question

QUestion.....

WHy should i carry on doing this?

I'm going to take a holiday to figure out whether
 i want to bother to continue with this for so lirttle interest.
IT seems so utterly pointless. Nobody ever comments
 or bothers to make contact with me.

riverside london 3

Eland road 2

 The poltergeist continued to overturn heavy furniture, 

and break objects , including several window panes, 

and drop or throw objects like coal, stones, and

potatoes, as the days went by. Harry Price and the reporter 

found evidence of the damage, and had near misses,

 as when a gas lighter, weighing a couple of ounces 

apparently landed on the floor behind their backs.

A little while later young Fred, was taken to hospital

for examination, as it was believed that he was responsible.

Despite his absence, the poltergeist's behaviour remained.

Mrs Perkins said that whilst she tried to prepare dinner, 

chairs began to line up and march down the hall.

This particular trick has become somewhat famous in 

poltergeist literature.

It even got a cartoon to itself in an issue of Punch.

A policeman was called in and he didn't believe her, 

but  once he was gone an attache case flew across the room, 

 an umbrella jumped from its stand, and the table fell over.....

riverside london 2

Eland Road

In Poltenrgeist over London Harry Price devoted a chapter 

 to Eland Road. Lavender Hill...the Robinson House.

This is the one, where the property backed onto a mental

health institution, so ... of course... they got blamed for the

 stone throwing. The house was a typical suburban house

 of a working class family, two floors and gardens back and front.

 Its occupants were the elderly Henry, 86, Frederick(27) 

and his three daughters, Lillah, Kate and the widowed 

Mrs George Perkins, and her son Peter.

This house was to come to be dubbed "the mystery house"

bY the press. It appears to have come to Harry's attention

 at Christmas 1927. He visited in January, at the same time 

as a "garrulous female journalist"

The house had been reduced to mayhem by the poltergeist

already, Windows and furniture was smashed, and ornaments broken.

They had lived there 25 years without incident. Then on November 29th

in true Fortean style, lumps of coal, pieces of soda, 

and pennies began to fall on the conservatory behind the house.

Red hot cinders formed in a pile in the outhouse.

When the old man's bedroom window was smashed they decided

to move him out

Even as they did, a heavy chest of drawers crashed to the floor

of the bedroom......

....to be continued.....

putney and battersea 1

Putney heath

Abershaw the highwayman was tracked down 

 after several highway robberies to his favourite haunt, 

 The Green Man pub in Putney, and,

in a desperate attempt to escape, he shot at the two 

 officers, and one was killed.and the other seriously injured.

When he was caught he was tried for murder and on 

3rd August 1795, he was taken to Kennington to be executed.

But some say that he was gibbetted on Jerry's Hill

On Putney Heath, and that is where he is said to haunt. 

The story goes that his gang retrieved the body,

 as it mysteriously disappeared.

  He's said to trail people who wander the Heath at night.

Apparently his body is interred in a highway man's cemetery up there.

"And still of a winter’s night, they say,
when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon
tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight
over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding…
up to the old inn-door."
​Extract from The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes (1880-1958)

I do like tales about ghosts of highwaymen... maybe it's the involvement of gibbets.

I wanted to go on to talk about the Eland Rd haunting...

Next....

riverside London 1

Beside the Thames.....

 

 I've been out of things for a few days. 

Anyway, i'm up in London today, 

at the London wetlands, in Barnes.

I once lived in Shepherd's Bush.

I also had a time in Hounslow, and worked in Richmond Surrey,

and worked just up the road from Wandsworth Bridge station.

So, in preparation for the sitting down to watch

 the London Marathon, which i believe is tomorrow.. 

I thought i'd return to where my heart really resides.

SO .... let's look at ghosts here about, shall we?

There's a poltergeist case...

I recently bought a copy of a story told by a participant called

"The Poltergeist Prince". Wycliffe Rd,

The Eland Rd ghost investigated by Harry Price.

Highwaymen on Putney Heath.

I love this part of the Thameside.

My ancestors were involved in collecting dark age artefacts

from the river, and this collection now is housed

In the Museum of London.

Honestly.....

That then is of which i speak next week on these pages....

A short distance beyond ponds on Putney heath

is a forgotten burial ground, where several of the highwaymen, 

who terrorised the area, were buried.......

tomb ghosts

Barrows etc

I  have an idea that shadow people are somehow 

connected to the demon phenomenon.

It's about how our minds leave a trail behind them, 

when negative emotion takes shape...

Or having spiritual phenomenon feeding on the shadows

of our course through life, perhaps. 

Evil times breed evil beings.

I sometimes wonder in my own darkest moments, if life isn't a sick joke, 

and some spiritual parasite doesn't feed off our suffering.

But then our darkness, our depression, our anger and hatred

could be said to be the parasite.

Do we leave our negative emotions behind us in some form 

when we die? Is that something like what ghosts are, actually?

There are tales about dark shadows running around or standing like 

  gravestones in cemeteries, and at least one of the early series of

"A Haunted" tells of ghost hunters in a cemetery, where a boy 

is possessed by a demon. (There were some good ones, very well

produced, in the first 4 series, but it's dropped in quality since.)

The idea of shadow-people-like presences mimicking

 gravestones  in cemeteries ties in, I think, to the dark

presences, of ancient English lore, connected to barrows.

 What i mean is that the spectral beings, which we reportedly

see today, were seen historically as well. 

The human mind works in the same way now, as it did then.

Does the old debate, whether consciousness survives 

really relate to whether dark emotions survive in some way?

The protective angel which returns from sleep,

like King Arthur, to save the English people,

being one side, the other being the dark emotional side 

protecting the burial from bejng disturbed.

the earth hall

 The earth hall

 Inside a barrow, there is a cavern, or a great hall, 

in which sleeps a knight until he is needed to protect his people, 

or else a dragon, curled up and waiting to arise and terrorise

 the community, or the spirits of the dead, which return

 like vampires to inflict revenge on the living.

Obviously if it is a tomb, then it would stand to reason that 

something incredibly precious is hidden there.

The tale of Grendel and Beowulf's battle with the spirit, and its mother,

 of course is in line with these stories. 

Exactly what kind of spirit the Grendels were is hard to define,

 and they are often interpreted as being dragons, 

but they seem bloodthirsty.

Iron Age hill forts are often shaped with dragon-like rings 

or embankments surrounding them, which may have something 

to do with why serpentine  monstrous worms are supposed to live there.

Such serpents are alleged to have driven away treasure seekers,

for instance, at Cissbury Ring.

There is alleged to be a tunnel leading from Offington Hall (demolished in 1960s)

to Cissbury,  and in the nineteenth century, 

 a blocked tunnel entrance was found behind pannelling in its library,

and explorers trying to open the tunnel,(about 2 miles)

were chased away by ghostly serpents.

As serpents are  tunnel dweller, of course, 

The manorial hall joining to the earthly hall, 

The corporeal power to the spiritual in the community.

 

barrows

Barrows

Of course, barrows are mysterious places.

Eerie by their very nature, as the tors and hillforts are.

 There is one other thing which adds to the mix.

Burial. Naturally the interred dead in such places are 

buried with ancient artefacts, and hence treasure.

Wherever you have treasure, you have treasure hunters,

whether there is any treasure there or not.

 Try to convince a treasure hunter that it isn't there!

 The fact is that hidden treasure and the occult

 or hidden lore are inextricably linked.

 There will always be an association between treasure and magic.

 Between the supposed wealth of the dead and the supernatural.

 Both are discussing the possibility of hidden secrets.

 Naturally you will bury your wealthy dead, and their "source of power"

 with a defender... something to protect it from tomb raiders...

A curse, or a being, which represents the curse made manifest.

 Where there is the possibility of treasure 

there must be treasure, and secrets to be discovered,

 and tasks to be performed to reach that treasure.

This series of interconnected motifs run all of the way back

to myth, such as the tale of the minotaur, 

like Orpheus travelling to Hades  to recover his lost love. 

 To the mysteries of Ephesus.  Rituals have been performed

for centuries in magical initiations, depicting mystic journeys.

The shaman took narcotics to travel to the land of the spirits, 

 and gain his precognition of events and occult knowledge.

There is a whole history of human being's association with 

the dead, and the buried treasure, material or magical, which they guard.

Whatever it is, Dan Brown, it's still the holy grail!

None of this explanation of the origin of a tale in any way 

Negates its reality. it isn't a sceptic's dismissal. I believe

  that it strengthens the story.

I'll look at barrow legends more in this light....

wights

WIghts

SEe, it's still doing it! Webmasters never answer your problems....

I am looking into "wights." What are "wights" you ask?

They only appear in one place in literature that i can find,

legendary beings from Norse or Celtic literature.

The place i've seen them is in that segment of

The Fellowship of the Ring dropped out of the 

mega film version of the Lord of the Rings. 

It happens early on, when Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry

meet Tom Bombadil. They ride off into the mist with the 

mysterious tale of the barrow wights in their heads.

 We aren't really told the body of this tale, and fog descends,

 the travellers get separated, and each one of the hobbits is taken prisoner

  and brought near to death by a shadowy form, which isn't 

really described, but Frodo kills with a nearby sword blade.

The word "wight"is middle saxon, really

There is an original  anglo saxon  word 'wiht,'

 which means "a being, something, anything"

I Suspect that this got mixed up with an old norse word 'vigr'

which meant "warlike," which entered saxon as 'wight', as well,

which the dictionaries say had the

meaning "swift, nimble, courageous and strong"

Hence you get a hostile, powerful being of a spiritual nature,

And this came to be a 'spiritual entity'

The creature is a creature of the dead and darkness, and 

probably in some way connected to all of those legends,

like the one telling how King Arthur and the knights 

of the Round Table would emerge from their hill to save

England when its people were in mortal peril.

Obviously there must be something, which will emerge from a hill

as well, to create  mortal peril.

In the Lord of the Rings, the suggestion seems to be that the hobbits

 were nearly drowned.......? And rescued by Tom Bombadil.

It's really vague and a peculiar episode, and 

I can't say that I'm surprised that the film

 makers chose not to include it.

One of my missions is to keep alive tales of spiritual 

beings, which are too good to lose.

And ghosts of the long barrows are so important to English mythology.

highdown hill

HIghdown Hill

THe google peopl still aren't answering my enquiry.

I Am up Highdown Hill Worthing this morning. 

Got a cake and coffee in cafe and a seat.

 It's usually a free for all.

Taking videos and photos. This is a haunted place,

 at least atmospheric. Remember the Miller's tomb?

I Posted about it some time ago.

This hill like most hill forts has an eerie atmosphere, 

espcially first thing in the morning.

It is the sense of history here.

I'll post some of my spooky videos on fbook

the wild hunt

THe wild hunt

I Still haven't had any response to my request from google to  

sort this double capital problem out. 

Anyway, whilst I'm waiting, I'll have a look at the story of

the wild hunt, I think. I had a discussion with a friend about 

Herne the hunter, and she thought he was mythic,

but I was sure that there was a royal keeper of

Royal Parks, who was called Herne, and this related to the

 much older wild hunt stories.

Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles is a possible result

 of the tale of a pack of Dartmoor Wisht hounds, 

led by a dark huntsman, who run on the trail of

 the Dead or damned. 

Here is an account from a version of the

 Anglo Saxon Chronicles:

"Several persons saw and heard many huntsmen hunting. 

The hunters were swarthy and huge, and ugly; 

and their hounds were all black, and wide-eyed and ugly.

And they rode on black horses, and black he-goats.

This was seen in the very deer-park in the town of Peterborough, 

and in all the woods from that same town as far as Stamford.

 And the monks heard their horns blowing in the night. 

Credible men, who saw them in the night, said that

 there might well be about twenty or thirty horn-blowers."

technical issue

I had a few days off to prepare a letter, submission, etc,

 for sending to a literary agent, with a hope

 that I might get a novel published

I am having trouble with this blog as well.
It insists on typing the first two letters of every new line
WIth two capitals, (like this,) and i can't find how to stop it.
THis is very irritating, and I need to sort this out.
IT slows down composing these pireces
ANd is very irritating.

I have requested assistance from the team... besr with me.

the desire of spirits

THe desire of spirits

I Recently came across a wikipedia entry
 for a creature called a dhampir.
The idea is that a vampire would continue to desire
  sexual relations with its former wife or lover after they had died.
I have always been interested in the stories
of demons, like the succubus and incubus,
which are said to visit a man or a woman respectively,
during the night.
They are said to have become very attached to their adopted
lover... those of you x-files fans might remember the x-files
episode, where DS Skinner is visited by an elderly female  spirit,
which looked after his welfare, and he picked up in Vietnam.
The Dhampir is a Balkans vampire  child, born of a union
 between a vampire and a human woman,
A very fragile being, which is supposed to be unclean
( that is dirty and , slimy
even, ) and without nails or bones.

The vampire's sexuality isn't just the creation of Bram Stoker.
The same is said of revenants all around the world,
And a returning spirit in African cultures needs to
be kept out of the village, because it might come back to
claim its connubial rights. A concept, which
has been continued into vudu.

Myth is full of tales of the liaison between spirits and human
 women. The whole mythology oof the Fallen Angel,
for instance, as a horde of lusting angels were thrown
 out of heaven for desiring to fraternise with human women.

ghost photos

Ghost photos

You can believe tyem or not...
The top two are quite famous.
I thought i'd collect some together;
Greenwich, Rainham.
Not sure of the source of the third.

night terrors

NIght terrors

I  remember having woken up one night to hearing 

the tap tap tap of a wooden leg outside of the airing

 cupboard on the other side of my bedroom door.

I suppose that it must have been a fixture of the machinery

  of the boiler in there, but that's looking back 

with the hindsight of adulthood.

In fact, i never saw "pegleg" but i was afraid one night

 i might run into him going to the bathroom.

I Recently discovered that Buddha, otherwise known

 as Constantine or Neo, had a similar experience:

Keanu Reeves, that is......

He says that ' I was living in New Jersey, when i saw 

and felt this ghost. I remember just staring at this suit

 which had no body or legs in it as it came into the

 room before disappearing. It was a doubke-breasted suit in white,

 and i looked at my nanny, who was just as shocked as me.

 I just couldn't get back to sleep afterwards,

 and i still see the figure in my dreams and nightmares."

...........Theme tune for the Twilight Zone........

Bexhil

Bexhill

You know, the De Le Warr pavilion, where Poirot cornered the 

kIller in Suchet's version of the ABC murders...

There's a spooky story here...

A student visited Bexhill Museum and tells a story

of being approached by a tour guide, who gave her 

an informative and thorough tour with lots of local 

information... when it was over, she shook his hand

 and thanked him very much, but when she approached

 the door, she met an official,who told her that

 he was the only one working that afternoon.

Whoever he was they ought to have employed him.

Looking up Bexhill i also came across this... the ghost of a suicide.

 I could, i think, only direct you to this web  page,

A Forum, where the story unfolds... i like that.

.

http://www.discoverbexhill.com/messageboard/thread.php?tid=2541

Apparently a man hung himself in a garden at Watermill Lane, 

in the 1920sand consequently haunts there

vampires 4

Croglin Grange

This is an interesting tale, but Harper himself questioned it.

He said that Croglin Grange didn't exist, as far as he could find.

There was a Croglin High Hall and a Croglin Low Hall, according to Harper 

It reads like a story, rather than an account of an "actual" happening. 

I haven't come across it anywhere else, but.....

THis is what the wikipedia entry says about it: 

The Vampire of Croglin Grange is a vampire legend that took place in Cumberland, England. The story first appeared in Story of My Life by Augustus Hare, written in the 1890s. In 1929, Montague Summers republished the story along with the first chapter of Varney the Vampire. He pointed out that the two stories were very similar and should be dismissed as folklore.

It also says that

A version of the story appears under the title "The Window" 

in Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell's 

More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1984).

Still, it is a good dark story, isn't it?

vampires 3

Croglin continued...

"As it bit her, her voice was released, and she screamed with all her
might and main. Her brothers rushed out of their rooms, but the door was
locked on the inside. A moment was lost while they got a poker and broke
it open. Then the creature had already escaped through the window, and
the sister, bleeding violently from a wound in the throat, was lying
unconscious over the side of the bed. One brother pursued the creature,
which fled before him through the moonlight with gigantic strides, and
eventually seemed to disappear over the wall into the churchyard. Then
he rejoined his brother by the sister's bedside. She was dreadfully hurt
and her wound was a very definite one, but she was of strong
disposition, not given either to romance or superstition, and when she
came to herself she said, 'What has happened is most extraordinary and I
am very much hurt. It seems inexplicable, but of course there is an
explanation, and we must wait for it. It will turn out that a lunatic
has escaped from some asylum and found his way here.' The wound healed
and she appeared to get well, but the doctor who was sent for to her
would not believe that she could bear so terrible a shock so easily, and
insisted that she must have change, mental and physical; so her
brothers took her to Switzerland.

"Being a sensible girl, when she went abroad, she threw herself at once
into the interests of the country she was in. She dried plants, she made
sketches, she went up mountains, and, as autumn came on, she was the
person who urged that they should return to Croglin Grange. 'We have
taken it,' she said, 'for seven years, and we have only been there one;
and we shall always find it difficult to let a house which is only one
story high, so we had better return there; lunatics do not escape every
day.' As she urged it, her brothers wished nothing better, and the
family returned to Cumberland. From there being no upstairs in the
house, it was impossible to make any great change in their arrangements.
The sister occupied the same room, but it is unnecessary to say she
always closed her shutters, which, however, as in many old houses,
always left one top pane of the window uncovered. The brothers moved,
and occupied a room together exactly opposite that of their sister, and
they always kept loaded pistols in their room.

"The winter passed most peacefully and happily. In the following March
the sister was suddenly awakened by a sound she remembered only too
well--scratch, scratch, scratch upon the window, and looking up, she
saw, climbed up to the topmost pane of the window, the same hideous
brown shrivelled face, with glaring eyes, looking in at her. This time
she screamed as loud as she could. Her brothers rushed out of their room
with pistols, and out of the front door. The creature was already
scudding away across the lawn. One of the brothers fired and hit it in
the leg, but still with the other leg it continued to make way,
scrambled over the wall into the churchyard, and seemed to disappear
into a vault which belonged to a family long extinct.

"The next day the brothers summoned all the tenants of Croglin Grange,
and in their presence the vault was opened. A horrible scene revealed
itself. The vault was full of coffins; they had been broken open, and
their contents, horribly mangled and distorted, were scattered over the
floor. One coffin alone remained intact. Of that the lid had been
lifted, but still lay loose upon the coffin. They raised it, and there,
brown, withered, shrivelled, mummified, but quite entire, was the same
hideous figure which had looked in at the windows of Croglin Grange,
with the marks of a recent pistol-shot in the leg; and they did--the
only thing that can lay a vampire--they burnt it."

vampire 2

Croglin Grange...

...continues

THe story continues...

....She longed to get away, but
the door was close to the window and the door was locked on the inside,
and while she was unlocking it, she must be for an instant nearer to
_it_. She longed to scream, but her voice seemed paralysed, her tongue
glued to the roof of her mouth.

"Suddenly, she never could explain why afterwards, the terrible object
seemed to turn to one side, seemed to be going round the house, not to
be coming to her at all, and immediately she jumped out of bed and
rushed to the door, but as she was unlocking it, she heard scratch,
scratch, scratch upon the window, and saw a hideous brown face with
flaming eyes glaring in at her. She rushed back to the bed, but the
creature continued to scratch, scratch, scratch upon the window. She
felt a sort of mental comfort in the knowledge that the window was
securely fastened on the inside. Suddenly the scratching sound ceased,
and a kind of pecking sound took its place. Then, in her agony, she
became aware that the creature was unpicking the lead! The noise
continued, and a diamond pane of glass fell into the room. Then a long
bony finger of the creature came in and turned the handle of the window,
and the window opened, and the creature came in; and it came across the
room, and her terror was so great that she could not scream, and it came
up to the bed, and it twisted its long, bony fingers into her hair, and
it dragged her head over the side of the bed, and--it bit her violently
in the throat. ,.."

This is the actual text from Augustus Hare's book. 

.......More to come tomorrow......

vampire story

Vampire story

I Found this tale in one of the books in my collection,

 that you may have heard of, or not.

It comes from C. G. Harper's Haunted Houses book.

He quotes it as taken from  Augustus Hare's "Story of My Life" (1900)

 so this is a fairly old one. Harper wrote his book in 1907..

It refers to an event told to Augustus Hare, so it's already second hand, 

But as I don't tell vampire tales a lot, here it is...

This is about a place called Coglin Grange, 

which a family called Fisher had outgrown.

They let the grange to two brothers, and a sister, and

moved nearer to Guildford. The tenants  spent

 their first winter contentedly, and were liked in the neighbourhood.

Summer came, and on one very hot day,

and, although the brothers tried to study, it was too hot to work,

 so they dined early, and retired. The night was still hot, and

unable to sleep, the sister went and stood by her window,

looking out over a churchyard.

She began to notice flickering lights moving about in the belt of trees, 

separating the house from the churchyard.

 A figure slowly began to emerge. It increased in substance as

it drew closer, intermittently disappearing "Every now and then

 it was lost in the long shadows, which stretched across the lawn.

   from the trees, and then it emerged larger than ever 

and still coming on - on, and as she watched it,

 the most uncontrollable horror seized her........

to be continued.......