Vile piggishness
ALAN MURDIE sniffs out some rare stories of porcine possession and supernatural swine
One Christmas morning back in the 1960s, or maybe earlier, a man from the village of Cawthorpe in Lincolnshire set out on foot for the pub in neighbouring Legbourne, intending to join “his cronies” for a festive drink. Walking by a gate to a particular plantation, he heard footsteps behind him. Fancying a chat with a fellow wayfarer heading in the same direction towards the pub, he slowed his pace to allow the other walker to catch up with him. He heard the footsteps drawing closer, then exactly parallel with him and then overtaking him. But no one was visible!
Scarcely had he absorbed this startling fact when a herd of pigs came dashing down the road towards him. Greatly startled and alarmed by their abrupt appearance, he was forced to leap aside on to the verge to avoid them careering into him. Regaining his balance sufficiently to look around, he could see no pigs. The herd had vanished as unexpectedly as it had appeared. He was completely alone on the empty road as before.
It should be emphasised that he witnessed this spectacle before reaching the pub. On arriving, he blurted out his story, half-expecting to be met with ridicule and disbelief – for this Christmas walker had witnessed an entire herd of one of the rarest forms of apparition – the ghostly pig.
Humans have an unusual relationship with pigs. Winston Churchill: “Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.”
First domesticated in the Neolithic era, pigs have coexisted with humankind for millennia. The pig is a beast upon which humanity projects its fears, hopes, anxieties, prejudices and disgust. Pigs are associated with filth and disease, yet most societies worldwide steadily consume increasing amounts of its flesh each year.
The pig is loved as a popular cartoon figure for children, but it is also one that will occasionally kill and eat them. Tragic stories of swine attacks on infants occurred in Cameroon in 2020 and in China in 2014. Such cases were still within living memory of elderly country people alive in the 1970s, recalling days before 1914 when many labourers in rural England kept a pig and subsisted upon a basic diet of bread, beer and bacon (see the East Anglian Handbook, 1970, edited by Michael Watkins).
Yet despite many superstitions being associated with them, pigs rarely feature in ghost stories; when they do, there is usually an association with evil spirits, human crime and social sins.
The most famous story of pigs and the supernatural is found in the New Testament, the miraculous removal by Jesus of multiple demons from a possessed man living among tombs at Gerasene and their transferral into a herd of pigs, known ever since as the Gadarene swine. The earliest account comes from St Mark 5:1-20. The demons give their name as “Legion, for we are many”. The possessed man underwent an instant cure when the demons were expelled from
When pigs feature in ghost stories there is usually an association with evil spirits
him and entered into a nearby herd of several thousand foraging pigs, which then dementedly charge into a lake and drown. Like all New Testament miracles, the story has received exhaustive study, with one of the most penetrating being that by Dr Leslie Weatherhead (1893-1976) a leading 20th century Methodist scholar, who examined its wider context from the perspective of modern psychological theories.
Gadera was a Greek colony in biblical times, explaining the presence of the pigs, with Jews supplying the Greeks and profiting from a creature regarded as unclean. Weatherhead postulated the demon-possessed man might have been wracked with social guilt to the point of mental breakdown. Alternatively, Weatherhead postulated that the insanity of the man stemmed from torture inflicted by Roman soldiers, explaining the reference to the demons as ‘Legion’.
Visiting the Holy Land, Weatherhead pinpointed the miracle occurring at Khersa on the eastern (Golan Heights) side of the Sea of Galilee, the only spot on the entire shore where the steep ground falls into deep water. Recalling this visit in Religion, Psychology and Healing (1963) Weatherhead wrote:
“On a blazing June morning in 1934 I found this place strangely uncanny, weirdly desolate” adding: “If it made that impression on a Western mind on a sunny June morning, after a peaceful voyage in a motor-boat, we can imagine the effect produced on the minds of the superstitious disciples who thought pigs were unclean and graveyards full of devils, in the dusk of the late evening” – but he heard no ghostly squeals or grunts.
While recognising parallels between spiritual healing in miracle stories and techniques of psychotherapy, and citing how pigs easily panic, he found no parallel case in psychiatric literature where an instantaneous cure coincided with a reaction in animals; but an exorcism manual published in 1972 directed that whenever rituals take place, no animals should be on the premises.
Elements of crime, sin, burial sites and a sense of evil can be found in stories of swinish hauntings many centuries later. Ghost hunter Elliot O’Donnell recounts in Animal Ghosts (1913) a haunting by phantom pigs, citing an eyewitness ‘a Mr B’, a small boy at the time. He lived with his family in a small house called the Moat Grange in the Chilterns, situated in a very lonely spot near crossroads connecting four towns. A gibbet once stood there, with the bodies of executed criminals buried in the moat.
Soon after moving in, the family were awakened by the most dreadful noises, part human and part animal. Getting up and looking though a long front window overlooking the crossroads, they saw a number of spotted creatures like pigs, screaming, fighting and tearing up the soil, inflamed by heaven knows what impulses. They appeared above the criminals’ cemetery. As Mr B was about to strike a light on the tinderbox, a “most diabolical white face” pressed itself against the windowpane outside, staring in towards them. The children shrieked with terror and Mrs B fell to her knees and prayed, whereupon the face at the window vanished. The herd of pigs, ceasing their rampage, tore frantically down one of the highroads, disappearing from view. Thereafter, the haunting intensified, becoming so bad the family moved out.
Assuming there is any truth in this tale, from its vague details it occurred during the 19th century, between the end of gibbeting in 1834 and before the arrival of domestic electricity. The precise location remains obscure. The only information available that might identify the locality as somewhere other than within O’Donnell’s imagination is that the family name was Bonsell, revealed when the story was republished in the posthumous Elliot O’Donnell’s Ghost Hunters (1971) edited by Harry Ludlam. O’Donnell speculated that either “the piglike ghosts were supposed to be the earthbound spirits of the executed criminals” or alternatively, “the herd of hogs may well
have been the phantasms of actual earthbound pigs – attracted to the spot by a sort of fellow-feeling for the criminals, whose gross and carnal natures would no doubt appeal to them.”
With its elements of old burial ground, violent crime, a haunted house and a terrified family fleeing alarming manifestations featuring pigs, one is irresistibly reminded of America’s most notorious haunted house, 112 Ocean Avenue, Long Island, scene of the alleged ‘Amityville Horror’ [see FT190:32-37, 325:44-46, 397:56-57].
For anyone unfamiliar with this grand guignol of the 1970s, it was the story of George and Kathleen Lutz and their three children who were driven out of this house of horrors in January 1976 after just 28 days in residence. According to the bestselling The Amityville Horror (1977) by Jay Anson, in their brief occupation the Lutz family suffered ghostly voices, symptoms of possession, swarms of flies, slime oozing from walls and a variety of physical incidents and demonic apparitions. A highlight was a phantom pig with glowing red eyes staring in at the window and leaving giant tracks in the snow.
George and Kathleen Lutz had originally purchased the property at a knockdown price arising from it being the site of the massacre of six members of the DeFeo family by 23-year-old Ronnie DeFeo Jr on 13 November 1974. Anson also asserted the house stood on an old native American burial ground. The book proved a runaway success, blending classic elements from gothic literature with the 1970s fashion for novels and films about devils and possession. It has inspired numerous films, notwithstanding prompt investigations casting doubt upon many aspects, owing to the subjective and uncorroborated nature of most experiences reported by the Lutz family and the discovery that some events either never happened or were hugely exaggerated. Examining 49 claimed incidents, British ghost hunter Philip Paul (1923-2010) proposed natural explanations for most. Visiting 112 Ocean Avenue, he spoke to the new owners, James and Barbara Cromarty, learning they had experienced no ghosts but their life in the house was made “nightmarish by the persistent attentions of numerous morbid sightseers.” The new couple told the Washington Post of enduring “vandals and gawkers, who stood on the lawn for hours, rang the doorbell and asked whether Ronnie DeFeo was in.”
After several months of extensive research and interviews with those involved, Dr Stephen Kaplan, Director of the Parapsychology Institute of America, stated of the property in the journal Theta (1977, vol.5, no.4): “It is our professional opinion that the story of its haunting is mostly fiction.”
Further complications ensued, following litigation over Anson’s book and the rights to the millions of dollars it generated. Nevertheless in 2013, Danny Lutz maintained some genuine phenomena occurred at his childhood home, and he complained of still being troubled by memories. (See Philip Paul, ‘Amityville Horror or Outrage’? in Some Unseen Power, 1983; Washington Post, 16 Sept 1979; ‘Return to Amityville: eldest son of family terrorized by ‘possessed’ Long Island home’, D.Mail, 8 Mar 2013).
Claims of a phantom pig, amid a whole collection of beastly apparitions and strange phenomena, arose at the village of Hoe Benham in Buckinghamshire in the Edwardian era. Two artists, Osmund Pittman and Reginald Waud, had lived in a cottage for four years when visited in the autumn 1907 by their friend and student Miss Clarissa Miles. Miss Miles was an outdoors type keen on horses and hunting, but with a strong artistic streak. She also considered herself to possess psychic abilities, and experimented with telepathy and mediumship.
On 2 November 1907 (All Soul’s Day), Mr Pittman had just collected their milk delivery at the cottage. Gazing up the road, he saw Miss Miles approaching carrying her easel and paint-box. Following behind her was a large white pig with a long snout. Surprised, he went down to the painting studio and said to Waud, “What do you think Miss Miles is bringing down with her this morning, instead of her chow? A large pig!”
They both “roared with laughter”, cracking jokes about not letting the animal into their garden. As Miss Miles arrived, Pittman opened the window and shouted
out, “What have you done with your companion?” She was baffled, saying, “My companion, what do you mean?” They told her what had been following her. Going to check, she found the road was empty. Neither had the milkman seen any stray pig. Later, they enquired in the village, No one had reported any escaped pig; it turned out swine fever restrictions were in force. But what enquiries did reveal were numerous sightings of strange creatures by villagers, spanning 50 years.
Pittman and Ward were inundated with stories of animal apparitions, variously resembling a cat, a dog, a sheep, or a rabbit, together with a creature that changed shape. For example, a William Thorne told of seeing in January 1905 an apparition like a large black dog running out from a hedge. Initially, he thought it was the dog belonging to the curate, but it suddenly changed shape, appearing as a black donkey standing on its hind legs with glowing eyes “almost as big as saucers”.
Others reported seeing a strange snowy white shape “too large for a cat, more the size of a terrier with a fluffy coat.” Sightings of this and other entities with glowing eyes stalking the area went back many years. Villagers blamed manifestations upon ‘Tommy King’, an 18th century farmer who had committed suicide.
In February 1908 Clarissa Miles returned to Hoe Benham to continue her painting and investigate the manifestations further. Passing a spot known as Tommy King’s Well, she sensed an evil spirit trailing them, “a deadly malice and hate in the air”. On another night, she and the two artists all heard an unearthly scream that ended in a moan. Venturing back to the Well under bright moonlight, Miss Miles attempted contacting the entity by automatic writing, her hand writing the words: “I am in hell, pray for me” twice over.
Subsequently, all three witnessed other strange luminous phenomena, vague apparitions and further uncanny noises, these continuing until 27 February 1908, when Miss Miles left Hoe Benham. Unfortunately, as many of these experiences were subjective or occurred in states of heightened suggestibility and expectation, it is difficult to unravel from the diverse accounts what was produced by over-imagination, what phenomena were possibly genuine and what amounted to folkloric motifs of the dead returning in animal from. ( SPR Journal, vol.13, 1907-08, p.253; Ghosts Over Britain, 1976, by Peter Moss).
Folkloric fragments lacking origin stories telling of phantom pigs are known from Wiltshire, Hertfordshire, the Isle of Man and a few other places. At Kelling and Salthouse on the Norfolk coast, a phantom blue sow crossed the road with no hedge growing there, but locals had no story or explanation beyond considering it a ruse by smugglers (‘Some East Anglian Hauntings’ in Here are Ghosts and Witches, 1954, by J Wentworth Day). Otherwise, ghostly pigs are rare in the spectral bestiary of the British Isles, so the report of Christmas Day Cawthorpe swine at Cawthorpe is very much a stand-alone oddity.
The lack of other corroborating witnesses is not surprising, given the period. Until the end of the 1970s, British roads were typically devoid of traffic on 25 December, until higher car ownership and greater rates of family breakdown ensured they became packed with divorced parents driving from one unwanted turkey to another.
Yet it appears the witness was not mocked upon relating his ghost experience at the pub, but found a sympathetic audience. A listener recalled that at the plantation entrance where the walker first heard the footsteps there once stood a memorial stone, commemorating the murder of a drover around the year 1800. The drover was returning with a herd of pigs purchased at Louth Market and a pocket full of coins from the sale of his own stock when he was ambushed and his throat
cut by a robber. Apparently, some soldiers removed this monument during World War II.
More problematic is that the whole story of the phantom pigs of Cawthorpe turns out to be second-hand, collected by Joan Forman for a book on hauntings (see ‘Walking Boots and Pigs’ in Haunted East Anglia, 1974). Her informant was not the witness himself but a Mr Harry Borrill of Cawthorpe, “80 if he was but a day”. He said it happened “a few years ago” a span in oral accounts capable of expansion like a pocket telescope. However, the reference to World War II and the monument potentially narrows it down to a Christmas Day sometime between 1945 and 1971, when Joan Forman began collecting her material.
I feel several factors should encourage further investigation into the Christmas pig ghosts at Cawthorpe. Firstly, Joan Forman, trained as a journalist, was a thoughtful and thorough researcher. Moreover, she grew up in Cawthorpe and revealed in a rather understated and non-sensational way that the area constitutes something of a paranormal hotspot.
Then there is also an intriguing report from “Alexa and Jonathan” received by BBC Lincolnshire on 24 September 2014, declaring: “On our way home last night (around 10:45pm) from Legborne to Louth, my partner and I were driving down the Legborne road when I spotted a pair of feet moving across the road. My partner slowed... I asked him if he had seen ‘that’. He hadn’t… but had seen the head and shoulders of a person running across the road. We were both as cold as ice”. Only the next day did Alexa learn of hauntings on the road attributed to a suicide and of “a pig farmer who walks the road”.
Finally, one may note the traditional belief in ghosts manifesting at Christmas, held in Britain and Scandinavia. In Swedish folklore, walking out at Christmas might induce spectral encounters, some carrying a prophetic meaning. One particularly feared seasonal spectre is called ‘the Gloson’, which takes the form of a terrible ghost pig. Appearing near churchyards and on roads over Christmastime, it is considered dangerous to encounter. (See www.bbc. co.uk/lincolnshire/unexplained/your_ sightings.shtml; ‘He Met His Own Funeral Procession: The Year Walk Ritual in Swedish Folk Tradition’ in Folk Belief and Traditions of the Supernatural (2016) edited by Tommy Kuusela & Giuseppe Maiello.