I have certain favorites among all the ghost stories out there. In England, one such straddles the line between ghostlore and folklore: Herne the Hunter, who haunts Windsor Forest, around the eleventh century castle of the same name.



Folklore experts--among them the generally discredited Margaret Murray--point out that Herne, who is usually depicted as a man wearing a helmet made of a deer's antlers, bears a striking resemblance to the Celtic god Cernunnos, lord of the forests, animals, and fertility.

Herne has also been linked to the Wild Hunt, a spectral band of riders, horses and hounds originally from Norse and Germanic mythology. (Other ethnic folklore has taken up the Wild Hunt; there's even a Cajun version in Louisiana lore know as the Chasse Galerie, composed of those who hunted on the Sabbath instead of going to church.)



Historically though, Herne's story goes something like this: Herne was a forest warden (we'd call him a park ranger or a game warden) in Windsor Forest during the reign of King Richard II (r. 1377-1399). On a hunt one day, he saved the king from being gored to death by a wounded stag by throwing himself in front of the animal. Herne was mortally wounded, but a man who has been described as a wizard appeared out of nowhere and told the king that if the dead stag's antlers were cut off and tied to Herne's head he would recover. This was done, Herne got well, and the king bestowed so many favors upon him over the next several years that jealous fellow huntsmen went to the king and accused Herne of witchcraft. A search of Herne's hut in Windsor Forest revealed a crude altar on which were found the skulls of several animals--the exact species the royal hunt had killed that day. In fourteenth century England, as in most medieval societies, witchcraft was considered a form of heresy; accused witches would be tried in ecclesiastical courts and burned to death. Rather than face such a fate, Herne ran out into Windsor Forest and hanged himself from a giant oak tree. Until 1796, one particular ancient oak was pointed out as "Herne's Oak"; the tree that was blown down in an 1863 storm, and famously burned in her own fireplace by Queen Victoria "to lay the ghost" was a tree planted to replace the original, which actually stood in another location.

As a ghost, Herne was a well-established Windsor tradition by the time of Shakespeare; in THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR (1600) he's used to play a joke on the foolish lovelorn Sir John Falstaff. As Mrs. Page says in Act IV, scene iii:

There is an old tale goes that Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the wintertime, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragged horns. . .
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Received and did deliver to our age
This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth.

Sightings of Herne are bad omens. He is such in Harrison Ainsworth's novel WINDSOR CASTLE (1843); Henry VIII's repudiation and judicial murder of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, follows upon a sighting of Herne. Herne is said to have appeared in 193l, just before the Great Depression affected Great Britain, and again in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. He was said to have been seen on horseback in 1962, racing through Windsor Forest accompanied by great hounds of a breed not seen in England in nearly seven centuries. The most recent report comes from the early 1970s, when an observer was allegedly found a suicide, hanging from an oak, after seeing Herne.



One final note: Those who haven't read it already, check out Anexplorer's blog at http://anexplorer.blogstream.com. He has a beautifully written and illustrated account of a personal experience of the supernatural he had in England. It's truly chilling.

Until next time, fair thee well.

Just wanted you to know that A) I've deactivated my DOOR HANGING blog--I realized I'm more comfortable with short subjects than novels and gave it up; and B) I have a new one called Gimme a Book. It's also here on blogstream, at gimmeabook.blogstream.com. Hope you'll come visit me there.

I found this photo on photobucket and it brought to mind a poem I wrote a long time ago--it's WAY out there, gotta say--but I have always felt that the woman speaker would have slipped away to look at the moon eventually--

Night: dead-silent

reach, touch
faltering along the curve of my waist

I turn slightly, only half-asleep
wondering as always
is this midnight move reassuring
or reassurance?

Your fingers close on mine
vise upon vise: muscles strain
to maintain contact------
my joints feel dislocated within your grip

and though we lie together in fire
on some occasions

now your somnolent clutch turns my blood cold

**********************************************************************



copyright 2008 by Fairweather Lewis

Hope you like it. One of my favorites.

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.