On Christmas Day, 1890, a disturbing story appeared on the front page of a Victoria newspaper, the Daily Colonist, which told us "Just as the clock was striking midnight, ushering in the joyous Christmas day, a misdeed as dark, cowardly and mysterious as ever disfigured the history of this province was perpetuated.”
A young man named David Fee, who was only 21 years old, had gone out to a costume party. Fee had dressed up in a white clown costume. After the revelries had finished, Mr Fee had then walked to meet his parents for evening mass. But just as Fee arrived at the corner where the cathedral lay, a man leapt out from the shadows and aimed a double-barrel gun at him. The man simply said, "You challenged me!"
Before Fee could answer, the man fired, killing Fee on the spot. Apparently it was a tragic and brutal case of mistaken identity. But ever since that night, especially on Christmas Eve, it is said you can see a ghostly clown, the shade of David Fee, slowly walking the streets around the cathedral.
Now Christmas Day is a time for family and friends to gather together, and houses, rich and poor, large and small, are often full of guests come for the festive season. And of course at such gatherings, a ghost story or two may well emerge. Such is the case with the strange story of a haunted room in a grand old house near Manchester. The story was told to famed ghost hunter Elliott O’Donnell some years prior to the Great War by a Miss Mellie, who actually experienced the phenomenon. He recounted Mis Mellie’s festive brush with fear thus in his 1931 book Rooms of Mystery.
She was invited to spend Christmas in an old country house to the north of Manchester with some people who, for the sake of convenience, I will call Barron - Colonel and Mrs. Barron. She was allotted a room in the front of the house immediately overlooking the drive. It was a large and rather gloomy room, furnished after the ponderous fashion of the mid-Victorian era. Several pictures hung on the oak-panelled walls, but the one that attracted her attention most was that of a handsome young man, clad in the costume of the early Georgian era. There was something about his boyish face and laughing eyes that pleased her very much, and she stood, after dressing for dinner , for quite a long time looking at it.
Two nights later she was alone in her room, dressing for dinner, she heard a curious banging, rattling sound. When she turned around, she saw to her amazement that the picture that had interested her so much, the portrait of the young man with the laughing eyes, was swinging backwards and forwards on the wall as if someone were shaking it very violently. But the moment she approached it, she got another shock. The portrait became suddenly still, but the picture itself had undergone a horrible transformation. The young man now had no head. Where the head should have been there was nothing; the neck terminating in a bloody stump, which was so realistic that Miss Mellie fainted. When she recovered, her maid was standing over her with a glass of water. Wondering if she could possibly have been dreaming, and thinking that the maid would deem her mad if she told her what had just happened, she attributed her faint to the heat of the room and continued dressing, and in due course went down to dinner.
During dessert, when the servants were out of the room, she said to her hostess, “I witnessed a rather remarkable phenomenon just now in my bedroom, I think it must have been due to vibration.”
“What was that?” Mrs. Barron said, turning slightly pale.
“Why,” Miss Mellie went on, “the portrait of that handsome youth in early Georgian costume began to sway about, as if in a hurricane, or at least as if someone were shaking it vigorously. Moreover…” But here the lady sitting next to her, a relative of the Bartons, gave her a nudge, and Miss Mellie, realising that she had probably made a faux pas, said no more.
Mrs. Barron was now deadly pale, and a painful silence ensued, but, thanks to the tact and cleverness of the aforementioned relative of the Bartons, who enquired of the Colonel what programme he had in store for them all on the morrow - Christmas Day - the tongues of the guests were loosened, and in a few moments the conversation resumed.
Some minutes later, in the drawing-room, the lady who had nudged Miss Mellie drew her aside and said to her, “Whatever induced you to allude to that picture? I suppose you don’t know the tradition. Listen, and I’ll tell it you as briefly as possible...
"That young man in the portrait was a Jacobite ancestor of Colonel Barron, and he was heir to this property at the time of the 1715 Rebellion. The second brother, who coveted the estate, hatched a diabolical plot. He hired two men to waylay and murder the heir when he was on his way to join the Old Pretender’s army, so that his death would naturally be attributed to an encounter with enemy troops. Everything turned out as the second brother had hoped, up to a certain point. The assassins waylaid the heir, cut off his head, and buried his remains by the roadside. After they had received payment, however, by chance one of the sisters of the brothers overheard the assassins say that they had not been paid enough.
On her telling her father what she had overheard, the father had the two men seized, and he himself threatened them with instant death if they did not confess. The two men then confessed, and by doing so placed the parents in a terrible dilemma. To give the killers up to justice would mean revealing their second son’s guilt, while to hush the matter up, would mean a heavy bribe which they could not afford to pay. Choosing the latter, they paid the two rogues an exorbitant sum of money, and subsequently sent the son who had brought all this trouble upon them away to study abroad, where, within a few months of his arrival, he was killed in a drunken brawl.
Immediately before his death, however, the portrait of the brother he had murdered, which was hanging on the wall of the room he had occupied during his lifetime, was seen to swing backwards and forwards, whilst the head in it temporarily disappeared, leaving the neck a mere stump, jagged and bleeding. These ghastly phenomena have been repeated ever since, always before the death of a member of the Barron family, and it is for this reason that your reference to that picture just now caused such a sensation. I only hope that the omen in this instance will prove futile, and that no death will ensue.”
Miss Mellie was, of course, greatly perturbed on hearing what her experience augured; but she was very shocked indeed, when, a few days after her visit to the Bartons, she was told that they had just received the news of the death of their eldest son in a boating accident.
And so then dear friends, that sinister tale brings our Ghosts of Christmas advent calendar to a close! And believe it or not, we have only detailed but a few of the spooks and phantoms that are said to walk at Yuletide, so do keep an eye out, for they may a Christmas spectre that walks near you! So then, from all of us here at the Great Library of Dreams, we wish you all a very merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!
