Rather by subterfuge, I got the keys of the empty house from the Brighton agents, and I well recall the agent’s admission, when I pressed him, that the house was said to be haunted. That admission (from a house agent) took some getting, but I got it. And I planned to spend a night in this unfurnished, empty haunted house.
I had arranged to take a sister with me, but at the last moment she got “cold feet”. She just couldn’t face it. Nor did I blame her. In the daylight of the sunny Brighton front it was easy; when the dusk fell and shadows began to creep, it was different. It so happened that our hostess exclaimed suddenly. “Oh, I’ll come, if you want a companion. I don’t believe in this ghostly stuff and, anyhow, I don’t care a damn!”
We went together. It was about 11.30 p.m. The night was still. No wind. And the sound of the surf fell booming through the deserted square as we made our quiet way, not talking much, I noticed. A moon, almost at the full, silvered the empty square and silent streets. Everybody seemed in bed. My companion, my hostess, whom I knew slightly, was a youngish woman, gay, cheery, chatty. But as we entered the square and approached the house, her chatty volubility, I noticed, died away. It was all so silent, so deserted. The bright moonlight, the booming of the surf, these alone struck our senses. We padded on together then in silence towards the empty house. I recall wishing I had been alone. I didn’t quite like her increasing silence.
And then we reached the house in the corner of the square. It looked menacing to me in that blaze of moonlight. I had brought with me a thermos, candles, matches, food, and a rug. First making sure there was no one in sight, above all a wandering bobby, we mounted the steps and I put the key in. Once inside, I closed the front door behind me and took out my matchbox. For this was before the days of electric torches. I must mention. And as I opened the box, there was a sound of someone coughing close beside me. There, standing in the darkness of the entrance hall, someone coughed. It was a man’s cough, I swear.
It gave me a nasty turn, I admit. There was someone else in the empty house besides our two selves. There was no possible doubt in my mind about that cough. It was close beside me as I stood in that darkened hall. It was a natural, not a premeditated cough. A shiver ran up my back. Yet, that strange thing, as later interrogation proved, was that my companion had not heard it. It came to my ears only. Now, please remember that of seeing a ghost I had no faintest fear. I was burning to see one. I had no fear of that kind, for my interest was far stronger than any superstitious terror. But that cough, close against my ears in the darkness – well, it gave me a nasty turn as I’ve said. And, to make things worse. I had opened my matchbox upside-down, so that its contents scattered on to the stone floor – and had to be picked up. A rat, a mouse even, anything might start a fire. Laboriously, while my friend said nothing, I picked them up – and lit my candle.
So, here and now, was the immediate problem. Somebody else besides ourselves was in this empty, unfurnished house. They might be crooks, using a haunted house as their hiding place. A dozen explanations flashed through my mind. But, at any rate, we must first search the house from floor to ceiling.
Persuading my companion with some difficulty that this was first necessary, we carried it out faithfully from the kitchen and scullery to the servants’ rooms on the top floor. A nasty, creepy business, I admit it was, expecting any minute to see a face in the shadows or a figure slinking round a door. I think the servants’ attics were the worst. It was here of course, the murderer had found his victim before he crashed her over the banisters to her death. We found – we saw – nothing; and eventually, we sat up to wait for events in a small room at the top of the stairs leading from the attics to the lower floors. We sat on the large boards, a lit candle shining through the door of a half-open cupboard . . . waiting, waiting, waiting, and listening, listening, listening. We spoke little, and for some reason in whispers only. The moonlight fell in slantingly across the floor. We just heard the distant booming of the surf at the end of the square. Otherwise there was silence, silence broken only by our rare whispered remarks.
I was expectant, keyed up, hopeful. I admit it. But I had no sense of fear. If, by any lucky chance, as the hours wore on, there came a voice, step, or some evidence of anybody moving. I was ready, on the instant, to jump up and investigate. I might, God knows, see the terrified housemaid in full flight down the stairs, I might see the love-crazed man full tilt at her heels, hunting her down to her terrible death, I might, with any luck, see a ghost at last!
For my companion, so eagerly did I sit there waiting as the hours passed, I admit I had little thought; and then – suddenly – it struck me: “Does she feel the same? Is she perhaps a bit scared? Could she jump up and come with me?” I think her prolonged silence made me suddenly ask these questions. And I imagine an unwelcome doubt about her state of mind caused them.
We were sitting, as I said, side by side on the bare boards of the little room at the top of the stairs. The candlelight through the opened door of the cupboard made her face plainly visible. I glanced down at her sideways.
“If we hear a step or a voice,” I whispered, “we ought to go out and investigate it at once. Are you all right?”
But the sight of her face froze me stiff. She did not answer. Her face, not uncomely, had somehow gone back to the face of childhood. It was the face of a girl, lines and wrinkles all ironed out. It was a face masked by utter terror, its youthfulness somehow terrible.
My own reactions were immediate. I must get her out of the house. My mind worked quickly at that moment. If a step or a voice had come outside on the stairs or landing, she could not have moved for terror. I realised that. Her terror had been growing, increasing for hours evidently, but I had not noticed it. Had anything “ghostly” intervened just then, she would simply have passed out. I knew it. I felt sure of it. I must get her out of the house at once. To be caught in an empty house with an unconscious young woman on my hands at 2 a.m., with police and press inquisitive, publicity and the rest, would have been an unenviable situation.
And so it was. Explaining as convincingly as I could that nothing was now likely to happen – it was almost early morning and we had sat waiting for hours – I took her arm and we crawled together, side by side down the long stairs and so out into the street and the fresh keen air blowing from the sea. And she told me frankly that for hours, she had been too scared to move or speak, not even whisper.
And, as I mentioned, it was only years later that I came across a short story of Kipling’s where he mentions this strange effect of real terror that blots out the adult face and masks with the innocence of childhood. My experience at least can claim this backing from a close observer. An unusual thrill had certainly come my way though it was not, after all, the thrill I had hoped for, the thrill of seeing a ghost at last.
1953: Children feature in quite a number of ghost stories – usually tragic little figures who have died young or been brutally murdered, leaving their spirits to haunt the locality where they passed away. NICHOLAS MONSARRAT (1910–79) was a freelance writer who served with distinction in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and later wrote one of the classic books of the era, The Cruel Sea (1951). He had a deep interest in the traumas of the young, too – one of his first novels was This Is The Schoolroom (1937) – and never forgot an experience in Quebec in 1953 which he later described in an unsettling portrait of . . .
THE HAUNTED CHILD
This story was told me by a man who was a stranger, and an actor as well, so it may well have been a pack of lies. But the circumstances of its telling – near midnight, in a shooting-lodge in northern Quebec, with the first snowfall lying two feet deep outside, and the bare pine forest sighing all round us, and the wind howling authentically in the huge stone chimney – the circumstances were so eerie that belief was easy, and a prickling fear even easier.
Here is what the stranger – call him George – told me, on that memorable night. I think he told it to me because I had said somet
hing about his son, a boy of eight or nine, who was also staying at the lodge, though now safely in his bunk upstairs.
The boy had the most astonishing eyes I had ever seen – really enormous, bright blue, staring at the universe as if he did not believe any of it. When he had first looked at me, I felt as if I were myself gazing through a window into unfathomable depths, into a different world altogether.
Now, when I said something about this George answered: “He’s always looked like that.” Then he told me his story.
George was originally Hungarian, though he had lived in Canada nearly all his adult life, and had become thoroughly “Canadianised” – so much so that he played Canadian parts on television. He had married a Canadian girl, and as soon as a baby – the boy upstairs – was on the way, his mother had come from Hungary to help at the birth of her first grandchild, and then to stay on with the family.
She was an old woman, of peasant stock, who spoke no English; and she was very shocked at what Canada had done to her son – the different customs, the different language, the smart wife, the urban gloss over everything. She seemed to have a morbid fear that this would happen to her grandson, that he would know nothing of his forebears and lose all trace of his true homeland. She begged to be allowed to bring him up in her own way.
“Let me have four years,” she said, again and again. “Just a little time – enough for the language and some of the old customs. Then he will be yours again.”
For the sake of peace and quiet – and also, George inferred, because his mother would probably make a better job of the upbringing than his wife – they agreed.
But just after the baby was born, the old lady died.
The boy grew up good-looking, healthy and obedient; and absolutely normal except for one thing. He never spoke a word: not at 18 months, not at two years, not at three. He just stared at his surroundings with those huge blue eyes, without uttering a syllable or making a sound. Neither doctors nor specialists could do anything, nor suggest anything to reassure the worried parents. The boy was perfectly healthy. Perhaps he was a late developer.
One night, when the boy was about three years old, George and his wife returned home late from a party. They heard a voice from an upstairs room – a voice which could not have been the maid’s. They went up to their son’s bedroom, and there they found him. He was standing up in his cot, staring fixedly at one corner of the room, and talking sixteen to the dozen. It was a language unknown to his mother, familiar though half-forgotten by his father. It was Hungarian.
Next day, said George, the child was silent again, and he remained silent for another whole year. Then, when he was four years old, he suddenly became perfectly normal – except for those astonishing eyes, and a strong Hungarian accent as soon as he started, quite confidently, to speak English.
1955: Ghosts are found all over the world, of course, and though they have different traditions are essentially alike in the emotions they generate among eyewitnesses. ANTHONY BURGESS (1917–93), author of the cult novel about the exploitation of evil, A Clockwork Orange (1962), worked for several years as a teacher in Malaya where he became steeped in the culture and superstitions of the people and underwent an experience that was stranger than any fiction when he came face to face with a . . .
HANTU
The malay word for “ghost” is hantu, which, being so like the English “haunt”, suggests an ultimate tie-up somewhere in a pre-Sanskrit language. Hantu-hantu means “ghosts of all kinds,” which Malaya certainly has – the graveyard hantu, for instance, which gets out of the grave in its winding sheet and rolls rapidly around; the hantu of the kitchen, which throws things about until appeased with an invitation to a party; the female hantu which is mostly floating entrails and a cry of “Su su su,” a great feeder on the blood of newborn infants. For the hantu which my wife and I met there is no particular name: it was one of the forlorn spirits let violently loose by the Japanese during their occupation of Malaya.
We lived in King’s Pavilion, the old Residency of Kuala Kangsar, which is the royal town of the state of Perak. The bigger of the two bathrooms was a fine Hollywood affair with mosaic tiles, but it had been desecrated by being turned into a Japanese torture-chamber – highly convenient, since there were drains set in the floor for easy swabbing-out, and blood could flow down these as well as water. There were, however, great dried blood-pools all over the mosaic, and these could not be cleaned off. The little amah tried hard enough when she could be persuaded to enter the bathroom, but she hated it – indeed, she hated the whole house. “This bad place,” she said, “in Japanese time.”
That the bathroom was haunted there could be no doubt. My wife and I always found it cold, even in all that heat, but not pleasantly cold. The chill was somehow obscene, as though it were trying to turn itself into a bad smell. We used the other bathroom instead, and this was neutral, too small anyway ever to have been useful as an interrogation chamber. But it was not possible to ignore the major bathroom: it was next to the master bedroom, and its very door seemed to radiate cold. It was an inescapable presence.
It erupted into an active presence when Yusof, the cook, went screaming round the verandah one day with cries about a hantu. Calmer, he told a confused story about going into the bedroom to collect tuan’s shoes for cleaning (a sideline job) and finding the bathroom door half-open. He went to shut it and then saw something horrible. From the bathroom floor a strip of congealed black blood rose in the form of a miniature man and sailed towards Yusof. He banged the door shut and ran yelling.
Whether this apparition really appeared was never the point. The point was not to have servants rushing round the verandah screaming and possibly breaking crockery. To quieten Yusof we performed a mock exorcism ceremony, straight out of the Rituale Romanum, complete with a candle and bell, though we were dubious as to whether Oriental ghosts could be exorcized by a Western liturgy.
The next thing that happened was that Yusof (the cook) and the amah (whose name was Mas, which means “gold”) began, hearing a phantom voice. The voice seemed to be perched, like an invisible transistor radio, on one of the ventilator grilles that brought air into the bathroom from the verandah. This time, for some reason, they were not frightened. The voice was gentle, they said, and it seemed to complain a good deal, though never in anger, and they swore that it spoke Chinese – a language which they didn’t understand. One evening they came to us in the sitting-room and said, without fear, that the voice had just started up: would we ourselves listen?
We went with them to the verandah. Sure enough, a voice was quacking quietly and monotonously away from the ventilator grille. It was not possible to put a sex to the voice, but it was certainly there, and it was certainly not explicable in rational terms. I thought of the usual things – the metal grille acting as a sort of loudspeaker and picking up the news in Cantonese or Mandarin from somebody’s radio; a quirky echo from somewhere – but the hantu explanation seemed the easiest and hence the best. It was strange that four of us should be standing there and listening – interested, wonderstruck, but not frightened. But what was the voice saying?
It was difficult to persuade one of my Chinese colleagues – whose name I have forgotten but whom I will call Guan Moh-chan – to come in as interpreter for a hantu, but he eventually humorously consented, though he had many fruitless, though not whiskyless, evenings of waiting before the voice started again from the grille.
It’s still all so clear; the single bare bulb on the verandah ceiling, with flying ants thudding about it; a loud radio from the town; the last waktu called from the mosque by the bilal; the five hours of standing around, listening to the tinny voice from three feet above our heads. Guan spoke courteously to the hantu, asked and answered questions. “It is Hakka it speaks,” he told us. And then he gave a long speech to it, garnished with courtly hand-movements and deferential smiles. “Very simple,” he then said to us. “It has forgotten its name and its family but it remembers what the Japanese d
id to it in that room there. All it wishes to do is to go on complaining. I have said that it ought not to interfere with people’s lives by continually complaining, and it ought to go and live out there among the banyans in the Residency Gardens. I have told it to try to be a bird.”
Guan’s counsel must have got home. There was no further quacking and twittering from the ventilator grille, but in the garden, if one walked there at night, the voice could be heard complaining in the air. The complaints were gentle and conventionalised into a kind of bird-chatter. There is a bird called the burong hantu, which ought to mean “ghost-bird” but only means “owl”. For this kind of garden-ghost there seems to be no term: ours merely became the hantu King’s Pabilion, Malay possessing no “v”. The ghost must still be there.
The bathroom lost its obscene chilliness, and Mas could now be persuaded to enter it and have another try at cleaning the floor. The blood-stains yielded easily to soap and water. Twice, and in the daytime too, the ghost-voice did some good. It cried out when a child went too near a cobra’s nest, and it scared two drunken fighting Tamil gardeners and made them desist.
I’m a professional fiction-writer, but none of this is fiction.
1956: The American writer MIRIAM ALLEN DeFORD (1888–1975) was a reporter by training and a writer of mystery stories and science fiction by inclination. Her interest in the paranormal developed during her time as contributing editor to The Humanist where she remained sceptical about the claims of mediums and certain accounts of haunted houses. This was despite the “jarring phenomena” that beset Miriam and her husband when they bought a cottage in Mill Valley. As she explains in this article for True Experiences With Ghosts (1956) it was not possible to explain in “normal” terms what happened in . . .
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 51
