Ghoulies, Ghosties and Long Leggedy Beasties
Engraving by Thomas Bewick… is that a pumpkin or a neep?
“From ghoulies and ghosties
and long leggedy beasties
and things that go ‘bump’ in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!”
We’re well into the Spooky Season now, and Hallowe’en is traditionally a busy time of year at Newcastle Castle. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has put paid to our usual program of film screenings, family activities and other eerie events that would normally fill our days at this time of year. We thought instead we might have a little look at the history not just of Hallowe’en, but of spooks, spectres and sinister creatures that were once believed to roam the North East in medieval times.
Many people like to point out that modern Hallowe’en is an American import to Britain, but this is only half true. A lot of the traditions surrounding Hallowe’en were taken to America by British settlers, where they all seem to have mingled together to create the holiday that we know today. In the middle ages, when the Castle was built, All Saint’s Day (November the 1st) was known as All Hallows, and was one of the most sacred days in the Christian calendar as was All Soul’s Day on November 2nd. These days served as a time for people to remember and pray to the saints on behalf of the souls of the recently deceased, and served as a time for people to commemorate their friends and family members who had died. Church bells would be rung for the souls in purgatory, and people would bake ‘soul cakes’ which were given to groups of beggars and children who went house to house collecting these in return for offers to pray for the souls of the departed. Shakespeare mentions “beggars at Hallowmas” in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, showing that the custom was well known by his time.
Danse Macabre from Hexham Abbey - a Cardinal of the church is led away by Death!
The Middle Ages provided plenty of opportunities to pray for the departed – during the first major outbreak of the Black Death in England in 1349 around a third of the population died, and at the same time England was embroiled in almost constant wars with Scotland and France. It is during this time, when life could be short and death unpredictable, that images of the Danse Macabre become common. These works of art, which could be seen in churches and public spaces all over Western Europe, depicted Death as a skeleton leading people from every social stratum in the dance of death. Though it seems a bit, well, macabre today, these images served as a reminder to everyone in medieval society that death was the great leveller. Everyone, from the lowliest peasant to Kings, Queens and Popes, would one day have to face death just the same. There is a beautiful surviving example of a Dance Macabre painted on wooden panels in Hexham Abbey. This medieval imagery of death and remembrance does seem to have filtered through into modern celebrations of Hallowe’en, and the custom of going round begging for cakes bears more than a passing resemblance to the American custom of “Trick or Treating”.
Gradually these customs, which were seen as very Catholic or “Popish” by Protestant reformers in England in the 1600s, were abandoned in favour of Bonfire Night on November 5th, which seems to have taken over a lot of the folk practices of Hallowmas. But modern Hallowe’en is a lot more than a remnant of a medieval religious festival. What of the ghosts? The ghouls? The jack o’ lanterns? Well, those things were carried to America by settlers from Scotland and Ireland, where Hallowe’en has traditionally been much more strongly observed than it ever was in England. The Irish festival of Samhain, which takes place on October 31st to November 1st, is of pre-Christian origin, and in old tales was a time when strange and unearthly happenings were commonplace and the influence of gods, spirits and the Otherworld could be felt, and it was dangerous to go outside. This reputation seems to have continued into much later folklore, as in many Northern English and Scottish ballads of the 1600s onwards, Hallowe’en was the night when the fairy folk ride through the mortal world – and these fairies were not your fluttery, friendly Tinkerbells.
A Victorian woodcut of a man lured into a ring of dancing fairies…
The ballad of Tam Lin is a fine example. Lady Janet takes a foolish wander into the forests near the Cheviot and encounters an “elfin knight” called Tam Lin, and sleeps with him. When she realises that she is pregnant she returns to the forest to confront her otherworldly lover, who reveals that he was once a mortal like her. He fell from his horse in the forest and was captured by the fairies. Every seven years, the fairy folk pay a ‘tithe’ of a living soul to the Devil, and Tam fears that this year, on Hallowe’en, that soul will be his unless Janet can save him. He tells her that if she claims him as hers and drags him off his horse as the fairy folk ride past Mile Cross, and if she can hang on to him, she can save him from his fate. Courageously, Janet waits by Mile Cross on Hallowe’en Night and watches the host of the Queen of Fairies ride past to take Tam’s soul to Hell. She grabs him from his horse, but as she lays hands on him, he transforms into a wolf, a bear, a lion and a burning coal. At last she hurls the coal into a nearby well, and he transforms back into a man, and she covers him with her cloak. The Fairy Queen rages and threatens to put out Tam’s eyes, but in the end is forced to admit defeat, and Janet claims Tam as her husband. The fairies of this tradition, which stretched across Northern England and Southern Scotland, were far from the cute little sprites people associate with the word ‘fairy’ today – they were terrifying otherworldly figures with much power to harm. The tradition of hanging horseshoes over doors began because the fairies famously hate cold iron, and it was believed this would ward them away from a house. Fairies were also notorious in folklore for carrying off children and replacing them with fairy changelings.
A traditional Irish Jack O’Lantern, made from a neep
Other Scottish and Irish folk traditions on Hallowe’en included ‘guising’ (going round in masks and asking for money), playing pranks and tricks and carrying Jack O’ Lanterns made from hollowed out ‘neeps, as well as various games like bobbing for apples and forms of divination, such as staring into a mirror to try and get a glimpse of your future wife or husband. Robert Bruce describes many of these traditions in his poem Hallowe’en. Most of these traditions would be recognisable today, and while the commercialisation of Hallowe’en is certainly an American invention, it has deep roots in the soil and soul of Britain too.
But what of spooks, spectres and spirits? Well, in medieval England they were believed to be abroad all year round, not just at Hallowe’en. They also might surprise you with their, well, solidity. Medieval England seems to have had a couple of different conceptions of ghosts and the living dead. On the one hand, the Church had introduced a lot of ‘Latin’, Roman ideas into England, and it seems to be from this tradition that we get the idea of the ghost as a wispy, see through figure floating through walls and rattling chains. These ‘ghosts’ are often stuck on earth due to some unfinished business and appear to try and ensure that they get a proper burial or that their murderer is punished. The Church was a bit cagey about whether these spirits really were the spirits of the dead - after all, when you died you either went to Heaven or Hell, and there was no coming back from there. Some said that these apparent ghosts were demons in disguise, but popular imagination held that ghosts could sometimes return from Purgatory to warn the living to mend their ways. These kinds of ghosts were unlikely to do you much harm, even if they did frighten you out of their wits.
The other traditional way of getting rid of the undead, by driving a stake of hawthorn through their heart.
Medieval England was in many ways a blend of cultures though, and there was another tradition at work. Norse and Anglo-Saxon ideas of ‘ghosts’ were very different. Rather than being the ‘spirit’ of the dead, these were the actual animated corpses of humans returned from the grave to wreak havoc on earth, much more like our idea of a zombie or vampire than a wraith. A great example of this kind of spook haunting the North East comes in the work of the medieval Chronicler William of Newburgh, who writes of an evil man who flees from York to the north and settles in the town of Alnwick, where he finds work with the lord of the Castle there. Rather than taking this opportunity to mend his evil ways, he doubles down and becomes even worse, committing all kinds of outrages. He also becomes convinced that his wife is being unfaithful to him, and he sets up a plan to find out. He tells her that he is going away on business, but after riding away a short distance he returns and sneaks back into his house where he hides up in the rafters and looks down into the house. When he sees his wife return to the house with another man, his suspicions are confirmed, but in his anger, he falls from the rafters and is dashed to the floor, badly injured. He is taken to his bed, and physicians confirm that he is mortally injured. He refuses the attentions of the priest, and so receives no forgiveness for his sins before he passes away. Nevertheless, the lord has him buried in the local churchyard. But he doesn’t stay buried! Each night, rising from his grave he roams the streets of Alnwick followed by a pack of spectral hounds, and attacks anyone he encounters. Worse, he is surrounded by a cloud of foul-smelling air (well, he is a corpse), which spreads a deadly plague throughout the town. One night, while the people are debating what to do, a pair of young hot heads go to dig up his corpse. They find it only a few feet below the earth, bloated and swollen with blood like a great leech. They behead him with a shovel, and burn the body, and at once the plague is lifted from the town.
This sinister story is told with an absolutely straight face by William of Newburgh in a work that is meant to be a sober chronicle of history, so there can be no doubt as to people’s belief in these creatures of the night and the danger that they posed. He tells of another such “vampire” in Melrose in Scotland at the same time, so the north seems to have been fairly crawling with them. In modern times sightings of the undead are, it’s fair to say, a bit rarer. With that said, Newcastle Castle, particularly the Castle Keep does have a certain reputation in the region. Paranormal investigators hire the building out on a regular basis to be allowed to stay in the dark, chilly chambers overnight and search for evidence that the dead can really touch the realm of the living. While some very eerie tales of shadowy shapes, inexplicable mists, disembodied voices and other paranormal phenomena have come out of these investigations I think it’s fair to say that the jury is still out on the survival of the human spirit after death. But the search for such proof, and the belief in the supernatural goes back deep into the roots of our history, just like Hallowe’en itself. We’ve only had a chance to touch on a few of the ghosts and other things said to haunt the North East here, so there’s plenty more dark tales for you to explore - look up the Grey Man of Bellister, the Cauld Lad of Hylton or chill your blood with the tale of the Longpack or the Ghostly Bridal of Featherstone Castle. Enjoy this spooky season, and "from ghoulies and ghosties and long leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us.”
Image courtesy of the British Library