The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  So I reasoned at the moment, and came back and stayed another hour in the castle, if only to convince myself that I was not afraid. But neither before nor after that alarm did any gust of wind howl round the battlements with anything approaching to the clamour which gave me such a fright. One thing amuses me in looking back at a letter which I wrote at the time, describing my alarm. I say, “Superstition, sneer you? It may be. I rejoiced that I was capable of superstition; I thought it was dried out of me by high pressure civilisation.” I am afraid that some of my critics will be inclined to remark that my capacities in that direction stand in need of a great deal of drying up.

  HAUNTED BY A SHADOW

  By Shaw Desmond

  Irish-born journalist and supernatural investigator, Desmond founded the International Institute for Psychical Research and wrote My Adventures in the Occult (1956). A protégé of W T Stead, he had a foreboding of the older man’s death on the Titanic while the two men were walking in London in April 1912 discussing Stead’s forthcoming trip on the new liner:“There came to me for the first time in my life, but not for the last, the conviction of impending death – in this case, that the man at my side would die within a very short time.” The following concerns one of the many true hauntings Shaw Desmond investigated.

  The “haunt” was one of the queerest in my experience. We have often heard of a man being haunted by a shadow-man – but who has heard of a man being haunted by a shadow alone?

  In some ways, this was one of the weirdest of my occult experiences and, for the moment, did bring about the psycho-physiological happening of “making my blood run cold”. For such is no figment of the imagination and many have experienced it.

  This great pile had innumerable bedrooms and little drawing-rooms and “attics”. I could quite believe the owner who said that even now only a part of these innumerable rooms and attics, some of them packed with costly furniture, had been explored. Even the owner had not seen them all! I know that when I myself went on a voyage of discovery alone, I found myself in such vastnesses and such lonely places that my heart misgave me. Often it would seem to me that this was no palace of stone and mortar but a palace of dreamland.

  I had come out of one of the marble-flagged bathrooms – a room which itself might house a small family! – when I saw on the white marble at my feet a shadow. Standing there with my towel, I looked idly at it, believing it was a shadow from myself and due to the strong electric lights behind me. Then I noticed a curious thing.

  First of all that the shadow gradually assumed a spheroid shape and that it seemed to be mounting about my legs. The other disturbing thing was that I saw a strong electric light hung before me and therefore that no shadow could be cast.

  The effect of this discovery was quietly disturbing. Perhaps it was the eeriness of this particular part of the building, where even at noonday I had felt an icy clamminess. Perhaps it was all “hallucination”.

  Standing as though I were tied there, I saw the shadow gradually build itself up about my legs, mount my body, and then slowly detach itself, and I watched it move away before me down one of the endless dimly lighted corridors, to disappear.

  This shadow was quite inchoate. Not like the human form. It just was.

  The only comparable happening was that of the Richmond Park ghost-keeper of whom a friend and myself asked the way in broad day and who gradually melted away before our eyes.

  I know that this does not seem much to set down in black and white, but the thing itself was nerve-shaking. But I freely admit that by this time rather frenetic imagination may have played its part.

  I do not think I can be called a timid or apprehensive man. I have, at times, had unique experience in psychical research. I have encountered strangely inimical phenomena without quavering. I have felt and spoken with visitants of the spirit world of every sort and description from saints to devils. But I must affirm that never anywhere have I felt quite the eerie and “suggestive” atmosphere of this affrighting place. Again, I may have been peculiarly susceptible to its vibrations, and I have known those who have never seen or felt anything uncanny within its walls. But some people can never feel or see the invisible. They are to be pitied! for contact with the invisible worlds is essential to education and to progress.

  Without contact with the spiritual, the people perish.

  Within that dwelling, there were three magnificent halls the walls of which, almost Westminster Abbey-like in their imposing proportions, bore priceless paintings, some of the people in which seemed more living than those who looked at them. There they hung, to stare contemptuously or ironically at the staggered guest, and there were moments, especially towards the dusk of evening, when one expected them to come down from their frames to walk among living men, much as the famous Tankerville Castle picture was said to do.

  If this be thought far-fetched, I, who as a youngster knew the then earl, can vouch that he told me of even stranger happenings in that home of the famous “Chillingham herd”. What I was told by the then Countess of Warwick, about Warwick Castle, when, in the old days, I visited it, was even more remarkable than anything I have set down here.

  In one of these halls there was a hand-painted grand piano of superb tone, on which I would play. Here is a note made at the time:

  “The massive halls were terrifying in their suggestion. In broad daylight I went to the grand piano in the biggest hall – itself like a cathedral nave – but it took much more courage to find my way to the instrument in the twilight or dark.” And as I played, I know that my fingers evoked through the music spirit-visitants, who would steal out from their hiding-holes in order to look and listen.

  Some of these visitants I would feel to be kindly and beautiful. Others, saturnine and menacing. But even the darker beings, it would seem to me, yielded themselves as I played and found, perhaps, an hour of release from their “hells” on the Other Side. These visitants I did not see with the human eye, for I was rarely clairvoyant in that way. I felt them – but they were all the more real for that, as I have invariably found that materialization destroys, rather than encourages, the sense of reality, much as the advent of the “talkies” left out a good deal of the power of suggestion of the silent film.

  Once, in my peregrinations, I happed upon a room which I found was called the “King Edward Room” and which was filled with the most luxurious suite of golden furniture I have seen. There was the golden bed in which the genial bearded monarch had lain – that king who was “of the earth earthy”. And yet, though it was daylight, there crept to me the feeling which I always had in that “House” – the feeling that I was not alone.

  Who was looking at me? Who was asking: “What right has this stranger to my room?” Perhaps it was the dead king himself. Perhaps it was some other. In that place, even when nothing did happen, one always expected something to happen.

  THEY WALK THE BATTLEFIELDS

  By James Wentworth Day.

  The Editor of The Field and a regular contributor to Country Life and Daily Mail, Day specialized in stories of East Anglia where his family had owned property for hundreds of years. He became particularly interested in the supernatural after an extraordinary experience while serving in the British Army in France in 1918 which he relates here.

  The guns in Flanders were dead. In that last month of the grey winter of 1918 an eerie stillness dwelt on the battlefields of France and Belgium. Dead lay unburied in fields and sodden trenches. Guns and rifles, shells and Mills bombs lay rusting. Warneton Ridge was a wilderness of mud and crawling wire, shell-pocked and lonely as the wind. Mont Kemmel, “The Gibraltar of Northern France”, alone with its dead and its torn trees, loomed above the grey plains that have been Europe’s cockpit for centuries.

  By day carrion crows croaked deathlike from shattered trees, travesties of nature whose bare trunks were bullet-scarred and shell-splintered. Moated farms and straggling villages lay ruined, roofless, and gaping-walled – if they stood at all.

 
By night the winter moon looked on the twisted dead, the cornfields and roofless farms with white dispassion. Frost mantled the trees and whitened the tents where No. 298 Prisoners of War Company crouched by the gaunt ruins of Bailleul, the town which was blown to atoms in twenty-four hours.

  No longer was the night horizon lit by the fantastic spears and flashes of gunfire, the ghostly aurora borealis of the front line, no longer pin-pointed by star shells or shuddering with the thunder of guns.

  In our tents and shacks outside the great barbed-wire cages which prisoned 450 Germans, newly-taken, we, the guards, shivered with cold. In their prison tents the Germans slept like sardines for warmth’s sake. We were new to the ruins of that spectral town, we and our prisoners, who a month before had been fighting us. The Arctic cold smote English and German alike.

  So when at the railhead to pick up post and rations, I heard by chance words of a great country auberge – an old posting inn of the eighteenth century – whose stables and ruined rooms were full of abandoned Queen stoves, that perfect little camp cooker, I determined to impound the lot.

  Next day, late in the afternoon, after a morning of sudden thaw, I took Corporal Barr, that minute but unquenchable fighting man, and set off along a rutted road from Bailleul to the east. Flooded fields lay on either side. Rotted crops stained the soil. The smell of dead men, cold and oily, that smell which strikes to the pit of the stomach like the smell of a dead snake, was heavy on the air.

  Ahead, in the afternoon sun, the road gleamed with sudden splashes and shields of light where water lay. Two kilometres, near enough three, and we came to the standing archway of the auberge. The yellow walls of what had been a fine old Flemish inn stood windowless, gazing like dead eyes over the fields of the dead. Bullets had sieved its walls. Shells had shattered the roof where rafters and roof tree stood stark as the ribs of a skeleton.

  Under the great arch which had echoed to the clatter of coach wheels and rung with the guttural cries of Walloon and Flamande farmers, the courtyard, with its mighty midden, showed a foursquare array of stables, sheds, barns, cartsheds and coach-houses. Doors sagged on broken hinges and sandbags filled empty windows.

  Within were wooden bunks, the black ashes of long-cold fires, rusty dixies and mouldy webbing, mildewed bully and Maconochie tins – and Queen stoves!

  We found at least a score – enough to warm our pitiful shacks and spare one or two for the prisoners. I told Corporal Barr to bring a party of prisoners next day and remove the lot.

  That dour and unimpressionable little man with the square, short body, the beetling black eyebrows and steady eyes – a soldier among the best of them – said “Aye”. He was being loquacious.

  Then we started back. It was, maybe, four to four-thirty and far from dark. In the sunset the sky had cleared to a wide band of apple-green fading into pink. Overhead high clouds caught a sudden ethereal sheen of crimson and flamingo. The heavens were alight above the stricken earth. On our left fields lay waterlogged and gleaming – lake beyond miniature lake.

  On the right a low upland swept up to a torn, fantastic wood of larch and birch. The thin trees were twisted into grotesque shapes by shell blast. It was a Hans Andersen wood of Arthur Rackham trees through whose sun-reddened trunks we could see cloud masses lit with a Cuyp-like glow.

  Suddenly, as we splashed through the sunset pools of that deserted road, German cavalry swept out of the wood. Crouching low over their horses’ withers, lance-tips gleaming, red pennants flying, they charged out of that spectral wood – a dozen or more German Uhlans in those queer high-topped hats which they had worn in the dead days of 1914. I saw horses, men, lances, and flickering pennons clear and sharp in the level sun.

  And up the slope to meet them galloped French dragoons – brass cuirasses flashing, sabres upswung, heavy horsetail plumes dancing from huge brass helmets. Fierce-moustached and red-faced, they charged with flashing sabres on heavy Flemish chargers to meet that flying posse of grey-faced men who swept down with slender lances on flying horses – the hurricane meeting the winter wind.

  Then the vision passed. There was no clash of mounted men – no mêlée of shivering lance and down-smashing sabre, no sickening unhorsing of men or uprearing of chargers – only empty upland and a thin and ghostly wood, silver in the setting sun. The earth was empty. I felt suddenly cold.

  I am no spiritualist, but to the truth of this vision I will swear.

  I glanced at Corporal Barr. He looked white and uneasy.

  “Did you see anything?” I asked.

  “Aye – something mighty queer,” said that non-committal little Glasgow baker. “Ssst! look! What’s that?” he gasped. His rifle bolt clicked back, a cartridge snapped in the breech and the butt leapt to his shoulder. In a gap in the hedge on the left two baleful eyes glared at us from a dim, crouching shape. At the click of the rifle bolt it sprang to its feet – a wolf in shape and size – and loped into a sudden burst of speed.

  Two rifles cracked almost as one as the grey beast splashed through the shallow floods. Bullets spurted up sudden fountains as it raced away. Not one touched it. Yet the day before I had killed a running hare with my .303 and Barr could pick a crow off a tree at a hundred yards.

  The beast raced belly-low into the sunset, leaving a trail of flying water. Bullet after bullet cracked after it, missed by yards. We were both off our shooting.

  No wolf was that half-starved ghoul of a beast, but one of the lost, masterless Alsatian sheep-dogs of the dead farmers, pariahs of the battlefield who ravished the flesh of the staring dead.

  We reached camp, shaken and oddly shy of talking too much.

  Next day, at Neuve Eglise, that skeleton of a village on the spine of the Ravelsberg, I drank a glass or two of vin rouge at the estaminet of the one and only Marie, a kilometre up the road from the Armentières Road douane.

  I asked her of the wood and the auberge. And Marie, forty-five and peasant-wise, said: “Ah! M’sieu, that wood is sad. It is on the frontier. A wood of dead men. In the wars of Napoleon, in the war of 1870 – in this war in 1914 – always the cavalry of France and Germany have met and fought by that wood. If you will go beyond the auberge half a kilometre only, you will find a petite église. There you will see the graves of the cavalry of all these wars. It is true, I tell you.”

  I went. In the tiny churchyard were the graves. And the headstones told the brief and bloody tales of gallant horsemen in frontier skirmishes which had played prelude to three mighty wars. And since I love a horse and revere a good rider, whether he is an Uhlan or a Gascon under Murat, a turbaned Mahratta or a red-coated foxhunter, I stood in homage for a frightened minute.

  A PHOTOGRAPHIC SEANCE

  By James Malcolm Bird

  Bird was Associate Editor of Scientific American, and his investigations in the USA and Europe did much to explain the mysteries of psychic research to the prestigious magazine’s large readership on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1922, the publication offered a prize of $2,500 for the first person who could produce “a spirit photograph under laboratory conditions”. Bird here recounts his experiences with one of the first challengers, William Hope, described as “the most famous photographic medium of his time” – though ultimately revealed as a fraud.

  During the late summer of 1922, a test séance was given by William Hope, the photographic medium, before officers of the British Society for Psychical Research. A package of plates was brought in, presumably in the original seals as obtained from the manufacturers; but by special and secret arrangement, the makers had marked these plates, either before wrapping, or with X-rays after wrapping. Several plates were exposed; one of them on development showed a psychic extra; and this plate failed to show the secret mark. The investigators claimed to have actually observed the act of substitution; Hope and his defenders agree that the result shows substitution to have been effected. But with this agreement ceases.

  Hope’s defenders have brought several different arguments to bear, but always t
hey accuse the investigators, or somebody connected with them, of the substitution. The investigators, in attempting to clear themselves, have given a history of the package of plates, which shows that it was in their hands an unnecessarily long time, and that it was passed about from one custody to another in a very unsatisfactory fashion while they had it. Equally, neither side made adequate attempts to protect the wrapper which had been removed from the package, so that when the claim was advanced, several months too late, that this showed marks of tampering, no defense could be made to this charge. The people, in England and America, who feel that psychic photography is not possible, are entirely satisfied that Hope has been shown up as a fraud. Those who accept psychic photography as within the possibilities are entirely satisfied that he has entered an adequate defense, and that the researchers have been convicted of sharp practice through too great anxiety to “expose” him at any cost. There the matter rests, and the circumstances are such that no arbitration is now possible.

  This incident has really nothing to do with my story. But I set it forth here, simply to make it clear, to those who may have known of the charges against Hope and not of his defense, that he has entered a defense, and one that does not suffer greatly in comparison with the case for the prosecution. Were this not the fact, were he with any degree of certainty a convicted even if not a confessed fraud, I should still, I think, have sat with him when opportunity offered, merely to see whether I too could catch him. As things stood, it did not seem necessary to apologize to myself even to this extent for sitting with him; it would be unfair to regard him as under any more suspicion than any other physical medium. So when an engagement was made for me to sit with him at the British College on Tuesday, March 13th., the eve of my departure for my Continental jaunt, I arranged to go, as a matter of course.