Gallows and Ghosts

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 39, 9 May 1927, Page 7

Gallows and Ghosts

CRIMES AND CRIMINALS OF DAYS GONE BY. { GRUESOME COURT RECORDS English folk of the eighteenth century when public executions provided regular and popular amusement, and the hanging of criminals i n chains enforced a more or less moral and enduring lesson, were prepared to regard the foot of the gallows as the scene of witches’ frolics, and the grease sweated from the gibbet, or the moss I ° l } the murderer’s skull, as material for spells and specifics. Presumably it occurred to few folk to ?hfr 0n r tl ; e Justice or the value of the English criminal code, and ceruone to suggest the possibihty that the hanging judge was likely to be affected with terrors of conscience and imaginings of supernatural vengeance from the victims of the law, any more than were the accomplished hangmen of the century Jack Ketch, and Edward Dennis of the Gordon Riots. Ghosts from the gallows did not appear in the courts to haunt the cruellest of judges, as the ghost of Pyneweck appears to Mr Justice Harbottle in Joseph Sheridan ie Fanu s grim story. It mattered nothing to the hanging judge that the poor wretch should be slowlv strangled, and the body either handed over to the surgeons for dissection, or daubed with pitch as preservative and gibbeted. Popular superstition might raise a ghost to haunt the scene of crime, or of execution, or of hanging in chains the judge dreaded no visitant from all the victims of assizes. FEARSOME JUDGES Le Fanu’s hanging judge is patterned on the once-popular conception of Judge Jeffreys. Macaulay’s distorted picture of Jeffreys, coming into court, having but half slept off a debauch, his cheeks on fire, his eyes staring like those of a maniac, is not more shocking than Le Fanu's description of Mr. Justice Harbottle in the flesh, or his Hanging Judge Horrocks in the spirit, in that haunted house of Aungier Street, Dublin, where Horrocks had died by the rope. Harbottle, his brow indicative of intellectual power, his face huge, grim, and purple, his body bloated with debauchery, is as powerfully melodramatic a figure as ever Le Fanu drew. At Shrewsbury Assize, 1748, he condemns to death Lewis Pyneweck for forgery; he has done Pyneweck a gross injury in the past; he ignores sinister warnings that the man’s fate means his own fate. At the Old Bailey he is thundering at, gibing at, a prisoner, in a case of forgery, when suddenly he sees in the court a slight, mean figure dressed in seedy black, whom he recognises as the hanged Pyneweck. Through wild debauchery—such debauchery as Jeffreys practised at Hare Court, in the Temple—terror grows upon him, though conscience troubles him in no way, as conscience troubles Matthias in the similar theme of “The Bells.” Driving home at night with boon companions, he loses grip of realities; he is dragged before a ghostly court; the spectre of Pyneweck bears evidence. The prisoner is condemned by a spectral judge, a dilated effigy of himself, with all his fierce colouring and ferocity of eye and visage enhanced awfully. The date fixed for his execution is March 10. Waking from vision, he seeks to laugh off his terrors, but they crowd upon him still. On the night of March 10 awful sounds are heard from his room, and in the morning he is found hanging by the neck from the top of the great staircase. APPALLING CHARACTERISTICS Le Fanu had a habit of employing a theme as the basis of two stories. Horrocks, the appalling spectre, with his countenance embodying intellect, sensuality and malignant omen, seems an anticipation of Harbottle. For stark horror the tale of the experience of two young medical students in the house haunted by Horrocks, is at least comparable with Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”—indeed, with not a few of the performances of the master of horrors, Edgar Allan Poe. Jeffreys in the Tower, and near his death from agonising disease, was troubled in no way by conscience or fears of the supernatural! on his death-bed he retorted to Dr. John Scott’s exhortations to repentance for the butcheries of the Bloody Assize that he deserved praise from humanity instead of blame for cruelty; his clemency had drawn on him the extreme displeasure of his master. Now Jeffreys, despite the juster estimate which later historians than Macaulay have formed, surely of all hanging judges might popularly have been credited with such terrors as Harbottle’s. It mattered nothing to the notorious judge that he had administered the law in his own way; it mattered nothing to any hanging judge of the period. But ghosts did figure on occasion in the trials of notorious malefactors —ghosts and visions. Chief among the instances recorded in the “Newgate Calendar” is the revelation of the murder of Maria Marten at the hands of William Corder, tried at Bury St. Edmunds, found guilty, and executed on August 11, 1828. The story of Maria, the mole-catcher’s daughter, formed the theme of popular melodrama for several generations. It had all the elements—the seduction of the wretched girl, and the promise of marriage by the young farmer, Corder, the murder in the Red Barn, the concealment of the body, and the flight and disappearance of Corder in London. In March, 1828, Maria’s mother dreamed on three successive nights that her daughter lay murdered in the barn. So the floor of the barn was dug up, and there were the remains of poor Maria, with all the “appearances of death by violent means.” Corder, having been convicted, and having subsequently confessed, was duly turned off; and for

the rope as much as a guinea an inch was paid by the spectators, and a piece of skin flayed from the “wretched malefactor” was neatly tanned, and long exhibited by a leather-seller in Oxford Street, Lonaon. A PUBLICAN’S DREAM In 1751, John Caulfield, a seaman, was hanged at Waterford for the murder of a little sickly sailor named Hickey. One night Adam Rogers, “a creditable man,” who kept a publichouse near Waterford, dreamed that he saw a huge fellow murder a little fellow on the high road near at hand. A day or so later two seamen, resembling the figures in the dream, turned up at the public-house. Rogers, in terror, urged Hickey not to continue his journey, but did not tell him the reason. Hickey persisted in accompanying Caulfield, and on the lonely spot of road seen by Rogers in the dream Caulfield struck Hickey down with a stone, cut his throat and robbed the body. The body, still warm, was discovered by labourers; Rogers immediately reported his dream; Caulfield was arrested and tried for murder. In court Rogers described the dress of the companions with such exactitude that, he was asked by the prisoner why he should have taken such notice of strangers calling at a public house: accordingly, he told the court the full details of the dream. Caulfield, too. was executed because of a dream. GHOSTS OF THE ROAD William Nevison, the notorious highwayman of the seventeenth century, considered by certain authorities to have ridden the famed ride to York, popularly ascribed to Dick Turpin, figured as a ghost at one stage of his career, but not in court. Lying in Leicester Gaol for highway robber y, he pretended to -develop the plague; his confederates painted him with blue

spots; lie was declared dead, and carried out in a coffin. To the horror of travellers, a ghostly Nevison promptly appeared on the roads, and exacted toll, as in the flesh. For years, now as highwayman, now as beggar, he evaded capture, but, taken at last, he was hanged at York in 1684. Apart from the case of Red Barn, the most notorious case in the “Calendar,” in which a spectre figured, was the trial of the young exciseman, Francis Smith who was condemned to death on January 13, 1804, for the “murder of the supposed Hammersmith ghost.” A ghost had appeared in the churchyard for several weeks; it had scared a poor woman to death; but, on being chased by a watchman, it had fled ignominiously, leaving a white sheet behind it. None the less it was reported that a real ghost, with horns and glass eyes, stalked up and down the graveyard, and the lanes about it. Smith waited for that ghost with a gun, and, on the night of January 3, seeing a white figure approaching, fired at it, and killed poor Thomas Millwood, who was wearing “a white dress, the usual habiliment of his occupation,” as a bricklayer. So Smith went for trial, and was condemned to death. The sentence was commuted to imprisonment —for one year; but the Hammersmith ghost, after this tragedy, walked no more.