Spectre’s Agency – or hallucination?
Weird happenings attributed to the Duppy, the Jamaican ghost, or spectre, made an audience “creepy” in London yesterday. Eerie accounts of stone throwing which could not be traced to any human agency, of locked doors which swung violently open and as violently closed again, and of a vanishing black arm which struck a young dying woman a priest was about to anoint, were given by the Rev. Joseph J Williams at the International Congress on Anthropology.
Father Williams, who has had long experience of mission work in Jamaica, quoted from other Fathers as well as his own experience. His own strangest adventure was near midnight just before the hurricane of November, 1912. Awakened by loud knockings at the mission side entrance, he began to dress, but the knockings changed to crashing sounds which made him think thieves were breaking in.
Being alone, he flung his shoe against the door from which it bounced back a couple of feet or so and he shouted to the supposed marauders to go away. “As I did so the door crashed open towards me and I sprang away to avoid being knocked down. It was a dark night and I saw nothing beyond the door.” Seizing an old gun as he heard the tramp of feet across the room next to his, he pointed it in the direction of the noise and pulled the trigger. There was only a “snap”, the gun was not loaded. All noise having ceased he hurried to his room to call for help, “only too find that the door I had seen crash open, was now closed, locked, and bolted on the inside and nothing was broken. It was only then I realised that I was not dealing with theives and my hair seemed to stand on end, especially when I found my shoe that I had seen fall well in front of the door, actually back against the wall where it had been pressed when the door swung open.”
It was a “Father P.” who saw the black arm come round and strike the dying woman he was about to anoint with such force that her head was dislodged from the pillow. When he resumed his ministrations the arm which had disappeared again, reached around him and “actually threw the woman from the cot to the ground.” He looked for the body to which the arm should have been attached, but found himself alone with the woman dead at his feet.
Father Williams asked: “Is it all hallucination? For my own part – with full realisation of the seeming pathos of the confession – as regards the individual cases considered seperately, I must simply say I don’t know. I state the facts.”
Sheffield Independent, 1st August 1934.