The mystery of England's sinking churches

English parish churches, if they have been there for any length of time as most of them have, tend to display a strange characteristic, which is that they seem to be sinking into the ground. Quite often the lowest course of stones appears to be a couple of feet below the level of the surrounding churchyard.

However, this is not because the church builders did not set the foundations properly, or that they regularly chose to build on soft ground into which the structure would sink over time. The fact is that the surrounding land has risen, and not that the church has sunk.

The reason for this is that churchyards are where people from the surrounding village have been buried for century after century. It is not all that long ago that the only legal way of disposing of a dead body was to bury it (cremation was first legalised in the United Kingdom in 1902, although the practice had started in the late 19^th century). Burials could only take place in consecrated ground, and that meant the village churchyard.

However, churchyards were limited in area, which meant that space for burials was at a premium. The same piece of ground would therefore be re-dug for fresh burials several times over. Bones do not always decay completely – it depends on the acidity of the soil – so many burials took place on top of the bones of previous ones. Over time, layer upon layer of human remains, as well as the action of repeated digging, pushed the land surface higher and higher.

In a parish with a steady average population of 300 people, one might expect around a thousand adults to die every century. However, with child mortality being what it was in the past, there would have been many more than that number of burials. In a churchyard that was first laid out in the 10^th or 11^th century, the number of times that the gravediggers got to work between then and now could have been as many as 20,000, possibly even more.

It is little wonder that many churchyards seem to be swallowing their churches!

© John Welford

A mysterious library

I am a bit mystified about a mystery writer and a mysterious place that celebrates another mysterious person. Are you mystified already? I don’t blame you!

Choosing a career

Back in 1974 I had just finished at university and was unsure as to what I wanted to do for a career. One possibility was librarianship, but before committing myself I decided to have a go at the job to see what it entailed. I therefore found myself at the central library of the University of London, working as a junior assistant for a whole academic year.

This involved moving round a number of departments within this vast library, housed in a towering edifice very close to the British Museum. One of the departments was the Reference division, which was responsible for a number of special collections. And that brings us to the mystery!

It is not unknown in academic circles for scholars to accumulate vast collections of material and stipulate in their wills, or even during their lifetimes, that they want those collections to be housed by prestigious university institutions. This is partly out of vanity, but also because the value of their work is widely recognised and it is the university that has persuaded the scholar to make such a provision. However, in the case I want to mention here, I reckon that vanity had much more to do with it!

Harry Price

Harry Price is a name that was much more widely known in the first half of the 20^th century than it is now. He was one of the chief pioneers of “scientific” psychical research, investigating claims of ghostly apparitions, spirit phenomena, and all sorts of weird and wonderful things. He came to public attention in a big way when he investigated the ghostly goings-on at Borley Rectory in Suffolk, which caught the public attention as “the most haunted house in England” in the years just prior to World War II. Unfortunately for Harry’s reputation, later investigations have shown that in his efforts to expose frauds and mountebanks he committed a huge number of fakeries himself.

However, the gift of his library to the University of London in 1936 was made before the truth was known, and the collection was accepted in good faith as a contribution to the world of learning and knowledge. 

The Harry Price Library

When I found myself having to visit this collection on an almost daily basis, it had been in situ for nearly 40 years, kept intact in a part of the building that was not generally accessible to students and other visitors, except by special arrangement. The space it occupied was crossed by pipes through which the wind whistled eerily or water gurgled menacingly, and the lighting was not of the brightest. This all seemed highly appropriate for the contents of the library, namely Price’s vast accumulation of books and papers on virtually anything to do with the occult, mediums, ghosts, witchcraft, magic, astrology, conjuring, and much more. Several of the young ladies who worked as library assistants were very reluctant to go near the place, and I quite often ran gallant errands on their behalf!

I mentioned above that visitors were only allowed by special permission, and the few who did ask tended to be of a different nature from the usual class of researchers that would be expected in a university library. I remember one little old lady who had a fascination with witchcraft and the occult and who established herself in the library on a virtually permanent basis. It may have been her resemblance to a witch that made visits by the girl library assistants so unpopular! The lady had eventually to be asked to leave when it was found that she had brought in an electric toaster that was plugged into a lighting socket!

So who is the mystery writer that I mentioned in my opening sentence? Not the little old lady with the toaster, but another “scholar” with an abiding interest in all things mysterious, and who might indeed have gathered much from the contents of Harry Price’s library. She even features a very similar library in her stories about a boy wizard, curiously named Harry.

Did J K Rowling ever make use of this library? No biography I have read has said so, but it would not surprise me if this was the case.

© John Welford

The ghost of the Hotel del Coronado

The Hotel del Coronado is a resort hotel near San Diego, California, that is said to be haunted by a woman who died there in November 1893.

The Coronado ghost 

The woman was Kate Morgan, although there are different stories to account for how she met her end. One is that she checked into the hotel alone, under a false name, after she and her husband, named Tom, had quarrelled during their journey there by train. She had told him that she was pregnant, which was not welcome news to him. He got off the train early and said that he would join her later.

After two days alone, staying in Room 3312, she went to San Diego where she bought a gun; she was found dead the following day on the north steps of the hotel, apparently by suicide.

However, there was something very strange about her death, which was that the gun she had bought, and which was in her hand with one chamber empty, was not of the same calibre as the bullet that killed her.

Another mystery concerned the maid who disappeared the day after the funeral and was never seen again. So did Kate’s husband Tom turn up at the hotel and kill both Kate and the maid, who had seen enough to implicate him in the murder?

Another account has Kate committing suicide because she found her husband with another woman. In this version the married couple had arrived together and booked into Room 3502. He went down to the gaming room on his own and Kate later decided that this would be a good time to surprise him with the news of her pregnancy. He had not thought that he would be disturbed by Kate turning up, hence the discovery of his flirting so shocked Kate that she killed herself.

As with many such stories there are elements that don’t really hold water, but the hotel seems to have done all it can to boost the stories for what they are worth. For one thing, there are two rooms, not one, that guests can sleep in that might produce odd sensations – and, naturally enough, they duly oblige with stories of mysterious presences, cold gusts and subdued whispers. Then there are the two possible scenes of the drama, namely the hotel steps and the gaming room, either of which are worthy of attention from the ghost-hunting perspective.

In addition to the sensations mentioned above, guests have reported seeing the ghost of Kate Morgan moving through corridors or standing by windows.

Many haunted houses increase their attractiveness by being the scene of hauntings by numerous ghosts. The Hotel del Coronado has achieved this trick by splitting their one ghost into two, which sounds like an excellent marketing ploy!

© John Welford

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