These haunted isles
Britain is a land of enclaves and hidden streets, stately homes, battle elds, coaching inns and barns where murders have taken place; bombed underground stations; woods that have sheltered suicides; accident- riven highways; shipwrecks; desolate heathlands where travellers have gone astray. It is a place of suburban secrets, of poltergeists lifting beds in council houses, of security guards watching video feeds in empty hospitals awaiting demolition.
It is also the dead woman who lingered constantly at the end of the corridor of my childhood home on the Isle of Wight. Even now when I see the darkened end of a passageway resisting a bright summer’s day, I pause and remember that return from the village school in the afternoon, no one in the house but me, ending with the dreaded climb up the stairs, followed by a dash across the corridor to safety.
When I was a little older, my mother told me she had seen a ghost in that very spot. A friend who came to stay saw her too. It was a thoroughly domestic apparition of a woman lost forever in her chores, not frightening, just busy, carrying blankets into the spare room. We never knew who she was. Most ghosts have no satisfying back story as they do in literary ction: most ghosts are only ever seen once.
Round about the age of nine, I was given a Reader’s Digest book – Folklore, Myths And Legends Of Britain. It’s one of the great books of the 1970s, written with impeccable scholarship and graced by some ne original artwork from the likes of Charles Keeping and Robin Jacques (whose Sherlock Holmes artwork you can see in Baker Street Underground Station).
One especially spooky photograph gripped me in this book. It was of a bedroom in Sawston Hall in Cambridgeshire, showing an old four-poster bed with eerie-looking tapestries on the wall and a pool of sulphurous yellow light throwing shadows from near the ceiling. I decided that I was going to sleep there, and 10 years later, I did.
It was dark. It was cold. It was January. The ghost hunter Harry Price once maintained it was January and not December that was the haunted month – the unloved dark corner of the year where everyone is at home and half asleep.
I was there with seasoned ghost hunter Tony Cornell, from the Society for Psychical Research, and the experience was later written up by him in their official journal. The house, bed and room were associated with Queen Mary, who in 1553 took refuge there from the treacherous Duke of Northumberland. As Mary fled, Northumberland burnt the house to the ground. Later, when in power, Mary repaid the loyal Catholic Huddleston family by rebuilding it anew. A grey lady is said to knock three times and enter this bedroom at night. Other inexplicable sounds include that of a spinet and the unearthly trill of a girl’s laughter.
The Huddleston family had recently sold the house after hundreds of years, and it had been bought for use as a language school. They had left the famous bed behind. Ghosts are said to manifest when families leave a house and new ones move in: they are somehow thrown up by the dust of activity.
We secured the building and settled in for a long night. It had none of the vaudeville atmosphere of ghosthunting these days – it felt like a solemn business. In the haunted bedroom, with several other people sleeping on the oor, I awoke at about 5am to hear soft and persistent knocks from somewhere near the ceiling. I turned the old cassette player on to record and fell back asleep. Little more seemed to happen and we got up an hour later, cold and deprived of sleep.
Some weeks passed and I got in touch with Tony Cornell. I was told that when the tape was examined a few days later, not only was there the sound of the coughs and rustles of restless sleepers in the room, there were three distinct notes from a woodwind instrument recorded too. Was it a radio broadcast somehow picked up from the ether? No.
Cornell told me that the music had the ‘ramp function’ found in some poltergeist cases – where the sound is actually backwards, something that doesn’t happen in nature and not really on radio, either.
Some years after that I found myself sleeping in another haunted house, also featured in the Reader’s Digest book. It was then owned by a famous cookery writer and, as with Sawston, had recently been sold by a family who had lived there immemorially.
Again, I saw the photo in the book as a child and then saw the real thing – in this case a human skull. Tradition said it was the skull of an 18th-century slave who was buried against his wishes in the local graveyard. Hideous screams from the grave were only silenced when the skull was brought back to the house at Bettiscombe in Dorset. The owner had then put the skull in a box in the attic, and on the box was a bible.
It didn’t stop the ghosts though, even in broad daylight. One afternoon when I was in bed with flu, friends came up and asked me why I was moving the furniture around. Nothing had been moved and I hadn’t heard a thing. Another night, a friend was woken by a horrendous noise: like someone jemmying out a replace, he said. Needless to say, nothing was disturbed.
The incident – yet another in which I remained off-stage while others experienced ghostly activity – reminded me of accounts of Hinton Ampner in Hampshire, a haunting from the 18th century, whose story remained within the Ricketts family for generations, until nally being published in the late Victorian age. You can visit the pleasant National Trust gardens today, but the particular house where the haunting took place is long gone – eventually demolished because it was simply too haunted to live in.
The terrifying, head-splitting crashes and sounds would be heard by one person but not by another standing close by. Yet the ghosts – of a man and a woman – whose hauntings horri cally strayed into daylight hours, were seen by a great many people, including one of the most credible ever witnesses to a famous haunting, John Jervis, later Admiral of the Fleet, later Earl St Vincent, and the man who gave Nelson his commission. It was said this practical, no-nonsense man ‘ ew into a rage’ whenever the ghosts of Hinton Ampner were mentioned, simply because he was unable to explain what he saw and heard.
In my book, A Natural History Of Ghosts, I go into the reasons why I believe this to be the seedstory for Henry James’s The Turn Of The Screw, as related to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It was a well-known story in the higher echelons of the Church of England. It has all the elements – imperilled children, and the ghosts of an overbearing servant and a woman, at least one of which was involved in a sex scandal.
I’m often asked whether I believe in ghosts. I always answer: it depends what you mean by ‘believe’ and it depends what you mean by ‘ghosts’. I’m also asked whether it is true that the UK is the most haunted country in the world. That’s impossible to establish, of course, but we certainly love a ghost story more than most, and like telling them.
That all comes from our history, from the time, for example, when believing in ghosts identified you as a Roman Catholic or, later, a Methodist. It depends on having successive monarchs – James I, Charles II, Queen Anne – who loved a ghost story. It depends on an import of German folkloric ideas in the 18th century and of course a mystical Celtic input from Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
The British ghost story is a product of our own unique history, unexpectedly polyglot, a weave of different traditions. And no, I still haven’t seen a ghost, though I’ve met a great many people who have, and don’t always like to talk about it.
A Natural History Of Ghosts: 500 Years Of Hunting For Proof, by Roger Clarke, is published by Particular Books, priced £20.
Lives up to its name, with the wailings of the Blue Boy whose bones and scraps of blue clothing were found in a wall of the property
ELVEY FARM, Kent
A host of characters haunt this picturesque farm: a schoolmaster, a highwayman and a white dog among them.
JAMAICA INN, Cornwall
The 18th-century inn, made famous by Daphne du Maurier’s novel, is home to a cacophony of out-of-this world noises, including horses’ hooves on cobbles and the quick steps of a gentleman in an empty corridor.
RUTHIN CASTLE, Wales
This is roamed by the Grey Lady, a jealous wife who murdered her husband’s lover with an axe.
THE TALBOT HOTEL, Northamptonshire
A former coaching inn said to be haunted by Mary Queen of Scots, who was executed nearby.
GHOUL A malevolent otherworldly being who robs graves and feeds on corpses.
ORB A ball of light that appears unexpectedly (often captured on fi lm), believed to be manifestations of spiritual energy.
POLTERGEIST Invisible form of ghost that makes itself known by moving objects (and occasionally people) around.
It is also the dead woman who lingered constantly at the end of the corridor of my childhood home on the Isle of Wight. Even now when I see the darkened end of a passageway resisting a bright summer’s day, I pause and remember that return from the village school in the afternoon, no one in the house but me, ending with the dreaded climb up the stairs, followed by a dash across the corridor to safety.
When I was a little older, my mother told me she had seen a ghost in that very spot. A friend who came to stay saw her too. It was a thoroughly domestic apparition of a woman lost forever in her chores, not frightening, just busy, carrying blankets into the spare room. We never knew who she was. Most ghosts have no satisfying back story as they do in literary ction: most ghosts are only ever seen once.
Round about the age of nine, I was given a Reader’s Digest book – Folklore, Myths And Legends Of Britain. It’s one of the great books of the 1970s, written with impeccable scholarship and graced by some ne original artwork from the likes of Charles Keeping and Robin Jacques (whose Sherlock Holmes artwork you can see in Baker Street Underground Station).
One especially spooky photograph gripped me in this book. It was of a bedroom in Sawston Hall in Cambridgeshire, showing an old four-poster bed with eerie-looking tapestries on the wall and a pool of sulphurous yellow light throwing shadows from near the ceiling. I decided that I was going to sleep there, and 10 years later, I did.
It was dark. It was cold. It was January. The ghost hunter Harry Price once maintained it was January and not December that was the haunted month – the unloved dark corner of the year where everyone is at home and half asleep.
I was there with seasoned ghost hunter Tony Cornell, from the Society for Psychical Research, and the experience was later written up by him in their official journal. The house, bed and room were associated with Queen Mary, who in 1553 took refuge there from the treacherous Duke of Northumberland. As Mary fled, Northumberland burnt the house to the ground. Later, when in power, Mary repaid the loyal Catholic Huddleston family by rebuilding it anew. A grey lady is said to knock three times and enter this bedroom at night. Other inexplicable sounds include that of a spinet and the unearthly trill of a girl’s laughter.
The Huddleston family had recently sold the house after hundreds of years, and it had been bought for use as a language school. They had left the famous bed behind. Ghosts are said to manifest when families leave a house and new ones move in: they are somehow thrown up by the dust of activity.
We secured the building and settled in for a long night. It had none of the vaudeville atmosphere of ghosthunting these days – it felt like a solemn business. In the haunted bedroom, with several other people sleeping on the oor, I awoke at about 5am to hear soft and persistent knocks from somewhere near the ceiling. I turned the old cassette player on to record and fell back asleep. Little more seemed to happen and we got up an hour later, cold and deprived of sleep.
Some weeks passed and I got in touch with Tony Cornell. I was told that when the tape was examined a few days later, not only was there the sound of the coughs and rustles of restless sleepers in the room, there were three distinct notes from a woodwind instrument recorded too. Was it a radio broadcast somehow picked up from the ether? No.
Cornell told me that the music had the ‘ramp function’ found in some poltergeist cases – where the sound is actually backwards, something that doesn’t happen in nature and not really on radio, either.
Some years after that I found myself sleeping in another haunted house, also featured in the Reader’s Digest book. It was then owned by a famous cookery writer and, as with Sawston, had recently been sold by a family who had lived there immemorially.
Again, I saw the photo in the book as a child and then saw the real thing – in this case a human skull. Tradition said it was the skull of an 18th-century slave who was buried against his wishes in the local graveyard. Hideous screams from the grave were only silenced when the skull was brought back to the house at Bettiscombe in Dorset. The owner had then put the skull in a box in the attic, and on the box was a bible.
It didn’t stop the ghosts though, even in broad daylight. One afternoon when I was in bed with flu, friends came up and asked me why I was moving the furniture around. Nothing had been moved and I hadn’t heard a thing. Another night, a friend was woken by a horrendous noise: like someone jemmying out a replace, he said. Needless to say, nothing was disturbed.
The incident – yet another in which I remained off-stage while others experienced ghostly activity – reminded me of accounts of Hinton Ampner in Hampshire, a haunting from the 18th century, whose story remained within the Ricketts family for generations, until nally being published in the late Victorian age. You can visit the pleasant National Trust gardens today, but the particular house where the haunting took place is long gone – eventually demolished because it was simply too haunted to live in.
The terrifying, head-splitting crashes and sounds would be heard by one person but not by another standing close by. Yet the ghosts – of a man and a woman – whose hauntings horri cally strayed into daylight hours, were seen by a great many people, including one of the most credible ever witnesses to a famous haunting, John Jervis, later Admiral of the Fleet, later Earl St Vincent, and the man who gave Nelson his commission. It was said this practical, no-nonsense man ‘ ew into a rage’ whenever the ghosts of Hinton Ampner were mentioned, simply because he was unable to explain what he saw and heard.
In my book, A Natural History Of Ghosts, I go into the reasons why I believe this to be the seedstory for Henry James’s The Turn Of The Screw, as related to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It was a well-known story in the higher echelons of the Church of England. It has all the elements – imperilled children, and the ghosts of an overbearing servant and a woman, at least one of which was involved in a sex scandal.
I’m often asked whether I believe in ghosts. I always answer: it depends what you mean by ‘believe’ and it depends what you mean by ‘ghosts’. I’m also asked whether it is true that the UK is the most haunted country in the world. That’s impossible to establish, of course, but we certainly love a ghost story more than most, and like telling them.
That all comes from our history, from the time, for example, when believing in ghosts identified you as a Roman Catholic or, later, a Methodist. It depends on having successive monarchs – James I, Charles II, Queen Anne – who loved a ghost story. It depends on an import of German folkloric ideas in the 18th century and of course a mystical Celtic input from Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
The British ghost story is a product of our own unique history, unexpectedly polyglot, a weave of different traditions. And no, I still haven’t seen a ghost, though I’ve met a great many people who have, and don’t always like to talk about it.
A Natural History Of Ghosts: 500 Years Of Hunting For Proof, by Roger Clarke, is published by Particular Books, priced £20.
5 haunted houses
CHILLINGHAM CASTLE, NorthumberlandLives up to its name, with the wailings of the Blue Boy whose bones and scraps of blue clothing were found in a wall of the property
ELVEY FARM, Kent
A host of characters haunt this picturesque farm: a schoolmaster, a highwayman and a white dog among them.
JAMAICA INN, Cornwall
The 18th-century inn, made famous by Daphne du Maurier’s novel, is home to a cacophony of out-of-this world noises, including horses’ hooves on cobbles and the quick steps of a gentleman in an empty corridor.
RUTHIN CASTLE, Wales
This is roamed by the Grey Lady, a jealous wife who murdered her husband’s lover with an axe.
THE TALBOT HOTEL, Northamptonshire
A former coaching inn said to be haunted by Mary Queen of Scots, who was executed nearby.
A guide to ghosts
GHOST A self-aware apparition of a deceased human being, capable of interacting with those still inhabiting the linear world of time and space.GHOUL A malevolent otherworldly being who robs graves and feeds on corpses.
ORB A ball of light that appears unexpectedly (often captured on fi lm), believed to be manifestations of spiritual energy.
POLTERGEIST Invisible form of ghost that makes itself known by moving objects (and occasionally people) around.