Supernatural Cumbria, by H C Ivison, and Paranormal Cumbria, by Geoff Holder

Given their extensive range of titles on paranormal Britain, it is not surprising that Amberley Publishing and the History Press have produced volumes with similar geographical coverage. The two here are directly comparable, allowing the literary equivalent of a ‘Battle of the Bands’. Should the purchaser wanting to know more of this region’s paranormal heritage buy both, or will one – or perhaps even neither – do?

Supernatural Cumbria, by Helen Ivison, is the earlier book. Its advantage is that it is written by a local historian who has long experience of the area’s legends and has easy access to the paranormal grapevine. It is reasonably well organised, with a mix of thematic and geographic chapters. While there isn’t an index of locations, it is easy enough to skim down the contents pages to find a particular place. The style is very readable but the text is full of spelling errors, which let it down and suggest that editing was minimal.

It contains a typical mixture of recent ghostly accounts, usually unattributed, and older folkloric stories, boggles and brownies for example. Significant localities have their own chapters. Slightly more unusual are a couple of vampires – Croglin Grange, of course, plus another at Workington – a timeslip and golden coffin stories. The Souter Fell ghost army has a brief chapter: Peter McCue and Alan Gauld wrote a significant paper which included this case, ‘Edgehill And Souter Fell: A Critical Examination of Two English “Phantom Army” Cases’, in The Society for Psychical Research’s Journal of April 2005, but Ivison does not refer to it.

Unlike Ivison, Perth-based Geoff Holder is not local to Cumbria, but he is a professional writer with long experience of producing regional paranormal gazetteers. Paranormal Cumbria has fewer pages than Supernatural Cumbria, but more words per page, so they are roughly comparable in length. It is a follow-up to Holder’s The Guide to the Mysterious Lake District (2009), though with completely new material. The contents, conveyed in his usual humorously perceptive style, are arranged thematically, but a map at the front shows where the places mentioned are, and there is an index, not that common in this type of book, to allow places to be found easily.

The other obvious difference between this and Ivison’s effort is that Holder has undertaken more archival work, delving back where possible to the sources and examining secondary layers that may have accumulated errors. He supplies references for all his stories, the result of which is a three-page bibliography of books, journals and newspapers that allows readers to double-check for themselves. This rigorous analytical approach is rare in the field, and all the more welcome for it. He does not use Ivison, though he must have been aware of her book given the amount of research he has done.

The usual suspects, psychic abilities and witches, for example, are present, but Holder takes a more Fortean approach than Ivison, with an analysis of the various types of fairies and kindred creatures that may be found in the area; lake monsters and alien big cats; an amusing overview of the bizarre controversy which followed the installation in an ex-underpass of the Cursing Stone of Carlisle, a large lump of granite; and ending up with a look at the Solway Spaceman (a more thorough treatment of the history of this strange photograph can be found in an article by Andy Roberts and David Clarke, ‘Farewell to the Solway Spaceman?’, in the April 2012 issue of Fortean Times). Souter Fell does not appear as it was included in the earlier Lake District book.

Obviously there are some areas of overlap between Supernatural and Paranormal, and these are instructive. Thus the Croglin Grange vampire appears in both, but whereas Ivison gives it half a page and repeats the bare bones, Holder delves into the various accounts as they evolved from the first reference in print by Augustus Hare, showing what a complex narrative it actually is. Both discuss a witch called Mary Baynes who lived at Tebay, but Ivison gives the story without any sources, whereas Holder does.

As expected, both books are nicely produced. Supernatural Cumbria is well illustrated, mostly with the author’s photographs, though a number show the same scene from different angles, which seems redundant. Paranormal Cumbria too is generously illustrated, but as well as the author’s own photographs he has included archival material, which makes it visually more attractive as they not just a series of snapshots illustrating the places referred to in the text.

The Amberley offering is entertaining, but its lack of references and ‘friend of a friend’ reliance limits its use to a casual read. If this is what the reader requires, then Amberley has delivered a book that will be of use to anyone keen to find out about the darker side of Cumbria’s beauty. Holder has more historical material, well referenced, but fewer recent stories than Ivison was able to gather through local contacts. Ivison does have ghost stories, Holder none in this volume, so if that is the primary interest then Ivison’s is the one to purchase. She is though often frustratingly vague on detail, and it is fair to say that her book provides spread but not depth, and Holder’s, with a different though overlapping focus, provides spread and depth.

To sum up, the resident of Cumbria may well want both (plus Holder’s Lake District book) in order to ensure that they have maximum coverage of the county. But the visitor who does not want to purchase both will be better off with Holder’s book. And it’s three quid cheaper. I therefore declare Paranormal Cumbria the winner.


Supernatural Cumbria, by H C Ivison. Amberley Publishing, October 2010. ISBN 9781848689091

Paranormal Cumbria, by Geoff Holder. The History Press, March 2012. ISBN 9780752454122

Some Reflections on ‘Some Reflections on the Loss and Return of a Small Harp’

In ‘Some Reflections on the Loss and Return of a Small Harp’, Paranormal Review, Issue 61, January 2012, pp.28-31, Robert A Charman discusses Dr Elizabeth Mayer’s experience of recovering her young daughter’s stolen harp through the offices of a dowser. This is to be found in her book Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (2007), ‘The Harp that Came Back: My Journey Begins’. For Charman it is a compelling story and he concludes that “Given the unchallenged facts of this case it would seem reasonable to accept that the faculty of psi, or ESP, exists...”

Charman is not alone in his admiration. Lawrence LeShan thought highly enough of Mayer’s account to reprint it as a “case history” in A New Science of the Paranormal (2009). Jeffrey Krippal also discusses it in Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2010), and continues: “The remotely viewed harp, after all, strongly suggested that consciousness is not bound to the brain or the body...” He assumes that the dowser viewed the harp remotely and gave accurate information to Mayer. Most recently, Russell Targ mentions it in passing in The Reality of ESP: A Physicist's Proof of Psychic Abilities (2012). Yet there is an evidential gap which it seems strange that its enthusiasts have failed to note. It can certainly be challenged, on rather obvious non-paranormal grounds.

So what happened? In December 1991, Elizabeth Mayer was an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her eleven-year old daughter Meg possessed a small valuable harp on which she had become an accomplished player. At some point during a Christmas concert in Oakland it was stolen. The police could not help, nor could instrument dealers across the country, the American Harp Society or CBS news, leaving the family frustrated and Meg disconsolate.

A friend suggested Mayer try dowsing as a last resort so the friend contacted the American Society of Dowsers and was given the telephone number of Harold McCoy, the Society’s president, who lived 2,000 miles away in Arkansas. Mayer rang McCoy and explained the situation. He said to wait a moment and he would see if the harp was still in Oakland. It was, he said, and he asked Mayer to send him a map of Oakland so that he could locate it for her.

The map was sent, and two days later McCoy telephoned Mayer, naming a specific street and giving the location there of the house in which he said the harp was being kept. She went to the police saying she had had a ‘tip’, but not unreasonably they said that they could not obtain a search warrant on vague information. With no other avenue open to her, Mayer fly posted the two blocks around the house, offering a reward for the harp’s return. She did not visit and challenge the occupier.

Three days later, she received a phone call from someone who said his next-door neighbour had the instrument. After some negotiations, she went to a car park at 10pm and retrieved it from a teenager. As she turned into her driveway with the harp safely secured she thought: “This changes everything”. Mayer finishes her account of how she recovered the harp and the confusion it engendered in her as she tried to rationalise what had happened with a quote from a friend at Berkeley: “Get over it and get some sleep, Lisby. As a statistician, I can promise you the odds that dowsing works are a lot greater than the odds that this could have been coincidence.”

It didn’t have to be coincidence though. Potentially the posters could have been seen by hundreds of people living in the area or passing through in the three days between them going up and Mayer receiving the call from the person who said his neighbour had the harp. Those people could have told others, so a large number of individuals who did not watch CBS news or read the American Harp Society newsletter would have heard that the owner was looking for the instrument, and offering a reward, always an incentive for news to travel. The possessor may even have heard about Mayer’s quest previously but not had an easy mechanism to contact her, one now provided by a telephone number on a poster.

The possibility that McCoy correctly dowsed the precise house where the harp was being kept has to be balanced against the possibility that the thief still had it, or had sold it locally, and someone in the know happened to see a poster and thought that the reward money available for its safe return was worth more than it would realise elsewhere; a harp which was so distinctive, having been custom-made, that it was perhaps effectively unsellable by the possessor. The posters were in a small area admittedly, but perhaps Mayer was just lucky. We can’t know.

Charman asks if this experience would have “changed everything” for the reader as it did for Mayer. No, it wouldn’t have for me. It may have done if the police had gone to the specified house and found the harp there, but they didn’t, which means that there is enough uncertainty to weaken the case. To see how leaky it actually is, it is worth examining the links in the chain from theft to recovery. Charman provides “four apparently indisputable facts:

1 That Meg’s small harp was stolen from a theatre in Oakland during a Christmas concert.
2 That some two months later, McCoy pinpointed the exact house where it was hidden.
3 That he achieved this feat from nearly 2,000 miles away.
4 That acting upon this information Dr Mayer was able to effect the safe return of the undamaged harp from that address.”

Of these, only the first can truly be said to be indisputable. Of the others, McCoy was certainly 2,000 miles away, but we do not know that he pinpointed the exact house. And Mayer did not effect the return of the harp from that address; she effected it from a Safeway car park. We only have McCoy’s word for it that the house was involved at all. There is nothing in this that says that he was a fake, of course. He may well have been sincere, and thought that the harp was at the place he specified. If the police had obtained a warrant, and not found the harp there, he might well have been genuinely surprised. But his sincerity does not mean that he was right. This was not a controlled test, in which dowsers tend to do badly.

Charman does not consider the possibility that the dowsing (or rather, McCoy’s remote viewing intuition using dowsing as a method) was not causally linked to the recovery of the harp. He wonders if we can spot a non-psi explanation that passed Mayer by – “Did she really miss something here that lets the sceptic off the psi hook?" – but the only counter-possibility he entertains is that McCoy in Arkansas might have known the thief and where he lived. He provides biographical details about McCoy which indicate that this was most unlikely, though it raises the issue of how unlikely something has to be before it is ruled out completely. He does not entertain the possibility that someone with knowledge of the harp saw a poster in the street and got in touch.

The episode was certainly convincing for Mayer, changing the way she looked at the world and sending her on an intellectual journey, but from the outside her experience is not nearly as compelling. It is interesting, certainly, and suggestive, but not of sufficient quality to stand on its own. The possibility that the house McCoy identified from a map in Arkansas had nothing to do with it, and the posters alone did the trick, is too plausible to take this case as particularly strong evidence for either dowsing or remote viewing.


The Paranormal Review is a quarterly publication of the Society for Psychical Research. See www.spr.ac.uk for further details.

The Death of Poor Joe – The earliest surviving Dickens film?

Conveniently in Dickens’s bicentenary year, the British Film Institute (BFI) claim to have “discovered” a film which they are trumpeting as the earliest surviving film based on a Dickens story.  They are making the most of the find: their 9 March 2012 press release shouts:  MAJOR DISCOVERY – EARLIEST EVER DICKENS FILM FOUND BY BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE.  The director was George Albert Smith, who made films at St Ann’s Well in Hove (the press release incorrectly states that the film was made in Brighton).  It’s hardly an extensive adaptation, being merely a minute in length, but the BFI are saying that it depicts the death of Jo from Bleak House.  According to Bryony Dixon, the BFI’s curator of silent film who made the identification, it dates to before March 1901, which means it predates the previous record holder, Walter Booth’s Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost, which was released later that year, though to be fair to Booth, The Death of Poor Joe is a very loose adaptation…

The film shows a policeman on his rounds walking past the gates of a churchyard (the church can be glimpsed on the painted flat) in the snow, the fall of which is quite convincingly simulated presumably by bits of paper.  Slowly he shines his lamp around, and we see its beam as he examines his surroundings.  He exits left, and there enters from the opposite direction a figure in rags, carrying a broom.  It makes an ineffectual attempt to sweep, and gestures forlornly in the direction taken by the policeman.  The policeman re-enters and initially motions the sweeper (clearly played by a woman despite the male garb) to go away, but the sweeper melodramatically collapses into his arms.  He tries to give the sweeper something, possibly a restorative handkerchief, but to no avail.  As the policeman helpfully plays the lamp over the sweeper’s face, the tragic figure briefly rallies, puts ‘his’ hands together in prayer, and then goes to a better place.  Death is tested in that time-honoured theatrical tradition, the policeman holding up the deceased’s arm and letting it drop.  Finis.

According to the BFI’s press release, the film was donated in 1954 by a Brighton collector who had known G. A. Smith.  They have not given the name, but was presumably Graham Head, a near neighbour in Hove to whom Smith gave items.  This early date is curious as Smith died in 1959, so one wonders why he didn’t donate it himself.  Also, the Smith-related items that belonged to Head now in Ronald Grant’s Cinema Museum were only given by his widow after Head’s death in 1980.  There is no doubt that the film was made by Smith, because of its provenance, and it probably features Smith regular Tom Green acting with Smith’s wife Laura Bayley; though it may be one of Laura’s sisters.  The sweeper does not display Laura’s overbite, though that was exaggerated by her for comic effect (most notably in Mary Jane's Mishap; or, Don't Fool with the Paraffin), and as the sweeper collapses it looks as if the policeman cups his/her breast, which might be seen as a liberty too far when acting with the boss’s wife, though one might still wonder at its propriety with his sister-in-law.

We are told that Bryony Dixon found the film lurking in the BFI National Archive in unusual circumstances.  She was researching early films from China when she came across a catalogue entry for The Death of Poor Joe, which she recognised as a (misspelled) reference to the minor character in Bleak House.  However, in the BFI database the film had been listed as Man Meets Ragged Boy, and dated to 1902.  Having realised the spurious nature of the title Man Meets Ragged Boy, and based on the catalogue entry, the film was retitled The Death of Poor Joe.  That title was listed by the Warwick Trading Company as number 1021 in its 1901 catalogue, issued in March of that year, hence the date given by the BFI for its film as no later than that for its production, and the claim that it was the earliest extant Dickens film.

There are one or two problems with this account.  The press release maintains in effect that the film sat on a shelf for the best part of six decades unrecognised, and the Death of Poor Joe title only came to light by accident.  Yet not that long ago the BFI’s database, SIFT: Summary of Information on Film and Television, had an entry for The Death of Poor Joe.  I printed off all of its records relating to G. A. Smith in August 2003.  One of these is for The Death of Poor Joe, dating it to 1900.  I did not find one for Man Meets Ragged Boy.  Even more surprisingly, according to this record there was a viewing copy of The Death of Poor Joe available at the BFI, which made me wonder to what that referred, if the film had only just been ‘discovered’; the BFI are not saying that they have found a second copy of the same film.  The most likely explanation of this puzzle is that it was not in fact lost when the SIFT database was compiled as someone in the organisation knew that a copy was held in the archive.  The BFI press release is wrong to assert that the film which Dixon pulled off the shelf was “hitherto unknown”.

 Naturally I asked Dixon about the inclusion of The Death of Poor Joe on SIFT, and she acknowledged that there was a viewing copy of the film, but said that it was listed under the title Man Meets Ragged Boy.  This was certainly not the case as recently as 2003, which suggested that somehow in the last nine years an incorrect title had been substituted for the correct one by a member of the BFI staff.   Why someone would take what sounded like a description – man meets ragged boy – and make it the title, a significant and worrying piece of clerical carelessness, was a mystery.

The second issue is how sure the BFI can be that they now have the correct title for the film in their possession.  The SIFT entry for The Death of Poor Joe (as at August 2003) reads: “A man walking through the snow on a cold winter night, meets a boy, thin and dressed in rags.  The boy collapses in the man’s arms (74ft)”.  That sounds roughly like the right one, though there are no references to broom or police uniform.  The character in the film is carrying a broom, as does Jo in Bleak House, and each is praying when he expires, clear links between the two.  But Jo in the novel dies in bed, not in the snow.  The BFI release gets round this awkwardness by theorising that the narrative conflates two stories, that of Jo, and Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Matchgirl, which does have a child dying in snow; quite a feat for a film a minute long.  That would mean immediately that the declaration that this is the earliest extant Dickens film is not completely accurate.

 However, the reference to The Little Matchgirl is not required.  While there are obvious discrepancies between the film and Dickens’s book, the former bears a greater similarity to the conclusion of a stage adaptation made by George Lander in 1875: Bleak House; or Poor ‘Jo’.  In the play, not only does Jo die by a churchyard after collapsing into the arms of Bucket (a detective) and Snagsby, but a line refers to a light: Jo says, “It's turned wery [sic] dark. Is there any light comin' ?  Snagsby replies, “It's coming fast, Jo”.  Jo then dies while repeating the Lord’s Prayer.  This may be an intermediary source for Smith’s film and account for its curious conclusion where the policeman very deliberately shines the light into the dying sweeper’s face, who puts his hands together in prayer – presumably interpreting the lamp as a divine light – just before his death.

 Even so, while the BFI were busy booming this film as based on a Dickens story, there was yet another candidate for the title, one made by Smith but dated to 1902, the date attributed to Man Meets Ragged Boy in the BFI database which Dixon consulted.  As described in Denis Gifford’s The British Film Catalogue, Vol. 1: The Fiction Film, 1895-1994 (3^rd edition, 2001), After Dark; or, the Policeman and his Lantern, was a “comedy” in fifteen scenes starring Tom Green: “PC’s lantern illumines scenes of waif, drunkard, burglar, cook, beggar, pie, etc.”  This is more elaborate than the description of After Dark, or the Policeman and his Lantern as given in the November 1903 Charles Urban Trading Company (CUTC) catalogue (p.107): “A most successful film.  Amusing and very original.  The police leave the station on their night beat.  Then follows a series of views as seen by the lantern rays of one of the force.  Interest is kept up by beggar boys, drunken swells, latch-key troubles, and burgling episodes are presented.”
 

 As well as a slightly different description, Gifford’s version has variant punctuation for the title, so he may have used another source.  However, he calls it a comedy, the CUTC catalogue calls it “amusing”; Gifford refers to a “waif”, the CUTC catalogue to “beggar boys” (the use of the plural is possibly rhetorical).  Both the Gifford and CUTC entries state that it was 225 feet in length.  Neither refers to Bleak House or Poor Jo(e).  The film we see doesn’t look particularly comical admittedly, though the cross-dressing puts it in pantomime territory, but it does have a policeman, and it does have a lantern, which is actually a major element of the action.  In fact the first part is devoted to showing off the lamp effect, and the running time is almost half over before the sweeper even appears.  The catalogue descriptions of After Dark, showcasing the simulation of the “lantern rays”, seem a good fit.  What we see could be one part of that film, with a generic waif/beggar boy perhaps inspired by Bleak House’s Jo via George Lander.  Yet the BFI release does not mention this rather obvious possibility.

 Finding out whether there was a link between the film and After Dark was not difficult.  Barry Salt in his Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (second edition, 1992, p.43), refers to After Dark’s technique: a “very early attempt at a lighting effect is the use of the sun reflected in a small mirror to produce a patch of bright light which is intended to simulate the light from a lantern.”  That is precisely what we see, a day-for-night shot with someone attempting to direct sunlight to match the movements of the lamp, not very well synchronised.  When I contacted Salt with my suspicion that the film might be the one he had described as After Dark: or, the Policeman and his Lantern in his book, he replied that he had seen the BFI archive’s viewing copy of After Dark more than once, and this was the film now identified by the BFI as The Death of Poor Joe.

 He added that in the National Film Archive’s 1966 Catalogue Part 3: Silent Fiction Films 1895-1930 (ie produced by what is now the BFI National Archive), the film which he saw was identified by a ‘supplied title’, as the Archive calls it, and this was Man Meets Ragged Boy.  This means that the title was printed in brackets to indicate that it had been supplied by the cataloguer, as the real one was unknown.  The National Film Archive’s 1985 Catalogue of Viewing Copies identified it in the same terms.  Unfortunately, presumably for simplicity but misleadingly, the BFI’s press release merely calls Man Meets Ragged Boy an “alternative title”, as if it originated with the filmmakers, rather than being a working title given by themselves.

 So three titles – and one film or two?  It may be that the correct title for the BFI’s film should be The Death of Poor Joe (assuming the Lander play was a source) rather than After Dark, or the Policeman and his Lantern.  But there has to be an element of doubt, given the lack of a definite chain linking the film we see and either of the titles.  The possibility that this is part of a later film does warrant consideration.  Perhaps the date posited when the film was labelled Man Meets Ragged Boy – 1902 – is accurate, and it is a surviving fragment of an entirely different, and non-Dickens, film, After Dark, or the Policeman and his Lantern.  Or it is conceivable that the pre-March 1901Dickens-themed The Death of Poor Joe was recycled as part of a longer film, one scene among a variety of situations exploiting the mirror/lantern effect, collectively called After Dark.  More research needs to be done by the BFI’s curators to establish the relationships of these titles and the film or films to which they should be assigned.

Clearly the BFI have not “discovered” the film as it wasn’t lost, just mislabelled.  It is curious that they seem to be unaware that within the last decade their own publicly-available database had already contained the title (together with the information that they possessed a viewing copy) upon which they bestowed such fanfare in 2012.  Had this not been Dickens’s big year, it is unlikely that the BFI’s announcement would have created a stir, and it seems unlikely they will now bother to correct the widespread misapprehension their press release has created that a “hitherto unknown” film has been unearthed after nearly sixty years lost in the vaults.  The best one can say about the affair is that the BFI have rectified a cataloguing error, an achievement really not worth a press release, but at worst that they may well have misidentified the film, which does not depict Bleak House’s Jo at all, and is not the earliest surviving Dickens film.

I would like to thank Bryony Dixon and Barry Salt for responding to my questions.

 

First published 13 March 2012, revised 6 December 2012.

Ghostly Guitars

Listening to the CD Dunninger: Airwave Mentalism, I found one track rather intriguing, an extract from a We, the People show broadcast on 6 February 1940.*   It features a story which frankly sounds fictitious.   According to Dunninger it took place in May 1938, when Tom and Eleanor Carpenter came to spend the summer in the old Carpenter homestead near Keeseville, in the Adirondacks.   The house, empty since Tom’s father’s death ten years before, was reputedly haunted, and Eleanor was uneasy, feeling that Tom’s father was there, watching them.

Tom’s father’s old guitar was still hanging over the fireplace, and in the night the couple was disturbed by the sound of it seemingly being strummed.   Yet when they investigated, nobody was there, the guitar was in its usual place, and the sound stopped when they struck a light.   Suddenly though, Eleanor saw something white which touched her face, causing her to scream.

For the next week they were disturbed each night by the sounds coming from the guitar until, in desperation, they called on Dunninger to help them.   He visited, and in short order established the cause of the unearthly playing: giant moths living inside the guitar, and striking the steel strings as they flew about.   It seems remarkable that Tom and Eleanor never managed to work this out for themselves, but kudos to Dunninger for busting the non-existent ghost.

This is not the first ghostly sound-emitting guitar in the annals of psychical research. George Albert Smith, an early figure in the Society for Psychical Research, and later film pioneer, lived in a supposedly haunted house in Brighton with his wife Laura from August 1888 to September 1889.   Their bedroom was separated from the sitting-room by curtains.   In the sitting-room was a piano and above it on the wall hung a guitar.   Smith says in his account that on Saturday 15 December 1888, at 11.35pm, there was a strange incident.   He had gone to bed, leaving Laura in the sitting room saying her prayers by the fire, as it was cold.   Suddenly, the guitar strings sounded:

–  pung, pang, ping –  pung, pang, ping –here my wife called out in a loud, awe-struck whisper, “Did you hear that?” whilst even as she spoke a third pung, pang, ping sounded clearly through the rooms.   I immediately sprang out of bed and rushed in to her, finding her kneeling upon the hearth-rug by an armchair, staring with astonishment at the guitar upon the wall.

They sat by the fire for over half an hour but no further sounds were heard.   The cat (”an extremely lazy Persian”) slept through it all.   Laura said that she had been distracted a couple of times during her prayers by odd sounds, like someone sweeping a hand over the wallpaper.   She said that when the guitar sounded for the second and third times she was looking at it and saw no movement, nor was anything near it.  On 13 January Smith came in at about 10.30 and Laura said that the guitar had again produced a note.  Later a visitor, Margaret Verrall, when alone in the sitting-room, heard the guitar, not knowing that it had happened before.

The sound was definitely not caused by the pegs slipping and a note sounding as a result, leaving the Smiths with no explanation how it could have happened.  It is safe to assume that moths, giant or otherwise, were not involved; in fact Smith actually mentions the insect:  “How to account for the fact I do not know.  I can only record it as it occurred, and leave it to others to estimate the probability of such a feat being accomplished by mice (in a house where mice were unknown), or by a moth (in December), or by something similar which escaped our observation.”  One is left wondering if Dunninger was a reader of the SPR’s Proceedings, and adapted the report.  

There are a number of similar accounts to be found of guitars mysteriously playing themselves.   John Fahey, in ‘Spooky tales of a haunted Hyndburn’, which appeared in the Accrington Observer in 2003, wrote:

Meanwhile, a house in Queensway, Church, has terrified residents for years. Just 10 years ago a terrified mother of four abandoned the semi-detached home, begging the council to be re-housed. An exorcist was called after a guitar played itself, family members were grabbed by invisible cold hands and the bath filled itself rapidly. But the council refused to release the family from their horror.

Someone called ‘Beefy’ reported in 2005:

My apartment was haunted. I think the whole building was, but the ghost seemed to like to mess with me. I nicknamed it "Pink" after several occurances (sic) with it and Pink Floyd. It didn't like the name so it left me alone.

Some things it did to me where banging on my bedroom door. I was the only one home. My room mate wasn't staying there at the time. My hallway light would turn on by itself. So would my bathroom light and my dining room light. My guitar played itself one day. My room mate heard it as well. We checked it and it had fallen off of the wall and onto the floor and the pick was still stuck in between the strings, yet we heard every string be plucked.

‘Nepenthes’ wrote in 2008:

There were many odd experiences that happened to individual family members (including myself), but the next weird experience to happen in front of a group, was a couple years later when I was in high school. It was me and 2 friends sitting in my room watching a movie. I had a pretty large room back at my parents' house and there was a guitar resting on top of a sofa on the other side of my room. During one of the quiet scenes in the movie, completely out of nowhere, the guitar played itself. Usually when I tell this story, people think that the guitar strummed a chord or two, as if something bumped up against it. This is not what happened. It literally played a 5 second tune, that had some melody to it. My friends and I looked at each other and what they said can't be repeated here. I calmed them down and told them that weird things happen in that house but one of my friends wasn't having it. He is a huge guy too, literally 6'8" 300lbs, and he wanted to go home like a little girl lol. We finished the movie uneasily and then they bolted.

‘Anon’ asked a question in 2011:

Every night I go to bed at around 10 pm and I wake up at 2 to the sound of a guitar strumming. When I open my eyes, I no longer hear it. Then I look at it and get closer and it's like it never made a sound in the first place. This guitar used to be my great grandfather's and he died while playing it. I think his ghost possessed my guitar and taunts me every night because he didn't like me. What should I do?

Responses were generally helpful: “Set up a digital recorder and see if you can record it playing. If you can, then there's your mysterious noise. If you don't, then most likely its (sic) your subconscious playing tricks on you. Also, try multiple nights if you don't catch the noise. Rome wasn't built in a day, nor is catching paranormal noises.”   “Put it in a different room so you can get some sleep.”   “Your (sic) dreaming obviously. if you feel emotionally attached to your great grandfather then that could be why. Or it could simply be you dreaming for no apparent reason. If this is really disturbing you then you should move the guitar into annother (sic) room but I guarantee there is no ghost”

A woman in her early fifties produced this account in 2011, though it is unclear whether she possessed a real guitar or whether the sounds were heard without one present:

I was only 17 or so. I remember going into my bedroom to go to sleep.  I got into bed, as soon as I laid my head down I couldn't move.  I felt a cool, tingeling sensation come over my body, I got goose bumbs.  All of a sudden I saw boots, I couldn't move or look all around, only floor level.  My twin bed wasn't on a frame, it was the "hippie daze" and the mattress was on the floor.  It was the dead of night and quiet in my room. I at first heard the sound of celepane from a cigarette pack maybe, but I heard the sound of it being crumbeled up. I couldn't move..........I hadn't even fallen asleep yet so I knew it wasn't a dream.  I couldn't lift my head or move my body, but I could see these cowboy light tan colored boots walking across from my bed.  It was still, then all of a sudden I heard this quitar music. The strumming of the song was like nothing heard before.  It was sooooo slow, sad, melodically maybe? I can't even be sure of a word to discribe the music I heard.  I lay there in my room listening untill the guitar music stopped. I sat up fast in my bed looking around, nothing there?!  As soon as I laid back down in my bed the same thing repeated itself?! I've never heard the melody before or since. But I could feel the cords being played on that guitar all the way to my soul............it was sad and sweet. Just beautiful, wish to hear it again. (sic throughout, ellipses in original)

Kim Haruko wrote, also in 2011:

I absolutely believe in the spirit world including angels and demons etc. I've had encounters with demons eg. one time I was reading the Bible to my brother at night before he went to bed and in the middle of reading, the door handle started turning as though someone was trying to get in ... that freaked us out quite a bit. I've had countless other experiences like a time my brothers (sic) guitar was playing itself ... and I also know my grandmother and my friend whose (sic) experienced things like that. Both happen to be very spiritual people. (ellipses in original)

Some stories can be discounted as hypnagogic hallucinations, despite what the experient claims, but that does not cover instances where people were wide awake.  A theory involving sympathetic vibrations of strings would not account for the hearing of tunes, nor would a theory involving amplifiers account for the phenomenon involving an acoustic guitar.  A radio playing somewhere else is unlikely to be confused with sounds in the same room.

There is certainly something rather eerie about a guitar sounding by itself, and it is worth noting that guitars, along with other musical instruments, have long been staples of the séance room.   If it plays something approaching a tune, that strongly suggests an intelligence behind it, one able to interact with its environment and potentially with the witness.

A self-playing guitar is going to seem a robust encounter with life after death so it is no wonder the hearers find it unsettling.   Also, in most cases the playing appears to happen spontaneously in a domestic setting with no warning.   G A and Laura Smith were in an apparently haunted house, in Tom and Eleanor Carpenter’s case the house already had a reputation, and they would have had a framework in which to locate the experience; but someone settling down to watch a film does not expect ghostly guitar strumming to occur, making it all the more uncanny.

* Dunninger: Airwave Mentalism is available from The Miracle Factory, based in Los Angeles.

Update 2 December 2015

The December 2015 issue of Fortean Times (FT334, p.12) has a sidebar snippet entitled ‘Sibling hell’ about a woman named Donna Ayres, aged 33, who said in early 2015 that she was being terrorised by the ghost of her brother Paul.  The various elements of poltergeistery she reported included the ghost playing a guitar.  A search for further information threw up a number of videos of ‘ghostly’ activity which Donna had recorded using her camera phone.  The videos had generated a large amount of discussion about her claims, some of it supportive but mostly unflattering.

Donna is originally from Burnley but now lives in Blackpool.  She said that her brother, with whom she had a troubled relationship when he was alive, had been creating chaos since shortly after his death in 2009.  Her distress had forced her to move five times, but she was unable to escape his malign attention.  Filming the various manifestations had increased the intensity of the activity, which Donna thought indicated that Paul had been angered by her films (though it could have been he was vexed by the publicity).

Among her YouTube videos – one of which is ‘I have a real ghost demonic in my home’ (an unusual usage of ‘demonic’ as a noun), suggesting either that she doesn’t think that Paul alone is tormenting her or that they had a really bad relationship – there is footage of the guitar, uploaded to YouTube on 17 February 2015 (‘Guitar playing by spirit ghost’).  Despite the sound of a single string being manipulated the strings on the guitar being filmed do not move, as far as one can tell from the low-quality shaky footage, so if the sounds are paranormal it would indicate they are coming from some ethereal instrument.

However, even though Donna states specifically ‘before you say it, there’s no-one behind me’, that explanation cannot be ruled out, especially as the camera is kept firmly on the (non-vibrating) guitar and she does not attempt to support her assertion by showing the rest of the room while the sounds continue.  As threads have been suggested for other activities she has filmed, and would seem a plausible explanation, the chances are the guitar sound also has a non-paranormal explanation.

Further, Donna certainly does not sound scared as she gives her commentary, even laughing at one point when she says ‘it’s singing’.  It is difficult to square this film, and the others she has uploaded, with the claim that her brother is terrorising her.  In fact her attitude conveys the impression that she is rather enjoying herself.  Interest in her ‘plight’ seems to have waned dramatically since the spring so it looks like her moment of fame has passed.

Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, by A E Moorat

Dark forces are afoot in 1830s England, with only a small band of intrepid and well-armed heroes, the Protektorate, to stop them. Distressingly, the fate of the Royal Family, and thus the country as a whole, hangs in the balance, making for an entertaining, if disposable, example of the historical-horror hybrid, very hybrid, novel.

The cover and strapline – “She loved her country. She hated zombies” – are somewhat misleading, as apart from showing a more mature Queen Victoria than that in the book, her opponents for most of it are the titular demons rather than zombies, not forgetting the werewolves and succubi. Purists may bridle at the eclecticism, but A E Moorat mixes his ingredients with panache. The demons it turns out are embedded in the very highest stratum of European society, led by no less a luminary than King Leopold I of Belgium, which may explain something about his son’s later rule in the Congo, and they are manipulating the royal bloodline for their own nefarious ends. The results are sporadically graphic but also at times very funny.

Moorat (Andrew Holmes) sticks fairly closely to the historical record, inventing a secret narrative in parallel. Queen Victoria emerges from this makeover a much more interesting (thanks to her mother) character than the dull monarch of the official biographies. Despite the novel’s genre trappings (and we‘re not talking neo-Victorian high literature here), her twinkling interchanges with Prince Albert have a real warmth which one can imagine being enjoyed by the real-life couple.

The satire is sharp if not always subtle. The scene in the House of Commons, with zombie MPs who represent places nobody else can remember all fighting among themselves and slipping around in gore, is metaphorically any PMQs. The squalor that existed in the real London is here laid on with a trowel, suggesting that really we don’t need demons to make our lives a nightmare. The Queen refuses to sanction torture even for positive ends, which would particularly have resonated at the time of writing with events in Iraq.

The supporting characters are generally well done, from Lord Melbourne, with his nose that tells the Queen when he is lying, to the Archbishop of Canterbury with a fondness for drink. The wicked but inept Lord Quimby was clearly such a favourite of the author’s that he threatens to steal the show. Curiously only the Protektorate, the ones you would think most likely to fly off the page, remain two-dimensional. Another criticism is the pacing, as Queen Victoria has a rather slow first half before the axe-wielding really gets going. It could all have been messy (in a stylistic fashion) but the various strands of the plot come together nicely, and appropriately at Bedlam.

There is a raft of similar recent titles utilising literary classics or secret history, such as Henry VIII: Wolfman (also by Moorat); Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (now a series, Heaven help us); Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters; Jane Slayre; Mr Darcy, Vampyre; I am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas; Alice in Zombieland; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim; Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, etc etc (classic authors must be bobbing about in their graves in fear that they will fall victim to the mash-up fad), so this looks like a literary strand that will burn itself out in a tide of ever-more tedious bandwagon jumpers. In the meantime, while it is not going to win the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter stands tall, when not slipping over in the guts or worse, and will make every true-born Englishman proud of the way our noble monarch kicks the hell out of Baal’s minions. God bless you, Ma’am!

A minor character is a young John Brown, here a boy gifted with second sight, but who in real life came to be a significant person to Queen Victoria. As the bad guys are not vanquished, only their evil underling (very satisfying), there is scope for a sequel set some time later, though it would be interesting to see how Moorat might handle a heroine stout of body as well of heart (ie the figure on the cover). Now, did Albert really die of typhoid fever after that fateful visit to Cambridge to give his son a bollocking?


Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, by A. E. Moorat, Hodder & Stoughton, 2009.