The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  A year later one of Father’s professors described an almost exactly similar experience he had had when bug-hunting in the Cairngorms. He was a materialist, but had been so profoundly startled that he wrote to The Times – and received a letter from a reader who had also been pursued by the “Thing.” Some years later, when I was living at Muckerach, the doctor told me that two hikers, for whom search-parties had been out three days, had been found dead. He showed me the exact spot on the map. It was the place of my terror. Both men were under thirty. One came from Grantown, the other from Aviemore. The weather was fine. They had spent a good night under the shelter-stone on the highest ridge, for they had written to that effect in the book which is kept up there. They were found within a hundred yards of each other, sprawled face downward as though they had fallen headlong when in flight. “I did a post-mortem on them both,” said the doctor gravely. “Never in my life have I seen healthier corpses: not a thing wrong with either of the poor chaps except that their hearts stopped. I put ‘heart failure’ on the chit, but it is my considered opinion that they died of fright.”

  1941: The tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas is a long one and owes much to Charles Dickens and the stories he wrote for magazines for the festive season. The poet and novelist ROBERT GRAVES (1895–1985), author of the imaginative reconstruction of the Roman way of life, I Claudius (1934), was fascinated by the supernatural and in a special Christmas article for Picture Post on 27 December 1941, described what he had felt and heard and seen in haunted places which had led him to some remarkable conclusions on . . .

  WHAT I BELIEVE ABOUT GHOSTS

  One may look at ghosts from either the religious, or the scientific, or the commonsense point of view.

  John Wesley argued that, since it is a Christian’s duty to believe the Bible, and since if he believes the Bible he must believe that the Witch of Endor raised the ghost of Samuel at the request of King Saul, therefore there are ghosts.

  The scientific view is that one cannot deny that ghosts exist, in the same positive way that one denies, on zoological grounds, the existence of centaurs or mermaids. A great many people claim to have seen ghosts, and the duty of scientists is to interpret in scientific language, if possible, what they mean by this. The interpretation is difficult, partly because scientists no longer agree on the old distinction between subjective and objective experience, partly because ghosts are not good subjects for laboratory experiment. Sir Henry Head, the neurologist, told me some years ago that only a single type of ghost had so far proved amenable to scientific treatment. This was the tall, glowering ghost that stands silent and immovable by one’s sickbed. He said that this ghost, which appears in Japanese prints as well as in clinical reports from European hospitals, corresponds with a particular kind of brain lesion and can be moved round with the bed. But he added that it was too much to hope that all ghosts could be simply explained as “phantasmagorial projections of a traumatic neurosis.”

  Far too much. The commonsense view is, I think, that one should accept ghosts very much as one accepts fire – a more common but equally mysterious phenomenon. What is fire? It is not really an element, not a principle of motion, not a living creature – not even a disease, though a house can catch it from its neighbours. It is an event rather than a thing or a creature. Ghosts, similarly, seem to be events rather than things or creatures – and nearly always disagreeable events.

  I reckon among ghosts the nameless and disembodied hauntings of particular stretches of road, clearings in forests, bare hill-tops. I have twice met with powerful examples of this phenomenon. The first occasion was in 1921 on a hill-top near Cwmbychan in North Wales, where there was an ancient British earthwork; the second was in the Spanish island of Majorca, in 1932, on the lonely coast road near Deya, where it is said there was once a temple of Diana. On each occasion it was dusk with a waxing moon, and I felt that sudden inexplicable dread that makes the hair of one’s head rise like the fur of an angry cat and the legs run with no sense of effort, as if one were skating. Previously, I had thought that when Shakespeare wrote about the haunted ship in The Tempest:

  Not a soul

  But felt a fever of the mad and played

  Some trick of desperation . . . Ferdinand

  With hair upstaring – then like reeds, not hair –

  Cried “Hell is empty and all the devils are here!”

  he was writing poetical nonsense. Now I know that he was giving a not exaggerated account of a disagreeable physical fact. The Greeks had a word for this sort of dread – “Panic” – meaning the fear that suddenly struck them in woods or on hills when the god Pan was about. I conclude that the spots where it is experienced have once been the scene of religious rites in which horror has been conjured up among the worshippers, and that the rocks and stones still occasionally sweat out that horror.

  Haunted houses seem to enclose sharp individual horror centred in a particular room, or else a general feeling of misery, sorrow, boredom or vice which pervades the whole building. Sensitive people can tell the difference between a happy house and an unhappy one as soon as they cross the threshold. But most of them would be ashamed to tell the house agent or caretaker: “I’d rather pay a thousand pounds than rent this place – it has an evil atmosphere.” They say instead: “I’m afraid, you know, that my husband would find that dressing room far too small, and there isn’t enough space for his books in the sitting-room. And the garden is much too large for just the two of us.”

  The Chinese are a more practical nation. I am told that the house-hunter there can usually choose between “a modest residence with a good feng-sui” (personal atmosphere) and “a palatial mansion with a bad feng-sui” – both offered at the same price in dollars. If he is a man of virtue and industry, with a large, virtuous and industrious family, he may be wise to invest in the bad house and restore its original value by the irreproachable emanations of his household. A house, near Braintree in Essex, where I often stay, and which originally belonged to Wm Benlowes, Sergeant-at-Law in the reign of Mary I, used to have an extremely bad feng-sui, and had passed through a succession of unpleasant hands before my friends bought it. They have now reclaimed all but the spare bedroom, where there is something that wakes one up with a start nearly every night at a quarter to two – it was a quarter to four when I was there last, because of Double Summer Time – the distinct presence of someone, it seems to be a woman, in great terror. This is evidently a ghost of long standing, because three years ago, when the beams were scraped, a small piece of parchment – which I have examined – was found in a bolt hole. It was a Latin prayer in Tudor handwriting, the conventional charm against evil spirits:

  O mitis Jesu, libera nos (Sweet Jesus, deliver us!)

  Haunting of the disembodied sort is a matter of degree. Every house that has had a previous occupant is, in a sense, haunted. For my part I would rather live in an ordinary moated grange where a Grey Lady or Headless Monk walks regularly than in a house that has been used as a reformatory, a lunatic asylum, or a Victorian boarding school. The walls are usually so soaked with miserable brooding that only fire could cleanse them.

  Of houses in which I have stayed for a time the two most unpleasant were the ancient stone-built house of Maesyneuadd, in the hills near Talsarnau in N. Wales; and a top flat in a modern block, built by a Belgian company, in the main street of Heliopolis, near Cairo.

  At Maesyneuadd, when I was staying there with friends soon after the last war, uncomfortable things were continually happening. Doors opened and shut without a draught, quite stiff ones, too. There were rappings on the walls of empty rooms, and one evening I saw a shade jump off a reading-lamp in poltergeist fashion. There was a long tradition there of owners who had drunk themselves to death from boredom, and one had hanged himself in the garret. On New Year’s Eve of 1919–20 we were all sitting round the fire in the drawing-room, mulling claret. I was on the right of the semi-circle and put my tumbler to cool on the side-table at the corner o
f the fireplace. When I reached for it again, two or three minutes later, it had been drained dry. Nobody had moved from the semi-circle of chairs and nobody had come into the room. I don’t say that the ghost had drained it – but certainly I had not, and a horror descended on us that the warm wine and the pleasant smell of nutmeg and lemon-peel could not disperse.

  The Heliopolis flat was far worse. I rented it for a month in 1926 from an Assyrian widow, because it was the only vacant one in the town, and I had to find temporary lodgings for my young family. It was full of gaudy furniture in bamboo and red plush and I remember a locked glass bookcase containing Hebrew books and a small French legal library. My Sudanese servants said at once that they didn’t like the place, and later, complained that there were afreets (evil spirits) about. I told them that it was only for a month, so they did not give notice. The sense of evil grew thicker and thicker as the days passed. Soon the afreets were almost visible, coming as apparitions between waking and sleeping, and as little black creatures, seen only from the corner of one’s eye, doing nasty things in the shadow of the sofa or bookcase. The most alarming phenomenon was the sudden whiff of burning that constantly spread through the flat even when there was no fire in the kitchen. The servants afterwards told us – I don’t know how truly – that the Assyrian husband had been burned to death in the flat some months before, and it had since been used as a disorderly house. But even this was not enough to account for the strength of our impressions. Perhaps someone had been monkeying about with black magic there; black magic is a means of reviving and focusing ancient evil, and anyone sufficiently idle, cruel and curious can achieve horrible results without much difficulty. But since it was not worth while to attempt a reclamation of the flat we cleared out after ten days and took rooms in a hotel.

  On the whole, I consider ghosts an unimportant and far less mysterious phenomenon than many others – for example, poetry and love. People who manage their lives well leave only gracious emanations behind them. It is the wastrels, the bores and the deliberately evil who give a place a bad name. The ghosts they leave behind should be sternly disregarded, as one disregards drunks who stop one in the street and begin a rambling hard-luck tale mixed with threats and hiccoughs. One should show neither sympathy, embarrassment nor alarm.

  Another sort of ghost, which since J W Dunne’s Experiment With Time has scientific as well as commonsense justification, is what may be called the “cosmic accident.” In 1938, three friends and myself rented a chateau, La Chevrie, a few miles from Rennes, in Brittany. Five of the chimneys were full of bees, there were crickets behind the library fire, bats in the attics, rats in the cellar, but the feng-sui was excellent. One day I found, in a box of rubbish, an ancient sheet of cooking recipes, and began deciphering and translating them. There was one for Blanc-Manger, which began: “On the evening before, put two pieces of fish-glue as big as your thumb (or else gelatine) to melt on the embers. The next morning bring it to the boil. Take one and a half quintons of sweet almonds and half a quinton of bitter almonds . . .” Late that night I was crouching at the kitchen fire, blowing up the embers with the bellows to heat a coffee-pot. I was thinking to myself: “Melt the fish-glue on the embers . . . but I think gelatine would taste nicer . . . I wonder how much a quinton of almonds is. . . .”

  Suddenly a woman’s voice behind me called out sharply: “Marthe!”

  “Oui, Madame,” I answered automatically.

  But of course no one was there. As I did not believe in the absolutely reality of time I was not greatly surprised. I told myself afterwards: “It was cosmic coincidence. Somehow, by thinking about the fish-glue and the embers and the almonds, I strayed into another region of time. Marthe’s mistress, seeing me squatting over the embers in the half-light with my back turned, naturally mistook me for Marthe. She must have got a shock when I stood up and she saw a tall, dark man in black corduroy trousers: In fact, probably I was her ghost, not she mine.”

  Madame’s voice, by the way, did not sound in my outer ear, so to speak, but in my inner ear as voices do when one is just waking up.

  I have only once seen a daylight ghost. That was in France, in June, 1915, when I was with the B.E.F. A soldier called Private Challoner had been in my company at Wrexham when I was serving with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. When he went out with a draft to join the 1st Battalion he shook my hand and said “I’ll meet you again in France, sir.” I was sent out myself a month or two later, but I got posted to another regiment, the Welsh. One evening in June, while it was still light, my company mess, in billets at Béthune, were celebrating a safe return from Cuinchy trenches. We had fresh fish, new potatoes, green peas, asparagus, mutton chops, strawberries and cream and three bottles of Pommard. While we were singing very noisily – a medley of church anthems and drinking songs – Challoner looked in at the open window, saluted, grinned and passed on. There was no mistaking him or his cap-badge. No Royal Welch Fusiliers were billeted within miles of Béthune at the time. I jumped up and rushed to the window, but saw nothing except a fag-end smoking on the pavement. Challoner had been killed at Festubert, a few miles away, in the futile May 16 offensive.

  I don’t know how to account for this, but since Challoner’s battalion had been in Béthune shortly before his death, there may have been a slight cosmic accident, assisted by my memory of his last words to me and (if you insist) by three or four glasses of Pommard.

  1945: Cornwall is again the setting for an uncanny story by one of last century’s great female novelists, DAPHNE DU MAURIER (1907–89), who lived for most of her life on the south coast and featured it in several of her most popular books, notably Rebecca (1939) with its immortal opening line, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again.” In an area steeped with legends, it is not surprising that Daphne du Maurier should have woven supernatural elements into a number of her plots. An event that occurred not long after she moved into her famous home at Menabilly caused her to wonder if she herself had been part of a “vision of the future” as she explains in . . .

  THE LADY IN BLUE

  It was in 1945 when I moved to my house, Menabilly, at Par in Cornwall that I had a very strange experience. The house was a seventeenth-century mansion overlooking the sea and St Austell Bay and seemed like the ideal setting for the book I was writing, The King’s General, about a family riven by war and haunted by a grisly discovery.

  I was told that the house was haunted. That a “lady in blue” – late Victorian or even Edwardian – had been seen looking out of a bedroom window. But I was quite unable to find who it was that had actually seen this lady in blue.

  Ever since then it has amused me to imagine that the lady in blue was not a phantom of the past, but a peep into the future. For when I was writing The King’s General, I wrote it in the room where the lady was supposed to appear. I also frequently looked out of the window for inspiration and invariably wore a blue smock while I was working.

  So perhaps the Victorian or Edwardian person walking across the lawn in 1910 had looked up and seen somebody of 1945 at the window!

  1948: An unfurnished house in Brighton had become impossible to let because of its reputation of being haunted when the novelist and broadcaster ALGERNON BLACKWOOD (1869–1951) decided to spend a night there in 1948. The author, who had become known as “The Ghost Man” because of his supernatural experiences in Canada, America and Britain, which he had turned into numerous short stories, was not daunted by the task – but admitted later to being quite unprepared for what happened that night at . . .

  THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

  In the distant days when I was so eager to see a ghost with my own eyes. I recall a singular example of the strange effects of terror; and I don’t mean the terror of meeting a tiger, or a burglar face to face with a pistol raised; I mean spiritual or ghostly terror, whichever you prefer.

  I’ve always felt a psychological interest in these alleged effects of terror: paralysis of movement, speechlessness, hair turning white (apparently quite un
substantiated) and the rest. With regard to the latter, you may know the delightful tale of the old lady who was so terrified by a ghost that her wig, carefully draped on the dressing-table, was white next morning.

  But coming back to my own personal experiences, I once came across a result of terror that was quite new to me. If you don’t want to hear about it, just turn over the page to the enchanting pictures you will find. If you care to listen, however, may I add, before my little tale, that it was only years later I came across a reference to this particular effect of ghostly terror in Kipling. It is the only reference I know. Kipling, you must admit, was a prince of accurate observations. He mentions it. All right. If you’re still reading, here’s what happened.

  Eager to see a ghost with my own eyes, I was lucky enough to get advance notice of haunted houses the Psychical Research Society considered worth investigating, cases, that is, with good evidence behind them. Among these was a certain unfurnished house in a Brighton square. The story was horrible. A manservant in the household, crazily in love with a housemaid, had crashed the girl over the banisters to her death. The evidence of the crime, as also the evidence supporting its alleged re-enactment in ghostly terms, was overwhelming.