The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  In 1968, the famous old Second World War fighter base at North Weald was used for location filming of the multi-million pound epic, Battle of Britain, starring Laurence Oliver, Kenneth More, Michael Caine and many more big stars of the time. The station, where the legendary “tin legs” pilot, Douglas Bader, had led the fight against the might of the Luftwaffe was refurbished to recreate the atmosphere of those critical days in the war. The work was done so well, it seems, that during the filming the ghost of a pilot was seen in one of the hangars.

  Benny Fisz, the producer of the film, gave a conducted tour of the location and introduced a group of journalists to the cast, in between shooting a sequence in which enemy fighters attacked the base. After watching a flyover and the exploding of carefully controlled explosives, Benny told the journalists that all the upheaval seemed to have disturbed a former resident. He explained:

  “A couple of times while we’ve been here there have been some strange occurrences. One of the security staff spotted a chap in RAF uniform walking past a hut long after the actors had stopped filming for the day. When he ran after the man, he vanished completely.”

  Benny Fisz said during the flyover of Spitfires he and the other members of the cast and crew were startled to see seven planes rather than six.

  “There couldn’t be any doubt about the number as we’d only been able to hire six. But there definitely seemed to be one more as the fighters flew overhead. A lot of people saw it. But the strange thing was once the negative of the film was developed there were just six planes as there should have been.”

  Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard experienced a similar optical mystery when he was a young RAF pilot in 1937. Flying over East Anglia, the man destined to play a major role in the Air Force’s victory over Germany happened to look out of his cockpit and was totally surprised at what lay below him. In his account, “The Phantom Airfield” published in 1978 he explained:

  “Below me was an airfield and hangars and aircraft. What surprised me was that the place was not recorded on any maps or charts I had seen. When I got back to base I reported the sighting and left it at that. Five years later I saw the place again. It had only just been built, I was told, exactly where I had seen it, as part of the RAF’s front line against the Luftwaffe.”

  The same area came under the scrutiny of ghost hunter Joan Forman when she was writing her book, Haunted East Anglia, in 1974. She, too, found an intriguing tale of a phantom airman. The locality was a house in Bishop’s Stortford and the figure was a tall man in a grey-green uniform who had been seen from time to time moving fleetingly around the property. Joan Forman learned that a visitor who also saw the figure in the garden had finally solved the mystery. This lady had identified the figure from a photograph hanging in one of the rooms. She told her host the description matched an airman in the picture who had been killed in an early morning raid. Forman later wrote:

  “It seems that airmen from the nearby base at North Weald had been in the habit of dropping in to see the family, treating the place as a welcome home-from-home while posted in England. It was common practice for the boys to drop by in the morning to greet their friends after an early raid. The man in the photograph had been particularly fond of the house and its owners. As can be imagined, both hostess and visitor were deeply disturbed and moved by the occurrence.”

  The resourceful Eddie Burks was also called on to solve the problem of a haunted RAF station at Linton-on-Ouse near York in 1989. He was asked to sit out a vigil on the roof of the control tower in the hope of solving the haunting said to be caused by a Warrant Officer Walter Hodgson who had “returned” to the training base where he had served until 1943. Three women air traffic controllers had apparently first spotted the ghostly figure in August 1987 – although subsequent sightings had given rise to some dispute as to whether he had been correctly identified.

  Eddie Burks was approached to investigate the haunting by the BBC. In order to remove any suspicion that he might have done any prior research in the locality, he was not told about his destination in Linton-on-Ouse until the day he went, 2 March 1989. The following day he told the Sunday Mirror:

  “I sat on the stairs of the tower. In moments the ghost was with me and I went through his death experience with him. I saw him being carried on a stretcher. I knew it was not wartime. It was several years later and he was an aircraftsman who had been knocked down by a vehicle. I was able to release his spirit into the afterlife.”

  The verdict of Eddie Burks was once again proved correct when further research into local records established that an aircraftman had indeed died on the base after being hit by a petrol tanker in 1950.

  I have just two further stories to add – and both are about what I can only describe as “Spectral Spitfires”. The famous fighter plane, which is often credited with winning the Battle of Britain though it should share the credit with the equally proficient Hawker Hurricane, features in two extraordinary supernatural tales. The Kent Messenger reported the first of these in 1994:

  “People living near the famous Battle of Britain airfield at Biggin Hill, Kent, have often reported the sound of a wartime Spitfire returning from a sortie. Occasionally the plane has actually been seen, screaming low towards the landing strip, then turning into a victory roll before disappearing as mysteriously as it has appeared.”

  The second, even more bizarre tale, appeared in The Spectator magazine in 2003. It claimed that every 24 October a lone Spitfire flew across a cemetery in Chingford, Essex where the bodies of the notorious Kray twins, Ronald and Reggie, were buried. The idea of a flypast to honour the two criminals was amazing in itself – but the idea of a phantom aircraft carrying out this strange annual ritual seemed even stranger. The Spectator explained:

  “Every year at about 11.30 on the anniversary of the twins’ birth, a group of balding villains arrive in hired cars, stamp out their cigarettes on the kerb and wander down the dank lanes to a far corner of the Chingford cemetery. At about 11.40, a lone Spitfire takes off from Old Warden in Kent and flies northwest across the Essex marshes, arriving 300 feet above the grave. As they listen to the sound of the Merlin engines fading away, the old boys pull up the collars of their camel-hair coats around their necks, before setting off to an Italian restaurant in Borough High Street for a meal and a chat about old times.”

  The problem with this story is that no Spitfire has flown from Old Warden in many years. The airfield is actually in Bedfordshire not Kent and by flying northwest from there an aircraft would fly over Leicester not Essex. Any such flight would, of course, have to be reported to the Civil Aviation Authority and recorded by Air Traffic Control. And there is no such evidence. So if a Spitfire does cross the sky over Essex at the appointed time it has to be a spectre. And the only way to find that out is to go to the cemetery just before midday on any 24 October and look up – as people have been doing to spy phantoms for over a hundred years now . . .

  4

  Encounters With The Unknown

  Eyewitness Stories by Journalists

  The twentieth century has witnessed numerous investigations into accounts of ghosts and hauntings by organizations such as the Society for Psychical Research, The Ghost Club and the American Psychical Institute. But the pursuit of the truth about such encounters has also attracted the interest of a considerable number of strong-nerved reporters and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic. Some were following up an initial report; others stumbled into supernatural events for which there were no simple or logical explanations. In this section I have assembled a number of such reports that have interested and intrigued me – as well as inspiring admiration for those writers involved.

  The reporter who effectively started this tradition over a hundred years ago is, sadly, unknown, although he worked for the Daily Mail and the price of telling the story nearly cost him his job and, initially, cost the newspaper a not inconsiderable sum for publishing it. It is a story that begins with a well-known literary figure of the turn of
the last century, Stephen Phillips (1868–1915). The accounts of his troubled days in a haunted house in Egham, near Windsor, which he recounted to the Mail’s reporter in 1904 were to have repercussions that neither man – nor the newspaper – could have imagined. The owner of the property, in fact, became so upset by the story that he sued both Phillips and the Daily Mail.

  Phillips was an interesting figure of his time. The son of a churchman, he had toured for six years with Sir Frank Benson’s Shakespearean Company, then turned to writing and edited the prestigious Poetry Review. He was enjoying what would prove to be a transitory success with his poems, Christ in Hades (1896) and blank verse plays, notably Paolo and Francesca (1899), when he decided in the spring of 1904 to rent the house in Egham to finish one of his plays. No one had warned him, he later told the reporter from the Daily Mail, that the property was reputed to be haunted. He then told his story:

  “I had hardly established myself with my family when the most incomprehensible noises began to disturb me. I heard in the night, and sometimes even in the evening, raps, scratchings, the sound of steps, both heavy and light, slow and fast. Cries were added to these noises – choking and despairing cries – as of a person mad with terror or on the point of being strangled.

  “That was not all. We saw, even in broad daylight, the doors open, though no hand was visible. Every time I sat down at my desk and started work I was disturbed, as if somebody had entered and had walked in the room. I turned round, I saw the door opening, moved by an invisible force, and I heard as usual the steps coming closer and receding in turn.

  “I was never afraid of anything, but these phenomena finally annoyed and impressed me. The quiet I had desired was not given to me. And as for work, I could not think of it.

  “I was not alone in hearing these noises. My family and servants were more disturbed than I. One evening my little daughter called out and said she had seen in the garden a little old fellow, a sort of dwarf, who had quickly disappeared.”

  According to the Mail reporter, Phillips suffered one sleepless night after another because of the disturbances. Not knowing much about the area, he made enquiries concerning the house and whether anyone knew its history. He learned that on the site, fifty years before, an atrocious crime had been committed. A passing tramp had one night strangled a woman and child.

  Stephen Phillips told the reporter that as soon as the people in his household heard the facts they acted immediately. The servants all left his employment early one morning without even taking their belongings. He added that it was only when he was deciding to leave himself that he learned that all the previous tenants had been victims and left precisely as he was doing.

  “I believe I am not a poor-spirited person,” he added, “and I should like to hear of an explanation. Meanwhile, I have given up the house.”

  The poet’s account of the disturbances caught the attention of the SPR who promptly instituted an enquiry. The investigators concluded the haunting was genuine, but could not offer an explanation. In the interim, the story – to quote one source – “made much stir in England”. Phillips gave several more interviews in which he repeated his story word for word.

  Within a short while of quitting the house, however, the owner, a Mr Arthur Barrett, angrily contacted Stephen Phillips. He had found it impossible to relet the building and was proposing to bring an action against him and the Daily Mail. The case was heard in London and the newspaper was ordered to pay the plaintiff £90. There the episode might have ended unhappily if the Daily Mail had not decided to fight the award against them. A subsequent report in the newspaper states:

  “The Daily Mail appealed against this judgement as making the position of the Press very difficult in such matters. The higher court now decided in favour of the paper, in consideration of the fact that the house was commonly held to be haunted before the publication of the story. The press had a right to collect facts of this kind if it did so ‘in good faith and without any intention of damaging anybody.’ ”

  If Mr Barrett imagined his attempt to muzzle the press from reporting cases of haunted houses might prove influential on others, the overturning of the award against the Mail had quite the opposite effect. Indeed, as the earlier section “A Century of Hauntings” demonstrates, reports like that of Stephen Phillips’ haunted house have been popular with editors and readers ever since. Journalists, too, like the anonymous scribe who recorded the case, have had their own encounters with the unknown – sometimes unintentionally – while in pursuit of the facts. This section contains a selection of the best of their stories . . .

  A VISIT TO THE DEVIL’S CASTLE

  By W T Stead

  The Editor of Pall Mall Gazette, Stead became famous in 1885 when he received a three-month jail sentence for buying a girl child in order to expose the vice trade in Britain. He was also fascinated by ghost stories, encouraged his readers to write of their experiences, and investigated a number of instances himself before publishing his groundbreaking collection Real Ghost Stories in 1906.

  There is a certain uncanny fascination about haunted houses, but it is one of which it may emphatically be said that distance lends enchantment to the view. There is something much more thrilling in looking at a haunted house from the outside and reading of it at a distance of many miles, than spending a sleepless night within its walls. It has never been my good fortune to sleep in a haunted house, but on one occasion I went to sleep in the ruins of a haunted castle, and was awakened with a shuddering horror that I shall never forget as long as I live.

  It was in Hermitage Castle, Hermitage, that grim old border stronghold which stood in Liddesdale, not many miles from Riccarton, that most desolate of railway junctions. I visited it when I was just out of my teens, with a mind saturated with legendary lore of the Scotch border. I made a pilgrimage to Brankesome Hall, taking Hermitage on my way. I write this, not to maintain the objectivity of any ghostly haunting of Hermitage Castle, but to show that although it may all have been the merest delusion of a subjective character, I have at least gone through an experience which enables me to understand what it feels like to be in a haunted house.

  Lord Soulis, the evil hero of Hermitage, made a compact with the devil, who appeared to him, so runs the legend, in the shape of a spirit wearing a red cap, which gained its hue from the blood of human victims in which it was steeped. Lord Soulis sold himself to the demon, and in return he could summon his familiar whenever he chose to rap thrice on an iron chest, on condition that he never looked in the direction of the spirit. Once, however, he forgot or ignored this condition, and his doom was sealed. But even then the foul fiend kept the letter of his compact. Lord Soulis was protected by an unholy charm against any injury from rope or steel; hence cords could not bind him and steel would not slay him. When, at last, he was delivered over to his enemies, it was found necessary to adopt the ingenious and effective expedient of rolling him up in a sheet of lead and boiling him to death.

  That was the end of Lord Soulis’s body, but his spirit still lingers superfluous on the scene. Once every seven years he keeps tryst with Red Cap on the scene of his former devilries:

  When I visited Hermitage Castle I was all alone, with my memory teeming with associations of the past. I unlocked the door with the key, which I brought with me from the keeper’s cottage, at a little distance down the valley. As it creaked on its hinges and I felt the chill air of the ruin, I was almost afraid to enter. Mustering my courage, however, I went in and explored the castle, then lying down on the mossy bank I gave myself up to the glamour of the past. I must have been there an hour or more when suddenly, while the blood seemed to freeze down my back, I was startled by a loud prolonged screech, over my head, followed by a noise which I could only compare to the trampling of a multitude of iron-shod feet through the stone-paved doorway. This was alarming enough, but it was nothing to the horror which filled me when I heard the heavy gate swing on its hinges with a clang which for the moment seemed like the closing
of a vault in which I was entombed alive. I could almost hear the beating of my heart. The rusty hinges, the creaking of the door, the melancholy and unearthly nature of the noise, and the clanging of the gate, made me shudder and shiver as I lay motionless, not daring to move, and so utterly crushed by the terror that had fallen upon me that I felt as if I were on the very verge of death. If the evil one had appeared at that moment and carried me off I should have but regarded it as the natural corollary to what I had already heard. Fortunately no sulphureous visitant darkened the blue sky that stretched overhead with his unwelcome presence, and after a few minutes, when I had recovered from my fright, I ventured into the echoing doorway to see whether or not I was really a prisoner. The door was shut, and I can remember to this day the tremour which I experienced when I laid my hand upon the door and tried whether or not it was locked. It yielded to my hand, and I have seldom felt a sensation of more profound relief than when I stepped across the threshold and felt that I was free once more. For a moment it was as if I had been delivered from the grave itself which had already closed over my head. Of course, looking back upon this after a number of years, it is easy to say that the whole thing was purely subjective. An overwrought fancy, a gust of wind whistling through the crannies and banging the door closed were quite sufficient to account for my fright, especially as it is not at all improbable that I had gone to sleep in the midst of the haunted ruins.