Just Don't Call It History

Halloween is a dark time for historians. We believe in facts, not ghosts – and yet -- we are also the keepers of the past. We see dead people all the time, and tell their stories. So come October, the phone rings often. Have I got any good ghost stories, reporters want to know? Any thing gross, scary, supernatural, or unexplainable will do.

Now I love a good creepshow as much as the next guy. I spend hours each year wandering the Halloween superstore with its animated talking ghouls and plastic severed body parts. And I adore the annual Halloween Parade. No town does it better than Portsmouth. But duh -- it’s all fake. So are the scary movies, horror novels, comic book heroes, and funhouse rides. It ain’t history.

What scares me silly is the increasingly fuzzy line Americans draw between fiction and fact. People who channel messages from departed loved ones are entertainers, not truthtellers. So are the people who drag electronic measuring devices into old houses to calculate the residual "energy" of dead souls. This is Hollywood, people, not science, and clever charlatans have been making a living this way for decades. Just because you saw it on the History Channel, doesn’t make it true.

Life is not a horror novel

Caught up in the Halloween spirit, even professional reporters may refer to "authentic" or "documented" ghosts from history, when no such category exists. All supernatural phenomena are considered folklore to historians. Those of us who insist on sticking to the facts are considered party poopers during Halloween. Others suggest we are withholding the truth, X-Files-style, about a parallel paranormal dimension where imagined creatures run free. We have raised a new generation, weaned on video games and Sci-Fi films, that is skeptical about history, yet open-minded to fantasy.

The reporters press harder. Have I knowledge of any real local zombies, witches, sprites, imps, devils, vampires, aliens, angels, werewolves, dragons, shape-shifters or yetis? Nope, nor have I compiled a dossier on the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. One can write a fascinating thesis on the evolution of the Santa Claus legend in American culture, but I’m sorry, Virginia, no one has yet produced the real McCoy.

But what about Dracula, the believers insist? Wasn’t he based on a real person? More or less. But little resemblance remains between the medieval Vlad the Impaler (1431- 1476), and the Dracula popularized by novelists Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Stephen King and actor Bella Lugosi.

In an age of information overload, popular culture often trumps fact. I’ve heard people seriously debate whether garlic and crucifixes can keep a vampire at bay. Historical research is especially time consuming, often dull, plodding work. Most ghost believers are unwilling to dig, or they rely on shoddy research, hearsay, unauthorized sources or ancient amateur history books. Knowledge evolves. An old history book may be as out of date as an old TV Guide. Easier to just search on Google, click the top few items, and call it research.

And yes, people have been convicted, even executed in New England for witchcraft. But that does not make them witches. Puritan law in the 17^th century banned everything from drinking toasts to wearing long hair. Besides treason and murder, citizens could be put to death for idolatry, blasphemy, public rebellion, witchcraft, bestiality, buggery, bearing false witness, rape, "man stealing," and burning a house or ship. Even children could legally be executed for cursing their parents. Based on early colonial law, we would all be on death row.

My neighbor is a cat

Ghost stories are the junk food of history and New England towns horde them greedily like Halloween candy. They provide a dramatic sugar rush, but no lasting nutrition. As folklore, they can tell us a great deal about human behavior and life in the past. Taken literally, however, they only lead us round and round the barn – and back to where we started. And junior reporters beware. While it is fine to say, "John Doe believes he saw a ghostly figure in his attic" it is not accurate to say that John Doe lives in a haunted house.

The problem increases when writers unfamiliar with historic research begin pulling "evidence" from early documents without context. It is a matter of record, for example, that in 1656 Susannah Trimmings files suit in Portsmouth Court against her neighbor. A portion of the testimony reads:

"As I was going home on Sunday night the 30^th, I heard a rustling in the woods, which I supposed to be occasioned by swine, and presently there appeared a woman, whom I apprehended to be old Goodwife Walford. She asked me to lend her a pound of cotton; I told her I had but two pounds in the house, and I would not spare any to my mother. She said I had better have done it, for I was going a great journey, but I should never come there. She then left me, and I was struck as if with a clap of fire on the back; and she vanished toward the water side, in my apprehension, in the shape of a cat."

Not even Timothy Trimmings believed his wife had been bewitched. She was just suffering from "her weakness" he told the court. But another neighbor swore he too saw a cat, and when he tried to shoot it, his gun jammed, possibly due to witchcraft. There is no limit to what the human mind can imagine or conclude, especially in an era of constant terror and uncertainty like the 17^th century – or now.

GHOST BUSTERS CONTINUED

Rocks, devils & reality

Our brains are pattern-making machines. Everything, ultimately, must fit our personal vision of the world. If you believe in ghosts, then you have no need to explain further why a ghostly event occurs. Gate unlocked, things missing, strange lights, weird noises? Must be a ghost. The more one assigns the unknown to the realm of ghosts, the more ghosts there seem to be. No need to do the heavy research, just collect more spooky tales.

Supernatural tales and mythology, to the historian, demonstrate how our view of the world has changed through the centuries. In the mid-1800s, journalist Charles W. Brewster complained in the Portsmouth Journal that what used to be called witchcraft was again gaining public appeal. Mesmerists, spiritualists, astrologers, and Satanic cults were trying to turn superstition into science. And why not? Much of what we call science today evolved from superstition. But at some point the party-pooper historian just has to put a foot down. Enough is enough.

Until recently, Brewster was our key source on the history of witchcraft in Portsmouth. I own a stained copy of an actual Portsmouth Journal from July 20, 1839 with his front page article headlined "Witchcraft in New Hampshire". Here Brewster listed the witch and wizard cases found in the provincial records, including the story of Goody Walford quoted above.

Brewster treasured the tale of the "Rock Throwing Devil" of New Castle in which land owner George Walton was pelted by mysterious stones from an unseen hand in 1682. This local event, precfeding the infamous Salem witch trials by a decade, has been called New Hampshire’s most documented tale of supernatural activity. Thankfully, we now have Prof. Emerson Baker’s brilliant history book The Devil of Great Island (2007) to parse the details. Baker, who is among the most knowledgeable 17^th century scholars in the region, captures the drama of the mysterious stonings without exploiting them. Then he fills in the rich details surrounding the stone throwing legend. Times, according to Baker, were wildly different in the 1600s, but, human nature remains much the same.

Although the source of the mysterious flying rocks was never discovered, Baker offers a host of reasons why George Walton was the sole target. Walton was a Quaker, for example, a religion persecuted in nearby Massachusetts that also included Maine. He was wealthy. He was powerful and controversial. He was on the wrong side of an incredible legal dispute that threatened to strip many New Hampshireites of their homes and property. And George Walton, elderly for his time, had a host of greedy grandchildren who wanted to inherit his land. In provincial New England, accusing your neighbor of witchcraft was a common ploy in property disputes.

In other words, a lot of human beings had devilish motives for getting rid of George Walton during the weeks when the stones rained down on him. Baker peels the legend like an onion to uncover, as the historian must, what was truly going on and why. The facts, as is so often the case, are so much more compelling than some dull old ghost.

More busted myths

-- Charles Brewster tells a stirring story of an 18^th century murder of a visiting French sailor on "Frenchman’s Lane" near Islington Creek in Portsmouth, and a bloody stone that, legend says, could not be washed clean. However, in a footnote in a second edition of Brewster’s Rambles, the editor notes that, further research shows, that the French fleet did not arrive in Portsmouth until four years after the famous murder. The mysterious supernatural stone later could not be found. (More on Frenchman's Lane)

-- For decades Hampton historians swore that a local rock bore the ancient inscriptions or "runes’ of the Viking Thorvald, brother of Leif Eriksson and son of Erik the Red Thorvald reportedly explored this region in 1004 AD. Vikings may certainly have passed along these shores, but the marks on the rock, it turns out, were most likely created by a steam shovel. The hoax may have been planted to boost real estate values on summer homes. (More on Thorvald)

-- There really was an Ocean Born Mary, whose family arrived at Portsmouth from England in 1720. It is uncertain whether a pirate spared the lives of passengers aboard a ship when he saw the newborn Mary Fuller. (1720-1814). Mary did not wed the pirate who did not hide his treasure in her son William’s Henniker, New Hampshire home. That fact did not stop tourists from paying 50 cents to dig for gold coins in the back yard. Research eventually proved they had been digging at the wrong house. (More on Ocean Born Mary)

-- Eunice "Goody" Cole of Hampton was not a witch, but she was convicted of witchery by local residents who wanted her land and disliked her brazen attitude toward authority. Exploited by neighbors, she was jailed, then died destitute and alone. Legend says local citizens drove a wooden stake through her heart after her death and tossed her into the sea. A group of Hampton residents officially apologized for the town’s behavior in 1938. (More on Goody Cole)