The ghost of Pawleys Island

Who is the “grey man” ghost of Pawleys Island? Opinion has long been divided on this issue, and deciding the matter is not helped by the fact that the ghost has no face and cannot therefore be identified with any certainty. However, there have been many people over the years who have claimed to see it, although this only happens when a dangerous storm such as a hurricane is on the way.

Pawleys Island is a long, low-lying island, formed from a sandbar, off the coast of South Carolina (United States). It encloses a narrow tidal lagoon and is occupied by housing along its entire length of three miles, with each property having access to the dunes and beach via its own boardwalk.

The island takes its name from the first white settler, Percival Pawley, who discovered in the early 18^th century that this was a good place to get away from the mosquitos that made life difficult during the summer in the steamy lagoons of the Carolina coast.

One theory is that the ghost is Percival himself, but there are some much more entertaining stories involving blighted love and tragic death.

One such involves a young woman in the 1820s who eagerly awaited the arrival of her fiancé at her family home on the island. However, as he rode on his way to meet her he decided to challenge some other horsemen to a race. He thought he saw a shortcut through the marsh that led to the island but this only led to a quagmire into which he fell and was dragged into the mud from which he could not be rescued.

The young woman was driven mad by her distress, saying that she could see a ghostly image of the dead man, and had eventually to be taken to Charleston to seek medical help. After she and her family had left the island for this purpose, a hurricane blew up and destroyed every house apart from theirs.

This story has given rise to the notion that seeing the ghost is both good and bad news – a hurricane is on the way but your house will be spared.

Another story concerns a beautiful woman from Charleston who wanted to marry her cousin against the wishes of her family. They arranged for the undesirable suitor to be sent to France and later told the woman that he had been killed in a duel. She had no choice but to accept what she had been told, married another man and set up home on Pawleys Island.

One night, when her husband was away on business, a terrible storm blew up and a ship was wrecked on the island. There was only one survivor, who made his way ashore and sought refuge at the first house he came across, which was the woman’s. As is always the case in such stories, the man turned out to be the supposed-dead cousin. She was horrified to see who it was, and to realise that she had been tricked into marrying the wrong man, and the cousin reacted badly to seeing that she had a ring on her finger and - as he supposed – had not waited for his return but instead married someone else.

He ran from the house and promptly died of a broken heart, and she was troubled by his faceless ghost for the rest of her life.

So which story do you believe, if any? The fact remains that people on Pawleys Island claim to have seen the ghost at intervals down the years, and that the grey man has saved many lives by warning residents that a hurricane is on the way.

© John Welford

The exception that proves the rule

“It’s the exception that proves the rule” is something that you often hear said when an objection is raised to a “rule” being broken. Person A believes in the rule but person B has their doubts and mentions a circumstance that simply does not fit the rule. Person A then sweeps back with the classic line, as though that settles the matter.

But does it? On the face of it, this statement is complete nonsense. In logic, a proposition of the type “All items of type X possess quality Y” is rendered invalid if just one example of X is found that does not have quality Y. You cannot say that all swans are white if somebody manages to find one that is black. However, according to our Person A, that black swan exception would be the proof we needed that all swans are white! Surely, this nonsensical statement simply turns logic on its head.

In order to make sense of exceptions proving the rule, we have to look a bit more closely at what an “exception” is. In its original sense, it means a person or thing that lies outside the scope of the rule in question. If we take just about any rule, such as “Students cannot bring hot food into the library”, there are several implications as to what would be acceptable behaviour, including the possibility of bringing in cold food and that of having hot food in places other than the library (and there is also the suggestion that it would be OK if you are not a student, but I’m not so sure about that one!).

In other words, the rule works because there are “exceptional” circumstances where it does not apply, namely outside the library and if cold food is being brought in (and this is in fact the case at the university library where I work).

Exceptions prove rules because they define the scope of the rules, and if we use the word “exception” in that context and no other. However, there is every possibility that people will continue to misuse the word and spout utter nonsense as a consequence!

© John Welford

Not the Loch Ness Monster!

For a short time in 1972 many people genuinely believed that the Loch Ness Monster had been found. Unfortunately, it was dead. Even more unfortunately, the people in question had been taken in by a hoax.

It was found in the Loch by a group of zoologists who were “Nessie hunting”. The carcase, which was 15 feet long and weighed half a ton, was brought ashore and packed in ice. The scientists planned to take it back to their base in England and announce to an astonished world that there really were prehistoric monsters in Loch Ness and that they had one to show everybody.

However, word got around and the locals were distraught to learn that “their” monster was about to be whisked across the border and lost to Scotland. The van that contained “Nessie” was eventually stopped on the Forth Road Bridge and the monster was impounded by the Police. The truth then emerged as to what the zoologists were actually so keen to take south.

Some weeks before this incident a ship had set sail from the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic with a cargo of live elephant seals destined for a zoo in England. However, as they neared the British coast they became aware that one of the elephant seals had died. It was then thrown overboard.

Shortly afterwards, the dead seal was caught in the nets of a fishing boat, and the fishermen thought that it would make an excellent Loch Ness Monster, so they took it to the Loch and threw it in.

The massive monster, which generated so much excitement and nearly led to an Anglo/Scottish international incident, was therefore nothing more than an unfortunate elephant seal that had met its end aboard a ship in the Atlantic, nowhere near Loch Ness.

© John Welford

Don't fly your flag upside down!

It amazes me just how often people who display the Union Flag of the United Kingdom do so by flying it upside down!

There is more here than meets the eye at first glance

Although the flag that is generally known as the Union Jack may look symmetrical, it is not. If you turn it over, by either the vertical or horizontal axis, it will not look the same.

This becomes apparent when you look at the ‘X’ cross on the flag. This consists of a broad white stripe with a narrow red stripe inside it. However, the red stripe is not positioned centrally within the white stripe, but to one side. This means that in each of the four quadrants of the flag the white stripe is broader on one side of the red stripe than on the other.

Another interesting feature of the red ‘X’ is that it does not cross the centre of the flag as a continuous line. If you trace the stripe across the flag it looks as though it hops to one side behind the central vertical/horizontal cross, so that it emerges on the other side in a different position vis-à-vis the white stripe.

These subtleties are what makes it possible to fly the flag upside down

The rule is that, in the top left-hand quadrant, the portion of the white stripe above the red stripe must be broader than the portion below the red stripe, on the ‘hoist’ side of the flag. This needs a word of explanation.

Hoist and fly

Flags are made for flying from flagpoles. They therefore have toggles on one side that enables them to be attached to ropes so that they can be hauled up and down. The toggles are normally on either end of a length of cord that is covered by a piece of canvas running up one edge of the flag. This canvas therefore makes it obvious that this is the ‘hoist’ side of the flag. Not surprisingly, the other side, the one that flaps in the breeze, is known as the ‘fly’.

Flags are often displayed on paper or other media without any indication of toggles or cords being present. However, the general convention is that they are shown with the hoist to the left and the fly to the right. It is still therefore possible to state that a flag is upside down even if it is not being shown ‘in flight’.

Your flag is upside down!

What all this means is that it is easy to tell if a Union Jack is upside down. If, in the top left-hand quadrant, the upper white portion is narrower than the lower one, then the flag is upside down. The same is true of flags on which someone has written a team name (for example) across the middle – if the name is readable, the hoist must be to the left, and if the broad and narrow parts of the white stripe are in the wrong places, then the flag is upside down.

Does it matter?

To pedants like me, it certainly does! There is a convention that the Union Flag flown upside down is a signal of distress. However, if my ship was sinking I think I might try a less subtle means of calling for help!

Do other national flags have the same problem?

National flags seem to fall into three categories in this respect. There are some that would never be flown upside down because it would be blatantly obvious from the outset – those of the USA and Australia, for example.

Then there are those that are horizontally symmetrical and it makes no difference which way up they are flown – the flags of Japan and France come to mind here.

 However, there is also a category where it makes (almost literally) all the difference in the world. If you fly the flag of Poland upside down you get the flag of Indonesia!

© John Welford

Burning ears: an ancient superstition

Are your ears burning? If they are, it is presumably because someone, somewhere, is talking about you! At least, that is the belief held by some, although “old wives tale” would surely be nearer the truth!

The superstition – for it is nothing more than that – only applies when the talking is being done way out of earshot – it is not the case that you suspect that you are the subject of discussion between people on the other side of the room but can’t quite hear what they are saying.

It might surprise you to learn that this notion owes its existence to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, who wrote during the first century AD and was a victim of the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD. Pliny set out to write down as much knowledge – about everything – as he could gather, producing 37 volumes of his “Natural History”. It was his insatiable curiosity that prompted him to get too close to Vesuvius.

In Book 28 of Natural History Pliny wrote a collection of commonly held superstitions, and he managed to find and record around 20,000 of them. Somewhere on the list was:

“… it is believed that absent people divine, by the ringing in their ears, that people are talking about them.”

It is important to remember that Pliny’s intention was to debunk all these superstitions, not to publicize them, but the latter does appear to have been the end result.

One writer who took up the idea – whether directly or indirectly from Pliny is not known – was Geoffrey Chaucer, who used it in his Troilus and Criseyde, written in the 1370s. Criseyde’s uncle Pandarus tells her that he and Troilus will:

“… speak of thee somewhat … when thou art gone, to make thy ears glow”

This is not quite what Pliny had in mind, given that the person with glowing ears is not supposed to know that they are the topic of conversation, but only to assume that they are - due to the red ears!

Although this is clearly a piece of nonsense, as Pliny tried to make clear, the superstition is still around nearly 2,000 years later. However, let’s hope that not too many people take it seriously. It is almost always mentioned as a joke, such as: “We were talking about you yesterday, were your ears burning?” – to which the answer should always be “No”!

© John Welford

The Whitby Penny Hedge

All sorts of strange things go on in Great Britain! Some of them are ceremonies and customs that have been performed for centuries in certain places, although the reasons for so doing are either uncertain or completely forgotten. One such is the annual planting of the “penny hedge” at Whitby in North Yorkshire.

Every year, on the day before Ascension Day, a small hedge is planted on the east bank of the River Esk estuary that must be strong enough to withstand three tides before being washed away. The hedge must be completed before 9 a.m. The hedge is carefully woven from hazel and willow branches but is only a few feet in length.

Traditionally the hedge is laid by two men, one of whom plays the role of “factotum to the abbot of St Hilda’s” – which is the abbey the ruins of which overlook the town. The factotum blows a horn and shouts: “Out on ye!” (meaning “Shame on you”) three times.

The question that must surely strike anyone is: Why? Two explanations have been offered.

According to local folklore, in 1159 a group of hunters were thwarted by a hermit who gave sanctuary in his chapel to the wild boar they were hunting. They promptly beat the hermit to death, but with his last words he forgave the hunters on condition that they built a hedge every year on Ascension Eve as their penance. They, or their successors, would meet the abbot’s bailiff in a wood and cut a penny’s worth of sticks which they would then plant at the water’s edge before blowing a horn and denouncing themselves.

This sounds highly unlikely for all sorts of reasons, which is why a second explanation is more believable. This is that the custom derives from a medieval practice known as the “horngarth”, which is another name for the penny hedge ceremony. This was an obligation that tenants owed to the lord of the manor – the “garth” part of the word being an Old English term for an enclosure. The horngarth was originally a substantial boundary fence to land belonging to the abbey, but the obligation to maintain the fence had become a token event by the mid-14^th century.

The “penny” may refer to the cost of the knife used to cut the stems, or it may simply be a corruption of “penance”.

Whatever the explanation, the ceremony is still performed every year on the appointed day, and sometimes the hedge survives for more than three tides!

© John Welford

The Samoan legend of Tuifiti and Sina

The people of Savai’i, the largest of the islands of Samoa in the Pacific Ocean, tell a story about an eel named Tuifiti and a beautiful girl called Sina.

Tuifiti was enchanted by Sina’s beauty and he swam to where she was so that he could admire her all day. She caught him in a calabash gourd and fed him so that he grew bigger and bigger. Indeed, he could not stop growing, and grew so large that he eventually became a nuisance to her and she tried to get rid of him.

Tuifiti went to a gathering of the island elders and told them that he loved Sina so much that he could not live without her. He therefore knew that he was going to die, but he did not want his death to be in vain. He told the elders that, when he was dead, they should cut off his head and bury it in the ground in front of Sina’s house. A tree would grow that would be a blessing to her, because its leaves could be woven together to provide shelter when the sun was too hot and its fruit would provide drink when she was thirsty. Every time she did this she would be kissing him.

And that was how the first coconut tree came to be!

© John Welford