Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (10 page)

I’m sure I have read somewhere that magpies were once believed to be psychopomps, lying in wait for the souls of the dying. It was said that they timed their cries to cover the struggling breath of those at death’s door. According to myth-making.blogspot.com, magpies are known as “the devil’s bird” in Scottish folklore, and are supposed to carry a drop of Lucifer’s own blood beneath their tongues: “It was believed that the magpie could receive the gift of speech if its tongue was scratched and a drop of blood from a human tongue inserted into the wound.”

Old Toki, the district’s founding pagan father, would doubtless have considered the tiding a very ill omen indeed, as a magpie’s form was believed by the Norsemen to be a favourite disguise of witches. That being the case, they must be having their Sabbat tonight, as I have never heard the magpie chorus so loud or prolonged. Their numbers seem to be growing by the minute. The cat is sitting at the window listening intently, but seems reluctant to venture outdoors. For the time being anyway.

Best,

John

+ + +

To: Brian J. Showers ([email protected])
From: John Reppion ([email protected])
Sent: 21 Dec 2008 21:09
Subject: Jenny Greenteeth

Brian,

Almost as soon as I had sent my previous message mentioning witches, I came across my notes on Jenny Greenteeth. She was once Princes Park’s resident crone – in a manner of speaking anyway. In 1841, when the park was still under construction, an article appeared in the wonderfully named
Liverpool Porcupine
newspaper, stating that something quite unexpected had been found on the site:

Labourers working under the supervision of Mr. Edward Milner upon land in the district of Toxteth made a most surprising discovery yesterday. The men were engaged in excavating a channel, which is to form the basis of an artificial lake, when they unearthed a great wooden figure. The statue is said to be some seven feet in height and was evidently carved from a substantial trunk many years ago. Despite its age, the figure was not in any great state of decay and could easily be discerned as that of a woman holding a twisted staff in one hand and clutching an infant to her breast with the other. The chisel work is said to be very intricate with knotted and curling hairs being wonderfully rendered upon both the child and the lady’s heads. Skilful though her maker may have been, she is nevertheless rather an unattractive woman and in such a state of undress that Mr. Milner is said to have already rejected the possibility of the figure being displayed publicly.

For whatever reason – perhaps the
Porcupine
article drew too much interest – Milner recanted. The statue went on public display when Princes Park was opened in 1842. Jenny Greenteeth, as the figure became known, stood beside the boat-house, looking out over the lake beneath which she had once lain. I remember seeing a very old photograph of the statue in some volume or other when I was researching
800 Years of Haunted Liverpool
. The unseemly “state of undress” written of in the article had been dealt with by the application of a considerable amount of dark paint, giving Jenny a distinctly nun-like appearance.

The choice of name, while presumably unofficial, is interesting. Marc Alexander’s
Companion to the Folklore Myths & Customs of Britain
has the following entry for Jenny Greenteeth:

A particularly evil entity who dwelt in stagnant ponds and scum-covered pools. Jenny Greenteeth would seize unwary children with her fangs and pull them down to their death. She was obviously a creature of cautionary folklore perpetuated by parents to ensure their children kept away from dangerous places.

In addition, Harland & Wilkinson’s 1867 book
Lancashire Folklore
contains the following related passage:

We derive the familiar epithet of “
Old Nick
” from the Norwegian
Nok
, the Norse
Nikr
, or the Swedish
Neck
; and no further proof of their identity is required than a comparison between the attributes possessed in common by all these supernatural beings. The
Nok
is said to require a human sacrifice once a year, and someone is therefore annually missing in the vicinity of the pond or river where this sprite has taken up its abode. The males are said to be very partial to young maidens, whom they seize and drag under the water; whilst those of the opposite sex are quite as attractive and dangerous to the young fishermen who frequent the rivers. The German
Nixes
possess the same attributes. Both sexes have large green teeth; and the male wears a green hat, which is frequently mistaken by his victims for a tuft of beautiful vegetation. He is said to kill without mercy whenever he drags a person down; and a fountain of blood, which shoots up from the surface of the water, announces the completion of the deed. A perfect identification of this with our own popular belief is now easy. Nothing is more common at present than for children who reside in the country to be cautioned against venturing too near the water’s brink, lest “
Green Teeth
” or “
Bloody Bones
” should pull them in.

It seems safe to assume that the statue was christened “Jenny Greenteeth” in an effort to alert children to the dangers of the park’s own body of water. Admirable though such intentions may be, the scare tactics were not as effective as locals must have hoped.

The first child to die in the Princes Park lake did so in November of 1843 – only one year after the park was opened. The boy was an unnamed urchin who was presumed to have entered the park seeking shelter after hours. He was found the next morning, floating lifelessly in the icy water. The boy’s death was reported in the
Liverpool Mercury
and treated with typical Victorian sentimentality – indeed, a more Dickensian tragedy is hard to imagine. I cannot say precisely how many others suffered similar fates, but in October 1845, the following article appeared, again in the
Liverpool Porcupine
:

The fire brigade was called to a blaze at the Swiss boat-house of Prince’s Park in Toxteth in the early hours of yesterday morning. The fire burned through the night and caused considerable damage to the structure of the building. It is believed that a wooden carving which stood next to the boat-house was deliberately set alight by persons unknown during the hours of darkness. The act of vandalism is thought by some to have its root in a superstition which has become common amongst locals regarding the statue. Several persons have tragically been drowned in the waters of the boating-lake these past few years and a belief is said to have emerged that the carving, which depicted a bent old woman, was in some way to blame.

The piece goes on to state that the boat-house would be repaired, at the expense of Richard Vaughan Yates, the gentleman responsible for the park’s creation. Jenny’s burnt remains were to be removed from the site.

The cat seems at last to have overcome his dread of the magpies’ relentless chatter. I think I will interpret his appeal for release as a signal that I should take a bit of a screen break and cook myself something to eat.

Very best,

John

+ + +

To: Brian J. Showers ([email protected])
From: John Reppion ([email protected])
Sent: 21 Dec 2008 23:47
Subject: A Brief History of Princes Park

Brian,

Looking back over my preceding emails, I realise that I’ve basically been piecing together scraps of information which I have not worked through before now. On the one hand, I’m rather pleased with the results. This method of running through the data without attempting to create a fully formed article seems to be really helping me string points together. However, I have so far failed to examine the more general history of the area where Princes Park now stands. So, in this email, I will attempt to work through some ideas I have had regarding the region’s reputed origins, and possible evidence thereof.

Written evidence of Toxteth from back when old Toki first planted his fabled spear in the Mersey mud is, as you might expect, hard to come by. According to volume three of Farrer & Brownbill’s
History of the County of Lancaster
, prior to the Norman Conquest the district was divided equally into two manors held by the Saxon thanes Bernulf and Stainulf. They each possessed “a virgate and a half of a plough-land”, as well as a similar quantity of unfarmed, heavily forested land. The untilled portion of the territory is widely assumed to have been either unsuitable for farming, or else left wild for the purpose of hunting boar and other game.

After William the Conqueror had had his way with England, Toxteth passed into the ownership of Frenchman Roger de Poitou, along with other lands all over the country. The name “Stochestede”, attributed to the place in the
Domesday Book
of 1086, is translated by some scholars as “stake place” or “stick place” from the Anglo-Saxon words
stocc
and
stede
. A reference to the Viking founding ritual I mentioned earlier, seemingly.

You may have come across the 12
th
century historian William of Newburgh. He was infamous for his accounts of “The Green Children of St. Martin’s Land”, revenants returning from the dead to terrorise medieval England, and of magicians who “through secret cooperation of evil angels, turn rods into serpents, and water into blood”. In book six of his
Historia rerum anglicarum
, William makes mention of
Tosteth
near the
maeres ea
(literally “boundary river”, and widely thought to be the origin of the name Mersey). There, “... deep within the woods exists a tiny and ancient village whose tenants still converse in the old tongue and shun the Sacrament of Baptism.”

I have long been tempted by the idea that this brief entry might suggest that the original Viking settlement and its customs had survived among those trees which Bernulf, Stainulf, and Roger de Poitou had left untouched.

In 1207, Liverpool officially came into being. King John had the manor of Toxteth and the nearby village of Smeedown (now Smithdown) destroyed, to make way for hunting land. This territory was named the Royal Park of Toxteth, though its boundaries extended far beyond those recognised as Toxteth today.

As the centuries went by, the Royal Park of Toxteth shrank, its boundaries forever being eaten away. It was inherited by various men of title before coming to Richard Molyneaux, 1
st
Baronet of Sefton, in 1604. Molyneaux decided to tame the land which had been given over to beasts half a millennium earlier, and the Royal Park was miraculously transformed into farmsteads.

The tenant farmers on the southern edge of the district – corresponding approximately to today’s districts of Toxteth and Dingle – were Puritans from the nearby town of Bolton. They built the historic chapel in whose graveyard Cromwell’s troops are said to have encamped during the Civil War. It still stands at the corner of Park Road and Dingle Lane, less than half a mile from my own front door.

It is known officially as Toxteth Unitarian Chapel, but is more commonly called The Ancient Chapel of Toxteth. This is where the astronomer and poet Jeremiah Horrocks was schooled, and eventually laid to rest in 1641. A plaque dedicated to his memory still hangs on the wall, each of its four corners decorated with a five-pointed star. Horrocks’ schoolmaster was the clergyman Richard Mather who, though well respected locally, seems to have been at odds with his church superiors. He was suspended several times for “nonconformity in matters of ceremony”, on one occasion by the Archbishop of York himself.

In 1635, disillusioned with the Church of England, Mather and several of the Toxteth Puritan parishioners joined the Company of Pilgrims. They made the journey to Bristol, and from there set sail for America, arriving at Boston Harbor during one of the most catastrophic hurricanes of the era. This trip was recorded by one Isaac Whateley in “The Old Country. Memories of an Andover Old Gentleman.” published in
The Andover News-letter
of 1706(reprinted rather badly in Campbell’s
Mersey Memories Volume Two
). Whateley was a mere infant when his family left Toxteth for New England, but his article includes stories told by his older relatives of their lives on the Liverpool farmsteads. The most intriguing of these reminiscences reads as follows:

... short way from the Chapel [there was] a wood where lived a group of aged women whose huts stood before my people came [to Toxteth]. The place was as [large as?] a farmstead but much overgrown, with the River Jordan running though it... The Preacher said the women shouldn’t be allowed [to live there?] but the landholder held that they had the right, their mothers and their mother’s mothers having lived there. People were unhappy and after a time [the huts] were burned and the women driven away.

“River Jordan” was the nickname the pious Puritans gave the brook that once marked the southern boundary of the Royal Park, the stream which later became Dickinson’s Dingle. This suggests that the women mentioned in the piece lived within, or on, the boundary of the Royal Park. That their “huts stood before my people came” and that “their mothers and their mother’s mothers” had lived there would seem to indicate that theirs was a community of some age. The fact that only “aged women” lived in the settlement implies a society at the end of its life where men and the young have left and only mothers and grandmothers remain. Could Isaac Whateley’s testimony be evidence of the last remnants of the “tiny and ancient village” which William of Newburgh wrote of some 500 years earlier? The relevant passage in
Historia rerum anglicarum
mentions that those who lived in the wood refused to be baptised, presumably subscribing to some older religion. Could this be the reason that “the Preacher” (possibly Mather?) and others were not keen on having them live so close to their Puritan community? Could a fraction of Norse culture and society have survived for almost 1,000 years here on the banks of the River Mersey?