The Reverend A.J.E. to whom repeated reference will be made was the Reverend Abraham J. Emerick, a Jesuit Missionary who took up work in Jamaica in 1895, at first in Kingston, and subsequently in the heart of the mountains where for ten years, as he expressed it himself, he “lived in an atmosphere impregnated with obeah and other superstitions.”
Case I. (By Rev. A.J.E.)
One of the favourite pastimes of the duppies is stone-throwing. Reports of persons and places being stoned by duppies are very common. My first experience of stone-throwing duppies was rather startling and trying. It happened soon after my undertaking the mountain missions on the north side of the island, and before I was acquainted with the habits of the people and knew anything about their superstitions and occult practices. One eveninga fter dark I was on my way to Alva mission, situated at a lonesome spot on a hill in the Dry Harbour Mountains. I was met by a crowd about a mile away from the mission. They got around me and warned me in an excited way against going up to the mission. They said that duppies were up there at night throwing stones; that the duppies had stoned the teacher away from the Alva school.
It seems that the stone-throwing had been going on for a week or more before my arrival. For several nights crowds went up to the old Alva school, not far from the church on a mountain spur partly surrounded by a deep ravine covered with thick bush. The teacher of the school, a certain Mr D. lived in two rooms that overlooked the declivity. Every night the crowd was there, stones were thrown from various directions, but most of them seemed to come from the bush-covered ravine. What mystified the people most and made them believe and say, as did the teacher and the most intelligent store-keeper in the district, that the stones were thrown not by human hands but by spirits, was that those who were hit by the stones were not injured, and that some of the stones which came from the bushy declivity, after smashing throught the window turned at a right angle and broke the teacher’s clock, glasses, etc., on a sideboard.
In spite of the dreadful stone-throwing duppies
, I went up to the hill followed by a crowd. I found the school building littered with stones, broken windows and a generally smashed-up, sure-enough ghost-haunted place.
The story of the stone-throwing, which I afterwards put together, amounted to this. On a Saturday night Mr D and a hired girl noticed a suspicious person lurking around the premises. They became frightened, left the place, and returned later with a man by the name of H. who brought a gun with him. They were not long in the school building before stones began to fall here and there in different rooms, at first one by one but gradually very plentifully. They ran away in fright with the stones pelting after them as they ran. H. turned around once and fired, pointing his gun in the direction from which the stones were coming. As he did so, a stone flying from the opposite direction hit him in the back of the neck.
The stone-throwing followed them into the house to which they fled for refuge about a quarter of a mile away. They, with the family living in th ehouse, made a gathering of six or seven or more. Stones were fired into this house and broke a number of things on the sideboard, but no one could tell from where the stones were coming. Some of them seemed to come in the open door, turn around and fall at the teacher’s feet. One of the persons marked a stone and threw it out saying: “If him be a true duppy, him will throw this stone back.” This marked stone was said to have been thrown back, proving that the stone-thrower was a true duppy. After a while they went to bed, the stone-throwing ceased.
Psychic Phenomena of Jamaica, JJ Williams (1875 -1940), first published 1934.