Family history. . .you need to learn
Lest old troubles will return
Come back and haunt you
You'll hear them rattle their chain

--------------------------------Tim O'Brien

Physically, very tired. Babysat the Princess today; school in our county closed because so many students have flu. We had a good day--played computer games and board games, especially Junior Monopoly. The Junior Monopoly board is set up like an amusement park run by Uncle Pennybags, and one of the attractions is a haunted house. She had a very scary experience at the Haunted Mansion at Disney World a couple of years ago, and she wouldn't buy the haunted house concession at all; she let me have it every game we played.

Did make me think of a family story about a ghost light, though--

Not half a mile from the house there's a Baptist church, founded in the 1820s and with a thriving congregation to this day. The oldest part of the building was put up by slaves owned by its founder and first minister, of bricks made on his nearby plantation of the ubiquitous local red clay. In the oldest part of the graveyard, across a little swampy branch and up the slope of a hill, the good reverend lies under an obelisk stone of a kind common in the mid-nineteenth century, with his slaves buried around him. Some of their graves have rounded markers too small to bear a name; other have no markers at all.

Some eighty years ago, when my maternal grandmother was a young girl, this cemetery was haunted for a short time by a ghost light. Mamaw actually saw it. She said that more than likely it was swamp gas; in shape it resembled the light cast by a lantern, and would dance with a flirtatious flutter over the cemetery before abruptly winking out.

It wasn't that big a deal, except to one man who lived in a little shack on a direct line of sight to the graveyard. As hillbillies delicately put it, he wasn't quite right. Mentally unstable from childhood, he nevertheless lived quietly, with his widowed father, until the night he saw the ghost light.

That night, they say, he crashed through the front door of the shack and hunkered down in the corner farthest from the door in the front room, his arms cradling his head. The only thing he would say in answer to increasingly frantic questioning was a drawn-out shriek of terror: "I seen the light, and it was a bright light!" Over the next few days he grew so violent that his father finally signed him into the asylum, where he would be confined intermittently until he died sometime in the 1990s.

Strangely, there are no reports of that light being seen later than that short time in the 1920s. I've looked over that graveyard from the vantage point where the young man saw it, and it is worth noting that the light danced over the graves of the old minister and his slaves.



And on that speculative note, fair thee well.

Nothing especially to say today. I was looking at pics over at photobucket and for the heck of it typed in "abbey ruins" in the search whatchamathingy. This is a beautiful shot of England's Whitby Abbey, on a cliff above the sea in Yorkshire.

Whitby Abbey has a long and fascinating history. A Benedictine house, established as a double foundation of monks and nuns by King Oswy in AD 657, its first abbess was the redoubtable Hilda. In AD 664, Whitby was the site of a great synod or council in which the Anglo-Saxon Christians essentially aligned themselves with the Catholic church based in Rome and split with the less organized Celtic Christianity that had been the most common form in the British Isles.

The house of monks at Whitby was the home, in the 670s-680s, of the Saxon cowherd Caedmon, generally acknowledged as England's first poet. The story goes that the monks would gather each night to sing songs, but Caedmon always slipped away before his turn came, fearing he would embarass himself. One night, as he lay in his bed in the barn, he heard a voice that told him, "Sing me a song, Caedmon!" When he protested he could not, the voice told him he could, and gave him a subject: "Sing the story of creation." To Caedmon's delight and shock, he found himself singing, and the next night he sang for the company of monks for the first time. St. Hilda, when she heard him, declared his song a miracle and asked for more. From being a lowly cowherd, Caedmon became a monk, and the first poet known to have composed in his native Anglo-Saxon language rather than Latin. Only one fragment of his verse survives; it is known, simply, as Caedmon's Hymn. In modern English, it reads:

Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven's kingdom,
the might of the Creator, and his thought,
the work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders
the Eternal Lord established in the beginning.
He first created for the sons of men
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator,
then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind,
the Eternal Lord, afterwards made,
the earth for men, the Almighty Lord.

At the bottom of at least one copy appears, in Anglo-Saxon, the first copyright in English: Caedmon first sang this song.

The original abbey buildings were destroyed by Vikings in 867. A second abbey was founded and built beginning in 1078. This second abbey stood until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540, when Henry VIII broke with the Church in Rome and despoiled the rich religious foundations of England. Whitby was left the ruin we see today.



Whitby is probably most famous today for its connection to Bram Stoker's classic 1897 horror novel DRACULA; the Demeter, the ship that brings Count Dracula to England, runs aground on the beach below the ruins, with a dead man lashed to the steering wheel and no one else aboard. The graveyard at the ruins also feature in some scenes from the novel.

And on that note, fair thee well.

Sarah ban Breathnach once described the atmosphere of a theater where live performances take place as "the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd." It was one of her dreams to be a stage actress, and when I was younger it was one of mine too--until I realized I have no talent for it.

Theaters are haunted, by both the famous and the infamous--look at the contrasting stories of theaters haunted by, respectively, Edwin Booth and his murderous brother, John Wilkes. They are most commonly haunted by stagehands, who in the course of their duties spend more time in them than actors do. And smaller, local venues can be haunted by the anonymous actors who played their parts there but for one reason or another never moved on.

A friend of mine who has worked in all sorts of capacities in live theater told me this story. I have his permission to retell it, as long as I change names and the like.

He was working with a little theater group in a small town not far from Lake Erie some years ago. The building itself was built shortly after the turn of the last century, and was said to be haunted by an actress from the twenties or thirties, but nobody quite knew the whole story; they were sometimes strongly aware of her presence, but she was rather retiring for an actress, very seldom seen.

Because of conflicts within the group, he was shortly after his experience to leave it; his departure was not hastened by his encounter with a ghostly lady with a gun.

When he first saw her, she had her back to him. She was dressed in Victorian white, a tall slender woman with dark blond hair in a bun on the back of her head.



He didn't think much of it at first; there are always women in costume backstage in a theater. Then he remembered he was alone in the building--and they weren't doing a Victorian melodrama, so her costume was definitely out of place.

She turned around to face him, as if she had only just become aware of him. She was, he saw, holding something even more out of place than her costume: a small pistol, which she raised and without warning fired at him.

He could feel the bullet go through him, he says; and even now, after nearly two decades, the memory makes him tremble.

And then she was gone, and he was not bleeding. That's as much as he remembers; he left in a hurry.

Several years later, in a book of legends and ghost stories by a local author, he read her story. In the theater's early days, a young actor and actress had appeared opposite each other in a number of productions in which they played loving couples. Often, such roles bleed over into real life, and soon the pair were almost engaged.

Unfortunately, the young man was less than faithful, which drove his almost-fiancee mad with jealousy and rage. The last straw came when she found him backstage in a fairly compromising position with one of the company's ingenues. She went out and bought a gun. Within days, her false lover was dead; she shot him backstage as he was waiting to make an entrance.

She was adjudged insane, and confined to an asylum. Some years later, she managed to escape, and was--as my friend puts it wrily, in the best Ophelian tradition--found drowned in a nearby creek, like Hamlet's mad love.



And on that watery note, fair thee well.

http://auntornery.blogstream.com/

The above is a new blog by my dear old friend, Aunt Ornery. You may recall that Willard and I met up with her on that last shudder-inducing excursion we made to Wal-Mart with Madame Sadie? Well, Auntie's a good old soul. I've know her as long as I've known Willard. Do please drop over, give her a read, tell her Fairweather sent you. She'll be glad to hear from you.

Some time ago I wrote a piece about the Poe Toaster, who visits the grave of Edgar Allan Poe yearly on Poe's birthday, January 19th. I seem to recall speculating whether the Poe Toaster took his inspiration from the mysterious Lady in Black who has left flowers at the crypt containing the body of silent film star Rudolph Valentino. I still can't answer that one, but I've had a lot of fun doing research about the origins of the Lady in Black.

First, a brief bio of Valentino:



Born Rodolfo Guglielmi in Italy in 1895, he was sent to the United States in 1913 after a troubled childhood and adolescence. He made his way in New York City as an exhibition dancer (a skill that stood him in good stead during his movie career), busboy, and, rumor has it, a gigolo. He moved to Hollywood in 1919, changed his name to Rudolph Valentino, and began to appear in small parts in films, usually cast as the villain--thanks to his dark good looks. He became a major star in 1921's THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, playing a French-Argentinian playboy who dies in WWI; this part led to his iconic role in the eponymous THE SHEIK.

His career did not last long; on August 15, 1926, he collapsed in a New York City hotel and died eight days later of peritonitis following a perforated ulcer. At the time of his death he was allegedly engaged to the actress Pola Negri, following on two failed marriages. Negri would claim, in later years, to have been the Lady in Black, who began delivering flowers to his crypt in what is now the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on the first anniversary of his death.

In 1947, a woman named Ditra Flame (pronounced fla-MAY) revealed that she was the original Lady in Black. Her mother was a friend of Valentino's. When Ditra was a young girl, she was hospitalized for a serious illness, and Valentino came to visit her. At that visit, she said, Valentino asked her to come to his grave to visit him once he was dead, for he did not wish to be alone. Ditra recovered, and when Valentino died some years later, she--by then a teenager--kept her promise to him. She only revealed her status as the original Lady in Black after a former showgirl named Marian Watson--who, like Pola Negri, claimed to have been Valentino's fiancee--claimed she was the Lady in Black. In later years, Flame stopped wearing black clothes on her anniversary visits to Valentino's crypt. There was no need; that role was taken up by a series of fakes.

Ditra Flame discontinued her visits in 1954, and began to go again in 1977; she continued to go to Valentino's crypt from then until her death in 1984. She is identified on her tombstone as the Lady in Black.

A woman named Estrellita del Regil began to visit Valentino's grave in the early 1970s, and is generally accepted as the second "official" Lady in Black. She continued in the role until 1993, when illness forced her to give it up. Since 1995, an actress named Vicki Callahan has been the "official" Lady in Black.

As it happens, Valentino and Edgar Allan Poe are not the only ones who have mysterious admirers who leave flowers on their graves. For many years, someone has left two dozen red roses on the grave of Queen Anne Boleyn, the second wife of the infamous Henry VIII of England, every year on the anniversary of her death. Anne was executed on May 19, 1536, and buried beneath the floor of the Tower of London's Chapel of Saint Peter ad Vincula. No one knows who leaves the roses; if anyone has ever been seen, nobody's talking...

And there is said--if Wikipedia is to be believed--to be a connection between Valentino's Lady in Black and the classic country song "The Long Black Veil," written by Marijohn Wilkin and Danny Dill in 1959. The Lady in Black is said to have inspired the song.

Interesting stuff. Till next time, fair thee well.