SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: NORTHERN LIGHTS

 "Northern Lights" by E. d'Esperance" (Elizabeth Jane Puttock), from her collection Northern Lights and Other Psychic Stories, 1899

Here's an odd little tale from an odd little writer who took advantage of the Spiritualism craze of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  It isn't even really a story, but a collection of incidences leading nowhere with no real ending.  I found it interesting for what it was and what it wasn't.

The main character is Herr Massie, a representative of a British firm with interests in Sweden.  We learn later in the story that fur of Herr Massie's predecessors had been lost -- one was found dead on a boat, one had drowned, the two just vanished.  Amazingly, this has nothing to do with the story.

It is a bitter cold winter in Sweden and Massie hire a horse, sledge, and driver to take him over country.  Massie, who is familiar with the area, is glad it is winter for the sled can then travel over frozen lakes, reducing the time needed for his business.  The driver, Petter, has one stipulation -- he will not drive after 8:00 pm past the area where cutthroats are known to attack travelers and he will not go past the house where the cutthroats are said to frequent -- a house that also holds many ghosts.  Again, the cutthroats and the ghosts have nothing to do with the story.  **sigh**

The pair travel throughout Sweden.  The sledge overturns once and once they almost sink through thin ice on a lake, but again nothing happens.  One Saturday, they put up at an inn in Dufved and woke the next morning to bitter cold -- a broken thermometer tells Massie that it is at lest 40 degrees below zero.  It is really too cold to travel and, since it was Sunday, Massie could get no business done, so Massie decided to take a little holiday there.  He got a pair of snow skates and with a guide, they headed off to Mullfjell, a mountain on the northern Swedish-Norwegian frontier, leaving Peter back in Dufved.  As evening approached they came across a Kota (a crude hut) and several Lapps tending their deer.  Somewhat tired, Massie asks the Lapps is they could rest there for an hour or so.  The leader of the group, an unnamed man about 60 years old, welcomed them and fed them by the fire in the center of the Kota.  Because of an expected drop in temperature, he invited them to spend the night (on a bed of pine boughs with a sack of potatoes for a pillow).  They accept.

Later that night, finding he could not sleep, Massie leaves the tent and watches the Northern Lights with wonder.  His host followed him out and told him the lights were a bridge between the world of the living and the dead.  The dead ride up the lights to Valhalla and while other dead use the lights to travel back to Earth.  Those who die during winter when the ground is too frozen to dig a grave mus wander the land of the living until they came have a proper burial.  Th two return to the Kota where the Lapp tells the story of his life and his lost love.

"The you've been to England, I suppose? his host said.  "Then you'll know the Prince of Wales.  He bought some reindeer from us, but that was before the terrible storm when we lost so many.  Poor Karin was among us then.  I was to have been married to Karin, but she preferred little Napoleon, and I did not care for any other girl, so I never took a wife, and now I'm nearly sixty."

Karin was a distant relative; his mother and hers were half-cousins.  She was beautiful with little of Lapp features.  Fair-haired and blue eyed with round cheeks and always smiling, Karin was the sweetest sight he had ever seen.  When she married Napoleon, Massie's host lost all pleasure.  He never smelled the flowers in the glade, nor saw the beauty of the woods, nor heard the birds in the spring and summer; all seasons were the same to him.  Her children grew up but she remained as youthful and beautiful as ever.  Then came a dreaded winter that coated their reindeer with a hard crust of snow so that they suffocated.  Karin cried over their misfortune until she was ill and Nappi took was few possessions he could spare to town to sell for medicine.  Instead of medicine, he spent the money on liquor and brought back one bottle of brandy for his wife.  Karin drank the bottle and then could never get enough of the stuff.  The pair soon packed up and left, headed south.  Stories came back of the pair begging drink and tobacco.  Eventually came a report that Nappi might be dead "somewhere about Jerfso, where people die of leprosy."  On hearing of Nappi's death, Massie's host went looking fro Karin, hoping to bring her back to her home.  All he found were rumors that she still roamed the countryside, begging for liquor.

Massie told him that he may have met her several winters ago.  He had met an old woman near Solleftea who  wanted to sell her wedding ring to him. In exchange he gave her a crown and parted ways.  Massie's host recognized the ring as being Karin's.

The Massie related a story his driver, Petter, had told him about a family with two young daughters.  The oldest daughter, about twelve, began talking about an elderly couple who asked for brandy and tobacco.  When she pointed them out to her mother, there was no one there.  Over the next few days, the pair continued to talk to Elsa, the young girl, but no one was or heard anything.  Then, with her mother present, Elsa said thy could have this, holding a piece of hard bread in her hand.  The bread vanished.  The next day Elsa asked her father to give them some tobacco.  Her father was willing but could not see them.  He handed the tobacco to Else and, when she held it out, it vanished.  The same with a small glass of brandy:  when he held it nothing happened but when Elsa held it out the full glass became empty.  Elsa caught a cold and was laid up for a few days.  when she recovered, the ghosts were gone.

And that is basically the story.  The Lapp host added that his people are not afraid of ghosts because they consider them a natural occurrence. possible because while they accp\ept the "white Christ," they also have links to the old gods.

The author, born Elizabeth Jane Puttock (1848-1914) was a well-known medium and spiritualist.  She was also known as Elizabeth Hope Reed (or Reid).  As a child she claimed to have lived in a haunted mansion and had a number alleged psychic visions.  A lonely child, she suffered her mother's verbal and physical abuses as well as dire hints of the asylum from harassing doctors.  In her early twenties. Jane discovered spiritualism with all its trappings -- including the medium's kit bag of powers:  automatic writing, ectoplasm, empathy, premonitions, table turning, and the like.  Taking the name E/ d'Esperance, she travelled through Europe giving seances in which she would materialize both flowers and spirits.  In 1880 she was exposed as a fraud when a sitter grabbed "Yohlande," the spirit she has just materialized and the spirit turned out to be Elizabeth herself.  She became more careful in her seances and was not "busted" for another thirteen years. At a seance in 1983, she claimed to have dematerialized her lower body, with just the stomach and had remaining.  Researcher Heywood Carrington explained his that trick was done in a darkened room.

."E. d'Esperance" wrote two books:  Shadowland, or, Light from the Other Side (1897, an autobiography of sorts) and Northern Lights, and Other Psychic Stories (1899, a collection of ten stories).  Northern Lights is available to read at the Internet Archive.