FT244

One of the staples of contemporary horror films is a scenario whereby intrepid archæologists uncover ancient artefacts only to unleash an antediluvian terror upon an unsuspecting world. Another, closely related, is one in which a modern building (a home, a leisure centre, or even a pub) turn out to have been built upon an ancient site… with terr­ible results. The latter scenario has become so ubiquitous within popular culture that even such a mainstay of the Jewish-American establishment as Krusty the Clown decided to build one of his most popular commercial ventures – a children’s summer camp – on “the site of an ancient Indian burial ground”.

I have spent most of my profess­ional life trying to separate real fortean incidents from their analogues in pop-culture (I don’t even like horror movies) and try to avoid involving myself with cultural clichés, fortean or otherwise – at least until now.

When I was 11 years old, my family moved to a small North Devon village called Woolfardis­worthy (or Woolsery). It was an enormous culture shock for me. I’d grown up in the colonial splendour of Hong Kong in the 1960s (still very much part of an Empire on which the Sun hadn’t entirely set), and a small, wet and windy farming village nine miles (14.5km) from anywhere took a bit of getting used to – but I soon grew to love it.

A couple of years ago, I found myself back in Woolsery, and when my father died, I decided to stay here. I now live in the same late-18th-century cottage as my parents did, together with my wife and the motley collection of animals (and men) that makes up the Centre for Fortean Zoology.

You will have noticed that the village in which I live has two names. This phenomenon inspired my late father to write a booklet entitled Woolsery: The Village with Two Names (1998) in which he revealed the fact that ‘Woolsery’ is merely the dialect contraction  of ‘Woolfardisworthy’, itself an Anglicisation of the Saxon ‘Wulfheard’s homestead’, denoting the fact that the village was probably originally founded in 680 when the Saxon Abbot Wulfheard of Crediton was granted two manors – the village in which I now live, and a smaller one with the same name near Crediton.

From the beginning, when Woolsery was a small gaggle of mud huts in the bottom of a wooded valley, the two focal points of the village would have been the pub and the church. The porch of the present church was built in 1160 and the deeds of the pub in the village go back to 1207, although it is a safe bet that there would have been an alehouse, and a place of worship, in the village for as long as it has existed.

One of the great pleasures of living in the village after so many years away is the sense of commun­ity. Everyone knows everybody else, and is ready to help when necess­ary, and all the clichés one reads about rural communities being like extended families are more or less true. And, just as they were 1,000 years ago, the two hubs of this commun­ity are still All Hallow’s Church and the Farmer’s Arms (shown at left), one catering for the spiritual needs of the community, the other for its need for spirits.

And because – unlike some of their urban counterparts – neither looks askance at a tall, fat bloke with long hair, a leather jacket and an anarchist T-shirt – I  frequent both.

In May 2007, I was sitting in the pub when the landlord – a genial Liverpudlian called Allan Lindsay – came over to me. “What do you think of this?” he asked as he led me to the back of the lounge bar. I have been drinking in the Farmer’s Arms on and off since about 1974, and it hasn’t really changed a bit. I was rather taken aback, therefore, to find that a large chunk of the wall at the back of the bar was missing, and – fenced off behind a spidery arrangement of bollards and the fluorescent ribbons that the council uses to desig­nate roadworks – there was now a circular hole which appeared to reach down into the bowels of the Earth.

“Bloody hell,” I said. “What have you been doing?”

He explained that, wanting to extend the bar area and make access to the restaurant easier, he had, with – as the latest incumbent of a job that goes back 1,000 years – some misgivings, begun (along with a couple of helpers) to demolish the wall.

At about floor level, underneath what had been a fireplace and wall, they had found two enormous slate slabs, which had taken several days to shift. They were immensely heavy, and had, unfortunately, broken in half when moved.

Underneath they found – perfectly preserved – an artesian well over 20ft (6m) deep. And deep inside the wall, where it had lain hidden, unsuspected for perhaps hundreds of years, was an almost perfect clay oven. They had also found what appeared to be an ancient bronze coin, although a miffed Allan confessed that he appeared to have lost it. We admired these interesting finds, had a few beers, and went home.

Over the next few weeks, more information came to light, and it appeared that both the well and the oven were so old that they might well date from Saxon times. We, and the other regulars in the lounge bar of the Farmer’s Arms, were all duly impressed, had a few more beers, and went home.

And then the weird stuff started happening.

Six months after the odd goings-on began, Allan was emphatic that “none of these events has affected me directly, but I have had to deal with the results of them!”

Like all good ghost stories, it started in the cellar. Now, the word ‘cellar’ has many connot­ations; one imagines a vast stone affair, fest­ooned with cobwebs and the skeletal remains of long-dead bar staff mouldering in the corner. But this cellar is clean, tidy, relatively small, and bathed in fluorescent white light.

However, for some unknown reason, the gas supplies to the beer pumps kept on going on and off. Allan and his staff checked the mechan­isms, and all seemed sound, but the gas continued to be mysteriously turned off. Allan testifies that on at least one occasion he was working in the room above and can swear that nobody was in the cellar, or could have got into the cellar to interr­upt the gas supply.

All very vexing, and rather annoying, but hardly the thing of which horror stories are made.

Enter the other major player in this story: Allan’s wife Jennie, the landlady of the Farmer’s Arms and mastermind of its rest­aurant. She is a lovely, unflapp­able lady, who deals with all the trials and tribulations of landladyhood with calm good humour, and incidentally makes the best onion-rings that I have ever tasted.

One evening in early summer 2007, at about 8.30pm, shortly after the aforementioned excavations had taken place, Jennie was in the kitchen, standing on a stool as she stacked plastic food containers on top of the freezer. Suddenly – she swears – something pushed her hard on the hip and she fell to the floor. She describes it as not like a hand, but a sharp force. She had a stiff brandy to recuperate, and got on with her business.

A few days later, Nyah (15), one of the waitresses, had placed four wineglasses neatly on a shelf above the microwave when one of them flew out, banged her hard on the head, and then bounced off to shatter on the floor. What makes this particular incident even more peculiar is that the glasses were arranged in a square, and it wasn’t one of the glasses at the front that flew out, but one from the back.

Allan heard the crash, and ran from the bar into the kitchen to investi­gate. After comforting Nyah and clearing up the mess, he conducted a few experiments of his own to see if he could replicate the accident. He tried slamming the door, banging around the kitchen, and various other ways of causing tremors, but to no avail.

On 8 October, the pub was closed and Jennie – wearing a dressing gown – was in the restaurant. The double door which leads into the kitchen was swinging back and forth of its own accord – “freaking out”, as Jennie says in her soft Liverpudlian accent – although there was no draught or anything else that could have caused it to do so. She was understandably scared and, by now, becoming convinced that the ancient pub was most definitely haunted.

Allan came downstairs to calm his wife, and was shocked at the “weird atmosphere” that he felt in the restaurant. Not really knowing why, he said: “Behave yourself!” in a sharp voice, and the door slammed shut. Soon after, an electric bell in their daughter Clarissa’s room started to ring of its own accord.

During the summer, one of the antiques in the pub – an antique cobbler’s last used as a doorstop – had vanished. Allan was cross, and blamed a visiting female darts team with a well-deserved reput­ation for rowdy behaviour. But, as I said to him at the time, this was a particularly unlikely thing for someone to pinch as a trophy. Surely, they would have taken something slightly more iconic or significant.

My wife and I, together with our friends “Geordie Dave” and Joanna Curtis, were up at the pub in early December having dinner. Allan came over to do his ‘mein host’ bit, when he did a double take. There, on a shelf above my head, was the missing last; and I can attest that it is far too heavy to have been moved on a whim. Within a few days, the other missing antique – the “ancient bronze coin” which they had uncovered, and then lost, during the excavation – also reappeared under mysterious circumstances. Allan found it in the pocket of a freshly laundered pair of trousers. He swears that the coin was not in the trousers when it went to the laundry.

And the unexplained events continue; always in the area immediately adjacent to the excav­ations. The gas pipes in the cellar constantly switch on and off, and in mid-January 2008, Emily (17), another of the pub waitresses, narr­owly escaped being injured in the kitchen when a clock flew off the wall horizontally, before crashing to the floor. Allan and Jennie’s son Matthew (17) also witnessed the restaurant door banging open and shut, seemingly in slow motion and of its own volition. He went upstairs and told his parents: “Mum, Dad – I think we’ve got a ghost in here.” Both Emily and Nyah have – together and separ­ately – seen the door banging on numerous occasions, and both find the whole thing unsettling.

Ghosts in the Farmer’s Arms are not a new occurrence, however. When, as a teenager, I first read Andrew Green’s Our Haunted Kingdom, I became interested in the subject. Soon afterwards, the noted ghost-hunter Anthony Hipp­isley-Coxe and his wife moved to the village, and my parents invited them to dinner. I sat agog, as he spoke of the ghost tales that he had uncovered, and I set out to do some ghost-hunting of my own.

The late Ron Chappell, the landlord at the time, told me that the cellar of the pub was definitely haunted. He had heard footsteps down there, he said, and “something” had moved the barr­els around on many an occasion. An old lady, whom all the village children knew as ‘Auntie Rosie’, told me how the victims of highwaymen and footpads were always brought to be laid out in the bar of the pub before they were interred, while the footpads themselves were imprisoned in a back room of the pub before being taken to Bideford gaol to await the Assizes. Whether any of these stories are true or not, or whether they were just spooky tales told by well-meaning adults to sate the blood-lust of a macabre teenager with a taste for the weird and wonderful, I have no way of knowing.

What I can tell you is that the events happening up at the Farmer’s Arms are real. Very real. They may not sound much to the average FT reader – after all, the annals of forteana are full of the echoes of strange and gruesome events – but when you are a 15-year-old waitress, the prospect of another item of catering equipment shooting off the wall like a rocket to bang you on the head is a pretty scary one. Likewise, for Allan, Jennie, their children and staff, the feeling that any minute you might meet a spectre from ‘the other side’ while hoovering the bar is, to say the least, rather unnerving.

Even eight-year-old Clarissa, the Lindsays’ youngest child, has cottoned on to the strange events, to her parents’ dismay. When I visited the pub to check some details of the story, she rushed up to me to tell me about the latest ghostly goings on, and seemed to be enjoying every minute of it.

For the past couple of summers, we at the Centre for Fortean Zoology have held our annual Weird Weekend in the village, and each year it has culminated with a feast in the Farmer’s Arms. In 2007, Allan was showing the newly discovered well to conference-goer Steve Jones, well known to the fort­ean community as Britain’s first pagan magistrate. Steve asked Allan whether he had found one or more large stones covering the head of the well.

Allan admitted that he had, and, startled, asked why. Steve merely smiled and said, that he wasn’t surprised. Such stones were usually placed there “to keep the spirits in”.

One can’t help wondering whether they have now got free…