GHOST STORIES OF THE GYPSIES
If you don’t live in a house, then can you still be haunted? JEREMY HARTE explains why the ghost stories told by English gypsies are quite different from those of the settled majority.
In the quiet places of the English countryside, a legacy of strange experiences has been passed down within the travelling community. JEREMY HARTE brings to light the stories told by a fiercely independent people, and finds that traditions among the Romany have much to tell us about the supernatural itself.
Tutte jins, said Tommy Boswell to a gentleman friend, sar Romanichals si ’jaw trashed o’ mullos: which in the language of the housedwellers, means “You know that all Gypsies are truly terrified of ghosts”. Old Robert Smith could tell you about that. Hadn’t he got on the donkey’s back one night, when his wife was taken ill, and ridden four miles to see the doctor? Then returning, and trying to take a short cut, he found himself at a crossroads, where the donkey began to kick and jump, all in a dripping sweat. And turning round he saw a boro kovel av avri o bor, a great something come out the hedge, more like a pig than anything else, with its eyes like balls of fire, and jumping easily out of the way of his stick. At last the thing put its tail in its mouth, turned round three times and left, and Robert got back to find his wife on the mend. And as soon as she was well, they packed up tent and rods and all, said goodbye to that dreadful place, and never went there again.
That’s typical for a Gypsy ghost story. Away in a lonely spot, something eerie has crossed your path, bizarre and unexplained; even at the end of the story, it is neither pacified nor laid, but simply left behind, for the Gypsy solution to life’s problems was always to put the horse in the shafts and move on. So it was in 1912 when Tommy Smith told his story, so it had been for generations before, and so it still is, for these stories are still popular today. Maybe they are not being told to strangers: Alan Murdie, who must know more about ghosts than any man alive, didn’t have many of these tales to hand when he wrote about Gypsies and the supernatural recently in these pages (see FT393:18-21). This ghostlore is an isolated tradition, but it is passionately held. You do not have to fly to the ends of the Earth to find people with a different culture, language and supernatural lore. It is all here in England, on the far side of the hedge, behind that fence on the fringe of town.
That’s true today, even though the language is just a ghost of its former self. How much more so it must have been when Old Romani was the home speech of the community, and English was only used for communicating with the gorjers – the settled people, those threatening strangers outside the warm circle of Gypsy firelight. Romani is a practical language, worked and reworked on the long road that led from the plains of northern India to the furthest reaches of Europe; it contains ideas that do not quite match up with the usual way of thinking in English. Mullo, for instance (it rhymes with ‘fuller’), doesn’t quite mean ‘ghost’, but has a primary sense of ‘dead body’. Like the people of the Balkans who gave Romani so much of its vocabulary, Gypsies didn’t think of a revenant as a wispy thing, but as a real, heavy body rising from the grave: so much so that when early Christian converts wanted to talk about the spirit, they
AWAY IN A LONELY SPOT, SOMETHING EERIE HAS CROSSED YOUR PATH, BIZARRE AND UNEXPLAINED
had to invent a new word for it, bavolengro, ‘him of the wind’. The other sort of ghost was physical and frightening, though it might not necessarily come in human form.
BOUNDARY ISSUES
“I knows a lot about mullos,” said a little Boswell. “There’s different sorts – milk-white ’uns and coal-black ’uns. When we’re abed at nights, they come screaming round our waggon and flapping at the windows… When mammy’s going out with her basket of a morning, and daddy’s gone somewhere to see about a hoss, I daren’t go far into the big wood agen our stopping-place, ’cos of the black pig what lives there. Daddy has seen it, and nobody can’t kill it, for you can bang a stick right through it without hurting it. Mammy allus says ‘Don’t you never go into that wood, else the black pig’ll get you’.” A convenient bogie, if he kept the young ones from straying: but it wasn’t just children who saw dark things. “In about 1927 in a little lane near Gainsborough
Gordon Boswell, for whose truthfulness I have the highest regard, avers that he saw the Devil in the shape of a large black dog.” Supernatural animals were so common you couldn’t always be certain you were looking at a live one. One of the Smiths was stopping in a field in Suffolk and went out after sunset to see to his donkey. Instead of coming up to him and nuzzling for a tit-bit, the animal stood aloof.
Though clearly standing still as a stone, as the owner walked towards him he receded further and further away, until finally he vanished. And the next morning the real donkey was found in the village pound, where he had been all the time.
You had to be careful when going out at night. Old Tom Lee was on the way to Brough Hill Fair with a couple of Romany pals, bringing horses to the fair, and he went to check them last thing before it got dark. The other men called him back, but he wanted to get everything done right. They called him again, and this time there was something in their voices that didn’t make him want to linger. When he got back, they were asking, Didn’t you see it? All the time he’d been tending to the grais, there was a black shadow on his back, climbing all over him, like an animal. That was in the Fifties. Forty years later, at another gathering – Yarm Fair, this time – the talk was of another stopping-place best avoided. “There was a little man sitting at
“GORDON BOSWELL AVERS THAT HE SAW THE DEVIL IN THE SHAPE OF A LARGE BLACK DOG”
the front of the waggon. My dad chased him but he couldn’t catch him so he turned round and went back to the waggons. When he got there the little man was sitting back where he had been before. So he chased him again, but couldn’t catch him… The next day we had to move on.”
The boundary between this world and the other was easily transgressed, but then Gypsy life was already open to things from outside. Romany people lived an outdoor life, and for most of the 19th century there was no sleeping accommodation apart from bender tents. These were made out of a frame of hazel rods with blankets pinned over them, so that nothing more than a thickness of cloth separated you from whatever was in the night. This bred a different attitude to the supernatural from that of house-dwellers, locked away from the darkness by their doors and walls. The Lockes knew of a family who stopped down a lane near the Black Mountains in the 1870s, “and about midnight Dosia saw something get over the gate, like an old woman; and it come and stood close by her tent, looking down upon her as she was lying abed.” She shouted at it in Romani, Tutte wafodi puri grasni, ka so beshes tutte adoi? – “You filthy old mare, why are you standing there?” – and it moved over to the men’s tent, saying something like “I’ll take the two” with a groaning sound and a gale of wind. “And that very instance Old Gilderoy and his son was dragged right out of the place behind. They couldn’t help themselves, they said; and the tent was blown clean up.” They lay on the ground till morning and then packed up and moved on. “And we never went back to that place, nor we never stopped there neither.”
As the 19th century wore on, tents gave way to living-waggons (the ‘Gypsy caravan’ of children’s books) but these were still far more permeable to the outside world than houses. Every outside noise is audible in a waggon, and you fall asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof. Gypsies felt, perhaps with reason, that a life spent close to wild nature was the best preparation for observing the supernatural. As one of the Welsh Woods said to a visitor: “You’re a gorjer. Things like that won’t appear to you, because you’ve got no faith in them.”
HORSE SENSE
Gypsies defied the threat of the supernatural, not by locking and barring it out, but by watching out for its presence, paying close observation to what was going on around them. Significantly, even though there are plenty of charms for good luck, there is no equivalent in Romany tradition to the hagstones and witch balls and lucky horseshoes with which gorjers protected their homes, even when these things would have been easily portable; they belonged to a different mindset. Instead a family would carefully study the behaviour of other living creatures, especially the horses. A group of Smiths were stopping at Quakers Lane outside Kendal, where there were mullos dikked ’drey rati, hauntings seen at night. How did they know? “Look at that there horse; he
won’t stay up the lane; they never will, and often they comes down with a gallop.”
Horses always knew. Reuben Draper pointed out a holly tree at Chesham as a place where you should never stay. Why not? Because a family tried it, and tied their horse to the tree to keep him safe, but he pranced about so much they thought he was going down with the staggers. As soon as they untied him, he was fine. Another family that hadn’t heard the story did the same, but the horse was so miserable, pulling and whinnying, that they soon moved on. And after that, no one would approach the tree, they knew it had a mullo. Ah, said Britannia Smith, but there’s a way to tell if a place is safe. “The owl knows when ghosts is about, for it never goes where they are; so my people always stop where we hear the owl cry, don’t we, brother?”
“My mother’s father was stopping one night, back in the old days,” Hilda Brazil of the Surrey Gypsy Forum tells me, “and last thing he did, he tied the horse to a rail. Well, the horse was kicking and sweating – he went back to him, he tried to soothe him, but he couldn’t do nothing, and in the morning that horse was all white with the sweat on him. When it was day there comes a policeman to move them on, and he says, I’m surprised to see you’ve pulled on here. Surprised? – what for? Don’t you know, says the gavver, this is the place where the sailor was killed, over there, just where that rail is.” They’d stopped in the Devil’s Punch Bowl, where the famous murder took place.
Another cautionary tale came from Jim Penfold of Battersea, who was a big man in the days of the Gypsy Council; it was passed down to him by his grandmother. Her parents had stopped at Ruddington, a day’s journey from
Nottingham Fair, and it looked a kushti poov, a decent place, but as soon as they gone to bed the horses began to neigh and stamp, and the dogs howled. As they got out to quieten the animals, the waggon started to rock back and forth, like something shaken in a high wind. But there was no wind. The wife’s hawkingbasket was whisked a hundred yards across the field and everything in it was scattered, then the heavy kettle-iron blew into the air as if it were a straw ta wustered aglal o vardo sa churi, and was thrown against the waggon like a knife. They didn’t dare set a foot nearer but spent the night under the hedge, too trashed to move, until they fell asleep from sheer weariness and fright. And when the Sun rose and the singing of the birds woke them, they looked out, afraid of what they’d see, but nothing was wrong. The horses were still tied to the cratch on the back of the waggon, the dogs asleep under the wheels, the kettle-iron where they’d left it in the ashes of last night’s fire, and there wasn’t a scratch on the vardo. They looked at each other in amazement and pulled immediately to get away from the place.
Well, the fair was a good one and it took their minds right off what had happened, till at the end they were visited by a missioner, one of those preachers that goes round looking after the souls of the Romany. And they told him what had happened, the waggon shaking and the basket flying through the air and everything. “Tell me,” says the rashai, “tell me, what did you have in the basket?”. “Nothing much,” says Great-Grandmother, “just some lengths of kushti mohair lace that I was going to hawk at the fair.” “And where was this field?” They told him just where, and he looks very serious and says “That’s the place where the girl was murdered.” “What girl?” “The one that got strangled with a length of mohair lace.”
It didn’t always have to be grim. Fiddling Tiger Shaw, who travelled in the Fenland, knew a Gypsy couple who were out after fodder for the horse. Luckily, they’d found a lonely haystack and were about to pull out the hay when “they looked up and saw on the top of the stack a wizened old man wearing a threecornered hat, a cut-away coat with silver buttons, knee-breeches, silk stockings, buckled shoes, and by his side hung a curious sword.” Well, there’s no harm in talking, so the wife asked the old thing if it didn’t mind them taking some hay, just a handful, to keep the poor horse strong. And it nodded, so off they went with a big armful each, and a trail of loose wisps dropped behind them all the way to the
waggon. It was easy to see where they’d been and in the morning the squire himself came to wake them up, asking what they thought they’d been at in his haystack. And they said they’d had permission, and described what they’d seen. “At this the squire turned deathly pale, and laid hold of a fence to steady himself. ‘Why, you’ve seen my old grandfather who has been dead years and years, and if he gave you leave, you can get as much of that hay as you please.’ And you may be sure they did.” 13
GORJER GHOSTS
There’s a pattern emerging here. Gypsies find themselves by accident in a strange place, where they are alarmed by a mullo: sometimes this is just a senseless something, but sometimes it is explained by a story about some stranger who died – and that story will itself be told by a stranger, a gorjer. As for the threatening dead, they too are always gorjers: a sailor, a village girl or, in the explanation which followed the Lockes’ story, a drunken gentleman. Gypsies do not tell about places haunted by other Gypsies.
And yet there is no shortage of such accounts from the other side of the racial divide. Alan Murdie effortlessly quotes a dozen locations from which gorjers report Gypsy apparitions. True, these are a small minority in ghostlore; they have to share their hour in the moonlight with phantom monks, Cavaliers, smugglers, Vikings, ladies in white and other easily recognisable figures, because to settled people a Gypsy is just one more character in the costume parade of history. But this sort of
TO SETTLED PEOPLE A GYPSY IS JUST ONE MORE CHARACTER IN THE COSTUME PARADE OF HISTORY
imaginative assimilation is not an option to Romanies, for whom the host community will always be an inescapable Other, pressing at the edge of consciousness by sheer force of its majority. Gorjers outnumber Gypsies, as the dead outnumber the living. It is their ghosts, and not those of the community, which appear unannounced to wreck stopping-places and move people on; but then, was that very different from what they did while alive?
True, there are Gypsy traditions about the return of dead Gypsies, but they are very different in character, though they may also be covered by that versatile word mullo. In the 1910s Yoben Gray joined in a conversation on spectral things by saying “Why, yes, of course, mother, there’s mullos. Don’t you remember after Dolferus died, his voice used to speak in the tent to Delaia? She says it really was his voice as nat’ral as life, and it made her shiver to hear it. One day she went to a parson for advice. He told her the next time it spoke, to say: ‘I promise you nothing. Begone!’ Well, sure enough, the voice came again, and she remembered to say what the parson had told her, and she never heard the voice no more.”
Another story was told 30 years later, when waggons had replaced tents, by Caroline Price from South Wales. She was sitting with her husband when “we both heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming towards the waggon from outside. I clutched my rom and whispered to him not to say a word. Up the waggon stairs came the footsteps and in through the door, which wasn’t open. We could not see anybody, but we could hear a sound as if someone heavy, like a man, sat down on that little fixed seat just behind the door. The seat creaked under the weight. We sat still for what seemed a very long while, and then whoever it was went out, down the steps, and away again.” The Gypsy who owned the vardo before them had been a big tall fellow; they lost no time in selling off a waggon that was obviously still dear to him.
And to bring things up to date, here is another story from Hilda Brazil. “When trailers were starting to come in my mother bought one new. It was a Bluebird and she got it ever so cheap. It wasn’t very big, one of those ones where you pull the bunk bed down. And she was sitting on that bed, next to the kitchen part, and she heard the most awful crash, it was like cups and saucers falling and break
ing. It wasn’t just her, there was other people who heard it, always the same crash. Well, they didn’t like that and they sold the trailer on. And it was only then, afterwards, that the people who sold it to them came up and said – We didn’t want to tell you – not while you was living there – but the old lady who had it before, she died sudden, of a heart attack. She was just coming through from the kitchen with the tea-things. Dropped them, she did, dropped the tray all over the floor.”
MOVING ON
There’s a pattern emerging here, too. Gorjer ghosts are seen, but Gypsy ghosts are heard. The ghosts of strangers are threatening, come from the past, and can only be understood by asking other outsiders for an explanation, whereas ghosts from within the community are harmless, if alarming; they come from the generation that is only just gone, and other Gypsies know well who they were. You escape them, not by moving away from a place, but by selling on the haunted property, preferably at a profit. After all, waggons and trailers have never been permanent possessions; as luck came and went, you traded your vehicle up or down depending on what you could get for it. That gave you a flexibility which was impossible for people who had gone into brick.
In the 1990s a family in York thought they would sell off their trailer and move into a house. That lasted until the night they were sitting round the telly and a blast of wind came out of nowhere, shaking all the pots down in the kitchen. The next day Father was talking to the gorjer neighbour, and he told him about the previous occupants, a group of young people who’d left when one of them died in the house. “The next day we moved out of the house and back into a trailer. We’ve never been in another house since.” This has the tropes of older stories about threatening mullos, but with all the complications added by an address and a front door: moving away is not so easy when you have to sell a house to do it.
Moving on might have been the quickest answer to life’s problems, but it came into its own at the time of death. Then everything was done to put distance between the dead person and the living, a principle which underlay many traditions, including the burning of the waggon. As the most public part of the funeral, this attracted spectators from beyond even the most extended family circle, including journalists, who left convinced that every Gypsy life ended with a vardo going up in flames. In fact, the ceremony was usually reserved for elderly and respected people, but it formed the last step in a sequence of much more common acts: breaking up the household china, burning clothes, and in the older and less-regulated days, shooting dogs and horses. Everything with a personal, organic link to the dead person was destroyed.
Ceremonies invite explanations, and here the most obvious one was that these things were done to prevent the return of the dead. If the waggon or trailer of the deceased was burnt, broken up, or sold on to those who knew no better, then there was no risk of heavy footsteps or crashing plates disturbing its new occupants. This makes a kind of sense, but rituals aren’t always so logical. Gypsies will also put away photographs of a family member who has died, though the dead do not return to photo frames. The important thing is to sever connections between those that are gone and those who are living. You don’t avoid speaking the name of the dead, as was the custom for close relatives, because you fear their mullo popping up out of the hedge: you do it because that would bring them back to memory, and kindle old sorrows.
It is quite compatible to feel the keenest grief for a lost companion, and yet to be full of dread at the death which has overtaken them. Awareness of contamination by death is very strong among Gypsies; with a people for whom memory counts for more than written rules
EVERYTHING WAS DONE TO PUT DISTANCE BETWEEN THE DEAD PERSON AND THE LIVING
and arrangements, these things are not easy to shrug off or strike a line through. I was looking at some black horses, beautifully turned out, and the owner came up and started talking about them. Yes, they were a fine pair, but he’d made the mistake of his life lending them out to an undertaker who wanted one of those oldfashioned horse-drawn funerals. Now nobody would buy them. They were mullerdi grais.
ADJACENT FOLKLORES
The Gypsy world abides by its own rules. “When you gather round the fire with the members of Tom and Caroline Gray’s family,” wrote their scholarly amanuensis in 1922, “on a dreary afternoon or long dark evening in winter, the chances are that before very long you will find yourself in a world where the devil and the fairies, the cunning man and the witch, take a prominent part in human affairs; a world of enchantments and strange apparitions, and portents that always come true; a world in which the dead return to trouble the living, and men must be circumspect if they would avoid contamination.” 18 That was true then, and much of it is still true today. But it was also true that Gus Gray was a storyteller, master of his craft, and if he was alive now he’d be another Stanley Roberts or Richard O’Neill, with all enquiries booked through his agent. The supernatural could be a source of entertainment as well as terror.
Phantom black dogs, invisible footsteps, restless horses, and the voice of a newly dead relative: these are the common stuff of ghostlore, and Gypsies cannot lay any particular claim to them, although when stories are told by the community these motifs are selected and recombined to reflect a particularly Gypsy sensibility. But the presence of this parallel supernatural, different to but co-existing with the culture of the gorjers, raises difficult questions about the relationship between ghostly legend and paranormal reality.
It’s often claimed that popular traditions contain some kernel of genuine anomalous experience, clothed by the percipients with added details from tradition. So the researcher’s job is to strip away the stage effects of phantom coaches, corpse candles, hooded monks and so on and get back to the primary paranormal stimulus which prompted them. That might be workable: but it’s certainly true that the more limited your knowledge of different traditions, the more likely you are to mistake the norms of your own culture for objective universal facts.
Settled people, for instance, take it for granted that a ghost sighting will feature figures from the historical past who are seen at places where significant events happened. There has been much paranormal theorising – place-memory, stone tapes, Lethbridge’s ghouls and so on – to provide a sciency sort of explanation for this phenomenon. But there is no phenomenon to explain, because placeghosts are purely a convention of settled culture. Gorjers see them because they expect to see them. Gypsies don’t expect, and don’t see.
As the stories have shown, stopping-places can be haunted by anything from black shadows to malicious winds, but they never feature a visual re-enactment of a past event. As for haunted houses, what price place-memory when your home is on wheels? It’s one thing to imagine the limping tread of HenryVIII somehow burning itself into the stonework of Hampton Court. It’s quite another to suppose that uncle’s footsteps will physically write themselves into the canvas of a bowtop waggon and trundle along with it all the way to Appleby and back.
For 500 years, English Gypsy culture has remained distinct from that of the host community, and we can understand more about ghosts when we place the two folklores side by side than could ever be found by treating them separately.
NOTES
1 William Dutt, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 2nd ser 6, 1912-13, pp68-9.
2 ‘Gypsy’, please, not ‘Traveller’ (which covers many different groups, including the Irish) or ‘Roma’ (which is used for Eastern European members of the great Romany diaspora).
3 George Hall, The Gypsy’s Parson, 1915, pp66–7. 4 Richard Wade, JGLS 3rd ser 46, 1967, p124
5 Charles Leland et al, English-Gypsy Songs, 1875, pp135–6.
6 Jane Stewart-Liberty, JGLS 3rd ser 32, 1953, pp149–50.
7 Sarah Buckler, Fire in the Dark, 2007, p66.
8 Francis Groome, In Gypsy Tents, 1880, pp174–6. 9 John Sampson, The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, 1926, s.v siker-.
10 Stanley Atkinson, JGLS 2nd ser 3, 1909–10, pp232–3.
11 Stewart-Liberty, JGLS 1953, pp146–7.
12 Jim’s records are in the Surrey Gypsy Archive, contact Surrey History Centre.
13 Hall, 1915, pp147–8.
14 Hall, 1915, p109.
15 Doris Stephens, JGLS 3rd ser 24, 1945, p62.
16 Buckler, 2007, p67.
17 Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, Gypsies of Britain, 1944, pp72–108.
18 Thomas Thompson, JGLS 3rd ser 1, 1922, p128. See also GD Jones, Gypsy Campfire Stories (Privately published, 2019, ISBN 9798668541942). It’s a brilliant collection of experiences as they are told within the community.
JEREMY HARTE is a folklorist and museum curator at Bourne Hall in Ewell, Surrey. He is secretary of the Surrey Gypsy Forum and dreams of a future where travelling cultures will be accepted as a feature of England’s past and present.