Today marks the very first Wednesday Weirdness post here at The Witch, The Weird and The Wonderful, and it is my very great pleasure to welcome Undine, with a tale of a general who made a rather rash bargain....
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Jonathan Moulton
(1726-1787) was an accomplished general, who served his country with
distinction in the French and Indian Wars. He did much to contribute
to the development of New Hampshire, and became a prosperous and
public-spirited landowner. He did much for his country during both
war and peace.
And he was such an
unpleasant character that even the Devil got fed up with him.
Legend has it that one
day early in his career he said to his wife Abigail: “I've got
to get hold of some money. I am not a man ever to be satisfied with
a retired army general’s pension. I need cash, wealth, riches,
money to burn.”
Abigail had no argument
with these sentiments.
“I’d sell my soul
for unbounded wealth,” Moulton continued.
Mrs. Moulton began to
get a little nervous. She had obviously read enough quaint legendary
tales to be able to guess what would come next.
Sure enough, a short
while later, the General saw sparks suddenly flying from out of his
chimney. They were followed by a tall, distinguished-looking fellow
dressed in black velvet. “You've often said that neither man nor
devil could get the better of you in a trade,” Satan commented
agreeably. “Let’s see you prove it.”
After a bit of
dickering, Moulton and the Devil came to a deal: The Infernal One
would fill Moulton’s boots with golden guineas on the first day of
every month. In return, the Devil would get Moulton’s immortal
soul.
The Devil warned
Moulton not to “play me any tricks,” or he would repent it. But,
of course, the General thought he knew better. Not content with
acquiring the largest pair of boots he could find for the delivery of
his ill-gotten gains, he made the mistake of getting just too cute.
One day, when the Devil was pouring the gold into Moulton’s boots,
he noticed that they weren't becoming full. He found that the
soles had been removed, and as a result, the entire room was now
piled with gold.
Say what you will about
the Devil, but he always keeps his word. That very night, Moulton
did indeed regret his greed. His house suddenly caught fire and was
burned to the ground. When the General sifted through the ruins in
search of his hoard of gold, he found…nothing. All of his riches
had simply vanished.
As it happened, this
was not the end of Moulton’s fun and games. Sometime after his
ill-fated attempt to cheat the Devil, his wife Abigail died under
what were described as “very suspicious
circumstances”—circumstances that became all the more suspicious
when Moulton almost immediately remarried. It is said that on the
day of Abigail’s funeral, he removed all the jewels from this wife
number one—including her wedding ring--in order to gift them to
upcoming wife number two.
Abigail’s ghost soon
got her own devilish revenge. One night, the new Mrs. Moulton woke
up to find—something—gripping her hand. She barely had time to
scream before the spectral visitor ripped her rings from her fingers
and disappeared with them. John Greenleaf Whittier later
immortalized Abigail’s re-appropriation of her jewels in the poem
“The New Wife and the Old”:
“God have mercy! Ice
cold
Spectral hands her own
enfold
Drawing silently from
them
Love’s fair gift of
gold and gem.”
By the time General
Moulton died, there were few who believed he had any hope of resting
in peace. It is claimed that so many unsettling rumours circulated
about the General's hellish afterlife that his grave was exhumed,
only to find the coffin was now empty. The Devil had collected his
rightful property.
From what we know of
Moulton, I’d say Satan got the worst of their bargain.
Undine is the auhtor of the blogs Strange Company and The World of Edgar Allan Poe. She knows nothing else about herself and can be found on Twitter here.
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