Evening Star Newspaper, December 28, 1930, Page 67

Music Art PART 7. HIS Christmas season finds Britain ex- periencing an unparalleled boom in ghosts. Innumerable new ones are reported from all over the country, while during the last six weeks most “of the old established ghosts have been reported on the job. Anne Boleyn has gone wailing down the haunted corridor at Hampton Court. The little old lady in black who once frightened a man to death (he lies in the burial ground of the adjacent church) is again haunting Rufford Abbey, the jmagnificent seat of the Earls of Savile. In ornamental iron case in ancient Smithills Hall, the martyr’s footprint has been seen to bleed. The Duchess of York's forefather, Earl Beardie, first Lord Glamis, who died in 1454, s prowling his ancestral castle. Bishop Roger of Salisbury has been seen stalking the ruins of Sherborne Castle, as has been his wont for the last nine centuries. Glimpses of the ill- omened Golden Boy have been had in the ghost room of Corby Castle, and the drums which foretell the death of an Ogilvie, Earls of Airlle, &have been heard in Cortachy Castle. A domestic has caught sight of the Duchess of Mazarin, who was Charles II's mistréss, shamelessly flitting through her old apartments in St. James' Palace, and the fearful tube ghost (described by Swifte, the keeper of the crown jewels, who saw it in 1860, as “a cylindrical figure, like a glass tube, seemingly about the thickness of my arm, and hovering between the ceiling and the table”; it passed behind his wife, who crouched down and shrieked: “Oh, Lord, it has seized me!”), has eddied across a courtyard of the Tower of London and nearly scared a sentry out of his wits. Even the Lamp- ton Worm, that fabulous monster, has been heard by gquaking villagers shifting and tight- ening its enormous coils ’'round the hill by Lampton Castle. Rationalists will explain the present epidemic by the anxiety neurosis of the island folk just ' now. There was a similar epidemic during the World War, when all the old ghosts began to walk again and a multitude of new ones (among then. the celebrated angels of Mons) sprang up (or down, as the case might be). Clairvoyants, ghdSt hunters, spiritualists and other vested interests seem prepared to agree as to the anxiety neurosis, but argue that when people are worried, restless, nervous, business not going well and so on, they become more sen- sitive to occult presences, the veil which sep- arates us from the spirit world being thinned. ‘There may be something in this, for it is re- . markable that fat and genial types never see ghosts and are not seeing them even now, while renowned believers like Sir Oliver Lodge and the late A. Conan Doyle do not get on terms of intimate acquaintance with spirits until long past the robust or animal period of their lives and within sight of .the end of the allotted mor- al span. Myself, I prefer to echo Madame de Def- R fand, who, you will remember, when asked by & gentleman whether she believed in ghosts, geplied: “No, but I am afraid of them.” ABANDONING conjecture and speculation, let me draw you closer to these haunted castles environed amid drear landscapes, these spectral corridors in the guest wings of ancestral mansions, these rambling old houses surrounded by gnarled trees through whose bare branches the storm winds sound like screaming voices, filling the folk around the fire within with un- named apprehensions. It is a little difficult to make a choice among so many spooks clamoring for attention, but we might do worse than start at the top of the social tree with the Windsor Castle ghost, which was one of the first to bob up this year. The story breaks in November with the screams of a housemaid in a corridor off the blue drawing room. The King and Queen had left the day before for Buckingham Palace. A The Sundiy St Magasine WASHINGTON, D.- C, DECEMBER 28, 1930. By 'T. Porter Wood. footman came running ‘and found the girl in* a faint on the floor. When she recovered her « senses she asserted that a huge white figure had suddenly loomed at her from a recess in the wall as she went peacefully along with her feather dusting whisk. It had made a menac- ing rush at_her. * Common sense suggests a curtain blown in by an abrupt gust of wind except that this cor- ridor was an inner one without windows. Some scepticism is expressed by authorities on the ground that although the King’s huge old castle on Thames-side at Windsor is notoriously haunted, all the spooks are well known and well defined ones, and there is no record of an undefined shape more than life size, nor is there a recorded instance of any of theacastle ghosts being so ill-mannered as to offer violence, par- ticularly to an inoffensive menial of lowly sta- tion. King Charles I and Queen Elizabeth are the two most regular apparitions at Windsor. The late Empress Frederick has left it on record that she was reading in the library during the day, and, becoming aware of somebody else in the vast chamber, looked up to see the figure of a cavalier standing by her side. His face, S " she said, bore a strong resemblance to pictures of the unfortunate Stuart King who lost his head. The singular thing was that this cavalier was not carrying his head under his arm, as all ghosts of Charles I are supposed to do. On the contrary, this ghost was calm and hand- some and in no way frightening, and after standing quite still beside her for a few mo- ments, he vanished. Another frequent visitor to the castle, Prin- cess Beatrice, aunt of the present King, on sev- eral occasions has seen the spirit of Elizabeth, the virgin Queen, standing motionless on the terrace. On one of these occasions the prin- cess’ black cat also apparently saw the ghost, for he took sudden alarm and jumped out of a window and broke his leg. Then there is a strong rumor, which the re- porters so far cannot get confirmed or denied, that the ghost of Glamis Castle has not only appeared again, but is obstinately refusing to take himself off. Night after night, it is said, he visits the crypt of the castle. If you saw this old crypt, built of huge granite blocks, set er, screaming, back to prison. 4 with heavy pieces of old furniture, the bare walls hung with old clan shields, spears, clay- mores and the heads of animals slain in chases of long ago, you would not be surprised that people see ghosts here. “O’'er all these hung the shadow of a fear; A sense of mystery the spirit daunted, And said, as plain as whisper in the ear, The place is haupted!” Tx-ns particular ghost is a family affair and in the nature of a skeleton in the cupboard of the Duchess of York’s family—a family more ancient than the King of England’s. The legend —one of several—runs that Earl Beardie, a notorious gambler and Sabbath breaker of ghe fifteenth century, lost Glamis itself to a baron guest at card play in the crypt, and foully slew him to avoid paying the debt. Something thereupon happened, the exact nature of which is known, generation after generation, to only three living people; the living Earl of Strath- more, his heir, and the steward of the castle (the stewardship passes on from father to son). Legend again has it that on a certain night each year, and at a stated hour, these three men who alone know the dark secret visit the crypt at night, and there witness the sight of Earl Beardie replaying that card game with his Feattres 24 PAGES. 1 he Boom in English Ghosts All the Old Established Spooks Have Reappeared and Many New Ones Have Been Reported Recently in the Biggest Boom in Phantoms Britain Has Known in Many a Year. ghostly companion. He is doomed to play odf this night every year until the day of judgment, If there is anything in the story which exe cited the Village of Glamis, the spectral Earl Beardie has either mixed up-his dates, got tired of the crypt and started flitting about ethes parts of the castle or i8 working overtime witlg the cards. The tales that came into the London newse paper offices over the wires from Scotland werg closely followed by news which took reporters and a couple of psychic experts up to the Elizabethan mansion of the old Boynton fame ily in Yorkshire—scmewhat to the annoyance of the Boyntons, it appears, since these old families do not like exposing their private ghosts to the public gaze. The Boyntons, how= ever, have only themselves to blame. So proud are they cf“the family ghost that they keep the gruesome relic which perpetuates its legend under a securely fastened glass case right in the entrance hall. The relic is a skull, and the skull is supe posed to be that of a former female member of the family. The lady suffered a terrible wrong which has never been avenged—it is not likely to be avenged now, the perpetrator having died in his bed 300 years ago, and acts of vengeance against his great-great-great-great-and-some more grandson being prohibited in this effete age. However, the lady insisted that until she was avenged her skull should adorn the entrance hall to remind those who should have avenged her and did not, of tMeir everlasting shame. Passions have died down and the original cause of the trouble being almost forgotten, a skeptl= cal Boynton said in effect that he was tired of seeing the old lady’s head lying about, and di= rected that it should be buried in the garden, That night, screams from the hall! The housew hold rushed down. There lay the skull in the middle of the floor. It was silent now, and there was no doubt that it had worked itself out of its grave and rolled from the garden to the hall; it had been screaming to be restored to its proper place, and would go on screaming if it were not humored. The frightened head of the house humored it. Subsequent Boyntons ‘said that an old family retainer, scandalized by his master's contempt for the legend and the curse, had dug up the skull himself and done the screaming; but that is by the way. The present story is that the skull has been screaming again, but why, no one seems to know—and any one calling at the - Boynton mansion i norder to put the ques< gon now is likely to meet with a hostile recep- on. Two of Henry VIII's six wives, Catherine Howard and Jane Seymopr, regularly haunt Hampton Court, the magnificent palace on Thames-side between London and Windsor which Cardinal Wolsey built for himself, but tactfully presented to Henry when he found that King thought him too grand and intended to grab it anyway. Both ghosts have appeared again this month. Catherine has been seen flitting down oné of the painted corridors, although she is supe posed always to re-enact, at midnight, the tragic scene that she actually played in real life, when she unsuccessfully appealed to King Henry that she should not share the fate of Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded. Anne herself has been seen no less than four times this season. The last person who claima to have seen her was a gentleman who was dise " covered in the Haunted Gallery at 10 o’clock at night and handed over to the police. His story, was that he was a spiritualist who had secreted himself in the palace to test the truth of the ghost legend. As he had no housebreaking tools and nothing was known against him, the magistrate fined him and let him go. He told reporters he had seen Anne, but had heen in- terrupted just as he was going to talk to her. She is London’s most tragic khost. On Ail Saints’ day in 1541 Henry VIII and his Queen, Anne, were kneeling together in the chapel at Hampton Court when Archbishop Cranmer slipped in silently and placed in the hand of the praying King the paper the latter was expecting—the document containing evidence of adultery and incest by Anne, the evidence that was going to condemn her and elear Hepry's path to his next marriage. The Queen was led away at once and locked up, but a day or two later, on November 2, she eluded her jailers and ran down tkz gallery, where the King wts again at mass. Just as she reached the door of the chapel ttc soldie.s caught her and dragged her, screaming, down the long gallery back t0 her prison. So evory, November her despairing wraith returns to the scene of her agony and goes wailling elong the old gallery, its flimsy white garments fluttering in the night air, DIBCINDING to spooks of the lower soci:l strata, we may note that the restless spiric of Jean Donbleau is walking again this vear, Jean is the French sailor who was murdered by south coast smugglers in the days of George IIk He is an erratic visitant, and until this visih had been quiet for 15 years. News of hig