Ghoul Brittania Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  The Moon Still Rises, or British Ghostliness Today

  PART ONE

  The Tableau of Horror, or The Elements of Ghostliness

  PART TWO

  ‘It’s humbug still!’, or The Sceptical Point of View

  PART THREE

  ‘It had not been light all day’: Atmosphere

  PART FOUR

  The Lighting Up of the Theatre, and the Infernal Illusion, or The Crescendo and the Manifestation

  CONCLUSION

  Derek Acorah and the Re-Enchantment of Ipswich, or British Ghostliness Today (Continued)

  A GHOST STORY

  Little Jack’s, or The Secret Trust

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  The Moon Still Rises – or British Ghostliness Today

  On the face of it, British ghostliness is a thing of the past. It would seem to be another of those things that we pioneered and did well, but have now given up on, like making motorbikes or running decent pubs.

  Ghosts weren’t quite uniquely ours, but in his introduction to Phantom Britain, published in 1975 with the nifty subtitle, ‘This Spectre’d Isle’, Marcus Alexander wrote, ‘In Italy, a frequent beginning to a ghost story is, C’era una volta un castello in Cornovaglia…: There was once a castle in Cornwall…’

  In his A-Z of British Ghosts (1994), Peter Underwood, author and ghost hunter, mentions that Brede Place, near Rye in Sussex, was described by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens as ‘the most interesting haunted house in Sussex.’ The most haunted town or city in Britain is sometimes said to be my birthplace, York. According to The York Book (2003), it has a reputation as ‘the most haunted city in Europe, with a rumoured 140 ghosts’, but it isn’t even mentioned in Christina Hole’s book, Haunted England (1940), which is no criticism of her, but just shows the embarrassment of riches available to the British supernaturalist.

  There does seem to be general agreement that Pluckley in Kent is the most haunted village in Britain. Pluckley is on the route of a phantom coach and horses; there’s an old mill haunted by an old miller, a ghostly monk, a Red Lady, a White Lady, a poltergeist in The Black Horse Inn, over the road from which the ghost of a schoolmaster who hanged himself has been seen dangling from a tree, and so on. Pluckley is like Fairfield, ‘a little village lying near the Portsmouth Road about halfway between London and the sea’ in the frequently anthologised short story, ‘The Ghost Ship’ by Richard Middleton. Fairfield is entirely populated by ghosts, and so this is an amusing ghost story – which becomes less amusing when you know that its impoverished author committed suicide with chloroform in Brussels in 1911, leaving a note announcing that he was ‘going adventuring again’.

  I daresay that any book on the Pluckley ghosts would have a respectable sale, especially in Pluckley. Research conducted by Theos, the theology think-tank, found that four in ten Britons believe in ghosts, and any bookshop, however small, will have a supernatural section just as it will have a gardening section. The law of averages dictated that, when Google photographed the entire country for its ‘Street View’ project, it would capture a ghost minding its own business. This occurred in Tiger Bay, Cardiff. the Sun reported, ‘The footage appears to show a woman dressed in a long skirt, crisp blouse, bow tie, blue boater hat and scarf shimmering above the pavement.’

  The profession of medium has not entirely died. Derek Acorah, ‘Britain’s Number One medium’ (that’s more or less official, apparently), makes a very good living indeed, and we will see him at work later. But I suspect that most of us regard the whole business of contacting the dead as rather old hat; a hobby of yesteryear, like hopscotch or going to the beach with a metal detector.

  Oh, the curtain still rises every night, which is to say that the darkness falls over Britain and the moon rises, but the lighting is not what it was, for a start. The candles and oil lamps, which were capable of producing such moody and subtle effects, have been replaced by crude electric light. The old props manager has retired, taking with him his stock of velvet curtains so handy for half-concealing all manner of things; his French windows, primed to spring open without warning; his stock of grandfather clocks with especially ominous ticks. Admittedly, the sound man lingers on. He can still drum up some rustling leaves on autumnal trees, or trains that whistle (after a fashion), but there’s a certain loss of tone even here.

  And you can’t get the staff…

  There are no wall-eyed yokels who, when asked whether the black dog or white lady is due to walk on a particular evening, can be relied on to reply, ‘Thuy do zay zo.’ There are insufficient spurned aristocratic beauties, or naïve young Oxbridge men keen to inhabit abandoned mansions: ‘an ideal spot for some quiet study’. There are very few occultists in smoking jackets for whom Latin is practically a first language. I’ve also noticed a shortage of proper rectors. Instead we have depressingly hearty-sounding ‘team rectors’, and I bet they don’t live in rectories.

  According to the literary critics, the moment of the ghost story has passed. That moment began in the mid-nineteenth century, when people stopped believing in ghosts sufficiently to find them entertaining; or at any rate when Charles Darwin seemed to leave no room at all for anything spiritual or mysterious. This was – and is – an airless, claustrophobic feeling, and it prompted among the middle class the rise of Spiritualism (of which more later) and of séances, held in low-lit drawing rooms either just before or just after dinner, depending on how long contacting the dead was thought likely to take.

  For a while, The Great War boosted Spiritualism, there being so many more dead to contact, but the ghost story was one of the war’s early casualties. Headless horsemen could not be so lightly invoked after a fair percentage of the country’s young men had had their heads blown off. Ghost story writers lost their confidence, and their tales either became more gory in an attempt to keep up, or self-deprecatingly comic. Julia Briggs, in Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977), argues that the rise of Freudianism had also made authors who might have written ghost stories too wary of being analysed to do so. As a result, the genre began to die, which makes those of us who refuse to give up on ghostliness feel self-conscious about our interest.

  For example…

  I was sitting in a traffic jam on the North Circular recently or – to put the matter in an even more unghostly way – on the A406 just by the turn-off to Brent Cross. It was the middle of a sunny day, and I was listening to some Victorian ghost stories on CD, a fact that became embarrassingly public as the traffic seized up, since the volume was loud and the windows were down. In the next lane a kid of about twenty sat in a ‘pimped up’ Mini. The particular story playing was ‘Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’ by Sheridan Le Fanu, read by Richard Pasco. As Le Fanu/Pasco boomed from my car window: ‘The annoyances described did not begin till the end of August, when, one evening, Mrs Prosser, quite alone…’ the kid looked at me in disgust. He obviously thought I was… well, what? Behind the times? Morbid?

  But would he happily walk through a remote forest at midnight? I doubt he would, and not for fear of physical attack, but for fear of something else. My wife certainly wouldn’t. It’s not so much that she’s scared of ghosts as that she refuses to have anything at all to do with them. They are too proximate to the subject of death. My younger son has the same approach. If I leave one of my collections of ghost stories in his bedroom in the early evening, he will climb out of bed, and return them to me, saying tartly, ‘These are yours, I think.’ I admit that I once tested him out by deliberately leaving ghost stories in his room, and the swiftness with which they were returned suggested to me that, before going to sleep, he checks his room t
o make sure there are no ghost stories in it.

  Ghostliness has a power over us individually, and perhaps it will soon regain its power over us as a society. A friend of mine, a legal academic called Tatiana, is a connoisseur of ghost stories. She argues that an interest in ghosts arises ‘when there’s a disjunction between one paradigm and another’. We in Britain are certainly still suffering the after-shock of the Victorian crisis of faith, but the plates are also shifting beneath our own society. I’m thinking of the loss of economic confidence; the apocalyptic message of the environmentalists. And, as I will argue in my conclusion, there are other reasons more particular to Britain and its faltering sense of national identity that might dictate a reawakening of interest in our national ghosts – or at least in the ghosts of our ghosts.

  PART ONE

  The Tableau of Horror, or The Elements of Ghostliness

  The group of friends with whom I discuss ghostliness is quite select, and anyone moving into our orbit is expected to respond interestingly to the question. ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’ Short of an actual sighting, some account of ghostliness will do. I hope the meaning of that word will become clear in the course of this book, incidentally. You could say it was the desperate, vertiginous feeling that death is definitely going to happen, and that something even worse might follow. Or you might say, less melodramatically, that it’s something that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stick up, a cliché that Rudyard Kipling tried to refine in ‘My Own True Ghost Story’ (1888): ‘It is a mistake to say that hair stands up. The skin of the head tightens and you can feel a faint, prickly, bristling all over the scalp. That is the hair sitting up.’ Ghostliness need not necessarily involve a death, but it always points that way.

  Let’s try to find a practical instance, starting with my friend Lawrence.

  Lawrence is an Oxford graduate, and fluent in several languages. (Sorry about this, but ever since about 1830 it has been necessary to set out the bona fides of anyone interested in ghosts). By profession he is a radio producer who puts ghost stories onto BBC radio as often as he can. We meet by the fire in the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead, which serves appropriately Edwardian food, like oysters or Omelettes Arnold Bennett, and has the great virtue, as far as I’m concerned, of being just about the darkest pub in London. There I invite Lawrence to revisit his childhood, which gave him his taste for ghost stories, and was spent amid romantic scenery in Somerset.

  He lived near Wookey Hole Caves, and would visit them regularly, listening to the cave guide’s patter about the Witch of Wookey Hole. The Caves, if I might strike a prosaic note for a minute, were owned and operated as a tourist attraction by Madame Tussaud’s Limited, of which Lawrence’s father was a director. At an old disused paper mill near the caves, the firm kept the overspill from its London waxworks and in the mid-Seventies, Lawrence also frequented this mill: ‘There was shelf after shelf of stuff, going right up into the dark rafters of the drying lofts. They had the Beatles heads in there – the early Beatles, when they were still moptops. They had Prince Charles from 1970; they had John Noakes’s legs…and a guillotine, a real one from France. I mean, it had cut people’s heads off.’

  Lawrence’s own interest is mainly in fictional ghost stories, and our sessions in the Holly Bush might begin with him returning from the bar with two pints of bitter, and starting up a conversation about some dead ghost story writer most people have never heard of: ‘You know, the more I read of the works of Oliver Onions, the more worried I am about him. All his characters are so desperately isolated,’ or ‘Have you ever read anything by William Hope Hodgson? Interesting character: seaman, photographer, body builder…’

  But Lawrence does have his very own true, albeit short, ghost story.

  Lawrence’s Ghost Story

  It was the mid-seventies; I was about eight. It happened during the interval of an open-air amateur drama production. It was a Shakespeare, of course, and I’m pretty sure it was ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. I walked off on my own down to the bottom of a sort of a field behind a field. It was shaded by dark trees – could have been cedars. I was looking at this pile of leaves that had been swept up together, perhaps ready for burning, when suddenly a woman sat up within it. She had dark eyes, and wore slightly old-fashioned clothes. I think of her as a ‘charcoal gypsy maiden’, to quote Bob Dylan. We looked at each other in total silence, probably six feet apart. It was twilight, on the verge of darkness. Looking back, it was a panic, but I felt no fear or really anything at the time. I would have been 7 or 8. I walked away back up to rejoin my family, and didn’t tell anybody (in fact I don’t think I thought any more about it). I didn’t believe she was an actor from the play, but a ‘gypsy’ or ‘tinker’ as we charmingly called them in those days. Or, of course, she was something else.

  Another ghost story friend is David. David, it is necessary for me to point out, is a photographer who has also written plays for radio and stage. He is about the best read person I know, and his portrait of The Queen (yes, The Queen) appeared in The National Portrait Gallery.

  He has a habit, when the conversation is flagging next to the fireplace in Vat’s Wine Bar in Lamb’s Conduit Street, of asking, ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’ Except it’s not quite so brutally direct as that, but more like, ‘I’m just curious… Has anyone here had an experience that might be called… well, in some way supernatural?’ It generally works.

  After a stuttering start, with blurted offerings such as, ‘I believe in some sort of imprint, whether of past of future’, or ‘I’ve certainly had that sudden cold feeling in an old house…’ or ‘I’ve had that déjà vu thing – does that count?’, someone will offer something more sustained, and in the last year, David has turned up a couple of gems, one of which is Lizzie’s story, which appears at the end of this section. But often David is stuck with just me, and I give him a few of my own frissons or susceptibilities to ghostliness, while he nods politely and pretends he hasn’t heard them before.

  THREE OF THE AUTHOR’S OWN

  SUSCEPTIBILITIES TO GHOSTLINESS:

  1. If, late at night, I wake to find that my feet are sticking slightly beyond the end of the duvet, I quickly withdraw them, just in case some phenomenon that might happen to be passing by the end of my bed brushes against them, or touches them in any way. I feel that if my feet were touched I would die of shock. But sometimes I raise the stakes by deliberately thrusting my feet well beyond the end of the duvet and keeping them there, mentally challenging any such phantom, just as the protagonist in Algernon Blackwood’s story, ‘The Occupant of the Room’ (1917), suspecting that there’s something inside the locked cupboard in his hotel room, knocks on the door.

  2. Speaking of cupboards… When I was about seven, I went to Scarborough with my parents. On a wild evening in late summer, when it was hard to distinguish between the flying rain and flying waves, I went into an amusement arcade on the South Bay. Walking up to one of the more antique machines, I read, ‘See the Haunted House, 1d’. I asked my father whether he had a penny. Unfortunately, as it turned out, he did.

  Before me stood not so much a haunted house as a haunted room contained in a glass case about two foot square. All the furniture was normal if antiquated, but there was a coffin in front of the fire place. I put the coin in the slot, and for quite a long time nothing happened. Then an ominous whirring began as the hundred year old mechanism grated into life.

  The coffin lid opened, and a vampire sat up, but then I’d been expecting that. A curtain lifted; a white shaded spirit dropped down into the fireplace with an embarrassing clunk, and a hand came out of a box, all of which I took easily in my stride. Something about the whirring of the machine now suggested – to my mingled relief and disappointment – that it was winding down having done its worst. But just as I was about to turn around and walk away, the door of a little cupboard-in-the-wall that I hadn’t noticed sprang open and a skeleton loomed forward.

  That sight caused me about five years of neuro
sis. The trouble was that there was a very similar-looking wall cupboard at the foot of my own bed, and from then on I could not go to sleep unless the door was left ajar to exactly the right degree: not so wide open that I could see anything that might be within, but wide enough open so that anything emerging from the cupboard would not take me entirely by surprise. But no-one else (which is to say neither my father nor my mother) seemed able to take this requirement on board: they would recklessly leave the door wide open or shut it entirely.

  3. And the moon bothers me. I have a waking nightmare of seeing the moon in the night sky, not two hundred and fifty thousand miles away and looking about the size of a ten pence piece, but parked close… say, two hundred miles away, so that it takes up half the sky and you can see its white, dead pock-marked face in detail.

  This neurosis is of recent date, and began when I was walking along the beach at Southwold in Suffolk early on a winter’s evening. It was quite dark, but I could see three illuminated ships on the horizon and, a little way beyond them, what appeared to be a great pink balloon in the process of being inflated, or a great jellyfish looming out of the sea. The ships seemed to be in conspiracy with whatever this object might be. I walked along, transfixed, and ignoring the friend’s dog that I was walking (so that this dog, I later discovered, had run away). It gradually became apparent to me that this was the full moon rising out of the sea, and once it had cleared the sea it rose extremely rapidly, and with a somehow frightening sense of purpose, as though intent upon monitoring all nocturnal activity on earth.

  *

  David puts his own, polite gloss on these phobias of mine. For instance, he told me that Charles Dickens once played a practical joke on a carpenter by summoning him to prise open the wedged door of a cupboard in which he had placed two human skeletons.