The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness.  Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.  Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Metro Centric, Sophie Snyder Berkeley Square, CC BY 2.0]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late eighteenth century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the upper floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttelton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition that appeared to him as a brown mist and that "generated a feeling of absolute terror."  He shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttelton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttelton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand.  The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth.  The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall.  He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" that tried to strangle Martin -- beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.  It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttelton.

Sad to say for aficionados of "true ghost stories," the likeliest explanation is that the entire thing was spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual reliability as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttelton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out, in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what's actually there.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun and amusing discussion of a very ominous topic; how the universe will end.

In The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us through all the known possibilities -- a "Big Crunch" (the Big Bang in reverse), the cheerfully-named "Heat Death" (the material of the universe spread out at uniform density and a uniform temperature of only a few degrees above absolute zero), the terrifying -- but fortunately extremely unlikely -- Vacuum Decay (where the universe tears itself apart from the inside out), and others even wilder.

The cool thing is that all of it is scientifically sound.  Mack is a brilliant theoretical astrophysicist, and her explanations take cutting-edge research and bring it to a level a layperson can understand.  And along the way, her humor shines through, bringing a touch of lightness and upbeat positivity to a subject that will take the reader to the edges of the known universe and the end of time.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Noises in the basement

A couple of days ago, I was sent a link by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia with the message, "Thought you'd be interested... what do you think of this?"

The link was to a story on Wales Online, about a couple in the town of Ammonford who claims that they've been driven from their house by the sounds of ghostly screams, talking, and banging -- all coming from underneath their basement.

The couple, Christine and Alan Tait, are now living in their camper van because they're afraid to stay in their house.  "It was like a flushing noise that I heard first," Christine Tait said.  "I told Alan about it and that I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.  He left his phone in the bathroom with the recorder on to try to pick up the source of the noise, and then we could hear a machine running.  We started to record all over the house, and we picked up the sounds of chains, a motorbike starting, and people screaming."

Since then, Alan Tait said, they have heard "a woman screaming, sexual sounds, dogs barking, a printing press running, a motorbike, a car horn honking and what sounds like a police siren," all from beneath their house, which stands on a quiet alleyway.

Haunted House by Hayashiya Shozo, early 1800s [Image is in the Public Domain]

On the link is a recording made my Alan Tait that has some of the sounds he claims he captured by dropping a microphone down a 1.5 meter shaft he dug in his basement.  They're pretty creepy, I'll say that -- although, in context, not really much worse than you'd hear in a busy city (and we have only the word of the article's author, Robert Harries, about how quiet the neighborhood is).

So the people at Wales Online sent a team into the house, after Alan Tait said he'd let them go as long as they were aware that he wasn't responsible for anything that happened to them.  They brought in recording equipment, stayed there for hours, and what happened was...

... nothing.  The only thing the recording equipment picked up was the team themselves, moving around as they packed up to leave.

So it sounds a little fishy to me.  I'm always pretty dubious about evil spirits that magically vanish whenever anyone shows up with a skeptical attitude.  I'm reminded of what the character MacPhee says in That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis: "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

There's also the problem that (despite Wales Online's mention of sending out a team to investigate) the whole thing has a sensationalized tabloid feel about it.  I don't know what Wales Online's reliability is, but on a glance it reminds me of trash like The Daily Mail Fail.

Last, my spidey-senses were definitely alerted by the end of the article, where we find out that Alan and Christine Tait were "not prepared to say where in the UK they currently reside and did not want pictures of themselves published in the press," presumably to protect their privacy -- after giving out their names, ages (62), publishing photographs of their house, and stating that they were "travelling around the country handing out posters and fliers about what we think is going on."

So to me, it sounds like a publicity stunt, although (as a dedicated home-body) I have a hard time imagining wanting publicity to the point that you're willing to abandon your house and live out of a camper van.

But that's just me.

So to the reader who sent the link: thanks, but I'm generally unimpressed.  I guess that was a predictable response, but even so, this is one that doesn't add up to me.  Until I start hearing screams, banging, and "sexual sounds" from underneath my own basement, I'm not buying it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun for anyone who (like me) appreciates both plants and an occasional nice cocktail -- The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart.  Most of the things we drink (both alcohol-containing and not) come from plants, and Stewart takes a look at some of the plants that have provided us with bar staples -- from the obvious, like grapes (wine), barley (beer), and agave (tequila), to the obscure, like gentian (angostura bitters) and hyssop (Bénédictine).

It's not a scientific tome, more a bit of light reading for anyone who wants to know more about what they're imbibing.  So learn a little about what's behind the bar -- and along the way, a little history and botany as well.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A ghost in the machine

Because we skeptics don't already have enough to make us twitch, now we have:

A company in Kentucky that will provide "untraceable hoaxing of paranormal activity."

The company, Kentucky Special FX, bills itself as follows:

We offer various themed special effect props, Halloween props, Halloween Decorations, Haunted House Props, Haunted Attraction Props, Christmas props, pneumatic props, animatronic props, electronic props, cryogenic CO2 and LN2 special effects, large scale magician stage illusions and optical illusions for professional custom built Halloween props and Halloween theme props for haunted houses and haunted attractions on any scale with complete in-house, ground up creations.  Our staff has in depth knowledge of the latest blacklight / UV light, electronics animation and laser special FX technology. 

Our staff has over forty years of combined experience in various fields of the special FX industry.  If you do not see an item listed that you need, please by all means, call us, as we spend a lot of our time tending to custom built orders.

Owner Mike Bisch is up front about the fact that his special effects expertise is sometimes used not to design scary scenes for Halloween, but to fool people into believing that ghosts are real.  Bisch said that he and his team are capable of "creating everything from equipment malfunctions, sudden temperature fluctuations, and appearing and disappearing apparitions for unwitting ghost hunters in haunted buildings."  He has, he says, designed paranormal hoaxes at the sites of legendary hauntings "over twenty times" without being caught out.

Bisch says he doesn't believe in the paranormal himself; unsurprising, given that he knows first hand how easy it is to fake.  Magicians are notorious for being skeptics (the best-known example being James "The Amazing" Randi).  But then he adds, "I'm a man of science."

And there I take exception.  No, Mr. Bisch, you are not.  You are a hoaxer, taking money to set up scenarios deliberately to hoodwink the gullible.  This is not science.  This is encouraging credulity, the exact opposite of what science is supposed to do.

Okay, they were scared, but at least these guys knew that the ghost is always the carnival owner with a sheet over his head.

To their credit, a lot of ghost hunters are outraged by what Bisch and his team are doing.  Sue Nielson, who has traveled to a lot of allegedly haunted places in search of evidence, said, "If we wanted a fake haunting we would stay close to home and wait for the haunted houses to start up in October."

Well-known purveyor of the supernatural Chip Coffey, who has appeared more than once on Paranormal State, was furious.  "If there is reliable, substantive, irrefutable PROOF that such activity is occurring, then it should be made public," Coffey wrote.  "No blind accusations, suppositions or conspiracy theories. PROOF ONLY!"

Which leaves me in the awkward position of disagreeing with the guy who knows hauntings aren't real, and agreeing with a "psychic medium."

Seattle ghost hunter Todd Manoli-Smith concurs.  "Not only is this degrading to the field it’s so disrespectful to the deceased who may actually be trying to reach out."

Well, I don't think my grandma, who died in 1986, honestly cares much about what Bisch is doing.  But I sure as hell do.

There's already so much in the way of background noise in this field, due to human gullibility, misinterpretation of natural occurrences, and autosuggestion that the last thing we need is someone muddying the waters further.  This will make it even harder to determine if there is reliable evidence out there -- not that I think that's very likely.  Most scientists have already given up on researching the paranormal because tomfoolery is so common; all this will do is make the rest of them throw in the towel.

Bisch, for his part, is completely unapologetic. "I can’t apologize... or I guess I could, but I won’t," he says. "I’m an asshole, I know.  But a lovable asshole, though."

Well, Mr. Bisch, you're half right.

Legally haunted

Have you ever heard of the New York Supreme Court Case, Stambovsky v. Ackley?

I hadn't, until yesterday.

This came up because of a link someone sent me to an article called "There’s A House That’s So Terrifying It Was Legally Declared Haunted By New York State."  And my question, of course, was "what does it mean to be 'legally haunted'?"  If a ghost shows up in a house that is not legally declared to be haunted, do you have the right to call the police and have it arrested?  If so, how could you send a ghost to jail, when according to most people, ghosts can pass through walls, not to mention steel bars?

Be that as it may, the story centered around a house owned by a family named Ackley in Nyack, New York, a town on the Hudson River.  Soon after the Ackleys moved in, they began to have odd experiences, the most alarming of which is that family members reported waking up having their beds violently shaken by an invisible entity.  According to the article, they "learned to live with the spirits," which became easier when one of them apparently figured out that all they had to do to stop the sudden awakenings was to ask the ghosts not to shake their beds during the night.

Which I thought was pretty doggone amenable of the spirits, until I read the next part, wherein a young guest showed up to visit the Ackleys and died immediately of a brain aneurysm [emphasis theirs].  So that's not very nice.  There were also footsteps, slamming doors, and "gifts for the children [left] randomly through the house."  So you can see that with gifts on one end of the spectrum and brain aneurysms on the other, the haunting turned out to be quite a mixed bag.

The Ackley House, courtesy of Google Maps

Anyhow, all of this is your ordinary, garden-variety haunted house story until the Ackleys had enough and decided to sell the house.  The buyers, a family named Stambovsky, purchased it, but it turned out that the Ackleys didn't mention the fact that it was haunted by brain-aneurysm-inducing ghosts.  When they found out the house's reputation, the Stambovskys objected, understandably enough, and sued.  The case went all the way to the New York Supreme Court, where the judge sided with the Stambovskys.  The ruling said:

Where, as here, the seller not only takes unfair advantage of the buyer's ignorance but has created and perpetuated a condition about which he is unlikely to even inquire, enforcement of the contract (in whole or in part) is offensive to the court's sense of equity.  Application of the remedy of rescission, within the bounds of the narrow exception to the doctrine of caveat emptor set forth herein, is entirely appropriate to relieve the unwitting purchaser from the consequences of a most unnatural bargain...  Seller who had undertaken to inform the public at large about the existence of poltergeists on the premises to be sold was estopped to deny existence of poltergeists on the premises, so the house was haunted as a matter of law and seller must inform the purchaser of the haunting.

I wondered about how exactly a purchaser could demonstrate that a house was, in fact, haunted.  After all, that's usually what most failure-to-disclose lawsuits usually turn on; you find that the house you just bought has a leaky roof, and show that the previous owners knew about the leaky roof -- but along the way it's incumbent upon you to demonstrate that the roof does, in fact, leak.  How are you going to do that with a ghost?

But upon reading the ruling more carefully, apparently the decision was based upon the fact that the Ackleys themselves had made public the fact that they thought the house was haunted.  So I guess it's their fault for bragging about their ghosts and then deciding not to tell the purchasers before the contract was signed.

You have to wonder, though, if this might be something that should appear on disclosure statements under "Known Pre-existing Conditions," along with leaks, dry rot, damaged windows, broken appliances, and faulty septic systems.  "Ghosts/poltergeists present" -- yes/no/unknown.  "Ghosts that result in death by aneurysm" -- yes/no/unknown.

The article ends by giving us the address of the house in Nyack, but asking us not to go there. "Respect the current owner’s privacy by admiring it only from your screen," they tell us.  Which does bring up the interesting point of who bought the house after the Supreme Court allowed the Stambovskys to back out of the purchase, and whether the new owners have had any weird experiences or untimely deaths.  The article on the legal case (linked above) said that in 2015 the house sold for $1.77 million -- which was, they said, $600,000 higher than comparable houses in Nyack.

So maybe the Stambovskys should have stuck with it, ghosts and all.  Apparently disembodied spirits of the dead do nothing to diminish home value.  I know I'd happily sell my house for a cool $1.77 million.  I'd even sign a disclosure agreement admitting that it's haunted, and I don't even believe in ghosts.

The haunting of Hinton Ampner

On her mom's side, my wife is descended from English nobility, a fact of which she reminds me periodically when I get uppity.  Her great-great grandfather, one William R. Hylton, was born in Jamaica to a family of British sugar planters, and the line (if you extend it back far enough) includes not only the Mad Baron Hylton (about whom I should write another time) but a woman named "Benedicta de Shelving," a member of the Norman gentry named "Marmaduke de Thweng," and best of all, an illegitimate daughter of King Edward IV.

One of her ancestors on the maternal side of her Hylton lineage is a Rachel (Ricketts) Johnson, who would have been (if I'm counting correctly) the aforementioned William R. Hylton's great-great grandmother.  I found out quite by accident that Rachel is related to the central figures in one of Britain's creepiest ghost stories -- the tale of the haunting of Hinton Ampner, a mansion in Hampshire.

Hinton Ampner was built in the 1620s, during the reign of James I, by one Sir Thomas Stewkeley.  Sir Thomas's great grandson Hugh had no male heirs; his daughter, Mary, married Edward Stawell, a nobly-descended young man who was also apparently a little loose on the morals side.  Despite this, Stawell was appointed as Sir Hugh's heir.

After his father-in-law's death, Stawell apparently decided that he could get away with whatever he wanted, and he invited his wife's beautiful young sister, Honoria, to come live with them at Hinton Ampner.  Mary Stawell died shortly afterwards -- an eventuality that many of their neighbors found convenient -- and he lived there with Honoria (carrying on, sources say, in "a scandalous manner") until her death in 1754.  Stawell himself died the following year, and some claimed that the couple's demise was "divine retribution" for their having done away with an illegitimate child born to the union -- perhaps more than one.

Be that as it may, the house was purchased and then rented out to William Henry Ricketts (cousin to Carol's forebear Rachel (Ricketts) Johnson) and his wife, Mary (Jervis) Ricketts.  William was frequently away for long periods of time -- as I mentioned earlier, he and his family had ties to Jamaica, and voyages across the Atlantic were dangerous and drawn-out affairs -- but Mary was a no-nonsense, down-to-earth type who was quite up to the task of running a household (including their three children and a bevy of servants) by herself.

Whether she was up to dealing with ghosts remains to be seen.

The haunting, if such it was, started out slowly.  Mr. and Mrs. Ricketts both heard noises at night, prompting them on more than one occasion to awaken the servants for a thorough search of the house, which turned up nothing.  Then the nurse to the Ricketts's infant son saw a "man in drab clothes" walk into "the Yellow Room" -- Mary Ricketts's own bedroom.

Once again a search found no one.

Events accelerated.  Servants saw not only the apparition of the drab-clothed man, but a woman in a silk dress.  "Dismal moans" were heard at night, and doors opened and quietly shut by themselves.  Mary Ricketts, at first scornful of the claims of the servants, began to experience them herself -- especially when the disturbances intensified while her husband was away in Jamaica in 1769.  She was terrified one night to hear heavy, plodding footsteps near her bed, and in the days following began to make inquiries in the neighborhood regarding the history of the house.  She found only one curious story -- an elderly man who said that a long-time friend of his, who was a carpenter, had been summoned to the house while old Sir Hugh Stewkeley was still alive to pull up some of the floorboards in the dining room.  The carpenter saw Stewkeley and his son-in-law, the depraved Edward Stawell, place something in the space underneath.  The carpenter was ordered to replace the floorboards -- and not to tell a soul what he'd seen, on pain of death.  (A threat the carpenter either didn't believe, or didn't break until Stewkeley and Stawell were both dead themselves.)

Oddly, Mary Ricketts didn't have the floorboards pried up to determine the truth of the claim.  She was apparently reluctant to ascribe the occurrences to ghosts.  But even she began to have second thoughts when the haunting continued to worsen.  A strange murmuring could be heard in several rooms in the house, which sometimes resolved itself into intelligible words.  Not only did Mary hear it, but so did her brother, the famous British Navy officer Captain John Jervis, who wrote about it in his journal (a document that still exists today in a museum in London).  They also heard a tremendous "rushing sound," like a great wind, that would "fall with infinite velocity and force" upon a room, without a breath of air stirring.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Mary wrote about the entire story herself in a narrative that was given for publication to The Gentleman's Magazine by her descendants in 1872.  Throughout the tale, Mary strikes you as sane, calm, and collected, always looking for rational explanations, and not immediately leaping to the conclusion that ghosts were to blame.  One passage reads as follows:

Thoroughly convinced there were persons in the lobby before I opened the door, I asked her [Mary's servant Elizabeth Godin] if she saw no one there.  On her replying in the negative, I went out to her, examined the window that was shut, looked under the couch, the only furniture of concealment there; the chimney board was fastened, and when removed all was clear behind it.  She found the door into the lobby shut, as it was every night.  After this examination, I stood in the middle of the room, pondering with astonishment, when suddenly the door that opens into the little recess leading to the yellow apartment sounded as if played to and fro by a person standing behind it.  This was more than I could bear unmoved.  I ran into the nursery and rang the bell there that goes into the men's apartment.

I think if it'd been me, "not unmoved" would have been putting it mildly.  I think I would have fallen more into the "pissing my pants and then having a stroke" category.

Eventually, however, even Mary's stalwart patience was tried to the limit.  During his stay, her brother -- who is certainly a credible witness if anyone is -- heard groans, banging, dragging footsteps, and (on one occasion) a gunshot.  None of the noises seemed to have a corporeal source.  Jervis pressed his sister to leave the mansion, which she did in 1771.  Its owners were understandably unable to find anyone else who would rent the place, and shortly afterwards Hinton Ampner was demolished.

Okay, I know, you can't put much weight into anecdote, but this story to me has some characteristics that have the ring of truth.  I think it's the open-endedness of it that is the most persuasive, and the most creepy as well.  A lot of ghost stories have predictable endings -- the haunting ends when a skeleton is unearthed and reburied in hallowed ground, when the guilty party is arrested for a murder, when well-deserved revenge is taken against a killer.  Here, we have two seemingly reliable people recounting experiences that have no easy wrap-up.  In the end, Mary Ricketts and her family moved away, John Jervis went on to win the Battle of St. Vincent, and the haunted house itself was torn down.

So I find this a pretty cool story, even though I wouldn't call myself a true believer by any stretch.  Cool, too, that we have a family connection to the main characters; in fact, Captain John Jervis had no children of his own and chose as his heir Mary's son Edward Jervis Ricketts, who spent his childhood in Hinton Ampner, and who would be Carol's third cousin several times removed.  But whether it's true or not, and whether the explanation is supernatural or entirely rational, I still think it's a good tale for a particular day in late October.  And with that, I'll wish you all a happy and dismal-moan-free Halloween.

Borley Rectory, and the problem with anecdote

There's a reason skeptics have a problem with anecdotal evidence and eyewitness testimony.

It's not that that it's impossible that you saw a ghost, or Bigfoot, or an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  What we're saying is that we need more than your assurance that you did.  Not only do we have the potential for outright lies and hoaxes -- some of them very subtle and clever -- we have the fact that the human sensory apparatus more or less sucks.

To put not too fine a point on it.

I mean, it works well enough.  It keeps us sufficiently aware of our surroundings to stay alive.  But we're easily tricked, we miss things, we misinterpret what we see and hear.  As astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "The human perceptual system is rife with all sorts of ways of getting it wrong."

As an illustration, let's consider one of the most famous "haunted house" stories in the world -- the infamous Borley Rectory, of Borley, Essex, England.

Borley Rectory always shows up on those websites with names like, "Ten Most Terrifying Real Ghost Stories!", usually somewhere near the top of the list.  So here are the bare bones of the story, just in case you don't know it.

Borley Rectory was built in 1862 by Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, Rector of Borley Parish.  He designed the building to replace an earlier rectory that had burned down in 1841, and also to accommodate his wife and family of fourteen children, which indicates that Reverend Bull put a lot of stock in the "be fruitful and multiply" thing from the Book of Genesis.

Be that as it may, the parish was certainly steeped in history.  The parish church is thought to date to the 12th century, and the town was the site of Borley Hall, the ancestral seat of the Waldegrave family.  But here's where truth starts twisting in with fabrication; because the additional claim that the rectory had been built on the site of an old Benedictine monastery appears to have no basis in reality.

Which means that the tale that is the basis of the haunting also is of dubious provenance.  Because the story goes that a monk in the (almost certainly non-existent) monastery was having an affair with a nun from a nearby convent.  They made plans to elope, and had in fact arranged a coach driven by a friend of the monk's in order to get away, but the plan was discovered.

Sexual indiscretion by the clergy was a major no-no back then.  The coachman was beheaded, the monk hanged, and the nun bricked up in a wall inside the convent.

Except... none of them existed, remember?  Because there's no evidence there ever was a monastery on the rectory grounds.

But that didn't stop the tale from growing.  Here's one account of what Reverend Bull et al. saw:

On July 28th, 1900, three Bull daughters reportedly saw a figure on a path, which later became known as the "Nuns Walk", to the rear of the rectory. They were joined by a fourth sister to help greet the stranger, but the apparition disappeared. Harry also told of seeing the nun, together with the phantom coach in which she had eloped. 

She was also seen wandering the grounds around the Rectory, in and out of the bushes, dressed in grey. There are reports of the Monk and Nun passing across the grounds. Several people said they observed "A lady in grey cloak" and "A gentleman with a sort of bald head, dressed in a long black gown."

Once the story of the haunting began to spread, others reported seeing spectral nuns and monks.  But that's not all.  A later rector of the parish, one Lionel Foyster, moved in in 1930 with his wife Marianne, and they began to experience poltergeist activity in addition to the continuing presence of ghostly figures loping about.  Marianne began to receive messages written on walls and scraps of paper, such as the following:

Both of the Foysters reported having peculiar experiences:

During the first year of their tenancy, Lionel described many unexplained happenings including; bell ringing, the appearance of Harry Bull [son of the first rector of Borley], glass objects appearing out of nowhere and being dashed to the floor, books appearing, and many items being thrown, including pebbles and an iron. After an attempt at exorcism, Marianne was thrown out of bed several times.

The Foysters eventually moved out, apparently because of Lionel Foyster's declining health, and afterwards no one could be found who was willing to live in the rectory, almost certainly because of its reputation.

And then Harry Price got involved.

Price was a psychic investigator of significant fame, who had founded the National Laboratory of Psychic Research as a rival to the more reputable Society for Psychical Research.  Price himself was a strange mixture of skeptic and sketchy.  He was instrumental in unmasking outright hoaxers such as Helen Duncan, who used cheesecloth and paper soaked in egg white to simulate "ectoplasm."  But his investigation of Borley Rectory, leading to the publication of a book by Price in 1940, was unequivocally in support of its having been haunted -- despite a stinging critique by researchers for the SPR who said that Price himself was a trained conjuror (which was true), and had "salted the mine" by faking some of the evidence from Borley, in collusion with Marianne Foyster, who "was actively engaged in fraudulently creating [haunted] phenomena."

Price, of course, denied any such thing, but further inquiries by the SPR left his role in the alleged haunting in serious question.  And the matter came to an unexpected close when the rectory burned in 1939 because of an accident with an oil lamp.

The remnants of the building were demolished in 1944.  But people still visit the site, and the adjacent cemetery, and still report ghostly appearances, lo unto this very day.

See what I mean about anecdote?  We have a story that started out with a most-likely-false claim of three executions on the rectory grounds, followed by what many believe was an outright hoax perpetrated by Harry Price and Marianne Foyster.  Blend that together with overactive imaginations, and the rather dubious quality of the human perceptual systems, and you have a mishmash out of which any kernel of truth -- if there is one there -- becomes impossible to discern.

So is Borley haunted?  The most honest answer is "there's no way to know for sure," with a strong corollary of "... but probably not."  There's nothing here that any unbiased individual would consider hard evidence, just tall tale piled upon unsubstantiated claim, mixed with "I heard that people saw ghosts there."

If this is "one of the best-authenticated haunted sites in Britain," as one website claimed, we've got some serious problems.

To return to my initial point, it's not that I'm saying that any of the claims of the paranormal are impossible.  What I'm saying is that thus far, no evidence I've seen has been convincing, at least not to someone who wasn't already convinced.  But despite all that, I'm hoping to visit Borley this summer.  My wife and I are spending two weeks in England in August, and I'm going to try to convince my wife to pop in to say hi to the spectral monks and nuns.  I'll definitely report back with anything we happen to see.

Not that it should make a difference.  Because eyewitness testimony is still subject to all of the caveats I've mentioned -- even if it comes from yours truly.

The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness.  Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and which has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.  Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[image courtesy of photographer Sophie Ryder and the Wikimedia Commons]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late 18th century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the upper floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the 19th century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttleton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition, that appeared to him as a brown mist, and that terrified him -- he shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttleton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttleton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand. The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth. The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall. He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter, because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" which tried to strangle Martin -- beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.  It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers, and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttleton.

In my opinion, the entire thing seems to be spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual accuracy as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttleton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out, in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what it actually is.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.

Unreal estate

I've always wanted to spend a night in an (allegedly) haunted house.

Not alone, preferably.  It'd be nice to have someone's sleeve to clutch whenever a branch creaks against the roof.  But still.  There's nothing like direct experience.  Even though I tend to cast a wry eye at eyewitness testimony, the human memory and perceptual apparatus being what they are, having a personal encounter with the spirit of a dead guy would go a long way toward convincing me that this stuff is real.

Apparently, I'm not alone.  Not only do we have the whole ghost-hunting industry (and the television shows it's spawned), we now have people who seem to consider a resident ghost to be a selling point in real estate deals.

Just in the last week, I've seen four advertisements for houses in which hauntings were mentioned -- and none of them seemed to be the sort of mandatory disclosure statement you'd make about, for example, leaky plumbing.  All of them had the air of a brag -- "You definitely want to buy our house.  It comes with a pre-installed ghost."

First, in the UK, we have Sawston Hall, a grand Tudor manor house in Cambridgeshire.  It comes with a hundred-foot-long "great hall," a moat, an arboretum... and a disembodied spirit of a dead queen.

 The house was a favorite hideout of Queen Mary I, better known to history as "Bloody Mary" Tudor -- and it's said that she still haunts the place.  Stephen and Claire Coates, the current owners, say they've never seen her.  Still, having a royal ghost is quite a selling point, and they'd like a cool £4.75 million for the place.

If you'd like the UK but are looking for something a little more... "atmospheric"... then consider Dornoch Castle, which is a bargain at less than half of what Sawston Hall is going for -- only £2.25 million.

Consider the selling points -- an already-outfitted restaurant that seats ninety, a bar with an open fireplace, proximity to prominent whisky distilleries and golf courses, and a dead Sutherland sheep rustler.

The ghost at Dornoch is apparently one Andrew McCornish, who was hanged there in the 19th century for stealing livestock.  Which opens up an interesting question; why would ghosts linger around the place they were executed?  If I were hanged, and found myself a ghost, I would get the hell out of there.  Bad memories, you know?  But to each his own, I suppose, and I'm sure that Dornoch is charming in many other respects.

If that's still too rich for your tastes, or if you'd like something a little more subtropical, there's this lovely historic home in Punta Gorda, Florida, on the market for $1,590,000:

Vander and Natalie Wynn have this house for sale, and proudly include a 14-year-old dead girl as one of the house's selling points.

"It's a great view so it's a great place to be. And if you have a perpetual 14-year-old teenage girl playing tricks on you, kinda fun," said Wynn.  "I hear my wife walk down the stairs, and I call out her name and she says yes from a different part of the house.  There's some weird things like that you really can't explain."

"She's really not scary, she just makes noise.  Sometimes I've told her you need to be quiet," his wife, Natalie, added.

Apparently the ghost belongs to a girl who died in an unfortunate accident involving kerosene and a match back in the early 20th century, once again raising the "painful memories" question.  But you can't argue with the location.  Given that we're currently in the dead of winter in upstate New York, I'd happily move to Punta Gorda even if I had to content with a perpetual noisy adolescent.

Last, we have this lovely 19th century house in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, which is a steal at only $144,000, probably because its owners say it is only "slightly haunted:"

It does, however, make me wonder how a place can be "slightly haunted."  Either it has a ghost, or it doesn't, right?  "Slightly haunted" is like "a little bit pregnant."  And from the description, it's sounds like it's more "pretty freakin' haunted," if the owners are being straight with us:

Slightly haunted.  Nothing serious, though, e.g. the sound of phantom footsteps.  A strange knocking sound followed by a very quiet (hardly noticeable, even) scream at 3:13 AM, maybe once a week.  Twice a week, tops.  And the occasional ghastly visage lurking behind you in the bathroom mirror.  Even still, this occurs very rarely and only in the second-floor bathroom.

It also has a "study/library that has a secret door behind a moving bookcase leading into a small office," and a "large unfinished crawlspace behind a concealed door hidden in a bedroom closet."  All of which sounds like horror movie material, to me.

Oh, but the house has "tons of charm."  So there's that.

Anyhow, if you're in the market for some unreal estate, there you have it.  And I'm sure that's just scratching the surface.  A Google search for "haunted house for sale" got over 100,000 hits, so there has to be one in your area.  Make sure to find out the particulars about the ghost before you put in a purchase offer.  Caveat emptor, you know.

Ghost spotting

My wife and I just got back from a trip to Boston -- my first visit to that fascinating and historical city.  And as part of our visit, we got to participate in a ghost tour.

I thought of it as an "undercover mission."  My wife, on the other hand, thought of it as a prime opportunity for me to be obnoxious in public.

"Before I buy tickets for this," she said last week, her finger poised on the "Enter" button on her laptop keyboard, "you have to promise me one thing."

"What's that?"

"That you'll BE NICE."

So I reluctantly agreed, she bought the tickets, and Monday evening, we dutifully showed up in the chilly, windy evening in front of Faneuil Hall.  There we met our guide, Jim, who represented Boston Ghost Tours -- and also a "real" ghosthunting group, RTS Paranormal Investigations, of Wrentham, Massachusetts.

I decided right away that I wouldn't blow my cover and announce my status as a doubter.  I played along, even generating some naive-appearing enthusiasm at the beginning of the tour as Jim told us that Boston was one of the "most haunted cities in North America."  It was kind of a heady experience, being a spy, although the fact that Jim was dressed in Revolutionary War garb kept reminding me of what happened to Nathan Hale.

The first thing Jim told us was that there was no guarantee that we'd see a ghost.  Ghosts, he said, were notoriously unpredictable and uncooperative.  "After all," he told us, "ghost hunting isn't like whale watching."  Which, technically, is correct, because whales exist.  But I didn't mention that.

So off we went.  Our first stop was the site of the Boston Massacre, which we observed from the warmth of the glassed-in foyer of Bank of America.  We were told that bunches of people had seen the ghost of Crispus Attucks, one of the first victims of the Revolutionary War, and that the likely reason Attucks had appeared in the early years of the 21st century (he apparently hadn't been seen before then, and hasn't been seen in the last couple of years) was that they were renovating the area.  Ghosts, apparently, don't like renovations, which I can sympathize with.  We just finished remodeling our bathroom, and it was a nuisance.  Why ghosts care, I don't know, but apparently they do, and Crispus Attucks dealt with his frustration by dying over and over in front of the Old State House.  I guess everyone handles stress in his own way.

After that, we went to the Old South Church, where we heard about a British soldier who shot at a ghostly priest and then got flogged for discharging his weapon without orders.  After this rather cautionary tale, we went to the Omni Parker Hotel, "the most haunted building in Massachusetts."

We went up to the second floor, which seemed to mostly be comprised of meeting rooms and was empty unless you counted the three-dozen-odd middle school students, all in eye-damaging yellow t-shirts, who were touring the place.  So the ambiance wasn't exactly what it could have been.  We waited until the teenagers had departed and the airborne hormone levels had returned to normal to view the main attraction -- the "Charles Dickens mirror," a gilt-framed mirror in which many people have seen ghostly reflections.  Some have even taken photographs of it, only to find that there's the ghostly image of a man in the picture -- a man who hadn't been there when the photo was taken.  So, naturally, my wife had to give it a try herself:

And lo and behold, if you look carefully, you can see -- to the left of her (you can't see her face as it's being obscured by the camera flash) -- the figure of a ghostly man wearing a brimmed hat, staring into the mirror!

Oh, wait, that's me.  Never mind.

So we didn't see a ghost in the mirror, and believe me, I tried.  I stared into that thing like a madman, but all I saw was my own rather questionable face.

Afterwards, we went out into a large open space on the second floor, and Jim regaled us with tales of "Room 303," which "some of the hotel staff deny even exists."  They apparently tell people it's a broom closet.  But then he told us that it still gets rented out, which seems odd, for a broom closet, but what do I know about hotel administration?  In any case, Jim said we couldn't go up to room 303, but if we did -- man, there is one malevolent spirit there.  It grabs people's ankles while they're sleeping, and one time slapped one of the hotel staff across the face.  But even though we couldn't visit room 303, as a consolation prize we would get to see if there were any ghosts about -- using equipment, and everything.

So Jim got out a flashlight and an electromagnetic field detector (he said that an electronic stud finder, or even a compass, would also work).  He turned the flashlight on, and handed the EMF detector to a teenage girl who was on the tour and told her to ask any ghosts who were present to show themselves by turning off the flashlight or making the detector light up.

Giggling nervously, the girl did as Jim requested.  Silence fell in the group, as we looked around us at the opulent carpeting, the old woodwork, the empty halls receding into shadow.  And then... suddenly...

... nothing happened.  And after a while, nothing continued to happen.  There was one momentary tiny blip on the EMF detector, which Jim said was probably caused by the building's WiFi.  "Always look for the rational explanation first," he said, which seemed like good advice to me.  In fact, my rational explanation for no results is that there's nothing there, but Jim disagreed, apparently, and asked a couple of other members of the group to request that the ghosts make themselves known.

Which they did.  But the ghosts weren't cooperating that night, so we reluctantly packed it in, and Jim walked us all out of the hotel and back to the MTA subway station.

Anyhow, all in all, it was an entertaining evening, and I encourage any of you who are visiting Boston to check it out (you can make reservations at the link I posted above).  Maybe you'll have better luck than I did.  You'd almost have to, actually, given that I didn't see a damn thing and nearly froze to death on the outdoor part of the tour.  But I have to say that Jim is quite a storyteller, and even if I'm not the most receptive of audiences, I did enjoy myself and hardly rolled my eyes at all.

Well, a little, but I tried to keep it to a minimum.  You never know how ghosts are going to react to being laughed at.  For example, I suspect that the one in room 303 would not be amused, and however much I'd like to see a ghost, I think I'd prefer not to get slapped in the face by one.

The University of Iowa underwear-snitching ghost

I think one of the hardest things for me to understand about the woo-woo mindset is how quickly they're willing to jump to a supernatural explanation.

It's not that I don't have the impulse myself sometimes, mind you.  When I hear a bump in my attic, when I see something out of the corner of my eye, I (like most people) get a shiver up my spine.  But I don't follow that up by saying "Oh, it must be that pesky ghost again."  The first thing I look for is a natural explanation.  And you know what?  When I look for a natural explanation, I generally find it.  The bump in the attic was my cat knocking something off a bookshelf; the motion I saw was leaves being blown past the window.  In my 52 years, the number of things I've been left with that I haven't been able to satisfactorily explain from a completely ordinary perspective is exactly zero.

Apparently, though, I'm in the minority.  Consider the case of the University of Iowa baseball team, who have made some strange enough claims that their story was written up on the New England Sports Network.  (Read the story here.)  Members of the team have contacted ghost hunters after several of their number reported seeing apparitions, and having a variety of other strange experiences in their living quarters.

"We've lived here over the past two years," pitcher Aaron Smit told reporters.  "But over the past few months, we've noticed things getting a little bit weird.  We had a kid in here who thought he saw a ghost -- a shadow in the form of a human."

Others have reported "poltergeist-like" phenomena, with objects moving around, doors being slammed, and television channels spontaneously changing.  One player said he saw a "little girl in his bedroom."  Another, first baseman Brian Niedbalski, says there's an old man ghost living in the house as well, and the team has nicknamed him "Tim."  (The ghost, not the first baseman.)  "I'm on Tim's good side," Niedbalski said.  "I want to leave it that way."

Then, there's the incident in which two of the players' girlfriends, who were spending the night, woke up to find their underwear had been removed, and was elsewhere in the room -- although they were still wearing pants at the time.

Oooookay.  So, what do we have here?

First, of course, we have the complete lack of actual hard evidence.  Doors can slam because of drafts -- I lived in a house in Seattle where that used to happen regularly -- and the "corner of the eye" phenomenon is something that happens to everyone, whether there's a ghost there or not.  I see nothing here that can't be explained through a combination of suggestibility, natural phenomena, and ordinary human perceptual errors, with possibly the contribution of alcohol in the case of the teleporting panties.  None of this seems to me to be especially convincing, and you have to wonder if this may not be a few superstitious guys who convinced the whole team that something ghostly was going on, following which every additional stray noise just added to the team's conviction that they were living in a haunted house.

Of course, I have to admit that I'm drawing all of these conclusions long-distance.  I've never been to the team's living quarters to check out the claims for myself.  Spending a night in a haunted house is one of my bucket-list items -- and who knows, maybe if I get my wish I'll be convinced.  But at the moment, all of the natural explanations for the University of Iowa underwear-stealing ghost just seem to me to be much more plausible.