The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  Mrs Twigg went on, still quoting in the first person. “I’m tied to my regrets. Yet they are showing me the way out, and we must make progress together. I have to live my way and you yours.”

  DOM ROBERT PETITPIERRE was the second of the leading exorcists in the Church of England during the later part of the twentieth century. A diminutive little man with a gentle style that belied his ferocious determination, he took a science degree before entering the church and performed over a thousand exorcisms. “Real ghosts have human minds,” he declared in 1976, “but demons are an army and their general is Satan.” In a career lasting over half a century, Dom Robert took on a remarkable variety of cases and here records one of the strangest.

  THE HOUSE OF ILL-FAME

  Location and date: East End, London, UK, 1975

  The startling sex lives of the young girls in the new home that had been opened for them in the East End of London was worrying everybody connected with the place. Each of the girl had “gone off the rails” within a few weeks of arriving and there seemed to be no way of stopping them.

  The trouble continued for five years and then the parish priest discovered that the premises had once been a brothel. He decided that the girls were under evil influences left behind from the days when prostitution flourished in the building and it had to be exorcized.

  The priest called me in and told me what was happening in the girls’ home. It seemed to me to be a case of human sin leaving a heritage of evil to haunt and disturb those who lived on the site thereafter.

  We agreed to call in a Roman Catholic Bishop to exorcize the place. He had two shots at it, but broke down twice. He couldn’t get through. So we decided on an exorcism with the Bishop and twelve clergy including myself – which is the Roman Catholic ritual way – and that cleared the mess up. The home was all right afterwards.

  Trouble often arises from a house which has been the site of sexual misbehaviour. In the countryside this would apply to the site of an ancient fertility cult. Or it could come from the offices of a company devoted to greed or domination.

  I have seen just one ghost – also in the East End of London, in a church. It was one Good Friday and I saw the figure of a priest standing in the nave under the gallery clock.

  There should have been no one in the church and after a few seconds I realized it was a ghost. I mentioned it later to the church warden and he said, “Ah, six o’clock – that’s about the right time for him to appear.”

  I believe that a ghost is someone who, after death, has remained “stuck” because he or she was too tied to earthly things like home, garden, or place of work. They remain until released by exorcism – and the best exorcism is prayer.

  REVEREND DONALD OMAND also performed immumerable exorcisms in Britain during a thirty-year-long career which took him as far afield as Devon, the Highlands of Scotland and even the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Raised in Scotland where he began the study of the supernatural and perfecting methods of casting-out rituals, he was later called upon by numerous doctors and psychiatrists dealing with “possessed” patients. In June 1973, he carried out undoubtedly the most bizarre case of all – to exorcize the spirit of the Loch Ness Monster – which has understandably earned him a position of some notoriety in the annals of psychic research.

  THE GHOST OF NESSIE

  Location and date:

  Castle Urquhart, Scotland, 1973

  The whole business really started in Sweden. I work with an international group of psychiatrists and others who believe in possession. One of them had discovered that round a lake in Sweden there appeared to be a sinister influence on people. There was a more-than-usual percentage of mental cases and broken marriages, while people of high character become demoralized. The doctor found that this lake had a very similar legend to Loch Ness.

  Further inquiries showed that there are other lochs in Scotland, lakes in Ireland and two fjords in Norway with the same thing. We made a survey of these places and most of all Loch Ness, and while I don’t want to offend the people living round there, we found sufficient evidence to indicate the same pattern as had been first observed in north Sweden.

  So we decided when our group met in Oslo last year that I should exorcize Loch Ness. We chose it because it is the biggest, and if I succeeded there I could probably succeed everywhere else.

  I must point out that I did not propose to exorcize the monster itself, but the evil that surrounded it. I have always believed that Nessie is a spectre and not a zoological specimen. For one thing, I do not see how it would get on for food if it was a real creature; certainly there would be no fish left in Loch Ness and it is very full of salmon and trout and everything else. I don’t doubt the word of people who have seen something there, but I think it is a spectre they have seen. I have seen one in Norway, and when four of us went to Loch Ness last June we thought we saw it.

  So I performed a ceremony of exorcism, and reports that we have had so far indicate it was successful. This does not mean that Nessie will no longer be spotted there, it just means that the evil which concentrated about her will have gone.

  ARTHUR GUIRDHAM was a resident psychiatrist at Bathford Nursing Home just outside Bath who became convinced after years of research that a great deal of mental illness was a form of “haunting by spirits.” He believed that that earth was permeated with a variety of forces and energies that were not recognized by science and had been forced to make room for a “supernatural explanation” by recurrent experiences. Guirdham enjoyed considerable success with several of his books, including A Foot In Both Worlds: A Doctor’s Autobiography of Psychic Experience (1973) from which the following chilling and unnerving episode is taken.

  THE HAUNTED PLACE

  Location and date: Otmoor, Oxford, UK, 1933

  Otmoor was strange and haunted and out of this world, a sunken plain with low hills around it. The grass was knee high where you crossed its centre, and where there were hedges they were thick like screens and the inwoven roses were utterly static, like flowers in an old mosaic. The moor was crossed by a Roman causeway. There was always a silence of something beautiful and evil about it. It was flooded in the first months of the year. In February it was a desolation. It was numbed by the cold and the mist that hung above it. Even in summer, with the roses blooming, there was about it the memory of an old evil. I could feel its presence in the grey-green silence of the heavy vegetation.

  I stayed a night at the inn at Beckley during the summer vacation. I was due to do my examination in pharmacology. I found the subject easy and interesting. I had worked hard and had no qualms about the result. I returned to Oxford two days before the examination.

  When I went to bed that night I began to shiver violently. My rigors were coarse and repeated and beyond my control. The springs of the bed whined continuously with the violence of my movements. My teeth chattered harshly. Even the sound of their detonation was excruciating. I felt deathly cold. I staggered from my bed and took up the mats and carpets from my room as extra covering. On this summer night they had no effect. Next day I felt shrunken with cold and horribly ill. I was jaundiced, and nauseated by the sight of food. I had been living simply and the amount of alcohol I had taken was negligible. I felt so ill that I sent for a doctor. He was an old, impressive and kindly figure. He diagnosed a chill on the liver. At least he got the organ right. I was jaundiced and in the condition from which I was really suffering the organ is vulnerable. He was a kindly old man and no doctor could have been expected to make the diagnosis. He asked me if I was ready for the examination. He came of that vintage of doctors which did not inevitably regard patients as malingerers. I had no doubt he would have written a certificate for my tutor had I pressed him to do so. I assured him I was well prepared.

  I recovered in two days. The ice thawed from my muscles and my limbs and jaw were no longer convulsed by coarse tremors. The yellow tinge departed from my skin and eyeballs. I turned up for the examination shaken but competent and passed with ease. />
  What was the diagnosis? Was it hysteria? I do not know what I had to be hysterical about. Was it an unconscious evasion designed to avoid the examination by dramatic and obvious symptoms? There was no real audience for the display of my suffering. It was during the vacation. I was practically alone in the college, and nobody knew about it except the old doctor. And as I say I knew my work backwards. When it came to the test I passed with ease.

  It was years afterwards before I knew that Otmoor was one of the last resorts of malaria in England. I could well understand it. Even in my day there was a sodden luxuriance about it. It was a pool of tropical fetor sunk in the bucolic innocence of the English countryside. I learnt that well after the Middle Ages the yellow men of Otmoor were traditional. For a couple of days I had assumed their affliction. I did not feel this at the time. I only felt desperately ill as one does with malaria even though one may recover quickly from it. Only that, and the feeling that the countryside I loved was beautiful and evil. I have no such feeling about any other region in Britain. People talk about the atmosphere of Glencoe but to me this is fantasy. It is no more horrifying than the frowning majesty of Dunmail Raise with the rain clouds gathering. It is so easy to suggest oneself into a state where every place which has known horrors has a bad atmosphere. The recognition of many bad atmospheres depends on acute imagination plus the reading of history in a state of excitable romanticism.

  JOAN FORMAN is another writer fascinated by people and places haunted by evil. Born in Lincolnshire, she spent her early career in education before turning to writing and producing invaluable and well-researched historical works such as the popular Haunted East Anglia (1974) which revealed the area to be the location of some very extraordinary tales. Few ghost hunters have persisted as determinedly as Joan Forman to solve this next supernatural mystery.

  WRAITH OF A MURDER

  Location and date:

  Cawthorpe, Lincolnshire, UK, 1974

  I have known the stretch of road from the Louth-Legbourne corner to the commencement of Cawthorpe village proper since I was a child. Halfway down the plantation side lies a gateway, with a rutted cart track leading into it, and a clearing with a decrepit shed lying beyond. All round stand the sentinel trees, conifers mainly, with a sprinkling of deciduous wood.

  At no matter what time of year one passes that gateway, there is always a scarf of mist stretching out from it, lying inert across the roadway, like a barrier. On days of brilliant sunshine, on mornings of sparkling frost, that mist-barrier is there, always at the same point, lying still and unwavering across the path.

  My father, when a young man and long before he met my mother, was engaged to the miller’s daughter at Legbourne Mill. He was in the habit when his day’s work was over, of cycling out to Legbourne via Cawthorpe, taking the route by the plantation and then through Watery Lane to the Mill.

  He possessed a reasonably modern bicycle as cycling was one of his hobbies, but in those days modernity did not extend to battery-powered lamps. Both front and rear lights were acetylene-powered and the lamps had to be lit by hand.

  On one particular night, dark, with a moon about to rise but not yet risen, my father rode on his usual journey to the Mill. He had turned into the plantation stretch which leads to Cawthorpe, and was passing the gateway when the front lamp of his bicycle went out. He dismounted and re-lit the lamp, climbed back on the bicycle and was about to move, when the rear lamp of the cycle went out. He got off the machine again, re-lit the rear lamp and once more prepared to ride off. At that point both front and rear lamps were extinguished together.

  The young man was now thoroughly alarmed and disconcerted. As far as he could see, there was no earthly reason why even one lamp, still less both, should go out. One more he re-lit both lights, and thereupon jumped on the bike, and pedalled hell-for-leather down the lane. Once out of the mysterious gateway, both lamps remained alight. He came home by the main road through Legbourne village, and for several weeks gave the plantation road a wide berth.

  Forty years later when I went to live in Cawthorpe, the plantation road still held its scarf of mist, and not only I, but many of the village’s inhabitants, felt a sense of unease when passing the place.

  I asked Harry Borrill to tell me of its history and he raised his bushy eyebrows in surprise that I should not know the story. It came in two parts and he told me the latter half first.

  On a Christmas morning several years ago, a local man was walking from Cawthorpe to the pub, in Legbourne village, intent on a friendly drink with his cronies to celebrate the season. As he drew level with the plantation gateway, he heard the sound of footsteps approaching behind him. Feeling sociable, he slowed down to enable the man to catch him up, thinking to have a pleasant chat along the road to the inn. The steps came nearer, drew level and then passed him, but there was no person to be seen. Immediately following this unpleasant discovery, a herd of pigs dashed past him and he was forced to leap aside to avoid them. When he regained his balance enough to look around, there were no pigs in sight.

  As soon as he reached the pub, he told a friend of his experience. He half-expected to be greeted by laughter or disbelief, but surprisingly his friend nodded.

  “Aye,” he said, “when I was ditching there a few years ago, a lady in a car stopped and asked me about yon place. Said there was a stone nearby to commemorate a murder. It seems that some time in the 1800s, a drover had taken his stock to Louth market and came back with a herd of pigs he’d bought and a pocket full of money from the sale of his own stock. Somebody was lying in wait for him in that gateway, jumped out on him and cut his throat. The stone the lady spoke about had been taken away by the soldiers in the last war. Don’t know what became of it.”

  It seems the scarf of mist has replaced the stone as a memento mori in that particular place.

  MATTHEW MANNING is well-known for his psychic abilities and power as a healer – all of which stemmed from a childhood encounter with a ghost. From the age of sixteen, he and his family living in Cambridge were subjected to a series of poltergeist-like disturbances, which particularly fascinated the youngster. Later, Matthew discovered that he had a talent for Automatic Writing and his paranormal capabilities were subjected to intensive scrutiny by the Cambridge Psychical Research Society. Here he describes the extraordinary ghostly phenomena that occurred in his seventeenth-century home that changed the course of his life.

  THE FIGURE FROM THE PAST

  Location and date:

  Linton, Cambridgeshire, UK, 1971

  I was sixteen years old when I first encountered the ghost that was to have such a profound effect on my life. The year was 1971 and the place was our family home in the village of Linton in Cambridgeshire. It was a meeting that was to lead to me developing psychic powers and guide me into a life affected by the supernatural, the paranormal and the bizarre.

  I first saw the shadowy figure on the staircase of our seventeenth-century home. To begin with, I thought it was a burglar. Then I realised it was a ghost. When I looked at him, I thought he was completely solid. He was wearing a green frock coat with frilled cuffs and a cream cravat. He spoke to me and said, “I must offer you my most humble apology for giving you so much fright, but I must walk for my blessed legs.”

  I grabbed an old envelope and pencil and sketched him where he stood. A few moments later he turned, walked up the stairs and disappeared.

  In the months that followed, the ghost appeared again several times and played tricks on both my family and me. Strange antique objects appeared on the stairs and the bed in my parents’ bedroom was often found with the covers thrown back and the pillows dented as though someone had been resting his head on them.

  We also became aware of the sudden smell of strong pipe tobacco – although no one smoked – and the sound of heavy footsteps in empty rooms. Sometimes we would hear the sound of a bell ringing in the hallway although there was no such bell in the house. On other occasions, a candle was found lit on the cloakroom fl
oor.

  While all this was going on, I discovered I had the power of automatic writing – that is when a writer lets his hand and pen be guided by another mind. In that way, I exchanged messages with the ghost and discovered who he was. His name was Robert Webbe and he had been born in the house in 1678. I found out that the style of his clothes was from the 1730s and he had to use two sticks because of his “troublesome legs.” He had died in the house in 1733.

  I was able to exchange messages with Webbe and check the historical accuracy of the things he said. Then he began writing messages on the walls of my bedroom – though no one ever saw him doing it. Over a six-day period in July 1971, more than 500 pencilled names and dates appeared on the wall. They were in a variety of styles of handwriting and were the names of Webbe, his family and other families who had lived in the area.

  When I asked Webbe about these strange things, he admitted he was responsible, but said it was his house and he could do whatever he wanted in it. Once when I reached out to try to shake his hand, mine went straight through his. At that moment I experienced an eerie feeling of timelessness.

  My meetings with the ghost were an amazing experience and affected my life. It seems that Robert Webbe had been a grain trader and was very proud of the house, which he had enlarged but did not live long enough to enjoy. He wanted to take the house with him. I think that is why he was going round and round in a strange sort of time loop, trapped by his own will in infinity. Then from time to time, someone in the house provided him with enough psychic energy to allow him to make contact.