Sarah Jewell (right) with Sir Edward Grey
Sarah Jewell is an American occultist and fellow member of the Silver Lantern Club with Sir Edward Grey. Her adventures have even been adapted into a novel series known as "The Sarah Jewell Mysteries".
Overview[]
Sarah Jewell has had a long career as a paranormal investigator spanning from at least the 1880s into the 1920s. Her exploits were said to have inspired the serialization of penny dreadfuls in the United Kingdom or pulp novels and even the Nancy Drew novels. Hellboy and even John Constantine himself have read one of the Sarah Jewell novels, The Thing in the Well, which featured a teenaged Sarah Jewell.
History[]
Background[]
Jewell’s first major encounter with the paranormal was when she was younger, likely a teenager, and took on a poltergeist haunting an asylum in the United States. She did her homework and studied exorcism, and thankfully it paid off. After that, Sarah began traveling the world. This is when she had one of her most famed adventures, when she took on a manticore in a Persian harem. This adventure was later turned into a novel, The Mystery of the Sultan’s Crown.
Reign of Darkness[]
Eventually, Jewell arrived in London and joined the Silver Lantern Club, where she frequented with all manner of eccentrics and adventurers. This is where she first met Sir Edward Grey, also a member of the Silver Lantern Club. It was December 1888, and the two were in The Monk’s Head, a pub in Whitechapel, both independently investigating the Jack the Ripper murders. While her American impropriety initially rubbed Sir Edward the wrong way, he was affected by Sarah’s words about the London police’s lack of concern for the victims. In that brief meeting, she had managed to change the way he saw the world around him, and like a house of cards it soon came tumbling down.
Sarah Jewell is on her own. She believes there is something wrong with Proserpine House, a charity home for “wayward women,” and so she gets herself in there to find out what’s going on. She has no one on her side and no backup, she just sees something that needs to be done and no-one doing anything, so she gets in and does it herself. Unfortunately, this nearly gets her killed, and in addition it is revealed that the Proserpine House was tied to the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh and they were preparing to kill twenty-seven women in ritual sacrifice in order to summon the Crawling Chaos. Luckily, Sarah had good instincts and she was able to save herself and seven other women. That and she unknowingly had a diversion in the form of Sir Edward Grey, whose investigation had led him to Proserpine House and had caused a bit of a ruckus. Together, Sir Edward and Sarah managed to prevent the summoning and burn down Proserpine.
This was a meeting that would change both their lives and begin a long friendship between the two. In particular, Sarah Jewell changed the way Sir Edward saw himself. Afterward, he could no longer continue to serve the upper class at the expense of the working class, so he ceased working as an agent of Queen Victoria.
Traveling with Edward Grey[]
In the 1890s, they were both members of the Silver Lantern Club (which held its meetings in the rooms above The Monk’s Head in Whitechapel), a group of paranormal investigators. They rescued two children that were set to be sacrificed on the eve of the new century; these children were Richard Carnby and Emily Hartwood. Grey and Jewell guarded the children and while under the mentorship of the two hunters, both of whom excel in the investigation and paranormal department, they learned the ways of the supernatural and crime solving.
In 1981, the pair recovered a bracelet which apparently would grant whomever possessed it a boon from Cailleach Bheur, the Queen of Winter. During ‘The Great Blizzard,’ other investigations were briefly mentioned; the Limehouse Ogre incident, in which Sir Edward’s instincts are proven to be excellent; and an incident on Great Titchfield Street relating to William Blake’s ‘The Ghost of a Flea.’ Mainly though, ‘The Great Blizzard’ shows how much Sir Edward and Sarah Jewell had grown to trust each other. Especially with Sir Edward, we got to see him much more relaxed and open.
The two were involved in many other supernatural and paranormal incidents; one involving a cult known as the Children of the Black Goat accidentally summoning a “goat thing”, another involving some sort of rift, and a critter that had been asleep under Ludgate Circus since Roman times until a burst water main woke it up—an incident Sarah handwaved away as nothing more than a nuisance. After a few years of traveling, the two parted ways. Sarah would only see Sir Edward once more before his mysterious disappearance in 1916. For more than twenty years, Sir Edward and Sarah were constant companions, but she has stressed that while her relationship with Sir Edward was close, it was purely platonic.