Ghostwatch
ALAN MURDIE adds a further strange twist to the tale of the ‘Phantom Bird of Lincoln’s Inn’
F or the ghost enthusiast, the story of the bird-like footprints appearing in chalk sprinkled on the floor of a set of allegedly haunted rooms at Lincoln’s Inn on 11 May 1901 may already seem strange enough [‘A Winged Malevolence’ by nina Antonia, FT353:30-33]. However, I feel compelled to comment further, not on account of my own membership of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, but from the wish to share a further bizarre and little-known aspect of this already extraordinary story.
The ‘Phantom Bird of Lincoln’s Inn’ was certainly a story that impressed writers who were otherwise poles apart in their personal temperament and outlook on life. For example, James Wentworth Day described it as “the most remarkable London ghost, the most terrifying phenomenon I have ever heard of” ( Here Are
Ghosts and Witches, 1954). Day shot thousands of game birds in his time as a hunting-shooting-fishing country sportsman and had no qualms about wringing the neck of a chicken and biting its head off for a wager ( Farming Adventure, 1943), and so he might well have been perturbed by thought of an avian phantom back from the dead. But equally, strict vegetarian and vocal campaigner against animal cruelty Alasdair Alpin Macgregor similarly declared: “Of all the strange happenings recorded in the archives of haunted London none is stranger, none eerier, none more macabre’ ( Phantom
Footsteps, 1959). For myself the most remarkable aspect is a coincidence that occurred the same night with a message received in an experiment in mediumship 50 miles away in Cambridge. This scarcely known aspect of the ‘Winged Malevolence’ or ‘Bird Elemental’ caused the late Maurice Grosse to declare it “an astonishing story”. I had drawn it to his attention while discussing the practicalities of using powder and chalk when investigating haunted premises – and Maurice certainly had witnessed some astonishing events over the years.
The message was obtained by Margaret Verrall (1857-1916), a classics lecturer at newnham College Cambridge, who had taken to privately practising automatic writing. In automatic writing the hand of a person holding a pen – often in a trance or asleep – writes out messages without any conscious control or volition. Margaret Verrall had begun her experiments following the death of Frederic Myers (1843-1901) the poet, classicist and a leading figure in the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882.
On the same Saturday evening journalists Max Pemberton and Ralph Blumenfeld were beginning their vigil at Lincoln’s Inn, Margaret Verrall invited a small party of ladies to dinner at her home at 5 Selwyn Gardens, Cambridge, as her husband was dining out. After her guests departed, she went upstairs and felt driven to write automatically. She came downstairs again and while sitting in the dark at 11.10pm, her hand began writing words in a mixture of English, Latin and classical Greek. When translated her message read: “This is what I have wanted, at last. Justice and joy speak a word to the wise. A.W.V. and perhaps someone else. Chalk sticking to the feet has got over the difficulty. You help greatly by always persevering. now I can write a name – thus, here it is!” The rest was unintelligible, but her hand also rapidly drew a crude sketch of a bird.
She inspected the results of this experiment with her husband; they were more amused than perplexed, jokingly referring to the sketch between themselves over the next few days as the “cockyoly bird”. Indeed, it would have been dismissed as altogether meaningless but for what Margaret Verrall saw in the Westminster
Gazette five days later, on the evening of 16 May. This was an abridged account from the Daily Mail of the ghost hunt conducted by Pemberton and Blumenfeld “in rooms a stone’s throw from the Law Courts” (i.e. Lincoln’s Inn at the back of the High Court on the Strand) over the night of 11-12 May just as she had commenced her experiment.
Margaret Verrall realised she received her curious message and drawing of a striding bird at just after 11.10pm, only an hour and a half before the first door unlatched in the haunted room at Lincoln’s Inn and just over three hours before the first manifestation of footprints in the powdered chalk at 2.30am. Three tracks in the left-hand room and five in the right-hand room were noted. The baffled observers considered the marks were identical, exactly 2in (5cm) long – comparable to the footprints of a bird about the size of a turkey with three toes and a short spur behind.
That a medium should have received a message containing such elements simultaneously with the occurrence of a manifestation is virtually unique in the
Her hand began writing words in a mixture of English, Latin and classical Greek
annals of ghost hunting; at the least a most striking and singular coincidence. On one level Mrs Verrall tried to play down this connection between the events; she may have seen it as mildly undignified to find her private messages as an automatist linked with the sensational Fleet Street story of what later became known as “The Bird Elemental”, emphasising: “The question of a connexion between the story and the script is not affected by the value of the story”. But she considered: “A drawing of a bird with a leer is a singularly appropriate comment on the story in the Daily Mail.”
She did not think that telepathy could explain it since “the statement delivered by way of automatic writing was received some three hours before the manifestation, and its publication by a still longer period.” Whilst acknowledging “It is true that the sprinkling of the chalk probably preceded the writing”, she added: “There is no reason to think that the writer of the tale had any expectation as to the sort of marks he might find in the chalk; nor did they expect to encounter a bird.”
“The script was obtained on May 11th, and whether or not a bird made marks in the chalk in the early hours of May 12th, it is certain that a story to that effect was printed on May 13th, and brought to my knowledge on May 16th.”
More deeply, Mrs Verrall acknowledged that the story crystallised the meaning of the enigmatic words: “In this case the absurd element in the script and the quaintness of the phrase about the chalk sticking to the feet drew special attention to the writing, and it was discussed by us more than once. The word calx is ambiguous; it might mean ‘heel’ as well as ‘chalk’, and it was not till we saw the story in the Westminster Gazette of May 16th that we found an interpretation for the Latin words.
“At the time when this script was obtained I had no reason to attach any particular value to my automatic writing, and no steps were taken to obtain external corroboration of the dates of the script except entries in my Diary and scriptbook and communication of the writing at the first opportunity to my husband.” (In Proceedings of the SPR (1906), vol.20 chap. XIII, 328-331)
This coincidence has gone virtually unnoticed by most commentators, recorded briefly as a postscript by John Canning at the end of his chapter on the Lincoln’s Inn ghost in 50 Great Ghost Stories (1971), where he describes it as “a tail piece… one little and curious coincidence” and as “a minor demonstration of precognition”. The reader would thus be left unaware of its place in a much greater set of mediumistic communications produced by Margaret Verrall and a number of other leading mediums in the early 20th century, spreading over many years.
Between 5 March 1901 and 31 December 1904 Mrs Verrall produced 322 pieces of automatic writing, a number of which she believed contained prophetic material. Describing her technique she stated: “I usually write when I am alone, and I prefer not to have a bright light; it is desirable also to write at a time of day or under circumstances when I am not likely to be interrupted. But none of these conditions is essential. I write freely with my husband in the room; I have also written with my daughter watching me, and with a servant moving about in the room; on five occasions (July 30, 1901, Dec. 9, 1902, April 26, 1903, May 11 and 13, 1904) I have tried to obtain writing in presence of other friends, each time with success, though the amount has been less than usual; it is quite common for me to write in a railway carriage with other travellers present; and it has happened to me several times to be momentarily interrupted, to answer a question briefly, and to continue writing.”
Mrs Verrall was one of seven mediums whose scripts began to accumulate at the offices of the Society for Psychical Research, leading its secretary Alice Johnson to consider that they represented a scheme of communication devised by the discarnate Frederic Myers, using multiple and widely separated mediums (or perhaps ‘media’ in this context). Each individual medium received a fragment that made no sense in isolation but when combined with all the others began to take on a coherent meaning, leading the messages to be known as the ‘cross-correspondences’. Widely separated, variously being in the United States, Great Britain and India, the automatists routinely had no idea of the ultimate meaning of the messages they channelled, never having heard – at least consciously – of the numerous obscure references that appeared. These many obscure literary and classical allusions, together with the philological elements, go far beyond what the patience and, indeed, the comprehension of what any vulgar critic or opponent of spiritualism can deal with, so consequently there have never been any accusations of chicanery lodged against the mediums concerned.
The cross-correspondences have periodically been offered as providing the best evidence of survival of human
personality after death, since it is hard to envisage a ‘super-ESP’ power between all automatists working to produce the results over so many years. Unfortunately, the sheer complexity of the scripts meant they failed as a proof of survival, being too complicated for all but the most dedicated scholars to penetrate. It has not been until the 21st century that a full review has been undertaken, aided by computer. (Trevor Hamilton ‘Assessing the Assessors: the Cross-Correspondences – Automatic Writings Then and now’ paper to the Conference of the SPR, Sept 2016).
Equally, no incident better illustrates the sundering gulf that exists between the popular ghost story relayed by the fireside or on the screen and the work of psychical researchers both then and now. It is hard to credit that Professor Hornell Hart’s ‘Six theories of Apparitions’ ( Proc. of the SPR vol.50, 153-239, 1956) appeared in the same century rather than within just two years of Elliot O’Donnell’s Trees of Ghostly
Dread (1958) at the same time the story of the Phantom Bird of Lincoln’s Inn was being revived.
a HaUNTiNg oN THe sTreeT
‘Pat Phoenix has risen from the ashes’ was a sub-heading to ‘Exorcist called in to Corrie haunting’ in the Daily Star of 20 April, reporting that a Roman Catholic priest had been summoned to drive out a ghost from the former Granada TV set of Coronation Street in Manchester. Such was the prominence given to this story that Parliament’s vote to launch a British General Election was relegated to a minor column. To younger and overseas readers, mention of a ‘Pat Phoenix’ might seem to continue the fantastic bird theme in this column, but Pat Phoenix was a British actress who starred in the still-enduring soap opera between 1960-1973 and 1976-1984. Although the actress died of lung cancer aged 62 in 1986, it was no bar to the Daily Star airing her possible post-mortem return as the cause of mysterious ‘banging noises’ and ‘exploding equipment’ that prompted a band of musicians to threaten to withdraw from a music festival being planned at the former set. TV boss Christopher Wandsworth requested the exorcism to quell fears of soap stars who had been ‘freaked out’ by what were dubbed ‘poltergeist attacks’ and concerns that the festival might be put in jeopardy.
Rumours of a haunting at the site have been a tabloid favourite for years, leading the TV show Most Haunted to inflict itself upon it for a broadcast in 2005. In 2014, a guide reported seeing “a child and a woman dressed in Victorian clothes” and a woman who appeared to “float before disappearing into thin air”. Vague stories surfaced again in June 2015, but seemed largely limited to some unfortunate accidents and unexpected illness amongst cast and crew. Psychic News recalled that Tony Warren, the creator of the show who died in March 2016, was “utterly convinced” the set was haunted, and the
Daily Mail quoted claims before his death that Pat Phoenix had returned to him as a ghost. “After Pat [Phoenix] died, one of my dogs – who would always go bananas when Pat came to the house – suddenly started to behave as if she was there again. I would smell this great gale of perfume”.
However, this was Warren’s own house, not the Manchester set at ‘Granadaland’. notably, Warren had long before claimed that his previous home was haunted. In April 1961, and within six months of
Coronation Street first being transmitted, Tony Warren told the long defunct Daily
Sketch newspaper that his country cottage at Little Hayfield, Derbyshire, was haunted by a male ghost he had seen three times. “I awoke one morning and he was sitting in the rocking chair near the fire. He seemed to be looking at old sketches on the wall. He just melted away…” The same report also states that Pat Phoenix claimed that she was once present in another room in the house with a big fire when it suddenly went very cold and “something” brushed past her. (Daily Sketch, 18 April 1961).