Stealing Souls in China

In Traditional Chinese thinking the human soul has a precarious existence, being vulnerable to theft as well as loss. Each person is believed to have two souls: the po soul, which rules physical functions, and the hun soul, which rules the mind and heart. The sun soul may sometimes detach itself from the body, usually when a person is asleep or entranced. If it cannot return to the body, the person can become sick, go mad or die. The roaming hun soul may also be snatched by demons or spectres, who extract its vital essence. Evil humans can also steal it, usually through charms and spells, and through paper cut-offs of human figures called manikins.

                In 1768 a wave of soul stealing swept over eastern central China. Beggars and monks were accused of clipping hair from men’s pigtails in order to graft their souls onto manikins. The men would fall ill and die, while it was believed that the manikins were brought to life by being sprinkled with human blood and then used to rob others of their possessions. In the province of Zhejiang an uncle even tried to steal the souls of his nephews. He has copied their names onto some scraps of paper and asked a workman to hammer these onto the pilings of a bridge under repair. But the workman reported him to the authorities, and for attempted soul stealing the uncle received 25 strokes.

                Six years before this incident, according to Chinese records of the time, a beggar monk was convicted of sorcery for stealing souls near Nanjing. And 60 years before that it was said that 11 baby girls died in Zhejiang when their vital bodily essence was sucked from them. The authorities found a 70-year-old man guilty of this horrifying crime and sentenced him to death by slow slicing.

                The beggars and monks were finally exonerated of the charges of should stealing. Yet even this could not quell and age-old fear buried deep in the hearts of the people.

Tidworth’s Demon Drummer

The strange affair of the demon drummer of Tidworth in Hampshire, England, created such a flurry of excitement in the reign of Charles II that the king appointed a royal commission to inquire into it.

In March 1661 John Mompesson, a local magistrate of South Tidworth, ordered the arrest of vagrant musician William Drury an the confiscation of his drum. Mompesson promised to return the drum if William Drury was proved innocent. But the matter was dropped, so Drury was released and vanished-minus his drum.

The following month, while Mompesson was in London, the drum was sent to his house. His wife stayed at home and that night was alarmed to bear noises. She was convinced that the household was being burgled. Three nights later, on Mompesson’s return, he too reported ‘a thumping and Drumming on the Top of his house.’

After a month the drumming on the roof stopped, only to start coming from the room where the drum was kept. Then furniture was hurled about, floorboards flew up and bedclothes were whisked off at night. The children’s beds rose under them, and invisible hands tugged their hair and beat their legs. The servants were also terrorized.

Mompesson blamed witchcraft, but when the ‘racketing spirit’ refused to perform for the royal commissioners, there were rumours of fraud, which the magistrate angrily denied.

But not everyone agreed that fraud might be involved. One investigator, Joseph Glanvill, philosopher and fellow of the newly founded Royal society, published an account of what he witnessed. The story Glanvill tells in his 1681 Saducismus Triumphatus, also known as Witches and Witchcraft, is that he heard scratching from behind a bolster, followed by a noise like a dog panting under the bed, in which lay ‘two modest little girls’. He and a companion searched the room but found nothing unusual. Later he saw something he thought a rat or mouse – moving inside a linen bag, but when he looked it was empty.

In 1663 William Drury was jailed in Gloucester for theft. There he asked another man whether he had heard of drumming at a gentleman’s house in Tidworth. ‘I have plagued him,’ he said, ‘and he shall never be quiet, till he hath made me satisfaction for taking away my Drum.’

Drury was tried for witchcraft and sentenced to transportation. The disturbances ceased while he was out of the country but resumed when he managed to return, and continued for several years. Glanvil’s account does not say how the story of the demon drummer of Tidworth ended. 

Shaking Tents

Early European explorers of the New World came across many extraordinary phenomena, not least of which were ‘shaking tents’. The first known written account of these ‘talking tepees’ came from Samuel de Champlain, founder of the Canadian province of Quebec.

In 1609, while accompanying a group of Huron, Algonquin and other American Indian tribes warring against the Iroquois, Samuel de Champlain was surprised that they posted no night sentries. He was told that their jossakeed, or conjurer, would divine the enemy’s actions. After a sturdy-looking wigwam was constructed out of hides, the conjurer crawled inside and began singing an incantation. The tent started to twitch back and forth ever more furiously as he talked to the spirits. The skeptical Champlain regarded the whole performance as a charade.

Even so, ‘shaking tents’ have been observed by traders and anthropologists ever since. In the 1930s American researcher A. Irving Hallowell examined such tents among the Ojibwe people in northern Manitoba, Canada. He described one conjuring lodge framed by three sspruce and three birch poles, each pole 3 meters long, slanted firmly into the ground in a circle with a 1 –meter diameter. Branches were bound horizontally around the top like the hoops of a barrel. The framework was covered with birchbark, and caribou hooves were then tied on to rattle as the tent moved. After sunset several dozen onlookers gathered around while the conjurer crawled inside. Soon the tent frame began to shake.

The conjurers told Hallowell that they sat normally in the tents, with one hand merely resting upon a pole, and the tent shook as spirits came and perched on the upper hoops. Assistants gave tobacco to onlookers to honour the spirits with pipe smoke. Each spirit announced who it was-moose, Iynx or other – in song. The people especially awaited Great Turtle who, according to Hallowell, spoke in ‘a throaty nasal voice’, which was compared to Donald Duck’s. participants would ask the spirits about causes of misfortune or new of distant relatives. The spirits either answered directly or travelled through the air to gather information. Hallowell himself inquired about the health of his father in far – off Philadelphia.

As great Turtle journeyed to the city, the shaking of the tent died down, then increased as Turtle returned to say that Hallowell’s ill father ‘was no worse’, which Hallowell found was true when he arrived home.

Hallowell reported that men, and occasionally older women, became conjurers after having four dream visits by spirits. Every Ojibwe community had several of these people to play host to the singing, tent-shaking spirits. Hallowell believed that the conjurers’ many experiences of shaking tents, together with their intense desire to help people in distress, enabled them to perform without being fully aware of their won active participation. 

Ghosts of Hampton Court

Few English royal homes are richer in ghosts than Hampton Court, the splendid palace build by Cardinal Wolsey in 1515, which he prudently gave to Henry VIII in an unsuccessful bid to regain favour. The ghosts of the disillusioned Wolsey was first Glimpsed in 1966 and has been seen twice more since. Of the five of Henry’s wives who lived there, two have appeared more frequently than the others.

Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, was a tragic pawn in a power game between the Catholic and Protestant court factions. In 1540, aged 19, she was engineered into the royal marriage by her Catholic family. Protestants accused her of immorality, and she was beheaded on 13 February 1542. Her ghost is said to run shrieking along the so called Haunted Gallery, echoing her arrest in November 1541, when she is said to have broken away from her captors and run down the corridor screaming for Henry’s mercy.

In 1918 the Haunted Gallery was cleared, and for a while Catherine Howard’s ghost disappeared. But later an artist repeatedly saw a ringed hand in front of a tapestry he was sketching. The ring was identified as belonging to Catherine. A resident of the palace at the time told investigator Andrew Green that she had seen the Shrieking Figure often enough to take it as matter of course.

Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife, has been sighted too, although her restlessness is harder to explain. Henry was genuinely fond of her and was sincerely distressed by her death in 1537 soon after she gave birth to his only son, the future King Edward VI. Twelve hundred masses were sung for the repose of her soul.

Non –royal ghosts include Mistress Sibell Penn, foster-mother to Edward VI, who lived in the palace until she died from smallpox in 1562. She was buried in St Mary’s Church nearby. In 1829 her grave was disturbed, and soon after palace residents began to hear a woman muttering and the sounds of a spinning wheel. An entirely forgotten room was found, containing an ancient spinning wheel.

One February night in 1907, a policeman patrolling the grounds around midnight saw people in evening dress in the Ditton Walk. The only sound was the rustling of the ladies’ dresses. The party proceeded a little way and then suddenly vanished. This extraordinary incident has never been explained

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