The Wesley Ghost #8: Jeffrey Unmasked November 18, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
The best candidate for the haunting though has to be Emilia Wesley (aka Emily). What does this attribution rely upon? Well, let’s start with some minor suggestive points. First, she was fourteen at the time of the haunting, a classic poltergeist age. Second, in one of the letters Emily claimed that she gave the polt the name Jeffrey, though this is disputed in another letter. Third, when Susanna Wesley sees Jeffrey as a headless badger under the bed it disappeared into Emilia’s skirt: a chilling detail. Fourth, she talks of how ‘[My father’s] incredulity, and especially his imputing it to us, or our lovers, made me, I own, desirous of its continuance till he was convinced,’ (136). Fourth, she seems to have had the most articulate views about Jeffrey’s origins: she believed it was the work of local witches (138). Yes, yes, none of this is convincing but there is another point that is rarely noted, and that seems decisive.
Emily Wesley had a rather miserable life. She, like many of the Wesley girls, became a teacher and married late, and like all the Wesley girls, badly: Emily had no children, she was in her forties when she was finally joined herself in matrimony with a Mr Harper. In this time though she continued to write to her brother John and some of these letters survive in The Memorials of the Wesley Family (277) by George J. Stevenson, showing herself to be sharp and passionate. For our purposes her last surviving letter is of particular interest (16 Feb 1750):
I want most sadly to see you and talk some hours with you as in times past. Some things are too hard for me, these I want you to solve. One doctrine of yours… [she describes herself a sceptic] Another thing is that wonderful thing called by us Jeffrey. You won’t laugh at me for being superstitious if I tell you how certainly that something calls on me against any extraordinary new affliction; but so little is known of the invisible world that I, at least, am not able to judge whether it be a friendly or an evil spirit.
Emilia claims here that ‘something’ warns here against misfortune: we are perhaps dealing with a personal daemon much as Churchill and Socrates believed that they had. What is not clear from this letter is whether the ‘something’ was Jeffrey or whether she just used Jeffrey as a way in, a family reference her brother would have instantly understood. In either case this is significant. One possibility is that Emilia believed that Jeffrey continued to communicate with her: another that she had another, let’s say ‘intelligence’ at her call. In either case she becomes much more interesting as a candidate for the personality behind the Wesley hauntings.
Of course, it seems unlikely that she or anyone could have faked all the phenomenon, but this ‘psychic’ side suggests that she may have been a knowing or unknowing centre for the strange events in this house. Beach is ever a mellow materialist, but some aspects of the Wesley haunting seem difficult to explain with our present scientific understanding. If Emily was the poltergeist focus then by definition she must have had a strong dislike for her father and perhaps some sisterly hate for Hetty (19), the special subjects of Jeffrey’s dislike: both of these facts seem eminently credible for a fourteen year old girl in a religious house, which verged at times on tyranny.
So does Emilia work? drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
One doubt. Modern poltergeist hunters always look first at the person who has the most abnormal experiences: in the Wesley house that seems to have been Hetty.
Anyone interested in the original documents they have been usefully put together in a single pdf document. There are about sixty pages and the file weighs in at about 15 mb.
The tag for these posts is Wesley Ghost: all comments collected on Wesley 1.
