by Hans Holzer
“About a month later, the butler here was standing next to a stranger in the local pub, and he said, ‘What is your name?’ The stranger replied, ‘Oh, my name is Cutress, and I’ve just come here a short time ago.’ The butler wondered why he had come to this rather out-of-the-way place. ‘Oh.’ the man replied, ‘my family’s lived in Sawston for generations. I wanted to come back to the old family place.”’
“Tom Corbett certainly hit the nail on the head on that one,” I acknowledged. “Any other interesting witnesses to uncanny phenomena?”
“I was taking an old lady round, and it was broad daylight, and I was showing her the tapestries, and was so busy with that, I didn’t notice the change that had come over her face. When I looked around at her, she looked simply terrible, as if she were going to pass out. I asked her if I should get a doctor, but she assured me she would be all right.
“It’s really this room,’ she explained. ‘It’s the ghosts in this room.”’
We left the haunted bedroom and went along the Long Gallery to the priest’s hiding hole, which was ingeniously hidden in the thickness of the wall, barely large enough for a man to sit in, and accessible to the outer world only through a small trapdoor which could easily be covered during a raid.
I wondered if any hauntings had been observed in connection with the hiding hole, since so much tragedy and emotional turmoil adhered to the atmosphere around it.
“Not by the hole itself, but there is a nearby bedroom where there have been some ghostly experiences during the last few years. That room just above the staircase. A friend of ours, a well-known Jesuit priest, was sleeping in it, and he had so much disturbance during the night, knocking at the door, and noises outside, that he got up several times to see what was happening.”
“Did he find anything or anyone?”
“No, of course not. They never do.”
“Was there anyone else who experienced anything out of the ordinary around that staircase?”
“A lady from South Africa came here for a first visit. She arrived rather unexpectedly, so we put her into the haunted room, but the next morning she reported that she had had a good night and not been disturbed at all. Maybe the ghost had moved away? ‘Anyway,’ she bragged, ‘I always know when there is a ghost around, because I get very cold and get goose pimples all up my arms.’ So we forgot all about the ghost and started to show her around the house. But when she got to this same big staircase, which leads to this room I have just talked about, she suddenly gave a little scream and said, ‘Oh, there’s no doubt about it, this is where the ghost is!’ I hurriedly looked at her arms, and she was, in fact, covered with goose pimples.
“Tom Corbett also went up these stairs and he distinctly felt someone walking after him, so much so, he turned around to speak to him, but there was nobody there.”
There we had it.
The Gray Lady floating across the haunted bedroom, and the haunted staircase.
During the years of religious persecution, Sawston Hall was the principal refuge for those of the Catholic faith, including a number of priests and lay brothers. Many atrocities were perpetrated in those days in the name of the Reformed Religion, and the atmosphere at Sawston Hall is soaked with the tragedy and suffering of those martyrs.
Then, too, one must realize that Mary Tudor, later known as Bloody Mary, had found the old manor house her salvation when the Huddlestons saved her life by hiding her. Her ghost might, indeed, be drawn back there even though she did not die there. I don’t think the Gray Lady is merely an etheric impression without personality; the behavior is that of a bona fide ghost.
* 26
Spectral Mary, Queen of Scots
BACK OF HOLYROOD PALACE, Edinburgh, residence of Mary Queen of Scots and other Scottish monarchs, stands a little house of modest appearance going by the quaint name of Croft-en-Reigh. This house was once owned by James, Earl of Moray, half brother of Mary, and Regent of Scotland in her absence. Today, the house is subdivided into three apartments, one of which belongs to a Mrs. Clyne. But several years ago this was the official residence of the warden of Holyrood Palace. The warden is the chief guide who has charge of all tourist traffic. David Graham, the onetime warden, has now retired to his house in nearby Portobello, but fourteen years ago he had a most unusual experience in this little house.
“There were twelve of us assembled for a séance, I recall,” he said, “and we had Helen Duncan, who is now dead, as our medium. There we were, seated quietly in the top floor of Croft-en-Reigh, waiting for developments.”
They did not have to wait long. A figure materialized before their astonished eyes and was recognized instantly: Mary Queen of Scots herself, who had been to this house many times in moments of great emotional turmoil. Within a moment, she was gone.
On several occasions, Mr. Graham recalls, he saw the ghost of a short man in sixteenth-century clothes. “I am French,” the man insisted. Graham thought nothing of it until he accidentally discovered that the house was built by an architect named French!
* 27
Renvyle
ALL ALONG THE Irish countryside, whenever I got to talk about ghosts, someone mentioned the ghost at Renvyle. Finally, I began to wonder about it myself. In Dublin, I made inquiries about Renvyle and discovered that it was a place in the West of Ireland. Now a luxury hotel, the old mansion of Renvyle in Connemara was definitely a place worth visiting sometime, I thought. As luck would have it, the present manager of the Shelbourne in Dublin had worked there at one time.
I immediately requested an interview with Eoin Dillon, and that same afternoon I was ushered into the manager’s office tucked away behind the second floor suites of the hotel.
Mr. Dillon proved to be an extremely friendly, matter-of-fact man, in his early middle years, impeccably dressed as is the wont of hotel executives.
“I went to Renvyle in 1952,” he explained, “as manager of the hotel there. The hotel was owned originally by the Gogarty family, and St. John Gogarty, of course, was a famous literary figure. He had written a number of books; he was also the original Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Ulysses, and he was a personal friend of every great literary figure of his period.
“The house itself was built by Sir Edward Lutchins about 1932, but it stood on the site of the original Gogarty house, which was burnt down in the Troubled Times, some say without any reference to critical facts.”
What Mr. Dillon meant was that the I.R.A. really had no business burning down this particular mansion. More great houses were destroyed by the Irish rebels for reasons hardly worthy of arson than in ten centuries of warfare. Ownership by a Britisher, or alleged ownership by an absentee landlord, was enough for the partisans to destroy the property. It reminded me of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe when mere adherence to the Catholic or Protestant faith by the owner was enough to have the house destroyed by the opposition.
“What happened after the fire?” I asked.
“The site being one of the most beautiful in Ireland, between the lake and the sea, the hotel was then built. This was in 1922. Following the rebuilding of the house, Gogarty, who ran it as a rather literary type of hotel, collected there a number of interesting people, among them the poet and Nobel-prize winner W. B. Yeats, whose centenary we are celebrating this year. And Yeats, of course, was very interested in psychic phenomena of one kind or another and has written a number of plays and stories on the subject. He also went in for séances. We were told that some of the séances held at Renvyle were very successful.
“Now the background to the piece of information which I have is that during the years preceding my arrival it had been noted that one particular room in this hotel was causing quite a bit of bother. On one or two occasions people came down saying there was somebody in the room, and on one very particular occasion, a lady whom I knew as a sane and sensible person complained that a man was looking over her shoulder while she was making her face up at the mirror. This certainly caused some furor.”
“I can imagine—watching a lady put on her ‘face’ is certainly an invasion of privacy—even for a ghost,” I observed.
“Well,” Mr. Dillon continued, “when I went there the hotel had been empty for about a year and a half. It had been taken over by a new company and I opened it for that new company. My wife and I found some very unpleasant sensations while we were there.”
“What did you do?”
“Finally, we got the local parish priest to come up and do something about it.”
“Did it help?”
“The entire house had this atmosphere about it. We had Mass said in the place, during which there was a violent thunderstorm. We somehow felt that the situation was under control. About August of that particular year, my wife was ill and my father was staying in the hotel at the time. I moved to that particular room where the trouble had been. It is located in the center of the building facing into a courtyard. The house is actually built on three sides of a courtyard. It is one flight up. This was thirteen years ago now, in August of 1952.”
“What happened to you in the haunted room, Mr. Dillon?” I asked.
“I went to sleep in this room,” he replied, “and my father decided he would sleep in the room also. He is a particularly heavy sleeper, so nothing bothers him. But I was rather tired and I had worked terribly hard that day, and as I lay in bed I suddenly heard this loud, clicking noise going on right beside my ears as if someone wanted to get me up! I refused to go—I was too tired—so I said, ‘Will you please go away, whoever you are?’—and I put my blanket over my head and went to sleep.”
“What do you make of it?” I said.
“There is a strong tradition that this room is the very room in which Yeats carried out these séances, and for that reason there was left there as a legacy actually some being of some kind which is certainly not explainable by ordinary standards.”
“Has anyone else had experiences there?”
“Not the finger clicking. I assume that was to get my attention. But the wife of a musician here in town, whom I know well, Molly Flynn—her husband is Eamon O’Gallcobhair, a well-known Irish musician—had the experience with the man looking over her shoulder. He was tall and dressed in dark clothes.”
“Have more people slept in this room and had experiences?”
“Over the years, according to the staff, about ten different people have had this experience. None of them knew the reputation the house had as being haunted, incidentally.”
The reports of an intruder dated back only to Yeats’ presence in the house, but of course something might have been latently present, perhaps “held over” from the earlier structure, and merely awakened by the séances.
It was not until the following summer that our hopes to go to Renvyle House were realized. Originally we had asked our friend Dillon to get us rooms at this renowned resort hotel so we could combine research with a little loafing in the sun—but as fate would have it, by the time we were ready to name a date for our descent upon the Emerald Isle, every nook and cranny at Renvyle House had been taken. Moreover, we could not even blame our ever-present countrymen, for the American tourist, I am told, waits far too long to make his reservations. The Britisher, on the other hand, having been taught caution and prevision by a succession of unreliable governments, likes to “book rooms,” as they say, early in the season, and consequently we found that Connemara was once again British—for the summer, anyway.
We were given the choice of bedding down at nearby Leenane where Lord French is the manager of a rather modern hotel built directly upon the rocky Connemara soil on the shore of a lough several miles deep. These loughs, or fjords, as they are called in Norway, are remnants of the ice ages, and not recommended for swimming, but excellent for fishing, since the Connemara fish apparently don’t mind the cold.
I should explain at this point that Connemara is the name of an ancient kingdom in the westernmost part of Ireland, which was last—and least—in accepting English custom and language, and so it is here in the cottages along the loughs and the magnificent Connemara seacoast that you can hear the softly melodic tongue of old Erin still spoken as a natural means of expression. The lilting brogue and the strange construction of sentences is as different from what you can hear across the Straits as day and night. There is, of course, a small percentage of literary and upper-class Irish, especially in Dublin, whose English is so fine it out-shines that spoken in Albion, and that, too, is a kind of moral victory over the English.
But we have left Lord French waiting for our arrival at the Hotel Leenane, and await us he did, a charming, middle-thirtyish man wild about fishing and genially aware of the lure the area has for tourists. Leenane was pleasant and the air was fresh and clear, around 65 degrees at a time when New York was having a comfortable 98 in the shade. My only complaint about the hotel concerned the walls, which had the thickness of wallpaper.
The weather this month of July, 1966, was exceptionally fine and had been so for weeks, with a strong sun shining down on our heads as we set out for Renvyle after lunch. The manager, Paul Hughes, had offered to come and fetch us in his car, and he—the manager, not the car—turned out to be far younger than I had thought. At 27, he was running a major hotel and running it well. It took us about three-quarters of an hour, over winding roads cut through the ever-present Connemara rock, to reach the coastal area where Renvyle House stands on a spot just about as close to America—except for the Atlantic—as any land could be in the area. The sea was fondling the very shores of the land on which the white two-story house stood, and cows and donkeys were everywhere around it, giving the entire scene a bucolic touch. Mr. Hughes left us alone for a while to take the sun in the almost tropical garden. After lunch I managed to corner him in the bar. The conversation, in Sybil Leek’s presence, had avoided all references to ghosts, of course. But now Sybil was outside, looking over the souvenir shop, and Hughes and I could get down to the heart of the matter.
Mr. Hughes explained that the hotel had been rebuilt in 1930 over an older house originally owned by the Blakes, one of the Galway tribes, who eventually sold it to Oliver St. John Gogarty. I nodded politely, as Mr. Dillon had already traced the history of the house for me last summer.
“He was a doctor in Dublin,” Hughes explained, “and he came here weekends and entertained people such as Joyce and Yeats and Augustus John.”
Thank goodness, I thought, they did not have autograph hounds in Connemara!
Mr. Hughes had been the manager for three years, he explained.
“Ever notice anything unusual about any of the rooms?” I prodded.
“No, I haven’t, although many of the staff have reported strange happenings. It seems that one of the maids, Rose Coine, saw a man in one of the corridors upstairs—a man who disappeared into thin air.”
Miss Coine, it developed, was middle-aged, and rather shy. This was her week off, and though we tried to coax her later, at her own cottage, to talk about her experiences, she refused.
“She has experienced it a few times,” Mr. Hughes continued. “I don’t know how many, though.”
“Has anyone else had unusual impressions anywhere in the hotel?”
“They say since the hotel was rebuilt it isn’t as strong anymore.”
“But didn’t Miss Coine have her experience after the fire?”
“Yes,” the manager admitted, “last year.”
I decided to pay the haunted room, number 27, a visit. This was the room mentioned by Eoin Dillon in which he had encountered the ghostly manifestations. We ascended the wooden staircase, with Sybil joining us—my wife and I, and Mr. Hughes, who had to make sure the guests of number 27 were outside for the moment. The room we entered on the second floor was a typical vacation-time hotel room, fairly modern and impersonal in decor, except for a red fireplace in the center of the left wall. I later learned that the two rooms now numbered 27 and 18 were originally one larger room. I took some photographs and let Sybil gather impressions. H
ughes quickly closed the outside door to make sure nobody would disturb us. Sybil sat down in the chair before the fireplace. The windows gave onto the courtyard.
“I have the feeling of something overlapping in time,” Sybil Leek began. Of course, she had no idea of the “two Renvyles” and the rebuilding of the earlier house.
“I have a peculiar feeling around my neck,” she continued, “painful feeling, which has some connection with this particular room, for I did not feel it a moment ago downstairs.”
“Do you feel a presence here?” I asked directly.
“Yes,” Sybil replied at once, “something…connected with pain. I feel as if my neck’s broken.”
I took some more pictures; then I heard Sybil murmur “1928.” I immediately questioned her about the significance of this date. She felt someone suffered in the room we were in at that time. Also, the size of the room has been changed since.
“There is a presence in this area,” she finally said with resolution. “A noisy presence. This person is rough.”
After Sybil remarked that it might be difficult to get the fireplace going, we went to the adjoining room to see if the impressions there might be stronger.
“What do you sense here?” I asked. “Fear.”
“Can it communicate?”
“It is not the usual thing we have…just pain, strong pain.”
“Someone who expired here?”
“Yes, but did not finish completely.”
“Is the person here now?”
“Not the person, but an impression.”
“How far back?”
“I only get as far back as 1928.”
I questioned Paul Hughes. That was indeed the time of the Yeats séances.
“What sort of people do you feel connected with this room?”
“There is this overlapping period…1928 I feel very vital, but beyond that we go down in layers…traveling people, come here, do not live here…does the word ‘off-lander’ mean anything?”