Re-appearance of the Cookstown Ghost.
Extraordinary Occurrence.
A person going over Oldtown Hill, a well-marked locality in Cookstown, during the past week, any time between eight o’clock and midnight, or even later, must have noticed a crowd of persons on the wide footpath at the pump on the righthand side. The crowd might at one time amount to 40 or 50 persons, in a row four or five deep, gazing intently at the second storey window of a house there; at other times it might be a mob of 200 or 300 flying at the approach of the police, who, thereupon, would keep a large reserved area free of mortal foot.
And when one asked what was the object of attraction, he was informed “It is the ghost!” For, be it remembered, there is a Cookstown ghost. To the younger generation it is only a legend, but our elders can recount the strange destructive propensities of an invisible supernatural visitant, who gave to Cookstown more than a provincial fame just twenty years ago. Some indeed, with an air of profound knowledge in the etiquette of the demons, do declare that as the right of mortals to ancient lights, and other rights and privileges expires with twenty years non-use, so it would be an abrogation of the privileges of the spirits of darkness if they remained unmanifested for a similar period.
There is now, or at all events up to the present, nothing destructive in the latest appearance, but otherwise there is some parallel between it and the older “ghost.” Perhaps it is on this account that it is termed “ghost” at all, for there are wanting all the conventional accompaniments of a ghostly visitant.
Readers of the “shilling shocker” as well as of the “penny dreadful” are well acquainted with the figure clad in white, the fearful blood stains, the clanking chains, perhaps, of the spirits which wake at the stroke of mid-night (Greenwich mean time), when “graveyards yarn,” and walk the earth till cock crow. Then again it is a fixed and reliable plot of all budding story-writers who cater for the “detective” class of readers to invest some ancient tower with strange sounds and stranger signs, and bye and bye the hero discovers that the manifestation is only intended to scare off stray visitors from penetrating the den of the smuggler or coiner. These are stock plots, without which no series of tales is genuine.
Our “ghost” is altogether different. If anyone started it with the idea that it would frighten people from the “haunted house,” he made a great miscalculation. As we have indicated, it attracts so great a crowd that the Royal Irish Constabulary has to appear in force to keep the street clear. A patient waiting crowd it is, standing there in the hope of hearing a knock, which is audible sign of the supernatural. The crowd, however, does very rarely keep quiet enough for an ordinary knock to be heard, and though the police sometimes urge them to silence so the ghost will get a chance, yet as a rule, as one might say, it has not the ghost of a chance.
Still the rapping has been heard by too many independent and reliable witnesses for there to be any doubt about it. The sounds are described as a double knock and a single one, which series of sounds, it seems, corresponds with the blows made by a shoemaker putting on a sole. Occasionally there is a change, and a sawing sound is heard, but this is a special phenomena reserved for the few – a sort of side-show. The knocking or hammering, as it is generally termed, has, however, been heard by very many, both inside and outside the house.
The police have heard it, and gone inside to search the house without avail. The house has been searched time after time, and no explanation can be given of the sounds.
The inmates are: the owner, Mrs Shepherd, an infirm brother confined to bed, and a little girl. The knocking is heard at a particular window on the second storey, but it is stated that on the approach of anyone into the room it removes to the rere and wanders about. The phenomena indeed has a startlig resemblance to the rappinng which found the basis of the great spiritualistic movement which has grown till it has become in the United States and in England a regular religious system with hundred of thousands of adherents.
In that case, in December 1847, strange sounds were heard in the house of John D Fox, of Hydesville, New York State. It was thought it might be the rattling of the windows, but on these being tried, the sounds seemed to reply. Fox’s daughter snapped her finger at them, and the rapping responded, and then she made the same movements without any sound, and “it” seemed to see, for it replied. Unbelieving neighbours came in, but soon found the rapping real, and evidently the spirits were friendly and wished to communicate with this world. If asked to count to ten or any number the rapping counted carefully. The knowledge of the spirit was tested by its being asked to say how old the girl was, and being invisible and disembodied, it had no hesitation in telling the exact age. After a while, the girl who seemed to be the principal attraction, was sent away, but the rapping continued in the old place, and fresh rapping occurred in her new home. It was the same with another sister, and soon the phenomena attracted attention, and by various methods, it was found possible to have seances, and intercourse with spirits was reduced to a fine art.
It remains to be seen whether the explanation that these noises is caused by rats, or that it is a practical joke by some interested person is correct, or that we are having what all the spiritualists believe in, and what many very orthodox persons also believe in, but with distrust – an attempt by the unseen world and spirits to communicate with us on earth.
Dungannon News, 19th April 1894.
Cookstown is, it seems enjoying the sensation of a brand new ghost. So great is the excitement that the police have difficulty in controlling the crowds of persons who congregate nightly to discuss the supernatural manifestations. The new ghost must be in the joinery business, as the principal noises he makes consist in hammering and sawing.
People’s Advocate and Monaghan, Fermanagh and Tyrone News, 21st April 1894.
Another Ghost in Cookstown.
Extraordinary Scenes.
Our Cookstown correspondent writes – Twenty years ago Cookstown was in everybody’s mouth, owing to the vagaries of an alleged ghost, which was causing some very uncanny manifestations in the classic district of the “old town.” The same locality, but the opposite end and side of the street, bids fair to rival the story of twenty years ago. For the past three or four evenings the house has been surrounded by a crowd of one or two hundred men, women and children, some of whom wait in fear and trembling for the newest phase of the gruesome excitement.
One evening during the past week, so the story goes, the lady of the house in question – the inhabitants of which all retire to rest at an unusually early hour for townspeople – appeared at her door in partial dishabille and implored the services of a neighbour for the purpose of investigating the origin of some souds which prevented her from going to sleep. The person appealed to examine the shop and other portions of the basement from which the sounds proceeded in a very thorough manner, in the belief that some person was concealed with burglarious intent, but without success, and he left believing the lady to be suffering from some hallucinations.
Shortly after the sounds – which had ceased for a time – were renewed with redoubled vigour, with, however, a change of venue. Seeing that now they seemed to be caused by some person or thing on the first floor, another thorough search was made, with no more satisfactory result, and the suggestion was adopted by some of those concerned that spirits or ghosts were the originators of the mysterious sounds. Assuming that the spirits of deceased persons pursue in the mysterious spirit world the avocations followed in this sublunary sphere, and that one of them is responsible for the present disturbance it does not require a Sherlock holmes to limit the sphere of inquiry, as the sounds are those which a hard and painstaking joiner would cause at his trade.
It is said by those who have heard it that the tap, tap, tap of the hammer is indulged in with a perseverance which many of the trade would do well to emulate, and the sound is only varied with that caused by a saw.
On Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night large crowds assembled around the house, but the noise they kept up was such that no reliable information is forthcoming as to anyone having heard the sounds on those nights. On Friday night some of the more excitable of the crowd saw the ghost appear at one of the upper windows amid a blaze of light, but immediately vanish from sight. This rumour stimulated the excitement very considerably, and no amount of reasoning or argument will shake the belief in ghosts in the minds of those who saw “it.”
A very matter of fact explanation was vouchsafed, however, by an official who was present, and who asserts that the figure at the window was that of a little girl who had been awakened apparently by the noise outside, and had gone to the window, but failing to see very clearly, had struck a match, which went out immediately.
The same authority alleges that the mysterious sounds are caused by rodents, which abound on the premises in considerable numbers, and whose gambolling causes the rapping, while the gnawing of wood causes the alleged sawing. The scare seems to exist outside the house rather than inside, and the manifestations up to the present are far inferior to those of twenty years ago. One or two points of similarity exist between the two, the principal being that in neither case do or did any of the people of the house “see” anything.
At the present time the excitement at night is such that police have to be on special duty to keep the footpath clear of the crowds which assemble.
Larne Times, 21st April 1894.
Shooting Ghosts in Cookstown.
“Give me that mattock and the wrenching iron.”
“The time and my intents are dangerous and savage wild – more fierce, and more inexorable far, than empty tigers or the roaring sea.”
We learn, with much perturbation of spirit, that we have got a dangerous and tantalising ghost in Cookstown. In a house in Oldtown, where once lived a good man who worked in leather and shovel tops, there has been a singular visitation of the departed, or some one up in his worldly trade. For be it said that the palpability and sounds emitted by the visitant resembles the well-known tapping and beating of leather on a lapstone with a cobbler’s hammer. When tired at that, resort is had to the sawing of timber as the former occupant did when in this “weary mortal round.”
Mrs Shepherd, the present occupant, has heard these sounds, and knows them to have a family resemblance to the sounds got up by Mr Shepherd that was, and it may turn out now is, when he was in the body in the Oldtown. Now, it is alleged, he is in the spirit, and has taken the only means of letting us know – which is the only means a spirit or, as Mr Jones describes him, a “ghost” has to express his feelings on things mundane – to wit, a rapping or a tapping. If Mrs Shepherd had married again we should have put the interference down to jealousy; and, as we all know, no such sentiment is allowed, or possible, where we are told ghosts do generally congregate.
At all events the visitation or scene of this ghost need not be put down to jealousy, for Mrs Shepherd remains in a state of single blessedness, and consequently our original or preconceived notioins, or what you will, ideas of ghost lore and ghost habits elsewhere stand “as they were.” It is satisfactory to know that ghostdom is ghostdom all the same, and no difference. Mrs Shepherd, in accordance with all preconceived notions of natural law, as well as spiritual role, communicated her views of the rapping and the tapping at her chamber door to others. The secret of a poem, non less than a ghost’s prosperity, lies in the ear of him or her who hears it. Yield to its spell, accept the poet’s or ghost’s mood; this is after all what the sages answer when you ask them of its value. And now, take the hand of another-world visitor, strayed from some strange habitat, to that rude and dissonant Oldtown. Clasp the sensitive hand (not with Head-Constable Martin’s bracelets) of the troubled ghost, yet dreeing his weird presence, and share with him his clime in which he found – never throughout the day, always in the night – if not the Atlantis whence he wandered, at least a place of refuge from the bounds in which, by day, he was immured. To one land only has he power to lead you, and for one night only can you share his dream. A tract of neither earth nor Heaven; No-Man’s-Land, out of Space, out of Time. Here are the perturbed ones, through whose eyes, like those of the Cenci, the soul finds windows though the mind is dazed; here spirits, groping for the path which leads to eternity, are halted and delayed. It is the limbo of “Planetary souls,” wherein are all moonlight phantoms and uncertainties, all lost loves and illusions. Here some are fixed in trance, the only respite attainable; others “more fantastically / to a discordant melody;” While everwhere are “Sheeted memories of the past – shrouded forms that start and sight, as they pass the wanderer by.”
Such is the land, and for one night we enter it – a night of astral phases and recurrent chimes. Its monodies are seven, persons whose efforts strive to change, yet ever is the same and turn thing unknown ‘To shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.’ Each seems without a prototype, yet all fascinate us with elements wrested from the Shadow of the Supernatural. To study this weird subject, and meet face to face this strange visitant, enter these stalking gaunt looking “monodies.”
First, to enter on the scene and cross this terrible stage is a colossal dealer in dangerous and death-dealing weapons on murder intent. He affirms, in stentorious tones, that a ghost can be shot to death with silver only, and forthwith proceeds to borrow a “threepenny bit” with which to load the gun. This done, he calls on the weird brothers to follow to keep up his courage.
The next to follow was a surgeon, who offered, if the ghost got shot and was made palpable with the silver piece, to mend his wounds and rally him until he might make his will and disposition in trust.
Immediately in order was the inevitable lawyer – ready on a moment’s notice to execute the deed, and be made heir-at-law to all the property.
A banker hurriedly entered to set forth in proper form the ghost’s worldly possessions.
Not to be found wanting in case of emergency there was the coroner with his appendages of medical doctors and witnesses, and an array of jurymen in the persons of the members of the Royal Irish.
An M.D. methodically and learnedly examines the skull of the ghost, and offers to depose that he (the ghost died of water on the brain, caused by an overflow of silver from William Street, and the jury delivers a verdict of death from heart disease and other natural causes.
The last scene of all ends this strange, eventful history – the undertaker, with lugubrious look, prepares to carry from sight the mortal remains of the Cookstown ghost. Head-Constable Martin swears by Jones’s gourd – the man who was in the whale’s belly three days and six nights – that if he knew who fired the silver that killed the ghost he would run him in, have his hair cut, and put him on bread and water.
Tyrone Courier, 21st April 1894.