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Is There Anything You've Grown LESS Sceptical Of?

Min Bannister said:
The plot of Heart of Midlothian revolves around a woman who was sentenced to death for concealing pregnancy and subsequently losing the baby. It is set in 1736 and was written in 1818.

Edit - sorry, he was stolen and sold by gypsies. Either way, it is not a good look for how unmarried mothers were treated.
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Well yes, but Walter Scott wasn't exactly known for his historical accuracy - and a novel is akin to ghost stories, they have to be 'dramatic'. Like all those heroines in the early B&W films being thrown out into the snow by rapacious landlords; no doubt it happened, but not quite as frequently as popular culture would have us believe.

Many many girls, particularly servant or working class girls got pregnant 'out of wedlock'. Lots of them. Many just got married off to the first man who'd have them, others just dumped the children on their mother or sisters. They weren't killing themselves in their thousands because of the 'shame'. Until the Victorians came along and told them they should.
 
But, in the Victorian setting, were the accounts a warning, an ideal for society or reality?
Considering the assumed predilection for young men/masters getting their servants with child (a carry-over from slavery but not legalised), you'd assume a massive population of destitute single mothers who are unemployable.
 
Not sure whether to be sceptical of this or not. It's a legend, or perhaps a FOAFtale, in my family, that one of my fairly recent ancestors (i.e. late nineteenth or early twentieth century) was an abandoned baby - a foundling, in fact. Apparently one of my actual ancestors found a baby boy abandoned at the edge of a field where a band of gypsies had been camped, and adopted it into the family.

One can easily enough imagine what happened; a Romany girl, probably underaged, made pregnant either by a close relative or by a non-Romany boy, either of which would have been a cause for shame, abandoned the baby where she hoped he might be found. So, depending how far back this happened, I might be one-thirtysecond, or one-sixteenth, or even one-eighth Romany. Which might explain a lot.

Again, I don't know whether to be sceptical or not, but it's a fascinating tale.
 
Yes, girls got pregnant. Master of the house, exercising his droit de seigneur, girls having sex with boyfriends, being taken advantage of, etc etc. But they didn't all go and throw themselves in ponds, out of buildings, hang themselves in the barn ...any of the things that lead to 'ghost stories'. In fact, I would hazard that very few did. Some would abandon the baby, many would just have it and hand it out to family members or take it around with them (even calling themselves 'widows'). To hear some of the ghost stories, you would have thought that being pregnant and unmarried was an instant death sentence, when in fact, apart from the very rich where parentage was important, it was just one of those things. Girls may 'lose their position' in a household, but there was agricultural work and other work that could be undertaken at home. Having an illegitimate child wasn't quite the life-ending event that ghost stories try to lead us to believe.
 
Illegitimacy was quite common in much of England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and there was often little stigma attached, although there was always friction relating to the possible extra burden on the poor rates. Anyone who’s interested can look out my book ‘Courtship, illegitimacy and marriage in early modern England’. Some individual tragedies did occur, which could be written up in heartbreaking detail, but this was not the usual experience.

Foundlings were regularly recorded in London decades or centuries before Thomas Coram founded his specialist hospital.
 
This is why I previously theorised, in one of our Ghosts threads, that such tales of ghosts being the spirits of cruelly abandoned women may have been a kind of quiet protest abut how the rich mistreated the poor: these accounts might not be true but they were emotionally true to those who told them...tales of injustice as a communal consolation and as a lesson for future generations.
 
Steven said:
This is why I previously theorised, in one of our Ghosts threads, that such tales of ghosts being the spirits of cruelly abandoned women may have been a kind of quiet protest abut how the rich mistreated the poor: these accounts might not be true but they were emotionally true to those who told them.
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And perhaps it is the rarity of such tragedies that led to them becoming embedded in local consciousness, the tragedy and the unfairness of it all... after all, if it happened all the time, people being people, they would more-or-less say "oh dear, there goes another one" and carry on.
 
My main objection to the 'pregnant maid/killed self/shame/Grey Lady Walks' thing is that there don't seem to be many actual records. It's all 'it is said'. There should be actual, written records of such things (I know many are supposed to have happened before general records were kept, but really, not one single local clergyman making a note?).

I'm sure it really did happen, but not to the extent that walking Grey Ladies backstories would have us believe. See also 'Killed Self for Love' with teenage girls being forbidden to marry the stable boy and throwing themselves out of windows - lots of ghostly backstories but not much in the way of actual, real written records.
 
It must be taken into account that certain attitudes which were common then are rare now. Thus, it's so alien that "she found herself unmarried and pregnant" is a reason for suicide.
I suspect that sometimes this trope is used to fill a story. Tragedy? Check. Victim? Check? There is no need for actual reality. Romantic fiction at it's core.
If you want a back story to a haunting, this is your go-to.
As 'evidence' for phenomena it's self-defeating. Lazy.
 
catseye said:
Well yes, but Walter Scott wasn't exactly known for his historical accuracy - and a novel is akin to ghost stories, they have to be 'dramatic'. Like all those heroines in the early B&W films being thrown out into the snow by rapacious landlords; no doubt it happened, but not quite as frequently as popular culture would have us believe.

Many many girls, particularly servant or working class girls got pregnant 'out of wedlock'. Lots of them. Many just got married off to the first man who'd have them, others just dumped the children on their mother or sisters. They weren't killing themselves in their thousands because of the 'shame'. Until the Victorians came along and told them they should.
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My maternal great-grandmother was such a one - she had a baby boy as a single young woman in 1919, held on to him, and a few months later married my great-grandfather who maybe wasn't considered a conventional 'good catch' - he had a minor disability, was 20 years older but by all accounts was a very good husband and father, she went on to have a daughter (my granny) and another son.
 
AnonyJ said:
My maternal great-grandmother was such a one - she had a baby boy as a single young woman in 1919, held on to him, and a few months later married my great-grandfather who maybe wasn't considered a conventional 'good catch' - he had a minor disability, was 20 years older but by all accounts was a very good husband and father, she went on to have a daughter (my granny) and another son.
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My grandmother did the same - illegitimate baby at 20, kept her, went on to marry (a different man), had three more children, then divorced him in 1939 (which was almost unheard of, and disgraceful). Her family stopped speaking to her, but nobody regarded her as unemployable.
 
Apart from the link in the post I cant add much more, used to see it most days sometimes
2 or 3 times a day no noise no bad feelings, just accepted it was there and did no harm,
next doors cat Pushkin a great fluffy white thing would often come in but never as far
as I remember reacted in any way, the house is now gone replaced by some sort of centre,
I do wonder if they have a little black visitor but no way of knowing.
Now a days I would set up camera's and such but those were the days of 35mm film pity.

This is were the house once was looks like flats.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.5...HRfOlhHt-2gJNI7Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
 
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RaM said:
Up to my late twenty's I didn't believe in ghosts even though I had been told tales
of them by people I did not doubt on other things I just could not believe there was
anything to it, then we moved into a house haunted by a black kitten, lived there a
few years and there was no alternative you had to believe.
:omr:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-ghosts-of-my-life.59546/#post-1556217
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One of my all-time favourite hauntings was being told by two different people at different times that the gatehouse lodge in Devon they had both lived in had a resident ghost in the form of a black cat. One of the witnesses had cats of his own, the other didn't but both would see it walk into a room and then vanish.
 
It was thought lucky for a building but likely not the cat to bury one in the foundations
and often a cat would get under the floor during construction and get trapped so dead
and often mummified cats are found under floors, so if ghosts are something to do with
the dead it is not surprising if buildings have a ghostly cat.
:litg:
 
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