Fairy as vampire, Doyle as chump, Houdini as ... Congress's oracle of truth?
Fiona Macleod's 'By the Yellow Moonrock' (1921) reflects anxieties about change
The supernatural was trending hard by the early 1920s. From magicians to spiritualists to authors, it seems everyone wanted to say something about what was real and what wasn’t.
Houdini had long campaigned against spiritualist frauds by the time of his death in 1926. A poster for a 1909 stage show promises an event where the magician “says NO” to question of “Do Spirits Return?” and “PROVES IT.”
Shortly before dying, Houdini even testified to Congress to support the criminalization of fortune-telling: “It takes a flim-flammer to catch a flim-flammer.”
Curiously, Houdini had also befriended the most famous spiritualist of his time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote with conviction that the “photographed” Cottingley Fairies of 1917 were real. (Spoiler alert: they weren’t.)
One story I enjoy from this supernatural heyday is Fiona Macleod’s “By the Yellow Moonrock” (1921). It’s currently found in Fearsome Fairies: Haunting Tales of the Fae (2021), a collection of twelve stories published between 1867 and 2014.
“Moonrock” is set in rural Scotland and revolves around Rory MacAlpine, a mournful bachelor and wandering piper struggling to come to terms with a vision of a beautiful fairy he saw in a recent dream. While playing a wedding reception, listeners notice his music is off. The piper confesses that what he saw in his dream has rendered him “fëy” (fated to die). He visited the Moonrock, a creepy local formation, where he saw birds with strange feathers and a woman who tested his devotion to an irreparably lost lover.
“‘… I saw standing before me the beautifullest woman I ever saw in all my life. I’ve had sweethearts here and sweethearts there, […] and long ago I loved a lass who died, Sine MacNeil; but not one o’ these, not sweet Sine herself, was like the woman I saw in my dream, who had more beauty upon her than them altogether, or than all the women in Strathraonull and Strathanndra.’”
The fairy, later revealed to be a bhean-nimhir (serpent woman), is a blood-sucking vampire that preys on local men.1 Toward the end of “Moonrock,” Rory MacAlpine encounters the fairy again, but this time in a wakeful vision only he can see. He alone is entranced by her beauty and music and lured away from safety. An eyewitness gives us a hint of what happened by recalling the scene where the piper was babbling to himself while moving along a road like a man possessed:
Rory MacAlpine passed him, and played till he was close on the Moonrock. Then he stopped, and listened, learning froward as though straining his eyes to see in the shadow.
What you, as a reader, see in the shadow might depend on what you want to learn from “Moonrock” and the 1920s. I looked in three corners:
Biographically speaking, it’s important to note that Fiona Macleod wasn’t really Fiona Macleod. The name was a secret pseudonym of Scottish writer William Sharp. This was not a man moonlighting as a woman to exploit femme fatalism for commercial gain. In fact, Sharp was an early believer in the New Woman Movement. In 1892, he published the only edition of the New Pagan magazine, where he used multiple pen names to advocate for gender equality. Any reading of this man’s intent in writing as a woman will require nuance.
Historically speaking, the women’s suffragette movement in Great Britain was beginning to earn hard-fought, decades-long parliamentary victories. The Representation of the People Act 1918 granted the right to vote to a limited numbered of women aged 30 or older; ten years later, women gained voting equality with men with the passage of The Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928. “Moonrock,” a story written by a writer interested in women’s rights, can be examined with a political eye. Why did Sharp become Macleod? Who was she that he couldn’t be? A feminine pseudonym might have granted Sharp a freer imagination to exploring issues of equality, gender, identity, desire, and sex. By 1921, readers were well aware what men writers thought about these topics. Sharp’s pseudonym suggests he was more interested in women’s views. (Should he have pretended to be a woman? Any answer to that question is less interesting to me than the fact that he, well, just went and did it.)
Popularly speaking, supernatural stories like “Moonrock,” which revolve around the roles of men and women and the strange boundaries they should never transgress, were nothing if not timely in 1921. They were part of a larger conversation about where to seek truth during a rapidly modernizing time. Houdini argued spiritualists were fools. Doyle believed we were fools not to believe in fairies. And Sharp played make-believe as Macleod to follow a fool to the limits of his supernatural fears. So which flim-flammer is our best guide to understanding why fairy lore never really went away?
The fairy tale, as a storytelling medium, survives because it is an ungoverned space where we can safely examine the changes that scare or astound us. And in a good fairy tale like “Moonrock,” the reader’s chaos of uncertainty—Why do I care about what is real or what isn’t?—is good for inquiry. It pushes us to explore new ideas without having to take sides. Houdini accused spiritualists of being charlatans—can you believe that guy lobbied before Congress?!—but I place little faith in a man who spent his life as Bullshitter in Chief. I love Doyle, but a real-life Sherlock Holmes solving the mystery of the fairy world, once and for all, he was not. But Sharp as Macleod? This little-known deceiver, I’ll follow. Elizabeth Dearnley, editor of Fearsome Fairies, lends my choice some solid footing. She writes:
Macleod’s bhean-nimhir is part of a lengthy tradition of seductively threatening female fairies; as with other alluringly sinister supernatural women we find in myths and legends worldwide, such creatures invariably embody patriarchal fears about unruly female sexuality.
I would emphasize that Sharp’s writing not only reflected patriarchal fears that extended from myths and legends. It also poignantly captured his readership’s present-day ideas about “unruly women” and the changes they could bring about with new gender-equality laws.
Sharp was operating a fictional space where, in order to tell truths, he was expected to lie very well. And “Moonrock” succeeds in that regard, because I’m chasing after ideas like a Rocky chases chickens.
Houdini and Doyle, while responding to very real anxieties about “other” worlds, never acknowledging the supernatural for what it was: a fictional alternate dimension that was best suited as a space to explore inner fears of change. That is to say, fairies and ghosts only feel real to us because of the very real social and cultural disruptions they represent. To focus on the veracity of their existence is, well … good luck with that cause, Houdini and Doyle. I’m sure Congress still has space on its calendar.
Supernatural stories like “Moonrock” remind us that inner forces like grief make us fear the future. We’re not unsympathetic to Rory MacAlpine being haunted by a vampiric fairy that may offer him release from the loss of a sweetheart. But what was Rory really grieving? The death of a pretty real girl, or the loss of a pretty ideal that was dying away? Given changing laws about gender equality in the 1920s, it’s not a stretch to say the bhean-nimhir, a clever fictional embodiment of an “unruly woman,” was apropos of its time.
Maybe larger conversations about equality needed to be fed by voices like Macleod’s. In an odd way, because Macleod didn’t actually exist, the pseudonym was completely free to unleash ideas that could shake up conventional thinking.
Maybe we need to be reminded that for every Houdini or Doyle driving the conversation about what is real or fake, there is a Sharp who can play a Macleod and remind us that decisions about reality—what we accept, what we reject, what we fear, and how we change—shouldn’t be made by those pretending to be oracles of truth.
And maybe, just maybe, we should look more often to writers like Sharp who explored richer meanings of the supernatural, who adopted the pseudonym Fiona Macleod to perhaps point out that supernatural truth doesn’t exist to be proved or disproved. The supernatural belongs to a sacred, shared fictional world where we seekers must remain free to question feelings we don’t yet understand.
My thoughts bubbled up after reading Elizabeth Dearnley’s outstanding introduction to Fearsome Fairies, which also covers Doyle’s fairy and photographic follies. He not only believed in things like fairies and ectoplasm, like many of his contemporaries, but he wrote articles (plural) and books (plural) about them!