Welcome back to All Things Eerie.  The very best short stories of tonight’s author, Herman Cyril McNeile, also known as Sapper, are those in which the reader’s expectations are neatly, ingeniously, and very swiftly upended in the last sentences, frequently in the last few words.  Although it is doubtful that Sapper believed in the supernatural, on the odd occasion he revealed a talent for making the flesh creep in some notable weird tales. Tonight’s story. “Touch and Go” is less implausible than some of his yarns, and rather more grisly.

We come, this evening, to a strange crossroads of science and superstition.  The issue at hand is whether stress, fear, or any of a number of unpleasant experiences are enough, in themselves, to make a person’s hair turn white.  We who travel in ghostly and ghastly circles all know someone who knows someone who knows someone to whom this has happened.

This idea has pervaded popular culture for centuries.  It’s often referred to as Marie Antoinette syndrome, in reference to an often told but perhaps apocryphal story of the ill-fated French queen’s hair turning white overnight after being captured during the French Revolution. Other stories state that her hair turned white the night before her execution.  Madame Campan, the queen’s lady-in-waiting and biographer, whose memoirs provide a rare insight into the daily life of the queen, says that this change took place in a matter of a few weeks, following the arrest of the royal family at Varennes, where they were stopped from escaping France and its turmoil. The queen’s hair reputedly went from ash blond to white and was completely white when she was rolled in a tumbril to the guillotine at the age of only 36.

In Christina Rossetti’s poem “The Convent Threshold,” the protagonist’s hair goes gray overnight from the internal struggles that bring her to abandon her lover for the convent, rather than offend the blood of her father and brother.  

While the idea of one’s hair turning white in an instant after a sudden fright is for some merely an amusing cartoonish fiction, there is a solid body of anecdotal evidence describing instances where hair rapidly turns white after months, even weeks, of stress or trauma.  Scientists are now involved in numerous studies to determine the connection between stress and its effect on physical tissues and organs, including the mystery of hair blanching in times of stress.  Most scientists resist any supernatural suppositions; it is generally thought that times of stress simply accelerate the aging process, and it is this mechanism that rapidly turns hair gray.  Today, alopecia takes much of the blame for this phenomenon, as the dark hairs fall out, leaving the white ones and making the head look prematurely gray.

Fear, shock or grief, on the other hand, are something people can imagine and understand, which perhaps explains why emotions play a huge part in most of the stories about hair turning white overnight.

Well, we shall leave it at that for now, and you can come to your own conclusions. Look for more of the writings of Madame Campan on our sister podcast Just Listen.  For now, turn down the lights and join us for “Touch and Go” by Sapper….