The evidence, it may be seen, is not very coherent, and the Franciscans may have been the deceived, not the deceivers. [{117}] Wierus himself admits that he often heard a brownie in his father’s house, which frightened him not a little, and Georgius Pictorius avers that a noisy spirit haunted his uncle’s house for thirty years, a very protracted practical joke, if it was a practical joke. [{118}] This was a stone-throwing demon.
A large book might easily be filled with old stories of mysterious flights of stones, and volatile chairs and tables. The ancient mystics of the Levant were acquainted with the phenomena, as Iamblichus shows. The Eskimo knew them well. Glanvill is rich in examples, the objects flying about in presence of a solitary spectator, who has called at a ‘haunted house,’ and sometimes the events accompany the presence of a single individual, who may, or may not be a convulsionary or epileptic. Sometimes they befall where no individual is suspected of constitutional electricity or of imposture.
We may select a laughable example from a rare tract. ‘An authentic, candid, and circumstantial narrative of the astonishing transactions at Stockwell, in the county of Surrey, on Monday and Tuesday, the 6th and 7th of January, 1772. Published with the consent and approbation of the family and other parties concerned, to authenticate which, the original copy is signed by them. London, 1772, printed for J. Marks, bookseller, in St. Martin’s Lane.’
The dramatis personæ are old Mrs. Golding, of Stockwell parish, ‘a gentlewoman of unblemished honour and character’; Mrs. Pain, her niece, a farmer’s wife, ‘respected in the parish’; Mary Martin, her servant, previously with Mrs. Golding; Richard Fowler, a labourer, living opposite Mrs. Pain; Sarah Fowler his wife—all these sign the document,—and Ann Robinson, Mrs. Golding’s maid, just entered on her service. Ann does not sign.
The trouble began at ten a.m. on January 6, when Mrs. Golding heard a great smash of crockery, an event ‘most incident to maids’. The lady went into the kitchen, when plates began to fall from the dresser ‘while she was there and nobody near them’. Then a clock tumbled down, so did a lantern, a pan of salt beef cracked, and a carpenter, Rowlidge, suggested that a recent addition of a room above had shaken the foundation of the house. Mrs. Golding rushed into the house of Mr. Gresham, her next neighbour, and fainted. Meanwhile Ann Robinson was ‘mistress of herself, though china fall,’ and seemed in no hurry to leave the threatened dwelling. The niece of Mrs. Golding, Mrs. Pain, was sent for to Mr. Gresham’s, Mrs. Golding was bled, when, lo, ‘the blood sprang out of the basin upon the floor, and the basin broke to pieces!’ A bottle of rum, of sympathetic character, also burst. Many of Mrs. Golding’s more fragile effects had been carried into Mr. Gresham’s: the glasses and china first danced, and then fell off the side-board and broke. Mrs. Golding, ‘her mind one confused chaos,’ next sought refuge at Mr. Mayling’s for three-quarters of an hour. Here nothing unusual occurred, but, at Mr. Gresham’s (where Ann Robinson was packing the remains of her mistress’s portable property) a ‘mahogany waiter,’ a quadrille box, a jar of pickles and a pot of raspberry jam shared the common doom. ‘Their end was pieces.’ Mrs. Pain now hospitably conveyed her aunt to her house at Rush Common, ‘hoping all was over’. This was about two in the afternoon.
At eight in the evening, the whole row of pewter dishes, bar one, fell from a shelf, rolled about a little, and ‘as soon as they were quiet, turned upside down; they were then put upon the dresser, and went through the same a second time’. Then of two eggs, one ‘flew off, crossed the kitchen, struck a cat on the head, and then burst in pieces’. A pestle and a mortar presently ‘jumped six feet from the floor’. The glass and crockery were now put on the floor, ‘he that is down need fear no fall,’ but the objects began to dance, and tumble about, and then broke to pieces. A china bowl jumped eight feet but was not broken. However it tried again, and succeeded. Candlesticks, tea-kettles, a tumbler of rum and water, two hams, and a flitch of bacon joined in the corroboree. ‘Most of the genteel families around were continually sending to inquire after them, and whether all was over or not.’ All this while, Ann was ‘walking backwards and forwards’, nor could they get her to sit down, except for half an hour, at prayers, ‘then all was quiet’. She remarked, with stoicism, ‘these things could not be helped’. Fowler came in at ten, but fled in a fright at one in the morning. By five, Mrs. Golding summoned Mrs. Pain, who had gone to bed, ‘all the tables, chairs, drawers, etc., were tumbling about’.
They rushed across to Fowler’s where, as soon as Ann arrived, the old game went on. Fowler, therefore, like the landlord in the poem, ‘did plainly say as how he wished they’d go away,’ at the same time asking Mrs. Golding ‘whether or not, she had been guilty of some atrocious crime, for which providence was determined to pursue her on this side the grave,’ and to break crockery till death put an end to the stupendous Nemesis. ‘Having hitherto been esteemed a most deserving person,’ Mrs. Golding replied, with some natural warmth, that ‘her conscience was quite clear, and she could as well wait the will of providence in her own house as in any other place,’ she and the maid went to her abode, and there everything that had previously escaped was broken. ‘A nine-gallon cask of beer that was in the cellar, the door being open and nobody near it, turned upside down’; ‘a pail of water boiled like a pot’. So Mrs. Golding discharged Miss Ann Robinson and that is all.
At Mrs. Golding’s they took up three, and at Mrs. Pain’s two pails of the fragments that were left. The signatures follow, appended on January 11.
The tale has a sequel. In 1817 an old Mr. Braidley, who loved his joke, told Hone that he knew Ann, and that she confessed to having done the tricks by aid of horse-hairs, wires and other simple appliances. We have not Mr. Braidley’s attested statement, but Ann’s character as a Medium is under a cloud. Have all other Mediums secret wires? (Every-day Book, i. 62.)
Ann Robinson, we have seen, was a tranquil and philosophical maiden. Not so was another person who was equally active, ninety years earlier.