Ghost Hangs Four in New Orleans January 22, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Here is an American story (of who knows what veracity) that got sucked across the Atlantic and into the British newspapers: WDP, 22 Nov 1872, 3.
Few positions in life can be imagined more disagreeable than that of being imprisoned in a haunted cell in police station. The New Orleans Times tells a most unpleasant story of a ghost-infested cell in the Fourth Precinct police station in that city. It appears that several years ago a little old woman named Ann Murphy [generic name often used in ghost stories?] committed suicide by hanging herself this cell, and since that event no fewer than thirteen persons shut in the cell have attempted to destroy themselves in a similar manner, four of these attempts being attended with fatal results.
So a supernatural cell, journalist’s fantasy or an indictment of New Orleans’ finest?
One of those lately cut down before life was extinct was a girl named Mary Taylor, who on recovering consciousness declared that while lying by the door of the cell she was aroused by little old white woman, dressed in a faded calico dress ‘with brown jeans and josey,’ no stockings, and downtrodden slippers, with a faded handkerchief tied round her head. Her faded dress was bound with a sort of reddish brown tape, and her hand was long, faded, and wrinkled, while on the fourth ringer of the left hand was a plain thin gold ring. ‘This little woman,’ said the girl, beckoned me to get up, and impelled me by some mysterious power to tear my dress strips, place one end strip round my neck, and tie the other to the bars. I lifted my feet from the floor and fell. I thought I was choking, a thousand lights seemed to flash before my eyes, and I forgot all until I was myself in the room with the doctors and police bending over me. It was not until then that I really comprehended what I had done, and I was, I believe, under kind of trance or influence all the time, over which I had no control.’
Of course, in a country where suicide was a crime this was also a convenient alibi.
Mary Taylor had never heard of the suicide of Ann Murphy, whose appearance, according to the police, exactly tallied with the description given by the girl. Others having complained in like manner of the ghostly occupant of the cell, the police, to test the real facts of the case, placed a night lodger who had but just arrived in the city in this cheerful apartment. Being thoroughly tired and worn out, he fell asleep immediately, but soon afterwards rushed into the office in a state of terrible alarm. He too had been visited by the little old woman, and wisely declined to sleep another hour in the station.
The story appears in Elliott O Donnell’s Dangerous Ghosts, which, had it not been published almost a century before, would have been a fatal objection. Any parallels to this weird little story: drbeachcombing At yahoo dot com
