The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, Andrew Lang [free children's online books txt] 📗

form of Dr. Shustoff, now hinted that electricity or magnetic force was at the bottom of the annoyances, a great comfort to the household, who conceived that the devil was concerned.  The doctor accompanied his friends to their country house for a night, Maria was invited to oblige with a dance, and only a few taps on windows followed.  The family returned to town till 21st January.  No sooner was Mrs. Shchapoff in bed than knives and forks came out of a closed cupboard and flew about, occasionally sticking in the walls.

On 24th January the doctor abandoned the hypothesis of electricity, because the noises kept time to profane but not to sacred music.  A Tartar hymn by a Tartar servant, an Islamite, had no accompaniment, but the Freischütz was warmly encored.

This went beyond the most intelligent spontaneous exercises of electricity.  Questions were asked of the agencies, and to the interrogation, “Are you a devil?” a most deafening knock replied.  “We all jumped backwards.”

Now comes a curious point.  In the Wesley and Tedworth cases, the masters of the houses, like the curé of Cideville (1851), were at odds with local “cunning men”.

Mr. Shchapoff’s fiend now averred that he was “set on” by the servant of a neighbouring miller, with whom Mr. Shchapoff had a dispute about a mill pond.  This man had previously said, “It will be worse; they will drag you by the hair”.  And, indeed, Mrs. Shchapoff was found in tears, because her hair had been pulled. {205}

Science again intervened.  A section of the Imperial Geographical Society sent Dr. Shustoff, Mr. Akutin (a Government civil engineer), and a literary gentleman, as a committee of inquiry appointed by the governor of the province.  They made a number of experiments with Leyden jars, magnets, and so forth, with only negative results.  Things flew about, both from, and towards Mrs. Shchapoff.  Nothing volatile was ever seen to begin its motion, though, in March, 1883, objects were seen, by a policeman and six other witnesses, to fly up from a bin and out of a closed cupboard, in a house at Worksop. {206}  Mr. Akutin, in Mrs. Shchapoff’s bedroom, found the noises answer questions in French and German, on contemporary politics, of which the lady of the house knew nothing.  Lassalle was said to be alive, Mr. Shchapoff remarked, “What nonsense!” but Mr. Akutin corrected him.  The bogey was better informed.  The success of the French in the great war was predicted.

The family now moved to their town house, and the inquest continued, though the raps were only heard near the lady.  A Dr. Dubinsky vowed that she made them herself, with her tongue; then, with her pulse.  The doctor assailed, and finally shook the faith of Mr. Akutin, who was to furnish a report.  “He bribed a servant boy to say that his mistress made the sounds herself, and then pretended that he had caught her trying to deceive us by throwing things.”  Finally Mr. Akutin reported that the whole affair was a hysterical imposition by Mrs. Shchapoff.  Dr. Dubinsky attended her, her health and spirits improved, and the disturbances ceased.  But poor Mr. Shchapoff received an official warning not to do it again, from the governor of his province.  That way lies Siberia.

“Imagine, then,” exclaims Mr. Shchapoff, “our horror, when, on our return to the country in March, the unknown force at once set to work again.  And now even my wife’s presence was not essential.  Thus, one day, I saw with my own eyes a heavy sofa jump off all four legs (three or four times in fact), and this when my aged mother was lying on it.”  The same thing occurred to Nancy Wesley’s bed, on which she was sitting while playing cards in 1717.  The picture of a lady of seventy, sitting tight to a bucking sofa, appeals to the brave.

Then the fire-raising began.  A blue spark flew out of a wash-stand, into Mrs. Shchapoff’s bedroom.  Luckily she was absent, and her mother, rushing forward with a water-jug, extinguished a flaming cotton dress.  Bright red globular meteors now danced in the veranda.  Mr. Portnoff next takes up the tale as follows, Mr. Shchapoff having been absent from home on the occasion described.

“I was sitting playing the guitar.  The miller got up to leave, and was followed by Mrs. Shchapoff.  Hardly had she shut the door, when I heard, as though from far off, a deep drawn wail.  The voice seemed familiar to me.  Overcome with an unaccountable horror I rushed to the door, and there in the passage I saw a literal pillar of fire, in the middle of which, draped in flame, stood Mrs. Shchapoff. . . . I rushed to put it out with my hands, but I found it burned them badly, as if they were sticking to burning pitch.  A sort of cracking noise came from beneath the floor, which also shook and vibrated violently.”  Mr. Portnoff and the miller “carried off the unconscious victim”.

Mr. Shchapoff also saw a small pink hand, like a child’s, spring from the floor, and play with Mrs. Shchapoff’s coverlet, in bed.  These things were too much; the Shchapoffs fled to a cottage, and took a new country house.  They had no more disturbances.  Mrs. Shchapoff died in child-bed, in 1878, “a healthy, religious, quiet, affectionate woman”.

CHAPTER X
Modern Hauntings

The Shchapoff Story of a Peculiar Type.  “Demoniacal Possession.”  Story of Wellington Mill briefly analysed.  Authorities for the Story.  Letters.  A Journal.  The Wesley Ghost.  Given Critically and Why.  Note on similar Stories, such as the Drummer of Tedworth.  Sir Waller Scott’s Scepticism about Nautical Evidence.  Lord St. Vincent.  Scott asks Where are his Letters on a Ghostly Disturbance.  The Letters are now Published.  Lord St. Vincent’s Ghost Story.  Reflections.

Cases like that of Mrs. Shchapoff really belong to a peculiar species of haunted houses.  Our ancestors, like the modern Chinese, attributed them to diabolical possession, not to an ordinary ghost of a dead person.  Examples are very numerous, and have all the same “symptoms,” as Coleridge would have said, he attributing them to a contagious nervous malady of observation in the spectators.  Among the most notorious is the story of Willington Mill, told by Howitt, and borrowed by Mrs. Crowe, in The Night Side of Nature.  Mr. Procter, the occupant, a Quaker, vouched to Mrs. Crowe for the authenticity of Howitt’s version. (22nd July, 1847.)  Other letters from seers are published, and the Society of Psychical Research lately printed Mr. Procter’s contemporary journal.  A man, a woman, and a monkey were the chief apparitions.  There were noises, lights, beds were heaved about: nothing was omitted.  A clairvoyante was turned on, but could only say that the spectral figures, which she described, “had no brains”.  After the Quakers left the house there seems to have been no more trouble.  The affair lasted for fifteen years.

Familiar as it is, we now offer the old story of the hauntings at Epworth, mainly because a full view of the inhabitants, the extraordinary family of Wesley, seems necessary to an understanding of the affair.  The famous and excessively superstitious John Wesley was not present on the occasion.

THE WESLEY GHOST

No ghost story is more celebrated than that of Old Jeffrey, the spirit so named by Emily Wesley, which disturbed the Rectory at Epworth, chiefly in the December of 1716 and the spring of 1717.  Yet the vagueness of the human mind has led many people, especially journalists, to suppose that the haunted house was that, not of Samuel Wesley, but of his son John Wesley, the founder of the Wesleyan Methodists.  For the better intelligence of the tale, we must know who the inmates of the Epworth Rectory were, and the nature of their characters and pursuits.  The rector was the Rev. Samuel Wesley, born in 1662, the son of a clergyman banished from his living on “Black Bartholomew Day,” 1666.  Though educated among Dissenters, Samuel Wesley converted himself to the truth as it is in the Church of England, became a “poor scholar” of Exeter College in Oxford, supported himself mainly by hack-work in literature (he was one of the editors of a penny paper called The Athenian Mercury, a sort of Answers), married Miss Susanna Annesley, a lady of good family, in 1690-91, and in 1693 was presented to the Rectory of Epworth in Lincolnshire by Mary, wife of William of Orange, to whom he had dedicated a poem on the life of Christ.  The living was poor, Mr. Wesley’s family multiplied with amazing velocity, he was in debt, and unpopular.  His cattle were maimed in 1705, and in 1703 his house was burned down.  The Rectory House, of which a picture is given in Clarke’s Memoirs of the Wesleys, 1825, was built anew at his own expense.  Mr. Wesley was in politics a strong Royalist, but having seen James II. shake “his lean arm” at the Fellows of Magdalen College, and threaten them “with the weight of a king’s right hand,” he conceived a prejudice against that monarch, and took the side of the Prince of Orange.  His wife, a very pious woman and a strict disciplinarian, was a Jacobite, would not say “amen” to the prayers for “the king,” and was therefore deserted by her husband for a year or more in 1701-1702.  They came together again, however, on the accession of Queen Anne.

Unpopular for his politics, hated by the Dissenters, and at odds with the “cunning men,” or local wizards against whom he had frequently preached, Mr. Wesley was certainly apt to have tricks played on him by his neighbours.  His house, though surrounded by a wall, a hedge, and its own grounds, was within a few yards of the nearest dwelling in the village street.

In 1716, when the disturbances began, Mr. Wesley’s family consisted of his wife; his eldest son, Sam, aged about twenty-three, and then absent at his duties as an usher at Westminster; John, aged twelve, a boy at Westminster School; Charles, a boy of eight, away from home, and the girls, who were all at the parsonage.  They were Emily, about twenty-two, Mary, Nancy and Sukey, probably about twenty-one, twenty and nineteen, and Hetty, who may have been anything between nineteen and twelve, but who comes after John in Dr. Clarke’s list, and is apparently reckoned among “the children”. {212}  Then there was Patty, who may have been only nine, and little Keziah.

All except Patty were very lively young people, and Hetty, afterwards a copious poet, “was gay and sprightly, full of mirth, good-humour, and keen wit.  She indulged this disposition so much that it was said to have given great uneasiness to her parents.”  The servants, Robin Brown, Betty Massy and Nancy Marshall, were recent comers, but were acquitted by Mrs. Wesley of any share in the mischief.  The family, though, like other people of their date, they were inclined to believe in witches and “warnings,” were not especially superstitious, and regarded the disturbances, first with some apprehension, then as a joke, and finally as a bore.

The authorities for what occurred are, first, a statement and journal by Mr. Wesley, then a series of letters of 1717 to Sam at Westminster by his mother, Emily and Sukey, next a set of written statements made by these and other witnesses to John Wesley in 1726, and last and worst, a narrative composed many years after by John Wesley for The Arminian Magazine.

The earliest document, by a few days, is the statement of Mr. Wesley, written, with a brief journal, between 21st December, 1716, and 1st January, 1717.  Comparing this with Mrs. Wesley’s letter to Sam of 12th January, 1716 and Sukey’s letter of 24th January, we learn that the family for some weeks after 1st December had been “in the greatest panic imaginable,” supposing that Sam, Jack, or Charlie (who must also have been absent from home) was dead, “or by some misfortune killed”.