L. M. Montgomery, curses and two suspicious deaths

The article about the novelist Mary Webb contains an account of what happened some years after her death to her husband and his second wife. This is a good example of the 'curse or coincidence?' scenario, which is featured in several other articles.

I was reminded of this case by something that I recently read in a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery: there are two similar, possibly suspicious, deaths in her life too.

Each case is all the more significant in the light of the other one, and even more so when put into the wider context of suspicious deaths involving other creative people who might have used unseen influences against someone who injured them.

A summary of the Mary Webb affair

Mary Webb's husband Henry became more and more distant from her: she was difficult to live with and he was attached to an attractive young pupil of his.  When Mary Webb died, the sales of her books took off; her husband soon married the ex-pupil and they got all the royalties. Their new life of luxury came to an end when Henry Webb died prematurely after an 'accident' while mountain climbing. His widow remarried, but just like Mary Webb she died of an incurable disease at the age of forty-six.

A summary of the L. M. Montgomery affair

When she was around 23 years old, L. M. Montgomery became infatuated with a very attractive man called Herman Leard. They enjoyed each other's company, but nothing came of it. Her side of the story, which she mentioned in journals written for eventual publication, is that despite being overwhelmed by her feelings for him, she rejected him because he was unworthy of her. She considered him beneath her socially, intellectually and educationally. 

Herman Leard died in 1899, one year after she had last seen him, possibly of complications from influenza. He was almost 29 years old. He had been engaged to a very beautiful young woman who mourned him for some years, married someone else and died 10 years after Leard's death.

David St. Clair’s string of misfortunes

I first learned about August Strindberg’s string of misfortunes from Colin Wilson’s book The Occult.

I found another case of interest in Beyond the Occult, where Colin Wilson gives a summary of the run of ’bad luck’ experienced by the American journalist David St. Clair.

This ‘curse or coincidence?’ case has inspired an article because of some familiar features and resemblance to other cases.

As with Strindberg’s troubles, there is an obvious starting point and an obvious - and metaphysical - cause. There is a difference in that Strindberg brought his trouble on himself whereas St. Clair was an innocent victim.

Both men experienced good patches in their lives immediately before the trouble started: Strindberg had a few good months in Paris, while David St. Clair lived a very pleasant life for eight years in Rio de Janeiro before everything started to go wrong.

Strindberg endured a long period of misfortunes, while St. Clair’s spell of bad luck did not last very long.

The Maharishi Yogi, the Beatles and Joyce Collin-Smith

In her book Call No Man Master, Joyce Collin-Smith suggests that the Maharishi Yogi used his occult powers to cause the deaths of two men. One was the Beatle John Lennon and the other was the Beatles’ agent Brian Epstein.

She believed that the Maharishi had the ability to influence events remotely. This belief was based on her own experiences of seeing him and other people in action. I have both read about and experienced many metaphysical phenomena, some of which have been mentioned on here as have some suspicious and/or convenient deaths, so I too believe that a few people have special powers, powers that are often used to harm others. 

Joyce Collin-Smith’s account of these deaths will be followed by some supporting material from various sources.

Two similar painful incidents: curse or coincidence?

Thinking about a fairly recent painful incident has reminded me of something similar that happened a long time ago. 

What these events have in common is both the effect they had on me and the suspected cause:  I was hit where it hurt most and an energy vampire was involved. 

In both cases, administrators behaved unprofessionally and out of character.

The empty bank account
Many years ago, I got a horrible, jarring shock when a letter from my bank manager arrived out of the blue informing me that my account had gone overdrawn, and that while he was not unduly concerned about this he thought that I should be made aware of the problem. 

I was always very careful with my financial affairs so I couldn’t understand how this could have happened - for the first time ever. I was expecting two big cheques from a client; they were overdue but I knew that I had enough money in my account to last until they arrived.

Mary Webb’s legacy: curse or coincidence?

Stella Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote to and comic parody of a certain type of fiction: the rural novel as written by authors such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. 

I have never been able to see the attraction of what is known as the ‘Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’ myself  - not even Thomas Hardy’s books have the power to hold my attention – but when I read in an article I found online while researching Stella Gibbons that Stella once expressed her regret to the writer Michael Pick that she had parodied Mary Webb "because she had such an unhappy life", followed by “This was perhaps oversensitive. Webb had, after all, died five years before the publication of Cold Comfort Farm. Her life, though dogged by illness and depression, was by no means without happiness, and her childhood, compared with Stella's, had been idyllic”, I became curious about Mary Webb and decided to investigate further. 

I read the biographies The Flower of Light and Mary Webb, both by Gladys Mary Coles, and the novel Precious Bane, which is generally considered to be Mary Webb’s masterpiece.  

I found some familiar scenarios in Precious Bane; I decided to produce this article after reading about what happened to Mary Webb’s husband after her death.

Ouida and the death of her Italian nobleman: curse or coincidence?

Deaths, illnesses and misfortunes that seem to be natural, accidental, unavoidable or just coincidences – after all, stuff happens and such things are part of life – may seem less innocent when other, similar incidents are taken into account and patterns start to emerge. 

Reading about the convenient (for J. M. Barrie) death of the Llewelyn Davies boys’ father has reminded me of another death, which I learned about from biographies of the Victorian novelist Ouida. 

Thinking about the curse that Biddy Iremonger put on the man she hoped to marry when he chose someone else and the Kathleen Raine/Gavin Maxwell affair, not to mention the Brontë family’s misfortunes and the jilted woman in Patrick Brontë’s past, makes me wonder whether Ouida could have been indirectly responsible for the death of an Italian nobleman, someone she was infatuated with and hoped to marry.

The Brontë family misfortunes: curse or coincidence?

I have written elsewhere about the witch Biddy Iremonger, a major character in Wilkins’ Tooth aka Witch’s Business by Diana Wynne Jones. She deliberately puts a curse on the man she had intended to marry when he chooses someone else. This curse hits him and his family very hard: his wife has to go into a home for mentally ill people, and his pale, shabby, neglected children are considered peculiar, old fashioned and strange looking. 

Reading about the effects of her curse makes me feel very uncomfortable: it all reminds me very much of what happened to and in my own family after my step-mother left in a fury because of disappointed hopes.

It also reminds me of another family: that of Charlotte Brontë. 

The strange, old-fashioned appearance of the children, the unsuitable housing, the dreadful school, the suffering, the ill health, the blighted lives, the terrible state that Branwell Brontë was reduced to, the ‘too little too late’ successes and the untimely deaths have all been recorded in family letters and described by many biographers. Some of it is very familiar: once again my own family comes to mind.

The Biddy Iremonger story left me wondering whether there was someone who could have put a curse on the Brontë family. 

I refreshed my memory by re-reading some biographical material, and found a person of interest.

Curse or coincidence? Two more cases from real life

A few years ago, I picked up a discarded copy of a free newspaper called Metro just to have something to read while making a short train journey. There was not much of interest to me in it, so I just skimmed the pages until I suddenly came to an article about something that was very much on my mind: putting curses on people.

It was a copy of an interview with a crime writer called James Ellroy. I had never heard of him, perhaps because I am not a fan of most crime novels. This extract speaks for itself:

“James Ellroy, 62, is an American author whose crime novels include The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, both made into films. His mother was murdered when he was 10 years old, three months after he put a curse on her. It remains an unsolved case.”

Kathleen Raine and Gavin Maxwell: curse or coincidence?

The poet Kathleen Raine was involved in an unsatisfactory and tempestuous relationship with Gavin Maxwell, the naturalist who later became famous for his books about otters. She cursed him after he pushed her to the limits of endurance; he suffered a series of misfortunes then he died.

I would like to believe that the misfortunes would have happened anyway, but after learning about the effect that some creative people had on those close to them I think that her ill-wishing actually worked. Poets are closer to the subconscious – or unconscious – and she was pushed right to the edge at the time. 

One difference between this example and others I have written about from personal experience is that both of the people involved were aware that a curse had been launched, and one at least believed that it had been effective.

From articles I found online:

“Their relationship burnt itself out, however. Banished from the house during a raging storm in 1956, a weeping Kathleen Raine cursed Maxwell under a rowan tree: 

‘Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now.’

Within the next few years his pet otter was killed by a workman, his house was destroyed by fire, and he himself was diagnosed with terminal cancer.”
From an obituary.