The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  THE STEPS IN THE STAIRWELL

  Location and date:

  Strand, London, UK, 1959

  When it is known that I have written books and articles about hauntings, I am invariably asked if I have ever seen a ghost. I have to confess that, although I have slept in quite a few haunted bedrooms, I have never yet glimpsed one, perhaps because I am not psychically developed enough. But I certainly have sensed things and experienced some odd happenings when going about Britain in search of material, and on one occasion I believe I heard a ghost. I know to hear a ghost does not sound particularly exciting in comparison to other hauntings described in this book, yet when I realised what it was, I experienced a brief but memorable feeling of sheer terror and I can confirm that the hair on the back of your head does rise.

  The story goes back to the autumn of 1959 when three journalist friends of mine invited me to join them in a publishing venture. The idea was to publish a weekly trade magazine for the television industry which we called Television Mail. It was an exciting adventure and we plunged in with the confidence that comes through lack of experience. After the euphoria of seeing the first issue come off the printing presses, we suddenly realised that we had to produce another magazine for the following Friday and so on. Our financial resources were pitiful and for our editorial and advertising offices we could only afford two small rooms on the third floor at 408 The Strand, one of the oldest buildings in the street.

  My experience occurred one Wednesday, which was the day before we went to press. This meant that, because of our lack of staff, I would be working very late sub-editing material. At that time our reporter was a friend named David Wisely, with whom I had worked on a New Zealand newspaper. He kindly said that, although he had to go out that evening, he would return about midnight to help me finish the final copy.

  At twelve o’clock I heard footsteps echoing in the stairwell which rose from landing to landing of offices similar to ours. The steps were extremely slow and laboured, and I thought that Mr Wisely, having perhaps looked upon the wine when it was red, would probably not be in a condition to be very helpful.

  The heavy steps continued to resound in the stairwell and then paused at the landing outside my door. I looked up, expecting it to open and for Dave to wander in with a typically cynical remark about the trade press and Television Mail in particular. To my surprise I heard the footsteps suddenly continue, slow and measured, up the final staircase which led to an accountants’ office above us.

  It was obvious someone from that firm was going up to burn some midnight oil. At the time I did not think it was a burglar because one would expect somebody following that profession to be suitably light-footed. It seemed as though the person whose footsteps they were had all the cares of the world on his shoulders. I carried on with my work, envying the absent Mr Wisely who had presumably found something better to do. Three or four minutes later I heard the steps again, just as slow and measured. They came down the stairs, paused outside my door and then continued down the stairway.

  This time a nagging voice at the back of my mind told me I ought to investigate. I knew it was unlikely to be a prowler as the front door was always heavily locked. Yet for some reason I remember a certain reluctance to do so. Summoning up my determination, I went to my door, flung it open and stepped out on to the landing to find it in complete darkness.

  Whoever had been coming up and down had not needed the lights which were placed on every landing. The steps were still sounding on the stairs as I pressed the switch which illuminated the stairwell from top to bottom. As the yellowish lights came on it seemed that the footsteps faded away, and as I gazed over the banisters, I realised with that feeling of shock that I was alone in the building. The stairwell was deserted, the lights shone on the blank doors of locked offices. I went down the stairs and tested each office door and the front door. It was securely locked. I returned to my desk with mixed feelings, rather like the little boy who saw an elephant for the first time and declared: “I don’t believe it.”

  I thought of the usual things: was it the creaking of old woodwork, had my ears been playing tricks? But no, the memory of those footsteps was too vivid and detailed.

  The next day I went up to the office above in the hope of finding some explanation. Speaking to one of the accountants I inquired if his office had been burgled or if there were signs of anything unusual having taken place. He said he had found the door locked when he came that morning and nothing had been disturbed.

  “Have you been hearing things?” he asked. I replied that I certainly had and told him about the footsteps.

  “Oh, you’re not the first to hear those,” he said. “I can’t explain what they are but I think in some way they are related to an incident which took place a few years ago – a man committed suicide here in the attic . . .”

  PETER UNDERWOOD is as well known as a ghost hunter in Britain as Hans Holzer is in America. A member of the SPR for many years, he served as President of The Ghost Club and was once described as having heard “probably more first-hand ghost stories than any man alive”. He has investigated scores of haunted houses and from his comprehensive files produced a number of highly regarded volumes including Gazetteer of British Ghosts (1971), The Ghosts of Borley (1973) and his autobiography, No Common Task (1983). For all his diligence, Underwood admits he has not experienced as many ghosts as he hoped, but remains convinced that some “thing” or force does exist.

  THE FEN MYSTERY

  Location and date:

  Wicken, Cambridgeshire, UK, 1971

  In the heart of the Fen country and only a mile from Wicken Fen, the stretch of land that has remained unchanged since the days of Hereward the Wake, there stands an isolated collection of buildings grouped round an imposing farmhouse known as Spinney Abbey. The name was derived from the ancient priory which formerly occupied the site. Ghostly singing monks, mysterious lights and strange figures have been reported here.

  The original Spinney Abbey was for the last fourteen years of his life the home of Oliver Cromwell’s distinguished son, Henry, who settled here after he had lost his lands with the return of the Stuarts. It was here that the reputed “stable-fork incident” took place. King Charles II, returning from Newmarket with his retinue, visited farmer Henry Cromwell, and found him farming contentedly. A member of the King’s party thought it a fine jest to take up a pitch-fork and carry it before Cromwell, parodying the fact that the farmer had been macebearer when he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The mortal remains of this well-loved son of the Protector rest in the little village church where a brass plate tells us that he was the best of Cromwell’s sons. Carlyle once said that had he been named Protector, English history would have taken a different turn in the seventeenth century.

  Now the occupants are the Fuller family and I remember that one of the first things Tom Fuller showed me were some fragmentary ruins of the old building, built in the twelfth century. Part of it was now a piggery and I was told that the pigs, although contented enough elsewhere, are often seen to be fighting whenever they occupy that part of their enclosure. I remember, too, examining the cellars, remnants of the old building with reputed secret tunnels, and seeing the remains of a grating and the attachments for primitive handcuffs showing that the cellars were used as dungeons.

  One of the most frequent unexplained happenings here was a mysterious twinkling light which was often seen between the house and Spinney Bank, about a mile away. The lights have been observed within a hundred yards of Spinney Abbey and once a local man saw a light move away from him and illuminate a mill almost a mile distant. Witnesses never seemed to be able to get near the lights for as soon as they are approached, they drift away and when the observer stops, the lights seem to stop too. Such lights are often Ignis Fatuus (from the Latin: foolish fire), usually seen in the vicinity of marshy places and churchyards and are sometimes known as “Will-o’-the-Wisp” and “Jack-a-Lantern”. They are generally accepted as being a natural although i
ncompletely understood luminosity, due perhaps to the spontaneous combustion of decomposed vegetable matter. At all events, the Fullers told me that local people will go a long way round to avoid Spinney Bank at night.

  Outside the room where I learned of the many strange happenings at Spinney Abbey, Tom Fuller told me of the figure of a monk that he had seen glide slowly along the garden path and disappear at an angle of the house. The hood of the clothing which the figure wore covered its face so that no features were discernible but Mr Fuller wondered whether the ghostly monk had any connection with the murder of an abbot at the original Spinney Abbey in 1406. Other people, too, have seen a ghost friar here and sometimes ghostly footsteps, slow and measured, sound and resound about this quiet house.

  One Sunday morning unexplained chanting was heard in the west part of the house by six people, including three of the children of old Robert Fuller, who were now telling me about the strange happenings they had encountered over the years. Music, faint but distinct, accompanied the Latin chanting. The whole thing was over in a few seconds but all the six people in the room at the time heard and agreed upon the unmistakable sounds. Robert Fuller himself had heard the same sounds some years before but he heard them in the stack-yard and they appeared to come from fourteen feet above the ground. “Clear as a bell,” he said; “pure and sweet, all in Latin; and just where the old Chapel of the Abbey used to stand.”

  Mr Fuller’s daughter Unis and her husband told me that they had heard something they had never been able to explain. It was a curious, uneven, rolling sound, like a coconut being rolled over the floor. After a while it ceased; then it began again and it was heard intermittently throughout that one evening, never before and never afterwards.

  During the course of a night I spent in the grounds of Spinney Abbey I placed delicate thermometers at strategic spots: in the piggery where the pigs always fought, the place where the chanting had been heard, another spot where an unexplained female figure had been seen on one occasion and finally where the monk walked. Readings were carefully recorded every ten minutes throughout the night. No thermometer showed any abnormality – except one. Each of them steadily declining from around 31°F at midnight to 24°F at six a.m. But the thermometer placed where the ghost monk walked showed a sudden and inexplicable drop in temperature of seven degrees! This occurred at two-ten a.m. and was verified by my two companions; yet the other thermometers showed no similar drop. This one was no more exposed than the others and in any case ten minutes later, this thermometer showed the temperature back to normal and in line with the others. I have thought of many possible explanations but none that I can accept as probable. It is interesting to note that some horses stabled nearby were quiet throughout the night except at the exact time at which this sudden and unexplained drop in temperature occurred. At exactly two-ten a.m. the horses suddenly made a terrific noise in their stable, kicking their stalls, whinneying and neighing loudly. Gradually they quietened down and by the time the thermometer showed a normal reading at two-twenty a.m. the horses were quiet again. Horses, like cats and dogs, are believed to be supersensitive, so perhaps some shade of a ghost passed near to me that night.

  ANDREW GREEN as a member of the SPR and Ghost Club devoted his life to investigating cases of hauntings and his book, Our Haunted Kingdom (1973) is one of the most comprehensive collections of over 350 reports of paranormal activity ever published, while his Ghost Hunting: A Practical Guide (1974), is one of the most instructive. Green founded the Ealing Psychical Research Society and apart from conducting numerous ghost hunts, lectured widely on psychic phenomena and appeared regularly on television. In April 1996 he was famously called upon by the Administrators of the Royal Albert Hall to investigate alleged supernatural phenomena in the building. Appropriately, Green lived in a haunted house, as he describes here.

  THE WOMAN IN WHITE

  Location and date: Robertsbridge, Sussex, 1972

  My home in Robertsbridge, Sussex, is haunted. Built about 1725 as a pair of tied farm cottages on the Egerton estate, this rather attractive cottage was practically rebuilt in 1971 when the conversion was made into a single building. A rear wall built with stones from the mediaeval villa known as Glottenham Castle, the site of which is about two miles away, had to be removed and reconstructed with modern brick. The stones, however, have been retained in the garden.

  Within three feet of the pair of privies in the back garden a copper powder flask was found which suggests that at some time flintlocks were used to defend the privacy of the occupier, though part of a Roman glass bottle was also found in the area.

  Whilst working in the garden early in 1972, I felt that I was being watched by a pair of “old characters” standing on what had been, up to 1934, a public footpath leading across the fields to Brown’s Farm. On another occasion a vague shape like a white dress hurriedly “flitted” past a hall window.

  Three local residents have stated that the property was haunted by a “woman in white”. Experienced by visitors, however, is the occasional smell of strong pipe tobacco which wafts around the dining room, close to the inglenook fireplace.

  The building had been derelict from 1968 to 1970 and neither the owner nor any of the visitors since it has been re-occupied smokes a pipe, but the phenomenon suggests that someone there did once.

  ENA TWIGG was for many years regarded as one of the most respected mediums in the world and in 1968 was named “Spiritualist of the Year”. A good-natured and matter-of-fact lady, she was praised by Psychic News for her “outstanding contribution to modern spiritualism and to a better public understanding of its values”. Claiming that paranormal “things” had been happening to her for much of her life, Ena Twigg was consulted on a wide variety of cases, but few more unusual than the hauntings described here.

  THE PYROMANIAC GHOST

  Location and date:

  Old Kent Road, London, UK, 1973

  I have been involved in a number of interesting hauntings. One of the funniest stories involved a theatre, although I did not know that I was being taken to one for this adventure.

  When we started, I was picked up, taken to a car, and blindfolded. All I was told was that we were going to a place that was having some trouble – and they thought a haunting might be involved. I was driven round and round, and eventually we arrived at the destination. Our escorts said that we were too early, so we had to drive around once more.

  Finally, we stopped. They helped me out of the car. Harry was with me, fortunately. Then they took my arm and guided me while I stumbled along. They took off the blindfold, and there I was on a stage, surrounded by a bevy of girls with next to nothing on. We were in a theatre. The performance was over, but the cast lingered on, curious to see what was going to happen.

  I thought, Goodness, what am I doing here in this strange place with these half-naked girls?

  The girls all thought it was rather weird – and so did I, for that matter. Finally the girls went off. Then I was supposed to discover what was wrong with the theatre. Everybody insisted that there was something wrong on the stage.

  I was quite sure that it wasn’t on the stage at all. So I asked them to let me wander around the place, and then I would tell them where the trouble was coming from. When I got up into the gallery, I knew immediately that I had found the place.

  “Oh, it’s here. There’s a spirit of a man sitting here, and he doesn’t know he is dead!” I called out. The man had died sitting in that seat in the theatre and didn’t know he was dead. He’d frightened the life out of the whole staff. So my job then was to explain to him that the show was finished and he’d just as well get on with his new life.

  On another haunting case, I was asked to go to a house with the press. When we arrived at the place, miles from home. I was taken into a room. As I sat down on the settee, I saw a man. He said, “I have been swindled out of this house.”

  I asked, “What is the matter?”

  “They’ve twisted me out of the price of this
house,” he replied.

  “But you don’t need this house now,” I pointed out to him. “You are in another world.”

  Then I relayed to the people in the room what I was hearing. I patiently explained to the poor spirit that he was creating an awful lot of disturbance and distress to the people – they couldn’t live in the house because of his activities.

  “The thing that has really made me angry,” he replied, “is that they’ve ripped out my oak bookcase that I built with my own hands – they’ve ripped it out and thrown it away out in the garden.”

  Now, I was a complete stranger to that house and family. I had never seen either before. So I asked the family if what he was telling me about the bookcase was true. They said it was.

  So I began reasoning with the unhappy spirit. “Why raise such a fuss about the bookcase? They don’t need it, and you don’t need it, so what are you mad about?”

  As for being twisted out of the money, the present occupants were only renting the house, they didn’t own it. Besides, the spirit didn’t need or want the house or money or anything else in this world. Finally he was convinced, and he departed.

  The terrible part about this story is that the haunting had been so bad and the spirit had been so determined to make someone pay attention that he had overshadowed the son of the family renting the house, who had committed a violence on his own mother and who had to be put in a mental institution. He was a long time getting well. After I talked with the spirit, the haunting stopped and never occurred again.