The more people in the Victorian era were addicted to the supernatural, the more there were hoaxes. In the "age of reason", most considered ghosts to be superstition, but the fear of "beings from another world" is rooted in the human subconscious, and now it burst out. In an article published in Folklore magazine, historians David Waldron & Sharn Waldron recount this phenomenon from colonial Australia in the mid to late 19th century.
I see the dead
If in England representatives of the idle "golden youth" dressed in a sheet and went to frighten citizens, then in the English colonies they caught quite rational, respected and seemingly not prone to antisocial behavior. Among them were school teachers, housewives, officials and even ordinary workers who seemed to have no time for such entertainment. Therefore, despite the fact that this phenomenon was common to England and its colonies, it was perceived and manifested in different ways.
According to Carl Jung, ghosts are archetypes - universal basic innate mental structures that make up the collective unconscious. The visions associated with them are capable of turning off the logical thinking of a person. The ghost-costumes hoaxers exploited this very principle.
In the middle of the 19th century, the Australian state of Victoria became a center for spiritualism and a source of folklore about the supernatural. The local press wrote about the whole "reactionary movement against materialist philosophy."
Prose, press and folklore
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In this atmosphere, ghost stories were extremely popular and shaped Australian colonial folklore. Many folklore images were well known to Europeans and British, since the local population consisted of immigrants from these countries: headless horses, women in white, animal spirits and ghosts of the slain. Publications in the press about meetings with them spurred authors of fiction, who turned folklore into novels and stories.
Lady Helena Newenham and the ghost of her daughter, June 4, 1872. Photo: Frederick Hudson / Wikipedia
By 1890, public excitement around such stories, fueled by pranks and hoaxes, forced newspapers to talk about "ghost obsession." The panic caused by eyewitness accounts was reflected in the regional budget, increasing the cost of maintaining order. Some media even called for the posting of patrols of constables to shoot at any moving silhouette that resembles a ghost. If the creature is incorporeal, then the bullet will not harm him, the journalists reasoned, and if this is a person dressed up as a ghost, so much the worse for him.
While most newspapers have had a fair amount of sarcasm and skepticism about ghosts, they also added fuel to the fire. Some reporters tried to debunk the hoaxes. You can recall the story of a "headless dog" who turned out to be a cat with its head stuck in a tin can, or the story of a miner about a terrible woman with a "transparent body" riding a horse, for which he mistook an abandoned mannequin standing near a log.
Other correspondents were slow to draw conclusions. They did not claim the reality of ghosts, but noted that visions help, for example, find the place of murder of a particular victim.
Jokers
The hoaxers (usually men) dressed up as ghosts (they sewed the costumes themselves) and went out on the road at night, groaning and frightening passers-by. Sometimes they even attacked them.
Each had its own special style, and the "overalls" were very different, which allowed newspapermen to give the "ghosts" nicknames. For example, the Bombardier wizard: his white robe was complemented by a white pointed cap. He frightened workers and passers-by on the road between Ballarat and Kilmore, emitting terrible screams and throwing stones. The wizard bombardier loved to play cat and mouse with the law enforcement officers, who organized unsuccessful raids on him. In the end, he was still caught by two local residents - and beaten.
Some pranksters applied phosphorescent paint to their costumes, which became available in Australia at the end of the 19th century. They glowed in the night, and passers-by were even more frightened. Sometimes skulls and bones or other eerie signs were painted with this paint on the walls of houses.
Illustration for Walter Woodbury's book Photographic Amusements, 1896. Illustration: Wikipedia
Interestingly, the phosphorescent solution was very toxic. Poisoning with them led to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, diseases of the digestive system, diarrhea, urinary incontinence, visual impairment, increased pressure, causeless anxiety, tremors and seizures. Such jokers might well even fall into a coma and die. Turning themselves into a symbol of death, they themselves brought it closer to themselves.
Sometimes the image of a ghost helped criminals hide their identity during robbery or rape. An example is a former patient of the Ararat insane asylum, who wandered the streets of Ballarat in black clothes smeared with phosphorescent paint and tried to rape local girls. Eventually vigilant citizens grabbed him and took him to the police.
In the city of Bendigo, a man painted a skull with bones on his bare chest, signed the drawing with the word "death" and performed acts of exhibitionism in a cemetery. There, another man in a white cloak soaked in phosphorescent solution attacked women at night. There were also more dangerous cases: for example, a certain man, smeared with glowing paint, with a coffin on his back, stabbed a miner with a knife who came to the aid of a girl whom the "ghost" was trying to rape.
In 1904, Herbert Patrick McLennan was arrested for indecent behavior and attacks on women. He wore high rubber boots and a white cloak, and had a nine-tailed whip with him. Although a five-pound reward was established for information about him, McLennan managed to escape justice for a long time.
Mocking the authorities, he once sent a letter to the Mayor of Ballarat:
McLennan was a renowned and respected teacher of public speaking. His arrest caused shock among the local population and sparked heated discussions. Despite his high social status, the police have long suspected him and collected evidence that the "ghost" was him.
Not only men were pretending to be ghosts. One woman did this to steal chickens and eggs. Another, previously seen wearing men's clothing, was caught under a bridge in a suit smeared with phosphorescent paint and a creepy mask. Newspapers also reported about a woman in the guise of a ghost playing guitar outside a hotel in Sandhurst.
A joker in a ghost costume is beaten by disgruntled citizens. Devon, England, 1894. Illustration in Police News Illustration: Public Domain
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Although the criminal motives in the described cases are obvious, such behavior was also a way to challenge the materialist ideology of the "age of reason". "Ghosts" rebelled against Victorian morality and notions of respectability of a particular member of society. These people tried to refute the thesis that prejudices remained in the distant past, thus trying to change the existing status quo as a whole.
Unsurprisingly, many of these pranksters abandoned traditional gender roles and violated all kinds of social taboos - dress, behavior, and abusive language. The care with which they designed their costumes, risked being caught or poisoned with toxic paint, shows how important the feeling of belonging to the idea of denial of social norms was to them. "Ghosts" can be considered the embodiment of colonial Australia - the land of immigrants who invaded the territory of a foreign culture of aborigines and did not find a place for themselves in the not yet fully formed new Australian society.
Mikhail Karpov
