An Army ghost gets his marching orders.
He’s promised to stop his scaring.
A medium who was called in by the Army last night to drive out a barrack-room ghost reported that his mission had been a success. He said that the ghost had promised not to return and frighten any more soldiers. A seance was conducted in the Army-owned Mitchett [Mytchett] Place, an eighteenth-century house at Keogh Barracks, Aldershot, Hants, by medium Mr George McAllister. The house is used by the Royal Army Medical Corps, who post a soldier there on picket duty every night. But this year, the haunting started…
Soldiers on picket duty heard noises in empty rooms, sounds of a body rolling down the stairs, and saw a bolt being drawn by an invisible hand. Lights were mysteriously switched on and off in deserted offices, and once a private was struck on the head with his own pick handle.
Later last night Mr McAllister told RAMC officers that in the seance he worked through his “main control” – a Chinese. “My main control told me that the chief offender was a man who lived in the house between 1835 and 1850,” he said. “He had committed suicide after making both his wife and his maid pregnant. He referred to his maid as Frankie.”
Daily Mirror, 23rd September 1966.
Mytchett Place: house of mystery.
The ghost of a Victorian woman, silhouettes on the stairs, lights which switch themselves on and cannot be turned off and the smell of Christmas puddings and laundry. These are just some of the strange happenings experienced by people who work at Mytchett Place, Mytchett, opposite Keogh Barracks. The old two-storey house which was built in 1779 is now occupied by the Royal Army Medical Corps, but for a long time was the private residence of the service’s Dirctor General.
Two people who have been associated with the building for the longest time are the daily cleaners, Mrs Vera Elgie, of the Crossroads, Mytchett and Mrs Florence Bennett, from Ash. They have both seen ghostly figures in the building while they were at work during the early morning. Mrs Elgie said she was upstairs in the house in February this year, when she looked up while emptying a rubbish tin and saw the figure of a Victorian woman standing at the end of the passage. “She had a bonnet on and was all dressed in a crinoline,” she said. “I couldn’t make out any face at all. I felt as though there was someone there, but when I looked up again she had gone,” she said.
Mrs Bennett said late last year she was working upstairs in the house when she saw a black shadow going down the stairs. “It was in the early morning and dark outside so we had the lights on,” she said. “I could just see this black shadow moving down the side of the stairs.” Mrs Bennett said she did not call out to tell Mrs Elgie about the shadow “because I thought she would think I was daft.” But moments later Mrs Elgie called out from downstairs that she could see a shape moving up the stairs. “Sometimes when we come into work in the morning you just get the sense that things are amiss. Other mornings it just feels allright,” Mrs Bennett said.
Both women have had experiences of turning off lights in the rooms in the house only to see them back on again moments later. “When you go back you find that the light switch is still off, yet the light is on,” Mrs Elgie said.
WOH Robin Desmond said when he was an instructor in the building in the late 1960s he would often lock a room after turning off a light, then get halfway down the passage only to look back and see the light still on. “Hess had this experience when he was a prisoner in the house in the war,” he said. “He used to say that the lights came on in the middle of the night and claimed his guards were using psychological warfare on him,” WO Desmond said.
Some of the most unusual happenings in the house have occurred in the large room in the right hand wing of the house where Hess slept during his time in Mytchett Place. Mrs Elgie told the story of how cleaners who worked before her in the house once found photographs that had been lined up on the mantelpiece lying in a straight line on the floor beneath it. “I think the ghost sometimes objects to movements in the building, particularly when people change things in the rooms around,” she said.
WO Desmond said once when he was conducting a first aid class in the room, one man in his course saw a mirror which was propped up on a table, lift off it and smash on to the floor. “The mirror was right in the centre of the table,” he said. “There is no way that it could have just fallen.”
WO Desmond said soldiers who had done sentry duty at the house at this time had reported doors which had been locked at night found open in the morning. “Once I was woken up at 3 in the morning by a soldier who was put on guard there and was so frightened that he refused to stay there any longer,” he said.
The most widely experienced phenomenon in Mytchett Place is the smell of cooking, which staff say is strongest during the winter months. “The most common smell is of cakes cooking and Christmas pudding around Christmas time,” Mrs Elgie said. There have also been smells of lavender, bread baking and laundry reported by several people. “Sometimes the scents last for up to two or three hours,” she said. “They are the strongest downstairs where the old kitchen used to be, but there are no cooking facilities in the building at all now.”
Everybody working in Mytchett Place agrees that the ghost that haunts the house, if there is one, is certainly a friendly being. “She’s never harmed or frightened us,” Mrs Elgie said. “I think she’s got her likes and dislikes.” There are a number of rumours as to who the ghost might belong to. There is a story of a coachman murdering a serving maid in an upstairs bedroom then hanging himself in the coach house. Another version is of the son of a family who once lived in the house, throwing himself out of an upper storey window when he found out a serving maid was pregnant to him.
Although these tales are dismissed by many of the officers working in the building, most do prefer not to have to stay there too late into the night. Capt. Bill Howarth, who classes himself as a non-believer admits that late at night the building does have an eeriness about it. “It just gives you a sort of haunted feeling if you have to go back into the building to do something late at night,” he said. Mrs Elgie claims that she does not really believe in ghosts. “I am the type of person who has to see before they believe,” she said. “I have no qualms about working here. The other cleaner used to say we were welcome to the ghost when we took over, but I never believed the things that they said happened until they actually did,” she said.
One person working in the building who says he is slightly psychic is Mr Stanley Hughes. “On odd occasions I just get the feeling that someone has just gone along the passage although there is no one there,” he said. “I have never actually seen anything.”
The clerical workers who now occupy the room where Hess slept all say they have noticed the smells peculiar to the building. “Cards and papers put on the windowsill are sometimes scattered on the floor or all moved to one end of it,” Mrs Jean Fowler, who lives in Mytchett Road, said. “We thought that the cleaners might have moved them but they were all off sick that day,” Said Mrs Phyllis Feltham, of Underwood Avenue, Ash. “No windows were open so there was no question of them being blown off the sill.”
Mrs Glenn Norris, of Linwood Drive, Mytchett, said the women did not mind working in the building as they were all in the same room together. “We all leave fairly early at night anyway,” she said.
The ghost of Mytchett Place appears to have been accepted by everybody in th ehouse, and most people admit that although there can be no logical reason found for the smells noticed by practically all the staff, it does not worry them. “Most people just shrug it off after a while,” WO Desmond said. “It’s not a malevolent feeling.”
“The ghost seems to have frightened a few soldiers, but never a cleaning woman,” Mrs Elgie said. “The most frightening part for me is coming from the car park up to the front door of the house. I’m really more frightened of people lurking outside than I am of the ghost within.”
The staircase at Mytchett Place.
Farnborough News, 27th October 1978.