Possessed Possessions: Haunted, Cursed, and Hoodoo Furniture

Roll out the U-Haunt truck while Chris and Simon load up stories of haunted furniture. Simon tests out haunted chairs where ghosts sit and deftly avoids cursed seats. Chris takes joy in bouncing beds from brothels and trap beds that make human sausage meat. There is the murderer trunk and the toy box with angry gnomes. Clocks foretell death (and, in rare instances, prevent premature burials). Do humans get so attached to household furnishings that they cling to them even after death? Can a piece of furniture somehow influence us in weird ways? Or do spirits possess possessions? And what about the IKEA ghost, Chris's vacuum cleaner tale, the Monet painting and Simon's bagatelle board? All will be revealed in the October episode of Boggart and Banshee!

Transcript

Simon: Well, Chris, I thought I would begin today by asking you about your favourite piece of furniture. And before you answer, I should just warn you and the listeners that my favourite piece of furniture is just behind me and my dog is trying to dig a hole in it as we record. So please excuse any slight noises from offstage.

Chris: Favourite pieces of furniture. Okay. I've got a dining room set that was my grandparents and fond memories of things that they would keep in the buffet. There was a monkey puppet that we played with. There's a very elegant table with lion's paw feet, which was in their house, and I've got that. So I'm very pleased to have those. I told my daughter something about, yeah, we used to play fort underneath this table. You'd hide under the table. And she says, that's why I can never get rid of grandma's dining room set, because I used to play under the table.

Simon: So that was cute, I thought. For my favourite piece of furniture, I was going to talk about my leaning chair in the study where I do my reading and proofreading. And that was the chair that Flo, my elder dog, was trying to dig into. But actually, your description was so lyrical, I had a flash. My favourite piece of furniture is actually something that's in my father's house. And it was bought more than a century ago. And I don't know, Chris, whether this will fit into your definition of furniture, but it's a bagatelle board. Do you know what a bagatelle board is?

Chris:  It's a game board of some, but I don't know the rules of the game. Right.

Simon: So it's a game board. It's kind of like pinball, but everything is done by hand. And when we go, particularly with my youngest daughter, we still play bagatelle. And inside the box that incredibly is still the original, bought five or six years after the Battle of the Somme. It's amazing that it's lasted this long and this well. And in the box, there are 20, 30 pieces of paper of family matches over the decades. But is that furniture? Because I know that you have rather demanding definitions of what furniture is. I do.

Chris: I'm just such a legalistic Swiss person. I have a very, very legalistic definition.

Simon: Before you launch into the definition, perhaps we should explain to our poor, innocent listeners that today's episode is on haunted furniture. So this blabbing has not been completely beside the point and the definition matters. Back to Chris.

Chris: Well, your bagatelle board might matter because it's personal chattels in the use of a family. By the term household furniture in a will, all personal chattels will pass, which may contribute to the use or convenience of the householder or the ornament of the house, as in plate, linen, china, both useful and ornamental in pictures. It also includes anything which furnishes a house. It also means personal property rather than fixtures in residential structures, which isn't used for the production of income at any time. So it's only the use of household.

Simon: So let me hit you with a few examples just to make sure I've got a sense of this. A picture on the wall would be furniture then? It would.

Chris: It would be considered furniture. Yes.

Simon: Okay. What about a record player?

Chris: Yes. The term furniture embraces everything about the house that has been usually enjoyed there.

Simon: Okay. So an old gramophone player or for that matter, a modern stereo would technically be furniture. Technically be furniture.

Chris: Yes.

Simon: A computer not.

Chris: Probably not. Falls under personal property, at least in our insurance over here.

Simon: Interesting. Now, surely we're not going to really go this wide. I had one listener to the podcast today who I shared the topic with, write to me with a whole series of things about haunted glasses, water glasses. Surely we're not going to go down to this level.

Chris: I'm not going to, no. I'm going strictly with mostly wooden type furniture.

Simon: I'd also make a case that pictures, paintings, and perhaps mirrors as well, deserve their own episode.

Chris: Absolutely. Absolutely. The haunted painting genre has had quite a boom in the last few years.

Simon: Now I should speak over Chris's head here to our listeners and say, that as often when Chris suggested this topic, I thought she was a little bit barmy, but I've since discovered that I could very easily publish a small puka book on haunted chairs alone. There is a lot of stuff out there. I've been very surprised. So let me hit you with another definitional problem. If we talk, for example, about chairs, thinking of some of your proclivities, Chris, there are chairs on graves, benches in graveyards. There are fairy chairs, thinking of my proclivities, on hills. Surely we're not going to go up there.

Chris: Again, a separate episode. This is just interior furniture entirely.

Simon: Okay. Okay. Well, I'm going to give this a chance, Chris. No promises, but I'm going to see what you do with this. Should we kick off with our first reading?

Chris: Sure. And this is about a haunted chair. I will end with a story which was told me recently by a friend in Devonshire, in which I have every reason to believe is literally true, although naturally it's impossible to give the names of the actors therein. A young couple, both of whom lived in a small and ancient Devonshire town near the South Coast, got married. The husband was about 25 and had worked with one firm for seven years. He was a steady, pleasant, and good-tempered young fellow as could be found in the place. And the girl too was popular, pretty, and level-headed. They went to London for their honeymoon and returned to their new house. And a fortnight later, the young husband came home drunk. His bride was horrified. The next day, the poor fellow was utterly penitent. I can't think what made me do it, he kept on saying. I don't really like drink, except just a glass of beer. For a month afterwards, all went well. Then he broke out a second time.

He was carried home and again was miserably self-reproachful. A few weeks later, he got drunk for a third time. And then his wife went off quietly and consulted a wise woman. The latter came to the house and almost at once pitched upon a certain chair. It was a big, old-fashioned armchair which has been given to them as a wedding present and in which the young man usually sat in the evening. This is the trouble, said the wise woman. It is all wrong. If you take my advice, you will break it up and burn it. The wife did not hesitate. She burned the chair and after that, all went well. The husband has never since had the least inclination to drink. The history of that chair has been traced. It belonged formerly to a butcher who was a drunkard and who in a fit of delirium killed himself while sitting in it.

Simon: I like the story, Chris. Don't get me wrong, but I do notice that on both occasions, the young man got drunk a long way away from the chair. I am somewhat suspicious about this story. He was carried home from the pub, for goodness sake. I think there may have been other issues in this family. 

Chris: Well, he didn't get drunk after the chair was burnt. People who study these things say there's an influence. The spirit of the dead man was influencing him. Dr. Wickham, who studied in particular alcoholism, said that most of the alcoholics he knew were possessed by the spirits of dead drunkards. He had to have his wife, the medium, explain to these dead drunkards that they needed to leave the body of this human through whom they were trying to satiate their cravings.

Simon: Naturally for a fee, I suspect.

Chris: Well, he was a doctor. He would inject them with insulin and cause a seizure, and that drove the spirit out. He claimed to have a very high success rate.

Simon: I just want, before you go into more detail with chairs, to give a more general point. It struck me when you were talking about your favourite item of furniture, when I was talking about the Bagatelle, and also in this story where there's a reference, I think it's to a Victorian chair, correct? We live in a world today where furniture, including chairs, are really quite disposable. And I think it's worth remembering that a lot of these experiences relate to a world where a piece of furniture was made and it was expected to last for a couple of hundred years at the very least. And the modern thing that we often see in our cities of people putting out perfectly good furniture, but furniture that's perhaps no longer in fashion, would have been absolutely bizarre to our ancestors. And so perhaps it's just worth emphasising, Chris, this personal connection between an item of furniture and a person, or perhaps more particularly a family, because clearly for examples of the essence of spirits supposedly remaining in the furniture, it makes much more sense with 18th century woodwork than it does with Ikea.

Chris:  Well, I've got to write a ghost story about haunted Ikea furniture or something. There's a story there to be wrought, I'm sure.

Simon: But now I think about it, don't you have a great ghost story about a haunted Hoover?

Chris: I do, I do. A haunted vacuum cleaner, yes.

Simon: So we shouldn't be so against these disposable bits of modernity. Any other examples, Chris, of spirits in chairs? Oh, I've got loads.

Chris: There are just so many of them. And I was looking in my book that I have on my shelf, Ghosts in Photographs by Fred Gettings. And there's a really interesting picture of ghosts sitting in a chair. This was taken in December of 1891, Combermere Abbey in Cheshire. She took a long exposure, it was about an hour long, of the library. And nobody was in the room when the picture was taken, and the plate showed the head, body, and arms of an old man. Now some relatives who saw it said it was Lord Combermere, who at the time the plate was being exposed, was actually being buried in the local churchyard after dying in a road accident.

Simon: Where his legs were damaged, correct?

Chris: Yes, exactly. He would never have walked again. The Society for Psychical Research sort of poo-pooed it because there were several other entrances to the room. And it was possible that somebody entered and sat in the chair. But you'd think it would be recognised if it was one of the servants. And it was said that it did look like any of the servants. Someone tried to duplicate the picture and they had a man come in and sit and uncross his legs. And it came out looking much the same. But as I say, the figure didn't look like any of the servants and all the men of the household were at the funeral.

Simon: 

Interesting. And when they did the second photograph, do you actually see the legs?

Chris: No. It was blurry because long exposure on the photographic plate, if you moved, you got blurred.

Simon: Just a call out for Fred Gettings here. He was the man who broke open the Cottingley case. He was the person who first found definite proof that the Cottingley photographs were a forgery.

Chris: Right. With the Princess Mary's gift book.

Simon: And the dancing fairies.

Chris: He located that. Yeah. Wonderful.

Simon: I came across a few chairs as well, and I was interested how they seem to slip into different categories. First of all, there is what I think of as the cursed chair. And this is a chair that if you go and sit in it, you will experience what the person who had previously been associated with the chair would have. And so the example of the alcoholic butcher works very well. I came across an example that I found quite effective. It was describing a chair that had been used by an old woman in the 1920s, and she had become a little bit senile at the end of her life. And she had heart problems and died from a heart attack. The woman who took that chair used to say that she would have problems with her memory and a pain in the chest whenever she sat there. And that seemed to me quite representative of this genre, the cursed chair, the chair where there is a memory that someone who sits there can receive. The influence chair. Influence, yeah. Influence chair. That's better.

Chris: Well, we've also got a lot of superstitions about chairs, like never leave a rocking chair rocking without anybody sitting in it. It will sure to be occupied by an unwanted ghost. Or if an empty rocking chair is seen to move, a deceased member of the family who's come back to choose the next one to go. So any chair rocking by itself is a bad, bad omen.

Simon: That was another thing that interested me, that rocking chairs seem to get a lot of attention from ghosts. I came across several examples of rocking chairs rocking with no one in them and a song. And presumably this relates to the idea that mothers would be in the chair with the baby and they would be singing a lullaby. I think I came across three examples of that. And if I come across three examples in a couple of hours, that usually means there are 50 or 60 out there.

Chris: Yes, I've run across that too. I'm looking for one of my theories things.

Simon: So Chris is going through her vast files here. How do you make this work for the podcast, Chris? Do you print out 80 pages or? 

Chris: Oh, no, no, no, no. I'm scrolling through here. 

Simon: I didn't know that we could scroll while we were doing the podcast. That never occurred to me. It seems almost like cheating. It is cheating.

Chris: Absolutely.

Simon: But you do it with such style.

Chris: I've suggested before without any scientific evidence whatsoever, that the motion of the rocking chairs somehow records a ghostly image in the chair. There we are. No scientific evidence whatsoever, but other people have suggested that as well. And people who believe in psychometry, where there's a vibration or something or something's attached to an item, ghosts seem to get attached to a house. They can be drawn to a beloved object, like their favourite old chair.

Simon: It reminds me of the notion that someone making a pot can accidentally record sound in the area. This kind of thing. I love that. One thing that I came across with rocking chairs that I had no idea about is that apparently rocking chairs were much more an American than a British thing.

Chris: Yeah, I was thinking that myself. Yes.

Simon: But it seems that lots of British people who travelled to the US in the 18th and 19th century found the American use of rocking chairs vulgar and disturbing, to quote one woman in the 1860s who I came across. It has sort of a rural flavour.

Chris: You think of somebody out on the farm in their old rocking chair. And that's kind of the trope over here. It's an old fashioned thing. It was also easily used by the spiritualists because you just put a little black thread and set it in motion and then draw the thread out and, oh, look, someone's rocking in that chair. It must be one of your relatives.

Simon: Yeah. And of course, if you do that with a normal chair, it's not quite so effective because the chair creaks a little bit. So what? But whereas a rocking chair, it actually goes back to that movement it used to make when granny was in the chair. Exactly. Yeah, I can see that. I mean, talking about spiritualists, another kind of haunted chair that I ran into more than I expected were the spiritualist chairs. And these are the chairs connected with poltergeist cases or seances where chairs were said to jump around. I presume, yes, there was lots of invisible threads being pulled. And I came across one amazing case of allegedly clockwork chair that someone had constructed chairs that could be wound up to dance.

Chris: Whoa. Now that's new to me. I would like to see more about that. That's nothing I've ever seen in the list of there were companies that sold goods to spiritualists, like blow up figures that you could blow up in the seance room and then deflate it so it looks like it's disappearing. I've written about that.

Simon: Yeah. But you've written about everything, let's face it. 

Chris: Well, not everything.

Simon: Well, I should say that while I was looking for chairs for this episode, I kept running again and again into this strange Midwestern site called, I think, Haunted Ohio Books. But you're everywhere. You're all over Google. It's incredible. You really, more than anyone else, you have covered the gamut, Chris, of human experience. 

Chris: Or non-human experience.

Simon: Or non-human, exactly.

Chris: Now, you were talking about the influence of things. I've got a good story from 1897. This lady told how her mother-in-law had suffered from a very painful illness and could only sit up to sleep because she couldn't breathe if she lay down. And she also had delusions that somebody was trying to tamper with her will. Now, after the woman's death, another invalid was living in the house. And she was cared for by two nursing sisters who alternately sat up all night with her. And the lady asked one of the sisters if they were well looked after by the servants and if their chair was comfortable. Yes, she answered. But whenever Sister Marie sits in it, she says she feels an uncountable pain in her chest and fancies that someone is trying to take money from her. We have come at last to say that the chair is haunted. The lady enquired what chair it was and found it was the one in which her husband's mother had died. So there's that. Now, you're talking about distinctions. We've got the distinction between a haunted chair, where a spirit seems to sit in it or is seen with it, and a hoodoo or cursed chair, like you described, which brings bad luck to successive occupants. And away from the domestic sphere, there's a number of hoodoo chairs described as sitting in legislative chambers and jury rooms, where anybody who occupies the chair gets sick or dies or has some other disaster befall them. And I wrote about a hoodoo chair at a hotel in Blanchester, Ohio. There was this huge number of victims. First, a man was found dead in it. And after that, the chair seemed to attack people. It would fall off the porch. A dog was knocked senseless. One man's collarbone was broken by it. He was pushed downstairs by it. And there were just dozens of accidents associated with this hoodoo chair.

Simon: I would just like to draw attention to the fact that you are cheating, Chris. We agreed to stick to houses.

Chris: Oh, you're right.

Simon: And you immediately march out to your five-star hotel.

Chris: It's not a five-star hotel.

Simon: But in revenge, I just want to point out that I came across a very convincing haunted chair along these lines in Westminster Abbey of Old Places, near Poet's Corner. Have you ever heard of this one?

Chris: I have not heard of this one.

Simon: And apparently, when you sit there, you see an old man next to you. And there was one description of someone offering him a prayer book and dropping it into his hands and it just falling to the floor because this was a ghost. And I was actually going to quote from this. But when you came up with this, no, we've got to stick to the domestic sphere. I thought I would play by the rules. I should have remembered that you would not, though. I would not. Oh, well. Chairs, you have convinced me. Chairs are fascinating. But next up on our list, I'm much more sceptical about these beds.

Chris: Oh, so we're talking about now beds. I have a couple of interesting anecdotes about that. I mean, things happen to people in beds. And think about the monsters under the beds. I was once told by a librarian that an older gentleman had visited the reference desk wanting to know about the history of his house. And he was certain that it was haunted because his bed kept moving up and down. Research turned up the logical, if X-rated, explanation that his house had once been a brothel. And also a friend of mine was called in on his first case of paranormal investigation. And the primary complaint was made by the woman who called was that her bed moved. She'd set up some sort of crude and ineffective instruments to monitor this, which he never saw for himself. And the pattern seemed to follow poltergeist behaviour. And it turned out that the bed was about 20 years old and had been used by her ex-husband and his mistress during their trysts. The woman was still quite bitter about the affair and the divorce. And my friend suggested that the bed's associations might be causing some sort of telekinetic phenomenon and she might want to get a new bed. For some reason, this did not satisfy her. And that's where the matter rested or didn't rest. Haunted beds are surprisingly rare. I was a little bit surprised. I mean, there's the haunted bed of ware, but that's sort of been proven to be a publicity stunt for the fellow that owned it. I've lost whatever source I ever had for this cursed bed story from the White House. Apparently, Mrs. Taft, Mrs. Helen Taft, the first lady from 1909 to 1913, was the first president's wife to introduce twin beds to the White House. And she had her terribly debilitating stroke in one of them just a few months after moving into the White House. In the same bed, Ellen Louise Wilson, President Wilson's wife, died of Bright's disease. And in the same bed, President Coolidge's son, Calvin Jr., lay dying of blood poisoning. He actually died at Walter Reed Hospital. And in the same bed, Mrs. Warren G. Harding had her near-death experience while nearly dying of kidney failure. So that's innuendo and folklore, but it's been reported. 

Simon: What strikes me is that today, unfortunately, in my view, many people die in hospitals rather than at home. Also, of course, childbirth is quite rare now at home. And yet, if you think of centuries past where the same bed might survive for a couple of hundred years in a single family, think of the number of people who would have died on that bed. Think of the number of couples who made love on that bed. Think of the babies that were born on that bed. Again, I come back to this point that it wasn't Ikea furniture. This was furniture that lasted a long time. And almost by definition, a number of experiences would have been associated with. 

Chris:  Right. Childbirth, not maybe so much. It would depend on the era, because in the earlier times, you did not give birth in bed. You sat up, you had a birthing chair, or you were on a pallet of straw, which could be burned afterwards to clean things up. So you wouldn't want to risk a nice feather bed with childbirth.

Simon: So sorry, Chris, all these costume dramas I've been watching in the last three decades, where a woman in the Georgian nightdress starts screaming about the baby coming. It's just all a lie.

Chris: Well, it depends on where you were and what socioeconomic strata. I'm outraged.

Simon: Can I just chip in with my only bed knowledge? Obviously, there are lots of people who have experiences in beds, but I think it's more connected to the act of sleeping or almost sleeping than to the bed. But one thing I do associate with beds is more legend, perhaps, than haunting. But the idea that you find in some English taverns, and I bet there are equivalents in the US, of these beds that were actually traps that you would lie down and suddenly it would open in the middle of the night and you'd be shot down to the cellar where you were made into sausages.

Chris: Or just your money taken and you're dumped in the river. Right. Yeah. Yes. That's more of an urban legend type story about beds. Yes.

Simon: No, I should have left that alone. Back to the ghosts. W

Chris: Well, since there are not that many beds that I've been able to find that were legitimately... Except, I mean, you do find it in poltergeist cases where the beds catch on fire, something like that. And there's dozens of cases like that. And I've written about that in several places. But let me talk about a couple of other pieces of furniture. This one is actually a rug. I wrote about it. A woman told me this story. She bought a strip of rug for her hallway at a garage sale and it had a large stain on it, but she was sure she could get it clean. And she scrubbed and scrubbed, always came back. Annoyed, she put it in the hallway, determined to get her money's worth out of it. One night, her husband was watching TV and he saw something moving in the hall. He knew his wife was in bed. They didn't have any pets. So he leaned over to see what it was. It was a pair of legs walking up and down the hall. And they had those long grey socks with the red stripe at the top, like they make sock monkeys out of, paced up and down. And it was just the bottom half tapered about mid thigh. He didn't say anything about it until one night he returned from a meeting to find his wife sitting outside on the porch because she had just seen the ghostly pair of legs and so had their grandson. And they're like, why just legs? Was that spot on the rug blood? Was somebody killed and hacked to pieces and the pieces rolled up in the carpet? They put it out on the curb and it got taken away. And after it was gone, they never saw the legs walking again.

Simon: But isn't this the essence of a lot of these furniture stories? The exciting moment is actually when the mystery is unlocked at the end and we discovered that it was a butcher's chair and that this butcher was an alcoholic and he died in his chair of beer poisoning. And I feel that in this respect, you've let us down, Chris.

Chris: Well, it was only their theory. They had no proof.

Simon: I know, but I wanted a little bit more, a little bit of that final shiver that the Mafia would use to wrap some legs up.

Chris: All right, well, let me tell another one. This is about a woman named Judy and her husband, Jim, and they bought an immigrant trunk from an antique dealer. 

Simon: So what's an immigrant trunk? 

Chris: It's a very big trunk and it has a domed lid made of three individual boards. It was people who came from the old country and they brought these large trunks to carry their tools or their clothes or whatever. It was big enough to hide a man and it dated from 1720, 1740. It was painted with sort of a faded red buttermilk paint. They cleaned it up, put it in their family room and they began to feel a menacing presence in the house. And Jim's sister, as well as the couple's children, saw a tall, dark bearded man in old-fashioned clothes and they were terrified of him. After the sister refused to visit anymore, they called in the neighbourhood white witch. She took out a silver needle on a tripod and held it over different pieces of furniture and it reacted when she put it on the trunk. And she asked questions and the needle would move one way for yes, another direction for no. And according to this oracle, a girl had brought the trunk from Scotland when she eloped with her lover. Her father followed the couple, killed his daughter and then himself. And it was his violent spirit that they were seeing walking around the house. So Judy went back to the antique dealers and said, do you know any history of the trunk? And they said an ancestor of the original owners had brought the trunk from Scotland. And according to family legend, she had been murdered. So they sold the And of course, things settled down after that.

Simon: And another family welcomed this presence into their house. Listen, I'm sure that many of our listeners will be a little bit tired of the ghost. And so I am going to stage now a fairy insurrection. And I'm doing this knowing that Chris has introduced the trunk so I don't feel as guilty as I would. This is not a trunk as such, Chris, it's more a toy box. This is from Fairy Census 1, it's number 94. At the time, I was, I think, around five to six years old, maybe a bit older. In my bedroom was a wooden play box, which I was very afraid of. And I remember, for instance, as a child being very scared of a grandfather's clock in my grandma's house. I think children do sometimes take against furniture. Anyway, back to the account. The reason for this was I would often hear voices coming from inside the box. And these voices belong to very tiny men, a bit like gnomes, who would come and go from the box. This happened over a period of time, and I heard them often. I can still recall the voices, but in describing the men, I'm not at all sure now. I heard them far more than seeing anything. After moving house, the box no longer was in my room, and I never heard voices coming from it again. I still don't like the box. This is someone who's in his 50s. It's now a blanket box in my dad's house. I cannot remember ever saying anything about this to anyone else. So there again, we have a piece of furniture that brings with it supernatural beings, apparently.

Chris: Wow. That would be scary as a child hearing voices coming out of that.

Simon: Particularly a toy box.

Chris: Yeah, exactly.

Simon: Well, look, I think that you gave us a few beds. We've had a couple of trunks. We've had this rather suspect rug. I also mentioned just now my fear of a grandfather's clock in my grandma's house, and I think I will give you a couple of clock stories because I've long been interested in clocks. Now here, I should say, I'm going to ignore stories about church clocks because unlike Chris, I respect rules. I respect rules when they're laid down, but there are lots of church tower stories out there as well. However, the classic clock story is the one that it's not that clock has a memory of someone. It's slightly different. The clock is associated with someone and you have the idea that this clock has belonged to person X and that when this person dies, age say 90, the clock just stops working. And I particularly enjoy different versions of this story, but I think that in supernatural terms, it's not particularly satisfying because of course, something to happen once doesn't give you that much of a narrative kick. We need more dopamine folks. You know, we need a little bit more of a thrill. And so I've come across alternative versions where clocks that don't work come alive when someone in the family is about to die. I've also come across versions where, for instance, a clock will lose time when one brother dies and then stop working completely when the second, I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh, it's terrible. But when the second brother dies or also weird things like the sister has a car accident and the pendulum falls off or the dad dies and the clock falls down the stairs. So there are lots of different possibilities here, but I find it really interesting, this association between a time piece and a person. And there's that great old song that I know you know, Chris, and that I can vaguely remember from school. Is it about my old grandfather's clock or how does that go?

Chris: It's called my grandfather's clock. And the punchline is, and the clock stopped never to go again when the old man died. Yes.

Simon: And also there's a line early on that says that the family bought the clock on the day he was born. So there's this sense of identity there in the clock. What about you, Chris, anything with clocks?

Chris: There's actually a folkloric belief, you were talking about clocks falling apart or getting damaged. If the big hand falls off, some male in the family will die. If it's the little hand, some woman in the family will die. And the clocks are always intimately linked to death, maybe because their ticking echoes the heartbeat. Oh, I never thought of that, Chris. And there's something very noticeable in the literature of Victorian death, in the notion of time and death. I mean, you've got the biblical score, three score years in 10, God knows the number of our days, you know not what hour your death come, that kind of thing. You've got the idea that the dying wait to die at the ebb tide. And there's so many words regarding time in obituaries. And they talk about that awful hour or afflictions hour or the sad hour of their bereavement. And there was even a thing called a sad hour clock. And it was, you could have it in a flower arrangement for the funeral, you can still buy them, I was amazed to find. It's a clock face with the hands set at the very time the person died. There are also coffin plates that are made in metal with movable hands that you can set to the hour that they died or the very minute that they died.

Simon: If I can give you a couple of examples there, this isn't supernatural at all. There were some instances around the world where clocks stopped at specific times and have been kept as civic souvenirs. The most dramatic example I know just really an hour from where I'm sitting is in 1980, Bologna train station suffered the greatest mainland European terrorist attack. I think, I mean, a terrible bomb over 100 people killed in a moment. And the clock in Bologna station is still, I think it's 1025, the time that the bomb went off. I'm reliably told that if you go to Hiroshima, in the museum there of the bomb, they have a number of clocks that stopped because of the blast and were then were kept as a memorial. So there is a little bit of that in our culture.

Chris: There's actually a legend and I have not verified this, but it was reported in the 1890s that if you were painting a clock as like an advertisement or a sign, the hands would always be pointing at 18 minutes after eight, because that was the exact time when President Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth. So I haven't verified that, but as I say, it was widely reported in the 1890s that that's what people did.

Simon: Fascinating.

Chris: One of the most interesting stories I have about clocks is from about 1904. This woman had a favourite clock that she'd bought as a souvenir, and she apparently died, and her friends tried to stop the clock, and it wouldn't stop. One of her friends was frightened by this, and she refused to allow her friend to be buried until they could get the clock to stop, and it wouldn't. And the woman revived after three days.

Simon: So it kept her from being buried alive. But this brings me to something else that I've learned from your own writing, Chris, that I didn't know, that it was traditional to stop the clock when someone died. Yes, it was. And so suddenly these stories of clocks stopping at the time X died arguably make a lot more sense, and maybe this also deflates the supernatural element. Perhaps a butler was just going by and stopped the clock because master or mistress had just passed on.

Chris: Well, I'm reminded of W. H. Auden's funeral blues, stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. So yes, it was definitely a custom. How widespread, I couldn't say, but it is reported quite a bit. And here's a modern-ish example from the 1990s. There's a place called Allen Spark, Colorado, and they had a trading post called the Eagle Plume Trading Store, run by a Native American named Charles Eagle Plume. And there was an antique clock behind his desk, and every week he would shout, has anybody wound the clock? And his clerk said, why does the clock have to be wound so punctually every Sunday? And he said, because when that clock stops, I die. And as he grew older, he wasn't well, but he continued to work at the shop. On 8 September 1992, the staff found that the clock had stopped at 6.20 PM, the exact moment when he had died.

Simon: So there it's almost the suggestion that it's causal, that the clock stopping killed him.

Chris: In that case, yes. And you do find that there was the Danbury Hatmakers Association, when their clock at their offices stopped mysteriously they knew that some hapless Danbury Hatter's doom is sealed, they said.

Simon: So honestly, I don't know what to make of this, but- It sounds like the Vestal Virgins and the Eternal Flame. You just got to keep it going.

Chris: Got to keep it going. And there was one man who said, I'm going to keep winding this clock because every time it runs down or it falls out of order, somebody dies. So if I can keep it going, nothing bad will happen.

Simon: Yeah. Not good for blood pressure, but okay. No. Well, Chris, I suggest, I don't know if you're amenable to this, but I suggest that we skip one of our traditional sections. This is the further reading, because I confidently predict that no one has written a book on Haunted Furniture yet. And we just say that Chris- 

Simon: No, no, no, no, no. 

Simon: Oh dear, oh dear. Okay. Why don't we get onto the further reading then, and then perhaps a little bit of time we could spend talking about whether there's anything to this. To this, yes.

Chris: Okay. Now, I've cribbed the title of this episode from two wonderful books, Possessed Possessions and Possessed Possessions Too, by Ed Okonowicz. And they are chock full of haunted objects and furniture.

Simon: I'd like to apologise to Ed at this point. I didn't think that someone like you would exist. I was wrong.

Chris: Plus, The Clock Struck One, the Reverend Samuel Watson, 1872. And he discusses the clock striking as a token of death. And he wrote two books on this whole subject. Wow. I mean, how did he manage that? He collected a lot of cases. I think there are some haunted things in the book, The Soul of Things. I think the guy's name is William Denton. I know the last name is Denton, but I think it's William. So there we are. And I've, of course, written a number of things about vampire furniture of whales and medium clocks and bouncing beds and mirrors and things. So haunted desks as well. So those are on my blog. We'll put some of those on the Facebook page.

Simon: What about, Chris, the science of this or rather the complete lack of science? Can there be anything in it? Let me start by teasing you with the question of influence. Going all the way back to the Romans, to Lucretius, there is this notion that perhaps we can leave an emotional trace behind us. So perhaps there's an incredibly potent moment in our life when we somehow affect the environment around us, perhaps including the chair where we're sitting or the bed where we're dying, whatever it might be. Do you take this personally seriously? Do you think there might be something to that?

Chris: I've been around too many people who were weirded out by objects or clothing or furniture not to take it seriously, but I don't have an explanation. The only explanation I can offer again, and I've spoken to this before, is pheromones. If you're upset about something, can those actually linger long enough to influence people a century? Hence, I don't know. There was a lady who was speaking on psychometry, where you hold something and you get a vibration from it or you get a picture of something. She says, it is a very solemn thought that not only are we influencing each other daily by our acts and words and thoughts when present, but that we are actually leaving on every material object that we touch, on the very walls of the room in which we live and breathe, a record of ourselves, which may influence for good, or alas for evil, the people who come after us. She talks about sacred shrines, sacred relics, the garment which one's clothed, a holy man or woman, rings and ornaments worn by beloved friends. Something clings to those items and we cherish them.

Simon: So could we easily do an episode in the future, I'm laughing because I'm asking you of old people, on haunted clothes. We could do a series, an entire series. We could do trousers in February, knickers in March. We'll do the whole range. What about this thing of sympathetic association? The idea that I love the clock, the clock loves me, and that when I die, the clock stops.

Chris: Again, we have so many records of this happening and records of people who are very distant and they don't know that their loved one has died. And then they look and see it's the same exact time, given the fact that that person was across half the world, adjusting for time change. I don't know what to make of it. I really don't. There's loads and loads of anecdotes. What's the mechanism? I don't know what the mechanism is. There's been some recent scientific talk about consciousness, for example, lingers 30 minutes beyond death or something, or the brain is still working even though death has been declared. And where does that enter into it?

Simon: It doesn't get us halfway across the world.

Chris: No, no, it doesn't. But when you find somebody whose sister dies in Japan as the clock is striking in a house in Boston, and it's striking not only for the sister, but for a newborn baby that the sister didn't know was coming. It's odd. It's very odd.

Simon: I would almost romantically perhaps have more sympathy with the second idea that is the idea of a sympathetic connection between a human being and an object in their possession. But I must say that this detail in your writing that clocks were traditionally stopped when someone dies, that has given me pause for thought. And I agree that it doesn't explain the sister in Tokyo and the family clock in Boston. But I'll have to read the two volumes of what was that wonderful book called?

Chris: The Clock Struck One by the Reverend Samuel Watson.

Simon: Well, Chris, this has been a lot of fun. It brings us to our final reading. And here I must say that I chose the final reading, sent it to Chris.

Chris: Not doing it. 

Simon: This is what I feared. It was such a good final reading 

Chris: No, it wasn't. It wasn't.

Simon: It was. It was. It was.

Chris: It wasn't. It wasn't dramatic enough.

Simon: Oh, please. It was beautiful and understated. It was like a Monet painting. Okay. Okay. Well, well, that's it. That's it. I'm handing over to Chris now for the final reading.

Chris: Mrs. Westfield writes, about five years or less, I was really terrified. I was very tired and in a deep sleep when I was awakened by my bed shaking and vibrating as if someone was trying to move it backwards and forwards. I half woke and heard someone shuffling around the bed. The person bent over me and it seemed that someone touched my feet and then began to grope their way up to my face. I was frozen with terror and seized a matchbox. And as soon as I got a light, it stopped. I got out of the bed and with a powerful torch, searched the room and the whole house, but there was nothing to account for it. It was a dead, calm, moonlit night. Exactly the same thing happened about three years later, when someone seemed to grope around my bed and actually feel their way up to my face and press their face close to mine. Now see, that's more dramatic.

Simon: I'm going to acknowledge that the verb grope was very effective.