dual personalities

Halloween is fast approaching and it’s time, once again, to consider tales of horror and the supernatural. As a rule I don’t go for scary things. Certainly I abhor the current trend of movies that substitutes gore for character and content. In fact, when I’m in the mood for shivers, I usually return to old favorites like Shirley Jackson or Algernon Blackwood. Ambrose Bierce is just too creepy for me. Still, there’s nothing so good as a haunted house, is there?

from http://previouslylovedplaces.tumblr.com

“No Human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.” (Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House)

It fits this picture pretty well, doesn’t it? And then there’s this one:

http://previouslylovedplaces.tumblr.com

“Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighborhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased.” (Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House and Other Stories)

Aside from the fact that those two passages are remarkably similar (albeit Jackson’s is notably better), they both emphasize the possibility that a house can simply be bad from the start. Nowadays, I suppose, we’d say the feng shui needed work. In any case, there’s no denying that people react to places and that some places seem intrinsically creepy.

http://previouslylovedplaces.tumblr.com

Even Jane Smiley recognizes that,

“There’s nothing more haunted than a house. Doesn’t matter where, how grand, how small, made of brick, straw, stone, or gingerbread, whether perfectly cared for or blown to bits. Beings gather there. Every house is a planet, exerting gravitational pull. Every house is in a dark wood, every house has a wicked witch in it, doesn’t matter if she looks like a fairy godmother…”

She seems to be trying to capture the house as a trap for “accumulated human experience”, but I don’t see why that has to be negative. I LIKE the patina of age and use. The only houses I’ve ever been in that really bothered me were the perfect, everything-in-its-place, carpeted-to-silence, and as impersonal- as-a-hotel type of house. They are as soulless as the people who live in them. Now THAT’S scary.

Give me a crumbling haunted house any day. At least it was once a home.

*Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

It comes from a far off place and we feel it.*

The story can also be very elusive when you are trying to track it down. In my case, the quarry has been information about my Cameron ancestor, who died serving in the 10th Lincolnshire Regiment in South Africa in 1861. Family lore had it that he had died at Fort Beaufort (you can read my earlier post here), but all my searching has not found any evidence that he served there and he could have gone to another fort in the area. It is also possible that he never left Grahamstown, the point of arrival in South Africa. I’m still looking into that, but have recently made a couple new discoveries.

It seems likely that Daniel Cameron had been mustered out of the Scots Fusilier Guards after the Crimean War and then joined the 2nd Battalion of the 10th Lincolnshire Regiment when it was formed in 1858. In fact, one of the Crimean War Victoria Cross winners from the Scots Fusilier Guards did the same thing. In any case, Daniel married Ann Hilton in London that same year and then they and their infant son (our great grandfather) were off to South Africa soon after. The 2/10 arrived in Grahamstown, Cape Province.  Here’s the old fort located on Gunfire Hill overlooking the town.

Fort Selwyn (photo by Lugerda via Wikipedia)

Apparently, the 10th had a boring time there.  In his 2 volume regimental history, Albert Lee remarks that,

In fact, Grahamstown is a lovely town, dominated by the Anglican Cathedral.

and full of neat colonial buildings.

True to their Scottish roots, however, the Camerons baptized their offspring at the Presbyterian church, of which, alas, I could find no picture. In the Presbyterian baptismal records, I did find two children, Dora Anne Cameron, born 1st September 1860 and Kenneth William Cameron, born 8th December 1861, a few months after his father died. Interestingly, the record lists Kenneth’s father as David Cameron. Either Ann remarried or the record is wrong (very possible — such records are notoriously full of mistakes), but after that I have lost track until the children resurface in Scotland as orphans in the 1871 census.  And so the search continues…

*Bushman saying via Laurens van der Post, A Story Like the Wind