Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The Wesley Ghost #7: Psychology of the Haunting November 17, 2015

There is a long history of trying to explain poltergeist events with reference to fakery of household members; or extreme angst within the family circle. The first is absolutely credible, given the vagaries of human nature, but difficult to deploy as an explanation when the experiences were so bizarre and so, well, ‘total’ as in the Wesley haunting. How, for example, do you simultaneously get Mum to think that coins are rolling down her front and Dad that the bottles in the cupboard are exploding under the stair? The problem, meanwhile, with the angst explanation is that no one has ever even quarter credibly explained how a mental emotion can create external noises, visions or physical experiences. This is not to say that it cannot, only to say that there is no scientific hook to hang the experience on. In what follows Beach has taken the simple solution of just dismissing the two common explanations and focusing on correspondences between the haunting and the family. Four personalities emerge as potentially interesting: the father, the mother and Hetty: a fourth candidate will be driven out from the shadows tomorrow.

First, the mother. Susanna was a strong-minded individual and possibly the most impressive person in the house: she shines past her rather mediocre husband. The worldly success and the emotional difficulties of so many of her children is down, above all, to her idiosyncratic way of raising them. Oh and she seems to have had, like the ghost, Jacobite loyalties. Consider this key passage from John Wesley.

The year before King William died [1701], my father observed my mother did not say Amen to the prayer for for the king. She said she could not; for she did not believe the prince of Orange was king. He vowed he would never cohabit with her till she did. He then took his horse and rode away; nor did she hear any thing of him for a twelvemonth. (476)

The father eventually came back with his tail between his legs, but what is interesting is that Jeffrey, too, hated prayers to the king. He particularly didn’t like the word ‘amen’ at the end; there were ‘thundering knocks’ (151). It is not clear what John Wesley thought about this but he included the passage above as relevant information in a short digest. He clearly believed that this was part of the puzzle: he perhaps implies that God was punishing his father for not respecting his vow; was Jeffrey a demon for John?

Next up is Samuel Wesley himself. He was the last of the family to accept that something was happening: his first comment was the not unintelligent: ‘These boys and girls fright one another’ (476). He, in fact, only accepted that there was a real phenomenon 24 Dec, more than three weeks after the first serious events. ‘His incredulity, and especially his imputing it to us, or our lovers, made me, I own, desirous of its continuance till he was convinced,’ (136) wrote Emilia his daughter. Samuel’s wife, meanwhile, had been worried that Samuel might interpret Jeffrey as a sign of his own imminent demise! Wishful thinking? When Samuel became aware of Jeffrey he and it seemed to have had a particularly difficult relationship: ‘And [Jeffrey] had a particularly spight at my father’, while Samuel called poor Jeffrey a ‘deaf and dumb devil’. The only members of the family that Jeffrey actually attacked (pushing and shoving) was Samuel and at one point Samuel actually took out a pistol to shoot Jeffrey before he was gently talked down by a fellow churchman: Jeffrey also loved imitating Samuel’s knock in a diabolical fashion. This contrasts with Susanna who was able to negotiate a truce, after having asked Jeffrey not to disturb her during her devotions from 5-6: a request that Jeffrey respected.  Another fascinating point is that Jeffrey died away when Samuel left the house 1 Jan and seems not to have returned for three weeks: unfortunately we do not know how long Samuel stayed away.

A younger candidate is Hetty, then aged 19. She was perhaps the most brilliant intellectually of the Wesley children: but she was also the most difficult for her parents to manage as her later and catastrophic love life would go to show. (To an outsider it looks as if Hetty needed more freedom than the rather uptight Wesley family was ready to give.) Why does Hetty stand out among the children? Well, there are several references to Jeffrey being fascinated by her: ‘My sister Hetty, I find, was more particularly troubled’; and again ‘[Jeffrey] never followed me, as it did my sister Hetty’ (138). Hetty it seems did write about Jeffrey (139), but unfortunately the letter does not survive. Consider though this passage from Emilia that seems to put Hetty at the epicenter (or is this just an overactive imagination?):

My sisters in the paper chamber had heard noises, and told me of them, but I did not much believe, till one night, about a week after the first groans were heard, which was the beginning just after the clock had struck ten, I went downstairs to lock the doors, which I always do. Scarce had I [Emilia] gone up the best stairs, when I heard a noise, like a person throwing down a vast coal in the middle of the fore kitchen, and all the splinters seemed to fly about from it. I was not much frightened, but went to my sister Sukey, and we together went all over the low rooms, but there was nothing out of order. Our dog was fast asleep, and our only cat in the other end of the house. No sooner was I got up stairs, and undressing for bed, but I heard a noise among many bottles that stand under the best stairs, just like the throwing of a great stone among them. Which had broke them all to pieces. This made me hasten to bed: but my sister Hetty, who sits always to wait on my father going to bed, was still sitting on the lowest step on the garret stairs, the door being shut at her back, when soon after there came down the stairs behind her, something like a man, in a loose night gown trailing after him, which made her fly rather than run to me in the nursery.

So Hetty waited on her father as he was going to bed, sitting still on a stair: the noises began at night in the first phase. The man coming down the stairs behind her could almost be a mirror image of her father coming up the stairs… Or is this all too much? Note that Hetty may have taken up her mother’s cause with the prayers: though we have no record of the children’s early sympathies: they were all good Tories later in life. However, there is another and better candidate and tomorrow we will rip the mask from the true perpetrator of the haunting…

Anyone interested in the original documents they have been usefully put together in a single pdf document. There are about sixty pages and the file weighs in at about 15 mb.

The tag for these posts is Wesley Ghost: all comments collected on Wesley 1.