Ghost Stories for a January Night

Mindful of my friend Annette's grandfather, who was married to a medium and swore it was all a load of bollocks until the day he walked slap-bang into his wife's Native American spirit guide by the newel post at the foot of the stairs, I keep an open mind on the various phenomena that get lumped together under the heading of ghosts. There's much still to learn about the passage of time and the nature of memory, and even more about death and where all that energy goes.  As it happens, I've been reading and writing a fair bit about graveyards and ghosts lately, and it made me realise that I hadn't actually documented my several possibly paranormal encounters over the years and could be in danger, as old age encroaches, of forgetting them. So here they are.

That some places have a particularly eerie atmosphere is beyond question. Mostly, though, that slightly shivery feeling doesn't stop me wandering around them quite happily. There is, however, something unspeakably bad in the ruins of Berry Pomeroy Castle near Paignton.  I know this, partly because of well-documented apparitions, but mainly because each time I've been there, I've felt it.  

And then there's Lidwell Chapel on Haldon Moor, also in Devon and the site of the first documented serial killings in the British Isles.  The first time I went there, I was so shaken I vowed never to return.  I've since been back twice, each time with friends who heard me say I was never going back and persuaded me otherwise.  Both visits were as chilling as before. It doesn't help that the eponymous well - or spring - turns the red earth to what looks like blood under your feet, or that both collies who have accompanied me - in their individual times - were decidedly reluctant to go inside the ruins - and let's face it, what collie doesn't like thickets, water and sticky, sticky mud? All told, I shudder just driving past on the B3192 and even sunlit photos of the beautiful surrounding countryside make me anxious.

Closer to home is somewhere I've been very often, namely, the Frome valley in Bristol. The area known as Snuff Mills is in quite a deep gorge - though on nothing like the scale of the celebrated Avon Gorge - and in winter, it's as if the darkness seeps up from the ground as the afternoons dwindle. There's something about the atmosphere here that makes me think of it as a place of ghosts. I grew up with the story of two children, June Sheasby (aged 7) and her brother, Royston (5), who left home to visit a horse that was grazing in Wickham Glen one summer day in 1957, and who never returned home. Their bodies were discovered twelve days later, when a police constable noticed a small hand poking out of the undergrowth. (We're told thousands of people joined in the search for the children, and you have to wonder how it took so long for their bodies to be found.)  Their murderer was never caught and brought to justice, and it's impossible to know whether that dark episode - especially alarming for an over-sensitive, pony-mad little girl growing up nearby just a few years later - coloured my impression of the place, but whatever the cause, it's somewhere that makes me shiver.

Another disturbing atmosphere caught me off-guard during my visit to Canterbury Cathedral in 2011.  Time was tight - I had to drive back to Maidstone to pick up my son and I'd lingered rather too long at the spot where an eternal flame burns in memory of the murdered Archbishop, Thomas Becket, so I wasn't surprised to feel anxious as I hurried, head down, towards the north-west transept.  Except that suddenly I was very very anxious, to the point where I could barely breathe; my mouth was dry, my heart was hammering and I looked up to see an altar with a sculpture of three fearsomely jagged swords above it.  This, I then realised, was the spot where the Archbishop's murder had happened, not the site of the flame which merely marks where his shrine stood before it was destroyed in 1538 on the orders of Henry VIII. But I'd felt the actual location and its atmosphere of murderous intent before I'd learnt its significance.  

Now let's head to Langford Budville in Somerset.  Back in 2009, my sceptical friend Cathy and I were whiling away a cold January afternoon visiting churches in the vicinity before going to a gig in the evening.  Around dusk we reached St Peter’s Church in the aforementioned village, and I did what I always do as soon as I step inside a parish church – namely, make for the table where the guide books are sold, as they often have curious stories in them. I never got there, however, as almost immediately I felt such a dark, malevolent presence somewhere up towards the altar that I had to get out, immediately. It wasn't just fear; I also felt a visceral disgust - whatever it was, there was something profoundly obscene about it. 

What was strange, however, was that as I reached the door, I saw my companion dashing towards me.  ‘There’s something evil in here,’ Cathy gasped. ‘Got to get out!’  This from a nurse with years of training in Being Sensible, who'd give me short shrift whenever she caught me watching ‘Most Haunted’.  In fact, the only creepy thing that ever happened to her – though this is seriously creepy – was when Fred and Rose West tried to abduct her from a bus stop in Stokes Croft in the early 70s.  Until we went to Langford Budville, that is.  

Upon our return, I did a bit of research to see if there were any ghost stories associated with the church but found none. I suspect that if this presence were a 'thing', it would have been abandoned long ago.  So what Cathy and I both experienced that day remains a mystery.

At Berry Pomeroy, Lidwell, Snuff Mills, Canterbury Cathedral and Langford Budville, I neither saw nor heard anything specific: there was simply a dark feeling of evil in all four places.  Yet when I have experienced something which could be a ghostly encounter, it hasn't been frightening at all, merely intriguing.  

The Theatre Royal in Bristol has a reputation for being haunted by several different ghosts.  My strange experience happened in the spring of 2007, in the Ladies' toilets. My elder daughter had gone on ahead; I'd finished my drink before following her a couple of minutes later.  As I walked in, I heard a outburst of sobbing in one of the two occupied cubicles.  I turned and exchanged a concerned glance with a woman standing by the sink.  After a while, the door of one of the toilets opened and out walked its occupant.  She showed no sign of distress at all and departed with her waiting friend.  I began to worry.  As I hadn't passed her on the way in, and there was no one else in the toilets, I figured the crying person in the other cubicle had to be my daughter.  She hadn't long split up with her partner and I knew she was pretty miserable, but I hadn't realised just how distraught she must be to wail in public. After a bit I called her name, then tentatively pushed at the door.  To my surprise it swung open to reveal … no one.  I left perplexed, rather than frightened.  I still can't fathom what both I and the waiting woman undoubtedly heard. 

Eighteen months later, in autumn 2008, I visited Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, the thought of hauntings far from my mind as I wandered along the cloisters, taking photos and delighting in this fragment of wall painting and that play of light and shadow. 

In the north-east corner of the cloister we came to a room – well, more of a passage really – known as the Parlour, where visitors to the Abbey were received in mediaeval times.  To the left of the doorway was a rectangle of orange plastic fencing, closing off a section of uneven floor and partially blocking the view into the room.  As I stepped over the threshold I found myself looking over to the light-filled Warming Room on the right.  Through the open door I could see pillars and a massive cauldron, and I remember thinking how familiar they looked, as both room and its contents make an appearance in one of the early Harry Potter films.  Then I stopped dead and heard myself say 'Whoa!'  It was as if I'd come up hard against an invisible barrier or obstruction, or received a mild electric shock – or someone or something had walked through me.  At which point I looked towards the window at the back of the Parlour and saw three stone coffins along each of the three stone walls.

Again it wasn't scary, just a bit surprising.  When I got home I did a bit of googling.  There was no mention of a ghost specifically in that room in any of the official literature I read, but I did come across a photo of the interior complete with coffins and a vague, misty sort of blur that the person who posted it claimed was a ghost.  It's accompanied by a caption saying 'this is where I felt the presence of Anne Trubelle, a lady in her early 30s'.  But who Anne Trubelle was, when she lived, and where this information comes from wasn't stated.

Then there's the personal: the sensation, back in 1996, of sinking irrevocably under the stress of my then-life and suddenly feeling a distinct lightening of the weight on my shoulders, as if someone had walked up to me and physically lifted a burden from them.  

Later that year, I moved house with my now ex-husband and four young children.  My grandmother, Hilda Hill, was almost five years dead and I remember thinking, as I was packing up, that our new house would be the first she'd never visited.  I wondered if she'd know where we'd gone.  But I wasn't thinking of her a few weeks later as I walked from the kitchen of the new place into the hall and sensed her standing in the corner behind me.  So strong was this feeling that I stopped in my tracks and looked around.  I could see nothing apart from the understairs cupboard door and kitchen door and the short stretch of wall running between them, but I was so convinced she was there that I greeted her out loud and told her how happy I was that she'd come after all, that she'd found me. 

About six weeks ago, there was an echo of this on the day I moved to my new home.  Resting for a moment on a handy cardboard box and chatting with my son and his girlfriend, I was suddenly aware of sunlight, a feeling of warmth and my grandmother's laughter - Hilda all around me in my new life.     

My grandmother was the cornerstone of my childhood and my first three years of motherhood.   Almost 25 years after her death she still shapes the way I am.  A psychologist might say her constant presence in my mind would explain why occasionally I've imagined her present - except that both times I've been absorbed in what I was doing, yet have suddenly known, with all my wit and reason, that she is with me, as palpably as any other member of my family.  

Murder in the Cathedral

Last November I made my first visit to Canterbury and met up with my niece, Ruth, for a tour.  We had lunch first.  Then, as we were heading to the Cathedral, I had a call from Son the Elder, whom I'd deposited in Maidstone to watch a couple of sessions of Robot Wars.  He was bored.  Could I come and pick him up after the first session, please?

Thus, our visit to the Cathedral was somewhat rushed.  Also, I had it in my head that I would get back there this year, so didn't write about it (apart from the amazing graffiti with serifs there).  However, a return trip now seems somewhat more remote that I'd anticipated, so I shall at least post some photos before I forget why I took them.  

As well as ancient graffiti, I have a penchant for  worn flights of steps.  This isn't quite as impressive as the one leading to the Chapter House in Wells Cathedral, but I liked the way the light was catching the edges.  All those feet wot have trod up it, blah blah blah ... 

I'm only picking out a few things, partly because Ruth popped my guide book into her bag at one point because my hands were full and I never did get it off her.

This is a detail from the exquisite 1480 mural of the legend of St Eustace, showing the Roman General Placidus (Eustace) on his knees before a stag, between whose antlers he can see a vision of the crucified Christ.  Various events in the middle section of painting show Eustace's new found Christian faith being tested. At the top, Eustace, his wife and children are roasted to death inside a bronze statue of a bull on the orders of Emperor Hadrian (AD118) for failing to make a pagan sacrifice.  Which seems a bit harsh.  

I loved this stalwart, double-chinned cherub and could easily imagine it making jam when the Cathedral is closed to take to the next meeting of the WI.  

Who'd have thought that The Walt Disney Company moonlighted as stained glass window artists?

More to my liking was this window by Harry Stammers. 

There was, of course, all the wonderful soaringness you need in a mighty mediaeval Cathedral.

This vista lifted my spirits all the way up there with it also.

But my overall favourite part was the 11th century  Crypt, where for some undisclosed reason, you're not allowed to take photos (which meant that I had to sneak a few, obviously.)

This is a wonderfully delicate roof painting, ill-served by me and my camera. 

Not to be outdone by Winchester Cathedral, Canterbury has commissioned a sculpture, entitled Transport, by Antony Gormley for its Crypt.  Whilst it lacks the atmosphere of the stunning flooded Crypt of Winchester, where the figure interacts with, and is enhanced by, its watery surroundings, I still love this recumbent  floating body made from ancient nails replaced when the Cathedral roof was repaired.  

It's more a defined space than a solid, floating above the site of St Thomas Becket's first tomb, where he lay from the date of his murder in 1170 until 1220, when his bones were removed to a shrine in the newly completed Trinity Chapel.     

Talking of which, here's the eternal flame burning at the site of the shrine, which was destroyed, along with sainted remains, on the orders of Good King Psychopath in 1538.  

Time really was running out and I was feeling anxious about not having left to drive back to Maidstone, except that I was really very very anxious, to the point where it was difficult to breathe and then I turned and looked up and saw in front of me a small altar surmounted by a sculpture of murderous swords.  

I hadn't realised until then that Becket had been killed not where the flame was, but here, near the stairs into the Crypt.

'The wicked knight leapt suddenly upon him, cutting off the top of the crown which the unction of sacred chrism had dedicated to God.  Next he received a second blow on the head, but still he stood firm and immovable.  At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living sacrifice, and saying in a low voice, 'For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.'  But the third knight inflicted a terrible wound as he lay prostrate.  By this stroke, the crown of his head was separated from the head in such a way that the blood white with brain, and the brain non less red from the blood, dyed the floor of the Cathedral.  The same clerk who had entered with the knights place his foot on the neck of the holy priest and precious martyr, and, horrible to elate, scattered the brains and blood about the pavements, crying to the others, "Let us away, knights; this fellow will arise no more."'       

Edward Grim

Graffiti with Serifs in Canterbury

 

I went to Canterbury in November of last year and I still haven't written an account of my visit which I like to do so that I remember it.  Oh well, I suppose I shall at some point.  In the meantime, here's some of my favourite stuff from the Cathedral - graffiti with serifs.