“You think I don’t watch your movies? You always come back.”

I was disappointed to see this ‘vampire killing kit’ surface again, not because it’s back on the market (previously sold by LiveAuctioneers.com on 9.6.2012), but because Christie’s Paris have either failed to do the proper research or are ignoring the work that I and others (see also Joe Nickell’s chapter in his ‘Man-Beasts’ book) have done in the last few years to expose these kits as modern novelties.

Google Translate makes this of Christie’s auction notes;

‘Witty (s), this singular set is an invitation to travel that immerses us in the Carpathians at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It reminds us in particular to the publication in 1897 by Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The whole of Europe is so passionate about the fantasy world of vampires. Very quickly, creating Stoker transcends and creates a real fascination. This is particularly important in the Carpathian Mountains, considered the territory of vampires.

Professor Ernst Bloomberg, with the support of Nicholas Plomdeur a gunsmith Liege, then creates a business of destroying vampires. A destination for travelers to Eastern Europe, they produce kits containing the necessary equipment to protect themselves from these evil creatures.

Examples of such boxes that have survived are rare, it is nevertheless one of Sotheby’s New York, 16 November 2011, lot 112.’

Blomberg (not Bloomberg guys) is fake, Plomdeur was nothing to do with kits, and they can’t seem to make up their minds whether the kits were produced for those genuinely afeared of vampires, or if they are ‘witty’ flights of fancy. Added to which, the kit appears in the Decorative Arts department! Which is it guys? Real? Vintage novelty? Modern art? Arguably the latter of those, but in reality there’s just no evidence for these things prior to 1986, and I generously push the possible date back to c1970 in my Fortean Times article and the above-linked blog entries.

Ah well, maybe I have more work ahead of me!

 

Wears the Soap?

No, I haven’t failed to spellcheck – it’s an old joke…

I’m an RSS subscriber to Retronaut, which if you haven’t come across it already, is a wonderful depository for old photos of all kinds. I recommend it heartily, even if sometimes there are a lack of references for those of us interested enough to find out more. A recent update included some bizarre images of supposed devices designed to curb masturbation, like this one;

No, it’s not part of a steampunk Gonzo costume…

Like the sole commenter at time of writing, I was rather sceptical that these were genuine, and if they were, that strapping them to people was really a ‘thing’ that was done with any regularity. They remind me of the spurious torture implements that were either made up entirely or fancifully replicated in order to titillate and shock Victorian sensibilities (a post on that subject coming up when I can find time to write it).

However, these pics also came from the V&A and Wellcome Trust, both august and scholarly heritage institutions, which gave me pause for thought. I also found more contextual images on the Wellcome’s website, showing people actually wearing the devices, and with original captions describing them as ‘counter-onanism’ contraptions. So I thought I’d dig deeper, and found the amusingly-titled ‘Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror’ by Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck. This makes clear that such devices were widely known about at the time, and that there was even something of a medical controversy about them – some doctors advocating their use, others decrying it. So whilst you might not have been clapped straight into one of these the first time you were caught choking the proverbial chicken (or for that matter, polishing the bean), this does indeed seem to have been a real practice. The above-linked source also details the other methods used to prevent masturbation, and explains the general attitude that it was somehow a harmful practice. Of course, we still don’t quite know the scale of usage of these devices, and it seems likely that only the most well-off parents would consider purchasing them.

We’ve come a long way since then. But then again, we still eat Cornflakes…

(More about this chap at my link above and at Cracked.com)

Devil Dogs

In my post about the apocryphal ‘ladies from hell’ a few years back, I mentioned the US Marine Corps nickname ‘Devil Dog’ in the same breath as being an invention of the press adopted by the fighting men themselves. They form part of a larger trend of applying names to your own military units that you imagine your (hopefully) fearful enemy might choose. I’ve just picked up on this piece from 2011  that deals specifically with that very nickname, and agrees with my own findings. I found it via this more recent article, which although missing the point that it’s an invented term, seems to suggest that its veracity is becoming a moot point, with ’Devil Dog’ has actually fallen out of favour, and is only really used ironically, even to the point of being a term of abuse during training. That’s really interesting – some sayings and terms persist, some change their meaning, and others disappear entirely.

If anyone’s come across any other terms like this that they suspect might be similarly invented, post a comment below and I’ll look into them. I have some other items to write up and post soon on other subject, as I’m aware I haven’t been very active online lately.

When the Lights Went Out – Revenge of the Black Monk

If a ghostly monk can bite a sandwich, what’s stopping you from giving it a damn good thrashing?

There’s a new ‘true life’ haunting movie coming out next month, and this one is British.

Interestingly in this case the director has a connection to the ‘real’ story (Wiki’s version here). Inexplicably, he’s advanced the period setting by nearly a decade, presumably to hook the story onto another real life event; the energy crisis of 1973/4 (hence the title). Ironically, this draws attention to one alternate explanation for the lights going out during the ‘real’ haunting – power cuts and electrical problems happened before said shortage, and they still happen today. Even this may be redundant when we consider another explanation; that somebody might simply have been turning switches off;

‘The lights would go out, and when they looked in the cupboard under the stairs the main switch would be turned off. On one occasion, Mrs. Pritchard carefully taped it in the “on” position with insulating tape; half an hour later, the lights were off  again, and tape had simply vanished.’
-’Poltergeist!’, 1981, p.130

Wooooooo! Ahem. Anyway, Holden is the son of a one of the contributing figures in the story, Mrs Rene Holden:

‘Another neighbour, Rene Holden (who was a bit psychic), was in the Pritchards’ sitting room when the lights went out. In the faint glow of the streetlamp that came through the curtains she saw the lower half of a figure dressed in a long black garment.’
-‘Beyond the Occult’, 1988 p.237

‘A bit psychic’? Isn’t that like being ‘a bit pregnant’? The other major incidents involving Holden’s mother were the apparently spiritual theft of a fur coat, and the mysterious throwing of a plate of sandwiches around a room before a ghostly yet physical bite was taken out of one of them. All of this being under cover of another bout of another selective power failure. The latter is a rare instance of potential physical evidence of the paranormal that could have been tested, bearing as it did the impressions of apparently ‘enormous teeth’. Instead however, Holden kept the sandwich herself and somehow allowed it to deteriorate into ‘crumbs’ after only a few days. So we are told by author Colin Wilson, who has produced the closest thing we have to a written primary source for all this; his book ‘Poltergeist!’ (along with his other books like ‘Beyond the Occult’, referenced above). Though the director of the movie has drawn from family oral history for his version of the story, Wilson’s book was written closer to the time when the events in question happened, so might better reflect personal testimony. Then again, maybe not. In any case, his book was still published a good decade on from the ‘hauntings’, in 1981. Wilson himself was not involved or even present at the time, so far as I can determine. This, along with Holden’s film, is by its nature actually a secondary source and of limited usefulness in getting to the bottom of events. As Wilson relates, ‘no trained investigator came on the scene while the disturbances were at their height.’ So we don’t have any evidence from parapsychologists or even the pseudoscientific investigations of the average ‘ghost club’ to go on. Nor even any newspaper reports (that I could find). Just anecdote; although in this case it isn’t just family tradition, as visitors are also claimed to have experienced supposedly supernatural shenanigans (which of course doesn’t mean that they were). The film director claims that the police witnessed the ‘ghost’, and local MP Geoff Lofthouse writes of his personal experiences in his autobiography:

‘I suppose it would be about 1965, and I was in a Council meeting with Violet Pritchard, when I started ribbing her about the stories that were going around that her son’s house up on East Drive was haunted. Violet had great charm, but also great directness. She looked me in the eyes and said: “Well Geoff, if that’s what you think, you had better come up with me.” So after the Council meeting I picked up Sarah, and we went up to Joe Pritchard’s. Just as we entered, Violet said: “This will wipe the smile off your face.” The stories of the poltergeist had been going the rounds for a few months then. Sarah had heard them, but neither of us took them very seriously; after all, Chequerfield estate was not some haunted house in the South of London or a ruined tower up in the Yorkshire Dales, it was newly built council housing on what had been agricultural land. In we went and sat down. We had been there about twenty minutes when suddenly there was a banging on the wall, at this sound the dog, who was sitting right in front of me, stood up stock still and the hairs on his body rose up in the air. It only stood a second before darting through the door. Joe Pritchard said “It’s here again,” and to prove that it was, two candlesticks rose up and were thrown through the air. One second they were standing on a sideboard, or it may have been a shelf, and the next they had gone up into the air and broken the chandelier. This was enough for Sarah. Without any ado she dashed out of the house. I was just following her when politeness caused me to stop at the bottom of the stairs to say: “Excuse me but I have to go.” And I did, I went rapidly at the point when a number of blankets were thrown down at us.

In most things I am a bit sceptical, but when it comes to the stories of the Pontefract poltergeist I am a true believer. Taps were turning themselves on, and a whole range of activity was taking place, and this in a family of everyday Pontefract people. I decided that Violet Pritchard should be my Deputy Mayor because of all the people I have met in my life as a politician, I regard few politicians with such warmness as Violet Pritchard. When I say that she was a kind and simple soul, I do not mean to be disrespectful in any way.’
-’A Very Miner MP’, 1986, p.69

Very disconcerting at the time, no doubt, but so can fiction be. There are any number of explanations for what Lofthouse relates that don’t require the existence of ghosts – something that should require some pretty extraordinary evidence to accept. This lack of empirical evidence is a perennial problem with hauntings and similar experiences, in that all available evidence is anecdotal, mediated through a third party, and not recorded until years after the fact.

Wilson, too, is not a parapsychologist. is well-known in paranormalist and Fortean circles, having written a string of ‘factual’ books and bought into a wide range of ‘phenomena’ from illusionist Uri Geller (‘The Geller Phenomenon’) to the lost city of Atlantis. He’s also an author of true crime books and fiction.

Sightings like Holden’s led to the ghost being identified as that of a local historical figure, the ‘Black Monk’. Amusingly, this turned out to be a load of nonsense, and so Wilson, having himself debunked this hypothesis (p.146-7 of ‘Poltergeist!’), rationalised the whole thing away as the ghost choosing to look like the monk based upon overheard family conversations. Alternatively, the sightings were hallucinations, delusions, confabulation, or something else entirely. But it seems that it’s easier to just make the facts fit the story on the presupposition that what the family experienced was something paranormal.

So what really went on here? We’ll probably never know, but other cases from the Fox sisters to the Enfield poltergeist suggest that these ‘ghosts’ are linked to a very real phenomenon; that of growing up. The paranormalists express this in terms of supernatural manifestations fuelled by the available ‘energy’ of puberty, but a more realistic interpretation would be that they are the result of childish attention-seeking, acting out, and/or teenage angst. The title of the new film becomes highly relevant here. All of the major physical manifestations (sandwich hurling included) took place ‘When the Lights Went Out’, giving a great deal of room for real, live, human beings to get involved, just as in physical mediumship. Whatever the case, the film looks likely to provide an interesting dramatisation of a real life experience of a ‘haunting’ – but through no fault of the makers, it isn’t evidence of the paranormal. Doubtless the true life marketing will convince many that it is.

Aaaaagh! Vampire log!

Or is a saintly log? Surprisingly good preservation is often cited in folklore and history as evidence for a) vampires and revenants or conversely b) the very pious, depending largely upon one’s social status. If you’re a peasant with retarded decomp, you’re a tool of the devil, whilst if you’re a dead abbot or similar, you might even get canonised.

The deceased tree member in question seems to have attracted the interest of the superstitious because the locals expect wood to rot underground or in water. Well, sometimes it does. Other times, not so much. It depends entirely on the conditions involved, included the levels of oxygen in the water. The fact that they equate the decay rate of wood with that of metal shows a misunderstanding of how things decompose. I’m no expert myself, but I would certainly consult one before leaping to the conclusion that I had a magical garden fence.

Gogmagog

The extremely helpful Facey Romford has pointed out this classic example of the danger in favouring experience over evidence. There’s not much I can add to Britarch’s excellent summary, except to point out that the Margaret Murray that so loudly protested in favour of the imaginary chalk figures was the same Margaret Murray that popularised the bogus ‘witch cult’ theory that underpinned Gerald Gardner’s new religion – Wicca. Thankfully, many pagans today are rather more open-minded.

Dowsing again.

Some more people who think they’re doing archaeology by waving sticks about. This one fails to provide any support for its claims (though the journalist is nice and neutral about them), and interestingly, doesn’t try to hide the supernatural mechanism behind the idea or dress it up in pseudoscience;

“We all leave a footprint behind – both physically and spiritually – wherever we go, and dowsing allows us to glean an understanding through a metaphysical connection.”

In other words, dowsing is magic.

The only advantage the dowsing has is that it’s cheap/free. Which is no advantage at all if it doesn’t bloody work. Which it doesn’t. At least the hall’s owners haven’t wasted money – only time. The frustrating aspect to this is that because it’s been chosen as a cheap alternative to real archaeology, no real archaeology will be used to confirm/disprove any of the findings, at least, not for a long time.

A Yorkshire Vampire Killing Kit

Another vampire kit has surfaced, this time in the UK. Being a Daily Mail article, no effort has been made to research the subject, and the auction house appear not to know much about them either. To their credit though, they aren’t claiming it as definitively 19th century in date.

As ever, it’s not quite like any other before it, but to me appears to have been fashioned out of a ‘vanity box‘ or possibly a writing case, instead of the pistol case typical of the ‘Blomberg’ kits. It’s a nice one – how nice we shall soon see. On past performance the £2000 estimate in on the low side…

A Ripper of an Idea

Another day, another Jack the Ripper suspect, this time put forward by former solicitor John Morris. As ever, we’ve no more reason to believe this suggestion than any of the dozens of others that have been advanced, sometimes repeatedly, over the years. At least the name appears to be a new one, even if the idea of the Ripper being a woman certainly is not.

Be wary of definitive statements about 120-year-old cold cases;

‘There’s absolutely no doubt that the Ripper was a woman.’

It’s pretty clear that there is, I’m afraid. The list of proof reads like a textbook definition of ‘circumstantial evidence’, and are not necessarily even established facts. I’m no Ripperologist, but in 20 minutes of investigoogling found some problems with the claims made in the press piece. Firstly;

‘Three small buttons from a woman’s boot were found in blood near Catherine Eddowes’

…is true, but lacks some important context. The actual source reads;

‘Sergeant Jones picked up from the foot way by the left side of the deceased three small black buttons, such as are generally used for boots, a small metal button, a common metal thimble, and a small penny mustard tin containing two pawn-tickets.’

Note that the boot association comes from a policemans’ attempt to describe the objects in the absence of a photograph, and the fact that the buttons were found with various other objects you might expect to find in a woman’s handbag or pocket. It’s far more likely that the buttons were loose and in the victim’s possession than it is that they were somehow torn from the killer’s person.

That a Victorian journalist thought arranging items in some kind of order was a ‘feminine’ trait reveals far more about Victorian attitudes to gender (and possibly our own if we’re prepared to set store by them) than it does about our elusive killer.

Finally, I’m not sure how we can know that Mary Jane Kelly had ‘never been seen wearing’ the clothes found in her fireplace, as one witness does describe a hat and jacket, and another (contradictory) witness specifies a pelerine (cape) and skirt. Eyewitness testimony being notoriously unreliable, of course.

I should reserve judgement until someone (not sure I can face another Ripper book) has analysed the main thesis and evidence for it. But on past form, I can’t hold my breath. We will almost certainly never know who Jack the Ripper was, and it’s no coincidence that scholarly study in the area is more concerned with the social historical context of the killings than it is with the futile search for the actual killer. Personally, my money’s still on the Phantom Raspberry-Blower.

Going the Whole Nine Yards?

 

By this logic, firing a whole sub-machine gun magazine would be ‘giving them the whole eight inches’…

Snopes have recently updated their entry for the origin of ‘The Whole Nine Yards‘, and as they rightly point out, it’s pretty much the case that whatever you think it comes from, it doesn’t. I do have a few comments though. Firstly, there’s one other reason why the machine-gun belt explanation can’t be true that isn’t covered; that there is no standard-length belt of that measurement for any machine-gun, air or land service. Despite this and the other good reasons given by Snopes and others (notably a total lack of references for it anywhere), it remains one of the most popular explanations. Even the Smithsonian have repeated it as fact.

The other, more important thing has to do with their suggested real origin for the saying – a lewd ‘joke’ about a Scotsman’s penis…I mean kilt. Having discounted the idea that it arises from the kilt per se, they end the article by referring to said joke/story. As an apparently American joke, featuring a Scottish stereotype and not rooted in historical reality, it would overcome the problem of all the early written references being American in origin. It also doesn’t require that a kilt actually be a standard nine yards in length (it isn’t).

However, I have a couple of issues with this. Snopes state that the story is ‘of uncertain age’, yet the version they give is in very modern English, and must have come from somewhere traceable. Yet they give no date whatever – nor any source for the version they reproduce.

Their source would appear to be the claim here (recounted version of the story here) by US Navy Captain Richard Stratton, who remembers first hearing it in 1955, just a few years before the phrase as we know it appeared in print (1962 according to Snopes, or perhaps slightly earlier). However, aside from this, I can’t find any evidence that it’s a traditional story at all. In fact it seems to be an original song with a known writer and a copyright date of 1991 (and a performance date of 1990). Now, it’s possible that this is a version of an existing folktale of some sort as Stratton’s memories suggest, but if so it’s pretty poor form to claim words penned by ‘Traditional’ or ‘Anon’ set of words as your own. More discussion on the song/story question here. More likely is that it is based on an off-colour joke of relatively recent vintage that was current in Stratton’s day. He may well be correct in remembering both this and the contemporary use of the phrase, but have wrongly assumed that the two are related. The phrase as ‘punchline’  not only seems like an afterthought, but a total non-sequitur. At least the song version sort of makes sense, though it doesn’t specify ‘nine yards’ and isn’t itself claimed to have anything to do with the phrase. I just don’t think that this claim is any more convincing as an origin for the phrase than any of the others that Snopes list. I’m not alone.

Finally, I might actually have a contribution to make here, though it does admittedly run counter to the presumed American origin of the phrase. The U.S. is, however, a nation of immigrants with a language (and a good deal of folklore) in common, and I think the gap in written sources not insurmountable. It’s also quite possible that, as the story was preserved as an oral tradition in Scottish Gaelic, it could have made the jump straight to American English without ever passing into British English. But I’m starting to speculate here.

I came across the following during past research on this same subject. It’s a Scottish (funnily enough, though kilts don’t factor) folk-tale entitled ‘The Stupid Boy‘, collected by a Miss Dempster in 1888. Its opening subject is a nine yard length of cloth, the successful selling of all nine yards being key to the story;

‘There lived once on a time in Sutherland a widow, who had one son, and he was a very stupid boy ; so stupid that he could not be trusted out of sight, and that he had no idea how to buy or sell. One day his mother had nine yards of home-spun to sell ; and there was a market within a few miles of her, at which she wished to show it for sale ; but she could not go herself, and had no one to send but her son, and she thought a great deal how she was to prevent him doing something stupid with it, and being cheated. At last she thought that as the fair lasted three days she might send him every day with three yards, and that he could not go far wrong in getting a price for so small a quantity.’

Dempster, 1888. ‘The Folk-Lore of Sutherland-Shire’, The Folk-Lore Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1888), pp. 149-189

It would have been particularly neat had the boy’s magical revenge taken place after he’d sold the ‘whole nine yards’ rather than just six out of the nine, but you can’t have everything. I’m not suggesting this as definitive, mainly because there is such a huge gap between this story being written down (and no doubt it is far older than 1888) and the first written appearance of the saying proper. We’d expect some sort of ‘missing link’, particularly as with the latter we are talking about a different country. Nonetheless, it’s by far the earliest relevant instance of the idea, if not the actual phrase. Even if Stratton’s origin is accurate, ‘The Stupid Boy’ still pre-dates the kilt story/song as a specific reference to the idea that a total of nine yards of something is somehow significant, and is not in itself incompatible with Stratton. As with everyone else who’s ever speculated on this question, I doubt we’ll ever know if it’s actually significant, but it’s interesting if nothing else.

So, what’s the real answer to the question? It’s another ‘we don’t know’, I’m afraid. Whatever quibbles I have with the Snopes article, we certainly agree on that.