Victorian Urban Legends: Story-Killers! August 27, 2022
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my just released book: The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. This legend (with full references) will appear in a second volume. If anyone can fill in missing pieces or offer other sources… I’ll be grateful and you’ll be credited. drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com. Note that this month there is also a podcast on Victorian Urban Legends at Boggart and Banshee***
There was, from the eighteenth century onwards, much concern over what a frightening story could do to the young. Addison, for example, watched, in the very early 1700s, a group in the kitchen listen to a ghost yarn: ‘I took notice in particular [during the tale telling] of a little boy, who was so attentive to every story, that I am mistaken if he ventures to go to bed by himself this twelve-month.’[1] By the nineteenth century there were sometimes claims that stories, by inducing fear, could damage young children permanently. One book for infants published in 1849 in Halifax raged:
It is a very foolish, as well as a very wrong thing, to fill the minds of children, with old women’s stories about ghosts, hobgoblins, and raw-head and bloody-bones, &c for two reasons… because it leaves injurious impressions on the mind, which exercise their influence upon it in after years, in opposition to both better sense, and maturer judgment. [2]
And how these children suffered! Some of the Irish nationalist, Charles Parnell’s peculiarities were explained by the fact that his nurse, ‘a Mrs. Tuppeny… scared him with horrible stories; and he never got over it’.[3] The hero of one nineteenth-century French novel describes, meanwhile, how the supernatural tales told by the family servant: ‘little by little destroyed my spirit, and turned me into the unfortunate coward I became.’[4] In the same way that the penny-dreadfuls were believed to turn children to a life of crime, so supernatural tales could stunt their intellectual and spiritual growth.[5]
In the later nineteenth century, there was the idea, though, that these stories were so powerful that they could, in some circumstances, kill those who listened to them. In a remarkable short fiction, published in 1871, a young man accidentally kills the woman he loves by telling her and a group of friends a supernatural tale. ‘She has fainted. Bring a light. Some one get a candle, or anything….’[6] There are, in the newspapers, numerous examples, in the same period, of children being, so it was claimed, killed by supernatural tales. Some can be connected to the bogey-man tradition. John Widdowson has shown in his writing that, in the English-speaking world, everything from policemen to Jack the Ripper, the fairies to mermaids were deployed to scare children.[7]
In 1831 a nurse threatened a child on going to bed with a ‘boakie’ (a Scottish bogie) who she claimed lived in the corner of the room:
On her return she found the young creature quite dead, with its eyes open as if staring at the identical corner of the room whence she threatened the boakie would come. Though dead, an expression of the utmost terrification was visible on the child’s countenance. It died of fright.[8]
In 1859 an eleven-year-old in Bristol told a three-year-old charge, about ‘the black man’ who lived in the coal-hole. ‘The child became frightened and was seized with convulsions which resulted in her death.’[9] In 1865 one girl (unnamed and no location given) was told a bogey man story and then died on seeing a clergyman in his surplice. She ‘naturally… took the clergyman for that bogey’ who would, she believed, take her away in his sack.[10] In 1871 there is a news report about the death of a child in Lancashire. A neighbour’s son had frightened Ellen Macnamara ‘by telling her that there were ‘boggarts’ in the coal hole’. ‘The fright affected the child very seriously; she was seized with vomiting fits, and during the night became insensible, and a few hours afterwards died’.[11] In 1881 death struck in London. A ten-year-old Kate Weedon, ‘expired under very remarkable circumstances through fright’. She had been reading the prophecies of Mother Shipton and had learnt that the world was about to end.
Her mother told her it was all nonsense, but this had not the least effect upon her, and when she went to bed at half-past ten she was still crying and wringing her hands, saying that she knew the end of the world would come in the night.
She died in the early hours.[12]
Note that most of these deaths really took place. Reports were often based on the Coroners’ findings: findings that would bemuse modern doctors. For instance, in 1887, Jane Halsall, who lived at Southport (Lancashire), had been told stories of a ghost by her young friends. Going home:
She took hold of [her father’s] hand and turned back with him, saying at the same time, ‘Father, there is a ghost at Liverpool, and it is coming towards Southport.’ Witness, knowing her nervous disposition, replied, ‘Nothing of the sort;’ and deceased then said, ‘The children say so.’ On arriving home, she said the same thing to her mother, who replied that ‘the ghost is dead and buried.’… About four o’clock the following morning he heard her vomiting, and he got up and gave her a drink of water…. She complained [the next day] of pains in her head, and about six hours before her death she said, ‘The ghost is coming.’ Dr. Hawksley said he was called in to see the deceased about eleven o’clock on Thursday night… Having heard the history of the case from the father, he was certain that congestion of the brain was brought on by shock to the system consequent upon fright…. He had given a certificate that the primary cause of death was fright. The Coroner, addressing the Jury, said it was common knowledge that in the newspapers recently there had been accounts of some person who very foolishly ‘personated a ghost’ in the neighbourhood of Liverpool, and before that in the county of Cheshire, and it seemed that by some means or other the deceased had become acquainted with the fact, and had been told by other children that the ‘ghost’ was coming to Southport….[13]
[1] Addison, The Works, III, 37.
[2] Riley, Juvenile tales, 92. All this was rather undermined by the fact that the author had just told a frightening ghost story to his young charges!
[3] ‘Mr. Parnell’s Superstitions’.
[4] Leclerc, Coward, 40.
[5] Andrew, The Boy Detective, 56-57.
[6] ‘What a Ghost Story Did’.
[7] Widdowson, Don
[8] ‘Danger’.
[9] ‘Child Frightened to Death’.
[10] ‘Child Frightened to Death’.
[11] ‘A Child’.
[12] ‘Mother Shipton’s Prophecies’.
[13] ‘Frightened to Death’.
