Fragments of fright (9)
From Richard Cavendish’s The Great Book of the Supernatural
THE MESSENGERS OF THE AFTERLIFE
Most people do not know when they will die - but a few of them are apparently warned of their imminent demise, thanks to the appearance of a ghost. This messenger of the afterlife can be a wraith, or a mysterious animal, and many families are proud of "owning" one.
The Hohenzollern dynasty, which reigned successively over the Brandeburg, Prussia and Germany (until the abdication of the kaiser Wilhelm II at the end of WWI) was boasting the existence of a "family ghost". This specter tied to their bloodline was a White Lady - a female ghost dressed in white, with a mourning armband, usually seen before the death of a member of the family, and appearing in the royal residences of Berlin or other Germany regions. It was believed that she might be the ghost of a princess of the 15th century, who was cruelly abused by her husband, who was a Hohenzollern. The dynasty of the Hesse of Darmstadt (Germany) also had its death herald - a Black Lady this time, in a mourning outfit, her face hidden by a dark veil. This ghost was supposed to be the archduchess Maria-Anna, wife of the archduke Ferdinand.
In the Danish royal family meanwhile, disasters were believed to be announced by the apparition at Gurre, south of Helsingor (a location that inspired the setting of Shakespeare's Hamlet), of the ghost of king Valdemar IV, who ruled on the Denmark in th 14th century and died at Gure in 1375. Another strange fact of the history of the Danish crown concerns the queen Astrid, killed in 1935 by a car accident. Some times after her death, she supposedly appeared before numerous people during a spiritism séance organized at Copenhague by the medium Einar Nielsen. A picture of her "manifestation" was apparently taken - but unfortunately, these kind of pictures are very easy to falsify and thus do not make an actual, solid proof of the ghost's apparition.
The Hasburgs, who ruled over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were traditionally warned of any upcoming tragedy by the appearance of a group of great white birds circling in the sky. They were seen in 1889, soon before the double suicide of the heir-prince Rudolf and his mistress in Mayerling. Later, the emperor Franz-Josef the First also saw them in 1898, on the eve of the murder of his beloved Elisabeth. Finally, these sinister birds were spotted in 1914, before the Sarajevo attack which killed the archduke Franz-Ferdinand and caused World War I.
The most famous of these "messengers of death" is without a doubt the Irish banshee, which makes the pride and glory of the greatest and oldest families of the island. The banshees howls and wails with a melancholic voice through the night, crying the death of a family's member soon before it actually happens. She can appear as a beautiful maiden with a red shirt, or a green dress under a gray cloak ; or she can appear as an old hag. This "dual face", the beautiful maiden and the ugly hag, were the usual manifestations and appearances of the great goddesses of the pre-Christian Celtic religion, of which the banshee seems to be a remnant. It seems that getting rid of a banshee is hard, since there are records of them still wailing near the old domains of families that left Ireland a long time ago. A few years before the publication of this book, an American that was visiting the Aran island in the Galway bay, organized a party, with lot of music and dancing. As the night was ending, the young man returned home, playing accordion. The noise he made distressed the neighborhood, and someone had to go explain to a poor frightened old man that what he heard wasn't the screams of a banshee, but the sounds of a drunk playing very badly the accordion. Reassured, the old man knew three more weeks of peace... Until he heard the ACTUAL wails of the banshee, and soon after died.
According to a very old tradition, the death of the bishops of Salisbury is announced by the arrival of mysterious white birds flyig over the plain. Other bad omens - not necessarily meaning "death" - are the black dogs, or rather the black hounds, usually of an enormous size, that supposedly haunt the British countryside. Peel's castle, on the isle of Man, is the lair of one of those monsters, the Moddy Dhu, whose mere sight causes a person's death. You will also be doomed to die if you meet the Shriker dog, which hides in the Burnley cemetery (Lancashire). Many more sinisters black hounds are believe to wander on the paths leading to cemeteries. In a lot of popular beliefs and local folklore, dogs are associated with death, probably because in the distant past hungry dogs used to dig up corpses to eat them. There could also be something related to the strong belief that dogs are able to sense entities invisible to humans. Ghosts of dogs are particularly dreaded in the East-Anglia, where strikes the formidable Black Shuck, whose only eye shines in the darkness.
During World War II, an American air-pilot and his wife lived in Walberswick, in the Suffolk, and they had there a terrifying experience. During one whole night, an enormous black dog tried to enter in their house, and they only prevented it from doing so by piling up furniture in front of the door, that the animal nearly split open. At dawn, the beast left, but without leaving any prints in the mud surrounding the house. This event happened during a storm night - which reminds one of the old beliefs claiming that storms are caused by the mad run in the countryside of a pack of infernal hounds, whose howls causes death, madness and misfortune. In some regions, these hounds are led by the "Wild Hunter". In Denmark, it is king Valdemar that leads the pack, in Normandy the Devil himself ; in northern England it is "Gabriel's hounds" led by the Angel of Death, while in the Dartmoor the dogs follow sir Francis Drake riding a hearse. All these legends inspired without a doubt Conan Doyle when he wrote one of Sherlock Holmes' most famous adventures - The Hound of the Baskervilles.