FT262

The story of the auction in New Zealand of two glass vials allegedly containing spirit entities prompts memories of similar tales once current in Britain. The belief that troublesome spirits could be laid or conjured into bottles or containers is a common folklore motif, and survived in rural England until at least the 1930s.

One vintage bottled ghost that still reson­ates today is recorded in a type­written manuscript compiled by the Cambridge scholar John Saltmarsh for the short-lived Eastern Counties Folklore Society (1936–39). His manuscript is now preserved in Cambridge University Library and describes how the opening of one such bottle triggered a haunting at a rectory on the Cambridgeshire /Suffolk borders in the 1920s.

The ghost originated from a time when a “disgraceful parson” and his butler were drinking companions at the rectory. One night they argued, and one killed the other, dumping the body in the moat. At a later date, the parson’s ghost haunted the rectory, though whether as perpetrator or victim of the crime was unclear. Around 1870, a new young rector moved into the haunted rectory with his impressionable wife. She did not like the ghost, so he called upon 11 other clergymen to perform an exorc­ism. They held a service in the building and forced the ghost into a bottle, which they corked and locked inside a cupboard in the rector’s study. They then threw the key into a pond and papered over the cupboard door so that it was forgotten.

The incumbency was a long one, but the rector eventually retired. Around 1920, a new family moved into the rectory; they found the cupboard and uncorked the bottle. “And then all the trouble began,” with the ghost haunting the village and footpaths near the rectory avoided after dark. The spirit also showed up inside the rectory, where it could be heard walking around, opening and shutting doors. A face with a pointed beard was seen peering through the curtains at night.

This latter detail is reminiscent of an embryonic tale once conceived by the greatest of ghost story writers, MR James (1862–1936). In his short essay “Stories I have tried to write”, James states he contemplated writing about “The man… who, sitting in his study one evening, was startled by a slight sound, turned hastily, and saw a certain dead face looking out from between the window curtains: a dead face, but with living eyes. He made a dash at the curtains and tore them apart. A pasteboard mask fell to the floor. But there was no one there. And the eyes of the mask were but eye holes.” But the story was never written, with James asking rhetorically: “What was to be done about that?” (Collected Ghost Stories, 1931). James was based at King’s College, Cambridge, until taking up a post at Eton in 1918; was the rectory story an inspir­ation for his stillborn tale?

According to Saltmarsh, the uncorked ghost fortunately proved to have little stamina left after its incarceration, growing fainter until fading away entirely. But because of contemporary sensitivities, Saltmarsh obscured the precise location of the rectory, heavily typing over the name of the village in his manuscript. The best guess from remaining textual clues was that the rectory was at Bradley in Suffolk. However, on close examination of the manuscript in 1999, I discovered that the name ‘Carlton’ could still be just discerned beneath Saltmarsh’s attempts at erasure.

Carlton Rectory in Cambridgeshire certainly fits the bill. Close to the Suffolk border, it was originally a moated manor house, although the moat is now reduced to a pond. Further research conducted by hist­orian Robert Halliday reveals that in 1832 the rector of Carlton, one William Boldero, disapp­eared after going into his garden after a visit to another clergyman. Servants later found Boldero had drowned in the pond: though why or how remains a mystery.

The story also helps make sense of another fragment of a story contained in Justin Brooke’s memoir Suffolk Prospect (1963) about life in nearby Wickhambrook, over the boundary in Suffolk. Brooke told the story of a builder who was asked to do some work at Carlton Rectory. The housekeeper warned him that a ghost had been sealed in a bottle in a cupboard. He decided to play a practical joke: finding an old bottle, he opened it in front of the housekeeper, who turned pale and fled the room. The rector was upset and angry, saying such stories should not be treated as mere superstition as they could contain some truth.

Robert Halliday also spoke to Robin Wylie, the owner of Carlton Rectory, who had lived there since he was two; he knew of a legend that a butler killed a rector before drowning himself in the pond. A real tragedy had clearly entered into local folklore. Wylie was unaware of the story of the bottled ghost. He felt tranquility there: he thought Rev. Boldero’s spirit approved his presence. Although he had only sensed things, his daughter Polly had seen a man in an upstairs bedroom, standing by a corner fireplace with a cupboard above it (which sounds not dissim­ilar to the place where the ghost had been locked). Polly’s music centre used to turn itself on, and earlier that year the daily help had come down and asked why the mirror was in the middle of the room. Polly told FT that the ghost is “very friendly to all of us, we are very fond of him”.

Similar stories of exorcisms where ghosts are driven into bottles or boxes that are then concealed can be found in other parts of the UK (though not in Devon where such exorcisms were considered ineffect­ive – see Theo Brown: ‘Post-reformation folklore in Devon’, Folklore vol.72, June 1961).

At Little Lawford Hall in Warwickshire, the exorcist trapped a spirit within a glass vial and threw it in a marl pit. (Anthony Hippesley Coxe: Haunted Britain, 1973). Herefordshire has several examples, as at Aconbury where a phantom monk was exorcised into a bottle that was then buried in the wall of the church, while at Garnstone a snuff box was used to trap and bury a spirit manifesting as a calf (Ella Mary Leather: Folklore of Herefordshire, 1912). As late as 1932, locals believed that the spirits of monks were trapped inside an iron pot hidden at Manor Farm, East Holton, Lincolnshire, the lid of the pot being weighed down with pins to prevent egress. Folklorist Ethel Rudkin located the pot in the farmhouse cellar, but didn’t tempt fate (Ethel Rudkin: Lincolnshire Folklore, 1936). Many more local variants could be cited where the ghost-filled bottles or containers are thrown in ponds or hidden in trees.

Nonetheless, it must be pointed out that however widespread and durable stories of bottled ghosts may be, there are some major philosophical stumbling blocks to their acceptance. Just some of the conceptual problems of confining immat­erial essences such as spirits within finite spaces were amply illuminated by Kant in his relatively little known 1766 work Traume eines Geistersehers (‘Dreams of Ghost seers’), and all remain valid today (see CD Broad: “Kant and Psychical Research”, Religion, Philo­sophy and Psychical Research, 1953). However, as noted in a previous column, poltergeist phen­omena often seem to occur in smaller premises or confined spaces, suggesting that some psychic effects may be spatially limited.