The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  “I was just a kid of nine in the fourth grade of Pine Street Elementary School in Hamden, Connecticut when I got the first clue. I was dreaming one day in class and I sketched a scene that kept going through my mind. A lone Roman soldier was standing at one end of a bridge. He seemed to be holding off a horde of enemy soldiers single-handedly. Years later when I made it to High School I had to read ‘Horatio at the Bridge’ and that’s when everything clicked. I suddenly realized I’d sketched a picture of that legendary Roman hero who held the Etruscan hordes at bay, single-handedly holding the bridge over the River Tiber. An eerie tingle went right up my spine – because I knew I’d made that drawing years and years before I’d ever heard of Horatio.”

  Years later, when Borgnine was an established actor, the subject of reincarnation came dramatically back into his life again. He was talking to a psychic medium when she suddenly looked him straight in the eyes:

  “She told me she could see me in the uniform of Roman soldier. But not any old soldier – it was Horatio at the bridge. You can say I was shocked rigid and you would still be making an understatement. You see she couldn’t have known about that sketch and the dreams I’d been having about being Horatio.”

  Glenn Ford who made something of a speciality of playing amiable but tough and introspective heroes in dramas such as The Blackboard Jungle (1955) and classic Westerns including 3.10 To Yuma (1957) was in his private life a serious student of ESP. During several hypnotic regression sessions he learned about two previous lives he felt sure he had led. At Ford’s insistence, these experiments were held at the University of California in Los Angeles and conducted under rigorous scientific controls – and every word he spoke was recorded.

  “In the first experiment I was regressed back to eighteenth-century France and the Court of King Louis XIV. Let me tell you I would have been very suspicious if I had been told I was the king. In fact I was just a minor member of the court, I remembered the smell of the swamps at Versailles – a smell that could only have existed at that time because the palace had only just been built. I was also able to describe the stables in their exact location. I apparently got caught up in a court intrigue and died in a duel with the king’s best swordsman run through the chest. For many years I’ve had a pain in my own chest at that precise spot. No doctor could ever explain those pains. Now I know.”

  Ford’s regression was also remarkable in that he spoke in a patois of Parisian French faithfully recorded on tape. He had never spoken a word of French previously. A second session had him speaking with an English accent about a bachelor life in the nineteenth century.

  “This time I spoke about a lonely existence in a small city in the north of Scotland where I had taught the piano and died of consumption in 1892. On the tape I gave specific details of where I was buried and who was interred in the adjoining plots. The hypnotist then asked if I would play something. There happened to be a piano in the room and apparently I sat down and played a work by Beethoven. I have to tell you that I cannot play a note.”

  Christopher Lee, the versatile British actor, who has played many of the leading characters in literature from Dracula to Sherlock Holmes, is also fascinated by the supernatural and has told an interesting story of his regression to the fifteenth century. He explained to Lee Bury in Hollywood in 1980:

  “I took part in a psychic regression session with Kebrina Kinkade and saw myself as a man of seventy lying on my deathbed. I didn’t see my burial, but I saw a plain stone with a coat of arms on it and the inscription, ‘He Served God and Man’. I saw my name: Francesco di Sarsanio, Duke. This is extraordinary because my grandfather’s name – in this present life – was Francesco and he was the Marquis of Sarsanio.”

  The ghost that haunted hell-raising actor Oliver Reed while he lived in a large mansion in Dorking, Surrey during the 1970s had the unique distinction of being seen by the star and caught on camera by a newspaper photographer. Reed, a powerfully built, burly man ran away from home as a teenager and worked as a nightclub bouncer, boxer and taxi driver before getting parts as an extra in British films and then starring in The Curse of the Werewolf in 1961. Later roles in Night Creatures (1962), The Shuttered Room (1967) and The Devils (1971) awakened his interest in the supernatural as well as more diverse parts in Oliver! (1968) and The Three Musketeers (1974). That year he found there was another occupant of the house and its extensive gardens as he told the Sunday People:

  “The house was a monastery for about one hundred years before I bought it. Locals in The Cricketers [pub] told me that a ghost had been seen roaming about the place. It was said to be the ghost of an Irish sea captain who claimed the monks had cheated him. I’ve actually seen things happen and felt an icy chill. I once saw a book floating in mid-air as it went across the room. More than once, too, I’ve noticed a heavy armchair has been moved nearer to the fireplace. I was told the monks had also seen the ghost. One of them fainted when he saw a pair of boots moving from a chair by the fire to the liquor cabinet and then return with a bottle held by a hand . . . Just the hand.”

  Reed’s reputation as a heavy drinker – he once boasted of sinking 106 pints in a two-day binge – made some people doubtful about this story. But a photograph taken in the garden on 27 April 1975 and reprinted in the Sunday People prompted dozens of letters from readers claiming to be able to see a ghostly face in the trees. But the figure through the branches of a tree was not that of the Irish sea captain but a female. June Hilliard of Hatfield, Hertfordshire said she could clearly see “the face of a young woman in the background”, while Edna Urquhart of Sutton Coldfield thought the ghostly shape looked like that of “a real lady with refined and dignified looks”. Leslie Newbold of Tarporley, Cheshire disagreed, however. He thought the figure in the undergrowth was a “horse’s head”.

  An actor who appeared twice with Reed, Donald Pleasence, whose name belied the kind of evil roles he specialized in – from the title role in Dr Crippen (1962), Himmler in The Eagle Has Landed (1976) to the scene-stealing Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967) – also lived in a haunted seventeenth-century house at Strand-on-the-Green in west London, which he purchased in 1971. The man with the fixed gaze and unblinking eyes who always seemed to fear nothing on the screen told his story a decade later in Weekend magazine:

  “There was actually another house adjoining it, so we bought that one, too, and knocked down the wall between them to make one large living room. That’s when the fun started. We began hearing strange noises – thumping sounds. There was no explanation. We checked throughout the house on many occasions but could not find their source. At first, naturally, I was frightened. I began to worry about what I had unleashed by changing the nature of the old house – had I disturbed something or someone? Gradually, my wife, Meira, and I came to realize that the sounds were distinctly those of children running about – just children. When we’d knocked down the adjoining wall, we’d allowed the spirits of the children who’d once lived there to run through the house again as they’d probably done many years before when it was all one big house. Now that we believe we know what the once-mysterious sounds are, we just treat them as sounds of joy. We can feel the happiness of the children; it seems they’re happy to have a free run of the place after all those years, probably centuries. So what harm is that? A happy house is a haunted house!”

  Dirk Bogarde, a contemporary of Reed and Pleasence, who made a quite different reputation for himself on the screen as a subtle and sensitive actor with a variety of roles from the hapless young medic Doctor in the House (1954) to the groundbreaking homosexual in distress in Victim (1961), also lived in a haunted house. The former scenic designer and commercial artist, who became a leading figure in the British film industry and, latterly, a bestselling author, owned Bendrose House, an old farmhouse on Amersham Common, Buckinghamshire. Talking to ghost hunter Peter Underwood in 1971, he said:

  “The oldest bedroom in the house, a gloomy, timbered chamber was reputed to
be haunted. While I was there, seven people slept in the room at different times and, without previously being aware of the others’ experiences, all discovered themselves waking suddenly between three and four in the morning with the feeling that an electric shock was passing through their bodies. The experience seemed to last about four minutes. Some mysterious footsteps were also heard in one particular corridor of the house. While I was living there, I learned that Oliver Cromwell was reputed to have stayed there and some local people believed it was his spirit that infested the farmhouse.”

  Bob Hoskins, another pillar of the British cinema industry, who has made an international reputation from playing a diversity of roles from the Fascist dictator, Mussolini, in Mussolini and I (1985) to the straight man to a group of cartoon characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) also came to the screen after a variety of jobs including filing clerk, accountant, labourer and picking mangoes and bananas in Israel. One provided him with an experience he has never forgotten – as he told Jim Crace of the Sunday Telegraph:

  “When I was a lad I took a job as a porter at the old Covent Garden market. I was shifting some vegetables one evening when I saw a shadowy figure. It was a ghost – the ghost of a nun from the convent that the market was built on. I told this old porter about it, but he didn’t laugh at me. He said, ‘You’re privileged, son. You’ve seen the lady – you’re going to have a lucky life.’ He was dead right, wasn’t he? I’ve seen the lady and I’m leading a lucky life.”

  Experiences with the supernatural in old houses are not exclusive to male actors. The beautiful Susannah York, who came to public notice exuding sexuality in Tom Jones (1963) and participated in a controversial nude lesbian scene in The Killing of Sister George (1968), physically bumped into the supernatural while playing Margaret More in A Man For All Seasons in 1966. She explained:

  “My husband, Michael Wells and I were looking for a new home. One of our friends owned a rambling, sixteenth-century mansion in Essex. He wanted to sell it and invited us to go and look over it with him and, if necessary, stay a few days to get the feel of the place. So Michael and I went there after a day’s filming and arrived at about eleven at night. It looked marvellous, just the sort of home we were looking for. One of the most attractive features was a moat surrounding the house – on which some black swans were swimming – and a drawbridge that provided the only access to it.”

  When Susannah and Michael went to bed that night they were convinced they had found their dream home. Somewhere they could literally pull up the drawbridge and keep the world at bay. But at about 3 a.m. Susannah sat bolt upright in bed:

  “I had no idea what had awakened me, but I felt so wide awake that I got up and went out into the long corridor off which all the bedrooms led. Suddenly this awful feeling crept over me. I couldn’t see anything or anyone, but I had the feeling that some other force was present. I was unable to move. I just stood there scared out of my wits. I tried to scream for Michael, but I fainted. I learned later that as I fell I knocked over a vase and the clatter awoke my husband. He carried me back to our room, but it took him over half an hour to revive me.”

  By the following morning Susannah had decided she must have had a bad dream. She and her husband were still keen on buying the house and decided they would return during the next break from filming. Again they returned at night – and once more Susannah grew edgy and irritable:

  “Suddenly, I knew what was bothering me. It was the moat. I realized the drawbridge was the only way in and out. I had a horrible thought of being trapped in the house with the drawbridge not working – and having to jump from the window into the moat with the black swans. We left the place immediately and later Michael telephoned the owner to tell him we did not want to buy it. When he explained why, the owner said, ‘Susannah must have met the ghost. It’s the ghost of a girl who was trapped in the house when the drawbridge wouldn’t work. She jumped from a window into the moat and was drowned . . .’ ”

  Two other leading actresses have had encounters with spirits in their homes – although both properties were rather more modern. Elke Sommer, the sexy German actress less well known for her sharp intelligence and fluency in seven languages than her starring roles in Love Italian Style (1960), The Art of Love (1965) and Deadlier Than The Male (1966), shared a terrifying brush with evil spirits in her home in Benedict Canyon in 1966. Her writer husband, Joe Hyams, in the Saturday Evening Post of 2 July 1966, later described the events in detail.

  The couple had bought the house in the summer of 1964 and thought nothing was untoward about the spacious property until a German newspaper reporter doing an interview saw an unidentifiable man walking from the house to the swimming pool. According to the journalist, the figure was about fifty years old and wore a white shirt, dark tie and black suit. Two weeks after this, Elke’s mother, who was visiting the couple, woke up and found a man staring at her – but he vanished before she could scream. From then on, people in the house kept hearing unusual sounds in the dining room – in particular the noise of chairs being pushed back and forwards.

  The Hyams decided to call in specialists to investigate the mystery and learned that the previous owners had had similar unnerving experiences and reached the conclusion it was haunted. In his article, Joe Hyams concluded:

  “Whoever or whatever the ghost is, we do not intend to be frightened out of our house. But a few nights ago, after locking the downstairs doors and checking all the windows carefully, I went to bed anticipating a quiet night. Just as I was falling asleep, Elke nudged me and said, ‘Listen!’ I sat up in bed and listened. The dining room chairs were moving again.”

  The story took another strange turn in the autumn when an English clairvoyant, Jacqueline Easthund, was quoted in Reveille magazine warning Elke and Joe, “I see your dining room in flames next year; be careful.” In the spring of 1967, the prediction came true, as Elke Sommer told reporter Sally Francis:

  “Joe wrote a long article about the haunting. It was a strange but true story. He brought in all this photographic apparatus hoping to get some pictures of the ghost but he never did. Then, one night, just after we had agreed to sell the house, it caught fire. The fire started near the dining table where the ghost had been seen. If we had not been awakened by a mysterious knock on the door we might have been killed by the fire if it had spread beyond the room. It was all quite incredible.”

  A similar sense of unease awaited lovely Charlotte Rampling and her husband, Brian Southcombe, when they returned from honeymoon to a Kensington flat after their wedding in February 1972. She had already played a series of provocative leading ladies in The Knack (1965), The Damned (1969) and ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (1971) and had just completed work on her ultra-sensual role in The Night Porter when she talked to Barbara Jeffrey of the Sunday People in December 1974:

  “When we returned to the flat we found there was another woman in the flat – a lady ghost. We used to see her at least once a week. We never got to see her face – it was just a board creaking, then a flash like the hem of her nightdress disappearing as she flitted along the passageway. There was a very odd incident one night. Brian’s dressing gown fell down behind the bathroom door. I didn’t bother to pick it up – but in the morning I found it folded very neatly over the end of our bed. Brian would never have bothered to do that. I knew straight away who had, though – our ghost.”

  The couple grew to know when the figure would appear. There would be a strange, tense feeling in the air. A number of visitors to the flat also saw the ghost. Then, says Charlotte, the spirit disappeared as suddenly as she had appeared. The actress has a theory as to why this happened:

  “Brian had lived in the flat for about a year before we were married and always felt uneasy about the place. I think the spirit was that of an old lady who had lived in our flat for twenty years before she died in hospital. Maybe she came back because she wanted to die at home. She must have been about all the time. I believe that when I moved in she came to ha
ve a look at me. Perhaps after she’d seen a woman’s influence here again she felt she could leave her home in safe keeping and rest at last.”

  Probably one of most enduring rock ’n roll stars of the twentieth century, Tommy Steele also tells one of the most fascinating stories to come from the ranks of popular musicians. He related the facts to Innes Gray of TV Times in August 1974:

  “When I was sixteen I was paralysed from the waist down – the result of an attack of peritonitis – and taken to Guy’s Hospital in London. They thought I’d be dead by the morning and I was taken into a room full of old people. Behind the screen round my bed I could hear a child’s voice giggling, then a coloured ball landed on my bed. I could move my arm so I threw it back. I went back to sleep and next morning, when they took the screens away, I was cured. I had a brother, Rodney, who died when I was three. The two of us were inseparable until then. And, although I didn’t remember it at the time, my mother told me that his favourite game was throwing a ball to me.”

  Every bit as well known on the British music scene is the jazz duo of Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth. In 1982, she gave a remarkable account to Richard Maino of her haunted home, a 150-year-old Gothic-style rectory set in seventeen acres in Wavendon, Buckinghamshire, where the couple lived: