Ghosts & Gallows (7 page)

Just before 3.40 a.m. on the morning of Friday 31 August, a carter named Charles Cross walked into Buck’s Row, a street behind the main thoroughfare of Whitechapel Road, and noticed what he initially took to be a tarpaulin bundle lying in the entrance to Brown’s stable yard. It proved to be the body of London-born Mary Anne ‘Polly’ Nicholls, a prostitute in her early forties; her throat had been cut and the lower part of her abdomen slashed, exposing the intestines. A week later, on 8 September, forty-seven-year-old Annie Chapman was refused a bed at a lodging house in Dorset Street for not having sufficient doss money. Her body was discovered a few hours later just after six in the morning by a resident in the back yard of a house at 29 Hanbury Street off of Brick Lane. The yard, accessed by a narrow passageway from the street, was often frequented by prostitutes and their clients. Annie Chapman had been brutally murdered – the head, practically severed from the neck, was tied in place with a handkerchief and as well as disembowelling his victim, the killer had removed and taken away the uterus. Seventeen people asleep on the premises only yards away heard nothing.

At the end of the same month, on 30 September, two more women were murdered within an hour of each other on what has become known as the night of the ‘double event’. Around 1 a.m., Louis Diemschutz, a jewellery hawker, drove his horse and cart into Dutfield’s Yard behind a working men’s club in Berner Street, Whitechapel, and came across the body of a woman lying in a pool of blood, her throat cut. This was Elisabeth Stride (‘Long Liz’), a forty-five-year-old Swedish-born prostitute originally from Torslanda near Gothenburg. The lack of mutilation has given some commentators reason to doubt whether this was actually a Ripper murder but it is highly likely that the sound of Diemschutz’s approach interrupted the killer before he could begin his butchery and, hiding in the shadows, he made his escape as the peddler ran into the club to raise the alarm. Forty-five minutes later and half a mile to the west, Police Constable Edward Watkins was passing on his regular beat through Mitre Square when, in a secluded corner opposite Church Passage, the light from his lantern revealed the horrific sight of another dead East End woman, forty-three-year-old Catherine Eddowes who had been, in Watkins’ own words, ‘cut to pieces’. The Ripper had worked quickly and in only a few minutes (the policeman had passed the same spot a quarter of an hour earlier and seen nothing) had laid open Eddowes’ abdomen – this time both the left kidney and the uterus were missing and, as well as gashing open the throat, the killer had viciously slashed and disfigured the face
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In between the killing of Annie Chapman and the double slayings of Elisabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, a letter sent to the Central News Agency on 17 September and signed ‘Catch me if you Can, Jack the Ripper’ was the first of several communications (all of which may or may not have been written by the murderer) to give the killer a chillingly anonymous identity and, subsequently, set the benchmark for sadistic slaughter which, in the words of crime writers Joe Gaute and Robin Odell, has become ‘a kind of universal standard against which other murders are measured’. For the whole of October, Victorian London held its breath; several weeks passed with no new killings, but in reality it proved to be the eye of the storm. Forty days after the grim events of Dutfield’s Yard and Mitre Square, ‘Jacky’ seemingly concluded his reign of terror with a final killing of almost mind-numbing savagery.

On 9 November 1888, around a quarter to eleven in the morning, Thomas Bowyer, assistant to Mr John McCarthy, a local landlord and candle maker, knocked on the door of 13 Miller’s Court, effectively the twelve foot square ground-floor back room of 26 Dorset Street, only yards from the main Commercial Street thoroughfare, to collect twenty-nine shillings-worth of back rent from one of the tenants, twenty-four-year-old Mary Jeanette Kelly, who was several weeks in arrears. Receiving no response, Bowyer reached through a broken windowpane and, pulling back the curtain, peered into the room. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he was greeted with a scene from a nightmare. With little chance of interruption, Jack the Ripper had subjected the young Irishwoman to a prolonged and ferocious assault lasting over an hour, inflicting appalling injuries and leaving the tiny room looking like an abattoir. Police constables and later Scotland Yard detectives found what was left of Mary Kelly lying on a bed soaked through with blood. Flesh had been stripped from the legs and arms, the abdomen opened and organs removed (the liver was found placed between her feet), both breasts had been sliced off and the heart cut out and taken away. Ashes found in the grate suggested the killer had worked (possibly naked to avoid saturating his outer clothing with blood) by the light of a pile of burning rags in the fireplace.

Over the next fifteen months several more murders, all of women, took place in and around the same area which have been described by some researchers as further Ripper crimes. They included parts of a headless body dredged from the Thames in June 1889, which were subsequently identified as that of a prostitute named Elizabeth Jackson from Turks Row, Chelsea; Alice McKenzie (‘Clay Pipe Alice’), found the following month in Castle Alley, Whitechapel with her throat cut and gashes across her abdomen, and twenty-five-year-old Frances Coles, discovered with similar injuries under a railway arch at Swallow Gardens in Whitechapel on 13 February 1891. Most commentators, however, consider the killing of Mary Kelly to be the final Ripper murder, whose brief but unprecedented reign of terror was curtailed either by the killer’s suicide or anonymous incarceration in an unknown lunatic asylum. For those both investigating and rediscovering the mystery of Jack the Ripper during the renaissance of the 1960s, the Whitechapel murderer – despite many imaginative theories as to his real identity – was an unidentified man who was never caught.

In the sixty years between the execution of William Corder and the chilling ‘autumn of terror’ of Jack the Ripper, a significant landmark in the history of the paranormal took place when the small village of Hydesville, twenty miles from Rochester in New York State, became the birthplace of Modern Spiritualism. Two decades after Ann Marten’s prophetic dreams of the Red Barn, strange things began to happen in the home of the Fox family.

On 11 December 1847, John D. Fox became the tenant of a small cabin-like house and moved in with his wife and six children. The building itself had in the local area something of a haunted reputation. Nothing of any particular significance happened until March 1848, when curious events started to unfold. The Fox family became disturbed at night by strange rapping noises and knocks sounding within the house itself. These were accompanied by noises suggesting the movement of furniture and later the sound of footsteps. The rapping noises seemed to be centred around three of John Fox’s daughters, twelve-year-old Kate, fifteen-year-old Margaret and later their sister Leah, who also became a focus for the disturbances
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. What today’s modern researchers would recognise as being a spontaneous poltergeist outbreak was to be the catalyst that would unlock a doorway to seemingly dormant psychic faculties inherent in mankind.

It became apparent to the Fox family that the alarming noises seemed to have some form of intelligence behind them, something that was confirmed when they began putting questions to whatever was making the sounds. Answers were received in the form of raps and knocks and a gruesome picture began to emerge. Apparently, a thirty-one-year-old man had been murdered in the house five years previously and his remains buried in the cellar of the building. The news of the disturbances quickly spread throughout the area and the family soon became inundated with visitors wanting to hear the rappings for themselves. During the course of a few days, over 300 people came to Hydesville and whatever was causing the disturbances did not disappoint them. The sinister knockings continued and volunteered more information to the effect that the murdered man was a peddler who had been killed for money. Digging took place in the cellar of the house in an attempt to ascertain the truth behind the bizarre affair. The work was temporarily suspended until the summer, when the excavators finally unearthed part of a skeleton. This was too much for the Fox family and they finally vacated the house. Kate Fox moved to her brother’s home in Auburn, in New York State, while Margaret went with her sister Leah to Rochester. The remaining parts of the murdered peddler had to wait a further fifty-six years before they were finally unearthed in 1901 when the house itself, then as now considered of immense importance to the Spiritualist movement, was physically moved in its entirety to a new location in Lily Dale, New York.

For the Fox sisters, however, their move away from Hydesville did not end the attention of the forces that were now apparently at work. The rapping noises continued to disturb the three girls and were now accompanied by other phenomena that included the eerie movement of objects. Margaret, Kate and Leah Fox continued to communicate with the noises and through a system of rapping were finally able to establish permanent contact with the spirit ‘entities’ that were making the sounds, proclaiming a new era of interaction with the departed.

On 14 November 1849, not quite two years since the Fox family had moved into their little Hydesville home, the first Spiritualist meeting took place at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. Before long the movement began to grow, but its spread was greeted with hostility and was denounced by the establishment. Despite this the circles that had formed around the three Fox girls began to develop and it soon became apparent that Margaret, Kate and Leah were not the only ones who were able to establish contact with spirits. The Kate Fox circle developed two new mediums, Mrs Tamlin and Mrs Benedict, who went on to become well known in their own right. In other circles sitters discovered that they too had the ability to cause phenomena. On 28 November 1849, Leah Fox became the first professional medium, charging sitters a fee for her services as an intermediary with the spirit world. At this stage the phenomena demonstrated consisted of rapping noises, movement of the table about which the sitters gathered – giving rise to the popular term ‘table turning’ – and psychic touches experienced by the sitters themselves.

The Fox sisters were public mediums for many years but as time went on their own reputations, as well as those of the many mediums who followed in their footsteps, came under attack as the new movement continued to be derided and dismissed as either hysteria or fraudulence by the scientific fraternity, newspapermen and the public alike. In 1861, Kate Fox became engaged to a New York banker named Charles Livermore and over the course of the next five years gave nearly 400 private séances in Livermore’s home. These sittings were significant as in several Kate achieved an alleged materialisation of Livermore’s dead first wife Estelle that convinced him of the genuineness of her mediumship. Kate herself travelled widely, visiting England and Russia, where she continued to expand the Spiritualist movement. However, the personal relationships between the three founding sisters of Modern Spiritualism deteriorated over the years, fuelled by Margaret’s descent into alcoholism. She managed to turn Kate and Leah against one another and, in 1888, the same year that Jack the Ripper stalked the East End of London, and some forty years after the Hydesville rappings began, made a confession denouncing the movement. A year later, Margaret issued a full retraction, but her actions caused much damage to the Fox sisters’ reputations. All three sisters died within three years of one another, Leah first in 1890; Kate followed her on 2 July 1892 and finally Margaret on 8 March 1893. The founders were gone but in their lifetimes they had seen the incredible growth of the movement and this was to go from strength to strength in the years to come.

The spread of Spiritualism outside of its native America was inevitable due to the activities of travelling mediums. In October 1852, Mrs W.R. Haydon was one of the first to arrive in England from Boston. She was a medium in the mould of the Fox sisters who demonstrated rapping phenomena and table turning. The popularity of the latter method of communication, the simplest involving the tilting of a specially built lightweight table to which questions were directed, became immense and quickly exploded into a craze. Society invitations were extended to include five o’clock tea and table turning. Many mediums followed Mrs Haydon and many diversities of spirit communication began to be represented. P.B. Randolph was a notable trance medium who arrived in 1857.

The early 1850s saw the first experimental organisation for the study and development of English mediumship. This was the Charing Cross Spiritual Circle, which in July 1857 was superseded by the London Spiritualist Union. Several other organisations developed but in time either fell by the wayside or were incorporated into other groups. As well as the London Spiritualist Alliance, inaugurated in 1884, English Spiritualism was consolidated by various other factors. In 1871, Kate Fox settled in England and gave many séances. Mrs Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899) was an inspirational speaker and propagandist for the Spiritualist movement who visited England during the course of her extensive travels, as was Mrs Cora L.V. Richmond (1840-1923), who arrived in 1873 and spent several years in the country.

However, the single most important influence in England was the mediumship of Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886) whose phenomena galvanised the entire spiritualistic scene in this country and his importance in the history of mediumship cannot be overstated. The New York scholar and theologian Professor George Bush was the first to investigate him, after which Home travelled to England, arriving in April 1855. Many Victorian Spiritualists were converted through experiencing his phenomena first hand and he impressed a number of notable persons of the day as to the genuineness of his abilities. These latter men included the Victorian scientist Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), noted for his work with optics and the inventor of the kaleidoscope,
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novelist and journalist William Thackeray (1811-1863) and Lord Edward Robert Lytton (1831-1891), later Viceroy and Governor of India. The most famous aspect of Home’s mediumship was levitation but he also produced materialisations and the telekinetic movement of objects. His most famous feat of defying gravity was in December 1868 at Ashley House in London, where he is said to have levitated himself out of one first-floor room and entered another by floating in through the windows.