The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  Almost from the start she encouraged it in herself: “Angela was occupied at first with her social life, entertaining and being entertained; and gradually, as time went on, more and more with her charities and with business affairs, as she had inherited some of the shrewdness and far-seeing qualities of her grandfather Thomas Coutts. She was one of the first to perceive that the day of private banking firms was over, and the fact that the great business of Coutts was turned into an unlimited private joint stock company was chiefly due to her foresight and influence.”

  From the start she was naturally besieged with suitors. With the aid of her regular maid-companion, Miss Meredith, she learned how to dispose of these: “Miss Meredith became quite expert at seeing that a proposal was coming, and on these occasions retired to the adjoining room, leaving the door open. When the proposal had taken place, Angela would give a cough, and Miss Meredith would at once return to relieve an awkward situation. Lord Houghton once said that he believed Miss Coutts liked him because he had never proposed to her.”

  Miss Meredith, in short, acted as Nerissa to this Portia, this “lady richly left.” But she was a Portia who, in spite of her sense of fun, retained her dignity.

  Her achievements were chiefly philanthropic. Few wealthy persons have ever put their wealth to so much good use, or used so much imaginative foresight in so doing. I have already mentioned Charles Dickens and Henry Irving as being two close friends who taught her to conserve her wealth even while she distributed a large amount of it in charity. An earlier and even closer friend was the great Duke of Wellington. At one time it was commonly stated that she was going to marry him, though he was old enough to be her grandfather. They gave up the idea of marriage early in the year 1847, when Angela was 33 and the Duke was nearly 78. In a letter which survives he advises her not to throw herself away upon a man so much her senior, and she accepted the advice. She lived for another 60 years after this letter was written, pestered by a crowd of beggars and a handful of blackmailers, but untouched by scandal.

  In 1871 the State acknowledged her manifold charities by giving her a peerage – the first woman in England to be so honoured for her own deeds and merits. In the following year she was given the freedom of the City of London. The Baroness was married at the age of 67 – to a young man of 27. He was an American and had been her secretary, William Ashmead Bartlett, and the marriage threw a bombshell into English society. Queen Victoria was so little amused that she called the Baroness “a silly old woman” but the biographer writes from her own experience: “I only knew them both when she was an aged woman and he was a man between forty and fifty with greying hair, but she still adored him. As far as one can tell, she, at any rate, was happy during the twenty-six years of their married life. She always addressed him with the utmost affection. Once at Holly Lodge I saw her remove her wedding-ring from her finger for some reason. Presently she turned to her husband and said, ‘No one but you shall put it on again, Ashmead,’ and he replaced it on her finger with the courtesy with which I always saw him treat her.”

  The amazing marriage took place at Christ Church, Down Street, Piccadilly in 1881, a church which the Baroness herself had endowed. Her biographer notes: “Just as in the case of many a younger woman, marriage softened the Baroness, gave her a wider and a more understanding outlook with regard to individual relationships, attributes which so far had been reserved mostly for humanity as a whole.” In 1882 the bridegroom assumed the bride’s name, and the following year he stood for Parliament and was elected Conservative member for Westminster. He predeceased the Baroness, dying in 1902.

  Sir Henry Irving, as I have said, died in October 1905, and the Baroness, knowing that his flat in Stratton Street was much too small for the purpose, placed her house at the disposal of his kindred. The great actor lay in state in her large dining-room. Over his heart was laid a cross of flowers from Queen Victoria, and on a table before the coffin was a wreath from Ellen Terry. A procession of mourners moved round the coffin all the day from dawn till dusk.

  The Baroness followed Irving to Westminster Abbey little more than a year later. She died at the great age of 92 on December 30, 1906. King Edward VII said of her that she was “after my mother the most remarkable woman in the kingdom.” The amount of good that she did with her great fortune is incalculable.

  And now here am I, born in the year of Irving’s death, fully convinced that I have seen the tangible spirit of Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who died and was buried in the Abbey when I was a two-year-old. I have nowhere told my true story before. I gave a hint of it in a review of a book concerning extra-sensory perception. Shortly after this I had a letter from Mrs Patterson’s daughter, Mrs Betty Coxon, who asked me to lunch with her and her husband at the Berkeley Grill. I told them my tale much as I have told it above, without elaboration or adornment. They had no sceptical look in their eyes as I told it. They said, in fact, that it was by no means the first rumour they had heard of their distinguished ancestor being seen on an unattended walk in London. She had been reported as having been seen not only in the West End, but also in the East End, where she endowed a market and a block of model dwelling-houses in Bethnal Green.

  Shall I encounter her again? I fervently hope so, and never walk up or down the Strand – which I do at least three days a week – without thinking of her and seeing her again vividly, but, alas, only in the mind’s eye. And next time the apparition does meet my actual gaze I shall “cross it though it blast me” as Horatio said of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. I shall say “Good morning, Baroness” and see what happens.

  MY DOMESTIC GHOSTS

  By Mary Carter Roberts

  This well-known postwar American journalist and critic contributed to a number of the leading US publications including the prestigious New Yorker. Like Alan Dent, she finally told the full story of her experiences years after they had occurred, in the December 1950 issue of the magazine. Roberts said she “seemed to possess a personal lodestone” for the supernatural and had been the focus of some quite extraordinary ghosts ever since childhood.

  The first time I was conscious of the ghost my family christened “Kelly”, was one afternoon in late winter when I was in the house alone. I was in my room upstairs, dressing, and was expecting my sister Dorothy to arrive any minute.

  While I was dressing, I heard someone walk across the front porch and open the front door. It was her step; I consciously recognized it. Then I heard the door close. It had a trick of catching on the last inch or so of the sill when it was being shut, so that we of the household who knew the fault always gave it that extra pressure needed to bring it to.

  Whatever came in that day gave that extra shove. I not only heard the door close firmly – I also felt its familiar jar when it caught and had to be pushed hard. Then I heard steps in the downstairs hall.

  I called out, “I’ll be down in a minute.” There was no answer.

  When I came downstairs, I found nobody. The house was empty. Dorothy arrived about five minutes later. She had not been there before and no other member of the family had been there, either.

  Another afternoon – this was in the summer – my sister Anne and I were sitting in the living room of that same house, happily consuming a healthily, girlish snack, which had been laid out on the tea wagon.

  The only other person at home was our mother who, half an hour before, had told us she was going to take a nap. That meant she had retired to her bedroom, which was on the third floor.

  Then “Kelly”, with flagrant sound effects, came down the two flights of stairs. What is more she imitated Mother’s step all the way. She was heavy and slightly lame and when she descended the staircase, she always leaned hard on the banisters and proceeded slowly, making frequent pauses – “Kelly” did just that.

  Anne and I heard him on the upper flight. We looked at one another, a little surprised and one of us said, “Mother’s gotten up.”

  We went on eating our snack, supposing that she was merely coming
down to the second floor to get something she wanted. When, however, her steps began to descend the lower flight, we paid attention, wondering what had made her change her mind about a nap.

  When mother should have been halfway down, I went into the hall to meet her. She was not there. Nobody was there. But the sound of her feet kept right on descending, the stairs and the banister creaking all the while. On the bottom tread, there was an extra-loud creak – and then silence.

  I turned and found Anne standing beside me. She had heard it all, just as it had sounded to me. We both went upstairs then to the third floor, exchanging looks rather frequently and tiptoed into Mother’s room. She was asleep on her bed.

  Our “Kelly” was never visible and he was not always audible. Sometimes he would come into a room and, without a sound, sit down in a rocking chair. At least we assumed that he was sitting in the chair, although he may have just given it a push. What happened over and over again was that the rocking chair began incontinently to rock.

  My brother, who was of a scientific mind, said that the phenomenon could have been caused by a change in temperature. But the catch in this theory was that none of us could ever detect that there had been a change in temperature when a chair began to move.

  Chairs rocked in summer with the windows open; chairs rocked in winter with the furnace on. We had one period piece of fumed oak and black leather – a regular antediluvian monster – wide enough for two sitters and almost as heavy as a piano. It was quite a sight to see that thing, quite empty, start off gaily swinging to and fro with no discernible propulsion.

  There were two very nice things about “Kelly”. He never did any spectacular haunting when we had company. We used to hear him prowling around sometimes when we were entertaining guests, but he made only off-stage noises and never in a way to attract a stranger’s attention. And he was strictly a daylight host; there was never a sound out of him at night.

  Later in my life, I acquired what you might call a personal ghost – one that not only lived with me, but also followed me around. I had this one in three different residences: an apartment in New York City, an apartment in Easton, Pennsylvania and a house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

  The ghost was no more visible than “Kelly” but, unlike him, it did not walk. It seemed to be an altogether aerial spirit. It manifested itself by making a sound – a sound not audible to me alone, I want it understood. Anybody who was near me could hear it and a number of people did. But nobody could find an explanation.

  The sound was like the snapping of fingers three times in succession. But the snaps followed each other faster than any human fingers could have made them. I always heard it in front of me and a little to the left. It did not come often: days would pass between its occurrences.

  I did not like the idea of being haunted and so, when this noise continued, I undertook to find a sensible cause for it. I had a plumber in to look at the steam and water pipes. I questioned the landlord about termites and mice and other fauna that might be lurking in the walls. No sensible cause could be discovered.

  When I moved to the second apartment the “phantom fingers” moved with me. The snapping sounds continued, but I just got on with my life and stopped trying to explain them. When I moved again to Delaware, I think I would have been almost disappointed if my ghost had not come, too!

  More recently, I have had a ghost that whistles. It began to live with me when I was renting a farmhouse in Silver Hill, Maryland. Once again it accompanied me – or followed me – to my present home on South River, also in Maryland.

  This ghost is also aerial. It makes a high, fairly musical little toot, which lasts for about two seconds. The sound is not loud, but it is perfectly audible. Other people have heard it, too.

  The finger-snapper, I should perhaps just record, had taken his leave before the whistler came.

  THE GLOWING CHEST

  By Chapman Pincher

  This distinguished Science Correspondent and expert on espionage of the Daily Express provided the newspaper with a lifetime of exclusive stories from his well-placed sources in all areas of scientific and political life. As might be expected of a man with such a highly developed instinct in solving mysteries, Chapman Pincher set out to find a solution to his own ghostly experience which he wrote about in an Afterword to Ghosts Over England in 1953.

  I can best explain this theory and the new evidence for it by first describing a recent “Supernatural” experience.

  I was sleeping in the attic bedroom of an old country inn. Opening my eyes around midnight I was astonished to see a huge wooden chest on the floor beside the bed. There had been no chest in the room when I went to sleep.

  Only the vague outlines of the familiar furniture – the bedside chair, the old-fashioned dressing table, and the grotesque wardrobe – were visible in the darkness. But the intricate carvings which covered the chest were glowing with a green fluorescent light.

  To reassure myself that the phantom was just an hallucination, I carried out a couple of quick experiments.

  First, I shut my eyes. The chest disappeared. When I opened them I saw it again. This proved that the phantom was something more than a purely mental picture.

  Then I turned over and peered into the darkness of the other side of the bed. The chest suddenly materialised there. Then it vanished, and I could not conjure it up again.

  This eerie experience might have been frightening but for the fact that it fell into line with a ghost theory which I had put forward in the Daily Express several Christmases ago to explain a phantom I had seen.

  According to this theory, seeing a ghost is simply due to a reversal of the process of ordinary vision, which happens in certain abnormal circumstances.

  In normal vision light from an object falls on to the sensitive screen of your eye – the retina – and makes an image there. This image is then converted into nervous signals which pass along the optic nerve to the back of your brain, where they combine to form the picture you “see.”

  What would happen if this process suddenly backfired? Any imaginary picture in your brain at the time would be broken down into nervous signals which would then run forwards to the eye and make an image on the retina.

  If this image then surged back to your brain to make a mental picture there in the normal way you would have no means of knowing whether you were seeing something real or unreal.

  This is the important point to grasp. A purely imaginary object “seen” by this process would look as real as reality itself.

  How could this explain the phantom chest? In this way: I was dreaming about such a chest immediately before I woke, and the image of it in my subconscious mind was projected on to the retina of my eyes.

  Immediately I awoke light from real objects also fell on my retina. So I saw not only the phantom chest but the real furniture too. Then, as the false image faded, the phantom vanished.

  This sort of explanation could cover all those ghost reports which begin: “I awoke with a start and there, standing at the foot of the bed . . .” It could also account for the realistic hallucinations experienced by alcoholics and sick people.

  So far there has been one overriding scientific objection to the theory. The backfiring of nervous signals from brain to eye is theoretically impossible because of a series of one-way valves in the optic nerves.

  But now there is hard experimental evidence that it can occur. Dr Larry Weiskrants, a young American scientist, discovered it accidentally while working at the Institute of Experimental Psychology in Oxford.

  To understand his experiments, first look for ninety seconds at a picture having a clear black and white groundwork. Then switch your gaze to the ceiling. You will see a negative “after-image” – white where there was black and vice versa. You have probably done it many times as a party trick.

  This illusion is due to the fact that the image of any object seen by the eye remains on the retina for a short time before fading.

  While Weiskrants was c
arrying out experiments on this “image persistence” he asked several men and women to imagine a black square on a white background and to concentrate on this purely mental picture.

  To his astonishment one woman, 24-year-old Mrs Ann Batchelor, reported that, after doing this, she could see a definite after-image before her eyes – a white square on a black background.

  Mrs Batchelor’s claim was repeatedly proved in tests which ruled out any possibility of trickery. In one case the false after-image lasted for 55 seconds.

  In my view this can only mean that a flow of nervous signals backfired from Mrs Batchelor’s brain to her eyes, in spite of the one-way valves.

  The false after-image seen by Mrs Batchelor were always negatives of the pictures she visualised. Some of the fleeting phantoms reported by waking people may also be negative after-images – which would explain why so many ghosts are described as “misty wraiths.”

  But, if reversed vision does occur, positive false images in full colour could also be projected.

  Our theory may therefore explain every type of ghost, banshee, and hallucination – except one. It would not account for a case where the same ghost was seen by two or more people at the same time.

  But after four years of search I have been unable to find any really convincing evidence that this has ever happened.

  THE GREENWICH VILLAGE GHOST

  By Elizabeth Byrd

  An American journalist and novelist, Byrd experienced a number of instances of supernatural phenomena during research for her articles and books. The accounts in The Ghosts In My Life (1968) have been praised for “making Byrd’s ghosts come to everyday life as vividly as the historical figures in her novels”. The following tale from the New York paper, The Villager, of 30 April 1964, is typical of her skill with the delightful and the eerie.