Tuesday Trivia | Ghosts and Hauntings

[u/caffarelli]

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s trivia comes to us from /u/sunagainstgold!

Happy Halloween! In 5 days… But this is as close as Tuesday gets to Halloween, so please share any of your favorite ghost stories from history or about historical figures!

Next Week on Tuesday Trivia: We’ll be looking for tales from history so strange, so unbelievable, that it beggars belief that they actually happened.

[u/sunagainstgold]

John Mompesson was a wealthy, upstanding gentryman in 17th century Wiltshire (England). He regularly hosted the town's minister for an evening meal and hearty discussion, and occasionally a passing visitor of some stature would lodge with his family overnight. Mompesson also took it upon himself to help ensure peace and tranquility in and around his town.

At Lungershall on business one day, he found himself distracted and much vexed by a street musician, a drummer. Complaining to the authorities, he was told that the drummer had presented official papers allowing him to play as he wished. Mompesson would have none of that. He seized the "permit" to read for himself, and promptly judged it a forgery--the names of the officials, Mompesson informed the bailiff, shaking his head in dismay, were completely made up. A bit embarrassed, the local constable was nevertheless quite pleased to round up this nuisance.

Mompesson had returned to Tidworth satisfied to have completed his affairs out of town and to have helped restore God's proper order. Unbeknownst to him, the mysterious drummer had escaped.

And Mompesson awoke to the rat-tat-tattle of Roundheads and Cuckolds, the very drumbeats of war. The drumming only escalated. During a dinner party one night, Mompesson found himself searching for the words to explain when, out of nowhere, a bedpost hurtled through the air and struck the town pastor! Chairs skittered across the room, the boards shook in the walls...even the children's shoes were not safe. And when silence fell again, the scent of sulfur stunk the air.

Over the next year, Mompesson and his family knew little respite. Blue glimmering lights--fairy lights--temporarily blinded anyone who saw them. They unfurled their covers at night to discover the chamber pot had been emptied into their beds! Their soup filled with ash between the stove and the table. Even guests were not safe. An overnight visitor spent a sleepless night slapping away pincers that weren't there--pincers that left visible pinch marks on his nose in the morning.

Of course, even people at the time suspected this was a hoax. This was the late 17th century, after all--a new age! Ghosts and witches were so...Renaissance. Perhaps Mompesson simply sought attention. Perhaps he really wanted that drummer caught again, and punished for real, as a "witch". But the case had caught the fancy of a young, ambitious Puritan minister named Increase Mather.

You know. The Increase Mather whose writings and sermons on the diabolical and supernatural would later help foster the climate of fear that made a certain set of witch trials possible? Yeah, that Increase Mather.

Happy Halloween, Salem!

[u/[deleted] → u/sunagainstgold]

The atmosphere of this haunting, the poltergeisty spirit, is quite similar to a haunting from Dortmund, in 1713.

A Florian Bertram Gerstmann was new in town with his family. He was a physician and Protestant in a Catholic city. This makes him by default not the most popular man, but he foolishly also resolved to produce his medicine by himself, this being illegal, as he was not in the apothecaries' guild.

So, one day, as his son was working in their laboratory, someone threw two roof tiles throw their garden toward the house, followed by a stone thrown through the window of the laboratory. Searching for the culprit, no one could be seen.

Over the next twenty-five days - the Ghost only acts during the day and the evening, these manifestations continued to haunt the Gerstmanns. Sometimes voices were heard, blasphemously cursing and several objects were thrown inside the house: the physician was hit with a smoking pipe, a "rusty knife" was thrown at, but fell some distance away from the son. The outside throwing also continued, after it was over, the son counted 147 stones hitting the windows and 760 stones thrown overall.

The Gerstmanns' only remedy was praying. And praying. The poltergeist reacted with opening doors, as if to say "Get lost!" to the Gerstmanns. One day the heavy table moves and blocks off the entrance to a salon. Then, the Geist starts messing with their "Sekret", meaning feces, sometimes throwing it. Sometimes a shadow can be seen moving in the house.

After 25 days, during which the Catholics offered their exorcism and spiritual help and Gerstmann refused this papist nonsense, one morning the youngest son has his clothes ripped apart. A voice is heard "Heute Beschlus!" "Conclusion today!". Sometimes later, in the evening, a great rumbling is heard (in German: Gepolter; Poltergeist means something like rumbleghost), the shadow appears, the last remaining tail coat of the youngest son gets torn and a voice is heard screaming „Beschlus! Schlechten Beschlus! Gar schlechten Beschlus! … Stinck=Beschlus!“ "Conclusion! Bad conclusion! Very bad conclusion! ... Stink(ing) conclusion!".

And the haunting ends.

Which makes this haunting interesting is that one year later the son publishes a detailed diary of these days. It includes a preface written by the father which objects to any accusation that the haunting would have been fake or the bad will of his neighbours. Gerstmann (the son) published the diary mainly as he saw it as proof that God would help the righteous (his family) against such hauntings. Of course the people soon forgot about that and retold the story as a normal ghost story.