Salutations
All!
He’s a little
piece of my researches that I hope you find interesting. It’s a piece taken
from a book called Bradwell: Ancient and Modern that was published in 1912 –
Bradwell is a village in Derbyshire. A man called Seth Evans wrote about a
beast called a Lumb Boggart.
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| Bradwell, Derbyshire |
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| Old Bradwell, Derbyshire |
In the book,
Evans entitles this piece ‘an absurd tale which everybody believed even down to
half a century ago. A Lumb, you might like to know is the old English word for
pool and a Boggart is traditionally a type of rogue hobgoblin that had left
their homes because their human co-inhabitants didn’t care for them properly,
but by the 1800s, a boggart referred to something different. Where previously a
boggart had been a shunned, rogue domestic goblin living in the wilds, living
off what it could steal from travellers, it became interchangeable with the
word ghost. Many tales from the late 1700s and most of the 1800s including
boggarts have a lot of similarities with what we know categorise as cases of
poltergeist activity.
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| Exorcism |
I did a little
research into what an ousel was. Just for peace of mind and ease of reading,
it’s a bird that nests in rocky crevices.
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| Ousel |
Anyway, here’s
the extract:
It used to be said that about a century and a half ago
(1710 ish) the body of a young girl who was supposed to have been murdered was
found buried under the staircase of a house at Hill Head. The ghost of the girl
appeared every night until everyone in the neighbourhood were terrified and
thrown into a cold sweat. Unable to bear it any longer the people got a
well-known individual who belonged to the Baptists… to undertake the task of
‘laying’ the ghost. As this individual professed to be able to rule the
planets. Of course, no one doubted his power of getting rid of the ghost.
The time came, and the haunted house was filled with
affrighted spectators when the exorcist appeared among them with his
paraphernalia, and when he prayed until streams of sweat poured from his face
as he knelt within a ring he had chalked on the chamber floor, the lookers-on
kneeling around, and later afterwards declared that they “felt the floor move
for yards up and down in quick succession.” Then the magician arose and
exclaimed, “Arise! Arise! I charge and command thee,” when the spirit appeared,
and the man ordered it to depart and assume the body of a fish, and to locate
itself in the Lumb Mouth. He also ordered that every Christmas Eve the ghost
should assume the form of a white ousel, and fly to Lumbly Pool.
Consequently,
the family that lived at Hill Head moved soon after this incident.
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