One of my favorite writers of macabre tales is the Irishman Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873). The other night I found and read online one of his most eerie tales, "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter" (1839). In this story the young apprentice painter Schalken is in love with his master's ward, Rose, and is likely to marry her when, out of the blue, a wealthy suitor makes an offer for her hand. This suitor, popeyed and cold to the touch, appears and vanishes at will; when he IS visible, he does not blink, breathe or remove his gloves. Rose is forced to marry this repellent creature, and the story ends with the terrified girl vanishing forever, forced to accompany her husband to the netherworld from whence he came.

Le Fanu was inspired to write the story after viewing the works of the Dutch Baroque painter Godfried Schalcken (1643-1706), who specialized in nocturnal scenes consisting of small lighted areas surrounded by vast dark ones--a technique called chiaroscuro. Le Fanu's dreadful suitor, however, is a literary example of a British folklore figure: the Demon Lover.

The Demon Lover--who returns from the dead in the form of the Devil himself--first emerges as a distinct folklore figure in medieval times, from what I've been able to find, but made his first appearance in print in a 1657 broadside ballad. Ballad lyrics were published in this form, on one side of a sheet of paper, for distribution from the sixteenth till the early twentieth centuries. Only the lyrics were published early on because England's Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603) gave a monopoly on the publication of musical notation to two court musicians. Ballads often dealt in musical form over those centuries with current events; many were written, many more vanished. "The Demon Lover" survived because it was collected in the all-important Child canon--it's Child Ballad 243.

In the ballad the Demon Lover is a ship's captain who returns after an absence of seven years to claim "the vow you promised me/To be my partner in life" of his sweetheart. Thinking him dead, she has in the meantime married another man (usually identified as a "house carpenter") and borne his sons; nevertheless she willingly abandons her husband and sons to go with her former lover, only to learn once they are at sea that he is in fact the Devil and is taking her off to hell with him.

"The Demon Lover" was one of the ballads brought across from Britain to America by early ballad singers; here he lost most of his demonic characteristics and the ballad is usually called "The House Carpenter"; the young wife still abandons husband and sons, but the end result is more in line with "Gypsy Davy" in which a young runaway wife ends up a beggar, deserted by her gypsy lover. Among professional folk singers, though, he's come back in his original form, my favorite version of the song being a duet by Tim O'Brien and Karen Kasey on his 2001 CD TWO JOURNEYS.

Le Fanu was not the only writer to make use of the Demon Lover motif. He turns up again in an 1852 story by Charles Dickens called "To Be Read at Dusk," in which a young English bride in Italy meets a man whose face has terrified her in her dreams; she vanishes at the end of the story, last seen with the man of whom she was so afraid. This story has since gained the status of an urban legend. In 1945, the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen uses the motif in her short story "The Demon Lover," in which a woman traumatized by the World War II blitz wanders back to her ruined London home, where she encounters the man who was her lover at the time of World War I; ultimately she vanishes with him. And the American writer Shirley Jackson, in her short story collection THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES (1949), has several stories featuring a character called James Harris who may, folklorists theorize, have been the prototype of the Demon Lover, centuries ago.

There is also a tale told in Michael Paul Henson's MORE KENTUCKY GHOST STORIES (1996) which is alleged to be true, on this same motif. Henson says the events took place in Letcher County, Kentucky, in 1934, and involved a young wife who, before her wedding, was courted by a much older man who was believed by the locals to be a male witch. She married a younger man to escape the older one's attentions, but on their way home after the wedding were accosted by the old man, who told her that he would die soon, but he would be back for her, and that she would go with him...The old man died. A year after his death, on a snowy night, there came a knock at the front door. The young wife--called Evelyn in Henson's account--was reading in the living room and called to her husband, who was sitting in the kitchen with his two brothers, that she would see who was at the door. The three men heard the door open, but no one came in; when they went into the living room they found the door wide open and Evelyn gone. Outside the door they found the tracks of her bare feet in the snow; they followed the footprints two miles, to where they vanished at the old man's grave. The grave was undisturbed, but when they opened it the casket was empty--and neither the old man's body, nor any trace of the young wife--was ever found.

And on that chilly note, fair thee well.

BTW--Madame Sadie's evidently been on a road trip. Check out what happened at http://sylviasdaughter.blogstream.com. I shudder to think what the old bat might have gotten into if she hadn't turned up at Syl's.

Hi guys. Yet another cold spell today, and I'm sick as a dog. But I did think last night of yet another ghost story preserved in my family. This is one that was told by my paternal grandmother.

Here in my little hometown there stand several houses that were designed by and built for wealthy local families in the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century by a man who is always referred to as the Philadelphia Architect. Although I may be wrong as to this (all my books on local history have been spirited away by my brother, who uses details from them when he occasionally guides hikes), he originally came to town from Pennsylvania to build a new courthouse in the 1870s, and stayed on to undertake private commissions.

One of these private houses, which stands out in the knobs alongside what was once a major US highway but became a glorified back road when a bypass was built in the 1970s, is different from others built by this man, in that it has a spiral staircase that rises two full stories and can be seen from outside the house through a huge window on the second floor.

In the 1930s, the house was owned by a family named Blanchard (a pseudonym): a married couple with several children ranging in age from puberty to their late teens. All was well in the family until the husband began an affair with a woman whose name is not preserved in local lore. The affair was especially devastating to his wife, and she finally in despair hanged herself from the top of the spiral staircase. Her children found her when they arrived home from school that afternoon.

Blanchard eventually sold the house. It's been through several families since then, but there have always been whispers that, down the decades, alarmed motorists have rushed up onto the front porch, banging on the door and anxiously informing whoever answers: "I saw a woman hanging off that staircase--through that big window! Is she--did you--" And the words trail off into silence as they look up at the stair and see there's no one there at all.

I've been past that house many times, but have never seen the dangling body. Maybe I haven't been in the right frame of mind; maybe I've not seen the right trick of the light. But Gran told the story well; I can't go by there without feeling a chill up my spine.

Now I'm gonna go see if chicken noodle soup really does do miracles. Until next time, fair thee well.

Among the new species blooming today, paperwhites, later than the other members of the jonquil-daffodil family. Amazing whiteness on a cloudy day.

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Also have peaches blooming in an old hedgerow and Bartlett pears in an abandoned orchard. Come summer the peaches won't be much good; they've gone too long untended and are little and sour, but the pear trees will bear gorgeous fat-bottomed fruit, still edible.

And with that blossom update, fair thee well.

Around the curve and down a slight incline to the left from my dad's homeplace there's a patch of woods that's had the reputation of being haunted for seventy years or more. Here's the story:

In the old days, it was a terrible disgrace to have to "put away" a family member because of mental illness. Having family in the asylum was as much a disgrace as adultery, drunkenness, illegitimate births or domestic violence; it was talked about in whispers, if it was talked about at all. Many families tried to keep their loved ones in seclusion, in a back bedroom or an attic, and only signed them into the asylum if they grew too violent for the family to handle.

Such was the case, in the 1930s, of a local family who lived maybe three quarters of a mile beyond that patch of woods, near what is now Highway 411 North (which actually runs east-west through Monroe County--go figure). They had kept this man at home until he tried to kill someone in one of his "spells"; after that they sent him away.

Several years after they first signed him into the asylum, they brought him home for a family reunion. In those days, reunions were massive affairs, with lots of people coming in from out of state whom they hadn't seen in years. They knew that some of the family wouldn't know they had had to put Joe--that was his name, Joe--away and would expect to see him, so they brought him home, planning to take him back to the hospital when the reunion was over.

Unfortunately, he was not in one of his lucid spells, which got fewer and farther between as he aged. He grew so violent they had to tie him to a bed in the back room, and hoped he would be all right.

Sometime during the reunion--no one was sure afterward when--he managed to get loose from his restraints. In his haste to get away he thrust his feet into his leather shoes, without socks and untied, and carrying one of the ropes he'd been tied up with slipped out of the house and took off running, his shoelaces slapping his shoes as he went.

He ran to the patch of woods and down into their shadow until he came to one particular tree. It's still there; a giant oak, with a lot of mistletoe growing in the top. He hanged himself from that tree. It still bears the rope marks. By the time the family realized he was missing and then tracked him down, he'd been dead for hours.

He was buried a few days later. But the woods have never forgotten that night when he came there to die. Beginning in the 1940s, there have been reports of sounds in those woods, always at night. They start at the edge of the road and continue until they reached a certain tree. Animals, disbelievers scoff, but people who hear the sounds know they are from no animal.

They say they sound exactly like untied shoelaces slapping against leather shoes on a running man's feet.

I haven't got the nerve to go listen for them, myself.

And on that noisy note, fair thee well.

The Easter squall hangs on. I slept poorly last night and today have neither the heart nor energy to do anything other than blog--my ego fix--and later, perhaps, pile up with a book.

Even though the world is a dreary one today--even the grass, so green when the sun shines, looks sepia toned again--this would be a good day to have a windowseat.

In my insular younger days, I came across a RD Abridged Classics edition of Charlotte Bronte's JANE EYRE. It was illustrated--by whom I can't remember--One illustration depicted Jane, during those interminable pages while she was living as an orphan at her aunt's, sitting in a windowseat with a book. It was one of those deep ones, almost like a bay window, hidden from the room by long heavy garnet velvet drapes. Jane was sitting in a gap in the curtains, in what looked like a full lotus position, and I remember thinking how uncomfortable that looked. The windowseat has remained in my imagination for decades, but in my vision it's got a padded bottom and is smothered in bright fluffy huge pillows. It has a sill on the window large enough for a cupholder. And there I'd hide away with a book, my journal, and a sketchpad.

I went over to photobucket and looked for something similar to that vision. Never found one, but did find this.



Oddly, according to its caption, it depicts not Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, but a scene from her sister Emily's WUTHERING HEIGHTS: Catherine Earnshaw writing a diary entry on blank leaves of a book of sermons; a book that will later be found by Heathcliff's tenant Mr. Lockwood, on the night Lockwood encounters Catherine's ghost, by that very window.

Would be a good place for a nap, too. And on that drowsy note, fair thee well.