About 1671, parson Symonds, who officiated at Garsdon church in north Wiltshire in south west England, was riding home late one night when a specter leapt up behind him. The specter rode parallel to him until they came to the parsonage, where it jumped off. The apparition then turned to face Symonds, and “gap’d at him”. Symonds identified the ghost as that of John Estcourt, a gentleman who had died about two years earlier.
Halloween is all about witches and ghosts. In English scientific circles in the second half of the 17th century, there was a discussion about whether such things existed and how their existence could be proved.
The Royal Society, founded in 1660, was the country’s principal scientific institution. Joseph Glanvill, a Royal Society fellow, investigated spirits and witches. His Saducismus Triumphatus(1681) aimed to prove their existence by cataloguing cases in detail. He argued that denying them was to deny God’s existence.
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Symonds’ haunting was recorded by that of another of the society’s fellows, John Aubrey, in a survey of Wiltshire’s natural world. Aubrey agreed with Glanvill that the supernatural deserved serious study and directed his readers to Saducismus, but he thought Glanvill somewhat gullible.
Aubrey was born in 1626 at Easton Piercy, a few miles from Garsdon. I have edited John Aubrey’s Natural History to mark his 400th anniversary.
This natural history of Wiltshire was begun in 1656 and was the first English county survey of nature to be attempted – although by the time he finished it, decades later, other surveys had already been published. It was an important scientific work, and in 1691, acknowledging that, the Royal Society had the Natural History copied and added to its library.
Its subject matter is highly idiosyncratic, and Aubrey sometimes goes off on tangents. He covers swan-sized dragons in north Africa in a chapter on birds and the existence of giants in a section called “Men and Women”. Almost at the end of the text is a chapter titled “Accidents” that records extraordinary events, including supernatural ones, like the haunting of Symonds.
Aubrey has long been seen as naive, partly because of Miscellanies (1696), the only book he published, which recorded tales of the unexplained. In the Natural History, he was clear:
Though I myselfe never saw any such things, yet I will not conclude that there is no truth at all in these reports. I believe that extraordinarily there have been such apparitions: but where one is true, a hundred are figments.
He also documented exposed frauds, such as Katherine Waldron, who pretended to be bewitched and endured pins being driven into her flesh to prove it. As the objective of natural history at this time was to gather evidence from which new scientific theories could be developed, Aubrey’s method in chronicling cases was entirely in keeping with the aims of scientific enterprise.
So, Aubrey was neither uncritical nor dismissive about Symonds’ story. Symonds was “a lusty strong fellow”, presumably not someone nervous or hysterical and prone to flights of imagination. His position as a churchman also gave authority to his testimony. Yet Aubrey noted a French saying that drunk men saw devils, a skeptical observation that cast doubt on the account. But he concluded with a strange detail: it was corroborated by the parson’s horse, “that trembled and sweat, when he came home and continued to do so the next day, and would not eat his oates”. The horse could not lie or get drunk; its fear, manifest in the trembling and sweat, was genuine.
Aubrey recorded another anecdote about a night ride. It concerned Sir Ralph Bankes’ valet:“a briske young fellow”, who, riding late over Badbury Warren, Dorset, discerned something that looked black, which, as he approached, became bigger.
Feare came upon him, and he protested his haire stood on end: but thought he, I have but a life to lose and I will see it, be it spirit or not.
The valet spurred his horse and came to the place, only to find the apparition was “a heap of horse dung”.
In Symonds’ haunting, the truth of the specter could not be tested; but witnesses were recorded, and their testimony weighed. In the valet’s case, the witness tested the truth of the ghost himself and found it was a pile of dung.
Aubrey applied the same empirical method throughout his Natural History to both natural and supernatural phenomena. He assembled evidence with care, tested it if he could and resisted easy conclusions. It’s an approach worth remembering this Halloween when fantastical tales hit your social media feed. A phantom may prove to be a load of poo.
This article was first published by The Conversation. Read the original article here.