The man in the stovepipe hat
The girl who had suffered the ghostly strangulation attempt had bruises on both sides of her neck and found it hard to swallow. We saw the man in the stovepipe hat one more time that summer, in broad daylight, walking up the street from the waste ground. His dog was with him and when he saw myself and a group of friends near a public phonebox, as one of us was making a call, he threw his head back, laughed and then pointed a finger at us before stopping in his tracks, turning round, and heading back to the waste ground. We stood transfixed and watched him until he simply popped out of existence. Several people became convinced he was Satan. Even back then, I hadn’t much time for the concept of the devil and so I dismissed the idea. I did, however, believe – and still do – that this was a perverse, malicious entity out to do harm and with a huge chip on its shoulder where humanity is concerned. He, it, hated every one of us without exception.
And that was that. We never saw him again and I never want to. I started my next course of studies at Manchester that same year, in September. I did a one-year diploma course in Recreational Arts for the Community before heading to London to study my undergraduate degree. I lost touch with my friend from my A-level days, though I bumped into her once in London, surprisingly close to where I lived back then. We met in a supermarket and it turned out she was living in the same area. We promised to meet up but both of us knew, I think, that we wouldn’t. I don’t know why. I’d peg the beginning of the end for our friendship around the time we had to deal with the spooky goings-on that summer on the UMIST campus. Things just fell apart between us after those high-adrenalin, knee-shaking experiences.
I was never and still am not a great fan of horror movies. I enjoy the non-gory, psychological ones such as The Blair Witch Project but I never go near stories like The Omen because I can’t handle not so much the sight of blood but scenes of cruelty and torture and the like. That said, in the early 1990s I was persuaded to watch The Poltergeist series of films, having been promised more scares than any blood. They were pretty lame, which was okay by me, but when I first saw the character I think is known as ‘The Preacher’, I screamed out loud. There, on screen, more or less, was the man in the stovepipe hat. It wasn’t exactly like him but the actor’s gaunt face, hinting at perversity and cruelty, coupled with the dark clothes and fanatical religious air, was a very close approximation to the entity I and others had witnessed back at the UMIST campus. Many years after that, the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured a villain very close to the man with the stovepipe hat, again a preacher but this time not quite so reminiscent because Joss Wheadon had chosen an actor for the part who wasn’t thin and skeletal but muscular and quite hunky. Still, the clothes and the behaviour brought the man in the stovepipe hat back to mind.
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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