‘Did you see that?’ my mother-in-law asked, with a knowing look.
Despite the warmth of the sunlight, I felt a sudden chill. I could tell by the expression on her face at that moment that she had seen something uncanny. But I did not want to spook my wife on our very first day in the house. Geraldine and I were both townies, and this was our first move into the countryside. She was already apprehensive about the isolation of the property. The last thing I needed was for her to be unnecessarily scared by a ghost! So I shook my head and told Evelyn I had not seen anything. But in truth, I was feeling a little spooked by this.
Our first night was uneventful, and our Hungarian sheepdog, Boris, had been very happy and calm. I’d been told that dogs would often pick up on any supernatural occurrence way before their owners, so I took this as a good sign.
In the morning, Geraldine left for work at 8 a.m. After breakfast I went to my study to resume work on my third supernatural novel, Sweet Heart. Around 10.30 a.m. I went downstairs to make a cup of coffee. As I entered the atrium, on my way through to the kitchen, I saw tiny pinpricks of white light all around me. My immediate reaction was that it was sunlight, coming through the window in the far wall, reflecting off my glasses. I took them off, put them back on, and the pinpricks of light had gone.
I returned to my study, but when I went downstairs to make myself some lunch, the same thing happened again. And again, after removing my glasses and putting them back on once more, the pinpricks had gone. But I was left with a slightly uneasy feeling. In the afternoon, when I went downstairs to make a mug of tea, it happened again.
I said nothing to Geraldine when she arrived home that evening, and she did not see anything.
The next day around mid-morning, when I was alone in the house, I saw the pinpricks again, and at lunchtime. After lunch I took Boris for a walk. We’d only gone a short distance along the lane when an elderly man came up to me, introducing himself as Harry Stotting, a neighbour in the hamlet. ‘You are Mr James, aren’t you?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I am,’ I replied.
‘You’ve just moved into the big house?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘How are you getting on with your grey lady?’ he said, with a strange, quizzical look that immediately unsettled me.
‘What grey lady?’ I asked.
He then really spooked me. ‘I was the house-sitter for the previous owners. In winter, they used the atrium as a ‘snug’ because, as it adjoined the kitchen, it was always warm from the Aga. Six years ago I was sitting in the snug watching television, when a sinister-looking woman with a grey face, and wearing a grey silk crinoline dress, materialized out of the altar wall, swept across the room, gave me a malevolent stare, flicked my face with her dress, and vanished into the panelling behind me. I was out of there thirty seconds later, and went back in the morning to collect my things. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me back in there again!’
I was struck both by the sincerity of the man, and his genuine fear, which I could see in his eyes as he told me the story. It truly made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
I returned to the house after our walk feeling very uncomfortable. I even wimped out of going through the atrium into the kitchen to make my afternoon cuppa! But when Geraldine came home in the evening, I said nothing – I suppose I did not want to believe it myself, and she was still extremely nervous about living in such an isolated house. One of the things you realize when you move into the depths of the countryside after living in an urban environment is the sheer darkness of the nights. In a city, it is never truly dark, ever – there is always an ambient glow from the street lighting. But on a cloudy or moonless country night, it is pitch back. I had tried to convince her that for a potential intruder total darkness was harder than ambient light, so we were safer. But she did not buy that.
The following Sunday, we had invited Geraldine’s parents to lunch. Whilst she was occupied putting the finishing touches to the meal, I took her mother aside and asked her what exactly she had seen that day we were moving in.
She described a woman, with a grey face, dressed in grey silk crinoline, moving across the atrium – exactly what the old man, Harry Stotting, had described to me.
I was stunned – and very spooked. Later, after her parents had left, I decided I had to tell Geraldine. She took it in the pragmatic way she had of dealing with most difficult issues in life. ‘You’ve met several mediums in your research – why don’t you ask one of them to come in and see what they find?’
A few days later, a medium who had helped me a lot during my writing of Possession came to the house, and I took her into the atrium and left her on her own, as she had requested.
An hour later she came up to my study, and yet again described exactly the woman in grey silk crinoline. She explained the pinpricks of light I kept seeing by telling me I was slightly psychic, so while I was not actually seeing the entire apparition, I was picking up some of its energy.
I asked her if there was anything I could do about this, and she told me that the apparition was of a deeply disturbed former resident of the house, and that it needed a clergyman to deal with it.
I felt a tad cynical about her response – but at the same time, I was now feeling deeply uncomfortable in what should have been the sanctuary of my own home. However, there was a vicar I knew who I thought would be able to help.
At the time he was officially the Vicar of Brighton – but with another hat, he was also the chief exorcist of the Church of England. That wasn’t his actual title, which was the less flaky-sounding Minister of Deliverance. A former monk with a double first from Oxford in psychology, and the son of two medics, he was as far from Max Von Sydow’s Father Merrin in The Exorcist as you could get. He is a delightful human being, with whom I had become good friends, and still am to this day. He is a modern thinker, a clergyman who has a problem with the biblical concept of God yet still retains an infectious faith.
Even so, I was a little surprised when he cheerfully entered the atrium, stood still for a couple of minutes, and then loudly and very firmly enunciated into thin air, ‘You may go now!’
He turned to me and said, ‘You should be fine now.’
Well, we were, until a mid-June day in 1994. My novel Host, which had been published the previous year by Penguin in hardback, had just been published both on two floppy discs, billed as the world’s first electronic novel, and in paperback. The thick paperback lay on a beautiful antique wooden chest which we kept in the atrium. I always put my latest book there for visitors to see. On this particular sunny morning, I was having breakfast around 7.45 a.m., while Geraldine was upstairs getting ready for work. Suddenly she called down, ‘I can smell burning!’
I suddenly realized that I could too. I turned around, and to my amazement, the copy of Host, on top of the wooden chest, was on fire!
I rushed over, grabbed the book, ran to the kitchen sink and threw it in, then turned the taps on to extinguish the flames.
There was, of course, a perfectly prosaic explanation: close to the book, on the chest, was a round glass paperweight. The hot June morning sun rays had been refracted through it, much the same way that as kids we used to set fire to things by letting the sun’s rays refract though a magnifying glass. But . . . the fact it had happened in this room which had had the apparition in it added a very sinister dimension.
The above story was only one of the spooky occurrences we had in this otherwise glorious house. The second happened the first weekend we spent there. It was on the Sunday morning and I said hello to our nearest neighbours, who lived in what had, in former days, been the coach house. ‘I just want to ask you,’ the cheery elderly occupant asked, ‘because my wife and I are very curious. Do you have anyone staying with a young baby this weekend?’
‘No,’ I told him.
‘Ah, must be your ghost again,’ he said, very matter-of-factly.
It turned out that he, and other neighbours across the narrow lane outside th
e house, would regularly hear a baby crying. We learned that in the 1920s the drawing room floor had been dug up because of damp and dry rot and the skeleton of a baby had been discovered – perhaps stillborn, or possibly even murdered way back in time.
In the grounds was a very narrow lake, a quarter of a mile long, and on the far side was a public footpath. During the decade we lived in the house, several residents of the hamlet and of surrounding villages told us how they had been chased off the footpath at dusk by a Roman centurion! To me, this was the least credible of the stories. But in many ways, one of the most credible was the one I was told the day I was collared by another of my neighbours.
The house used to own many hundreds of surrounding acres. Over time the land was sold off in parcels. Several houses had been built in the 1930s and 1950s along the far side of the lake. One day I was walking Boris along past them when the owner of one – a very down-to-earth factory manager in his forties – shouted, ‘I wish you would keep your bloody ghosts under control!’
He then told me, ‘Last Sunday, we held a christening party for my grandson here. At 4 p.m., all the guests had gone and I went and sat in the conservatory to read the Sunday Times. Suddenly the room turned icy and I shivered. I looked up and saw a monk in a cowled hood staring down at me. I thought at first it was one of my relatives playing a prank on me. I stood up and followed it into the kitchen. But he had vanished. The only person in there was my wife, doing the washing-up. There is no door out of the kitchen. She had not seen or heard anything.’
There was one more very spooky occurrence during our time there. At the front of the house were two sets of classic Georgian bay windows. One was in a spare bedroom, which we called the Blue Room, where we often put up guests, and all the time we lived there, I never felt comfortable entering it. Whenever we went away, we employed a house-sitter. On each occasion, when we returned home the house-sitter would have moved out of this room, giving a lame excuse about not liking the colour, or the morning sun, and slept somewhere else in the house.
As a postscript, I should add something of the house’s history. For much of the twentieth century it was owned by the Stobart family, the most famous member of which, Tom Stobart OBE, was a photographer, zoologist and author. A true adventurer, he was the cameraman who climbed Everest with Hunt and Hillary and took the photos of their ascent, was subsequently shot in the knee in Ethiopia, and tragically died far too young from a heart attack at the local railway station, Hassocks. One member of the family was – reputedly – a strange lady, who became a man-hating lesbian and subjected Tom’s sister Anne, who we befriended in the years before she died from a stroke, to such cruelty as a child she was never able to live a normal life or form normal relationships. Anne told us one day that this relative used to strap her hands to the side of the bed when she was a child to prevent her, should she be tempted, from touching herself.
Was she the grey lady in the atrium?
During the Second World War, the house was used to billet Canadian soldiers. After the war, during the second half of the twentieth century, three couples bought it – and subsequently divorced. We were the third. Was the grey lady in any way responsible?
I will always wonder.
TWO MINUTES
When he was a small boy, Rod Wexler loved to hang out on Brighton’s Palace Pier – long since renamed Brighton Pier. He liked looking down, through the holes in the metal gridding of the walkway, at the sinister, shadowy dark green water fifty feet below. And he was fascinated by the escapologist, the Great Omani, whose act (which the strange man repeated hourly, on the hour) was to tip a gallon of petrol into the sea below, drop a lighted taper to create a flaming circle, then tie himself up in a straitjacket, jump off the side of the pier into the flames, disappear below the surface, then emerge a minute or so later, triumphantly holding the straitjacket above his head, to a small ripple of applause.
From an early age Rod had always been obsessed with trying to work things out; there were so many mysteries in the world, and the Great Omani’s escape act was one of the first to consume him. What, he wondered, was so clever about escaping, when you tied yourself up in the first place? Now, if someone else had tied him up, that would be very different!
But he never got a chance to study the act for long. When the Great Omani spotted him, he would shout at him angrily that his act wasn’t free, and people had to pay to watch him by putting money in his hat. ‘I don’t take pennies, son. Minimum a shilling on this bit of the pier – so pay up or clear off!’
Rod did not think the act was worth a penny, let alone a shilling, which was an entire week’s pocket money. For him, there was much better value inside the amusement arcade. One row of wooden slot machines there, in particular, fascinated him.
They had their names displayed on the outside, such as Haunted House!, Guillotine!, Gulliver’s Lilliput World! You pushed a penny coin into the slot and things would start to happen. The interior would light up behind the glass viewing window. He liked the haunted house. A coffin lid would rise up to reveal a glowing skeleton. A spider would drop down and rise up. Doors would open and apparitions would appear and disappear. The lights would flicker. It was like a cross between a very spooky doll’s house and a miniature ghost train.
Rod had never been on the real ghost train, further down towards the end of the pier, because he’d seen people coming off it looking terrified; it scared him too much. Also, it was too expensive for his tiny budget. He could have six goes on these slot machines for the price of one sixpenny ghost train ride.
But the machine he liked the most, on which he spent most of his shilling each week, was the Guillotine!
He would push his penny coin into the slot, and then watch as a blindfolded Marie Antoinette was dragged to the guillotine, placed face down, and then after some moments a character would pull a lever, the blade would slide down, slice clean through her neck, and her head would drop into a basket. Then the lights would go out again.
Every time he watched, he wondered, was she still conscious after her neck had been severed and, if so, for how long? And what, if anything, did she think about while her head was lying in that basket, in those final moments of her existence?
Years later, as a forty-year-old adult, the attractions on the pier, like its name, had changed. The wooden penny-in-the-slot machines had been moved to a museum underneath the Arches, close to the pier, where they were maintained in working order. You could buy a bag of old penny coins and still activate the machines. He took his own kids to see them, but they weren’t impressed; they were more interested in computer games.
But his own fascination never went away. He was enjoying a successful career as an actuary for a reinsurance group, in which his natural curiosity was able to flourish. His job was to calculate the odds, much like a bookmaker might, of accidents and disasters happening. One role, for instance, was to calculate the odds against rainfall happening in particular regions. In some parts of the south of England, much though the country had a reputation for being wet, he was able to demonstrate that, in fact, there were only ninety-four days a year when it actually rained – he defined it as there being precipitation at some point during the twenty-four hours of the day.
Some of his friends called him a dullard, obsessed with facts and statistics. But he really, genuinely, loved his work. He liked to refute the saying that ‘No man on his deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time in the office.”’
‘I would say that,’ he would announce proudly in the pub and at parties. And it was true. Rod loved his work, he really did. Facts and statistics were his life; these were the things that gave him his bang. He loved to analyse everything, and break it all down to its component elements. He loved to be able to tell people stuff they didn’t know – such as what was the most dangerous form of travel, what your percentage chances were of dying of a particular ailment, or how long you were likely to live if you reached fifty.
It used to infuriate his
wife, Angie. ‘God, don’t you ever feel anything?’ she would ask him.
‘Feelings are dangerous,’ he would retort, which angered her further. But he wasn’t being frivolous, he genuinely believed that. ‘Life is dangerous, darling,’ he would say, trying to placate her. ‘No one gets out of here alive.’
Once at a dinner party, he had raised the subject of his childhood fascination with the slot machine with the guillotine. A neurosurgeon friend, Paddy Mahony, sitting opposite him had said that he reckoned after being guillotined, people could remain conscious for up to two minutes. Or was it ninety seconds? Rod could not quite remember, although it was pretty relevant now, since one moment he had been texting his mistress, Romy, and the next he had looked up to see all the traffic ahead of him on the fast lane of the M4 had stopped dead.
He was surprised at just how calm he felt as the bonnet of his Audi, bought for its safety points after analysis of crash statistics, slid under the tailgate of the truck. He frowned, thinking that there had been a law passed, surely, that they needed a bar to stop his car doing just what it was now doing – sliding under the tailgate while the occupants are decapitated. Like the guillotine.
Funny, he thought, to be lying on a wet road, looking up at exhaust pipes and bumpers and number plates and brake lights. Not the way he would have chosen to exit this world, but it certainly was interesting to see if Paddy was right. Although, of course, he could not see his wristwatch. That was still in the car attached to the rest of him.
‘Hello,’ he said to a woman who climbed out of one of those little Nissan Micras, a bilious purple colour. ‘Could you tell me the time?’ He mouthed. But no sound came out.
She screamed.
This was not going well. Then she vomited. Fortunately she did not splash him. His sense of smell was acute at that moment. He felt no pain, but smelled diesel and puke. It was normally a smell that instantly made him puke too. But not today. He heard a siren.