Eight Ghosts

by Jeanette Winterson

  Dear Mr Porter,

  Thank you for your letter.

  I no longer work for English Heritage but yes I do remember Mrs Charbury.

  This was 2012. I was meant to show her around. I found her on the front drive, in a terrible state. She said her sister Delia was trapped in some paintings in the map room and had been since 1937. She said the lemur had attacked her. I admit to you I thought it was nonsense. I thought she was crackers. For starters the palace was locked and alarmed.

  I opened up after Mrs Charbury had left in the ambulance. There was nobody there. I called out the name Delia several times, because I had promised Mrs Charbury I would. I was embarrassed, and a little unnerved, alone in there calling out for someone. The map room was closed with no sign of any disturbance.

  I searched the premises thoroughly. You ask about a bad feeling in there. Yes, I did have a bad feeling in there, that day. The only noteworthy thing was that one of the WW2 educational costumes from the basement, a brown woollen suit, had been left upstairs in the Mah-Jongg Suite, presumably by one of the half-term school parties. And that was that.

  In 2014 when the restorers uncovered the paintings in the map room I admit I was highly perturbed and remembered Mrs Charbury’s terrified ramblings about her sister. I attempted to make contact, but she had cancelled her English Heritage membership. I found her with a bit of googling and saw that she passed away back in 2012, after her visit to Eltham. Poor old dear, she died of an infected animal bite to her hand. Nasty business.

  Anyway, strange old place, Eltham.

  Good luck with your story,

  Rory Kippax.

  WITHIN THESE WALLS

  How the Castles, Abbeys and Houses of England Inspired the Ghost Story

  Andrew Martin

  The ruins of Minster Lovell Hall – an elegant Oxfordshire manor house of the fifteenth century – are promisingly located for the ghost fancier, lying between the graveyard of St Kenelm’s church and a lonely stretch of the River Windrush. The English Heritage noticeboard announces that the site is open at ‘any reasonable daylight hour’, which possibly does not include dusk on a day of heavy rain. But those were the conditions as I stood alone before the manor, thinking of the rumoured discovery of a skeleton in the basement in 1718, supposedly the body of Francis Lovell who had hidden there after the Battle of Stoke in 1487, at the end of the Wars of the Roses, and died of starvation. All around me were sounds, some explicable (the cooing of doves roosting in the remains of the tower, the rushing of the Windrush), some less so. Suddenly, there was a great, grey shape over my head. I looked up and saw a bird – a heron, I think – coasting to land on the adjacent pond.

  If I had run away without looking up, I would have had a ghost story. As I walked back to the house in which I was staying, I contemplated developing one anyway, just to see the effect of saying to my hostess, ‘I saw a ghost just now at Minster Lovell Hall . . .’ I would have felt the lie justified by the entertainment value, and it is possible that I would have forgotten that I was lying the moment I began the story. If I had told it well enough, my story might have been passed on by my hostess. She might have embellished it – consciously or unconsciously – in her turn, and each of these retellings would have been a tribute to the lure of the Minster Lovell ruins.

  The dissemination of my tale would have been rather folkloric, in that it would have been communicated by word of mouth, with no undue fussiness about the facts. Since the late eighteenth century, we have kept our works of fiction and non-fiction on separate shelves, but a ghost story should always seem to be non-fiction or – to use the word favoured by the late Victorian investigators of the Society for Psychical Research – ‘veridical’.

  Often, a tale’s truthfulness is insisted on at the outset. Here is the title of what has been called, because of its forensic tone, the first modern ghost story: ‘A true Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs Veal the next day after her death to one Mrs Bargrave, at Canterbury, the eight of September, 1705’. The story, by Daniel Defoe, begins:

  This thing is so rare in all its circumstances, and on so good authority, that my reading and conversation has not given me anything like it. It is fit to gratify the most ingenious and serious inquirer. Mrs Bargrave is the person to whom Mrs Veal appeared after her death; she is my intimate friend, and I can avouch for her reputation these past fifteen or sixteen years . . .

  This presentation of credentials would become a familiar device and is used by Oscar Wilde in his parody ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887). As Lord Canterville says: ‘I feel bound to tell you, Mr Otis, that the ghost has been seen by several living members of my family, as well as by the rector of the parish, the Reverend Augustus Dampier, who is a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.’

  Whether nominally factual or fictional, ghosts tend to fit standard templates. By the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens could write that they are ‘reducible to a very few general types and classes; for, ghosts have little originality and “walk” in a beaten track’. These words come from the mouth of the elderly and irritatingly sagacious narrator of ‘A Christmas Tree’ (1850), a minor Dickens’ ghost story. Such ghost world-weariness doesn’t belong to Dickens himself, who stated, ‘I have always had a strong interest in the subject and never knowingly lose an opportunity of pursuing it.’ But most ghosts are conventional in their appearance and behaviour, either because that is just what they are like, or because that is what most people who talk about them are like.

  The female ghosts of castles or big houses, for example, tend to be ‘ladies’ and they tend to be white. White ladies have been spotted at (among others) Beeston Castle in Cheshire, Rochester Castle, Kent and Goodrich Castle, Herefordshire. Wistful aristocratic ladies are also available in green (Helmsley Castle, Yorkshire) and blue (Berry Pomeroy Castle in Devon, commonly regarded as English Heritage’s most haunted site, and also in possession of a white one).

  Headlessness is another common complaint among ghosts. That icon of decapitation, Sir Walter Raleigh, appears at Sherborne Old Castle in Dorset and a headless drummer drums at Dover Castle. In the vicinity of Okehampton Castle in Devon, Lady Mary Howard (b. 1596) rides in a coach made from the bones of her four dead husbands, daintily decorated with a skull on every corner, and driven by a headless coachman. At dawn on old Christmas Day (about 6 January), a coach pulled by headless horses races through the ruins of Whitby Abbey and over the cliff edge – which makes me appreciate my computer’s point when it keeps changing ‘headless’ into ‘heedless’.

  We cannot leave the stock spirits without mentioning ghostly monks. There is one or more at Waverley Abbey in Surrey, at Bayham Abbey and Reculver Towers in Kent, at Thetford and Binham Priories in Norfolk, at Hardwick Old Hall in Derbyshire, Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire, Thornton Abbey in Lincolnshire, at Roche Abbey and Conisbrough Castle, both in South Yorkshire, and Whalley Abbey in Lancashire.

  A historical digression is required here, in order to note that monks – as the principal chroniclers of medieval life – were also among the first ghost story writers. In about 1400, for example, a monk at the great Cistercian abbey of Byland in North Yorkshire transcribed twelve ghost stories in the spare pages at the end of a popular encyclopaedia, the Elucidarium (so called because it shed light on points of theology and folk belief). The anonymous ghost story collector had the concern with provenance that we have already noted. He was careful in his scene setting – mentioning many places in the locality – and he gives the name of the protagonists in over half of the stories. The second tale, for example, concerns ‘a miraculous struggle between a spirit and a man who lived in the time of Richard II’ – a tailor called Snowball who encountered the ghost on his way home to Ampleforth, which is very near to Byland.

  One ghost took the form of a disembodied voice shouting ‘How, how, how’ at midnight near a crossroads. It then turned into a pale horse, and when the percipient (William de Bradeforth) charged ‘the spirit in the name of the Lord and by t
he power of the blood of Jesus Christ to depart’, it withdrew ‘like a piece of canvas unfurling its four corners and billowing away’. In other stories, the spirit is more corporeal, a revenant of the kind associated with Scandinavian folklore: a lumbering animated corpse. In the third story, the revenant – the spirit of a man called Robert from nearby Kilburn, who has been frightening the locals and making the dogs bark loudly – is captured in a graveyard and pinioned on the church stile, whereupon it, or he, begins to speak ‘not with his tongue but from deep within his innards, as if from an empty barrel’. The story ends, as do most of the Byland ghost stories, and many others chronicled by monks throughout the Middle Ages, with the victim/protagonist confessing his sins and being given absolution. The monks did tend to conclude their stories in this way, stressing the efficacy of prayer in releasing souls from purgatory.

  Even after the suppression of the monasteries, Catholics continued to believe in this pre-Reformation type of ghost: a soul returning and requesting prayers. Given that Protestantism had dispensed with the notion of purgatory, anyone holding such beliefs began to seem primitive and superstitious. Hence the sinister monks populating Gothic fiction, the genre that directly preceded the modern ghost story.

  Gothic fiction (a romantic backlash against a dominant neo-classicism) had its lurid heyday in the late eighteenth century. It promoted the antique, the violent and the macabre. The spectral monks (as well as the white ladies and ranks of the headless) associated with so many English Heritage properties were probably instituted during this Gothic phase, monastics seeming to epitomise the decadence and hypocrisy of the medieval world that had brought their monasteries to ruin. Matthew Gregory Lewis set the template with The Monk (1796), closely followed by such sensational works as The Italian or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) by Ann Radcliffe, Gondez the Monk (1805) by William Henry Ireland and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin.

  This anti-Catholic strain can perhaps still be detected in the work of the distinguished antiquarian and ghost story writer M.R. James, especially in the diabolism of the eponymous ‘Count Magnus’ (1904). (It was James, incidentally, who first transcribed and published the Byland stories – transcribed, not translated; he enjoyed the ‘very refreshing’ Latin in which they were written.)

  The Gothic writers were drawn towards monks not only because of their exotic theology, but also because they were so picturesquely accommodated. Gothic literature got its name, after all – from its association with medieval ‘Gothic’ buildings and ruins, from the monasteries and castles with their underground passages, brooding battlements and crumbling staircases. Its level of hysteria was unsustainable, however, and its energy was channelled, and the sinister backdrops tamed, in the more decorous historical romances of Walter Scott. The new sensationalism resided in ghost stories, whose authors tried to throw off the materialism implied by Darwinism, just as the Gothic writers rebelled against eighteenth-century rationalism.

  It is arguable that ghost stories were the first form of ‘genre fiction’, and for a while scientific advances complemented, rather than negated, ghostliness. There is an analogy to be drawn, for example, between telegraphy and telepathy. These new ghosts went at large into the world, and the familiar stage sets – ruined castles or monasteries – were no longer required . . .

  Ghosts migrated to residential areas, where captive audiences awaited. The dining room of almost any Victorian house might have accommodated a séance, whose genteel sitters were not expecting a galumphing Frankenstein-ian revenant of medieval ghost stories to pitch up. There was not sufficient faith to animate such a creature. It was accepted that the afterlife would be proved obliquely, by a disembodied voice, a drop in temperature, a movement of the planchette. If the sitters did manage to conjure up a manifestation, it would be fleeting and transparent.

  Ghost hunting became increasingly domesticated, concerned with faces at the window, slamming doors, creaking floorboards, and scufflings behind the skirting board. (In Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories, the naive principals would at first attribute these noises to rats, but rats were not so lightly invoked after they had played their role in the horrors of the First World War trenches.) A classic of the haunted house genre is Sheridan Le Fanu’s story of 1851, ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’. In this story – the brilliance of which is suggested by the title alone (the gloominess of ‘Aungier’) – two Dublin students rent a house that had belonged to a hanging judge. Lying in bed one night, one of the young men becomes aware of ‘a sort of horrid but undefined preparation going forward in some unknown quarter . . .’ Le Fanu himself would be kept awake at night with horrible imaginings. He had a persistent nightmare of a large house collapsing on him as he slept, and when he died in bed – of a heart attack and with a shocked expression on his face – his doctor observed, ‘That house fell at last!’

  A bed is also the focal point of one of the best M.R. James ghost stories, ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904). The ghostliness starts out of doors. A very rationalist academic called Parkins is walking along a bleak, grey beach in Suffolk. He comes to the site of a Templar preceptory, where he unearths a bone whistle. He takes it back to the inn where he is lodging, and into his bedroom, where he rashly blows it, causing a wind to stir beyond the windows. It is in the bedroom that the manifestation finally occurs, in the form of crumpled bed linen – never to be forgotten by anyone who has seen Jonathan Miller’s short film of the story, broadcast in 1968. My reading of this denouement is that the ‘sincere and humourless’ Parkins suffers a twofold comeuppance. First, there is the manifestation. Secondly, he is reduced to trembling fear by such a bathetic object as a bedsheet.

  The most famous of all domestic hauntings was chronicled by the celebrated ghost hunter and charlatan, Harry Price, in his book of 1940, The Most Haunted House in England – namely Borley Rectory in Essex. When he repaired to Borley, which he did regularly over ten years, Price carried his ‘ghost hunter’s kit’, which included a flask of brandy (in case anybody fainted), and a pair of ‘felt overshoes used for creeping unheard about the house in order that neither human beings nor paranormal “entities” shall be disturbed when producing “phenomena”.’ Here, you feel, is the ghost hunter as lounge lizard.

  Any sort of house might be haunted. Dickens spoke of the ‘avoided house’, the neglected and mysterious property that is put to shame by (or possibly shames) the primness of the conventional dwellings on either side. In literature, haunted houses do tend to be at the upper end of the market. In Walter de la Mare’s story, ‘Out of the Deep’ (1923), the protagonist, Jimmie, inherits his uncle’s ‘horrible old London mansion’. In ‘Moonlight Sonata’ (1931) by Alexander Woollcott one of the two principals inhabits ‘the collapsing family manor house to which he had indignantly fallen heir’. Then again, poltergeists do not need a large, grand house. They will turn up anywhere there is furniture to throw about.

  ‘Haunted Houses’, a poem of 1858 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, begins:

  All houses in which men have lived and died

  Are haunted houses . . .

  And the more deaths the better, frankly, which is why I went to Minster Lovell Hall at dusk. It is what takes me to any English Heritage property: as the more studious visitors are in the next room hearing about the dentilled cornice and door surrounds, I am lingering in the previous room, and staring into the clouded mirror, daring any face from the past to appear alongside my own.

  I am hoping, in short, for the sight of a ghost, and the sense of wonderment that would – I am confident – accompany the jolt of pure fear.

  A GAZETTEER OF ENGLISH HERITAGE HAUNTINGS

  Ghosts have been seen – or felt – at English Heritage sites the length and breadth of the country. Here is a nationwide selection – by no means exhaustive – of properties which are said to be haunted and the shuddering histories behind them, including the eight locations which inspired the stor
ies in this book.

  London

  Eltham Palace and Gardens

  This opulent palace, which at its peak far exceeded the size of Hampton Court, began life as the manor of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother of William the Conqueror. In 1296 Bishop Antony Bek of Durham built a manor house, parts of which have been excavated, and in the early fourteenth century Edward II gave this moated manor to his wife. It became a favourite royal residence and was greatly enlarged. The great hall seen today was built by Edward IV in the 1470s, a magnificent space for the king to entertain up to 2,000 guests, as he did in 1482. Henry VIII spent much of his boyhood at Eltham, but under Elizabeth I the palace began to fall into ruin. It wasn’t until 1933 that it was returned to a state of splendour, when the fashionable couple Stephen and Virginia (Ginie) Courtauld leased the estate from the Crown. Stephen was enormously rich – having inherited wealth enough from his family’s textile business to live at leisure, pursuing cultural and philanthropic interests. While preserving the medieval hall, he and Ginie employed the architects Sealy and Paget to build a new home, fitted with every technological convenience: a glamorous, ultra-modern setting for their collections of art and furniture, and their regular parties.

  Ginie had a much-adored pet lemur named Mah-Jongg who was infamous for biting people he did not like. Mah-Jongg had his own heated and designer-decorated sleeping quarters at Eltham which can be seen today. The leather map of the estate mentioned in Max Porter’s story was created for the Courtaulds and remains above the fireplace in the boudoir. The vignettes he describes are in the neighbouring map room, where conservators have recently uncovered (beneath later wallpaper) large maps of areas to which the Courtaulds travelled pasted to the walls. The vignettes were painted onto the walls adjacent the maps, depicting scenes and characters from around the world.