William Wilthew Fenn (1827-1906) began a career as a painter, but an affliction of the eye and increasing blindness caused him to shift into the field of writing. He publicly recognized his wife’s contributions to his publishing success, as she worked as his amanuensis to create the books published under his name.10 After 1848, when the American press spread the story of the young Fox sisters using raps to communicate with a spirit bound to their house, the American Spiritualism movement quickly ignited.11 The movement became a well-publicized force, one that had political ramifications. In 1854 the U.S. Senate was petitioned to appoint “a scientific committee to investigate spirit communication,” and the death culture resulting from Civil War casualties further promoted spiritualism.12 So, when the narrator of this tale returns from an 1877 trip to the United States, he finds himself fascinated with the new ideas of communicating with the dead, and he is ripe for an uncanny encounter and considers what it will take to lay the ghost. This tale first appeared in the Christmas number of Illustrated London News in 1881.
10 “William Wilthew Fenn,” The Biography and Review (July 1881): 84–88.
Porth Guerron is in Cornwall. If you do not know the place it must be because, in your exploration of the hundred and one similar villages abounding on that romantic coast, you have overlooked the one—and that one must be Porth Guerron.
Like many of its fellows, it is situated in a little ravine in the dark serpentine rock running down to the sea from the higher land of gorse and heather-clad moor. Most of the thatched, and occasionally slate-roofed cottages, with their irregular patches of garden, nestle right and left among the ferny, craggy banks of the steep winding way by courtesy called a street, by which the traveller reaches the beach. Some few other dwellings, looking from the sea like huge white-winged gulls, are to be seen perched here and there upon apparently inaccessible ledges of cliff, whence they command many a fine peep across the “wide, wide world.” The square-towered tiny church on the verge of a few green pastures and corn-fields stands at the head of the village, and the watermill, worked by a miniature mountain torrent, stands at the bottom. Only a little below this, begins a conglomeration of capstans, beach-houses, boats and boat-sheds, anchors, spars, chains, and the rest of the rumble-tumble of the fishing-trade, which holds high change on the shore. Here the coast, broadening out with a curve on either hand, forms a secluded cove between two arms of frowning precipitous cliff, which seem stretching forth to embrace this lapful of deep green-blue sea. The rugged and lofty formation of the land almost hides the existence of the little industrial hive until you come close upon it; and, so far as its importance in the world is concerned, you may be excused for overlooking it altogether—as you probably have done. But, if so, you have missed a very beautiful and romantic picture, and will scarcely have realised to its full extent the superstitious side of the Cornish mind, for there is attached to this place a legend in which many of the inhabitants believe with an almost religious intensity. It was told to me some years ago by a brave and intelligent old salt, one Jacob Sellar by name, a native of the village, whose implicit credence of the story supplied a strong example of the characteristics of his race.
I was returning from America in one of the Cunard boats. Sellar was a seaman on board, and spun for me many a yarn, ghostly and otherwise. I had lately witnessed some unaccountable spiritual manifestations in the States, and my natural scepticism on the question had, I confess, been considerably shaken—my mind was full of the subject, so that I listened with more interest than I might otherwise have done to this particular story, which greatly impressed me, not only from the man’s manner of telling it, but from its weird nature, and I never forgot it.
Thus, when fate took me to the western crags of England in the autumn of 1877, and I came plump upon the nestling village of Porth Guerron, as most people do, before being aware of it, I recognised on the instant the feature in the landscape which marked it as the background to the legend I had heard from the lips of old Jacob.
This was a tall isolated mass of almost inaccessible rock, standing about two hundred yards away from the western headland of the cove. I call it “isolated,” because it nearly always is so, for, except about an hour at the lowest of spring tides, in very calm weather, it is entirely cut off from the mainland. But on these occasions a narrow ridge of soft, sandy shingle is left bare, looking as if it would form an easy path to the rude promontory. Yet a little closer inspection soon shows this idea to be fallacious, inasmuch as, except by a boat, you cannot even reach the main shore end of the little causeway, jutting out as it does from the base of the sheer down cliff. Hence the Leopard’s Head, as the crag is named, is never scaled, being inaccessible except at the one spot where its rocky spurs lose themselves in the sand of the narrow connecting ridge; thus it is left to the undisputed possession of the myriad sea-birds that make it their home.
The fishing-boats on their way to and from their anchorage in the cove always keep outside the Leopard’s Head, and are never tempted to make a short cut westward by passing between it and the main land. However high the tide or calm the sea, they avoid this narrow channel, with its treacherous, never-absent ground swell; for, apart from its natural dangers, the superstition runs to the effect that a malignant demon stretches a huge iron net across the opening. Invisible to him until his craft is entangled within its fatal meshes, the mariner who, from ignorance or hardihood, should attempt the passage will, it is declared, struggle in vain to extricate himself, and must inevitably founder. So ran the legend, as told to me by the old salt aforesaid.
“Did he believe it?” I asked him.
“Yes, indeed, he did,” he said; “he had good reason: he had seen the net once himself when a lad, and it was a terrible and strange business. It was the end of September, 1847, and a boat, during a heavy squall from the westward, was trying to make the cove by the short cut—and surely, just as she got betwixt the Leopard and the main land, in the Leopard’s grip as the channel is called, she seemed to kind o’ stick fast, although she had been running quite free the moment before. There was plenty of water, and she couldn’t hardly have struck on the bar or little beach-way. But, howsomever, whether she did or not, she couldn’t get through—the heavy seas broke over her of course, directly she was brought to—pooped her, in fact, and down she went with all hands, two men and a boy. The boy was my brother Isaac,” continued Jacob Sellar, looking very grave when telling me the tale; “but he was saved; that is, he was picked up in the cove senseless, but they managed to restore him to life; the other two was never found even. There’s a many curious things connected with that calamity, Sir, I can tell you,” he added, “one of which is that, it being pretty nigh dark at the time, nobody couldn’t exactly make out what did happen, ’cept that we all saw, as we stood on the beach, the net suddenly stretched across the channel, and could see that it was that as the craft got tangled in, as it brought her up, and turned her broadside on to the seas. The water was breaming at the time, you know, and this made the net plain to us, for it seemed to come up out of the sea just in front of the boat, and was sparkling all over its meshes just like silver, with the phosphorescent light.”
“And you saw this?” I asked.
“That I did, Sir, with these very eyes.”
“And the boy, your brother, when he came to his senses, what had he to say about it?”
“Ah! that’s where ’tis, you see, Sir—poor chap, he never did come rightly to his senses—it gave him such a scare as he never got over—he’s been kind o’ cracky like ever since. He’s a bit younger than I am, though elderly, you know, by this time. But he never quite got his wits back. He is harmless, don’t you know, but dazed and silly, ’specially at times.”
“And he could never give any account of how the accident happened? How it was the boat came to grief in the Leopard’s Grip?”
“No, Sir; he warn’t never able to tell nothing at all about it—never a word.”
“Well,” I remarked, after a pause, “it was true the poor fellows lost their lives, anyhow, whether the devil caught them in his net or not?”
“Yes, Sir; but another curious thing is, these two men—I remember them well—Tom Fenthall and Raymond Sass, were partners in the boat, and said to be great friends, and staunch to one another, but they were both in love with the same girl, Alice Dournelle, and it was said there had been words about her between ’em more than once, and especially just before they got lost. Another curious thing yet,” went on old Jacob, presently, “is that some of the people looking on declared that, as well as seeing the net as I have just told you, when the boat foundered, they saw one of the men get ashore on the lower rocks of the Leopard’s Head, and that he was seen standing there and waving his arms till night quite hid him.”
“But could not they get him off?”
“No; no boat durst go near the place in such a sea.”
“And next morning?”
“The next morning he was gone, been carried away again, if so be as he had ever been seen there at all—though I make no doubt he had.”
“And the girl? What became of her?”
“Ah! that’s the most curiousest part of it all,” said the seaman, growing graver and graver and slower and slower in his utterances; “more curious than anything I’ve told you yet, Sir; and this I’ve seen myself, too, many times before I came away to sea. Poor Alice Dournelle took on terribly when she knew her lover was drownded; for she gave the preference, it was said, to Raymond Sass. Howsomever, a couple of years afterwards she died, in a kind o’ decline, like; and she’s the phantom of Porth Guerron Cove.”
“What? haunts the place, I suppose?” I said, smiling.
“Yes; but you needn’t laugh, Sir. This is a fact. I tell you I’ve seen her more than a score of times; and I do hear she may be seen even now, specially in September—about the anniversary, as you may say.”
“Well, what does one see? What did you see?”
“Why, I’ve seen her standing in the dusk on the rocks of the Leopard, all lighted up by the phosphorus, just as if she had come out of the sea, as we saw the net that night. Well, I’ve seen her just so. I remember her by sight, when she was alive, quite well, and I’ve seen her looking just as she did then, only all lighted up, as I say. Lots of the Porth Guerron folk have seen her; and they’ll tell you so if you ever go there. My poor brother can always see her. He has a kind of gift that way. Like enough, you’d see her yourself.”
“And what does she do?”
“Oh! do? Why, she seems to come out of the sea, as I tell you, and stand on the rocks, and then she’ll go up higher and higher. Not seeming to clamber, but as if she was going up and up, as a spirit would, don’t you know—floating like: rising, rising, till she reaches the flattish top of the Leopard’s Head, and there she’ll stay for hours passing to and fro, breaming with the light all the time.”
“Why, then, she makes a sort of lighthouse,” I said, still smiling; “a very useful phantom, truly.”
“ ’Tain’t no good for you to laugh, Sir,” continued Jacob, yet more seriously, evidently not relishing my scepticism. “I tell you I’ve seen her over and over again, as you may if you ever goes to Porth Guerron.”
And now I was at Porth Guerron; and now, as I have said, the old salt’s story came back to my mind with a renewal of the interest it had originally created. The vexed question of how far we are permitted to have contact with the vast unseen has never ceased to interest me since my visit to the States, but a subsequent deep immersion in the stern realities of life had left me no opportunities for pursuing the subject. Here, however, was one at hand unexpectedly put before me; and, although I had attributed Jacob Sellar’s strong belief to the natural superstition of the Cornish people, there was, nevertheless, an earnestness in his manner, and an intelligence peeping out beneath his uncultured speech, which forbade one to disregard it; and since, for the present, I was a wanderer and my time all my own, some of it I determined should be spent upon the scene of the mystery. I have given but the barest outline of my talk with Sellar. It was resumed over and over again, and it elicited so many circumstantial details, that, if they were not the result of a too fervid imagination, the phantom of Porth Guerron Cove was a manifestation equal to anything I had ever heard of, and well worth investigating.
Snug quarters at the little inn were readily obtained, and in the course of two or three days I had scraped acquaintance with many of the hearty, honest, kindly natives, including Jacob’s brother, old Isaac Sellar, the poor chap who had been “kind o’ cracky like” ever since that fatal time when he nearly lost his life in the Leopard’s Grip. He was quite a feature of the place, much respected by his fellow-villagers, and not at all incapable of work. But I was told he had periodical fits of abstraction and wandering, which seemed to lift him quite above the world, and gave him a dazed and incoherent manner; otherwise, he was a strong, fine-looking man with a long grey beard, and with quite the air of a prophet and seer, as he professed himself to be. He was also a preacher at times, when the spirit moved him; and though undoubtedly “kind o’ cracky,” he was by no means bereft of intelligence.
All the fisher-folk were ready to talk about the phantom, and to believe in it; but I found very few after all, besides poor crazy Isaac, who admitted having seen it. In his garrulous, half-witted way, however, he was very strong on the point, throwing into it a sort of religious fervour, and they said it was the only one on which he was thoroughly sane. He confirmed many of the details given me by his brother. To wit, the spirit of Alice Dournelle was only to be seen by ordinary folk in the gloaming, and then only under conditions of tide and weather similar to those which had prevailed when her lover lost his life, now thirty years ago. About the anniversary, too, she was more frequently visible than at any other time. But he (Isaac Sellar) could see her almost whenever he liked, he said, because he had faith, and could see farther into things than most folk. He had been a dreamer and a seer all his life, he avowed; he saw many strange things, of which other people had no idea, but sometimes, when they would believe him, he could make them see strange things too. In fact, from his own account of himself, Isaac Sellar would have been considered a first-rate medium in America—he seemed endowed with all the qualifications. In answer to my inquiry if he thought he could make me see Alice Dournelle, he said he thought he could.
“I doubt not but ye will see her yourself,” he added, after looking at me in an odd, vacant, yet penetrating manner; “ye have the eye of belief, the face of a believer. It all depends on faith, as the Scripture tells us—faith in something just beyond what ye can touch and lay hold of. If ye’ll walk in the right way, Sir, ye’ll have the gift vouchsafed ye.”
After a pause, during which he removed his eyes from mine, and seemed to gaze into space, he continued fervently, “Ah! sweet Alice! I knew her when I was a child. She loved the lad Raymond truly. I knew that all along; he had no need to have told me. And now, she never leaves him, never strays far from him—as in life so in death.”
“You mean,” I said, “that her spirit never strays far from the place where he was drowned?”
“That is my meaning,” answered Isaac; “she dwells with the sea-birds among the rocks of the Leopard’s Head, and sometimes, with them, dives deep beneath the treacherous waters which encircle it; dives deep, I believe, to where he lies many a fathom down. Then when she comes up she breams with light, and waves her arms, often beckoning and pointing, and in the dusk, or by night, she will be visible even to some of those without faith: even the fool who hath said in his heart ‘there is no God,’ may see her then. But I—I can see her in all lights, at all times, as plainly as the birds with whom she skims and flies around the Head. Sometimes, too, I hear her voice mingling with their notes. Faint but clear it comes to me—a painful wailing cry that the unbeliever will tell you is naught but that of the kitty-wake and sea gulls; but I know the difference, though she speaks no word. Surely to-morrow will be, of all days, the day to look for her presence. Thirty years will then have come and gone to the very hour at nightfall when Raymond died. Early and late she will be there, and as the dawn creeps into the air ye shall see her if ye’ll come and bide by me.”