Dreams of one's death

When people talk about “dreams that come true” they usually have in mind beneficial situations that they have dreamt about and which they wish can become reality. However, there have also been instances of people dreaming about their own demises, and which have indeed come true.

Abraham Lincoln

President Abraham Lincoln was in a sombre mood at the White House on 11^th April 1865. He told his guests at an evening function that he had had a vivid dream a few nights before in which he had walked into the East Room of the White House and found a corpse lying on a catafalque, surrounded by mourners. He was told that the body was that of the President, who had been killed by an assassin.

Three days later Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth during a performance at Ford’s Theatre. He died the following morning.

Thomas, Lord Lyttleton

Lord Lyttelton was 35 years old in 1779. He told his friends that he had had a disturbing dream on the night of 24^th November, at around midnight. He said that a woman dressed in white pointed at him and said that he would be dead within three days.

Lyttleton was clearly troubled by this prediction and left town for his country estate in Surrey in the hope that the three days would pass uneventfully. On 27^th November he went to his room at about 11 o’clock, clearly convinced that he was now safe. His servant helped him to undress and left the room for a few minutes. When he returned the young man was having a fit from which he failed to recover. He was dead before midnight.

Robert Morris

Robert Morris was a tobacco planter in pre-Revolution America. He was invited to inspect a warship but turned down the invitation on the grounds that he had had a dream in which he was killed when one of the cannons was fired. The ship’s captain was disappointed by this refusal and told Morris that no guns would be fired in salute until he was safely back on shore, and this was enough to persuade Morris to change his mind.

The visit proceeded as planned and the boat taking the visiting party back from the ship was on its way when a fly landed on the captain’s nose. He waved his hand to brush it away and the sailor in charge of the salute gun took this as his signal to fire. Robert Morris was killed by shrapnel from the shot, just as in his dream.

Spooky or what?

The thing about dreams is that they are created by the subconscious from elements that are already present somewhere in the brain. Abraham Lincoln was convinced that dreams were sent by angels and were therefore messages from God, but he must also have been aware that he was an object of hatred for many Americans in the defeated South. A dream of his demise was therefore a high possibility. The timing of dream and fulfilment was what made the event “spooky”.

The death of Thomas Lord Lyttleton was also not to be wondered at. Given that he took the dream seriously, it is entirely possibly that his brain could not cope with the pressure and brought on a fit. Had his servant had some medical or first aid knowledge it is possible that he might have survived the fit, but that is mere speculation. The “fit” might have been a stroke or brain haemorrhage that was more likely to be fatal.

The story of Robert Morris comes closer to “spooky” than the other two. Morris was clearly worried about being close to a discharging gun, and the prospect of having to attend a function where this would happen was presumably what inspired the dream. The tragic outcome, caused by a fly and a misunderstanding, must be put down to coincidence.

There must also be plenty of cases in which dreams of death have not come true, and even more in which nobody has known about such dreams because the dreamer chose not to relate it to someone else.

© John Welford

Dunting the Stone at Newbiggin-by-the-Sea

We Brits are renowned worldwide for our eccentricities and for hanging on to ancient customs that have long since passed their sell-by date. One such is the ceremony of Dunting the Stone, which takes place from time to time at the small town of Newbiggin-by-the-Sea in Northumberland.

Newbiggin-by-the-Sea

Even locals would be hard pressed to say that Newbiggin-by-the-Sea has a great deal to attract the visitor, although the beach and promenade are pleasant enough. Since 2007 it has boasted one very unusual feature, which is a sculpture by Sean Henry of two young people, a man and a woman, looking out to sea from a platform built in the middle of the bay. Entitled “Couple” it is a talking point if nothing else.

However, if one goes back far enough, Newbiggin was a very important place indeed, being a major port for the export of grain, third only to London and Hull. The status of freeholder was therefore a highly cherished one, because freeholders were entitled to collect dues from ships using the harbour.

There are fewer than 80 freeholders in Newbiggin today, and their privileges have diminished somewhat down the years. They do (jointly) own land on Newbiggin Moor, where the links golf course is now situated, and they also share ownership of the foreshore with the crown. Every year since 1235 the freeholders have “beaten the bounds” by walking or riding round the entire perimeter of the town as a symbolic gesture of ownership.

You cannot become a freeholder except by inheritance. When a new freeholder gains this status they are initiated according to the ancient custom of “Dunting the Stone”, which is where things get more than a little weird.

The “Dunting” ceremony

The stone in question is on the edge of the golf course, and to be dunted you must be held by the feet and shoulders and have your backside bumped against the stone, three times. The secretary of the Freeholders’ Trust then declares, in formal Middle English, that the “duntee” has now acquired full freeholder status and all the privileges that this entails.

If one is going to be dunted in this manner, it is probably a good idea to be properly padded in the right area, otherwise having one’s posterior thumped against a rock could be a bit painful. The people doing the dunting are supposed to be the two oldest freeholders, so this might also be a problem if they are in their nineties and you tip the scales at 17 stone! Presumably there is a Plan B should that prove to be the case.

It is an utterly pointless piece of nonsense, but that is absolutely no reason why the freeholders of Newbiggin-by-the-Sea should not go on holding such ceremonies for as long as they like. At least they won’t be spied on by “The Couple”, who are staring resolutely in the opposite direction.

© John Welford

Homophone trouble

Homophoneuality can get you into big trouble!

According to a piece in the Salt Lake Tribune, using the letters h, o, m and then o again – within an educational establishment - can get you into real trouble however careful you are. This is especially true if your boss is a complete idiot.

A teacher at an English language school in Provo, Utah, decided to teach his students about homophones – that is, words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings. Examples include ‘bear’ and ‘bare’, or ‘flaw’ and ‘floor’. The teacher posted several examples on his blog (which presumably had the word ‘homophones’ in the page title) so that the students could read them and suggest their own examples.

The next day he was called into the principal’s office, to be shouted at and sacked on the spot. His crime had been to hint that the school had a gay agenda, because people might get the impression that ‘homos’ were welcome there.

The principal complained that students would not know what a homophone was – which is a bit strange given that the whole object of the exercise was to teach them exactly what they were – and they might easily get confused.

Presumably there were other words that the principal would not allow his teachers to use, such as ‘homogenous’ and ‘homo sapiens’ – but this is pure conjecture!

© John Welford

The mystery of "The Man in the Iron Mask"

The title “The Man in the Iron Mask” belongs to a novel by Alexandre Dumas (1802-70). He based his story on a real event, namely the incarceration for almost 34 years of a prisoner whose face was always concealed. Who could the mysterious prisoner have been?

The bare facts

The story begins on 24^th August 1669, with the arrival of a prisoner at Pignerol prison (in what is now northern Italy but under French control at the time). He was delivered in person by a minister of King Louis XIV, but the document that was handed to the prison governor contained some very unusual stipulations, namely:

“The prisoner must be closely guarded and be unable to communicate by letter or any other means. He must be kept in complete isolation so that his guards cannot hear him, and you will never listen to anything he might wish to tell you, threatening to put him to death if he ever opens his mouth to speak to you of anything other than his needs”.

There were occasions when the prisoner was transferred to other prisons, including a move in 1687 to the Ile de Sainte-Marguerite (off the south coast of France near Cannes), when he was transferred in a sealed sedan chair with his face covered by a mask of black velvet.

In 1698 he was transferred to the Bastille in Paris, with instructions that every precaution be taken to ensure that he was not seen by anyone. The officer who was second-in-command at the Bastille later made it known that he was not told who the prisoner was, it was not written down anywhere, and his face was always masked.

The prison log recorded the man’s death in 1703, and that he had always worn a black velvet mask which he was never allowed to remove, even for eating or sleeping.

The mention that the mask was of iron, not velvet, came courtesy of the writer Voltaire, who was a prisoner in the Bastille in 1717 and heard stories from the jailers about their earlier mysterious prisoner.

Speculation about a royal twin

Alexander Dumas only wrote his novel in 1850, and clearly he based it on what he had read. He used speculation, rumour and imagination to concoct his tale, in which the mask followed the “iron” tradition begun by Voltaire and the prisoner had become a twin brother of King Louis XIV.

The idea was that Louis had had an identical twin brother, but his father (King Louis XIII) was concerned that the younger twin might come to challenge his brother for the right to be the heir to the throne. He was therefore removed from the royal household when very young and brought up as the son of a French nobleman.

However, at some point after Louis had become king (which he did in 1643 when still not five years old) the younger twin had seen a picture of Louis and realised who he was. When this was reported to the king he took the extraordinary step of having his brother incarcerated for the rest of his life in the manner that has been described. At least, that is how Dumas imagined things to have been.

Could this have happened?

If Louis had had a twin brother, is it at all likely that he would have taken such action? Even if King Louis XIII had been afraid of sibling rivalry to the extent that the younger twin would have challenged the older for the throne, why must one assume that Louis XIV thought the same way? Did he see his brother as a potential threat, even when he was established as the most powerful ruler in Europe – which he was in 1669 after 26 years on the throne?

Another question is whether Louis knew that he had a twin and, if so, when did he know this? Was it only in 1669 when he was told that his brother had recognised him from a portrait?

If the facts are as Dumas surmised, then Louis’s action does make some sort of sense. Rivals to the throne would normally be dealt with more severely and be done away with, either publicly or secretly, but when that rival is one’s own twin brother, one can imagine that this would have gone against the grain.

Under such circumstances, one can also see why it would be important for the brother not to be recognised by anyone else, and for him not to be allowed to communicate with anyone that he was indeed the king’s twin.

However, there are also huge problems with this scenario. For one thing, there is absolutely no evidence that Louis ever had a twin brother.  Royal births were hardly secret affairs (it was typical for the room in which a birth took place to be crowded not only with doctors and midwives but also with high ranking people who would witness the birth and thus confirm that the child was definitely the son or daughter of the queen and not a smuggled-in substitute), and it is hard to imagine that a second baby would have been overlooked or that everyone present would have been sworn to secrecy and kept that secret for decades afterwards.

Then there is the question of why concealing the identity of the prisoner was so important after 1669 but apparently less so before then. If the twin brother had suddenly realised who he was when aged around 30, why had nobody else noticed the similarity at some point before then? If, as Dumas suggests, the twin had been brought up in a noble household, there must have been plenty of people around who regularly saw the king and who would surely have spotted the likeness. It also seems unlikely that anyone brought up in such an environment (the supposed twin brother, for example) would not have seen the king on many occasions, especially as Louis XIV was renowned for maintaining a large court of aristocratic hangers-on and engaging in many lavish ceremonies and functions in which all the nobility of France would have played a part at one time or another.

For all these reasons, the notion that Louis had locked up his twin brother and insisted that he always be masked does sound to be highly unlikely.

In that case, who was the masked man?

More than sixty suggestions have been made as to who the man in the mask (whether iron or velvet) might have been. These have included some very well-known names such as the Duke of Monmouth (an illegitimate son of King Charles II of Great Britain) and the French playwright Moliere. However, all these candidates pose a particular problem, namely that it is known when they died and it wasn’t in 1703.

Many of the suggestions have related to less well-known people, such as French army officers and obscure aristocrats who fell from favour. However, if the person was not of any great importance, why bother with the charade of keeping them alive in such circumstances for such a long time?

My own theory

This may not be an original idea – highly unlikely! – but it strikes me that there could be another reason why a prisoner was kept masked for 34 years. This was not so that they could not be identified but because their face had become so disfigured that its sight would be too great a shock for any observer, including the person himself should he happen to see himself in a mirror.

A disease such as leprosy or necrotizing fasciitis (the “flesh-eating bug”) might have had this effect. With little understanding of the cause of the ailment it might have been assumed that the condition was infectious and that the victim had to be kept as far away from human contact as possible, such as in a secure prison.

If the person was of high birth – such as a member of the royal family – they would have been allowed to live out their natural term of life, however long that might have been. This might have applied, for example, to an illegitimate son of the king. According to Voltaire’s account, passed to him by prison officers, the man was finely dressed and an accomplished musician who was clearly not treated in the manner that a dangerous criminal might have been, so imprisonment for protection as opposed to punishment does sound at least possible.

However, this is mere speculation, as is virtually every other account of the case. Stories tend to grow in the telling, and Alexandre Dumas wrote his novel some 150 years after the events in question, so there had been plenty of time for growth! Nobody knows the answer to the conundrum, and it is unlikely that anyone ever will.

© John Welford

The Pascagoula alien abduction, 1973

The Pascagoula River enters the Gulf of Mexico at Pascagoula, Mississippi. This was where, on the evening of 11^th October 1973, 19-year-old Calvin Parker and 42-year-old Charles Hickson were fishing from a pier jutting into the river when, according to their testimony, they had an experience that brought them considerable fame – or possibly notoriety, depending on your point of view.

The story goes that they heard a loud buzzing noise behind them and turned round to see a glowing egg-shaped object, about 3 metres wide and 2.5 metres high, at a distance of about 12 metres. It was hovering above the ground and had flashing blue lights on it.

Three strange creatures emerged from the egg. They were quite short, at little over a metre in height, vaguely humanoid but with round feet and claw-like hands. Their heads were bullet-shaped, they had no necks, or even eyes, but slit-like mouths and odd lumps that seemed to serve as ears and noses.

These “aliens” grabbed hold of the two fishermen and hustled them on board their craft. The younger man, Calvin Parker, fainted from the shock and therefore could not offer any further details of what happened, but Charles Hickson remained conscious and he was therefore the sole source of information for the supposed event.

According to Hickson, once on board the craft the two men were examined closely for about 20 minutes by a hovering electronic eye, after which they were returned to the pier completely unharmed.

The craft then took off and disappeared skywards at great speed, leaving Parker and Hickson with an extraordinary tale to tell. Or to put it another way, it left Hickson with a tale to tell because – as mentioned above – Parker was apparently out cold from beginning to end of the “alien encounter”.

The only corroboration of Hickson’s story came from reports of a sonic boom heard that evening across Ohio and Pennsylvania, for which no direct cause could be assigned. Could this have been caused by the alien “egg” heading off back to its mother ship?

During the following days hundreds of other reports flooded in of UFO sightings, notably from Ohio and West Virginia, thus lending credence to the tale told by Charles Hickson. Pressmen from far and wide descended on Pascagoula and the two “abductees” became celebrities in the UFO watching community, being invited to conventions and conferences for years afterwards. Their story clearly did them no harm as far as their bank balances were concerned.

But what is the possibility that the men were talking about a real experience as opposed to an invented one? There are several factors in this story that should make sane people wonder at the credulity of some their fellow human beings!

For one thing, as mentioned above, we only have Charles Hickson’s word for most of the story, due to Calvin Parker’s apparent unconsciousness during most of the supposed encounter. A sceptic will immediately conclude that this would be remarkably convenient for someone who wanted to spin an alien abduction yarn – if only one person tells the tale, they cannot be accused of telling it differently from someone else. As it was, Charles Hickson was happy to take a lie detector test from an inexperienced polygraph operator but not from someone who knew what they were doing.

There are in any case some facts that don’t add up. Why, for example, would a sonic boom heard in Ohio have anything to do with an alien spacecraft taking off on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, 850 miles away? If this strange craft with its flashing blue lights was able to land close to a town with a population of around 20,000, how come no-else else saw it arriving or leaving?

Then of course there is the massive improbability of alien lifeforms travelling for many years across the vast distances of space for the sole purpose – it would appear – of scaring the living daylights out of two guys fishing beside a river in Mississippi! No-one else reported a similar encounter at around that time, so what were these aliens doing during the rest of their visit to Planet Earth? For the Pascagoula encounter to be even remotely credible one would have to assume that the aliens’ mindset would have been similar to that of the crew of Apollo 11 had they stepped on to the Moon, grabbed a few rocks and headed straight home again!

A highly unlikely story!

© John Welford

Point of Ayr: a haunted lighthouse

Lighthouses, especially abandoned ones, are often cited as buildings that are subject to ghostly goings-on. This is hardly surprising given that they stand as isolated towers in remote locations where they are battered by waves and winds. There are many stories of lighthouse keepers who have disappeared without trace, or been murdered by colleagues who had lost their minds as a result of having to live in a virtual prison for months on end. The Point of Ayr lighthouse, in North Wales, is reputed to be one such haunted lighthouse.

Point of Ayr

This is the most north-easterly point of Wales, on the western side of the Dee Estuary. The lighthouse was built in 1776 to warn ships approaching and leaving the port of Liverpool not to stray on to the sandbanks that stretch for miles into Liverpool Bay. It stands on the beach at Talacre and can be reached on foot at low tide. The building has not been used as a lighthouse since 1883 but the structure has been kept in good repair down to the present day.

Many people have reported odd sensations and sightings in the vicinity of the lighthouse, with some complaining of feeling unwell but recovering when they have left the area. There have also been sightings of a keeper on the walkway round the top of the tower. There is a story that a man named Raymond died there of a broken heart and that it is his sprit that troubles visitors.

There has been a “keeper” permanently on duty at the top of the lighthouse since 2010. This is a 7-foot-high metal sculpture created by Angela Smith, a local artist. She used many pieces of high-grade polished steel to build the figure, thus allowing the wind the whistle through his ribs and create all the eerie sounds one might want to hear!

© John Welford

The Ogham script of Celtic Ireland

Ogham is a script method that was used mostly by Irish Celts from around 300 to 700 AD, although it also spread to parts of Britain where a number of examples have been found, most commonly in Wales.

Ogham script

The script consisted of straight lines inscribed to the left or right of a central line. On standing stones, the central line was a vertical edge, such that short horizontal lines could be scratched on the faces that met at that edge. Because the writing started at ground level, the length of the message was limited by the size of the stone, even if more than one edge was used. The visual appearance of Ogham script, with lines branching off a central “trunk”, was that of a tree, and the system is sometimes referred to as the “Ogham tree”.

Ogham, in its original form, was an alphabetical system comprising fifteen consonants and five vowels. These were delineated by groups of up to five lines, to the left, to the right, or right across the central line. To distinguish five of the consonants from the five vowels, the former were long lines that crossed the central line at an angle, whereas the latter were short lines that crossed “straight”.

The origin of Ogham

The name Ogham betrays its Irish origin, because it was named after the Irish god of learning and poetry, Ogma, who is credited in legend with being its inventor.

Another name for Ogham is Beth Luis Nuin, which equates to the use of ABC for the modern English alphabet because the Ogham names are those of the first three letters, which are delineated by one, two and three lines to the right, respectively. The resemblance of Ogham to the depiction of a tree also gave rise to the letter names being used to mean specific trees, with Beth meaning “birch”, Luis “rowan” and Nuin “ash”. The Irish Celts held trees and forests in high regard, such that their word for “wood” also meant “knowledge” and Ogham script had religious significance as well as being a means of recording facts.

How Ogham was used

Ogham may well have been used on materials such as wood and leather, but these are perishable and it is therefore the case that Ogham script is known today almost exclusively from its use on standing stones.

Because of this, it is not surprising that the uses to which it was put related to the functions performed by the stones themselves. Many were boundary markers, with the inscriptions stating the names of the owners of the land on either side of the stone. Others were grave markers, bearing the name of the person buried beneath (typically followed by the names of their father and their tribe).

More recent uses of Ogham script

Ogham has also been used in post-Celtic times, notably by medieval scribes who may have been inspired by original manuscript Ogham sources that have not survived. Sometimes these scripts mixed Ogham and runic symbols, and they were often transliterations of Latin texts. When used, the central line was usually horizontal and extra characters were incorporated to account for letters that were not available in the original Ogham alphabet.

The “Book of Ballymote” is a 14^th century manuscript that is preserved in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. This contains pages in Ogham and other scripts that have been used as a key for deciphering the Ogham alphabet.

As mentioned above, the majority of surviving Ogham inscriptions are on Irish stones, and they are highly prized as relics of Celtic history. Modern developments have threatened the loss of many such stones and efforts have therefore been made to collect and preserve them. The best such collection is at University College Cork, where a covered walkway known as the Stone Corridor is lined with a large collection of Ogham stones. There is another important collection at the monastery of Mount Melleray in County Waterford.

© John Welford