Vincent Price and Hands of Glory

Over on Dark Tales Sleuth, I’ve revisited a tale from one of the Vincent Price’s Caedmon spoken word recordings that I did an attribution search on way back when.

• Read “The Legend of Old Spital Inn” at Dark Tales Sleuth.

One of the pieces that Vincent Price reads on his 1974 spooky tales album, A Graveyard of Ghost Tales, is a story called “The Ghostly Hand of Spital House,” by Dorothy Gladys Spicer. This is a fun and engaging tale about some bandits who try to rob an inn with the help of a hand of glory : a candle (or candle-holder) made from the hand of a hanged man. Lighting the hand of glory puts all the sleeping occupants of the house into an even deeper sleep, from which they don’t awaken until the hand is extinguished. You can see how this would be a (cough) handy tool for robbers and catburglars to have.

In the post, I also talk about a supposed pre-Colonial Mexican analog to the hand of glory as a housebreaker’s tool: the left arm and hand of a woman who died in first childbirth. While the source for that piece of folklore was not exactly disinterested (it was written by a 17th century Spanish friar), the story does in a way tie in with how Aztecs regarded women who died in childbirth, as equivalent to warriors who die in battle.

Have I intrigued you yet? If you’d like to read some earlier versions of the Spital House legend, give another listen to Vincent Price’s spooky reading, and learn how this relates to aspects of Aztec mythology, then head on over to Dark Tales Sleuth, and check out The Legend of Old Spital Inn.

Enjoy!

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Featured Image: Detail of Jacob meets magician Hermogenes, Pieter van der Hayden, after Breughel (1565). Source: Wikimedia.

Illustration of Hand of Glory, annotated as from The Grimoire of Pope Honorius Grimorium Verum Petit Albert by Albertus Parvus Lucius. Source: Wikimedia.

A Ghost Story and a Fairy Tale

There’s no real theme to this post; I’m just tying up some loose ends I’d forgotten about. Specifically, a couple of posts to Ephemera that I never boosted here.

First is a translation that I posted last October of a ghost story, of sorts, by Emilia Pardo Bazán. This is an interesting and ambiguous tale: is the protagonist mad, or possessed? It reminds me a little bit of The Horla, and also a little bit of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” See what you think.

• Read “Exculpation” (Eximente) here, on Ephemera.

Second is a version of the Snow White fairy tale, in verse, by Aleksandr Pushkin, called (in this version) “The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights” (1833). It’s a mix of the traditional Snow White narrative (Aarne-Thompson-Uther tale type 709), with a little bit of “East O’the Sun, West O’the Moon” (Aarne-Thompson-Uther 425 I think? — only in reverse).

The Dream House: From Fireside Tale to Fiction

Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1834-1903) was an English writer who wrote mostly, it seems, about his travels and his family. Why he thought anyone would be interested in his six volume autobiography (The Story of my Life), I don’t know; but from it, we do learn that he had a lot of friends who liked to tell ghost stories. And Hare wrote them down.

Augustus Hare (1834-1903). Source: Wikimedia

In that roundabout way that happens while doing research for a potential post, I found myself browsing the last three volumes of The Story of my Life. And I came upon an oddly familiar story, one that Hare records from a “Miss Broke,” the niece of the Gurdons, a family that Hare is staying with in Suffolk.

A woman living in Ireland begins having frequent dreams of “the most enchanting house I ever saw”—detailed dreams, about walking through all the rooms of the house, its garden and conservatory. Eventually the family decides to leave Ireland and move to England, and they proceed to search for a house in the vicinity of London. During their search, they learn of a house near Hampshire.

A Ghost Story from C. G. Jung

I recently spent an evening listening to Andreas Sommer’s three-part YouTube series, Poltergeist Phenomena and the History of Science. The series is based on an early post from Sommer’s Forbidden Histories blog, “The Naturalization of the ‘Poltergeist‘” (the linked article also posts to the YouTube videos). Really interesting article and video series; I recommend it.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). Source: Wikimedia

One of the things Andreas mentions in passing (in Part 3, if I remember correctly) is the real-life haunted house experience of noted psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Jung eventually wrote about this experience as a chapter of Spuk. Irrglaube oder Wahrglaube? (Hauntings. False Belief or True?), a 1950 collection of case studies of hauntings and poltergeists edited by the zoologist and researcher of paranormal phenomena Fanny Moser.

Jung had this experience in the summer of 1920, when he was in England to give a series of lectures. His host, “Dr. X,” arranged for Jung (and himself) to spend weekdays in London for the lectures, and weekends in the country at “a charming cottage” that rented for “a ridiculously low price.”

No regular reader of ghost stories will be at all surprised at what happens next.

Eastern Vampires and Other Things

Someone said to me the other day, “It’s too bad ghost story (Winter Tales) season is over.” It’s always great to hear that someone enjoys what I post! So here’s another story (and a mini film review). Arjan, this post is for you.

In case any other readers are feeling ghost story withdrawal, here’s where I remind you that all my Dark Tales Sleuth posts also link to a copy of the (usually supernatural) story/stories that I’m discussing, either at the Internet Archive or to a PDF I’ve transcribed myself. And most of my posts to Ephemera are ghost stories, too. Whenever I post to one of those blogs, I eventually post about it here, too, so if you follow Multo, you’ll be up to date on all my blogs.

Anyway, today’s post involves vampires, of sorts. First, the vetala, a ghoul-like Indian revenant that haunts cemeteries and can possess dead bodies. And secondly the jiangshi, or Chinese hopping vampire, which consumes the qi, or life force of their victims, rather than their blood.

Dark Tales Sleuth is Still On the Case!

Remember my other blog, The Dark Tales Sleuth? That’s where I’m tracking down the sources of the unattributed stories in the 1856 anthology, Evening Tales for the Winter, edited by Henry St. Clair. I’m still working on it!

After wrapping up Volume One, I started on Volume Two with what seemed like a straightforward case, which quickly turned super interesting. I began with what I thought was a plagiarism of one of the seven “horrid novels” from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and found what I think is an alternative (and earlier!) translation of the first section of the German source novel. Pretty cool!

Better than B: A Short and Idiosyncratic List of Films

I’m more of a reader than a movie buff, but there are times (especially this past year, and—whoo-boy!— this past week) when my mind is too unquiet to focus on a book. At times like that, or times when I’m just too tired to attend to a text, I reach for an easy-watch movie. By this I mean a movie that’s not too heavy or weighty or intellectual, that’s fun and light and easy to follow, and preferably one that doesn’t overstimulate the senses: not too much gore or violence, no dizzying action (unless it’s silly), no cacophonic soundscape. A movie I can watch with a bowl of popcorn and my brain turned to “low.”

I think everyone has a set of movies or TV shows that they turn to in times of stress; different people find comfort in different genres. I often find that B-movies or “programmers” from the 1950s and 1960s do the trick nicely.

Every so often, though, I’ll turn on a movie that I think is of that type, only to realize — Hey! This movie is actually good! Yes, I have to turn my brain back on, but that’s probably a good thing anyway. These discoveries are always a pleasant surprise.

So here’s a short list of some movies I’ve stumbled on this way. I’m sure film buffs will read the list and say, “Duh!”, but hey—they were delights to discover for me.

Die and You’ll See

My first translation of the new year! Actually, I did this last year (before Winter Tale season started), but I put it aside for my Christmas ghost stories, and only just finished reviewing and polishing it now. This odd little tale from 1875 is by the relatively obscure Spanish author Pedro Escamilla. I’ve just put it up on my Ephemera blog.

• Die and You’ll See” (Muérete y verás): One day, Gil Asverus literally wakes up dead. And then things get weird.

As I’ve written before, I personally find Escamilla a bit uneven. Some of his stories are well-executed but unexceptional treatments of familiar ghost story tropes; others, while supernatural, are not so much spooky and macabre, but more like Catholic fairy tales, full of intercessions by the Virgin Mary, and the like. I don’t actually mind this latter type of story, but I admit they might not have a general broad appeal.

Every so often, though. I find something quirky and unusual from his pen, and I think this one unquestionably falls in that category. So many questions: is the narrator reliable, or not? What exactly is going on? I really liked this one, and I hope you do, too.

Enjoy!

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Illustration for “Muérete y verás,” from El Periódico para Todos, No. 16, 1875. Illustrator unknown.

Featured image: The great funeral, Félix Vallotton. Source: Old Book Illustrations

The Dance of the Dead

I’m closing out this year’s Winter Tales season with a dark and delightful German gothic tale, as filtered through the pen of British author Dick Donovan. “The Dance of the Dead” is apparently based on one of the German folk legends about the mountain spirit Rübezahl, which means either “turnip counter” or “turnip tale.” He was originally a weather spirit who sent mountain storms, but evolved into a guardian of the poor who lived on his mountain. Like many a good fairy, he can appear to a person as an old man or old woman in need, to test if that person has a kind heart or not. If so, the person is rewarded. This is closer to his role in this story:

A young artist falls in love with Brunhelda, the lovely daughter of the hateful mayor of Neisse. The mayor has big marriage ambitions for Brunhelda; she’s too good for a penniless painter. But Robert’s “foster father,” the strange old Willibald, is a bagpiper of such amazing abilities that he can make anyone dance—even the dead. Can he help the young lovers out?

Yes, this is a ghost story. Since one could make the (admittedly tenuous) argument that the main action takes place around January, I judge it a fitting tale to finish this season’s Winter Tales series, and kick off the new year.

You can read “The Dance of the Dead” here.

Dick Donovan was the pen name of J. E. Preston Muddock, a British journalist and author who wrote in a number of genres, including non-fiction. He was particularly well known for mystery and detective fiction; most of his stories featured a Glasgow detective named Dick Donovan, who was so popular that Muddock began publishing under that name. He produced two collections of macabre fiction: Stories Weird and Wonderful (1889), and Tales of Terror (1899), from which “The Dance of Death” is taken.

I had originally gone to Tales of Terror for another story that is genuinely a ghost story set at Christmas, but I like this story better. Not just because its folkloric nature appeals to me, but also because the contrast between Robert’s kindhearted (but naive) model of human nature when compared to Willibald’s cynical (but realistic) perspective resonates with me right now.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this round of Winter Tales. Best wishes to all of us for a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2021!

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A list (with links) of the winter tales I’ve shared in previous years is on my Winter Tales page.

Featured Image: Dance of Death, Henri Charles Guérard (c. 1888). Source: Wikimedia

Dance of Death from Folio CCLXIIII of Liber chronicarum, aka Nuremberg Chronicle, by Hartmann Schedel (1493). Source: Wikimedia

Fladda Light

As we head into the twelve days of Christmas, here’s another winter tale to usher in the New Year. “Fladda Light” actually takes place in late November, but it’s a stormy and wintry and spooky tale that feels appropriate to the season.

Hudson Burke is the new keeper of Fladda Light, a lighthouse with a dark reputation.

‘It was not a good place for men to be in,’ the informant would say; and then he would lean over to his hearer in an infectious ecstasy of fear. ‘There were things that came out of the sea that it was not good for men to be with.’

Will Burke survive with body and mind intact?

“Fladda Light” appeared in Cornhill Magazine in 1924. I came across it a few years ago, and loved the story, but it did not go into the US public domain until 2020, and so I had to hold on to it. I hope you agree with me that it was worth it.

You can read “Fladda Light” here.

The story’s author, Hilton Brown, was a Scottish poet, biographer, and novelist who wrote extensively about both Scotland and South India, where he served in the Indian Civil Service during the British Colonial period. Though he apparently didn’t write often in Scots, there is a touch of dialect in this story, which adds nicely to the atmosphere.

Brown wrote at least one other ghost story that I know of: “The Fourth Man,” an excellent, darkly humorous tale set in South India and published in 1930. You can find it in The Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories, which is a collection of tales in the “Classic English Ghost Story” tradition, some penned by Indian authors and others by British authors, but set in India. Both stories are great, but “Fladda Light” (in addition to being US public domain) is a better tale for this time of year.

And speaking of the season: have a Happy New Year, and enjoy this winter tale!

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A list (with links) of the winter tales I’ve shared in previous years is on my Winter Tales page.

Images

Neapolitan Lighthouse, Ivan Aivazovsky (1842). Source: WikiArt

Longship Lighthouse, Lands End, J.M.W. Turner (c. 1834-1835). Source: WikiArt