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.