Lang Andrew
The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
THE DANCING DEVIL
On 16th November, 1870, Mr. Shchapoff, a Russian squire, the narrator, came home from a visit to a country town, Iletski, and found his family in some disarray. There lived with him his mother and his wife’s mother, ladies of about sixty-nine, his wife, aged twenty, and his baby daughter. The ladies had been a good deal disturbed. On the night of the 14th, the baby was fractious, and the cook, Maria, danced and played the harmonica to divert her. The baby fell asleep, the wife and Mr. Shchapoff’s miller’s lady were engaged in conversation, when a shadow crossed the blind on the outside. They were about to go out and see who was passing, when they heard a double shuffle being executed with energy in the loft overhead. They thought Maria, the cook, was making a night of it, but found her asleep in the kitchen. The dancing went on but nobody could be found in the loft. Then raps began on the window panes, and so the miller and gardener patrolled outside. Nobody!
Raps and dancing lasted through most of the night and began again at ten in the morning. The ladies were incommoded and complained of broken sleep. Mr. Shchapoff, hearing all this, examined the miller, who admitted the facts, but attributed them to a pigeon’s nest, which he had found under the cornice. Satisfied with this rather elementary hypothesis, Mr. Shchapoff sat down to read Livingstone’s African Travels. Presently the double shuffle sounded in the loft. Mrs. Shchapoff was asleep in her bedroom, but was awakened by loud raps. The window was tapped at, deafening thumps were dealt at the outer wall, and the whole house thrilled. Mr. Shchapoff rushed out with dogs and a gun, there were no footsteps in the snow, the air was still, the full moon rode in a serene sky. Mr. Shchapoff came back, and the double shuffle was sounding merrily in the empty loft. Next day was no better, but the noises abated and ceased gradually.
Alas, Mr. Shchapoff could not leave well alone. On 20th December, to amuse a friend, he asked Maria to dance and play. Raps, in tune, began on the window panes. Next night they returned, while boots, slippers, and other objects, flew about with a hissing noise. A piece of stuff would fly up and fall with a heavy hard thud, while hard bodies fell soundless as a feather. The performances slowly died away.
On Old Year’s Night Maria danced to please them; raps began, people watching on either side of a wall heard the raps on the other side. On 8th January, Mrs. Shchapoff fainted when a large, luminous ball floated, increasing in size, from under her bed. The raps now followed her about by day, as in the case of John Wesley’s sisters. On these occasions she felt weak and somnolent. Finally Mr. Shchapoff carried his family to his town house for much-needed change of air.
Science, in the 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. 117
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. 118 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”. 119 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”. The reason for these apprehensions was that on the night of 1st December the maid “heard at the dining-room door several dreadful groans, like a person in extremes”. They laughed at her, but for the whole of December “the groans, squeaks, tinglings and knockings were frightful enough”. The rest of the family (Mr. Wesley always excepted) “heard a strange knocking in divers places,” chiefly in the green room, or nursery, where (apparently) Hetty, Patty and Keziah lay. Emily heard the noises later than some of her sisters, perhaps a week after the original groans. She was locking up the house about ten o’clock when a sound came like the smashing and splintering of a huge piece of coal on the kitchen floor. She and Sukey went through the rooms on the ground floor, but found the dog asleep, the cat at the other end of the house, and everything in order. From her bedroom Emily heard a noise of breaking the empty bottles under the stairs, but was going to bed, when Hetty, who had been sitting on the lowest step of the garret stairs beside the nursery door, waiting for her father, was chased into the nursery by a sound as of a man passing her in a loose trailing gown. Sukey and Nancy were alarmed by loud knocks on the outside of the dining-room door and overhead. All this time Mr. Wesley heard nothing, and was not even told that anything unusual was heard. Mrs. Wesley at first held her peace lest he should think it “according to the vulgar opinion, a warning against his own death, which, indeed, we all apprehended”. Mr. Wesley only smiled when he was informed; but, by taking care to see all the girls safe in bed, sufficiently showed his opinion that the young ladies and their lovers were the ghost. Mrs. Wesley then fell back on the theory of rats, and employed a man to blow a horn as a remedy against these vermin. But this measure only aroused the emulation of the sprite, whom Emily began to call “Jeffrey”.
Not till 21st December did Mr. Wesley hear anything, then came thumpings on his bedroom wall. Unable to discover the cause, he procured a stout mastiff, which soon became demoralised by his experiences. On the morning of the 24th, about seven o’clock, Emily led Mrs. Wesley into the nursery, where she heard knocks on and under the bedstead; these sounds replied when she knocked. Something “like a badger, with no head,” says Emily; Mrs. Wesley only says, “like a badger,” ran from under the bed. On the night of the 25th there was an appalling vacarme. Mr. and Mrs. Wesley went on a tour of inspection, but only found the mastiff whining in terror. “We still heard it rattle and thunder in every room above or behind us, locked as well as open, except my study, where as yet it never came.” On the night of the 26th Mr. Wesley seems to have heard of a phenomenon already familiar to Emily – “something like the quick winding up of a jack, at the corner of the room by my bed head”. This was always followed by knocks, “hollow and loud, such as none of us could ever imitate”. Mr. Wesley went into the nursery, Hetty, Kezzy and Patty were asleep. The knocks were loud, beneath and in the room, so Mr. Wesley went below to the kitchen, struck with his stick against the rafters, and was answered “as often and as loud as I knocked”. The peculiar knock which was his own, 1-23456-7, was not successfully echoed at that time. Mr. Wesley then returned to the nursery, which was as tapageuse as ever. The children, three, were trembling in their sleep. Mr. Wesley invited the agency to an interview in his study, was answered by one knock outside, “all the rest were within,” and then came silence. Investigations outside produced no result, but the latch of the door would rise and fall, and the door itself was pushed violently back against investigators.
“I have been with Hetty,” says Emily, “when it has knocked under her, and when she has removed has followed her,” and it knocked under little Kezzy, when “she stamped with her foot, pretending to scare Patty.”
Mr. Wesley had requested an interview in his study, especially as the Jacobite goblin routed loudly “over our heads constantly, when we came to the prayers for King George and the prince”. In his study the agency pushed Mr. Wesley about, bumping him against the corner of his desk, and against his door. He would ask for a conversation, but heard only “two or three feeble squeaks, a little louder than the chirping of a bird, but not like the noise of rats, which I have often heard”.
Mr. Wesley had meant to leave home for a visit on Friday, 28th December, but the noises of the 27th were so loud that he stayed at home, inviting the Rev. Mr. Hoole, of Haxey, to view the performances. “The noises were very boisterous and disturbing this night.” Mr. Hoole says (in 1726, confirmed by Mrs. Wesley, 12th January, 1717) that there were sounds of feet, trailing gowns, raps, and a noise as of planing boards: the disturbance finally went outside the house and died away. Mr. Wesley seems to have paid his visit on the 30th, and notes, “1st January, 1717. My family have had no disturbance since I went away.”
To judge by Mr. Wesley’s letter to Sam, of 12th January, there was no trouble between the 29th of December and that date. On the 19th of January, and the 30th of the same month, Sam wrote, full of curiosity, to his father and mother. Mrs. Wesley replied (25th or 27th January), saying that no explanation could be discovered, but “it commonly was nearer Hetty than the rest”. On 24th January, Sukey said “it is now pretty quiet, but still knocks at prayers for the king.” On 11th February, Mr. Wesley, much bored by Sam’s inquiries, says, “we are all now quiet… It would make a glorious penny book for Jack Dunton,” his brother-in-law, a publisher of popular literature, such as the Athenian Mercury. Emily (no date) explains the phenomena as the revenge for her father’s recent sermons “against consulting those that are called cunning men, which our people are given to, and it had a particular spite at my father”.
The disturbances by no means ended in the beginning of January, nor at other dates when a brief cessation made the Wesleys hope that Jeffrey had returned to his own place. Thus on 27th March, Sukey writes to Sam, remarking that as Hetty and Emily are also writing “so particularly,” she need not say much. “One thing I believe you do not know, that is, last Sunday, to my father’s no small amazement, his trencher danced upon the table a pretty while, without anybody’s stirring the table… Send me some news for we are excluded from the sight or hearing of any versal thing, except Jeffery.”
The last mention of the affair, at this time, is in a letter from Emily, of 1st April, to a Mr. Berry.
“Tell my brother the sprite was with us last night, and heard by many of our family.” There are no other contemporary letters preserved, but we may note Mrs. Wesley’s opinion (25th January) that it was “beyond the power of any human being to make such strange and various noises”.
The next evidence is ten years after date, the statements taken down by Jack Wesley in 1726 (1720?). Mrs. Wesley adds to her former account that she “earnestly desired it might not disturb her” (at her devotions) “between five and six in the evening,” and it did not rout in her room at that time. Emily added that a screen was knocked at on each side as she went round to the other. Sukey mentioned the noise as, on one occasion, coming gradually from the garret stairs, outside the nursery door, up to Hetty’s bed, “who trembled strongly in her sleep. It then removed to the room overhead, where it knocked my father’s knock on the ground, as if it would beat the house down.” Nancy said that the noise used to follow her, or precede her, and once a bed, on which she sat playing cards, was lifted up under her several times to a considerable height. Robin, the servant, gave evidence that he was greatly plagued with all manner of noises and movements of objects.
John Wesley, in his account published many years after date in his Arminian Magazine, attributed the affair of 1716 to his father’s broken vow of deserting his mother till she recognised the Prince of Orange as king! He adds that the mastiff “used to tremble and creep away before the noise began”.
Some other peculiarities may be noted. All persons did not always hear the noises. It was three weeks before Mr. Wesley heard anything. “John and Kitty Maw, who lived over against us, listened several nights in the time of the disturbance, but could never hear anything.” Again, “The first time my mother ever heard any unusual noise at Epworth was long before the disturbance of old Jeffrey.. the door and windows jarred very loud, and presently several distinct strokes, three by three, were struck. From that night it never failed to give notice in much the same manner, against any signal misfortune or illness of any belonging to the family,” writes Jack.
Once more, on 10th February, 1750, Emily (now Mrs. Harper) wrote to her brother John, “that wonderful thing called by us Jeffery, how certainly it calls on me against any extraordinary new affliction”.
This is practically all the story of Old Jeffrey. The explanations have been, trickery by servants (Priestley), contagious hallucinations (Coleridge), devilry (Southey), and trickery by Hetty Wesley (Dr. Salmon, of Trinity College, Dublin). Dr. Salmon points out that there is no evidence from Hetty; that she was a lively, humorous girl, and he conceives that she began to frighten the maids, and only reluctantly exhibited before her father against whom, however, Jeffrey developed “a particular spite”. He adds that certain circumstances were peculiar to Hetty, which, in fact, is not the case. The present editor has examined Dr. Salmon’s arguments in The Contemporary Review, and shown reason, in the evidence, for acquitting Hetty Wesley, who was never suspected by her family.
Trickery from without, by “the cunning men,” is an explanation which, at least, provides a motive, but how the thing could be managed from without remains a mystery. Sam Wesley, the friend of Pope, and Atterbury, and Lord Oxford, not unjustly said: “Wit, I fancy, might find many interpretations, but wisdom none”. 120
As the Wesley tale is a very typical instance of a very large class, our study of it may exempt us from printing the well-known parallel case of “The Drummer of Tedworth”. Briefly, the house of Mr. Mompesson, near Ludgarshal, in Wilts, was disturbed in the usual way, for at least two years, from April, 1661, to April, 1663, or later. The noises, and copious phenomena of moving objects apparently untouched, were attributed to the unholy powers of a wandering drummer, deprived by Mr. Mompesson of his drum. A grand jury presented the drummer for trial, on a charge of witchcraft, but the petty jury would not convict, there being a want of evidence to prove threats, malum minatum, by the drummer. In 1662 the Rev. Joseph Glanvil, F.R.S., visited the house, and, in the bedroom of Mr. Mompesson’s little girls, the chief sufferers, heard and saw much the same phenomena as the elder Wesley describes in his own nursery. The “little modest girls” were aged about seven and eight. Charles II. sent some gentlemen to the house for one night, when nothing occurred, the disturbances being intermittent. Glanvil published his narrative at the time, and Mr. Pepys found it “not very convincing”. Glanvil, in consequence of his book, was so vexed by correspondents “that I have been haunted almost as bad as Mr. Mompesson’s house”. A report that imposture had been discovered, and confessed by Mr. Mompesson, was set afloat, by John Webster, in a well-known work, and may still be found in modern books. Glanvil denied it till he was “quite tired,” and Mompesson gave a formal denial in a letter dated Tedworth, 8th November, 1672. He also, with many others, swore to the facts on oath, in court, at the drummer’s trial. 121
In the Tedworth case, as at Epworth, and in the curious Cideville case of 1851, a quarrel with “cunning men” preceded the disturbances. In Lord St. Vincent’s case, which follows, nothing of the kind is reported. As an almost universal rule children, especially girls of about twelve, are centres of the trouble; in the St. Vincent story, the children alone were exempt from annoyance.
