An old man, a young woman and a puppet are haunting Timberden Bottom.
On the first day after Christmas Mr Paul Howard of Shoreham will sleep in the little bedroom that looks out over the garden of Timberden Bottom. He plans to sleep soundly but in any case he is not afraid. “Whatever it is that I saw it seems quite friendly,” he said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything to be afraid of although it was the first time.”
Timberden Bottom is a lonely place in winter where mists creep up from the valley and round the few houses beside the narrow road. But as Mr Howard says, it is a friendly place. There is a strangeness sometimes but no evil thing. It is not just Christmas that makes the story but the date. Three times in a year something has happened on the night of the 26th of the month.
“I was afraid all right,” said Mr Howard. “But I had this feeling not to bother, not to try and find out, that nothing wanted to do me any harm.” The 24-year-old London businessman boasts that he is hard-headed and down to make money. But on Boxing Day night last year he woke in his parents’ house at Little Timberden to see an unknown woman standing by the door. “It was a moonless night,” he said. “I only saw her for a moment. She had dark clothes on, something formal or mourning and I think she wore a veil. She was not particularly young, maybe middle 30’s, but she was very beautiful. She was just standing there with her face turned to the window.”
He never saw her go because something caught his attention by the bed. It was an old man, rocking gently backwards and forwards. “It was as though he was sitting in a rocking chair but there wasn’t one in the room,” said Mr Howard. “I could only see his head and shoulders. His face seemed bright red, like a painted puppet. He had white hair and his face looked as if it was lit up from inside. The face was in profile. As I watched the head turned very slowly and for an instant the face looked straight at me. He had blue eyes, kind eyes, they looked straight at me, understandingly, then the face seemed to move back through the wall.”
Mr Howard said he wanted to get up to investigate. But he had a feeling he should not, that he should go back to sleep and forget about it. “It may seem hard to believe but that is just what I did,” he said. “I slept perfectly soundly until the morning.”
There was another night about three months ago, also the 26th, when Mr Howard was sleeping in a room on the opposite side of the passage when he saw something strange. There were two beds in the room. He woke up and bright moonlight was flooding through the window. Something was jumping up and down on the other bed. It was about four feet tall. It seemed to have a red coat and some sort of ruffle where the neck should be. But there wasn’t any face. Only a thing like a puppet dressed in old-fashioned clothes. It jumped up and down on the bed making a hissing noise and seemed to be throwing Mr Howard’s clothes around. “The curious thing was that although I could not see any face I knew when it was looking at me,” he said. “It seemed to be jumping up and down in an absolute fury. Then it drifted out of the room and hung outside the window. The dog was in the passage and I let it in. It slept on my bed for the rest of the night.”His mother, Mrs Lola Haward, came to the room to ask what all the noise was about. But he had done nothing except get out of bed and open the door.
Other people have seen things in the house, parts of which are said to date back to the 16th century. Paul’s 21-year-old sister, Jane, who is married and lives at Ide Hill, has always been conscious of something. Things move in bedrooms. There were noises like someone moving about. A visiting cousin went downstairs in the night – another 26th of the month – and saw something in black, outdoor clothes and a black hat come out of one of the rooms and cross the hall. She went back upstairs and told Mrs Howard that Paul was back but Paul was at a party and did not come in until much later.
Paul’s parents, Mr and Mrs James Howard, have seen nothing. They call the ghost “George”. His main interest seems to be centred on Paul.
Not long ago a medium went into the room where Paul saw the old man by his bed. She said the ghost had only recently been able to get through to him as there had been evil things in the room. The previous owners of the house had used the room as a museum and there had been iron collars and wrist chains from Pompeii, believed to have been instruments of torture. The medium said other things as well; that Little Timberden stood on the site of a medieval wayfarers house where priests lodged on their way to Rome. There is believed to be the remains of a chapel nearby with a confessional grill.
One day an Earl stayed at the house on his way to a Crusade and sought to make his confession to one of the priests. For some reason the priest refused and the man went campaigning in the Holy Land where he died unabsolved. The priest heard of this and it tortured his conscience that he had sent a man to his death without hearing his confession. He has sought him ever since at the place where he refused the Church’s absolution to a penitent soul. This explains a lot if you believe in ghosts except why the old man with gentle eyes should choose to sit by Paul’s bed gently rocking in an attitude of listening contemplation. Two things help to fill the gap. According to the medium who sat alone in the bedroom for an hour Paul has the face of the noble Earl who went crusading in the East and Paul admits that three generations back his family had aristocratic blood.
Mr Paul Howard, of Timberden Bottom, Shoreham, is very real. And so, he maintains, is the ghost story which followed the dramatic incidents in this small upstairs bedroom.
Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 24th December 1969.