THE CURSE OF THE MARY CELESTE

A period painting of  the `Mary Celeste`

It's the stuff of maritime legend: a ship sighted in the distance, hailed without response, and boarded to reveal a vessel under full sail, its wheel creaking aimlessly, cabin doors slamming open and shut in the wind, and ... not a soul onboard. 

On Dec. 4, 1872, it actually happened. The Mary Celeste was discovered between the Azores and Portugal—her crew vanished without a trace of a struggle, the ship still fully provisioned. What calamity befell the ship remains a mystery. A final log entry, on Nov. 24, showed no hint of distress. The cabin of Capt. Benjamin Briggs was untouched, right down to the sewing machine and parlor melodeon belonging to his wife and infant daughter; the child's ghostly indentation remained visible on a bed. The crew must have "left in a great hurry," reported the boarding party, for their pipes and tobacco were still there—and no sailor, they noted, willingly abandons ship without his pipe.

Captain Briggs

Theories on the cause of the disappearance have ranged from cargo fumes to mutiny to (inevitably) alien abduction. The Mary Celeste's fate inspired fictional solutions in an Arthur Conan Doyle story (which blamed a race war), a 1935 Hammer horror film (a hook-armed Bela Lugosi), and a Dr. Who episode (Daleks, of course.) 

What's not as well-known is that the Mary Celeste was also at the center of a second mystery. The disconcerting disappearance of its crew notwithstanding, the Mary Celeste still had plenty of life left in her, and soon went back into service. Thirteen years and 17 hapless owners later, Mary was mostly infamous for being in poor shape and for losing money on runs from Boston to Africa and the West Indies. It was merely one final indignity when she wrecked off Haiti in January 1885, slamming squarely into Rochelois Reef, a known hazard. The ship didn’t sink, but its hopelessly splintered remains would never leave the reef. Capt. Gilman Parker declared the cursed ship a loss, and then went ashore to sell the salvage rights to a load of ale, cutlery, and shoes for $500. That's where the story might have ended—except that police showed up at the captain's door in Boston three months later. The Mary Celeste, they charged, was a 282-ton, fully-rigged insurance scam.

The July 1885 trial of Capt. Parker and the ship's co-owners, now buried in the Boston Globe archives, offers a fascinating glimpse into a Gilded Age flimflam. Laying out charts and totting up blackboard figures in a broiling Boston courtroom, prosecutors revealed a chain of scams that reached from Haiti back to the alleyways of their own city. 

Capt. Parker might have pulled it off, too, except that he'd gotten greedy: Not content to rip off just his insurers, he also tried to con the local salvager in Haiti. The salvager hadn't found anything near the 125 casks of Bass ale promised on the ship's manifest, and the few he did locate weren't exactly good drinking. Called to the stand, a Boston bottler revealed they were moldy blanks with Bass labels pasted to them, and filled with "ullage"—bottom-of-barrel runoff from smashed and leaking bottles. The bottler hadn't even bothered filling many of them; some were “half full, some a third full, and some just enough to wet the bottle."

The rest of the cargo was similarly suspect. The 975 barrels of "New Fortune Herring"? That was actually 780 barrels of rotten fish that stank so badly that one fish merchant said it was good only "for fertilizers." Wooden barrels of "Fine" butter proved to be rank "slush." The Haiti-bound food cargo was so foul that one conspirator was overheard musing, "If these n— eat that fish and drink that beer, they will all be dead." 

A crate supposed to contain $1,000 in cutlery, when pried open, revealed $50 worth of dog collars. Boxes of "women's high-button boots" were old galoshes. The ship and its cargo, covered by five insurers for a whopping $34,000, were hardly worth the kerosene necessary to burn the wreck. Capt. Parker, in short, was in deep trouble.

"The defense lawyers were wild," one investigator later marveled of Parker's shambolic team. Parker's attorney cited famed Massachusetts eccentric "Lord" Timothy Dexter—a late-18th-century merchant who supposedly shipped mittens and warming pans to the West Indies—to assert that the Mary Celeste's cargo belonged to a splendid tradition of crazy-like-a-fox speculations. If the vulpine side of the simile was left unexplained, the crazy part was easy to spot. Haitians didn't typically buy new Bass ale or salted herring, let alone rotten beer and fish.

"They say the goods were overinsured. Suppose they were. It is a common thing to overinsure," sputtered Parker's attorney. And if the crew said the goods were worthless, well, everyone knew they liked to tell stories. "Spinning a yarn is a sailor's phrase," he insisted.

Perhaps yarn-spinning could also explain the crew members who saw Capt. Parker toss the ship's papers overboard, proclaiming "They're gone. No one will know what's in them." And maybe it accounted for the first mate's claim that he'd dissuaded Parker from a plan to wreck by the more dangerous Turks Islands, pleading, "For God's sake don't pile her up there; we shall all be drownded."

But it wasn't so easy for the defense to explain a letter in the captain's hand, dated two months after the wreck, which the first mate also produced:

E. Boston, March 5, '85

I wood advise you not to know to much a bout cargo fer the shipers have put in their bill of Invoice to the adgestors and the protest and Log Book as that stand is all that I want. You will be cald over to the Insurance look out you do not get in the Roung track by knoing to much.

G.C. Parker

After days of testimony, now it was the jury who knew too much. They had to decide whether Parker's plot deserved a conviction on the maritime charge of barratry—deliberate destruction of a vessel—a crime then punishable by death.

After counts and recounts, the jury returned with a shocker: They’d deadlocked, 7-5, with the majority in favor of conviction. The five holdouts, it seemed, just couldn't bring themselves to send a man to the gallows over rotten fish and bad butter. Three years later, and perhaps with the abandoned prosecution of Capt. Parker in mind, a Massachusetts congressman worked to amend the barratry law so that it would no longer be a capital offense. 

"The penalty of death would be simply shocking," he admitted to a House committee. "In many cases juries refused to convict, even when guilt was proved, as the only way to prevent a greater evil."

But the doomed ship seemed to carry its own sentence: Nearly everyone else indicted in the conspiracy went bust, and Capt. Parker died under obscure circumstances just three months after his trial. They might have taken heed of the fate of David Cartwright, a previous owner who had already lost a small fortune on the Mary Celeste. "Of all the unlucky vessels I ever heard of," he would recall, "she was the most unlucky."
Source: Slate.com

CHARLES DICKENS AND THE SUPERNATURAL

Dickens and the Supernatural

According to his biographer John Forster, Charles Dickens loved a good ghost story. Indeed, Forster says, he had "something of a hankering after them".

Of course, we already associate Dickens with ghosts thanks to A Christmas Carol, but his more general interest in the supernatural is less well known.

Dickens enjoyed scary stories from a young age and read The Terrific Register as a teenager, a penny weekly magazine featuring macabre tales of murder, incest, ghosts and cannibalism. Elements of the supernatural appear in a number of his works.

 Now the British Library has put together an exhibition examining Dickens' interest in the otherworldly to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens birth in 2012, looking at how he used the supernatural in his works and set it in the context of the scientific and philosophical thoughts of the time.

Victorian England had a fascination with mortality, death and the macabre. Spiritualism had reached 19th century England from America and people were interested in ghostly activity. But along with this fascination for the dark and unexplained, there was also a growth in science and a new understanding of how the mind worked.

Dickens himself believed that all supernatural phenomena must have rational explanations and he was interested in psychology and animal magnetism or "mesmerism" - a popular practice in the 19th century of inducing a trance-like state, similar to hypnosis, by waving hands over the body.

Among the items in the exhibition is a letter from Dickens to his wife referring to a disagreement they had had over a lady he had been treating for a nervous disorder with mesmerism and an article called "well authenticated rappings", in which Dickens makes fun of spiritualists for believing that spirits would waste their time conveying pointless messages full of mistakes.

A programme of events to accompany the exhibition will include talks by the well-known biographer, Claire Tomalin, author of Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit, writer and broadcaster, John Bowen, and Victorian magic tricks from David Weeks of The Magic Circle.

There is also a lecture series for schools on Gothic and 19th century literature in relation to Dickens.


Exhibition: A Hankering after Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural, British Library, London, until March 4 2012
Open 10am-6pm (8pm Tuesday, 5pm Saturday, 11am-5pm Sunday). Admission free.


Source: Culture24

A VISIT TO A HAUNTED NORFOLK HOUSE

Well, eventually I got there! Here is the video of the visit and preliminary investigation of Thorpe Lodge, the headquarters of Broadlands District Council in Norwich, Norfolk.
The video has been abridged to just under 15 minutes, and covers much of the activity which was recorded to camera.

As you will see, there was an incredible amount of E.V.P and other anomalies which in the period we were there investigating is quite a record amount of activity.
It was great to meet some of the team from the council as well as John Frary our contact for the night.
We are hoping to return there in January 2012 to carry out a full night investigation of this Regency period property.

This is the shape of how I saw the woman`s dress on the staircase. The only difference is that it had a heavier collar at the back  I couldn`t say what colour or pattern it was.

Special thanks to John and Josie Lewin who arranged for our visit.
If you enjoyed this video, please `like` here on this post and on Youtube if you have an account.
Your support means a great deal in the long hours employed in travelling to locations, as well as the even longer time involved in editing and producing this work.

Lastly, feel free to share this video on your Facebook page, Blog or website. But please use the embed code from the Youtube page or for Facebook the html link from this page.
Thanking you all in advance for your support and patronage of my work in 2011!

IS THIS A GHOSTLY APPARITION CAUGHT IN YORK CASTLE?

A mysterious ghostly shape has been caught on camera at one of Britain's oldest castles.
The bizarre apparition, which cynics believe is a plume of cigarette smoke, appeared in a photo of the chapel in Clifford's Tower in the remains of York Castle.

York local Karen Cussons lent her camera to her brother's girlfriend for the couple's visit to Clifford's Tower in December and was mystified by the smoke-like shape when the photo was developed.

She said: "Of all the photos she took in the tower, this is the only one with a strange image on it.

"There was no one else in the room and my brother was standing behind her when she took the picture."

Clifford's Tower has a macabre history - in 1190 around 150 Jews hiding in the tower were massacred or committed suicide when they were surrounded by a violent mob.

Local folklore claims the walls of Clifford's Tower "bleeds" blood red on the anniversary of the massacre.

Many ghost-hunting groups have spent the night at Clifford's Tower and claim they have felt cold in the chapel - the same room the photo was taken in.

Many ghost-hunting experts claim York is the most haunted town in Britain and is a stop on York's Original Ghost Walk.

Source: Daily Mail

THE BLOODY TOWER AND IT`S GHOSTLY HISTORY

The Tower of London

 The history of the Tower of London



One of the oldest and most persistently haunted locations in London has to be the Tower of London complex, nestling on the banks of the River Thames.
The Tower has almost a  1000 year history, and was used at various times to imprison and kill those that displeased royalty or state.

 The site was originally built by William the Conqueror in around 1080, as a massive stone tower fortress to help maintain his control of his new English territories.

During this time, the main structure, the White Tower, was completed in 1100 AD.
This tower`s original purpose was accomodation and defence for royalty, however from the 14th to the 19th century, it was used as a military storehouse.

Famous prisoners of note held there were:
Ranulf Flambard, the Bishop of Durham, was imprisoned here in 1100 by Henry I.
Other prisoners include John the Good, a French king imprisoned in 1360, and Charles, Duke of Orleans who was captured at the Battle of Agincourt and imprisoned in 1415.

As a powerbase in peacetime and refuge in times of crisis, the Tower’s fortifications were updated and expanded by later medieval kings.

At the age of only 9, John’s son Henry III (1216-72) inherited a kingdom in crisis.
The boy king’s regents began a major extension of the royal accommodation at the Tower, including the building of two new towers on the waterfront: the Wakefield as the king’s lodgings and the Lanthorn, probably intended as the queen’s.

When rebellious barons caused Henry to seek refuge at the Tower in 1238, the nervous King soon noticed the weakness of the castle’s defences.

In 1238 he embarked on the building of a massive curtain wall on the north, east and western sides, reinforced by nine new towers and surrounded by a moat flooded by the Flemish engineer John Le Fossur (the ditch-digger).

King Edward I (1272-1307) was a more confident and aggressive leader who managed his country’s rebels, but he was determined to complete the defensive works his father had begun at the Tower.

 Between 1275 and 1285 he spent over £21,000 on transforming the Tower into England’s largest and strongest concentric castle (with one ring of defences inside another).

He filled in the moat and created another curtain wall enclosing the existing wall built by his father, and also created a new moat. In spite of all this work and building comfortable royal lodgings, he seldom stayed at the Tower.

He constructed St Thomas`s tower completed in 1279, and was famous for building the water gate entrance more famously known as, `Traitor`s Gate`. Many who passed through here never saw the outside daylight again.

Increasingly the tower site grew to importance as a prison and place of execution. Although there were periods of royal residential use, the Tower was more famously known as a place of  state persecution.

The many who were imprisoned within it`s cold stone walls are said to have returned to haunt the site, and here are but a few of the ghostly legends there.

A photographer claims two ghosts are in the doorway

Ghostly Victims of the Tower  (Source: Guide-to-castles-of-Europe)

Thomas A. Becket is "the first reported sighting of a ghost at the Tower of London."

During the construction on the Inner Curtain Wall, Thomas appeared apparently unhappy about the construction, and it is said he reduced the wall to rubble with a strike of his cross. Henry III’s grandfather was responsible for the death of Thomas Becket, so Henry III wasted no time building a chapel in the Tower of London, naming it for the archbishop.

This must have pleased Thomas’ ghost because there were no further interruptions during the construction of the wall.

The Bloody Tower was the scene of the infamous disappearance of the two princes; Edward V (12) and Richard Duke of York (10), who are thought to have been murdered in 1483 on the probable command of the Duke of Gloucestershire, who was to be crowned Richard the III.

According to one story, guards in the late 15th century, who were passing the Bloody Tower, spotted the shadows of two small figures gliding down the stairs still wearing the white night shirts they had on the night they disappeared.

They stood silently, hand in hand, before fading back into the stones of the Bloody Tower.

These figures were identified as the ghosts of the two princes. In 1674 workmen found a chest that contained the skeletons of two young children, they were thought to be the remains of the princess, and were given a royal burial not long afterwards.

The story of the little princes is still to this day a heartbreaking story. They are "among the most poignant ghosts" in the Tower of London.

The most persistent ghost in The Tower of London is the ghost of Queen Anne Boleyn.

The King, Henry VIII, after learning the baby she carried for nine months was a boy and still born, accused by her of infidelity.

She was taken to TOWER GREEN and was beheaded on May 19, 1536.



Queen Anne appears near the Queen’s House, close to the site where her execution was carried out. She can be seen leading a ghostly procession of Lords and Ladies down the aisle of the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula.

She floats down the aisle to her final resting place. Queen Anne is buried under the Chapel’s altar. Her headless body has also been seen walking the corridors of the Tower.

Sir Walter Raleigh lived quite comfortable compared to others who were imprisoned within the walls of the Bloody Tower.

His "rooms" are still furnished as they were in the 16th century, and can be seen when visiting the Tower today.

He was executed by James I, and has been seen looking exactly as he does in his portrait hanging in the Bloody Tower.

The most grisly execution and thus haunting is that of the 70 year old Countess of Salisbury, the last of the Plantagenets. King Henry VIII had her executed for political reasons. The feisty Countess refused to put her head on the block like a common traitor. When her executioner came after her she ran, but was pursued by him, with his axe in hand hacking at her until he had hewn the Countess to death.



Her ghost has been seen reliving this truly gruesome act. Also the shadow of a great axe has been seen falling across the scene of her murder.

At one time the Tower of London was home to the Royal Menagerie. Lions, leopards, bears, birds, monkeys and an elephant, that was a gift from the King of France, were kept on exhibit. On the stroke of midnight in January of 1815 a sentry saw a bear from this menagerie emerge from a doorway. He lunged at it with his bayonet, it passed right through the apparition. The Sentry was later found unconscious, it is said he died of fright within two months of this encounter.

Something unseen and very frightening is in the Salt Tower. This is one of the most haunted areas of the Tower of London complex. This is a very old section, dogs will not enter this ancient building, and ever since one of the Yeoman Warders was nearly throttled by a force unseen, they will not go in the area after nightfall.

In 1864, a soldier whose post was to guard the Queen’s House at the Tower of London, saw a apparition so real, that after ignoring the soldiers three challenges, he charged with all his might at the intruder with his bayonet, only to go straight through the figure.

Is this the `White Lady` Ghost

He was found unconscious at his post and was court-martialled for neglecting his duty. Luckily there were two witnesses who corroborated his story. The soldier was eventually acquitted.

Lady Jane Grey is another tragic story of a young life cut short at the Tower, due to the actions of others the most despicable of who was her own father.
She was the granddaughter of Mary (Henry VIII younger sister) and Louis XII of France. The Duke of Northumberland would lose everything if Henry VIII’s son was to die and Mary, who was Catholic, would become queen.

He and her father arranged her marriage to his son and persuaded her cousin Edward VI to name her his successor in case of his death instead of his two half-sisters. When Edward VI died she was crowned Queen of England, but the supporters of Mary overthrew her.

Her own father got scared and in hopes to save his own skin, left the Tower of London and went to Tower Hill to proclaim Mary I, as the Queen of England, Lady Jane never left the tower; she and her husband were immediately imprisoned and sentenced to death. Queen Mary carried out the execution of Lady Jane’s father-in-law but set both Jane and her husband free.

Her father was involved in a rebellion against Mary I, Lady Jane and her husband were again placed in the tower. Lady Jane watched as her husband was taken to Tower Hill where he was beheaded. She saw his body being carried back to the chapel, after which she was taken to Tower Green where she was beheaded. She was only 17 years old.

Lady Jane Grey’s ghost was last seen by two Guardsmen on February 12, 1957, the 403rd anniversary of her execution. She was described as a "white shape forming itself on the battlements". Her husband, Guildford Dudley, has been seen in Beauchamp Tower weeping.


Catherine Howard escaped from her room in the Tower of London. "She ran down the hallway screaming for help and mercy. She was caught and returned to her room." The next day she was beheaded. Her ghost has been seen sill running down the hallway screaming for help.

Other strange sightings at the Tower of London have been "Phantom funeral carriages" and “A lovely veiled lady that, upon closer look proves to have a black void where her face should be."