Hells Bells: Polts, Underground Cities and Supernatural Disinfectant

Chris and Simon ring the changes on bell folklore: bells mysteriously rung by polts (or rats or monkeys or blackbirds), bells ringing in churches beneath the waves and in coalmines, and bells with the power ('supernatural bleach') to drive away plague, the Devil and the Fae. Bells toll as death omens the 'death-bell' or ringing in the ears predicts imminent death, and Big Ben chimes thirteen when a royal is about to die. Chris finds a-peal in some physics experiments testing whether bells drive away thunderstorms and Simon chimes in with mermaids and their watery bells. Also, Great Aunt Moll, fierce disagreements over servants, and tips on how to keep your teenage kids in at night...

Transcript

CHRIS

So what have you been up to, Simon?

SIMON

Well, I've spent the last few days mourning my computer because my darling, darling desktop PC that I've now had for five years and has done incredible service to boggarts, mermaids, and many others is winding down. It is now, I feel, in a computer hospice. Every day it gets a little bit worse. And so I've spent a lot of the past two or three days actually just trying to get everything backed up. Now I do have everything backed up in the, I believe it's called the cloud, but I don't trust clouds. And so I'm also just trying to make sure everything is double and triple backed up. And it's made me think a lot about how I classify material because it's that you and I have in common is that we're looking for a lot of primary material. We're recording a lot of sources. What, Chris, do you do in that way? How do you keep your data?

CHRIS

Well, my in-house IT guy has set us up with the cloud, but I also have a couple of little hard drives. Once a month I record everything on that. And I don't trust any of it. I don't a primary source hoarder, or as I call myself, the primary sorceress.

SIMON

Very nice. Very nice. Thank you for beginning the podcast with this, Chris. I really appreciate that. Well, with this, I need to ask you to introduce today's topic and it will not be enough just for you to tell us what it is. I request that you justify yourself because many people will be listening and thinking, how on earth did she settle on this?

CHRIS

The title is Hell's Bells, Polts, Underground Cities, and Supernatural Disinfectant. So we're studying the folklore of bells today. And frankly, bells can do anything. They can tame the winds and the rain and the thunder and they purify the air during a pestilence. They can speed up the delivery of a baby and they drive devils and fairies away as well. And whether that's a good or bad thing, I leave it to your own taste. So there's all kinds of interesting folklore about bells and they're particularly found at Christmas. So I thought December was a pretty good month in which to talk about the folklore of bells. So we're going to be talking about ghostly bells, phantom bells, underwater bells, subterranean bells, death bell.

SIMON

Fairy bells.

CHRIS

Okay. So we've got loads of things. We need to establish a little bit of context first as to the ubiquitous nature of bells.

SIMON

The subject of bells reminds me in a weird way of our episode on horse spirits. And I can understand that everyone will be thinking, why? What on earth do they have in common?

Bells and horses belong to an older world. And of course, they're still around today, but they're not as important as they once were. In Italian, there's a wonderful word, campanilismo. And campanilismo basically translates as local loyalty. It's the patriotism you feel to your village, to your city, to your town. But the etymology is literally belltower-ism. So it's the patriotism around the bell tower. And there are three things about bell towers and bells that mattered in Italian history. First of all, they stood out. They were visible from all over the landscape because they were the tallest thing in the landscape. Secondly, they stood out in audible terms because of course you heard the bells and you didn't have a pocket watch. So the ringing of the bells was really important. And third, continuous ringing in the bell tower was the sign that your village or your town or your city was under attack and that you had to make your way to the mustering points to defend your community. With these three reasons, I just think we have a reminder of how much bells mattered in the past. Now today, of course, bell towers are no longer the tallest things in cities because we have skyscrapers and the like. They're no longer even the loudest things in cities because we have ambulances and everyone has their earphones on anyway. We're all in our little bubbles. And of course, if towns and cities come under attack, mustering below the bell tower is not going to help in the slightest. And so I just throw this out as a reminder for how central bells were. And when we talk about their various purposes supernaturally as we go through this, just think the way that bells imposed themselves on the lives of our ancestors.

CHRIS

Absolutely. I've said before, unless you've lived in a cloistered monastery, you have no conception of the role of bells. They were rung multiple times daily. They're marking the canonical hours. They were marked saints' days, funerals, festivals. And villagers knew the sound of their own bells. It's like they had their own signature. And there's some poignant stories about sailors and soldiers dying far from home saying that in their last moments, they could hear the bells of their church chiming.

SIMON

It's also worth throwing in there that villages very often have their own name for bells. So listen, can you hear old Tom seems to be ringing a bit late tonight. And there were sentences like this. And of course, in some churches, there was more than one bell and so there were multiple names. So they really were family members in a way.

CHRIS

Well, and they were baptized. They were christened. So they got their names. They were blessed. So yes, they were part of the whole community.

SIMON

I think we've got a general sense here. So why don't we jump in with one of your traditional readings, Chris?

CHRIS

Okay. This comes from Cloven Country, the Devil in the English Landscape by Jeremy Hart. And it is about a church in the Norfolk Broads. At Halvergate, legend has it that the village church was ravaged by a fire, which only the bells survived, hanging precariously from their charred headstocks. Should they be propped on a timber cradle while the tower was repaired around them or could they be sold off to augment the building fund? The parson and church wardens were arguing the point when the clouds grew dark around them, a bolt of thunder split the sky and the devil himself seized the bells, the full ring this time, which may have been a bit ambitious for almost immediately he dropped them in a boggy field from which they've never been recovered. And that is why this field has always been known as the bell hole. Now, I find this intriguing because I've seen the same story in other books and the field is called the hell hole. I find bell hole a little more compelling because very often bells were actually cast on site in a hole lined with moulding material like clay.

SIMON

There are certainly lots of place names called bell hole in Britain. And we've talked before about the way that holes are associated with supernatural legends, supernatural lairs, fairy holes, boggit holes, this kind of thing. There are lots of stories, of course, with bells that ring either underground, which begs a number of questions, or underwater, maybe in a lake or maybe in the sea. And in Britain, I know of about 20 of these stories and some of them are really charming because, for instance, there's one from Nottinghamshire where an old member of the parish says that people of his age, the youngsters didn't do this, but people of his age would go down on Christmas morning to the bottom of the valley and they would all put their ears to the stones there and they could hear down underground the church bells ringing because many years ago there had been a church there. It had been swallowed up by an earthquake and the church had then disappeared from the life of the community. It had been taken over by some strange supernatural beings underground and they too followed the Christian calendar and at Christmas they rang the bells. And we have lots of lovely stories, but about bells ringing in strange places. For example, in Cheshire at Rothesmere, there's the story that if you go there on Easter, a mermaid swims in from the Irish Sea, which is a bit strange because that's about 80 miles over land, but apparently there is an underwater channel and she comes up and she rings the bell that many years before had fallen down from the church. The church is on a very steep slope above the mere and she rings the bell and this is signalled not just by noise but by little bubbles coming to the surface. And if you're the first person there to see the bubbles on Easter morning, you get a wish. So now you know.

CHRIS

Now I know. What do you think is behind all these underground bell stories? That just is such an odd trope. I mean, obviously churches got destroyed various ways and their bells were taken away, but people still continued to hear the bells either above ground or below. Why below?

SIMON

Well, let me give you first of all a sceptical response to that. I think in many cases these legends are about some kind of weird acoustics in the area and I suspect that what people are possibly hearing, apart from the beating of their own heart, are actually bells in the area that for some reason are transmitted into certain objects or certain places. And there's a lovely version of this from Dartmoor where there's a great stone called the Pixie Church and if you put your ears to the church on Sunday morning, if you're not at church, bad boy or bad girl, but if you've gone for a walk on Dartmoor and you happen by the stone, at the same time the church is ringing down in the valley, the Pixie Church rings. But you can't hear it, you have to actually put your ear to the stone and then you can hear the bell within this great rock monolith. And I don't think I'll surprise anyone if I suggest that it's probably something to do with the bell ringing down and somehow the sound being transmitted into the stone, or maybe the sound being transmitted into the head and this coming out of the ear against the rock. Some unusual confirmation there, but I expect a lot of the stories actually have their basis in this. Now, I'm aware that for a Fortean podcast this is rather dry, so I'm hoping Chris that you have something a bit juicier to give us.

CHRIS

Chris Well, it is a bit of a kill joy to think that they can be explained by you mishearing bells from an adjoining parish. But to be fair, every parish is going ding dong merrily on high, you're going to be hearing bells everywhere. So, I mean, it may be also like people who claim they can track by putting their ear to the ground and they can hear a train or a car approaching, that kind of thing, or even footsteps. So, something like that.

SIMON

But... Paul But another example, Chris, would be the bells that people supposedly hear from the sea. Now, one of my favourite episodes with you was when we looked at the Fairies of Sennin Cove, do you remember in Western Cornwall? And there were a couple of rather late, but very authoritative accounts from Sennin Cove of being able to hear the bells in the ocean. And these were the churches that at a certain point were washed over in huge inundations. And supposedly late in the night, sometimes the noise of the bells drifts through. And I've gathered in my soon to be defunct computer, I'll try and keep back the tears here, but I've gathered a number of bell in sea accounts. And here too, I'm going to be sceptical. The majority of these accounts take place late at night. And I suspect that there that's something to do with sleep patterns or something that I personally have experienced, the way that sound at night when you're waking up can be distorted in rather unusual ways.

CHRIS

MG That's true. Yeah. But so many of the underground underwater bells tell stories of natural disasters, overwhelming churches. And as I said, there's so much of a connection with Christmas Eve, like Berkshire apparently, it's asserted that if anybody watches on Christmas Eve, he will hear subterranean bells. And the miners say that hear the bells down in the mine, well, the high masses, some sort of ghostly high masses performed. And I wonder, is it possible that the buried or submerged bells or some sort of memory of church bells hidden during the Reformation?

SIMON

Paul Well, that's interesting. And I should say that I'm cursing your name, Chris, because I have a list of underground churches, but I don't know about any miners in Berkshire. So I'll be sending you a polite email afterwards asking for a reference. I'm not convinced for this reason, yet it makes perfect historical sense that there will be some kind of memory of this. But the problem is that most of the legends are about bells falling into water, and that doesn't seem to work. Also, when the bells go into water, it's not usually the devil who's responsible, going back to Jeremy's lovely account from the Broads. It's usually a mermaid. I've already mentioned a mermaid earlier today, typically a freshwater mermaid in the west of England. And that makes me think here that there is just some weird connection between water spirits and bells, probably a deep psychological level that we're never going to be able to articulate, but that just seems to be very powerful. That would be my guess.

CHRIS

Well, it also does seem to be that things getting inundated. Was there a big disaster? What is it? Doggerland is where everything got inundated. So there were a whole bunch of communities under the water. I mean, we've got places over here where somebody, they did a dam and the community was completely flooded, and the church is still under the water, and you can occasionally see it's belfry, but we don't have the stories about bells ringing. But there are just so many, you know, the water's rushed in and flooded the town, and you can still hear the bells ringing under. And I've never heard those in association with mermaids.

SIMON

No, I think they are actually in association in a weird way, because very often, why does the water inundate? Because the daughter of the king or the daughter of the mayor or someone like this does something that disrespects the natural order in some way. And that figure is sometimes connected with a kind of water spirit. And here, I think we run into this very difficult question in folklore and history. Do we have ancestral memories in the way that, for example, in Australia, we seem to have extraordinarily old memories from the Aborigines in Tasmania, that Tasmania was once part of continental Australia, as indeed it was? Or do we have just folklore lyricism, let's say, that, oh, once down in the bay, there was a village, and the daughter of the king did a foolish thing, and it was drowned, and one person escaped on the back of a horse. I'm struck by the fact that in Britain, which is clearly my parish, that the legends are overwhelmingly from the Brittonic world. That means from the Welsh and from the Cornish, and if we can perhaps gobble up a bit of France from Brittany as well, the three Brittonic homelands. And I don't think it's because these areas have had more inundations than other parts of the UK. I think for some reason in their mythical system, this seems to have a special appeal.

CHRIS

Okay. Can't quarrel with that.

SIMON

I played the Brittonic card, Chris. I played the Brittonic card.

CHRIS

But you studied these freshwater mermaids and other mermaids, and you know where they are, so you've associated them with some of these submerged churches, bells.

SIMON

Yes, and very crudely, cutting a long argument short so we can get on to other kinds of bells. The mermaids are found in England on the Welsh border, and I think that's very telling. And then they're found in Wales and Cornwall. So, there does seem to be something quite Brittonic there. However, your Berkshire bells might yet be the destruction of this argument, so I'm silently cursing you.

CHRIS: Well, we'll see. I'll send you my reference. 

SIMON: Chris, let's move on to another type of bells now, and here I want to leverage in my darling great-aunt Moll. And we're going to talk for a minute about bells in houses because, of course, this is another type of bell. In the 1970s, when I was just a wee scrap, I used to go and visit in Surrey my dear great-aunt Moll. And she lived in a beautiful, really quite big house with some lovely grounds, a red brick house in what is a very wealthy area of the UK. And she lived with her husband there. It's the kind of place where a hundred years before, there would have been servants. In fact, there were a couple of rooms for the servants, though they had no one apart from a lady, I think, who came in from the village to help. However, in the kitchen, I was intrigued that there was a list up on high on the wall of the different parts of the house. So, library, sitting room, first bedroom, second bedroom. And I remember saying to my great-aunt Moll, what's that for? And she said, well, there used to be bells. And that if you were up in the second bedroom saying you needed something and you had this serving staff, you would ring the bell and they would know in the kitchen, because the bell would ring there, there would be a long wire that would go to the kitchen, that someone in the first bedroom needed help. And I thought this was very strange. But now looking back, I realised I was incredibly lucky to be in a house where the bells themselves hadn't survived, but I was able to see part of the old system as a child. And this was something that dates back, of course, to Victorian times, already the Edwardians were replacing them with electric tricks. And it was a big deal. If you go to the British census returns and put in bell hanger, this was the name of people who worked in this sector and who ran wires through houses, copper wires, and attach them to bells in places that were central where the serving staff could deal with them. And we have loads of supernatural stories on this. And Chris, if I haven't gotten in the way of your telling of this, do you want to take off with some internal bells?

CHRIS

Yes, that's a good introduction. I live in the Victorian era most of the time, so I'm used to knowing what servant's bells are, but not everybody knows about that anymore. And in the United States, it was not terribly common, unless you had an absolutely huge house with staff, because if you were just in a farmhouse with one hired girl, you'd just scream up the stairs for her. So one of the best documented bell ringings was out of the Beelings bells. And we could spend an entire episode on the story, but briefly on the 2nd of February, 1834, the servant's bells at Great Beelings, Major Edward Moore's country seat in Suffolk, began to jangle and jangle the servant's nerves. And for the next 54 days, various combinations of the nine call bells rang. They pealed, they tinged. Despite Moore and his household testing the pull wires, the cranks, they tried various methods to see if the very violent ringing could be duplicated by human beings. And apparently it could not. And then suddenly on the 28th of March, the bells fell silent and no explanation, despite Moore's exhaustive attempts to find one was ever found. And he wrote a book, Beelings Bells, an account of the mysterious ringing of bells at Great Beelings, Suffolk, and in other parts of England. He included some other stories of mysterious bell ringings. And I love this. Apparently the proceeds from the sale of the book were used to maintain the local church bells.

SIMON

Well, but it's even better than that. He actually decided to write the book to sell at the church fate and therefore they could go towards the upkeep of the bell tower and the bells. Chris, I'm just going to throw another small thing in there. One of the great things about this book, and we'll be talking later about how our listeners can read it, is that it's full, like you say, of all these accounts of other people who've had similar experiences. And most of them seem to be his near or far neighbours. They're people in East Anglia, where he's from. And in many cases he knows the people and he gets letters saying, oh, it's nice to hear from you again. We also had this experience. And in his naivety, and I mean this in the most respectful way, this was someone who'd served in the Indian army, was clearly a remarkable man, but didn't understand the workings of folklore. He seems to have started to assume that this was perhaps almost an East Anglian thing. Whereas clearly it was just something that was going on everywhere, but that most people weren't daring enough to do as he did and write a letter to the local newspaper.

CHRIS

Well, what gets me is that there are recurring stories about this sort of thing. There was one in Liverpool in 1865, and there they had 12 bells for the servants. And it was very harsh, very violent, just like the ones at Beelings. And it said the time preferred for ringing the bells and alarming the natives was whenever they sat down to a meal. And this continued for a whole fortnight, 16th of May, 1st of June, again, back 1865. And rats were suspected, traps failed to catch any, and they finally just vacated the premises. They brought in a bell hanger to look at it. And they said a force equal to six pounds to ring one or any of the bells, so a power equal to 72 pounds must have been exerted when all of them are rung at once. But the bell ringing stopped, and then it expanded to knockings on the wall and furniture and objects being thrown around. So that's when the residents decided to leave.

SIMON

Now, Chris, you've brought up an important thing. But as you live in the Victorian age with these occasional sallies into the 21st century, I think many people listening will be thinking, rats? Bells? So can we just cover a couple of the natural explanations? Rats is by far the favourite. And if you're thinking, how on earth can a rat ring a bell? Rats run along wires. And so in some cases, rats do seem to have been responsible. Now, of course, they're not going to be able to violently ring a bell, one would suspect. But you can see how, with their extraordinary acrobatism, running along a wire, trying to get from point A to Y, they could cause problems in the system. Other examples were, do you have a monkey on the premises? The answer invariably was no. The Beelings Bell, an early theory, was that it was some black birds in a pear tree and quite how that worked out I'm not sure.

CHRIS

Well the wires were running outside the wall on that section. They didn't have enough room on the inside of the wall to run the wires so it was running on the outside and they thought the birds were perching on the wire, which I thought was very plausible.

SIMON

Of all the explanations I've heard for these kind of ringings, the one that made the biggest impression on me, and this was in the Beelings volume, was a fiancé who wrote in a very self-satisfied way to say that he had solved a similar mystery and he went to his girlfriend's house and while he was there there were these issues with the ringing so he experimented pulling on the wire and he found that after a while the wire became taut and that if he just placed a finger on the wire at that point the wire down in the kitchen would ring violently. It's just a reminder that within closed systems of wires and things like this rather unusual dynamics can start up that we might not immediately understand.

CHRIS

The idea of metal strain, that sort of thing, things expanding with cold and heat, who knows? Who knows? We weren't there. I'd rather think it was poltergeist.

SIMON

There's one letter that he has in the volume which is very telling where there's a young woman who is essentially reading between the lines being forced into a marriage by her father who is dying and this husband proved to be a catastrophic choice for her, this poor woman. The poltergeist phenomenon seemed to be associated with the father and the mother, they die roughly the same time but probably also with just the misery of this young woman who seems to have had more wisdom than her father. Of course, these are the classic things where one thinks, I bet there were poltergeist phenomenon. Whereas the Beelings episode, this guy was a very bluff ex-Indian army major and who knows what was going on in his house, but he doesn't give us any details. He just gives us the exact measurements of these damn wires running here, there and everywhere.

CHRIS

We could posit, of course, that it was just the servants playing pranks, but that for 54 days straight, nobody gets caught. That just seems a little improbable to me. If it went on for a few days and then somebody decided to stop it because they were afraid they were going to get caught, yeah, that's plausible, but that's a long time to be able to pull off a prank like that.

SIMON

Listen, I'm not sure I agree with you there. I think there's something really symbolically powerful about servants messing with these bells. Of course, these bells were the chains that held these people to the house that got them scurrying up and down the stairs. If you were going to sabotage any bit of the system, if I was a pissed off butler, can we swear, Chris? Sorry. But if I was a pissed off butler, I think I would start with the bells. When would I do it? When people were sitting down to eat.

CHRIS

Yeah, but that was the Liverpool case. That wasn't the Beeling case.

SIMON

Okay, fair enough, fair enough. I think that if a servant stumbled on a way that touching a wire or messing with a wire at a certain point had a certain effect, I can see why a servant would do that. I've been struck over the years by how a lot of poltergeist cases do seem to come down to a disgruntled servant or an imaginative maid on her first job who just wants to lighten the boredom. And of course, Charles Fort famously said, oh, stuff and nonsense. Whenever there's poltergeist phenomenon, they find someone to blame. And it's possible that there was that dynamic, but I suspect in most instances, it was the servants.

CHRIS

Well, I think the cook left because she supposedly was afraid. She went to check on a friend of hers because she thought the bell ringing was an omen of the woman's death and found that she was actually okay. But I don't know if you were disgruntled, you wanted to leave and you didn't want to be dismissed without a character just by leaving, you could cause trouble and say, oh, I'm too scared. I've got to go home. But to do that for 54 days, that just, to me, doesn't make any sense.

SIMON

I agree there's an unusual psychology going on there, but it's interesting how often the fakers in these cases seem to have been teenage girls. I say girls because sometimes they were really quite young, 13, 14, 15. And I suspect it was just this thrill of being in a weird way, the centre of attention, creating activity roundabout. And it is interesting that in many of these cases, when they're investigating them, and I love this detail, your favourite century, Chris, they gather all the serving staff and lock them in a room. It's terrible, but it gives some sense of the concerns that were there.

CHRIS

Well, there was actually a case, a junior doctor, he claimed to be a complete sceptic. And he went on a visit to his sister and brother-in-law in 1852. The brother-in-law died very suddenly and was laid out in the nursery. So the doctor, his sister, the cook and the housemaid were the only people in the house. And the housemaid made a remark to him without being asked. And she said, Doctor, if you hear the bells ringing during the night, do not be in the least alarmed as it is quite a common thing in this country where there is a corpse in the house. Now, he laughed at her and the cook said, no, no, this is no joke. And he said, well, if the bells ring, you've given me warning and I've got a pretty good guess who's going to do it. So they went to sleep upstairs with the doctor's sister and he locked the nursery and actually put a nail in the door. Right after he went to bed, a bell rang. And he said he recognized it as the dining room bell, the key of which was under his pillow. And then it rang again. And in the morning, the housemaid said, did you hear the bell ring? And he said, what bell? Well, the dining room bell to be sure. How often did it ring? Twice distinctly shortly after you left us. And then he said, of course I heard the two rings, but then one of you did it. And she said, no, your sister can testify. None of us left the room till six this morning. So he was taken aback by the fact that something might have happened, but maybe they got out while the sister was asleep. I don't know.

SIMON

Yeah, these mysteries. Now, Chris, you talk to me when we were initially discussing this episode about the possibility of death omens. And I suppose you've just given us one there, but with bells generally, I think there are quite a lot of associations with death.

CHRIS

Oh, so much, so much. There are just all kinds of little axioms about it. When the death bell tolls, whichever side the tongue touches last from that side of the village will the next corpse come. If you break a bell, you'll hear of a death. If you are, if you have the sound of a bell humming in your ear, it's the sign of death. On Candlemas, if you hear a bell toll for a funeral, the number of strokes will tell you the number of days that will elapse before you hear of the death of a friend.

SIMON

Merry England, eh?

CHRIS

Yeah. So the ringing in the ears is quite fascinating. It's known as the death bell by some people.

SIMON

So this is tinnitus?

CHRIS

Yeah, it is. Ringing in the ears means death before the week ends. So James Hogg, the poet, he alluded to this superstition and he said, by the dead bell is meant a tinkling in the ears, which are peasantry in the county regard as a secret intelligence of some friend's deceased. When he was otherwise unable to prevent his serving maids from undertaking a nightly expedition, he took a drinking glass and approaching the door of their chamber passed his finger rounded in a way as to produce a tinkling sound. And this had the desired effect. Most women agreeing they had never heard the death bell so distinct.

SIMON

I should try this with my teenage daughters and see if I can get them to stay in. I fear not.

CHRIS

It also are a couple of royal death omens. Apparently there was a bell in Spain where when the kings of Aragon died, the bell would ring of its own accord. And this goes back to our wandering Jew story because supposedly he put one of the pieces of silver that Judas got for betraying Jesus into the bell when it was being founded. And there's of course the legend that Big Ben strikes 13 at midnight whenever a member of the royal family is about to die. This was said to have happened before the death of Queen Victoria. And I really doubt that the legend goes back much further than that. But it also was before the death of Prince Albert, Princess Alice and the Duke of Clarence. So, I mean, there are instances of the clock having struck 13, but whether it's actually a death omen or not, I couldn't say.

SIMON

I mean, what I find interesting there is you were talking about going back. It reminds me of actually you said about the bells in the house. The servant warned the doctor who was going to stay tonight that in this part of the country we hear bells with death. And that must have been a fairly recent thing because there won't have been bells in houses for that long. It suggests that there you have a belief that's been transferred from the church bells to more local bells, house bells. And it gives some sense of the power of bells that these ideas can travel in this way.

CHRIS

Except that she may have been mentioning that in connection with clock bells, because there's loads and loads of death omens to do with the clock foretelling death because it was stopped and then it suddenly started up again and chimed and somebody died. So, it may not be that they're referring to the church bells, but actual clock bells.

SIMON

Okay, that makes sense. Interesting though, interesting.

CHRIS

And churches though, do have a lot of death omen bells. There was one in Georgetown, Delaware, where the church bell tolled just as this gentleman was passing away. And he was one of the most ardent supporters of the movement to get a bell some years ago and contributed about half the money. But nobody was in the church. The church was locked and there was nobody near the bell. There's a tradition of chimes of the village of Avonbury and Hertfordshire. It had a ghost bell named Gabriel, and it would ring of its own accord whenever the vicar died. So, there were about three vicars apparently where this happened.

SIMON

When you say ghost bell, it existed, but it rang on its own.

CHRIS

Is that the sense? A ghostly bell or phantom bell. Yeah. No one pulled the rope, declared the parishioners, yet the entire village heard the chime. And these are associated also with phantom funerals. There was apparently somebody, they call him a Hanoverian knight walking in the garden of the royal palace. And he saw a funeral procession approaching from the castle and heard all the bells ringing. And he went into the castle and said, who's dead? Six days afterwards, the news was received that King George of Hanover had died on that day at the very moment when he'd seen the procession. Apparently, even fairy funerals have phantom bells. There was one in St. Uni in Cornwall, and a fisherman returning home late at night heard the church bell tolling a death, saw lights in the church. He peers in at the window and sees a fairy funeral going on. There was another one at the Church of St. Mary in Penworsham, and the church bell began tolling and then began to ring the passing bell for somebody age 26. And that was one of the witnesses who saw the fairy funeral there. And then he, of course, passed away.

SIMON

And yet this is so curious because one of the things that we know about fairies is that they're supposed to hate bells. And this comes down to our title, the idea that bells are supernatural disinfectant, because we have many, many more stories than this about a church being put up in a given area, the bells being added, and then the locals saying that the fairies, the trolls, delete as appropriate, disappear from the valley. And there you have the tradition, which is very important in European supernatural law, that supernatural beings, particularly social supernatural beings, hate noise. And so you sometimes get versions of this with the railway, with factories, but it begins with bells. And there, presumably, you do have this idea that bells are holy, that bells clear the air. And yet here we have a typical fairy double play, that they're all scaredy-weardy of the bells, but if they want a fairy funeral, they're the first to start ringing.

CHRIS

Right, right. And with the idea that there's some sort of spiritual disinfectant, and my question is, why bells specifically? Why not holy water, holding up the cross, doing the exorcism, power of Christ compel thee? Is it because of their range? I'm not quite sure why bells specifically.

SIMON

I think two answers, yeah. First of all, the noise, so it's the range. And second, their constancy. If you are a troll living under the bridge, and someone puts up a church tower, and brings a bell up there, it's over, because every hour you're going to hear this Christ noise. So I think it does make sense. And remember, of course, that bells were also used to drive away thunderstorms, to drive away bad weather as well.

CHRIS

Oh, I was fascinated to see a couple of papers by physics students actually discussing whether bell ringing prevents storms.

SIMON

No. Yes. And does it? 

CHRIS

No. 

SIMON 

Okay, okay. No shock there then.

CHRIS

No, no. But just the idea that you would take that seriously enough to check it, is there some actual acoustical property that kills germs, that it would drive away the pestilence? Because I remember in my youth reading about some fellow that claimed that he had different sound frequencies that would kill cancer. Which, of course, doesn't sound rational, but maybe they're, you know, I don't know if anybody's done any work on that since. And supposedly the sound of some bells is very soothing and conducive to meditation, would reduce stress. So maybe that would just make people feel more optimistic about the plague. I don't know how, when everybody's dying around them. But anyway, yes, there has actually been some scientific work done on this subject about storms.

SIMON

I, as someone who is not Christian or perhaps residually Christian at best, I still find bells very powerful. I live in a village where they chime every hour and I never count the bells. But I'm happy that they're there.

CHRIS

Because it's bad luck to count the bells.

SIMON

Oh, I didn't know that, but it's more because I've got my wristwatch on. But I guess that I like the sound because it seems to me that it's the sound of my community. It's the sound of the village where I live. And I imagine that even in very bad times, to hear the bell is a way of giving you a sense of continuity. The community's still here. We're still respecting the hourly divisions while this continues, the community survives.

CHRIS

I think the only time I've ever heard bells tolling other than on TV, for example, the late Queen's funeral, it was one of our local Catholic churches. And I don't remember what the occasion was, but they were actually doing tolling the bell. And I have never heard it since. 

It just occurred once. I don't remember if I counted the strokes or not, but it was just such an unusual occurrence. You don't hear bells around here at all.

SIMON

So, and is that generally true? Forgive my ignorance of North America, would it be? But if you lived in a village in North America, say in Maine, and there was a church, wouldn't the bell ring hourly?

CHRIS

No, probably not. A few had, sometimes communities have bell tower on the city hall, and maybe it'll chime every quarter hour sometimes.

SIMON

It's interesting. So in the end, bells are a very European sound, or at least they are now. Chris, should we turn to the question of further reading that I think will be, even by our standards, very brief. So can I throw up this Beeling book that you have already mentioned? This is Beeling Bells, An Account of the Mysterious Ringing of Bells at Great Beeling, Suffolk in 1834, and in other parts of England with Relations of Father and Unaccountable Occurrences in Various Places. He's got all his bases covered. And this was by Major Edward Moore, and it was published in 1841. And you can't find it on Google Books and you can't find it on Archive, but I have a copy and I'm going to put this up on academia.edu. I'll put a link on our Facebook page, so anyone who wants that, it's there. I found it a weird combination of the amusing and the tedious. The amusing are all these great accounts and the understandable mystification they cause, and the tedium are the long descriptions of how these wires work. I'm afraid there, my eyes brushed down the paragraph rather quickly. Chris, anything else?

CHRIS

Well, just to read general folklore, Bells and Bell Lore by T. Harrison Myers, 1916. There's not a lot written recently that I've found. I mean, there are things online. The Bell, Its Origin, History and Uses by Alfred Gatti, English Bells and Bell Lore by Thomas North. And I would encourage people to read The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers.

SIMON

Oh, I can't stand Dorothy Sayers.

CHRIS

Okay. But if you want to know about bell lore and bell ringing, change ringing, which is a particularly English form of bell ringing, you'll learn a lot from that book. And there's a lovely story about a cursed bell called The Legend of the Bells from Legends of the City of Mexico by Thomas Janvier. And we'll put these up on the Facebook page.

SIMON

Let's move on to our final reading.

CHRIS

All right. This ties into something I've been thinking about. We've discussed this before, whether certain fairy manifestations could be resulting from insects or birds or things like that. And we know that starlings know how to imitate bells. There's tree frogs and certain birds that sound like bells. So I'm throwing that out there before I read this and we'll see if anyone can identify what might have happened here. The following tale was told by an English vicar. And the vicar's informant was a woman who'd paid a visit to a sick friend and was returning home along a lonely footpath, which was pointed out to me close to a wood. And as she was approaching the sideline, she heard charming music, much like that produced by numerous small silvery sounding bells. Her path lay close to the spot whence the music was proceeding. And when she was within 30 yards of the hollow in the field where it was, she stopped and listened to the sweet sounds. But she had not long been there before a something came running forward from the direction of the hollow and brushed past her and struck against her as it passed. This frightened the woman greatly and in fear she went quickly towards her home. And the only explanation that she could give of the strange music was that it was fairy music.