Creatures of the Night

In Search of Ghosts, Vampires, Werewolves and Demons

Gregory L. Reece

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857730428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Vampires and werewolves; phantoms and phantasms: looming out of the fog leaps the menacing spectre of the lycanthrope, ghoul or blood-crazed zombie. Intrigued by some of the most sinister, yet at the same time most compelling, legends of western civilization, Gregory L Reece dusts down his stake and crucifix, loads his silver bullets and takes off into the wilds in search of answers and fresh adventures. Rummaging around in crumbling tombs and cobwebbed sarcophagi, his latest quest leads him into the haunted realm of the dead and the undead: of those carnivorous, nocturnal hunters that might perhaps better be left undisturbed. Why, he asks, is our culture obsessed by the eerie and the macabre? Why, despite its horrors, does the 'dark side' of the supernatural - its seances and ghost-hunting, demonic possession and the occult - call to us with such dangerous allure? Whether tracking night-stalking werewolves, chanting black magic mantras with Satanists, or interviewing a funereal modern-day Count Dracula, Reece is determined to uncover the truth.
A wry exploration of a secret and secretive subculture, "Creatures of the Night" is at the same time a bold and startling journey into a wraithlike world that has so often seemed to lie beyond the limits of rational comprehension - until now.

Chapter One
The Holy Ghost and Fire

I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and fire.

Matthew 3:11

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except that the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale certainly should be.

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

She was burning. Her nightgown ablaze, she ran down the long hallway, screaming in terror and in pain. The air was pungent with the smell of burning cotton, burning hair, burning flesh. The girls on the hall stood in their doorways and watched the flaming comet, the blazing meteor, streak by their door. She was a banshee, crying out the warning of her own death, a will-o’-the-wisp with a jack-o’-lantern skull.

* * *

It was 1908 when Condie Cunningham combusted in Main Hall, the dormitory of what would become the University of Montevallo. She was cooking fudge with her friends, heating the chocolate with a Bunsen burner, when the head resident called for ‘lights out.’ A bottle of alcohol was upset in the excitement and Condie burst into flames. She ran down the long hallways, down the stairs, and into the open air. Too frail for transport to her home or a hospital, she lived her last days in a ground-floor room of Main Hall. Soon after her death, residents of the dormitory reported seeing Condie ablaze and again running down the hallways, screeching down the stairs. I imagine that they would not be able to stop seeing her. I imagine that her screams would ring in the ears of the witnesses for the rest of their lives, that the sight of that blazing phantom would haunt the memories of the young girls of Main Hall long after they had left the school and grown to adulthood. Wouldn’t you see her every time you closed your eyes, every time the lights went out, every time you smelled chocolate cooking or saw a candle flame?

The image of Condie kept appearing long after her friends had moved on with their lives. New generations of girls attending the small Alabama college had their vision haunted by the specter of Condie aflame, Condie ablaze, Condie afire. Bunsen burners would turn into microwave ovens, but Condie’s flame kept burning, kept lighting up the night, kept singeing the nerves of the young women of Main Hall.

For those who doubted that the presence of the unfortunate girl could live on after her body was gone, for those who laughed at the imagination of the young foolish women, there was always Condie’s door as a reproach, as circumstantial evidence that there was something hauntingly real about Condie’s ghost. There, on the doorway that led into Condie’s old bedroom, as if burned into the wood grain, was the image of the burning girl. The door, long since removed from its place at Condie’s threshold, is now kept in storage by the university for most of the year, brought out and displayed at Halloween when anyone is free to see for themselves Condie’s face, her exposed teeth giving her a look of macabre joy, her flaming hair billowing atop her head. I have seen the door, looked into the frightened and frightening face, felt the heat from the century-old fire, felt my skin crawl at the thought of the young girl burning, burning still.

7. Condie’s door at the University of Montevallo, Alabama (photo by R. Hendrix).

The University of Montevallo campus sits just across the street from my home. I walk its red-brick streets regularly. My wife lived in Main Hall when she was a student. We dated in its expansive lobbies and drawing rooms when we were young. Now, my children run up and down its front steps on their way to piano lessons. In the spring, we see the wisteria that entwines its front columns burst into bloom (like Condie, I sometimes think, bursting into flames), its great clusters of purple flower-grapes blowing in the breeze and dropping petals on the steps and stones (the same wind, perhaps, that fanned Condie’s flames). Condie is a very personal ghost, someone we know on a first name basis, an old friend, a spectral acquaintance.

Condie is not alone. Mr. Edmund King, whose 1823 home stands within sight of Main Hall, still prowls the campus, wandering between his former home and his burial site (also on the campus), carrying a lantern and shovel. He is said to be looking for his treasure, which he buried somewhere in the area to protect it from Yankee soldiers during the American Civil War. His greed keeps him alive long past his appointed time.

The horrors of the old war also provide the setting for the haunting of Montevallo’s Reynolds Hall, a ghostly white building next door to Main. It was here that, according to legend, Captain Reynolds of the Confederate army was stationed to guard the sick and wounded troops housed in the building, which was being used as a makeshift hospital. Upon receiving news of an imminent attack by the Northern army on a local ironworks, Captain Reynolds left his post at the hospital and took his men to defend the plant at Brier Field. While Reynolds and his men were away, General Sherman’s soldiers slaughtered the patients in the unprotected hospital. When Reynolds discovered the horror caused by his actions, he vowed to stand guard over the building forever, even after his death. According to witnesses who have seen the soldier standing guard still, this is exactly what he has done, his guilt a barrier to his eternal rest.

So Captain Reynolds and Mr. King, haunted by their greed and their guilt, haunt the world in turn. Mr. King wanders lost, his lantern fire too dim to lead him to his lost wealth, his lost life. Captain Reynolds stands guard awaiting Sherman’s army that will never again come this way, their fires long died out, extinguished by the passing years. Along with Condie, eternally aflame in her private hell, they haunt the night.

Around the world, ghosts haunt. None of us has to travel far to find their like. They haunt cities and towns, farmhouses and mansions, lonely meadows and busy streets. Ghosts are not distant and exotic phenomena. They are our neighbors, inhabiting the landmarks of our lives, the building across the street, the room down the hall. They are universal, a common theme in human life. The dead do not go away; they remain with us. They haunt us. I tell Condie’s story, the story of her burning death and her burning afterlife, because it is my story. We all have one. We are all haunted.

* * *

Perhaps it should be obvious, this universal haunting, perhaps it should come as no surprise. Edward Burnett Tylor, an English anthropologist, theorized in 1871 that ghosts have their origins in the most primitive and ancient of human cultures. Indeed, ghosts haunt, according to Tylor, the very origins of religious belief. Tylor’s influential work, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, offered an evolutionary view of culture and religion. Eschewing the idea espoused by conservative churchmen – that the original religion was the monotheism revealed by Jehovah and contained in the Bible – Tylor argued that the origins of religion could instead be found in some simple features of human existence.

As Tylor put it,

It seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of culture, were deeply impressed by two groups of biological problems. In the first place, what is it that makes the difference between a living body and a dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death? In the second place, what are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions? (vol. 1, 428)

Faced with these two phenomena, the ancients, according to Tylor, developed the theory that every person has two mysterious features: ‘life’ and a ‘phantom existence.’ Both of these features of the human experience appear to have existence separate from the body. Life can clearly depart the body upon death, while the phantom-self leaves the body while it is alive and can be seen by others in dreams or visions. Over time, primitive cultures combined these two features into one, something Tylor called an ‘apparitional-soul’ or ‘ghost-soul.’ These early cultures came to believe, to put it simply, that every human being possessed a spirit, something Tylor described as:

a thin unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates; independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner, past or present; capable of leaving the body far behind, to flash swiftly from place to place; mostly impalpable and invisible, yet also manifesting physical power, and especially appearing to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it bears the likeness; continuing to exist and appear to men after the death of that body; able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies of other men, of animals, and even of things. (vol. 1, 429)

Tylor proposed that such a conception of human beings is found universally among primitive cultures, a fact that need not be attributed to the spread of the idea of the soul from one culture to another. Rather, he believed this idea of the spiritual nature of humanity is a universal feature of early cultures’ attempts to understand some basic phenomena associated with human life in the world. It is a simple fact of life that humans sometimes see other people – whether in dreams, visions, or by dark of night – that they have no business seeing. It is a simple fact of life that people sometimes see ghosts.

Tylor saw this basic human experience of ‘seeing a ghost’ as the central impetus for the origin of religion. From the belief that human spirits lived on after death, early cultures developed beliefs about the afterlife. Since loved ones were called upon for assistance during their lifetimes, it was only natural that they should be called upon after they had entered the spirit world. In this way the practice of prayer and offerings arose. Over time, the most famed ancestors were elevated above others, becoming deities that demanded worship. In time, primitive cultures developed techniques and practices for contacting the spirit world. Fasting, extreme penance, and the use of narcotics were all means for opening up paths to the world of the spirits and allowing devotees to ‘obtain the sight of spectral beings’ and ‘gain spiritual knowledge and even worldly power’ (vol. 1, 446). The features of religion, the belief in spiritual survival after death and the belief in gods and goddesses arose, according to Tylor, because ancient cultures, like modern ones, were haunted by ghosts, because in ancient times and amid primitive peoples specters appeared in the dark of night.

Religion, historically for Tylor as existentially for Otto, had its origin in the ghostly, though Tylor’s thoroughly modern sensibilities meant that he saw belief in ghosts as the result of a logical mistake made by early theorists, as if primitive humanity sat around campfires and hypothesized about the origins of their dreams and developed explanations for their visions of dark and hooded ghosts. For Otto, on the other hand, before there was theory there was the shudder, the terror, the fear. For Otto, it was here that the origin of religion is truly found. He wrote in reference to Tylor’s theory,

the important point is not the origin of ‘spirits’ in their ideational aspect, but the qualitative element of feeling relative to them. And this does not consist in the fact that ‘spirits’ or ‘souls’ are thinner or less easily visible than the body, or quite invisible, or fashioned like air: often all of this is true of them; no less often none of it is; most frequently all of it is both true and false. The essence of the ‘soul’ lies not in the imaginative or conceptual expression of it, but first and foremost in the fact that it is a spectre; that it arouses ‘dread’ or ‘awe’. (120)

Missing from Tylor is the clammy sweat, the goose-bumps, the racing heart of the haunted house, the séance room, the dark woods, all of which must surely precede theory and hypothesis. For Tylor, there was no reason that modern cultures should continue to be haunted by ghosts. We have better theories to explain the phenomena that frightened our ancestors. Otto, however, knew this was not true. For as long as we are human we will be haunted, and no theory will take away the shuddering awe that lies in the pit of our stomachs and at the base of our spines.

Sacheverell Sitwell, in writing about the ghost known as a poltergeist, drew distinctions between the spirits of religion and the spirits that haunt, of which he wrote,

They come from the underworld, from caverns or cesspools covered up or hidden. These things creep underground; they are blind like the mole, sightless and pale from their imprisonment, with long rodent fingers, cold, and as a dead man’s hand. . . . Every religion, and all superstition, serve one another and are sealed in compact. But, at this moment, our meeting is wi...