Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  “He didn’t seem to be hooded but had long hair and was bearded,” stated Mrs. Janet Halls of Norwich, and Mrs. F. Nicolaisen of Cambridge volunteered that “I had seen the figure on the previous showing but didn’t mention it for fear of being laughed at. This time I traced it out for my husband, but he still couldn’t see it, much to my annoyance.”

  If all these people were suffering from mass hallucination, it is certainly strange that they hallucinated in so many different ways, for many of the reports differed in slight but important details. “Towards the end of the showing, my sister and I distinctly saw an image of a cowled monk from head to waist,” wrote Miss W. Caplen of Lowestoft. Probably Mrs. J. G. Watt of Cambridge put it best when she wrote, “I had no idea what sort of ghost I was expected to look for, and I saw nothing until the two men were discussing the house. But outside the window I then saw clearly, behind them, the figure of a monk. He wore a monk’s habit and was bare-headed, with the monk’s haircut associated with the monks of olden days, bald patch with fringe, either fair or gray hair. His face was that of a young man and had a very serene look on his face. His arms were hanging down in front of him, with his right hand placed lightly on top of his left. I saw this all very plainly and naturally and I thought everyone else would be able to, so I thought the television people were having a game with the viewers, and I thought it was all a hoax. Next day a friend told me of Anglia TV’s purpose of rerunning the film, and I realized it was serious. The strange thing is that our television set is not what it used to be, and we don’t get a good picture—and yet I saw this monk very clearly.”

  By now it was clear to me that twenty-three people—or at last count thirty-one—had actually seen or thought they had seen the figure of a monk where none was supposed to be. Many others, if not the majority of viewers, however, did not see the monk. Obviously, then, it was on the film, and yet visible only to those with psychic gifts. This raised interesting questions: while we know that ghosts appear only to those capable of seeing them, can apparitions also be photographed selectively, so that they can be seen only by those who are psychic, while others not so gifted will not be able to see them in the photograph or film? Also, was the case of the ghost on television unique, or are there other such instances on the record?

  According to the London Express of December 19, 1969, five shop girls saw a ghostly figure on a closed-circuit TV set. “The girls and customers watched fascinated for forty-five minutes as the figure of a woman in a long Victorian dress stood at the top of the stairs in the boutique in High Street, Kent, occasionally waving her hand and patting her hair. Several times the figure walked halfway down the stairs and then went back up again to the upper floor of the boutique, which had been converted only a few months ago from an old house.” The first one to see the ghostly apparition on the closed-circuit television setup was eighteen-year-old Sally White, who pointed her out to her colleague, Janet Abbs, saying, “You’ve got a customer.” But Janet Abbs walked right through the figure. One of the other girls, Andree Weller, said “As the figure went upstairs it disappeared into a sort of mist and then reappeared again.” The incident happened at lunchtime, and though five girls saw the woman, when they walked upstairs where they had seen her, they found the place empty. When they returned downstairs and looked at the screen, there was the ghost again. Unlike the monk of Morley Old Hall, who appeared for only a few seconds on screen, the Victorian lady of High Street, Chatham, Kent, stayed for a whole hour, apparently enjoying her performance hugely.

  However, what none of the viewers who had written in had pointed out was the fact that the figure of the monk was not in proportion to the size of the two flesh-and-blood people talking on the screen at the time: the monk seemed considerably smaller than they were. Ruth Plant found the emergence of the second ghost most exciting. She decided to consult two other London mediums, to see whether they might pick up something concerning his identity. One of them was Trixie Allingham, who immediately “saw” a ghostly monk around the house and informed Ruth that he had been attacked by someone who came in while he was praying. The monk had defended himself by striking the intruder with a chalice. She felt that the priest, with the help of a soldier, had later buried the body and the chalice. George Southhal, primarily a drowsing medium, volunteered that there was a chalice buried on the premises and described a set of cups, the largest of which was reserved for a man of importance. He saw Morley as a place similar to a pilgrims’ retreat. At the time of Miss Plant’s sitting with George Southhal, neither of them knew as yet that it had been a little-known pre-Reformation practice to give a special chalice to a prior or bishop, since he was not supposed to use the chalice used by ordinary priests. All the mediums Ruth Plant sat with were emphatic about some buried treasure and secret passages leading from the house to a nearby church. The latter could be confirmed during later research. As for the treasure, it hasn’t been found yet, but the effort continues.

  I decided to arrange for a visit to Norfolk at the earliest opportunity. That opportunity presented itself in September of 1966 when a film producer offered to come with me to inspect potential sites for a documentary motion-picture. I suggested Morley Old Hall and notified Ruth Plant to get everything ready: arrange for a visit to the Hall, suggest a suitable hotel nearby, notify Anglia TV of our desire to see the controversial television documentary, and, finally, to make everybody happy, let the local press have a go at us—the American ghost-hunter and his entourage paying a call to the local ghost. Miss Plant was to serve as technical advisor to the film. (Unfortunately, the film was never made, because the producer and I could not see eye to eye on a treatment that would allow the story to be told in exciting but scientifically valid terms.)

  We rode up to Norwich from London. The project’s film producer, Gilbert Cates, who was a firm nonbeliever, could not see how such things as ghosts were possible, while the third member of the party, the distinguished motion picture scenarist Victor Wolfson, argued equally strongly that such things as spirits were indeed not only possible but likely. At one point the discussion got so heated that I began to worry whether we would ever arrive together in Norfolk. Finally, Victor Wolfson changed the subject. With a shrug, he commented, “I don’t think I can convince Gil. He’s underdeveloped.” Gil, a good sport under all circumstances, smiled. As for me, I began to wonder about the wisdom of having brought my two fellow adventurers at all.

  Ruth Plant had advised us to bed down for the night in Norfolk, but my producer friend was so eager to be close to the “action” that he insisted we stay at the little Abbey Hotel at Wyndmondham, which is very near to Morley. We arrived at the hotel, tired and dirty, just in time to have an evening meal.

  Walking early, I looked out onto the church and cemetery below my windows. It seemed very peaceful and far removed from any ghostly encounters. I took a look at a local map supplied to me by Ruth Plant. The city of Norwich, where we would view the television film, was nine miles to the east, while Morley Old Hall was a little over twelve miles to the west.

  The abbey church at Wyndmondham was an impressive edifice for a village of this small size. Early in the twelfth century, William D’Albini, who had been given the town and manor of Wyndmondham, which included Mor-ley, for his help with the Norman invasion of England, established here a monastery consisting of a prior and twelve Benedictine monks. The Benedictines, wearing black habits, were the most aristocratic and wealthy of all the religious orders, and, because of that, frequently came into conflict with poorer, humbler religious orders. It also appeared that Richard, William’s brother, was made Abbot of St. Alban’s, in Hertfordshire, one of the largest Benedictine monasteries in England, and Wyndmondham was a sort of daughter house to St. Alban’s.

  “But the relationship between the two houses was never good, and the jealousies and rivalries between them only ceased when, in 1448, Wyndmondham became an abbey in its own right,” writes the Reverend J. G. Tansley Thomas in his History of Wyndmondham Abbey. I ha
d the occasion to study all this while waiting for the car to pick me up for the short journey to Morley Old Hall.

  After twenty minutes or so, there appeared a clump of bushes, followed by tall trees—trees that showed their age and the fact that they had not been interfered with for many years. All sorts of trees were growing wild here, and as the road rounded a bend, they seemed to swallow us up. We rumbled over a wooden bridge crossing a deep and pungent moat. Directly behind it was a brick breastwork, overgrown by all sorts of plants. This was the second, inner moat, I was told later; the outer moat was farther back and scarcely noticeable today, although in Saxon times it was a major bulwark. The car stopped in front of the imposing mansion, built of red brick and topped off by grayish-blue shingles in the manner of the seventeenth century. Part of the surrounding wall was still standing, and there were two very tall trees inside the inner moat, which gave Morley Old Hall a particularly romantic appearance. The Hall rises three stories, and windows had been replaced in many of them, attesting to the owner’s skill at restoring what he had bought as a virtual ruin. We walked up a beautifully restored staircase, to the second story, where the Cotterill family lived at the time. Much of the mansion was still uninhabitable. Some rooms consisted of bare walls, while others still had ancient fireplaces in them, staring at the visitor like toothless monsters.

  Ruth Plant had managed to arrange it so that the principal witnesses to the phenomena at the Hall would be present for my interrogation, and so it was that we assembled upstairs in the library—not the magnificent Stuart library of old, but a reasonable facsimile. I first turned to Frank Warren, a man in his middle seventies who had once lived in the house, long before it passed into the present owner’s hands. He had come from the nearby village to talk to me, and later I paid a courtesy call on his little cottage, adorned with beautiful flowers from one end to the other: Frank Warren was, and is, a dedicated gardener. Like so many people of the area, he is “fay,” that is, psychic, and he recalls vividly how he saw and actually touched his pet dog two months after the animal had died. But the human ghost at Morley Old Hall was another matter.

  “I was working in the garden,” he began, “and the lady of the house said, ‘I wish you’d clip around that window; those pieces annoy me.’ So I started to clip. It was a beautiful day, with the sun shining. All at once, just like that, there appeared a lady in the window, as close to me as you are and she looked at me. She was tall, and I noticed every detail of her dress. She looked at me and the expression on her face never changed. Her lips never moved and I thought to myself, ‘I can’t stand it. I’ll go and do some work in the vegetable garden.’ When I returned she was gone, so I completed my job at the window. Well, I used to go and have a meal with the housekeeper. I said, ‘There is something I’d like you to tell me: who is the other lady living in this house?’

  “‘Well,’ she replied, ‘there is no other lady living in this house. You know exactly who is in this house.’ I replied that I didn’t, because I had seen somebody here I had never seen before.”

  Apparently the housekeeper was frightened by the idea of having ghosts about the place, for Lady Ironside, who was then the owner of the Hall, summoned the gardener about the matter. “I can’t help it,” he replied to her protestations. “I saw her with my own eyes.” It was wartime and Lady Ironside was hard put to keep servants about the place, so she asked the gardener please to keep quiet about the ghost.

  “Did you ever see the lady ghost again?” I inquired.

  “A fortnight afterwards I went past the other window, on the opposite side, and there sat the housekeeper reading a book, and beside her sat the same lady. The housekeeper didn’t see her. She wore a plain black dress, which seemed a bit stiff and went right to the ground, so I couldn’t see her feet. I had a quarter of an hour to examine her, and I didn’t see her feet.”

  Gordon Armstrong had come from London to talk to us at Morley Old Hall. “This is my second visit,” he began. “I was here toward the end of July last year, 1965. I was working in London at the time and hitchhiked my way through the night and arrived at Morley in the small hours of the morning. Having walked up the road, I came into the house—it must have been somewhere around 2 o’clock in the morning—and at the time I had already heard a ghost being there, or rumored to be there, so I was half expecting to see one. Of course, I had never seen a ghost before, so I was rather apprehensive. When I came up the stairs in the dark, with only a small flashlight to help me, I heard a sound that reminded me of a cat jumping from one landing to another. This was on the third-floor landing.”

  “Did you see a cat?” I asked.

  “No, I didn’t see a cat. I thought I was alone, that is, until I heard someone breathing in one of the rooms. Part of the floor was only rafters, without floorboards, so one could hear what went on on the floor below. It was one of the rooms on the second floor where the noise came from.”

  “What did the breathing sound like?”

  “I thought I heard a man breathing rather heavily.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I was sitting up there on these rafters, and it was pretty dark. I didn’t feel like meeting anyone, so I slept against a wall up there. I must have been asleep for a couple of hours. The wind was blowing, and I woke up once and went back to sleep again, and when I came to the second time it was just getting light. I went down and explored the house further and found the room where the noise had come from, and there was a sort of couch there, so I lay down for a bit and dozed off for another couple of hours. I looked at the room and realized that no one had slept there during the night.”

  Ruth Plant remarked at this point that the area where Mr. Armstrong had heard the heavy breathing was the same spot where her friend from Norway had also heard breathing, though she thought it could have been a woman, not necessarily a man.

  Later on, the television people ran the controversial documentary for us. None of us saw the monk. We stopped action at the spot where thirty-one people said that they had seen the bearded monk, but all we could see were two men in conversation.

  Nevertheless, the question of identifying the two ghosts at Morley intrigued me. This was one of the oldest and most fought-over spots in all of England, and the emotional imprint of many periods was undoubtedly still very strong. In antiquity the Iceni lived in this area. Their famous Queen Boadicea battled the Romans here in the first century. Later the Saxons made it a stronghold, and there is undoubtedly much undiscovered treasure in the ground. “A few years ago a ploughman turned up a wonderful collection of Saxon silver not far from Morley,” Ruth Plant, ever the historian, explained. Scandinavian raiders had been there at an early stage: the word mor in Morley means mother in Norwegian. In 1066 a survey of all the land in England was undertaken. Known as the Domesday Book, it listed Morlea as belonging to one William de Warrenne. He was a wealthy Norman baron who took part in the Battle of Hastings. The Domesday Book also states that the land was let out to a priest and five freemen. Eventually the manor passed from the Warrenne family into the hands of the Morleys, and in 1545 it was sold to Martin Sedley, a Roman Catholic, whose family held it until 1789, when the direct line died out. It appears that the house fell into disrepair soon after, for, according to Ruth Plant, the Norfolk Directory of 1836 describes it even then as a “farmhouse encompassed by a deep moat.” White’s Norfolk Directory of 1864 named a certain Graber Brown as Lord of the Manor, and called Morley Old Hall “an Elizabethan house with a moat around it now used as a farmhouse.” Eventually General Lord Ironside, World War I hero, bought it, but he passed on soon afterwards, and it passed into the hands of the Cotterills.

  Since we could not stay on in Norfolk beyond the two days assigned to our visit, I entrusted further research to Ruth Plant. She concentrated on the monk and, whether through historical intuition or her psychic ability, shortly came up with some strange facts about one of the abbots of nearby Wyndmondham Abbey. “I unearthed the extraordinary fact that one
of the abbots went completely mad and was so violent he was put into chains and died in them at Binham Priory. I believe I can find out more about this if I go to St. Alban’s Abbey where the records are kept.”

  I encouraged Ruth to undertake that journey, and a few months later she contacted me again.

  Ruth had managed to get hold of a rare book in a London library which contained a commentary on the records of St. Alban’s Abbey done by an eighteenth-century vicar. It contained the story of a prior of Wynd-mondham whose name was Alexander de Langley. “He went violently mad while in office at Wyndmondham and was recalled to St. Alban’s,” Ruth Plant informed me. “He lived around 1130 and died in chains at Binham Priory, about ten miles from Morley. I am sure Alexander de Lan-gley, the mad prior, is the ghostly monk.” In a further effort to throw light on the two ghosts at Morley, Ruth visited Lady Ironside, who resided at Hampton Court.

  “I had agreed with Ricky Cotterill not to mention the ghostly side, “Ruth Plant explained to me. “But she greeted me by remarking about ‘that lovely Morley and the lovely lady who is seen standing at the window looking at the view.’ She then asked me if I had ever visited it, making it quite clear she knew nothing of my psychic experiences concerning it. She added that many people have claimed to have seen her, though she didn’t think that any of them would still be alive in the village to talk about it now.”

  But who was the ghostly lady at the window? Ruth Plant showed Lady Ironside the letters written to Anglia TV. One of the letters describes not a monk but a ghostly woman wearing a mantilla. Lady Ironside felt that the ghost must be Anne Shelton, daughter of one of the great supporters of Mary Tudor, which would account for the impression received by Ruth Plant that the female ghost was Catholic, and for her hearing a Hail Mary.