by Hans Holzer
We were welcomed by the manager, a Mr. Blenkinsopp, and shown to our quarters. Everything was furnished in eighteenth-century style. Our room, facing the rear, led onto a magnificent garden behind the house: obviously this was the monastery garden, or what remained of it. I understood from previous correspondence with the owner that the area is frequently plunged into sudden mists, but the day of our arrival was a particularly nice day in early August, and the sun was warm as late as 7 o’clock at night. “Mrs. Holzer and yourself are in the Bambrugh Room,” the manager said, with a significant raising of the eyebrows, when I came downstairs after unpacking. Then, making sure that no one was listening to our conversation, he added, “This is the room in which most of the activities are reputed to have taken place, you know.” I nodded. I had specifically asked to be put up in the “haunted room.”
Our arrival had gone unannounced, by my request; however, I offered to give a press interview after we had done our work. While my wife and Trixie rested after the journey from the airport, I took a walk around the premises. The peaceful atmosphere of the place was incredible. It almost belied the rumors of a haunting. A little later we had dinner in the candlelit bar downstairs. My psychic tour had meanwhile arrived and been placed in various rooms of the inn, and they were eager to participate in what for them was a unique and exciting adventure: to witness an actual séance or make contact with an authentic ghost!
It was already dark when we repaired to the room in which we were to sleep that night. Things were a bit on the tight side, with fourteen people trying to squeeze into a double bedroom. But we managed to find everyone a spot, and then Trixie took to a chair in one corner, closed her eyes and leaned back, waiting for the spirits to manifest.
Immediately Trixie looked up at me with a significant nod. “There was a murder in this room, you know,” as if it were the most natural thing to expect from a room that was to serve as our sleeping quarters for the night.
“Anything else?” I said, preparing myself for the worst.
“I saw three monks come along, and the odd thing is one dropped his girdle—you know, the cord. It is all very odd.”
I agreed that it was, but before I could ask her anything further, she pointed at the bed we were sitting on. “I see a woman lying on this bed, and she is dead. She has been murdered. This happened centuries ago. Now I see a little child running into the room, also wearing a dress of centuries ago. There is an unusual coffin leaving this room. I hear chanting. The coffin is black and shaped like a boat. I have the feeling this happened between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Also, I have a feeling of sword play and of a stone, a very special stone standing up somewhere outside.”
At this point Trixie called for us to join hands to give her more power for what was to come.
Immediately her face became agitated, as if she were listening to something, something coming to her from far away. “I can hear somebody calling, ‘Jesus, Jesus have mercy, Jesus have mercy,’ and I see a monk wearing a dark habit, while the others are wearing a grayish white. But this man has on a dark robe which is extraordinary. He is a monk, yet he is really Satanic.
“I think his name is Peter. I don’t know whether he committed this murder or got caught up in it. He has a hawk-like face, and there is a very beautiful woman who was tied to this monk. I hear her crying, ‘Help me, help me, help me!”’
“How can we help her?” I asked.
“Get on your knees and pray,” Trixie replied. “She wants absolution.”
“What has she done?”
“Credo, credo—what does it mean?”
Trixie seemed puzzled, then she handed me a key. “Go to my room and you’ll find a crucifix there. Bring it to me.” I asked one of the tour members to get the crucifix from the room down the hall.
“This very beautiful girl died in childbirth, but it was not her husband’s child,” Trixie explained. “And now she wants absolution for what she had done. I hear ‘Ave Maria.’ She was buried stealthily outside this area, but she comes back here to visit this guilty love. Her progression is retarded because of her inability to clear her conscience, and yet one part of her wants to cling to the scene here. Wait a minute, I get ‘Lord’ something. Also, I wonder who was imprisoned for a time, because I see a jailer and rusty keys. It is all very much like looking at a movie screen—I’m getting bits and pieces of a picture. There is a great sense of remorse; this woman was married, yet she had this love for a monk. The child is lying on a bier. It is all tinged with murder. It seems she killed the child. Now I’m getting something about Spain and the Inquisition, but I don’t understand why.”
“Tell her she must divulge her name, so that she may be completely cleared,” I suggested.
Trixie strained visibly to read the woman’s name. “I get the initial F.,” she finally said.
“Can you get something about the period when this happened?”
“She said 1260. She’s beautiful; her hair is chestnut colored.”
“What happened to the monk?”
“He was banished and died in misery, and she says, ‘My fault, my fault!”’
I instructed Trixie to relieve the unhappy one of her guilt. Trixie took up the crucifix and intoned in a trembling voice, “You are forgiven and helped in Christ, the Savior!” I asked what was the name of the unlucky monk so that we could pray for him too. “F. F. F.” Trixie replied. “He was a monsignor.”
At this point, trance set in and Trixie turned more and more into the unhappy woman ghost. “I thought it would be some reparation for the misery I caused if I came back here. I am trying to impress my survival by coming from time to time. I do not see him now. Oh, we are separated from each other. I kneel in the church.”
Trixie “returned,” and the entity again spoke to her, with the medium relaying her messages to me. “When she was young, this house belonged to the earl.” I offered to have some prayers said on her behalf in the church, but in whose name should they be said?
“Just pray for me. I shall know much happiness and I shall be free.”
“Then go in peace with our blessings,” I replied, and I could see that the entity was fast slipping away. Trixie came out of her psychic state now, visibly tired.
While she was recuperating, I asked the others whether they had felt anything peculiar during the séance. One lady spoke up and said that there was a sort of electric feeling in the room; another admitted to having a strong feeling that she received the impression of a monk who wasn’t a real monk at all. Trixie said, “Now I understand about the three monks and one of them putting down his cord. He was being defrocked!”
Mr. Hewitt, one of the managers, had been present throughout the séance, watching with quiet interest. I asked him for verification of the material that had come through Trixie. “It all makes sense,” he said, “but the peculiar thing is that the times are all mixed up—everything is correct, but there are two different layers of time involved.”
The part of the building where the séance had taken place was the only part of the abbey remaining from the very early period, the Abbey of the White Monks—the white monks seen clairvoyantly by Trixie at the beginning of our session. Mr. Hewitt could not enlighten us concerning the defrocked monk, and when I mentioned it, Trixie filled me in on some of the details of her vision. “It was a terrible thing to see this monk. There he stood in his dark robe, then the cord dropped off and his habit came off, and then I saw him naked being flayed and flayed—it was a terrible thing.”
According to the manager, several of the villagers have seen the apparition of a woman in the churchyard and also in the church next door to the hotel. People sleeping in the room we were in had at various times complained of a “presence,” but nobody had actually seen her. “She was absolutely beautiful with her rust-colored hair,” Trixie said. “I could just see her vaguely, but she had on a light dress, very low, nothing on her head, and her hair was loose.” The manager turned to me and asked whether he might bring in a picture of
the lady whom they suspected of being the ghost. When Trixie looked at it, she said firmly, “This is the girl I saw.” The picture was a portrait of Dorothy Forster—Trixie had named the woman F.—and it was this Dorothy Forster who had played an important role in the history of Blanchland. In 1715, Dorothy’s brother Thomas was a general in the Jacobite army, although he was not really qualified for the post. He was captured and imprisoned at Newgate Prison. Three days before his trial for high treason, his sister Dorothy managed to enter the prison, disguised as a servant, get her brother out, and help him escape to France, where he eventually died. Also of interest is the reference to the initials F. F. F. by Trixie. In 1701 a certain John Fenwick killed Ferdinando Forster in a duel at Newcastle. As a result of this, the estate fell into debt and was later sold to Lord Crewe, the Bishop of Durham. He in turn married Dorothy Forster’s aunt, also named Dorothy. “There still seems to be some confusion as to which of the two Dorothys haunts the village and the hotel,” says S. P. B. Mais in a pamphlet entitled “The Lord Crewe Arms, Blanchland”: “She is to be seen walking along the Hexham Road and opens and shuts doors in the haunted wing of the hotel. A portrait of the niece hangs in the sitting room which is named after her, and a portrait of the aunt hangs in the dining room alongside that of her husband, the Bishop of Durham.”
I realized by now that Trixie had tuned in on two separate times layers: the grim twelfth and thirteenth centuries, together with the story of a monk who had done wrong and had been punished for it. This particular haunting or impression came as a surprise to the manager, because it had not been reported before. On the other hand, the ghostly presence of Dorothy Forster was generally known around the area. The question was, which Dorothy was the ghost? During the state bordering on trance, Trixie spoke of the house owned by the earl. This was in reply to the question of whose house it was when Dorothy was young. So the ghost could only be the niece, the second Dorothy, because Lord Crewe, the Bishop of Durham, had married her aunt, also named Dorothy. The younger Dorothy would have grown up in her aunt’s house. But why was Dorothy Forster, the younger, seeking forgiveness of her sins? Here the mystery remains. On the one hand, Trixie identified the ghost from the portrait shown her by Mr. Hewitt; on the other hand, Dorothy Forster definitely had nothing to do with any monks, since in the eighteenth century there weren’t any monks around Blanchland.
The following morning we left for Newcastle and a television interview. A reporter from one of the local papers, The Northern Echo, headlined the August 9, 1969, issue with “HAUNTED, YES—BUT WHOSE GHOST IS IT?”
Two psychic sisters from Dallas, Ceil Whitley and Jean Loupot, who had been on the haunted tour with us, decided to jot down their impressions in the haunted room immediately afterwards.
“Both of us feel that Trixie was mistaken in at least one of her impressions. Trixie felt the young woman was inconsolable because she had killed her newborn child, but both of us had the definite impression that she said, ‘did away with,’ meaning, not killed. We thought it was spirited away by the monks who delivered it. We are so sure of this impression that we do want to go back to Blanchland and see if we can pick up anything further.”
On September 15, 1970, the two ladies got in touch with me again. “When we were at Blanchland, Jean ‘saw’ a woman standing beside a wall at an open gateway. She was quite plump, approximately forty to forty-five years old, and dressed in a black, stiff, full-skirted, long-sleeved dress, nipped in at the waist. There was a laced scarf over her head, crossed in front and back over her shoulders. She stood with her arms crossed in front of her, and her face had a look of sad resignation, as though she were remembering some long-past sadness. We thought it was the girl we ‘picked up’ last summer, only she was showing us herself in middle age, though still suffering the loss of her child.”
* 78
The Ghosts of Edinburgh
I WOULD NOT BE so familiar with some of the ghosts in and around Edinburgh were it not for the friendship and enormous help given me by Elizabeth Byrd, the author of Immortal Queen, and Alanna Knight, author of October Witch and many other books, and her husband Alistair. These wonderful friends not only helped plan my recent visit to Scotland but spent much time with me as well. There is something very peculiar about the intellectual atmosphere of the Scottish capital: when you walk along the impressive eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century streets, you feel in the heart of things, yet also removed from the turbulence of the world.
“Guess what? I’m coming to Scotland,” I wrote to Elizabeth in March 1973. It was May 3 when I checked in at the George Hotel in the heart of Edinburgh. Shortly after my arrival, Elizabeth paid me a visit with detailed plans for the rest of my stay, pretty much in the manner of one of Napoleon’s field marshals when the emperor was about to embark on a campaign. As my first official act on Scottish soil I presented Elizabeth with a large bottle of Scotch, imported from New York. Elizabeth had wanted to take me to one of the famous old hotels where she had had an uncanny experience in the ladies’ room. There was some question on how to get me into the ladies’ room and what to tell the manager. “Suppose I watched outside and barred any lady from coming in?” Elizabeth suggested. “Five minutes in there should suffice, should you feel any impression.” I declined, explaining that I wouldn’t mind going to a haunted men’s room but then since there wasn’t any at that particular hotel, I would pass. But my curiosity had been aroused, so I asked Elizabeth what exactly happened at the ladies’ room at the——Hotel.
“Well,” Elizabeth replied in her well-modulated voice, “last year on December 8, which happens to be my birthday, I was in a very happy mood. I was in Edinburgh for business appointments and to celebrate. At noon, I happened to run into a book dealer who invited me for a drink. So we went to the——Hotel. He ordered the drinks and I went upstairs to primp. The ladies’ room is immaculate, new, and neon-lit. Absolutely nothing to frighten anyone, one would think. No one else was in there. I was there for about two minutes when a feeling of absolute terror came over me. Without so much as combing my hair, much less putting on lipstick, I just had to run.”
“Did you hear or see anything?”
“No, just this feeling of terror. I went down two flights of stairs and was extremely glad to get that drink from the book dealer, who said, ‘You look peculiar.’ I kept wondering what had frightened me so. All I knew about the hotel was that it had been built around 1850. When I told a friend, Kenneth Macrae, what had happened to me in the ladies’ room, he said, ‘I know something about the history of the hotel.’ He suggested I also check with The Scotsman.”
Elizabeth’s greatest terror is fire, so she inquired whether there had been any disastrous fires at the hotel at any time. There had indeed been a fire in May of 1971 in which a woman was killed, and a chef had been found guilty of starting the fire and causing the woman’s death. Earlier, in 1967, a fire had broken out in a club nearby and the hotel staff had been evacuated, but the fire had been quickly brought under control. The newspaper librarian regretted that there was no fire of any proportion at the hotel at any time. A little later Elizabeth went to London and while there she received a note from her friend Kenneth Macrae: “Dear Elizabeth, is it possible that your discomfort in the ladies’ room was prophetic? A Welsh Rugby supporter was killed in a fire on February 3, 1973, in the hotel.”
Miss Byrd thought that was the end of that, but then on April 29, 1973, a really disastrous fire broke out in the hotel, the result of which left two hundred people dead. “It must have been this really big fire I felt, long before it actually happened. I’m glad I wasn’t in the hotel at that time.”
But Alanna Knight had a different impression of the haunted ladies’ room. “Elizabeth insisted on taking me there one day. I must admit I was very skeptical, but as soon as I opened the door I got my unfailing signal—that old, familiar scalp-crawl—and I knew that despite the modern decor, and bright lights, there was something terribly wrong. Luckily we had the place t
o ourselves for the moment, although I must admit if Elizabeth had not been there, I would have taken to my heels at once!
“I felt immediately that she was mistaken about thinking it had anything to do with a fire. I got an impression of a woman, thirty-five to forty, sometime about 1910, who had suffered such a tragedy that she took her own life in that room. It was a particularly gruesome end, and the room absorbed it. My impression of her was that she was neat but rather shabbily dressed, a ‘superior’ servant, perhaps a housekeeper or a teacher or someone of that nature.”
Because Elizabeth frequently visits the hotel where all this happened, she has asked I not give the hotel’s name. She likes the bar, the dining room, and the lounge—everything, in fact, except the ladies’ room. Therefore, when the call comes, there is but one thing for Elizabeth to do—leave.
* * *
The telephone rang. It was Ian Groat, who with his friend James Grandison, who would serve as the driver, was to take us to the outskirts of Edinburgh for a look at a haunted country house. During the ride from the center of town up into the hills surrounding it, I had an opportunity to interview Mr. Grandison.
“This happened in 1965, in a modern bungalow built in 1935, on the outskirts of Edinburgh,” he began in a soft voice colored by a pleasant Scottish burr. “The place was called Pendleton Gardens, and there had not been anything on the spot before. I lived there for about two years without experiencing anything out of the ordinary, but then strange things started to happen. At first we heard the sound of wood crackling in the fireplace, and when we checked, we found the fire hadn’t been lit. Sometimes this noise would also occur in other parts of the place. Then there was the noise of dogs barking inside the house. My wife used to hear it on her own, and I of course discounted the whole thing, saying that there must have been a dog outside. But eventually I began to hear it as well. There were no dogs outside, and I was able to pinpoint the direction whence the bark came. Added to this was the noise of a kettle boiling over on a stove, as if one had to run to the kitchen and turn off the kettle. Whenever we approached the entrance to the kitchen, the noise stopped instantly. While we were still wondering about this, other things began to happen. A door would suddenly slam in our faces, just before we got to it. Or I would go to the bathroom, and the bathroom door would be halfway open, and just as I reached the handle, it would slam violently open, wide open.”