Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  In this “town house” Nell Gwyn lived for many years. But she actually died of a stroke in another house in the Mall which the King had given her in the days when they were close. According to Burnet’s Own Time, Vol. I, p. 369, she continued in favor with the King for many years, even after she was no longer his mistress, and it is true that the King had words of concern for her on his deathbed: “Let not poor Nelly starve,” he asked of his brother and successor on the English throne, James II.

  That of course might have been an expression of remorse as much as a sign of caring. When her royal protector was gone, Nell was most certainly in great debt, and among other things was forced to sell her personal silver. The Dictionary of National Biographies is our source of reference for these events that filled her last remaining years. She survived Charles II by only two years, leaving this vale of tears on November 13, 1687, at the age of thirty-seven, considered middle age in those day, especially for a woman!

  But there were periods during which Nell was at odds with her King, periods in which he refused to look after her. Nell, of course, was not a shy wallflower: On one occasion she stuck her head out of her window, when some sightseers were staring at her house, and intoned, “I’m a Protestant whore!” Although her profession had been listed as actress, she herself never made any bones about what she thought she was.

  During those lean years she badgered the Court for money, and the sentimental King sent it to her now and then. Their relationship had its ups and downs, and there were periods when Nell was in financial trouble and the King would not help her. Whatever help he gave her was perhaps because of their offspring. The first-born child later became the Duke of St. Albans, taking the title from Charles’s romantic memory still attaching to his and Nell’s early days (and nights) at Salisbury Hall near St. Albans. The descendants of this child still thrive, and the present duke is the thirteenth to hold the title. Gradually the King’s interest started to wander, but not his possessiveness of her. While he allowed himself the luxury of casting an appreciative eye in other directions, he took a dim view of anyone else doing likewise toward his Nell.

  There are popular stories that Nell died broke and lonely, but the fact seems to be that while she had years when she was indeed poor and unhappy, at the very end she had a measure of comfort due perhaps to the personal belongings she had managed to save and which she was later able to sell off. The house in the Mall was still hers, and it was there that she passed on. In a final gesture, Nell left the house to the Church and was buried properly in the crypt at St. Martin’s in the Fields.

  We know very little about her later years except the bare facts of her existence and continued relationship with the King. But this knowledge is only a skeleton without the flesh and blood of human emotions. The story fascinated me always from the purely historical point of view, but it was not until 1964 that I became interested in it as a case of psychic phenomena.

  The English actress Sabrina, with whom I shared an interest in such matters, called my attention to an incident that had occurred a short time before my arrival in London.

  One of the girls in the show got locked in by mistake. It was late at night, and she was the only one left in the building. Or so she thought. While she was still trying to find a way to get out, she became aware of the sounds of footsteps and noises. Human voices, speaking in excited tones, added to her terror, for she could not see anyone. Not being a trained psychic researcher, she reacted as many ordinary people would have reacted: She became terrified with fear, and yelled for help. Nobody could hear her, for the walls of the building are sturdy. Moreover, she was locked in on the top floor, and the noises of the Soho streets below drowned out her cries for help. Those who did hear her took her for a drunk, since Soho is full of such people at that time of the night. At any rate, she became more and more panicky, and attempted to jump out the window. At that point the fire department finally arrived and got her out.

  Jimmy Jacobs was so impressed with her story that he asked the editor of the Psychic News to arrange for an investigation, which yielded two clues: that the Royal Stables were once located in the building, and that Jimmy Jacobs himself was very psychic. The first fact he was able to confirm objectively, and the second came as no surprise to him either. Ever since he had taken over the club, he had been aware of a psychic presence.

  “When I bought this place in 1956, I hadn’t bargained for a ghost as well, you know,” Jimmy Jacobs explained to me, especially as the subject of ESP had always fascinated him and running a burlesque show with psychic overtones wasn’t what he had in mind. But he could not discount the strange experiences his employees kept having in the old building, even though he had given explicit instructions to his staff never to tell any new dancer anything about the psychic connotations of the building. If they were to learn of them, they would do so by their own experiences, not from gossip or hearsay, he decided.

  One night in 1962, Jimmy was standing in the reception room on the top floor. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, after the club had shut down and he was, in fact, the only person in the building. He was about to call it a night when he heard the elevator come up to his floor. His first thought was that someone, either an employee or perhaps a customer, had forgotten something and was coming back to get it. The hum of the elevator stopped, the elevator came to a halt, and Jimmy looked up toward it, curious to see who it was. But the doors did not open. Nobody came out of the elevator. His curiosity even more aroused, Jimmy stepped forward and opened the outer iron gates, then the inner wooden gates of the small elevator, which could accommodate only three people at one time. It was empty.

  Jimmy swallowed hard. He was well aware of the operating mechanism of this elevator. To make it come up, someone had to be inside it to press the button, or someone had to be where he was, to call it up. He had not called it up. Nobody was inside it. How did the elevator manage to come up?

  For days after the event he experimented with it to try and find another way. But there just wasn’t any other way, and the mechanism was in perfect working order.

  Jimmy stared at the elevator in disbelief. Then, all of a sudden, he became aware of a shadowy, gray figure, about five yards away from him across the room. The figure was dressed in a period costume with a high waist; it wore a large hat and had its face turned away from him—as if it did not wish to be recognized. Jimmy later took this to be a sign that the girl was “an imposter” posing as Nell Gwyn, and did not wish to be recognized as such. That he was wrong in his conclusion I was to learn later.

  For the moment Jimmy stared at the shadowy girl, who did not seem to walk the way ordinary humans do, but instead was gliding toward him slightly above floor level. As she came nearer to where he was rooted, he was able to distinguish the details of her hat, which was made of a flowered material. At the same time, his nostrils filled with the strong aroma of gardenias. For days afterward he could not shake the strong smell of this perfume from his memory.

  The figure glided past him and then disappeared into the elevator shaft! Since Jimmy was only a yard away from the figure at this point, it was clear that she was not a human being simply taking the elevator down. The elevator did not budge, but the figure was gone nevertheless.

  The next morning, when Jimmy returned to his club, he began to put all reports of a psychic nature into a semblance of order, so that perhaps someone—if not he—could make head or tail of it. Clearly, someone not of flesh and blood was there because of some unfinished business. But who, and why?

  The interesting part seemed to be that most of the disturbances of a psychic nature occurred between 1962 and 1964, or exactly two hundred years after the heyday of Nell Gwyn. It almost looked as if an anniversary of some sort were being marked!

  An exotic dancer named Cherry Phoenix, a simple country woman, had come to London to make her fame and fortune, but had wound up at the Gargoyle making a decent enough salary for not-so-indecent exposure, twice nightly. The men (and a few women, to
o) who came to see her do it were from the same country towns and villages she had originally come from, so she should have felt right at home. That she didn’t was partially due to the presence of something other than flesh-and-blood customers.

  For the first months of her stay she was too busy learning the routines of her numbers and familiarizing herself with the intricate cues and electrical equipment that added depth to her otherwise very simple performance to allow anything unusual to intrude on her mind. But as she became more relaxed and learned her job better, she was increasingly aware that she was often not alone in her dressing room upstairs. One night she had come in fifteen minutes early, and the stairwell leading up to the roof was still totally dark. But she knew her way around, so she walked up the winding old stairs, using her hands to make sure she would not stumble. Her dressing room was a smallish room located at the top of the stairs and close to a heavy, bolted door leading out to the flat rooftop of the building. There were other dressing rooms below hers, in back of the stage, of course, but she had drawn this particular location and had never minded it before. It was a bit lonesome up there on the top floor, and if anything should happen to her, no one was likely to hear her cries, but she was a self-sufficient young woman and not given to hysterics.

  That evening, as she reached the top of the stairs, she heard a peculiar flicking sound. Entering her dressing room in the darkness, she made her way to the familiar dressing table on the right side of the room. Now the noise was even more pronounced. It sounded to her as if someone were turning the pages of a book, a sound for which there was no rational source. Moreover, she suddenly became aware of a clammy, cold feeling around her. Since it was a warm evening, this too surprised her. “I went goosey all over,” the girl commented to me in her provincial accent.

  In the dark, she could not be sure if there wasn’t someone else in the dressing room. So she called out the names of the other two girls, Barbara and Isabelle, who shared the room with her. There was no answer. Cherry Phoenix must have stood on that spot for about fifteen minutes without daring to move. Finally, she heard the noise of someone else coming up the stairs. The steps came nearer, but it was one of her dressing roommates. With that, the spell was broken and the noise stopped. Casually, the other girl turned the lights on. Only then did Cherry talk about her experience. She got very little sympathy from the other girl, for she had heard the strange noise herself on many occasions. For the first time Cherry found out that the ghost of “Nell” was responsible for all these shenanigans, and was told not to worry about it.

  This was of little comfort to the frightened girl. The more so as other uncanny happenings added to her worries. The door to the roof was always secured by a heavy iron bolt. It would be impossible to open it from the outside, and the girls were safe in this respect even in Soho. But it could be pulled back by someone on the inside of the door, provided the person attempting this had great physical strength. The bolt was rarely pulled as this was an emergency exit only, and it was stiff and difficult to move. Nevertheless, on a number of occasions, when the girls knew there was no one else upstairs, they had found the bolt drawn back and the door to the roof wide open. In fact, it soon became apparent that the rooftop and that door were focal points of the mysterious haunting.

  The last time Cherry found the rooftop door wide open was in 1964, and even after she left the show in 1965, it continued to “open itself” frequently to the consternation of newcomers to the dressing room.

  One night, when Cherry was getting ready to leave—about the same time as Jimmy Jacobs’ encounter with the gray lady—she heard a rattling sound, as if someone wanted to get out of a cage! There was such an air of oppression and violence about the area then that she could not get out of the dressing room and down the stairs fast enough.

  When I visited the haunted stairwell in September of 1966, I clearly heard those terrifying sounds myself. They sounded far away, as if they were coming to my ears through a hollow tunnel, but I could make out the sound of metal on metal…such as a sword hitting another sword in combat. Was that perhaps the rattling sound Cherry Phoenix had heard earlier? At the time I heard these metallic sounds I was quite alone on the stairs, having left two friends in the theater with Jimmy Jacobs. When they joined me outside on the stairs a few moments later, the sounds had stopped, but the whole area was indeed icy.

  Cherry Phoenix never saw the gray lady the way her boss had seen her. But another girl named Tracy York had been in the Gargoyle kitchen on the floor below the top floor, when she saw to her horror the outline of a woman’s figure in a pale lilac dress. She ran out of the kitchen screaming, into the arms of choreographer Terry Brent, who calmed her down. In halting words, Tracy York reported her experience, and added that she had wanted to talk about the strange voice she kept hearing—a voice calling her name! The voice belonged to a woman, and Miss York thought that one of her colleagues had called her. At the time she was usually in the top-floor dressing room, and she assumed the voice was calling her from the next lower floor. When she rushed down, she found there was no one there, either. Terry Brent remembered the incident with the gray lady very well. “Tracy said there was a kind of mistiness about the figure, and that she wore a period costume. She just appeared and stood there.”

  Brent was not a believer in the supernatural when he first came to work at the Gargoyle. Even the mounting testimony of many girls—noises, apparitions, metallic rattlings, cold spots—could not sway him. He preferred to ascribe all this to the traditional rumors being told and embroidered more and more by each successive tenant of the top-floor dressing room. But one night he came in to work entering through the theater. It was still early, but he had some preliminary work to do that evening. Suddenly he heard the laughter of a woman above his head, coming from the direction of that top-floor dressing room. He naturally assumed that one of the girls had come in early, too. He went upstairs and found Isabelle Appleton all by herself in the dressing room. The laughter had not been hers, nor had the voice sounded like hers at all. The girl was pale with fear. She, too, had heard the violent laughter of an unseen woman!

  When I had investigated the Gargoyle and also Salisbury Hall for the first time, I had wondered whether the restless shade of Nell Gwyn might be present in either of the houses. According to my theory she could not very well be in both of them, unless she were a “free spirit” and not a troubled, earthbound ghost. Had there been evidence of Nell Gwyn’s presence at Salisbury Hall, once her country retreat?

  Some years ago, Sir Winston Churchill’s stepfather, Cornwallis-West, had an experience at Salisbury Hall. A guards officer not the least bit interested in psychic phenomena, Mr. Cornwallis-West was sitting in the main hall downstairs when he became aware of a figure of a beautiful girl with blue eyes and red hair coming down the stairs toward him. Fascinated by her unusual beauty, he noticed that she wore a pale cream dress with blue chiffon, and he heard clearly the rustling of silk. At the same time he became conscious of the heavy scent of perfume, a most unusual scent for which there was no logical explanation, such as flowers or the presence of a lady. The figure reached the heavy oaken door near the fireplace and just disappeared through it. Cornwallis-West was aware of her ethereal nature by now, and realized it was a ghost. His first thought, however, was that perhaps something dreadful had happened to his old nanny, for the girl reminded him of her. Immediately he telephoned his sister and inquired if the woman was all right. He was assured that she was. Only then did it strike him that he had seen an apparition of Nell Gwyn, for the nanny had always been considered a veritable double of the celebrated courtesan. He quickly reinforced his suspicions by inspecting several contemporary portraits of Nell Gwyn, and found that he had indeed seen the onetime owner of Salisbury Hall!

  A chorine showing the door that kept opening mysteriously

  Others living at the Hall in prior years had also met the beautiful Nell. There was the lady with several daughters who occupied Salisbury Hall around 18
90. On one of several occasions she was met by a beautiful young girl, perhaps in her late teens, with a blue shawl over her shoulders and dressed in a quaint, old-fashioned costume of an earlier age. The lady assumed it was one of her daughters masquerading to amuse herself, and she followed the elusive girl up the stairs. It was nighttime, and the house was quiet. When the girl with the blue shawl reached the top landing of the stairs, she vanished into thin air!