The Women in Black of Pennsylvania

Beginning in the 1860s, mysterious figures dressed like Victorian widows began flitting around in the dark, terrorizing communities across the United States. Who were these Women in Black? 

Transcript

 [Simon] Chris, welcome back. Last month, we looked at the elf dancers of a small Welsh valley. And this month, we're traveling across the Atlantic to go in search of the woman in black, particularly in relation to Pennsylvania. Can you just give us a very general idea, first of all, about who the woman in black was?

 [Chris] I always like to say it's a female Jack. It's in the dark, mostly smaller US cities, roughly between 1860, 1920. They sometimes just sprang at people. Sometimes they actually attacked people, but they almost always caused a panic. There's hundreds of cases I could go on for hours, but today we're mainly going to be concentrating on some interesting cases from Pennsylvania.

[Simon] Brilliant. And I have to ask why Pennsylvania? Why not New York state or California?

[Chris] There just seemed to be a concentration. There was a flap like they call a UFO flap or something, or a ghost panic in the state of Pennsylvania. And I attribute it mostly to some of the dire conditions in the coal mining communities, because that's where these things appeared. And we can discuss later who it was that was seeing these ghosts and what in their backgrounds might have precipitated this, but there's a big cluster of them in Pennsylvania.

[Simon] Okay. So that makes sense. Just to kick us off, could you perhaps give us a sample or just a taste of what one of these apparitions was actually like?

[Chris] Right. Here's one from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, and it seems to sort of give the flavor of how they behaved and what happened when people saw them. This is from 1892, actually in February. Superstitious people in the city and neighborhood are greatly disturbed over the appearance in the city of what they call a black ghost. This mysterious apparition has been seen three times within the past fortnight, each time just after midnight, and in different parts of the town. It is in the form of a woman dressed in black from head to foot. An employee of the Erie Railway Company whose duty it was to awaken the men who go out to the trains was the first to see it. The woman in black was standing in the street near the railway depot. The caller approached her and she moved slowly away towards the city. The caller and another railroad man wondered what could have brought a woman alone to that part of the town at such an unusual hour, and they followed her. She seemed to be moving slowly along the street, but although the men walked as rapidly as they could and then broke into a run, they could not overtake the figure in black, she keeping a few yards in advance with the same apparent slow movement and finally suddenly disappearing from sight entirely. A few nights later, the woman in black appeared again in another part of the city, and early in the Friday morning, she was seen and disappeared under the same mysterious circumstances near the old Colebrook Mine entrance. Miners say that a short time before the disastrous cave-in at the Delaware and Hudson Canals Company, old number one mine in this city 50 years ago, a black ghost just like the one that is prowling about the town now appeared under the same circumstances three times. And 28 years ago this winter, the same woman in black or one with the same habits appeared three times just as this one has done, and the memorable plague of black fever, which carried away scores of men, women and children in Carbondale followed her appearance.

[Simon] Well, suitably creepy stuff as an introduction to the woman in black. Can you tell us a little bit more, drawing together now from the many different cases we have from Pennsylvania, what did she look like? At the beginning of your description, two men see the women in black and they presume that actually she's just a normal woman wearing mourning clothes. So other than being dressed in black, was there anything that set her apart?

[Chris] They were usually, as you've said, dressed in Victorian mourning and often were heavily veiled. They were described as unusually tall very often or unusually thin, skeletally thin. They move very quietly and they vanish when they're cornered. They're very, very good at evading the mobs that were hunting them because they did inspire, as ghosts often did, a panic and they'd bring out posses to hunt these things, but they were always easy. They disappeared very, very easily. They're not quite ghosts. They're too solid to walk through because people were actually struck by them, but they're too insubstantial to catch.

[Simon] This business where they're clearly solid, or at least in many cases they're solid, struck me. And perhaps I should say at this point that we've put together a little source book, which is referenced on the podcast page, where we've put together a number of the Pennsylvania cases so you can actually download and read three or four thousand words. And what struck me is that these women in black, they often found themselves striking people, touching people. And there was one woman in black in particular who went around hugging people, not in a particularly friendly fashion. So we do often get a sense that they're quite solid, and yet they're also, as you say, insubstantial. They just slip away.

[Chris] They do. And the tallness, and they were often silent. Most of them didn't speak at all. Occasionally you run across one, although there was one in New York that hissed, which was just terribly frightening. You rarely saw the face. Sometimes it was described as skeletal if it was actually seen. But the tallness and the fact that they targeted young women very often. They specifically described how they were attacking a young woman who was coming home from work or from a ball or a dance. And that's led to suspicions that some of these were actually men in disguise. The one who was hugging girls was described as Jack the Hugger. But I wouldn't want to meet these dark things in an alley.

[Simon] No, no. I can well believe that. When you talk about the way they look and you talk about their face, tell us a little bit more because you're a real expert in this area. But Victorian mourning, would it be normal for a woman to cover her face during mourning? Is that part of the whole Victorian approach to mourning?

[Chris] Right. Generally, in the first parts of mourning, when you were newly widowed, you'd wear a veil over your face every time you left the house. These were relatively thick veils. You could see through them, but you were seeing through darkness. It's like wearing a very heavy pair of sunglasses. And sometimes they were actually doubled. So people did not want to have their faces seen while they were mourning. They viewed it almost as shelter from prying eyes. Nobody wanted their blood, their red tear-stained eyes seen. And it also, when you were veiled like that, people knew that you were entitled to sympathy and respect, and they didn't bother you. They didn't have to come up and ask, how's your husband? They knew that a loss had been suffered. So yes, it was very, very common. So that's kind of one thing that puzzles me about these women in black is what's so frightening about a widow. They were very, very common, and particularly in coal mining areas where people died all the time in accidents and life expectancy was relatively short. Why were widows so terrifying? Because you knew widows. You saw them every day. And I don't have a real answer to that, except perhaps there's some things in folklore about widows being bad luck. And I think it's because they're a reminder of death and how easily we can all be dragged into this by an untimely death.

[Simon] In a superstitious community, any omen can be picked up on, and seeing a woman in black could hardly be a good sign in the scheme of single magpies or owls flying the wrong way across the sky. I can imagine turning a corner and suddenly finding yourself face to face with a widow could be construed as awfully bad luck. Again, this is my lack of knowledge about North America in the 19th century, but to what extent would it have been normal for a widow to be out on her own after dark? We often have descriptions from people who see the widow, and maybe they want to talk to her to see if she needs help or assistance. I almost got a sense, and perhaps I'm picking up on the wrong thing here, but I almost had a sense that her very presence was a little bit unusual.

[Chris] Yeah, I agree with that. Economically, widows were in a very precarious state, usually. There was very little life insurance, and if your husband, who was the only person working, which was mostly usual, the women stayed home and took care of the house, and the men went out to work or farmed. If you lost that economic support, you had nothing, and there was very little public relief. There was not the parish relief system there was in England, for example, and women might go out to work sort of surreptitiously. They were trying to maintain their middle-class respectability, but they weren't trained or expected to work by society. So, they were kind of in trouble. So, perhaps if you saw a widow out late, she might be returning from some job, or she might have dropped off the laundry or the needlework that she had done for somebody, but in general, no, you would generally expect a woman to be inside and at home at night. Certainly, there was a thought about respectability. Respectable women didn't go out much at night, and that's one thing that I find really hilarious about some of these examples, is that the newspapers say, well, if the woman in black scares the girls from going out at night, that's all to the good.

[Simon] All to the good, yes. There are several comments along those lines. Interesting, Chris. Very interesting. Of course, I imagine that everything you've just said is triply true of Pennsylvania, cold country, where insurance would have been that much lower. Many of these women who lost husbands would have found themselves in severe, very, very difficult economic straits.

[Chris] Right. If a miner was injured, he got nothing from the coal company, and he was evicted from the company house if he couldn't work, as was his widow if he was killed. So, if you were widowed, you didn't have much to go on if you lived in a coal mining town.

[Simon] Could we even say that coming face-to-face with a widow was perhaps not more traumatic, but more tragic in Pennsylvania in the 1880s, say? Because if you're on the poor side of town, it wasn't just the horror of losing your life partner, but there was also all the economic consequences that went with that. Even if this wasn't someone you knew, you knew that here was a tragedy unfolding before your eyes.

[Chris] Right. Interestingly, we do find women who are coming back from work or coming back from a party who do get attacked or confronted by the women in black, but you also get a lot of men. They seem to panic almost worse than the women do. So, possibly they're thinking, this could happen to my family. So, you may be right. It's just a reminder of the constant presence of death in these communities.

[Simon] So, let me take a step back from this and look at it as someone who's above all interested in the 19th century supernatural from Britain. First of all, there is nothing unusual about having an apparition in a small town. You've made several references to this already, but towns have these flaps from time to time where someone or something would be seen running around. Maybe it would be the classic Scooby-Doo ghost of our imagination with a sheet over its head. Maybe it would be something a little bit more exotic. In many parts of Britain, it was a shape-changing apparition. A horse would become a ball of fire that would then become a woman that would then become a man, et cetera, et cetera. There were also very tall, very short apparitions where one of the clues that something weird was going on was that this person wasn't quite of the right human dimensions. So, I have to say that so far I feel quite at home, but now I'm going to make my complaint and wave it in your face, Chris, and demand my explanations. What gets on my nerves a little bit about these women in black in Pennsylvania, and what makes them also so exciting as a supernatural phenomenon, is that they just don't seem to know what they are. Sometimes they're running around and vanishing like a ghost. Other times, they're clearly a solid, I would say, human thing. They're a physical object. Here you would assume, oh, this is a human being rather than a supernatural apparition as we understand it. You talked before about Springheel Jack. Springheel Jack was this very much a human figure in British towns that ran around, jumped over buildings, did incredible, almost superhero acts as he was being chased. Then sometimes as well, we have really far out ones. We're not exactly talking about a ghost. There's one of the reports, for example, in your Pennsylvania sourcebook where the writer talks about vampires and about the way that vampires operate, implying that this lady in black will raise down whatever man she can find and suck the blood, the life, and the soul out of him. Okay, I understand what they look like, but what are they?

[Chris] Well, you mentioned the vampire, and I'm going to have to contradict you on that. That is the only, the sole source for anyone calling the women in black vampires. There are no other references, and that came actually from a community settled by Hungarian immigrants. I'm assuming that that belief was imported because it never appears in any of the other. That's the odd thing is we do not see references to the woman in black being a vampire. Only occasionally do we hear her called a Banshee, and you would expect to hear more about Banshees in, again, were places where you had Irish immigrants, and there were plenty of them working the coal mines. I'm a little puzzled by why we don't have more of that, but this ambiguity of the creatures, I think we're dealing with copycats. If you believe in apparitions, and I try to take a broad view. If somebody says they've seen this thing and it vanished in front of their face, I'm not going to necessarily accuse them of just being drunk and delusional. I've read and experienced too many things to know that there are odd things out there. But at the same time, there do seem to be copycats. One of the sources mentioned something about the woman in black. Of late, she has not contended herself with simply appearing, but has assaulted a number of persons, and in some instances has committed robbery. Thus, the hallucination, which was at first harmless, has become serious by affording unscrupulous and criminally disposed persons an opportunity to do their wicked work under the mask of the woman in black. I've written before, and I've presented on the woman in black as widow's weeds, as criminal disguise. That was an extremely common thing because the veil was so good at protecting people from being identified. I think we're dealing with two different things. We're dealing with ghost panics and apparitions that people see as a ghost sort of creature, and then there really were people out there masquerading as these things.

[Simon] This is something going back to the British experiences of the 19th century was very common. You often had people from the lower band of the IQ spectrum, let's say, who would tag on, who would pick up the legendary slack when these flaps took place, and would just complicate everything by a ghost is being seen. They would get a sheet, and at midnight, they would run around town. This is a real phenomenon. I think even a very 101 in human nature would not surprise you that this happens and that it muddies the water considerably with these things. And I suppose sometimes there has to be the suspicion that there was an initial experience of hallucination. Do you think, Krista, in some cases, all of the women in black experiences could be explained in this way, or would that be just too much? As hallucinations? No, as the opposite, as perhaps an initial experience, and then people dressing up or people being misunderstood. Is there much to explain here? In historical terms, in cultural terms, what's going on is fascinating, however we talk about it. But in 14 or paranormal terms, do we really need to explain this stuff? We're seeing widows out after dark. So what?

[Chris] Well, okay. Here's an example from near Scranton, Pennsylvania. The workmen near the blast furnace saw the woman in black hiding under a lumber pile. Then they said they saw a female figure dressed in black running towards the river. Thinking they would capture it, they followed. But when they were near the riverbank, the woman in black sprang over a precipice and disappeared in the cave of an abandoned mine. Does that sound like a human? Is that possible? They searched the mine and they couldn't find anybody hiding. So later in the article, they said this twilight visitor whose queer antics have produced something like panic. It's believed by some that the woman in black is a crazy individual at large, who's taking this method of indulging a wild fancy. While the more superstitious are of the opinion it's a veritable ghost, there are yet others who suppose that the woman in black is some evil-minded man who is masquerading in female attire for the purpose of frightening timid persons.

[Simon] If we can go to that exact quotation, this was one that stood out for me as well. The first thing I'd say is, what do they mean she's hiding in a lumber pile? I really don't even know what that means. Does this suggest that one of the workers was going by a pile of lumber and saw a little bit of morning gear sticking out? As to the whole business of chasing her towards the river, in British sightings in the 19th century, you have women in white. This is a quite common paranormal type in Britain. You also have women in grey. There are a couple of other colours that come up, though the darker colours tend to be within houses. But of course, what's extraordinary about someone in morning clothes running through the city streets is, would you actually necessarily see her? Particularly, she's running towards the river, presumably in an unlighted area. And then last of all, we have this extraordinary posse heading down into the coal mine to dig this phenomenon out. I wondered if there was also a fair bit of journalistic exaggeration in all this.

[Chris] Possibly. Although, I would think that the blast furnace people would take exception to that. If you reported that they'd done this, they would come back and say, we're not that superstitious, because people didn't want to be seen as superstitious. So that's a possibility. It's interesting to me that if someone was actually doing a prank here, and just dressing up and running around for the sake of, they were going out with guns. Why would you run around in the dark, knowing you might be shot at any moment? What was in it for you, other than just a thrill? I wonder how much of this was just thrill-seeking people, but it seems a bit misguided if you're being hunted.

[Simon] I think you gave it away when you said, other than just a thrill, that there were people, perhaps particularly people in state jobs without many prospects, for whom the atavistic pleasure of being chased around the Scranton countryside at two in the morning by posses with guns. We know from the UK where occasionally people were caught, and this is also the case, I'm sure you'll confirm in the US, that there definitely were people who dressed up as ghosts, and then appeared the next morning in front of a judge. So there's no question that some people did take this risk, though you're absolutely right to say it was a risk.

[Chris] Yeah. I know people did this. I just still can't understand. I'm not much of a risk taker myself.

[Simon] I was going to say, Chris, you're far too healthy psychologically for this kind of nonsense. I think I'm just too much of a coward, but there's a distant part somewhere inside me that can imagine the excitement. It's back to being nine and having all your friends playing Tig as the sun's going down. Look, one thing that we've mentioned a couple of times where we've shied away from is transvestitism. If I'd heard this on a podcast somewhere, I would have just rolled my eyes. But let me just again state that this is a very valid point. We once more have cases, very striking cases, from the UK where men dressed up as women, they couldn't risk going out in the day for obvious reasons, but they were prepared to risk going out at night. Many of these people, again, appeared before the judge's bench. There's one case that obsesses me from the very late 19th century where a vicar in southern England was finally caught wearing women's clothes. A very painful episode. He had been interpreted by his parishioners as a ghost or some kind of strange supernatural figure, at least by some of them. Of course, if you are a man who has that desire to dress as a woman, what better than a widow's dress? The sense that having morning clothes on and a veil on gives you a right to a certain amount of privacy.

[Chris] Exactly. I've read hundreds of these cases, and in only one case was one of the young women who was confronted by a woman in black brave enough to yank the veil off the face and found, surprise, a local young man from a very prominent family.

[Simon] A very prominent family.

[Chris] The newspaper did not specify why he was running around in women's clothing, but yes, it was a very convenient disguise for transvestites. You might borrow your wife's clothing. You could buy morning clothing through the male. It was not unusual for a man to buy morning clothing for women because women couldn't go out until they had their morning. There's all these stories about male relatives going and buying clothing for the women. Nobody would have thought twice about that. Very, very convenient if you were a transvestite, but yeah, the tallness. In some cases, they talk about how the walk makes people suspect that it's a man instead of a woman.

[Simon] Let's move on though to another question that you shadowed with your comments before. When I was reading this, I found myself wondering whether the experiences were gendered. In other words, whether we have more women, more men, or about equal numbers, or whether the interactions between women and black and men, women and black and women were different. What would you say there, or am I making too much of that?

[Chris] Yeah, I don't know that you're making too much of it, but it seems to be fairly well-divided. They do mention, as I say, young women walking home from the mills or wherever they were working or coming back from a party. But there's also lots and lots of jokes about men who say, oh man, if a woman in black ever confronts me, I'm going to show her. Then of course, one of their friends dresses up and jumps out at him and he flees in terror. I think it's about equal with men and women seeing the women in black. Some of the women seem to be a little more intrepid. One of the women pulled a hat pin out and the woman in black fled.

[Simon] Yeah, these weapons of convenience that our 19th century ancestors had around them. Is there ever any sexual hints? In the Pennsylvania cases, I got no sense of this, but is there ever any sexual tension? I know sometimes in the 19th century, the widow, this is very strange for us, but the widow can have almost an erotic charge with some men. Was there any of that in any of the cases you've read?

[Chris] Well, it isn't in the women and black cases. It is very, very common in the papers to suggest how sexually desirable widows are and how adorable they are in their pretty black clothes. Because they're sexually experienced, they're easy prey. But you just don't find that here, which is a little odd. We call them jacks, female jacks, because a lot of the jacks seem to be sexual fetishists. The ones that were cutting off hair or throwing ink on people or pinching people or kissing them or hugging them. But you just don't find that with the women in black.

[Simon] I mean, Chris, you say that we don't find it, but you yourself talked of a reference to a woman in black kissing. And there is a couple of references in the Pennsylvania cases, I think in one case, to hugging. So there is a little bit of that.

[Chris] There's a little bit, but it's definitely not the main feature. It's more the panic and the fear that these creatures create. It's really not a sexual atmosphere at all. And the ones with the hugging and the kissing, again, they always say, we think it might be a man. So the sexual context is lacking.

[Simon] I was confused by their dates. You talked about flaps in individual towns, but to some extent, this seemed almost to be a national flap. And I just wondered what you would say about the dates. Because clearly, if we were to read a description of a woman in black today, it would be rather unusual. So when was the period of maximum women in black? When was this going on?

[Chris] Late 1800s and in the 1890s were the height of the newspaper reporting on the women in black. Now, there's often references like there was in the Carbondale to, yes, we saw these creatures 50 years ago and 28 years ago, and they were omens of death at that time. But you don't necessarily find the original story.

[Simon] What was the earliest story you found in the newspaper?

[Chris] I think it's 1860. And it's actually an unusual one, because it's from San Francisco. And it's indoors. A woman in black just walks through this house. And she slaps some girl on the face and leaves a bloody handprint. And then later she comes in and they find blood in a basin of water in the bedroom or something. So it's a very sinister story, but it's not actually the common story we would hear. It's a very unusual case.

[Simon] I suppose that if we can take the Scranton case at face value, they talk about 30 years before. So that brings us back to 1858. Who knows if that's not being retrospectively created. But that would be also a very early example.

[Chris] Actually, I looked up the cave-ins. They were referring to the mine accidents. And one was in 1846. There really was a cave-in that occurred. 14 men were killed. And about a month after this article was published in 1892, an epidemic of typhus and scarlet fever broke out in Carbondale. So they were thinking this was an omen of disease or disaster. Actually, they were correct. Whether it's just a coincidence or whether there really are such things as omens of death, I have no idea. But the things are in the newspaper. Those are reported.

[Simon] Asking you as a historian now, a historian of the paranormal, why would it be that around 1860, 1865, 1870, these cases start to shoot off the chart? Does mourning change at that point?

[Chris] Well, mourning, perhaps a lot more people were in mourning because it was post-Civil War. But you also had a wave of immigrants. Carbondale was settled by English, Irish, Scotch, and Welsh. Lots of Welsh immigrants working in the mines. So we could say it's one of those things where you've got social conditions that are ripe for mass hysteria. Most of the immigrants were working under very poor conditions. The mining companies liked mixing their immigrants from different cultures in their communities because then they couldn't speak a common language and couldn't organize labor movements. So you've got people bringing their own folklore in, but they can't share that folklore with each other. There were lots of social stresses. So if we believe those sorts of things cause hallucinations or flaps of ghost panics or things like that, the social conditions were ripe for that.

[Simon] So you're saying that perhaps what we have here is a truly multicultural society, very mixed immigrant society. And what they're doing is they're creating in this new land, a figure that can be understood by only six or seven or 10 different communities. And so in that sense, the woman in black would be a true North American creation, a new contribution to the paranormal encyclopedia.

[Chris] Yeah, I think you're right. Because, I mean, unfortunately, I don't have the background to know what women in black haunt European or Eastern European communities. I mean, obviously, I know about the Welsh and the Scottish and the Irish Banshee type creatures. I know there are modern women in black in Poland who behave like vanishing hitchhikers, but they're identified as the Black Virgin of Shostova. But my background is not in European folklore, so I can't tell you which creatures might have been imported by people from Poland or Eastern Europe.

[Simon] And one footnote I'd add there, again, from my British experience, is when I started looking at the paranormal, I often used the word Banshee to describe these omens of death. And I assumed that there was this special character in Ireland and also in Gaelic-speaking Scotland. But I slowly came to realize that actually she was found, albeit in different guises, in all parts of Britain and Ireland. And we often call her the Banshee because that's a convenient label. And the Banshee certainly has rather unusual characteristics. And she is dominant over, let's say, a wider area. But if you went to any English county, you could find the equivalent of a Banshee who carries out that role, who warns of a coming disaster or a coming death. And my suspicion is that that would be true of every European society and probably every world society. So in this case, if you were going to reduce the woman in black to this fundamental role of an omen of misfortune, and it does seem to me that she's rather more than that. But if you were going to concentrate on that, this is a natural figure to be created in the new world by immigrant communities simply because every community needs their Banshee in inverted commas.

[Chris] Right. And every community had a widow and you had widows, you know, dressed in black in Eastern Europe. You had them all over Europe. Yeah.

[Simon] It's a shared language.

[Chris] There you go.

[Simon] Yes. And of course, in Pennsylvania, in coal country, the need for a Banshee is just so much greater. This is a lesson that we get from Britain as well, because these mining communities constantly have the sword of Damocles over their head. Are their men going to come back out from the pits?

[Chris] Yeah.

[Simon] There's this fear that runs right through these communities and to some extent is always lurking there in the background.

[Chris] Mm hmm. Exactly. You had the clashes between the different immigrants. You had clashes with management. You had financial panics, labor strikes, riots. People were being murdered. I wondered if some of the women in black got their start as Molly Maguire's because they came to the coal country and there were all kinds of riots and murders of the Molly Maguire's dressed as women. Sometimes they veiled their face in black. But the trouble is there that the dates are a little bit earlier than the mass flaps that I've seen in Pennsylvania.

[Simon] Chris, can you- It's just a theory. But can you help me here with a Molly Maguire? Molly Maguire were men who dressed up as women. Is that right? And basically did illegal things in the name of striking and union action or is that it?

[Chris] Yes. They had their origins in Ireland. Some people thought they were heroes. Some people thought they were terrorists. It just depended which side you were on. So I don't want to take sides on that question. 

[Simon] Sure, sure, sure. So Chris, why did they end? From what you're saying, you mentioned the year 1920. What went wrong for the women in black? Because really the woman in black seems such a promising figure. I would very much like to see it today. What went wrong?

[Chris] Fashion changed. Women, great war. There was sort of a grassroots movement to stop wearing the heavy Victorian morning clothing. It was bad for morale. It was expensive. It was considered unpatriotic to wear black colors and depress your soldier boy when he came home from the war. So there was a big shift in how morning was worn or not worn. Also, hemlines rose. So if you had a man who wanted to disguise themselves as a woman, they were in a bit of trouble because they couldn't hide their masculine legs and shoes, whereas you could do that easier with a long skirt and certainly with a veil.

[Simon] So really we could say that two wars bookended the phenomenon. The Civil War sees not necessarily new morning customs, but just a lot more young widows mourning. Whereas the First World War, the Great War sees the end of Victorian morning culture. So we lost it to fashion. It was all the dictates of fashion.

[Chris] As with so many things.

[Simon] As with so many things. But I can't help but feeling a little teary-eyed about this. Let me go back to that point about her color. Part of me wondered the reason that also in 19th century the woman in black could start to work was surely you would need street lighting of some kind. Because if you're just walking around in black in the middle of the night, no one can see you. This is presumably why we have relatively few black supernatural figures other interestingly than the devil previous to the 1800s. Do you think there might be something to that? That there's a color problem? That lighting also made her possible street lighting?

[Chris] Mmm, that's a very interesting point. In a couple of the cases, I can remember reading that the witness didn't see her until she was right on top of him. So obviously, there was no street lighting there. Yeah, we are very spoiled by all the lighting we have at night. But we have very little conception of how dark it could be. And I'm not up on how many Pennsylvania coal country towns would have actual street lighting. I would assume that you would have some off-gassing that might be used as streetlights. But that's just speculation on my part. I almost would assume that the companies that own these towns would not want to put the money into streetlights. So I couldn't say on that. In smaller towns in the 1890s, you were likely to have streetlights. But a lot of these women also were flitting around back alleys. So there might not have been lighting.

[Simon] So there wouldn't have been lighting apart from very occasional glimmers of weak lighting out of coal miners' windows. I can't resist asking you this. We once talked about the woman in black before. And I tried to badger you, as gently as I know how, into writing a book on the woman in black phenomenon. Because though she seems to start in North America, she also catches on in Europe. She also perhaps draws on deep roots in different parts of Europe, perhaps particularly Eastern Europe. And you were a little bit off-putting about writing a book on the subject. Whereas I would think it would be absolutely a wonderful read. What put you off, the woman in black in the end, as a subject for a book?

[Chris] They're kind of all of a muchness. I mean, they're women dressed in black and they flit around in the dark. It's sort of the same story over and over and over. And as we've seen, they're so ambiguous. And at this remove, this time remove, there's no way to figure out what they really were. There's only occasionally times when in the newspapers they'll say, we've discovered who the woman in black is. She's Mrs. So-and-so Kennedy. And she was flitting around in the dark, hunting her husband, who she thinks is being unfaithful. That sort of thing. That's very, very rare. So, I just think it would be too repetitive to make an interesting book, but maybe a very short book.

[Simon] When I read the Pennsylvania accounts, again, the thing that I love is the fear. I get fear from these accounts that I don't always get in some of the English cases, which can be, by my standards, a bit tame, possibly. Whereas I do really feel chills. As the sceptic in the end, and thinking about the woman in the black hiding in lumber piles and running through the dark to the river and jumping into coal mines and so on, I do wonder if a lot of this just isn't social contagion. As we're recording this in late October, we've just had an extraordinary series of events in the UK. A series of women, young students, have had the experience of being injected in nightclubs. So, this would be the equivalent of roofies in drinks. In other words, the term that's being used is being spiked. And as the media has reported on this, cases have just grown exponentially, particularly in the university cities where young women are going away from home for the first time. And the presumption at the moment, we'll have to see the details, there are various police investigations. The British Home Secretary has made her pronouncements on this. But the presumption at the moment is that this is some kind of social contagion based on fear. When you look at something like the woman in black, there are clearly lots of minor streams coming together in a big river. But would you accept that a lot of this is social contagion?

[Chris] I believe it is. There's just too many parallels with your usual social hysteria or whatever you want to call it. My trouble with that is, in some cases, we label things social contagion or mass hysteria. And yet, there are physical results. In, for example, Puerto Rico, they discovered animals drained of their blood and said, you know, this is the chupacabras killing these animals. What physical mechanism is there that's caused by people being upset about social conditions that causes physical things to happen? That's my question. These women who say they're being spiked, are there actual physical traces? Are they being poked with something or other? Is there a picateur out there getting a sexual satisfaction by jabbing a woman with something, which we've seen before in London multiple times. In fact, there was a woman in black that was stabbing women in, I think, 1870s London. So, what's the physical mechanism if you're upset about something that all of a sudden you've got injection marks on your body? I'm always puzzled by that. I certainly accept that people get, there are these panics and they spread in very predictable ways. But sometimes you've got physical things involved with them and I don't quite understand where that fits in with just a purely mental panic.

[Simon] I like the word mechanism a lot here. I think that by using the word mechanism, we're signaling that something's happening, something needs to be explained, but we're perhaps not taking on the job of ourselves of explaining that thing. For other researchers who are possibly braver than us. Smarter than me. Well, perhaps more reckless than you. I've no idea how you explain these things. My attitude when I come across these uncomfortable facts for someone like myself, who is a small-s skeptic, is I always imagine myself just shuffling around the edge of the abyss. I'm not really clear how I can hope to deal with this material, but I suppose I satisfy myself with putting it down on record so other people can come to their own conclusions on this. Why don't we go out in glory with the woman in black? Do you possibly have another Pennsylvania reading or even a reading from further afield?

[Chris] We're going to go a bit further afield. This was from New York. It was at the Flatbush Asylum in New York, which was a rather badly run, insane asylum. The story comes from a Mrs. Geary, who was an experienced nurse there, very strong of nerve, they said. She wasn't thinking of anything when this happened, but at a certain spot in a solemn and mournful corridor, she felt an icy wind, damp and touched with the odor of a burying vault, blow upon her face. Blows suddenly and steadily as though a room had been opened before her and its noisome air were just pushing out. She lifted her eyes from the floor as she shivered with the chill of this awful breath, and she saw there before her wide eyes, but a few feet away, a figure all draped in a black robe, flowing of uncertain outline. The face of this figure was regarding her. Its eyes, deep-set and blazing like two living coals from a furnace depth, were scorching into her, and from its parched lips came a low sound, unlike mortal utterance. Mrs. Mary Geary, thus confronted with an unearthly and unfleshly being, bethought her to turn and flee, but the specter itself felt no such fear. It spread wide its flowing robes of night and advanced as if to enclose her. Mrs. Geary's wide-open mouth gave passage to one fearful shriek, then she fell to the floor in a faint."

[Simon] Well, Chris, that was pleasantly terrifying to round off our selection of women in black experiences. I suppose our duty to those who are fascinated as we are by these things is to talk about where you can read more. The first place to look would be the small source book that we've put together in PDF, and I'll give you the link for that on the podcast page. So that already will give you three or 4,000 words of original 19th century documentation, though focusing in on Pennsylvania. Chris, can you help us any further? Where else can we look? There is this deep frustration on the part of British folklorists. When we want to find these 19th century American folk experiences, we never really quite know where to go.

[Chris] Well, I've written two chapters on the women in black, one in a book called The Face in the Window, Haunting Ohio Tales, and in The Ghost War Black, Ghastly Tales from the Past. I've got chapters in each of those which are pretty comprehensive about some of the better women in black stories I've come up with. I would also look for work by the folklorist Bill Ellis because he's written about some of the European women in black. It was he that spoke about the Polish phantom hitchhiker women in black. He's done some good work on that.

[Simon] I'm trying to remember, Chris, the name of the book because you referenced it at one point, but is it Myths to Live By? Yes, there you go. 

[Chris] Yes, thank you. I was trying to look it up as we were talking. Yes, Myths to Live By. Interesting things to say about social contagion.

[Simon] Okay. My guess is that unless you want to spend hundreds of hours in various 19th century databases for newspapers, you're not going to actually find that much more. Is that right?

[Chris] That's correct. There is a book called The Women in Black. It's by Nick Redfern. It's mostly about phantom social workers. It's a more modern version of the women in black. They're not veiled, of course, but they're equally threatening. 

[Simon] So these are the sisters, presumably, of the men in black, which are often associated with UFO law. So a fascinating subject, but a different subject.

[Chris] Yes. So there really isn't a comprehensive book, and I suppose I have to write it if that's the case.

[Simon] I would appeal to anyone out there who's interested in this subject. I personally think there's an amazing book to be written on this. I trust Chris's judgment, but I can't help but thinking she's wrong in this case. Already, just the sample from Pennsylvania makes this so exciting. And the real challenge would be to go back and using two, three, four, five, maybe even more European languages, try and track down, A, the women in black cases from that magical period, what, 60 years, Chris, from say 1860 to 1920. But also to look even further back and see if there are figures in the folklore of various countries that sent immigrants to the US, where this phenomenon seems to have really caught fire, and to see if to some extent the woman in black can be explained. Anyway, we'll look forward to this book. Chris, I think we've come to the end. We should just thank everyone who wrote in after the last episode. We were amazed by how many people listened in the end. And we were also touched by the emails we got. And we got a particularly creepy fairy experience sent in that we'll leave for another episode. But please keep the communications coming.

[Chris] Yes. Thank you so much for listening. And if you've enjoyed this, do subscribe.