Sylvia Shults's Blog, page 47

The Twelve Nightmares of Christmas: Day Two

There is a haunted house in Church Hill, Virginia, ancestral home of the Throckmorton family. Generations have lived here, and one of the family keeps returning after death.

Elizabeth Throckmorton died soon after she was buried. She had wasted away after her father had forbidden her to be courted by an Englishman he didn’t find suitable as a match. Elizabeth had met William Taliaferro on a visit to London, and had fallen in love. Elizabeth’s father, however, thought that Taliaferro just wanted to marry Elizabeth for her money, and he intercepted the couple’s love letters. The young woman pined after her lost love, and after his letters stopped coming, she lost the will to live.

Everyone assumed that Elizabeth had died from a broken heart, but in reality, she had only slipped into a catatonic state. She was roused from her coma by grave robbers. According to lore, two of the family’s slaves dug up the casket to get at the jewelry on the corpse. They removed her earrings and necklace easily, then tried to wrench the rings from her fingers. When that didn’t work, they tried to cut Elizabeth’s half-frozen fingers off with a sharp hunting knife. The pain and shock woke the girl from her coma.

Frail as she was, Elizabeth managed to climb out of her grave and make her way up to the manor house. But there, her journey back to life ended. No one inside the house could hear her knocking on the massive front door, and she froze to death on the front porch, in the raging swirls of a vicious blizzard. Another slave found her the next morning, her body covered with the snow that had fallen overnight.

Now, whenever it snows, the family members that still live in the house are visited by Elizabeth’s spirit. Visitors to Church Hill have seen a trail of blood leading from the family plot to the front door of the manor house. Happily, another manifestation is more cheering. The family can hear the sounds of light footsteps running up the stairway to the warmth of an upstairs fireplace. It’s comforting to imagine that even though Elizabeth Throckmorton perished just outside the front door, her spirit made it safely inside.

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Spirits of Christmas — For Free!

I’m delighted to tell you guys that Spirits of Christmas: The Dark Side of the Holidays, is now available through Biblioboard, one of several library apps. It’s available for free to anyone in Illinois — you don’t need a library card. Heck, you don’t even have to log in or create an account. With Biblioboard, there are no holds, no waiting, and you can access any book any time you like. Just visit www.inkie.org or library.biblioboard.com, and search for Spirits of Christmas. When the book cover pops up, click on it, and it will download instantly to your device. (Seriously. I tried it. It’s instantaneous.) So give yourself the gift of Christmas ghost stories, and get something to read while you’re waiting in line to buy your Christmas presents!

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The Twelve Nightmares of Christmas: Day One

Welcome to the Dead of Winter! I’ve got great stuff ahead for you guys for the next twelve days, a celebration of all things Christmasy and spooky!

We’ll start off with a look at the Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas. Be sure and read all the way to the end … there’s a surprise waiting there for you. Read on …

People of the early nineteenth century had only recently gotten used to the luxury of having dependable sources of light after nightfall. Gas lighting was invented in the 1790s, and gas lighting of streets and buildings began in the early 1800s. Most streets in London were lit by gas lamps as early as 1816. But gas as a means of lighting homes was distrusted for the first fifty years or so.

There’s also a theory that gas fixtures themselves contributed to the epidemic of Victorian ghost sightings. There’s a reason the bright interior decorating of the Georgian period, all that beautiful white and gold décor, turned dark and gloomy in the Victorian age. Dark Victorian wallpaper hid soot better.

Gas fixtures began to show up in city homes and manor houses in the mid-nineteenth century, and sometimes, they leaked gas and tainted the air with noxious fumes. A tightly-laced corset was only one reason for a well-bred Victorian lady to faint. Another reason was lack of oxygen in gas-lit parlors. There’s a theory in paranormal circles that gas leaks sometimes led to hallucinations of wispy figures or shadows seen out of the corner of the eye. This would go far towards explaining the explosion of ghost sightings in the Victorian era.

Whether or not nineteenth century ghosts were the product of leaky gas fixtures, we have the Victorians to thank for a wealth of supernatural-themed literature. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw countless Christmas gift books published, that were entirely devoted to ghost stories. These weren’t cheap dime novels, either. These were classy, upscale publications, of quality design and prestigious writing. Contributors to these gift books and annually published anthologies included Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Rudyard Kipling. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle actually introduced the character of Sherlock Holmes in a story for a Christmas annual.

But the granddaddy of all Christmas ghost stories is, of course, A Christmas Carol. This most beloved of Dickens’s works was written for a most unsentimental reason—the author had bills to pay.

In October 1843, Charles Dickens was hurting for money. He’d gotten married in 1836, and he and his wife had already produced four children, with number five on the way.

Dickens had an almost pathological horror of being in debt. His father had been thrown into debtor’s prison when Charles was twelve years old. The grown-up Charles Dickens refused above all else to put his own family through such shame and degradation. He needed a project to raise some fast cash. He had an idea for a story of a miserly old curmudgeon whose grumpy outlook on life is changed by visits from three spirits.

Dickens was actually recycling material he had already written. In The Pickwick Papers, Dickens wrote “The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton”. This told the story of Gabriel Grubb (and isn’t that just the perfect name for a gravedigger), a drunken sexton who chooses to spend Christmas Eve digging a grave instead of celebrating the holiday. (I suppose someone’s gotta do it, but hey, Christmas is Christmas.) Grubb is dragged off by goblins, and has a change of heart after the Goblin King shows him a series of visions that prove his life is worth living after all.

Dickens took this theme and embroidered it. Instead of visions, Ebenezer Scrooge received actual visits from ghosts—first his late partner, Jacob Marley, then the spirits of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet To Come. For good measure, Dickens tossed in a ridiculously sentimental subplot involving Tiny Tim Cratchit—the kind of sickly poor child the Victorians loved to weep over. He wrote the book in a fever of production; it was on his publisher’s desk in less than six weeks.

And the gamble paid off, big-time.

A Christmas Carol was released on December 19, 1843. The original print run of six thousand copies sold out within three days. Since then, it has never been out of print. Taking on a life far beyond the printed page, it has been produced as a play, a musical, and many movies, the earliest being a 1908 version by Thomas Edison.

Dickens kept up with this fashion of telling ghost stories at Christmastime. Until his death in 1870, Dickens produced a number of Christmas annuals, and invited other writers to contribute to these anthologies.

With the success of A Christmas Carol, Dickens could pay off the debt that had led to its creation. Dickens was set for life. In fact, he was able to leave both his wife (from whom he had separated in 1858) and his mistress (an actress he met in 1857) independently wealthy for the rest of their lives. Not too shabby.  (Excerpted from Spirits of Christmas: The Dark Side of the Holidays, by Sylvia Shults.)

 

And now for the surprise! I have a couple of copies of my new book, Fractured Souls: More History and Hauntings at the Peoria State Hospital, that are sitting around not working too hard. Use the Contact Me button at the top of this page, and tell me who you’d give a signed copy of Fractured Souls to for Christmas. I’ll send them a copy — and you get one too, for being an awesome friend!

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Today I Learned …

According to Ukranian folklore, it’s good luck to decorate your Christmas tree with spiderwebs. Some families use webs woven from finely spun silver thread.

Lincoln’s New Salem

Welcome to another episode of Lights Out. The small village of New Salem, Illinois, was only inhabited for eleven years, from 1829 to 1840. But during that time, Abraham Lincoln called it home. Travel back in time to visit this flash-in-the-pan community. Some people may even linger there, still living their nineteenth-century lives. https://youtu.be/2NXa-0HRiFk

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Lights Out: Volo Antique Mall

Here’s another episode of Lights Out for your entertainment! Antique stores can be very haunted places, just by being the repositories of bunches upon bunches of family heirlooms. Come visit an extraordinarily haunted store with me; the Volo Antique Mall. Featured on Discovery Channel’s Ghost Lab, this sprawling complex houses over 400 classic cars, thousands of antiques — and a few spirits. https://youtu.be/8nvVr2mfp3E

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Today I Learned …

Reindeer lick up urine puddles to get salt in icy environments. Some reindeer herders in Siberia pee on the ground to attract their reindeer to come closer.

Silas Soule

We hear a lot around Thanksgiving about how the Indians really got a raw deal when the Europeans came over to the New World, and yeah, it’s true. The Wampanoag shared the first Thanksgiving feast with the Pilgrims — and provided most of the food — and less than a generation later, were embroiled in King Philip’s War and getting the worst of it. And that pattern, of Native Americans getting shafted by the immigrant Europeans, continued throughout our American history.

But I was delighted to discover, a while ago, that one of my own ancestors, a fellow named Silas Soule, made it a habit to stand up for the rights of Native Americans. Born in Woolwich, Maine on July 26, 1838, he was also an abolitionist. The Soule family was friends with John Brown, and the Soule house was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Members of the Soule family read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and were inspired by the tale. Silas’ sister Annie was convinced that it was this inspiration that led her father, Amasa, to move the family from Maine to Kansas to help make Kansas a free state. In November 1854, Amasa and his oldest son William arrived in Lawrence, Kansas, and staked a claim at nearby Coal Creek. The next fall, Mrs. Soule and the rest of the children (Silas, age 17, Emily, age 15, and Annie, age 13) came to join Amasa and William. Soon after this, the young people of Coal Creek decided they needed some fun, so they founded the Coal Creek Social Library Association. They met every two weeks in someone’s home for games, socialization, and reading, and they collected money to found to Coal Creek Library, which still exists today. So one of my ancestors started a library. How about that?

But that’s not Silas Soule’s only claim to fame and remembrance. He followed his brother William to Colorado to work in the gold fields, and when the Civil War broke out, he joined up. The war started in the spring of 1861, and by December, Silas had joined the First Colorado Volunteer Infantry, and later became cavalry. He rose through the ranks, ending up as captain. He was appointed commander of Company D of the First Colorado Cavalry, which was stationed at Fort Lyon in southeast Colorado.

Over the summer, there had been issues with Indian raids. That fall, Silas was present at a conference between chiefs of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and Governor Evans and Col. Chivington. In September 1864, Captain Soule and Major Edward Wynkoop participated in the Smoky Hill peace talks with Chiefs from the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations. The peace party met with the Governor and Superintendent of Indian Affairs John Evans and Colonel John Chivington in Denver. Silas’s presence at both of these important peace meetings reinforced his personal beliefs. The talks gave Silas a deep respect for the Native American nations and hope for a peaceful resolution. The Indians believed they had made peace and were camped on Sand Creek several miles from Ft. Lyon, when, on the morning of Nov. 29, 1864, Col. Chivington, with elements of the First and Third Colorado Cavalry, attacked. Some of the officers joined him, but Soule did not. As soon as Soule learned of the plan, he went to a room where some officers were assembled and told them that any man who would take part in the murders was “a low lived cowardly son of a bitch.”

Silas, knowing that the Indians were peaceful, refused to give his company the order to fire on them. But in spite of Silas’s courage, the Sand Creek Massacre was one of the blackest episodes in American history. At dawn on November 29, 1864, approximately 675 U.S. soldiers commanded by Chivington attacked a village of about 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women and children along Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. Using carbines, pistols and cannon fire, the troops drove the people out of their camp.

     Some managed to escape the initial onslaught. Some women, children, and the elderly fled to the bottom of a dry stream bed. The soldiers followed, shooting at them as they struggled to escape death. Women and children frantically scraped at the sandy earth along the sides of the streambed to protect themselves.

     Over the course of eight hours, the troops killed over 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people composed mostly of women, children, and the elderly. That afternoon and following day, soldiers mutilated the dead before departing on December 1.

     Silas and most of the other officers at Fort Lyon were appalled. Silas and Lieutenant Cramer wrote letters to their former commander, Major Edward “Ned” Wynkoop. The letters condemned the leadership of Colonel Chivington who ordered the attack. These letters led to investigations by the Army and two congressional committees. The Army’s investigation began in January 1865, and Silas was the first to testify against John Chivington. Chivington was brought before a US Army court-martial. Following the investigations, an Army commission changed history’s judgment of Sand Creek from a battle to a massacre of men, women, and children.

     Chivington was condemned for his actions, but not punished. He resigned from the Army in February 1865. He died penniless in 1894.

     After this, Soule returned to civilian life. He moved to Denver, and on April 1, 1865, he married Hersa A. Coberly. But the honeymoon was to be cut tragically short. On April 23, less than three months after testifying at Chivington’s court-martial, Silas was gunned down in the streets of Denver. His murderer was Charles Squier, a soldier who was loyal to Chivington. Squier was never brought to justice.

     On this Thanksgiving Day, I’m really proud to say that I’m related to Silas Soule, a man who stood up for what he believed was right, even though it cost him his life. And how are we related, you ask? Well, Silas’s ancestor was George Soule, who came over on the Mayflower, and who shared that first Thanksgiving feast with the Wampanoag. And George is MY ancestor too.

[image error]Silas Stillwell Soule. A stand-up guy, and a relative of mine.

Today I Learned…

We all know that Johnny Appleseed was a real person — John Chapman, a missionary who trekked all over Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana during the first half of the 19th century. But did you know that those trees that he planted so carefully were mostly gone by the 1920s? During Prohibition, most of them were chopped down by the FBI so that people couldn’t turn those lovely apples into hard cider. (From Reader’s Digest, September 2019, “Big Apple Facts, And Small Ones Too”.)

Today I Learned …