Cats -- A Cats ghost story. Episode 20 (Cats 6 of 8)

You’ve heard this one before.  Maybe it’s a beautiful Siren, singing a gorgeous song only to lure unsuspecting sailors on to the rocks and eventually their death.  Or a snake, promising you a delicious apple, only to curse all of humanity with the knowledge of good and evil.  Or a wolf, disguising itself as an old woman, to trick an innocent child into letting it into their house, only to have the beast devour the youngster as prey.

Or maybe a demon posing as a child’s playmate – maybe using the name “Captain Howdy” or something like it – only to trick the child into letting the ancient, evil entity possess them bodily, unleashing a series of horrors and torments that you only really hear in horror stories.

This episode is a Theater History and Mystery version of the War of the Worlds – a story that is entirely made up, but made up as a good Halloween story to entertain an audience prone to good ghost stories.

The events here are mostly made up, but the twist is – all the dates, actors, and even the seances – are confirmed historical events.  This isn’t a ghost story that really happened, but one that sure could have.

Taking a new turn, I’ll try as hard as I can to blur fact and fiction in this episode of THM and, if you get a chance, replay it on Halloween…

Transcript

Episode 6 – a Cats ghost story.

You’ve heard this one before.  Maybe it’s a beautiful Siren, singing a gorgeous song only to lure unsuspecting sailors on to the rocks and eventually their death.  Or a snake, promising you a delicious apple, only to curse all of humanity with the knowledge of good and evil.  Or a wolf, disguising itself as an old woman, to trick an innocent child into letting it into their house, only to have the beast devour the youngster as prey.

Or maybe a demon posing as a child’s playmate – maybe using the name “Captain Howdy” or something like it – only to trick the child into letting the ancient, evil entity possess them bodily, unleashing a series of horrors and torments that you only really hear in horror stories.

This episode is a Theater History and Mystery version of the War of the Worlds – a story that is entirely made up, but made up as a good Halloween story to entertain an audience prone to good ghost stories.

The events here are mostly made up, but the twist is – all the dates, actors, and even the seances – are confirmed historical events.  This isn’t a ghost story that really happened, but one that sure could have.

Taking a new turn, I’ll try as hard as I can to blur fact and fiction in this episode of THM and, if you get a chance, replay it on Halloween…

[intro]

This episode is completely different than anything else I’ve done on the show.  Today, I will start by inventing a completely made-up story, one entirely consistent with known facts but that, prior to today, has never been told.  The historical record DOES support that TS Eliot, the author of a book called Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats, liked telling and hearing good ghost stories.  Here’s hoping he would have liked this one, or, more importantly, that you do.  As they say in show business, on with the show…

On April 23, 1616, William Shakespeare died.  He was buried two days later in the Holy Trinity church, which still stands next to Trinity College.  At his death there was a curse written upon his tomb.  Naturally, it’s written in verse, and this is how it reads:

“Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,
 To dig the dust enclosed here. 
 Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
 And cursed be he that moves my bones.”

That’s an amusing little pair of couplets, but hardly worthy of the greatest author of the English language.  It is almost…childish.  

Our story will pass through Shakespeare.  In fact, it will pass through Victor Hugo, the Salem Witch Trials, and the Channel Islands off of France, more than once.  But it ends at TS Eliot, who crossed paths, also more than once, with demons.

In earlier episodes I dwelt – probably more than I should have – on the strangely recurrent reference to demons that seem to surface in the life of TS Eliot repeatedly.  And they show up unexpectedly early in his life.

Peter Ackroyd has been introduced in earlier shows.  He’s a biographer, graduate of Cambridge, Fellow at Yale, and recipient of numerous literary awards.  Ackroyd recounts this story from Eliot’s youth, when he went to a dentist, picked up a collection of Edgar Allen Poe’s works lying around for some light reading, and in the words of Ackroyd:

“Eliot described how the lines so affected him that he could not rest until he had read the poem entire.  Here is a boy attracted to the melancholy cadence of the couplet, and to the sonorous low tone of its vowels.  He was to describe this immersion in poetry as a sort of ‘demonic possession,’ since he began scribbling verses of a similar tone and style.”

That passage is cited as coming from an interview that Eliot gave to the Paris Review in 1959, and the rest of Acroyd’s discussion is concerned with how Eliot, as a very young writer, had an uncanny ability to copy the style of any poet or writer he was trying to imitate.

And for us, it’s interesting that he seemed drawn to Poe – a true pioneer in literature concerned with macabre and supernatural – and that he described reading Poe as being like demon possession.

The next encounter with demons is as a graduate student at Harvard.  Donald J. Childs, of the University of Ottawa, is a serious scholar and he found a set of notes that Eliot took on a book by Pierre Janet (spelled the French way, with the “t” at the end).  Childs saw the beginning of some themes later developed in Eliot’s masterpiece poem called The Wasteland, and note the particular emphasis on demons in this passage:

“the note echoes in a more general way in The Wasteland (1922): there is the same visit to the spiritualist (Madame Sosostris); there is the same discover of malignant spirits (the poisonous Belladonna and the crooked merchant); there is the same England-Switzerland setting; there are als the same foreign voices and the same Demons [note the capital D!] (the latter appearing in the Wasteland in quotation from the Brihadaranayaka-Upanishad).”

So, this adds two more references to demons, one in his notes as a student and one in the poem that made him famous.

There is a fourth reference to demons I’d like to call attention to.  TS Eliot was giving some lectures to the National Book League in Westminster, and he needed to come up with some original content.  He was already one of the greatest American literary figures of the 20th century and he was trying to say something about poetry that had not been said before.  What he came up with was published under the title “The Three voice of poetry,” and on page 18 it includes this passage:

“He [the poet] is oppressed by a burden which he must bring to birth in order to obtain relief.  Or, to change the figure of speech, he is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing: and the words, the poem he makes, area  kin of form of exorcism of this demon…he many experience a moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable.”

This passage itself is famous, and if you start looking into TS Eliot it’s one that pops up a lot.  James E. Miller, the Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Chicago, was interested in tracing the biography of Eliot and seeing whether it could to help him interpret Eliot’s poem The Wasteland.  He titled the book Personal demons, a re-examination of The Wasteland.  Miller is a little focused on the sexual angle of TS Eliot’s life, so he’s talking about a pretty corporeal deamon, but he quotes that passage from The Three Voices of Poetry lecture in a preface to the book.  Whatever they were, Miller is pretty sure that Eliot had demons…maybe just metaphorical, but powerful enough to inspire the focus of the book.

So, for Eliot, there’s definitely some connection between the poems he has inside of him, and what he imagines demon possession to be like.

Or, more tantalizingly, maybe he already knows what demon possession is like, and that’s why the comparison shows up when he’s describing his first experiences with Poe to the Paris Review, to why demons show up in his course notes and in his greatest poem, and finally to why he chose to describe demon possession as the metaphor in his famous lecture to the National Book Club.

But what if demons are real?  There are many, many accounts that say they are, including the Bible, medevial guides to treating them, and even the supposedly real story that some maintain inspired the 1973 Horror classic, the excorcist.

This account that has demons as real starts in China and in the year 1279.  The Song dynasty has been ruling for hundreds of years.  They printed Confucian classics with moveable type, and art and especially poetry thrived under their rule.  No less an authority than the Encyclopedia Briannica describes it this way: “The Song dynasty is particularly noted for the great artistic achievements that it encouraged and, in part, subsidized. The Bei Song dynasty at Bianjing had begun a renewal of Buddhism and of literature and the arts. The greatest poets and painters in the empire were in attendance at court. The last of the Northern Song emperors was himself perhaps the most noteworthy artist and art collector in the country.”  But all this art and culture were not to last.  In 1211 no less a warrior than Ghengis Khan attacked the Northern Kingdom; his grandsons would finally conquer the North, but the South forged on.

Poetry was a passing concern in that last passage I just read, but among all the arts the Song dynasty most cultivated poetry.  One last tidbit from the Encyclopedia: “The literature of the Song dynasty emphasized a return to old-time simplicity of expression in prose, and short tales called guwen were written in great volume. A school of oral storytelling in the vernacular arose, and conventional poetry enjoyed wide cultivation. Song poets achieved their greatest distinction, however, in the new genre of the ci, sung poems of joy and despair. These poems became the literary hallmark of the dynasty.”

Aside from poetry, popular throughout the period were the famed Lei Ting curse charms.  Their purpose was to ward OFF curses.  They are the coins that have square holes instead of round ones, and they were prayers said to Taoist god of thunder to ward off evil spirits.  Some even thought that the orders inscribed on the coins, warding off nefarious supernatural forces, came directly from the Thunder God himself.  One particular demon that was widely feared was Ne Zha, the child demon, who killed with a flaming spear.  His myth is so enduring that there was a movie by his name in 2019, and it was a global hit.  Almost as if, somehow, Ne Zha managed to live on.

The purpose of these coins, warding AWAY evil, stood in stark contrast to the Artuquids of Mardin.  These circulated in Turkey between 1176 and 1184, putting them around just after the fall of the Northern Song empire and well in advance of the fall of the south.  According to coin collector Loong Siew, these coins didn’t ward off curses, they carried them.  But, under very specific circumstances: “The bottom three lines of the reverse text are …"cursed is he who abuses this dirham." …A very interesting coin as being the first in my experience which explicitly carried a curse for people who abuses the coin. Whilst a warning of death for counterfeiting is known to exist, this coin appeals to the spiritual/religious sentiments of the people instead in the form of a curse. Abuse in this case is expected to be damage, counterfeiting or like activities which may devalue the coin.”  If you damage an Artuquid coin, you don’t ward off curses, you invite them.

The one place the poetry and the coins all came together was in the gatha hymns adapted by the Buddhist monks who thrived under the Song.  According to Jason Protass, in his contribution to the Kuroda Studies in East Asian Buddhism series by the University of Hawaii press, “Although much has been written about verses in the gong’an (Jpn. kōan) tradition, very little is known about the large corpora—roughly 30,000 extant poems—composed by these monastics.”  There was something peculiar about these monks and their poetry; a distinct form of hypergraphia (that’s a term that literally means obsessive writing) among them was so common that they had a term that describes it, and it’s the title of Protass’ book: The poetry demon.

And these monks, given as most monastics are to a communal life that generally steers clear of material acquisitions, kept their mostly non-economic possessions in something like a library-slash-museum of the day.  Their shelves included items of artistic value, including their own poems, of course, the (gay-thay) hymns their poetry derived from, a passle of Lei Ting coins to keep the demons inspiring their poetry at bay, and a small handful of Artuquid coins they kept next to them.  Their Chinese being a little better than their Turkish, the monks knew the coins also fended off evil spirits.  But they didn’t know about the curse that came if the coins were damaged.

It all came to an end in 1279 at the battle of Yamen.  This time the enemy was the Yuan, not the Huns.  One year before the battle in 1278, the Song general Wen Tianxiang was captured, which effectively eliminated the Song land forces.  By design, the Song knew they could no longer resist the Yuan in a land battle, and leaving all land assets behind or destroyed they shifted all their resources to building ships.  Zhang Shijie commanded the Song navy, and more than anything he feared desertion.  He ordered 1,000 ships to be chained together to prevent individual ships from fleeing.  He also refused to secure a viable retreat corridor, and for good measure ordered all palaces, houses, and forts burned to the ground.  The Song would have to fight to the death.

And death would come.  Their ports cut off, the seamen had little food or fresh water and no way to supply either.  As a ruse the Yuan played festive music and flew large, colorful cloths to suggest a feast was at hand.  Falling for the bait the Song attacked, the soldiers lying wait emerged from the cloth, and slashed the starving and surprised Song attackers into bloody bits.  A desperate attempt to save the emperor on the 12 best ships failed, and the prime minster drowned himself and the boy king, who was left to rule the Song, rather than submit to the slaughter.

What remained of the ships was seized, including the trunk holding the Demon Poets meager possessions, including some now hopelessly mixed and fire-damaged coins that had been splattered with the blood of the butchered Song defenders.  The Song dynasty was over, and all that remained was the trinkets of their culture dispersed across the globe as their vanquishers saw fit.

According to the Smithsonian magazine in 2021, two sets of Song-dynasty coins had been discovered in England between 2018-2021.  Somehow, those coins made it to England by the 16th century.

[pause]

William Shakespeare’s death was momentous enough that he got a curse on his tomb, but otherwise it was not that spectacular.  Victor Hugo’s funeral was attended a number of people that exceeded the total population of Paris, but Shakespeare just hand the send off befitting a prominent retiree.

He was a known playwright at the time of his death in 1616, but his place in literary history didn’t come until the first folio was published, 7 years later, in 1623.  That’s a curious gap.  If you look up commonplace sources like biography.com you’ll find phrases like ”Shakespeare’s final days are shrouded by uncertainty.”  But there are suspicions.  His son in law was a well-known physician who lived in the house.  He left extensive medical records of many of his patients, including his wife, who was Shakespeare’s eldest daughter.  But he left nothing in writing about the great William.

William probably hadn’t been doing too well – he hadn’t written anything the 3 years before his death.  So, he probably did need medical attention.  Or at least, he needed the attention of someone who could attend to his ailments, whatever they were.

Even stranger, he had updated his will only week earlier, where he described himself as “in perfect health and memory, God be praised.”  He signed the document in 3 places, but his handwriting was notably shakier than it had been on the vast majority of his surviving work.  It was like he had just had some intense medical event, then fully recovered albeit in a weakened state, put his affairs in order, and then passed.  What could account for that?

Famously, he left most of his possessions to his daughter but to his wife, Anne Hathaway, he left only his “second best bed with the furniture.”

His fame would wait the 7 years until John Heminges and Henry Condell compiled the First Folio, a collection of Shakespeare’s writing.  It was that book that launched William into literary history, so to put it together they had to, of course, go through all his available papers.  They were curious about one document mixed in with all the rest; it was a bill of lading that listed a transaction between 15th-century Stratford locals and some travelling Chinese traders.  The chest of curios, coins, and some Chinese writing, presumably poetry, were stored at a house on Henley street that eventually belonged to one John Shakespeare, William’s father.  Presumably, it had fallen into the hands of William Shakespeare.

Presumably, those hands had touched the coins.

One other curiosity is that, and I’m now quoting biography.com directly, “In March 2016, researcher Kevin Colls from the Center of Archaeology at Staffordshire University revealed he had uncovered evidence using radar technology that Shakespeare’s skull is likely missing from his grave.”  As early as 1879 there were published accounts of attempts at grave robbery, commited by a local doctor named Frank Chambers.  The Stratford Society put together a 56-page article on that episode, first published in 1894, last updated in 2016.  Both the BBC and the National Geographic have taken up the tale of Shakespeare’s head and they…don’t come to many firm conclusions.  Including whether the skull is even missing.

But Frank Chambers, who does appear to have been born, has no official record of his death.  He simply went missing.  There was, however an unidentified corpse found 2 miles from Stratford in 1880, showing signs of having been hit by arrows and burned beyond recognition.

The trunk of coins and curios no longer resides on Henley Avenue in Stratford-on-Avon.   Their whereabouts are not specifically known, but one curious tale provides some clues, or at least some good stories.  The Channel Islands sit off the coast of France and, with some notable exceptions, have generally fallen under English rule as far back as written records go.  Our first traveler to those islands arrived in the early 1600s.  

A young preacher named Increase Mather received his undergraduate degree at Harvard, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and pursued a Masters in Divinity at Trinity College in Dublin.  Trinity is one of, ironically, three sister schools with the other two in Oxford and Cambridge.  A fourth, and more distantly related school, is Trinity College in Stratford on Avon, which houses and the Trinity Church, which as we know is the location of both the birth and burial of William Shakespeare.  

It was to Trinity College in Stratford that Increase Mather made an intellectual pilgrimmage sometime between his time Dublin and his later, documented presence in London. Whether he met anyone or acquired anything while in Stratford is not know, but his own autobiography traces his steps from there: “in April 1659 [I] transported my selfe into Guernsey. There I lived in Castle Cornet, and preached every Lords’ day, in the forenoon at the Castle, in the afternoon at the Town called petersport, where many French people who could understand English were my Auditors. Finding the Sabbath to be much profaned in that Island, I preached on the fourth commandement, (according to my weake ability)…”

The island, and in fact several channel islands, were reputed to be haunted long prior to his arrival, which might explain why the sabbath was so profaned in his eyes.  As we discussed in earlier episodes, Jersey has a series of druid stones, with a large number of ghost stories to match.  In particular there is a white lady, reputed to have killed her own children.   Gurnsey is no less haunted.

Increase Mather did not spend long in Guernsey, and after hid departure he would shortly make his way into history.  In 1661 he returned to Boston, earned the first doctorate Harvard ever conferred, fathered a son he named Cotton, and was ordained as the minster of the North Church.  You’ll remember that as the place that hung the lanterns to signal Paul Revere a century later.   By 1681 Increase Mather was the sitting president of Harvard.

In that same year, he began work on manuscript that would detail the history of witches and would go by the short name “Remarkable Providences” and included several first-hand accounts of witchcraft and demon possession. In it, he cited the Malleus Malefiracrum.  He made it very clear that believed in the real power of witchcraft.  The book was published in 1684.  It had the effect of establishing the reality of witches in Boston and it’s neighboring towns including a small village named Beverly and it’s kitty-corner cousin, SALEM.

In 1692, the town of Salem would have a very, very eventful year.  As the leading theologicn at the leading university Increase Mather was called upon to weigh in on the witch trials.  He did so from the pulpit and in his follow-up book, titled “Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits.”  He called for restraint in the witch trials, but he could never denounce them as farcial or fundamentally flawed.  Still his was, relatively speaking, a voice of restraint.  His son, Cotton, showed far less reserve, and provided the only comprehensive book on the witch trials that is contemporaneous to the period.  Compared the Increase, Cotton was all-in.  Witches and demons were real, and the trials were necessary to stop them.

Knee-deep in the proceedings was one Andrew Eliot, who was involved in three distinct ways.  Andrew was the first-generation immigrant of the line that would eventually produce TS Eliot, and he encountered the witch trials in 3 different ways.  There are a couple of different sources on this, but one that really impresses me is Marilynne Roach’s day-by-day account of the witch trials and careful citation of original source documents included across the book’s 698 pages.  If there’s a document from the time that details something that happened in Salem in 1692, Marilynne Roach has it in there.

He's not in that book very much, but Andrew does appear.  First, he accused a widow of witchcraft.  Both he and the widow lived in Beverley Massachusetts, a village adjacent to Salem, and in a written record that survives – survives so much that I’m going to put a link to a picture of it in the show notes – he claimed that he could hear banging in her room, as if someone was levitating and hitting the ceiling, and could hear as many as 5 or 6 different voices talking although the woman should have been all alone.  The widow was arrested on the basis of his accusation, and there is no record of what happened to her.  Her name was on the list of those arrested, but there is no surviving account of what happened to her.

Second, he served as a juror on one of the witch trials.  He and his fellow members of the venieremen found the accused guilty.

Third, he along with a bunch of other citizens and jurors from Salem signed a document recanting their involvement in the whole mess that, as history records, involved joining a mass mob purge that killed scores of their very innocent neighbors.  That document also survives, and I am also posting a link to it in the show notes.

Andrew Eliot, the very first Eliot in a long line of Eliots that would eventually end with TS, was very much involved in the Salem Witchcraft incidents of 1692.

As was Harvard President Increase Mather, and as was his son Cotton Mather.  Another author, one Robert Calef, wrote that Cotton played a key role in fomenting the hysteria behind the witch trials and, indeed, that Cotton Mather defended and excused the trials more than anyone else.  Increase Mather is said to have burned a copy of Calef’s book in the Harvard Yard.  

Personal squbbles aside, both Mathers thought the witches were real.  And why not?  Increase had seen them before throughout Europe, and on the Island of Gerunsey, and had written a book to prove it.

Cotton Mather sought to follow his father’s footsteps and lead Harvard as the President, and made a pitch 3 times, but missed out on all three chances.  Others were chosen instead.  No matter – fed up with the burgeoning liberalism that soured his faith, Cotton would pick up his stakes and go on to found his own university with a fellow named Yale.

Increase Mather, as Harvard’s first doctoral recipience and an early president, left a large number of crucial historical documents that are still housed, and catalogued, in the Harvard library.  Included are a collection of coins, which the library notes have curious holes in the middle of them and a note indicating that they were obtained at the Castle Cornet.  Even in the earliest days of the library the materials couldn’t be checked out, but the oldest pages do list visitors to the special collection.  One visitor was Andrew Eliot.

The witch trials faded into history.  There are debates to this day whether Cotton Mather encouraged or moderated the witch trials.  There is no doubt he believed in witches.

Almost two centuries after Increase Mather had been the pastor at Castle Cornet, in 1850, 

Victor Hugo and a patchwork entourage of family and friends had been exiled from France and arrived at the Channel Islands in 1850, initially staying on the Isle of Jersey.  They left a few years later, but not before they had held hundreds of seances and experienced numerous hauntings.  His family described Hugo as entering several trace like states.  He would later, in fact, have to deny that the poetry he wrote while there was inspired by ghosts from beyond the grave.

One very, very notable entity Hugo and his family encountered was the spirit of William Shakepeare, who heartily engaged his Frech-language fellow genius.  Through the seances, Shakespeare dictated the entire first scene of a new play.  You can find a copy of that today, and the references are in our episodes on Victor Hugo.

The seances ended abruptly, with one of the house guests going mad and Hugo’s son Charles flatly refusing to serve as a medium any more.  Within months, and citing political reasons, the Hugo’s left the island.  From Jersey the entire ensemble moved to the nearby isle of Guernsey, but they failed to escape the spirits.  In fact, the house they moved into was abandoned by its previous owner because it was haunted. 

More than that, Guernsey hosted the Castle Cornet that housed the island’s governor.  In 1672, a few decades after Increase Mather had left the island for Boston, the tower that held the governor’s personal chambers was hit with a bolt of lightning.  That event required a full inventory of what was recovered from the rubble.  The list includes what you would expect of a British Governor to possess with one notable exception.  There is one box, noted simply as “damaged and degraded, bearing the initials J. S.”  The contents are listed simply as “dross and un-useables, perhaps metal of the melted variety.”  There is no number indicting how many coins, and no way to say whether some had been removed, either before or after the lightning strike.

There is one other strange tale about the castle.  During a later excavation the skeleton of a 16th-century man was uncovered.  Where his stomach should have been were found a collection of coins.  The body was on the island of Guernsey, and adjacent to the Castle Cornet.  It was on that island that Victor Hugo finished Les Miserables.

And then, finally, TS Eliot was born in 1888.  He attended Harvard between 1906 and 1909, the President was Charles Eliot, a distant cousin.  But not so distant that the two couldn’t talk, and not so distant that Eliot did not visit and ask to see the library archives, a request that the President of the university was happy to grant.  They were both interested in what their first-generation ancestor, Andrew, had been up to with the collection.  And as they were both men of letters, they wanted to see the original documents that had been left by Increase and Cotton Mather.  It was here that TS Eliot touched the coins.  

In early 1915 he met Vivien Haigh-Wood and they were married less than three months later, in late June, inviting neither family.  Nobody could explain this whirlwind pace, why they got married so quickly, or why they were so secretive.  It was not true love; both fell in poor physical and mental health quickly and argued constantly.  They did not even honeymoon through the summer.  Their tumultuous relationship tormented them both.  Starting in the 1930s Eliot would describe the writing of poetry as akin to, or perhaps identical to, demon possession.  He would later write that the poems he’d written in the 1920s might have been the product of automatic writing.

Eliot would say that he had only been happy before he met Vivien and after she passed, which she did, totally insane, in 1947.  She had been in the asylum since 1938, and Eliot never visited her.

Those are a lot of disparate ideas, suggestions, and mysteries.  Our tale ends here, but it has a lot of holes in it.  Fortunately for us, the Theosophist Society has tied all those loose ends together in an anonymously authored manuscript which has never been published, or even duplicated, and exists solely in the archival locations that the Society refuses to disclose.  The document also relies on a series of revelations, revealed in a séance, that exist in no other written record.

At the battle of Yamen, the protective Lei Ting coins were in a cabinet that also held the Artuquid coins.  The Lei Tings protected the demonic monks, so that when they were possessed they could expel the demons from their bodies when the poetry had been written.  But when the damaged Artuquid coins unleashed their curses the coins themselves carried the demons.  The particular curse they held was that their shiny, inviting, and potentially valuable nature drew poets to touch them, and once touched, the spirit of the demon passed into the human body.  The poetry spilled out; the demon stayed until it either jumped from its host to another or was returned to the coin.  One particular demon, trapped in one particular coin, was the child demon Ne Zhu.

This was a phenomenon called “possessed possessions,” which refers to a demon being transferred through a physical object, and it was of intense interest to the Theosophists.

After the battle Chinese traders brought the coins to England, where they were purchased by John Shakespeare.  His son, William, found and touched the coins.  A demon entered his body, producing some of the greatest verse in English history.  But William was aware of the demon and the split it had made between he and his wife, who had remained devoted to each other but were never able to fully connect.

Toward the end of his life, and in an attempt to return the demon to the coin, he opened the cabinet again and grabbed the shiniest coin.  The demon did not exit him; Ne Zhou entered.  He could write no longer and spent the last 3 years in a state of demonic possession.  His son in law and attending doctor left no records because he recognized no symptoms.  As retribution, the child demon changed William’s will in his last days, largely disinheriting his wife, and altering his signature to that of a child.  Shakespeare’s revenge was that, as he was passing, he refused to touch his wife to deny the demon another host to jump into.  The demons returned to the coins.  

The poems on his tombstone were the most Ne Zhou could inspire.  But Ne Zhou  was serious about the curse, and when Frank Chambers disturbed the body the child demon used his flaming arrows to murder him as a fled from Stratford-on-Avon.

The coins sat undisturbed until the visiting scholar Increase Mather found the box and, wishing to study it further, took the box on the promise that he would either return it after his travels or pay what it was worth.  He took it to the isle of Guernsey with him and, breaking his promise, took the coins with him when he returned to America.  When he need to pack he had to leave some items behind, so pocketing only the shiniest coin and a few others he left the rest.  

Those were picked up a passing sentry, hoping to resell them.  He had the misfortune of carrying the coins in a bag around he waist; when the bag ripped the coins fell onto his stomach, the demons consumed his stomach whole, and all that was left was the corpse for archeologists to discover centuries later.

The death released the demons into the air but concealed them to the Castle Cornet.  When Victor Hugo arrived at the Island he lived near the castle; the psychic energy of the demon poets played at his mind and haunted him in the castle.  The influence would remain on him as he wrote poetry and novels in his own home just outside of it.  They compelled some of his best verse, and the same demon that had infested Shakespeare appeared to Hugo on a séance, pretending to be the Bard.  It was no feat to persuade Hugo that the voice was that of Shakespeare; Shakespeare’s voice had been that of a demon all along.

The coins Increase Mather took with him to Harvard.  There, he gave all coins but the shiniest away to a local resident, Andrew Eliot.  Andrew carried the coins back to Salem.  The population, primed to believe in reality of witches and demons, took the matter too far, but the demons released by Andrew Eliot’s coins were real.  Increase and Cotton Mather were both correct, in a rare moment of agreement between Harvard and Yale.  Innocents had been killed, but the demons afflicting the girls were real.  This explains why so many of the charges were obvious fabricated but so much of the torment of girls – fevers, levitations, speaking in tongues – were the kind of things that couldn’t be faked.

The last of the coins was the shiniest, holding the spirit of Ne Zhou.  When TS Eliot asked his cousin, then President of Harvard, to show him the Andrew Eliot archives, he touched the coin and was possessed by both Ne Zhou and another spirit that entered his body.  When he met Vivien Haigh-Wood, she was already troubled, but enthusiastic about the occult.  With the help of Alfred Orage, Vivien and Eliot attempted a cermony to expel the demons from TS.  It was partially successful; one demon jumped from Eliot to Vivien, Ne Zhou stayed inside of him.  Vivien already had a delicate constitution; possession by the demon made it much worse.  They married quickly and lovelessly to try to contain the truth.

Eliot composed his greatest work, the Wasteland, while both he and Vivien were convalescing, inspired and compelled by the demons who had forced their poetry through the demon poets centuries earlier, but now unrestrained by charms to hold them in.  The references to Shakespeare, in fact, the lines directly taken from the work of Shakespeare, confirm the presence of a single, malevolent force dictating both lines.

For a time, Ne Zhu became dominant.  In the voice of a child – rowdy, nationalistic, and xenophobic – he inspired Old Possum’s Guide to Practical Cats.  In it, he tried to inspire TS Eliot to take up the story of a damned woman, and tried to force a version of Villon’s La Belle Heulmeire into the set of poems.  Eliot, accustomed to trying to maintain his own personality while knowing he was possessed, fended off the demon and buried the poem, leaving only fragments of an uncompleted poem.

This is why Eliot’s biographers, and especially Peter Acroyd, note his tendency to seem aloof – to be perfectly polite but still cold, as if studying you from a distance as a lab result rather than a human.  Eliot’s personality was constantly being pushed backward; he was constantly trying to have normal human interactions while housing another demon.

His experiments with the occult having gone so disasterously wrong, he joined the Anglican church.  There he found solace and standing on holy ground drove the demon back, deeper into the recesses of his mind, but never eliminated it.  The church could help, but it would not perform an exorcism.

And so in 1933, he, Vivien, and Orage made one final attempt to free them both of the demons.  Orage had discovered an incantation, based on the Lei Ting, that would eliminate the curse. The spirits would be cast from the coins but at a cost; when the ceremony was complete, both spirits would enter a single human vessel, and it was not possible to know in advance which one, and the two must never meet again lest the demon would return to its original host.  Vivien and Eliot, bound by so much tragedy and trauma, made the sacred pact with each other.  Orage performed the ceremony, tossing the coin.  It fell in Eliot’s favor, and the demons entered Vivien.  Eliot left the continent for America to eliminate any accidental contact.  He had Vivien served with divorce papers in his absence.  

The first toll was taken against Orage, who passed away only 2 years later in 1935.  Eliot wrote an obituary, although nobody could figure out why he had taken up the task nor why it should appear in a literary journal he was editing, one that usually didn’t publish obituaries.

Vivien suffered until the end, her mind tormented, her body afflicted, just as if she had been possessed in Salem.  Eliot could not visit, and at any rate, was wracked by guilt.  He could not move forward with his life until her passing in 1947.  It took a decade, but Eliot was able to piece himself together and married Valerie Fletcher, the secretary of his literary estate, in 1957.  He never shared the demonic encounter with her.

Making her utterly unaware that when she turned over the scraps of the Grisabella poem to Andrew Lloyd Webber, she was handing him a demonically inspired tale that should not have been brought to the stage.

Which gives us the final interpretation of one of the most poorly understood productions in the entire history of haunted theater.  Grisabella wins the contest, but it’s a cheat, bait for the trap.  Grisabella isn’t ascending to heaven, but to that third space, that purgatory, that netherland between heaven and earth, that first drew TS Eliot to the occult.  The heavside layer isn’t heaven, it’s hell on earth, a trap to capture souls, just as the Artuquid coins had captured victims for centuries.  Just as the woolf had captured little red riding hood.

At least, that’s what the Theosophists believe.

[pause]

OK, just to be perfectly clear that story is a fabrication, and one I’m pursuing because I’m a huge fan of war of the worlds and it follows that conceit.  There are a LOT of historical facts in there, but the story is mine.  I promised an accounting, and here it is.

A stunning amount of that story is historically accurate.  In fact, just about everything in here is historically accurate except for the specific coins and where they travelled.  And, you know, the demons.  You know, depending on what you believe about demons.

The Lei Ting and Artuquid coins both really exist; the Lei Ting are said to ward off evil and the Artuquid do promise a curse on anyone who damages them.  The battle of Yamen really happened, did end the Song dynasty, and was a massive and bloody slaughter.  The demon poets were real.  But there is no evidence that they had a case of coins or that anything from the battle of Yamen ever exported.

Chinese coins did show up in England and were there when Shakespeare was writing.  There no evidence his father ever bought them, but he did die after 3 years without writing and edited his will as I’ve described it here.  There is inconsistent archeological evidence about whether his head is in his gravesite, and the Stratford Society document about Frank Chambers stealing the skull is a real document.

Increase Mather did visit the isle of Guernsey and live in the Castle Cornet, which IS reputed to be haunted, in a real way.  There’s a trip advisor review where the tourist claims staying the castle immediately convinced him evil was real and converted him to Christianity.  Archeologists did find a 16th-century corpse that did have a gold coin where the stomatch should be.

He did, of course, move to Boston, was the first president of Harvard, and was involved in the witch trials as described here.  The same is true of Cotton Mather, who really did found Yale.  Here is no record of either of them owning Chinese coins; that’s an invention.

Everything about Andrew Eliot’s involvement in the witch trials is accurate; but since there were no coins there’s evidence he touched them or had much involvement with the Mathers.  He was the first immigrant of the Eliot family that eventually produced TS.

Everything about Victor Hugo in here is correct – he did go to Jersey, did hold seances, did receive the first scene of a play by Shakespeare, did go to Guernsey, where he did report encounters with multiple evil spirits, and did visit the Castle Cornet but didn’t live in it.

All the quotes about TS Eliot and demons are actual, he was involved in the occult, and all this is in our immediately prior episode.  He was an intimate of Orage, and the dates concerning the relationship between he and Vivien are accurate.  did have a way of being polite and cold at the same time.  Their relationship was strained, but everything about the demon possession is made up in this story.  Eliot is said to have had a way of being polite and cold at the same time.  No one I can find has speculated about a ceremony involving Orage, Eliot, and Viviene.  In fact, although they both attended seances and attended them together, Viviene wasn’t much of a fan.  

Some consider Vivien a liability and there are those who will passionately defend her role as central to TS Eliot’s body of work.  But whether sympathetic or dismissive, all accounts of her life are that it was tragic.  My hope here is that I’ve tried to humanize some of that tragedy, or at least portray her as someone caught in unfortunate circumstances.  That much, I am sure, is a fair characterization of her life.

And the rest, my friends, I leave to your imaginations.  If you have enjoyed this, listen to it again on Halloween night.  That was, after all, the night that War of the Worlds originally aired.

We are done with made up ghost stories but not done with Cats!  Cats is one of the most successful musicals of all time but it has also been the source of some of the greatest failures in entertainment history.  What’s even more unusual is that the failures should have been can’t miss, sure-thing, softball wins.  How can you team up Steven Spielberg and Andrew Lloyd Webber and produce something akin to the Star Wars Christmas special?  How can you take an unlimited budget and put Taylor Swift in the show and barely make it out of the previews?  Could it have been a curse, passed down from – WAIT!  NO!  I’m stopping myself.  No more ghost.  Just facts about failures in the next episode of THM, coming in 2 weeks.

Shakespeare

https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/william-shakespeare/when-did-shakespeare-die/

https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/a60343606/how-did-shakespeare-die

Poetry Demons

https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/the-poetry-demon-song-dynasty-monks-on-verse-and-the-way/

Coins

https://www.cointalk.com/threads/coins-that-carry-a-curse.332903/

Song Dynasty

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Song-dynasty

Yamen account is cribbed from Wikipedia.

Song dynasty conis in england

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/medieval-chinese-coin-found-england-suggests-vast-medieval-trade-route-180976675/

Child Demon Ne Zha, and his movie

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/demon-child-nezha-how-he-captured-the-hearts-of-global-viewers-302382265.html