Saturday 16 March 2024

An Elegant Sprawl

One of my Christmas presents was a night at one of my favourite places: Lower Slaughter—not on its streets, nice though they are, but at at even nicer inn. 













I love the name, Lower Slaughter which suggests one of the many bloody battles in the War of the Roses. Just up the road is Upper Slaughter where, presumably, a better class of people met their end. The origin of the word is more mundane*


We explored those Cotswold villages we hadn’t been to before; the three villages in the Wychwood area were neat and prosperous but with little more to them. Chipping Campden was much more interesting, with the wonderful gardens of Hidcote within walking distance—if you’re that way inclined. But the real joy lay in exploring lanes that led to nowhere, and driving across green but desolate uplands offering vast skies and panoramic views. 


It was on our way home that we came across the magical Swinbrook and the church of  St Mary the Virgin. 













I've never seen this type of grave before, or know whether it is peculiar to the locality









But I find it fascinating that three of the four  Mitford sisters (Nancy, Unity, and Diana) are buried so neatly together. Pamela, for some reason,  is buried northwest of the church tower. Their brother Tom who died in Burma during World War II has a plaque inside the church.


The church itself  is thought to have C11th origins because of is Romanesque central arches, but most of it is C12th and C13th. An interesting addition is the tower built in six weeks in 1822. Puts our procrastinating culture to shame.


The choir stalls are C17th along with the wooden pulpit, which rests on a modern stone base.

But what makes the church unique is in its devotion, not to the Lord but the once powerful Fettiplace family that dominated the area and owned estates in 15 counties. 






As you walk on and around the altar area you’re aware of the corpses lying beneath you—that is if you can wrest your gaze away from the magnificent Fettiplace memorials.


I envy their elegant sprawl and hope, when my time comes, for a tomb as  richly ornate. 


This is the earliest tomb which dates from 1613, the oldest Fettiplace at the bottom wearing an Elizabethan ruff. The middle one is his son Alexander, and at the top is William Fettiplace


The tomb below was built in 1686 and is even more ornate. At the top is Sir Edward Fettiplace d. 1686. Under him is Sir John Fettiplace d. 1672 and on the bottom is John Fettiplace d. 1657




The first recorded Fettiplace is Adam who was one of seven townsmen imprisoned in 1272 for injuring clerks of the university of Oxford in a 'town and gown' incident.. It did him no harm, as in later life he became Mayor of Oxford for eleven terms between 1245 and 1268. From that point on, their prosperity grew through marriage and luck. They even impacted America. In 1607, two Fettiplace brothers, William and Michael,  are recorded in Jamestown  with Captain John Smith, though their relationship with Pocahontas is unknown.


There is also a Hampshire branch of the Fettiplace family who settled in Portsmouth, Rhode Island in 16771,

Overcome by a surfeit of Fettiplaces, we repaired to The Swan Inn a little farther down the road and mulled their place in history over a pint and a bag of vinegary crisps. 


*Saxon for a very muddy place. Slõhtre, It has an onomatopoeic sound to it, I think




Thursday 7 March 2024

Gallup.

I’m a sucker for old English churches, villages and folklore. I’m also in love with the Old West and the technology that allows me to explore it from home. In a previous book, Phage,  I became an expert in navigating myself around Phoenix and the surrounding mountains via Google Earth to the extent I wanted to go there and drop in to two or three of its more interesting bars. 

Gallup New Mexico is currently exerting a similar hold and for the same reason, a book—tentatively named Final Battle— that will hopefully surface in two years’ time. Set some time in the 2030’s, it features John Grey and Elizabeth McBride, first seen in the Gift Trilogy. Along with Elizabeth’s dark sister, Elsie they are characters too good to waste, and as Adepts with abnormal lifespans they allow me considerable scope to play with time. 

 

So why Gallup, New Mexico? A minor character is Chenoa, a Navajo* Shaman who leads a double life as Gill Darrat, a renowned psychotherapist, who for obvious reasons operates from the Navajo nation. On any map, Gallup stands out as the only serious contender, and that was where the fun began. Research is a compelling black hole, and I now know more about Gallup than most people—at least those living outside of it. 


There were three essential things I had to work out. Where did Gill Darrat live in Gallup? Where was her office? And where would her alter ego, Chenoa, be based?


The first question was answered by researching local estate agents, scanning charts showing the good and bad neighbourhoods, demographic profiles and crime statistics. Estate agents proved wonderfully compulsive, allowing me to wander through the interiors of their videoed properties until I almost became a serious buyer—like someone in the TV programme ‘Escape to the Country’—though a far cry from the bucolic English countryside. 






Does Gill Darrat live here?


Or here?



Google Earth allowed me to prowl the streets of Gallup in search of office space. I eventually settled on somewhere along the NM 610 between a Taco shed and an Indian Cultural Centre five miles farther down the road.



Highway 610 and things to see



And finally, Chenoa, her sanctuary—a far harder call. I had a cave in mind, its walls filled with ancient petrographs, but where? Two obvious contenders stood out: Pyramid Rock and Church Rock; not too far away from Gallup, but perhaps too close. Surely there’d be a convenient cave there, one that Chenoa could call her own? There was though the further problem: tourists, too many of them.


Church Rock



Pyramid Rock




The search continued deeper into Navajo country along Indian Route 12 which snaked into Arizona.  I glided over such evocative names as Window Rock, Fort Defiance, Sawmills, Wheatfields until finally I came across it—Lukachukai. By this time, I was Chenoa. This was my home.







But what about the extraneous, the research not used but tucked in a folder  just in case? The fact that Route 66 passes through Gallup. That Errol Flynn once rode into one of its bars for a drink—I’m guessing whisky, and water for the horse. The event is now part of Gallup folklore and advertised on Route 66 as you approach the town.


Driving through Gallup





El Ranchero with an inviting pool but no mounted Errol Flynn


 By this time I had become acclimatised, memories of the New Mexico I’d visited many years ago flooding back—deserts, mountains and sky, dry and invigorating heat. There are few architectural gems in Gallup, but several interesting bars, some of which I might be wise to avoid. But do I want to go there? You bet—especially Lukachukai. 


* The Navajo refer to themselves as 'The People' or Dine. 

 

Friday 1 March 2024

The Mad Gasser of Mattoon



 The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town. (complete story at the very end.)

 

 

In the process of writing about Spring Heeled Jack, I discovered America was also haunted by the weird and absurd. Eighty years ago (1944 for the mathematically challenged)  the small city of Mattoon in Cole County, Illinois was subjected to a deadly peril, a Mad Gasser or to be exact, the ‘Mad Gasser of Mattoon.'




It began in September  when Aline Kearney noticed a ‘sickening sweet odour.’ Within moments her legs became numb and then paralysed, her throat abnormally dry.  Alarmed, her sister Martha called her husband who saw a man outside lurking near a bedroom window. The brother chased the man away and later described him as tall, dressed in black and wearing a tight cap.  Within the hour Aline’s legs returned to normal. 


The following day the local paper reported the incident with the headline ‘Anaesthetic Prowler on Loose’ and thus launched a flood of other stories. Orbon Raef and his wife reported a similar thing had happened the day before the Kearney incident. Both had been asleep but had awakened to a strange and noxious smell. Both were paralysed for an hour and a half.


Olive Brown claimed she’d been attacked even earlier, she too experiencing a dry throat and temporary paralysis. On the same night as the Kearney attack,  Mrs George Rider recorded a similar experience.  For whatever reason, she’d been up late that night drinking ‘several pots of coffee.’ She heard an unexpected ‘plop’ followed by a noxious smell that made her dizzy and tingle all over.  A neighbour reported a strange smell that made her children vomit. 


On September 5th  Beulah Cordes picked up a small piece of cloth from her porch. For some reason, she sniffed it, staggered, and screamed.  She reported ‘a feeling of paralysis like an electric shock’ and was sick for two hours.


Not to be outdone, Edna Jones, a local fortune teller, smelled something suspicious in her boarding house. On running out, she saw an ‘ape-like man with long arms reaching out, holding a spray gun.’ He fired three rounds of gas at her causing her to go numb all over. 




Hysteria set in. Armed vigilantes roamed the streets hunting the ‘Mad Gasser.’  A woman loading her gun in readiness for the Gasser accidentally blew a hole in her ceiling. Chemical experts suggested a popular rat poison—chloropicrin, a sweet smelling poisonous gas but the symptoms didn’t match and no actual traces of it were found. Police theories ranged from a rogue chemistry teacher, Japanese terrorists, an escaped or recently released lunatic. A town had become unhinged. 


When no culprit was found, other theories came to the fore. The Chief of Police suggested it was chemical run-off from a local factory: the Atlas Imperial Diesel Engine Company. The company made the obvious point that none of its employees experienced any kind of symptoms. 


The final, most popular theory was that it was a classic example of mass hysteria. A similar incident in 1972 amongst data workers in a Midwest university was similarly dismissed as a manifestation of generalised discontent. 


No conclusive evidence was ever found for a similar incident in Springfield Missouri. In 1987 Springfield was terrorised by ‘Ether Eddie’ who broke into fifteen homes, knocking out women with a formaldehyde cloth pressed to their noses. None of the women ranging from an eight-year-old girl to a mature 56-year-old were sexually molested and nothing was stolen. Even so, the town went berserk, few walked the streets alone at nights, and shops sold out of deadbolts. The following year a woman shot a burglar prying open her window. The wounded man was arrested and served ten years but police found no direct link between him and ‘Ether Eddie.’


I won’t go into the Hopkinsville Goblins. Time doesn’t allow. But for those who enjoy anodyne explanations for the weird and peculiar, it’s hard to beat the American government’s explanation for recent ‘attacks’ on U.S diplomats summed up in the term ‘Havana Syndrome,’ where it was first experienced. These unexplained symptoms are now officially classed as AHIs or Anomalous Health Incidents.







For any who wish to enjoy or endure the full story of the Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old LondonTown.

Friday 23 February 2024

Spring Heeled Jack


My father would have been four, my mother's father fourteen on the last reported sighting of Spring Heeled Jack in Liverpool. It may have been the very last sighting of a character* that haunted not only the Victorian imagination but the dreams of small children growing up in the 1950s, such is folk memory—to the extent I’m still aware of him in the 21st century, though I no longer have bad dreams he might carry me away for being naughty.


What makes these sightings relevant to my father and grandparents, was that they occurred in their neighbourhoods when they were children or adolescents, so the experience would have been directly or indirectly lived.


The first reported sighting of Spring Heeled Jack was in the outskirts of London in 1837 when a young Mary Stevens was out walking late one evening. Suddenly a tall dark figure leapt out at her, blocking her path. He was tall, cloaked, with sharp features and clawed hands. His eyes were red, his grin wide and unsettling. The final straw was when he spat out blue flame. Mary screamed. The figure turned, and with unnatural agility, leapt over buildings and walls. He struck again a few days later causing the terrified driver of a horse drawn carriage to lose control and crash. Soon all of London was talking of Spring Heeled Jack.


His final appearance in London took place on February 19th in 1838 when a young Jane Alsop opened the door to a man claiming to be a police officer and asking urgently for a light; they had captured Spring Heeled Jack in an adjoining lane!


She ran for a candle but on returning to the doorway he ripped off his cloak to reveal a monstrosity: fiery red eyes, a nightmarish grin and tight white clothing that looked to her to be oilskin. Blue fire billowed from his lips, and he ran at her with clawed hands. He caught up with her, clawing her neck and arms. Her screams alerted her sister who came running to her help, and the monster escaped leaping over hedges and walls. 





Sightings were rare after that though he became a staple in comics and ‘Penny Dreadfuls’. In the 1870s he appeared again. In 1872 The News of the World reported that Peckham was “in a state of commotion owing to what is known as the ‘Peckham Ghost’ quite alarming in appearance.” He appeared again in Sheffield later that year, and in 1877 was shot at by troops garrisoned in Aldershot. He was seen in Lincolnshire that same year.


St Francis Xavier church in Salisbury Street.


In 1888 he appeared in Everton, North Liverpool where he appeared on the roof top of Saint Francis Xavier church in Salisbury Street, and again in 1904 where he performed an encore in William Henry Street. 




It was in William Henry Street, one moonless night, that a  twelve year old boy called Tommy crept out from his house like adventurous boys are wont to do. Wandering through the dim, gas-lit streets he heard an eerie cackling sound then, turning a corner he bumped into a tall, cloaked figure with fiery red eyes. Luckily for Tommy, the apparition leapt out of sight, bounding over chimneys and roofs to effect his escape—though to my mind it should have been Tommy bounding over roofs to effect his escape.


William Henry Street**


Soon all of North Liverpool was talking about Spring Heeled Jack. There were more sightings. People were afraid to go out at night. Again, it made the News of the World.


Spring Heeled Jack – Ghost with a Weakness for Ladies:

“Everton (Liverpool) is scared by the singular antics of a ghost, to whom the name of Spring Heeled Jack has been given, because of the facility with which he has escaped by huge springs, of his would be captors to arrest him. William Henry street is the scene of his exploits . . . So far, the police have not arrested him, their sprinting powers being inferior.” 

 

 


Despite the poor sprinting powers of Liverpool’s finest, the locals were more agile.

One legend has it that on the final sighting of Jack, an angry mob chased him as far as Toxteth where he leapt over the reservoir and was never seen again. 

The end of the story.

*Or is it? He was most recently sighted near the border between Herefordshire and Monmouthshire during the 1980s. A Mr Marshall was slapped by a strange jumping figure that bounded away across open countryside, his eerie cackling echoing across the fields. In my defence, I wasn’t living in Monmouth at the time, though I remember experimenting with springs tied to my shoes as a boy.  


**With thanks to this excellent site 




Thursday 15 February 2024

Mr Sludge


The following short passage  is taken from one of my ghost stories set in late Victorian England. All of the characters but one are fictitious. The ‘reveal’ directly follows:


…. Miss Fiske nodded her head as one accustomed to doubt. “Ah we have a Voltaire amongst us; and yet had you been privileged to witness, as I have, the incomparable Daniel Dunglas Home floating from an upper-story bedroom window, passing with complete equanimity across a street seventy feet above—he raised his hat, sir, before re-entering his house by a sitting-room window.” Miss Fiske stared at each of them in turn. “A mystery most profound as is the Lord who allows such things.”

“The problem is, which lord?” the bishop muttered in an audible whisper. Eleanor sighed, sensing

another sermon coming on. 

“This restless doubting; this endless search for meaning in a world capering on the edge of lunacy, truly reflects the emptiness of our Godless time. Where has our puerile faith in technology, progress and profit for profit’s sake left us? Our sweet Lord who for our sins died on a pagan cross is to be replaced by…table rapping?" The bishop sighed deeply.  “This Gaderene rush towards that bleak precipice called progress…how many poor souls have been left behind, crushed beneath the wheels of mammon? How many souls, of the lower orders now find themselves embracing any and every ideology that may alleviate their situation…? How…” 

Laura cut him off. “I have always tended to side with Mr Scrooge on such matters. It was he— correct me if I am wrong my dear Septimus— that dismissed the spirit of poor Marley as a piece of undigested beef.”

The bishop considered the theological implications for a moment and allowed himself a tolerant smile. 

“Is it only through trance that the spirits can be contacted?” Eleanor asked. 

“The less gifted can of course avail themselves of the Planchette.” Miss Fiske shuddered delicately as if to suggest that such devices were little more than ethereal carving knives. “They are I believe quite popular amongst those for whom the other world is but a parlour game. Indeed, I do believe that there is now published ‘Spirit Rapping Made Easy.’” She shuddered again. “Can you imagine?”

            “Consecration in Five Easy Steps, perhaps?” Eleanor smiled sweetly at the bishop then turned again to the still shuddering medium. “Yes, indeed I do sympathise, Miss Fiske.”



Miss Philippa Fiske, though I wish otherwise, is fictional. Daniel Dunglas Home is not fictional, neither by all accounts was his ability to levitate at the drop of a hat.



An intimate account of his powers was given by Princess Pauline Metternich  in 1863 when with fifteen guests they sat around a table in a richly furnished room. “He was very pale,” the princess later wrote, “with light china-blue eyes, reddish hair thick and abundant but not inordinately long.”


Sitting on an armchair, someway from the table, Home sank into a trance. Soon after, taps were heard, sounds came from the chandelier and a chair moved across the room. A posy of violets drifted across the room from the piano and landed on Princess Pauline’s lap.

Some guests felt unseen hands and sensed movement beneath the table. The lights were switched on, the tablecloth removed, and table and floor thoroughly examined. Nothing was found. Suitably impressed, they adjourned for afternoon tea. 


Daniel Home came from a family of seers but as a small boy emigrated to America in the care of his uncle and aunt. His gifts were quickly recognised, so much so he was kicked out of his aunt’s God-fearing home and thereafter spent his life moving from place to place. In August 1852, at the home of a Connecticut silk manufacturer, he levitated several times during a séance, on one occasion touching the ceiling. 



Shortly after, he moved to England where he became a sensation. Lord Brougham, a former Chancellor and the scientist Sir David Brewer, witnessed a table lifting off the floor, an accordion and a handbell sounding without being touched. Despite a thorough investigation no trickery or rational explanation was found.


Between 1871 – 1873 the British scientist Sir William Crookes investigated Home’s ‘powers.’ On one occasion, he placed an accordion within an electrified cage to prevent tampering or fraud. The accordion sounded without Home touching the keys, and Crooke concluded that Home had genuine power.

Charles Darwin, too, was intrigued by Daniel Dunglas Home but was content to sit on the fence: “I cannot disbelieve Mr Crooke’s statement, nor can I believe in his result.”


One of his earliest fans was the poet Elizabeth Barret Browning. Both she and her husband, Robert Browning attended one of his seances in 1855 where ghostly hands placed a wreath of clematis on her head. Robert Browning, on the other hand despised the man, forbidding “this dungball” from his house and later writing a poem about him: “Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium.’”


Despite Robert Browning’s disapproval, Daniel Dunglas Home was famous throughout Europe, conducting seances for Napoleon III of France, Tsar Alexander II and a ‘veritable who’s who of Victorian society.' He died in Paris in 1886 and was buried in the Russian cemetery in that city.




Friday 9 February 2024

Burford. Ghosts and Saints

The A40 is one of my favourite roads, based in parts on an old Roman road and once the link between London and Fishguard. The stretch I find most attractive cuts through the Cotswolds en route to Oxford. 

We travelled it often and were always intrigued by the village of Burford twenty miles west of the dreaming spires. Recently, we took the left to Burford and spent an hour or two exploring it. 

The village is typically Cotswold, one long street with some interesting pubs (could spend a happy day there) gift shops and tea rooms. Off the main street are several interesting lanes, a car park that floods when the river Windrush overflows, and a very impressive church: St John the Baptist.











Inside the church is a tomb, which illustrates the beautiful complexity of history—that of the 'establishment'  as opposed to folk history. 


 The picture below shows St Peter's Chapel, once the private pew of the local Tanfield family. 


here hosting a Christmas Nativity scene



A close up of the chapel altar, 



                           And a  fascinating history of St Dorothy, whom I'd never heard of before.



For me, the centre piece of the church was not the high altar or the strangely arranged  chairs in place of pews



but the gorgeously ornate tomb of Lord and Lady Tanfield. 



At the head of the tomb is a coloured sculpture of their only child, Elizabeth Tanfield. 







At the foot of the tomb is Elizabeth's son, Lucius Carey



And here is what the tomb says of  Lawrence Tanfield


Clearly, the man was a saint—an establishment panegyric that would however cut little ice with St Peter. In reality, as a leading Treasury official, Sir Lawrence Tanfield was notoriously corrupt, and both he and his wife were hated as harsh and exacting landlords. Not a whiff of that here.


Soon after their demise, according to local folk lore, a fiery coach carrying the two of them could sometimes be seen flying through the streets and lanes of Burford—those unfortunate enough to see it cursed on the spot. The legend may have arisen years after an earlier tradition that began after their death—the burning of their effigies by the local people. Mercifully, the curse of the fiery coach carrying the two malevolent sprites ended after an exorcism. During it, the local vicar captured the ghost of Lady Tanfield and placed it into a bottle, which he promptly corked and threw into the river Windrush. During droughts, so desperate were the locals to prevent the bottle ever surfacing, they would attempt to fill the diminishing river with buckets of water.  The question though arises, what recourse did they have when the river flooded?




As it did when we were there. Our car is out of picture to the right, and we had to paddle out of the carpark.




Not everything about the family was bad. 


Their only child, Elizabeth, was something of a prodigy, her talent nurtured by her parents. She was forbidden candles, unless it was to read by night; a French tutor was hired when she was five years old and in just over a month she was speaking fluent French. From there she went on to learn Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hebrew and Transylvanian. At fifteen, she was contracted in marriage to Sir Henry Carey, and when her new mother-in-law told her she was not permitted to read, she developed a gift for poetry instead—in between having eleven children. When, in Ireland, her eldest daughter Catherine saw a vision of the Virgin Mary on her deathbed, Elizabeth converted to Catholicism shortly after. As a result she was banned from court, her father disinherited her, her husband tried to divorce her, and when her four daughters also converted to Catholicism, they were taken from her. Elizabeth however fought back. The boys had been put in the care of her eldest son, Lucius, a staunch protestant. She instigated their escape and led by example. By the time of her death in 1639 six of her children had followed her into the Catholic Church, four of them becoming nuns. 


Elizabeth's  son, Lucius was a gifted intellectual who took an active part in the turbulent politics of the day. He fought for the king, whilst despairing at the intransigence of both sides and was killed at the battle of Newbury. There, his body was stripped and left until recognised by a servant and taken home and buried in an unmarked grave in the village church yard of Great Tew—which we have yet to visit.