by Hans Holzer
“This was Mrs. Stevenson’s domain,” our hostess explained. The magnificently furnished drawing room was pretty much the way it must have been in Stevenson’s day, except for the addition of electric light and some of the personal belongings of the Macfies. In particular, there was a chair by the window which Stevenson is said to have sat in when resting from his work. As we walked in, I felt a distinct chill down my back, and I knew it wasn’t due to the weather. It was a definite touch of some sort. I asked Alanna whether she had felt anything. She confirmed that she too had been touched by unseen hands, a very gentle kind of touch. “I feel a presence. There is definitely someone here other than ourselves.” I turned to Mrs. Macfie. “What exactly have you felt since you came to this house?”
“I am most sensitive to a feeling when I am alone in the house, but maybe that isn’t right, because I never feel alone here. There is always somebody or something here, a friendly feeling. Actually, there are two people here. At first I thought, perhaps because of what I had read about Robert Louis Stevenson, I was imagining things. But then the Irish writer James Pope Hennessey came to stay with us. Mr. Hennessey had been to Vailina, on Samoa, where Robert Louis Stevenson lived and ended his days. There, in the South Seas, he had seen an apparition of Stevenson, and in this house he had seen it also. It happened in his own room because he slept back there in what we called the master bedroom.”
“Have you seen anything?”
“No, but I feel it all the time. It is as though I would look around and there was somebody behind me. Sometimes, when I wake up early in the morning, especially in the winter, I feel as if there is somebody moving about. It is very difficult to talk about it. You see, my husband is an utter skeptic. He thinks it is the central heating. Even my small son would say ‘Oh, don’t listen to Mother. She sees ghosts everywhere.’ You see, the family doesn’t support me at all.”
Kathleen Macfie admits to having had similar “feelings” in other houses where she has lived. When she arrived at the Stevenson House eighteen months prior to our conversation, she soon realized that it was happening again.
“While the movers were still bringing the stuff in, I didn’t pay any attention to what I felt or heard. I thought it was just the noise the movers were making. But then the feeling came: you know, when you are looking in a certain way you have peripheral vision and feelings; you don’t have to look straight at anything to see it. You know that it is there. But it is a comforting, marvelous feeling.”
Some of the poet’s personal belongings were still in the house, intermingled with period pieces carefully chosen by the Macfies when they bought the house. “There is an invitation which he sent to his father’s funeral, with his own signature on it,” Mrs. Macfie commented. “But when his father died, his mother took nearly all the furniture out of here and went to live in Samoa with her son. When Stevenson himself died, the mother came back to Edinburgh to live with her sister, but Robert Louis Stevenson’s widow brought all the furniture back to St. Helena, California, where she ended her days. By the way, this is his parents’ room. His own room is up one flight. Originally the top story was only half a story, and it was for the servants, but Stevenson’s parents wanted him to have proper accommodations up there, so that he could study and work. The house was built between 1790 and 1810. The Stevensons bought it from the original builders, because they wanted a house on drier ground.”
Mrs. Macfie explained that she was in the process of turning part of the house into a private museum, so that people could pay homage to the place where Robert Louis Stevenson lived and did so much of his work.
We walked up to the second floor, Stevenson’s own study. The room was filled with bookcases, and next to it was a bedroom, which Mr. Macfie uses as a dressing room. Nowadays there is a bed in the study, but in Stevenson’s time there was no bed; just a large desk, a coal scuttle, and of course lots of books. I turned to Alanna and asked if she received any impressions from the room. She nodded.
“Near the fireplace I get an impression of him. When I just came in through the door it was as if somebody were there, standing beside the door.”
While she was speaking, it seemed to me as if I, too, were being shown some sort of vague scene, something that sprang to my mind unexpectedly and most certainly not from my own unconscious. Rather than suppress it or attribute it to our discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson, of whom I knew very little at that point, I decided to “let it rip,” saying whatever I felt and seeing if it could be sorted out to make some sense.
“Is there a person connected with this house wearing a rather dark coat and a light-colored or white shirtwaist type of thing with a small tie? He has rather dark eyes and his hair is brushed down. He has bushy eyebrows and he seems rather pale and agitated, and at this moment he is tearing up a letter.”
Miss Macfie seemed amazed. “Yes, that is him exactly. His desk used to be where you’re standing, and this was where his mother used to leave food for him on a little stool outside. She would come back hours later and it would still be there.”
“I get something about age thirty-four,” I said.
“Well, he was married then. On May 9, 1880, in fact.” This was May 4, almost an anniversary.
We stepped into the adjacent room, which was once Stevenson’s bedroom. I asked Alanna whether she felt anything special. “The presence is much stronger here than in the other room,” she said. Even while she was talking, I again had the strange urge to speak about something I knew nothing about.
“I have the impression of someone being desperately ill from a high fever and very lonely and near death. He’s writing a letter to someone. He expects to die but survives nevertheless.”
Both ladies nodded simultaneously. “During his teenage period, he was always desperately ill and never expected to survive,” Alanna commented. “It was consumption, which today is called emphysema, an inflammation of the lungs.”
Alanna Knight was eminently familiar with Robert Louis Stevenson, as she was working on a play about him. My knowledge of the great writer was confined to being aware of his name and what he had written, but I had not known anything about Stevenson’s private life when I entered the house. Thus I allowed my own impressions to take the foreground, even though Alanna was far more qualified to delve into the psychic layer of the house.
“Was there any kind of religious conflict, a feeling of wanting to make up one’s mind one way or the other? Is there any explanation of the feeling I had for his holding a crucifix and putting it down again, of being desperate, of going to consult with someone, of coming back and not knowing which way to turn?” I asked.
“This is absolutely accurate,” Mrs. Macfie confirmed, “because he had a tremendous revulsion from the faith he had been brought up in, and this caused trouble with his father. He was Presbyterian, but he toyed with atheism and the theories of the early German philosophers. All of this created a terrible furor with his father.”
“Another thing just went through my mind: was he at any time interested in becoming a doctor, or was there a doctor in the family?”
“He was trained as a lawyer, very reluctantly,” Mrs. Macfie replied; “his father wanted him to become an engineer. But because of his uncertain health he never practiced law. His uncle, Dr. Louis Balfour, insisted that he leave Edinburgh for his health. His wife, Fannie Osborne, was very interested in medicine; she helped keep him alive.”
Alanna seemed puzzled by something she “received” at this moment. “Was there a dog of a very special breed, a very elegant dog? When he died, was there great upheaval because of it? I feel that there was a very strong attachment to this dog.” Mrs. Macfie beamed at this. “There was a West Highland terrier that he took all over. The dog’s name was Rogue and he was very attached to it.”
We thanked our hostess and prepared to leave the house. It was almost dinner time and the rain outside had stopped. As we opened the heavy door to walk out into Heriot Row, I looked back at Kathleen Macfie, sta
nding on the first-floor landing smiling at us. Her husband had just returned and after a polite introduction excused himself to go upstairs to his room—formerly Robert Louis Stevenson’s study and bedroom. Except for him and for Mrs. Macfie on the first-floor landing, the house was empty at this moment. Or was it? I looked back into the hallway and had the distinct impression of a dark-eyed man standing there, looking at us with curiosity, not sure whether he should come forward or stay in the shadows. But it probably was only my imagination.
* 25
Bloody Mary’s Ghost
SAWSTON HALL LIES a few miles south of the great English university town of Cambridge, and can be reached from London in about two and a half hours. When I heard that reliable witnesses had seen a ghost in this old manor house, I contacted the owner, Captain Huddleston, about a visit. The Captain’s nephew, Major A. C. Eyre, wrote back saying how delighted they would be to receive us. Like so many British manor houses, Sawston Hall is open to the public at certain times and, of course, I wanted to avoid a day when the tourists were sure to interfere with our quest. Although I usually avoid getting secondhand information on hauntings, and prefer to talk to the witnesses directly when I see them, I like to know the general background of a haunted house before I approach it. This gives me a better idea as to what I might encounter in the way of atmosphere, mementos, and such. As a trained historian, I have no trouble finding my way around English history. I picked up one of the little booklets the Major had prepared for the visitors, to familiarize myself with the history of Sawston Hall while the car, driven by the imperturbable Mr. Brown, rolled quietly through the picturesque countryside.
The booklet read:
Sawston Hall has been the home of the Huddleston family for over 400 years and is noteworthy for being one of the few old manor houses in Cambridgeshire built out of stone. In 1553 Edward VI was ailing and entirely dominated by the ambitious Duke of Northumberland. The King was already dead when his half sister, Princess Mary, afterwards Queen Mary Tudor, who was living in Norfolk, received a message purporting to be from him, begging her to come to him. Mary immediately set out for London and at Hoddesdon she received word that the message was a trap. On her way back, she accepted the hospitality of John Huddleston, the then Squire of Sawston, and spent the night at the Hall. During the night, however, the Duke’s supporters from Cambridge who learnt she was there, set out to capture her. John Huddleston just got her to safety in time by disguising her as a dairy maid.
When we arrived at Sawston Hall, it was already 4 o’clock, a little late for tea, but our gracious hosts, the Huddlestons, had waited to serve until we got there. By now the light was not quite so strong as I would have liked it for the sake of my motion-picture camera. But I never use artificial lighting, only the available light.
We started up the stairs, and Mrs. Huddleston explained the treasures of the house to us. We admired, but quickly passed through the imposing Great Hall with its magnificent portrait of Queen Mary Tudor, the drawing room with its harpsichord in perfect playing condition, as if Queen Mary were about to use it, and proceeded past the Little Gallery and a paneled bedroom into the Tapestry Bedroom, so called because its walls are hung with a set of Flemish tapestries showing the life of King Solomon. Dominating this room is a four-poster bed in which Queen Mary is said to have slept, back during the dark days of 1553 when she was running for her life. To the right of the bed, there is a small marble fireplace and farther down the wall an oaken door opening onto a passage which ultimately leads to the priest’s hiding hole. I think these connections are of some importance if the ghost is that of Queen Mary, who was Catholic.
We stood in front of the four-poster when I started my examination.
“Tell me, Mrs. Huddleston, what are the facts about the hauntings here?”
Mrs. Huddleston, a soft-spoken, well-organized lady in her middle years, smiled a friendly smile. “Something always seems to take place in this room we’re standing in. The original story is that in the middle of the night you suddenly hear three slow knocks at the door, and the door slowly swings open and a lady in gray slowly floats across the room and disappears into that tapestry. A great many people have slept in this room and there are a great many different stories of various things that have happened to them.”
“What sort of things?”
“One girl woke up in the night very frightened, because she heard someone next to her in the bed breathe very heavily.”
“What did she do, scream?”
“No, she just crawled to the bottom of the bed and tried to forget all about it.”
“I can’t say that I blame her under the circumstances. Did anyone else have trouble in this bed?”
“Well, there was a young man who was sleeping in this room, and he wasn’t very well when he went to bed. When he came down to breakfast the next morning, he said, ‘You know I was quite all right last night, you needn’t have bothered to come to see me.’ So I said, ‘But I didn’t.’ He insisted, ‘Oh, yes, you did; you knocked on the door three times, and rattled on the latch, and I got awfully frightened, and kept saying, “Come in, come in,” and nothing happened, and I suddenly felt really, really frightened, so I crept down to the bottom of the bed and tried to forget all about it.”‘
“Seems habit-forming,” I said, “that bottom-of-thebed business. Of course, it is a huge bed.”
“Well, he insisted, ‘it must have been you; you must have come to see me,’ but I told him, ‘No, I’m sorry. I never came near you; you weren’t nearly sick enough.’ That was that.”
“How long ago did this take place?”
“Four years ago.”
“Did you yourself ever hear or see anything unusual?”
“When I was first married and came here as a bride, I heard distinctly some very tinkly music rather like a spinet or virginal, and I asked my husband who it was, and he said, oh, he had heard nothing and that it was all nonsense. However, I heard it again the next night and again a little later. He kept telling me this was all rubbish, so I felt very triumphant when about a month later a visitor came down to breakfast, and said, ‘Do tell me, what is this music I keep hearing.”‘
“Who do you think is playing the instrument?”
“The general opinion is that it is Queen Mary Tudor herself.”
“You mean her ghost?”
“Yes. Of course, you know she slept in this bed and was very fond of this house. But the reason I think that it is really she is that she was a very good performer on the virginal, in fact she was so good that her father, Henry VIII, had her brought down from the nursery as a child to play for the Flemish ambassadors when they came over.”
“And you are sure you heard the music?”
“Absolutely. It was quite clear.”
“Has anyone else had psychic experiences in this room?”
“Oh, yes; quite a few, really,” Mrs. Huddleston said with typical English understatement. To her, a ghost was no worse than a famous actor or politician in the family. In England, one need not be looked at askance just because one believes in ghosts. It is rather respectable and all that.
“One day I was taking a rather large group around the house, and when we were in this room an old lady suddenly stepped forward, and said, ‘You know, I knew this house long before you did! You see I was employed here as a young girl, as a house maid. Once I was kneeling down, attending to the fire, and suddenly I felt very cold, looked up, and I saw the door slowly opening and a gray figure swept across the room and disappeared into the tapestry there. I was so frightened I flung myself out of the room and fell headlong from the top to the bottom of the stairs and hurt myself so badly that I’ve never dared come back to this house until this very day.”‘
“That’s quite a story,” I said. “Did you check on it?”
“Yes. You see, you can’t see the bottom of the stairs when you’re upstairs, and so she must have been absolutely right in the way she remembered things, because when we’d fini
shed the round, and were at the bottom of the stairs, she suddenly called out, ‘Oh, that’s the place, I remember it, that’s where I fell!”‘
“And there was such a place?”
“Yes, there was.”
“Have there been any manifestations here lately?”
“Not long ago, Tom Corbett, the well-known psychic, slept in this bed. He reported a presence bending over him every hour of the night. His alarm clock, which he had set for 7 o’clock, went off at one, two, three, four, five, six. When it did so this presence kept bending over him. Mr. Corbett had the impression the ghost was that of a night watchman with one eye, and a name that sounded to him like Cutlass or Cutress.”
Bloody Mary’s haunted bed
“Did this make sense to you?”
“Well, I thought it simply meant he was carrying a cutlass with him, but Tom Corbett insisted it was a name. I made inquiries after Mr. Corbett had left, and I found to my amazement there was a man named Cutress living in the village. I had never heard of him. But the people who did the research for me said, ‘That can’t possibly have any connection with the night watchman, since he’s only just arrived from London.’