GHOSTWATCH
Should we expect to find ghosts in cemeteries? Or even vampires?
Part of the job of a serious writer on ghosts should be to quash exaggerated rumours and hysteria concerning alleged hauntings, seeking the truth rather than feeding sensation and fear. This is particularly so with claims of hauntings in burial grounds. The general view amongst serious ghost hunters in Britain is that cemeteries are largely unhaunted. Very few people have been known to die in graveyards and credible reports of paranormal phenomena are infrequent. This is despite cemeteries being visited by bereaved people recalling their deceased friends and relatives. In actuality, you are more likely to experience the ghost of a loved one in your home than any burial ground in which their remains lie.
As veteran investigator Andrew Green (1927-2004) often pointed out, because of the association made between graves and the ghostly in many people’s minds, quite normal occurrences at burial sites, or within new buildings constructed upon them “are often assumed to be paranormal phenomena”. (Ghost Hunting: A Practical Guide, 1973, 2016). Pseudo-experiences may be generated by the existence of tombstones or other signs of burial, even if none has ever taken place.
Green cited a case concerning a family in Guildford. A man had cleared a churchyard in Abinger, Surrey, in 1968, and removed two lorry-loads of broken tombstones to construct a path in his own garden near Guildford some miles away. This was done quite effectively, but in 1970 the new owners of the property, although delighted with the general appearance of the path, became worried by the fact that the previous owner had laid the stones face uppermost, so that the fragments could be read. Being so disturbed by this they uprooted all the slabs, reversing them and then laying them back face down. One complete stone was deliberately broken into fragments as “no one would walk on it” because one young member of the household “had felt a presence whenever she was near the stone”. Green proposed a test whereby she would walk blindfolded along the path to see if she could locate the offending stone without seeing it, but this suggestion was not taken up.
Green stated: “The general attitude seemed incredible to me, for the stone in question had never been used: it was merely a spare waiting for a ‘customer’. This provides a good illustration of the power that imagination can sometimes have.” He also saw the potential for confusion if the site was ever excavated in the future considering “archaeologists may well be puzzled by finding what appears to be a 19th century graveyard in an area marked on the map as ‘flood fields’ and which has been the back gardens of property since 1961”.
Green’s own theory of ghost experiences was that they were generated by the unconscious mind, occasionally involving psi powers of the living, or accumulations of electromagnetic energy. So on this basis there was no reason to expect hauntings
in burial places. Set against this are the widespread and entrenched beliefs found in many cultures that regard cemeteries to be abodes of spirits. Such ideas have been current for thousands of years in the Middle East, dating back to the civilisations of Sumer, ancient Egypt and Babylonia. Contemporary examples can be found in reports emerging in September 2019 from Wadi-us-Salaam, the largest cemetery in the world, situated at Najaf, Iraq. In Arabic, its name means ‘the field of peace’ but for some of its gravediggers, the dead are not resting quietly.
The scale of the cemetery is staggering. Its vastness can only really be comprehended from the air. First used for burials more than 1,200 years ago, the number of graves is not known exactly, with estimates suggesting up to five million, the numbers swollen over the last 40 years by warfare and insurgency in the country.
As reported by Al-Jazeera, complaints are coming from cemetery workers reporting attacks by supernatural beings. Some locals attribute these to a solid apparition, variously known as ‘Tantal’, ‘Bzebza’, or ‘Gheria’. Hani Al Ghnaim, a 61-year-old gravedigger who has worked there for 11 years, claims there are two entities, one living and one dead. He believes the ghost appears in different guises, including a worm, a child and “a cat in a large fur coat” – and feeds on corpses. Venturing into the cemetery at night, Mr Al Ghnaim arms himself with a pick for protection. If he encounters an apparition he screams to drive it off.
Some gravediggers have quit entirely. Others report suffering physical assaults by corpses being buried. One employee, Murtaza Jwad Abo Sebi, aged 23, recalled: “It happened at night while I was working down in a grave to put a dead woman in her tomb during the funeral ceremony. When I bent down, her hand slapped my face so fiercely that I was left petrified.” Despite his puzzlement as to how the dead body, wrapped in a shroud could lash out, he received a severe shock and underwent a lasting traumatic reaction. He attempted suicide and underwent a course of treatment and psychotherapy at the American University Hospital in Beirut, Lebanon. He is now happily recovered and married.
Less fortunate was another victim, Haider al-Hatemi. He believes he was struck in December 2016 by a ghost “resembling a shadow”, that “sneaked up behind me and hit my head violently, leaving me badly injured.” Whatever occurred, there has been a disturbing aftermath. Now unable to walk straight, he believes a spirit has possessed his body for more than two years. Despite costly shamanic healing sessions, Mr alHatemi remains ill and his wife is divorcing him because of his behaviour.
According to Ameer Al Juboury, 23, who manages the gravediggers unit, ghosts are walking because their burial plots are being illegally sold by family members on the black market. Presumably these spirits are angry over being denied their rightful graves, a resting place in the cemetery being much coveted by many of the Shia faithful, or their remains have been disinterred by usurpers.
Alternatively, when interviewed about these stories, Sajida Jalazai, Assistant Professor of Religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, tentatively identified these entities as specimens of ‘ghuls’ from a “class of djinn that dine on the flesh of the living and dead humans” that haunt cemeteries. (Source: ‘Gravediggers claim ghosts haunt world’s largest cemetery’ AlJazeera, 10 Sep 2019).
From a rationalist viewpoint, it is not unknown for professionals dealing with the dead to become emotionally affected by their work environment. Several archaeologists and museum curators have
told me how they became unsettled by uncovering human remains, or from working in stores containing hundreds of collected bone shards. With so many staff at the colossal site, workers at Wadi-Al-Salaam might well include a small proportion of employees especially sensitive or susceptible to such conditions, suffering anxiety attacks or even hallucinatory experiences. Without more background information and further investigation, it is impossible to reach any conclusive verdict on the meaning and significance of these experiences.
What can be said is that Western apparitional encounters in cemeteries – rare to begin with – seldom display any corporeal element. Although poltergeist manifestations are defined by physical effects, any alleged entities are domestic, intangible and invisible, with little evidence that they “invade the tomb”. (See ‘Do Poltergeists Invade the Tomb?’ in Ghosts and Poltergeists, 1953, by Herbert Thurston).
Occasionally, British cemeteries have been the focus for panics and scares prompting mass ghost hunts for seemingly material entities. The Hammersmith ghost of 1803-04 was a suicide interred in the graveyard, considered sufficiently physical for an off-duty customs officer to shoot at it, with fatal results for a living man, a plasterer wearing white overalls mistaken as the apparition. (See A Natural History Ghosts, 2012, by Roger Clarke; ‘The Hammersmith Ghost’ by Alan Murdie in Justice of the Peace, 2003, v.167, pp. 975-77; also FT296:42-45, 310:34-35.)
In the 20th century a hunt for ‘a vampire with iron teeth’ blew up at a Glasgow community graveyard on the evening of 11 September 1954. The graveyard filled with young children armed with stakes and knives, searching out a vampire claimed to have slain two infants (see FT294:48). Attempts by a policeman to move the children on failed and the group hunted for the vampire for hours, only going home when it started to rain. Over the next two evenings gangs of children returned, but the hunt petered out. No children were prosecuted as all participants fell below the age of criminal responsibility in Scotland. (Furthermore, as later observed at Highgate Cemetery in similar incidents occurring in 1970-74, it is not technically a crime to hunt vampires).
Folklorists have puzzled over the significance of the solid “vampire with iron teeth”. Though superficially having a resonance with the ancient Middle East,
A ghost “sneaked up behind me and and hit my head violently, leaving me shaken”
suggestions of childish inspiration from a verse in the Book of Daniel 7:7 (“After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth”) seem improbable. Blamed more widely were the invidious effects of ghoulish juvenile horror comics imported from America. A campaign composed of an unlikely alliance of Christians, communists and the National Union of Teachers blamed this frisson-inducing literature for corrupting Glaswegian children, sparking a campaign to ban horror comics, a cause taken up by Alice Cullen, MP for the Gorbals. This resulted in Parliament enacting the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955.
Beyond these and other examples, traditions of aggressive physical revenants in Western Europe belong to the Middle Ages before insensibly vanishing away (although in the Orthodox Christian lands of the East fears persisted much longer). Perhaps it was trauma of the Black Death of 1347-51 that finished this kind of story in Britain. Aside from a few folkloric fragments from the Hebrides, and real cases of premature burial of persons still living or botched executions where prisoners revived, supposedly true stories of walking corpses are notable by their absence. The massive expansion in the use of cremation has greatly reduced the scope for them today.
Outside folklore and fiction, stories featuring dead bodies rising to molest the living are relegated to feverish visions, druginduced hallucinations and bad dreams. Nonetheless, such visions may have possible paranormal content on occasions.
For instance, a story entitled ‘The Corpse that Rose’ is recorded in Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book (1936). Its source was the Revd RA Kent, who recounted a nightmare suffered by his grandfather Reginald Easton around 1890, featuring a body climbing out of its coffin. Easton dreamed of staying at Breede Hall in Staffordshire and walking out to the church where a bell was tolling and a funeral cortege approaching. On enquiring as to the identity of the deceased, he was told it was his friend Monckton of Somerford Hall (misspelt ‘Summerford in the text). Moved by this news, he joined the service for the deceased. At its conclusion the old verger “of revolting aspect” approached him and said, “I understand you are Mr Monckton’s oldest friend. If this is so, will you lead the way to the vault after the service?”
Easton agreed and accompanied the pallbearers in taking the coffin down into the vault, descending several flights of steps to reach where it was to be laid. Looking around he saw “thirty to forty coffins of members of the family”, some
of them half-broken through age and with skeletons spilling out. After the coffin was deposited, the verger suddenly rushed away up the stairs and slammed the vault door shut, trapping Easton inside. Easton screamed for help and after an hour heard cracking noises, which he initially interpreted as rescuers seeking to free him. To his horror he then realised it was the body of old Monckton, already in a state of decomposition, wrenching itself from the coffin. The re-animated body got out and tried to seize him. Easton dodged around the coffin to avoid its grasp. A ghastly pursuit began until Easton collapsed from exhaustion, whereupon the corpse sprang upon him and proceeded to sink its fingernails into his face. Easton awoke screaming at this point, and to his immense relief found the sun shining through the windows. But the next day he learned that Monckton had died, his horrific dream apparently coinciding with the death or providing a symbolic forewarning.
If cemeteries in Western societies are relatively unhaunted nowadays, ghost beliefs may still cluster about other dark entrances into the earth like caves or tunnels. Urban myths and contemporary superstitions can invest them with auspicious and frightful reputations. A good example of one such modern tradition involves the supposedly haunted Mount
Victoria Tunnel at Wellington, New Zealand, where it has become customary for motorists entering to sound their horns while passing through.
According to the Guardian: “Many residents believe a jaunty toot – or, for some, blasting their horns for the tunnel’s entire 623-metre length – either wards off evil spirits, or acknowledges the memory of a teenage girl.” The girl was Phyllis Symons, a 17-year-old murdered in 1931, whose body was discovered during the building of the tunnel. Her killer was a construction worker named George Errol Coats, 29, hanged on 17 December 1931.
Among tales that surfaced on-line in 2018, compounding the notion of troubled spirits, are assertions of the tunnel crossing the site of a cemetery for victims of a yellow fever epidemic. Headstones were moved to the side of the road, but mass graves were allegedly not relocated. Consequently, the Wellington tunnel story has acquired a life of its own, inspiring a fictional TV drama and also a novel published in August 2019.
Attempts to impose a ‘honking ban’ have so far been unsuccessful, amid concern for the welfare of pedestrians hazarding to walk along a path through the tunnel. As in Iraq, making a noise is deemed a protective measure to drive away malign influences, the practice of relentlessly honking horns being described as “a city-wide superstition”. (Guardian, 31 Oct 2019; ‘The dark reason we all toot in the Mt Victoria Tunnel’ Wellington Live, 28 Jan 2018).
The Guardian seems somewhat astonished that, save for the most adolescent or superstitious, any New Zealanders of today would believe sounding car horns wards off malign spirits. Even when participants in a folk custom assert this reason, it should not be assumed that the belief is necessarily held and engaged. This is a point made by folklorist Bob Pegg in Rites and Riots (1981) regarding a claim made over the firing of a gun during the nocturnal ceremony of apple wassailing held in Somerset orchards in the 1950s. It is more likely this remark was derived from a vague understanding of once-fashionable antiquarian theories about folk customs being ‘survivals’ of ancient magical rites. More likely the discharge of a gun simply reflected an exuberant sense of fun, a celebratory letting off of steam, more than any motives of deterring evil spirits.
In fact, many people still adhere to protective spiritual techniques. As Judge
Carol Atkinson observed in the High Court in 2015: “There is nothing unusual in such a belief. Many mainstream Christian faiths have their homes blessed by a priest before occupying. Other faiths have prayers written on paper rolled up into a container and nailed above the door to keep their home safe. The crucifix over the entry to the home. The blessing of a baby by practising Catholics before christening, lest anything untoward might happen. Crossing your fingers. In my judgment, these are all examples of the same thing.” (In Re R (A child) (Fact-finding hearing) [2015] Lexis Citation 153)
Also many people actually relish thoughts of a hair-raising encounter amongst the tombs, judging from comments by media presenter Paul O’Grady to daytime ITV show This Morning with Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, on 25 October 2019. He told his hosts “how much he has always been into the paranormal” and explaining that he loved going into tombs during his work with the show Most Haunted: “You run round in the dark screaming ‘cos, you know, it’s fun, and also, I’m curious as well… I’ve been in tombs and all sorts. I can’t tell you what they’ve done to me. Strapped to a bed in an old asylum in Venice.” (Metro, 25 Oct 2019.)
Keen though he is, I think it unlikely that Paul or even Most Haunted will venture into Wadi-Al-Salaam anytime soon. Meanwhile, Paul can console himself with his home being haunted by a number of ghostly smells. He and his partner Andre Portasio get a “waft of perfume” they attribute to an elderly woman haunting the property. “I went to dinner with somebody and one of the people at the dinner, they said to me, ‘My friend is the granddaughter of the lady that used to live in your house’ and she said, ‘Can you smell the perfume?’ – And I said ‘yeah’, but we’ve all smelt it. He identifies it as a fragrance called ‘Joy’. “It’s very heavy but no, it’s not scary”. A second olfactory manifestation at his home is “a whiff of home perm solution. You get this whiff of that ammonia. It takes me back to me mother years ago, sat there with a plastic cape on having her hair done.”
Of all forms of reported ghostly manifestations, phantom smells probably have least scope for engendering fear on the part of those encountering them.
The Wellington Tunnel story has acquired a life of its own, inspiring a TV drama and a novel