Uncanny hauntings.
Paranormal door-banging.
By H.J. Channon.
Four years ago I wrote a series of articles for the Herald on uncanny hauntings. One house in particular, not three miles from Taunton, interested me. I got first-hand information from several percipients, who spoke of recent occurrences of psychical phenomena. It is a pity so little is known of the long history of this solitary rural habitation. For obvious reasons, care must be taken to keep the whereabouts of the house a secret.
The old part (perhaps 14th century) appears from structural indications to have been connected with a conventual establishment. There is no evidence that it was a retreat for Augustinian Canons of Taunton Priory. The more modern part of the building is late 16th century. It is a large, many-roomed, rambling place, standing alone surrounded by a coppice. It is exactly the sort of dwelling one associates with ghosts. The rough, weedy drive links up with an ancient coach road now overgrown with brambles, and, according to reports, a phantom coach has been both seen and heard in the grounds at various times.
I should not like to climb the old stair-cases and roam through its corridors at mid-night. “Expectant attention” or hallucinosis, a sad confession, would make me see or hear things, I am sure. To a psychic person the conditions seem ideal to make his own ghosts. I do not know what psychic power there is in the house to work upon, but if it is plentiful, I should say an imaginative mind would create all kinds of phantoms. I am very sceptical about these ghost stories, but they intrigue me. I want far more light to convince me that ephemeral and intangible figures which are said to flit hither and thither through passages, rooms and solid walls were once living men and women.
But, all the same, what I heard from several people in this house convinced me that, if competent investigators got to work, their report might provide a fascinating chapter in the history of psychical research. But, if such revelations were made public and the name of the house revealed, it might never let. That is one of the stumbling blocks in the path of the psychical researcher.
One big bed-sitting room in the older portion of the house provided a young lady guest, to whom I talked, with some excitement for several weeks. We walked up an ominous, spiral stone stair-case until we reached a massive, heavy oak door, leading to her room. She said: “Examine the lock and test the weight of the door. It was no rare occurrence when I had gone to bed for it to unlock itself, open slowly and then close and lock with no bang.” But no apparition entered the room. On the opposite side of the apartment the same thing happened to a bookcase with glass panels.
The young lady distinctly heard the ticking of a watch, the sounds moving to different parts of the room. A terrier that slept in one corner showed its agitation by growling and roaming about the room while the phenomena continued, which generally lasted about half-an-hour. Dogs appear to be very sensitive to paranormal occurrences. The young lady experienced no eerie feeling, rather the reverse. In fact, it was just as if the room became charged with the remnants of a soothing, kindly personality of a person, once associated with the house, or as she put it, “as if a gentle spirit just seemed to be paying a friendly visit to its old haunt.” There was no rustling of garments, no sound of footsteps, the air seemed to be saturated with emanations from one who had lived a good, quiet life.
But the “Blue Room” on the first floor, overlooking the front lawn, was the focus of paranormal happenings of a different nature. It is extraordinary what a number of “Blue Rooms” there are in alleged haunted houses and how the major phenomena are centred there. The “Blue Room” at this house got a notorious name. It was haunted by a very disgruntled, noisy poltergeist, who on quiet days and nights banged the keyless door and locked people in.The tenant took me up to this room and said: “Now notice the heavy door, half open, and keyless. You will find it needs a good deal of force to close it. Try, but don’t be surprised if the poltergeist objects to this intrusion and locks us in. It has happened to me and I have had to get out via the window and a drain pipe. But the strange thing is, that when I have returned up the stairs, the door is again half open. When the door bangs, it is with a crash.”
In this room inarticulate voices come from the entity that seemed to retain feelings of revenge expressed on the occupiers in the line of usurpers who perhaps entered into possession of the house after the despoiling of priories by Henry VIII. On quiet summer evenings, I was told, you can hear from the lawn noises coming from the “Blue Room” when there isn’t a soul in the house. Usually this room is unoccupied, but it is worth recording that the poltergeist was quiescent when a Roman Catholic lady, who pinned her faith to the protection of St Francis, slept there.
It was here, so the tenant told me, that he had a strange experience one night. A very reliable gold watch, handed down in the family, stopped at 1.23 am. Was it a mere coincidence that at that very moment his father died a hundred miles away? The only reason for recalling this story is that I have just read The End of Borley Rectory, the exciting sequel of Mr Harry Price’s The Most Haunted House in England, an attempt to solve the mystery of the century-old haunting of Borley Rectory, Essex. […]
Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 18th January 1947.