Glacial Errata, No. 42

One

Thirteen years ago tomorrow, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New York City. That weekend, which I would later come to understand would be a turning point in my life in many different ways, I gave a short talk on the story of the Witch of Berkeley.

The witch, as reported by William of Malmesby in the mid-12th century, was “addicted to sorcery,” and was “skilled in ancient augury: she was excessively gluttonous, perfectly lascivious, setting no bounds to her debaucheries, as she was not old, though fast declining in life.”

One day, she heard the call of the jack-daw, a little louder than usual, and she realized something was dreadfully wrong. The knife she was holding fell from her hand, and she grew pale as death. “This day,” she lamented, “my plough has completed its last furrow; to-day I shall hear of, and suffer, some dreadful calamity.”

Two

My talk on October 25, 2012, was at the original space of the Morbid Anatomy Library, in Gowanus; I had come to the city to do a reading for my latest book, The Afterlives of the Saints, and to launch the Kickstarter for The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. As I put the talk together, I realized I had very little to say about the Witch of Berkeley; I felt simply compelled, in some way, to tell her story.

For no sooner had she heard the bird’s call and realized something terrible was happening, then a messenger arrived with news that her son and his entire family had died by sudden accident. Drawing together her remaining children, she confessed to them how her life had been one of vice and witchcraft, that she had, in life, been “the sink of every vice, the teacher of every allurement,” finding solace only in the thought of the piety of her children. Now, on her deathbed, she does not repent, she does not seek forgiveness or absolution, but instead asks her children only this: “although you cannot revoke the sentence already passed upon my soul, yet you may, perhaps, rescue my body.” She tells them that once she is dead to sew her corpse in the skin of a stag, lay it in a stone coffin with a lead lid, and to place a stone on top of this, secured by three iron chains, all “to allay the ferocious attacks of my adversaries.” If her body remains undisturbed for three days, she tells them, “on the fourth day bury your mother in the ground; although I fear, lest the earth, which has been so often burdened with my crimes, should refuse to receive and cherish me in her bosom.”

Three

I’d left Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the night before, where my friend John, hearing of my travel plans to New York, warned me of a storm that was coming. I didn’t really pay much attention.

I could not see then what was coming—just as the Witch’s daughters, and the clergy attending to her forsaken corpse could not imagine what awaited them. On the first night, as her body lay within the church in its massive, weighted coffin, enclosed with three heavy iron chains, they kept vigil with nervous unease. That first night, the wind swelled as the darkness closed in, and a horrifying demon appeared, breaking through the heavy door of the church with ease, assailing the coffin and ripping apart one of the massive iron chains that enclosed the witch’s coffin. The second night, another demon appeared, this one more terrifying than the first, striding boldly into the church and crushing the second chain.

By the beginning of the third night, only the last chain, heavier and stouter than the other two, still held strong.

Four

I was reminded of the Witch of Berkeley because she appears briefly in John Blair’s new book, Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, which I reviewed for The Chronicle of Higher Education (the review should be out sometime this week). While not a story of a vampire, the Witch of Berkeley, Blair notes, “belongs to the same thought-world,” for it is a story not of ghosts but unquiet corpses. And yet, Blair goes on to note, the story doesn’t make much sense as a cautionary tale—if her soul is condemned, why does anyone care so much about her corpse? Why would she go to such great lengths to protect it, and why is the Devil so eager to reclaim it? The story, Blair contends, is “theologically incoherent.”

I agree. The standard morality tale—of a woman who embraced sin in life and is punished in death—is up-ended here, as it is not her soul that is fought over, but her body, which, in William’s time, would have had little theological significance. Perhaps it’s why the story remains so terrifying to me, for it is not staged on a traditional field of morality but something weirder, darker.

Five

I’ve never tried to write anything more formal on the Witch of Berkeley because I don’t have a take or a thesis about it; it exists in some strange world where all I can do is re-tell the narrative in wonder and terror.

A horror story in which there is a cautionary tale or obvious moral holds little thrill for me. True horror, I find, lies in those tales that brush away any reassurance that there is an order to this world that we might divine and live by. Perhaps there is no answer, only that terrifying, hurricane-like force that grips us in the darkest of night and compels us ceaselessly forward.

For what is there to be done, as the cock crows on the third night? The witch’s body is secured, the nuns and priests have gathered to sing psalms and pray for her corpse, her daughters wait in fearful anguish, hoping the final chain will hold and they may safely inter their mother’s body in the ground. But then a terrible clamor, a shaking as though the entire foundation of the church is about to be overthrown, and in the swirling blackness of that terrible night the enemy approaches once more. They watch in horror as a third devil, this one more terrible in appearance than the other two, taller and fiercer, strides towards them, smashing the gates as though they’re kindling as he approaches. The priests are struck motionless in fear, unable to speak or condemn this monster as it desecrates their sacred ground, standing boldly before them, as he calls out to the Witch of Berkeley by name, commanding her to rise.

From her coffin she replies she cannot, on account of the heavy chain that binds her, and he responds only, “You shall be loosed, and to your cost.” In a single gesture this monster sweeps aside the stout iron chain and the stone atop the lead lid of her coffin, as effortlessly as though it had been “made of flax.” Before the stunned congregation, he reaches into her coffin and drags the woman out by her hand.

No one speaks. No one moves. A black horse has appeared, proudly neighing and covered with iron hooks across its back, and the devil sweeps the Witch of Berkeley onto this nightmare and rides off.

And even as she vanishes quickly from sight, her daughters, the priests and the nuns who witnessed the event can hear her as she screams, for miles afterwards, her voice carrying across the wind before fading slowly into the night.

Happy Halloween.