The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  “I think our ghost must be a nice ghost. If he objected to us or our way of life he could have frightened the wits out of us by now. I’m not the only one to have seen him so that shows it’s not just my imagination. Somebody else saw him in the dining room, but just won’t believe that he is a spirit although the only other person in the house was right on the top floor.”

  Cleo believes the ghost has very good taste and loves music. Unfortunately, though, there is no real clue to his identity. She added:

  “It’s hard to describe what he looks like. He is more of a vision, a faint impression rather than a clear form. He looks as if he lived in the last century, possibly earlier. He seems restless about something – that’s what I feel about the manner in which he behaves. John used to laugh at my stories about the spirit going around in the grounds, but that was until many of our friends reported similar strange incidents. I have never tried to make contact with the vision. I can only presume that he was happy at the old rectory in this life and likes to return from time to time – perhaps because it is still a happy place.”

  Possibly one of the most haunted of modern singers is Lynsey De Paul, who has lived in a haunted house and recorded one of her best-known songs in a studio where something very supernatural occurred. She told the first of her stories to Jill Evans of the News of the World:

  “It was in 1977 when I was recording ‘Rock Bottom’ for the Eurovision Song Contest. With me were my manager, Mike Moran, and a sound engineer. Just after 3 a.m. we began to hear what is known as ‘white noise’ – the kind of crackling sound you hear when there is interference on a radio. It gradually became so loud that I had to take my earphones off. The engineer was baffled, finding nothing wrong with the equipment. When the sound became louder we all got alarmed. Then suddenly this enormous triangle of white light appeared in the middle of the room. I felt pressure on me from head to foot as though someone had place an enormous hand on me. I was terrified and burst out crying.”

  Lynsey said that the two men were also scared at seeing the light, but only she experienced the feeling of pressure. The light then disappeared. She went on:

  “When I recovered I said, ‘Have we got a ghost?’ The engineer gave me a strange look and told us about strange happenings in the men’s lavatories at the studio. Apparently people kept complaining of sharp jabs in the back when they went into the loo, although there never appeared to be anyone there. Some time later I met Michael Bentine who is an expert on the paranormal. He explained to me that the white light was a friendly thing – a manifestation of energy that went back as far as the Druids.”

  Shortly after this Lynsey moved into a very Gothic-looking house overlooking London’s famous Highgate Cemetery, a place that with its mixture of ornate mausoleums and huge tombs has prompted reports of grave robbing, horror stories and even vampire attacks for many years. Talking in 1982, she said:

  “I suppose if any house looks as it should be haunted it’s this one. And since I’ve been here, there have been lots of strange forces at work. Doors in the servant’s cottage have opened and closed mysteriously and one of the stained-glass windows and a heavy metal mirror fell to the ground. I have also seen bits of electric flex bursting into flame and whenever my keys go missing they turn up in the strangest places – like the freezer, for instance. Whatever causes all this isn’t necessarily evil or an evil force – although I’m sure there is only one force. It’s people who make it a good or bad force.”

  A strange force was also reported to be at work in the Elizabethan manor house at Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire used as a home and recording studio by the former Rolling Stones’ lead guitarist, Mick Taylor, in 1977. According to Valerie Jarvis, Taylor’s partner, lights being flicked on and off and noises intruding without any apparent cause had interrupted a number of sessions. She told the Observer: ‘None of the guitars and recording equipment have been touched, but the ghost has made recording a struggle.”

  Mick Taylor himself commented: “I did hear voices in the kitchen the other day and when I went in no one was there, but it didn’t really worry me. We’ve been told a spectral churchwarden called Jerman who committed suicide over an unrequited love haunts the house. None of us think he is malevolent, though.”

  In September 1985, Sting told John Blake of the Daily Mirror that two ghosts – a mother and child – haunted his house in Hampstead where he often wrote and made recordings. He had staged a séance with a top spiritualist to try and communicate with the couple. He explained:

  “The house is definitely haunted. Ever since I moved in there other people have said things happen. Like they’re lying in bed and voices start to talk to them or things go missing. I was very sceptical until one night after Mickey, my daughter, was born. She was disturbed and I went to see her. Her room was full of mobiles and they were going berserk. I thought there must be a window open. But the windows were dead shut. And this baby was lying there with her eyes open. About two days later I woke up and looked into the corner of my bedroom and, clear as day, there was a woman and child standing in the corner. And I heard Trudie, my girlfriend, say, ‘Sting, what’s that in the corner?’ I just went totally cold, icy cold.”

  Rod Stewart has admitted that he is a firm believer in ESP. Journalist Lee Bury of the News of the World reported in November 1980 that three years earlier, Stewart had a premonition that his friend Elton John was about to have a heart attack. Lee wrote:

  “Rod told his wife Alana, who regularly consults a Hollywood psychic. A week later Elton collapsed. Doctors at first thought it was a heart attack, but later diagnosed exhaustion through overwork.”

  The spirits of two of the most famous rock stars of the twentieth century, Marc Bolan and John Lennon, have allegedly been in contact with people close to them according to recent reports. Marc Bolan, the T-Rex front man who died in a car crash in 1977, and whose work is now enjoying a huge renaissance of interest, spoke to his former manager, Mick O’Halloran, through medium Ronald Hearn in 1980 during a public demonstration at Ryde on the Isle of Wight. O’Halloran said:

  “The most fantastic thing was the stance adopted by Mr Hearn while Marc was communicating through him. It was exactly the way Marc used to stand on stage. Mr Hearn told me of things which in no way could have been public knowledge. He spoke of one incident when I arrived in an American hotel wearing a huge pink wig and Marc fell about laughing. And he recalled two occasions when Marc narrowly missed being electrocuted and crushed to death. But the most conclusive evidence was the fact that Marc was writing a new song just before his death. I didn’t know that – but when I mentioned it to a fan she said that Marc’s father told her the police recovered a half-finished tape after his death.”

  John Lennon is claimed to have made contact with Robin Givens, the former wife of heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, who lives in a Hollywood home once occupied by the legendary Beatle while the group were on the west coast of America. Robin says that she has heard Lennon “singing in the house late at night or talking quietly out by the swimming pool”. This story of the musician speaking from beyond the grave is one of several reported by Linda Domnitz in her book, The John Lennon Conversations. According to the medium, Lennon contacted her just four days after being shot and killed in New York. She says, “I had been meditating with a friend when John came through to me. He is such a warm and friendly spirit and has been passing on a lifetime of wisdom to me.”

  There have been ghostly experiences among the latest group of media celebrities, too – the television soap stars. A few of the most interesting will suffice for a great many more among this group of actors and actresses who are mostly usually being “haunted” by the press and paparazzi. One of the earliest superstars of the small screen was Patricia Phoenix who played the legendary Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street. Pat spotted the spectre of an old lady who subsequently appeared several times at her home in Sale, Cheshire in the 1960s:

  “I was alone in one of the rooms when my dog su
ddenly pricked up his ears. I looked around and saw the woman – she was holding something. It could have been a candle or a bowl of some kind. She walked out of the door. I went after her, but she’d vanished. Even after I moved from that house to one in Salford, she would visit me from time to time. Eventually I found out who she was – or is. My old home had been owned by Madame Muelier who is believed to have been an actress of the 1800s. She died there alone – but for her dog.”

  Stratford Johns who played the brusque Chief Inspector Barlow in the phenomenally successful series Z-Cars, spent much of his screen career battling villains and hard men. Unbeknown to the public, he also had to use all his renowned toughness in a struggle with a very dark force in his home, an old coaching house in Suffolk. He talked about how this clash became a test of strength – literally:

  “I have this instinct which tells me when something is about to happen. Call it a gut feeling and it’s usually right. Often it’s something slight like stubbing my toe – but other times it can be far more serious and unpleasant. I feel as if I’ve suddenly become hollow and am being filled with ice-cold water from my feet up. It’s quite horrible.”

  Of the various experiences Stratford Johns had with the unwelcome phantom in his house, one amounted to a violent battle, which could have been fatal when he was in danger of being pushed down some stairs. Fortunately, he had had the foresight to install heavy handrails. The encounter happened one day when he suddenly sensed a presence in one of the bedrooms:

  “I walked in and the room was like a cold store, that strange icy feeling again. There was nothing visible, but I felt I had to be forceful. I bellowed at it to leave my house. That seemed to work for a while. The room’s temperature became normal. I went into the next room and it was there, but it seemed to leave again. I walked out on to the landing and as I was standing there, a massive blow on my back sent me flying headlong down the stairs. I just managed to grab the handrail and stop myself hurtling down the entire flight. The fall could have easily broken my neck – thank God I had replaced the old rail. Far from making me cower with fear, although it was frightening, it just made me very angry. I went berserk. I ranted and raved. The spirit didn’t hang about that time. It did return later, though, and we had to have it exorcized.”

  The machinations and plotting in the famous American TV series Dallas gathered huge ratings as well as many stories in the media. The only one with a supernatural angle concerned the tiny actress Charlene Tilton, who played the role of Lucy Ewing, frequently referred to as “the poison dwarf”. Off-screen, Charlene was a delightful raconteur and on several occasions told the story of being haunted by the ghost of her grandfather.

  “When I was little I lived with my mom and grandfather in a little flat in Hollywood. I was six years old when he died and I often had to be left alone when my mother went out to work. One day, my mother came home from work and found me crouching on the doorstep, shivering with fright. I told her there was ‘something scary’ in the flat. Without a moment’s hesitation, my mom told me that my grandfather’s spirit was still there.”

  Strange things continued to happen as Charlene grew up. She was always conscious of her grandfather’s presence.

  “I remember very clearly something incredibly scary when I was a teenager. One day a neighbour called in and asked if I would turn down the radio, which was blaring out pop music. In a teenage tantrum I refused. Then things began to happen. The plug jerked out of the wall without anyone being near it. When I pushed it back into the socket it was jerked out again so violently that sparks flew. The neighbour stood there with her mouth open, struck dumb by what she had seen. But we knew it was the ghost again.”

  When Charlene left home to live in another district of Hollywood and pursue her career as a model and actress, she hoped she had left the spirit behind. When she settled down with a boyfriend in a new apartment she thought no more of the past – until her man started to complain that the place was “spooky”. Charlene agreed with him – and also suspected she knew the reason why:

  “You could sense something or someone invisible when you walked into an empty room. There were pockets of cold air and nearly every door would open silently and close again. Eventually I could stand it no more and moved again hoping the presence would grow tired of following me. Thanks to the success of Dallas I was able to buy a beautiful place overlooking a canyon. There were no more problems with the ghost. I like to think that if he was my grandfather he had at last found peace.”

  Even stars of science fiction series have not been exempted from supernatural occurrences. William Shatner, the original intrepid Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame, who has “boldly gone” where others have feared to tread, walked into an inexplicable incident that could have come from an episode of the show while on a motorcycle trip with three friends in desert country outside Los Angeles. Speaking in 1989 he explained:

  “We’d just stopped for a drink when we saw this other bike rider approaching us. In that kind of country it’s not advisable to ride alone. What would happen if you came off your bike? Anyhow, the guy tagged along with us. The moment I looked into his face, though, I felt an odd vibration humming through the air. Nobody else noticed anything. Then somehow I fell behind the others and shortly afterwards my bike hit a rock and overturned. I fell on the exhaust pipe, injuring my leg and badly burning my face.”

  Lying on the ground, Shatner realized that the others were too far ahead to notice his accident. He called out, but no one returned. He struggled to his feet and tried without success to restart his motorcycle.

  “I knew I was in trouble. My leg, face, everything seemed to be giving me pain. But I knew I couldn’t just stay there under the burning sun. So I began dragging and pushing the bike. When I reached a small hill I thought I could force-start the machine if I could roll it down the slope. But by the time I reached the brow, the effort caused me to black out. I wasn’t unconscious very long and when I came to I could hear that weird humming again. Strangely, too, I suddenly felt totally fit. My limp had gone, the burn had disappeared, and now the bike seemed to have a mind of its own. It wanted to go its own way, not mine. I couldn’t fight it, so I just trailed along. I didn’t know where I was heading – until I suddenly came over the brow of a hill and there was a gas station in the distance.”

  Shatner hurried to the station and asked the attendant if he could repair the bike. The man gave one push of the pedal and the machine roared back into life. At that moment, his three friends also appeared:

  “I asked them what had happened to the stranger and they said he’d just vanished shortly after I fell behind. I heard the strange humming again and saw the stranger on a far hill. He was waving at us, but I was the only one who could see him. I didn’t care – I waved back my thanks to whoever – or whatever – it was that had saved my life.”

  Gillian Anderson, who played FBI Agent Scully in the X-Files, has investigated every kind of supernatural event from UFOs to Alien abductions on the small screen. But she was forced to ask for help when eerie spirits beset her own home in Vancouver in 1995. Talking to Liz Hodgson of the Sunday Mirror, she recalled:

  “It was really creepy. When my husband Clyde and our daughter, Piper, moved into the house weird things began to happen. Lights going on and off, noises at night and after a while it seemed there was something attached to me. I knew we would have to get help.”

  Gillian’s knowledge of the supernatural had been carefully cultivated by all the reading and study she had done for her role as Agent Scully. She knew the best source of help would be a local expert:

  “I contacted a Native American who visited the house and told us we were living near an Indian burial ground and they were still in a state of unrest after dying in a plague. He then performed a ritual called ‘Smudging’ in which herbs were burned to purify the space. It was amazing what happened. Once it was over we felt that whatever had been there had gone.”

  Indeed, ghosts have not bothered Gillian And
erson again. But after another century of haunting can there by any doubt that the next generation of stars of films, music and television will not find themselves – when they least expect it – thrust into incidents very like those described in these pages?

  6

  Supernatural Tales

  True Ghost Stories by Famous Authors

  A substantial number of twentieth-century authors have written novels with ghost story themes, not all of them writers associated with the genre, the best of which I listed in my companion volume, The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories. The American writer Stephen King naturally features prominently in the list, notably with The Shining (1977) and Bag of Bones (1998). With this in mind I was interested to discover that King had actually come looking for a supernatural encounter for one of his books by staying in England in 1977 – a precedent that had worked for him earlier in the decade.

  In the early 1970s, Stephen and his wife, Tabitha, had been forced by bad weather while travelling to seek shelter in the palatial old Stanley Hotel near Estes Park in Colorado. He was already mulling over an idea for a story about a family trapped in a haunted locality and when he discovered that the hotel, built in 1909, had a reputation for being full of mysterious sounds, phantom footsteps, doors that opened and closed of their own accord, and even a few guests who had disappeared on the premises and never been seen again, he realized he had the concept that would ultimately become the terrifying Overlook Hotel in The Shining.