House of Mystery
Weird Experiences in Vicarage
Family leave in alarm.
A Sheffield suburban vicarage has recently been the scene of certain visitations which have caused the family to seek another residence. The servants averred the house was haunted. Other people believed otherwise, but so far have been unable to account for uncanny things that have happened. The events, up to the present, have the air of mystery which is more appropriate to the tales of the dark nights than to a season of much sun and many heat waves.
The house is Ranmoor Vicarage, in the fashionable West End of Sheffield, and before the Rev. J.G. Williams decided to remove from it he obtained ocular demonstration that there was morewithin its walls than his philosophy could explain. Prior to Mr Williams’s personal investigations a succession of time-honoured manifestations from creaking floors, opening doors, and clanking chains, down to the appearance of a mysterious white-robed lady, had reduced the household from a state of uneasy wonder to veritable panic.
The first to take alarm were the servants, a few weeks ago. They had heard uncanny noises in various parts of the house, and averred they had seen the figure of a woman in some filmy drapery glide through one of the upper rooms. Their belief in the supernatural visitant was strengthened by the fact that the wife of the vicar had died some little time previously. The vicar himself was the next to become perplexed, and when he, too, had seen the apparition, he decided to take action. A plumber and after him a joiner were summoned, to make a thorough examination of the house, the latter taking up the floor boardings. Neither of them finished their investigations. They both saw the uncanny figure and fled from the place.
Matters grew more unsettling, and one day one fo the maidservants burst into the study in hysterics. The vicar then held a consultation with one of the churchwardens and a local doctor. The house was left for a night untenanted, and it was then decided to make a further effort to solve the problem. A well-known baronet residing in the locality volunteered to prove the groundlessness of everybody’s fears by himself making an examination. However, he was no more successful than the others, and was, in fact, considerably upset by his experience.
In a last effort to get to the bottom of the mystery, the vicar permitted a gardener to secret himself in the bedroom formerly occupied by the late Mrs Williams, where the “ghost” was stated to have appeared. Even then, however, the affair was not cleared up, and the whole business became so unpleasant that the vicar decided to leave the place, and has taken another residence in the neighbourhood.
Millom Gazette, 28th July 1911.
“Yorkshireman” writes: – With no little interest have I read the account quoted by the “Daily Post and Mercury” of the ghostly manifestations at St John’s (Ranmoor) Vicarage, Sheffield. As one who was a visitor at the vicarage in question years ago, and who knows and esteems the baronet – he has a Liverpool association – lately acting as an independent investigator, let me venture the opinion that the causes of alarm which have led vicar and servants to migrate have no solid foundation.
The Ranmoor “ghost” is not the first in the history of Sheffield. Some thirty years ago the cutlery capital was disturbed by the “Pearl-street ghost.” I listened to that “ghost” repeatedly. It manifested its presence by heavy thumping sounds in the cellar of a small house. Few investigators doubted that a trick was being played, and it seems to me as if the same kind of prank has been indulged in at the vicarage, now unoccupied.
Liverpool Daily Post, 29th July 1911.
The Sheffield Ghost Story.
The Rev. W. Sykes writes to us from Hillsborough Vicarage, Sheffield, under date, August 2nd: –
“On receiving my “Gazette,” I noticed that you had inserted an account entitled “House of Mystery.” As I am well acquainted with both the Vicar and the Baronet, I take the pleasure of sending the enclosed cutting from the “Sheffield Daily Telegraph,” in which you will find a denial of the story. I surmise that possibly you will not have seen this account. I am sure you will give the denial the same publicity as the unfounded story has unfortunately received at Millom.”
The extract from our Sheffield contemporary, to which Mr Sykesdraws attention, is as follows: –
Alleged Ghost At A Sheffield Vicarage.
Yesterday one of the London halfpenny papers contained a sensational story about a ghost at a Sheffield vicarage. The comment of the Vicar upon it is that “it is a scandalous, lying story from beginning to end, with not a word of truth in it.”
The owners of the property have put the matter into the handsof their solicitors, owing to the injury such stories might do to their property.
The name of a well-known Baronet was associated with the story. We submitted the statement to Sir John Bingham, who replied: “The statement in the newspaper which you have laid before me is untruthful. There was no mystery in the Vicar’s residence.”
Millom Gazette, 4th August 1911.