Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (87 page)

The culmination of that foul rite which they impiously call the baptism is the sacrifice of an animal; sometimes a goat, sometimes a young bull. In this case the bull had been selected.

Before the knife is drawn across the throat of the animal, however, the candidate for the baptism, on hands and knees, and stripped naked as the hour he was born, must ‘confront’ the goat or the bull. Yes, Malling, as I gathered it from those twisted, pain-galled lips of that black fiend, the two, the candidate and the sacrificial animal, gaze for a long period into each other’s eyes; the belief being that in this way the two, for the time being, exchange, as it were, their personalities! It seems incredible that it should be believed, yet such is what he assured us of.

In the ordinary course, the officiating priest having determined that this alleged exchange of personalities had indeed taken place, the animal is abruptly killed, its throat being cut across with a sharpened machete or canebill. At this, the personality of the human being retransfers itself to its proper abode; yet some modicum of it is supposed to remain in the animal, and this on the animal’s death, passes out of it and into the custody of the thing they name the Guinea Snake, which is the ultimate object of their nefarious devotions, as a sacrifice, given up by the candidate thereto.

Such, as it was explained to us, is the underlying principle of a voodooist’s baptism.

That is how it would have occurred in the case of Otto Andreas, if there had not been a kind of unexpected hitch. Naturally, one would gather, the nervous and mental strain upon such a candidate would be an extremely severe one. In the case of my half-brother it proved too severe.

Otto Andreas had dropped dead, doubtless from heart failure induced by the strain of it all, there on the platform, just at the very moment before Pap’ Joseph himself, as he assured us, who was officiating at the baptism, was to slaughter the bull.

The personalities, as the voodooists believed, were at that moment entirely interchanged. In other words, lacking the release and relocation of these, which would have come at the knife stroke across the bullock’s throat, the ‘soul’ of the sacrificial animal died at the moment of Otto Andreas’ unexpected death, and –
the soul of Otto Andreas remained in the bullock
.

‘An’ so, sar,’ finished Pap’ Joseph, with a devilish leer in his eyes, and addressing me, ‘yo’ is destroy the life of yo’ bruddah, sar, when yo’ is so hasty as to shoot de bull!’

The witch-doctor, it transpired from a portion of this account, had given old Herman the orders – not knowing of my imminent return home – to keep the bullock in the hall, because he was ‘making magic’ to get the ‘souls’ exchanged back again! It had, of course, been necessary to bury Otto Andreas’ body. But we were assured, if the bullock had been left alone, it would, by now, have been changed back into Otto Andreas, a process which, the witch-doctor gravely assured us, required not only a great skill in magicking like his own, but considerable time!

There was only one thing to be done that night. Pap’ Joseph was sent back to the Christiansfort, with instructions that he was to be liberated the following morning at six o’clock. Then the four of us, having placed a blanket about the body of Otto Andreas, carried it among us to the cemetery. Arrived there, with the two spades we had fetched along, Hansen and Knudsen set to work to dig up the coffin. It was moonlight and, of course, at that hour of the night no one was in or even near the cemetery.

The earth, even for a newly made grave, was unusually loose, it seemed to all of us. A spade struck wood, about four feet down. Macartney spelled his son-in-law. I offered to do the same for Knudsen, but he refused. Within a minute he said in a puzzled tone – ‘What is this!’

He squatted down in the grave and with his gloved hands threw up a mass of soft earth about something he had discovered.

Malling, they had disinterred a smashed coffin, a coffin burst out of semblance to the narrow box which is designed to be the last housing place of a human form. And no wonder it had been burst asunder, from the monstrous thing which came partially to light. We did not wholly uncover what he had discovered down there under the surface of the holy ground. There was no need, Malling.

It had been the stiff, unyielding, bony limb of a four-legged horned animal, from which Knudsen had thrown up the loose earth. A bullock was buried there, where some thirty-six hours previously men had interred the body of my late half-brother Otto Andreas Gannett. Pap’ Joseph, it appeared, under that direful compulsion to which he had so reluctantly yielded, had told us the truth.

We hastily enlarged the grave sufficiently to receive the body we had brought with us and, leaving a higher mound than had met us on our arrival, though beaten down with the flats of the spades, we came back swiftly and in silence to my house and there, as brother Freemasons, swore that, save for this information to you, our fellow brother Freemason, which I specified as an exception, we would none of us – and the others during the term of my life – reveal anything of what we had heard to any man. Knudsen answered for his
gendarmes
and from the reputation he bears as a disciplinarian, I have little fear that either of them will ever mention what part of it all they were privileged to witness.

This will serve, then, my friend, to account to you for why I am leaving Santa Cruz and going to Scotland whence our family came here four generations ago, when these islands were for the first time opened to the settlement of planters other than natives of Denmark through the generosity of the Danish government. I can not stay in this cursed house where such things as confound man’s understanding have taken place; and so I place my property in your kind and efficient hands, my friend Malling, in the belief that I have made my reasons for such a decision clear.

I am taking with me to Scotland my faithful old servant Herman. I would not leave him here to endure the tender mercies of that pestiferous scoundrel Pap’ Joseph, whose orders, out of faithfulness to me, he broke. One cannot tell what would happen to the poor old fellow if I were so inconsiderate.

I remain, yours most faithfully and to command,

Angus Gannett

P.S. Knudsen, of course, insists that some blacks, followers of Pap’ Joseph, merely exchanged the bodies of the bullock and my half-brother, during the interval, after my shooting of the beast, in which my hall remained unvisited by any of my household.

A. G.

3

I finished the account and handed it back to Herr Malling. I thanked him for his extraordinary courtesy in allowing me to read it. And then I walked straight to Gannett House to look once more at that hall where all this mysterious succession of strange affairs had taken place. I sat down, after Robertson had let me in, in the place usually occupied by Mrs Garde, and Robertson brought me a solitary tea on the great circular tray.

I could not forbear glancing up toward the place once occupied by that board platform where a voodoo baptism had all but taken place; a strange rite interrupted just before its culmination by the collapse of long dead and gone Otto Andreas, with his unquenchable desire for the fellowship of the Snake! There are strange matters in our West Indies. Well, God was, always had been, always will be, stronger than the Snake. There would be, I felt well assured, no recurrence of that strange vision which had projected itself after all these years, of that bullock’s ‘almost human’ eyes, reproachful, pathetic, as Mrs Garde had said, looking down at the grim Scot with his steady hand leveling his great horse pistol at the point between those eyes.

Mrs Garde returned to her hired house infinitely refreshed by her sea voyage, her mind occupied with other affairs than the horror of the wall near the portrait of her late husband.

There was, as I had anticipated, no recurrence of the phenomenon.

Naturally, Mrs Garde was solicitous to inquire what I had done to remove the appearance which had done so much to destroy her comfort and happiness, but I was loath to explain the matter to her, and managed never to do so. Perhaps her splendid gentility sensed that I did not wish to offer her explanations. Mrs Garde was a Boston Unitarian, and Boston Unitarians are apt to take things on an intellectual basis. Such are not likely to be sympathetically familiar with such other-worldly affairs as the exorcism of a house, routine affair as it had been to good Fr Richardson.

Besides, I have no doubt, Mrs Garde was so pleased at the non-recurrence of the old annoyance, that she probably attributed it to something popularly called ‘eye strain’. There was nothing to remind her of that bloody-faced, pathetic-eyed bullock, drooping to its final fall. Otto Andreas Gannett was not even a memory in Christiansted. We had many delightful tea parties, and several evening dances, in that magnificent hall of Gannett House that winter in Christiansted.

Seven Turns in a Hangman’s Rope

I first became acutely aware of the dreadful tragedy of Saul Macartney one sunny morning early in the month of November of the year 1927. On that occasion, instead of walking across the hall from my bathroom after shaving and the early morning shower, I turned to the left upon emerging and, in my bathrobe and slippers, went along the upstairs hallway to my workroom on the northwest corner of the house into which I had just moved, in the west coast town of Frederiksted on the island of Santa Cruz.

This pleasant room gave a view through its several windows directly down from the hill on which the house was located, across the pretty town with its red roofs and varicolored houses, directly upon the indigo Caribbean. This workroom of mine had a north light from its two windows on that side and, as I used it only during the mornings, I thus escaped the terrific sun drenching to which, in the absence of any shade without, the room was subjected during the long West Indian afternoon.

The occasion for going in there was my desire to see, in the clear morning light, what that ancient oil painting looked like; the canvas which, without its frame, I had tacked up on the south wall the evening before.

This trophy, along with various other items of household flotsam and jetsam, had been taken the previous afternoon, which was a day after my arrival on the island, out of a kind of lumber room wherein the owners of the house had plainly been storing for the best part of a century the kinds of things which accumulate in a family. Of the considerable amount of material which my houseman, Stephen Penn, had taken out and stacked and piled in the upper hallway, there happened to be nothing of interest except this good-sized painting – which was about three feet by five in size. Stephen had paused to examine it curiously and it was this which drew my attention to it.

Under my first cursory examination, which was little more than a glance, I had supposed the thing to be one of those ubiquitous Victorian horrors of reproduction which fifty years ago might have been observed on the walls of most middle-class front parlors, and which were known as chromos. But later that evening, on picking it up and looking at it under the electric light, I found that it was honest paint, and I examined it more closely and with a constantly increasing interest.

The painting was obviously the work of a fairly clever amateur. The frame of very old and dry wood had been riddled through and through by wood-worms; it literally fell apart in my hands. I left it there on the floor for Stephen to brush up the next morning and took the canvas into my bedroom where there was a better light. The accumulations of many years’ dust and grime had served to obscure its once crudely bright coloration. I carried it into my bathroom, made a lather of soap and warm water, and gave it a careful and much needed cleansing, after which the scene delineated before me assumed a surprising freshness and clarity.

After I had dried it off with a hand towel, using great care lest I crack the ancient pigment, I went over it with an oiled cloth. This process really brought it out, and although the canvas was something more than a century old, the long-obscured and numerous figures with which it had been almost completely covered seemed once more as bright and clear – and quite as crude – as upon the long distant day when that rather clever amateur artist had laid down his (or perhaps her) brush after putting on the very last dab of vermilion paint.

The subject of the old painting, as I recognized quite soon, was an almost forgotten incident in the history of the old Danish West Indies. It had, quite obviously, been done from the viewpoint of a person on board a ship. Before me, as the setting of the scene, was the well known harbor of St Thomas with its dull red fort at my right – looking exactly as it does today. At the left-hand margin were the edges of various public buildings which have long since been replaced. In the midst, and occupying nearly the entire spread of the canvas, with Government Hill and its fine houses sketched in for background, was shown the execution of Fawcett, the pirate, with his two lieutenants; an occasion which had constituted a general holiday for the citizens of St Thomas, and which had taken place, as I happened to be aware, on the eleventh of September, 1825. If the picture had been painted at that time, and it seemed apparent that such was the case, the canvas would be just one hundred and two years old.

My interest now thoroughly aroused, I bent over it and examined it with close attention. Then I went into my work-room and brought back my large magnifying glass.

My somewhat clever amateur artist had left nothing to the imagination. The picture contained no less than two hundred and three human figures. Of these only those in the remoter backgrounds were sketched in roughly in the modern manner. The actual majority were very carefully depicted with a laborious infinitude of detail; and I suspected then, and since have found every reason to believe, that many, if not most of them, were portraits! There before my eyes were portly Danish worthies of a century ago, with their ladyfolk, all of whom had come out to see Captain Fawcett die. There were the officers of the garrison. There were the
gendarmes
of the period, in their stiff looking uniforms after the manner of Frederick the Great.