Uncanny Whistlers

 

Whistling spirits aren’t the best-known of supernatural folkloric creatures, but they do occur, as I myself can tell you. The 'Seven Whistlers' was a death portent of seven crying birds - which Wordsworth describes in part of a sonnet about a poor old man who nevertheless ‘hath waking empire, wide as dreams’ since ‘rich are his walks with supernatural cheer’:

He the seven birds hath seen that never part,

Seen the seven whistlers on their nightly rounds

And counted them! And oftentimes will start,

For overhead are sweeping Gabriel’s hounds,

Doomed with their impious lord the flying hart

To sweep forever on aërial grounds.

'Supernatural cheer' seems an odd way to describe these dread omens, but perhaps the old man enjoyed telling Wordsworth the stories. The Whistler is among the 'fatal birds' Edward Spenser mentions in The Faerie Queene: 'the Whistler shrill, that whoso hears, doth dy.' (Book II, canto XII, verse 36)

I first came across the Seven Whistlers as a child reading one of Malcolm Saville’s well-known-at-the-time ‘Lone Pine’ adventure stories. Seven White Gates is set in Shropshire around and on the hill called Stiperstones. It’s a region full of folklore – Wild Edric and Lady Godda lead the Wild Hunt there, and the Devil sits on the rock formation on top of Stiperstones, known as the Devil’s Chair. Jenny, one of the characters in the story, tells the heroine Peter (yes) about the Seven Whistlers:

‘I remember Dad telling me once – and there are lots of others who’ll tell you too – that the Whistlers are seven mysterious birds sometimes heard whistling together at night. When you hear them in the night like that it’s bad, and the miners round her often wouldn’t go to work because an accident might happen to them ... it’s horrid. I hate them.’

There’s a rather wonderful 19^th century poem about the Whistlers by Alice E. Gillington (1863-1934), who collected folklore and folk songs. The first verse: 

Whistling strangely, whistling sadly, whistling sweet and clear,

The Seven Whistlers have passed thy house, Pentruan of Porthmeor;

It was not in the morning, nor the noonday’s golden grace,

It was in the dead waste midnight, when the tide yelped loud in the Race;

The tide swings round in the Race, and they’re ‘plaining whisht and low.

And they come from the gray sea-marshes, where the gray sea-lavenders grow;

And the cotton grass sways to and fro;

And the gore-sprent sundews thrive

With oozy hands alive.

Canst hear the curlews’ whistle through thy dreamings dark and drear?

How they’re crying, crying, crying, Pentruan of Porthmeor?

Though the Seven Whistlers were often associated with curlews calling, that didn’t mean they were not still feared:

‘I heard ‘em one dark night last winter,’ said an old Folkestone fisherman. ‘They come over our heads all of a sudden, singing “ewe, ewe,” and the men in the boat wanted to go back. It came on to rain and blow soon afterwards and it was an awful night, sir; and sure enough before morning a boat was upset, and seven poor fellows drowned. I know what makes the noise, sir; it’s them long-billed curlews, but I never likes to hear them.’

            Folklore of the Northern Counties, William Henderson, Folk-Lore 1879, 137

So that’s the Seven Whistlers, but there are solitary whistlers too. JG Campbell’s Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands records a tale from Tiree, ‘The Unearthly Whistle’. A young man was hurrying home late one moonlit night:

His way lay across a desolate moor called the Druim Buidhe (‘Yellow Ridge’), and when halfway he heard a loud whistle behind him but in a different direction from that in which he had come – at a distance, he thought, of above a mile. The whistle was so unearthly loud he thought every person in the island must have heard it. He hurried on, and when opposite an Carragh Biorach (‘the Sharp-Pointed Rock’) he heard the whistle again, as if at the place where he himself had been when he heard it first. The whistle was so clear and loud that it sent a shiver through his very marrow.

            With a beating heart he quickened his pace, and when at the gateway adjoining the village he belonged to, he heard the whistle at the Pointed Rock. He made off the road and managed to reach home before being overtaken. He rushed into the barn where he usually slept, and after one look towards the door at his pursuer, buried himself below a pile of corn.

            His father was in the house, and three times, with an interval between each call, heard a voice at the door saying. ‘Are you asleep? Will you not go to look at your son? He is in danger of his life and in risk of all he is worth.’

            Each call became more importunate, and at last the old man rose and went to the barn. After a search he found his son below a pile of sheaves, and nearly dead. The only account the young man could give was that when he stood at the door he could see the sky between the legs of his pursuer, who came to the door and said it was fortunate for him he had reached shelter, and that he (the pursuer) was such a one who had been killed in the ‘Field of Birds’ in the Moss, a part of Tiree near at hand.

                        The Gaelic Otherworld, JG Campbell, ed Ronald Black, Birlinn 2005, 282

Another tale of a strange whistler was collected in Gaelic in 1891 by Lady Evelyn Stewart Murray from John Robertson of Atholl (born c. 1829), carter and labourer. But ‘The Whistler of Glen Tilt’ was not malevolent:

There was a whistling spirit in Glen Tilt. It could be heard whistling up and down the glen but nobody ever saw it. A farmer called Paul lived in the glen. He had a flock of sheep and when he was out among the sheep Whistler would call to him, ‘Paul! Leave the sheep,’ and Whistler himself would keep the sheep safe. A thief went to steal Paul’s grey sheep and he tied the animal’s legs with garters and carried her off on his back. Whistler shouted, ‘Leave the grey sheep, Paul,’ and Whistler struck the man and he left the sheep. When the folk got up in the morning they found the sheep, tied up just as the thief had left it.

Tales from Highland Perthshire, Stewart Murray: tr. & ed. Robertson & Dilworth, Scottish Gaelic Text Soc. 2008, 139

A second tale of the same whistling spirit was told to Lady Evelyn by 83 year-old widow Mrs Ann Stewart (born 1808) on Saturday May 16^th, 1891:

In Glen Tilt there was a spirit called the Whistler. The shepherds would hear him chivvying along the sheep and they wouldn’t see him, but they could hear the whistle even though they couldn’t see him. One wet night the River Tilt was in spate, and the shepherds said to each other, ‘We won’t see the Whistler tonight’ and the Whistler said, ‘I created the spirit laws. I went round by the bridge and here I am.’

Tales from Highland Perthshire, Stewart Murray: tr. & ed. Robertson & Dilworth, Scottish Gaelic Text Soc. 2008, 287

And so to my own whistler story. Far too long ago I lived in an old house in the remote Dales village of Malham, in Malhamdale at the top of Airedale. Nights were dark, winters were wild, and I'd lie at nights listening to the owls and the noise of the beck rushing over stones on its way down to the source of the Aire. Once in a while there was another sound, which I described in a diary entry of December 7^th 1977. (I was twenty-one.) 

A black wind blowing around the house and I don’t like getting up in the mornings because of the cold. Last night there was the whistling again, long fluctuating whistles like a farmer to his dog. The time was ten past midnight and it was fainter than before, and only lasted about ten minutes. I have heard it often, louder and longer; it can’t possibly be the wind and is like no owl I ever heard.

It wasn't a curlew either, I was used to hearing their long melancholy cries. They are rare now. And later that month, Sunday December 18^th:

Whistling again: it’s a clear still night, midnight. Very clear, shrill and fluctuating; it’s not wind. Either man, bird or ghost!

Maybe it was one of the farmers, though they wouldn’t usually be moving sheep at midnight, or be whistling for so long, so close to the farms. I don't have a good explanation, but I wrote a small poem at the time.

 

Whistling after dark,

whether man, bird, ghost,

often seems to come

when the stream runs most;

 

while the beck’s rough and loud

it carries most plain,

the long sheep-dog whistle

again and again,

 

like somebody walking

unable to sleep,

whistling the lost collie,

the canny dog that knew the sheep.

 

 

 

Picture credits:

Turner: Breakers on a Flat Beach (1835-40), National Gallery, Wikimeda

Turner: Fishing Boats Bringing a Disabled Ship into Port, Tate Gallery

Katharine Holmes: Malham: Trees and Barn, ink and wash: in possession of author.