The man in the stovepipe hat
The same evening many of the MYT students and their guests, including myself, were in the bar on campus. It was basically a small shed some distance away from the accommodation, close to the waste ground. There was a pool table, one bar, some gaming machines. I was having a drink – I was not drunk – when someone burst through the door, someone I didn’t know but had seen around, shouting about lights in the sky. We all rushed outside. It was a warm, clear night and above us we saw several large lights, each of them rotating but together forming a rough oval. We saw nothing else but some of us, myself included, thought we could see something like a heat haze, a vague hint of connecting outline around and between the lights. The meteorological office was called and we asked for an explanation of the lights in the sky. We had the benefit of youth making us bold as brass but we were surprised they didn’t laugh at us. Instead, they told us Prince was playing a gig in Manchester that night. The thing was, we could see the stadium lights from where we were and these were nothing to do with Prince. The lights remained for approximately half an hour, then seemed to fade away.
That night, I was staying in my friend’s room and we heard a scream. We, and others, jumped up and ran out of our rooms to discover that two female MYT students who shared a room had encountered a mystery man in their quarters. One girl had woken with a sensation that she was choking. Her roommate heard her having difficulties, switched the light on and saw, just for a second, a man dressed in black with a stovepipe hat on, leaning down over her friend’s bed and throttling her. His bony fingers were tight around her neck. He looked up, the woman not under attack saw his red eyes and he snarled, then vanished. Not many people slept again that night, as large cups of coffee were drunk and speculation mounted as to what this creature was. All agreed he was evil. Some said several suicides had taken place on the campus; I remarked this was not surprising, given that, sadly, too many students take their own lives through drugs, drink, loneliness or mental health issues exasperated by being away from home and under study pressure. Students who decide to kill themselves often have a predilection for hanging, so when someone said a person had hung themselves on the waste ground, again I was not surprised. But what if something was promoting anxiety and suffering? What if people were led to their deaths? That’s assuming these tales weren’t just rumours, hysteria setting in, which I must admit I think was given what had taken place. I recall being a strange mix of calm inside and scared shitless in physical terms, weak-kneed and stammering. I suppose it was shock.
This is a multi-page entry: page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4
tags: aliens, bizarre, elementals, Fortean, ghosts, nature spirits, sightings, stovepipe hat, strange, weird
9 comments on “The man in the stovepipe hat”
July 17th, 2006 at 1:15 am
Hi A…!
Wow! Thank you for having the courage to share this experience with us. My friend Heather in BC, Canada collects these reports of the stovepipe hat apparitions, and they do occur all over the world. I will send her the link for this entry as I’m certain she will appreciate it.
Often people write to me because they are frightened by a haunting that they are experiencing and I will tell them that it is very, very rare that anyone suffers physical harm beyond what they might cause themselves fleeing (such as tripping in their rush to get away or banging into things).
However, I think that might be true only in case where the apparition or haunting was once human.
I do not believe that these stovepipe hat fellows are the same as a traditional haunting or what we define as “ghost.”
Very scary indeed!
July 17th, 2006 at 2:51 am
the Stovepipe Hat Man
July 17th, 2006 at 8:57 am
That’s interesting. I’ve no idea if he was human once or not but I have theorised that he’s an archetype, though how that word translates from our usual sense of it into a being apparently capable of intelligence and action/reaction, I don’t know.
I’ve never believed in the devil - who is more or less a Christian construct - and I know the Anti-Christ is, again, not only a Christian construct but one with absolutely no foundation in the Bible but instead created in the early Middle Ages. Similarly, there are no Biblical grounds for the evangelical and other fundie Christian concept of the Rapture. All that said, I wonder if we create these beings ourselves somehow or if these beings are the foundation for belief in such things as the devil.
I also wonder why this entity chooses to appear dressed in black with skeletal appearance and a stovepipe hat. Maybe it doesn’t choose; maybe it just is but either way, the look of the character conveys such an image to me of witchfinders, the Inquisition, the darker more shameful aspects of Christian history rolled into one being.
Many belief systems talk of there being spirits and then there are demons, angels, gods, goddesses. If demons exist it doesn’t point to the existence of the devil as their leader but, if they do, then this man certainly fits the label of demon. I’d be interested to hear from your friend.
I agree that spirits do not and cannot harm, neither can what might be termed inactive ghosts. But there are definitely, in my view, more things ‘out there’ than the spirits of the departed. There are gods and goddesses some of whom are good and some of whom are anything but, so maybe there are demons but maybe there are simply a mix of other-worldly beings both good and bad, reflecting the state of things in our own realm of existence. After all, people have long talked of war between Heaven and Hell or, when stripped of that theological baggage, the notion of good versus evil being played out on a cosmic scale.
I have difficulty accepting dualities as they invariably don’t play out in what we call the ‘real’ world - I mean, even Hitler must have loved, even Pol Pot had feelings, even Stalin knew tears and so on. We use judgement to define who is good and who is evil and we can never judge anyone correctly as wholly one or the other. In the case of the man in the stovepipe hat, my usual belief in complexity is confounded because he appears thoroughly evil with no redeeming elements to be found whatsoever. x
July 17th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
Hi A…,
I too wonder if “we” create them … like a Tibetan Tulpa ????
I’ve added a link to this entry on our blog.
Cheers!
Sue
July 17th, 2006 at 10:42 pm
Thanks Sue - and even some scientists agree with the idea that a poltergeist is a created, mental phenomena. I’ve been checking your blog at least once a week so will head over in the morning. It’s late here!
x
July 19th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
That’s a powerful and scary image. It reminds me of a brief mention from the book Gumbo Ya Ya that a friend and I researched once upon a time when I was a reporter. Gumbo Ya Ya is a book of folklore about Louisiana and was written in the Great Depression. It told of the Mother Hubbard Man seen in Alexandria, LA, my hometown, in 1915.
My friend and I went through microfilm and found the newspaper article which was brief but described the Mother Hubbard Man frightening people in an Alexandria neighborhood.
It was almost certainly a man dressed up but still came across as eerie, especially coming from so far in the past. Reading familiar street and neighborhood names mentioned from a different era added to the tale’s tingle of fear.
July 20th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Hi Sid! All the scarier because it’s true - at least, it’s what happened as I perceived and experienced it at the time, and the memory is burned in. I don’t think I will ever forget although this is the first time I’ve ever written down what happened.
The Gumbo Ya Ya story you relate sounds very similar, though, to Spring-Heeled Jack; as a horror writer I am sure you’ve heard of him. The question, was he a man dressed up or something altogether different? The descriptions of him match the man in the stovepipe hat in many ways, particularly the burning coal eyes.
I searched for ‘man in stovepipe hat’ online and all I found were references to Abraham Lincoln! x
July 21st, 2006 at 11:05 pm
Spring-Heeled Jack reports were very well documented and researched … I personally do not believe it was a man dressed up.
I haven’t heard of the Gumbo Ya Ya story before, it sounds interesting!
Cheers!
July 22nd, 2006 at 8:44 am
No, I don’t believe Spring-Heeled Jack was a person dressing up. I think he was something else, somehow kin to these beings we’ve been discussing in this and the other post on the stick man. I hadn’t heard of the Gumbo Ya Ya, either.
We have a Beast of C… V… round here but that’s not human or humanoid but a Big Mystery Cat - thought to be a panther! It’s killed sheep and cows. I hope, to be honest, I never catch a glimpse of it. I’ve seen a wild boar and that freaked me out, let alone a wild big cat! x
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