The Doppleganger and Ghosts of Lower Gornal February 17, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Lower Gornal is a village in Staffordshire close to Dudley. The following news story appeared in 1881 and relates to what Beach has tentatively termed ghost riots. That ghosts are seen is, of course, absolutely par for the course, particularly back in the nineteenth century when fairy sightings were occasionally reported in local newspapers. But what is special about community ghost hysteria is that a wider group, sometimes the entire community, are caught up in the excitement. Beach has a handlist of a dozen of these events and the hysteria ranges from unofficial curfews to miners patrolling the streets in an attempt to lynch the ghost in question. This is an intermediate case:
Great alarm has been occasioned in Lower Gornal district in consequence of its being alleged that the ghost of the convict Martland, who attempted to murder the Rev. J. Rooker the vicar of the parish, has been seen in the churchyard. Scores of people assert that ghosts are seen in the churchyard every night, the result being that hundreds of persons are afraid to be near the church at night. The choir and other persons are so terrified that they refuse to go to the church unless protected by the police. For several nights the vicarage has been guarded by people who are afraid that the vicar will be murdered. The people are very superstitious. This morning a woman asked the vicar to cut a turf four inches square from a grave in which lay a man who could not be at ease because of a guilty conscience, and stated that the putting of the turf on the communion table would cause all the ghosts to disappear. (1881)
There are a couple of interesting points here. First, why the confusion between the ghost of the convict Martland and ‘the ghosts’ more generally? It sounds as if ‘the ghosts’ are a recent not a longstanding problem. Have they somehow been called into existence by the treacherous Martland? Are they his allies? Second, who the hell is Martland? Well, in 1879 Rooker, vicar since 1848, had had a run in with the head of his choir (note the importance given to the choir in the story above) one Charles Hartland (sic: newspaper editors in the nineteenth century had almost as little fact checking skills as bloggers in the twenty-first). Hartland shot Rooker. Rooker miraculously survived the shooting (though two bullets lodged in his head!) and Hartland was sent to prison for twelve years of hard labour: the general feeling in the locality was that Hartland had not been himself and many signed a petition for leniency including Rooker, a much loved village personality. Another source, incidentally, reveals that one of his parishioneers accidentally attacked the vicar believing him to be a ghost… Rooker seems to have been one of life’s fall guys. One curiosity in all this is that as of the census 1881 Hartland was still alive and in December there is a record of an attempt to have Hartland’s sentence reduced again. In other words this wasn’t Hartland’s ghost but a doppleganger!
Other dopplegangers: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
