Ancient cottage has a mystery.
Mrs June de Pulford and her son, Philip, who is three, look out of the window of the bedroom in which strange noises are heard.
The ancient cottage stands isolated on the edge of Herne Bay golf course. It is reached by a muddy track, and is surrounded on one side by a thick hedge. The garden is long, and near the cottage there is an ornamental bridge, a pond and a deep well, now closed in. The cottage is lived in by Mrs June de Pulford, her husband, Stanley, and five children, aged between 17 and three. Standing in its six acres of land, White Hall Cottage, Bullockstone Road, Herne Bay, is a mystery to Mrs de Pulford, who is a writer.
She and her family hear strange noises, especially in a bedroom slept in by her son, Mark, who is 13. “The sound is that of a group of men discussing something unintelligible and a manner rather secretive,” declares Mrs de Pulford. “Occasionally,” she adds, “there is quite a burst of song, which at one time used to send me scurrying round the house looking for a transistor radio carelessly switched on! It is not always at night. Sometimes I have heard it plainly while clattering about with a dustpan and brush on the stairs.”
But Mrs de Pulford adds that there is no atmosphere of evil, mystery or tragedy. “In fact, they seem to be rather roistering, rollicking spirits.” Mrs de Pulford showed a Herne Bay Press reporter and a photographer round her old cottage. A log fire burned brightly in the grate and the book shelves were full. There was also a rubbing from a Herne church brass in the kitchen. Mrs de Pulford says that it costs a fortune to heat the cottage. A cellar runs under the building, but its entrance has long before been bricked up and it is now a broom cupboard. There are at least two galleon beams, one in the main top bedroom and another on the landing outside.
Mrs de Pulford and her husband paid £3,400 for the cottage ten years ago, but they let it when they went to live in South Africa.
Mrs de Pulford naturally would like to know where the noises come from. The family have not seen any ghosts, or met poltergeists. There is no strange slamming of doors, no “bumps in the night”. It is only the sound of men talking – and the singing.
The bedroom was probably part of a much larger room, possibly a store room used to cure meat or bacon. For, in the strange bedroom, there are meat hooks embedded in the ceiling beams.
Mrs de Pulford is not worried about the noises she hears. She still writes on her kitchen-based typewriter, unconcerned about the mystery talk in the bedroom a few yards away.
Herne Bay Press, 23rd February 1968.