Ghost Stories for Christmas- The Last Bear in England

Merry Christmas! Due to my travels through the hustle and bustle of the season, I'm putting up the last post for 2019 early. Enjoy!

Trim up the tree with clanking chains and floating orbs, it’s Christmas! As in years past, Skullduggery in the Smoke follows the most Victorian of Christmas traditions: Ghost Stories. For the entire month, I’m searching through Peter Underwood’s Gazetteer of British, Scottish, and Irish Ghosts for hauntings fit for a gaming table to pull out adventure ideas, historical connections, and bizarre details. So bring a torch, Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for Christmas!

As Christmas nears, ghostly growls disturb the calm winter nights in the village of Fernhurst in West Sussex. Yearly, villagers witness the ghost of the last bear in England returning to the scene of its death in Verdly Castle. The castle’s location is now a thickly wooded hollow in Verdly Wood with brush growing over the few remaining piles of masonry, but once it was a magnificent hunting tower. On a Christmas day sometime in the early 1000s AD, a bear foraging for food through Verdly Wood stumbled into a pack of hunters from the castle. The hunters attacked. Wounded and worried, the bear turned tail. The bear sought any shelter it could and ran straight into Verdly Castle. In Verdly’s great hall, the hunters cornered their quarry and slew the last bear native to England. Now, the bear returns each year and the hunters’ cries of triumph remind the nation of its loss.

Adventure Ideas

Because of their hibernation cycle, bears serve as a symbol of death and rebirth. They spend the winter in the underworld and emerge brand new each spring. The killing of the last bear gives that creature enough magical significance to make this symbol the literal truth. It’s not a ghost, it’s the magically-powerful undead last bear brought back out of hibernation once a year to feed. 

The skeletal remains of the last bear may lie near the foundations of Verdly castle lost in the ground. The ancient Celts wore bear-shaped amulets and bear teeth for protection. As a symbol of death, extinction, and loss, any part of the legendary bear makes a potent necromantic or enchanted talisman.

Unverifiable rumors claim Verdly Castle was used as a madhouse served by a handful of nuns before falling to a crumbling ruin. The growls and howls might not belong to a bear but an unquiet spirit of unsound mind pretending to be a bear. Anyone trying to put the “ghost bear” spirit to rest just strengthens its delusion. Or the bear’s specter adopted such “wild men” as her cubs. Now another charitable home opens near Verdly Wood. Certain incurable inmates vanish from their cells, although visitors sometimes hear their voices from beneath the ground. Any wardens mistreating their poor charges soon suffer a savage death.

One of the possible (if not portable ) translations of the name Arthur is “bear man”, possibly descended from the Celtic bear goddess, Artio. King Arthur legendarily lies sleeping under the ground waiting for his return and certain druidic circles celebrate King Arthur at the midwinter solstice only a few days from Christmas. When the last bear died the last link to Camelot died with it, but Merlin sends its spirit back to earth on the year’s greatest day of charity and hope. Following the ghostly clues and markers could lead to the Once and Future King.

As terrifically bonkers as the idea of a ghost bear may be, in the more fantastic world of Victoriana the monstrous possibilities stagger the mind. When the last owlbear returns, claw and talon marks mark the trees and screeches fill the air. The pale specter of a unicorn stalks the moors enchanting innocents and impaling the guilty. Gazing into the eyes of a ghostly cockatrice petrifies the soul but leaves the numb empty husk of a body alive.

Ghost Stories for Christmas- The Strange Facts of Old Hall and St. Mary

Trim up the tree with clanking chains and floating orbs, it’s Christmas! As in years past, Skullduggery in the Smoke follows the most Victorian of Christmas traditions: Ghost Stories. For the entire month, I’m searching through Peter Underwood’s Gazetteer of British, Scottish, and Irish Ghosts for hauntings fit for a gaming table to pull out adventure ideas, historical connections, and bizarre details. So bring a torch, Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for Christmas!

The next ghost story of the season leans back into the distant Victorian past and the less distant history of the Battle of Britain, making a haunting fit for Victoriana and Their Finest Hour. In the 1840s, nuns of the Benedictine order fled anti-Catholic sentiment in Hampshire to settle in the village of East Bergholt. They rebuilt the empty, faded chapel into the Church of St. Mary and converted the adjacent manor house, “Old Hall”, into a nunnery.

The air of both St. Mary and Old Hall crowd with legend and spirits. St. Mary lacks a bell tower, possessing instead a medieval-styled bell cage on the church grounds with over 4-ton weight of bells facing upside-down towards the ceiling and rung by dangerously shoving their massive bulk by hand. According to village folklore, workers spent 6 years attempting to build a bell tower, but the devil visited the worksite every night and undid all their labor. In Old Hall, chambers suffer sudden plummets of temperature with no obvious cause and wispy floating figures cross the corridors. 

Shortly after England entered World War II, the Benedictine order evacuated their nuns from East Bergholt due to the village’s location on the now-threatened southern coast. For the same reason, the British Army requisitioned the former nunnery as a barracks for its men stationed in the quiet village. The soldiers in Old Hall soon grew used to their new home and its strange atmosphere. They learned to avoid the main entrance and instead travel around the back of the building to the back door to avoid seeing strange figures and feeling ghostly touches. Each night at 10:50 the door to the sergeant’s mess unlocked and opened about a foot and half as a strange cold seeped into the hall. Soldiers armed with clubs waited on both sides of the door to catch the suspected pranksters. With no culprit on hand night after night, the enlisted men pragmatically started a nightly card game outside the haunted doorway so they could sneak in for a snack after the ghost unlocked the mess. 

 One young private progressing towards sleep in his bunk saw his door suddenly burst open. A faint shadowy figure crossed towards him and laid cold dead hands on his face. At the frigid groping, the private overcame his fear and yelled for help. The specter disappeared as his compatriots entered and turned on the light. The young private’s dark hair had turned white with terror.

Adventure Ideas

St. Mary and Old Hall changed denominations a few times in its history. Both Protestant and Catholic dead decay in their architecture and grounds. Arguments in life lead to disquiet in death. Do the strange unconnected hauntings reflect a ghostly battle of deeply entrenched beliefs? How can a ghost be swayed about the metaphysical facts of eternal life?

A bunch of soldiers stationed in an ancient house with a strange history makes an ideal scenario for a haunting. The men are trained and well-armed but not prepared for the supernatural. As outsiders, they have only church records and legends told in the pub to hint at the cause of their haunting. Best of all, they can’t leave the house without risking a court-martial. 

An inconveniently locked door conveniently unlocked by a ghost could facilitate many schemes. Murderers, thieves, prisoners, and star-crossed lovers could get that much closer to their goal provided they are bold enough to use dead hands to do their dirty work.

In folklore, the glorious ringing of church bells control the weather, grow crops, and drive away devils. The cold metal of most bells has been ceremonially baptized before their installation. Perhaps, the normally sacred church bells of St. Mary sleep in a “cage” on the humble ground due to some stain of evil wrought within the bells. What tragedies occur when a bell gets loose or worse installed high above the ground in a bell tower?

Ghost Stories for Christmas- Lady Dudley’s Pond

Trim up the tree with clanking chains and floating orbs, it’s Christmas! As in years past,  Skullduggery in the Smoke follows the most Victorian of Christmas traditions: Ghost Stories. For the entire month, I’m searching through Peter Underwood’s Gazetteer of British, Scottish, and Irish Ghosts for hauntings fit for a gaming table to pull out adventure ideas, historical connections, and bizarre details. So bring a torch, Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for Christmas!

On September 8, 1560, the servants of Cumnor Hall discovered the body of Amy Robsart at the bottom of a flight of stairs, her neck broken and two deep wounds in her skull. People started theorizing about her death soon after her skin turned cold. Although the coroner pronounced the death an accident, certain suspicious facts and more suspicious rumors wiggled into public knowledge. 

On the day of her death, Amy sent all the servants out of the house. Did she empty Cumnor Hall so she could commit suicide to escape the pain of the cancer in her breast? The house, Cumnor Place, belonged to one of her husband’s servants, Anthony Forster. He was present that day and suspiciously wealthy after her death. Did Forster push Amy to her death so her husband, Robert Dudley, a court favorite of Queen Elizabeth, could marry his admiring monarch? It could also have been an accident caused and exacerbated by her illness. Had the drug Amy took to nullify the pain of her cancer caused her to lose her footing while her bones weakened by her illness shattered down the stairs?

No matter the truth, Amy Robsart’s specter remained in the house long after her death. After repeated manifestations of her ghost on the stairs of Cumnor Hall, a team of nine parsons from nearby Oxford came to lay the ghost to eternal rest. They could not banish her, but together they managed to confine her spirit to one of the fish ponds on the manor grounds. Since then, the pond never freezes even on the coldest of winter nights.

 After many untenanted years, Lord Abingdon, the current owner, demolished empty, crumbling Cumnor Hall in 1810. Laborers rebuilt several nearby churches with materials from the demolitions. The church at the clean and bright village of Wytham gained a window from the room in which Amy Robsart slept her last night. St. Michaels in the center of the village of Cumnor received a gilded stone statue of Queen Elizabeth and a sturdy rear wall. All that remains of Cumnor Hall by 1855, are piles of stone and a chimney on the south side of St. Michael’s churchyard.

Adventure Ideas

The best part of this legend is the ghost transplanted to a different location. While they can’t get rid of a ghost permanently, some clergy can shift the unwanted haunting to a tree, an unused room, or an unlucky cow. Perhaps for a contribution to the poor box, the specter could be persuaded to migrate to the house of a disliked neighbor. Of course, if someone frees the ghost, the descendants of the parsons/ghost-trappers fall prey to a very angry ghost.

If Queen Elizabeth played a part in her death, Amy Robsart’s ghost might be persuaded by certain interested parties to unleash her vengeance on a currently living female monarch. 

Murder victims come back as ghosts, suicide victims come back as ghosts, and accident victims come back as ghosts. Is this ghost vengeful, regretful, or unlucky? That ambiguity makes research before an exorcism very difficult. Conspiracy and opinions handed down for generations hamper local inquires. 

The haunted pond could turn Amy Robsart into a Jenny Greenteeth sort of nightmare hag, ascending from the muck smelling of fish to pull down children unwary enough to fish in her pond.

The church of St. Michaels not only has bits of Cumnor Hall stitched into its architecture but the house’s inhabitants as well. The tomb of Anthony Forster, the man rumored to have killed Amy, sits in a place of veneration next to its altar. Perhaps two ghosts stalk through the church: one seeking to expose the truth and one to obfuscate it.

Perhaps the ghost in the pond is not Amy Robsart’s but her murderer. The ghost descendant’s hired the parsons to quarantine the specter to a quiet pond. If anyone recognized the shadowy figure at the top of the stairs, the scandal would ruin their family line.

Ghost Stories for Christmas- The Starving Children of Bramber Castle

Trim up the tree with clanking chains and floating orbs, it’s Christmas! As in years past, Skullduggery in the Smoke follows the most Victorian of Christmas traditions: Ghost Stories. For the entire month, I’m searching through Peter Underwood’s Gazetteer of British, Scottish, and Irish Ghosts for hauntings fit for a gaming table to pull out adventure ideas, historical connections, and bizarre details. So bring a torch, Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for Christmas!

In 1210, Bramber Castle in Sussex was the happy home of William de Braose, the 4rth Lord of Bramber. Through war, murder, and the patronage of King John, de Braose rose in power in the ranks of Norman nobles. After the de Braose’s capture of Arthur I (a threat to King John’s claim to the throne) and the subsequent suspicious disappearance of Arthur I, his fortunes should have risen even further. Unfortunately for him and his family, King John turned against de Braose, claiming his family owed taxes from the estates given him by the crown. The king took all their land, invaded their holdings in Wales, and captured de Braose’s four children. According to legend, King John had them starved to death.

The few remaining ruins of the Bramber castle sits on the western edge of the village of Bramber. Only the gatehouse tower and a few crumbled fragments of walls stick up out of the hill. The land now belongs to the Duke of Norfolk, but aside from stones for local civic improvements, the ruins provide little more than a pleasant place for picnics. In 1855, the village of Bramber numbers about 150 inhabitants. Most visitors come for an idyllic rest in the country. Tea rooms, tea gardens, and hotels stand next to mills and sheep pens.

At Christmas time, mysterious and emaciated children pleadingly hold out their hands and follow pedestrians through the streets of Bramber. They voicelessly cry for food, but if anyone tries to talk to them, the children vanish. Witnesses claim the apparitions beg around the ruins of the castle as well. Local rumor murmurs the children are the spirits of de Broase’s children, doomed by the death in their bellies to beg for eternity.

Adventure Ideas

Between 1844 and 1855, rail companies tried and failed three times to build a railway north of Bramber with a train station near the castle. While the marshy ground slowed the work, the creepy silent children stalking the worksite didn’t help either.

Given Bramber’s reliance on tourism, local leaders might pay good money to prevent dirty, ghost children from bothering guests to the village.

A peculiar number of children and teenagers in Willaim de Braose’s life died tragic deaths. Aside from this own children, Arthur I vanished in de Braose’s care at age 16. While committing atrocities against the Welsh, de Braose personally tracked down and killed the 7-year-old son of an enemy leader, earning de Braose the nickname "Ogre of Abergavenny". Perhaps the ghostly begging children are the embodiment of de Braose’s crimes for the crown, a cosmic stain looking for charity and justice at Christmas. Does the Ogre still seek out children during the winter?

In reality, King John captured de Braose’s family, but only de Braose’s wife Maud, and eldest son, William, died while imprisoned at Windsor castle or Corfe castle. Their cause of death escaped record. The rest of the children were released in 1218 although other accounts claim two of de Braose’s sons died. There are similar inconsistencies with the number of ghostly children and their genders. Are the children even connected to de Braose? The Victorian age was no stranger to tragic deaths. Is someone covering up their crimes and blaming their ghosts on the story of de Braose?

Bramber is also home to William Potter’s whimsical and naively creepy taxidermy tableaus on display in his families’ pub, the White Lion. Each diorama incorporates scenes of everyday life reimagined with stuffed small animals such as hamsters, birds, rats, kittens, and squirrels. If Potter’s art is as popular with dead Norman children as it is with living Victorian children, all sorts of macabre poltergeist activity could occur. Spectral hunger may manifest as stuffed animal bites.

A Handful of Yokai- East and West

While this blog’s monster hunting in Japan caught bucket-loads of adventures and encounters, London remains the undisputed champion setting of Victoriana. It’s time to bring our fire babies, snail ladies, and visually acute privates back home to the streets of 1850s London through the examination of Japanese-English relations.

At first glance, there is very little historic room for Japanese/English cultural exchange before the 1860s, let alone a bunch of crazy Japanese monsters. Fearful of western imperialism and the growing wealth of Japanese merchants, the Tokugawa shogunate restricted all international trade in Japan and banned its population from traveling abroad in the early 1600s.  The Japanese government exclusively traded with Dutch and Chinese ships and restricted these ships to dock only at the port of Nagasaki. Japan’s isolation lasted until July 8, 1853, when a fleet of modern American warships sent by President Millard Fillmore arrived at Edo bay threatening to either open trade relations with Japan or burn their capital city of Edo to the ground. Japan and America signed “the Treaty of Peace and Amity” in 1854 forcibly opening the island nation to American diplomacy and trade.

A mere month, after the American fleet arrived, a Russian fleet arrived in Nagasaki with a similar plan. Alarmed that their foe in the Crimean War could gain a peaceful toehold in Japan, the British government sent its own fleet led by Vice Admiral James Stirling to attack the Russian Fleet and to prevent the Japanese from aiding the Russians in the war. Stirling’s negotiations with the Shogunate bore unexpected fruit: not only did Japan remain neutral, but Stirling also opened up the country for British trade. The combination of the threatening sight of Stirling’s fleet, the hope of British forces deterring Russian advances into Japanese territory, memories of the American fleet’s recent demands, and near-constant miscommunication between translators led to the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty of 1854. The treaty opened Nagasaki and Hakodate to British ships and gave citizens of the British Empire the same rights as the Chinese or Dutch in Japan. The first British consulate to Japan opened in 1858. However, Stirling never got around to seeking and destroying the Russian fleet.

Japan took its biggest step in European relations in 1862 when the shogunate sent the First Japanese Embassy to Europe. This diplomatic mission consisted of forty bureaucrats, negotiators, and young samurai traveling through Europe on a mission to learn about the western world and delay unwanted clauses in certain treaties. These men explored all the major cities of Europe, watching Europeans in all strata of society with unquenchable curiosity. In London, the mission visited an opium den, noticing with pride it was full of English and Chinese addicts.

Now exposed to Japanese culture, Europe hungered for Japanese craftsmanship, and style. Creators of fashion, furniture, and art mingled their designs with Japanese simplicity and strength. The craze in England culminated in the Japanese Village Exhibition of 1885, wherein an entire Japanese village, complete with 100 Japanese men and women employed to populate the village, was replicated and displayed in London. In return, European technology and scientific advancements trickled into Japan through the late 1800s.

Adventure Ideas:

Japan and Russia have a mutual tradition tension over their respective nation's territories. Perhaps a secret diplomatic mission visited London to discuss the possibility of opening a new front against Russia in the East. A faction in the Japanese government sends Yokai to sabotage the proposed alliance.

Legends fill the waters surrounding Japan with numerous insidious Yokai. Whether they defend their nation or rampage through the waves, the foreign fleets seeking parley in the shogunate’s harbors brave these terrors or perhaps risk bringing something back to their home waters.

For 200 years, the Dutch formed the bottleneck between Japan and Europe. Once accidental English diplomacy opens up trade, greedy Dutch merchants seek the help of dangerous Yokai to make London shipping magnates think twice about intruding on their business. 

Hades Hotel p3- The Increasing Evil

The history of the Thames Tunnel is a story of disappointment, death, disease, and civil engineering. It’s a monumental achievement conceived in genius, built-in hellish darkness, revealed in triumph, and abandoned to sleazy ignominy. Such a bizarre structure with such a checkered life makes a perfect lair for whatever malicious forces hide in Victorian London. As Brunel wrote in a letter describing the conditions eroding his workforce’s health and sanity, “The evil is increasing”. You just have to decide what that evil is.

Adventure Ideas

The criminal element of London loves the Hades Hotel. Its privacy, cheap admission, and lack of police oversight beg for more complex illegal ventures than simple thievery. Literal underground prizefights could take over one of the entry shafts for a fight night protected from the elements. Under the rotunda, the spiraling stairs ensure every customer a good seat, while outside, lookouts armed with signaling flares watch for trouble at both ends of the tunnel.

Brunel conceived of his revolutionary method of bricking up the tunnel as his shield inched forward from the Teredo Navalis (more often known as the Naval Shipworm), a mollusk which burrows into a ship’s timber as it’s excrement reinforces the walls of its hole.  After acquiring the loan from the government, perhaps Brunel resorted to desperate invention to ensure his tunnel’s completion and protect his laborers. Instead of a bigger, stronger tunneling shield, Brunel actually used a massive Teredo Navalis fed with necromantic magics to eat through the dirt, darkness, and disease. Some of the diggers remember a “big red worm”. Where is it now, and what effect did its presence have on the tunnel?

At least six diggers drowned in sudden floods during the tunnel’s construction. One ghostly digger remains trapped in the tunnel. He greets visitors garrulously claiming to have gotten mixed up and asks which direction is north and south. If told, he thanks them but as he walks away a huge brackish phantom wave sweeps him out of sight. If a good Samaritan would just walk him the whole way to daylight he might finally reach his final reward.

The grimy marble staircase leading underground suggests a modern temple dedicated to a Chthonic deity of the underworld. Perhaps the Hotel Hades is more than a nickname and the Thames Tunnel leads to the land of the dead.  Some vile force transforms a small part of the Thames’ rushing current into the Styx, the river dividing the land of the living from the Underworld in Greek mythology.

To make extra income during its troubled construction, the Thames Tunnel Company charged sightseers a shilling to brave the descent and visit the excavation to watch the digging underway. What might have been fortuitously dropped in the soggy dirt just before the bricklayers started their work? It makes a secure a hiding place.  Even if they could pinpoint its location, who would ever dare disaster by pulling up bricks from a tunnel under the Thames?

During the excavation, horrible fumes and disease-carrying water filtered up through the disturbed earth blighting the diggers with a multitude of maladies. Now the entire population of a certain street in the East End suffers from the same symptoms. A strange dark fog weakens the sunshine over the street. What else might have been disturbed from its hibernation when Brunel dug too greedily and too deep?

Life in the Bones- Bone Mills

The fact that manure made from bones revitalized the prospects of countless Victorian farms doesn’t prevent its manufacture from being a disgusting, filthy ordeal. While a few forward-thinking farms purchased bone-milling machines and dug sulfuric acid pits to process bones on their own, large industrial factories crank out most of England’s bone manure. England’s earliest bone mills started production in Yorkshire during the 1810s. By 1850, cargoes full of bones shipped from continental ports feed mills in every seaport in the southern English coast. In the metropolis, bone mills scavenge their raw materials from the surrounding population. The people of London alone consume over 10,000 tons of meat a day, producing a remarkable quantity of unwanted bones.

The eponymous bone mill (or bone crusher) is a machine with a series of large metal rollers covered in durable spiked teeth. Laborers pour bones down into the whirling cylinders to pulverize bones down to the desired size. Those that survive the process with too much mass fall into a compartment which is again dumped out over the cylinders.  Beneath the cylinders, an oscillating grill further collects and separates the fine bone dust from the chunks. Deafening and unnerving cracks, pops, and rumbles constantly fill the air, making verbal communication impossible during the machine’s operation. The toothed cylinders can be adjusted or replaced to produce pieces of varying sizes, such as inch, or half inch bone nuggets. Water wheels provide constant power for those mills with access to flowing water. For the rest, a hundred pounds of coal keeps the toothed rollers crushing all day.

Wagons and carts full of stinking skeletal heaps surround the mill building. First workers separate the useless refuse (such as stones, hoofs, horns, or simple garbage) from the precious but filthy bones. Certain of the remains collected by bone mills have more valuable uses than being crushed to powder. They pull out the femurs and other large bones and ship them to France for manufacturing hair combs, knife handles, toothbrushes, and more. Then they run the larger bones through the crusher with the least thoroughly toothed cylinders or chop them up with axes. This step speeds up the next part of the process by breaking up the largest fragments and scraping up the bone’s surface. Next, the bone boilers drop the broken pieces into massive lidded cauldrons full of foul-smelling, pitch-black, boiling water to remove any remaining meat and fat. Many mills sell their own soap and grease made from the cooled animal fat skimmed off the top of these cauldrons. After their removal from the water with a ladle or pitchfork, the cleaned bones dry in storage for days or months before again facing the metal teeth of the bone mill. This last pulverization breaks the bones down to the right sized nuggets or dust.

Bone dust is the most valuable but most time-consuming product of the mill. Wicked bone-boilers adulterate their dust with clumps of dried lime, crumbling plaster, potash left over from soap making, sawdust, old wood, or any other substance they can crush to powder. Some of these additives hinder plant growth; others (such as arsenic) could seriously endanger farmhands. Upstanding and enterprising bone-boilers enrich their bone dust further by dumping it into an iron tank and mixing it with sulfuric acid. This treatment increases the dust’s efficacy which further increases crop yields.

Adventure Ideas

As a collection center for dead remains, a plethora of carcasses pass through bone mills. Biologists, taxidermists and magicians pay the bone-boilers to keep an eye open for specific animals useful to their business and research.

I think we’ve just about reached peak grimy grotesque Victorian history. Next post, I’ll unleash a fun new monster inspired by Bone Mills ready to menace your players.

Life in the Bones- Bone Manure

The inevitable process of decay reminds all of death, but decay also brings life. The breakdown of rotting and disgusting manure feeds barren ground the vital nutrients needed for growth. In Victorian England, mills and factories collected, processed, and sold the most blatant symbols of death, bones, to cultivate fertile land.

Originally a German innovation for growing tropical plants, the use of manure made of ground bones spread through English horticulture in the 1840s. Though it first met with skepticism, decomposing bones quickly became the most sought fertilizer for the soggy cold English climate. Before the British public caught on to collecting their waste bones, farmers imported their bone manure from Germany through ports in northern Europe. More than a small taste of the tens of thousands of tons of this valuable commodity exported to England was exhumed from German graveyards. Now every farm features a barrel tucked away in a dry place slowly filling with half-cleaned femurs, vertebra, ribs, and skulls. In the city, a bone collector’s cart stops at taverns, inns, and restaurants to pick up the day’s worth of skeletal waste nibbled clean by patrons. Rag-and-bone men sift through rubbish piles and keep shops where servants take their household’s unwanted but valuable remains.

Many farmers toss bone dust by hand to distribute it over a field during dry, sunny weather or scatter walnut sized bone chunks before planting seeds. The most common method of fertilizing is mixing one bushel of bone manure (weighing nearly 55 pounds) to every ton of traditional fecal manure, but the mixture must be used before the compost completely decompose the skeletal fragments. Fertilizing an acre of land with bone manure costs £10. Fields fertilized with bone manure only require another treatment roughly every ten years.

Decomposing bones fill the soil with phosphate of lime and nitrogen, key elements for growing turnips and potatoes and very helpful for quickly growing wheat and grasses. Chunks of bone also collect and hold moisture underground making it an excellent source of easily absorbed water for thirsty plants. It is not uncommon to pluck a vegetable from the earth and find its roots snaking through a shard of bone also pulled free. Bone manure works best in aerated, sandy soil, and has little measurable effect in clay-rich or wet soil.

Adventure Ideas
As a farmhand scatters bone manure over a field, a strangely sharp sliver of bone scratches his hand. The next day he starts to change.

In the city, the most successful professional rag-and-bone men collect their product from high volume establishments, such as stockyards, and eating-houses. Sometimes the competition at the bottom of the social ladder is just as ugly as that at the top. Theft, hold-ups, bribery, and frame jobs keep the best bones in the best hands.

The first farmer in a remote village decides to try bone manure on his fields. After purchasing and mixing his supply, the local clergy protest this sacrilege of possible human remains. The farmer doesn’t dare spread it with this condemnation, but how can he find out if some of the bones are human before the entire batch rots to uselessness?

In Greek mythology, the hero Cadmus buried the teeth of the Ismenian dragon in a field. Those teeth grew into the dangerous Spartoi warriors. Accidently planting bits and pieces of mythological creatures could have any number of strange side effects.

Several visitors to a rural village disappeared. A barrel of freshly processed bone manure sits in a local farmer’s storeroom ready to be spread over his land. The crime goes unsolved until ominous phenomenon manifests in the fields fertilized by his victim’s bones.

Next Friday, we move on from bone manure’s use to the utterly unappetizing process of its production in bone mills.

The Ratcliffe Tables- An Actuarial Grimoire

While researching burial clubs and friendly societies, one historical sidenote popped up over and over again. Treatises and pamphlets from the late 1800s about running a burial club repeatedly mention “the Ratcliffe Tables” whilst discussing financial responsibility and billing subscribers. So here is some background on the Ratcliffe tables and how it could be used in games:

Henry Ratcliffe was born in 1808 in Tyldesley. When he was 25, Ratcliffe joined “The Independent Order of Oddfellows Manchester Unity”, a faction of the Oddfellow fraternal order. The Oddfellows operated their own friendly societies, caring for their injured, sick, or retired members, along with the families of deceased members.  Henry rose through their ranks to become the Secretary of Manchester Unity in1848. His brother, William, previously held that position but his membership was suspended for embezzling £425 meant to aid the victims of famine in Ireland. During his time as Secretary, Henry balanced the order’s books, cleaned the hierarchy of corruption, and abetted legislation holding friendly societies accountable to their clientele.

Ratcliffe’s most famous contributions to the Oddfellows are his three sets of actuarial tables he meticulously researched and wrote in 1846-48, 1856-60, and the last in 1866-70. “Observations on the Rate of Mortality and Sickness Existing Amongst Friendly Societies” detailed the statistics and probabilities of death and illness among the population of Manchester from birth to 70 years of age. The appendices listing the amount of weekly payment required to adequately cover the claims of subscribers from various ages and backgrounds became known as “the Ratcliffe Tables. After he published the first study in 1850, friendly societies all across England revolutionized their fees and subscriptions according to his figures, making their organizations more dependable, secure, and successful.

While a book filled with columns of figures and prudent financial instruction may not seem like a potent source for gaming, the Ratcliffe Tables are an intensive study of death and loss. They could make a terrific plot hook, background detail, or treasure. 

Adventure Ideas

The Guild suppressed the original work by Ratcliffe because it’s an accidental but dangerous Necromantic Tome. Necromancers can gain temporary power or reduce the difficulty of their rituals by looking up their subject’s age and demographics in the Ratcliffe Tables. The knowledge of how much longer they could have lived and how much their lives were worth holds great magical significance.

If anyone memorizes the Ratcliffe Tables they will learn the exact time and date of their death, or be able to make an educated guess about the time and date of death for anyone they spend a few minutes observing. They may also be able to foresee and avoid small accidents or transform them into much larger disasters.

The banality of page after page of actuarial tables makes a potent trap. Falling asleep or daydreaming while reading the Ratcliffe Tables pulls the reader’s consciousness out of their body and into the land of the dead. If they do not return to their bodies in a short while, they will literally be bored to death.

Finally, Ratcliff intensely researched for his “Observations”. During his research, he spent up to 17 hours a day pouring though Civil Registry records and conducting interviews all over Manchester. He also hired clerks and investigators to compile and fill the gaps in his data. All sorts of strange rumors and suspicions could be uncovered by this sort of research.

Burial Clubs- Giving Death a Helping Hand

While most subscribers of burial clubs and friendly societies simply wanted to avoid a pauper’s grave, others used the many loopholes in the law and organizational practices to cheat at death and make some quick easy cash. Unscrupulous members of burial clubs committed fraud by falsely reporting the death of a loved one. A few went even further by causing their deaths. Both riskier and more certain of a payoff, murdering a family member provides the undeniable proof of death required by insurance and friendly societies.

With the multitude of accidents, accidental poisonings, and diseases facing the working class of Victorian London every day, those wishing to collect early on their loved one’s policies were spoiled for choice. Death from a dose of arsenic looks enough like cholera to be ruled a natural death at an inquest. Anyone could buy countless poisons from their local chemist with no identification or record of the purchase. Many potentially harmful substances were taken medicinally in small quantities so any overdose could be claimed to have been “self-administered”. The eternally popular fall from a flight of stairs also filled the pocket of greedy beneficiaries. Unless the murderer was very careless, officials only suspected foul play after multiple family members died in close succession, or once enough people connected to the beneficiary died.

The insured could also be enrolled in a policy without their knowledge. The larger insurance companies and friendly societies paid their agents for every policy they sold. The agents, eager for their commission, often did not check with the actually policy-holder, or even require their signature, as long as someone paid the premium. With the high illiteracy rate among the working classes, many friendly clubs helpfully allowed their clients to sign up with an easily replicated “X”.

While greedy murderers killed their insured parents, spouses, and siblings, the most vulnerable were defenseless infants and small children. Over a fourth of children born in the 1850s died before reaching five years of age. Their deaths could be easily excused as smallpox, teeth convulsions, scarlet fever, or accidental overdoses of laudanum which was commonly used to quiet crying infants. A young child cost a family about three shillings a week in food and care, but their death could benefit the family £5-20. The wave of grisly infanticide caused the British government to prohibit children under 6 to be enrolled in friendly clubs and from being insured. In 1850 parliament father restricted the maximum amount for which a child under 10 could be insured at £3. This did not stop the slaughter.

One of the most prolific murderers for the sake of insurance money (at least among those caught) was Mary Ann Cotton who killed three husbands, two lovers, her mother, at least eight of her thirteen children (only two outlived her), and 7 stepchildren before her execution in 1873. All poisoned with arsenic.

Adventure Ideas
Strangely, the members of a small burial club keep dying in alphabetical order by their last name. It’s as though someone is going by the club’s client list.  Just a few more deaths will bankrupt the club founders.

Whenever the representative of a friendly club tries to sign up a new subscriber a ghostly child appears and scares away the client. Is this a warning of a murder to come, a hoax perpetrated by a competitor, or a supernatural misunderstanding?

A successful shipping magnate took out insurance policies on several key employees in his corporation. Three of these employees died mysteriously during a massive financial crisis. It’s no secret their insurance saved his business, but did the magnate kill for the sake of money, or is he being framed?

Burial Clubs- The Much, Much Bereaved

Despite the many respectable benevolent organizations serving honest and hard-working clients, monetary gains inevitability invite fraud. While unable to afford insurance policies with massive payouts, many in England’s working class saved out a few pence for a subscription to a burial club of a friendly society. For some, the potential payout of £5 or £10 was enough to risk a prison sentence for committing fraud.

The General Register Office for England and Wales was founded in 1836. Country-wide record keeping replaced the old system of “Births, Baptisms, and Burials” kept by the local church. While this system was more accurate, easily referenced, and thorough, it opened up new cracks for crime. Friendly societies (at least those following the law) required both a death certificate issued by a civil registrar and a medical certificate (a form signed by a licensed physician verifying the cause of death) before making a payment. To collect from a burial society, a subscriber’s family only needed the death certificate as proof of the passing.

Fraudsters came to the registration office, falsely claimed the death of a loved one conveniently enrolled in a burial club, received their death certificate, showed the certificate to the representative of their burial club, and pocketed their payment. Often their “dearly departed” had wisely subscribed to several burial clubs, thus greatly increasing the rewards. Civil records show the same person dying multiple times on multiple dates, with multiple causes, with the same beneficiary profiting each time. 

In busy industrial metropolises, the clerk issuing death certificates rarely knew the deceased or the bereaved. He required only their say so that a death had occurred and had no power to investigate their claims. He could only report his suspicions and find enough evidence of wrong-doing to deny their certificates the next time.  It wasn’t until the 1870s, the law tightened up requiring all deaths to have a medical certificate before they could be issued a death certificate.

The lack of government oversight into their processes and practices allowed some organizations to operate as crookedly as their fraudulent clients. Investments of a Friendly Society registered with the British government were not subject to income or property taxes, making it a perfect place to launder ill-gotten gains. Inflated “running costs” and “hospitality budgets” hid embezzling and financial juggling. Adding to this mess is the fact that under British Law, an insurance company, a friendly society, and a burial club were all different legal entities subject to different laws and restrictions, and even then, not all were even registered with the government. If they didn’t bother even existing legally, why would they follow any other rules?

Unscrupulous representatives even pocketed their subscriber’s weekly payment and marked the policy unpaid. Stingy burial clubs used fine print to legally fight honest claims. Some barred subscribers from making any claims until two years after they joined!

Even when the society or club was striving to serve their clientele, honesty does not ensure solvency. Friendly societies and burial clubs dissolved every day to mismanaged funds, and well-intentioned but ill-advised investments. Even perfectly sound organizations foundered if too many elderly clients collected on claims, and not enough young healthy clients subscribed.

Adventure Ideas
One physician that confirms deaths for a friendly society, suspects he saw the same body 3 times over a period of six months and it hasn’t decayed.

A burial club’s founder invested some of the organization's money in a risky venture. It paid out spectacularly, but he’d rather not put all that money back into the club. To cover the surplus, he needs to invent a failure so he can claim to have lost it all. 

Burial Clubs- Making Death Pay

For many in Victorian Britain, a funeral was their last chance to show their worth on earth. As important as a memorializing funeral was to the upper classes, it was even more important to the lower. A family too poor to afford a funeral doomed their loved one to a burial “on the Parish”. A pauper’s burial was the lowest disgrace a Victorian could face. No coffin tastefully obscured covered by a pall. Only a linen shroud covered the corpse. No procession of pallbearers and solemn service. Instead, they laid the deceased into a massed grave with no headstone on undesirable land. Worse still, these uncared and unnoticed cadavers were a banquet for anatomists desiring to procure corpses cheaply and legally for dissection.

To avoid this ignominious departure, many among the working poor of England scraped out enough weekly savings for membership in a burial club.  Burial clubs (or more grandly “burial societies”) provided a subscription service, similar to insurance, guaranteeing to pay funeral costs no matter how long the deceased had been a member. Many burial clubs were run independently by entrepreneurs. Quite a few headquartered in the neighborhood pub or some other public gathering place key to local life.

Costs varied based on the desired quality of the funeral. Most plans paid out £2- £10 for an adult and £1-£4 for a child. The more expensive plans paid out for more expensive funerals. An average £5 funeral for a monthly two pence subscription looks a bit like this:

-One fine elm coffin decorated with black nails, a metal nameplate, flower embellishment, and four handles,

-One velvet pall to cover the coffin

-Three black cloaks, three black hat bands, three black scarves, and six pairs of gloves

-Two porters to help at the funeral

-One man to attend the funeral in mourning dress

Further luxuries such as brass nameplates, crepe paper banners, mourning jewelry, additional hired mourners, a hearse, and black feathers for the hearse increased the cost of the Burial Club’s premiums.

 The bigger burial clubs were part of Friendly Societies, broader benevolent organizations. For a small monthly fee, friendly societies also covered injury, illness, and pensions. Some even worked as saving and investment groups on behalf of their subscribers. They ranged from small clubs consisting of a single village to massive organizations with chapters all across Briton. The biggest and oldest friendly societies functioned similarly to a fraternal order right down to official regalia and ceremonies. Almost all friendship societies are grouped by a common vocation, such as the Gardeners’ Royal Benevolent Institution or the Railway Guards’ Universal Friendly Society.

Membership in these organizations grew every year. In 1815, almost a million working men subscribed to a Friendly Society. By 1870, these organizations had over 4 million confirmed members. For those unable to afford insurance, paying a few pence to a Burial Club or Friendly Society bought peace of mind knowing their funeral would not burden their families, and disgrace themselves.

Example Names of Benevolent Societies:

Benevolent Society of St. Patrick

The Burial Institution

Friends’ Provident Institution

Governesses’ Benevolent Institution

London Friendly Institution

Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds

Provident Association of Warehousemen, Travelers, and Clerks

Stock Exchange Clerks’ Provident Fund

Wesleyan Methodist Local Preachers’ Mutual Aid Association

That’s enough of the basic facts. Next week, we’ll start examining the shady side of combining financial gains with death by talking about fraud in Burial Clubs.

Ghost Stories for Christmas- The Highwaywoman of Markyate Cell

It’s Christmas time and once again the legends and folklore of the British Isles provide lumps of coal aplenty for all your players. We are again (we’ve done it twice so it’s a tradition now) looking at British ghost stories and picking out bits to adapt for Victoriana adventures. As before, all our tales come from the fabulous “Gazetteer of British, Scottish, & Irish Ghosts” by Peter Underwood, a terrific guide full of horrific hauntings.  So bring a torch Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for Christmas!

After English Civil War broke out in 1642, Parliamentary forces seized estates and incomes belonging to Royalist supporters, leaving many old families destitute. The patriarch of the Fanshawe family, Sir Richard Fanshawe ensured his family’s fortune by arranging the marriage of his nephew, Thomas, to his stepdaughter, Katherine Ferrers the heir of her family’s considerable wealth and lands.

The marriage of Katherine and Thomas in 1648 was not a happy one. The Fanshaws liquidated most of Katherine’s assets to support the Royalist cause, and Thomas left his young bride to join the war. Living alone in the Ferrer’s ancestral manor house, Markyate Cell, in the village of Markyate in Hertfordshire, Katherine sought to recover her money and her freedom through highway robbery.

By day, Katherine was the innocent mistress of Markyate Cell, but at night, disguised as a man in a tricornered hat and breeches, she rode to the main roads and hid in trees to drop down on passing coaches. The village of Markyate served as one of the major rest stops for travelers between London and Birmingham, providing Katherine with rich targets loaded down with loot. With the help of her partner in crime, a farmer named Ralph Chaplin, Katherine murdered and stole until the night of her death in 1660. Katherine ambushed a wagon and shot the driver, but a hitchhiker riding in the back shot back, mortally wounding her.
After her burial, villagers spotted her ghost racing on horseback across the countryside at night, or lurking high in the tree legendarily overlooking her buried treasure. In 1840, her ghost appeared at Markyate Cell during a mysterious and destructive fire in the house. Afterwards, the current owner, Mr. Adey, directed his hired repairmen to bash through a door long bricked up. After the demolition, they found a staircase hidden in the kitchen chimney leading to a secret room Katherine may have used to hide disguises, weapons, and loot.

Adventure Ideas

I should point out Katherine Ferrers’ reputation as a highwaywoman is almost certainly false. No records exist of Katherine’s accomplice Paul Chaplin in the village, or of their crimes. Markyate Cell was sold three years before her death, so Katherine almost certainly didn’t die on its grounds. After being captured in the war, Katherine’s husband Thomas returned home just four months before her death, which suggest a tragic early pregnancy ended her life instead of a gunshot. This can all be ignored for the sake of having the ghost of a highway-woman terrorizing the countryside.

If you have a thieving ghost, then obviously she has to steal from the player characters. No player character would ever “Stand and Deliver” their valuables to a highwayman, so I suggest having Katherine’s ghost take something more intangible: Quintessence. After each encounter with the ghost, a player character must pass a Resolve test or temporarily lose a Quintessence Die until they can put Katherine’s ghost to rest.

By the 1850’s train travel made the old coach lines obsolete. Goods, payroll, and passengers all ride the rails. If Katherine’s ghost manifests now, she might adapt to modern conveniences and learn to rob trains.

London served as a base for Parliamentary forces. Any Royalists fleeing London by coach could have encountered Katherine along their journey. Her lost hoard could hold any number of long stolen artifacts or secrets of the English Civil War.

Before Markyate Cell’s construction, its grounds housed a hermit named Rodger. A young lady named Christine sought refuge in the hermitage from a forced marriage, so Rodger hid her in a wooden shed. For four years, Christine endured in the cramped space growing in wisdom and piety. Her righteousness impressed Rodger, so he chose Christine as his successor. Under her leadership, the hermitage grew into a Benedictine Priory.
Markyate Cell has two legendary ladies in its past looking for freedom. Christine found hers in piety, and Katherine found hers in crime. It might be fun if the murderous phantom and the saintly specter fight over a woman’s soul as the players intervene.