The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  This started conversation around our circle, including comment from Cartheuser, who never had left his seat. Our chatter was cut off, however, by the readvent of the voice. He told us he would now take his voice down through the frequency cycles below the level of the human voice.

  He started down, again from the 300 cycle point. His enunciation became slower as his voice deepened to a bass-profundo and on down to the lowest reaches of an orchestral string bass. He paused to explain that this was 100 cycles below where the human voice could frame recognizable words. Still speaking clearly the voice sounded like that of a giant mumbling at the bottom of a well. Still sinking, it faded into a swishing sound that suggested the lowest note on the longest pipe in a giant pipe organ. Then it vanished.

  Again there was silence, this time broken by the original spokesman for the spirit engineers.

  “Well, there you have it,” he announced. “We hope you and your engineers have found our collaboration helpful. We want to thank you people and your medium for making it possible for us to demonstrate and record evidence that our voices are not fraudulently impersonated in this, and many other cases. The power is failing and we must go. But remember, we will be back to collaborate with you on any such experiment you choose to hold in the future.”

  The entire séance had lasted two hours and 15 minutes and had been recorded on nine 15-minute 33 ⅓ rpm LPs. Within a month of the recording date all records, with the masters, were turned over to the Society by Frank Black.

  This séance and its records made little if any impression in official circles. Only the engineers in the control room were in a position to testify to the reality of the discarnate voices. But they, like so many others, were not about to go on record officially. So, one of the technically best test cases for the reality of “spirit voice” phenomena went officially unconfirmed. The whole affair, along with the recordings, turned out to be just what it started out to be – no more than an interesting documentary in the archives of the Society.

  There was one important result. Those of us who were there came away with the unshakable conviction that, as far as proving survival is concerned, that séance will do very well; the spirits did, indeed, speak for the record.

  THE WARNING

  By Robert Thurston Hopkins

  Hopkins was a photographer/journalist with a special interest in ghosts who wrote features for the Press Association and Reuters, the London Evening News and Sunday Express, plus Picture Post for whom he took a series of remarkable pictures of Borley Rectory in 1955, including one of a “dark shadow” bearing a distinct likeness to a nun. Here he describes another equally strange and sinister moment that occurred to him in 1943.

  I am sometimes surprised when I hear people talking of whether they believe in ghosts or not. Believe in them? I have been meeting them, off and on, most of my life. They come and go of their own accord and seem to be occupied solely with their own business. But one ghost did his best to “communicate” with me and he possibly saved my life. I was living in an ancient manor house near Billinghurst in Sussex from 1940 to 1943 and the house was set in deep oak woods and reached by private roads. One night, during a sharp raid by German bombers, I decided to walk over a footpath to the local inn. I went into the hall to pick up my hat. Suddenly I heard a man coughing and muttering outside, and I opened a side door where he seemed to be. There was nobody in sight. I went to the front door. There was nobody there, either. I looked up and down the pathways; nothing was to be seen – nothing but falling snow. I returned to the hall and felt very uneasy, as German airmen from wrecked planes had several times been found hiding in the adjacent woods, and a few days before I had assisted the local policeman to carry an injured German pilot to my house to await a phone call for the ambulance.

  I decided to put off my visit to the local. A little later I again heard “somebody” coughing and muttering outside my window. I felt that he – whoever he was – seemed very anxious to talk to me . . . had an urgent message to deliver, but his voice and presence did not seem quite strong enough to reach me. Returning to the footpaths around my house. I examined the snow-covered ground where whoever or whatever had been muttering and standing. The snow was a thick blanket but there were no tracks – none coming, none going.

  When I returned to my room I got a clue to the mystery. My cocker spaniel Duster lay quite still before the log fire, alert, agitated and silent.

  If any human being had been outside, he would have rushed from door to door barking furiously. But he lay with his nose between his paws, watching me, waiting for me to understand what kind of a person our visitor had been. He had sensed what “it” was all along.

  I said: “I guess you are right,” and the old spaniel relaxed and sighed.

  A minute later there was a terrific explosion a short distance from my house. Later I discovered that a German bomb had fallen across the footpath which ran to our local inn. The explosion had made a crater large enough to hide a couple of houses comfortably.

  I then realised that my visitor had possibly prevented me from walking straight into that shattering explosion.

  After that, I could not help thinking about that German pilot who had rested for a while in my house. I had watched him as he was carried into the ambulance and he had waved to me, smiled and once more thanked me for some cigarettes I had given to him. I heard that he had died in the hospital a few days later.

  AN EMINENT VICTORIAN IN WARTIME LONDON

  By Alan Dent

  Dent, an eminent journalist, book reviewer and biographer, also had an extraordinary encounter during the war while London was being subjected to a blitzkrieg by German bombers. It was to be almost a quarter of a century before he related the episode in the Christmas 1967 number of The Illustrated London News – and only after he had discussed his experience with a relative of the ghost, “who told me that mine was by no means the first intimation that the baroness had been seen walking about London”.

  On a sunny June morning during the Second World War I was walking down the north side of the Strand. The sky was blue and serene, but the atmosphere was sinister and chilling because, since there had been heavy air-raids the night before, there came from every direction the singular, sharp noise of broken window-glass being swept, shovelled, and carted away in large quantities. Apart from the LCC workmen doing this job there were very few people about, and very little traffic.

  Just after I had passed the Adelphi Theatre I became aware of an elderly lady walking, not so much slowly as with a kind of deliberation, in front of me. My first thought was that I had seen her once or twice before, walking in front of me in just such a way – once, as I remembered, in the middle of Long Acre, and once again, as I more vaguely remembered, in that part of Oxford Street that affords a view of Denby House. As on those occasions she again struck me as a very singular old lady, but I had no impression that she was a hallucination or anything other-worldly.

  This time I resolved to have a better view of her, a face-to-face view if possible. I decided to pass her swiftly, walk 20 yards or so on, look into a shop window for a second, and then turn back slowly to get a full front view. From behind and while passing I could see that she was, as on the previous occasions, dressed in a black satin walking-costume of a very old-fashioned style, that she had a good deal of white or yellow lace around her neck, glittering ear-rings of what appeared to be diamonds, and a high bone-supported collarette of a kind I had not seen since my earliest infancy. I could see, too, that she was of an ashen-pale complexion – possibly powdered, but with no lipstick on her mouth, which had a slight but good-natured pout. So far as I could note and remember, she wore a small black hat of some feathery substance, and black leather shoes with what in my childhood were called Cuban heels. I had the impression, too, that the longish skirt of her costume was swathed rather than straight-cut. I tried to see her hands but they were both of them hidden in a black or dark-brown fur muff – which was, again, both out of fashion and out of
season.

  I passed her just after the point where Agar Street and King William Street debouch together into the Strand – just before reaching the façade of Coutts’s Bank, in fact. After briskly walking the length of the bank, which is at least 36 of my strides, I halted. The first shop beyond the bank – now a passport-photographer’s – was then a tobacconist’s. Stopping at this window, I glanced into it for not more than a second, then turned to walk back and discover, without staring, what this singular lady looked like full face. Let it be understood that I had lost sight of her for rather less than 30 seconds.

  To my profound surprise I found, on looking round and turning back, that she had utterly vanished. There was not a soul in front of me for the whole length of the bank. She was not crossing the Strand, and there was no one in the least like her on the opposite side. It was just – but barely – possible that she had suddenly hailed a taxi and driven off in it. But no taxi or car was in sight, in either direction. Why then, she must have gone into the bank – which again was possible, since she ought to have been very close to the bank’s front door at the moment when I had turned round to have a good look! It was just on the stroke of 10 o’clock, the bank’s opening time. When I reached the front door a commissionaire was in process of throwing the doors open. Much perplexed if not exactly astonished, I said to him: “Good morning, has a lady dressed in black just come in?” He smiled and said: “How could she, sir, I have this second opened the door?” There was nothing to do except to thank him and to come away mystified and far from satisfied. But I still thought of my old lady as an inexplicable, and not as a ghostly, apparition.

  Less than a week later I found myself describing this experience to the landlord of a tavern in Long Acre, next door to which, at No 20, I used to live. He was a shrewd old Welshman named Arthur Powell with bushy grey eyebrows and a notable resemblance to the late Lord Beaverbrook. I had not quite finished telling him my story when he interrupted me. He had been listening intently, watching me closely and gravely and without the usual sceptical smile of a listener who suspects one to be spinning a yarn. He said: “I know who it was you think you saw. It was the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. I recognize her from your description of her. You saw her walking into her own bank.” I gasped and expostulated. Surely the Baroness died 40 years ago at least? And in any case how did Arthur Powell recognize such a person from my description? He said: “Of course I recognized her. I saw her quite often in the old days. You see, my father was one of her coachmen!”

  At this point some customers came into the tavern, and the spell was temporarily suspended. But it was not completely broken, and it remained intact through several subsequent conversations in which this old Welshman repeated his conviction that it was the Baroness I had seen, or that I thought I had seen.

  At this time I knew very little about the Baroness Burdett-Coutts – not even that she was directly connected with Coutts’s Bank. As a Dickensian I knew that she was a great friend of Dickens in her middle-age, and as a drama critic and theatre-lover I knew that she was a helpful friend of Henry Irving in her old age, that she was reported to have financed some of his last theatrical ventures, and that she lent her large house in Piccadilly for the great actor’s lying-in-state. Sir Henry Irving died in October, 1905 (and it is not entirely irrelevant to add here that I myself was born in January the same year).

  In 1953 a biography of the Baroness was published by John Murray, called Angela Burdett-Coutts and the Victorians by Clara Burdett Patterson, the Baroness’s great-great-niece. It need hardly be said that I read this book eagerly, and also reviewed it. Before I had read a word, however, I studied closely the portraits of the Baroness at various ages which illustrate the book. The first is a head-and-shoulders portrait of the girl, Angela Burdett (born 1814), whose earliest recollection was of having a very old lady pointed out to her at Brighton as being Mrs Piozzi, formerly Mrs Thrale. If my ghost is genuine I have more than once beheld a lady who as a child glimpsed Mrs Thrale, who had been one of Dr Johnson’s very dearest woman-friends! The second portrait is of Angela Burdett-Coutts in her earliest 30s, a most elegant full-length and full-dress likeness, a watercolour painting on ivory by W. C. Ross. This, the more I look at it, is the one most uncannily like my apparition. The face is in three-quarter profile. The third portrait of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, again full-length and in full court dress, was painted by Edwin Long and now hangs in the Burdett-Coutts Schools in Westminster. It emphasises the lady’s height, a feature which I especially noted in her apparition – her height, and her corresponding leanness.

  The last picture, once again full-length, is a drawing of the Baroness as a bride, on the arm of her bridegroom and with an officiating clergyman in the background between the heads of the old-young couple. Her wedding shocked Queen Victoria, who had until then been a friend of the Baroness, and had often sat on her balcony watching the endless traffic in Piccadilly. Only there – she would say – could she watch London traffic without it stopping on her account. But after the wedding the royal visits were discontinued, and the Baroness was invited to Buckingham Palace only on formal occasions.

  This is not the place or the occasion to give more than a sketch of this remarkable lady’s career. But her family history is of quite exceptional interest even before she was born, in the year before the Battle of Waterloo. Her grandfather, the banker Thomas Coutts, married his brother’s servant-maid, and by her had three daughters all of whom made brilliant matches. The eldest, Fanny, married the Marquess of Bute; the second, Susan, married Lord Guilford; and the third, Sophia, married Sir Francis Burdett. For four years before her death Coutts’s first wife suffered from mental collapse and ceased to be in any sense a companion to him. Before her death the old man, now over 70, had fallen in love with the actress, Harriot Mellon, then about 40; and in 1815 he married Harriot exactly a fortnight after his wife’s death. The three titled daughters were now torn between love of their father and extreme dislike of his marriage to a woman they deemed a vulgarian. After much family quarrelling and disagreement, the old man – who seems to have had a dash of Lear about him as well as a dash of Balzac’s Goriot – came to live with his youngest daughter and her husband in the Piccadilly mansion.

  When Thomas Coutts died in 1822 it was found that he had left the whole of his great fortune to his wife Harriot. There was much adverse comment on this, but his three daughters had been well provided for already. Harriot Coutts remained a widow for five years, and at the end of that period married William Aubrey de Vere, the ninth Duke of St Albans, who was some 25 years her junior. He had to ask her three times before she consented.

  After her marriage the Duchess of St Albans wrote an admirable letter to Sir Walter Scott in answer to one of his which has not been preserved: “Thanks, many thanks for all your kind congratulations. I am a Duchess at last, that is certain, but whether I am the better for it remains to be proved. The Duke is very amiable, gentle and well-disposed, and I am sure he has taken pains enough to accomplish what he says has been the first wish of his heart for the last three years. All this is very flattering to an old lady, and we lived so long in friendship with each other that I was afraid I should be unhappy if I did not say I will – yet the name of Coutts – and a right good one it is – is, and ever will be, dear to my heart.”

  She goes on rather touchingly to comment on her own career, with a slight misquotation to indicate that she had once been Ophelia in her play-acting days: “What a strange, eventful life mine has been, from a poor little player child, with just food and clothes to cover me, dependent on a very precarious profession, without talent or a friend in the world ‘to have seen what I have seen, seeing what I see.’ Is it not wonderful? Is it true? Can I believe it? – first the wife of the best, the most perfect being that ever breathed, his immense fortune so honourably acquired by his own industry, all at my command . . . and now the wife of a Duke. You must write my life; the History of Tom Thumb, Jack the Giant Killer, and Goody Two
Shoes will sink compared with my true history written by the author of Waverley; and that you may do it well I have sent you an inkstand. Pray give it a place on your table in kind remembrance of your affectionate friend.” To this day the Duchess of St Albans’s inkstand is still to be gazed upon at Abbotsford.

  She died in the year 1837, and to universal astonishment left the whole of the huge Coutts fortune to her husband’s granddaughter, Angela Burdett. Here I quote Mrs Patterson: “It appeared that Harriot had taken a great fancy to Angela, who, as is sometimes the way of children of a younger generation, had ignored the family differences and had found pleasure in the kind company of the woman who, after all, must have possessed many endearing attributes.” The Duke, her husband, had died leaving her childless, and she made the young girl her regular travelling companion. Incidentally the Duchess travelled in very great state, usually in a cavalcade of coaches with a small army of servants and couriers, with two doctors in attendance (in case one of them fell ill), and with two chambermaids (one for day and one for night) for the extremely interesting reason that she was afraid of ghosts and could not bear to be alone at any time.

  The Duchess’s will was signed only a fortnight before her death, and young Angela Burdett found herself in the possession of an income of approximately £80,000 a year! Simultaneously she became a national celebrity, a popular byword for good fortune, and got a complimentary mention in the Rev Thomas Barham’s Ingolds-by Legends which first appeared in volume form in 1840. Again one quotes her biographer: “I think that during the long talks which Angela probably had with her step-grandmother, especially on their interminable drives, the old lady, who herself had no easy youth, must have instilled into her husband’s youngest granddaughter a deep concern for the trials and sufferings of others; or at all events she must have discovered in Angela a sympathy and large-heartedness which could easily be encouraged . . .”