The Sad Plight of the British Ghost
yr is to be feared that most of us have failed to notice how the ghosts of England have "one by one crept silently to rest." We have only ourselves to thank for this desertion. What inducement has a modern spectre to remain in business ? He knows, only too well, that the most artistic gibber, the most delicately modulated squeak, would fail to excite anything more satisfying than mild curiosity, or, more probably, open derision. If by any chance popular interest were aroused, the unfortunate apparition would find himself being " broadcast " before he realized what was happening ! Small blame to him if he
" Stalked off reluctant, like an ill-used ghost, • Not to return ; or if it did, in visits Like those of angels, short and far between."
Many of us can remember a much healthier attitude towards the unseen world. In the middle of the last century appeared The Night-side of Nature, by Mrs. Catherine Crowe, which contains crowds of ghosts, fully authenticated, and suited to all tastes. Mr. Charles Mackay, writing in 1841, asks : "Who has not either seen or heard of some house shut up and uninhabitable, fallen into decay, and looking dusty and dreary, whence, at midnight, strange sounds have been heard to issue— the rattling of chains and the groaning of perturbed spirits ? There are hundreds of such houses in England at the present day. There are many such houses in London."
Everyone will agree that there are still many large houses in England which are shut up and uninhabited, if not uninhabitable, but the cause is usually economic, not ghostly. Mr. Mackay is, it seems, wrong in men- tioning the rattling of chains as a typical accessory of the British ghost. Experts affirm that "dragging chains and black vestments" are the accoutrements of Continental spectres. The chain-rattling habit, however, though it does not seem to have become fashionable among the ghosts of this kingdom, is an old-established and re- spectable custom, which Mrs. Crowe, on the testimony of the younger Pliny, traces back to ancient Athens. An old friend whom one meets only very occasionally in Mrs. Crowe's pages is the ghost who carries his head in his hands. Mr. Ingram, in his book on Haunted Houses (1884), gives only one authentic instance of a house being haunted by a spectre of this kind, although he mentions an Edinburgh hospital in which, every night, the figure of a headless woman, carrying a child in her arms, rose from the hearth. His collection also includes an appari- tion, like that in Kipling's story, The End of the Passage, of whom he says : "The most terrible fact is that she is without eyes."
. A perusal of the authorities convinces one that the British ghost was usually an inoffensive, if not actively benevolent being. His object was not to frighten or injure the person to whom he appeared, but, in most cases, to give warning of some approaching danger, or to ensure the righting of some wrong which had occurred during his own lifetime. The vague but grisly horrors with which the modern ghost story has made us familiar are either importations from abroad or sheer inventions, ingenious, no doubt, but lacking any shred of connexion with our own traditions.
Supernatural malice is undoubtedly to be found in the old records, but the agent was seldom,' in such a case, believed to be a human ghost. It was generally thought to be an evil spirit—we should call it " poltergeist " or "elemental," without making ourselves or anyone. else much wiser—and the subject was connected closely with the science of witchcraft.
The Reverend Joseph Glanvil, Chaplain-in-Ordinary to King Charles II, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a staunch believer in the reality of witches and their horrid practices, who was born in 1636 and died at Bath in 1680, gives us in his Sadducismus Triumphatus an account of the troubles of Mr. John Mompesson of " Tedworth," in the county of Wilts, who in 1661 arrested a vagabond drummer and took away his drum. Whereupon his house was plagued with "strange noises and hollow sound," his children's beds and the floor-boards in their rooms were moved, unearthly lights were seen in different parts of the building, and for some years the life of the Mompesson family seems to have been distinctly un- comfortable. The phenomena were observed by " hun- dreds " of witnesses, and one gentleman was bold enough to address the spirit.. "Satan," he said, "if the Drummer set thee to work, give three knocks and no more," which it did, says Glanvil, very distinctly, and then stopped. The intrepid Mompesson indicted the Drummer on the Statute Primo Jacobi, cap. 12: "Where you may find that to feed; imploy or reward any evil spirit is a felony," but the prosecution failed—nominally for want of evidence—though we may well believe that the Court and jury, not being of Mompesson's bulldog breed, were in- clined to follow Dogberry's advice in the Drummer's - ease, to "take no note of him but let him go."
Andrew Moreton, Esq., who published in 1729 The Secrets of the Invisible World disclosed, or an Universal History of Apparitions, Sacred and Prophane, was anxious to prove that all apparitions must be spirits, good (i.e., angels) or evil, since the parable of Dives and Lazarus forbade him to believe in the possibility of the dead re- turning to this world. He has no doubt, however, of the reality of apparitions, and gives a generous allowance of whole-page illustrations, in which the spectres, mostly "good," are considerably incommoded in the perform- ance of their duties, so one must imagine, by a thick cloud which envelops either their heads or their bodies, and would certainly make it difficult for them to pass as ordinary men or women, which feat, the author assures us, they nevertheless successfully accomplished.
Sometimes, indeed, a true ghost seems to have been led astray, and to have imitated the vagaries of the poker- geist. Mrs. Crowe quotes from the Bristol Times of 1846 the experiences of a maidservant in an old house haunted by a ghost, "a whiskered gentleman, who has gone to the length of shaking her bed, and, she believes, would have shaken herself also, but she invariably puts her head under the clothes when she sees him approach."
The simple faith which could find in the bedclothes a sure defence against supernatural powers has gone, and with it, alas ! has gone the belief in the supernatural itself, except as a sort of restricted and jealously super- vised annexe of natural science. That is not enough to lure back our ghosts. Would it suffice to reconcile us to a world which had openly attributed our existence to
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