The ghost did not want to be interviewd.
Reporters’ 1a.m. ‘sit-in’.
By Penny Hopkirk.
There’s something peculiar going on in Hounslow. Once there were gibbets on Highwayman’s Heath where the hanged bodies were brought from Tyburn to be strung up as an example to the wicked. Could it be that one discontented soul lives on in JEL House, Bath Road? It rips through the direct mail office in the night, bending back the keys on the automatic typewriters, switching round files and taking labels off drawers. Things disappear, others are moved around. It started activities earlier this year, but that is by no means the beginning of the story.
Before the J.E. Lesser Group of Companies built JEL House in 1963, numbers 63-73 Staines Road stood on the site. Almost exactly where the mail order office is now, was number73, and for several years estate agent Mr Raymond Levesque, now a councillor, lived there in the flat above his office. “When we moved into the office,” Mr Levesque said, “almost immediately we noticed a fishy smell, almost like burning rubber in the rear office. We thought it might be electric plugs overheating but my brother checked them and said they were all cool. Some mornings we couldn’t use the office at all. On the landing about twice there was a smell like cheap talcum powder. The cheapest powder you could buy. I accused my wife of spilling it, but it wasn’t hers.
“On two occasions at least we heard noises which had no explanation. Three o’clock in the morning seemed to be a significant time. We heard quite heavy footsteps, slow and deliberate, plod, plod, plod up the stairs. They came from the hallway where all the doors were locked and barred. They went into the lounge, and we heard drawers opened and papers rustling. The noise lasted about 15 minutes. Then the same noise came out on to the landing up into the attic room. There were footsteps in the attic room above the landing. Afterwards there was a noise like someone dragging a sack across the roof.
“We got up immediately. My wife hadn’t let me get up before because she said everything was insured.”
Around Christmas there was another disturbance. Cllr. Levesque said: “There were no footsteps but there was a sort of rustling among some bags and presents we put on the landing after doing the shopping. This time I got out of bed and switched the landing light on. There was a scampering noise down the stairs of what seemed like a fairly sizeable dog. If there had been a dog I should have seen the backside and tail of it. I bolted downstairs after it but there was nothing and all the doors were locked. I don’t believe in ghosts. Even when we left the place we still treated the haunting as a joke. We told hardly anybody.
“One other thing was when some friends came to visit us. The wife was about 18. We left them in the lounge. The door was propped open for a meal to be brought in. The house was in full activity. This young wife said she saw a shadowy figure coming up the stairs.”
When there was a smell of cheap talc, Cllr. Levesque and his wife got down on hands and knees to smell the carpet but it did not smell. They could walk in and out of the smell. “When we left the building we were 99 per cent sure there was something odd about it,” the councillor told the “Middlesex Chronicle.” “Now there’s been this new business we’re 100 per cent sure. I used to walk past the place at one time and wonder how our ghost was getting on. Surely he must be dead now the old house has gone, I thought. But it doesn’t look like it. When we were still there I met the proprietor of a toyshop in Bell Road, just before he died. He was about 71. Because he was an old inhabitant I asked him if he knew who lived in our place before. He said it was a bakery. There was an elderly couple in the flat, the last people he remembered being there before us. This was when he was a boy. There were strange happenings then and they looked into it. As far as the old man could remember, the story went that the house was on the site of an old gallows where highwaymen were hanged.”
There were not gallows, but a mass of gibbets, it seems, on Hounslow Heath, formerly known as Highwayman’s Heath. The secretary of the local history society, Mr F. Clive-Ross, thinks this wouldn’t cause a haunting even if there were a gibbet on the exact site, which is probable. The bodies were already dead when they were brought to the gibbets.
The spook has certainly foiled the girls in JEL House. Over the past few months locks have been put on the inner and outer doors of the direct mail department. In the last two weeks additional precautions have been made against any human sabateur. The doors have Sellotape on them, talcum powder had been laid across the floor, drawing pins have been balanced on the machines. A hair has been laid across the lock of the inner door and still the trouble goes on, though the traps are undisturbed.
Last week the machines which normally produced about 100 letters a day were almost completely inactive. The work was done by ordinary typing or else put off.
There were two “sit-ins” last week and these two nights were almost the only ones when some of the office equipment was not damaged. The first ghost watcher was Mr Malcolm Chandler, who moved in to Levesque’s flat when they left in 1960. He and a friend took a tape recorder and stayed for several hours. They had no luck.
“When I lived there for three and a half years, I always felt it was a bit strange,” he said. “There was an intermittent smell of scent. You went through it and it was gone. I had this general feeling that something was there. I used to wake up at three or four in the morning, feeling that I should see something, but there was nothing there.”
One night a friend called round with his Alsatian dog. The dog, which is normally very placid, was disturbed all the evening, and kept sniffing at the lounge door. The second “sit-in” was staged by two of our reporters. They sat huddled in the building for two hours, from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m., but neither heard nor saw anything untoward.
J.E. Lesser are now thinking of calling in the Psychic Research Society. Said a spokesman “We consider we have taken every reasonable precaution to stop people entering our offices, and still these things have happened. We would still like to hear from anyone who takes this seriously and thinks he can help us.”
Middlesex Chronicle, 27th December 1968.
Another Haunt for Staines Road ‘ghost’
The Staines Road ghost, whose sinister activities at JEL House were reported in the Middlesex Chronicle last week, seems to have another haunting ground just next door. Mysterious hammering noises have been heard late at night over the past two or three years in a deserted and sealed building on the corner of Staines Road and Upton Road, at one time occupied by Flint Signs Ltd. The building stands in the shadow of JEL House, the offices of the J.E. Lesser group of companies.
Mr George Gardner, a baker, of 1 Upton Road, goes to work at about 1 a.m. each morning. Flint’s is next door to his home and about the time he goes to work he has often heard hammering in the deserted workshop. Mr Gardner said at his home this week, “Three weeks ago it was so plain I thought there must be somebody in there. But I thought if it was an old tramp he wouldn’t be hammering away if he just went in there for a doss. I don’t believe in ghosts. I’m not imaginative and I’m not nervous. I walked to the end of the road. The hammering was definitely in that place. I looked all round, but I couldn’t see any explanation. I was so impressed that when I got to work I mentioned the matter to my governor and his wife.”
Mr Gardner has heard the sound, which he is quite certain is hammering, maybe a dozen times since the building became empty. He has never seen any lights or ghostly or human figures, although he has developed the habit of looking up at the place, just in case. “I reckon old Flint’s ghost is there,” he said. Mr Flint died in 1957.
Every time he has heard the hammering noise Mr Gardner has told plenty of people. Once his wife heard it too, but mostly he has been the only witness. “If I go into the pub and say I heard old Flint in there last night, they all have a laugh and take no notice.”
Mr Gardner has lived in Upton Road for over 20 years. He used to work in the old bakery where J.E.L House now stands. When he was there he never noticed anything unusual, although he was sometimes on his own there quite late.
Mr C. Rickwood of Flint Signs now in Twickenham, also used to work alone late at night sometimes in the signmaker’s workshop in Staines Road, but remembers no inexplicable events. The property now belongs to a contractor’s subsidiary, Kenold’s of Hampton Hill. A spokesman described rumours of the hauntings as “a load of rubbish.” He said the place is secure. No-one has been in recently, and he didn’t know when anybody last went into it.
Meanwhile, back at J.E.L. House the mail order department, which is at the Upton Road end of the office block, has been left in peace since Christmas. The machines which were damaged by the “poltergeist” in the weeks before Christmas are back to normal.
Middlesex Chronicle, 3rd January 1989.
Girl-ghost stalks the typing pool.
By Bruce Maxwell.
Pretty Ellen Doherty, aged 16, is causing havoc in a London office block. She pulls typewriters apart, scatters filing cards, steals money and makes life difficult for young secretaries. The owners of the building, Jel House, in Staines-road, Hounslow, would throw her out – if they could. The snag is that Ellen died in 1830 after killing her young step-brother, Peter. And now, it is claimed, she has turned into a marauding ghost.
“We can’t find any other explanation for the strange things that have been happening,” said company executive Mrs Margaret Goodyear. “It all started late last year when someone – or something – began taking the typewriters to pieces,” Mrs Goodyear explained. “We put a lock on the inner office door. But it still kept happening. The girls would find their typewriters in ruins. Next we put a lock on the outer office door, but it made no difference.”
One of the girls who works at Jel House, Miss Margaret Pache, 22, said: “It was quite strange. I just don’t know how all those things could happen.”
Mr Mark Joseph, a director of the J. E. Lesser group of construction companies, whose headquarters are at Jel House, said: “We had to do something. This was costing us quite a bit of money.” Mrs Goodyear phoned an estate agent whose offices used to be on the site. He told her that one night he and his wife heard footsteps on the stairs. Then they heard the sound of something heavy being dragged across the roof. But next day nothing had been disturbed. On another occasion, a friend who went to dinner saw the blurred image of a girl on the stairs. Mrs Goodyear also found a night worker who had heard strange knocking noises coming from an apparently empty office.
Mrs Goodyear then went to a seance where the spirit “told” those present she was Ellen Doherty and what had happened to her. But they didn’t have much luck discovering what Ellen had against typewriters.
Sunday Mirror, 26th January 1969.
A photo of Jel House: http://www.14november1940.com/names/smith/s1/s1employment/s1lesser/s1jelhouse.html