The Snow Witch

One blazing hot day in July 1815, a sailing ship named Lothair arrived at Liverpool Docks from North America. Among the gaggle of passengers who disembarked from the trans-Atlantic vessel were a rich Scottish merchant named John Allan, his wife Frances, her younger sister Nancy, and the couple’s sickly-looking six-year-old foster-son Edgar. At Liverpool, the Allans met Thomas MacKenzie, a cousin of William Mackenzie, the Scottish railway engineer entombed in the famous pyramidal tomb on Rodney Street. Thomas MacKenzie found two trustworthy and hardworking Liverpool maidservants, Isabel Cook and Joan Slaidburn , to accompany the Allan family to Irvine in Scotland. Isabel’s seven-year-old sister Mary went to Scotland as well, and became a playmate for little Edgar, the Allans’ adopted son.

Just a week before Christmas, little Mary decided she would go out in the nearby woods one snowy afternoon to collect holly and ivy to decorate the Allans’ home. Young Edgar accompanied the Liverpool girl, and somehow managed to slip out of the cottage unnoticed. The two children collected holly, ivy and pinecones, and placed them in Mary’s basket, but during their stroll in the Scottish countryside, a strange incident occurred. A trail of arrows was mysteriously drawn in the snow on the ground, before the children’s astonished eyes.

Mary and Edgar followed the etched arrows, and at one point, Mary wrote ‘Who are you?’ in the snow with the tip of her umbrella, and the invisible doodler crossed out the question with three lines.

The arrows continued to appear, one after the other, and so the children followed them out of curiosity, until Edgar realised he and Mary had been lured onto the thin ice of a frozen lake. As the ice creaked, ready to give away, Edgar seized Mary by the arm and dragged her to safety. The children then heard the voice of an old woman cursing them, but they could see no one, so they ran home and told the adults what had happened. When Mary’s seventeen-year-old sister Isabel went to investigate the arrows, she saw that they really did exist, and when she tracked them to the lake, she recoiled in horror. Barely visible under the thin icy layer of the lake, was the face of a child, and the sight of it sent the servant running for help.

Police later discovered that the unfortunate child under the ice was six-year-old Carol McClean, a farmer’s daughter who had gone missing days before. John Allan opined that the arrows had been drawn in the snow by the evil spirit of a witch known as Old Nelly, who had been drowned in the lake by the local villagers a hundred years ago. A total of nine children had drowned in the lake since, most probably lured to their deaths by Old Nelly’s evil sorcery. Mary Cook and Edgar Allan were therefore warned to stay well away from that lake. Incidentally, Edgar Allan later grew up to become Edgar Allan Poe, the most famous horror story writer of all time.

Nature’s Power Source

In January 1984, the pilots of a Soviet Ilyushin-18 aircraft flying over the Black Sea were astonished and terrified to see a fireball, about four inches in diameter, in front of their airplane.

Then, as the Soviet news agency Tass reported, the fireball “disappeared with a deafening noise, but reemerged several seconds later in the passengers’ lounge, after piercing in an uncanny way through the airtight metal wall. The fireball slowly flew above the heads of the stunned passengers. In the tail section of the airliner, it divided into two glowing crescents, which then joined together again and left the plane almost noiselessly.”

The Russians had witnessed one of nature’s rarest and most mysterious phenomena—ball lightning.

Detailed reports date back many centuries, Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henry II of France, is said to have been burned by a ball of lightning that chased her around her bedroom on her wedding night in 1557. One year earlier, eight people in England were reported to have been killed by a “fiery, sulfurous globe” that rolled through a door.

Today, ball lightning is no longer a phenomenon of purely natural interest, for scientists are now studying it as a possible new source of energy. In Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, researchers have begun an elaborate experiment that may lead to the production of electricity from artificially created ball lightning.

The leader of the Dutch team, Gerard C. Dijkhuis, has proved that the lightning ball is held together by forces that fuse its atomic particles. If this fusion reaction could be controlled, ball lightning could be used to generate inexpensive electric power.

The first step: produce ball lightning to order. Dijkhuis had heard that sailors often report seeing the phenomenon following short circuits occurring in submarine batteries, and bought from the Dutch Navy an old system of 400 individual batteries.

Dijkhuis installed them in a shed on a dock in Rotterdam, linked them together, and then short circuited the system. Success came in 1985, although the apparatus produced fireballs only four inches in diameter and they lasted no more than a second. In subsequent experiments the scientists hope to sustain the ball indefinitely and create a continuing source of power.

One of the greatest problems, the Dutch team faces, is that no one can offer an easy explanation for ball lightning. Some researchers have even suggested that it is an optical illusion, no more than an image left on the retina of the eye following a conventional lightning flash. But the many reports of seeing it inside buildings, where no conventional lightning was visible, argue against this theory.

Two British investigators, Mark Stenhoff and Dr. E.R. Wooding, have made a list of the characteristics of ball lightning, based on more than 50 reports. Their analysis confirmed many properties of ball lightning that scientists had previously only suspected.

For example, they found that in 69 percent of the cases ball lightning is seen out-of-doors, although it can also occur in enclosed spaces, such as the room of a house or, as the Ilyushin-18 passengers discovered, in an airplane cabin. In 89 percent of the cases, the phenomenon appears during a thunderstorm. But, intriguingly, the researchers found that about a third of the witnesses had not seen it come from a conventional lightning flash.

A ball itself, Stenhoff and Wooding concluded, is about 10 inches in diameter, lasts about five seconds, and is as bright as a 40 watt light bulb. 

Occasionally, it seems to leave a pungent smell. In about a quarter of the cases the ball lightning caused damage; a broken window, for example, or scorched grass. More than half of the people who took part in the survey said that the ball seemed to explode as it disintegrated.

But ball lightning remains a mystery, and a tantalising one on that. Some scientists see it as far more than a possible source of energy. Ball lightning, they contend, is plasma, rare on earth but common in the sun and the stars beyond our atmosphere. Close study of its properties may offer a key to a greater understanding of the universe itself.

However, such projects are likely to mean little to those who happen to encounter the phenomenon. One lady in Florida did not pause to theorise when a sphere of lightning “the size of basketball” rolled into her house. Instead, she hit it firmly with her flyswatter.

The Red Gnome

In 1858, a 138-foot long, 385-ton wooden brig called the Black Hawk, built by Stevens and Presley of Ohio City, sailed from Detroit, Michigan to Liverpool, England, laden with very strange cargo. Down in the hold, stowed away among the 19,000 bushels of corn and padded parcels of stained glass, there was a barrel containing the pickled corpse of something truly terrifying.

Before I relate just what that thing was, let me take you back 242 years in time and 3,600 miles away in space to the days of the early settlers in Detroit, Michigan. In June 1763, British Captain James Dalyell and 58 of his officers were followed near the banks of Detroit River by a small, misshapen crimson-clad figure with penetrating eyes, a large fanged mouth, and a hideous scarlet face.

Several soldiers shot at the weird looking figure. An old trapper warned Captain Dalyell and his men that they were being stalked by what the French settlers called the “Nain Rouge”, the Red Gnome, a sinister supernatural entity whose appearance foretold misfortune and death.

Sure enough, shortly after seeing the crimson dwarf, Captain Dalyell and his soldiers were ambushed and massacred by the Indian Chief, Pontiac, and the blood of the slain turned the tributary of the Detroit River red for days.

Decades earlier, the founder of Detroit, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, was also unlucky enough to see the Red Gnome, and soon lost his vast fortune and political standing. The diminutive omen of impending misfortune and death was seen again in 1801, shortly before the wooden city of Detroit was destroyed by a fire. Then, in the War of 1812, the Nain Rouge was seen prowling about in fog by many witnesses, including General William Hull, who was forced to handover Detroit to the British troops days later.

Around the end of 1857, there was a rumour that two hunters had killed the Red Gnome in a forest. They had shot him several times and fixed him to a tree with their bayonets to prevent his escape, and the body had been exhibited and packed in salt.

The superstitious people of the colony arranged for the monstrosity to be burnt, for there was a widespread fear it would return to life, and a bonfire was built in a clearing, but someone approached the men who had killed the strange creature, and purchased it for an undisclosed sum.

A collector of oddities in Liverpool, England, arranged for the Red Gnome’s cadaver to be shipped to the home of warehouse keeper Michael Connolly, at 25 Clarence Street, Everton. The Black Hawk brig brought the curious cargo to Liverpool Docks, and the small cask was delivered, to the wrong Clarence Street. There were three streets of that name in the city at the time, and instead of going to Everton, it was delivered to the home of Abraham Harris, a jeweler living at 25 Clarence Street in the city centre. A servant signed for the cask, and Mr. Harris was horrified when he saw the grotesque little man, pickled in brine in the barrel. The cask was stored in the cellar, and in the evening when the jeweller went down to show a colleague the terrifying corpse, they found the barrel empty and its lid lying on the floor.

The evil-looking creature was never seen again. Had someone stolen the Red Gnome, or was the real explanation much more sinister?