The Feature With The Creatures: Spooky Beasts And Where to Find Them
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A Quick, But Immediate, Digression Into British Ghost Hound Traditions
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Look. The theme of this edition of the Ghostletter is animal ghost stories. At the beginning of my research I got almost immediately derailed into the concept of a Grim, which is not directly in theme because it's not an animal who has died and now haunts but it is one that I still find myself forced to cover for reasons which will become clear.
The Grim is a pretty basic concept-- it's a black dog who's a ghost. This started in the tradition of The Church Grim-- an old belief that the first person buried in a church's graveyard would be given the burden of guarding the site and its tenants for eternity meant people would often bury a dog on the site first, ensuring this furry lad took the job. Grims, while kind of fun, are not incredibly compelling. What is compelling, though, is the absolutely batshit list of other names that England has chosen to dream up for, again, just the concept of a dog who is a ghost.
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Before you scroll on I really, really need you to make sure you read this full list. Moddey Dhoo? Guytrash? SHUG MONKEY??
I need a minute.
Okay in that minute I also found a second screenshot on my desktop and I CAN'T FUCKING DO THIS WITH YOU ANYMORE ENGLAND!
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Okay. "Snickleways" really did almost put me in the hospital for extreme British poisoning but that's not your problem.
Here's, and again I'm so sorry, one more thing about British ghost dogs.
There's another specific type of ghost dog called Gabriel Hounds. They are also known as Yell Hounds or Gabble Ratchets which I can't even stop to comment on except to say fucking get it together England. The point of Gabriel Hounds is that they are dogs with human heads, sometimes said to be the souls of unbaptized children. Their calls start out loud and get quieter the closer they get, although they only ever fly high out of sight above cloud cover so I have no idea who came up with that. They're known to hover over houses where death or misfortune is about to take place. It is now believed that the noises people attributed to the yell hounds were actually geese honks and again I really want you to reflect on the fact that these people SAW birds, KNEW birds' whole deal, heard noises coming from above and went, yep that's a yelling man-faced undead baby dog, forsooth.
Please enjoy this image I found on the internet and, without further ado, your regularly scheduled Ghostletter will now resume.
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Point-making Ghost Chicken Strikes Again
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Sir Francis Bacon died as he lived: making a point about something. Following an argument he had with a friend during a carriage ride in the spring of 1626 (Dr. Witherbone, if you want to get British about it) about whether refrigeration could rival salt as a method for food preservation, Bacon forced the driver to pull over so he could buy and kill a chicken, bury it in the fresh snow and then presumably invent the "suck it" gesture in celebration. Unfortunately, "suck it" gesture science was set back decades when Sir Bacon caught pneumonia from all the running around in the snow with a chicken and expired shortly after.
Ever since Bacon's extremely on-brand demise, residents of the region where the chickening took place, Highgate, have reported paranormal sightings. Not of Bacon himself, thank god, but of what appears to be a half-plucked chicken running around in circles near Pond Square disappearing whenever someone draws close. Others reported it simply sulking in the branches of nearby trees.
It seems the spiteful chicken ghost is committed to being weird through the decades because it was still being spotted 300 years later. Air raid wardens stationed nearby during World War II would regularly spot the chicken and try to catch it, only to be thwarted when it would disappear into thin air.
As recently as the 70s a couple reported being interrupted near Pond Square by the phantom chicken during a romantic rendezvous. There's a phrase for derailing romantic moments that would be super appropriate here but I just can't quite put my finger on it.
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Benesquid Octobatch Is What I'd Call A British Octopus Ghost But Nobody Asked Me
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In 1840 a young fancy boy named Robert Warboys was in a public house in London, talking a big game about a haunted house nearby. 50 Berkeley Square had long been a known sight for spooky happenings, and apparently Warboys was absolutely tired of it. His drinking buddies dared him to stay on the second floor of Berkeley Square for a night and Warboys immediately accepted. They went to wake the landlord who wasn't at all down for the plan and insisted that if the fancy little man was going to do this dumb thing he at least bring a pistol and a string attached to a bell downstairs in case he needed backup.
Not even an hour after Warboys went upstairs the bell started ringing. When the landlord went to investigate he found Warboys dead with a "grimace of terror" on his face-- he had fired the pistol and the bullet was lodged in the wall opposite him.
In classic rich person tradition this death was not enough to prevent a flock of other foppish lads from meeting the same fate. Despite years of talk about a sentient mist moving through the house, a mobile ooze, a shadowy figure and even "tentacles that made sloppy noises as it travelled," there continued to be precocious little men in cravats (presumably) who wanted to risk it. There's a story of a nobleman who spent the night only to get turned into a speechless, catatonic mess. That's not the only fancy boy blood the house would spill. In 1859 one Lord Lyttleton (which isn't even a fake stupid aristocratic name I made up if you can believe it) stayed in the attic and reported seeing a wild apparition with tentacles. He obviously fired his rifle at it, but when he got up to check for octopusal remains he found only shells.
From there the Thing seemed to calm down (or maybe people just found something better to do than wake up landlords demanding to duel the invisible octopus monster on his property) until 1887, when two sailors named Robert Martin and Edward Blunden, on shore leave, ended up staying in the same room that Warboys had almost four decades before. The sailors reportedly woke up to "wet noises." Blunden got up to investigate and got immediately bodied by some kind of "grey mass," at which point Martin noped out of the situation to find a cop. Accounts differ, and by the time Martin and said cop returned Blunden was either found mauled in the basement or on the pavement outside after having jumped out a window. Either way he had a fearful expression on his face which, yeah.
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*Haunted Mongoose Voice* My Name Gef
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In the fall of 1931 the Irving family, who lived in an isolated farmhouse in the more isolated Isle of Man, UK, reported a strange new guest. Initially he only revealed himself via rappings and scratchings from the insides of walls around the house, but eventually the visitor appeared before the family and explained himself. He told them that his name was Gef, and that he was born in New Delhi in 1852. None of this might have seemed so outlandish if Gef weren’t also a big, talking weasel.
Gef was dodgy about his origins; he would sometimes claim "I am the ghost of a weasel, and I will haunt you with weird noises and clanking chains," a super cool introduction imo, and other times would claim to simply be “a little extra, extra clever mongoose.”
The Irvings, possibly because the idea of having literally anyone else to talk to, even a ghostly weasel, was so appealing, quickly got used to Gef's presence and in return Gef helped with the housework. Gef prided himself on turning the stove off if the family forgot, waking them up if they overslept, and catching rabbits for the family’s supper. In return Gef expected biscuits and conversation and would go absolutely batshit if anyone tried to lock him out of a room. He would call out insults to James specifically, usually insisting he read the newspaper out loud so Gef could hear.
There were regular reports of Gef being able to shapeshift or turn invisible. Once, when some workers were having lunch near the farm, one man threw his sandwich crust into a field only to see it moving around, apparently of its own volition. One of the Irving's cousins had a rock thrown over a hedge at him as he tilled a field near the house but when he looked, there was nobody on the other side.
Visitors to the house, including paranormal investigators Harry Price and Nandor Fodor, reported rapping on the walls and a shrill voice coming from behind the wainscoting. One visitor, Arthur Morrison, reported to Fodor that he had come to the house in 1932 hoping to expose the hoax if there was one. Gef introduced himself to Arthur with his normal screeching voice upon his arrival, and then quieted down until 8pm, when he reappeared to tell Arthur "I am going to keep you awake all night." And this Gef very much did. The next morning Arthur apologized to James for ever thinking it was a hoax.
Gef's antics didn't limit themselves to the farmhouse. Gef would reportedly often take the bus to Peel to spy on depot workers. The bus conductor even spoke to a psychic investigator about how Gef had stolen his sandwiches once: "Yes, I am the man whose dinner was pinched. The dinner was six sandwiches in a paper parcel. The paper was slit open as if by a knife or sharp claws. The sandwiches were missing. I should like to get my hands on that Gef."
As proof, the Irvings offered investigators samples of Gef's fur, a cast of his pawprint, and a few absolutely stunning photographs of him-- almost all of this evidence has been widely disputed. The fur, experts say, seemed like it came from the Irvings' family dog and the pawprint looked like it had been manufactured.
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Despite this, none of the Irvings have ever stopped insisting Gef was real. At multiple points the father, James, turned down large sums of money for the rights to his photos of Gef and his story. The Irvings' daughter, Voirrey, still insisted in an interview 40 years later that Gef was real. She says, as an introvert, having to meet all the people who came to their house to investigate was an actual nightmare that she would never have wished for. Voirrey often gets charged with having used ventriloquism to create the illusion of Gef. She responds, "Believe me, if I was that good I would jolly well be making money from it now!" There are indeed several accounts of Gef speaking through the walls while Voirrey was visible outside, so she has a point.
Ultimately the investigators were split on whether Gef was a hoax. Harry Price concluded James had faked Gef but, because James didn't seem to be profiting from it, was understandably confused as to why anyone would do this. Nandor Fodor, on the other hand, decided that Gef was exactly what the family claimed: an extra clever, talking mongoose.
Gef seems to have faded away when James did-- James' wife and other daughter Elsie (who was a hardcore Gef doubter) reported that while they sat in the living room after James fell ill, the brush from the fireplace picked itself up and started sweeping the floor. It fell to the ground at the same moment that James passed away and that was the last anyone heard from Gef. After that point when Elsie or Voirrey would come to stay at the house they could hear rattling around in the rafters and walls, but no more speaking.
Still, even 60 years later Gef remains That Bitch. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014 that a group of the world's preedominant Gef scholars met at the University of London's House Senate Library to discuss the mysterious mongoose. The Journal describes the group as "a small but obsessive band of researchers" and that seems like maybe the only way to describe them.
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ZooFact: A Camel's Humps Can Store 6 Months' Worth Of Water, And Also An Eternity Of Vengeance
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In 1883 in the Southeastern region of the Arizona Territory on Eagle Creek, two men left their wives at home to count how many sheep they had because it was olden times. One woman left to get water from the nearby spring and minutes later the second woman heard screaming. She looked out the window and all she was able to report seeing was something "red, enormous, and ridden by a devil." When the husbands came home, they found the unlucky wife had been trampled -- there were huge cloven hoofprints in the mud near her body and long red hairs everywhere. The manner of her death left the coroner extremely suspicious that one of the other family members had murdered her using the common clichéd method of stomping her repeatedly with a set of giant hooves, but eventually he ruled it a "death in some manner unknown."
Mere days later 2 prospectors camping at the nearby Chase's Creek reported that something had smooshed their tent right down on them. All they could describe was the sound of loud screaming and heavy hooves running away, and red hairs littered their now-smooshed tent. Miners began spreading the story of The Red Ghost as another tall tale of the Wild West, and would regularly circulate additions to the mythology, including that the camel had eaten at least one Grizzly.
A month later, 80 miles north of Eagle Creek, a rancher named Cyrus Hamblin climbed a ridge looking for stray cattle and saw from his perch a gigantic red camel with something on his back that didn't not look like a dead man.
A few weeks later and 60 miles West, five prospectors saw the camel grazing on a mesa and shot at it. They only managed to scare the creature off, but as it ran something fell from its back. When the men went to investigate they realized it was a human skull.
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A camel sighting in the American Southwest wasn't entirely implausible in the late 19th century. In 1855 Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had browbeaten Congress into giving him the funds to buy 33 camels to run around the Southwestern Territories with. This was almost immediately heralded as one of the dumbest fucking things any person has ever done. The camels were hardy enough to make the journey to the US with minimal losses, which was good fortune considering the only vet they had hired had one solution to every problem and it was "rub a chameleon's tail under the camel's nose until the problem goes away." On top of that, cowhands and muleskinners hated the camels on account of how camels are much more prone to dickish behavior than cows or mules or horses. The mules and horses themselves seemed to not be big fans of the camel plan either because the camels would regularly bite and terrify them and chase them away from camp. By the 1860s the program had been dissolved and all of the camels had either been auctioned off or released into the desert, presumably to go find new victims.
There are a few theories as to how the Red Ghost got its cargo. Some think a weary traveler, lost in the desert, strapped himself to the camel in the hopes that it would lead him to water and then died before it did. Others think that it was a classic soldier prank where one soldier who was (correctly) afraid of camels was strapped to one by his colleagues and it ran off before they could untie him.
The Phantasma Colorado would appear regularly over the next year, almost exclusively to chase people, stomp on their worldly possessions, and leave hair everywhere. And then, after one encounter nearly a year after its first trampling where it broke into a corral just to knock a man off his horse, the Red Ghost vanished.
Ten full years later, on February 25, 1893 the Mohave County Miner reported:
"Another ghost is laid. Another of the tribe of gaunt hobgoblins that keep the romance of the mysterious Southern deserts is gone. Another of the unearthly dangers that the timid Mexican women used to pray against has departed."
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The Miner went on to describe the story of one Mizoo Hastings of Ore, who had woken up to find a giant red camel eating from his turnip patch. Hastings aimed his gun through his kitchen window and shot the animal. When he drew closer, he saw it was covered in a network of rawhide strips that had clearly been on him for years. I'm sure it comes as some comfort to the Red Ghost that he had not only finally broken free of his ghastly cargo but also that he died as he lived: smooshing some things.
I know that usually ghost stories don't end with the ghost getting actually shot dead in a patch of turnips, and that technically this might qualify it more as a "spooky happening," so I'll leave you with a ghost story that someone made up to explain the occurance of the Big Red Asshole.
It is said that in the 1870s a prospector named Jake had bought three camels off of the army at an auction and used them for his mining operations. After he struck gold Jake came to town with camels carrying bags full of gold ore. A ne'er-do-well named Paul Adams took notice, listened to his story, and followed him back out of town. Jake, anticipating this exact thing, took a roundabout route to his secret mine. Paul, thinking they had arrived at Jake's mine, attacked the miner and was immediately bitten by one of Jake's camels. Paul murdered Jake and shot the camel who bit him, but soon realized Jake's mine was nowhere to be found. He began fruitlessly searching the hills for Jake's treasure until one night when the ghost of Jake, riding the ghost of his camel, appeared and chased Paul all the way to the sheriff's office where he confessed to his crimes.
~And it is said that Jake and his loyal steed still wander the desert to this day.~
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Sources
Point-making Ghost Chicken Strikes Again
-A Scientific Spirit: Sir Francis Bacon and the Ghost Chicken of Highgate, Mental Floss
-Highgate Chicken Ghost, Real British Ghosts
A London Inheritance
Benesquid Octobatch Is What I'd Call A British Octopus Ghost But Nobody Asked Me
-The Bizarre Nameless Thing of Berkeley Square, Mysterious Universe
*Haunted Mongoose Voice* My Name Gef
-Gef The Talking Mongoose, Fortean Times
-The Strange Story of Gef The Talking Mongoose, Mental Floss
-In England, Researchers Investigate Case of the Talking Mongoose, Wall Street Journal
ZooFact: A Camel's Humps Can Store 6 Months' Worth Of Water, And Also An Eternity Of Vengeance
-The Red Ghost, American Heritage
-Ghost Camels in the American Southwest, Legends of America
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Click the photo of the horrible dog sculpture for all the previous Ghostletters your heart could desire!
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Click that there cursed yell hound photo to go to the original Ghosthole, where we visit and explore all the haunted locations that are convenient to us personally!
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Oh, that photo of me looking wildly unprepared? That'll take you to our wildly infrequent podcast The Ghostcast!
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