by John Pinkney
The Heart Attack House in Germany’s Black Forest. [Illustration Faith Richmond]
It was a beautiful setting with magnificent forest views - but right from the beginning we knew something was wrong. Before moving in my uncle had been a bright entertaining person, liked by everyone. But after a few days in that house he became brooding and quiet. Often we’d hear him talking to himself. And his favourite pastime seemed to consist of dragging a chair down to the stream where the mill used to be. He’d sit there for most of the day, staring into the water.
Before long my uncle’s health went into a serious decline. Then he had a heart attack and died.
We didn’t connect his death with the house until we happened to overhear some gossip in the nearby village of Elteffe. We talked to the villagers and learned that the four previous owners had died from the same cause - heart attack - shortly after moving in.
My aunt didn’t believe it at first - but when she did some research in old newspaper archives, she learned that the story was true. She also discovered that some French workmen had died mysteriously in the house during World War II.
The parapsychologist Werner Durer asked my aunt’s permission to make a study of the house, to seek a cause for the apparent jinx. But her only interest was to sell up and escape.
Paranormal literature contains numerous references to houses plagued by a seemingly malign atmosphere.
In 1896 the author Rudyard Kipling and his wife were entranced by a beautiful mansion that commanded a clifftop in Torquay, England. They paid the expensive rental price and moved in.
‘Before long,’ wrote Kipling, ‘we were enveloped by a growing depression. It was a blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered, checking the very words on our lips.’
The atmosphere ultimately became so charged with misery that the Kiplings were forced to leave.
But there was a significant sequel to their experience. The author recalled, ‘More than 30 years later, on a motor trip, we ventured again up the steep little road to that house and met again, almost unchanged, the gardener and his wife in the sunny stableyard, and, quite unchanged, the same brooding spirit of deep, deep despondency within the open, lit rooms.’
Rudyard Kipling developed a theory about the ‘atmospheres’ in certain buildings. ‘Every event,’ he said, ‘must leave an impression in some substratum unknown to us. Memories seem to cling to some places and buildings, and the sensitive person can arouse those memories from their slumber, thus evoking the scenes of the past.’
Trapped, in ‘Freezing-Chamber’ Cold
British actor Mark Wagland has never seen a ghost - but he is convinced that in July 2006 he was deeply chilled by a phantom’s icy presence.
Mark described the encounter to me:
It happened when I was on a national tour with a children’s theatrical company. We’d just done a show at the Theatre Royal Brighton - and afterwards I went with the company’s manager Simon Gangloff to a friend Stephen’s basement restaurant, the Fisherman’s Rest on the seafront.
The conversation turned to the Sunderland Empire theatre where we’d appeared the previous week. We all knew of actors and comedians who refused to appear there because of the ghost. It was generally agreed to be the spirit of Sid James, who’d died onstage of a heart attack during a performance of The Mating Season. Since then he’d been spotted quite a few times backstage.
The haunted Fisherman’s Rest café in Brighton, UK.
Simon mentioned that the basement we were sitting in was haunted also. On a previous visit he’d fleetingly seen the entity, a drifting shape, from the corner of his eye. Stephen said, ‘I’ve had brushes with it too. One night I felt it walk right through me. But it’s always a benign feeling. It’s friendly.’
Stephen’s theory was that ‘some kind of time travel’ was involved in the haunting. The customers and staff who’d seen the entity seemed to agree that it never moved beyond a certain narrow area of the restaurant - precisely the place where the old bar had stood. When the phantom appeared it was as if someone from long ago was repeating the same ancient actions - over and over - somehow transmitted into the present day. Well, that was Stephen’s take on it anyway.
British actor Mark Wagland: ‘I could feel (the ghost) as though I was breathing fog’.
It was about then that Stephen said, ‘I can feel the ghost now.’ He rose from the table and gestured, ‘Come over here.’ I walked across the room and suddenly felt ice-cold air all around me and seeping into my skin. It was like being trapped in a freezing chamber.
In a situation like that I’d have expected to be quite scared. But my own reaction surprised me. That prickling chill - I could even feel it in my lungs as though I was breathing fog - was pleasant somehow. I wasn’t frightened at all - ‘excited’ is a better word. I loved it, actually!
Mark Wagland did not come to his experience as a sceptic.
It was my uncle who gave me the first firm idea that ghosts might exist. He’d never believed in them, until the night he was babysitting two children, seven and eight, whose mother had just died. He and the kids were in the sitting room watching TV when he heard the front door open. The children immediately rushed out and he heard them chattering in the front hall.
When they came back he asked who they’d been talking to. The older child said, ‘That was Mum. She came to say goodbye.’
The Film Star and the
Luck-Changing Nun
Bob Hoskins is another actor with happy memories of a ghost. Hoskins told Britain’s Daily Telegraph that his change of fortune came when he was almost penniless and working as a porter at London’s Covent Garden Market:
One bitterly cold morning I got out of bed in the dark as usual and trudged unwillingly off to work. Because my alarm clock had been fast I arrived about 20 minutes early to find my part of the market deserted.
While I was making myself a mug of tea in the cellar I got a tingling feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew someone was behind me, watching. The person’s eyes were boring into my back. I swung around, ready for trouble. But no one was there.
Then, right before my eyes, a woman wearing a nun’s habit appeared in the old damp wall. She reached out to me with her hands turned upwards and said something I couldn’t make out. It was as if she was speaking underwater.
Bob Hoskins: encounter with a phantom nun changed his life.
Then she vanished, leaving me shaking, more with excitement than fear. I knew I’d seen a ghost - and it was a bloody thrilling experience.
The following year, after my career started to take off, I read that Covent Garden was once called Convent Garden. It was owned by the Benedictines of Westminster and the story was that whoever saw the nun in the wall would have a very lucky life from that day on.
Certainly it applied to me. From the moment I spotted that nun I felt differently about the world. It gave me the confidence to pursue acting in a serious way.
Curious Case of the Battlefield Ghosts
It was one of the most bizarre incidents ever investigated by Britain’s Society for Psychical Research. The drama began at 4 o’clock on a black, still morning in August 1951. In a second-floor bedroom of a beachfront hotel in Dieppe, France, 32-year-old Dorothy Norton was sleeping peacefully.
Abruptly she was shocked into wakefulness. Outside, pandemonium had broken loose. Having served in several theatres of battle during World War II, Mrs Norton recognised the noises all too well. Machine guns were chattering, shells exploding amid the screams of wounded and dying men.
Wondering whether a new global conflict had begun, Dorothy Norton hurried to the window and peered fearfully outside. To her astonishment the beach was empty. The stretch of sand below her was desolate, dark. But the deafening din of battle still rose from it.
Shivering in her thin nightdress she hesitated by the window, wondering whether she might be losing her reason. But then Agnes, h
er sister-in-law, rushed in from the adjoining room. ‘What’s happening? Are you all right?’
The two women stared at each other, baffled. They little realised that they had just become witnesses to one of the 20th century’s uncanniest events: a mass haunting by the ghosts of more than 300 men.
* * *
Dorothy and Agnes Norton were people of considerable commonsense: a quality that had been essential to their work during the war against Nazism. Both had been officers in the WRENS, and were, by definition, highly trained observers.
On a deserted Dieppe beach, ghosts of more than 300 men reportedly re-enacted a 1942 battle.
Neither had previously encountered a ghost. But after listening for three hours to that unseen hell on the beach below, they became convinced that they had shared a paranormal experience.
The women were trained in chronicling the order of battles. On the morning after the invisible troop landing they wrote separate, precisely timed accounts of what they had heard - and sent the reports to the Society for Psychical Research in London.
Within weeks an investigation team headed by G.W. Lambert had made several fascinating findings that subsequently appeared to ‘prove’ the Nortons’ story.
In August 1942, the Lambert team found, Allied soldiers had tried unsuccessfully to storm the Nazi-occupied beach where the hotel now stood.
The women’s notes on the chronology of battle tallied with the historical record - a record not published until five months AFTER the haunting.
For example, both women wrote that they had heard fighter-bombers and anti-aircraft fire at 5.50 am. The official record, which the sisters-in-law could not have seen, confirmed that at exactly 5.50, 48 RAF planes had begun plastering the beach with bombs.
The Society for Psychical Research finds logical explanations for many of the anomalous reports it investigates. But it left a large question mark hanging over the case of Dorothy and Agnes Norton. ‘Perhaps,’ wrote G.W. Lambert, ‘these witnesses trespassed briefly upon a fourth dimension - a place in which long-stilled sounds are somehow preserved.’
Massacre Victims Haunt a
Queensland Farm
The notion that extreme fear, misery or pain can indelibly imprint themselves on the environment has becoming increasingly current among parapsychologists. Certain hauntings, many believe, might not involve sentient spirits at all - but are simply replays of events ‘recorded’ long before.
However, ‘involved’ ghosts - those which interact with living people - figure overwhelmingly in reported cases.
In November 2006 I interviewed a retired plumber who experienced three bizarre encounters over a 25-year period. He is convinced that a group of farmworkers - long dead and buried in a paddock - were desperately asking him, and his fellow-witnesses, for help.
Tom Williams of Tewantin, Queensland, told me:
The three incidents occurred at a 7800-acre station on the Granite Belt, about 40 kilometres west of Stanthorpe. The first time odd things happened was in April 1969 when I was shooting foxes with friends.
It was late afternoon and we were crossing a dry creekbed when we noticed a single bare footprint, quite small, in the sand. We all stood there staring at it, wondering how that one print could have appeared when there should have been a trail of them. We argued, but nobody had a convincing theory.
As we tried to work it out, a strange sickly smell came wafting up the creek on the breeze. It wasn’t anything I’d ever smelled in the Australian bush before - and I still vividly remember how it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. My mates reacted the same way. We were all armed with rifles, with sharp knives on our belts, but none of us felt safe. Without a word of discussion we ran as fast as we could.
Often I thought back to that afternoon and wondered why we’d all reacted that way, but I could never make sense of it.
Then, in 1984, with my eldest son Peter and my mate Bruce and his boys we visited the same property over a May long weekend. It was a Friday night and raining, and Bruce and his sons decided to go spotlighting for rabbits. After they’d been gone about 90 minutes Peter and I walked out onto the shearing shed’s verandah and looked down the track for them. That’s when Peter said, ‘What the hell is that smell?’
Ghost-witness Tom Williams: from their graves, murdered farm workers begged his wife for help.
I recognised it right away, from 15 years back. It was the same awful sickly smell, carried to us on an easterly breeze blowing over a paddock on the adjoining property.
Shortly after that, in the same year, we went back to the property and stayed overnight. I was fast asleep on a mattress down on the floor when something woke me with a painful kick in the back. The room was moonlit enough for me to look around - but I couldn’t see anyone. Then I heard a scratching noise coming from a corner. I switched on the torch and shone it towards the sound - and it stopped immediately. I checked the room. The door and the windows were still locked - nobody could have got in either way.
Next morning I woke early and was getting a fire going in the kitchen, when Peter came in and asked me what I’d been up to in the night. He said he’d heard me open the door and clump along the verandah into the kitchen and back again. I denied that I’d left my room - and that’s when Peter asked, ‘Is this place haunted?’
On the Monday morning we went up to the homestead - and while having a coffee with the owner I said, ‘I’d like to ask you a strange sort of a question’ - to which he smiled and replied, ‘You might get a strange sort of an answer.’
But when I asked, ‘Do you have spooks here?’ the smile froze and he asked where I’d got such an idea. So I told him the lot: the single footprint, the kick in the night, the sickly smell. That last one on the list seemed to jolt him. He asked me to describe the smell and when I did, he exclaimed, ‘Chinese joss. It’s a kind of incense.’ It seemed to trouble him a lot that I’d mentioned this.
He went on to tell us about the time his father, now dead, was repairing fences near the shearing quarters one afternoon when he heard voices speaking in Chinese. He threw his tools into the saddlebag and galloped his horse back up to the house. He didn’t want to work there, close to that adjoining paddock, any more. He was quite open about his reasons: the place was haunted. And that was why he’d no longer muster rams in that area either.
The owner told us that up to 1930, his present property had been part of the station next door - and a terrible thing had happened there in 1902. One of the white stockmen, a psychopath, had taken a dislike to the numerous Chinese working on the station - and he’d laced their flour with strychnine.
About 10 to 15 of the Chinese died in agony - and they were buried in a mass grave in the paddock.
I wanted to make sure that what the owner told me was correct, and not just a myth. I managed to find a book on the area, They Came to a Plateau - a history of the Granite Belt, and an account of the murders is in there: the Chinese workers, the strychnine, the mass burial, the lot.
Years later I took Cynthia, my future wife, on a trip to the Granite Belt. While I was showing her the shearing sheds she suddenly went still and told me to be quiet. She said she wanted to hear what they were talking about. Cynthia was of Irish descent and had what her mother called ‘the gift’.
She just stood there as if she was in a trance, whispering, ‘Yes, yes, I understand…I’ll do what I can.’
It was unnerving, standing there watching her hold that conversation. After a minute or so she returned to normal and I asked who she’d been talking to. She replied, ‘They’re not at rest.’ I asked if she’d detected any kind of accent and she said, ‘They’re Asian.’
Whether Cynthia ever did manage to help those poor people I’ll never know. I lost her to cancer in 2004. I think about her every day. And I think too of those cruelly murdered workers lying under the soil in the Top Ram paddock. Dead for 104 years. But possibly, in a strange way, alive as well.
A Hacker - or a H
igh-tech Haunting?
In 1985 Britain’s Psychical Research Society was divided by claims that a 400-year-old phantom was haunting a microcomputer. Some members tended to believe the electronic genie was genuine. But other investigators surmised that the ‘spook’ was a mere spoof created by students.
The controversy began when Ken Webster, a Cheshire economics teacher, was writing a program on his new machine. Abruptly a series of questions in antiquated English began flashing onto the monitor screen. The mysterious intruder enquired about Webster’s work and what the England of 1985 was like. Thinking that cyber-pranksters were hoaxing him, Webster entered good-natured replies. But as the dialogue continued he began to wonder just who, or what, he was speaking to.
After several days spent avoiding the issue the purported ghost revealed its identity. It was, it claimed, Thomas Harden, who had been Dean of Brasenose College, Oxford, in the 1530s. The college, the ‘entity’ said, had expelled Harden during Henry VIII’s purge of Catholicism, following priests’ refusal to remove the pope’s name from prayer books. Harden had then retired to a quiet farming life in Cheshire, where he died in 1546.
As the computer dialogue continued, the teacher began to wonder who - or what - he was talking to.
Webster was intrigued by the words the phantom coined to describe 20th century technology. It described the computer, for example, as a ‘leems boyste’ (lightbox) - or at other times, a scrit device. The young teacher searched for evidence that hackers were at play in his circuitry. He could find none.