Charles II, who gave the theatre its Royal Charter, is said to visit now and again, but the theatre’s most famous ghost is the Man in Grey, so named for his eighteenth-century long grey coat, tricorn hat, powdered wig and sword. He is said to come and watch the play from the balcony, where he slowly walks from one end to the other only to disappear into the wall. He is often seen at rehearsals and his presence is considered very lucky - when he appears during rehearsal the play tends to be successful. Another ghost is thought to be that of twentieth-century comedian Dan Leno. Leno’s ghost has allegedly been spotted in the dressing room he used last before his death.
DUDLEY town, CONNECTICUT
Dudley town is an abandoned eighteenth-century village in the woods of Cornwall, Connecticut and one of the most curious haunted locations in America.
Members of the Dudley family were among the first to settle into the area in the mid-1740s, earning their living by cutting lumber to fuel iron production in a nearby town. It wasn’t long before there were reports of strange beasts and apparitions and a host of strange, unusual and violent deaths, suicides and corpse mutilations. Over the years many people, believing that the Dudley family were cursed, left Dudley town, and by 1900 it was mostly deserted.
During the 1920s a man called Dr William C Clark set up a summer home in the abandoned town. One evening he came back from a business trip to find his wife talking hysterically about the apparitions and demons that had visited. She killed herself soon after.
Even today some visitors to Dudley still report disembodied voices whispering and laughing. A woman on a white horse has been spotted, among other apparitions. People also hear wagon wheels and other sounds of the past. Curiously few living sounds are heard, as birds and animals never seem to settle in the area. This may be due to lack of sunshine as, being in the shadow of three mountains, the town receives little natural light, but others believe that Dudley is an area of negative energy that attracts evil spirits and entities.
DUPPY
A ghost of West Indian tradition and unknown origin, regarded as the personification of evil, i.e. the Devil. The duppy allegedly operates only at night and is required to return to the grave before dawn; if it is prevented from doing so for any reason, the spirit forfeits its power to do harm to any living person. West Indians believe that the breath of a duppy will make a victim violently ill, while the mere touch of the spirit will induce epileptic fits and seizures. The duppy can allegedly be summoned by a secret ritual to do the conjurer’s bidding, and the traditional method to keep the duppy at bay is to place tobacco seeds around the doors and windows of the home it comes to plague. See Voodoo.
DYBBUK
The Hebrew word dybbuk comes from a word meaning ‘cleaving’ or ‘clinging’, and according to Jewish lore a dybbuk is a wandering, disembodied, evil spirit which enters a person’s body and holds fast. The kabbalah contains many instructions for exorcising a dybbuk, some of which are still performed today. When exorcised the dybbuk is thought to leave the body via the small toe and leave a bloody mark there on departure.
In early folklore dybbuk were thought to only inhabit the bodies of sick people and possessive evil spirits and exorcisms to banish them appear in the Old Testament. However, by the early sixteenth century many Jews believed that a dybbuk could not enter an innocent body, because of its past sins, and could only inhabit the body of a sinner. It was also thought that dybbuk were the souls of people not buried properly and they therefore became demons. Transmigration of souls and reincarnation are not parts of mainstream Judaism but the dybbuk offers a revealing glimpse of the supernatural in the Jewish tradition.
EAR of DIONYSIUS
A famous example of mediumistic cross correspondences. In this case, a series of communications that needed to be brought together before they made sense.
A medium by the name of Mrs Willet first communicated the phrase ‘Ear of Dionysius’ when she went into a trance in August 1910. At the time the phrase meant nothing to the sitter, a Mrs Verrall, but her husband, the classical scholar A W Verrall, explained that the name was given to a huge abandoned quarry at Syracuse, which was roughly shaped like a donkey’s ear. In this place unhappy Athenian captives were confined from 405 to 367 BC and the peculiar acoustic properties of the cave were said to have enabled Dionysius the Tyrant to overhear his victims speaking.
There was no more talk of the Ear of Dionysius for several years until, in January 1914, Mrs Willet produced, during an automatic writing session, a script for Mrs Verrall that contained a passage referring to the Ear of Dionysius. The script was allegedly sent by Dr Verrall, who had died a year or so before. The Verralls were supporters of the Society for Psychical Research, which stressed the importance of private communications as evidence for life after death, so it seemed likely that Verrall would try to communicate his survival after death to his wife in this way.
For the next year Verrall, along with another communicator, S H Butcher, another dead classical scholar and a close friend of Verrall when they were both alive, reportedly began a series of communications to Mrs Willet that made allusions to Ulysses and Polyphemus. It wasn’t until August 1915, however, when a communication referred to a man called Philoxenus, who had been imprisoned for seducing Dionysius’s wife, that all the references eventually began to make sense. It seemed that a satirical poem of the passionate and tragic life of Philoxenus was being communicated, in which Philoxenus was portrayed as Ulysses and Dionysius as Polyphemus.
The Ear of Dionysius case is often held up as an example of cooperation between two dead communicators and proof of survival after death. Sceptics, however, argue that only one medium was involved, not several as is more usual in cross correspondence cases, and Mrs Willet could have discovered the knowledge for herself from university research libraries. It’s also possible she managed to learn the key points through ESP when Verrall was alive and unconsciously wove them into her trance communications.
EARTH
In magical symbolism one of the four (or five) elements, corresponding to matter that is solid and to cold and dry qualities.
Earth typically symbolizes order, both in nature and in society. It also represents the female principle, the nurturing and mothering aspect of Mother Nature and the material realm of money and business. The magical tool associated with earth is the bell. Earth colours are green or brown and earth is associated with the zodiac signs of Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn. In Chinese philosophy earth is associated with the season of late summer and represents stability and practicality, but it is also the element involved in personal transformation. Dampness, the colour yellow, worrying and the sound of singing are also related to the earth element.
EARTH LIGHTS
Also known as ghost lights, earth lights are mysterious patches of light reported to have been
