King was hoping for the same kind of inspiration in 1977 when he came to England to work and rented a house at Fleet near Aldershot. If, however, he had done any research before crossing the Atlantic, he would have discovered that the nearest haunted building was Bramshill House about twelve miles away (as the raven flies) near Basingstoke. At this fourteenth-century mansion, the ghost of a young bride who died on the eve of her wedding is said to walk the Long Gallery in a white, ankle-length gown, while the apparition of a “Green Man” – supposed to be the Black Prince who died at Bramshill in mysterious circumstances – slinks around near a lake in the grounds. Perhaps appropriately, considering its history of suspected murder and death, the house is now a police training college. In any event, Stephen King arrived full of optimism, as he recalled in an interview with The Times on 21 October 2006:
“I came to write a book. I thought that England is the home of the ghost story; I’ll come over here and I’ll get a ghost story. But I never did. I was totally flat when I got overseas. It was like my umbilical cord had been cut. But I had a wonderful relationship with everybody while I was over here. I didn’t drink too much, didn’t get into any fights with anyone, but I didn’t find any ghosts. I think that if I had to do it over again and maybe if we found some new place – who knows?”
Not long after his return to America, however, Stephen King did utilize another authentic ghost story as the basis for an original television mini-series, Rose Red, shown on ABC TV in January 2002. The story concerned a psychology college professor, Dr Joyce Reardon (played by Nancy Travis), who coerces a group of psychics to spend a weekend in a turn-of-the-century Seattle mansion that has long been abandoned. According to tradition a menagerie of spirits haunts it and the number of rooms in the labyrinth interior are forever increasing. The group are soon trapped and terrified as they struggle to uncover the horrifying secret of how all those who lived there died and the haunting began. Talking before the programme was shown, King – who made a brief appearance as a pizza delivery man – admitted to TV Guide his inspiration had been the very curious Winchester Mansion in San Jose, California:
“I first saw the story of the house in one of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not comics when I was a kid and remembered it for years after. According to Ripley, Oliver Winchester, who invented the famous repeating rifle that won the west, left a daughter-in-law with a belief in Spiritualism when he went to his reward. At one séance, Sarah Winchester asked the medium, ‘When will I die?’ And the medium replied, ‘When your house is done.’ Well, the Winchester house was never really completed and construction went on around the clock until Sarah Winchester died. She continued to add rooms, hallways and entire wings, claiming to receive blueprints and ideas from the spirits on a nightly basis. After reading up on Winchester House, the idea of a ‘never ending mansion’ stuck with me and I decided to work on a screenplay.”
Initially, it was hoped to shoot Rose Red on location in Winchester House, but all the rooms proved too small to accommodate the filmmakers. Instead, a luxurious bed and breakfast hotel, Thornewood Castle near Tacoma, Washington was chosen. Built in 1911 for Chester Thorne, one of the founders of Tacoma, the castle is actually a 400-year-old Elizabethan manor house that was dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic from England and reassembled at a cost in excess of $1 million. Over the years, a legend has developed that brides-to-be staying at the castle have seen the apparition of a woman in a mirror as they prepare for their wedding. Shades of Bramshill House here!
Stephen King has had no more brushes with the supernatural, but an old man supposedly haunts his home in Bangor, Maine. He explains: “I’ve never seen the old duffer, but sometimes when I’m working late at night, I get a distinctly uneasy feeling that I’m not alone.”
James Herbert, Britain’s most successful answer to Stephen King, also featured in my list with two novels about ghost hunter David Ash, Haunted (1988) and The Ghosts of Sleath (1994) and has returned to the theme in The Secret of Crickley Hall (2006) about a couple trying to start a new life after a terrible accident in which their five-year-old son has disappeared. They chose “a tomb-like place, a mausoleum” in Devil’s Cleave in Devonshire and are soon beset and almost overwhelmed by paranormal phenomena even with the aid of a Spiritualist. Herbert himself lives in a huge house in West Sussex near Brighton, but it is quite free of ghosts. He said recently:
“Yes, I do believe in ghosts. Life after death is too important to trivialize. I’m a Catholic, so naturally I believe in the afterlife. I’ve talked to a lot of people involved in the occult while writing my books – psychics, ghost hunters and psychic researchers. One psychic told me it’s not me who writes these books. It’s an ancient spirit that possesses me and wills me to write. It’s funny, because when I do sit down, it’s as though I’m taken over. The story flows, it tells itself, like someone else is writing it . . .”
These tales are, of course, by writers immediately associated with the supernatural. But there have been plenty of others working in quite different genres who have found themselves in mysterious situations they would probably not have dared to invent – and later recalled what they saw and how they felt. The following selection of the best of their stories is, I believe, not without its surprises and, even, genuine shocks.
1900: The gloomy mansion known as Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire was the home of the Sitwell family: the eccentric Sir George Sitwell and his famous trio of literary offspring, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell, all of whom were aware that the building was haunted. SACHEVERELL SITWELL (1897–1988) in particular became interested in the supernatural and wrote one of the best studies of this in Poltergeists (1940) in which he described another spirit that troubled the family at the turn of the century and became known as . . .
THE TOADPOOL POLTERGEIST
There is never far to look to find the Poltergeist. A case occurred so near home as to be upon a farm belonging to my brother, in Derbyshire, not further, indeed, than a mile or a mile and a half from our home. The hauntings were some forty years ago, but I have been told of them all my life.
The scene, we can say this, had a name as good as Malking Tower. It was a lonely farm, which has to be reached across the fields and does not lie upon any road. The name of it is Toadpool Farm. And this name, already sinister enough, is, perhaps, bettered if the first syllable, as has been suggested, is the Saxon “tod” or death, in fact, a suicide pool, or a pool in which someone was drowned. All round the farm, in the fields, there are the mysterious mushroom rings. It is, or was, enchanted ground, but with an evil meaning.
The hauntings took place during two successive tenancies; the earlier of the tenant farmers being dead, long since, and his successor still alive, but in an asylum. The usual stone-throwing took place; showers of pebbles fell from the roof, or rattled against the windows. There were tappings and rappings. And, for greater mystery, in the time of both tenants, the cart-horses in the stables were found in the morning ready harnessed, or ready saddled.
The odd point in this story is the continuance of the hauntings under two successive tenants. The same children, therefore, or maidservants, cannot have been in the house. But, unfortunately, it was forty years ago and it is too late, now, to discover further details.
The background is a little similar to that of Willington Mill in the sense that it is rural or bucolic, but with railway lines and coal mines near by. The great slag heaps, or clinker, as it is known locally, raise their artificial hills in every direction, covered, in summer, with the pink flowering flax. The great Staveley Ironworks are in the distance.
Near by is Foxton Wood, with a dam one hundred feet deep, a favourite place for suicides, and, beyond the wood, a fine Jacobean manor house, now become a farmhouse, but once the dower house of Lady Frescheville, the wife of the Cavalier. This manor house, which, too, in its remoteness should be haunted, has the name of Hagge Hall. Toadpool Farm and Hagge Hall, what better or more appropriate names could there be!
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sp; 1910: Some old boarding schools have a reputation among former pupils for generating the most terrible fear by night – whether factual or fanciful. DENNIS WHEATLEY (1897–1977), one of the last century’s most popular writers of historical, high adventure and Black Magic fiction, notably The Devil Rides Out (1935), delighted in telling the story of “the most terrifying experience of my life” when he was a boarder at a school in Broadstairs in 1910 and came face to face with . . .
THE CROUCHING FIGURE
This true story took place when I was at a boarding school in Broadstairs run by a Mr and Mrs Hester and their assistant, Milly Evans. The event had such an effect on me that I never forgot it and later used it in my novel, The Haunting of Toby Jugg, which I published in 1948. I have to admit that I learned very little at that boarding school and it always seemed to be perishingly cold in the winter.
The school had a front door that opened onto a narrow hall. This led to a flight of stairs that went up to the first and second floors where our bedrooms were situated. One night I was going to bed up these stairs rather later than usual with my friend, Bernie Amendt. We were dawdling as usual and I was peering between each banister as we climbed up.
Suddenly, as I was looking through one of the gaps, I found myself staring straight into another face. It was only inches away from me on the other side and perfectly horrible in appearance. It was very white and bloated. There was also a hand grasping the rail of the banister and I could just make out the outline of the crouching figure of a man.
I was struck dumb with fear. For several seconds I could not move.
My friend Bernie had reached the top of the stairs and was staring out of a window. I heard him whisper, “Oh, what a lovely moon!” His voice seemed to bring me back to reality and I screamed and ran back down the stairs.
I looked back once as I fled. The figure on the other side of the banisters had moved, swiftly and noiselessly, and was gliding up the stairs. It went straight past Bernie, who was now looking down to see what had happened to me.
As soon as he heard my cry, he ran down the stairs, too, and asked what was going on. I shouted that there was a burglar in the school.
Within moments Mr and Mrs Hester, Milly Evans and a man they had been entertaining to dinner appeared from the ground-floor sitting room. Mrs Hester tried to calm Bernie and I, while her husband and their guest set off up the stairs to catch the intruder.
We all knew there was no way out of the building. No back stairs, no fire escape, no barred windows – and there was a 30-foot drop from the upper floor. Everywhere was searched for the mysterious intruder – but there was no sign of him. Nothing had been touched, nothing had been stolen and nothing had even been damaged.
The Hesters told me that my imagination must have been playing tricks – and they ticked us both off for not having been in bed and fast asleep by that time. It took us both a long time to get to sleep that night and although there was never a repeat, the episode was so vivid that it never left my mind.
Fate has a habit of playing tricks – and quite by chance the mystery of that intruder was solved a few years later during the First World War. I was serving in France at the time as a gunner officer with the 36th Ulster Division. One morning I was walking along a road behind the front line when an ambulance suddenly pulled up beside me.
As I stood there puzzled, the door opened and a young woman driver got down. She smiled at me and said, “You’re Dennis Wheatley aren’t you? Do you remember me? I’m Milly Evans.”
I was delighted to see her and we stood chatting for some time about the old boarding school days. During this conversation she asked me if I remembered the figure I had seen on the stairs. I replied that I had never forgotten it and asked if the burglar had been caught. The look on Milly’s face became serious then and she shook her head.
“You thought it was a burglar – but it wasn’t,” she said. “We let you think that because we didn’t want to frighten you. In fact, it was some sort of supernatural manifestation – and a pretty nasty one, at that. The Hesters were interested in spiritualism, you see, and two or three times a week we used to hold a séance – trying to raise a spirit, practise table-turning and all that sort of thing.
“There was never any doubt in my mind – and I don’t think theirs either – about what happened that night. Our séances had somehow attracted some sort of elemental, which materialized and began to haunt the place. After that the Hesters were so scared of what they had done that they never held a séance again!”
1916: Family holidays to Trebetherick near Polzeath in Cornwall, gave the poet and writer, JOHN BETJEMAN (1906–84), a profound love of the area, which is reflected in several of his poems and his blank verse autobiography, Summoned By Bells (1960). Supporting himself by journalism and satirical light verse, he rose in public affection until ultimately he became Poet Laureate in 1972. Betjeman loved ghost stories – in particular those of MR James – and claimed that it was a weird experience he had as a child in 1916 which fostered his interest in the supernatural when he was dared to enter the foul and dank world of . . .
THE WRECKER’S CAVE
I must have been about ten years old when this happened. That is to say it was about 1916, and summer holidays in North Cornwall. It was a remote place then – oil lamps, farmhouse teas, few motor cars, and the London and South Western Railway crawling along its single line through Launceston to Wadebridge and Padstow. A wet silence hung over the nights, and legends survived as yet uncommercialised, and we were young enough to believe them. One of these was about a smuggler called Cruel Coppinger – Baring Gould writes of him in his romance In The Roar of the Sea. Coppinger lured ships to their doom on our great slate cliffs. When a ship was sighted he would wave a lantern so that her captain thought she was approaching harbour, but instead she was approaching a hostile cove near Port Isaac full of rocks. Coppinger arrived in the district mysteriously. It was said he was a Dane. Like another famous wrecker, Gilbert Mawgan, he is said to have left the sailors thrown up not quite dead, to die on the rocks. Mawgan even went so far as to bury alive the captain of a vessel whom he found exhausted on the strand. When Coppinger was dying – as when Mawgan died – there was a tremendous sea and a strange vessel came up channel from nowhere. On the wrecker’s death it stood out to sea and disappeared.
Between two bays to which we used to make day-expeditions on foot there ran a tunnel. At high tide, and even at half tide, if you had been in this tunnel you would have been trapped. It was said that there was a way out of the tunnel by a shaft to the open air. Certainly, from the cliff path above, a dank cavern with luminous moss in it was said to lead down to the tunnel between the two bays. I never liked going down it myself because of the sense that it might fall in behind me and I would suffocate. This was the hole said to have been used by Cruel Coppinger for bringing up his plunder from the sea caves below.
One day bolder children than I, with me in their wake, explored the sea cave at a low spring tide in order to find the way through to the other bay. We wore bathing dresses. At first there was the usual scrambling over boulders and avoiding a slippery kind of green seaweed until it was too dark to know what sort of weeds, pools, or rocks were at our feet. The cave narrowed and I hoped it would peter out altogether so that we should have to turn back. But no. There was a pool in total darkness and the water came up to my chin. The others had gone ahead. I could still hear their voices. Then there was a sudden change in the air. Instead of the salt, seaweedy, iodine smell, it was as though I was in a stuffy much-breathed-in room. I had a distinct feeling, though I saw nothing, that there was someone else behind me who was not of our party. The rather sinister caress of what might have been ribbon weed, or a sea spider’s legs, around my ankles made me swim forward, breast stroke, as hard as I could. Then there was the light from the other bay, the air changed back to its sea-freshness and we were all safely through.
That afternoon someone photographed us on the rocks below the entranc
e to the cave. When we were shown the photograph there appeared in the black entrance to the cave a face with a big moustache and a tricorn hat. This was not an illusion created by the rock formation because it was in the black darkness of the cave aperture. I can think of four people alive today who must remember that photograph.
When I go to the scene now it looks small and used and there is litter about and always people, instead of the desertion we remember. And of course I cannot be certain now, for it is 50 years ago, whether I didn’t imagine that presence in the middle blackness after I had seen the photograph. All I am certain of is that the face I saw in the photograph was there, and that it was nobody we knew and rather larger than life.
1916: Ghosts have played an integral part in both the working and private life of BARBARA CARTLAND (1901–2000), one of the most successful romantic novelists of all time. Her home, Camfield Place, Hatfield was reputedly haunted and in 1983 she reported that her dead brother, Ronald, and friend, the late Lord Louis Mountbatten had “acted as ghost writers” on a number of her books. In fact, her interest in the supernatural, which was reflected in books such as The Ghost Who Fell in Love (1979), can be traced back to a paranormal experience when she was a teenager and first heard the sound of.. .
THE WOUNDED CAVALIER
In 1916 I lived in a haunted house, Nailsea Court in Somerset. There was always someone going up the stairs ahead of me or coming up behind; yet they could not be seen. The house was very old and filled with the panelling and furniture of Judge Jeffreys – the Hanging Judge. Had his bitterness and cruelty still survived? I was never alone.
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 48