The Complete Book of Ghosts

IF ANY SITE deserves its formidable reputation for spectral sightings it is the Tower of London whose weathered stones are soaked in the blood of countless executed martyrs and traitors. It is said that the walls still echo with the screams of those who were tortured there during the most violent chapters of English history and with the muffled sobbing of those innocents who were put to death for displeasing the monarchy. It is a place of pain where the unquiet souls of those who were imprisoned relive their suffering seemingly for eternity with no prospect of finding peace.

THE BLOODY TOWER

Its long and bloody history began almost 1,000 years ago in 1078 when William the Conqueror built the White Tower in a strategically significant location on the River Thames. Over the next 500 years, the 18-acre site was developed into a formidable fortress within which a succession of kings exercised their divine right over the lives and deaths of their subjects; former friends, wives and enemies alike.

By the dawn of the seventeenth century, English royalty had moved to more palatial quarters and the Tower became a soldier’s garrison and prison. On the morning of their execution, condemned prisoners were ceremoniously paraded past jeering crowds to the scaffold erected on nearby Tower Hill where they would be beheaded, or hung, drawn and quartered, and then their bodies would be brought back for burial within the walls of the Tower. These processions of sombre figures have been seen in modern times by sentries who were able to describe accurately the uniforms worn by the burial party.

Among the Tower’s most illustrious residents were the young princes Edward and Richard who were declared illegitimate and imprisoned in the so-called Bloody Tower by their ambitious uncle the Duke of Gloucester. It is believed by some that he ordered their murder so that he could be crowned King Richard III. The princes have been sighted several times walking hand in hand through the chilly corridors after dusk, possibly in search of their murderous uncle. Their alleged murderer has not been seen skulking around the scene of his hideous crimes which may suggest that his conscience was clear. Given the murdered princes’ sense of injustice or revenge, ghosts appear to be an emotional residue rather than a conscious presence.

This is borne out by the nature of the other ghosts which haunt the Tower – they are all victims, not the perpetrators, of the many crimes which took place there. Edward IV, father to the murdered princes, ordered the death of his Lancastrian rival Henry VI on 21 May 1471 at the end of the War of the Roses, but it is not Edward who haunts the oratory in the Wakefield Tower where the killing took place, but Henry who has been seen seated outside the oratory praying that his soul might find peace.

The second wife of Henry VIII is said to still walk in the Tower Chapel where she made her peace with her God before she was despatched to his heavenly kingdom in 1536. She is reported to have been seen leading a spectral procession through the chapel both with and without her head.

One of the most gruesome episodes in the Tower’s history was the botched execution of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury. Margaret was 70 years old when she was condemned to death in 1541 by Henry VIII, even though she posed no threat to his dynasty. Standing resolutely regal on the scaffold, she refused to submit to the hooded executioner who waited for her to rest her head on the block, but instead she commanded him to sever her head from her neck where she stood. When he refused she fled, forcing him to pursue her around Tower Green swinging the axe like a serial killer in a modern splatter movie. Within minutes the hideous spectacle was at an end; the last female Plantagenet had been hacked to pieces. If you find that too gruesome to be true, you only have to ask permission to remain in the Tower after dark on 27 May, the anniversary of her execution, to see the scene re-enacted by the principal players themselves as Margaret’s ghost tries once again to outrun her executioner.

Other apparitions are less active. The headless ghost of James Crofts Scott, the illegitimate son of King Charles II, for example, is said to do little more than walk the battlements connecting the Bell and Beauchamp Towers dressed in cavalier attire. Apparently, James was not satisfied with being made Duke of Monmouth as compensation for losing the crown to his uncle, James II, in 1685, and chose to assert his claim by force of arms. His rebellion was short lived and he paid for his disloyalty by forfeiting his head.

Arguably the most tragic figure to haunt the site of her untimely death is Lady Jane Grey who was a pawn in the Duke of Northumberland’s stratagem to usurp the English crown from the rightful heir, Mary Tudor. Lady Jane, who was only 15, ruled for less than two weeks before she was arrested and condemned to death together with her young husband and his father in February 1554. Her grieving ghost has been sighted by reliable witnesses on several occasions. In 1957, two sentries swore they witnessed the apparition of the young queen form from a ball of light on the roof of the Salt Tower while others have reported seeing the spirit of the Duke sobbing at the window of the Beauchamp Tower as he had done on the morning of his execution.

One would imagine that a spell in the Tower would be sufficient to bring even the most rebellious subjects to their senses, but Sir Walter Raleigh incurred the monarch’s displeasure more than once. In 1592, Queen Elizabeth I ordered him to be thrown into the Tower, but upon his release he continued to bait the Queen in the belief that he was too popular to be executed. After Elizabeth’s death, James I lost patience with Raleigh’s preening and boasting and had him convicted on a trumped up charge of treason. He was eventually freed in 1616 on condition that he journeyed to the New World in search of gold to fill the royal coffers, but he ignored the King’s express orders not to plunder from England’s Spanish allies and was beheaded on his return. His ghost still walks the battlements near what were once his apartments in the Bloody Tower.

Not all of the Tower’s non-corporeal residents have returned because they cannot rest or because they desire revenge. The ghost of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, has been sighted strolling amiably on the roof of the Martin Tower where he enjoyed walks during his enforced incarceration which began in 1605. Percy, who had been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot, was one of the few prisoners to have been allowed to keep his head and he whiled away the days debating the latest advances in science and other subjects with other educated nobles until his release 16 years later. Percy owed his release to his willingness to pay a fine of £30,000. Since he is clearly reluctant to leave the Tower centuries after his death, perhaps he feels he hasn’t had his money’s worth.

THE GHOSTS OF GLAMIS

If the typical collection of ‘true’ ghost stories is to be believed, every castle in the British Isles has its own resident ghost. Whether there is any truth in that or not, Glamis Castle in Scotland certainly has more than its share.

Glamis is the oldest inhabited castle north of the border and is renowned for being both the setting for the tragedy of Macbeth and also the ancestral home of the late Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. It also has an unenviable reputation as the most haunted castle in the world. Not all the ghosts are tortured souls. In the Queen Mother’s sitting room the ghost of a cheeky negro servant boy has been sighted playing hide and seek. There is no doubt that the legends of Glamis provide more gruesome thrills than an old-fashioned Gothic thriller. However, fact and fiction are so creatively intertwined that it is now impossible to know which is which.

Several visitors and guests have been distressed by the apparition of a pale and frightened young girl who has been seen pleading in mute terror at a barred window. Legend has it that she was imprisoned after having had her tongue cut out to keep her from betraying a family secret – but what that secret might be remains a mystery. In the 1920s, a workman was said to have accidentally uncovered a hidden passage and to have been driven to the edge of insanity by what he found there. Allegedly, the family bought his silence by paying for his passage to another country. There are also tales of a hideously deformed heir who was locked in the attic and an ancient family curse of which the 15th Earl is reputed to have said: ‘If you could only guess the nature of the secret, you would go down on your knees and thank God that it was not yours.’

The family’s troubles are believed to date from 1537 when the widow of the 6th Lord Glamis was accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake. From that day to this her ghost has been seen on the anniversary of her death on the roof of the clock tower, bathed in a smouldering red glow. Several of the castle’s 90 rooms have a dark and bloody history. King Malcolm II of Scotland was murdered in one of them and the floor was boarded because the bloodstains could not be scrubbed clean. It is thought that this may have been the inspiration for the murder of King Duncan, Thane of Glamis, in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth.

During the years of inter-clan warfare, the castle acquired an entire chamber of vengeful spirits when men from the Ogilvy clan were given refuge from their enemies in the dungeon, but were then betrayed by their host who walled them up alive. When the wall was torn down a century later, it is said that their skeletons were found in positions which suggested that they had been gnawing on their own flesh. The Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, who considered himself a hardy adventurer, braved a night there in 1793 and lived to regret it: ‘I must own, that when I heard door after door shut, after my conductor had retired, I began to consider myself as too far from the living, and somewhat too near the dead.’

In his classic survey of supernatural stories, The Ghost Book (1936), Lord Halifax recounts the unnerving experience of a Mrs Monro who was the guest of the new owners Lord and Lady Strathmore in November 1869, a story later verified by Lady Strathmore herself.

‘In the middle of the night, Mrs Monro awoke with a sensation as though someone was bending over her; indeed, I have heard that she felt a beard brush her face. The night-light having gone out, she called her husband to get up and find the matches. In the pale glimmer of the winter moon she saw a figure pass into the dressing room. Creeping to the end of the bed she felt for and found the matchbox and struck a light, calling out loudly, “Cam, Cam I’ve found the matches.”

To her surprise she saw that he had not moved from her side. Very sleepily he grumbled, “What are you bothering about?”

At that moment they heard a shriek of terror from the child in the dressing room. Rushing in, they found him in great alarm, declaring that he had seen a giant. They took him into their own room, and while they were quieting him off to sleep they heard a fearful crash as if a heavy piece of furniture had fallen.

At that moment the big clock had struck four.

Nothing more happened, and the next morning Mr Monro extracted a reluctant promise from his wife to say nothing about her fright, as the subject was known to be distasteful to their host. However, when breakfast was half over, [another guest] Fanny Trevanion, came down, yawning and rubbing her eyes and complaining of a disturbed night. She always slept with a night-light and had her little dog with her on her bed. The dog, she said, had awakened her by howling. The night-light had gone out, and while she and her husband were hunting for matches they heard a tremendous crash, followed by the clock striking four. They were so frightened they could not sleep again.

Of course, this was too much for Mrs Monro, who burst out with her story. No explanation was offered and the three couples agreed on the following night to watch in their respective rooms. Nothing was seen, but they all heard the same loud crash and rushed out onto the landing. As they stood there with scared faces the clock again struck four. That was all; and the noise was not heard again.’

PURSUED BY DREAMS

So far this follows the customary ghost story tradition, but then it becomes even more intriguing. On the night of 28 September, Lord Halifax was staying at Tullyallan Castle, a modern comfortable home with no hint of a ghost when he dreamt that he was back at Glamis, which had once been his late brother-in-law’s home. It was a fearful dream in which he was pursued by a huge man with a long beard. In a desperate effort to keep the ghost at bay – for in his dream Lord Halifax knew the man was dead – he offered him broken chains which a maid had found hidden in the hollow space below the grate in his room. His story continues:

‘“You have lifted a great weight off me,” sighed the ghost. “Those irons have been weighing me down ever since ...”

“Ever since when?” asked his Lordship.
“Ever since 1486,” replied the ghost.’

In itself the dream would not be significant, but on the very same night the daughter of Lord Castletown was staying at Glamis unaware of the ghosts who were said to haunt several of its rooms. According to Lord Halifax:

‘During the night she awoke with the feeling that someone was in the room and sitting up in bed she saw, seated in front of the fire, a huge old man with a long flowing beard. He turned his head and gazed fixedly at her and then she saw that although his beard rose and fell as he breathed the face was that of a dead man ... after a few minutes he faded away and she went to sleep again.’

Some years later, Lord Halifax had the chance to relate his dream to Lady Strathmore who remarked on the uncanny ‘coincidence’ and she gave a start when he mentioned the year of the ghost’s death. Apparently Glamis’ most infamous ghost, Earl Beardie, was murdered in 1486.

THIRTEEN GUESTS

The Winchester Mansion in San Jose, California is unique among haunted houses. It was built by ghosts. Haunted houses are usually host to the restless spirits of their previous occupants, but in the case of the Winchester Mystery House, as it is known locally, its ghosts were not only invited to make themselves at home, they even directed the owner as to how they wanted the house built.

In 1884, Mrs Winchester was grieving for the loss of both her son and her husband who had made his fortune manufacturing the famous Winchester repeating rifle – ‘The gun that won the West’. In her grief Mrs Winchester became convinced that the restless spirits of those killed by her husband’s weapons would torment her unless she devoted the rest of her life to extending the mansion according to their wishes so that they could while away eternity in comfort.

Every evening she presided over a spooky supper at a long dining table laid for 13, herself and 12 invisible guests. The servants indulged her eccentricities as they were allowed to partake of the leftovers. After dinner the widow conducted a private séance to hear the spirits’ latest plans which she would interpret for the workmen the next morning. Either the spirits had a sense of mischievous humour or else Mrs Winchester may have been deliberately trying to disorientate her guests. The house features a number of staircases leading up to the ceiling and doors which open onto a brick wall or a sheer drop. In one particular room there is a single entrance but three exits on the facing wall, one of which leads to an 8 ft drop into the kitchen on the floor below and another into a windowless room. The door to this room has no handle on the other side, perhaps to entrap a curious ghost or because Mrs Winchester believed it wouldn’t need a door knob as a ghost could supposedly float through the door!

The ghosts seem to have had an obsession with the number 13. They demanded that every new staircase should have 13 steps and new rooms must have 13 windows. The chandeliers should boast 13 bulbs and the same number of coat hooks should be available in case they needed to hang up their spectral raincoats. There were even 13 fan lights in the greenhouse in case the spirits fancied a spell of hot house horticulture.

By the time Mrs Winchester passed away on 5 September 1922 at the age of 82, she had devoted the last 38 years of her life to extending the mansion which by then had grown to 160 rooms.

In the 1990s, a pair of paranormal investigators stayed overnight in the house and were aroused by music from a ghostly organ which, on examination, proved to be disconnected. Moments later they were unnerved by a violent disturbance as the house was shaken to its foundations. In the morning they asked the tour guides if any damage had been caused by the earthquake and were dumbfounded to learn that no tremors had been reported in the area, although in 1906 the destructive San Francisco earthquake had struck at the very same time and severely damaged part of the house.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the mansion has become a popular tourist attraction, and in case any visitor sneers at the idea of a house being built for ghosts the guides are ready to assure them that at least three spirits walk the house – a young female servant, a carpenter who had died at the site and the indomitable Mrs Winchester, whom staff have seen in Victorian dress, sitting at a table. When they asked their colleagues why they needed someone dressed up as Mrs Winchester they were told that no one was employed to dress up and play the part.

BORLEY RECTORY

During the 1930s and 1940s, Borley Rectory acquired a sinister reputation as ‘The Most Haunted House in England’. This unimposing vicarage near Sudbury, Essex, was built in 1863 on the site of a Benedictine monastery which had a dark and unholy history. It was said that a Borley monk had seduced a local nun and the pair had planned to elope. They were caught and the monk was executed and the nun was walled up alive in the cellar.

The first incumbent of the new rectory was the Reverend Bull who built a summerhouse overlooking a path known as the Nun’s Walk. From there he sometimes observed the materializations of the weeping woman as she wandered the gardens searching for her murdered lover. Bull often invited guests to join him on his ghost watch but few stayed long enough to share his vigil. Once they had caught the nun peering in through their ground floor bedroom window they made their excuses and cut their visit short. Bull’s four daughters and his son Harry resigned themselves to regular sightings of the forlorn spirit drifting across the lawn in broad daylight, but when it was joined by a spectral coach and horses galloping up the drive, the surviving Bull children decided to move on. Their father had died in the Blue Room in 1892 and his son Harry in the same room in 1927.

At the end of the 1920s, the Reverend Eric Smith and his wife took up residence, shrugging off stories of phantom carriages and sobbing nuns. They had barely had time to unpack their belongings before a burst of poltergeist activity encouraged them to sell up and move out. However, during their two-year tenure they took the unusual step of calling in the man who was to ensure Borley a place in paranormal history – ghost hunter extraordinaire Harry Price.

Price was a notorious self-publicist and one-time music hall conjurer who had hoped to make a name for himself by exposing fake mediums and debunking the whole spiritualist movement as mere charlatanism. The more he saw at first hand, however, the more convinced he became that some of it was genuine. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that he was more likely to fulfil his ambition of getting into Debrett’s (a directory of the rich and famous) if he could find proof of life after death than if he merely unmasked a few fraudulent mediums.

At the invitation of the Reverend Smith, and later with the encouragement of the next tenants Mr and Mrs Foyster, Price recorded incidents involving phantom footsteps, flying objects and even physical attacks: on one notable occasion Mrs Foyster was even turned out of bed by an invisible assailant. She was also the subject of unintelligible messages scrawled on the walls. Her husband had the house exorcized but the spirits persisted. The servants’ bells rang of their own accord and music could be heard coming from the chapel even though no one was in the building. The Foysters admitted defeat and left the spooks in peace. Subsequent owners fared little better. Eventually, the house burned down in a mysterious fire in 1939 as predicted by a spirit 11 months earlier during a séance conducted on the site by Price. Witnesses stated that they saw phantoms moving among the flames and the face of a nun staring from a window.

THE GHOST-HUNTER’S BOOK

Price published his findings in 1940 under the title The Most Haunted House in England, boasting that it presented ‘the best authenticated case of haunting in the annals of psychical research’. The book was an instant bestseller providing as it did some escapism in the first anxious months of the Second World War and quickly established a non-fiction genre of its own – the haunted house mystery. Its success generated a slew of similar books by self-proclaimed experts and sufficient interest in Price to spawn several (highly critical) biographies. Price revelled in his new found fame, but it was short-lived. He died in 1948 having spent the last 40 years of his life providing what he believed to be irrefutable evidence of the paranormal. But he was not allowed to rest in peace. In the decade after his death there were spiteful personal attacks on his reputation by rival ghost hunters alleging that Price had faked certain phenomena. Mrs Smith wrote to the Church Times denying that she and her husband had claimed that the rectory was haunted, although it is thought that she may have done this to ingratiate herself with the Church authorities who had been embarrassed by the whole affair. An investigation by the SPR, conducted by members who were openly hostile to Harry Price, concluded that he had manipulated certain facts to substantiate his claims and that other incidents probably had a ‘natural explanation’. Price’s reputation was seriously undermined, but the fact remains that the Reverend Bull and his family had said that they had seen spirits before Price arrived on the scene. (Miss Ethel Bull had reported seeing a phantom figure at the end of her bed and of sensing another sitting on the end of the bed on more than one occasion.) Also Mrs Foyster appears to have provoked an outbreak of genuine poltergeist activity. Price himself suspected that she augmented it with some phenomena of her own creation, perhaps because she craved attention, or at least so as not to disappoint his expectations.

Either way, questions remain. If Price had faked phenomena, why did he rent the rectory for a year after Mrs Foyster moved out, only to admit that there was nothing anomalous to report? He would have had more than enough time and opportunity to stage something truly astounding to substantiate his claims. The inactivity during that period suggests that the spirits might have been attracted by the presence of the Reverend Bull and Mrs Foyster who perhaps possessed mediumistic abilities.

A subsequent investigation by the SPR under R. J. Hastings unearthed previously unpublished letters from the Reverend Smith and his wife to Price, written in 1929, in which Smith states emphatically that ‘Borley is undoubtedly haunted’. This discovery forced the SPR to revise its earlier findings. Price had been vindicated. Whatever short cuts Price may have taken to enhance his reputation as Britain’s foremost ghost hunter it cannot be denied that there was something out of the ordinary occurring at Borley.

A footnote to the Borley investigation was added in the 1950s by the novelist Dennis Wheatley, author of The Devil Rides Out and dozens of occult thrillers:

‘Kenneth Allsop, the book reviewer of the Daily Mail, told me that when Borley was in the news he was sent down to do an article on it, and with him he took a photographer. Borley was then being ‘debunked’ so that had to be the tone of the article. But when the photographer developed his photos the figure of a nun could be quite clearly seen on one of them. He took it to Allsop, who took it to his editor, but the editor said, “No, I just daren’t print it.”’

A curious postscript to the Borley saga occurred on 28 August 1977 when ley line expert Stephen Jenkins visited the area with a view to seeing if there was anything to the theory that the ‘curious manifestations’ might be linked to a spider’s web of ley line alignments.

‘The time was precisely 12.52 pm and we were driving south-west along the minor road which marks the north end of the hall ground, when on the road in front in the act of turning left into a hedge (I mean our left across the path of the car), instantaneously appeared four men in black – I thought them hooded and cloaked – carrying a black, old fashioned coffin, ornately trimmed with silver. The impression made on both of us was one of absolute physical presence, of complete material reality. Thelma and I at once agreed to make separate notes without comparing impressions. We did so and the descriptions tallied exactly, except that she noted the near left bearer turned his face towards her. I did not see this as I was abruptly braking at the time. What I had seen as a hood, she described as a soft tall hat with a kind of scarf falling to the left shoulder, thrown across the cloak body to the right. The face was that of a skull.

‘The next day we returned to the spot at precisely the same time and took a picture. It is a Kodak colour slide. In the hedge near the gap where the ‘funeral party’ vanished (there’s a path there leading to Belchamp Walter churchyard) is a short figure apparently cloaked, his face lowered with a skull-like dome to the head ... I hazard a guess that the dress of the coffin bearer is that of the late 14th century. There seems to be no local legend of a phantom funeral.’

WEIRD NIGHT IN A HAUNTED HOUSE

While Harry Price was accused of having falsified some of the ‘evidence’ and having made fraudulent claims in order to boost his reputation as Britain’s foremost ghost hunter, the following article from the Daily Mirror of 14 June 1929 suggests that Harry’s first visit to Borley was lively enough without the need for artificial aids or exaggeration:

‘Weird Night In “Haunted” House’
from our Special Correspondent

There can no longer be any doubt that Borley Rectory, near here, is the scene of some remarkable incidents. Last night Mr Harry Price, Director of the National Laboratory For Psychical Research, his secretary Miss Lucy Kaye, the Reverend G.F. Smith, Rector of Borley, Mrs Smith and myself were witnesses to a series of remarkable happenings. All these things occurred without the assistance of a medium or any kind of apparatus. And Mr Price, who is a research expert only and not a spiritualist, expressed himself puzzled and astonished at the results. To give the phenomena a thorough test however, he is arranging for a séance to be held in the rectory with the aid of a prominent London medium.

The first remarkable happening was the dark figure that I saw in the garden. We were standing in the Summer House at dusk watching the lawn when I saw the ‘apparition’ which so many claim to have seen, but owing to the deep shadows it was impossible for one to discern any definite shape or attire. But something certainly moved along the path on the other side of the lawn and although I quickly ran across to investigate it had vanished when I reached the spot.

Then as we strolled towards the rectory discussing the figure there came a terrific crash and a pane of glass from the roof of a porch hurtled to the ground. We ran inside and upstairs to inspect the room immediately over the porch but found nobody. A few seconds later we were descending the stairs, Miss Kaye leading, and Mr Price behind me when something flew past my head, hit an iron stove in the hall and shattered. With our flash lamps we inspected the broken pieces and found them to be sections of a red vase which, with its companion, had been standing on the mantelpiece of what is known as the Blue Room which we had just searched. Mr Price was the only person behind me and he could not have thrown the vase at such an angle as to pass my head and hit the stove below.

We sat on the stairs in darkness for a few minutes and just as I turned to Mr Price to ask him whether we had waited long enough something hit my hand. This turned out to be a common moth ball and had apparently dropped from the same place as the vase. I laughed at the idea of a spirit throwing moth balls about, but Mr Price said that such methods of attracting attention were not unfamiliar to investigators.

Finally came the most astonishing event of the night. From one o’clock till nearly four this morning all of us, including the rector and his wife, actually questioned the spirit or whoever it was and received at times the most emphatic answers. A cake of soap on the washstand was lifted and thrown heavily onto a china jug standing on the floor with such force that the soap was deeply marked. All of us were at the other side of the room when this happened. Our questions which we asked out loud were answered by raps apparently made on the back of a mirror in the room and it must be remembered though that no medium or spiritualist was present.

THE WHITE HOUSE

When the tour guides in Washington, DC, talk of the White House being haunted by the ghosts of former US presidents they are not speaking metaphorically, neither are they being melodramatic. It is known that Eleanor Roosevelt held seances in the White House during the Second World War and she claimed to be in contact with the spirit of Abraham Lincoln. During the Roosevelt residency their guest Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was awoken in the night by a knock on her bedroom door. Thinking that it might be Eleanor Roosevelt she got out of bed, put on her nightgown and opened the door. There, framed in the doorway and looking as large as life, was the ghost of Abe Lincoln. Queen Wilhelmina’s reaction is not recorded.

Winston Churchill was a frequent visitor to the White House during the Second World War and he often indulged in a hot bath, together with a cigar and a glass of whisky. One evening he climbed out of the bath and went into the adjoining bedroom to look for a towel when he noticed a man standing by the fireplace. It was Abraham Lincoln. Unperturbed, Churchill apologized for his state of undress: ‘Good evening, Mr. President. You seem to have me at a disadvantage.’ Lincoln is said to have smiled and tactfully withdrawn.

The wife of President Calvin Coolidge entertained guests to the White House with her recollections of the day she entered the Oval Office and saw Lincoln looking out across the Potomac with his hands clasped behind his back – a habit he acquired during the Civil War. Lincoln himself was a firm believer in the afterlife and enthusiastically participated in seances during his tenure in office prior to his assassination in 1865. He confided to his wife that he had a premonition of his own death. He dreamt that he was walking through the White House when he heard the sound of weeping coming from the East Room. When he entered he saw an open coffin surrounded by mourners and guarded by a detachment of Union soldiers. He asked one of the guards who it was who lay in the coffin, to be told, ‘The President. He was killed by an assassin.’ Lincoln then approached the coffin and saw his own corpse.

President Harry Truman often complained that he was prevented from working by Lincoln’s ghost who would repeatedly knock on his door when he was attempting to draft an important speech. Truman wasn’t known for his sense of humour and no one would have thought of playing practical jokes during his tenure in the Oval Office so it is assumed he was in earnest.

In the 1960s, Jacqueline Kennedy admitted that she had sensed Lincoln’s presence on more than one occasion and ‘took great comfort in it’. It is thought that Lincoln’s ghost might be drawn to the White House because his son Willie died there and it is reported that the son has himself been seen wandering the corridors in search of his father.

ALCATRAZ

Long before Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay was converted into a prison to house America’s most notorious criminals, the Native Americans warned the US army not to build a fortress on ‘The Rock’ as it was the dwelling place of evil spirits. Needless to say, their warnings were ignored. When the fortress was converted into a military prison in 1912, several soldiers were said to have been driven insane by mysterious noises in the night, by cold spots which turned their breath to mist even on warm summer evenings and by the sight of two burning red eyes which appeared in the cells on the lower level.

By 1934, the spirits had company when the Rock re-opened for business to house the most notorious gangsters of the prohibition era including ‘Scarface’ Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly. But even the most hardened inmates feared being thrown into ‘the hole’, the windowless cells of D Block where the red-eyed demon was said to be waiting to consume lost souls.

On one memorable night during the 1940s a prisoner was hurled screaming into solitary in 14D and continued yelling until early the next morning. When the guards finally opened his cell, they found him dead with distinctive marks around his throat. An autopsy was conducted and the official cause of death was determined to be ‘non self-inflicted strangulation’. The story gets more extraordinary when, according to the sworn statement of an eyewitness, the prisoners were lined up for roll-call the next morning and the number didn’t tally. There was one extra prisoner in the line. So a guard walked along the line looking at each face to see if one of the inmates was playing a trick on him. He came face to face with the dead man who had been strangled in the night and who promptly vanished before his eyes. The guard later related this story to others and swore on the life of his children that it was true.

Despite the Warden’s boast that the prison was escape-proof, several inmates tried to break out and died in the attempt. Their ghosts are said to haunt the hospital block where their bodies were taken. Other parts of the prison are host to the unquiet spirits of the five suicides and eight murders which took place before the prison was closed in 1963.

Since the Rock opened to tourists, visitors have claimed to have seen cell doors closing by themselves and to have heard the sound of sobbing, moaning and phantom footsteps, the screams of prisoners being beaten as well as the delirious cries of those made ill or driven insane by their confinement. Others have spoken of seeing phantom soldiers and prisoners pass along the corridors and out through solid walls, and many have complained of being watched even though the corridors and cells were empty.

Those brave enough to try out one of the bunks for size have found themselves pinned down by a weight on their chest as the previous occupant made his presence known and showed his resentment at having his privacy invaded. In the lower cells, 12 and 14 in particular, even the least sensitive tourists have admitted to picking up feelings of despair, panic and pain, and they have excused themselves to catch a breath of fresh air. Whenever a thermometer has been placed in cell 14D it has consistently measured between 20–30 degrees colder than the other cells in that block.

And what of the Rock’s most notorious inmate, ‘Scarface’ Capone? Well, Capone may have been a ‘big shot’ on the outside but in the ‘big house’ he was apparently a model prisoner who sat quietly on his bunk in cell B206 learning to play the banjo. It is said that if you sit quietly in that cell you can hear the ghostly strains of Capone whiling away eternity playing popular tunes of the Roaring 20s.

THE EDGAR ALLAN POE HOUSE

The spirit of Edgar Allan Poe, author of The Fall of the House of Usher and other tales of terror, haunts both American fiction and the house in Baltimore where he lived as a young man in the 1830s. The narrow two and a half-storey brick house at 203 North Amity Street in an impoverished area is said to be so spooky that even local gangs are scared to break in. When the police arrived to investigate a reported burglary in 1968 they saw a phantom light in the ground floor window floating up to reappear on the second floor and then in the attic, but when they entered the property there was no one to be seen.

Even in daylight the house is unsettling. An eerie portrait of Poe’s wife, painted as she lay in her coffin, hangs in one room, her melancholic gaze following visitors around the room. Local residents have also reported seeing a shadowy figure working at a desk at a second floor window, although Poe, whose morbid obsession with premature burial led to his incarceration in an asylum, worked in the attic.

The curator has recorded many incidents of poltergeist activity and this appears to originate in the bedroom that belonged to Poe’s grandmother. Here, doors and windows have opened and closed by themselves, visitors have been tapped on the shoulder and disembodied voices have been heard. Psychic investigators have also reported seeing a stout, grey-haired old woman dressed in clothing of the period gliding through the rooms.

In a twist of which the master of the macabre might have been perversely proud, local parents still use the spectre of the horror writer to terrify their children into doing what they are told. Poe has become the bogeyman of Baltimore.

TOYS “R” US

It is a common misconception that ghosts only inhabit crumbling castles and mouldering mansions. The modern Toys “R” Us superstore in Sunnyvale, California occupies a substantial plot on what had been a ranch and an apple orchard back in the nineteenth century. It is assumed that the poltergeist activity that has been witnessed there is connected with the previous owner John Murphy who, it appears, disliked children, as well as the commercial development of his former home.

Each morning, employees arrive to find stock scattered across the floor and items placed on the wrong shelves. Turnover in staff increased when sensitive staff members heard a voice calling their name and were then touched by invisible hands. The fragrant scent of fresh flowers has unsettled several employees, but it was the unwanted attentions of a phantom who assaulted female staff in the ladies’ washroom which brought the matter to the attention of the local press and ghost buffs around the globe in 1978.

As a result, local journalist Antoinette May and psychic Sylvia Brown camped out in the store overnight with a photographer and a number of ghost catchers. Once the staff had left for the night and the lights were dimmed, Sylvia began to sense a male presence approaching the group. In her mind’s eye she ‘saw’ a tall, thin man striding down the aisle towards her with his hands in his pockets. In her head she heard him speak with a Swedish accent, identifying himself as Johnny Johnson and warning her that she would get wet if she stayed where she was. It later emerged that a well had existed on that spot. Sylvia established such a strong connection with Johnson that she was able to draw out his life history. He had come to California in the mid-1800s from Pennsylvania where he had worked as a preacher before succumbing to an inflammation of the brain which affected his behaviour. This appears to account for his antics in the aisles and the ladies’ washroom, as well as the nickname ‘Crazy Johnny’, given to him by locals at the time.

Johnny lived out his later years working as a ranch hand for John Murphy, pining for a woman named Elizabeth Tafee who broke his heart when she left him to marry a lawyer. Johnny was 80 when he died from loss of blood after an accident with an axe while chopping wood.

Infra-red photographs taken for Arthur Myers’ book on the haunting,The Ghostly Register, appear to show the figure of a man in the aisles of the store. Surprisingly, the publicity surrounding the haunting hasn’t put off the customers, and it has allayed the fears of the employees who are no longer upset by the disturbances – they now know it’s only ‘Crazy Johnny’.