by Hans Holzer
“In other words, whoever was causing it was aware of you?”
“Oh, absolutely, yes. Then we started getting knocks on the walls. We tried to communicate by knocking back, and sure enough this thing kept knocking back at us, but we weren’t able to establish a code, and apparently this thing didn’t have enough energy to carry on indefinitely. We tried to ignore the whole thing, but then something or someone started to knock on the back door. Whenever we answered the door, there was no one there. One day I was lying on the bed while my wife Sadie was in another room with my mother. Suddenly I heard the sound of heavy footsteps walking down the path to the back door and someone knocking on the door. It sounded like a woman’s footsteps, but I can’t be sure. Then my wife and my mother also heard the footsteps going down the path. We did nothing about answering the door, and after a moment the noise came again, but this time it was a thunderous knock, bang-bang-bang. It sounded like someone was very annoyed at not getting in, and this time both my wife and my mother ran to open the door, and again there was no one there and no sound of footsteps receding up the path.
“We were in the habit of going away weekends then and coming back Sunday night. During our absence the house was well locked up, with safety locks on the windows and on the front door. The back door was barred entirely with bolts and quite impregnable; there was no way of getting in. The first time we did this, when we came back we found all sorts of things amiss: the hearth rug in the bedroom had been picked up neatly from the floor and placed in the center of the bed. An ashtray had been taken from the mantelpiece and put in the middle of the hearth rug. We had a loose carpet in the corridor running the length of the house. It was loose and not nailed down. After we got back from our weekend, we found this carpet neatly folded up end-to-end, and we had to unwind the thing again and put it back along the corridor. There was a large piece of wood in the living room, part of the back of a radio-phonograph. When we came back after the weekend, instead of lying against the wall, it was flat on the floor. So the following weekend, we put the piece of wood back against the wall and two chairs up against it so it couldn’t possibly fall down. But when we came back, the wood was again right on the floor, yet the chairs had not been disturbed! Whoever it was who did it must have lifted it straight up over the chairs and slipped it out from behind them and placed it in the middle of the floor, as if they were saying, ‘Look, I’ve done it again, even though you tried to stop me.’ By now we were pretty sure we had a poltergeist in our house.”
“What did you do about it?”
“While we were still trying to figure it out, there was an incident involving a cat. One day we clearly heard a cat purring in the middle of the kitchen floor. But our cat was sitting on a chair, looking down at this imaginary cat as if she could see it. We also heard a terrible crash in the living room, only to find nothing at all disturbed. Once in a while one would hear an odd note on the piano, an odd key being struck, but there was no one near it. This went on and on, gradually building up. At first it was perhaps one incident a week. Eventually it was happening every day. After two years it was getting really ridiculous, and we were beginning to worry in case the neighbors would hear dogs barking inside the house and things like that. Finally I asked a medium by the name of James Flanagan to come to the house.”
“A professional medium?” I asked.
“It is a hobby with him, but he tells me that his work is his hobby, and the mediumship is his actual profession.”
“What happened?”
“He brought another man with him, James Wright, and they had tape recorders with them. He informed us that he felt spirits all over the room, and that he could see them even though we couldn’t. He told us it was the original owner of the house, an old lady; she had become strange and was put in a hospital, where she died. She didn’t know that she was dead and insisted on coming back to her home. He described her as having reddish hair. Her husband had been a freemason.”
“Did you cheek this out?”
“The person who had shown us round the house when we bought it,” Mr. Grandison replied, “was a ginger-haired woman who turned out to have been the daughter of a lady who had died. Also we found a number of things in the attic having to do with freemasonry.
“What advice did the medium give you to get rid of the spook?”
“He asked us to get a basin of clean water and put it in the kitchen and to try to imagine his face in the basin of water after he had left. Also, in two weeks’ time the entire phenomenon would disappear—and much to our surprise, it did. Incidents were less frequent and eventually they ceased altogether.”
* * *
I had mentioned to Elizabeth Byrd that a certain David Reeves had been in touch with me concerning a poltergeist at his Edinburgh residence and expressed the desire to visit with Mr. Reeves.
“It all started at the beginning of 1970, when my cousin Gladys, her husband Richard, myself, and my wife Aileen were discussing the unknown and life after death,” Mr. Reeves had stated to me. “We had heard of other people using a Ouija board, so I drew one on a large piece of paper and placed it on the floor, then placed a tumbler in the center of the paper, and we all put our right forefingers on the glass. After a few minutes I experienced a cold shiver down my back and Richard said he felt the same. Then the glass started to move!”
They received no message, and Mr. Reeves was very skeptical about the whole thing. But the little circle continued using the Ouija board, and eventually they did get evidential messages, from a spirit claiming to be Richard’s grandfather. The message was succinct: Richard was to have a crash on his motorbike. A few weeks later he crashed his three-wheeler, which had a motorbike engine. Messages came to them now from different people. One night they received a message stating that the two men were to drink salt water(!) and to make their minds blank at precisely 11 o’clock.
“At 11 I ‘fell asleep,’ and what happened afterwards is an account told to me by the others,” Mr. Reeves explained. In trance, through Mr. Reeves, an entity calling himself St. Francis of Assisi manifested. Since none of the group were Roman Catholics, this was rather surprising to them. The entranced David Reeves then got up, demanded that the light—which he called ‘the false light’—be put out, and that the curtains be opened. This done, he demanded that everyone fall to his knees and pray. He himself then proceeded to pray in Latin, a language which neither Mr. Reeves nor any of those present knew.
Unfortunately, Mr. Reeves’s cousin Gladys mistook his deep state of trance for illness and put the light on. Immediately he came out of his trance and complained of great pains in his hands.
“When I looked at them, they were covered by blood, and each hand had a hole in the center,” Mr. Reeves said. “This was witnessed by everyone present. I quickly ran to the tap and washed the blood away. The holes then vanished.”
But the holy tenor of their séances soon changed to something more earthy: Mr. Reeves was impressed with advance information concerning local horse racing and won quite a lot of money because of it. This was followed by what he described as a “distinct evil presence” in the circle, to the point where his wife refused to participate any longer. The other couple, Richard and Gladys, evidently took part of the presence to their own home: poltergeistic activities started and objects moved of their own volition. It was at this point that Mr. Reeves contacted me and wondered what they ought to do next. Unfortunately, I was unable to find him at the address he had given me. Had he been forced to move? I wrote him a note advising him to stay clear of Ouija boards and to consider his experience in trance as a form of psychic hysteria: it could just be that a spirit who wanted to be St. Francis had taken over Mr. Reeves’s body and expressed this unfulfilled desire for martyrdom.
The discussion of various ghostly events had made the time fly, and suddenly we halted at our destination, Woodhouse Lea. Ian Groat, a gunsmith by profession, had had an uncanny experience here and wanted me to see the place where it all happened
. We were on a hill overlooking Edinburgh, and there were a stable and a modern house to our left. Farther up the hill, following the narrow road, one could make out the main house itself. According to my information, Woodhouse Lea had originally stood on another site, farther east, but had been transferred to the present spot. There was a local tradition of a “White Lady of Woodhouse Lea,” and it was her appearance that I was after. It was a bitingly cold day for April, so we decided to stay in the car at first, while we sorted out Mr. Groat’s experiences.
“In January 1964 I went to Woodhouse Lea in the company of Mr. and Mrs. Peter London,” Ian told us. “We waited for several hours in the basement of the house, which had been used to store fodder for horses.”
“I gather you went there because of the tradition that a ‘White Lady’ appeared there?” I asked.
Ian nodded. “After about two hours, a fluorescent light appeared behind one of the doors, which was slightly ajar. It seemed to move backwards and forwards for about five minutes and then disappeared. All three of us saw it. The light was coming from behind that door. We were waiting to see whether anything would actually enter the room, but nothing did, and so we left.”
“What was the house like at that point?”
“It was still standing, though several large pieces of masonry had fallen and were lying in front of it. The woodwork was in very poor condition and floorboards were missing, but part of the original grand staircase was still there. It was dangerous to walk in it at night, and even in daylight one had to walk very carefully.”
The house could have been restored, if someone had wanted to foot the expense. For a while the monument commission thought of doing it, but nothing came of it, and eventually the owners pulled it down. The decision was made in a hurry, almost as if to avoid publicity about the destruction of this historical landmark. It was all done in one weekend. The masonry and what was still standing was pulled to the ground by heavy machinery, then stamped into the ground to serve as a kind of base for the modern chalet which the owners of the land built on top of it. It reminded me of some of the barbarous practices going on in the United States in pulling down old landmarks in order to build something new and, preferably, profitable.
Peter London was shocked at the sudden disappearance of the old mansion house, and he got to talking to some of the women working in the stables at the bottom of the hill, also part of the estate. Several of them had seen the apparition of a woman in white.
The strange thing is that the British army had invested seven thousand pounds in central heating equipment when they occupied the building. This was during World War II and the building was then still in pretty good shape.
“During the war there was a prisoner-of-war camp that bordered on the actual Woodhouse Lea Estate,” Ian continued. “The sentries kept a log of events, and there are fourteen entries of interest, stretching over a three-year period. These concerned sightings of a ‘woman in white’ who was challenged by the sentries. Incidentally, the stable girls saw her walking about the grounds, outside the house, not in the house itself or in the stables.”
I decided it was time to pay a visit to the area where the mansion last stood. Since there had been no time to make arrangements for my investigation, Mr. Groat went ahead, and to our pleasant surprise he returned quickly, asking us to come inside the stable office, at the bottom of the hill. There we were received by a jolly gentleman who introduced himself as Cedric Burton, manager of the estate. I explained the purpose of my visit. In Scotland, mentioning ghosts does not create any great stir: they consider it part of the natural phenomena of the area.
“As I know the story,” Mr. Burton said, “her name was Lady Anne Bothwell. and originally she lived at the old Woodhouse Lea Castle, which is about four miles from here. Once when her husband was away, one of his enemies took over the castle and pushed her out, and she died in the snow. I gather she appears with nothing on at all when she does appear. That’s the way she was pushed out—naked. Apparently her ghost makes such a nuisance of itself that the owners decided to move the castle and brought most of the stones over here and built the mansion house called Woodhouse Lea up on the hill. The last person I know of who heard a manifestation was a coachman named Sutherland, and that was just before electric light was installed. There has been no sign of her since.”
“I gather there were a number of reports. What exactly did these people see?”
“Well, it was always the same door on the north side of the building, and on snowy nights there was a fairly vigorous knock on the door; and when someone would go outside to investigate, there was never anyone there—nor were there any footprints in the deep snow. That, I think, was the extent of the manifestations, which are of course tremendously exaggerated by the local people. Some say it is a White Lady, and one has even heard people coming up the drive. I’ve heard it said, when the old house was standing there empty, lights were seen in the rooms.”
“Has the house ever been seriously investigated?”
“Some Edinburgh people asked permission and sat in the old house at midnight on midsummer’s eve. However, I pointed out to them that she was only known to appear around seven in the evening and in deep snow. Midnight on midsummer’s eve wasn’t the most auspicious occasion to expect a manifestation. There was another chap who used to bring his dog up and stand there with his torch from time to time, to see if the dog was bristling.”
“When did the actual event occur—the pushing out of the woman?”
“The house was moved to this spot in the early fifteenth century. It was originally built around the old Fulford Tower. It is a bit confusing, because up there also by the house there is an archway built from stones from an entirely different place with the date 1415 on it. This comes from the old Galaspas Hospital in Edinburgh.”
“If Woodhouse Lea was moved from the original site to this hill in the early fifteenth century, when was the original house built?”
“Sometime during the Crusades, in the thirteenth century.”
While the early history of Woodhouse Lea is shrouded in mystery, there was a Lord Woodhouse Lea in the eighteenth century, a well-known literary figure in Edinburgh. Many other literary figures stayed at the house, including Sir Walter Scott, Alan Ramsey, and James Hogg. Evidently Sir Walter Scott knew that old Woodhouse Lea was haunted, because he mentions it in one of his books, and Scottish travel books of the eighteenth century commonly refer to it as ‘haunted Woodhouse Lea.’ In 1932 control of the house passed into the hands of the army, and much damage was done to the structure. The army held onto it for thirty years.
“Have there been any manifestations reported in recent years?”
“Not really,” Mr. Burton replied. “When the bulldozer pulled down the old house, we told people as a joke that the ghost would be trying to burrow her way out of the rubble. Some of the stones from the old house have been incorporated into the new chalet, built on top of the crushed masonry, to give it a sort of continuity.”
The chalet is the property of George Buchanan Smith, whose family uses it as a holiday house. He is the son of Lord Balonough, and his younger brother is the Undersecretary of State for foreign affairs in Scotland.
“The house has been talked about tremendously,” Mr. Burton said. “It has even been described as the second most haunted house in Scotland. Also, Woseley is not too far from here, and it too has a nude white lady. She has been observed running on the battlements.”
“Why did they move the house from the old site to this spot?”
“Because of her. She disturbed them too much.”
“And did the manifestations continue on the new site?”
“Yes,” Mr. Burton acknowledged. “She came with the stones.”
He turned the office over to an assistant and took us up to the chalet. The owner was away, so there was no difficulty in walking about the house. It is a charmingly furnished modern weekend house, with a bit of ancient masonry incorporated into the walls here
and there. I gazed at a particularly attractive stone frieze over the fireplace. Inscribed upon it, in Latin, were the words, OCCULTUS NON EXTINCTUS: the occult is not dead (just hidden).
* 79
The Ghostly Monk of Monkton
WHEN ELIZABETH BYRD moved into a monastic tower at Old Craig Hall at Musselburgh nine miles outside of Edinburgh, she probably didn’t figure on sharing the quarters with a ghost, much less a monk. If there is one thing Elizabeth Byrd doesn’t want to share quarters with, it is a monk. As for ghosts, she has an open mind: to begin with, she has had ghostly experiences all through the years.
The monastic tower has two stories and is part of a larger complex of buildings which was once a monastery. Her landlord, who is also a good friend, lives in the main house, while Elizabeth is lady of the manor, so to speak, in her tower—an ideal situation for a romantically inclined writer, and she has been able to turn out several novels since moving into Monkton, as the place is called.
We had left my visit to Monkton for the evening of my second day in Edinburgh, and it turned out to be a foggy, chilly day. Alistair and Alanna Knight brought me in their car, and Ian Groat, the gunsmith whom I had met earlier, was also there.
One walks up a winding stair from the ground floor to the main floor, in which Elizabeth has made her home. The apartment consists of a living room with fireplace, a small kitchen and pantry to one side, and a bedroom to the other. I am sure that when the monks had the place, they did not do nearly so well as Elizabeth does now, so I can readily understand why a monk, especially a ghostly monk, would be attracted to the situation. We grouped ourselves around the fireplace with only a candle illuminating the room.