There has been a boy who Just lay down and Died

On May 25, 1968, four-year-old Martin Brown disappeared from his home in Scotswood, a working-class neighborhood in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northern part of England. Martin lived with his mother in an area of town full of derelict houses in various states of disrepair that were considered a danger to children and adults alike. Some boys playing that afternoon came across Martin lying on the floor in one of these houses, with blood and saliva coming out of his mouth. They called to construction workers outside for help, but the boy was already dead. Because there was no sign of violence, and an aspirin bottle lay nearby, authorities initially suspected he might have accidentally gotten into the medicine and overdosed.

Martin Brown

As police talked to neighbors following Martin's death, the behavior of one child, Mary Bell, appeared odd. It was she who had first informed his aunt of Martin's death, telling her "There's blood all over" and offering to lead her to where the body had been found. Mary later had seemed overly curious about the accident, asking the aunt, "Do you miss Martin? Do you cry for him?" Martin's mother, June, was also plagued with visits from Mary, who had knocked on her door the day after his death to ask June if she could see Martin. When told no, that Martin was dead, Mary responded with a smile, "Oh I know he's dead. I wanted to see him in his coffin."

The following Monday, May 27, teachers arriving at nearby Day Nursery found that the school had been broken into over the weekend. The intruders had not stolen anything, but had thrown school supplies around and splashed cleaning fluid onto the floor. They had also left four ominous notes, reading: "I murder SO That I may come back." "fuch of we murder watch out Fanny and Faggot" "We did murder Martain brown fuck of you bastard" "You are micey because we murdered Martain Go Brown you beter look out there are murders about by Fanny and and auld Faggot you srcews"

At the time, the police thought the break-in and the notes were nothing more than a prank, and the school, having had trouble with vandals in the past, installed an alarm system. These notes, however, would later prove to be more than just a bad joke.

On July 31, three-year-old Brian Howe went missing from his home. His older sister, Pat, was frantic with worry, going from house to house looking for him. A small boy who always stayed near home, Brian was unlikely to have simply wandered away. Mary Bell again appeared, with best friend (but no relation) Norma Bell, offering to help Pat look for her brother. Mary gradually led Pat up to an industrial area near the neighborhood, where older children often played. Mary motioned to a large stack of concrete blocks, suggesting that Brian might be playing "behind the blocks, or between them." Though she encouraged Pat to go and look around the blocks, Pat refused and soon left the site. Hours later, police found Brian's body in that exact spot.

Brian had been strangled, and his body showed signs of an attempted mutilation. His hair had been chopped off in big clumps, there were puncture wounds on his thighs, and bits of skin had been stripped away from his penis. A broken pair of scissors lay on the ground near his body. When they removed his clothes at the morgue, police discovered an "M" carved into his stomach with a razor blade. Speculation, oddly pointing directly to the murderers, was that someone had initially carved the letter "N", then changed it into an "M". Whether this was determined after the identities of the killers were made or before is significant, and will be discussed later.

Evidence: Broken scissors

Along with the other neighborhood children, Mary and Norma were interviewed by investigators. The pair immeditately stood out, due to their unusual interest in the two crimes. Stories began to emerge about both girls' actions during the time between the two murders. In one, a schoolmate observed Mary attack Norma on the school playground in the days following the break-in at the nursery school. Mary scratched and kicked her friend, yelling at her "I am a murderer! That house over there, that's where I killed!" At the time the boy ignored the "confession", since Mary was well known to be a show-off.

Incredibly, it also emerged that Mary had visited the Howe's home days before Brian was killed. Even then she was pointing a finger at her friend Norma, saying (inexplicably) "I know something about Norma that will get her put away straight away.... Norma put her hands on a boy's throat. It was Martin Brown -- she pressed and he just dropped." In telling this story, Mary put her hands around her own throat to demonstrate. Then she left.

The girls also displayed inappropriate emotion during the funerals of each of the victims. Norma was described as having smiled and been "oddly excited" throughout the funeral of Martin Brown. An officer stationed outside the Howe home reported that Mary was among those gathered in the street as Brian's coffin was removed for the funeral. She waited, watching the house in rapt fascination, and as the coffin was being carried out, "She stood there, laughing. Laughing and rubbing her hands," reported the detective.

Norma Brown near the construction site where Brian was found

Mary's demeanor at seeing Brian's coffin spurred authorities to move more quickly to get her off the street. Fairly certain of her involvement in the two murders, police grilled the girl, whose story changed each time she told it. She first told police that she had seen Brian going to the construction area with an older boy, who had hit him. She also said she had seen a broken pair of scissors in the boy's hand. Since the presence of scissors at the crime scene was confidential information, police assumed Mary could not have known about them unless she had either witnessed or participated in the murder of the boy.

Mary then said she had seen Norma kill the boys. Questioned again, Norma now reported that Mary told her she had committed the murders. Showing unusual savvy for an 11-year-old child, Mary told police she wanted to make a statement. The lengthly signed statement again placed the blame for the killings on Norma. Finally, police arrest them both, as they each know far too much about the murders not to have committed the crimes themselves.

Mary Bell, after being taken into custody

Both Mary and Norma are tried for the deaths of Martin and Brian. During the trial, Mary is consistently portrayed as the ringleader, with Norma described as the mentally deficient follower. In closing arguments, Prosecutor Lyons outlined the accepted version of the relationship between the two and of its role in the murders: " In Norma you have a simple backward girl of subnormal intelligence. In Mary you have a most abnormal child, aggressive, vicious, cruel, incapable of remorse, a girl moreover possessed of a dominating personality, with a somewhat unusual intelligence and a degree of cunning that is almost terrifying."

Not surprisingly, Norma was found not guilty of either murder. Mary was convicted, but on a lesser charge of "manslaughter because of diminished responsibility," indicating that her age and her lack of a stable family life made it impossible to convict her of murder.

In the years that followed, it is Mary Bell who is remembered as the evil child with no emotion or empathy, who killed because she "enjoyed hurting people." The first psychiatrist to examine Mary in prison, Dr. Robert Orton, stated, "I've seen a lot of psychopathic children...But I've never met one like Mary: as intelligent, as manipulative, or as dangerous." It is Mary who is remembered as the child with the dead eyes, the girl who told a guard at the prison where she was housed during the trial: "I like hurting little things that can't fight back."

But the duo of Mary and Norma bears further examination. The concept of folie à deux, a shared madness that causes two people to commits acts neither would undertake alone, is evident in this relationship. The duality of the girls is clear in the uncanny shared last name, the carving of the letter "N" turned into an "M", the way in which each girl claimed the other committed the crimes followed by an immediate reversal into taking sole responsibility...all point to a melding of identities of the two, both in how they are seen by authorities and on the part of the girls themselves and how they view each other.

Indeed, evidence brought out during the trial indicates a mixing up of the identities of the two at the level of their physical activity and their shared psychic connection. According to Gitta Sereny, whose book Cries Unheard has recently been republished after its controversial reception in Britain in 1998, Mary and Norma were seen on many occasions during their trial to kind of psychically "link up": "Their heads turned toward each other, their eyes locked, their faces suddenly bare of expression and curiously alike, they always seemed by some sort of silent and exclusive communion to reaffirm and strenghten their bond."

Also indicative of the increasingly blended identities of the two are the four puzzling "confession" notes left at the school. Though it was first reported that Mary wrote all but one of the notes, handwriting experts later examined the items and determined that the act of writing had been shared in what Mary and Norma called "joining writing." Each girl would alternate writing on the note, sometimes to the point of alternating each letter in a word, one being composed by Norma, the next by Mary. They shared as well the inspiration for writing the notes, or as Mary put it (using similar terminology as described their writing process), penning the notes was a "joint idea" planned as "a great big joke."

Furthermore, the initial(s) carved into Brian Howe's stomach indicate the public's own twining of the girls' identities. The much-accepted version of the story is that once the body was removed to the morgue and undressed, the letter on the stomach became evident. It appeared that it had originally been carved into the shape of an "N", then later the extra line was filled in to make it an "M." Several writers have speculated that "another hand" carved that line, shifting the guilt from "N" -- Norma  -- to "M" -- Mary. This speculation, however fascinating and indicative of one or the other girl's desire to claim the crime, is not linked to any source. Possibly true, but more likely the fabrication of a public wanting to poeticize the crime, the visual link of the two letters serves to underscore the bond between the two girls, and as such, to strengthen the folie à deux at work in their psyches.

Further boosting the idea of shared madness is the existence of a fantasy world known only to Mary and Norma. According to Mary, the girls fantasized about becoming criminals, committing crimes, then escaping to Scotland. Their idea of "crime" was childish, based on movies they had seen, of bad guys full of bravado, powerful and afraid of nothing. Their entire juvenile crime spree was undertaken in a spirit of "naughtiness," to cause trouble and, if they were successful, to be sent away. "We built it up and up until, it now seems, we kept hoping we'd be arrested and sent away. We never talked about anything except doing terrible things and being taken away."

The fantasy world they created, their bonds to each other, and the crime they committed make Mary Bell and Norma Bell yet another example of the folie à deux couple, albeit the youngest one on record at the time. But does the diagnosis really point to an illness? Does folie à deux actually exist, or is it a convenient way to explain something we as outsiders cannot understand otherwise?

Le Peuple de Paris au XIXe siècle

I would so love to go to this exposition that is in Paris right now. It's called "Le Peuple de Paris au XIXe siècle" and it is running at the Musée Carnavalet until February 26. The exhibition examines life during the latter part of the nineteenth century in terms of violence against people, crime, the Commune...generally the untold story of the unwashed masses of the era. Consisting of artifacts and discussions of such cultural markers as la grisette, les Apaches, les ouvriers, la peur, the exhibit is laid out in a series of rooms. As Didier Daeninckx says, the exhibition space is literally framed between the barracades and crime, perfectly representing the two tensions of the time: one in the form of violence that attempts to change the world and the other a violence "suicidaire" among criminals. But mainly I want to go to this because the use the music from Taxi Driver during transitional bits of the clip. ;-)

The exposition consistes of a series of rooms grouped thematically. Here is a description of the room entitled "Life in Paris":

"Life in Paris" at that time might mean a variety of things: finding a place to sleep during a severe housing crisis, finding food at a time when buying necessities used up a large portion of a working class family’s budget, but also keeping clothed and physically taking care of oneself. Housing conditions were often difficult and were marked by a lack of privacy, whether you lived in a “garni” or in a furnished flat.

This exhibition room is built around a large central showcase, in the middle of which are exhibited several articles of clothing which, by a visual trick, are put in perspective with the other rooms. A long panorama, consisting of the façades of houses on the rue de Belleville taken by the L’Union Photographique Francaise, makes possible a re-creation of the general atmosphere of the quartier in 1906. Neighborhood social interactions and manners of speech and of carry oneself are all indicative of popular culture in Paris at the time.

While leisure time, especially for the working class, was limited, people still managed to enjoy themselves. Their activities were simple: a walk through the quartier, going to a cabaret, a dance in a tavern, or a picnic on the fortifications were the basic everyday pleasures of the era.

Atget, Petite chambre d'une ouvriere,
Rue de Belleville, 1910

There is an exhibition catalogue, if anyone wants to buy me a birthday present...

More information about "Le Peuple de Paris au XIXe siècle" can be found here.

My Paranormal Life

Abandoned cemetery, Dekalb County Georgia

I have always felt spirits. When I was a child, from about three to five years old, I could sense things in the house we lived in. It was an ordinary ranch house in the Garden Lakes subdivision of Rome, Georgia, a seemingly harmless house, but I had an imaginary friend whom I now believe to be a child spirit. I named him/her Doe A Deer, like the song. I can remember that I actually saw Doe A Deer, and that he/she was an actual child. I never thought about who he/she was, just accepted the fact that this was my friend. This was a good, friendly spirit.

There was also a bad spirit, or spirits, in the house. At night, I used to wake up terrified and not know why. I would often run across the hall from my room into my parents room, and I remember having to get up the courage to navigate those three steps, because there was something at the other end of the hall. Of course this could have been simply child’s fears, but I can still feel the “things” at the other end of the hall. They were real.

I also had a terrible nightmare when I lived in that house, a dream that stays with me even now. I was outside in our yard and my dad had pinned my brother up on the laundry-drying device we had…a kind of umbrella-shaped thing (only without the fabric of an umbrella) you could spin around and hang laundry from. Dad was spinning my brother around on it, and while he didn’t seem to mind, it kind of upset me. I went inside the house, and there was an evil woman there. She came towards me and I tried to get away but she grabbed me and put me in a cardboard box she had on the kitchen table. I remember her pushing down the lid as I was fighting and crying. Then my mom came in and said in a sharp voice, “What are you doing to her?” The woman let go of me and left the house immediately. Then I woke up.

Nothing else stands out from the rest of my childhood, except for a feeling I had for old houses. I always was drawn to old houses, and could feel something very unique in most of them. My grandparents’ house in Knoxville, for example, was built at the turn of the century, and had clawfoot bathtubs and a big attic. I can remember being transported as if into another world when I was in that house. I would go off by myself and “feel” the past, not only there but in nearly any old house I went into.  I think I really entered another dimension. My parents used to say “I’ll bet you’re going to grow up to be a historian” but it was much more than a simple interest in history. I was able to enter into the world of the past, of the spirits.

As an adult, I have lived in several houses where spirits made themselves known to me. First, in college, I lived for a year in a beautiful Gothic structure in Athens, Georgia that was built in the late 19^th century. I lived upstairs, and used to hear footsteps at all times of the day and night. Usually it was the sound of someone running down the stairs, at breakneck speed. Then they would get to the bottom of the stairs and stop. I would wait for the front door to open, as I hoped it was one of my roommates on their way out, but it never did. I would go look down the stairs and there would be no one there. Usually when this happened I was the only one home. We also heard things moving in the walls at that house, almost like the sound of someone breathing. But it was inside the walls.

I had another odd experience while living in Atlanta in my late 20s. I bought a piece of fabric at an antique store, and planned to use it as a tablecloth. It was cotten cloth with designs on it, maybe a batik. The man who sold it to me said it had been an altar cloth. I didn't really think anything of it, just like it because it was pretty and interesting. I brought it home with me and left it folded up in the linen closet for a while. One day I remembered it, and decided to air it out on the porch, then put it on my kitchen table. I went outside, where it was a very nice sunny spring day. I walked to the edge of the porch and opened up the cloth and started shaking it to get the dust out. As soon as I did, a wind came up and started blowing the trees. It got stronger and began to blow the plants around on my porch, and blew my hair into my face. I stopped shaking the cloth and looked up at the sky. These huge dark clouds had moved in, and now blocked out the sun. The wind really started to howl. I got scared and knew it had something to do with the cloth. I folded it up quickly and put it down, then went inside, leaving it on the porch. It rained for a while, then cleared up. Later in the day I took the cloth immediately to the trash can and threw it away. Someone said I should have burned it, but I would never had done that. It felt like doing anything other than getting rid of it immediately would have unleashed more power into the world.

Orb in Reed House hotel room, Chattanooga Tennessee

The most significant experience I have had was in the house I lived in right after getting married. It was in Decatur, Georgia, just a regular 1950s brick ranch house. When I first looked at the house, my friends lived in it, but were thinking of selling. I was attracted by the warm, homey feel it had. We eventually bought it and moved in, but from the moment we moved in the homey feeling was gone, and instead I felt nervous and uncomfortable in it. Soon afterwards I started smelling odd things from time to time – cigar smoke, perfume, mothballs, bacon—smells that would appear and disappear completely at random. They were very strong, and definitely not coming from any natural source.

I was pregnant at the time, and went to bed very early every night. Our bedroom shared a wall with a smaller room we used as a den and t.v. room. One night, after I’d fallen asleep but my husband was still up watching t.v., I heard him open the bedroom door. “Are you okay?” he said. “Yes, I’m asleep. Why?” “Oh, never mind. I must be imagining things.” This happened again a few nights later, and then again, and finally I asked him what was going on. He told me that as he was watching t.v., he kept hearing the sound of someone crying. Each time, he would turn the volume down on the t.v., and hear the crying that seemed to be coming from my room. He thought it was me, but I never was crying, but sleeping. This went on for months, and finally he stopped coming in to check on me, though he kept hearing the crying.

We finally moved out of that house about a year after my son was born. The last night that we officially owned the house, my husband went back to gather a few last minute items we hadn’t yet moved, and the baby and I stayed behind at the new place. When he got back from cleaning he was shaken up. He said that after he had gotten all our things out of the house, he went back in to sweep. Each time he cleaned out a room, he would close the door and move on to the next room. He said he would pass back by cleaned rooms and find the doors opened. Finally, he heard a door slam in the back of the house and decided to leave. He is not easily frightened but was obviously upset.

Other experiences involve a healing ability and dreams that come true. Several times I have held my hand over someone (usually one of my children) and feel warmth coming out of my palm. The children feel the warmth and feel better. The most significant experience of this kind was when at the age of five or six, my son had fluid on his hipbone and suddenly couldn’t walk. We took him to the ER and they took x-rays and told us it would eventually be reabsorbed by the body, and that he should rest for several days. He was in a lot of pain and slept in bed with me that night. I woke up before him, and held my right hand over his hip for quite a while, sending healing energy to him. He woke up a while later and said “Mom! My leg isn’t hurting at all!” He jumped out of the bed and was able to walk completely normally, which was amazing given he had to be carried in to bed the night before.

My premonitory dreams occurred only once, over the period of about three months in my late 20s. I had a series of dreams about insignificant things which later materialized. One was a dream about an old abandoned building I drove by on my way to work every day that had been standing desolate for several years. In the dream I was with a dear friend in the upstairs window of the building. We were looking across the lawn at a bulldozer that was coming to tear down the house. We were very upset, and rushed downstairs to try to stop them from coming. Then the dream ended. Two or three days later I was on my way to work. I saw a bulldozer standing in the yard of the house. On my way home, the house was gone.

The second dream involved my boyfriend, with whom I had recently broken up. It occurred the night of his birthday, He and I were supposed to have gone out during the day to celebrate, but he had stood me up. I went to bed very angry. I dreamed that he called me the next day and said “I am so sorry about yesterday. My sister came into town unexpectedly and said she would take me out to eat anywhere I wanted to go. I told her I wanted to go to the Grill in Athens, so we drove up and spent the whole day there.” The day after dreaming this, I called him to berate him for standing me up on his birthday. He said, “I’m sorry! I went to Athens with my sister and we didn’t get back till late.” I told him about the dream, and how weird it was that he actually had gone to Athens with his sister. He replied, “Oh my God. You’re freaking me out. Do you know where we ate lunch?? The Grill.”  

My daughter is also a psychic, perhaps stronger than me. She lacks any training but is in touch with spirits in my mom's house and at her school. She is a healer as well. Is this hereditary? Is it something we can hone and develop and really put to use? I wonder.