FT268


Horror films have taught us that it’s unwise to construct posh housing developments on ancient burial grounds, but it would seem that spirits and spectres can be disturbed by less dramatic forms of building work. A number of reports suggest that ghostly phenomena sometimes accompany or closely follow building renovations, and that disturbances to the ground caused by road works or tunnelling can often precipitate similar phenomena. Writing in 2008 (FT234:20–21), Alan Murdie reported that members of a committee of the Society for Psychical Research had been conducting a survey of hauntings reported in 2007. Referring to figures for the first half of that year, Murdie noted that building work or demolition featured in nine per cent of the cases involving haunted premises. If this is true, what might we be able to learn about the nature of such hauntings?


A PUB POLT AND A HAUNTED HOTEL
In June 2005, Rob Adam and his friend Ed took over The Swan, a pub in Marbury, south Cheshire.[1] When Rob and Ed acquired the pub, it had been closed for over a year and was in a sorry state. They found a flooded cellar with half-empty barrels of sour beer, and ‘dead’ fridges and freezers containing thawed food items. However, they had plenty of DIY experience, a renovation plan and a budget.

But odd things soon started happening, with screwdrivers and hammers mysteriously going missing. The anomalies persisted to a point where Rob and Ed began to accuse each other of being lax, and then they became defensive. Rob notes: “I became almost obsessive over ‘where things were’, and they often weren’t where I’d left them. Ed was doing the same.” About three weeks into the six-week project, Rob and Ed retired for the night after hanging, and closing, the window curtains in the bar. Rob was the first down in the morning. He found all the new curtains – and a window – wide open. He states: “That was the point at which I started checking the locks on the doors and wondering what the hell was going on. Knowing Ed as I did, his swearing blind that it wasn’t a practical joke [on his part] was something I believed; frankly, he didn’t believe my story and thought I was winding him up. After that, Ed and I became more attuned to these ‘anomalies’, and eventually resigned ourselves to the possibility that ‘something’ was inhabiting the building with us, which enjoyed making mischief.”

Rob notes that: “No-one else was working on the renovation at the time, save for a couple of villagers who were doing exterior work for a couple of hours a day.” He explains that “[none of my staff] has been employed at The Swan longer than two years, which is over a year after the first ‘manifestations’.” However, members of staff have sometimes been disconcerted by the happenings. Rob mentions, for example, an occasion when a leg of lamb, just brought out of the oven, vanished from a carving board in the kitchen in the middle of a busy Sunday lunch. The chef was furious, and the only possible culprits – a sous chef and a 16-year-old pot-washer – were terrified.

Flitwick Manor in Bedfordshire was the ancestral home of the Brooks family for many years, but is now a hotel. In 1995, an attic room was discovered during renovat­ion work on the roof. Three days later, a hotel guest called John Hinds checked out after a disturbed night. He’d apparently sensed a presence in his bedroom, and five minutes later it seemed that something heavy had landed at the foot of his bed, although he saw nothing to account for it when he turned on a light. A few minutes later, he heard shuffling at the bottom of the bed and then he saw the silhouette of a person sitting there. The following night, hotel receptionist Lydia Dawson was in bed in the hotel when she saw a female apparition. She ran from the room without turning the lights on, but they were all on when she returned. Hotel manager Sonia Banks also had a strange experience. Staying alone in the hotel one night, in a room on the second floor, she heard footsteps going across the ceiling and a door slamm­ing towards the front of the building, where the attic room had been discovered. And the head chef, Duncan Poyser, reported having had a strange experience while he was in bed in a room on the second floor. He tried to turn, but found himself temporarily unable to move his lower legs.

The Flitwick Manor case featured in an episode of the TV series Strange But True?, which dealt with paranormal experiences.[2] John Lyall, a descendent of the Brooks family, spent his childhood at the Manor. He appeared on the programme and related that when he was a child, his mother had spoken of hearing knocking sounds on her bedroom door while she was lying in bed. And he said that there had been stories in the village about the house being haunted. Possibly, then, the renovation work reactiv­ated a dormant haunting. I contacted the hotel in December 2008, and was informed that “Guests and staff are still experiencing strange phenomena.”


HOMES OR OWNERS?
In their book Mysteries of the Mersey Valley, Peter Hough and Jenny Randles refer to a Mr and Mrs Farris (pseudonyms) who bought a corner shop in Hyde, Greater Manchester.[3] Between 1989 and 1991, they worked to renovate the gable end. This seemed to precipitate both poltergeist and apparitional phenomena. For example, at one point, Mrs Farris went out for 20 minutes and returned to find that her saucepans had been removed from the shelving and set up systematically across the kitchen, from smallest to largest, with all the handles pointing the same way, and with her large wok presiding over the array!

The apparitional phenomena reportedly included the sighting of an old man in Victorian clothing, who was seen sitting in an armchair, smirking at the couple. At one point, the building next door caught fire, and two children were seen peering out of the upstairs window of the Farrises’ property. However, the couple had no children on the premises. The Farrises were asleep at the time, but the commotion of the rescue attempt awakened them, and they were able to get out of the building. Unfortunately, though, Hough and Randles don’t say what the outcome of the case was.

In some instances, it may be purely coincidental that ghostly phenomena occur around the time of renovation or demolition work. After all, many buildings undergo renovation or demolition, and ghostly experi­ences of one sort or another are relat­ively common. In the case of The Swan, it may have been the arrival of the new owners that somehow triggered the poltergeist effects, and not the renovation work itself. Or perhaps the pub had been the site of paranormal phenomena even prior to 2005.

In the following case, the role of renovat­ion work is also unclear, since there had been some phenomena prior to its being carried out.

The events in question concern a semi-detached house in Scotland, and the case came to my attention in late 2004. The house has been occupied by David (pseudonym) since 1987. His current partner Susan (pseudo­nym) and her daughter have been there since 2002. Starting in the summer of 1990, David would sometimes smell an unfam­iliar perfume in the living room. These olfactory experiences tapered off (although there were two further incidents in 2005), but over the years there were occas­ionally other phenomena. For example, at one point, David’s then partner, who was downstairs at the time, reportedly saw the lid of a linen basket lift about four inches and then slam shut. David was upstairs and didn’t see this, but he heard a bang. In about August 2003, roughly two weeks after the completion of renovations, David found that a TV set in the living room had come on by itself. He turned it off and went upstairs. When he came down, it was turned on again. Further manifestations ensued, of both a sensory and physical kind, with 2004 and 2005 seeing a good number of incidents. For instance, one morning, David discovered that three folded £20 notes had disappeared from a metal container in the living room, although when he returned to the house at lunchtime, three £20 notes were laid out on the coffee table! They looked new and weren’t creased. During a telephone conversation in November 2008, David told me that things had been mainly quiet of late.


ROAD GHOSTS
So far, the focus has been on cases involving the renovation of buildings. But other types of environmental disturbance, such as road construction, have also been linked with strange phenomena. During the construction of the Stocksbridge bypass (A616) in South Yorkshire in autumn 1987, there were reports of people having ghostly experiences. For example, two security men saw a circle of children dancing around a pylon one night. The men drove past them and stopped their vehicle, only to find that the children had disappeared – and without leaving any footprints in the mud. Later that night, the men saw a figure on the newly-built Pearoyd Bridge. While one of them waited at the base of the bridge, the other drove around behind the figure and shone the headlights of the vehicle on it. The cloaked figure seemed to have no head, and the light went through its body. The apparition disappeared within seconds, leaving the witnesses badly shaken.

A few nights later, PC Dick Ellis and Spec­ial Constable John Beet also experi­enced unusual phenomena in the area. FT’s own David Clarke interviewed Ellis a fortnight later, when the witness explained that while he and Beet were sitting in their police car, he sensed that someone was standing beside him.[4] He slowly turned his head and saw “something standing by the side of the car”. He then turned around quickly, but there was nothing to be seen. At that point, Beet screamed and hit Ellis with his arm. When Ellis looked round, he saw someone on Beet’s side of the car. Clarke also quotes Beet, who described the figure he saw as looking “like something out of Dickens’s time”.

With both witnesses, these visual experiences were apparently fleeting. Referring to the incident in a TV documentary, Ellis stated that he sensed, and then saw, a figure beside the car, which accords with what he told Clarke. But commenting on the incident in another documentary, he didn’t explicitly state that he and Beet had seen anything unusual, although he said that they had sensed a presence. At any rate, that same night, the two men apparently heard banging sounds, as if someone were striking the back of their patrol car with an implement.

Another witness quoted by David Clarke is John Holmes.[5] During the construction of the new road, he worked in a lorry depot immediately below it. He stated that he and his fellow workers had had a strong feeling that they were being watched, and that they had “often heard kids singing late at night”. The sounds seemed to come from some woods.

Following the official opening of the bypass in May 1988, people continued to report ghostly experiences in the locality, and the A616 acquired some notoriety as a result of fatal accidents. However, its status as one of Britain’s most dangerous roads hasn’t gone unchallenged.


FROM BLUE BELL HILL TO SKINWALKER RANCH
Blue Bell Hill is a chalk hill on the North Downs in Kent. It lies between Rochester and Maidstone, and would have once been an idyllic spot. But the general area now bears the scars of overpopulation and over-development, with two motorways – the M2 and the M20 – nearby, and the busy A229 running over the hill, following the route of a former Roman road. A village on Blue Bell Hill also bears its name. The North Downs Tunnel runs under the hill, carrying the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Items of archæological interest on the hill include Kit’s Coty, the remains of a Neolithic chambered long barrow.

Over the years, motorists have reported ghostly encounters on Blue Bell Hill (See FT73:28; 104:36–40). These, and other ‘road ghost’ cases, are discussed by Sean Tudor on his website. In some of the encounters, motorists believed that they’d collided with a woman or girl. For example, one night in November 1992, Ian Sharpe was driving over Blue Bell Hill when he saw a fair-haired woman run in front of his car. As the car hit her, she was looking over her shoulder, straight at him. She seemingly fell down under the vehicle, but when Sharpe got out and checked, nothing was there. Two weeks later, another driver, Chris Dawkins, had a similar experience. Tudor refers to accounts of car occupants seeing a witch-like female figure in the area, and he also mentions witnesses who claimed to have had experiences of the ‘phantom hitch-hiker’ type thereabouts. For instance, one night in 1934, a motorcyclist allegedly saw a girl standing in the middle of the road. He gave her a lift to a village a few miles away and dropped her off. He turned his bike around for the return journey and noticed that she’d disappeared.

Tudor notes that “a major refurbishment of junction 6 of the A229 in conjunction with […] widening of the M20” began in spring 1992, and was well under way by the following November (the month in which Sharpe and Dawkins had their experiences on Blue Bell Hill).[6] In a ‘Sightings Record’ on his website, Tudor tabulates 20 incidents of various types, spanning 1934 to 1993. Overall, though, there may be insufficient information to establish a definite correlat­ion with road-building or other types of environmental disturbance.
It should be noted that there are TV masts on Blue Bell Hill. It’s been speculated that their emissions may have affected the brain activity of motorists, helping to engender anomalous experiences.

In their book Hunt for the Skinwalker, Colm Kelleher and George Knapp discuss a ranch in north-east Utah that’s reportedly been the setting for a bewildering array of anomalous phenomena, including UFO sightings, cattle mutilations and poltergeist effects (see FT169:44–47; 263:42–44).[7] Kelleher is a biochemist, and Knapp an investigative journalist and TV anchorman in Nevada. Between 1996 and 2004, Kelleher worked for the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), funded by the wealthy American businessman Robert Bigelow to study anomalous phenomena. In August 1996, NIDS bought the ranch from its then owners, Tom and Ellen Gorman (pseudonyms), who, along with their two children, had been there for about two years. Tom Gorman noticed that when he made changes to the topography of the ranch – for example, by digging a new irrigation ditch – there would be UFO sightings. NIDS researchers tried to elicit the same phenomenon, and in some instances neighbours reported sightings of a low-flying orange object within 48 hours of the digging of large trenches in symmetrical rows. However, NIDS’s surveillance cameras didn’t detect the flying object, and NIDS personnel were unable to provide visual corrob­oration, even though the UFO was said to be heading towards the ranch.


IN SEARCH OF EXPLANATIONS
In some cases, there might be prosaic explan­ations for incidents suggestive of a renovation haunting. Maurice Townsend points out that when someone moves into a new house or flat, it might take a while to get used to the sensory impressions that the building produces. At first, the various sounds and sights, and even smells, might seem a bit disturbing. Townsend calls this the ‘new house effect’. He suggests that in a house or flat that one is familiar with, a ‘mini new house effect’ can occur after building work, since there might be new walls, ceilings, and so on. Arguably, though, this could only account for cases featuring relatively minor effects.

As noted, in some cases it could be purely coincidental that paranormal phenomena accompany or follow renovation work. Obviously, the same would apply to manifestations seemingly related to demolition, road-building projects, and the like. During the building of the Stocksbridge bypass, numerous people (construction workers, engineers, security men) would have spent time on the strip of land concerned. If there had been the same number of potential witnesses in the years before the construction work, would just as much ghostly activity have been experienced? David Clarke notes that stories about a ghostly monk in a long-hooded cowl can be traced back in local lore.[8] He refers to a woman called Annie Stainforth, who once lived at White Row Farm, near the route of the future bypass. She apparently told her daughter that she’d seen a phantom monk on several occasions.

For many people, having renovations carried out in their home will be stressful. After all, there might be temporary disruptions of electricity, water, and heating; and unforeseen problems might arise. Unwittingly, some people might generate psycho­kinetic effects when they’re under stress. Therefore, in some cases, it could be psychological pressure, rather than the renovation work itself, that triggers the paranormal phenomena.

Spiritualists tend to attribute ghostly phenomena to discarnate spirits. In her book True Hauntings, the late Hazel Denn­ing refers to a case in which a married couple (she calls the wife ‘Ann’) bought a house and employed workmen to remove a high wall that enclosed the front garden.[9] Almost immediately, unusual things began to happen. For example, the workmen found that their tools seemed to have been moved about, and one of them insisted that he’d been pushed from behind and knocked to the ground. Denning visited the house with a psychic called Gertrude Hall, and the latter reportedly spoke to the spirit of a woman who’d lived there. She and her husband had supposedly built the house, but had had little time to enjoy it before they were killed in a car accident. The spirit of the woman was reportedly very angry with the new inhabitants about the changes being made to her former earthly home. But through Gertrude’s mediation, things were smoothed out, and the spirit “left willingly with a spirit helper”. But Denning doesn’t say whether she sought corroboration of what Gertrude had said about the couple who’d supposedly built the house.

Denning returned to the house a fortnight later and learned from Ann that there’d been no further phenomena. But ghostly events are typically intermittent. Arguably, then, a much longer period of follow-up would be required before one could claim that the manifestations had ceased. At any rate, it’s hard to tell exactly what happened in this case. Perhaps Gertrude really did contact an angry spirit and help it to ‘move on’. For her part, Ann apparently believed what Gertrude had said, and “was visibly relieved just to have an explanation”. If her mind was put at rest, was it this, rather than the departure of a spirit, that somehow brought the manifestations to an end?

Certainly, the notion of discarnate agency – which seems to be taken for granted by many commentators – is problematic in many instances. In the Stocksbridge bypass case, for example, multiple appar­itions were reportedly seen. If each represented a spirit, it would mean that multiple spirits were haunting the area simultan­eously. An alternat­ive approach is to think of recurr­ent apparitional and auditory phenomena in terms of some sort of ‘recording and replay’ process. From this perspective, seeing an appar­ition would be like watching a video recording of something that had happ­ened in the past. However, as noted, many hauntings involve poltergeist-type effects as well as sensory phenomena, and it’s hard to see how such physical manifestations could be encompassed within a ‘recording and replay’ theory.

It would seem that no current theory provides a clear, credible, and comprehensive explanation of these enigmatic cases.
 


Notes
1 Ed has since moved away to Somerset, but Rob is still there, running the pub with his wife, Clarissa, and has kindly given me details of the anomalous phenomena that have occurred at the premises.
2 The relevant clip can be viewed on YouTube. My description of the events is based on this source.
3 Peter Hough & Jenny Randles: Mysteries of the Mersey Valley, Sigma Leisure, Wilmslow, 1993, p13.
4 David Clarke: Supernatural Peak District, Robert Hale, 2000, pp42–44. (See also 'David Clarke Urban Legends 2').
5 Clarke, op. cit., p42.
6 For “junction 6 of the A229”, we should no doubt read junction 6 of the M20, which links the motorway with the A229.
7 Colm A Kelleher & George Knapp: Hunt for the Skinwalker, Paraview, New York, 2005. 
8 Clarke, op. cit., p36.
9 HM Denning: True Hauntings, Llewellyn Public­ations, St Paul, Minnesota, 1996, pp45–48.






POLTERGEISTS OR HAUNTINGS?
Psychical researchers sometimes distinguish between poltergeist cases and hauntings, but both types have been associated with building work. Perhaps it’s worth re-examining this traditional distinction and asking whether it’s still valid.

The term ‘haunting’ is applied to cases in which recurrent sensory impressions (apparitions, footsteps, voices, feelings of cold) are experienced in particular places over an extended period. For example, a manor house in the hamlet of Hinton Ampner, Hampshire, was reportedly the setting for such phenomena in the second half of the 18th cent­ury. The manifestations spanned a period of some 18 years, from about 1755.[1] A family called Ricketts took up residence in 1765 and were there, with servants, for the best part of seven years before leaving on account of the ghostly events. Mrs Mary Ricketts wrote an account of the incidents for her children to read when they were older. The house was let to a family called Lawrence in 1772, but they left suddenly the following year. It then remained uninhabited and was eventually pulled down.

The phenomena at Hinton Ampner – at least, during the occupancy of the Ricketts family – were mainly auditory: footsteps, knocks, murmuring sounds and voices. But there were also appar­itions. There seem to have been no clear-cut physical effects of the poltergeist type – household objects weren’t thrown about, displaced, or broken – and the ghostly sounds weren’t always heard by all who might have been expected to hear them. Accordingly, it’s possible that they were paranormal hallucinatory experiences. The same may have been true of the apparitions.

Poltergeist cases entail decidedly physical phenomena, such as the breakage of glass and crockery, and the movement of objects. In many cases, a living person seems to be the source of, or catalyst for, the manifestations, although some commentators suggest that discarnate agency may be involved. The ‘Enfield poltergeist’ case of 1977–78 (see FT32:47–48; 33:4–5; 166:39; 229:58–59) is probably the best-known British example from recent years.[2] Here, a council house occupied by a mother and her four children was the location for such phen­omena as object movements, disturbance of bedclothes, the appearance of pools of water, and human levitation.

But the haunting/poltergeist distinction is challenged by numerous cases that feature both sensory impressions, such as those reported in the Hinton Ampner case, and physical effects. Like episodes involving only sensory effects, these mixed cases are generally called ‘hauntings’. Given this overlap, can the haunting/poltergeist distinction be justified? Some years ago, Alan Gauld carried out a statistical analysis of a sample of 500 cases, taken from printed sources, involving phenomena of the poltergeist and haunting type.[3] He found some evidence to support the traditional differentiation, but suggested that the two categories could be composite rather than unitary.

A further complication is that cases of short duration or low intensity may be less likely to come to the attention of investigat­ors and be written up. Therefore, on the basis of published cases, researchers could get a mistaken impression about the nature and duration of the ‘average’ haunting or poltergeist episode.

In a ‘place-linked’ case involving a building, phenomena might continue at the premises despite a change of occupants. In a ‘person-linked’ case, on the other hand, phenomena might follow someone to a new location. But it’s not always clear whether ghostly events are ‘place-linked’ or ‘person-linked’. Take, for example, the following case.

A widow wrote to me in 1999 about phenomena that had been occurring in her home in the east of Scotland. Among other things, she noted that light switches and plug switches had gone off by themselves and that she’d heard footsteps when she’d been alone in the house. During visits to her home, I spoke to her and to her two sons. I also obtained a statement from a young man who’d stayed there overnight on occasions. The evidence wasn’t perfect. For example, the widow’s recollections weren’t completely concordant with her sons’. But all four witnesses described unusual incidents.

From the widow’s account, it appeared that the phenomena had begun around the end of 1990, about nine months after her husband’s death. It was interesting to note that he’d had a ‘pet hate’ about people leaving switches on unnecessarily. The phenomena didn’t seem to depend on the presence of any particular member of the family. This may have been a place-centred haunting; but it’s poss­ible that at least one member of the family, or someone associated with it, needed to be present in order for phenomena to occur. When I last spoke to the widow, she and her younger son were still living in the house. If they left, and if subsequent occupants then experienced similar phen­omena there, it would be easier to conclude that the case was a place-linked haunting. However, the manifestations may have run their course by now.

Perhaps we need more than one polarity or dimension to categorise ghostly phenomena adequately. Using a two-dimensional classification scheme of the type shown in the diagram (left) might offer a useful starting point. A place-linked case with purely sens­ory phenomena (sounds, apparitions, sense of presence) would belong in the upper-left quadrant (Case A).[4] A person-linked case with purely physical phenomena would appear in the lower-right quadrant (Case B). A person-linked case with purely sensory phenomena would appear in the lower-left quadrant (Case C); and a place-linked case with purely physical phenomena would go into the upper-right quadrant (Case D). A case that entailed a mixture of sensory and overtly physical manifestations could be indicated by placing it at an intermediate point on the horizontal axis. For example, the positioning of Case E in the diagram would show it to be a place-linked haunting with an equal mix of sensory and physical phenomena.



Notes
1 Harry Price: Poltergeist, Bracken Books, 1993, pp129–144. (First published as Poltergeist Over England by Country Life in 1945.)
2 GL Playfair: This House is Haunted, Souvenir Press, 1980.
3 Alan Gauld & AD Cornell: Poltergeists, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, pp224–240.
4 The horizontal axis indicates the relat­ive preponderance of sensory or physical phenomena. It shouldn’t be thought of as a measure of degree. If a case were placed at a mid-way point on it, it wouldn’t mean that the physical phenomena were ‘less physical’ than the physical manifestations in a case placed further to the right. I’m grateful to Stefan Lobuczek for help in constructing Fig 1 (see pics).