The bonfires are lit, and everyone gathers

We are primitive, aren't we? We need to celebrate the dying of a year, 

in hope of appeasing the dark forces of winter, and allowing the spirits to dance 

with us around the fire. 

Do you remember the lights being turned out, candles lit, perhaps in 

the head of a pumpkin, and being told ghost stories by your grandfather

or grandmother?  Like Sally Ann Howes in Dead of Night, 

Who then goes off to play hide and seek, and finds a ghost...

the unexpected ghost of a child....

Not scary at all, but then part of a longer darker older story.

Why are we so keen on still keeping the fires of the supernatural burning?.

There was a time, when the church tried to wipe out different beliefs. 

They failed, and now science is trying to do the same,

but the fact is that magic and the inexplicable

still feed our hunger more than dry facts and technology can.

We are that little ghost boy, or girl,  who hides in the old empty house, 

at Halloween, ourselves! The fact is that when we die 

where will our inner child go, then?

They had a torchlight procession for Halloween on Saturday in Littlehampton, 

A feast of fire and torchbearers and a night carnival.

Pagan West Sussex.

halloween

Halloween

Has the boundary between this and the other world thinned yet?

According to wikipedia, my conjecture that other

root vegetables than the pumpkin were formerly used as jack o lanterns, 

seems to be agreed. The mummers would travel the streets with a hollowed out 

turnip or wurzel to announce their coming.

Maybe they themselves were meant to be the returned spirits of the dead

begging to return to human life to join in

the festivities.People would always make sure that a place was left

vacant in case such a visitor dropped in.

A little like the leaving of food and drink on the doorstep, to keep

ghosts away. Another way of appeasing them is to invite

 them in under the rules of the special time, 

to befriend them just enough before the dark sets in.

After all, the following day is All Saints Day, and they could be driven out

should they stay. As I understsnd it Pope Gregory IV  changed the day 

set aside for All Saints Day so that it would coincide with Halloween. 

Halloween celebrations Dorothea Lange, 1938

Associations with the Latin American version: The Day of the Dead.

Mexico -- El Día de Muertos

    Yo, Netzahualcóyotl, lo pregunto.
    ¿Acaso de veras se vive con raíz en la tierra?
    No para siempre en la tierra.
    Aunque sea jade se quiebra,
    aunque sea de oro se rompe,
    aunque sea plumaje de quetzal se desgarra.
    No para siempre en la tierra:
    Sólo un poco aquí.

    I, Netzahulacóyotl, ask this.
    Do we really live with roots on earth?
    Only for an instant do we endure.
    Even jade will shatter,
    even gold will crush,
    even quetzal plumes will tear.
    One does not live forever on this earth:
    only for an instant do we endure.

    —Netzahualcóyotl, Aztec warrior, architect, poet and ruler of Texcoco (1402-1472)

More to come........

halloween gets closer

I spent yesterday polishing a short story for a halloween competition.

So busy,, mostly trying to get a computer to sort the fee requirements out.

If there's a real monster on the loose at Halloween it's this one.

The Great internet wen.

Halloween, All Soul's eve, or Hallows Eve,

There is a three day observance, called Allhallowstide afterwards,

so the sprites, goblins, witches, forces if darkness like the demons, 

Ghosts, all the other wonderful denizens of our shadow worlds are thronging

to get their rites in, and seduce as many followers ss possible

into their arcane worship.

 Jack o' lanterns may be more recent symbols,

 but halloween masks go right the way back  to the pagan

origins of the festival.

A "pagan" mask used at the period of Halloween in ireland.

What then would its origin be? When Christianity swept into England,

it rather cleverly built its observances around the sacred places

and mystical customs of the indigenous peoples.

Samhain, "summer's end, 

How do we draw in supernatural beings? 

Dress up, light bonfires, and play all those riotous games 

so beloved by the "fairies",  - call them the Good People - carousing,

 strange rites, mummery, wassailing...

Fun, games, sexual romps and lots of alcohol..

halloween

Halloween

Here is a blog for Charlie Brown fans.

The Great Pumpkin.

The Great Pumokin

 

There was a ghost of halloween, and, as Linus knows,

it walks at this time of year.

You go sit in a pumpkin patch, and see if it comes......

The jack o'lantern. 

In  some versions of the story of Sleepy Hollow, the ghost threw a pumpkin's

head at Ichabod Crane.

Samhain, it's called really, a festival leading from harvest into 

the dark land of the dead, e.g. winter.

When it was begun presumably more common root vegetables

were used than pumpkins to make a face. 

They would needs be a large one, say a huge turnip.

The tradition of the Halloween pumpkin doesn't really emerge 

until the early nineteen hundreds.

The Jack o'lantern is perhaps earlier.

I read that the pumpkins were "sacrificed" to bonfires in the fields, 

so what more natural than that the spirits dancing in the flames should take

pumpkin shape. Maybe Linus was right after all?

The Wendigo

It belongs in the dark wild woodlands of Native America and Canada

They nest in damp dark places, and are said to be cannibal?

What does that mean, as they'd be no threat to people if they 

ate themselves? Blackwood's story is about a man being carried off by 

the Wendigo. However he may have become the Wendigo himself.

Like werewolves, if they are taken by the spirit, they become transformed.

The idea is that if people lost in the wilderness resort to cannibalism, 

then they will become wendigos.

A little like werewolves.

"Simpson for the first time hesitated, then, 

ashamed of his alarm and indecision, took a few hurried steps ahead; 

 the next instant stopped dead in his tracks.

Immediately in front of him all signs of the trail ceased;

 both tracks came to an abrupt end. On all sides, for a hundred yards or more,

he searched in vain for their continuance. There was -- nothing."

He hears the guide crying out in the distance far away.

What is it that drives man to extremes, in order to survive, in the 

immense, tractless and terrible wilderness?

The Were

I have to go to that other great horror of modern life

for Halloween, the dentist.

It looks as if i have to have three teeth extracted, so 

I may not be in a fit condition to blog.

I'll mention today werewolves i think, as it ought to include them.

Our primitive nature.

Is a werewolf a person with some mental health issue, somebody 

retreating into the primitive, or is our affinity with dogs

contagious in some way?

I sometimes get the feeling that really the human race is another

pack animal. That's why we and dogs get on so well. 

We aren't really civilised. Is it more like our societies 

have a similarity to, or grew out of, the Pack.

The mob, as struck London a short while ago, 

Hitler's Germany, examples of a state, where members of a group become

primitive within the allowance to do so by a large wild pack.

If so, why are werewolves so often loners, like vampires are?

Do you know the legend of the Wendigo? These tales of the Were resemble that.

I would recommend the story of that name by Algernon Blackwood,

as the best way into the lore of the Wendigo. 

It is again an ancestral spirit, or a strange wild force, a personification

of evil, within the elements. a legend of the backwoods....?

Algernon's work was uneven, and his novels generally sound trite, 

but his short stories are very haunting sometimes.

One of my favourites, especially The Willows.

Jewett City

Where else but Connecticut?

Well, New England, the witches, H.P.Lovecraft, Dunwich and Innsmouth?

In Jewett City, Connecticut, though, 

in 1854, townspople had exhumed various bodies, 

who were believed to belong to people who had become vampires.

How does a person become a vampire? Is he one to begin with?

Anyway, upon the death of a number of members of the Ray family,

a scare began. It's believed now that the mortality was due to Tuberculosis.

There was evidence in the placing of bodies.Bones were displaced, 

which is a means of preventing a whole dead body from walking...

Obvious really.

In the early 1990s an unmarked grave site of the assiciated Walton family

was opened, and one of the bodies

there showed its head displaced. 

It was very common practice to turn the skull around,

so that it would then stay dead and buried.

The practice still continues I believe, 

and not just in eastern european countriesl

 the same fears probably exist in the west, after Bram Stoker,

and Hammer horror, Buffy Angel, and the Twilight stories?

I recently watched Josh Gates on the travel channel

Expedition Unknown: watch out for that one!

 interviewing a man who had opened a grave to kill a vampire.

 

 

revenants 2

Revenants

The general view of the book on vampires, which i quoted

was simply that the people, disinterring a body

found it not as decomposed as they thought that it ought to be.

They expected no blood to be flowing, and the skin decomposing,

Not bloated, perhaps, and not appearing alive.

Even the smell of decomposition was taken to be a symptom 

of increasing unnaturalness, rather than death.

They then felt that they must kill the returned being, before it 

killed them all. Behind their fear there might very well be 

their fears and suspicions, engendered by the man or woman, 

when they were alive.

They might then be suspicious that anyone who died 

whilst this threat persisted, had died because

of the activities of the first reanimated corpse.

So the idea of a plague of vampires was born.

Were they right? Or were they only superstitious for believing this?

It's an old belief, if it goes right back to our 

cultural beginnings. If the ancient Egyptians, 

Chaldeans, Greeks, Romans, also believed it.

I'll carry on with some more tales of the revenant, shall i?

revenants

Revenants

Rather than use the word 'vampire'

for all of these species of the returned from the dead 

It might be better to use the word revenant,

 as each of these creatures seems to share the same 

sort of characteristics, being a body, which ought to be buried

and no longer alive, and which people believe has returned,

because it is overwhelmed with the unfinished business

of hatred, anger, or the lust for what it's lost, 

Flesh, blood, etc.

The story of the zombie, as described in voodoo, is somewhat different

from that, as it's raised by a sorceror, using poison, and isn't dead.

Of course, it could be argued that a revenant is the same -

It's not as dead as it ought to be, and it is alive somewhere.

If you knew how to call its consciousness back you could.

It's like that scene in the film, "The Princess Bride"

where the sorceror, Max, was it?, said that the hero was

"Nearly dead" 

and asked him what there was still worth living for?

Well, what is it that a revenant wants to live for?

Draculine vampires will probably say sex.

The best vampire in film that i ever came across, was 

in the film " Innocent Blood"

where vampires run riot because 

Anne Parillaud , who is lovely in the role,

"Didn't kill the food!"

Now there's a memorable vampire one-liner!!

vampires 3

Vampires continued.

What all this means is that there have always been  "vampires"

of one sort or another, originally as revenants, which return 

from the dead to drain the living dry, not necessarily

of blood, but there have always been some, which did just that!

When a family member died, it was always thought best 

to ensure that they did not come back to terrorise the living.

The best way being to ensure that the passage to the Other Side,

whatever and wherever that might be, was as safe as possible for them.

 

The best known examples are the Books of the Dead,

e.g. ancient Egypt's symbolic description of the process, 

judgement by weighing of the heart, etc 

Then there's the Bardo Thos'grol of the Tibetans,

which could serve as a text book for the burial practices

 of many cultures, in terms of the means of ensuring spirits are 

sent on their way through weeks of different  techniques.

The human fact is that there was a widely held belief with 

our ancestors, that if the process was not thoroughly conducted,

then angry spirits of one kind, or another, even the resurrected 

bodies themselves, would return, and the net result would be

the creation of a new demon.

Especially if the person, when alive, was violent, angry,

had unfinished business, or was a witch:

 that is to say, capable of casting the evil eye.

 

vampires 2

Vampires......

What is interesting is the place that witches and vampires can have in 

some cultures. In the annals of vudu for instance there are 

Witches that will trap a man by making promises,

the fee for which can be the death of a relative. 

Sometimes in pursuit of power, he will have to choose

which of his relatives he sacrifices. 

Some sorcerors attack at night and drink blood. 

There is a sense in which sometimes the distinction between the witch 

and the vampire really blurs.

After all witches float, don't they? That was one of the ways of testing them.

Throw them in water, and they would not sink.

Trial by water, as, according to King James,

"that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom."

 

The vampire would come to the surface out of its grave, or be washed out 

into the river. Barber quotes  Folklore (1926) 

"vampires never drown, they always float on top."

For the Slavs, especially, apparently, witches and revenants tend to merge.

But not in the water!!

Please, please, don't try this at home, this Hallowe'en!

Maybe it's the same psychic power, which could make a man or woman

a witch, which could make them a vampire?

So if you want to be a witch maybe you should think twice?

vampires

Vampires

I was thinking about the idea of a vampire.

It has been with us a long time, but i do wonder how much

the idea of the vampire has been adulterated by the 

image of the bat cloaked vampire of Bram Stoker

and the mixing in the story of Vlad the Impaler.

There were what we call "vampires" roaming the streets of Ancirent Greece,

and the "vampire" was a dangerous spirit believed in,

even further back, by the Mesopotamians,the Sumerians and Chaldeans.

But the question is what they meant by the word, 

which we translate as "vampire" today.

The idea seems to have been that some ghoul had blood drinking

characteristics, and that we today call them "vampires".

They were probably then known as just another form of demon.

They would not have been bat-people

(no offence to Batman fans)

I recall seeing an episode of the Monkey TV series,

 where a very Western version of the bat image of a vampire clan 

attacked the travellers. In the original stories of the Journey to the West, 

by Wu Cheng'en, the enemies were mainly spirits and demons.

Then of course, there is the story of Lilith, 

Who fed on the blood of babies.

Among other interpretations or manifestations 

she was said to be the spirit of a dead harlot, who latched onto 

a man, drained him dry, and would never let him go.

More like a  succubus, in fact, which i imagine wasn't after blood,

although it's possible that the succubus wanted to drain 

its victim of other sorts of bodily fluids!

(Remember, a succubus is a female creature,

 the male of the species is called an  incubus.)

..... to be continued.

vampires and zombies 2

THE VRYKOLAKAS

The spread of the idea that the dead return is a broad one. 

After all, here in England we celebrate halloween

and fill it with vampires and zombies, 

although surely it's more to do with witches.

Here is a tale from Greece, -the island of Mykanos - 

related in the book i quoted from in the last post.

This is recorded by the botanist Pitton de Tounefort

at the beginning of the 18th century.

Pitton writes:

 "..he had been killed in the fields, no one knew by whom or how.

Two days after he had been buried in a chapel in the town

it was bruited about that he had been walking during the night.....

that he came into houses, turned over furniture, 

extinguished lamps, and embraced people from behind.

"On the tenth day they said a mass in the chapel where the body lay,

in order to drive out the demon that they believed

to be concealed in it."

They disinterred the body and the village butcher tore out its heart.

He claimed that the blood was red, and that it was still warm.

 The villagers also claimed that the smell and fumes 

emitted by the corpse, when it was opened, were unnatural.

Following this scare, various magical attempts were made to lay

the monster, by putting holy swords into the coffin.

Nothing seemed to work.

In the end they burnt the body on a funeral pyre. 

This is very interesting because nothing which happened, 

as the author emphasizes, need not be totally 

normal for a decomposing corpse, under certain conditions.

But how many people actually do know how a dead body decomposes?

 We hide it away so quickly, don't we?

vampires and other undead 1

My source for my views on zombies and vampires is 

a very informative book in my collection called

"Vampires, Burials, and Death"

by Paul Barber.

It goes right back to the root of the folklore of revenants of this kind.

He quotes events in Silesia, Serbia, and Walachia (Romania) 

E.g the case of Peter Plogojowitz.

"a subject by the name of Peter Plogojowitz had died, ten weeks past,.....

And since with such people ( which they call vampires) various signs are to be seen

- that is, the body undecomposed, the skin hair, beard and nails growing -"

The writer  was the imperial provisor of the Gradisk district in Serbia.

"...and viewed the body.....".

"I did not detect the slightest odour that is otherwise characteristic of the dead, 

and the body, except for the nose, which was somewhat fallen away,

 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 appeared underneath

....Not without astonishment i saw some fresh blood in his mouth."

This account comes from 1725.

It is obvious that the dead man was suspected of being a returning spirit,

 which attacked the living at night. The  folklore vampire

 is not a creature with fangs, nor a bat like cloak. 

In effect there would be very little to distinguish him from modern cinema's 

impression of the zombie, apart from the idea of cannibalism

Associated with them now.....

To be continued.

necromancy

I just watched the millenium issue of the x files the other week,

Where the plot was that a necromancer was bringing back to life a group of 

plotters who thought that their rejuvenation would bring about the end of the world.

Obviously we did get through the millenium alright...

Although this might be debatable.

I went to see the Dee exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians in London

earlier this year. As i understand it, this particularly nasty-seeming dark art,

was not considered so bad in Dee's day, and they had a picture of him,

Painting by Henry Glindoni,

Standing in front of the court and the queen, allegedly when Elizabeth 1st 

visited him at his home, but that probably never happened.

He was originally painted in a circle of skulls, but the skulls had been painted out.

Dee was said to have had a concourse with a spirit raised by scrying 

with a crystal, thanks to his rather dubious assistant Edward Kelly, 

Another claiming to be psychic.

In Lovecraft's stories it's clear that the raised beings are 

not merely zombies, but something much more.

If they were zombies they wouldn't have been able to pass on secrets

from the past. 

Viz "the Case of Charles Dexter Ward."

I thought for Halloween i'd look at some of the creatures

 who will be supposed to walk 

at the end of the month.

Get your pumpkins ready!!

 

Preston Manor 2

Preston Manor 2

Sorry not to post yesterday.
The supernatural creatures, which hit with cold weather
are starting their winter campaign. I feel like a crazed Frankenstein
is using my brain as a basketball before sewing it into
someone else's head!
I was talking about Preston Manor
Which i've been to several times,
Once for the Wicca exhibition there this year,
and for talks. I didn't go with Yvette Fielding, I promise.

For ghostly events
 look at : http://brightonmuseums.org.uk/prestonmanor/news-events/

They seem to be performing Dracula there for Halloween.
Is this the most haunted house in Brighton?
I was interested to see the witches share some of their lore with us.
This is a most haunted house with family values?
Perhaps?

Preston Park

Preston Park

I visited Preston Park, and we had a guided tour.

I thought that I could hear distant music like a piano being played.

Actually it turned out that it was a

passage on a video presentation in another room.

The building of Preston Manor, however, is really said to be haunted.

It was built in 1738,

Apparently a visitor saw a ghost of a soldier sitting on a bed.

A dead son of the family killed in the war.

There is a report of disembodied hand holding a bedpost.

Ada Freer held a seance in the Cleves Room inNovember 1896.

She claimed to be receiving messages from a nun called Sister Agnes.

That nun again! Maybe ut was actually haunting her!

This nun was supposed to be buried in unconsecrated ground, 

and that if her body was found, her spirit would find peace.

A while later they did find a 400 year old skeleton of a woman

In the grounds, 

but the ghost in that  area was not necessarily a nun.

Most Haunted also visited there.

I remember watching their show. I'm sure that all i remember is the screaming.

More to come...

Well worth a visit if you're in Brighton.

Ballechin 3

Ballechin continued

The story of Ada Goodrich Freer is interesting, 

Because she was able to pass herself off as many things,

By bluff, if you like, without the credentials to do so.

To some extent in today's society where everyone is pigeonholed

 almost at pains of public flogging, you almost admire her for that.

She got away with posing as a teenager, when she was in her thirties, 

as well as alleging herself to be psychic, 

but this was a period, when you could easily do this.

She claimed to have Socts ancestry, hence getting various jobs in Scotland,

But hadn't. She even went out to the islands scouting

for folklore information without a word of Gaelic.

Hence her impressing herself on Lord Bute, and other menfolk, 

and bluffing her way along. But probably that was how 

to do what she had to, to prosper in Victorian society.

She led an investigation with guest researchers

much like Price was to do at Borley,

and her book contains tables of who saw or felt what during their stay.

Look for the critique by J.C.Ross in the Times in 1897

If you have access to the Times indexes.

Ballechin 2

Ballechin

Ada Goodrich Freer

Miss X, as she called herself, gives this account of seeing a ghost

Like Borley, she claims Ballechin had a nun.

"Against the snow i saw a slight black figure, a woman, moving up 

the glen. She stopped and turned, and looked at me. She was dressed as a nun.

Her face looked pale. I saw her hand in the folds of her habit. Then she moved on, as it seemed, on a slope too steep for walking. When she came under the tree

she disappeared - perhaps because there was no way to show her outline. Beyond the tree she reappeared for a moment, where there was again a white background, close by the burn. Then I saw no more. I waited, and then still in silence, we returned to the avenue"

She then goes on to say:

"I described what I had seen. The others saw nothing."

She was with her friend "Miss Moore" and two men.

What struck me when i read this was that it was one of the "biggest"events recorded 

during the period of the investigation there, but we only have her testimony, 

and it sounds "too good to be true", just what her story needed. 

Did she tell them that she was seeing it, when she did? 

No, only after they had walked away.

ballechin

BALLECHIN HOUSE

Ballechin house

The most haunted house in Scotland?

Well, it was demolished in 1963.

but back in the Victorian era it was taken to be haunted,

and the SPR wanted to investigate it, under the sponsorship of Lord Bute, 

John Crichton-Stuart. He was to give a free hand to

An investigator called Ada Goodrich Freer, 

who was something of a dubious character.

She claimed to be psychic and to be a seer, and was far from

averse to using shady practices to achieve her ends. 

using other people's researches, and claiming them to be her own,

and colouring her investigations with made up stories probably,

which sound spurious if you read them.

It's worth looking at The Alleged Haunting of B------- House

I found a copy on line some time ago.

Look at Mount Stuart ghost week

mountstuart.com/media-and-news/

ghost-story-week-the-haunting-of-ballechin-house

She was discredited, but her name crops up now and then. 

I visited Preston Manor in Brighton, which has its own assembly

of ghosts, of which more anon,

and i believe she held a seance there, claiming to 

contact spirits of the dead, who wanted to be interred properly.