Greetings from the future! This week, I’m blogging from The Land Down Under and preparing to ring in 2024 a few hours earlier than normal. Along with the usual champagne, dancing and hat ticklers, I’m celebrating with killer spiders, fish and snakes, copious amounts of vegemite and inexplicably, haunted church bells:
A practical joker at Woollahara, New South Wales, on New Year’s Eve deserves no mercy. The clergyman there is rather “high,” and has been in the habit of calling his flock together at what a majority of them consider unseasonable hours to offer prayer and praise, or to receive admonition, as the case might be.
On New Year’s Eve just as everybody was getting into bed the bell of the Woollahara Church began to ring. The clergyman had retired, but jumped out of bed again in a hurry, and in unclerical costume rushed to the church to see what was the matter. The clerk and the sexton did the same, and a number of devout parishioners followed suit.
On arriving at the “sacred edifice,” as newspaper reporters used to call a church, there was the bell “tonging” away apparently of its own accord. Some of the more superstitious proposed going to prayers at once to exorcise the fiend who was working the clapper so vigorously, but the clergyman in a very matter-of-fact spirit climbed up to the bell by the light of a lantern, and then found that one of the “unregenerate” had tied a piece of twine to the clapper of that bell, and was pulling the twine at a considerable distance away. The twine was “run up” over two paddocks and at a distance of nearly a quarter of a mile from the church—but nobody was found at the other end of it.
At the same time there was no sort of doubt on the mind of any person present that it was the work of someone of “mortal mould” however wicked he might be, and not of a disembodied spirit from the lower regions—or anywhere else in the spirit world. It will be a sad look out for that miserable sinner if he does not repent in time.
– The Week, January 17, 1880
If that’s our phantom bell ringer’s fate, I shudder to think what’s in store for the fiend who pranked the West Virginia State Poultry Association.
I hope you, dear readers, will save the repenting for after the holidays. Best wishes for a healthy, prosperous and joyous new year!
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Disclaimer: The modern era is far from the first to grapple with rampant “fake news.” As I am neither a historian nor journalist, I make no claims about the accuracy or lack thereof of the above sources. I assert only that they make for a good story.