THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS (3 page)

Pliny vouches for the truth of his narrative. Ludwig Lavater, at any rate, than whom there is no more serious-minded author, reproduced it entire in his
De Spectris, lemuribus, et magnis atque insolitis fragoribus (Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght)
, and the little duodecimo edition of Lavater, published at Gorkum in 1687, give us an illustration of the haggard spectre confronting the philosopher.

In Latin literature the supernatural informs at least one masterpiece of the world's romance, the
Metamorphoses
of Apuleius, a book to which that sadly overworked word "decadent" may be most fittingly and justly applied. From the first sentences to the last these pages are heavy with the mystic and the macabre, as some ornate cortège is palled with velvet trappings and the pomp of solemn habiliments of sacred dignity and reverend awe. Lucius is travelling in Thessaly, earth's very caldron, where voodoo and unclean sciences seethe and stew amain. At the outset he falls in with Aristomenes, who tells how, as it seemed to him, his fellow-companion had been slain by foul hags in the midnight inn, and yet he counted it but some evil dream, and travelled through those early morning hours with a dead man at his side. But when they came to running water the spell was broken, the corpse fell rigid and stiffening fast upon the river's bank with staring eyes long glazed and slackened, gaping jaw. It may be that this suggested Richard Middleton's
On the Brighton Road
, where the tramp plods along and two miles beyond Reigate meets the boy who asks to walk with him a bit, who died in the Crawley hospital twelve hours before.

It has not been possible to give any selection from Apuleius. It were difficult and it were profane to attempt any excerpt from his chapters, which must be read in the fullness of their beauty — a beauty which is that of some still night when the cypress point to heaven like burned-out torches against the dusky sky and the yews darkly splotch the landscape, when the sickle of the harvest moon rides high in heaven, and nightingales are singing amorously, and the owl hoots dully ever and anon to remind us that there is death as well as love.

"Aut indicauit, aut finxit,"
wrote the supreme wisdom of S. Augustine as he pondered the tale that Apuleius told.

Throughout the Middle Ages the supernatural played as large a part in literature as in life. Those were the days of the sabbat and the witch. The old chronicles narrate deeds more horrible and facts more grim than any writer of fiction could weave. In the sixteenth century, too, the ghost story had no place when the
Malleus Maleficarum
lay open upon every judge's bench, when Guazzo and later Sinistrari penned their narratives of demon lovers, and Remy wrote his
Demonolatry
"Drawn from the Capital Trials of 900 Persons" executed for sorcery within the space of fifteen years.

There is a little interlude of sheer horror it may not be amiss to quote,
The Three Queens and the Three Dead Men:

1st Queen: I am afeard.

2nd Queen: Lo! what I see?

3rd Queen: Me thinketh it be devils three!

1st Dead Body: I was well fair.

2nd Dead Body: Such shalt thou be.

3rd Dead Body: For Gode's love, beware by me!

Boccaccio in the
Decameron
, giornata quinta, novella ottava, relates the story of Nastagio degli Onesti, who one day whilst walking lonely in a wood near Ravenna, sees flying down the glades a wretched woman,

Her Face, her Hands, her naked Limbs were torn,

With passing through the Brakes, and prickly Thorn;

Two Mastiffs, gaunt and grim, her Flight pursu'd,

And oft their fasten'd Fangs in Blood embru'd.

Mounted on a black charger there follows a grisly knight, and he looes on the two swift hounds of hell. Nastagio already had his hand upon the pommel of his sword, when, as the rider faces him, he realises that he is gazing at a damned soul. The knight reveals that he is no distant ancestor of the Onesti line, who during his life loved, but loved in vain. In despair at the lady's wanton cruelty, he stabbed himself, and now, after death, for her pride she is condemned to be hunted down by her spectre lover,

Renew'd to Life, that she might daily die,

I daily doom'd to follow, she to fly;

No more a Lover but a mortal Foe,

I seek her Life (for Love is none below:)

As often as my Dogs with better speed

Arrest her Flight, is she to Death decreed:

Then with this fatal Sword on which I dy'd,

I pierce her open'd Back or tender Side,

And tear that harden'd Heart from out her Breast,

Which, with her Entrails, makes my hungry Hounds a Feast.

Nor lies she long, but as her Fates ordain,

Springs up to Life, and fresh to second Pain,

Is sav'd to Day, to Morrow to be slain.

This, vers'd in Death, th' infernal Knight relates,

And then for Proof fulfill'd their common Fates;

Her Heart and Bowels through her Back he drew,

And fed the Hounds that help'd him to pursue.

The horrid details of the ghostly chase in the haunted forest are admirably related by Boccaccio, and are even better told by our great poet John Dryden in
Theodore and Honoria
(Fables, folio 1700), which he has taken from the Italian.

 In Chaucer the expression runs quite naturally:

He was not pale as a for-pyned goost; and in the
Nonne Preestes Tale
Chanticleer most appositely relates an excellent ghost story of the two travellers. They sleep at separate inns, and during the night one vainly endeavours, as in a dream, twice to wake his friend and call him to his assistance. A third time he appears covered with wounds and bleeding sore, and reveals that his corpse will be conveyed out of the town gates that morning in a tumbril of filth. The second traveller early hurries to his comrade's hostelry, to learn he has left ere daybreak. Ill content, he makes his way to the western gates; a cart is jolting through; at his cries the people come running up; they search amid the manure, and there they find

The dede man, that mordred was al newe.

At the Reformation, divines and common folk attempted to revise their ideas of the supernatural. And then it was, as Pierre Le Loyer says in his
IIII Livres de Spectres
(1586), which was translated into English by Z. Jones (1605):

"Of all the common and familiar subjects of conversation that are entered upon in company of things remote from Nature and cut off from the senses, there is none so ready to hand, none so usual, as that of visions of Spirits, and whether that said of them is true. It is the topic that people most readily discuss and on which they linger the longest because of the abundance of examples, the subject being fine and pleasing and the discussion the least tedious that can be found." 

Words that are as true to-day as they were when written three centuries and a half ago.

Ludwig Lavater of Zurich, who has been already mentioned, published his treatise
De Spectris, lemuribus, et magnis atque insolitis fragoribus
at Geneva in 1570. This was translated into English in 1572 as
Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght and of strange Noyses, Crackes, and Sundry Forewarnyages
, and a year before it had been turned into French as
Trois livres des Apparitions des Spectres, Esprits, Fantasmes
. Lavater, however, was unorthodox and often at fault, and so Pierre Le Loyer in 1586 issued a learned and, it must be confessed, salutary corrective in his
Discours et Histoire des spectres, visions et apparitions des esprits . . . en VIII livres . . . esquels . . . est manifestee la certitude des spectres et visions des esprits.
Le Loyer's book is far more important than that of Lavater, and equally valuable in ghost lore is the
De Apparitionibus . . . et terrificationibus nocturnes (Of Ghosts and of Midnight Terrors)
, by Peter Thyræus, a famous Jesuit professor of Würzburg, which was first published in 1594 and several times reprinted, although it has now become an exceedingly scarce book, the more so inasmuch as it was never translated from the original.

It is not out of place to devote a little attention to these serious and learned treatises of ghosts and apparitions, since they form the background, as it were, to the fiction of the subject, the ghost story. Indeed, a few more well-known English books of this kind may here be mentioned, although it must be always remembered that of very many it is possible only to name some half a dozen, which yet, at any rate, will serve to show how deeply the whole philosophy of ghosts was studied and treated in literature.

The Terrors of the Night, or, A Discourse of Apparitions
, 4to, 1594, by Thomas Nashe, is important as an indication of popular interest, for none so quick as Nashe to catch the topics of the hour. In itself this piece is of little value.

In 1681 was published Joseph Glanvil's
Saducismus Triumphatus, or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions
, a work which caused no small sensation in its day. It is Glanvil who tells of the Drummer of Tedworth, of a Hollander who was strangely psychic, of the ghost of Major George Sydenham, and many more.

It was long thought, and amongst others even Sir Walter Scott gave currency to the error, that Defoe's "A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal, the next day after her Death, to one Mrs. Bargrave, at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705," which was published for threepence by Bragg of Paternoster Row, and which is often printed with Charles Drelincourt's
The Christian's Defence against the Fears of Death
, translated into English by D'Assigny, was specifically written to help off a number of copies of the Huguenot pastor's treatise which lay heavy on the booksellers' hands. Such is far from the case. Recent research has shown that Mrs. Veal and Mrs. Bargrave were not fictitious characters, but real persons, well known in their proper circles. Mrs. Veal was buried at Canterbury on 10 September, 1705. Mrs. Bargrave was Barbara Smith, a widow, whom Mr. Richard Bargrave, a maltster, married at S. Alphege, Canterbury, on 11 January, 1700. The narrative relates facts, and Defoe is merely a reporter. It is true that in an interview, 21 May, 1714, Mrs. Bargrave stated that a few trifling details were not strictly accurate; "all things contained in it, however, were true as regards the event itself on matters of importance." Mrs. Bargrave told her story in 1705, and at the time it caused a tremendous sensation.

It is possible but barely to mention Increase Mather's
Remarkable Providences
, and Cotton Mather's
Wonders of the Invisible World
. Andrew Moreton's
The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclos'd: or, An Universal History of Apparitions
, which had run to a third edition in 1738, is a useful and ably argued book.

To come down to the nineteenth century, a very famous work is Mrs. Crowe's
The Night Side of Nature
, 1848, which has been called "one of the best collections of supernatural stories in the English language," and of which I cherish a real yellow-back copy of about 1885. In 1850 the Rev. Henry Christmas, Librarian of Sion College, issued a translation of Dom Augustine Calmet's great work under the title
The Phantom World
. Thomas Brevior, in
The Two Worlds
, has a chapter on apparitions which should not be neglected. That fine scholar and — may I say it? — romantic ritualist, Dr. F.G. Lee, sometime Vicar of All Saints', Lambeth, left a whole library of ghost lore:
The Other World, or Glimpses of the Supernatural,
2 vols., 1875;
More Glimpses of the World Unseen
, 1878;
Glimpses in the Twilight
, 1885; and
Sights and Shadows
, 1894.
The Christmas and New Year's Numbers of the Review of Reviews
, 1891-2, supplied a large number of Real Ghost Stories, under which title, indeed, they were reprinted in October, 1897. Many of us will remember how people at the time spoke of the review with bated breath: how it was hurried out of the sight of children, and read almost in secret by their elders with blanching cheeks and tingling nerves. I fear we may have become very sophisticated since those happy days. In
True Irish Ghost Stories
(1926), by St. John D. Seymour and Harry L. Neligan, we have an admirable book. The tales are fascinating and most excellently told. From Ingram's
Haunted Homes of Great Britain
, third edition, 1886, I can always be sure of a shudder. True, the book has been largely superseded by Mr. Charles G. Harper's
Haunted Houses
, first published in 1907 and re-issued in 1924, with some first-rate drawings of haunted mansions by the author. It is a veritable encyclopædia, but I wish Mr. Harper would not try to strip us of our last vestige of Victorian romanticism. He does not succeed — at any rate, in my case — but the bad intent is there. None the less he has, and well deserves, my hearty thanks. In
The White Ghost Book
and
The Grey Ghost Book
, Miss Jessie Adelaide Middleton has given us a series of excellently told accounts of apparitions. Her reports of these hauntings are quite simple and sober; there is no bravura, there are no artificial situations and long planned climaxes. The result is that The House of Horror in
The White Ghost Book
is one of the most terrible, as it is one of the best authenticated, narratives I know.

To go back a little, in 1859 that ardent "old Conservative" Edward Tracy Turnerelli (1813-1896) published
A Night in a Haunted House, A Tale of Facts
, describing his own experiences in an ancient mansion at Kilkenny. It is a narrative of extraordinary interest; and publicly related, as it originally was told, at a meeting in aid of various charities at Ryde, it created an immense sensation.

Perhaps even more notice was attracted by the same author's
Two Nights in a Haunted House in Russia
, 1873, which ran through many editions, and was very widely discussed during the next decade and longer.

Here should be mentioned
News from the Invisible World,
a little known and older collection, which was (I believe) first published in Manchester, 1835, as by John Tregortha. This name, however, is variously given, and the author is more usually called George Charlton, but of him nothing seems actually to be recorded. Whoever he may have been, he had a wide knowledge of his subject and, in addition to the more familiar, one might say the historical matter, he has drawn on a number of new sources. At least they are new to me, and I have not found them mentioned in similar repertories.