija board and expressed her interest in trying to “contact the spirits.” Curran thought it was all a waste of time. And on that first August afternoon she was right: the ouija board planchette, or pointer, spelled a few recognizable words, but it was mostly nonsense.
But Emily and Pearl tried again—and again. And finally, on June 22, 1913, the planchette guided them to spell out the word “pat” several times and then wrote not just words, but a poem.
Pearl Curran
A Quaker Poet
The ouija board spelled out the following message from the unknown spirit:
Oh, why let sorrow steel thy heart?
Thy bosom is but its foster-mother,
The world its cradle and the loving home its grave.
Six days later, the board revealed the spirit’s identity: “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come, Patience Worth my name.”
Eventually Patience explained that she was a Quaker girl, born in 1649 or 1694 (the board had dictated both) in Dorset, England. She had worked hard—apparently on a farm—until her family emigrated to the Americas. Shortly afterward, she was killed by Indians.
Placing the fingertips lightly on a planchette allows spirits to spell out messages on a ouija board.
Foretelling the Future
Just before Christmas, Patience displayed an interesting ability to predict the future. Emily asked her what Pearl intended to give her for Christmas and Patience replied “Fifteen pieces, and one cracked.” In fact Curran had ordered a set of kitchen jars for her friend, and when they were delivered the next day, one of the 15 was cracked.
During the next couple of years, Curran, who had gone from a skeptic to a believer, seemed to forge a strong bond with Patience. She claimed to visualize the long-dead woman, who seemed to be about 30 years old. Curran could see her in almost picture-book images, saying, “her hair was dark red, mahogany, her eyes brown, and large and deep, her mouth firm and set, as though repressing strong feelings.”
In 1915 Patience became something of a celebrity when Caspar Yost, editor of the Sunday supplement of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, wrote a series of articles about her. Those pieces caused a sensation, and Yost later wrote a book.
By now Pearl, through channeling the spirit of Patience, had embarked upon writing Red Wing, a six-act medieval play, and a 60,000-word medieval novel, Telka. But “Patience” was a disappointing writer, so long-winded as to be almost unreadable.
In June 1917 Henry Holt published Patience’s vast pseudo-Biblical epic The Sorry Tale. Again, many papers were ecstatic, which is curious, as the writing is atrocious and often illiterate, with phrases such as “The temples stood whited and the market place skewed emptied.”
Patience’s book
Patience Worth Wee
One of the most bizarre episodes in the entire story of Patience Worth began in August 1916. The Currans were told “ye shall seek a one, a wee bit, one who hath not;” and then, “Aye, this be close, close.”
Soon it became clear what Patience meant: the Currans, who did not have children, should adopt a baby and that this baby would be, in some sense, Patience’s own daughter.
A pregnant widow was located; her husband had been killed in a mill accident, and she agreed to relinquish her unborn child to the Currans. Patience seemed quite certain it would be a daughter, and so it was. And on Patience’s instructions the child was named Patience Worth Wee Curran.
Who Was Patience?
For those who are willing to accept the possibility of life after death, the most convincing explanation is certainly that Patience was a “spirit.” But if Patience was a spirit, then it was probably of a frustrated would-be writer with a strong tendency to mythomania.
Enough Is Enough
By 1918 there were signs that the Patience fad had run its course. In the Atlantic Monthly that August a writer, Agnes Repplier, expressed dismay that Patience—who was already dead—could be on the literary scene forever. Of Patience’s books, Miss Repplier said tartly, “they were as silly as they were dull.” Most people now agreed.
John Curran, whose health had begun to fail, died in June 1922. Pearl, who was now 39 years old, was pregnant with their first child; a girl was born six months later. Pearl now had a family to support on a dwindling income. It was at this point that a New York admirer, Herman Behr, came to the rescue: he not only made her an allowance of $400 a month but also paid for the publication of Patience’s poems, which appeared under the title Light From Beyond.
But in the age of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos, the ramblings of Patience Worth now seemed irrelevant.
Curran would marry twice more. In November 1937 she announced to her old friend Dotsie Smith that “Patience has just shown me the end of the road, and you will have to carry on as best you can.” Pearl seemed to be in excellent health; but on Thanksgiving Day she caught a cold, and on December 3, 1937, she died of pneumonia in a Los Angeles hospital. Patience Wee, who by the age of 27 had been twice married, also died suddenly, in 1943, after the diagnosis of a mild heart ailment.
The classic ouija board
Fairies: Are the “Little People” Just a Fairy Tale?
(1917)
In the summer of 1897 the poet W. B. Yeats traveled to Coole Park, in Galway, with Lady Augusta Gregory, who was to become his close friend and patroness. The two of them began collecting fairy stories from the local peasantry. Yeats had already compiled two collections of Irish myths and fairy tales based on interviews of peasants in his home county of Sligo. But during this visit he came to realize that the majority of Irish country folk accepted the existence of fairies, not as some kind of half-believed superstition, but as a concrete fact of life.
Life of a fairy
The Fairy Faith
Yeats’s father was a skeptic, and yet Yeats himself had been inclined to toy with a belief in fairies as a kind of reaction to the materialism of the modern world. His collaboration with Lady Gregory made him aware that belief in fairies could hardly be dismissed as wishful thinking.
A few years later Yeats encouraged Orientalist W. Y. Evans Wentz to study the folklore of the fairies; the result was Wentz’s first book, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), a bulky and scholarly volume based upon his own extensive fieldwork. In it Wentz concluded that the factual and scientific evidence for the existence of fairies is overwhelming and that “there are hundreds of proven cases of phenomena.”
William Butler Yeats, right, had an abiding interest in Irish folktales and the occult. In his early life, encouraged by his patroness, Lady Augusta Gregory, he expressed a belief in the existence of fairies.
In 1920 the front cover of the Christmas issue of the Strand Magazine announced “Fairies Photographed—An Epoch Making Event Described by A. Conan Doyle.” Facing the opening page of the article was a photograph of two teenaged girls, sitting in a grassy field gazing at a group of four cavorting fairies, complete with gossamer wings.
It was not a seasonal joke. Doyle and his fellow investigators were convinced that the photographs virtually proved the existence of “the little people.” The resulting controversy was to remain unsettled for the next 60 years.
The two girls, Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths, lived in the village of Cottingley, in Yorkshire. They had taken the photographs three and a half years earlier, in the summer of 1917, and had consistently claimed that the photographs were of real fairies.
Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright took a series of photos of each other posing with local “fairies.” They produced five images: Frances with dancing fairies (at right), Elsie shaking hands with a gnome, two show each girl with a single fairy, and the last shows two fairies dancing.
A Fairy Haunt
In 1917, Cottingley, near Bradford, was surrounded by green English countryside. In April of that year 10-year-old Frances Griffiths had moved to the village with her mother, Annie, who was from South Africa. Frances later claimed that she soon realized that there were fairies in the fields around her home, especially near the local beck (stream) that ran down a steep-sided dell at the bottom of her garden:
One evening after school I went down to the beck to a favourite place—the willow overhanging the stream . . . then a willow leaf started shaking violently—just one. I’d seen it happen before—there was no wind, and it was odd that one leaf should shake . . . as I watched, a small man, all dressed in green, stood on the branch with the stem of the leaf in his hand, which he seemed to be shaking at something he was looking at. I daren’t move for fear of frightening him. He looked straight at me and disappeared.
Frances decided not to tell anyone for fear of being laughed at. After she’d fallen into the stream several times, her mother and aunt pressed hard for an explanation. It was then that Frances admitted, “I go to see the fairies!”
At this point her cousin, 15-year-old Elsie Wright, came to her defense insisting that she too had seen fairies. No amount of questioning could shake the girls’ story.
An obliging “fairy” perches long enough to pose with Elsie.
On a Saturday afternoon in July 1917, Elsie asked her father, Arthur Wright, if she could borrow his plate camera. The girls hurried off to the stream and returned within half an hour. As the plate started to develop, Wright realized that it was a picture of Frances leaning on a bank. Near her were tiny human forms with wings growing from their backs; they were apparently four dancing fairies.
The whole affair might have been forgotten if it had not been for the local Theosophical Society. At a meeting after the war, Polly Wright approached the speaker and told him about the photographs. Copies were soon circulating among the Bradford Theosophists. Edward L. Gardner, head of the Theosophist Lodge in London, was excited about the photographs and asked to see the original prints and negatives.
Gardner took them to a professional photographer, Harold Snelling. Snelling examined the four dancing fairies negatives and told Gardner that he believed they were genuine.
Gardner was delighted. In the summer of 1920 he was flattered to receive a letter from the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The 60-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle was not a Theosophist, but in recent years he had become convinced of the truth of Spiritualism. He had already been commissioned by the Strand to write an article on fairies, and the news of the Cottingley photographs must have sounded like a gift from beyond.
Toward the end of July 1920 Edward Gardner visited the Wrights. And although Elsie’s father expressed his opinion that the photographs were fakes, Gardner told Doyle that he was convinced that the girls were genuine.
The Cottingley fairies dance on a bird’s nest
Sensation!
When the magazine was published that Christmas it caused a sensation. The Cottingley fairies were the talk of every London dinner table. But skeptics were outraged at what they regarded as the public’s infantile gullibility.
In due course the debate ran out of steam and for the next 40 years Elsie and Frances were forgotten.
In 1965 Peter Chambers, a Daily Express reporter, tracked down Elsie, then in her 60s, in the Midlands. He believed that the pictures were faked, and Elsie’s comment that people should be left to make up their own minds on the subject only deepened his skepticism.
In 1976 the Yorkshire psychical investigator Joe Cooper organized a television program about the case. Elsie and Frances returned to Cottingley. In the intervening years, Elsie had lived in India with her husband, Frank Hill, a Scottish engineer; Frances had married a soldier, Frank Way, and had spent much time with him abroad.
On camera, Elsie and Frances identified the place where Frances had seen a gnome and flatly denied that they had fabricated the photos.
By the late nineteenth century, the image of fairies as minuscule, winged females was well-established in Anglophone iconography (this is an example from Harper’s Weekly in 1898). Their very familiarity may have helped the girls perpetuate their fairy hoax.
Cottingley’s verdant landscape looks like a likely home for fairies.
New Evidence
The year 1977 brought an interesting development. A researcher named Fred Gettings, who was working on nineteenth-century fairy illustrations, came upon Princess Mary’s Gift Book. The book had been published during World War I to make money for the Work for Women fund. It contained a poem entitled “A Spell for a Fairy” by Alfred Noyes, illustrated by Claude Shepperson. Two of the fairies in the illustration were virtually identical to the fairies in the first Cottingley photograph.
In September 1981 Frances asked Joe Cooper to visit her, telling him that there were “some things he should know.” As they sat in a coffee shop, she dropped her bombshell:
“From where I was, I could see the hat pins holding up the figures. I’ve always marveled that anybody ever took it seriously.”
“Why are you telling me?” asked the flabbergasted investigator. “Because Elsie has already told Glenn [Elsie’s son],” she answered. “What about the other four? Are they fakes?” asked Cooper.
Her answer was, in its way, as astonishing as the original admission: “Three of them. The last one’s genuine.”
Cooper and Elsie then discussed writing a book together, but his publisher felt there would be no interest.
Late in 1982 a magazine called The Unexplained published Cooper’s article “Cottingley: At Last the Truth,” in which he revealed that the fairies in the first four photographs were cut-outs stuck to branches with hat pins. This upset both Frances and Elsie. When Frances called Joe Cooper’s wife on New Year’s Day, 1983, and Joe answered the phone, she called him a traitor and hung up. Frances died in 1986. Elsie died in 1988, maintaining that she had never seen the fairies.
James Randi, stage magician and professional scientific paranormal debunker is one of a long line of skeptics to question the Cottingley fairies. He has pointed out the impossible crispness of the fairies’ wings in comparison to other moving creatures.
Zombies: Evidence for the Walking Dead
(1932 to present)
Ever since Bela Lugosi starred in White Zombie in 1932, zombies have been horror-movie staples, challenging the vampire, mummy, and Frankenstein monster in popularity. These monsters may be popular in film and folklore, but what are they really, and do they actually exist?
Zombies, according to Alfred Metraux’s book, Voodoo (1959), are “people whose decease has been duly recorded and whose burial has been witnessed, but who are found a few years later . . . in a state verging on idiocy.” In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, says Metraux, “there are few, even among the educated, who do not give some credence to these macabre stories.”
Understandably, such tales have met with skepticism outside Haiti.
Night of the Living Dead, 1968
Zombified!
One of the first non-Haitians to record an actual incident of zombiism was the writer and ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston, who trained in the United States under famed anthropologist Franz Boas. In October 1936 a woman was found naked and wandering in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley. Her name was Felicia Felix-Mentor, and she had died and been buried at the age of 29. Hurston visited the woman in the hospital at Gonaives and described her as having “a blank face with dead eyes” and eyelids “white as if they had been burned with acid.”
According to Hurston, people were “zombified” if they betrayed the secrets of the Haitian secret societies. No one believed her; Metraux wrote patronizingly of “Zora Houston [sic], who is very superstitious.” Nevertheless he relays a story about two members of “high society.” After the car of one of them broke down, he was invited to the home of a little white-bearded man—a houngan, or vodoun, or voodoo, priest. Piqued by his guest’s skepticism about a wanga (magical charm), the old man asked him if he had known a certain Monsieur Celestin—who had, in fact, been one of the visitor’s closest friends. Summoned by a whip crack, a man shambled into the room. The visitor, much to his horror, recognized his old friend Celestin, who had died six months earlier. When the zombie reached for the visitor’s glass—obviously thirsty—the houngan stopped him, saying that nothing could be more dangerous than giving or taking something from the hand of a dead man. The houngan told his visitor that Celestin had died from a spell and that the magician who had killed him had sold him to the houngan for $12.
Other stories recounted by Metraux make it clear that he considers zombies to be people who have literally died and then been raised from the dead. Understandably, he rejects this as superstition. In fact, Zora Neale Hurston was correct and Metraux was wrong.
Zora Neale Hurston.
Columbus discovered Haiti in the West Indies in 1492, but it was not until two centuries later that it became a base for pirates and buccaneers. French colonists developed Haiti’s rich sugar trade, using black slaves from Africa. The Spanish ceded Haiti (or Saint-Domingue, as it was called) to the French in 1697.
The slaves were treated with unbelievable cruelty—for example, hanged from trees with nails driven through their ears or smeared with molasses and left to be eaten alive by ants. In spite of the risks of terrible punishments if they were caught, slaves often ran away and hid in the mountains.
In the 1740s a slave named Macandal, who had lost his arm in a sugar press, escaped to the mountains and taught the Maroons (as the runaway slaves were known) to use poison against the slave owners, as well as some colonists and cattle. Macandal was eventually betrayed and sentenced to be burned alive (although, according to legend, he used his magical powers to escape). From then on, secret societies spread revolt among the black slaves. After the great revolts of the 1790s, French authority virtually collapsed, and although it was savagely restored under Napoleon, the emperor was never able to conquer the interior of the island. A series of black emperors ruled until 1859, but the island has alternated between a state of virtual anarchy and harsh authoritarian rule ever since, both of which have nurtured the secret societies.
Zora Neale Hurston asserted that “zombification” was effected by means of a “quick-acting poison.” Her assertion was given further credence in the early 1980s, when a young American anthropologist, Wade Davis, heard rumors that poison from the pufferfish was used to zombify people.
The Haitian Revolution
Brother Zombie
Wade Davis heard about two cases from New York psychiatrist Nathan Kline that seemed to demonstrate that zombification was not a fantasy. In 1962 a Haitian peasant in his 40s, Clairvius Narcisse, was admitted to the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in the Artibonite Valley suffering from fever. He died two days later and was buried the next day. Eighteen years later, in 1980, a man approached Narcisse’s sister Angelina and identified himself as her brother, Clairvius. He said that he’d been “zombified” by order of his brother, with whom he had had a land dispute. Clairvius said that he’d been removed from his grave and taken to work with other zombies. After two years their master was killed and he escaped to wander the country for the next 16 years. It was not until he heard of his brother’s death that he dared to make himself known.
Narcisse’s identity was confirmed, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) made a short film about the case. In the same year, a group of “zombies” was found wandering in northern Haiti, exactly where Narcisse had been forced to work, confirming his story of the escape.
When Davis went to Haiti to investigate, his attention focused on Datura stramonium, known in America as jimsonweed or devil’ trumpet and in Haiti as zombie’s cucumber. He visited Max Beauvoir, an expert on voodoo. He interviewed Clairvius Narcisse and confirmed his story.
Jimsonweed or “zombie’s cucumber” in bloom
A film depiction of a zombie rising from the grave
Davis’s research led him to a highly poisonous toad, the Bufo marinus, and to two varieties of pufferfish, so called because they inflate themselves with water when threatened. Both are full of deadly neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, a fatal dose of which would just cover the head of a pin.
Captain James Cook suffered severely after eating the cooked liver and roe of a pufferfish in 1774. Today pufferfish sashimi is a delicacy in Japan. Chefs there discard the poisonous parts of the fish, but the deadly liver is also eaten after being cleaned and boiled.
It was clear to Davis that the poison of the pufferfish was not the sole secret of “zombification.” In his book The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), he describes his search for samples of zombie poison. His aim was to obtain samples and have them tested in a laboratory. He met a number of houngans and witnessed some remarkable ceremonies. In some, he saw people who were “possessed” by spirits—one woman was able to place a lighted cigarette on her tongue without being burned.
Deadly pufferfish
Davis’s quest came to a premature end when one of his major backers died and another suffered a debilitating stroke. His book leaves little doubt, however, that the secret of “zombification” is a poison that can produce all the signs of death. Once the body is dug up and an antidote is administered, the victim is often stupefied by further drugs that reduce him or her to a level of virtual idiocy.
A 1984 British television program produced by the BBC confirmed that “zombification” results from a poison that affects certain brain centers, reducing consciousness to the level of dreaming. Wade Davis was left with little doubt about the reality of “zombification.” But his investigation into the voodoo religion also seems to have convinced him that not all the phenomena of voodoo can be explained in such naturalistic terms.
Hundreds of followers of the voodoo religion line up as they prepare to take part in a ceremony to show their devotion to the spirits in Souvenance, Haiti, in 2008. Voodoo, which came to the islands with the West African slaves, is one of the state religions of Haiti.
The Work of a Jealous Husband
In 1976 a 30-year-old woman named Francina Illeus, known as Ti Femme, was pronounced dead. Three years later she was found alive by her mother, who recognized a scar on her temple. When Illeus’s coffin was inspected, it was found to be full of rocks. She believed that she was poisoned on the orders of a jealous husband.
