The first occurred on Christmas night, 1962. I had installed oil-fired central heating, and the large house was well warmed. But as I, my wife and the children ate our simple evening meal – we had gorged ourselves at lunchtime – I noticed that the dining room was rapidly growing cold. The radiators, I found, were chilly. I therefore fetched a torch and went to the small cellar under the house where the heating mechanism was. I found that the floor was deep in oil, and the furnace red hot. I waded through hot oil to the main switch, and turned it off. I then rang the heating engineer in Blandford, who was miraculously at home, and who came at once. He told me that had I not acted as I had done, in a matter of minutes the house would have burned. A safety device had failed, inexplicably, to function. This was one hundred years to the day, perhaps almost to the minute, since old Waterston had burned. Whoever shall own that beautiful house in the year 2062 had better watch out, on Christmas night.
Thomas Hardy knew the house well, both inside and out, in the years before the fire when he was a very young man. It is Bathsheba Everdene’s house in Far from the Madding Crowd. Before 1862 it was lived in and farmed by a tenant of Lord Ilchester’s named Genge. There were daughters and young Hardy was very fond of girls. He had been born, and was again living, a mere mile or so away, and may well have fallen for one of them. Was she perhaps the Lizbie Browne of his famous, beautiful poem, the girl to whom the shy young poet never dared declare his love? Dear Lizbie Browne . . . sweet Lizbie Browne . . . was she perhaps a Miss Genge?
For in late 1964 I was finishing my Life of Dylan Thomas. One stormy winter’s night I telephoned John Betjeman to ask him about poets’ incomes in the 1930s. Betjeman recalled how beautifully Dylan had once read To Lizbie Browne when they were both dining with the A.J.P. Taylors in Oxford. This reminded me of Dylan reading that same poem, in my house in Chelsea, in 1944. Later that night I reread the poem to myself in my darkly panelled workroom. The fire was burning low, the only light that of my desk lamp.
And then this happened. I was quite certain that somebody was standing behind my left shoulder, and that this person was also reading the poem in the open book before me. Furthermore I had a physical sensation – which I had read about but never experienced before or since: my hair was slowly rising from my scalp. It was, as they say, standing on end. How long this sensation, which was terrifying, lasted I do not know. A fraction of a second? Longer? I forced myself to turn my head. This required courage. And there was no one there, and my hair settled, and I went and poured a nightcap.
Which ghost had been reading, over my shoulder, that lovely poem written so long ago? Dylan Thomas? Thomas Hardy? I prefer to think that it was Lizbie Browne, sweet Lizbie Browne, herself.
1969: This is another ghostly experience in a far-flung corner of the world by a journalist turned bestselling novelist, FREDERICK FORSYTH (1938– ), famous for The Day of the Jackal (1971) and one of the best sequels to a classic, The Phantom of Manhattan (1999) in which Gaston Leroux’s mysterious character achieves his dream of a great opera house in New York. Forsyth covered several stories with paranormal elements as a young reporter, but had his eeriest personal experience in Nigeria in 1969 working for the BBC when . . .
SOMEONE STARED
In 1969, as a war correspondent covering the Biafran side of the Nigerian civil war, I found myself accompanying a group of Biafran commandos led by a mercenary on a foray deep into the bush behind Nigerian lines. We had come across a deserted village and while the Biafran soldiers rootled through it for signs of life, I was leaning against a doorpost doing nothing in particular and, as is my wont, doing it rather well.
I became aware of the sensation that someone was staring at me with considerable intensity. I could see nothing but the wall of forest fifty yards away, and the Biafrans were out of sight. Within my range of vision, from extreme left to extreme right, nothing moved. And yet I was convinced I was being stared at.
Quite suddenly there was a flicker of movement to my left. I turned my head sharply to see who it was. In fact it was a timber post, standing upright twenty yards away and the movement occurred when it just wobbled and toppled over. I later discovered termites (white ants that abound in those parts) had been nibbling at the base of the post and must have been chewing for weeks. At that moment one termite must have given the last nibble that separated the last strand of wood and the post just fell over.
As I turned my head I felt the “whump” of a passing bullet slamming into the doorpost then the “whack” of the sound. Jerking my head to the left had stopped it going through my forehead; instead, it went past my ear and buried itself in the door-jamb. I had indeed been stared at – by a Nigerian sniper in the forest fifty yards away. The shot proved the first of quite a brisk fire-fight during which I made like a tent-peg.
I never did find my friendly termite, but when it was over I dug the bullet out of the soft wood and now, on the end of a thin gold chain, I occasionally wear it for fun. Also, I am very kind to ants.
1987: Domestic ghosts hovering in ordinary kitchens, dining rooms and lounges have been a theme in the work of BERYL BAINBRIDGE (1934– ), rightly acknowledged as one of the greatest living British novelists. The years of her youth in Liverpool feature in many of her novels such as An Awfully Big Adventure (1970), while the London that became her adopted home after her success has also thrown up its own surprises like the events of . . .
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
Last week I had a sudden urge to learn to play the piano, and I saw a ghost. The ghost sighting came after the urge and in broad daylight. It was downright spooky, though hardly frightening. Let me set the scene.
I had just returned from the BBC in Portland Place and was standing looking out of the back window of my laboratory at the top of the house.
On the way home my cab had stopped at some traffic lights and I distinctly heard through the wound-down window – I was smoking you see, so I had to put up with the fresh air – the sound of a piano playing something difficult, one of those pieces full of F sharps and B minors.
Immediately I made up my mind to take it up, the piano, that is. I would start with less classical stuff, Roses of Picardy for instance, and work my way upwards.
Anyway, there I was in the laboratory mentally flexing my fingers when I saw the ghost. Actually, the “laboratory” is really the spare bedroom where I keep my word processor, an instrument which the cleaner thinks of as a fiendish crucible of language, hence the posh name.
The view, now that it is winter, is somewhat bleak – the backs of houses, a few stripped trees, various clumps of dusty ivy.
In the distance, pink and white, rise the turrets of the building that is now the home of the theatrical costumiers, Nathan and Bermans.
To the right, painted a severe cream and piled like the superstructure of an ocean liner sails the superb bridgehead of the old ‘Craven A’ factory in Mornington Crescent.
I could see my bit of yard and the next, concrete covered and featuring a bottle bank and a bicycle, and the one beyond that. The sky was grey all over and fitted like a pan lid.
As you may have gathered my part of town does not go in for landscape gardening, though we try, oh, how we try. Next-door nurtures roses, man-sized cabbages, boy-sized Michaelmas daisies and family-size washing.
On the other side we have a tasteful display of unpruned rubble, late flowering piping, rampant old iron, and, until recently, set plumb in the middle of a squashed lawn a rather rare specimen of a toilet bowl with seat.
I myself have plastic poppies twined about the branches of a mountain ash, but I always bring them indoors at the first sign of frost.
You can therefore understand my astonishment the other morning when I saw a piano stool, a round one on three legs in the yard beyond the bottle bank, and a lady wearing a shady hat and white gloves sauntering among the fallen leaves towards it.
Even as I watched she sat down and raised her gloved hands and began pumping her elbows up and down like
bellows. She didn’t have a piano so I didn’t bother to open the window, but she did have a halo round her head.
As you may imagine I fairly raced downstairs to the kitchen where my daughter and the cleaner were shaking rugs out of the back window and arguing about men. “There’s no middle road,” my daughter was complaining, “they either wear kid gloves or boxing gloves.”
“Ah, how sweet,” exclaimed the cleaner (she often gets the wrong end of the stick) when I’d described what I had just seen.
“So?” demanded my daughter, “are you trying to make out you’ve seen a ghost?” She ran upstairs to see the apparition for herself, but, of course, the woman had disappeared.
There followed a heated discussion both on the state of my mind and my lack of musical aptitude. My daughter also brought up the unfortunate time I arrived “half-seas-over” to collect her from a piano lesson and insisted on playing the Fairy Wedding Waltz, during which rendering I collapsed face downwards over the ivories.
Oh, I never, little lamb, I protested, which is what I always call her when I feel I’m being sacrificed.
It did however remind me of the cautionary tale of my son’s nursery school teacher, a lady named Miss Smith who was referred to as Mith Mith by her lisping charges.
It’s a true story, albeit tragic. A group of infants on a Tuesday morning just before Christmas in a house in Ullet Road, Liverpool, were discovered at home time marching up and down swigging bottles of milk in an abandoned manner while Mith Mith lay slumped across the piano.
She had been dead for a quarter of an hour and had apparently passed on in the middle of The Grand Old Duke of York.
This shocking incident has remained fresh as a daisy in the memory because I hadn’t got round to paying the fees whereas the rest of the mothers had stumped up the three guineas a term in advance.
Neither the cleaner nor my daughter would believe a word of it. As I could no more prove the existence of that ghost of Christmas past than I could produce the lady in the back yard, I went upstairs in a huff to consult the Oxford Companion to the Mind, an excellent work of scholarship edited by Richard Gregory which no girl should be without.
It didn’t say much about ghosts except that they’re manifestations of dead persons in human form, and that sometimes the person who sees one is in a state of fear or guilt.
I’m now quite satisfied I saw Mith Mith, summoned up by that snatch of music heard at the traffic lights – for what it’s worth. The taxi fare plus tip came to the equivalent of three guineas.
I’m thinking of slipping out tonight and throwing a cheque over the garden wall so that the poor soul can rest in peace.
7
Phantom Lovers
Sexual Encounters with Ghosts
One of the great rarities of the supernatural world is nude ghosts, although accounts of sexual interference by spirits have become comparatively commonplace during the past century. While in the majority of cases apparitions have been described as wearing garments of some kind or other, it has long puzzled researchers why the undead rarely appear naked. Sceptical columnist George Riley bemoaned this fact in an article in the News of the World in January 1980:
“I cannot understand why most sightings of ghosts are so often blood-curdling events. Headless spectres or ghastly nuns rattling chains and vanishing through walls. Surely ghosts can be fun? I wouldn’t mind being haunted by a glamorous nude blonde with a good sense of humour. If that happened I might believe in the supernatural!”
In fact, it might interest George Riley to know that a number of naked or near-naked ghosts have been reported over the years: some bewitching, as he hoped, but others rather unpleasant. A good example of the former appeared in the bedroom of a vicar in Essex only a few years ago. The clergyman himself, Reverend Ernest Merryweather, who saw the beautiful spirit in Langenhoe Hall, near Colchester, attests the story.
Merryweather was standing admiring the view from the window of the historic house when something caused him to turn around. He was conscious of someone else in the room and walked straight into a body he could not properly see. He found himself being embraced by what felt like a naked young girl pressing her shapely figure against him. The embrace was “fantastic”, the vicar said later, but when he tried to return the pleasant feeling the girl “seemed to dissolve in my grasp”.
The story of this naked spirit attracted the attention of the Ghost Club who sent a team down from London to investigate in 1980. Locals were soon telling them that the story was well-known and Reverend Merryweather had recorded several more personal encounters with the ghost. The unusual phantom had also been seen in the vicinity of the church. A legend claimed she was the girlfriend of a rector of Langenhoe and when she became pregnant, he murdered her. It was suggested that she was seen in the nude because she was enacting one of the happier moments in her life.
Peter Wormell, the owner of the hall, told the investigators that although Merryweather was considered a bit eccentric, he was much loved by his parishioners and not the sort of man to be easily fooled. He added, “I’ve always understood that the sighting occurs in the best bedroom. Some people believe that the girl was Arabella Waldegrave. The name came up at séances in the church and the Waldegraves were the ancient owners of the village. The vicar was never in any doubt about what he had seen and felt.”
Another church property not far from Langenhoe, Rattlesden Rectory, just outside Ipswich, is also said to be haunted by a naked phantom, although it is male and rather gruesome in appearance. A Stowmarket carpenter first publicly reported the spectre in June 1953 while he was working on some alterations in the rambling old house. Bill Smith told the East Anglian Daily Times:
“I was doing some work on the ancient panelling when I suddenly became conscious of a musty smell. The next thing I knew was when one of my white dust sheets came through the pantry with a head seemingly on it. I thought at first it must be my assistant playing a joke and I shouted at him to stop his nonsense. At this, the figure dropped the sheet, revealing a naked apparition with blotchy skin the colour of old parchment.”
Subsequent enquiries established that the ghost was in all probability that of a parson who had once lived in Rattlesden and – for a reason that no one could explain – had been buried under the house instead of in an ordinary grave. A suggestion that the man had been involved in a scandal with one of his female parishioners, and as punishment was interred without his clerical garments, remains the best explanation of this curious haunting.
A second naked apparition as memorable as the beguiling spirit of Langenhoe Hall was reported two years later by James Mann, a chartered accountant practising in Moray, Scotland. The female ghost materialized in his old family home near Aberdeen. Visiting the house one summer day, James found the place full of relatives from India. As there was not a free bedroom for him, he was offered a small room on the ground floor of the big stone building. It had rarely been used in recent years and was not even wired up with electric lights or heating. In a later account given to the ghost hunter Dennis Bardens, Mann explained:
“Because these was no lighting, I had to read by the light of an oil lamp before going to sleep. Very soon I sensed an unpleasant atmosphere about the room. I also experienced a strange but distinct tension and became convinced that I was not alone. This feeling quickly developed into real fear.
“Then, through the wall, the ghost of a young girl in her twenties appeared. She wore only a petticoat and was otherwise naked to the waist. She was almost transparent and, gliding to the end of the bed, seemed to say, ‘What are you doing here?’ Then she smiled and disappeared. Talking to one of my relatives the following morning, I learned that the girl had been seen before in the house and the other versions of her appearances tallied exactly with mine. I can assure you that no one had told me about the existence of a half-naked ghost before that night and I am quite satisfied that I really saw her and she was not an hallucination.”
In the 1980s, the Sun new
spaper commissioned the social historian Jeremy Sandford, famous for his book Cathy Come Home (1967), to search the countryside for a series of articles on “Haunting Beauties”. The paper, famous for its topless page three beauties, was delighted when he turned up several reports of scantily dressed phantoms. Sandford located one voluptuous beauty in Scotland: a young girl who had been seen on several occasions preening herself before a mirror in a bedroom at Muchalls Castle near Stonehaven in Grampian. The owner of the castle, Geraldine Simpson, provided him with the facts:
“There used to be a secret underground passage from the room where the girl is seen that leads to a cave by the sea. The story goes that the girl had a smuggler boyfriend and when she heard one night that his boat had put into the bay, she did not stop to put much on but ran straight down the tunnel to meet him. The man was just rowing into the cave when she fell into the sea and was washed away by the tide.”
Sandford found a bevy of lovely ghostly maidens who had similarly become involved in illicit activities over the border in Wales. They were said to appear combing their long hair to hide their modesty on the shore of Llyn Morwynion. A local ghost hunter, Chris Barber, told him the story:
“Legend tells how these lively lasses were victims of a pirate raid by a party of young men from a more distant part of Wales and were carried off to be their wives. But before the men with their captives got very far, the young men hereabouts gave chase. A terrific scrimmage took place and all the raiders were killed. But the girls had fallen in love with the strangers and were so bored with the idea of going back home with the local young men that they threw themselves in the lake and drowned. Sometimes the girls emerge from the lake at dawn combing their hair.”
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 53