This illustration from the Illustrated Police News of 18 November 1926 shows the unfortunate aftermath of an attempted “ghost hoax”:
Category: Ostension
“Ghost Stories: Collected with a Particular View to Counteract the Vulgar Belief in Ghosts and Apparitions” (1823)
This unusual book is an anthology, not of “ghost stories” in the usual sense, but rather of “ghost exposure” stories; mysteries in which each appearently supernatural event is revealed to be the product of innocent mistaken identity or mischievous trickery.
Here follows the introduction by the anonymous, skeptical author/compiler (who is often mistakenly identified as F.O.C. Darley – Darley was actually the illustrator).
What is a ghost? In the popular acceptation of the term, it is a visible appearance of a deceased person. It is called also a spirit; but, if visible, it must be matter; consequently not a spirit. If it is not matter, it can only exist in the imagination of the beholder; and must therefore be classed with the multifarious phantoms which haunt the sick man’s couch in delirium.
But ghosts have appeared to more than one person at a time;—how then? Can he exist in the imagination of two persons at once? That is not probable, and we doubt the ” authentic” accounts of ghosts appearing to more than one at a time. The stories we are about to tell will show, however, that in a great many instances several persons have thought that they saw ghosts at the same time, when, in fact, there was no ghost in the case; but substantial flesh and blood and bones.
(…)
But to cut the matter short—the whole theory of ghosts is too flimsy to bear the rough handling of either reason or ridicule. The best way to dissipate the inbred horror of supernatural phantoms, which almost all persons derive from nursery tales or other sources of causeless terror in early life, is to show by example how possible it is to impress upon ignorant or credulous persons the firm belief that they behold a ghost, when in point of fact no ghost is there. We proceed at once to our stories.
We here at The Ghost Racket tend to agree with this thesis.
If you’d like to read these non-ghost stories, the anthology is freely available here.
Houdini and Doyle, Episode 4: Spring-Heel’d Jack (reviewed)
Edwardian-social-issue-of-the-week: mass hysteria
“Supernatural” crime: Spring Heeled Jack attacks!
Cards on the table; we here at The Ghost Racket are massive, long-term Spring Heeled Jack fans and we’ve been eagerly anticipating Houdini and Doyle’s take on London’s “leaping ghost” for many months. How does it compare to the frustrating SHJ storyline in the 2015 Jekyll and Hyde series? Read on …
Episode 4 opens, curiously, with a newsboy hawking the latest London buzz; automotive omnibuses are soon to replace the good old horse-drawn variety. Automobile magnate Barrett Underhill should be on top of the world, but instead he’s perturbed by a sinister note quoting Moby Dick, which is slipped under the door of his 7th-floor hotel room:
From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee!
Later that night, Underhill is roused by strange flutterings and scratchings at his window. Investigating, he opens the window and gazes out over the London roofscape – but then, just as he glances upward, a demonic, bat-like figure hurls itself at him from above, sending him plummeting to his death!
The next morning Constable Stratton summons Houdini and Doyle, and they learn that the hotel doorman spotted an uncanny winged figure leaping or flying from the roof moments after Underhill fell. Houdini, scoffing at the suggestion that a demon might have been to blame, leaps to the conclusion that it was simple misadventure; the startled doorman, Houdini suggests, mistakenly associated the coincidental overhead flight of a large bird with the man’s accidental, or perhaps suicidal, death. Stratton and Doyle aren’t so sure – after all, Underhill was just about to make a great deal of money from the automotive omnibus deal, and had also just received an overtly threatening, anonymous note.
Stratton, meanwhile, receives a mysterious telegram and temporarily excuses herself from the case, claiming illness.
Investigating Underhill’s business rivals leads Houdini and Doyle straight into a confrontation with a Mr. Tuttle, the owner of London’s largest horse-drawn bus company. Tuttle is a surly man who seems to have had both motive and method for murder. Doyle, however, pursues the supernatural angle and notes that the hotel doorman’s description, and the circumstances of Underhill’s death, are highly reminiscent of the legend of Spring Heeled Jack. Just then the two amateur detectives encounter Lyman Biggs, a cheerily verbose tabloid newspaper reporter who decides the “leaping demon” angle is far too good to pass up.
Shortly thereafter, a slumlord is pursued through the back alleys by an agile, shadowy, blue-fire-breathing phantom. The landlord’s body is found the next morning, gruesomely impaled on the railings of a high fence. Then Jack strikes again, smashing through the window of a wealthy Russian woman’s apartment and slashing at her with his claws before leaping off into the night.
Within days, London is paralysed by the fear that Spring Heeled Jack has returned. Doyle notes darkly that his reappearance has always betokened some great disaster, while Houdini takes the opportunity to demonstrate how easily mass hysteria can be conjured by briefly convincing a roomful of people that they’re endangered by an invisible gas.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s family is swept up in the general Spring Heeled Jack panic, as his young son Kingsley becomes tearfully convinced that Jack is stalking him; Doyle seems unable to comfort the boy beyond telling him to keep a stiff upper lip.
Houdini, Doyle and Stratton are eventually able to eliminate Mr. Tuttle as a suspect – he did write the threatening note, but cannot have committed the Spring Heeled Jack attacks. Pursuing a lead offered by the Russian woman, the trail then leads to a circus acrobat, Vladimir Palinov, who was both a jilted suitor of the woman’s and a recently evicted tenant of the landlord’s, but who seems to have had no connection to Underhill the automobile magnate.
That night, Lyman Biggs, the journalist, is confronted by Spring Heeled Jack, who drops from the shadows above; but Biggs quickly recovers his composure and berates the costumed figure before him for “nearly giving the game away”. “Jack” then pulls off his mask to reveal the face of Harry Houdini; as it turns out, Palinov the acrobat confessed that Biggs had hired him to impersonate Spring Heeled Jack in order to “goose the story” and sell more papers. Biggs himself, therefore, has accidentally just admitted to orchestrating the plot to the disguised Houdini.
Later, however, while being interviewed in prison, Biggs claims that the slumlord’s death was a tragic accident. Palinov had only been trying to scare him, and the panicked victim had slipped and impaled himself on the railings while trying to escape. Biggs also insists that he had nothing to do with the attack on Barrett Underhill, and, in fact, that he had never even heard of Spring Heeled Jack until he overheard Doyle describing the demon to Houdini. At that point, he conceived the plan to bring the legend to life, so as to profit by fear-mongering through his newspaper stories.
In the final shot, a mysterious, dark figure is watching Houdini and Doyle from the rooftops …
Observations:
- This is the first episode in which we start to get a real feel for Houdini, Doyle and Stratton as characters of significant depth. Doyle’s “stiff upper lip” reserve, which has sometimes registered as rather wooden, is now starting to make more sense; he’s terrified that he’s going to lose his comatose wife Touie forever, and doesn’t know how to deal with that fear (or with his children’s fears).
There’s a very strong scene in which Houdini and Doyle debate the nature of fear and the best way to deal with it; Houdini, fulfilling his role as the brasher, more outwardly emotional of the two, urges Arthur to admit his terror, telling him that this is the only way it will lose its power over him. Arthur is then, in a rather touching interlude, able to tell his son that it’s all right to be afraid.
- The Adelaide Stratton character is still a bit of an enigma; she’s often almost as reserved as Doyle, but in this episode we at least learn that she is (or has been) married. The mysteries of her past relationship(s) seem to be being set up as a major through-line for the series. Despite excusing herself from the investigation early on, she does have a bit more to do in this episode than previously.
- The pattern develops apace; Houdini consistently jumps to the wrong conclusion straight off the bat, but he’s also consistently right about the ultimate solution being non-supernatural. Doyle’s more cautious approach – as befits a trained physician and the creator of Sherlock Holmes – admits more possibilities, though he’s very apt to get side-tracked looking for paranormal explanations where none actually exist. Stratton can see both sides and basically serves as the referee, though again, it would be nice to see her display more of an independent set of personality traits and motivations.
- After the disappointment of the Jekyll and Hyde treatment, in which Spring Heeled Jack was presented as a rather hapless, ineffectual character, it’s wonderful to see justice done to Jack in a fairly major TV series. His appearances are all suitably mysterious and dramatic and the writer obviously did his homework regarding the actual folklore. Some of the “historical sketches” Doyle produces to explain the legend to Houdini are closely inspired by actual 19th century SHJ-related art, although one sketch is, rather cheekily, based on the monster from the 1957 movie Curse of the Demon!
Jack’s acrobatics are also very pleasingly handled – it’s a good bet that a parkour-trained stuntman executed his street gymnastics of vaulting and side-flipping over walls, etc. Dynamic stuff and, again, just what we were hoping for in watching Spring Heeled Jack in action.
- It’s implied that the “great disaster” foreshadowed by Spring Heeled Jack’s appareance in early Edwardian London is the pollution that will follow once automobiles fully replace horse-drawn vehicles. It’s also implied, though, that virtually any two events can be tied together via the confusion of correlation with causation …
RATING:
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Nine ibangs out of ten for our favourite episode so far! Plenty of action and mystery, some welcome character development and the whole thing moves along at a cracking pace.
Playing the Ghost: Ghost Hoaxing and Supernaturalism in late Nineteenth-Century Victoria
Dr. David Waldron, a lecturer in History and Anthropology at Australia’s Federation University, wrote this fascinating and highly detailed account of the curious craze for “playing the ghost” in 19th century Victoria.
A parallel craze took place in England during roughly the same period, as recounted in Jacob Middleton’s book Spirits of an Industrial Age: Ghost Impersonations, Spring-heeled Jack and Victorian Society. It will not be surprising to find similar “outbreaks” of DIY hauntings in many other places, just waiting for academic verification …
Houdini and Doyle, Episode 1: The Maggie’s Redress (Reviewed)
The ten-part Edwardian mystery/drama/action series Houdini and Doyle teams friendly rivals Harry Houdini (Michael Weston) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Stephen Mangan) as freelance investigators of crimes that appear to have a supernatural slant.
The first episode begins with a murder of a senior nun in one of London’s notorious Magdalene laundries, in which young women – often unmarried mothers – were effectively imprisoned and forced to work. The twist is that the murderer is said to have been the ghost of a former “Maggie”, or young resident, who had been cruelly tormented by some of the nuns and had died some six months previously.
Both arch-skeptic Houdini and true believer Doyle are fascinated by the case because of its apparently otherworldly nature, but there the similarities end. Houdini is convinced that a mortal murderer has exploited the laundry’s resident ghost story to cover their tracks, whereas Doyle is equally convinced that a restless spirit is to blame.
Essentially bullying their way in to the Scotland Yard investigation on the strength of their celebrity, they are assigned the help of the progressive and forthright Adelaide Stratton (Rebecca Liddiard), the Yard’s first female police constable, by a condescending Detective Inspector who wishes to be rid of both H&D’s amateur sleuthing and of his female constable. The Inspector, of course, has significantly underestimated Houdini, Doyle and Stratton, who combine their talents to solve the mystery behind the bloody crimes.
As it turns out, Houdini was right; the motive for murder was personal and punitive revenge. The murderer exploited the ghost story to cover her tracks and hoped to establish a legend that might, perversely, lead to less cruelty by the Magdalene nuns in the future.
Observations:
- The Maggie’s Redress is an effective procedural that strikes all the requisite beats at a rapid clip, including numerous allusions to the lives of the real Houdini and Doyle while also playing very fast and loose indeed with historical accuracy. Although Houdini and Doyle were, in reality, friends and mutual admirers, they did not actually meet until the 1920s. That friendship only lasted a few years, ending acrimoniously due to their vehement disagreements about the reality of spiritualistic phenomena. That said, their fictional relationship in the show is layered and the interplay between Doyle’s optimistic embrace of all things numinous and Houdini’s rational humanism is well portrayed.
- The character of constable Adelaide Stratton is fictional and, in real history, the first female constables in London were not appointed until the outbreak of the First World War, some fifteen years after the period portrayed in Houdini and Doyle.
- Some of the dialogue is painfully anachronistic – no more so than when Houdini seemingly coins the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” some eighty years before it actually gained any currency – but the sets, costumes and other production design elements are all effectively evocative of London circa 1900. Everything is ultimately explained, though the rationales for some of those explanations do strain credibility; if you like the show you may be inclined to forgive those trespasses, and if not, they’ll probably bother you.
All in all, The Maggie’s Redress is an enjoyable if lightweight 45 minutes’ worth of entertainment, noteworthy for its nuanced treatment of skepticism and gullibility. We look forward to the remaining nine episodes of this intriguing new series.
Rating:
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With all due ceremony, we award episode 1 of the Houdini and Doyle series a total of seven ibangs out of a possible ten (note – one full ibang deducted for “garbage in, garbage out”).