by Hans Holzer
Hans Holzer’s wife, Catherine, examining the haunted corridor
“Can you possibly speak to him, Trixie?” I asked.
“I am speaking to him now,” Trixie replied impatiently, “but he says, ‘There is no hope for me.’ I tell him we will pray for him. I hear him speak in Latin. I know a fair amount of Latin, and I’m saying it in English: ‘Out of the depths I have called unto thee, O God, hear my voice.’ Then the monk reappears, and there is also a tall lady here, by his side. I believe this is his wife; she’s very slender and beautiful, and she’s holding up one of his hands, saying, ‘Pray, pray as you’ve never prayed before.”’
We left the Red Library and slowly walked up the staircase, one of the world’s greatest, to the upper stories. When we arrived at the haunted corridor where the famous duel had taken place, Trixie sensed that something had happened around December or January of one particular year—not an ordinary passing. Immediately she explained that it had nothing to do with the haunting downstairs.
“The passing of this person was kept quiet. He was carried out in the dead of night in a gray shroud. I can see this happening. Five people are carrying out this ominous task. The whole situation was tragic and hushed up. He wasn’t murdered and it wasn’t suicide, but it was a person who came to an untimely end. Above all, they wanted no attention, no attention. He didn’t live here, but he stayed here for a while. He came from Spain. I think he died from a wound in his side, yet it wasn’t murder or suicide. He was about thirty-five years old. He says ‘O my God, my God, to come to such an end.’ He was a Catholic, he tells me. He was not shriven here after he passed. I see lanterns; he’s not buried in sacred ground. Wait a moment, sir,” Trixie suddenly said, turning to Lord Bath. “Is there a name like Winnie or something like that connected with your family?” Lord Bath’s interest perked up. Winnie sounded a little like Weymouth.
The haunted “Red Library”
“Francis, Francis,” Trixie said excitedly now. “And I hear the name Fanny. She’s just laughing. Did you know her?”
“Yes,” Lord Bath replied, “a long, long time ago.”
“Was she a very bright person?”
“Well, she was as a child. Her nickname was Fanny.”
Evidently Trixie had gotten some more recent spirits mixed in with the old characters. “I see her as a younger woman, lovely, laughing, running along, and she tells me you have in your pocket a coin that is bent, out of order, not a normal coin. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Lord Bath said, surprised.
“She just told me; isn’t she sweet? Oh, and there is a lord chief justice here. Do you know him?”
“Peculiar,” Lord Bath replied. “There was a lord chief justice upstairs.”
For a moment Trixie seemed particularly sad, as she reported: “There is a child here named Tim, Timothy, but he died at the age of one-and-a-half. Is this true?”
Lord Bath seemed to struggle with his emotions now. “Yes,” he finally said in a low voice.
“He wants me to say, ‘I am Tim,’ and you should know he is still your son.”
Lord Bath confirmed that his oldest son, Tim, had died in infancy, but that the fact was known only to members of the family and had never been publicized.
Trixie then reported a servant woman, continuing to serve in her ghostly condition, and when I didn’t show any particular interest, she went on to say that there was also a rather funny-looking man, “someone holding his head under his arm, walking, and I really shouldn’t laugh at this sort of thing, but I saw this man with his head under his arm.”
Since none of us were laughing, she assumed that it was all right to address the man with his head under his arm. “Can you tell me, sir, how you lost your head, and why?” She listened for a while, apparently getting an answer from the unseen headless specter. Nodding, she turned to us. “There is something about some rebels here; they are linked with France, and these rebels have come in strength. Somebody was being hounded, a person of high birth. He was hidden here, and I don’t like it at all.”
Lord Bath was visibly impressed. “During the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth,” he explained, “some rebels took refuge here. It is not at all unlikely that one of them was put to death on these grounds.”
Trixie now exhibited unmistakable signs of weariness. Under the circumstances, we decided to call it a day and return in the morning. The following morning we started again in the Red Library. On entering, Trixie described a woman walking up and down wringing her hands and saying that her child had died. Trixie identified her as Christina and explained that this had happened no more than a hundred years ago. However, my main interest was in an earlier period, and I asked Trixie to try for full trance if she could. Again she seated herself in the comfortable chair at the far end of the Red Library.
“There is a link here with the tragedy I saw in part yesterday,” she began. “I still see the horseman and the woman at the window, and I smell the tragedy. There is something about a rapier wound. Ron is murdered and a Helen is mixed up in this. The man I saw yesterday is still here, by the way, and he looks happier now.”
“Ask him to identify himself.”
“I get the initial R. He wears a cape and a lace collar.”
“Why did he murder the three people?”
“I get the initial P. Someone was in a dungeon here.” All of a sudden we weren’t hearing Trixie’s voice anymore, but a rough male voice coming from her entranced lips. I realized that the ghost had at last taken over the medium and was about to address us directly.
“Who put you into the dungeon?”
“S. Mine enemy, mine enemy.”
“Is this your house?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Did you build this house?”
“With bad money.”
“What is your name, sir?” I insisted.
Suddenly the entity was gone again and Trixie was back. “He was a Catholic by birth,” she said, “and he is showing me a very large ruby ring on his finger. His ankles hurt him. He must have been chained for a time, and I see a short dagger in his hand. Now he is fading again.”
“Is he the victim or the murderer?” I almost shouted.
“He did it; he says, ‘I did it, I have no peace.’ He was the owner of the house. He says, ‘You will pray for me, you will pray for me.”‘
I assured the entity through the medium that we would all pray for him.
“He says someone owes him something.”
“But he can be forgiven; tell him that.”
“There is a little chapel here somewhere in this mansion. I can see the altar, and he wants Lord Bath to go there, to the chapel. ‘If he will do it, he will give me peace; he will give me rest.”‘
I promised that we would do it, without even asking Lord Bath, for I knew he would go along with it, although he was not a religious person.
“I can’t do any more, I can’t do any more,” the medium said now, and she looked exhausted. I questioned her about what she remembered.
“I saw two men killed over a woman,” Trixie recollected. “There is a lead coffin amongst all the others, one different from the others. It is away from the others. This man is in it, the one who murdered. I hear the name Grace, and someone was hung, hanged from the rafters.” Impressions seemed to hit her now from various directions, possibly getting different layers of history confused in the process. It was up to us to sort it out.
“Tom,” Trixie now said firmly, and looked at me. I asked her to describe the man. “I see him very dimly; he is old and belongs to an earlier age.” Lord Bath then informed me that we were in what used to be the chapel, although the floor had been changed and we were actually above it. Just as I had promised, we grouped ourselves around the spot where the altar once stood below, bowed our heads in prayer, and I said, “May Thomas rest free from worry, happy in his home. May he be free from any guilt or fear. Let us now have a moment of silent prayer.”
In the silence I
glanced at Lord Bath, a man who had told me before that he thought himself an agnostic. He seemed genuinely affected and moved.
“I don’t know whether it was a bishop,” Trixie said, “but I saw a man with a gold miter on his head make the sign of the cross and I heard the word ‘progression,’ and then something very odd happened. A feather was put on his shoulder, but I don’t know what it means.”
Medium Trixie Allingham in a trance in the Red Library
“Perhaps his soul is now light as a feather?” I suggested. Trixie then asked Lord Bath whether he knew any jeweled crucifix in the mansion. Lord Bath could not remember such an item offhand. Trixie insisted, “It is a jeweled cross with dark stones, and it has to do with your people. I also see three monks who were here when you were praying. Three in a row. But now I feel peace; I feel a man who had a leaden weight on his shoulder is now without it. It was important that he be helped.”
I have already mentioned that the name which the medium got in connection with the death of the thirty-five-year-old Spaniard in the haunted passage upstairs sounded very close to Weymouth, the man who killed him in a duel. The medium’s description of this death as being neither death nor suicide is of course entirely correct: he was killed in an honest duel, which in those days was not considered murder. Trixie described the man’s death as an affair that had to be hushed up, and so it was indeed, not only because a man had been killed, but also because the wife of the Viscount had been unfaithful. A scandal was avoided: the body was interred underneath the kitchen floor, and, as Lord Bath confirmed, it had been found several years earlier and been given burial outside the house.
More fascinating is Trixie’s account of the haunting in the Red Library. The man she described is obviously the same man described by the old nanny whom I interviewed in 1964, and the same man whom Dorothy Coates, former librarian of Longleat, had encountered, as well as a certain Mrs. Grant, former housekeeper in the greathouse.
In a somewhat confused and jumbled way, however, Trixie hit on many of the facts surrounding the ancient palace. I doubt that Trixie would have known of these family secrets, which are never found in tourist guides of Longleat or in popular books dealing with the Thynne family. They are, however, available in research libraries, if one tries hard enough to find the information. There exists, for instance, a contemporary source known as the “John Evelyn Diary,” a seventeenth-century chronicle of the London scene. From this source we learned that Thomas Thynne, then already one of the wealthiest men in England and somewhat advanced in years, had fallen in love with a sixteen-year-old heiress by the name of Elizabeth Ogle. He married her despite the great difference in their ages, and after the wedding ceremony preceded her to Longleat, where Lady Elizabeth was to follow him in a few days’ time. But Elizabeth never arrived in Longleat. Unwilling to consummate the marriage into which she felt herself forced by her family, she ran away to the Netherlands, where she continued living as if she weren’t married. In the Netherlands, Elizabeth Ogle met a certain Count Koenigsmark and fell in love with this somewhat adventurous gentleman. Since divorce was out of the question, and Lady Elizabeth was legally married to Thomas Thynne, the young lovers decided to murder Elizabeth’s husband so that she might be free to marry her count.
In view of Thynne’s affluence and importance, such a plot was not an easy one to bring off. Koenigsmark therefore engaged the services of three paid murderers, a certain Lieutenant Stern, a Colonel Vratz and a man named Boroski. The murderous foursome arrived in London and immediately set about keeping a close watch on their intended victim. One Sunday night Thynne left a party in London and entered his coach to be driven home. That was the signal they had been waiting for. They followed their victim, and when the coach with Thomas Thynne reached Pall Mall, which was at that time still a country road, the murderers stopped it. Lieutenant Stern, galloping ahead of the coach, put his hands onto the reins of the lead horse. As Thomas Thynne opened the door of the coach and stepped out, a volley of shots hit him in the face.
The restless ghost had called “mine enemy.” Could this have been Stern?
The murder created a great deal of attention even in those unruly times. Count Koenigsmark and his henchmen were apprehended just as the count was about to leave England to join Elizabeth. According to John Evelyn, the trial, which took place in 1682, saw the count acquitted by a corrupt jury, but the actual murderers were condemned to death on the gallows. The hired assassins paid with their lives, but the man who had hatched the plot got off scot-free. No wonder the restless spirit of the victim could not find peace! But if one of the ghosts who contacted us through Trixie was indeed Thomas Thynne, the victim of the murder plot, why should he then grieve for the three people who had been put to death for his murder? Undoubtedly, Trixie, in reaching several levels of hauntings, had brought up bits and pieces of John, Thomas, and perhaps even his murderers—all presented in a slightly confusing but essentially evidential package.
Trixie also spoke of “one lead coffin, different from all others.” According to the diaries, two weeks after Colonel Vratz had been put to death his body was still not decayed, owing to a new process of preservation which was being used for the first time. “He lay exposed in a very rich coffin lined with lead, too magnificent for so daring and horrid a murderer.”
So it seems that at least four ghosts occupied the halls of Longleat: the Lady Louisa, who mourned her lover’s death at the hands of her husband; the rebel from the Duke of Monmouth’s army, who was caught and slaughtered; the builder of Longleat, Sir John Thynne, whose personal attachment and possibly feelings of guilt keep him from leaving his rich estate for greener pastures; and, of course, Thomas Thynne. I should think the latter has departed the premises now, but I am equally sure that Sir John is still around enjoying the spectacles his descendant, the present Lord Bath, is putting on for the tourists. Surely Sir John would have understood the need to install turn-stiles in the cafeteria and toilet downstairs, or to bring in lions for a zoo, and to do whatever was possible to raise revenue to keep the magnificent palace in prime condition; for Sir John, not unlike his descendant, was foremost a man of business and common sense.
* 77
The Ghosts at Blanchland
“THE MOST OBVIOUS THING about Blanchland is its remoteness,” writes G. W. O. Addleshaw in his short history of Blanchland. It wasn’t as remote for us, because we arrived on a well-planned schedule, by private car, followed about two hours later by a busload of special tourists: participants in a Hunted Britain Tour arranged by Vision Travel, under the guidance of Andre Michalski, Polish nobleman and former orchestra conductor. Over the hills, into the dales, and over still another chain of hills we rode, shaken up all the while, but hopeful of eventually reaching our destination intact. By we I mean my wife Catherine and myself and London medium Trixie Allingham, whom I had invited to participate in a rare and unusual experiment. She hadn’t the slightest idea why I was bringing her up north. All she knew was that I was on a ghost-hunting expedition, that she would have a quiet room that night and be brought back to London the following day.
When we left the airport at Newcastle, I had no idea that I would soon be in the heart of the Middle Ages, in a small market town so perfectly preserved that it gave one the impression of being in the middle of a motion-picture set in Hollywood. The square commons was reached through a city gate, turreted and fortified, and to the left was a solid-looking gray stone building with a colorful sign dangling from the second story. The sign read “Lord Crewe Arms.” This was the unusual hotel which was once a sixteenth-century manor house, which in turn had been converted from a twelfth-century monastery.
The Abbey of Blanchland had been founded by Premonstratensian monks, a strict offshoot of the Benedictines. The land which gave the abbey its income was originally part of the old earldom of Northumbria, expropriated by Henry I for the Norman de Bolbec family. The family itself added some of their own lands in 1214, and it was then that the name Blanchland,
which means white land, was mentioned for the first time. Most probably the name is derived from the white habits of the Premonstratensian monks. Up until the middle nineteenth century, the area around Blanchland was wild and desolate, very thinly populated and cut off from the outside world. This was, in a way, most fortunate, because it prevented Blanchland from being embroiled in the political struggles of the intervening centuries and allowed the monks to lead a more contemplative life here than in any other part of England. The monastery was dissolved under Henry VIII, as were all others, and in 1539 the remaining monks were pensioned off, leaving Blanchland Abbey after four hundred years of residence. At first a family named Radcliffe owned the estates and buildings of the dissolved abbey, but in 1623 the Forsters, an old Northumberland family, came into possession of Blanchland. By now the church was in ruins, but a chapel still existed within the main building. Part of the abbey buildings were converted into houses for the village, and the abbot’s residence became the manor house. When the last male of the line died, the property passed into the hands of Dorothy Forster, who had married Lord Crewe, Bishop of Durham.
When the owners of Blanchland got into financial difficulties in 1704, Lord Crewe bought the estates, and thus the name Crewe was linked with Blanchland from that moment on. Unfortunately for the family, they became embroiled in the Scottish rebellion of 1715, taking the Jacobite side. The estates eventually passed to a board of trustees, which rebuilt the damaged portion of the village.
A group of buildings, chiefly the kitchen and the prior’s house, eventually became an unusual hotel, the Lord Crewe Arms, owned and operated by the Vaux Breweries of Sunderland. The stone-vaulted chamber of the house now serves as a bar. There is an outer stone staircase leading to the gateway and another one leading to what is called the Dorothy Forster Sitting Room, a room I was to know intimately.