Ep. 1 - Crime and the Supernatural

My goal is not to convince the listener, you, that ghosts are a thing. But if there is such a thing as ghosts, doesn't it make sense that a crime scene would be a prime occupational space for one or more spirits? Surely evil entities would find a tasty morsel or two lingering. Such manifestations seem to feed off of emotions like rage and fear. And for victims, a violent death or one that finds no justice in the end, it certainly makes sense that their spirits would be caught up in the ether, unable to cross beyond a veil between this world and the next. I'm here to feed your morbid fascination. We all crane our necks at the scene of an accident. True crime is arguably the most popular genre. Why is that? Are we just curious about the whole nurture or nature debate? Is it because we wonder about our own inner demons? Do these kinds of crimes offer us an escape from the mundane? Or is it that we seek the same feelings we experience when watching a horror movie or riding a roller coaster? Whatever the answer may be, I'm here to help you explore the answers while I entertain you. And if I convince you that ghosts are really a thing, all the better!

As a society, we place a lot of trust in our first responders. For some people, a first responder makes the difference between life and death. These heroes are sometimes the last face seen, the final voice heard, before the embrace of death snatches one away.  When a firefighter, paramedic, member of the military or police officer shares a story of the unexplained, they are more likely to get our ear. Their stories seem to hold more credibility. After all, they may have much to lose if people think they are seeing things that aren't there or hearing voices that no one else hears. Edwin Woodhall will make many appearances throughout this podcast. He was a man intrigued by the same things that intrigue me and more than likely you as well. Are spirits real and can they be helpful when it comes to solving crimes?

Edwin Thomas Woodhall was not the kind of man one would expect to be a detective or a spy. With his bow ties and chiseled profile, he had more the look of a business man than an international spy. Considering that he was a highly regarded man in his day, it was quite surprising to discover his 1935 book "Crime and the Supernatural." 

Woodhall was born in 1886. Like many young men of the time, he attained some basic military training, which helped him get accepted to the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1906 when he was twenty-years-old. This would be a fortuitous occurrence as Scotland Yard would be launching a Special Branch for its secret work in 1910. Woodhall says of those early days "I was prepared to serve as a uniformed constable in order to realize my ambition to become a detective. Never shall I forget my fears that I might not be accepted. I was under regulation height by half an inch, but the late Chief Inspector John McCarthy, who never failed to help and encourage the younger members of the police, took an interest in me, and my first-class army training and splendid physical fitness secured my appointment. I had the distinction of becoming the smallest officer in the Metropolitan Police."

He may have started at the bottom as a street cop, but Woodhall quickly moved up the ranks. Throughout his career, Woodhall brushed shoulders with many of the police officers and detectives who had worked on the Jack the Ripper Case and this was a case that was a lifelong obsession for him. He respected those men and they respected him. By 1915, Woodhall had joined Scotland Yard and was an agent for M15, which was responsible for domestic espionage in Britain. Under the Protective Surveillance team he was "Guardian Detective" for King Edward VII, King George V, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George and a variety of diplomats. Woodhall was also credited with the capture of Percy Topliss, the "Monocled Mutineer" during World War I. Although Topliss managed to escape.

This brief biography is to give you a sense of this man, so that this particular experience he had, holds some level of credibility. During World War I, France came under German occupation. Alexander von Kluck was a German general assigned to lead the 1st Army in the German offensive against Paris at the start of World War I in 1914. The plan was for him to hit the French forces hard near Paris and then surround Paris. Success would mean an early end to the war in the West. Laventie and Houplines are two French cities about 10 miles apart and there was a small village between the two of them at this time. This once peaceful hamlet found itself the center of fighting and German troops regularly marched through. Things were not going well in Kluck's sweep to Paris and the German soldiers were tired and hungry. A regiment of German soldiers entered the village and a Sergeant-major led his company to a large farmhouse and busted down the door. He announced that his men would be taking over the house and they demanded food. The man who owned the farm had fled before the soldiers came, so the only inhabitants at the farmhouse, were a young woman and her child. Their names are lost to time, but what happened here was well known.

Few villagers had stayed when they heard the advancement of the German soldiers. Why the young lady remained is hard to know, but many claim that she and a handful of inhabitants, including the priest, had decided to defend their village. The German soldiers searched the farmhouse and found a large stash of wine in the cellar and they all imbibed heartily. The evening devolved into rucous singing and the poor woman found herself the victim of unwanted advances from the sergeant-major who told any other men who came near the woman, that she was his woman. That evening she was brutalized.

As dawn broke and the soldiers all laid about passed out from the wine, the young woman grabbed her child and ran to the chapel to seek help from the priest. The priest surely offered his help and he would pay a price. The sergeant-major grabbed two of his men and went to find the young woman and when he discovered her with the priest, he pulled his gun on them. He accused them of being spies and surely was feeling some fear as Allied forces were approaching the village. If his actions were found out, he would surely hang. The other German officers and soldiers in the village called out for everyone to retreat. The soldier with the sergeant-major pulled at him, begging him to leave. Two eye witness accounts were recorded, one left at St. Omar and the other at Hazebrouck, of what happened next.

The sergeant-major shot the woman and her child and then turned the gun on the priest who yelled, "Wicked man, your spirit will live on. When your hour comes, you will come back here in repentance until God thinks fit to absolve your soul." And then he was shot. The sergeant-major then ran with his two men, but they didn't get far. One of the French '.75' guns fell near them, wounding the two shoulders and killing the sergeant-major. When the French took back the village, they discovered the three victims and buried them together in a grave near the wall of the farm. The sergeant-major was buried in a grave near them.

And now we come to the ghost story shared by Woodhall. This village ended up becoming a reserve dump of explosives because most buildings there had been destroyed. The enemy would not be interested in this tract of land, so it was thought these would be good hiding places for this material. A small regiment of soldiers would be assigned to guard these dumps and the job was thought to be rather easy. After all, there was no combat. A soldier could spend his day smoking and playing cards and they were given a week's rations. So when headquarters started hearing reports that men were unwilling to take the assignment, they started to wonder what was going on. Rumors claimed that any sentry working on full moon nights was experiencing something haunted.

The Intelligence Office decided to send Woodhall to find out what was going on because it was assumed the "hauntings" were being caused by the enemy. The theory was that an enemy spy was making these strange appearances in order to scare the sentrys away and gauge the extent of the supply of munitions or maybe even make an attempt to blow up the explosives. Woodhall had been told that sentrys were claiming to hear heavy booted footsteps on the cobbled roads when no one was outside. A shadowy figure had been seen moving around in the ruins. The most incredible encounter was made by a soldier who claimed to not only see this shadowy figure digging in the ground near the reserve dump, but that he actually shot at the figure only to run over and discover that nothing was there.

The sentry was told that Woodhall would be coming with an armed French policeman and a password was set-up, so when the sentry heard someone coming through the shambles of the ruins he could verify that it was Woodhall. The night of Woodhall's first watch, he showed up at ten o'clock. The sentry on duty showed Woodhall and the policeman around and the three men played a few games of cards as they visited. Around midnight, Woodhall decided to get some air and he climbed up out of the cellar. The ruins of the small village were cloaked in darkness and the air was crisp and cool. Distant gunfire could be heard, but otherwise there was a deep silence.

Woodhall climbed back down into the cellar and the three men decided to take two-hour shifts through the night. Woodhall took the first one, which started at 1am. He grabbed a magazine and settled in, soon finding himself dozing as he listened to the rhythmic breathing of his companions. He tried his best to stay awake, but found it difficult. He awoke with a start at about half past two because he heard something. There was a scraping outside. Movement. The sounds of footsteps. Woodhall was sure that someone was sneaking around just outside the cellar. He shook his companions awake and placed a finger to his lips to keep them quiet. He pointed upward as he pulled his revolver and the three men crept over to the stairs. The sounds of earth and loose brickwork crumbling under foot were clear.

Woodhall wrote of this moment, "Quickly I crept up the few remaining stairs and into the fresh morning air. All around by now bright moonlight. I was the first out into it, and somehow, to this day, I thought I saw something move from the wall in the deep of the shell-blasted farm in the cellar of which the ammunition dump was stored." Neither of his companions saw anything and the men searched the area for an hour finding nothing. Woodhall felt fairly embarrassed by the incident and figured that a wild animal was what caught his attention. Woodhall was sent back to headquarters and another Intelligence Officer took his place. This was a man he highly respected and he believed the story that this officer would later share with him. The same sentry and same French policeman were with this officer on this second watch.

The three men heard a sound just before 3am. This was the unmistakable sound of iron-studded boots walking in a regulation step on the cobble-stoned street. They climbed the stairs quietly and stepped out into the moonlit street, keeping themselves hunched down behind ruins. There they saw the figure of a German soldier with his back to them. He was bending over and picking up bricks. His German uniform was covered in clay as if he had been buried in dirt. The Intelligence Officer jumped to his feet and ran at the man, telling him to put his hands up and get on the ground. The soldier turned around and Woodhall describes what the moonlight revealed, "The head that turned in their direction was unearthly, horrible and hideous, for it took the form of a fleshless mask. A mere horror, that of a human skull." The three men fired at the figure and when the smoke cleared, they found that the figure had disappeared. The men were shaken for the rest of the evening and kept their eyes glued to the area where they had seen this unexplained thing.

The Intelligence Office tried to bury the story and the munitions were removed from the cellar and moved to a new location. All three men were reassigned to other duties. However, the Office knew that something must have happened as these men were all of sound mind. A group was sent to investigate the story and they found the accounts about the sergeant-major and his victims. This group them dug where the graves were said to be and they found the skeletal remains of a woman, a child and a man in the decomposing garments of a priest in one grave and the skeletal remains of a German soldier in another. Woodhall and these three other men didn't know that there were four bodies buried near the cellar. So what did they see? And why would these men make up a story like this? Further, why would the intelligence and military offices decide to vacate the area, if this was just a story?

Sir Oliver Lodge wrote in his 1929 book Why I Believe in Personal Immortality, "There are some who think that violent emotion can be likewise unconsciously stored in matter; so that a room where a tragedy has occurred, shall exert an influence on the next generation, or rather on anyone sufficiently sensitive to feel it. In this way it is hoped that some day the strange influence of certain localities whereby a tragedy seems to be re-enacted, can be rationally explained, and the puzzling phenomenon popularly known as 'haunting' can be removed from the region of supernatural to the domain of fact."

Sources:

Woodhall, Edwin T.; Crime and the Supernatural; John Long, Limited; London; 1935