Goldenrod Folk Medicine

Nothing says "Happy late summer!" like a congested head and a scratchy throat. I unfortunately have a cold (blech!), but I know many people also suffer from pollen allergies at this time of year. There are lots of wildflowers blooming in the parks, meadows, and along the roadsides. So pretty, so irritating to the sinuses.

One wildflower that sometimes gets blamed for summer allergies is goldenrod. I can remember people complaining about goldenrod pollen when I was a kid, and I sometimes still hear that complaint. Well, apparently we are all wrong. According to the National Audubon Society Field Guide to New England, the allergies ascribed to goldenrod are actually caused primarily by ragweed.

Don't fear this goldenrod plant!

Perhaps the following will further help rehabilitate goldenrod's reputation: in 19th century New Hampshire, goldenrod actually was believed to prevent rheumatism. That's arthritis to us contemporary Americans.

If you look at the stem of a goldenrod plant you may see a small swollen lump or gall. This gall is caused when an insect (usually trypeta solidaginis, a type of fly) lays its eggs in the plant. After the egg hatches a small larva will live inside the gall until it matures, crawls out, and flies away.

In New Hampshire it was believed that carrying one of the galls in your pocket would prevent rheumatism. These so-called "rheumaty-buds" were only effective while the grub inside them was still alive. Once the grub died you would need to get another gall. (It seems kind of cruel to carry these grubs around just so they could die, but I don't think 19th century rural folk were too concerned with the pain and suffering of insects.) I'm guessing the galls were considered effective against rheumatism because they resemble the swollen joints arthritis sometimes causes, but I'm just speculating.

I've poked around a trying to find information about the life-cycle of trypeta solidaginis, but without too much luck. From the little I found it appears the galls can usually be found in the autumn. I would suggest examining, but not plucking, a gall. Let the trypeta solidaginis live its life!

And if you are suffering from rheumatism or arthritis, please see a doctor. 

I found this little tidbit about in Fanny Bergen's article "Some Bits of Plant-Lore" from The Journal of American Folklore, Jan. - Mar., 1892.

Mary Hortado's Demonic Assailants

The horror movie The Conjuring was quite successful at the box office this summer. I think one reason for its popularity is because it's supposedly based on a true story. True stories of the supernatural always seem more powerful than fictional ones, and it's probably been that way since people started to tell stories.

Increase Mather. Thanks Wikipedia!

In early New England there were of course no movies, so people read stories of supernatural events. Reverend Increase Mather's 1682 book An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences was chock full of them, including the following one about Mary Hortado of Salmon Falls, Maine and her Portuguese husband Antonio. Mather titled it "A Brief Narrative of sundry Apparitions of Satan unto and Assaults at sundry times and places upon the Person of Mary the Wife of Antonio Hortodo, dwelling near the Salmon Falls: Taken from her own mouth, Aug.13, 1683."

Or, as we would say in the 21st century, "based on a true story."

Mary's troubles started one day in June of 1682. The sun was setting, and Mary heard a voice at her door, but when she opened it no one was there. Weird, but nothing particularly creepy. Maybe Mary thought it was just a prankster, but an hour later when she was standing in the doorway an unseen hand punched her in the eye. Yikes!

The odd occurrences continued that week. A large stone was thrown into the house by invisible hands and then disappeared. Shortly afterwards the Hortados' frying pan rang like a bell, loud enough for the neighbors across the river to hear it.

Perhaps it was good that the assailants were mostly invisible, for the glimpses the Hortados caught of them were a little unnerving. For example, one day Mary and her husband Antonio were canoeing across the river when they noticed that something was swimming in front of them. The creature had the "head of a man new-shorn" and the tail of a white cat. They couldn't see the rest of its body and the creature vanished. It reappeared and followed them again when they returned home across the river. Another apparition appeared twice to Mary in the shape of a woman dressed for travel, once brandishing a fiery brand and laughing silently at her. I think the implication here is that the woman was a witch's spirit, probably from a distant town or city (hence the traveling clothes).

Image taken from this blog about 17th century American women.

The spirits also continued to invisibly assault Mary. She was struck by a stone thrown by unseen hands, bitten on the arms ("the impressions of the Teeth being like Mans Teeth"), and scratched on the breast. Her husband Antonio also experienced strange things, but to a lesser degree. He heard footsteps on the second floor of their house when no one was upstairs, and found large sections of their fence thrown down. Perhaps most troubling, he found large hoof prints near the ruined fence, though no cattle were in the area. Was a demon (or Satan himself) responsible for leaving the prints?

The situation became so bad that the Hortados abandoned their house to live on the other side of the river. Before they did, they tried to keep the spirits away by placing bay leaves at the entrances of their house. Increase Mather writes:

I am further informed, that some (who should have been wiser) advised the poor Woman to stick the House round with Bayes, as an effectual preservative against the power of Evil Spirits. This Counsel was followed. And as long as the Bayes continued green, she had quiet ; but when they began to wither, they were all by an unseen hand carried away, and the Woman again tormented.

Although as a Puritan minister Mather disapproved even of protective magic, it seems like bay leaves were the anti-witchcraft herb of choice in the 17th century seacoast area.

By the next year the invisible assaults stopped, and the Hortados' life returned to normal. As Mather writes, "Since when said Mary has been freed from those Satanical Molestations." (I really wanted to use the phrase "Satanical Molsestations.")

I enjoy these stories for their creepy details (I find the cat-tailed creature particularly spooky) and for their insight into the mythic world of witchcraft our ancestors believed in. However, I can understand that some people want an explanation about what was happening in Salmon Falls during 1682. Increase Mather certainly thought it was an authentic case of demonic assault, and I suppose that explanation is sufficient if you believe in demons.

If you want a more scientific explanation you can find one Emerson Baker's book book The Devil of Great Island. Baker, a historian at Salem State, claims that "a close reading of the story indicates that the attacks covered up a serious case of domestic abuse."

Domestic abuse was a major crime in Colonial New England, and one of the few recorded cases that went to trial actually involved Mary's brother-in-law Moses Worcester. Baker bases his argument on the claim that Mary was alone (or perhaps only with her husband) when the attacks happened. He may be right, but I don't think the text is really detailed enough to make that deduction. You can read An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences for yourself and decide. I'd suggest you keep the lights on, because some of the stories are pretty creepy. 

Lovecraft, Poe, and Ghosts in St. John's Churchyard

Last week while we were down in Providence we stopped by St. John's churchyard. Because it was a beautiful day and we all like visiting cemeteries we had a nice time. But if we went at night it seems like I might be telling a different story.

St. John's dates back to the early 18th century, and it's reflected in the gravestones. Rather than the grim skulls you see in older New England cemeteries, the monuments here are decorated with smiling cherubs, urns, and weeping willows. Providence was a well-established commercial port by the 1700s, and people were feeling a lot better about life (and the afterlife).

However, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) reports having a different experience. He wrote the following to a friend:

"About the hidden churchyard of St. John's - there must be some unsuspected vampiric horror burrowing down there & emitting vague miasmatic influences, since you are the third person to receive a definite creep of fear from it ... the others being Samuel Loveman and H. Warner Munn. I took Loveman there at midnight, & when we got separated among the tombs he couldn't be quite sure whether a faint luminosity bobbing above a distant nameless grave was my electric torch or a corpse-light of less describable origin."

Lovecraft also admitted to a friend that he once sat on a tomb in St. John's to write rhyming acrostics of Edgar Allan Poe's name. What's the Poe connection? Well, Poe lived in Providence in the late 1840s while he was courting the poet (and Spiritualist) Sarah Helen Whitman, whose house was behind the cemetery.

Lovecraft wrote in another letter, "...Poe knew of this place, & is said to have wandered among its whispering willows during his visit here 90 years ago." Although the willows have been replaced by a giant beech tree, St. John's is still an evocative place, rich with history and literary tradition. Oh, and maybe something emitting "vague miasmatic influences," if you're into that type of thing.

Next week I won't be posting about H.P. Lovecraft, but if you want to learn more about him be sure to  check out NecronomiCon, a convention dedicated just to this master of horror! I think the word "miasmatic" will be used often.  It take place August 22 - 25 in Providence and passes are still available.

I got my information for this post from Michael Bell's Food for the Dead, and from Dark Destinations.

The Shunned House: Facts As Strange As Fiction

Tony and I were in Providence visiting our friends Bill and Ed, and we decided to stroll down Benefit Street. If you've never been it's a worth checking out for the beautiful architecture.

Look at this photo of 135 Benefit Street. It's such a charming, well-maintained, historic house. Since it's near Brown University, you can also bet it's worth a lot of money.

That wasn't always the case for this particular property. Providence has definitely gentrified in the past few decades, but before that some of these beautiful 18th century homes were downright wrecks. Here's how H.P. Lovecraft describes this house in his story "The Shunned House":

In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled, and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass, and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders.

Lovecraft's short story relates how a prosperous merchant named William Harris builds the house in the 1700s, but he, his family, and his servants slowly sicken and die. Strangely, his wife goes insane before dying and raves wildly in an obscure dialect of French - a language she never learned. Perhaps even more strange is the giant human-shaped patch of phosphorescent mold that grows on the damp cellar floor, which everyone seems to take for granted. Shouldn't they try to remove it? They didn't have dehumidifiers back in the 1700s, obviously.

Virgil Finlay illustration for "The Shunned House" in the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales.Thank you Wikipedia!

One maid employed by the Harrises, a Rhode Islander from someplace wonderfully named Nooseneck Hill, thinks all the suffering might be caused by a vampire of some kind. In her part of Rhode Island people exhume, burn and then consume the hearts of suspected vampires, but the tasteful merchant family fires her for expressing her crazy ideas. They should have listened to her. All the mysterious deaths give the house such a bad reputation that no one, even the indigent, is willing to live there. The house becomes abandoned. 

Don't try to go inside - the house is private property and someone's home.

 In the 1920s, a professor named Elihu Whipple and his nephew decide to investigate the house's unsavory history. They find that a Huguenot (French Protestant) family lived in the same spot in the 1600s. The Huguenot family, who were occultist descendants of an accused werewolf from the French town of Caude, were slain by a mob of their angry Providence neighbors and buried in unmarked graves near their home.

Professor Whipple and his nephew, armed with the latest 1920s scientific devices, decide to spend the night in the shunned house's cellar. I won't give away the final ending of the story, but since it was written by Lovecraft you can bet someone turns into a puddle of slimy yellow grease.

Lovecraft's "The Shunned House" is fiction, but given the sensational nature of this story it's surprising to learn much of  it is actually based on fact. OK, maybe some of those facts are a little legendary...

Convenient street-level access to a cellar haunted by vampiric mold.

 FACT: According to Charles Skinner in Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, there was indeed a human-shaped mold that sucked the life out of people. It seems likely Lovecraft used Skinner's story as an inspiration. Breathe easy, Providence. The vampiric mold was actually found in a house on Green Street in Schenectady, New York and is no longer malevolently active.

FACT: Up until the 1890s, many New Englanders thought consumption (tuberculosis) was caused by the recently dead feeding on their surviving family members from the grave. The cure was to burn and eat one or more of the vampire's internal organs. There were many documented cases of this alleged vampirism in Rhode Island, including most famously one Mercy Brown. The best book about this practice is Michael Bell's Food for the Dead. He also devotes a chapter to "The Shunned House."

FACT: There is a village called Nooseneck in Rhode Island. I hope they sell t-shirts!

FACT: There was a werewolf from the French town of Caude. Jacques Roulet was accused of transforming into a wolf and murdering a young boy in 1598. He was convicted and sent to an insane asylum. As far as we know, none of his ancestors moved to Providence.

FACT: A family graveyard was located at 135 Benefit Street before the Harris House was built. All the remains were moved to the North Burial Ground, but legend claims a few bodies were left behind, including those of a French Huguenot couple. 

FACT: The house on Benefit Street was inhabited by a merchant named Harris, but his real name was Stephen, not William. According to Quahog.org, the Harris family did suffer some bad luck after building the house, including poverty, infant deaths, and the insanity of Mrs. Harris. Mrs. Harris was known to shout wildly in French - a language she had never learned.

A Haunted House and Puritan Fornication

Instead of one big topic, this week I just wanted to share a couple interesting things.

First up, a horror movie called The Conjuring opened this week. It's supposedly based on an actual haunting that occurred in Burrillville, Rhode Island in the early 1970s.

The supernatural shenanigans started almost immediately after Carolyn and Roger Perron moved their family into an old farmhouse. Objects moved on their own, blood oozed out of food, and strange voices were heard in empty rooms. The wife Carolyn was particularly afflicted by the multiple spirits that haunted the house.


Eventually, Ed and Lorrain Warren (ghost hunters who later became famous for The Amityville Horror) showed up at the Perron's house to investigate. I won't tell you what they found in case you want to see the movie, but you can also read about their investigation in this article from The Providence Journal.

Although Ed Warren has passed away, Lorraine still actively investigates the paranormal and maintains an occult museum in her home in Monroe, Connecticut. This sounds like a great field trip, but don't touch the exhibits - most of them are cursed. Youtube has a short video tour of the museum:



Fast forward to 3:00 if you want to see a spooky possessed doll named Annabelle, and then watch to the end to see a sinister wooden statue found by a hunter lost in the woods of Newtown, Connecticut. Creepy!

Maybe all this is too scary for you and you want something a little more academic. In that case, I give you this article that appeared in Boston.com about fornication charges in colonial America. A professor at Louisville University has recently published a paper on the topic, and she notes that women were charged for fornication more than any other crime in 17th century New England. There was even a category of crime called "open and notorious fornication." I suppose Puritan sex laws are scary in their own way, but unlike the ghosts who sometimes haunt our houses the sex laws seem to be staying dead and buried.