Borley Rectory, located near the River Stour in Essex, was built in 1863 by the Reverend Henry Bull, and was destroyed by fire in February 1939.  The ground it was built on had a reputation for being haunted, with many strange phenomena reported in the area before the rectory was built.

The house was said to host several ghosts, including that of its first vicar, Henry Bull.  Other spirits included a phantom nun (my note - allegedly a nun fell in love with a monk, when it was found out - they punished her by walling her alive in the rectory), and a ghostly coach that could be heard rattling up the drive.  Many residents complained of poltergeists; one vicar was reputedly hit on the head with a hairbrush.  The occupants who allegedly experienced the most paranormal activity were the Reverend Lionel Foyster and his wife Marianne, who moved into Borley Rectory in 1930 and left five years later.  During their stay, over 2000 alleged paranormal events took place.

Harry Price Investigates –

The Rectory, in its day known as the most haunted in England, is most famous for the ghost hunting investigations instigated by Harry Price, who claimed that the hauntings included strange whispers, a woman’s voice that moaned and then exclaimed, “Don’t, Carlos, don’t!”, unexplained footsteps and the phantom nun who had been seen by almost all residents.  His investigations led him to believe that the hauntings had been occurring for some 50 years.  Strange activities recorded included the banging of doors, footsteps, voices, spontaneous combustion of portions of the house, wall writings, touchings, choir singing, music, strange lights, odours, mysterious smoke in the garden, rappings and even communication with the equivalent of an Ouija board.  Price himself heard bells ringing and witnesses strange poltergeist activity, such as objects raining down stairwells.

A picture of Borley Rectory shortly after the fire, if you look closely, you can see a brick flying through the doorway.

Sarah Winchester, the last surviving member of the affluent Winchester family, moved into a farmhouse in San Jose, California, in 1884.  She believed that she was haunted by all those who had been killed by Winchester rifles.  She received messages from her dead relatives encouraging her to add more and more rooms to the house.  They warned her that a curse would be enacted the moment she stopped building.  Sarah continued to build for 36 years, using a crew hired to work seven days a week.  Eventually Winchester House spread over six acres, with 160 rooms, 47 fireplaces, 2000 doors and dozens of secret rooms and corridors.  Every night at midnight, dressed in robes, she entertained her ghost guests in the Blue Room, summoning them with a tolling bell.  There she hosted dinner parties, setting 13 places, one for herself and 12 for ghosts, and served them meals cooked by chefs from Europe.  When she died in 1922, she bequeathed her house to a niece, and requested that the ghosts continue to be cared for.  Winchester House is now a tourist attraction.

Here is an overhead shot of Winchester House today.

Known as the ‘house of faces’, Belmez de la Moraleda in Spain had a concrete kitchen floor in which mysterious faces appeared.  The first face appeared in 1971.  It was removed and the floor laid with fresh cement.  However, other faces immediately took its place and at one point there were nine faces in the concrete.  The house had been built over a graveyard and ghost experts concluded that the faces were made by poltergeists.  More recently, the house has become a place of pilgrimage to those who believe that the faces are portraits of saints.

Here is one of the faces on the floor.

A house in Amityville, Long Island, was once the most famous haunted house in the United States.  In 1974, Ronald de Feo killed six members of his family there.  In 1975, the Lutz family moved in but left after only a month.  They claimed they had been driven out by phantom footsteps, horrible smells, clouds of flies in the sewing room and the children’s playrooms, window panes that broke simultaneously, extreme cold and heat, personality changes, levitations, strange scratches and ghost hands.

The Horror of Amityville –

George Lutz, the father of three children, grew a beard and began to closely resemble De Feo.  His wife Kathy suffered strange scratches to her body, and her brother and his bride mysteriously lost $1500 in cash in the house.  Father Ralph Pecarato, the local priest who blessed the house after the Lutzes moved in, suffered illness, anxiety and pain that caused him to be transferred to another parish.  He claims to have heard a voice ordering him to get out when he sprinkled holy water.

In 1977, The Amityville Horror was written by Jay Anson, and published as a non-fiction title.  The book, avidly published by the Lutzes, became a best-seller, and several films and book sequels followed.

This is a shot of Amityville House today.

The ghosts of Queen Mary I (1516-58) and a Lady in Grey are said to haunt this sixteenth-century house in Cambridgeshire, UK.  In 1553, Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, was involved in a struggle for the throne of England.  Edward VI, who was dying of tuberculosis, was persuaded by the Duke of Northumberland to give the crown to his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, who was Henry VIII’s grandniece.  The duke attempted to imprison Mary, but she fled, taking refuge for the night with a family named Huddlestone at their home, Sawston Hall.  Mary escaped, the following day disguised as a milkmaid.  When the duke’s men arrived, they burned the house to the ground.  Mary was duly crowned queen; Lady Jane Grey’s reign had lasted only nine days and she was later beheaded.

The Lady In Grey –

Mary later rebuilt Sawston Hall to thank the Huddlestones, and to this day her ghost may be seen gliding through the house and the gardens.  The Lady in Grey appears in the Tapestry Room, where she knocks three times at the door and then floats across the room.  It is believed that Mary once slept in this room, now also known as Mary’s Room.  Those who have spent the night there report being disturbed by rapping sounds, phantoms and the sound of someone fumbling with the latch.

Here is a picture of Sawston Hall.

This twelfth-century cathedral in Kent, where Thomas Becket (Archbishop of Canterbury from 1161 to 1170) was murdered, is a famous pilgrimage site.   However, it is the ghost of another archbishop, Simon Sudbury, that allegedly walks the cathedral to this day.  Sudbury was murdered by Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasant’s Revolt, in 1381.  Sudbury, a pale man with a long, grey beard, haunts the tower that bears his name, and at least 100 sightings have been documented over the past century.

Nell Cook –

A passage in the cathedral known as the Dark Entry is haunted by Nell Cook, who was servant of a canon of the cathedral.  On discovering her employer was having an affair Nell was so angry that she poisoned the canon and his lover.  As punishment for her crime, Nell was buried alive beneath the Dark Entry.  Her spirit is believed to haunt the passageway on dark Friday evenings.  According to legend, anyone who is unfortunate enough to see the ghost of Nell Cook will die soon after.

The cathedral is also said to be haunted by a monk who can be seen walking in the cloisters with a thoughtful expression on his face.

A very nice picture of beautiful and eerie Cantebury Cathedral.

Ghosts of King Henry VIII’s wives have been seen in several parts of the UK.  Visitors to Hampton Court Palace in London have spotted an apparition that resembles Jane Seymour, who died shortly after childbirth.  Her ghost, carrying a lighted candle, has often been seen on the anniversary of her son’s birth.  Another of Henry’s wives, Catherine Howard, was imprisoned for adultery in the Palace, but escaped and ran to the chapel to find Henry and beg his forgiveness.  Henry, deep in prayer, ignored her and she was recaptured and dragged away screaming.  She was subsequently executed, and to this day her screams are said to echo around Hampton Court.

Several years ago, when the gallery was open to the public, an artist sketching a picture repeatedly saw a ringed hand in front of his work.  He drew what he saw and the jewel in the ring was later identified as belonging to Catherine Howard.

King Henry himself was one of the first to see the ghost of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded on his orders.  Sightings of Anne Boleyn vary, with witnesses claiming to see her both with and without her head; in some sightings she is carrying her own head.  Those who have seen Anne Boleyn in the Palace describe her as walking slowly, looking either distressed or angry.  Many witnesses describe a strong sensation of rage, most likely Anne’s grief, anger, dread and fear of dying.

A lovely picture of Hampton Court Palace.

Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire was originally a Cistercian abbey and was rebuilt in the middle of the eighteenth century.  It has been the home of the dukes of Bedford for nearly 300 years and is reputedly haunted by a number of ghost forms.

According to Haunted Mansions of the World, the most recent haunting to take place in the abbey is thought to be the ghost of a young man who was half strangled and later drowned in the lake.  Although he cannot be seen, doors open and close for him as he walks through rooms.  Witnesses claim that the door handle turns and then opens, as if a person was coming through.  In the time it would take for a person to cross the room, the door at the other end opens and closes again for this invisible figure.

The ghost of a monk is also said to haunt the abbey and has been seen most often in the crypt, where monks were buried.  He may be the abbot of Woburn, who was hanged when he opposed Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn.

The Sorrowful Duchess –

The summerhouse is said to be haunted by the present duke’s grandmother, who died in a plane crash.  Although she has not been seen, witnesses claim to experience an overwhelming feeling of sadness in the summerhouse, which was her favourite place.

A picture of the abbey.

The Crown Hotel in Poole, Dorset, is reputedly haunted by a number of ghosts.  Most activity supposedly takes place in the old stable block.  Some workmen witnessed one of the stable doors swing open of its own accord, despite being bolted.  More horrifying are the reports of witnesses who claim to have heard the sound of children’s screams.  Local legend has it that a former landlord kept his two deformed children locked in the stable block and later killed them.  The stables were later converted into a nightclub, and during the 1960s were standing empty when the sound of someone playing the piano was heard coming from them.

Other ghostly activities in the hotel include the sound of something (a body?) being dragged across the upper floor, and a fluorescent mist that forms in the shape of a child’s head.

The famous Crown Hotel.

The Raffles Hotel is one of the oldest hotels in Singapore.  It was built in 1897 on the site of a girls’ boarding school  The hotel was renovated in the 1980s, and until then more than 100 witnesses independently claimed to have heard a girl’s voice singing an English nursery rhyme.  It was widely believed that the voice belonged to a long-dead pupil of the school.

The Raffles in Singapore.

A great many ghosts of historical significance are said to haunt the Tower of London, including Henry VI, Thomas Becket, Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey and Sir Walter Raleigh.

The ghosts of King Edward V and Prince Richard, brothers who died mysteriously at the Tower as children in 1483, have been seen.  A more gruesome haunting concerns the Countess of Salisbury, who was sentenced to death in 1541.  Her execution ceremony has been re-enacted by spirits on Tower Green.

Anne Boleyn –

Anne Boleyn, beheaded on the orders of her husband Henry VIII, has been seen, often in the White Tower.  A headless figure, she is surrounded by eerie light.  Lady Jane Grey haunts the Tower on the anniversary of her execution.  Sir Walter Raleigh’s ghost is said to haunt the Queen’s House near the cell that he was locked in.

Other hauntings at the Tower include the sounds of a phantom patrol marching past, terrible screams and the cries coming from the torture chambers and bizarre smoke-like apparitions floating in the air around the battlements.

The very much haunted Tower of London.

This theatre, in the heart of London’s West End, is believed to be one of the most haunted sites in the world, hosting a variety of thespian ghosts.

Most famous of these apparitions is the Man in Grey, who appears, only during the day, in the theatre auditorium.  He is dressed in elaborate costume and is probably linked to a man murdered in the theatre some 200 years ago, whose skeleton was found in a sealed room backstage with a dagger still wedged in the ribcage.  Many actors have seen him while rehearsing.  He is a benign spirit and a sighting has now come to represent a good omen, as the plays in which the ghost has appeared during rehearsals have gone on to be great successes.

Another apparition, believed to be the spirit of comedian Dan Leno, has been spotted in the dressing room that Leno inhabited in his acting days.

The haunted wings of the theatre in Drury Lane.

One of the most important spirit photographs was taken at Raynham Hall in Norfolk, UK.  The ghost of the Brown Lady, named for the brown flowing dress she wears as she descends the staircase.  She is thought to be the ghost of Dorothy Walpole, sister to eighteenth-century English prime minister Robert Walpole.  She was said to be held prisoner at Raynham by her angry husband, following an affair.  Those who have seen her ghost describe an illuminated, gaunt face, with dark hollows instead of eyes.  She appears to be benign, walking peacefully through the premises.  The photograph was taken in 1936 by Captain Provand, a photographer for Country Life magazine.  The image has been examined by numerous experts who found no evidence of forgery.

The famous picture of the Brown Lady.

Kensington Palace has three ghosts in residence.  Most frequently seen is the ghost of King George II, seen on the roof staring at the weathervane and asking “Why don’t they come?”  The King died on the 25 October 1760 at the palace, waiting for news from his homeland of Hanover in Germany.

A picture of the palace.

Windsor Castle is reputed to house at least 25 ghosts, four of them monarchs.  Princess Margaret once saw the ghost of Elizabeth I, as did a guard officer, who followed the former queen into the library, where she suddenly disappeared.  The same library is a favoured haunt of Charles I, who has been seen standing by a table several times.  Many people have seen George III in various rooms, muttering his favourite phrase of “What, what?”.  Two guards saw Henry VIII walk through a wall on the battlements of Windsor Castle in the mid-1970s.  They later learned that there used to be a door where the ghost disappeared.

The famous Windsor Castle.

Anne Boleyn spent several years of her childhood at Blickling Hall, a place which she had many fond memories.  She was executed at the Tower of London on 19 May 1536, and on the anniversary of her death every year, a phantom coach is said to convey her ghost, carrying her head on her knees, towards Blickling Hall.  The coach and horses are seen to drive very slowly to the front door and then vanish.  It is also said locally that the ghost of her father is doomed to drive his coach over 40 bridges in the country every year before returning to Blickling.

A picture of Blickling Hall.

A phantom black carriage, drawn by a team of horses, is regularly seen driving up to Oulton House, which was the scene of two murders.  In the eighteenth century, the squire of the house returned home after a day’s hunting to find his wife in bed with an army officer.  In a duel, the officer killed the squire and then fled, taking the squire’s wife with him and leaving her young daughter behind.  The daughter grew up and planned to marry a local farmer.  On the night before the wedding, a strange coach pulled up at the house, and out of it stepped a veiled woman carrying a bottle.  The following morning the girl was found dead and it was locally believed that the veiled woman was the girl’s mother, who had returned to prevent her daughter from revealing the identity of the man who killed her father.

A photo of Oulton House.

In Barbados in 1812, a strange sequence of events occurred within a sealed tomb.  A family tomb was opened to bury Colonel Thomas Chase, an affluent Englishman.  The tomb had been opened three times previously to inter his wife and two daughters, and on each of these occasions, nothing was found to be amiss.

However, when the tomb was opened to bury the colonel, the coffins were in disarray, as if they had been tossed in the air and allowed to fall to the ground.  Anxious family members assumed that the tomb had been vandalised (although there was no exterior evidence of this), and the coffins were duly rearranged and the tomb tightly sealed once more.  Over the following eight years, whenever the tomb was opened, it was found in disorder.  Finally, in 1820, the governor of Barbados ordered the tomb to be unsealed.  He found that sand laid on the floor of the tomb was undisturbed, yet the coffins were again in totally different positions around the tomb.  One of the coffins appeared to have been thrown against the wall with such force that a deep gash was left in the stone.  This prompted the family to remove all the coffins and bury them elsewhere, where they remained untouched.

A diagram of the coffins arrangements.

One of the most frequent ghost sightings worldwide is the phantom hitchhiker, or passengers who appear without being picked up.  These hitchhikers are often associated with tragic events that occurred on a particular stretch of road, although the romance of travel, and the emotion of partings and meetings, is believed to inspire some ghosts to appear.

The most common scenario is a distressed young woman, coincidentally en route to the same place as the driver.  When the drivers reach their destination they inevitably find she had vanished.  In some cases she has left something behind, and the seat is damp.  Sometimes drivers arrive at an address given by the woman where they find that the incident has occurred before, and that the girl or woman had died years earlier, often killed or murdered in the place where she had been picked up.

In 1978 a motorcyclist in South Africa gave a lift to a girl who subsequently disappeared while they were driving.  He knew the exact moment when she left because the change in weight caused his bike to slew.  The passenger was later identified as Maria Roux, who had died 10 years earlier.

(There is also a famous story in Chicago of Resurrection Mary, a girl who died on her way to a fancy ball in her car, later – she’s asked to be driven to a cemetery in town – and promptly disappears from cab driver’s backseats en route.  She has also been seen walking along the stretch of road near the cemetery, a wispy wraith with only holes for eyes).

A lonely road, haunted?

The area around Bluebell Hill in Kent, UK, has recurring episodes of phantom hitchhikers.  In 1992, a man named Sharpe described how a girl suddenly appeared in front of his car.  He hit her, and she looked right at him at the moment of impact.  He stopped the car and searched for the body, but could find nothing.  He called the police, who found no sign either.  Some years earlier, another driver has a similar experience, but he found the body and covered it with a blanket before going to find help.  When he returned with the police, the body was gone, but the blanket lay in place with no bloodstains or any sign of tracks away from the site. 

A beautiful picture of the Bluebell Hill countryside.

In 1958, British lorry driver Harry Unsworth picked up a man wearing a grey overcoat and dripping with rain on the A38 in Somerset.   The man described several accidents that had occurred on the road, and in following weeks Unsworth picked him up many times.  Unsworth thought nothing of it until he came across him twice in the same day.  After dropping him off once, he encountered him again, miles up the road.  It seemed unlikely that he had hitched such a distance in so short a time.

No, this is not the phantom hitchhiker, this is Somerset though.

Roadside phantoms are also common.  Mike Barns, an American doctor, was driving across the Arizona desert when he saw a distressed young boy in a Scout uniform, gesticulating wildly.  The boy asked for help, and directed Dr. Barns along a dirt road and up a mountain.  As they approached the top, screams were heard.  The boy pointed to the canyon below where a school bus, which had crashed just moments before, lay.  The only fatality in the accident was a little boy in a Scout uniform…

A typical Arizona scene in the desert.

Sightings of phantom travellers in certain places are so common that log books have been set up to record them.  London Underground’s Aldgate station records sightings of ghosts on an almost weekly basis.  London’s Heathrow airport is home to a number of ghosts.  One, wearing a dark suit and bowler hat, has appeared since 1948, when a Sabena CD3 Dakota crashed on a landing in heavy fog, killing all 22 people on board.  When rescue workers sifted through the wreckage, this man appeared, and politely asked if they had found his briefcase.  He is always seen walking along the same runway.

These aren't Sabenas, but this is Heathrow.

Beginning in 1848 at their parents’ farmhouse near Hydesville, New York, the Fox sisters were able to produce spirit ‘rappings’ in answer to questions put to them.  They claimed that their home was haunted by the ghost of a peddler, and they seemed able to control his poltergeist-like activity.  After moving to Rochester, New York, and receiving a wider audience, their fame spread to both sides of the Atlantic.  By the mid-1850s they had inspired a host of imitators, and the birth of the Spiritualist movement.  Margaret Fox later claimed to have manipulated her joints in order to create the rapping sounds, but after her death, when the farmhouse she had grown up collapsed (1904), the body of a peddler was found sandwiched between two walls.

A picture of the famous Fox Sisters.

In 1878, Esther Cox from Nova Scotia in Canada, was an ordinary 18-year-old when poltergeist activity changed her life.  One night she woke up and screamed, declaring that there was a mouse in her bed.  Rustling sounds were heard in a box that was rising and falling in the air, but proved to be empty.  The following night Esther once again woke in terror.  She claimed she was dying and her body swelled to almost twice its normal size.  Her family heard the sound of thunder, although the sky was cloudless.  Esther recovered from the swelling but strange activities such as bedding flying about the room continued, becoming increasingly violent.

‘Mine to Kill!’ –

Her family called the family doctor, Dr. Caritte.  While he was examining her, the bolster upon which she was resting rose and hit him on the head.  A metallic scratching sound then occurred behind him, and he saw, written on the wall, the words:  “Esther Cox!  You are mine to kill!”  The episodes went on for months, ceasing only when Esther left the property.  When fire broke out in the family barn, Esther was blamed and imprisoned for four years, after which the poltergeist activity stopped altogether.  Her family, the doctor and many local witnesses became convinced the poltergeist was the work of an evil ghost who had decided to torment her.

Experts believe that Esther was the unwitting focus of psychokinetic energy, which caused the phenomenon.  Whether she had repressed anger or other emotions, or sexual feelings that she could not communicate, there is no doubt that all the haunting ceases when she left the premises.

A typical picture of Amherst, Nova Scotia (the province I was born in).

The Bell Witch is one of the best-known cases of poltergeist haunting.  The witch set in motion a series of events that ended in death.  In 1817, John and Lucy Bell lived with their children on a farm in Tennessee in the USA.  One of the children, Elizabeth, became the focus of the malicious activity.  In the beginning, scraping sounds and other noises were heard, but soon her bedclothes and furniture began to be thrown around the room.  She was subjected to physical attacks, which included being pinched, slapped, bruised and stuck with pins.  Her family first though she had assaulted herself, but as the attacks became more intense, and the spirit began to speak, it became clear that external factors were at work.  The spirit claimed to be ‘a Spirit from everywhere, Heaven, Hell, the Earth…’ and said that she was Kate Batts’ witch.  Kate Batts was a local woman who had once fallen out with Bell and had threatened retribution.  She was still alive, but denied any knowledge of the haunting.  From then on, the spirit was popularly known as Kate.

The Murder of John Bell – 

The activities continued even when Elizabeth left the property and went to stay with a neighbour.  When Elizabeth became engaged to a local man, the poltergeist began revealing her intimate secrets, and the marriage never took place.  The poltergeist continued to plague the family for more than two years, and John Bell became increasingly ill.  The poltergeist took credit for his condition and promised that Bell would be tormented until he died.  On 20 December 1820, John Bell died.  A strange bottle was found in the medicine cabinet, and when the contents were administered to the family cat, it suffered convulsions and died.  The poltergeist declared that she had poisoned him while he was sleeping, and she shrieked in triumph.  The poltergeist left for seven years and then returned, wrecking the same havoc.  The Bell family never learned why they had been singled out for such an attack.

The cave of the supposed Bell Witch, is this her?

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