Ghosts

For Father’s Day weekend, the father of a bereaved household leaves a final token of his love in a mysterious image on the window.

While this post is not Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, there is a modest collection of Fortean oddities in and around the White House that goes well beyond the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences, the zero-year curse and the ghost in the Lincoln Bedroom. Part 1 on The Fortean White House.

In a shameless bid to ride the coattails of publicity for Dan Brown’s new book Inferno, and since I have previously covered Hell and its geography as well as some fiery relics of the Poor Souls in Purgatory, let’s look at some stories about Purgatorial pranks, where the living impersonate the dead for their own purposes.

There are many noises believed to presage death: birds tapping on windows, the death-watch beetle, howling dogs, crashes or knockings–and the sounds of a coffin being made. We’ve previously discussed the sights and sounds of the phantom funeral. Today we look at the sounds of the phantom coffin makers–well-known as a death omen.

A collection of stories of ghostly, disembodied heads, mostly malevolent and usually in a state of vilest decomposition.

Something strange appeared in southern Indiana in December of 1885: It was a shape-shifting ghost—no two witnesses agreed on the same form—and it arrived with a whir, like the sound of a flock of birds. When mocked for his vision, the initial eye-witness offered a substantial reward, but no one could collect it: they were all too terrified by THE GHOST OF BLOODY RUN.

A sweet odor, seen as a sign of heavenly grace, the proverbial “odor of sanctity” is well-known in the literature of hagiography. It is also sometimes reported in connection with paranormal phenomena. What are we to make of the reports of phantom incense at and around Glastonbury Abbey?

You are walking in the twilight when you see a funeral procession approaching. You see the coffin on the shoulders of the bearers, the mourners following in their black clothes. You stand aside to let them pass. And then they disappear. You have seen a phantom funeral and it is an omen of death.

The classic story from Froissart about “Orton” or “Orthon,” a helpful spirit or demon who brought news from afar to the Lord de Corasse.