PETER HAINING has written and edited a number of bestselling books on the supernatural, notably the widely acclaimed Ghosts: The Illustrated History (1975) and A Dictionary of Ghosts (1982), which have been translated into several languages including French, German, Russian and Japanese. His companion volume to this anthology, Haunted House Stories, was published in 2005. A former journalist and publisher, he lived in a sixteenth-century timber-frame house in Suffolk that was haunted by the ghost of a Napoleonic prisoner of war. Peter Haining died in 2007 after finishing this book.
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Constable & Robinson Ltd
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First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2008
Copyright © Peter Haining, 2008
The right of Peter Haining to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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UK ISBN 978-1-84529-688-9
eISBN 978-1-78033-365-6
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First published in the United States in 2008 by
Running Press Book Publishers
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US Library of Congress number: 2008931721
US ISBN 978-0-76243-396-4
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For my son
RICHARD
herein you’ll find the result of all those years of rustling . . .
“The tea-party question, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ is one of the most ambiguous that can be asked, but if we take it to mean, ‘Do you believe that people sometimes experience apparitions?’ the answer is that they certainly do.”
Professor H H Price, 1953
“Probably every fourth person you talk to has had an experience with a poltergeist or ghost – or knows someone who has.”
Steven Spielberg, 1982
Brought to you by KeVkRaY
Foreword: I am a Researcher of the Supernatural
1. A Century of Hauntings
Chronology for 1900–2000
2. The Ghost Hunters
Fifty Authentic Supernatural Experiences
3. Phantoms in the Sky
Ghostly Pilots, Aircraft and Haunted Airfields
4. Encounters With The Unknown
Eyewitness Stories by Journalists
5. Haunted Stars
Show Business and the Supernatural
6. Supernatural Tales
True Ghost Stories by Famous Authors
7. Phantom Lovers
Sexual Encounters with Ghosts
8. What Are Ghosts?
The Theories of the Experts
9. An A–Z of Ghosts
Phantoms of the World
Bibliography
Research Organizations
Acknowledgments
Foreword
I am a Researcher of the Supernatural
I have been fascinated by stories of ghosts since my teenage years. First as a newspaper reporter and later as an author I have investigated stories of the supernatural in Britain, Europe, America and even further afield – though never as a member of an organized group or society. This is not because I have an aversion to such organizations – far from it, because many of them have brought a scientific approach to a subject too long treated as superstitious nonsense – but I prefer to plot my own course through the voluminous material that exists on the subject in newspaper files and libraries and make my own enquiries into haunted localities with the people involved. This book, which focuses on the supernatural in the twentieth century, is the result of almost half a century of my research.
I investigated my first ghost story in the winter of 1958 as a reporter on a newspaper in rural Essex and still have the cutting from th
e West Essex Gazette. The story concerned the Holt family who lived in a 500-year-old farmhouse, Brook House Farm in Chigwell, which they claimed was haunted by a ghostly presence they named “The Invisible”. Sitting in the living room of the dilapidated wood and plaster house surrounded by bowls and pails to catch the water that dripped from the ceiling whenever there was heavy rain, seventy-five-year-old Henry Holt, a retired works foreman, told me about the events that had been a regular occurrence for many years:
“The ghost paces up and down the Long Room and a tiny passageway beside it. I’m not frightened of what I can’t see and it never causes any trouble. My wife and I have often laid awake at night listening to him.”
My suggestions that the haunting in the house might be due to creaking timbers or the weather rattling through the rafters were immediately denied by Mr Holt and the three members of his family then living in Brook House. Hilda, one of the couple’s seven children, recounted her own experience:
“It was about midnight one winter when I heard these footsteps outside my room. The next morning I asked Dad if he had been in the passage. He said, ‘Me? I was asleep at that time. You must have heard him’.”
The family had become convinced that the ghost was that of a former Vicar of Chigwell who had lived and died in the house in 1525. When I left the family late that evening after having neither heard nor seen anything myself, Mr Holt provided a tantalizing footnote to the haunting.
“We’ve lived in the house for eighteen years now and the ghost has been heard pretty regularly. But just recently he’s stopped pacing about at night. We’re all wondering why?”
I did, too. But one thing was certain: the Chigwell haunting certainly whetted my appetite to find out more about the supernatural and the paranormal. Before leaving the Gazette, I even had the opportunity to appeal for any ghost stories from readers and was almost overwhelmed by the response. My subsequent article, “Ghosts – West Essex has the Right Spirit for Them” was published in November 1960, and the accounts, which were a mixture of the possible and the improbable, remained in the back of my mind – as well as my expanding files of relevant material – when I moved to London to work on a magazine and, subsequently, enter the world of book publishing. My interest inspired me to publish several books of ghost stories and lead to an introduction to Paul Tabori (1908–74), then a leading authority on the supernatural and editor of the popular Frontiers of the Unknown series focusing on the latest developments in psychic knowledge. He was also the executor of the estate of the ghost hunter, Harry Price (1881–1948) and enabled me to gain access to Price’s huge library of 15,000 books, newspaper cuttings, documents and photographs that he had bequeathed to the University of London.
My knowledge of the supernatural was increased immeasurably through consulting this archive of material and it proved invaluable when I was later working on several books on the theme. In particular with information about the experiments of the pioneer Victorian “ghost hunters” – especially the members of the Society for Psychical Research – and Price’s own National Laboratory of Psychical Research. These men and women had started the search for conclusive answers to supernatural phenomena through investigations into reported hauntings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The statements, cuttings and glass-plate photographs opened a window onto psychic enquiries over a hundred years ago and while exposing many of the spirit mediums to be frauds and their pictures as fakes, there were still a number of eyewitness accounts that defied a logical explanation.
The name of Harry Price is, of course, inextricably linked to Borley Rectory on the Essex/Suffolk border, which for years was known as “The Most Haunted House in England”. The verdict on Price’s part in this story of the Rectory, its ghostly nun, weird phenomena and ultimate fate when it was burned down in 1939, is still disputed. Some investigators believe that Price, who was a clever amateur magician, created the most striking effects himself, while others have refuted these charges – both groups ensured that the controversy continues. Living near the Rectory myself has caused me to be drawn into the argument on several occasions, in particular when a couple I knew well told me of a horrifying experience they had undergone when visiting the site of the Rectory a few years ago.
Borley Rectory
My expanding knowledge of ghost lore made me the focus of interviews locally and nationally, as well as appearances on several radio and television programmes. An interview on the prestigious BBC radio morning show, Today, in 1974, provoked a response that left both the producers and myself amazed. At the time, I was planning an illustrated history of ghosts and hoped to augment the many old engravings, sketches and pictures that I had collected with the addition of a few photographs. If there was anyone listening to the broadcast that had such a thing, I said, I would be very pleased to hear from him or her.
In the next three weeks I received almost one hundred letters, many of them enclosing photographs of varying quality that showed ephemeral figures in all manner of situations from old mansions to modern council flats, from gardens to open countryside. Of these, almost two dozen were clearly not fakes and undeniably difficult to explain. They subsequently appeared in my book, Ghost: The Illustrated History (1975), which sold very well in Britain and America as well as a number of other countries of the world.
Thereafter, hardly a year has passed without my receiving letters, cuttings and the occasional photograph from readers on the subject of ghosts. Among this correspondence there were some extraordinary stories that I pursued whenever time and other commitments permitted. But amongst them all was one account that still intrigues me today and I propose to share it in print here for the first time.
The letter arrived at my home in November 1976 and was from a Mr Frederick Knaggs of Hull. It was written in a neat hand and enclosed a colour photograph of a floodlit building marked “The Farmhouse”. Mr Knaggs introduced himself as a man in his fifties who had served for ten years as an infantryman in combat zones with the Armed Forces and thereafter for several years in the merchant navy before settling down on Humberside. He was a man, he said, who was “accustomed to the hardness and reality of life”, so what had occurred to him in 1970 had been an opinion-changing experience. He then went on to describe the events plainly and without any attempt at sensationalism:
“I was employed at Pontin’s Holiday Camp at Middleton Towers near Morecambe from 1966 to 1970. While I was there I heard different stories about a ghost, known as ‘The White Lady,’ who was said to walk at certain times in an area of the camp by an old farmhouse near the castle wall. I heard a story of the head waiter and his wife who had woken up one night to see the ghost bending over their bed – and had left the very next day. Then there were two lady campers who woke up the camp with their screams one night after midnight when they were confronted by ‘The White Lady’.”
Mr Knaggs was, he said, intrigued by these stories. He was told that the ghost was believed to be that of a woman who had been murdered on her wedding night in the farmhouse over a hundred years earlier. Then he described how he had come face to face with her.
“One night I sat on the grass by the castle wall near the farmhouse from midnight until the early hours. About 2 a.m. something drew my attention and I saw the figure of a lady in an old-fashioned dress. She was pale and appeared smoky white as she walked past the castle wall. At first I couldn’t believe it was a ghost. I wasn’t really frightened and realized I was seeing ‘The White Lady’. I was about ten yards from her. She kept stopping and then walking on until she finally disappeared into the castle tower at the end of the wall. I must have watched the ghost for about five minutes. I have no doubt at all about what I saw.”
Mr Knaggs invited me, or anyone else who might be interested, to visit Middleton Towers. He was confident the ghost would be seen again. I replied to my correspondent thanking him for his story and suggested he contacted the Society for Psychical Research or The Ghost Club. At the time of writing, I am still wai
ting for another sighting of “The White Lady”.
When I first began work on this book in the winter of 2006, sifting through a lifetime of newspaper cuttings, personal stories and archival research, I had just the kind of experience that prompts stories of hauntings. My study in Peyton House, the sixteenth-century timber-framed house where I live, is on the top floor of three in an annexe to the main building. The middle floor is my library and, below that, a storeroom. For several days I was conscious every evening of a tap-tap sound coming from the library below. Whenever I investigated, though, there was nothing to see.
The mysterious sounds continued and I began to wonder if the house had a second ghost. Readers of my earlier book, The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (2005) will remember that Peyton House is haunted by a “smoke ghost,” which makes its presence felt each June and has been seen recently by my wife, Philippa. We believe it may be the last trace of a man who died in a fire in our outbuildings during the early years of the nineteenth century, and perhaps I can recommend anyone who might be interested in the full story to consult that book.
In any event, for several more days I hurried down from my office using the spiral staircase that links the two floors before the mystery was finally explained. The cause of the sounds was nothing supernatural at all. I caught a fleeting glimpse of a small bird at the window. He tapped the window again with his beak and then, seeing me, flew off. The little creature had obviously been looking at his own reflection in the window and – fearing a rival – was trying to drive himself off. My “ghost” was the bird’s reflection in the glass.
Despite the everyday explanation for my story, there have been a great many more reports of supernatural phenomena over the past one hundred years that have not been so simply resolved. Indeed, we live in times when at least fifty per cent of the population have some sort of paranormal belief and of these about half have had a paranormal experience. These are not my figures, but those quoted by Dr Caroline Watt, the senior lecturer at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh. Set up by a bequest from the famous author Arthur Koestler, it investigates such experiences. Dr Watt, who dislikes any reference to herself or her team as “Ghostbuster”, is campaigning to make parapsychology a more mainstream area for research and teaching. She explained her reasons in the Guardian in August 2007:
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 1
