Getting back to it

It's been over a year since I posted here. Latterly such an absence has usually indicated some health catastrophe (my 'career dogged by injury', to borrow the footballing phrase), but the last year has finally seen me getting back into the swing of things a little. I've given papers at conferences and symposiums (including my first international trip since the major medical interruption), I've done a couple of more popular talks and events (the first large-scale outing for my singing voice since 2014, for example), started to get used to indexing Folklore (in my second year at it), drafted a long-awaited chapter for an edited collection, and taken part in various other events and ventures that begin to feel like me finding my place in the world of folklore again. As someone who's still a little wary of his own physical fragility I'm surprised by how much I actually have done in the last year.

More interesting to readers here is the fact that I haven't just been picking up old threads. I have been doing that, of course, because it's essential - the book chapter sees me reviewing some of my thinking about ghost beliefs and new religious syncretism, for example, while last week I was giving a Vaughan Williams Memorial Library lecture on ghostlore in traditional songs - but it's not been static. My ongoing engagement with the history of the discipline has become ever more a way of introducing non-academic non-specialist audiences to its full range (I've just written a forthcoming guest post for the Folklore Thursday blog), as well as a way of trying to negotiate the survival of academic folklorists and other interested academics in a university world that offers us little security or support.

It's also seen me getting interested in some new figures and areas: I spoke twice last year (at the splendidly titled 'Folklorists Are Fallible' conference in my beloved Tartu, and then at the third Folklore Society/Royal Anthropological Institute 'Folklore and Anthropology in Conversation' seminar) about the 20th century field collector and writer Violet Alford, and will be speaking about her again this summer. My paper at the forthcoming Folklore Society conference is also very much about how we are as folklorists, what we do to identify as such and how we interact with other folklorists. Later in the year I'll be going back to the question of ghost belief and religious syncretism (particularly around Spiritualism) for a major conference in Oxford.

I actually have things to blog about again, it seems, so I will.

Part of this reorientation/reawakening has involved some apparently cosmetic fiddling with my library, refiling and reshelving books and copies of papers. In doing so I also moved around a lot of my fieldnotes. One sheet caught my eye as it fell loose. It dates from early in my MA researches (2004-6), when I asked co-workers in the Civil Service department where I was temping for their recollections of childlore, skipping games etc. The following was remembered by a woman in her late 20s from her schooldays in South Essex:

1, 2, 3 Mother caught a flea
She put it in the teapot and made a cup of tea
The flea jumped out,
Mother gave a shout,
And down came father with his winkle hanging out.

It's good to be back.

Under the Clock

Recently I read Robert Fraser’s biography of the poet David Gascoyne. It isn’t a terribly satisfactory book, for reasons related to Surrealism and poetry rather than to folklore. Fraser’s other work, however, is directly connected to folklore – he has written extensively on James Frazer and The Golden Bough, and one of my more interesting discoveries in the Gascoyne book was that Enitharmon, Gascoyne’s later publisher, was founded by Alan Clodd, grandson of the hugely important Folklore Society President Edward Clodd – so I might well find myself coming back to him. (I have tried to avoid J.G. Frazer as far as possible but he keeps cropping up: he might ultimately prove to be unavoidable).

What did catch my attention as a folklorist was a passing reference in Chapter 29, dealing with Gascoyne’s period of hospitalisation in Whitecroft Hospital, also known as the Isle of Wight Mental Hospital or the Isle of Wight County Asylum. Construction on Whitecroft began in 1894. Like other mental hospitals of the period its outbuildings centred on a clock-/watchtower. The phrase that caught my attention was Fraser’s comment that ‘The local expression for admission to this monument to Victorian philanthropy, or for simply losing one’s mind, was to go “under the clock”’ (p.352).

Fraser cites no source for this statement, and it sounds (particularly given the tenor of the rest of the book) like an unattributed reference from a local history pamphlet. The hospital closed in 1992, and I wondered how far (if at all) the phrase remained in current usage. I’ve noted previously how older usages hang on (and die out), and I was curious about this one.

A brief and unsystematic look online revealed that the phrase is still in use locally on the Isle of Wight, but how widespread that is remains to be seen. One reason I was interested was because I was in the process of moving to the Island myself: as if I hadn’t had enough going on in my life lately I was moving house. This may also have triggered my interest in the phrase (and concept) of being ‘under the clock’. We arrived about a month ago, and I am slowly beginning to get my eye and ear in. I’m hoping that the move will see me easing gently back into fieldwork after the disruptions of the last two years.

One other area of interest has already begun to make itself apparent. Whitecroft Hospital has now been converted into accommodation, with Fraser noting tartly that the developers’ ‘glossy introductory brochure makes no references to its original function as a mental institution’. Maybe not, but one should never underestimate the capacity to generate legends of place, particularly around former hospital sites.

A 2014 tourist article by Jo Macaulay noted Whitecroft as ‘another huge haunted site’, where ‘former inmates are thought to inhabit its walls, screaming in mental or physical pain’. She remarked that ‘Perhaps unsurprisingly the flats are not selling particularly well and the development has had a few starts and stops in the past ten years’.

Of course one might expect a proliferation of such stories around defunct hospital sites, and there is evident enthusiasm for them across the Island. The site of the former Chest Hospital (now the car park for Ventnor Botanic Garden) is another site regularly identified as haunted. Macaulay, in passing, also manages to highlight how local publications become part of legend negotiation. Pointing to local author Gay Baldwin’s series of books on the Island’s ghosts, begun in the 1970s, Macaulay writes that ‘Everyone knew the old stories that had been passed down by oral tradition, but nobody laid claim to having seen a ghost in print until Gay started to prompt them. But once the gates were open, stories began to flood in …’ Macaulay used Baldwin’s books as the basis for her own tourist piece.

It began as a moment of curiosity and minor irritation at an unsourced comment. That's how research starts.

Rats and Ghosts (again)

I'm looking forward to a couple of events this week. On Thursday I'll be at Treadwell's bookshop talking about London's Strange World of Rats. I'll be going over my continuing exploration of the folklore about rats, and admitting to another room full of strangers that yes, I really am obsessed by the topic. Then on Saturday I'm at the London Fortean Society's London Ghost Conference, talking about ghosts in London's hospitals and theatres. A year after finishing my PhD I finally feel able to talk about ghosts again, and I'm looking forward to the company of some good speakers.

It was fitting then that I prepared by hearing an East Anglian man talking about both rats and ghosts last weekend. John, from the Cambridgeshire Fens, heard about my researches with interest, and chipped in with two stories of his own.

He had been told about rats by a friend who worked in a chicken farm. The rats would come into the pens to steal eggs. One rat would clasp an egg between all four legs, then roll over onto its back and be dragged out into the yard, where the rats could safely break the egg and eat it.

In this story you see the idea of rats as intelligent and cooperative animals. (Both John and the other listeners commented on how far this proved the intelligence of the animals). I've written about this kind of idea before, and there is a link in that piece to a Walter Potter tableau of rats stealing eggs. A writer on Potter's taxidermy described this familiar story as 'an evergreen topic of folklore in the countryside', so it was very nice to hear it directly in oral testimony.

John also filled in the background to my friend's house, which is reportedly 'the most haunted house' in Soham. Well, John explained, there used to be a monastery on the other side of the road. One of the monks had had an affair, and the girl had become pregnant. When her time was due the monks tied her legs together in the house to prevent her being able to give birth. She and the child had died, and it is their ghosts that haunt the property. John and the resident of the house both indicated which room was affected, and I was told that several residents had been unable to stay there.

Again, this is a hugely familiar motif that turns up in legends across the country. In many cases (although not apparently in this telling) the woman was a nun, thus doubly compounding the errors committed. The motif turns up frequently in connection with legends of secret tunnels allegedly connecting monasteries with convents. John's account had a particularly lurid ring, but it fitted perfectly with the legend. It would be interesting to hear how it fits with other local accounts, so I'm looking forward to accounts from a forthcoming ghost walk in the village.

Across the Forest review

Supernatural beliefs are a difficult area to write about. A lot of contradictory assumptions are made – they’re dying out or they’re flourishing, they reflect experience or discussing them indicates no experience, they are exactly the same as artistic representations or artistic representations have changed them forever etc etc etc. All too often comments on belief are based on these preconceptions or, just as bad, are based on the assumption that commentator and original source had a common understanding of the concepts and entities being described.

One step towards overcoming these assumptions is just to go and ask people about their beliefs and experiences. (This seems obvious, but it also seems to need repeating). Problems still arise with interpretations, but at least you then have a starting point of people’s own testimony. It’s a real pleasure, therefore, to see such testimonies documented on film, and publicly available.

Across the Forest, dir. Justin Blair & Matthew Vincent, 2009 (79 mins) contains footage of interviews conducted in Romania. The interviewees describe their experiences of, and beliefs in, various supernatural beings. Many of these are stunning (‘binding’ a corpse to the grave by stabbing a nail through its heart), and informants are allowed to give their own accounts of experiences and belief (the man who insists ‘The dead do come back’ also states categorically that ‘without experiences people don’t believe’).

Blair and Vincent deserve credit for retaining the native terms here (strigoi, varcolaci etc), although these are often compared with English equivalents (vampire, werewolf etc). Strigoi are often compared to vampires: they have a lot in common with ghosts of the uneasy dead, but it would be forcing the issue just to translate the term, not quite accurately, by either word. They are strigoi, and we see here what this actually means. This is particularly important given how far notions of ‘Transylvania’ have shaped popular representations of supernatural beings, including the vampire of film and literature.

The film’s greatest strength is its refreshingly unflashy presentation of the interviews in extended sections. This is welcome for two reasons.

Firstly, it gives due weight to the speaker’s own account and interpretation of their stories. These unfold more fully than if they were implied in more heavily edited soundbites. This is not to suggest an absence of editorial direction, as I will discuss below, but it does place the emphasis on the interviewees. All of the interviewees are identified, but their names are listed during the end credits, a device more suited to the soundbite editing style eschewed here. Given the construction of the film it might have been better to have identified them as they appeared, but that is a minor quibble.

Secondly, the longer interview clips also give the viewer some idea of the narrative context for the stories. While most of the interviews are individual discussions, we do see some group storytelling contexts, and we hear about others.

This is significant, because one of the driving motivations for the film is the idea that ‘These beliefs are quickly dying out as the world modernizes around the tiny villages’. The evidence may be slightly skewed here, as the interviewees are mostly older people, so we do not see transmission of the stories to younger generations. However, family narrative traditions are revealed, and interviewees themselves do engage in some way with changing patterns of belief. It takes nothing from the interviews as evidence of individual positions to think that further work needs doing on how they are transmitted.

A related question is my biggest concern here. Blair and Vincent refer throughout to Transylvania. This seems a little too imprecise for the social context. One informant simply talks about being Romanian. There is evidence of social context within the interviews, including evidence of fluidity of labour across the region (one informant discusses a Moldovan indentured servant).

This may not be a big deal here, beyond flagging further questions for consideration in interpreting and analysing the testimonies here. Transylvania may just be intended as a general geographical term, but it needs a little more caution given its popular literary uses.

Perhaps I became more sensitive to this given the film’s one big weakness. The interviews are intercut with other footage. Most of the slideshows of establishing shots are unexceptionable. However, I found some strident soundtracking and night-vision footage of the filmmakers en route redundant. This left a slightly unpleasant aftertaste. This footage has no narrative significance, and the sub-Blair Witch night vision seems to be pointing to a literary and cinematic culture of supernatural representation somewhat different to the rest of the film. (Some of the slides fall into the same category). This felt at best like a slight loss of nerve, at worst like a manipulation of the interviews.

But this caveat should not discourage anyone from getting hold of this film. It is distracting, and points to areas for future study and consideration, but it does not undermine the remarkable interviews in this film. There is much to enjoy, savour and contemplate here, and it is worth your time

More information, and details of how to order the DVD, are at the film's website.

St Swithin's Day

It being St Swithin's Day today, I thought I'd reprint the following local ghost legend from Gilmer County, West Virginia:

Annie Reaser had come to help with the house-work, as a member of the family. Our flattering attention to her store of folklore brought out the tale of a ghost who caused forty days rain because he did not like his resting place.
'He was a good man' said Annie 'And he liked the church so well that he never missed a meeting day, and he was there for evening prayer meeting, in time to light the candles and hand the hymn books around.
'When his time came to die, seeing he was a lone man with no row of family graves in the churchyard, the deacons thought of letting him lie close to the church he had served so long.
'So they laid him right near, but a little too close, for when a rain came, the drip from the eaves of the church fell right down on the new-made grave. Careless like, too, they forgot to bury his measuring rod alongside his coffin.
'Soon, strange tales were told about folks hearing a clatter at the back of the church, and some said the measuring rod was never laid twice in the same place. But the noise stopped when anybody went to look, and few did that, for it rained and rained all that spring, and no one could put in crops, nor a garden either.
'Week after week, that rapping agin the church walls kept time to the hymn-tunes the folks sang, and the rain beat on the roof like drums. At last, one late spring Sunday, the deacons and elders had a meeting, after the preaching, and all agreed something must be done. Next morning, they came with spades and shovels, and picked out a place at the far end of the churchyard.
'No sooner was the first spadeful of ground dug up, than the sun shone through the mist, and the sky cleared off. So they laid the old man alongside his friends - and his measuring rod, they buried that too. They read the burial service over him once more, for good measure, and there he lies, quiet and peaceful, till the Judgement day. But you watch and see - if there comes a hard rain on the fifteenth of July (they say that was his birthday), it'll still rain every day for forty days.''
(Blanche Whiting Keysner, 'The Measuring Rod', Keystone Folklore Quarterly, 1.2 (1956), 14-16)

Blanche Whiting Keysner, who recalled Annie Reaser's tale, noted that this was a migratory version of St Swithin's story, although his name had been lost along the way. According to the local English tale, rain on St Swithin's Day will be followed by 40 days of rain as the saint's burial was delayed for 40 days by bad weather. Here that motif survives, but it doesn't really make sense in the context so it's expanded by the slightly confusing detail about rain on the coffin, and augmented with another local tradition about burying the measuring rod.

I came across the article because Indiana University is making freely available online some journal holdings that are not so easily found (certainly in British libraries). These will migrate eventually to Google Books, but at the moment they're hosted on the HathiTrust Digital Library. They include: Keystone Folklore; Keystone Folklore Quarterly; Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review; and Folklore Historian.

HathiTrust has some other holdings of interest for folklorists. I suspect I'll be spending some time with them over the next few days - after all, it has just started raining.

Dorson, Hospital, and Folklore Lived

I've been thinking a lot lately about Richard M. Dorson (1916-1981). Dorson was one of the key American folklorists after the Second World War, responsible for cementing the reputation of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Anyone interested in the early development of folklore in Britain should read his book The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), and the two-volume anthology he edited to accompany it, Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).
Dorson fought, above all, to establish Folklore as an academic discipline. He saw a university basis for the discipline as the way to ensure the training of new generations of folklorists. He was fierce in attacking 'fakelore', a word he coined to summarise 'the pseudo-scholar creating folklore for the mass culture', as he once put it. There's lots to argue with, to dispute, and to disagree with, in his conclusions, as well as in the positions he advanced in defending them, but his writings still burn as a passionate and reasoned championing of a marginal discipline that should be valued.
I was delighted to find that a couple of ghost traditions had attached to him. One is very funny (his ghost appearing in a dream to Henry Glassie to give him some important advice), the other is a deeply touching account of Nancy C. McEntire seeing his apparition. The stories are in Elizabeth Tucker, Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 51-53.
He'd already been on my mind, though. He was a clever fieldworker, and able to turn his clarity of vision onto his own situation. In 1972 he was hospitalised with arteriosclerosis, and underwent by-pass surgery. On his recovery he wrote 'Heart Disease and Folklore', about the procedures he saw in the hospital, and the folk medicine preventing such heart conditions. (It's reprinted in Readings in American Folklore, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 124-137).
I thought about that article a lot during a recent stay in hospital. I did observe a little of the changed folklore of nursing, but mostly I just lay there. I don't remember anything of the accident that laid me out, so I've renewed respect for Dorson's attentiveness on the ward. When he came out of hospital, he investigated folkloric mechanisms for managing stress and maintaining 'emotional equilibrium'. I wasn't in hospital because of any heart condition, but I was delighted with the concluding hypothesis of Dorson's essay. It's been a bit of an effort writing this, but now that I'm out again I'm happy to embrace Dorson's hypothesis fully: 'folklore lived, not studied, is the surest preventive of heart disease'.

Ghost Questionnaire Closing Shortly

As I've mentioned before, I'm into my writing up now. I've also just been reminded that the period of fieldwork I'd agreed with the university Ethics Committee is about to expire. I will therefore be taking down my ghost questionnaire in the next two weeks. If you've been thinking about completing it but haven't got round to it yet, now is your last chance.

This post gives some background information to my research, if you want some idea of where I'm coming from. I'm interested in hearing from you whether you believe or not.

Pepper's Ghost

Posts are likely to be somewhat irregular for the rest of the year, as the writing up of my ghost research is now underway. I won't be taking down the questionnaire opposite for a while yet, but if you'd still like to participate, now is the time.

I've spent most of the last month writing about the historical appearance of ghosts. Part of this has involved looking at popular representations of ghosts in woodcuts, on stage, in films and so on. For a splendid woodcut (used a great deal through the 17th century), check out the ballad 'a true and perfect Relation from the Faulcon at the Banke-side; of the strange and wonderful aperition of one Mr Powel a baker lately deceased' in the Bodleian collection.

Of course, I've been having a look at everybody's favourite 19th century theatrical effect, Pepper's Ghost. It was all done with mirrors, as seen below.

Pepper's Ghost was tricky to fit into existing stage mechanics, it seems, but thrived in dedicated fairground shows. It's still highly regarded - here's a design for a recent model.

I also enjoyed learning that it was so popular that it entered London slang. By the mid-1860s, London cabbies used the term 'Pepper's Ghost' to refer to passengers who ran off without paying their fare. I don't know how long this usage lasted. Is there an equivalent term in use today?

Roud 166

On 1st July this year the Daily Mirror reported that Aurica Cosmescu had been hospitalised in Brasov, Romania, following a shooting accident. She was wearing a black and white jacket when she was shot by a man hunting magpies.

This potentially tragic accident is a striking echo of the traditional song 'Polly (or Molly) Vaughn (Bawn)', number 166 in Steve Roud's Folksong Index. In the song the incident is usually blamed on poor light or weather conditions. Polly pulls her apron over her, sometimes to keep off the rain. Her lover is out hunting and shoots her, believing her to be a swan. In Harry Cox's charming Norfolk phrase, 'He shot his own truelove in the room of a swan'. The lover is appalled at what he has done. His relatives tell him not to run away but to stand trial, as no punishment will follow for his terrible mistake. Here's a version recorded in 1952 in Arkansas that tells the story up to this point.

Older versions of the song from the British Isles don't stop there. When the lover gets to court, Polly's ghost intercedes on his behalf. She appears and tells the court that this was an accident. This is a nice embodiment of the belief that those who have died untimely deaths are more likely to become ghosts, and will intervene to finish some unresolved business before they can rest.

I've just been learning Harry Cox's fine version of this song, 'The Fowler', and will be singing it at the Spectres at the Feast event in a couple of weeks.

Ghost hoaxes

Peter Millington has sent the following to the Talking Folklore newsgroup:

The Boots branch in Lincoln was built over a section of the old Roman city wall, and the public was occasionally allowed in to view it in the basement. Apparently the shop’s porter was a bit of a card. Every now and then, he would dress up in a Roman soldier’s costume, and walk silently across the distant end of the basement within the view of the sightseers. They would then swear that they’d just seen a ghost – naturally.

Whether or not the visitors were put wise to this wheeze I was not told, but it seems likely that the Lincoln Boots ghost could have entered local folklore. Can anyone tell me if this happened?

In the course of my ongoing research I've come across similar stories of such practical jokes. One hotel night security officer used a remote control to switch a ceiling fan on, creating unexplained spectral effects with the emergency lighting. Like Peter, I've also not come across the evidence of these stories actually entering local tradition.

What intrigues me is their relation with actual ghost beliefs. (This short introduction gives more information about my research). Reimund Kvideland has suggested that these kind of practical jokes indicate a decline in the belief, but he also acknowledges that such practical jokes could be used, too, "to defend a belief or to secure its continuation." (1)

Certainly they rely on traditional images and motifs which may not reflect current belief: one practical joker told me his intended victim had simply said "You look bloody silly in that [white sheet]" when the "apparition" happened. But this imagery, and the fakery, may also serve to reinforce a different set of beliefs. Discrediting an incident like this may not discredit the historical body of beliefs and images on which it relies, but may serve to nuance and reinforce them further.

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1) Reimund Kvideland, 'Legends Translated Into Behaviour', Fabula, 47.3/4 (2006), 261

The Ghost of Michael Jackson

The death of Michael Jackson has triggered a frenzy of folkloric activity. Tasteless jokes are already proliferating, as they do after any personal tragedy. Rumours are circulating about his death and burial.

It was not surprising then when television footage appeared that seemed to show a ghostly figure stalking Neverland. As a folklorist researching belief in ghosts, I'm much more interested in the responses on message boards than I am in the footage itself. Where parapsychologists study the reality or otherwise of the phenomenon, folklorists look, as Linda Dégh put it, at 'the nature of human creativity to be discerned through the report of such experience'. (1)

So from the perspective of my research, it's fascinating to see the very people who are most devoted to the memory of Michael Jackson also being the most critical in their assessment of the images on the film. News reports from the message boards have covered a wide range of responses, from the simple analysis of the phenomenon per se ('It's clearly not a shadow because ... there's no one there to make a shadow, plus it's completely see through'), via the hopeful ('Maybe it was Michael, telling us that he is still here with us in spirit'), right through to the dismissive ('You guys are craaaaaazy! It's too tall to be Michael ...')

What was most striking about the last quoted correspondent, RebeccaMJ, was that her comments rested on a body of implicit belief about spirit activity. Michael Jackson wasn't roaming Neverland, she wrote, because his spirit is "resting and at peace. Only disturbed souls creep around'. RebeccaMJ is clearly expressing a hope for the star's post mortem peace, but she is also dismissing this particular ghostly phenomenon by validating a much wider set of beliefs. I've come across this narrative device before, and I'm interested in probing it further.

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1: Linda Dégh, 'Foreword', in Leea Virtanen, "That Must Have Been ESP!": An Examination of Psychic Experiences, trans. John Atkinson and Thomas Dubois (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p.xii

Research into Contemporary Belief in Ghosts

My current research project, conducted at the University of Hertfordshire, is into contemporary belief in ghosts in post-war England.

All of the post-war opinion polls and surveys suggest that belief in ghosts has been steadily on the rise over the last 60 years. What might this mean? Does it mean that more people believe in ghosts? Or that they are more prepared to say so? One question that goes unasked is what people actually mean when they say 'ghost'. Might the increase in stated belief mean a change in popular definitions?

Accordingly, I've begun my research with some simple (but big) questions. What do people mean when they say 'ghost'? How is this understanding reflected (or not) in their beliefs? Are the things people believe the same as the stories they tell? What is the relationship between belief or non-belief and experience? How do these beliefs fit into other, maybe more orthodox, beliefs?

Quite apart from library research, these questions clearly demanded fieldwork amongst believers and non-believers. I've been conducting interviews, and also distributing a questionnaire. The plan is to continue this field research early into 2010, and then spend the majority of next year working through my findings.

My research is primarily into the situation here in England. Because of the University location, I'm concentrating to some extent on Hertfordshire. However, this is by no means a restricted or parochial survey - there have been huge demographic shifts in the post-war period, and I am interested in the ways in which ghost beliefs may reflect changing cultural influences. As such, I'm more than happy to consider broad comparative international material.

So, within those parameters, I am looking for participants and informants. The questionnaire is available to download below. and it can be returned to me electronically. I'm interested in as broad a range of responses as possible, from believers and non-believers alike. I'm also looking to identify possible informants for interview. This is more restricted geographically than the questionnaires, obviously, but I am still rolling out the interview programme and still looking for participants.

Questionnaire for download