Medieval Ghost Stories

by Andrew Joynes

  The year passed, but the debtor neither discharged the debt nor sought an extension of the loan. And of course, since no-one else but the deceased Herveus had been aware of the loan agreement, it seemed likely that he would get away with this avaricious behaviour. But the deceased, aware even in death of an obligation of brotherhood towards the monks, became anxious lest the debtor’s fraudulent behaviour meant that they would lose what he had arranged should be repaid to them. Therefore he made an appearance, dressed in monk’s habit, to the chaplain of the church with which he had been associated, who was travelling on the road to Tours. When the chaplain saw, by the clear light of day, a man whom he knew to have died, he was at first terribly frightened. But the dead man made the sign of the cross and said: ‘Do not be afraid, but listen carefully to what I have to say. I have been permitted to appear not so as to bring you harm but to convey benefit upon you.’ He then went on: ‘You must know how I wasted my life, and how lost my soul would have been if it were not for the prayers of the brothers of Marmoutier, who rescued me by calling upon the immense pity of the Lord. Now, in the purgatorial fires I am discharging my obligations through torments which far exceed the pain of mortal life. Soon, beset with freezing cold, I shall stand ready and waiting for the greater bliss which will follow the universal judgment. But I am constantly held back by the deceit of that treacherous companion of ours. The term which I set out for the repayment of the debt has expired, and he should by now have paid the money he owed to the brothers of Marmoutier. You therefore will go to him on my behalf to ensure that there is no more prevarication. Tell him to pay what he promised under sworn oath and kiss of peace. If he does not do so, I will ensure that his soul is answerable at the Day of Judgment.’

  With these words, the dead man disappeared. The chaplain immediately sought out the debtor and, recounting the vision, urged him to repay the debt. At first the defaulter contended that the chaplain had been deceived by a phantasm of his own disturbed mind, and said he would never feel himself under any obligation to follow the dictates of the dead. But almost immediately – in fact on the day after the apparition of the deceased man – the debtor was afflicted by a pain so great that he feared he was about to die. Whereupon he acknowledged his obligations, proving that, through the all-seeing power of God, no-one is able to escape judgment. He told the chaplain to call together the monks, paid the debt that he owed, and then transferred both his property and himself into their hands, thereby following in the holy footsteps of his first creditor Herveus. Through such outcomes does God give signs of both judgment and mercy …

  Source: Re-told from the Latin De Rebus Gestis in Majori Monasterio Saeculo XI, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, CXLIX, col. 409.

  The Autobiography of Guibert of Nogent

  Although the monk Guibert of Nogent (c.1064–c.1125) is best known as a chronicler of the First Crusade, his autobiography, De Vita Sua, which was written towards the end of his life in a conscious attempt to emulate the Confessions of St Augustine, contains many examples of the way the medieval mind tested every experience, however personal, against a theological model. The following story, however, is unusual in that it conveys the extent to which, even in the ‘theo-logically correct’ eleventh-century, a strong-minded individual such as Guibert’s mother could take control of the spiritual and emotional pattern of her own life. The story is not a ghost story as such; the apparitions of Guibert’s father and his illegitimate child appeared to his mother in a kind of waking vision, which, significantly, occurred on the Sabbath so that its contents would have been interpreted as having heavenly authority. However, it does contain a strong suggestion that Guibert’s mother was in effect haunted, as by a piteously crying ghostly child, by the knowledge of her husband’s infidelity and its illegitimate outcome. Guibert describes how, with extraordinary self-denial, his mother adopted and cared for an orphaned baby in the belief that by doing so she was relieving the suffering that her vision had shown the spirits of her husband and his child to be undergoing. It was a process of symbolic transference (what Guibert calls ‘measure for measure’) which might have won the approval of a modern psycho-therapist as a means of laying the emotional ghosts of the past.

  The Crying Child

  Book I, Chap. XVIII

  One summer Sunday night, just after Matins, my mother lay down on her narrow bed and began to fall asleep, and it seemed to her that her soul was leaving her body, although she was still aware of what was happening. It seemed that she was being led along a kind of corridor, and at last she left it behind and came to the edge of a deep abyss. Suddenly from this abyss creatures with the appearance of ghosts jumped out, with worms in their hair, and made as if to grasp her and pull her down to them. She was greatly frightened, when suddenly from behind her a voice cried out: ‘Do not touch her.’ At the sound of that commanding voice, the creatures fell back into the abyss. I should note that, as she was being led along the corridor, she had prayed to God that she should be allowed to re-enter her body.

  After she had been saved from the creatures in the pit, she stood by its edge and suddenly saw my father, with the same appearance that he had when he was young. Peering closely at him, she tearfully asked whether his name was Evrard (as he had been called when he was young) but he denied this. It is of course not surprising that a spirit should not respond to the name which it was given when alive, for spirit can only respond in accordance with its spiritual nature [I Corinthians II, 12–15]. Furthermore, it is impossible to believe that spirits know each other only by their mortal names; if this were the case, we would not know anyone in the world to come except those already close to us in life. It is unnecessary therefore that spirits should have names, since all their awareness is of an internal spiritual nature.

  Although he did not respond to the name by which she called him, she sensed that it was her husband. She asked him where he was staying. He gave her to believe that the place was not far from there, and that he was compelled to stay there. When she asked him how he was, he revealed his arm and his flank, which were both so torn and wounded that she was horrified and aghast. In the same place there was the apparition of a little child, crying in such distress that she was greatly disturbed at the sight. She was so upset at the crying child that she asked him: ‘My lord, how can you stand this child and its crying?’ His reply was: ‘I have no choice. I must endure it.’

  Now the following meaning can be attached to the crying child and the wounds on the spirit’s arm and flank. When my father was young, he had been prevented from making love with my mother through a malign spell which certain people had cast upon him; and at the same time he had been given the wicked advice that, as a young man, he should establish whether he was still able to have intercourse with other women. Young as he was, he followed this advice, and having committed the sin of attempting to lie with some immoral woman or other, he fathered a child which died before it was baptised. The wounds to his arm and side signified the breaking of his vows of marriage; the weeping of that troubled little voice was proof of the damnation of that misbegotten child. This, O Lord and Source of Abundant Goodness, was the punishment on the soul of a sinner …

  … My mother understood the meaning of the cries of the child, whose brief mortal existence she already knew about, from the precise manner in which the apparition corresponded to what she knew to be the facts … And being in no doubt about this, she gave herself over to providing help for my father. Providing measure for measure, she undertook to bring up a little child whose parents had died when it was just a few months old. But because the Evil One detests good intentions quite as much as loyal actions, the baby caused so much trouble to my mother and her household by its incessant screaming and crying at night that no-one in the same confined space could get any sleep. By day, incidentally, it was quiet and well-behaved, playing and sleeping in turn. I have heard the nursemaids that she employed say that every night they had to shake the baby’s rattle con
stantly, so restless was he – not that the child was badly behaved in itself, but was made so by the guile of the Devil, which not even a woman’s loving care could completely drive out.

  My worthy mother was severely pained and tormented by all this; as the child’s shrill cries went on, there was no way in which she could ease her aching head, nor could she look for sleep to bring any comfort in her trouble, since she was continually disturbed by the fury of the child. But although she went every night without sleep, she never gave the appearance of fatigue when it came to her nightly prayers. She was convinced that her suffering had the purpose of easing her husband’s troubles, of which she had become aware in her vision. She willingly underwent these troubles, because she believed, correctly, that by sharing in his suffering she was lessening the torment of the other. She never locked the door against the child, never cared for him any the less. In fact, the more she became aware that the Devil was wickedly attempting to undermine her resolution, the more resigned she was to any disturbance and inconvenience. Indeed, the more she sensed the Devil’s disruptive influence over the child’s behaviour, the more convinced she became that she was countering his wicked control over her husband’s spirit …

  Source: Re-told from the Latin De Vita Sua Guiberti Abbatis Sanctae Mariae de Novigento, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, CLVI, cols. 876–9. An edition of the autobiography was published as Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent, ed. J.F. Benton, trans. C.C. Swinton Bland, New York (Harper) 1970.

  The ‘Book of Miracles’ of Peter the Venerable

  Peter the Venerable (c.1092–1156) was abbot of Cluny, the greatest monastic foundation of its time, from 1122 until his death. He was one of the most influential churchmen of the twelfth century, both in terms of his institutional power as head of a network of Cluniac monasteries (thereby representing the traditions of the ‘black monks’ operating within a reformed Benedictine rule at a time when the Cistercian ‘white monks’ were expanding their influence under his friend and rival Bernard of Clairvaux) and because of his extensive writings on theology. The accounts of various apparitions of the dead in Peter’s De Miraculis represent the pinnacle of the twelfth-century use of the ghost story for the specific institutional advantage of a monastic foundation. Many of these stories demonstrate Peter’s ‘external’ political concern to defend Cluny’s interests as a territorial and financial unit. The apparition of Bernard le Gros, for instance, relates to the perennial problem of baronial depredation from lands adjacent to monastic holdings. A significant detail is the fox-fur cloak which Bernard’s apparition is wearing: it has been permitted to retain the cloak as a reward for a good deed in life, and is one of its few sources of comfort amid the torments of Purgatory.

  The Apparition of Bernard le Gros

  Book I, Chap. XI

  Bernard le Gros, who was renowned both for his noble lineage and his secular power, owned a number of castles in the vicinity of Cluny. From these fortifications he carried out many raids against the monastic lands and other churches nearby. Finally, however, having undergone a spiritual conversion, he sought out the reverend father Hugo [St Hugh, a former abbot of Cluny] and told him of his wish to go to Rome to pray for his sins. He promised that if he came back, he would renounce the world and become a monk at Cluny.

  Bernard duly left for Rome, and there, among the holy relics of the apostles and martyrs, he made use of prayers and alms, attempting to expiate the crimes of his past life with all true remorse and penitence. After spending in this way the forty days normally assigned to sinners for the expression of due penitence, he left Rome on the homeward journey. While he was staying in the city of Sutri, not far from Rome, a sickness which he had contracted some time before grew worse. There, as his death approached in a foreign land, he was cared for and was finally buried by his companions.

  Some years afterwards, the steward of one of Cluny’s dependent lands was making his way, in the middle of the day, through a forest near the castle of Uxelles. This was one of the castles which had been built by Bernard le Gros, and it was from there that Bernard’s men-at-arms often sallied forth to ravage the surrounding districts and take everything which fell into their hands. While this steward was riding along, he suddenly found himself face to face with Bernard. When he saw the apparition, mounted on a mule and dressed in a cloak of new fox-fur, and remembering that Bernard was dead, the steward was at first struck with terror; but, overcoming his fear, he asked the apparition whether it was indeed the person whom it seemed to be, and why it had come back. This was the reply:

  ‘You should know that I am indeed Bernard, the former lord of this region. As many people know, I was the cause of many misdeeds and because of them I am myself suffering greatly now. But what troubles me above everything else is the construction of the nearby castle, which, as you know, was built on my orders. Although it seems that, because at the end of my life I repented and did penance for my worst actions, I have escaped eternal damnation, I still have a great and present need of help to achieve a true liberation of my soul. For that reason, I have been given permission to come back to implore the forgiveness of the abbot of Cluny. For a long time, I have been following the abbot’s processional progress [through Cluny’s domains] and last week, while he was lodged near Anse, I actually spent the night among the members of his household. I beg you now to go and find him and implore him immediately to have pity on me.’

  When the steward asked the ghostly speaker why he was wearing a cloak of fox-fur, the reply came: ‘When I was still alive, I bought this fur, and on the very day that I wore it for the first time, I gave it away to a poor man. Because it was new when I gave it away, it remains new even now. I cannot describe the comfort it brings me in the midst of my torment.’

  With these words, the apparition disappeared, leaving the steward to fulfil the charge that had been laid upon him. He sought out the worthy abbot and told him everything that had happened. Abbot Hugh listened favourably to the supplication of the deceased and, full of the spirit of charity, busied himself with many oblations and offerings of the divine sacrifice which might come to the aid of a soul labouring under the eternal judgment. It seemed likely to him that, in this way, the soul would be freed of its torments, and brought to the repose of the blessed, according to the provisions of celestial providence. After all, it would have been very unlikely that a spirit which had been subject to the judgment of God would have been permitted to come back to implore help in its liberation if its return had not been of any conceivable use … And the spirit would not have asked to be succoured by the sacraments and by the performance of holy works, if it had not known that these would be worthwhile. By imploring help through such means, the spirit of the deceased demonstrated the efficacy of these holy works and proved that it merited help in this way.

  As for the man who had witnessed the vision, the holy abbot predicted that he would soon die. For indeed, in days such as these when apparitions of dead people occur quite frequently, one often hears that someone who has spoken to a spirit dies soon afterwards. The steward, struck by the horror of the ghostly vision and by the subsequent warning of the holy man, soon renounced the world, and ended his life as a monk shortly afterwards …

  The Apparitions in Spain

  Book I, Chap. XXVIII

  This lengthy account of ghostly visions given to Peter the Venerable in Spain by one Pedro d’Englebert of Estella was very timely from the point of view of the ‘external’ diplomacy of Cluny. As Abbot of Cluny, Peter had journeyed across the Pyrenees to meet King Alfonso VII of Leon–Castile to negotiate the settlement of arrears in the golden cense traditionally paid to Cluny by the Castilian monarchy. No doubt the satisfactory outcome of these negotiations when the abbot met the king at Salamanca in 1143 was helped by information Peter gave the monarch about the spiritual benefit accruing to the soul of the king’s grandfather Alfonso VI because of the prayers of Cluniac monks: this ne
ws had been obligingly relayed from the afterlife by the ghosts who appeared to the informant Pedro d’Englebert. This story is also noteworthy for the reference by the ghosts to the fact that they are travelling with a great army of the dead, a detail which is reminiscent of the Mirabilia accounts of Wild Hunts and spectral rabbles in Part Two.

  Peter the Venerable writes: … There is, in Spain, an illustrious stronghold which, because of its favourable situation, the fertility of the surrounding countryside and the number of its inhabitants, greatly surpasses the surrounding villages and which is called, not without reason, Estella [‘Star’]. In this place lived a gentlemen who came originally from Burgos, called Pedro d’Englebert. Celebrated for his valour and favoured with worldly riches, he lived in the world for most of his life until, touched in his old age by the Holy Spirit, he renounced the world and received the habit of a monk in the monastery of Najera, which was placed under the rule and jurisdiction of Cluny.

  When I arrived there, two years after Pedro had taken the habit, I learnt that he had recounted a memorable vision of which I had already heard without knowing its origin. Having eagerly enquired where the narrator of such a great report was to be found, I was told that he lived in a nearby hermitage, which was a dependency of the monastery of Najera. When my itinerary took me there, I met a man who seemed to merit total confidence by virtue of his mature years and the gravity of his demeanour, the sight of his snow-white beard and hair combining with the good report of others to invite our trust. However, wishing to rule out all suspicion of doubt, as much on my part as on that of others, I summoned him in the presence of the much-respected bishops of Orensa and Osma, as well as our colleagues, who were people of great religious and scientific authority. Emphasising that the truth sanctified those who forswore deceit, and adding many other remarks of this kind to prevent him from lying, I not only urged but commanded him, by virtue of the obedience he owed to me as a monk to an abbot, to tell us what he knew of this vision. Whereupon Pedro revealed what until then had been completely unknown. It is appropriate therefore that I should leave the words to him: