Physicians and phantoms
Five medical-themed macabre stories from the 19th century
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This article goes out on 1 November, by which time all the ghosties, ghoulies, monsters and witches should have returned to their slumbers. If, however, you want to keep the Halloween atmosphere going a little longer, take a moment to enjoy these spooky stories with a medical theme …
A graveyard ghoul
The impressively alliterative Dr Michael Mason of Muskegon, Michigan, was driving his horse and sulky back from a patient late one night when he approached the cemetery at Gobleville (now Gobles), sometime in the 1880s.
Twenty years before, he had seen a ghost there, so he glanced warily over the fence. This time, however, he spotted something more tangible – the graveyard grass had been made into hay, which stood in piles between the tombstones. Dr Mason’s hay supplies happened to be running out and the scarcity that year had sent prices up to $20 per ton. The doctor decided to help himself to enough of the (presumably well-fertilised) graveyard hay to keep his horse going for a couple of days. He took a hitching strap, rolled up as much hay as he could tie together, and hoisted it onto his head to carry it back to the sulky.
Just then, he heard voices passing by and hung back, thinking that he wouldn’t be seen, but:
One of the men screamed out terribly as he got near me, ‘A ghost! A ghost!’, looked at me in the haze of the misty darkness, screamed again, then all broke away in different directions with yells at every bound.
Dr Mason went home without further incident, but the next day the local paper reported a supernatural sighting at Gobleville. The demon was said to be:
… eight feet high, with a head as big as a hay cock, with awful eyes and teeth; that Tom Welch and Mr Strong saw it at the same time, that it stood inside the grave yard fence, and that its eyes were balls of fire, and its teeth as large as horse teeth.
The two witnessess were still so frightened that they had to call in Dr Mason to give them something for their ‘involuntary defecation and lassitude.’ Dr Mason prescribed opium, which did the trick, and sent them his bill for $2 each.
Beating up a ghost
Another case of mistaken ghostly identity turned out less well for a British doctor in 1870. Dr William H Clough of Huddersfield was summoned at about three o’clock in the morning to a patient not far from his home. Given the urgency of the situation and the short distance, he flung his dressing gown round his shoulders and hurried along the road. Coming from the other direction was William Peace, a young engine cleaner with the London and North-Western Railway Company, who interpreted the curiously clad doctor as the ghost of a local man who had recently died by unnatural means. He ran away, but found two of his friends and they all decided to lie in wait for the phantom.
Dr Clough attended the patient but when he went back to his house for some instruments he needed, the three lads set upon him and violently pummelled him. He got away but they followed and assaulted him a second and third time before he could explain who he was. Poor Dr Clough was so badly injured that he couldn’t work for a week.
The trio refused to apologise, so he went to the police. The court took a dim view of their behaviour and fined them £5 1s between them.
A speedy stiff
Oklahoma dental surgeon Wilhelmina Short recalled a lively anatomy lecture during her student days in Chicago in the 1890s. A class of 250 students awaited the professor, who intended to enlighten them on the muscular system by demonstrating on a cadaver. The cadaver lay under a sheet, having been wheeled in ‘by two students to whom this ghostly duty had been assigned.’
‘Dr E’ was greeted with applause as usual, and ‘stepped to the “stiff”’ to begin his instruction. But then:
… he lifted the sheet for the purpose of exposing the dead body, when the cadaver jumped from the table and ran as fast as his feet could carry him through the awe-stricken audience, to the nearest exit, through which he escaped.
Profound silence reigned in the demonstration room, until professor and students simultaneously realised that some idiot had ‘played the prank of acting cadaver, and had run to save himself from the cruel treatment of a frightened mob.’
The rattle of bones
Dr J D Minard of Imlay City, Michigan, had been brought up to be sceptical about superstitious nonsense, but one experience as a young doctor almost turned him into a believer.
In the summer of 1867, he had just qualified and started a practice in a small country town, where he slept in a humble bedroom above his office. His only companion was a human skeleton that he had brought with him from college. Its bones were laid out on a table in the corner of the room.
One night he awakened to the sound of the bones rattling and thumping!
Horrified as I was, I lifted my head from the pillow and rested on my elbow and fixed my eyes in the direction from whence I heard the noise, and there, moving slowly over the table, I could see a ghastly white figure!
It moved around noiselessly, but would sometimes knock the bones together in a way that sent chills down Dr Minard’s spine. He resolved to find out what it was, so:
…in as calm a voice as I could command, I called out, “Who are you and what do you want?” The white figure raised itself to its utmost height, sprang from the table and came straight for me, then passed the foot of my bed and out the window. It was the big white cat.
Crowds of uneasy ghosts
And finally, an 1889 ghost story with no claims to truthfulness but with an entertaining twist.
A young man, recently married, had no idea what to do when his wife suddenly fell ill in their isolated home. He at last resolved to ride to the nearest town and find a doctor, so he saddled up his carthorse and hastened into the night.
In the silent, eerie darkness, a figure emerged from the side of the road – a ‘gaunt, withered hag’, who asked him where he was going. He told her his purpose, and she said:
‘Know ye how to tell a good doctor?’
‘Nay, mother,’ he replied. ‘I take the first which God leadeth me to.’
The wise old woman handed him a sprig of the herb euphrasia and told him that when he arrived at a doctor’s house, he must look through the leaves and he would see all the ghosts who had died due to that doctor’s bungling. A doctor with few ghosts would be the perfect choice.
The young man did as instructed, and:
Oddzooks! A fearful sight met his clairvoyant gaze. Around every doctor’s door shivered a ghastly crowd of uneasy ghosts, and, what seemed strange to that man, the larger and more comfortable the house, the greater was the awesome troop at the door.
At last, he found a modest home displaying a doctor’s sign, and the euphrasia revealed one solitary spirit sitting on the step.
‘Here, by God’s grace,’ said the man, ‘is the doctor for me.’
The obliging physician got up behind him on the carthorse and they had nearly reached the sick woman when, to the young man’s horror, the passenger said:
I wonder right well by what good chance you called on me, for you know I have only been practicing medicine two days, and your good wife will be the second patient I have treated.
M Mason, ‘A Veritable Ghost’, W Short, ‘A Lively Corpse’, and J D Minard, ‘Was it a ghost?’ in John L Short, ed., Fun for doctors and their patients; fifty authentic ghost stories by fifty experienced physicians, 1901.
‘The Hillhouse Ghost Story,’ The Huddersfield Chronicle, 26 November 1870.
J B S King, ‘A Twice Told Tale,’ The Medical Visitor, July 1889.
What interesting stories. That last one seems to beg to become a fictional short story!