Victorian Archives - Page 2 of 2

#29 The Bloody Chamber

By boneandsickle | July 1, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:20 — 39.7MB)

Bluebeard and his bloody chamber full of murderous secrets is widely known as one of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, but it’s part of a larger family of folk tales and ballads we examine in this episode.

Our show begins with a brief summary of this tale in which a young woman is courted by the mysterious and strangely whiskered nobleman, Bluebeard. After lavishly entertaining the woman and her family in his castle, it’s agreed they should marry. Soon thereafter, Bluebeard departs on a journey leaving his bride keys to all the rooms of his estate, all of which to which may use — but one. Curiosity, however, getting the better of her, she unlocks the forbidden door and must face Bluebeard’s murderous rage at her disobedience.

1870s poster for Covent Garden pantomime

Perrault’s 1697 story, which draws upon older folk tales, is primarily known thanks to its inclusion in collections of fairy tales intended for children. Today, however, you’re unlikely to find the gruesome yarn anthologized for younger readers. If included at all, it may be sanitized, as it was in the 1970 children’s record from which we excerpted a clip at the show’s open.

Along with fairy tale collections and cheaply printed chapbooks, the Bluebeard story was largely preserved through theatrical representation. We look at a number of productions from the late 18th and early 19th century that treated the story in a semi-comic or melodramatic fashion, often combining elements of the Italian Commedia dell’arte, such as Harlequin and his antics. Wilkinson provides of some readings of the comedic dialogue as well as stage directions which often made the “bloody chamber” a lavishly designed and spooky centerpiece of the production.

Particularly important to how were think of Bluebeard today is the 1798 production Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity!, which moved the story to Turkey in order to exploit a growing fascination with the East. This image of Bluebeard and indeed its importance in the English-language repertoire is suggested by the inclusion of the play in the 1993 Jane Campion film, The Piano, a story set during this period. The theatrical tradition of representing Bluebeard’s wives as bloody heads severed from their bodies is demonstrated in this scene as well as many 19th-century photographs of such stagings.

1868 Harper's magazine article w/ illustrations by Winslow Homer. — 1868 Harper’s magazine article w/ illustrations by Winslow Homer.

Also discussed is 1 1903 Christmas staging of Mr. Bluebeard in Chicago, famous not so much for its musical numbers (such as the song “Raving,” which we hear excerpted) but more for a landmark fire, which claimed the lives of 602 theater-goers.

While there have been dozens of films that play with the theme of women marrying men with mysteriously deceased wives, only a few have directly addressed the tale. We very briefly discuss the 1944 Bluebeard with John Carradine, the 1972 Bluebeard with Richard Burton, and the 2009 French film, Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard), which is the most traditional of the lot.

In the next part of our show, we look at related folktales including the Grimm’s story “Fitcher’s Bird,” which features bloody chambers that must not be opened, a skull dressed as a bride, a woman rolling in honey and feathers, and a wedding that’s diverted into an execution party. We also look at the English tale “Mr. Fox,” in which a woman spying on her bridegroom discovers his habit

The Grimms also gave us “The Robber Bridegroom,” in which a bride-to-be visits her intended’s home “out in the dark forest,” where she makes unnerving discovery similar to that in Mr. Fox (but with an added element of grisly horror thrown in).

As a sort of musical tonic to all these tales of women and the bloody chambers they might end up in, we close the show with two traditional ballads in which the woman more satisfyingly gains the upper hand, and ends up slaying the serial killer she is to wed. The frist of these, is a Dutch ballad “Lord Halewijn” and the second “Lady Isobel and the Outlandish (or “Elf”) Knight.”

We close with a peculiar tidbit from modern life, a weird parallel between ancient folk ballads and a true-crime oddity.

#17 Christmas Ghosts

By boneandsickle | December 24, 2018

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:12 — 35.9MB)

Traditionally Christmas was a time for ghost stories, and tonight we’re doing our part to bring back the custom. A bit of history on supernatural stories of the season and then something a bit different for the holiday — a bit of storytelling for your fireside enjoyment — a ghost story from the Victorian master of the genre, M.R. James. An unfortunate holiday incident experienced by Wilkinson and your narrator is also discussed. Merry Christmas to you all! (This episode also provides an example of one of our Patreon rewards: audio texts from classic old books of horror and folklore delivered over a brooding soundscape.)

#12: Seances & Scandals

By boneandsickle | October 15, 2018

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:41 — 37.3MB)

Hope you enjoy part two of our exploration of Spiritualism and seances. This one is particularly full of shocking, sad, and amusing tales you won’t hear anywhere else.

First we wrap up last week’s story of the Fox sisters, who in many ways started the whole ball rolling. Two surprising revelations regarding their ghostly communications are revealed with the help of Vincent Price’s 1979 Hall of Horrors episode about these early mediums.

Article from "Modern Mechanix" on Edison's "spirit phone" — Article from “Modern Mechanix” on Edison’s “spirit phone”

News clipping depicting the "peddler's chest" recovered from the Fox home — News clipping depicting the “peddler’s chest” recovered from the Fox home

Next we get to the root of rumors about Thomas Edison’s building a machine to talk to the dead and have a look at some interesting ways in which his pioneering technologies were embraced by those eager to connect with those on the other side, including a 1901 Russian recording of spirits channeled in Siberia. Edison’s decidedly creepy (and failed) talking doll is also discussed

Edison's talking doll — Edison’s talking doll

Leaping forward a bit we provide a little background on the modern EVP phenomenon and and some rather eccentric Swedish and Latvian researchers (Friedrich Jürgensen and Konstatin Raudive) who were quite convinced their dead mothers were speaking from their tape recorders back in the 1960s and ’70s.

After some eerie snippets of their work, we’re back to early 20th-century Spiritualists.

Eva Carrière, was a French medium particularly notorious for conducting her seances in varying states of undress. The things she and her lesbian lover Juliette Bisson did with ectoplasm are truly the stuff of historic clickbait. Flash photos taken during her sittings by more skeptical researchers, however, reveal a decidedly less impressive side to her craft.

We also have a look at the Boston medium Mina (or “Margery”) Crandon whose notoriety came from a public feud with the debunker Harry Houdini and her own tendency toward scanty dress during sittings. Her dead brother Walter also figures into the story along with a suspicious “teleplasmic” hand revealed to be constructed in a rather ghastly way.

Stereo slide of Crandon's "hand" — Stereo slide of Crandon’s “hand”

From newspapers of the 1920s we provide two particularly obscure accounts of Spiritualists gone wild. The first, from a 1921 story in the Pittsburgh Press relates the tale of despondent mother who has lost her baby during childbirth. A particularly nefarious seance medium inserts herself into the tragedy, and before long the entire town is celebrating the arrival of a miraculous “Spirit Baby.” A purchase of cheap necklaces, however, proves to be the medium’s undoing.

The second tale, from a 1928 edition of The San Francisco Examiner, begins with a jeweled dagger found in the corpse of an unlucky newlywed. Though the police have already obtained a confession, a Spiritualist circle in France blames a rather brutish spirit that’s been hanging around their seances. A series of 13 inexplicable deaths, including that of dancer Isadora Duncan are also involved.

Our show concludes with an audio clip from a rather sad, but historically important seance held in Hollywood in 1936.

Episode 11: The Dead Speak

By boneandsickle | October 8, 2018

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:41 — 70.8MB)

The 19th-century Spiritualist movement was rife with fraud and misplaced hopes, but what made people so eager to believe in the possibility of talking to the dead? This episode looks at some early mediumistic pioneers, attractions beyond the metaphysical that drew sitters to take part in seances, and the growing pressure within the movement to produce ever more vivid phenomena passing for proof of supernatural contact. This episode also kicks off our Fall-Winter season and a (3-episode!) October dedicated to the theme of “talking to the dead.”

As communication with the dead is necessarily a two-way process, we begin with a story illustrating, not why we may wish to speak to the departed, but why the departed may wish to speak to us. A typical folkloric reason for a spirit’s return is the desire for resolution regarding the circumstances of death and proper burial. Our first story illustrates this with the story of William Corder’s murder of Maria Marten in 1827 — what came to be known as “The Red Barn Murder” — in which a ghost appears in dreams of Maria’s stepmother in an effort to identify the perpetrator and the body’s whereabouts. I include a 1932 recording of a popular Victorian melodrama enacting the story and a description of the widespread fascination which this case held and some particularly morbid consequences. I also include a snippet from a popular period ballad recounting the tale.

Digging up the grave. A Victorian Penny Dreadful.

Vincent Price’s 1979 series of radio shorts, “Hall of Horrors,” gives us a audio introduction to the de facto founders of the Spiritualist movement, the Fox Sisters, Margaret, Kate, and Leah, of Hydesville, New York. Like the unfortunate Maria Marten, a murdered peddler and his attempt to communicate in 1848 with the siblings through a knocking code is the purported initiator of this historical movement. Even as the sisters are developing a following in the 1850s, other small groups of friend and relatives are gathering in “home circles” to emulate the Fox’s supernatural communications, and other “public mediums” are gathering their own followers and offering performing on an evolving circuit of Spiritualist hotspots. We return to the Foxes in Episode 12 next week for the unexpected end to their tale.

One of these “public mediums” was Jonathan Koons of Mt. Nebo, Ohio, who in the early 1850s, claimed to have been directed by the spirits to build his “Spirit Room,” a log cabin, in which bizarre musical seances were held around a mysterious “spirit machine” handmade by Koons. We hear some strange firsthand accounts of the goings-on from newspaper accounts of the period.

As things progressed, greater proof of the spirits’ presence was demanded, and mediums complied with all sorts of gimmicks including physical tokens supposedly manifested from the spirit world (“apports”), spirit photography, and even impressions of ghostly body parts made in plates of warm paraffin left out during seances. We hear a couple cases of apports and spirit prints going terribly, terribly wrong.

We visit William and Horatio Eddy of Chittenden, Vermont, whose showman-like seances upped the ante with a cast of dozens of costumed spirits including costumed Native Americans, elderly Yankees, Russians, Asians, Africans, and pirates. A bizarre incident with a rat (or is it a flying squirrel?) and a dancing spirit is recounted.

William Crookes & "Katie King" — William Crookes & “Katie King”

Next, we hear the more well-known case the teenage medium Florence Cook investigated by Sir William Crookes, known for his pioneering work with vacuum tubes and radiography. Crookes’ fanatical investigation of of Cook’s spirit guide “Katie King” did not meet with the same success as his mainstream work. Listen for the rather embarrassing conclusions drawn by his colleagues in the scientific community.

Annie Fairlamb Mellon with her alleged materialization Cissie.

The show concludes with some tricks of the trade, a look at the a super-secret catalog used by fraudulent mediums and an exploration of ectoplasm, how it might be simluted, what exactly it feels and looks like, and what it should be capable of doing.

Ectoplasm produced by Stanislawa P. 1913. Photo Albert von Schrenk-Notzing. — Stanislawa P. during séance of 25 January 1913. Photo Albert von Schrenk-Notzing.

Episode 10: Victorian Mummies

By boneandsickle | August 24, 2018

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:30 — 98.0MB)

This time round we explore the way in which the death-obsessed Victorians fetishized the equally death-obsessed Egyptians, creating a number of gothic mummy tales, which often veer into storylines that are almost necrophilic.

To begin we have a look at how the Victorians interacted with mummies as artifacts. We hear an 1899 story from Philadelphia’s The Times making clear that the demand for mummies as displays for educational institutions and even as curios for private homes of the well-to-do, was so great that entrepreneurial types in Egypt came up with rather unsavory ways of meeting the needs of the market.

Examination of a Mummy by Paul Dominique Philippoteaux c 1891

We discuss Thomas Pettigrew and his promotion, not only of “mummy unwrapping” parties in the 1830s and ’40s, but also of the “miracle” of germinating seeds or “mummy wheat” allegedly found in ancient tombs. A peculiar story of a Scottish duke and his morbid preoccupation with Pettigrew’s mummy ballyhoo should also be of interest to listeners.

Wilkinson narrates a first-person experience of a mummy unwrapping during a thunderstorm penned by French RomanticThéophile Gautier, author of a number of mummy stories himself. His short, supernatural story, “The Mummy’s Foot,” is the first of several included in this episode that connect grotesque mummified remains (a foot in this case) with a rather comely, female love interest. One likely explanation for this tendency is offered via a short side-trip to French Orientalist art and Victorian pornography.

Jean Ingres' Grande Odalisque, 1814 — Jean Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, 1814

Next we explore The Jewel of Seven Stars, written in 1903 by Bram Stoker. This one also centers upon a regal Egyptian female (a queen and “sorceress”) who is missing an appendage — a hand in this case, which is wearing a ring with the valuable, titular “jewel.” The “seven stars,” we learn, wre lamps from the mummy’s tomb, which are to be used in an occult experiment to raise the spirit of the ancient queen. A mummified cat — much like the one recently gifted to the Bone & Sickle Library by Paul Koudounaris — also plays an interesting role in the story. Wilkinson narrates another strangely eroticized unwrapping scene from the novel, and there are snippets from the surprising number of films adapted from this previously neglected work.

Hammer Studios' 1972 adaptation of Stokers "Jewel" — Hammer Studios’ 1972 adaptation of Stokers “Jewel”

Then we’re off to the manly adventure-world of H. Rider Haggard who once delighted British audiences with tales of stiff-lipped men taming the Empire — and occasionally venturing into lost subterranean worlds, as in the novel She, which we discuss as another case related to the “seductive mummy” trope. Haggard’s stories generally, have more in common, perhaps, with the Indiana Jones model, but She crosses some paths with horror and science fiction, and was adapted for film by both Merian C. Cooper (director of the original King Kong) and British Lion (with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee).

A fair bit of the show is devoted to Arthur Conan Doyle’s interest in mummies, both as fictional devices and in real life. Doyle believed both in the much disputed curse upon Howard Carter’s King Tut outing and another case, the “Ingram mummy,” which happens to also have wound its way into the folklore of The Titanic.

Doyle never signed on as a member, but did attend some meetings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult organization popular in Edwardian literary circles and named for Hermes, more or less a Greek version of the Egyptian Thoth. We have a look at how this occult body, and many others, were influenced by Egyptian mythology and how a French novel from 1731 purporting to be the text of a newly translated papyrus shaped their ritual structure. Connections between Egypt, the Tarot, Crowley, and his religion of Thelema are also briefly discussed.

Lots of missing mummy appendages in this episode! The self-described “seer” and palmist going by the name “Cheiro” brings us another tale of a cursed mummy’s hand he supposedly kept in a wall safe for decades. He, like Doyle, also had some things to say about the Tut curse, lessons learned supposedly from a dramatic incident with this mummy’s hand.

Rising to fame in turn-of-the-century Britain, Cheiro migrated to Hollywood, where his later years were spent telling fortunes of the film stars of the 1920s and 30s, and where the idea of the cinematic mummy tale was first developed.

Having provided some background in the curse legends and literary mummy tales of Victorian and Edwardian era, we look at ways in which Doyle’s stories, particularly “Lot 249” might have been an influence on the Boris Karloff film The Mummy from 1932 as well as mummy films of the 1940s through 1960s. A few stray examples from later years are also included.

Karloff as Ardeth Bey in The Mummy, 1932

Snippets of two old, Egyptian themed recordings were used in the episode Esther Walker’s “Sahara” from 1919 and “Old King Tut” by Billy Jones and Ernest Hare from 1923.

LISTENER NOTE: Episode Ten is an extra-long deluxe episode wrapping up our Spring-Summer season. Wilkinson and I will be taking off September and returning in October with the folklore of the Fall-Winter season, Halloween, the Krampus, and more. We suggest you check back here, or even better, subscribe, so you know when we’re back.

Episode 8: Dreadful Ships

By boneandsickle | July 23, 2018

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:26 — 68.5MB)

On this episode of Bone and Sickle, we look at the folklore of ghost ships, undead sailors, some nautical elements in gothic literature, a song about a ship piloted by the Devil, and other horror stories of the sea.

We begin with a little reminiscing about our last show on the Pied Piper and a story by George G. Toudouze that I’d wanted to include but didn’t have space for, “Three Skeleton Key,” It features both a ghost ship and a horde of ravenous rats like those devouring the wicked Bishop Hatto in Episode 7. Clips from a 1956 radio dramatization featuring Vincent Price are included.

Discovery of the ghost ship Marlborough" 1913, from Supplément illustré du Petit Journal — Discovery of the ghost ship Marlborough” 1913, from Supplément illustré du Petit Journal

We then take a look at some notorious derelict ships from history, beginning with The Mary Celeste, which entered the popular imagination through a fictionalized account by Arthur Conan Doyle. Ships adrift in the Arctic with frozen crews, a ship cursed by malevolent spirits picked up in Zanzibar, and a ship discovered with its lifeless crew in a particularly grisly state are all discussed.

Edgar Allan Poe, in his only full-length novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, describes a ghost ship in ghastly detail in a passage dramatically interpreted by Wilkinson.

"Pym" Illustration for Jules Verne's essay "Edgard Poë et ses oeuvres" by Frederic Dargent, 1862 — “Pym” Illustration for Jules Verne’s essay “Edgard Poë et ses oeuvres” by
Frederic Dargent, 1862

In between the Edgar Allen Poe passage and my introduction to the Flying Dutchman, you heard a snippet of David Coffin and friends singing the sea shanty “Roll the Old Chariot,” which you can hear in its entirety here.

We then have a look at the lore of The Flying Dutchman, best known as the supernatural ship from the Pirates of the Caribbean films or the opera by Richard Wagner, Wilkinson relates some eerie accounts of Dutchman sightings from surprisingly recent times.

Hartwig & Vogel's Chocolate trading cards, "The Flying Dutchman" (1906) — Hartwig & Vogel’s Chocolate trading cards, “The Flying Dutchman” (1906)

A favorite explanation for stories, in which ghost ship are said to luminesce, is the phenomenon of St. Elmo’s fire, a weird electrical anomaly, which we find showing up everywhere from Melville’s Moby Dick to the laboratory of Nikola Tesla.

Ghost ships are sometimes said to arrive as omens of death, or their appearance may recreate the tragic end of ship and crew. These otherworldly aspects have been noted in mariners’ accounts and served as the basis for a few poems, including a work by Longfellow, which we’ll hear. Along the way, we learn about the Klabautermann, a strange sea-going gnome said to haunt ships on the Baltic and North Seas.

Next, it’s a musical break featuring the 17th-century folk ballad “House Carpenter” also sometimes called “The Daemon Lover.” This tale of demonic jealousy or the Devil’s retribution on the high seas is hauntingly rendered by Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie, Scottish singer A.L Lloyd, and in an instrumental arrangement by Adrian McHenry, and we hear bits of all these versions.

Samuel Coleridge’s epic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has often drawn comparison to the Flying Dutchman legend. We have a look at its undead sailors, ominous allegorical figures, and how its arctic setting may have influenced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Gustave Doré illustration for "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1876) — Gustave Doré illustration for “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1876)

And who would’ve known, but it seems there’s a peculiar link between Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. I work it all out in the conclusion of the episode.