Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts

by Will Storr

  ‘Fuck!’ I say.

  ‘Absolutely. They were all dressed in different periods. One was from the fifteenth century, one was from the sixteenth century and one was from the seventeenth century. It got quite daunting. I wouldn’t say frightening because I don’t get frightened.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I suppose I cowered by the door, thinking, oh my God, they’re going to attack me. They started to approach me quite quickly. But it was as if they couldn’t see me. They could hear me, but they were looking right through me.’

  ‘Almost as if you were the ghost,’ I say.

  He considers for a moment, then takes a drag of his cigarette, nods and blows the smoke out. ‘Yes, that’s absolutely right,’ he says.

  David looks a lot older since I last saw him. He’s got bleached highlights in his hair. As his smoke drifts upwards and leaks between the gaps in the floorboards of the haunted room upstairs, he looks into the middle distance, suddenly in the clutches of another, secret thought. I hear him murmur, ‘I am the ghost.’

  An hour or so later, we have unexpected company. A young friend of the owner’s has also decided to take advantage of his absence, and has invited his girlfriend and a clucking gaggle of her mates around for a mini-vigil. They’ve brought cans of lager, vodka, Coke and a lappy, hyperactive blond dog called Charlie. As they sit around the table, with their drinks not on coasters, the Founder flits between eyeing their crisp crumbs, fag ash and miscellaneous detritus crimes, and stunning them all into a fish-mouthed silence with his special expertise. They’re awestruck by David’s tales. The women have communal lipgloss, huge hoopy earrings and hair the colour of chips. As they lean forwards on the table and listen to the Founder, I sit back and find myself confronted with a triumphant parade of frilly thongs flying inches above the waists of their jeans.

  ‘You can point your camera anywhere you like in this house,’ says David, ‘and I guarantee you’ll get an orbicular light anomaly.’

  Everyone looks extremely impressed.

  ‘Do you want to hear the famous scream tape?’

  He’s beginning to enjoy himself now. He walks over to an eighties tape player, which is the size and shape of an upright briefcase, and pushes down the play button, heftily. The girls sit forward in silence, as the smoke from their Bensons gathers into a large milling cloud over the table. This recording was made a decade ago. It is chilling. The first thing you hear is a sole, agonised scream. That’s followed, instantaneously, by louder group screaming that sounds like it’s borne of a confused and panicked terror. The first scream, David tells us, was heard by some charity ghosthunters at between five and six in the morning. The second is their reaction to it. Like the Enfield tapes, there’s an unmistakeably authentic, non-Crimewatch-reconstruction edge to the recording that has all of us making worried eye contact around the table. For a silent moment, everybody tries to work out what everyone else is thinking, before we all break off into a murmuring clamour of ‘bloody hells’ and ‘oh my Gods’.

  The house’s owner has apparently had the tape analysed by specialists at Manchester University. Not only have they confirmed that the first sound is not of human or animal origin, but they also concluded that it actually seems to be made up of five separate screams.

  David then plays us some recordings that he’s made here during the night as he’s slept. There are footsteps, metal door latches being popped open, doors slamming and, most fascinatingly, a recording he made in the upstairs room where the workings of the drawbridge used to be. The tape sounds, incredibly, like a drawbridge being slowly raised. The most bizarre recording in his collection, though, lasts for about ten minutes and it sounds just like the swishing, clashing foils of a fevered sword fight.

  ‘You see, I think,’ David says to me, taking the tape out of the player ‘in our time and their time, the difference, although only a matter of minutes to us, is a lifetime to them. Take one of the recordings I got from this place. It’s five minutes long. But it only took five minutes to get here from the fifteenth century. They transmitted it in a five-minute segment and it took eight hours to receive it.’

  I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  ‘So … where did the sound start?’ I say, blindly feeling for an entry point. ‘Medieval times?’

  ‘In the fifteenth century,’ he says. ‘And it took eight hours for me to actually receive it’.

  ‘How do you know?’ I ask, fumbling haphazardly.

  ‘Because it came from the same location. It came from here, so it should be here all the time. But it wasn’t. It travelled. It came back. And it was pitched up by seven semi-tones. So then I had to slow it down seven semi-tones because it got here too quickly.’

  ‘So,’ I say, ‘when you say eight hours … where’s it been in that eight hours? It started off here … ’

  ‘It started off here and, obviously, because of the frequencies, it then takes eight hours to work its way back again. And the reason I knew that is because the electro-magnetic frequency meter-reading was constantly on fifty milligaus, which is an extremely paranormal phenomenon.’

  There’s a long pause. My mouth is a bit open.

  Suddenly, thankfully, one of the girls interrupts our confusing stand-off.

  ‘Why did you start doing this, then, Dave?’ she says. ‘What got you into it?’

  ‘It all started when, as a child,’ he says, ‘I had a ghost living under my bed. It had a cloak. It was quite terrifying. I kept telling my mum and she kept saying, “Don’t be silly, ghosts don’t exist.” And a couple of months later, she walked in just as the ghost appeared out from under the bed. The expletives were unbelievable. Soon after that we relocated.’

  ‘You moved?’ she says, with crisps.

  ‘We moved house, yes. Does anybody want to come upstairs?’

  We all stand and follow David up the stairs into the child’s bedroom. There’s a standard lamp, a couple of old armchairs and a thin rug over aged bumpy floorboards. There’s also a priest hole with its hatch off, low on the wall. Just like the ‘haunted room’ next door, this place is unused by the owner and the air inside it feels cold and angrily forbidding.

  ‘Is it true that there’s a head buried in the grounds somewhere around here?’ I ask.

  ‘There’s no circumstantial evidence for that,’ David says, ‘so we don’t know.’

  Behind me, I become aware of a small commotion. I turn to look. The larger of the guests has sat herself down in one of the armchairs. Her face is in her hands. Something is wrong.

  ‘You all right, Sam?’ says one of the girls.

  ‘I just suddenly feel really … ’ She breaks off and sniffs. ‘I just feel really, really sad,’ she says, pushing a weak smile out through the misery.

  I decide not to say anything, but just make eye contact with David. It’s been obvious since their arrival that these people aren’t familiar with the details of the phenomena in this house. I wonder if she could just be reacting in an emotional way to fear, to the adrenaline that might be flooding her blood. But why in this room? When it’s here – and only here – that I read several reports of the same thing happening, years ago? Just as I’m thinking this, and over the top of the group’s bubbling chatter, there’s a loud crash downstairs. It sounds as if someone has slammed a chair against the wall. Charlie the dog, who’s still down there, starts barking urgently. Everyone’s absolutely still: a mini, momentary group petrification grips us. Then, the girl in the armchair looks up, her eyes red and wide.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ she says.

  ‘Shit,’ I say.

  ‘Shall we go and find out?’ says David.

  But there’s nothing down there – just the room, exactly as we’d left it. Bags and crisp packets and ashtrays and the boiler, chuffing lazily to itself.

  AN HOUR LATER, the group of friends has got bored and gone home. And the Founder is not happy. He’s furious about the presence of Charlie the dog. He scrubs the stone floor
where it knocked over some water, puts all their rubbish in the dustbin outside and Mr Sheens a chair where a girl with perfume was sitting.

  ‘I hate that smell,’ he says as he rubs, ‘it makes me gag. Ur! Disgusting. Ur! And that bloody dog was totally out of order. I do get annoyed when people abuse this place. But I have to bite my tongue because I can’t say anything. Apart from if they do something terribly wrong upstairs. Like if they take a drink up there. Hang on,’ he says, pausing with his duster and his can, ‘I can hear sounds, like wooshing sounds.’ His ear is cocked skywards. ‘It’s almost like windy conditions, even though it’s not windy outside. Can you hear it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Is it an aeroplane?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘I heard it last night as well.’

  We listen in silence as the aeroplane goes past.

  ‘It’s almost like an influx or a flushing of the system, or something,’ Dave says. ‘It’s that vibration, that heavy rumble vibration.’

  We sit for a while. I watch the Founder smoke a cigarette. Then I eat a chocolate Hob Nob and try out some experimental amateur origami with a corner of the local newspaper. Then I get up and look out of the window for a bit. Then I sit back down again.

  ‘So, what do you usually do when you’re here on your own?’ I ask him.

  ‘I don’t just sit around doing nothing, you know,’ he says. ‘I’m a very accomplished guitar player.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘But what about the ghosts?’

  David takes a puff of cigarette. ‘I have a plethora of research data and information that I work through.’

  ‘Do you do experiments?’

  ‘Of course. Recently, I’ve done experiments where I pretend I’m slapping someone, like this.’

  I watch the Founder stand up behind his chair and strike an invisible human across the face. He does it with his fag hanging off his lip and one eye closed against the smoke.

  ‘So, when I’m a ghost and someone is actually sitting here, that’s going to happen. And another thing I have experimented with is this cup. I lifted the cup like this and I moved it off the table and round in the air. So in two or three hundred years, that cup’s going to do that and they’re all going to turn around going, “Oh my God! Did you see that?” I do it with cushions and broom handles, too.’

  I picture David by himself, in the night’s cold, pin-prick hours, walking around the house, hitting imaginary future-people and making broom handles float. For some reason, it suddenly makes me feel very sad.

  ‘Would you like to haunt this house when you’re dead?’ I say.

  ‘I would,’ he says. ‘Yes, I dearly would.’

  There’s a long silence. It’s after three in the morning now, and the house has been at peace with itself since the locals left.

  ‘Do you believe in heaven and hell?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘people were seeing ghosts BC – Before Christ – so that rules that one out totally. The earth is millions and millions of years old. You know, I think the Bible is a damn good book, but it’s nothing like the original translation. How can we translate that when we still have difficulty translating the original Latin, which is only five hundred years old? It’s very difficult, because it has so many syllabuses and nouns and whatever. It’s like the voices on the EVPs I’ve recorded here. Most of them are in German Latin, which is what people spoke until the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until eighteen-twenty-something that we began to speak English. A lot of people don’t appreciate that fact.’

  The Founder looks at my failed origami, open local newspaper, biscuits, notepad and pens. ‘It would probably be advisable to put this stuff away,’ he says.

  As I tidy up, I decide to make idle small-talk about vampires. I wonder, as I clear the table, if the one that he told me about in Wales, last winter, was the scariest thing he’s ever seen.

  ‘Not scary,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t say scary because that’s the one thing I don’t do.’

  ‘What was the most daunting thing, then?’ I ask. ‘The vampires? Or perhaps that glowing thing that came to you in the night?’

  ‘Yes, it could be one of those,’ he says. ‘Or it could be the lycanthrope.’

  ‘Lycanthrope?’ I ask.

  David sits down, opens his cigarette packet up again and pulls one out. ‘A werewolf,’ he says. ‘It’s a technical term. This woman just got down on all fours and started howling and hissing, and all this hair started growing out of her back. And it was really, really odd because her fingers became elongated, and then the nails came to a point and just grew.’

  I sit up in my seat and tighten my mental seatbelts. ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘That does sound really fucking daunting.’

  ‘The confusing thing about this case was that she was supposed to be the mother, but it didn’t all tie in. It was all confusion.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I say. ‘I don’t … ’

  ‘The mother said she was the mother and yet all the photographs of the mother didn’t look like the mother.’

  ‘Mother of who?’

  ‘Of this couple.’

  ‘So, you’re saying that –’

  ‘She just didn’t look like her likeness in the photographs. You can tell that. It doesn’t take a genius or Einstein to work that out. And the other odd thing was they had photographs of children but there were never any children in the house.’

  ‘So this couple,’ I say, ‘these werewolves, they called you in to investigate a ghost case?’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t a ghost case. They just wanted to play with us. They were probably just bored of the usual … whatever it is they do.’

  ‘So, what triggered her off then?’ I say. ‘Did you anger her?’

  ‘No, I was very polite. I always am. This is one of those things I don’t really like talking about too much. It brings back all these memories of what happened that night.’

  I take this as my cue to stop asking. We sit quietly as I drain the dregs of my tea. Then, over the rim of my cup, I notice that the Founder is still looking at me, expectantly. I look back at him and raise my eyebrows.

  ‘But, yeah … ’ he says. ‘In front of my eyes she started turning into a werewolf.’

  ‘So, what were the couple doing while the mother was turning into a werewolf?’ I say. ‘Did they start changing, too?’

  ‘Well, no. They were vampires and she was a werewolf.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ I say.

  ‘I know,’ says David, tutting. ‘Talk about keep it in the family.’

  ‘Did she attack you?’

  ‘No, I calmed the situation very, very quickly. In situations like that, you have to do something very drastic.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I ask.

  ‘I told a joke.’

  I watch the Founder take a final draw on his cigarette, which he stubs out carefully in the ashtray. ‘Do you remember what the joke was?’

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘while she was growing her hair and hissing and everything, she said, “I don’t like you” in a gruff man’s voice. And I turned around and said, “Don’t worry, love, not many people do.”’

  There’s a silence.

  ‘And that joke reversed the werewolfing process?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘All her hair shrunk back and the situation became normal.’

  I look at the Founder and the Founder looks at me.

  ‘Dave,’ I say, ‘I think I’m ready to go to bed now.’

  As I brush my teeth, I start to wonder if the plan I made back at Michelham, to simply believe everybody that I was going to meet has, in the end, proved a little naive. But then, tempting as it is to let men with werewolf stories persuade you that there’s no such thing as the supernatural, I think it’s a mistake. Take this place, for example. I have no doubt that this house is haunted. There have been quite a few moments since my arrival that David and I have simultaneously jumped and looked around towards the same direction or doorway. And we have seen the same things –
a black flicker, a movement in the air. The difference is, whereas I am unsettled and curious about these incidents, the Founder is rarely in any doubt that we have just been visited by an angry cavalier or a fat old monk.

  David and I go to bed on two settees in a newer, unhaunted part of the house. That night, I find it very difficult to sleep. And not because I’m daunted. The Founder, you see, insists on sleeping with all of the lights and the television on.

  ‘I’m not scared of the dark,’ he tells me when I ask him why, the next day. ‘By any means whatsoever. In fact, I don’t really need the lights on at all. It’s just nice to have something on in the background, like the TV, or something.’

  After a mostly uneventful day, we go to bed again. And, once David’s audibly asleep, I hop across the carpet in my sleeping bag and switch the TV and the lights off.

  I lay my head down, close my eyes and, just as I’m slipping comfortably down the slope, I’m suddenly dragged back into full consciousness.

  ‘You frightened the crap out of me,’ says the Founder. He’s out of bed and turning all the lights and the television back on. He’s wearing tight black pants. He has a tattoo.

  ‘We have to have them on for security purposes, I’m afraid,’

  he says. ‘So potential intruders think that there are people in.’

  ‘Can’t we turn them on in another room?’ I ask.

  ‘No, it has to be this one,’ he says, before getting back under his quilt on the sofa across from mine. Within seconds, he is snoring again.

  The next day, we get to leave the house. The Founder has been telling me about the food in the local pub. He says that not only are the meals reasonably priced, they are almost unbelievably delicious. ‘As good as you’d get at the Savoy,’ he says. They serve coffee with a little jug of cream and a chocolate on the saucer. And the plates, he says, measuring out a length roughly the size of a manhole cover with his hands, are ‘this big’.

  Before we leave, David sets up his Minidisc recorder to catch any activity that might occur in our absence. He’s meticulous. He makes me witness the unwrapping of a blank disc and watch as the machine’s display flashes up ‘Blank Disc’. I then have to record an intro, with a time, a date and an estimated time of return into the remote microphone.