Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each fact links straight to the page it comes from.

The drummer of Tedworth was tried under a law making it a felony to "feed, employ, or reward any evil spirit". Squire Mompesson had his supposed tormentor indicted as a wizard under a statute of James I. The drummer, unbroken, tried instead to bargain — offering to end the haunting if Mompesson would free him and hire him as a farm hand — and the Salisbury jury acquitted him outright. Read it in the book →
John Dee's crystal-gazer wore a skull-cap to hide the ears he had lost for forgery. Edward Kelley was rumoured to have dug up a fresh corpse and compelled the dead man's spirit to speak. "There was more truth in the report that the reason he always wore a close-fitting skull-cap was to conceal the loss of his ears, which had been forfeited to the Government of England on his conviction for forgery." Read it in the book →
A London magistrate threatened a rival ghost with hard labour in Bridewell — and it cancelled its performance. When word spread that "a new knocking ghost was to perform that evening" in Broad Court, the local magistrate sent his compliments and an intimation that it would not meet the leniency shown the Cock Lane ghost, "but that it should knock hemp in Bridewell. On which the ghost very discreetly omitted the intended exhibition." Read it in the book →
The Wesleys' ghost was judged a Jacobite because it interrupted prayers for King George. "Old Jeffrey" was noisiest at family devotions, "especially when Mr. Wesley began the prayers for King George and the Prince of Wales, from which it was inferred that the ghost was a Jacobite." It also produced sounds like a rocking cradle and like the gobbling of a turkey. Read it in the book →
Loudun's exorcists rested their whole case on the doctrine that "devils when duly exorcised must speak the truth". Father Mignon summoned the magistrates so the possessed nuns' demons could legally name the wizard responsible. The Latin interrogation of the mother superior duly produced the name "Urbain" — Grandier — who was tortured, sentenced and burned in 1634. Read it in the book →
The Loudun devils kept speaking bad Latin, and one was caught fishing for a cap with a horsehair line. A demon promised to lift the commissioner Laubardemont's cap and hold it in mid-air; two spectators noticed he had seated himself well away from everyone else, slipped up to the church roof, and found a man dropping "a long horsehair line, to which was attached a small hook" through a hole directly above him. Read it in the book →
The Tedworth ghost was afraid of swords. Mompesson's manservant John suffered the same nightly beatings and stripped bedclothes as the children, "but it was noticed that whenever he grasped and brandished a sword he was left in peace. Clearly, the ghost had a healthy respect for cold steel." Read it in the book →
Lord Brougham's father taught him "the only spirits deserving of the name were those which came in oddly labeled bottles". Raised a determined skeptic with a bent for mathematics, Brougham nonetheless saw the apparition of a boyhood friend while sitting in a hot bath at a Swedish inn — the friend having made a youthful pact that whoever died first would appear to the other. He learned later the man had died in India that same day, and to the end insisted it was merely a vivid dream. Read it in the book →
The Cock Lane ghost answered questions by code — one knock yes, two knocks no — and accused a man of murder by arsenic in her purl. Interrogated at the bedside of the Parsons girl, the spirit affirmed it had been poisoned, named the poison, and answered "Yes" to "Do you wish that he be hanged?" A bystander noted the deceased never drank beer but was fond of purl; the question was hastily re-put, and the ghost agreed. Read it in the book →
Samuel Wesley waved a pistol at the ghost, and his terrified fellow clergyman fled on the logic that guns only make spirits stronger. When Mr. Hoole of Haxey came to help exorcise Old Jeffrey, Wesley threatened to fire in the direction of the knocking. "Sir," Hoole protested, "you are convinced this is something preternatural. If so, you cannot hurt it; but you give it power to hurt you." Bruce notes: "The logic of Mr. Hoole's argument is hardly so evident as his panic." Read it in the book →
Swedenborg's revelations began with a stranger in a London inn telling him "Eat not so much". Mid-dinner, the floor seemed to fill with frogs, toads and snakes, and a man appeared in the corner eying him reproachfully. The visitor spoke only four words before vanishing; the figure returned later in a blaze of white light, announcing itself as God and commissioning him to expound the spiritual sense of Scripture. Read it in the book →
Swedenborg turned away callers with the excuse that God had zoned the two worlds apart. After the Stockholm fire vision his gambrel-roofed house "instantly became a Mecca for the inquisitive," and most who begged contact with the dead got a courteous refusal: "God having for wise and good purposes separated the world of spirits from ours, a communication is never granted without cogent reasons." Read it in the book →
The Epworth servant's chief complaint about the ghost was that it ground an empty mill. Robert Brown stopped grinding corn in the garret and "the handle of the mill was turn round with great swiftness." He later declared that "nothing vexed him but that the mill was empty. If corn had been in it, Old Jeffrey might have ground his heart out for him." Read it in the book →
The Cock Lane clerk was pilloried — and the mob took up a collection for him instead. Convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to the pillory three times in a month plus two years' imprisonment, Parsons seemed "to be out of his mind," and so evident was his misery that the crowd "instead of using him ill, made a handsome collection for him." Read it in the book →
The Society for Psychical Research was born on a starlit walk through Cambridge in 1869. Myers asked Sidgwick whether, tradition and metaphysics having failed, there was "still a chance of solving it by drawing from actual observable phenomena — ghosts, spirits, whatsoever it may be — valid knowledge as to a world unseen?" Gladstone later called psychical research "the most important work which is being done in the world." Read it in the book →
The Seeress of Prevorst's grandfather took her graveyard-walking and concluded she would end by seeing the dead. An "exceedingly superstitious old man, with a singular fondness for visiting solitary and gloomy places," Schmidgall noticed the child trembled and seemed rooted to the ground in graveyards. "The child," he told his wife, "feels the presence of the dead, and, mark you, she will end by seeing the dead." Read it in the book →
An Illinois girl "became" a neighbour's daughter who had died twelve years earlier. Lurancy Vennum greeted the Roffs as her family, recalled Mary Roff's childhood, and knew she was borrowing a body: asked if she remembered cutting her arm, she pushed up her sleeve, then stopped — "Oh, this is not the arm; that one is in the ground." Richard Hodgson investigated and could not explain it away. Read it in the book →
D. D. Home was sued for a fortune by a woman who wanted to adopt him. Mrs. Lyon settled some three hundred thousand dollars on the medium, then sued to get it back, swearing she had been influenced by messages from her dead husband. The judge called her testimony "quite unworthy of belief" — and ruled in her favour anyway. Read it in the book →
Dr. Dee's neighbours sacked his house the moment he sailed for Bohemia. Kelley had inspired the spirits to predict that Count Lasky would be King of Poland, which won them both an invitation abroad. "Scarcely had they taken ship before a mob, roused to fury by superstitious fears, broke into the philosopher's house at Mortlake and destroyed almost everything that they did not steal."
Cruikshank on the most famous haunting in England: "this drumming ghost was all a hum". Bruce ends his dissection of Tedworth — rats, shaky timbers, and mischievous children — with George Cruikshank's rhyme: "All this seems very strange, about this drummer and his drum; / But for myself I really think this drumming ghost was all a hum." Read it in the book →
Kelley's spirits danced, stripped, and cried "There is a God, let us be merry!". Dee's meticulous séance transcripts record his scryer narrating a figure putting on a pied coat and cap, casting his gown over his shoulder and dancing. "E. K. 'He danceth still.'" Read it in the book →