Haunted houses also come with libraries, as we have seen, and with servants. The protagonist in a ghost story is quite alone in his huge house…except for his fifteen servants. The reader might not know about the servants until one of them hesitantly knocks and enters the master’s study on the final page and finds him slumped in his chair ‘With such a look on his face, the like of which I’ve never seen…’
The author denigrates the house, but also slyly boosts it to engage our snobbery. In Walter de le Mare’s story, ‘Out of the Deep’ (1923) the protagonist, Jimmie, inherits his uncle’s ‘horrible old London mansion’. But how horrible and old can a London mansion be? 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.’ The owner is down to his last gardener, who tends the ‘once sumptuous’ grounds, but the place doesn’t sound too bad to me. For example, ‘The clock tower had been contemptuously scattering the hours like coins ever since Henry VIII was a rosy stripling’. ‘The Mystery of the Semi-Detached’ by Edith Nesbitt (1893) seems, from its title, to be bucking the trend, but the house is ‘commodious’, with several sitting rooms.
I myself grew up in a semi-detached of a more modest sort. We were its first occupants, and I was proud of inhabiting a new house. Those of my contemporaries who lived in old houses seemed to me to be taking a considerable risk. They were living in houses in which people had died, and people they didn’t know, at that – people that nobody currently alive knew. It must be like living in a tomb. There would have to be certain echoes. In grappling with the subject in his collection of sightings, ‘Apparitions and Haunted Houses’, Sir Ernest Bennett plaintively wonders, ‘Can it conceivably be the case that in some inscrutable fashion the woodwork and masonry of a house may exert some physical or mental influences which cause certain individuals to see the phantasmal figure of a former resident?’
A friend of my friend David’s is an American poet, blogger, journalist and all-round intellectual resident in London. She’s called Ada – well, at least that’s what I’m calling her. Being American, she is perhaps extra-sensitive to the oldness of London…
Ada’s Haunted House
‘It would have been 1988 or ’89. I was staying with friends in Pendrell Road, London SE4 – a late Victorian house. It got too late to go home, so it was decided I would spend the night there. There was a basement kitchen, and I was put up on a sofa in a little room behind it that had been converted into a sitting room. I went to sleep and sometime in the wee hours I woke up to see this green… shape. It was a translucent cloud, and there was something inside the outline. As I looked it resolved itself into a thin woman making a sort of pendulum motion with her arm, and there was a horrible energy to it, a horrible scary energy. It slowly became clear to me what she was doing: she was ironing. Once I’d worked this out, the green cloud grew and grew and then disappeared.’
(In a Victorian report by the SPR, the authors noted, from the hundreds of accounts of sightings they’d sifted, that ‘a fading away, occasionally accompanied by an expansion of the figure’ is a common way for a ghost to depart).
The older and more atmospheric the house, the more ghosts it will have. Any stately mansion open to the public needs at least one certificated ghost, just as it needs its health and safety clearances, and someone standing at the front door to collect the money. But there is a dutiful quality about these hauntings, and they are always described evasively, in the passive voice: ‘It is said that…’ ‘Legend has it that…’ They have all the magic and mystery of the following sentences from the introduction to a book called ‘Stately Ghosts’, published in 2007 by the Historic Houses Association: ‘The interest in ghosts and supernatural phenomena of all kinds attracts a growing number of visitors to Britain’s historic houses and is helping to boost the contribution they make to the wider economy. With more than 15 million visitors, providing employment for upwards of 10,000 people (who annually earn in excess of £85 million) and contributing an estimated £1.6–£2 billion each year to the rural economy, our historic houses form a vital link between past and present.’
But no book on British ghostliness can ignore the following half dozen.
1. The Tower of London
Historically, the main business of the Tower of London (which is the number one tourist attraction in the city) was the imprisoning and execution of people who didn’t deserve to be either imprisoned or executed. Accordingly the Tower is practically a ghost-making factory. The most famous case is that of the Princes in the Tower, the twelve-year old Edward V and his ten-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York. They were killed in 1483, possibly by their uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. Certainly, their deaths cleared the way for him to assume the throne as Richard III. Naturally, the Tower was said to be haunted by the Princes. In 1674, workmen found the skeletons of two boys in a wooden chest. King Charles II ordered that the skeletons be given a royal burial, which laid the ghosts, but many others took up the baton, including such former inmates as Sir Walter Raleigh, Guy Fawkes and Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, who was executed in the Tower. In his book, The Encyclopaedia of Ghosts Daniel Cohen writes, ‘Anne’s ghost has been spotted frequently in the Tower, both with and without her head.’
In 1800 or so, a Tower guard fainted – and was apparently permanently incapacitated by – the sight of a huge black bear standing on its hind legs, at which point I think the ghostliness of the Tower begins to become interesting. I believe that I would be permanently incapacitated by such a sight. In ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’ by Sheridan Le Fanu, the young narrator is roused from his bed by the sound of a slow, heavy tread descending the staircase (this is a house of which he is supposedly the sole occupant). He climbs out of bed, takes up his poker, and steps into the hallway, where he sees, or thinks he sees in the darkness, ‘a black monster, whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not say…’ In 1817, Edmund Swifte, keeper of the Crown Jewels, was dining in his private quarters when he saw floating in midair, a cylinder filled with a blue, bubbling liquid – which is another good one, I think: a beautifully irrelevant apparition.
2. Hampton Court Palace, Richmond, Surrey
Hampton Court – rated by Visit London as one of the capital’s top ten tourist attractions – was built for Henry VIII’s henchman Thomas Wolsey, who gave it to the king in 1528, in a futile attempt to keep in with him. Henry made it the most opulent of his palaces. There is a white lady, a grey lady, and a page boy ghost, but the principals are Henry’s wives: Jane Seymour (who patrols the Clock Court with a lighted candle); Catherine Howard (whose screams are heard on the anniversary of her arrest, which occurred at Hampton Court), and Anne Boleyn (who walks Hampton Court as well as the Tower of London). In the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, a family occupying an apartment in the Tower heard a persistent rumbling noise from behind a certain wall. This was knocked down, and a spinning wheel was found – a very good pay-off.
3. Burton Agnes Hall, Burton Agnes, near Driffield, East Yorkshire
This was built for three aristocratic sisters called Griffith, who observed the completion of their fine Jacobean mansion from premises over the road. When the house was nearly finished, in about 1628, Anne Griffith was attacked by robbers. As she lay dying, she insisted her head be kept at all times within the new house – a morbid wish commonly accounted for by her death delirium, and one ignored by her family who buried her body, including the head, outside the house. Cue much banging of doors and unprovoked rearing of horses etc. The head – now a skull – was detached from the body, and placed inside the house. It is, perhaps, walled up behind a panel in one of the bedrooms. The owners know, but will not say, or at least they say they do. Even so, the ghost of Anne Griffith – fawn in colour – still walks the house, along with many tourists, since Burton Agnes Hall is open to the public. Besides the house, there’s a gift shop and garden shop,
an ice cream parlour, and a children’s playground with guinea pigs.
4. Markyate Cell, near Dunstable, Hertfordshire
This oddly named house was constructed in 1539 on the site of a Benedictine priory called St Trinity-in-The Wood. (Monks’ habitations are cells, hence the name). By the seventeenth century, it had come into the hands of a Lady Ferrers, who is supposed to have taken to highway robbery as a sort of hobby. Some of her victims were the dinner party guests of her husband, whom she hated. She would rob them, disguised in full armour, on remote stretches of Watling Street, which was adjacent to the house, and is now the A5. The legend became the subject of a Victorian ballad, and then a film in 1945 starring Margaret Lockwood as The Wicked Lady (‘A mixture of hot passion and cold suet pudding’ – Guardian).
She was shot during one of her ambushes and died in the house at the foot of a staircase leading to a secret chamber where she changed back into women’s clothes. After her burial, this chamber was bricked up. The house subsequently burnt down three times, the last fire occurring in 1840. A gang of locals who were putting out the fire on behalf of the owner, a Mr Adey, saw the Wicked Lady swinging Tarzan-like on the branch of a tree – a compelling detail, I think. This haunting is in all the topographical guides to British ghosts, probably because of Margaret Lockwood. The present owner of what is now called Cell Park, Valerie Carr, was recently quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying that the part of the house containing the bricked up chamber ‘felt strange when we first arrived – it is certainly colder than the rest of the house.’
5. Littlecote House, Hungerford, Berkshire
A very magnificent example of Tudor architecture, according to Peter Underwood in his ‘A-Z of British Ghosts’ (1971). He commends the hand painted Chinese wallpaper in the drawing room, the unusual egg-shaped library, the Dutch Parlour, the Cromwellian chapel and ‘the several ghosts’. The main one is that of Sir William Darrell who, in 1575 or so, had impregnated a servant. When she went into labour, he sent for a midwife, but arranged for her to be brought to the house blindfolded. The reason for this became evident when the baby was delivered: he flung it on the fire. The midwife was then paid handsomely and sent away, again blindfolded. But she deduced the location of the house from the time she had spent in the carriage etc, and Darrell was prosecuted, only for his eminence to earn him a nolle prosequi. (The trial was abandoned, in other words).
The story is supported by a fragment of a letter, dated January 2nd 1566, and discovered in 1879 in the archive of the neighbouring mansion, Longleat. It was addressed to Sir John Thynne, the owner of Longleat, and requested him to ask a tenant of his, brother of a mistress of Darrell’s, questions concerning the children sired by Darrell: ‘how many there were and what became of them’… which all sounds very like the beginning of a ghost story by M.R. James or one of the other antiquarians, and these events are treated fictionally in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Rokeby, in which Sir William Darrell becomes ‘Wild Will’.
But as to the real ghosts…
In 1598, Darrell fell off his horse by a spot called ‘Darrell’s style’. The theory is that either he or the horse (or perhaps both) was startled by the sight of a flaming baby. Darrell haunts that spot, and a certain room in the house, the floor of which, according to Christina Hole Haunted England (1940), ‘can never be kept in repair but constantly moulders away’. He has also been blamed for phantom hounds, a phantom coach, and screams coming from the landing where the murder occurred. In The A-Z of British Ghosts, Peter Underwood recounts that in 1927, Sir Edward Wills, of the tobacco family, which had recently taken over the house, saw a female ghost holding a light ‘in the passage beyond the Long Gallery’. Sir Edward described her poignantly: ‘Her hair was fair, she was not very tall…’ She walked into the bedroom of Sir Edward’s younger brother. He observed that she opened the door herself, which was promising. But the younger brother slept on, and the ghost disappeared.
Littlecote House is today Littlecote House Hotel, run by Warner Leisure Hotels (‘Exclusively for adults’). No mention is made of Wild Will in the hotel website, but it is stressed at the foot of the homepage that ‘Littlecote House is a non-smoking hotel.’
6. Glamis Castle, Angus, Scotland
Glamis is the most haunted Castle in Scotland, which is saying something. It is name-checked in Macbeth, and is taken to be the site of the murder of King Duncan, but it was not the venue for the appearance of the actual ghost in the play: that of Banquo. Today, Glamis is the residence of the eighteenth Earl of Strathmore, and, less romantically, a ‘Visitor Attraction’, which sounds tautological. It hosts corporate events, and is open to the public. Visitors are shown the room in which King Duncan was killed, and told about Malcolm II of Scotland, who is also said to have been murdered at Glamis, in a room that was sealed up because the bloodstains on the floor could never be removed. (In Oscar Wilde’s parody ghost story, ‘The Canterville Ghost’, the breezy American owner of an English country house applies ‘Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent’ to a similarly obstinate bloodstain). In The Encyclopedia of Ghosts (1999), Daniel Cohen ruefully observes, ‘How an eleventh-century murder could have taken place in a castle that was not built until the fourteenth century it is impossible to say.’ There is, anyhow, supposed to be an elusive room at Glamis, and Cohen tells of how it used to be customary to hang towels from every room in the castle, but when this display was viewed from the grounds there was one window at which no towel could be seen, and every attempt to locate this window from inside the castle proved fruitless.
In the eighteenth century, the legend grew that each successive Earl of Strathmore was briefed about the contents of the room by the steward of the castle on reaching the age of maturity, whereupon they immediately became much more gloomy and introspective, and remained so for life. By the late nineteenth century, they had stopped wanting to know.
Another Glamis story concerns the second Earl, a drunken lout who was always stuck for someone to drink and play cards with and generally swear at on the Sabbath. One Sunday a black-clad figure turned up at the door offering a game in which the Earl, having run out of money, threw his soul into the pot. He lost, as does anyone who stakes their soul, as far as I’m aware.
I telephoned Glamis and asked a receptionist about ghostliness at the castle, whereupon she immediately had a coughing fit, which was intriguing. But when, still spluttering, she passed me over to her colleague, I was told, ‘Nothing has been seen recently. Is there anything else I can help you with?’
THE AVOIDED HOUSE
But I am more interested in what Dickens called avoided houses. In any street of any length, there’s one of these: a vacant house, or one that changes hands too often, or not often enough; a house in shadow, or one being taken over by its own garden. There were a couple of these on my paper-round when I was a boy. One had cracked windows, and a decaying Transit van parked immediately in front of the front door. Another had the curtains permanently closed and a front garden filled with rubble. I was encouraged by this rubble. I thought: ‘One day soon they’re going to use it to construct something marvellous like a pond with a fountain.’ But the rubble just remained. I never saw the occupants of either house, and I didn’t want to. I found it hard to imagine them going into Ellis’s newsagents and paying for the newspapers I delivered to them. That would require a degree of normality incompatible with the state of their homes. I monitored, and avoided, several of this type of house in my particular suburb of York, and if I heard that a divorce or death had occurred in one of them I was secretly gratified. My stigmatisation was justified. Nothing could be done for those houses, a fact to which their owners were presumably resigned, and, by the way, I love the fatalism of the landlord of the haunted house in the above-mentioned story, ‘The Haunters and the Haunted’ by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859): ‘I spent some money in repainting and roofing it, added to its old-fashioned furniture a few modern articles, advertised it, and obtained a lodger for a
year. He was a colonel retired on half pay. He came in with his family, a son and a daughter, and four or five servants; they all left the house the next day…’
It didn’t take much for me to condemn a property; it didn’t have to be semi-derelict. For example, I wasn’t very keen on any of the houses facing our own because they didn’t have the sun on them in the morning; and some of my friends’ houses just felt wrong inside. I am not going to broach the subject of psycho-geography because I find myself dying with exhaustion at the typing of the word, but it has been argued that houses with a reputation for being haunted occupy sites where ley lines intersect. Also blamed – and I like this – is carbon monoxide poisoning. This occurs where carbon combustion occurs with too little ventilation, and there’s quite a neat fit with ghostliness in that the symptoms can include anxiety and hallucinations. People burning wood or coal, or using coal-gas lighting in a shuttered room might be at risk, which connects the condition with Victorian winters – a fertile time for ghost stories.
When I first came to London I was amazed at the number of avoided houses. They constituted about fifteen per cent of the total stock. Even the most respectable streets had them and indeed the best-known avoided house in London is in one of its grandest squares.
Ghoul Brittania Page 9