HALLOWEEN TALE: EZRA PEDEN (1822)

Halloween Month rolls along here at Balladeer’s Blog with this look at one of Allan Cunningham’s Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry, published in 1822.

EZRA PEDEN – This was Allan Cunningham’s tale about the deeds of Scottish Presbyterian Minister Ezra Peden and his encounters with the forces of the supernatural in Scotland from the late 1600s to around 1706. It makes for nice Halloween Season reading and practically makes you feel the chilliness of Scotland in late October as Cunningham depicts the brave, if humorless, Ezra adventuring in the moonlight.

The short story is in three parts and begins by recounting Peden’s armed participation in the Killing Times between Scottish Presbyterian Covenanters and the government forces of King Charles II and James VII. The Killing Times ran from 1679 to 1688, but some sources dismiss the violence in 1679 and state 1680 marked the beginning of the period. 

In the following decades, Ezra Peden graduated from holding covert gatherings of the faithful and warring on dancing and singing to driving dark supernatural forces out of the Scottish hills. Peden battled witches who terrorized the community but fell into persecuting Halloween celebrants as glorifiers of Satan.

The minister intervened in the matter of elves attempting to abduct an old woman’s infant grandson, then escalated that into nighttime warfare against all the elven kind until he had caused them all to flee southwestern Scotland. 

Ezra Peden drove a ghost from the ruins of a tower, exorcised Hellish entities from a graveyard and consecrated the soil to prevent their return. Sea spirits who caused the sinking of Scottish ships also fell before the minister. Christians in Sweden and Norway sometimes called upon Ezra for aid against the forces of Hell.

At length, one night in 1705, Peden’s housekeeper Josiah ushered a visitor into Ezra’s presence. The rider begged the minister to attend to a dying man named Bonshaw, one of those who persecuted and killed Covenanters before and after the Killing Times.

Knowing his duty, Ezra rode off with the visitor to Bonshaw’s home, but found the dying man delirious, imagining he was still at work killing Covenanters and destroying Scottish kirks. Abruptly, the old persecutor fell down dead.

Peden fulfilled his religious obligations to the departed. However, he soon grew to brooding over not having gotten a final, deathbed exchange with the late Bonshaw, who had caused so much suffering to the minister’s co-religionists, many of whom he knew personally.

Ezra repeatedly mentioned this regret to all who knew him, and his obsession grew to resemble the ungodly desire to converse with the dead, or to summon Bonshaw back from beyond the grave. As a minister, Ezra Peden should have known the dangerous territory he was approaching, but he let himself be carried away by memories of the Killing Times, and the ravages of Bonshaw and men like him.

One night in the spring of 1706, several months after Bonshaw’s death, Ezra Peden was riding home under the moonlight after having presided at a wedding. A shadowy figure on a horse of his own suddenly appeared and tried to unnerve Peden by mimicking the minister’s every equestrian move.

At length, the rider revealed himself as the late Bonshaw, who claimed to have ridden out of the vale of fire and den of punishment, through regions of snow and hail, and through liquid lava for one hour among the living, to converse with Ezra Peden. 

The two old adversaries exchanged many words about life after death, and Bonshaw told the gloating Peden that many of his own fellow Covenanters were also in Hell being punished. The spirit further claimed that Charles II, James VII and George Gordon were among the damned. 

The dead man also cursed Ezra for taking so long to reach him the night he died, saying that if they could have conversed then there would be no need of this meeting. Eventually, the hour was up and Bonshaw brought the conversation to a close. He told Peden that if he wanted to speak with him again and learn more of the affairs of the dead, he should meet him Sunday night at an appointed graveyard.

Then, the awestruck minister watched as Bonshaw’s horse transformed into fellow damned soul Captain George Johnstone, while Bonshaw morphed into a beast of burden for his former subordinate officer. Johnstone and his mount rode back to Hell.

That Sunday, Ezra Peden again acted against his better judgment by arriving at the cemetery just as the moon was rising. We readers get a suitably melancholy and eerie encounter between the minister and a black-clad widow from his congregation.

She had been wailing at the grave of her late husband, who had died at sea. Peden upbraided her slightly for choosing the nighttime to visit her husband’s grave alone, then sent her on her way.

The next morning, the minister had still not returned home, so his servant Josiah went in search of him. He found Ezra Peden’s body outside the graveyard, barely clinging to life. The delirious man was carried home by Josiah and a few passing townsmen.

Ezra never came out of his delirium and died three days later. An old shepherd recounted to Josiah what he had witnessed as the sun rose on Monday morning after the Sunday night in the graveyard.

The terrified old man claimed he saw the late Ezra Peden consorting with a beautiful temptress in black, who had surely inflicted upon the minister the slow death which had taken him. The woman’s eyes caused the shepherd and his dog to flee in a panic.

Cunningham added that just before dying, Peden had made an enigmatic confession “which may be readily divined from this hasty and imperfect narrative.”

We readers are left to judge for ourselves if the dead and damned Bonshaw had tricked Ezra into meeting him at that cemetery only to find a temptress from Hell in his place, or if Peden had succumbed to the charms of the living widow and caught fatal pneumonia during their late-night tryst.

This story is also known as Ezra Peden and the Thousand Tales.   

FOR THE GOTHIC HORROR TALE ISABELLA OF EGYPT (1812) CLICK HERE.

FOR MY LOOK AT THE HALLOWEEN STORY LE DIABLE AMOUREUX (1772) CLICK HERE.