Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Read online

  Voodoo Tales

  The Ghost Stories of

  Henry S. Whitehead

  with an Introduction by

  David Stuart Davies

  Voodoo Tales first published by

  Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2012

  Published as an ePublication 2012

  ISBN 978 1 84870 312 4

  Wordsworth Editions Limited

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  Introduction

  The advice often given to those who wish to turn their hand to storytelling is to write about what they know. This has always seemed to me to be rather a restricting approach to fiction. It makes no allowance for the writer’s flights of fancy or the creative elements that his unfettered imagination can bring to the narrative. Certainly those who work in the genres of science and supernatural fiction would be greatly hampered if they followed this advice. In fact they write about what they do not know!

  However, ironically, Henry St. Clair Whitehead (1882–1932) was to a large extent able to combine the facilities of both a vivid imagination with factual knowledge of his subject, which he acquired during time spent in the West Indies. He developed a strong interest in black Caribbean folklore and Voodoo practices through the years of living on the island of Santa Cruz. He met with practitioners of black magic and high priests of the Voodoo cult and became familiar with their ways and ceremonies. He learned that their power was rooted in the unswerving belief of their flock. As a result of Whitehead’s experiences, he was able to infuse his narratives with a chilling verisimilitude. He seems to believe and accept the fantastic nature of the events that take place in his tales and thus his persuasive voice plays very nicely on the reader’s initial scepticism and undermines it.

  In reviewing one of Whitehead’s collections, the critic of the New York Times observed:

  With deceptive gentleness and clerical decorum, Dr Whitehead wrote of voodoo spells, fiendish manikins and other terrors to be found in the tropic nights of the Virgin Islands. So quietly did he edge up on horrors that his stories seem quite like the truthful reminiscences they purport to be, which means they are pretty good.

  That paragraph effectively sums up the essence of Whitehead’s craft and why he has, over the years, built up a strong appreciative following amongst fans of supernatural fiction.

  Henry S. Whitehead was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and spent most of his life in New England, except for that interesting and creatively stimulating period when he lived in the West Indies. He was possessed of two differing natures: the serious academic and the gregarious sportsman. He led an active early life, playing football at Harvard and serving as commissioner of athletics of the AAU. He resigned this post to enter the ministry and in 1912 he was ordained deacon of the Episcopal Church. After serving his ‘deacon’s year’ as curate of Trinity Church Torrington, Connecticut he went out to other pastorates, including the Virgin Islands where he gathered the content and colour which later went into his Voodoo tales. As a Christian, the Reverend Whitehead seemed to have no compunction in presenting this pagan material in the form of convincing fiction. It was as though when he was writing he was exercising another part of his brain which had nothing to do with his own religious convictions and duties. But then he was a man who was constantly surprising. His friend, the writer Robert Barlow, commented: ‘In later life he could be prevailed upon . . . to startle social gatherings by tearing a pack of cards in two and then quartering them.’ A habit which clearly shows that Whitehead took pleasure in shocking people. Barlow added: ‘His friends ranged from ship’s surgeons to safecrackers.’ One of these friends was the notable horror story writer H. P. Lovecraft who said of Whitehead: ‘He has nothing of the musty cleric about him, but dresses in sports clothes, swears like a he-man on occasion, & is an utter stranger to bigotry or priggishness of any sort.’ Lovecraft was also a great admirer of his friend’s dark stories. He commented on ‘the charm and erudition of the writing – a pleasing relief from the dominant crudeness and illiterateness of popular magazine stuff.’

  Whitehead spent his last years in the Gulf Coast town of Dunedin, Florida where he was rector of the Episcopal Church. He died on 23 November 1932, of a chronic gastric ailment, just as he was hitting his stride as a writer. In the opinion of some, this was the reason he was not as well known as his pulp-era contemporaries, especially since his stories were not collected until well after his death. The first such collection was Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales, published by Arkham House in 1944 and this was followed by West India Lights in 1946, also by Arkham House.

  His strange tales first began appearing in the American pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales and other similar publications in 1924. However his first short story was ‘Williamson’, written in 1910 but not published until 1946 in the posthumous collection West India Lights. This is a remarkable piece of work with a stunning climax, containing many of the elements that the author wove effectively into the canvas of all his tales: suspense, mystery, a cool delivery of events and yet told with an insidious sense of impending horror. It was in this story that he introduced the narrator who featured in most of his tales: Gerald Canevin, who E. F. Bleiler, one of the world’s greatest authorities on supernatural fiction, believed was ‘a mask for the author, whose ancestral name was Caernavon.’ Whitehead took great pleasure in pointing out that the name was made up of ‘cane’ and ‘vin’, which is cane wine, in other words rum, the typical product of the West Indies.

  At first glance Whitehead’s realistic treatment of Voodoo and its spells may seem to sit oddly with a minister of the Christian church, but in many instances the fearsome spells he writes about are able to be overcome by the power of Christianity: the force of good over evil. In ‘Black Terror’, for example, where a young black man has been condemned to death by a curse, a ‘sweat ouanga’, the narrator hits upon an idea how to beat the curse.

  Perhaps I could prevail upon the English Church Clergy to help. It was, when one came down the brass tacks of the situation, a question of belief. A similar ouanga ‘buried against’ me would have no effect whatever, because to me, such means of getting rid of a person was merely the height of absurdity . . .

  Later in the story, an English priest, Father Richardson tells the afflicted boy:

  God is intervening for you, my child, and God’s power is supreme over all things, visible
and invisible. He holds all in the hollow of His hand. He will now put away your fear, and take this weight from your soul, and you shall live.

  The point is that power of the Voodoo lies in the belief and imagination of the victim rather than in some dark satanic being. Whitehead implies that it is a power that can be destroyed by Christian beliefs and prayers. The author was at pains to show that supernatural forces are real, but are also susceptible to the powers of goodness.

  To the modern reader, some of Whitehead’s themes may sound racist, but his treatment of the West Indian blacks and ‘coloured’ people (i.e. natives of mixed ancestry) is presented cordially and with relatively little condescension. He perceived them as God’s children after all.

  It may be thought that as a representative of the Episcopal Church, Whitehead might have been hesitant in demonstrating the powers and efficacy of a primitive and alternative culture of belief, but he did not. He relayed in his stories the facts of the matter as he had learned them and it was this approach that gives his narratives their chilling effectiveness.

  This collection contains all the stories from Whitehead’s three collections, West India Lights, Jumbee, and The Black Beast, rare volumes all, but in addition there are five other stories which have never been collected together in a popular edition before: ‘No Eye-Witnesses’, (1932), is an unusual take on the werewolf tale, set in New York; ‘Across the Gulf’ (1926) concerns a dead mother who appears in a dream to warn her son of danger; ‘The Tabernacle’ (1930) is a departure in style and content for the author, retelling in a modern setting an ancient tale concerning a mysterious hive of bees; ‘The Door’ (1924), a spookily adroit tale with a surprise ending; ‘The Moon Dial’ (1931), an elegiac and atmospheric piece set in India; and ‘The Sea Tiger’ (1932), a dreamlike tale, featuring an hallucinatory premonition and a sea battle with a barracuda, the sea-tiger of the title.

  In Whitehead’s stories you encounter supernatural or evil beings which are unique to this kind of fiction. There is, for example the jumbee from the story of the same name; this is a corpse-like spirit that hovers in the air, and there is also a sheen who is an old woman who turns into a were-bitch. There is a kind of bizarre and unpleasant humour inherent in some of the tales, such as the unusual creature that appears in ‘Cassius’. It is a beast that looks like a gigantic frog which terrorizes a neighbourhood, and it turns out to be a partly absorbed Siamese twin which had taken on a life of its own after being surgically removed. This kind of grotesquery is found in a few other stories also. A fine example of this graphic, nightmare-type horror can be found in ‘The Lips’ in which the captain of a slave ship is bitten on the neck by an Ibo woman who whispers the word ‘l’kindu’ in his ear. This incident eventually causes his insanity and he commits suicide on the voyage home when it is revealed that where the wound had been there is now a mouth – complete with full lips, and a long pink tongue – which talks to him.

  Many of the stories in the collection deal with hauntings by spirits of people killed long ago. The ghost in ‘The Shadows’ is of a man who was murdered while seeking eternal life. In ‘Black Tancrède’, the hand of an executed slave looks for revenge. The soul of a man is trapped in a bull during a Voodoo ceremony in ‘The Black Beast’. A pirate is imprisoned in a painting in ‘Seven Turns in a Hangman’s Rope’ when a former lover paints his soul into the picture in an act of revenge. The spirit of a vicious gambler possesses ‘Mrs Lorriquer’, turning a kind, courteous woman hostile and unpleasant when she plays cards. A witch’s curse figures in ‘Sweet Grass’, which is considered one of Whitehead’s best stories. In ‘Passing of a God’ a Voodoo god enters and animates a man’s tumour, causing the natives to worship him.

  Scattered about the collection, however, are stories which, while strange and ghoulish, are set away from Voodoo territory. For example there is ‘The Fireplace’, which concerns the ghost of a murdered man who appears in a hotel in Mississippi and persuades someone to relate the circumstances of his death. ‘The Shut Room’ is about the haunting of an old English coaching inn; and ‘The Napier Limousine’ also takes place in England.

  Both the long tale ‘Bothon’ and ‘Scar Tissue’ involve the lost city of Atlantis. ‘Bothon’ is particularly accomplished, beginning in modern New York with the central character at first experiencing strange noises of catastrophe and battle which only he can hear. It is a unnerving case of ‘clairaudience’.

  One of Whitehead’s more ghoulish tales is ‘The Chadbourne Incident’ and it is heavily influenced by the work of Lovecraft. This story is set in the New England village of Chadbourne, which is Whitehead’s version of Lovecraft’s blighted Arkham, and tells of ghouls who eat little children.

  The combination of Whitehead’s early death and the fact that his stories had only appeared in pulp magazines, is the main reason that his name and his work is not more well known. His fascinating tales are certainly as effective and meritorious as those of Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood, for example. It was over a decade after he died before his short stories were collected into book form and they now have been long out of print. Therefore this Wordsworth Edition is a treasure trove for those lovers of these strange and unsettling tales penned by a master craftsman of the genre. We hope that this will not only please those who already admire Henry S. Whitehead, but attract a whole new legion of fans.

  David Stuart Davies

  West India Lights

  Black Terror

  I woke up in the great mahogany bed of my house in Christiansted with an acute sense of something horribly wrong, something frightful, tearing at my mind. I pulled myself together, shook my head to get the sleep out of my eyes, pulled aside the mosquito-netting. That was better! The strange sense of horror which had pursued me out of sleep was fading now.

  I groped vaguely, back into the dream, or whatever it had been – it did not seem to have been a dream; it was something else. I could now, somehow, localize it. I found now that I was listening, painfully, to a sustained, aching sound, like a steam calliope fastened onto one high, piercing, raucous note. I knew it could not be a steam calliope. There had been no such thing on the Island of Santa Cruz since Columbus discovered it on his Second Voyage in 1493. I got up and into my slippers and muslin bathrobe, still puzzled.

  Then abruptly the note ended, cut off clean like the ceasing of the drums when the Black people are having one of their ratas back of the town in the hills.

  Then, and only then, I knew what it was that had disturbed me. It had been a woman, screaming.

  I ran out to the semi-enclosed gallery which runs along the front of my house on the Copagnie Gade, the street of hard-pounded earth below, and looked down.

  A group of early risen Blacks in nondescript garb was assembled down there, and the number was increasing every instant. Men, women, small Black children were gathered in a rapidly tightening knot directly in front of the house, their guttural mumbles of excitement forming a contrapuntal background to the solo of that sustained scream; for the woman, there in the center, was at it again now, with fresh breath, uttering her blood-curdling, hopeless, screeching wail, a thing to make the listener wince.

  Not one of the throng of Blacks touched the woman in their midst. I listened to their guttural Creole, trying to catch some clue to what this disturbance was about. I would catch a word of the broad patois here and there, but nothing my mind could lay hold upon. At last it came, the clue; in a childish, piping treble; the clear-cut word, Jumbee.

  I had it now. The screaming woman believed, and the crowd about her believed, that some evil witchery was afoot. Some enemy had enlisted the services of the dreaded witch-doctor – the papaloi – and something fearful, some curse or charm, had been ‘put on’ her or someone belonging to her family. All that the word ‘Jumbee’ had told me clearly.

  I watched now for whatever was going to happen. Meanwhile I wondered why a policeman did not come along and break up this public gathering. Of course the policeman, being a Black man h
imself, would be as much intrigued as any of the others, but he would do his duty nevertheless. ‘Put a Black to drive a Black!’ The old adage was as true nowadays as in the remote days of West Indian slavery.

  The woman, now convulsed, rocking backward and forward, seemed as though possessed. Her screams had now an undertone or cadence of pure horror. It was ghastly.

  A policeman, at last! Two policemen, in fact, one of them Old Kraft, once a Danish top-sergeant of garrison troops. Kraft was nearly pure Caucasian, but, despite his touch of African, he would tolerate no nonsense. He advanced, waving his truncheon threateningly, barking hoarse reproaches, commands to disperse. The group of Black people began to melt away in the general direction of the Sunday Market, herded along by Sergeant Kraft’s dark brown patrolman.

  Now only Old Kraft and the Black woman who had screamed remained, facing each other in the street below. I saw the old man’s face change out of its harsh, professional, man-handling frown to something distinctly more humane. He spoke to the woman in low tones. She answered him in mutters, not unwillingly, but as though to avoid being overheard.

  I spoke from the gallery.

  ‘What is it, Herr Kraft? Can I be of assistance?’

  Old Kraft looked, recognized me, touched his cap.

  ‘Stoopide-ness!’ exploded Old Kraft, explanatorily. ‘The woo-man, she haf had – ’ Old Kraft paused and made a sudden, stiff, dramatic gesture and looked at me meaningly. His eyes said: ‘I could tell you all about it, but not from here.’

  ‘A chair on the gallery for the poor woman?’ I suggested, nodding to him.

  ‘Come!’ said he to the woman, and she followed him obediently up the outside gallery steps while I walked across to unfasten the door at the gallery’s end.

  We placed the woman, who seemed dazed now and kept a hand on her head, in one of my chairs, where she rocked slowly back and forth whispering to herself, and Kraft and I went inside the house, where I led him through to the dining-room.