Wesley Ghost #9: Fairy, Witch or Demon? November 24, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
In previous posts Jeffrey has been explained by this blogger as a product of life in a strictly regulated religious setting, where adolescent girls were yoked to Samuel Wesley’s strict high Anglican ideals. There is a very good chance that this is the key to understanding the poltergeist events and that some sort of poltergeist energy was created in the house. But in this final post Beach wants to consider how Jeffrey was understood by those who lived in the house and what this tells us about other similar events in eighteenth-century Britain. Leaving aside the rational explanations: for example that Jeffrey was rats or weasels (125, weasels !?!) or a discontented servant seven possibilities emerged:
(i) a punishment of God: John Wesley, describing his father’s vowing to leave his mother and not return until she had decided to loyally pray for a king, implies that God punished Samuel for not respecting that oath. Much was made of the fact that Jeffrey interrupted the family at the moment of the royal prayer.
(ii) a demon: Samuel Wesley preferred to see Jeffrey as a ‘deaf and dumb devil’ and certainly insulted and once almost shot Jeffrey in the spirit of muscular Christianity: get thee behind me, Satan etc.
(iii) a house ghost: Jeffrey ‘was the name of one who had died in the house’, though elsewhere we are told that Emily had given the name. The very fact that we learn nothing about ghost ‘Jeffrey’ suggests that this was more rumour than fact: or possibly the reluctance of the adult Wesleys to entertain the notion?*
(iv) a dead family member: Samuel at one point actually asked Jeffrey whether he was his son Samuel (the implication being that Samuel the younger had died and was now trying to communicate with the family). Susanna likewise wrote ‘thinking either you [Samuel the younger] was dead, or one of your brothers by some misfortune killed’. She also wondered if it was not her brother, then in India, who had unexpectedly died.**
(v) a witch’s spell: Emily noted that there had recently been a case of witchcraft in a local town and that her father had spoken in church against cunning men. She, thus, reasoned that this was maleficum launched against a Godly family. Whether this meant that (in her mind) a demon had been unleashed or whether this was just magic would depend on her understanding of eighteenth-century cunning folk.
(vi) a treasure spirit: Samuel the younger was impressed by the fact that his mother had heard (and possibly felt) coins running down her front on the stairs. He wrote: ‘Have you dug in the place where the money seemed poured at your feet’ (132). Treasure seeking through spirits was common in the late middle ages and well into the eighteenth century.
(vii) Susanna wondered whether it was not a premonition of her husband’s death.
The very number of different possibilities is a reminder of how different filters in different people, different places and different periods produce different interpretations. In one household seven overlapping keys were put on a key ring for understanding Jeffrey. If these same events had taken place elsewhere in the island other points would have been added. For example, if these events had taken place in Lancashire, in the north-west of England, they would very possibly have been blamed on a boggart (a house fairy): boggarts were said, like Jeffrey, to make great noises suggesting breaking objects when actually nothing was moved; the nicer boggarts were said to sweep, something that Jeffrey is claimed to have attempted on one occasion. Beach has found it interesting that in writing these posts he has constantly had to check himself from writing ‘ghost’, the most culturally obvious solution for a modern Briton:* the tag he thoughtlessly gave the series was ‘the Wesley ghost’. Yet this was not a foregone conclusion in 1716: in fact, it seems to have been a minority opinion.
Other solutions or reflections: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
*Stevenson (197) records this story from ‘a respectable authority’: The [Wesley] family having retired one evening rather earlier than usual, one of the maids, who was finishing her work in the back-kitchen, heard a noise, and presently saw a man working himself through a trough which communicated between the sink-stone within, and the cistern on the outside of the house. Astonished and terrified beyond measure, she in a sort of desperation, seized the cleaver, which lay on the sink-stone, and gave him a violent, and probably a mortal blow on the head; she then uttered a dismal shriek, and fell senseless on the floor. Mr. Wesley being alarmed by the noise, supposing that the house was beset by robbers, rose up, caught up the fire-irons of his study, and began to throw them with violence on the stairs, calling out Tom ! Jack ! Harry, &c. as loud as he could bawl; designing thus to intimidate the robbers. Who the man was that received the blow (or who were his accomplices) was never discovered. His companions had carried him off: footsteps and marks of blood were traced to some distance, but not far enough to find who the villains were, nor from whence they came.’ Stevenson further writes ‘I give this story just as I received it, which, though respectably related, I have not been able to trace to any authentic source.’ If this is the best the Wesley family could do in trying to establish a ghost, then it sounds like the ghost Jeffrey is not based on any particular death in the house.
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.
** Stevenson implies that Susanna’s brother in India (with whom the family had difficult relations), Samuel Annesley, disappeared around this time (197). This is not the case. He died in 1732.
*** For the record I do not believe in them!
