The Ghost Hunters

by Neil Spring

  – Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

  The sun was creeping up as I slipped the weighty manuscript back into the leather pouch with the broken lock. I sat staring at it.

  Was it possible?

  You might think that a middle-aged psychologist would have little about himself to doubt. But when I had finished reading Miss Sarah Grey’s memoir of hope, terror and betrayal, I sat in my study at home in Oxford, unravelling as the shape of the world and my own sense of belonging within it dissolved.

  That manuscript dropped a conclusion on me, like a hammer on the mind.

  As someone who has spent my career helping people cope with trauma, I admit only with grim reluctance that I have evaded the truth about my past since I was eleven. Since the day my parents decided to sit me down at the kitchen table in our farmhouse on the snarling North Yorkshire moors and tell me the truth: that I wasn’t really their son.

  The truth of my adoption rattled through me. All my life I had felt out of step with the rest of my family and now I knew why.

  ‘Your real mother was from a respectable Catholic family in London,’ my parents told me. ‘She was just twenty-six when she came here to give birth to you.’

  They explained to me how difficult it must have been for a woman of her age to have a child out of wedlock; that little else could bring more shame upon a family.

  I felt no animosity towards the woman who had given me away, but lacking knowledge of her identity, my true father’s identity and thus my own heritage cast me adrift on doubt, leaving me certain only of one thing: the fundamental essence of my identity did not descend from my adoptive mother. Or my father.

  He was a doctor of medicine, but also held a degree in physics and could easily have pursued a career in that field. Quite brilliant, he read Einstein and Bohr in his recreational hours. He understood them.

  I could not. Something in me recoiled from the notion that everything, including thought, was ultimately reducible to chemical reactions in my brain. I felt it with every shred of my being and found the evidence in every pungent smell, every vivid colour. There had to be something more. Not necessarily a soul, but something more than bits and pieces. Beyond the particles.

  I became fascinated with finding it, looking for evidence of it. It became my secret hobby to read about people who claimed abilities in extrasensory perception and out-of-body experiences. I consumed everything I could access that was written about world religions and belief systems, folklore and ancient mythology.

  My adoptive father did not encourage these pursuits. While I was young he tolerated my interests with pursed lips and heavy frowns, consoled that I was interested in reading even if the subject matter was not as orthodox or intellectual as the Greek scholars he had mastered as a young man. He was always a loving and decent father, but as I grew towards adulthood his tolerance evaporated. ‘If you want to be taken seriously,’ he insisted, ‘then you must choose a serious path.’

  I know he would have been pleased for me to choose medicine, though he never pressed it upon me. Perhaps he thought the subject beyond me. One thing I did know: his curiosity about my ancestry was growing. Where did my fascination with ‘pseudoscience’, as my father scornfully disparaged it, come from if not my mysterious birth parents?

  We knew nothing else about my biological mother, but my parents were unstintingly generous in their offers to help me find her. I shook my head against the idea. I already had a mother, sweet and dedicated to my well-being above all else. She had more than earned her claim to the title of Mother, and no one would take it from her.

  My parents – for that is what they were – had left London in their late thirties, and sold their house to begin a quieter life in the cottage that came with fifteen acres of pastureland. He took a more relaxed position than the prestigious but life-encompassing post of consultant neurologist; being the only General Practitioner within a fifteen-mile radius was still lucrative and respectable and allowed time for him to write monographs on various ailments of the brain.

  She, inevitably, retired from her job as a primary school teacher to devote herself to keeping house and home for the family. They were good people, generous and, with only one significant exception, unfailingly supportive. What right did I have to risk dishonouring them by searching for my birth mother?

  I wanted for nothing. Our village in the valley of Farndale was remote and peaceful, and notwithstanding the sombre, bleak atmosphere that characterised the late winter afternoons, my upbringing was stable. My life was happy. I had no desire to change it.

  Thankfully, the tension with my father never degenerated into outright hostility, but even so there are few things more corrosive for a young man’s spirits than a parent’s thinly concealed disappointment. I learnt to conceal the more outré theories that caught my interest beneath the academically respectable cloak of psychology.

  The most modern of the sciences, of all academic disciplines psychology offered the greatest possibility of delivering an explanation of the mind that did not rely purely on molecular actions in the brain.

  My father agreed, through gritted teeth, to fund my study of Philosophy and Psychology at Cardinal College, Oxford.

  Yet conflict raged within my heart. By the time I had left university the need to find my biological mother had returned, more urgent than before. The compulsion was almost irresistible but resist it I did. Whatever my birth mother’s reasons for giving me up, I knew her suffering must have been unbearable. Was it fair of me to risk finding her when she might not want to be found, to risk embarrassing her with shame? I couldn’t do that.

  Nevertheless, the questions continued and eventually a visceral need to know opened a hollow space at my core. I filled that space by carving out my own route through the world: a career in psychology, first as a counsellor for children receiving the dubious benevolence of the social services and later in academia; a return to Oxford for my doctorate, then as a lecturer and eventually a Fellow of my old college.

  Psychology may have been enjoying a wave of popularity, but I worried that if I publicly announced the full range of my scientific interests in areas such as extrasensory perception and telekinesis, my colleagues would laugh at me. That I would never publish again. At least, not in my own name.

  That was the solution I deployed. I conducted my research into these esoteric fringes of psychology in secret, and published my findings under assumed names, in heretical journals. Journals that sold a great many subscriptions in plain, unmarked envelopes.

  The work was my therapy, helping pacify my mind and banish, or so I thought, the residual doubts about my unconventional preoccupations and my unknown parents.

  I helped children with traumas that eclipsed my own and in the process I helped myself. I learned to quiet my questioning mind; I brought my thoughts to order and subdued them. I learned to be at peace with the past.

  And I was, for a time. Until John Wesley’s letter. Until Senate House and its curious library on the eighth floor.

  Until Sarah Grey.

  Now, as dawn broke through the shuttered windows of my study, I was overcome with an all consuming anger. All my life I had wondered about my birth mother, hoping she had enjoyed a happy, fulfilling life, only to discover, so late, how mislaid those hopes were.

  The truth about my real father’s identity lunged at me from the manuscript. Harry Price had been a rogue and a fraud, had abused the trust of my mother and of the whole world. He had presided over a carnival of gaudy lies, and covered his deceptions with the charm of a showman. The idea that my abiding interests were the legacy of his blood was intolerable.

  How could John Wesley, a stranger, have kept this from me? How could I have been the last to know?

  I spent all morning gazing into my coffee, struggling to make sense of the information I had read. I began to redefine my own identity in the language of Harry Price’s shortcomings. I recalled my arguments with my adoptive father, and realised with dismay that I wanted him b
ack.

  Maybe, just maybe, I was mistaken. Growing up in North Yorkshire, I was very well acquainted with dark tales of ghosts and superstitious legends. Perhaps this explained why, like Harry Price, I had held a lifelong interest in matters of the peculiar.

  The argument raged back and forth in my head. The clues were compelling: same dates, same name, even the same village. I had to know the truth, if not for my sake for that of my dear wife Julia and my little ones.

  Where to start? Who to ask? My adoptive parents had taken their offer to help me track down my parents with them to the grave. There was only one way to know for sure.

  By lunchtime I had informed Julia that I was I stepping out, heading back to London, to Senate House and the Harry Price Magical Library.

  *

  I found the curator, John Wesley, as before, on the eighth floor, sitting at a large desk before a high leaded window. I strode towards him, past playbills from the 1930s and framed posters for performances by various mediums, magicians and entertainers. Something about the gloomy room was different; there were more boxes than I remembered and fewer books.

  ‘How long have you known?’ I demanded once I was standing over him.

  The old man raised his head into the weak light. At the corners of his eyes, beneath yellowing skin, blue veins crawled away. ‘Too long,’ he said with grit in his voice. ‘Long enough to have watched you from a distance to be certain that you were the one to help me.’

  ‘Help you?’ I slammed the leather pouch containing the manuscript down in a puff of dust. ‘Help you with what?’

  ‘Please sit down, Dr Caxton.’

  I did so reluctantly, keeping my eyes on the curator’s wary features.

  ‘Dr Caxton, I’ve preserved this odd collection my entire life. But now I’m retiring’ – his gaze dropped sadly on a box already packed full of rare books – ‘the University wants to close it down, be rid of old Harry’s legacy for good.’ His chest rattled with another cough. ‘Someone must ensure that never happens, that these great questions about the occult and the mysteries of the universe aren’t left unopposed and unchecked.’ He darted me an expectant look. ‘You.’

  I couldn’t help scanning my surroundings even as I recoiled at his suggestion and feeling, in a peculiar way, joined to them now; I could hear the artefacts whispering to me. There was something unnervingly compelling about those voices. They spoke, rustling and seductive, directly to my soul, directing their enticements at my secret interests. Like my father before me, I could lie to the academic community, to this man before me, to the whole damn world – but not to myself.

  If the infamous Harry Price really was my father, then who else was better fitted to carry on his work? Work which would vindicate my own clandestine research and resolve the questions that had obsessed me all my life or take me to the brink of ridicule and professional ruin.

  ‘It’s out of the question,’ I blurted, scrambling for reasons to refuse him. ‘If Sarah Grey and Harry Price learned anything, it’s surely that these things are evil, better left alone. Borley Rectory took the better part of them both.’

  I turned my head away only to find myself staring directly at the stone bust of Harry Price.

  ‘You can’t run from yourself, Dr Caxton. It’s in your blood – Harry Price’s passion, his quest. You were conceived in that house by the original investigators of the case; you are the child of the Rectory. It is your duty now to continue what your parents, your father, started.’

  He was a tactician of truth, this gnarled and wily man. His exhortations pierced my feeble protests and thudded like arrows into the bullseye of my secret heart.

  ‘Sarah Grey,’ I said firmly. ‘Why are you so certain? Where is your proof?’

  ‘We’ll get to that,’ he said with a conviction that obviated the task. The proof was in his pale transfixing gaze. In his cracked and antique voice.

  ‘Then tell me where she is buried. I shall need to say goodbye, to pay my respects.’ I held his gaze defiantly even as my lip trembled. At last the doubts burned off like morning mist and golden rays of certainty came blazing through.

  ‘Your respects? Oh, my dear man.’ Wesley raised his eyebrows and the faintest trace of amusement crinkled the corners of his mouth. ‘Sarah Grey is alive.’

  The words jolted me to my feet and for a dreadful moment I felt the truth of his remark. The room swayed with me. I gripped the ladder-back chair to brace myself, in a surreal echo of that day in Yorkshire, decades away, at the kitchen table.

  Behind his half-moon spectacles, Wesley’s eyes narrowed with shrewd watchfulness. ‘You will help me,’ he commanded with gentle menace, ‘if you want to know the truth.’

  Against my inner reluctance I could feel myself nodding. No sooner had I returned to my seat than he reached beneath his desk for a battered briefcase. Buckles snapped and the case flipped open, releasing bundles of old papers – among them, a faded photograph of Sarah in a slim black dress standing next to Price on the doorstep of the Laboratory in Queensberry Place.

  ‘Was she mad?’ I asked.

  ‘She was in love …’ shrugged Wesley. ‘The same thing, perhaps.’ He slid something towards me across the desk: a small envelope, which I took and proceeded to open.

  The note within, seven months old, was scrawled in black ink:

  Overhurst Farm

  Broad Haven,

  Wales

  6 March 1977

  Dear John,

  I wanted to thank you for your prolonged efforts to keep interested investigators at a distance from us both. We appreciate your discretion more than you’ll ever know.

  It’s odd. Sarah always said she believed that the curse of Borley Rectory fell upon those who deceived others; but after she wrote the manuscript she entrusted to your care, her spirits lifted. Her confession exonerated her, somehow, from whatever dark punishment she believed was waiting for her.

  Although life has been very kind to us here in Wales, I do worry for my Sarah; that when I am gone she will be left behind, alone with her fears. When that day comes, and if it is within your power, please do your best for me and ensure she is not neglected.

  You see, John, there are mysteries here, in Wales, too. Odd things. Something very strange happened at a local school just recently. The children witnessed something most bizarre, something predatory. It needs the attention of an expert … you will know the sort of expertise I mean.

  Although I think Harry Price did psychical research a disservice with his occasional tricks, I do believe that, so long as mysteries endure, there should always be someone like him following in close pursuit. For all our sakes.

  Yours in trust,

  Vernon Wall

  Wesley was at my side, laying a bony hand on my shoulder. ‘Afterwards, she spent her life with Vernon in the one place she felt safe, the farmhouse she ran to in 1933.’ He gave a pained sigh. ‘And all these years I did as they wished … I kept Vernon and Sarah hidden – kept their location secret.’

  I tracked his gaze down to the weighty leather pouch resting in the glow of the table lamp, then looked again into the old man’s face. His eyes revealed a quiet expression of hope.

  ‘It was you,’ I ventured finally. ‘You brought them together. Vernon and Sarah.’

  He shrugged. ‘What else could I have done? Some ghosts haunt buildings; some we carry around with us. When Sarah entrusted her manuscript to me, I saw the weight of the thing had taken its toll upon her – she was haunted …’

  ‘By the Borley curse?’

  He nodded and, pausing for thought, added, ‘That and the rest: her own false hopes, her squandered desires. Well … I knew where to find Mr Wall …’

  ‘So you ensured they found one another.’

  ‘My good deed. Although I’m sorry to say it did not go unpunished …’

  He reached into his cardigan pocket, then held out a trembling, clenched hand and opened it.

  ‘Oh God …’ I stepped back, feeling the hair
s on the back of my neck prick up. In the palm of his hand lay a small brass medallion.

  ‘The lies have their price,’ said Wesley, before breaking into another frightful bout of coughing.

  ‘You took it from her? Why? Why did you keep it?’

  ‘I can’t get rid of it,’ was his next remark. ‘It always comes back. And helping Sarah was my calling. I answered it, as you must answer yours now, Robert. Vernon Wall died seven months ago and Sarah is alone. She needn’t be.’ He gripped my shoulders, studying my face. ‘The ghost hunter’s son! His quest passes to you now.’

  I glanced again to my right, to the stone bust of Harry Price, the man who was supposed to be my father, the collector and discoverer. And then, another thought struck me: ‘There must be more … other stories Sarah never shared. The places she and Harry went to together, their investigations into the supernatural, other adventures.’

  Wesley’s eyes glinted. ‘Oh yes, Robert. And if you’re willing to listen – if you’re able to find her – Sarah will tell you.’

  *

  I looked up ahead and through the rain-soaked windscreen saw the gloomy lane open into a small clearing beyond which wide fields sloped down towards the cliff edge. Directly ahead was an old well, and immediately to the right, behind a low, crumbling stone wall, was the farmhouse. Once, perhaps, it had been gleaming white, but now its walls were weathered yellow and the paint around the windows had peeled.

  No phone calls. A chain of letters, lengthening, culminating. Eventually a meeting. Here in West Wales.

  Her handwritten notes described me as a ‘beautiful child’. They told me how much I had weighed, that I had been a strong, happy baby. The nurses had smiled when they saw me.

  Her last note:

  After you were born, I went to a convent which stood on the outskirts of Ilkley Moor. You slept in my arms all the way from the hospital. When the time came to say goodbye, I froze. The waiting nun had to prise you from my arms. She walked away with a part of me, and from that day I wondered – every year, every birthday, every day – what had happened in your life, who you had become and what you looked like.