The weirdest ghosts of all?
RICHARD FREEMAN picks a couple of his all-time favourite examples of outré apparitions and surreal spooks...
According to Jennifer Westwood in her 1985 book Albion, a Guide to Legendary Britain, Walshes Road, Jarvis Brook, in Crowborough, East Sussex, is haunted by a ghostly bag of soot. This horrific phantom supposedly attacks anyone who sees it; just what it would do if it caught you, other than dirty your suit, is another matter.
This got me thinking about some very odd cases of what we might call surreal ghosts, and wondering just what was the strangest phantom ever reported. In the pages of Fortean Times readers have encountered a poltergeist mongoose and undead chickens, but there are ghosts even more obscure and absurd. These entities are so very odd that they fly in the face of the idea that ghosts are simply spirits of the dead.
Actor Jon Pertwee, of Doctor Who fame, had a childhood encounter stranger than anything he met while playing his best-known role, an experience recorded by Richard Davis in his 1979 book I’ve Seen a Ghost.
As a small boy Pertwee used to go and stay with a schoolfriend in an Elizabethan manor house in Sussex. The family lived in one wing, and the rest of the house was not widely used except when they were giving parties. There was also a dining area with a minstrels’ gallery running around it. Leading off the gallery was another room, used as a bedroom. On this particular occasion, Jon was asked if he minded sleeping in this room as all the others were full during the holiday season. He distinctly recalled his friend’s father saying “Do you think that’s wise?” The mother replied: “Oh yes, that’s all right, he’s a sound sleeper.”
On the first night Jon awoke feeling an awful nausea and proceeded to vomit on the bedclothes. Dreadfully embarrassed, he cleaned the sheets as best he could with water and hung them up to dry. In the morning he told his hosts he had slept well.
The following night he found out just what had made him so ill:
The next night I went to bed again and again I woke up and this time I was able to realise what had made me sick. In the room there was the most overpowering smell of putrefying flesh – it was exactly like a dead sheep, and it permeated the room.
I shot up out of bed and again felt violently sick. I looked up and about four feet from the end of my bed was a thing I can only describe as a sort of tree trunk. It was a light greenish colour and it undulated, and as far as I could see it bubbled: it seemed to have bubbles that blew up at the side of it and didn’t burst exactly but disappeared. This thing was moving very, very slowly towards me.
The ‘thing’ frightened Jon so badly he wet the bed and ran down the gallery to the wing where the others were staying. While being comforted by his friend’s mother, he heard her husband say: “You see, we should never have put him in there.”
On asking his friend about it he was told that other people had seen the thing and the family never put a guest in the room. They had rashly assumed a young boy would be a deep sleeper and would not be awoken by the thing. He never did find out what the crawling, glowing, bubbling, stinking tree stump was.
I could tell you a story concerning a haunted lamp post, but perhaps the weirdest of all phantoms on record is the case of a giant, floating, ghostly crab that was recorded in 19th century South Africa. The story appears in a book called They Walk in The Night: True South African Ghost Stories and Tales of the Supernormal by Eric Rosenthal (1949). This is the tale, taken verbatim from pp124-125:
Here is a tale set down by Mr CH Basson, an eyewitness of what went on in the home of Mr J van Jaarsveld of Haartebeest River in the district of Uniondale shortly after the Jameson Raid.
It appeared in the daily paper ‘Dagblad’, of Cape Town, as follows:
“In consequence of what he heard, he went to the farm of a Mr van Jaasveld. Shortly after sunset, the spook commenced his pranks and certain noises were heard coming out of a chest. The spook seemed especially attracted to Mr van Jaasveld and his niece, Miss Mayer. Whenever the latter dared to take a seat on the chest, she was moved about and the chest moved also.
“But the most weird thing of all,” proceeded Mr Basson, “happened at nighttime. Miss Meyer went to lie down. We blew out the candle, but no sooner had this been done than she called out to us to light it again. We did so and lo! The spook had, during the few seconds that the candle was extinguished, tied her hair firmly to the bedpost. We untied it and plaited her hair into one tress, tied it at the end with a firm knot and made her lie down again. We then ranged ourselves round her bed, each with a box of matches in his hand. The candle was blown out again. Immediately afterwards, she cried out that the ghost was tugging at her hair. We all struck a match and found that one strand of the plait had been twisted out and tied as firmly as ever to her bedpost. Three of those present were able to see the spook. They say it resembled a phosphorescent crab with two huge pincers. They saw it ‘floating’ about the room touching here and there. On a former occasion it assumed the form of a skeleton hand with two fingers.”
A floating phosphorescent crab? I think that must be the weirdest ghost ever – unless you know otherwise.