Odd this day
Yes, various years: the Ghost Club, you see, first established in 1862, used to mark its meetings on All Souls’ Day by reciting the names of its members — a sort of roll call. And — what with the clue in the organisation’s name — it didn’t just read out those of the corporeal members there present. The dead ones who may or may not also have been hanging about were included, too.
Only polite, really.
The club, according to its website (and various other sources, which appear to be basing this on what the club says), is the world’s oldest organisation “associated with psychical research”, and may have had its roots in Cambridge in 1855, when fellows at Trinity got together to talk about Spooky Things (presumably over a decent sherry). At least that’s what Wikipedia says, citing 1978 work The Dictionary of the Supernatural, which mentions no such thing.
Anyway, it was, indeed, founded in or around 1862 (the year M. R. James was born, which seems fitting)
with the idea of unmasking fake mediums and investigating the psychic phenomena of the day by a select group of London gentlemen.
…and William Hodson Brock’s 2004 book, William Crookes (1832–1919) and the Commercialization of Science, backs up the stuff about Trinity. When it started up in London, Charles Dickens was one of the select gentlemen who joined — but the group fizzled out. The Club’s website says it
seems to have dissolved in the 1870s following the death of Dickens but it was … revived on All Saints Day 1882.
(All Saints’ Day is 1 November, but All Souls’ Day is 2nd, so this may be an error, unless some or all of them met informally on 1st and resolved to gather everyone else the following day. Who the hell knows? The meeting and roll call were/are definitely the 2nd, though. All Saints’ Day is all about… well, saints, and All Souls is for remembering one’s dead. A sort of C of E Día de los Muertos, essentially.)
Anyway, it reappeared at the same time the Society for Psychical Research first manifested itself, and they shared some members. The SPR was “devoted to scientific study”, but the Club
remained a selective and secretive organisation of convinced believers for whom psychic phenomena were an established fact … At this stage of its existence the Ghost Club might possibly be viewed as a Victorian occult or spiritualist society celebrating November 2nd, the feast of All Souls. The archives of the Club reveal that the names of members — both living and dead were solemnly recited each November 2nd. Each individual, living or dead, was recognised as still being a member of the Club. On more than one occasion deceased members were believed to have made their presence felt!
They didn’t make their presence felt, obviously. They weren’t there. Still, each to their own. The Paris Review says this iteration of the club lasted until 1936, and its records (held at the British Library) say it wasn’t a revival of the earlier club at all:
A Club of similar name, founded some twenty years earlier, had come to an end, it had no connection with this 1882 Ghost Club…
…and that at its fourth meeting, on 12 January 1883,
those present decided on a motto, and noted it down in capitals:
NASCI : LABORARE : MORI : NASCI
Or, for the rest of us:
BE BORN : WORK : DIE : BE BORN
…which doesn’t sound all that much more profound to me than the once-popular bumper sticker ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die’, but — as I say — each to their own. Anyway, basically, they met in posh restaurants, where (William Hodson Brock says):
Over dinner, members were free to report and discuss any psychic experiences in complete confidence. So that members might relate their experiences without fear of ridicule, it was a specific rule that nothing would be published, though minutes of meetings were kept.
They were, perhaps, right to fear ridicule. When club member and eminent chemist and physicist William Crookes lost his wife in 1916, one William Hope, leader of the Crewe Circle Spiritualists presented him — in December of that year — with a photograph of Crookes in which the spirit of his late wife also appeared. Crookes, who was dead himself in April 1919, and “craved for” reassurance that he would one day see his beloved again, was taken in, not noticing that it was a dodgy double-exposure job, and that the likeness of his wife came from a photo taken for their golden wedding in 1906.
And, according to the Paris Review, club member W. B. Yeats
with the help of his wife Georgiana … redoubled his experiments in automatic writing. She would hold a pencil to a piece of paper and, while in a semiconscious state, scrawl down the words of invisible messengers … Yeats ended up telling the Ghost Club of the “lessons in Philosophy he had received from a group of beings on the other side.”
…despite the fact that
she did this as a trick on her husband (as Brenda Maddox observes in Yeats’s Ghosts, “the messengers seemed at times to have been reading Marie Stopes’s Married Love, a highly popular book that stressed the husband’s duty to give his wife sexual satisfaction”). Later, she would claim, she did it sincerely.
The club was revived in 1938 (hardly a gap at all), but this time on more modern lines: women were admitted(!), and new leader Harry Price declared it to be
a body of extremely sceptical men and women who get together every few weeks to hear the latest news of the psychic world and to discuss every facet of the paranormal
It ceased operations after Price died in 1948 (which suggests they were, indeed, sceptics. True believers would have kept it going, with him continuing to lead them from The Beyond), and its corpse was reanimated again in 1954, since when it has never been away. A piece in The Londonist a couple of years ago describes someone at one of its meetings as “a man with leonine hair and polka dot kerchief tucked into his lapel” (which reminds me of the guy “drinkin’ a piña colada at Trader Vic’s / His hair was perfect”, suggesting that ghosts weren’t the only supernatural entities represented), and the Dictionary of the Supernatural says it’s
a place where people who are interested in unusual subjects can meet
…and that the New York Times once described it as
the place where sceptics and spiritualists, mediums and materialists, meet on neutral ground.
The club’s website says it has “expanded its remit to take in the study of UFOs, dowsing, cryptozoology, etc”, and — happily — it has some of its newsletters on the website. In summer 2010, for example, it ran a piece about “Philip Paul, author, journalist and authority on the paranormal”, who became interested in the uncanny on
the sudden death of his sister Iris, aged 22, in the bath at home. Simultaneous with her death, a relative three miles away heard an unexplained knocking on the window. Philip puzzled about why his sister might have signalled thus, rather than alerting family members in the same house, and sought answers in psychical research.
I mean, if you were an appalling cynic, you might conclude that the knocking was simply a coincidence, but… yes: each to their own. Philip was, after all, 15, and had just experienced a family tragedy. Less forgivable is issue 9’s report on Britain’s (well, of course) ‘most haunted’ pub:
Messages were received by means of an improvised Ouija board using a tumbler. A complicated story of adultery and murder emerged, with one ghost supposedly identifying itself as an 18 year old youth called Rex Bacon who hanged himself in The Three Tuns in 1682 after killing his wife’s lover.
During one séance, a Mr Beckett, a local hairdresser, claimed to have seen a white ghost-like figure in a corner of one of the rooms where he later discovered a door had been situated. A former assistant manager Mervyn Blakeway told the press that his window had mysteriously opened and closed.
Christopher Reeve in Paranormal Suffolk (2009) reviews the evidence and points out that a local journalist searching local records found that at nearby Mettingham there was once a vicar named Bacon.
Two people called Bacon, and a haunted window. Well, I, for one, have thrown off my thoroughly immature sneering attitude and become a true believer. Which is just as well, because — having exhausted The Three Tuns, attention has moved to the nearby King’s Head, which
has been visited by paranormal investigation groups several times, and when I stayed there in November 2009, a member of staff told me strange noises had been heard recently but “the boss says it just creaks because it’s a very old building.” Others are convinced of paranormal activity, but on my own visit the chances of investigating strange sounds were curtailed by the pub hosting a 1980s themed fancy dress disco the same night. The decor is certainly contemporary to this period, with low level lighting.
God, I love that final detail. Both these pubs, incidentally, are in Bungay, in Suffolk, home to the infamous satanic dog Black Shuck.
Anyway, let’s hope that tradition is still upheld at this august institution, and that former members are still honoured. If so, that means that tonight they will remember — among others:
- W. B. Yeats — the man who once kicked Aleister Crowley downstairs
- Professor C. E. M. Joad — who appeared on the BBC’s Brains Trust programme until he was done for fare-dodging
- …and Osbert Sitwell — who was as normal as the rest of his family.
