The ‘old-fashioned’ grey lady who sets light to beds and sends dogs neurotic.
By Shaun Petley.
Contemporary theories on ghosts and psychic presences are generally as varied and reliable as hot tips for the Grand National – but there is one thing on which almost all the experts will agree. An authentic ghost has to be old, preferably eccentric and slightly transparent to boot, but definitely old. This makes a ghostly presence in Crawley New Town seem, at first glance, somewhat unlikely. The laws of probability, however, have never been known to deter a truly determined spectre, and, in the resident spirit of the Brewery Shades public house, Crawley has a ghost of which to be proud.
She chills the air, plays havoc with electricity, appears and disappears with credible infrequency and – of course – treats walls and doors with true spiritual disdain. In a mere 30-odd years of active haunting, she has disrupted the lives of hapless tenants, terrified children, sent dogs neurotic and once, in a fit of churlish anger, set fire to a bed.
Nobody is exactly sure when the ghost first appeared or who she is supposed to be, but the Hight Street pub is one of the few buildings in Crawley which can claim to be old enough to have a genuine ghost. It dates back to the sixteenth century and is believed to have been the old town court house. For many, it was the last grisly stop before the Pease Pottage gallows – and most who came before the local bench tasted the rough side of Elizabethan justice. Whitbread took over the building in 1972 and its history as a pub dates back to the turn of the century. The oldest rooms are upstairs and it is here that the ghost makes her temperamental presence felt.
Her favourite haunt is a small, low-beamed chamber on the first floor – known, strangely enough, as the court room. It has a cupboard-sized side chamber which is believed to have been used as an overnight lock-up for unruly convicts. The spirit is reputed to wear a long grey dress, a matching face and “old fashioned” accoutrements. There is, as yet, no explanation for her strange and sombre presence but few who have stayed at the pub would deny that some capricious spirit exists there. Luckily for present tenants, John and Sheila A’Court, the question is, for the moment, still fairly academic.
“We only came here in December, after the last tenants had been forced to move out,” said John, who moved into the pub business after working for seven years on Concorde flight development. “On one occasion my wife and I heard footsteps, but apart from that the ghost has been very quiet. We were warned about it of course, but so far we are just intrigued by the whole thing.”
So was his predecessor Mr Douglas Kimber – until the ghost set fire to his daughter’s bed and forced him to send his younger children to stay in Portsmouth. The Kimbers lived in the flat above the pub for 16 months, during which time the ghost carried out a more or less constant campaign of harassment and eventually forced the family to leave. “It got to the stage where we just couldn’t take any more,” said Douglas, who now runs a hotel in Southsea. “My wife would be doing the hoovering, when the switch would suddenly turn off. We would just sit and watch the television and the lights go out in the evening. The ghost would slam doors and jam them solid. She would walk up and down passageways and articles which had been left in one place would be found in another.”
The Kimbers’ dog had to be put down after working itself into a nervous wreck, rushing around rooms, barking and snarling at apparently thin air. Douglas and Marion Kimber, both down-to-earth sort of people, found the ghostly disturbances to be at their worst when their two youngest daughters were staying at the pub. “This was confirmed as very likely by a vicar who tried to help us,” recalled Douglas. “He held a service at the pub last year, but did not succeed in getting rid of whatever it is that’s there.”
The landlord himself caught glimpses of his unwanted guest on two occasions and local rumour has it that she can only be seen by men. For the most part she has stuck to childish practical jokes – and it was not until December, 1976, that she started indulging in arson. The Kimbers’ youngest daughters, aged 13 and 15, had just arrived at the Brewery Shades to stay over for their Christmas holidays. “They stayed downstairs until closing time because by then they were too scared to go up alone,” said Douglas. “When we went upstairs, the flat was full of smoke and one bedroom was on fire.” He called the fire brigade and the blaze was later discovered to have started in the middle of a bed. Nobody had been in the room all evening. “The ghost was quiet for some time after that,” remembered Douglas, who asked Whitbread if he could have another pub.
(I am told, by the way, that the fire station in Ifield Avenue was haunted by mysterious footsteps and bangings for some time. The theory is that the ghost temporarily shifted quarters).
In any event, she was back up at the Brewery Shades and up to her old tricks again within three months. The final straw for the Kimbers was a form of spectral “Roll out the Barrel” at 6.30 in the morning. The whole family was woken up one chilly October day by the sound of barrels being shoved noisily along a passageway. “When I got out there, I could see nothing,” remembered Douglas. “But there was unmistakably something out there – I could feel it. Up to that stage, it had just been intriguing but that time I was absolutely petrified.” Two months later, the Kimbers moved out for good.
For them that was the end of the story but for Mr and Mrs A’Court, and the Whitbread brewery, it is not yet over. Area manager, Mr Nicholas Lobley once had the court room door slammed defiantly in his face while investigating “this ghost thing.” It is not an experience he is ever likely to forget. “The door just stuck solid in its frame – it wasn’t either locked or jammed,” Mr Lobley told me. “After about two minutes, it suddenly flew open for no apparent reason and I was allowed to walk into the room.”
Above: annexe to the “ghost room” on the first floor of the Brewery Shades, which is believed to have been an overnight “lock-up” for convicts about 1600. Below: Landlord John A’Court holds open the door regularly jammed by the ghost and which leads into the haunted room.
Crawley and District Observer, 27th January 1978.