The Howling out of Spanish Town

March 12th, 1818, Bakewell: The Destruction of Thornfield Hall

Most in Derbyshire have only the vaguest memories of stately Thornfield Hall, and its unworthy master, Edward Fairfax Rochester. It is now a mouldering ruin, picturesque in its way. But it is the epicenter of a world spanning tale of horror, the remnants of which still lurk in the English countryside to this day. Rochester's murder by his first wife, Bertha Antoinette Mason-Cosway, led many researchers back to her family in Spanish Town, Jamaica where the Masons were wealthy creole planters. Historians confirm that a vein of madness ran in the family, more pronounced with each subsequent generation. The match between Rochester and Bertha was proposed by her father, though Edward ultimately agreed in recompense for a significant dowry. In bringing her back to England, however, he could never have known the destruction he was bringing back from the colonies.

Rochester wrote extensively of the howling and screaming that his wife was prone to, snarling like an animal and clawing at the faces of strangers if not calmed properly with ether. He took to locking her in his attic, hoping that one of her episodes would one day prove fatal. They did, though she took his life in the process and burned down Thornfield.

This would have a remained a dark chapter of provincial history, with little import (save as a curio in the published memoirs of Jane Rivers, the famed missionary) were it not for the later writings of one M. Paul Emmanuel, who researched the Mason madness during his time spent in Jamaica. Paul, a Spanish-born Labassecourien professor, spent 1850-1853 in Spanish Town managing a plantation and growing more and more curious about the way Arawaks, White men and West Africans alike, shunned the Masons.

What Paul Emmanuel discovered was nothing short of remarkable. Since the Spanish conquered the Taino, the locals claimed that their god, Opiyelguobiran, was missing, fled into a lagoon. Opiyelguobiran was the Taino's sacred guardian of the dead, a literal watchdog who must be enticed and then bound to sacred spaces, lest doom come to those who had loosed him. 

The Mason property was littered with sacred chalk drawings of the god, curious stone idols, and their servants talked of dark rituals and blood sacrifice made around fire pits by the edge of the Spanish Town lagoon. Emmanuel's inquiries appear to have led him into direct, physical confrontation with the Masons, owing both to the degenerate family's violent brand of madness, and what can only be described as M. Paul's irascible, easily inflamed temper.

Though a devout Cstholic, Emmanuel wrote that he had experienced, both in Villette and Spanish Town, events that confronted him with the reality of vengeful spirits, that no Christian God had sanctioned. He became obsessed with attempting to decipher precisely what was and was not true of the myths. Of most especial interest was the talk of a prophecy, the mention of the Taino's fear of having loosed Opiyelguobiran upon the island, resulting in the eradication of all Arawak peoples by the invading Spanish. And the suggestion that Opiyelguobiran would always hunger for new lands to conquer, new dead to watch over. And the god found men to in hide in, a stowaway waiting to manifest.

By the time Paul Emmanuel was on his way home, he realized it was too late. That the monster dog was already in him. It had noted his interest and was determined to cross the Atlantic. Survivors from the wreck of the SS Josephine, reported that it was not the storm which sank the vessel off the coast of Labassecour, it was a determined little scholar, with a wrench, headed for the engines. Those as far away as the Labassecourien capitol of Villette said that storm howled unnaturally, like a banshee keening its necrophonic squeal

As for the legacy of Bertha Mason, Rochester was long dead by the time the hounds began to be spotted in England. Dark, canine shapes scuttling through the underbrush, howling on the moors as far away as Exeter, and even in the faraway fields of Devonshire, where an especially monstrous beast was said to stalk the grounds of Baskerville Hall. This so-called Yeth Hound would remain upon the grounds, terrifying its residents  until the intervention of the Great Detective, early in the next century.