Posts That Go Bump in the Night

We’ve not had very much to say about Halloween on NineteenTeen, mostly because it wasn’t all that much of a “holiday” to the 19th century misses we often write about....though I can't imagine that they wouldn't have enjoyed parts of it as celebrated in the 21st century.

But that doesn’t mean that our 19th century misses didn’t enjoy a shiver or two, whatever day the calendar said it was … and those shivers could generally be found in a circulating library. Spooky stories had become to come into their own in the second half of the 18th century, and authors such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis wrote hugely popular "horrid" fiction—stories that would eventually be gently lampooned by Jane Austen. Later in the century and up to this day, tales of ghosts and the supernatural were more likely to be popular in Britain around a different holiday; authors like M.R. James wrote ghost stories for the Christmas season that still raise goosebumps on readers today.

And, after all, maybe Halloween was not widely observed because unexplained phenomena—ghosts and other echoes of the past—are so common in Britain. When unexplained footsteps and cold drafts happen every day, who needs a special spooky holiday?

Hmm. Then again, if Reece's Peanut Butter Cups are involved, I just may have to raise my hand...

 

Have a sweet, shivery evening, everyone!

Bunhill Fields Forever

Here in the states, we just finished Halloween. At my previous home, we had hundreds (no exaggeration—record of 223) of trick-or-treaters show up at the door. Now we live in a more rural area, and some years we have none. I was tickled to have 15 this year. So, in honor of Halloween, I give you a spooky nineteenth century place to consider.

Bunhill Fields.

The area at the edge of London in the nineteenth was used as a burial ground from ancient times. The name, in fact, may derive from the words “Bone Hill.” But its lineage wasn’t the only thing that made it a place that could frighten. Consider the following:

1. It was originally intended to bury victims of The Plague (though, aside for the pit for the bodies, it doesn’t appear to have served that purpose).
2. The churchyard at nearby St. Paul’s was crowded enough that when it was time for the next burial, a portion of someone else ended up getting dug up in the process. Those bones were dumped into Bunhill Fields.
3. The space was never officially consecrated by the Church of England.
4. Period drawings show gravestones at odd angles and grass growing wildly between the memorials. Someone did put up a spiked gate on the northeast corner, to hinder the work of resurrection men attempting to steal bodies.

Gives one the chills, what.

But the good news is that, because the ground was unconsecrated, those who did not conform to the Anglican Church (for example, Quakers and in some cases Methodists) could be buried there.

By the time Bunhill Fields was closed to new burials in the mid-1800s, it had seen more than 123,000 internments, including the likes of Daniel Defoe and William Blake. In 1867, the city built new walls and gates, laid out paths, and opened it as a public garden. The city even straightened tombstones and recut inscriptions. Iron plaques on the south wall directed visitors to particular plots.

Today, it is a pleasant park, proving that some things need not be scary after all.

The Ghost Ship

It’s the day before Halloween in the States, and things have already been going bump in the night on television and in movie theatres. But one of the spookiest things about the nineteenth century were the legends that sprang up, including one about the Mary Celeste.

The Mary Celeste was a merchant ship from America. She sailed with a crew of ten and the captain’s family from New York City in November 1872 on her way to Genoa, Italy, carrying a cargo of industrial alcohol. But after what appeared to be an uneventful journey based on the ship’s log, the vessel was discovered on December 4, 1872, off the Azores, abandoned. She was sailing along, all by herself, with cargo, supplies, and crew’s belongings largely intact, although the navigational instruments were missing and so was the lifeboat. The last log entry was dated 10 days earlier. No one who had sailed on her was ever seen again.

So what happened?

Over the centuries, theories have abounded. Some of the barrels of alcohol were apparently empty. Had the crew drank the foul stuff and mutinied? (Note to conspiracy theorists—have you ever tried drinking denatured alcohol? It isn’t pleasant, and I would think the crew would be too busy throwing up or running to the head to mutiny.) 

Was it piracy? Unless the pirates decided after slaying all the crew that the aforesaid alcohol wasn’t worth the effort to pilfer, not likely. Besides, there was no sign of a struggle, no damage to the hull from canon fire.

Was it insurance fraud? Not a particularly good one. The salvage award wasn’t particularly lucrative, because both the ship and the cargo were in good shape.

Had they abandoned ship because of a natural phenomenon such as submarine earthquakes, storms, or a water spout? None were recorded in the area, and at the time of the ship’s last log entry, the Mary Celeste wasn’t too far from one of the islands. Surely the life boat could have made it to shore.

Even more far-fetched theories have been suggested. Was it a giant squid? Sorry, he was busy that day. Bermuda Triangle? Nowhere near where the ship was found.

Oblivious to the consternation around her, the Mary Celeste continued her career, passing through several hands before being wrecked off the coast of Haiti in 1885. That captain actually was attempting insurance fraud. But her demise didn’t stop the stories. Newspaper and magazine pieces popped up in England and America from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. In January 1884, a young Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes himself, told the tale in a British literary magazine, from the point of view of a supposed survivor. He blamed the abandonment on the vengeance of a former slave, who rose against the white crew. The Strand published another “survivor story” in 1913, stating that the crew had fallen into the sea from a temporary platform and either drowned or were eaten by sharks. In the 1920s, other stories from so-called survivors claimed that the crew had colluded with that of the ship which found her to win salvage or the crew had found another ship abandoned with a rich cargo and sailed off on it instead. Radio plays, a stage version, and novels have also been written about the mystery. The Smithsonian sponsored a documentary as late as 2007; it disproved many theories but reached no conclusions.

So what really happened to the Mary Celeste?

The Brits have an answer. It seems their venerated hero the Doctor may have been involved, according to the accepted canon for the long-running Dr. Who franchise. I understand the Daleks were involved.

Now, that explains everything.

Happy Halloween!

Things That Go Bump in the Manor House

Happy Halloween!  Will you be dressing up today for work or play?  Perhaps escorting little ones around for treats?  Telling spooky stories or watching horror movies?  Well, as we’ve discussed before, Halloween might not have been a typical celebration in nineteenth century England, but that didn’t mean the lads and lasses back then didn’t enjoy a good scare!

Every town, it seemed, boasted its local ghost or grisly creature.  Black dogs, either evil or kindly, were popular.  Take the story of the Mauthe Doog, from Peel on the Isle of Man.  The large, curly-coated spaniel was said to haunt Peel Castle, to the point that it would come into the guard room each night and settle by the fire.  The tale was immortalized by Sir Walter Scott in Peveril of the Peak in 1823, only he made out the dog to be a large mastiff.  Either way, hundreds of tourists flocked to the castle for a chance to see the fearsome pet.

Most of the great houses had resident specters.  At Arundel Castle, the Blue Man haunts the library, looking for a good book.  (Does it never end?)  Residents of Kenilworth Castle have spotted the ghost of a little boy in the stables as well as ghost horses and, ahem, ghost chickens!

Be careful out there tonight.

Beware the Wrecker!

I hope you had a lovely time last night on Halloween!  I thought today might be a good day for a scary story from nineteenth century England, and few things are scarier than a wrecker.

Wait, a wrecker?

Yes, a wrecker.  Many of you are likely familiar with lighthouses or lighted buoys placed along waterways to guide sailors to safe harbor.  The concept wasn't lost on some dastardly criminals either.  They would post lights along England's shore in hopes of luring ships in to some nasty rocks or shoals.  When a ship floundered, the wreckers would swam aboard and take everything.  And if anyone survived the shipwreck, well, that was a shame.  Can't leave witnesses, can we now?

Do you have the chills yet?

Then let me tell you a story about Chambercombe Manor in Devon, which was once the home to a particularly dangerous wrecker named Alexander Otway.  His son William learned the trade from his father and actually married a beautiful girl he rescued from a ship his father had wrecked.  He apparently foreswore to follow in his father's footsteps at that point, and he and his wife were blessed with a lovely daughter whom they named Kate.  When Kate grew up, she fell in love with an Irish sea captain and moved to Dublin.

William and his wife fell on hard times, and the temptation to return to wrecking proved too great.  Soon he was turning a tidy profit from the misfortunes of others.  One night, a ship was wrecked on his shore in a terrible storm, and he went aboard and took what he could, including a woman so badly battered that he could not make out her face.  He carried her home, where she died, and stole her jewelry, saying nothing to anyone about finding her.  But this time, William hadn't finished his grisly work.  A few of the sailors from the ship had escaped its sinking and reported a passenger missing--a young lady named Kate who was traveling to the area to visit her father.  William Otway had engineered his own daughter's death.

Now there's a tale to chill the blood on All Hallows.

Things That Bump Off in the Night

Sunday is Halloween, so I thought perhaps you could use a little of the macabre to get ready. Nineteenth century England didn’t celebrate Halloween as we know it. But they had plenty of things to scare people, and one of the most vile, in many people’s minds, were the resurrection men.

Resurrection men stole corpses. They’d sneak into cemeteries late at night, dig into fresh graves, break open the coffins, and pull out the bodies, then sell them to medical schools to be dissected in anatomy classes. Sounds grisly, doesn’t it?

You’d think medical schools would protest. I mean, how many people walk up and try to sell you a dead body? Apparently, quite a few. You see, the Murder Act of 1752 required that only people who had been executed could be used for dissection. In the 1700s, as Marissa and I have mentioned, you could be executed for hundreds of pretty minor crimes, so there was no lack of fresh bodies. But in the 1800s, magistrates began balking at making everything a death sentence, and, as a result, there were a lot fewer criminal bodies available when the medical school, by some accounts, needed upwards of 500 bodies. So, resurrection men stepped in to fill the lack.

And a lucrative business it was. They received 8 to 10 guineas a corpse, more for a fresher one. One team admitted to stealing between 500 and 1,000 bodies over 12 years. With a guinea being worth a little more than a pound sterling, and a fellow being able to live nicely for a year in London for 100 pounds, the resurrection men made good money!

Families, of course, were appalled to return to the cemetery with flowers for dear Aunt Florence only to find that her grave had been dug up and her coffin emptied. They turned to a number of ingenious ways to safeguard their loved ones, such as standing guard over the grave, circling the grave with an iron fence, burying their dead in iron coffins that couldn’t be broken into, or covering the grave with a stone so heavy it couldn’t be moved, like this mort stone. The protections didn’t have to last forever; they only had to protect the body until it had decayed enough that it was no longer useful for dissection.

But some resurrection men got greedy. Fresh bodies were worth more, so why not create a few? They begin murdering the homeless and the orphans, the teens who were doing odd jobs to make ends meet. In 1830, for example, John Bishop and Thomas Williams were found guilty of enticing several people to a dark part of town with offers of cheap lodging, drugging their victims, and dropping them into wells to kill them, then selling their stripped bodies for cash. Their case was so publicized, and the public outrage so great, that the police decided to make a bit off the case too. They opened the house where the murders had occurred to the public for 5 shillings a look. Supposedly, the viewers ripped off pieces of the house as souvenirs, until nothing was left. In a quirk of fate, both Bishop and Williams were hanged for their crimes, in front of 30,000 people, and their bodies given to a medical school for dissection.

Partially as a result of these dark deeds, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act in 1832, which allowed bodies found and not claimed and ones that relatives donated to be used for dissection. It also required that anatomy teachers be licensed, which was supposed to make them more honest and less likely to buy dead bodies that showed up mysteriously at their doors. The changes affectively cut into the resurrection men’s trade, and the practice faded away like a tired ghost.

And for that I think we can all be thankful! Happy Halloween!

Books That Go Bump in the Night, Part 1

We're well into October now, which means chrysanthemums and pumpkins adorning yards and doorsteps... and not a few white muslin ghosts hanging from trees and lamp-posts and giant spiders, fake tombstones, and other scary appurtenances scattered about yards as Halloween approaches.

What is it about Halloween and the cult of spookiness? Is it the fun of getting a scare without really being…well, scared? We know that ghosts and witches and monsters aren’t really lurking around the corner, but sometimes it’s just fun to pretend that they might be…and Halloween is the time of year to indulge in that kind of fun.

But we aren’t the first to enjoy a good shiver and nervous glance over the shoulder. Our young ladies of the 19th century liked it just as well as we did. I rather think the vogue for ghost stories and other scary literature that first arose in the late 18th century and continued to blossom in the 19th is probably a direct result of the Enlightenment, that intellectual movement of the 18th century that, among other things, rang the death knell of common belief in things like witches and curses and other supernatural beliefs. People stopped believing that their horse had gone lame or their child taken ill because they had been “overlooked” by the old lady at the end of the lane with a wart on her nose and poor personal hygiene…but once the real fear of the supernatural waned, I think they also kind of missed the frisson of excitement that it lent to life.

The frisson came back in 1764 when Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, what's now known as the first Gothic novel...and for the next decades young ladies shivered over its haunted corridors, evil villains, and gigantic ghosts. I'll let Regina tell you more about the Gothic novel craze, and hope you'll come back from now through the end of the month as we look at 19th century Books that Go Bump in the Night!

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Fate sits on these dark battlements, and frowns,
And, as the portals open to receive me,
Her voice, in sullen echoes through the courts,
Tells of a nameless deed.
Frontispiece of The Mysteries of Udolpho


October is fright month on many television stations here in the states, with every horror flick from the last 30 years darkening the small screen. We have a rule at our house: no scary stuff if Mom has to be in the room. My sons and husband sigh with exaggerated patience as I stick my fingers in my ears and hum while crossing their viewing point. I just don’t like to be scared.

But that wasn’t the case for many young ladies and gentlemen in the nineteenth century. Then as today, tales of horror sent delighted shivers down their spines. The first “Gothic novel” was published in 1764: Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (although the first edition was written under a pseudonym). Gothic novels combine horror and romance, but often romance in the older meaning of the word, what today we would call adventure. They featured castles in exotic locations, what the English considered romantic time periods (often the 1500s), and menacing villains threatening lovely young heroines, but not necessarily with handsome princes riding to the rescue. The haunting supernatural events were often, but not always, explained away in the end.

Some of today’s horror icons, Dracula and Frankenstein, were popularized by nineteenth century Gothic writers Bram Stoker and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, respectively. By far one of the most popular pieces, however, was The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. Published in 1794 in four volumes, it has been called the first bestseller, and it was still a bestseller long into the nineteenth century. Jane Austen’s heroine in Northanger Abbey, which was written in 1798 but not published until 1818 after Jane had died, reads The Mysteries of Udolpho and begins to see the people around her in a whole new light.

So, are you looking for something scary on this Halloween? Or are you hiding out with a good book?