CHAPTER 7 Spooky sites

Unquiet spirits rarely linger in
graveyards as they do not wish to
to be reminded of how they died.
Some may even be unaware that
they are dead

IN THREE DAYS of fighting at the battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, a battle that was to mark the turning point in the American Civil War, 53,000 men lost their lives. The scale of the slaughter surpassed even that of the bloodiest days on the Somme during the First World War. No wonder then that visitors to the site have sworn that they have seen spectral soldiers wandering the battlefield as disorientated as the day they were killed. Some say it is the most haunted place in America.

HAUNTED HOTEL

On the first day of the battle rebel snipers were able to pick off retreating Union soldiers from their vantage point in the Farnsworth House on Baltimore Pike. The house, still pockmarked with bullet holes, is now a small hotel where guests have awoken in the night to find an indistinct figure at the end of their bed. Odder still was the occasion when a local radio station set up an outside broadcast from the Farnsworth House only to have the power and telephone lines cut out. A local psychic, who was on site to give impressions to the listeners, heard disembodied voices warning their comrades that ‘traitors’ were around and he suddenly realized that the sound engineers were dressed in blue shirts and blue jeans – the same colour as the Union uniforms of the Civil War.

Several tourists have approached the park rangers over the years to ask the identity of a ragged, barefooted man dressed in a butternut shirt and trousers with a large floppy hat who appears at the rock formation known as the Devil’s Den. He always says the same thing, ‘What you’re looking for is over there,’ while pointing north-east towards the Plum Run, then promptly vanishes. The description fits that of the Texans who were a rag-bag unit feared for their fighting spirit.

At the wooded end of the Triangular Field, site of Colonel Chamberlain’s heroic bayonet charge which drove Confederate troops off the hill known as Little Round Top, visitors have documented chaotic paranormal activity including phantom musket fire and drum rolls. Shadowy rebel sharpshooters have been seen taking cover among the trees, but whenever the ghost hunters enter the field to record these phantom figures their cameras malfunction. There appears to be some form of electromagnetic disturbance hanging like a pall over the field; even photographs of the area taken from the outside looking in are either fogged or fail to develop. One possible explanation is that it is a mass of residual personal energy discharged into the atmosphere following the violent death of so many soldiers.

Several visitors have regaled their fellow travellers with tales of having heard musket fire from Little Round Top and even having smelt acrid clouds of cordite and cannon smoke. In fact, it is known that on the third day of the battle the sound of the massed cannons was so loud that it could be heard in Washington, 80 miles away. But the most unearthly episode must have been that experienced by a group of volunteer re-enactors who worked as extras on the epic recreation of the battle for the movie Gettysburg in 1993. During a break in the filming the group were admiring the sunset from Little Round Top when a grizzled old man approached them in the uniform of a Union private. He smelt of sulphur which was used in gunpowder of the period and his uniform was threadbare and scorched, unlike those of the extras. The man handed out spare rounds and commented on the fury of the battle. It was only later when they showed the rounds to the armourer that they learnt these were authentic musket rounds from the period.

The battle was finally decided by a single suicidal assault, the infamous attack known as Pickett’s Charge, in which 12,000 Confederate infantry marched shoulder to shoulder across an open field only to be massacred by massed cannons and musket fire. In that single, fatal hour 10,000 were killed and with them died General Robert E. Lee’s hopes of victory. Park rangers have witnessed many apparitions in the field after visiting hours including an unidentified mounted officer and another who was the image of General Lee. Local residents have maintained that on warm summer evenings they have encountered cold spots while out walking which transformed their breath to mist.

THE TOWN TOO TOUGH TO DIE

They called Tombstone, Arizona, ‘The Town Too Tough To Die’ and it appears that certain of its most notorious inhabitants are equally reluctant to go quietly. The town is now preserved as a national museum with many of the old buildings lovingly restored to their former rickety glory and stocked with original artefacts from its violent past including the hearse that transported bodies to Boot Hill, the hangman’s noose and the honky-tonk piano which accompanied many a barroom brawl. Some say that if you stay after closing time you can hear the piano playing ‘Red River Valley’, the cowboys’ favourite tune and hear the echo of their raucous laughter.

Tombstone, 1885. The town suffered two major fires in 1881 and 1882. Those, with the decline in the silver mines, meant that by the mid-1880s the place was virtually abandoned

Some of the meanest gunfighters of the old West did their hardest drinking and gambling in the town’s notorious Bird Cage Theatre which took its name from the 14 cribs suspended from the ceiling in which ‘painted ladies’, dressed in exotic feathers, would swing. The Bird Cage also served as a saloon where the cowboys and card sharps took their pleasure with women who could out-drink and out-cuss the best of them. Arguments were settled with a six gun and the loser was buried on Boot Hill, so named because many of its residents died with their boots on.

The streets of Tombstone were the setting for numerous showdowns, the most famous being the gunfight at the OK Corral when Marshall Wyatt Earp, his brothers and their consumptive trigger-happy friend Doc Holliday faced down the Clanton and McLaury gang, three of whom were killed. In the aftermath, the surviving Clantons and their friends took their bloody revenge. Virgil Earp was shot in the back while playing pool in the Bird Cage and his dying words are said to echo there after dark.

The tour guides are fond of telling visitors that as many as 31 ghosts are thought to haunt the saloon which was the site of 26 killings – a fact borne out by the 140 bullet holes that can be seen peppering the ceiling. The spook most frequently seen in the saloon is a stage hand dressed in black striped trousers, wearing a card dealer’s visor and carrying a clipboard. He is said to appear from nowhere, walk across the stage and exit through the facing wall. Tourists have also reported seeing the ghost of a young boy who had died of yellow fever in 1882 and heard an unidentified woman sighing plaintively as if pining for her lost love. Others have commented on how impressed they have been by the authenticity of the actors’ clothes in the gambling parlour and the dancehall, only to be told that the museum doesn’t employ actors, nor does it ask its staff to dress in period costumes.

Since it is a museum, no one is allowed to smoke inside the buildings but nevertheless visitors will often remark on the strong smell of cigar smoke which lingers round the card tables and some have spoken of delicate scent of lilac perfume in the backstage bathroom. Equally odd is the $100 poker the poker chip which mysteriously appeared on the poker table one day then promptly vanished after being locked away in a desk before turning up in a filing cabinet some days later. And this is not the only object which appears and disappears to the bewilderment of the museum staff. The ghosts seem to enjoy playing hide and seek with small but significant items which they know the staff will notice if they are missing or out of place. Furniture has moved by itself and one member of the museum staff was physically attacked by a mischievous spirit who hit the tour guide on the back of the knee causing him to fall to the floor. Anyone who doubts that there is a physical presence in the old saloon only has to put his hand in the notorious ‘cold spot’ and feel the contrast with the warm air surrounding it to sense a distinct chill in the atmosphere.

Over the years several ghost hunters have attempted to capture the ghosts on film, but their cameras have malfunctioned as if triggered by an influx of energy as ghosts appear. Unattended still cameras have fired off exposures by themselves and have altered focus in the middle of shooting before resetting themselves correctly. However, it seems the ghosts can register on electrical equipment if their emission is strong enough. Small balls of light have been captured on film floating up from the floor and a face has been seen in the large painting which hangs behind the bar. One female member of staff who works in the gift shop on the ground floor of the Bird Cage Theatre swears she once saw on a security monitor a lady in a white dress walking through the cellar at closing time when all the visitors had left.

TOMBSTONE’S SPOOKY SITES

Other haunted sites in Tombstone include Nellie Cashman’s Restaurant, where customers and employees have reported seeing dishes crash to the floor, and Schiefflin Hall where rowdy town council meetings were held in the 1880s. At the Wells Fargo stage stop ghostly drivers and phantom passengers have been seen alighting from a spectral stagecoach on their way to the Grand Hotel – renamed Big Nose Kate’s after its most famous owner, a prostitute who enjoyed a volatile relationship with its most famous resident, Doc Holliday, who lived in room 201. Residents and tourists have also reported seeing a man in a black frock coat who starts walking across the street but never appears on the other side and traffic often stops for a woman in white who committed suicide after her child died of fever in the 1880s.

The town’s tour guides thought they had heard and seen it all until recently when they were shown photographs taken by visitors on two separate occasions. Both were taken at the same spot on Boot Hill and at first sight they appeared to be typical snapshots of their relatives standing in front of the gravestones, but on closer inspection the first subject was shadowed by the faint but unmistakable image of a cowboy in period costume. However, there was nothing discernible of this phantom figure below the knee. In the second shot, taken by someone unconnected with the first tourist, their friend or family member smiled from the photo unaware that behind them could be seen a ghostly pair of cowboy boots and the lower part of their owner in precisely the spot where the legless cowboy had been seen in the first photograph. It may be that the film or exposure setting on the first camera was less sensitive to residual personal energy and so captured the cowboy’s upper half which would be the stronger emanation, while the second camera captured the fainter portion only.

A GLIMPSE INTO THE PAST

For over a century, tourists have been allowed access to enjoy the elegant palace and gardens of Versailles, near Paris, where Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette lived in splendour just prior to the French Revolution. However, few can have seen as much of the palace’s past glories as Eleanor Jourdain and Anne Moberly did in the summer of 1901.

Miss Moberly, aged 55, was the head of a women’s residential hall at Oxford University and 35-year-old Miss Jourdain had been offered a post as her assistant. It had been Miss Jourdain’s idea to invite Miss Moberley to spend part of the summer vacation touring France with her in the hope of becoming better acquainted while she considered the offer. Both were the daughters of Anglican clerics and not given to a belief in the supernatural, but what they saw on their visit to Versailles on 10 August shook their faith and forced them to question their beliefs.

They began with a tour of the main palace and then decided to walk to the Petit Trianon, one of two smaller palatial buildings in the grounds where the ill-fated Marie Antoinette retreated to escape the formalities of the court. It was a pleasantly warm day with barely a cloud in the sky, cooled by a soft freshening breeze – ideal walking weather, in fact – but after strolling through a large formal garden and a glade the ladies lost their way. Perhaps they had been distracted in the course of conversation, or had misread their guidebook, but whatever the reason, they now found themselves at the Grand Trianon, the palace built for Louis XIV.

Unperturbed, they consulted their Baedeker guide, which offered an alternative route to the smaller building by way of a lane which lay ahead of them. Neither lady remarked on the fact that they appeared to be the only visitors in this part of the grounds, although it struck them both as very strange considering how popular Versailles was with tourists at that time of the season. But Miss Jourdain did think it odd when her companion did not take the opportunity to ask directions from a domestic servant who was leaning out of the window of a building shaking the dust from a bed sheet. It later transpired that the older woman had not seen the servant. In fact, when they compared notes some months later they discovered that their shared experience differed in small but significant details.

The end of the lane divided into three paths and it was here that the English visitors came upon two men dressed in green coats and three-cornered hats whom they assumed were gardeners. One of the men offered directions in such a gruff, offhand manner that Miss Jourdain felt the need to ask again, but she received the same response. Looking around for a more civil guide she caught sight of a woman and a young girl standing in the doorway of a cottage and thought it odd that they should be dressed in such old-fashioned clothes. She later learnt that Miss Moberly had not commented on it because she hadn’t seen the women – nor, for that matter, had she seen the cottage.

It was at this point that both women began to sense a change in the atmosphere. They were overcome by a profound sense of melancholy and a detachment from reality as if they were sleepwalking through a particularly lucid dream. Miss Moberly was later to describe the atmosphere as ‘unnatural’ and distinctly ‘unpleasant’: ‘... even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still.’

The atmosphere was unusually oppressive as they came to the edge a wood in front of which was a pillared kiosk, intended perhaps for tired visitors who wished to sit and shield themselves from the sun. But neither lady felt disposed to do so when they caught sight of the face of a man in a cloak who was seated nearby Both women sensed a shiver of of repulsion as they looked on the swarthy, malevolent features. But was he looking at them or through them? Neither said a word, but instead debated whether to take the left or right-hand path. While they were considering what to do a handsome looking young man, his face framed in black ringlets, appeared in period costume complete with buckle shoes, a cloak and wide-brimmed ht and he advised them to take the path to the right through the wood. An instant later he was gone, but his directions had proven correct. As they emerged from the trees they saw the Petit Trianon in the clearing and approached it with a palpable sense of relief. It was then that Miss Moberly spotted a rather pretty fair-haired young woman in period costume sketching near the terrace. She was attired in a low cut white dress with a full skirt, a light coloured scarf around her shoulders and a wide-brimmed hat to shield her pale skin from the sun. There was something about this artist that predisposed Miss Moberly to dislike the woman, but she couldn’t put her feelings into words. Curiously, her companion made no comment as they passed and it was only weeks later that Miss Jourdain admitted that she hadn’t seen anyone sketching in the garden. The oppressive stillness returned as they toured the outside of the house but swiftly evaporated when they encountered a French wedding party in modern dress near the entrance whom they joined for a tour of the rooms.

SENSE OF FOREBODING

Neither lady spoke of their experience until a week later when Miss Moberly was overcome with the same stifling sense of foreboding that she had sensed at the kiosk while recalling her experiences in a letter to her sister. At this she turned to Miss Jourdain and asked if the younger woman thought that the palace might be haunted. ‘Yes I do,’ replied Miss Jourdain. The two women then shared their recollections of that day. It was only later that they learnt that 10 August had been a significant day in French history for it was the day that revolutionaries marched on Versailles and seized the royal family. Had the two women unconsciously tapped into a residual memory of that pivotal day in the minds of those who had been present and sensed the approaching threat? And could it have been Marie Antoinette herself that Miss Moberly had seen sketching in the garden of the Petit Trianon? Miss Jourdain determined that another visit to Versailles was called for. Her second outing proved no less remarkable.

On a chilly damp day in January 1902 she returned to Versailles and immediately set off in search of the Hameau, a model peasant village where Marie Antoinette had amused herself play-acting an idyllic rustic life with her friends. As she neared the site Miss Jourdain was again overcome with a sense of unreality, as if she was sleepwalking through someone else’s dream. When she came in sight of the Hameau she passed two labourers in hooded cloaks who were gathering lopped branches and loading them into a cart. When she turned to observe them more closely they had gone. In the model village she was overwhelmed by an oppressive atmosphere and was tempted to turn back, but decided to press on as she suspected this might be her last opportunity to get to the bottom of the mystery. Eventually she emerged into a wooded park where she wandered a labyrinth of paths screened by dense hedges. The only person she saw there was an elderly gardener, but she heard the rustle of silk dresses which she thought impractical in wet weather and overheard the excited chatter of women speaking French. Occasionally she thought she could hear faint strains of chamber music although there were no musicians in sight. On returning to the main palace she asked the tour guides if there were any actors on the grounds in historical costume, or musicians, and was informed that there were neither.

Did the tension of the days leading up to the imprisonment and subsequent hanging of Marie Antoinette (right) imprint themselves on the grounds of Versaille, so that over one hundred years later two friends ‘saw’ what happened there in a spectral re-enactment?

Determined to verify what they had seen, Miss Jourdain and Miss Moberly embarked on a thorough examination of all the documents they could find relating to the palace during the period immediately prior to the Revolution. What they found appeared to validate their experiences. They traced a plan of the grounds which showed a cottage precisely where Miss Jourdain had said she had seen it, although nothing remained by 1901. They also found proof that there had been a pillared kiosk at the spot where they had observed the malevolent looking man who answered the description of the Comte de Vaudreuil. He had betrayed the queen by fooling her into permitting the staging of an anti-royalist play which had incited disaffected elements within the court to join the revolutionaries. As for the costumed figures, they identified the men in the three-cornered hats and green coats as Swiss Guards and the young man with black curls who had offered directions near the kiosk as the messenger who had hurried to warn the queen of a mob marching on the palace. This incident occurred on 5 October 1789, the same day that a cart had been hired to carry firewood from the park near the Hameau. If Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain had indeed tuned in to this particular day it would explain why all the men they had seen on that hot day in August were dressed in autumnal clothes and why the two women had been oppressed by a sense of foreboding.

PUBLISHED, AND DAMNED

Convinced that they had experienced a genuine glimpse into the past – a phenomenon known as retrocognition – the two ladies decided to publish their story. The resulting account, modestly titled An Adventure (1911), became an instant sensation and has remained a hotly debated issue ever since. Sceptics have argued that the women had mistaken actors in period costume for genuine spectres and in evidence of this offer Phillipe Jullian’s biography of turn of the century poet Robert de Montesquiou. Jullian notes that de Montesquiou and his friends often amused themselves by dressing in period costume and rehearsing historical plays in the grounds of Versailles and that Marie Antoinette was a prominent character. Although a perfectly rational scenario, this does not explain why Miss Jourdain did not see the domestic servant shaking a cloth from the window or the lady sketching in the garden, both of whom were observed by Miss Moberly. Neither does it explain the appearance of the woman and girl at the doorway of the cottage which had long been demolished, nor does it account for the kiosk which had also gone by 1901. Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain were equally adamant that the handsome young messenger and the men collecting fallen branches had vanished within moments of being seen and could not have had time to move on in so short a time.

Unfortunately both women naively willed the copyright to a sceptical friend, art historian Dame Joan Evans, who subscribed to Phillipe Jullian’s rational explanation of events. Consequently, Dame Joan Evans refused to allow the book to be reprinted after the authors’ death, but a century later their story continues to be cited as one of the most compelling cases of retrocognition.

Such episodes are very rare, but perhaps they are not as uncommon as one might imagine. In 1926, two English ladies shared a similar experience. They took a walking tour of the villages near their new home to familiarize themselves with the area when they came upon a large Georgian house in substantial grounds surrounded by a wall. But when they made enquiries as to the owner and its history none of the locals knew which house they were talking about. Intrigued, on their next outing the ladies retraced their steps but found only a vacant plot with no sign of the house.

THE GHOSTS OF GLASTONBURY

Glastonbury is one of the most sacred and mysterious sites in Britain, and of great spiritual significance to mystically minded Christians and pagans alike. Legend has it that King Arthur and Queen Guinevere are buried within the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey and that the Holy Grail, the chalice from which Jesus is said to have drunk on the night before his crucifixion, is hidden nearby. But of all the legends associated with Glastonbury the most extraordinary and controversial is that concerning the discovery of the ruins of the abbey itself.

In 1907, architect and archaeologist Frederick Bligh Bond (1864–1945) was appointed director of excavations by the Church of England and charged with the task of unearthing the abbey ruins which several previous incumbents had spent their lives searching for in vain. The work was unpaid, but Bligh had a thriving architectural practice in Bristol and he viewed the search for the abbey as an almost mystical mission. He was confident that he would succeed where the others had failed for he believed that he had an uncommon advantage over his predecessors.

His interest in paranormal phenomena had led him to join the Society for Psychical Research through which he had met Captain John Allen Bartlett, an eager advocate of automatic writing. Together the two men took up pen and paper in the hope of pinpointing the location of the ruins by tapping into what Jung had called the Collective Unconscious. The quality of the messages they received swiftly persuaded them that they were in communication with separate discarnate personalities, quite possibly the ghosts of long dead monks who had lived in the monastery.

At the first session, which took place in November 1907, the two men sat opposite each other across an empty table in reverent expectation. Bartlett took the part of the medium and Bond the ‘sitter’. This involved Bond asking the questions while placing two fingers on the back of Bartlett’s hand to make a connection with the spirits.

‘Can you tell us anything about Glastonbury,’ asked the architect, to which an invisible force answered in a legible scrawl by animating Bartlett’s hand: ‘All knowledge is eternal and is available to mental sympathy.’

The connection had been made and information as to the location of the chapels and other buried structures was freely given in a mixture of Latin and English by a disembodied spirit who identified himself as a fifteenth-century monk named Brother William (possibly William of Malmesbury).

To Bond and Bartlett’s delight the ‘monk’ and his companions, known as ‘The Watchers’, supplied very detailed information regarding the location of the abbey’s foundations. When the excavations started, often the workmen would simply have to dig a few feet down to hit the precise spot, after which the archaeologists would move in and begin sifting the soil for artefacts. Needless to say, Bond’s benefactors were beside themselves and the full extent of the ancient site was revealed over dozens of sessions during the next five years.

By 1917, Bond felt justly proud in having uncovered one of Britain’s most sacred sites and decided to tell his story in print. But when The Gates of Remembrance was published in 1918, the Church condemned it and strenuously denied that anything other than conventional methods had been used to unearth the abbey. In an effort to distance themselves from Bond they terminated his employment, banned him from ever setting foot within the grounds again and ordered that his guidebook to Glastonbury be removed from the shelves of the gift shop.

Since that time the occult significance of the abbey’s location has been argued over by scholars who believe that it was intentionally built on an ancient pagan site to conform to an alignment of stars. Bond’s communications with ‘Brother William’ appear to confirm this.

‘... our Abbey was a message in ye stones. In ye foundations and ye distances be a mystery – the mystery of our faith, which ye have forgotten and we also in ye latter days.

All ye measurements were marked plain on ye slabbes in Mary’s Chappel, and ye have destroyed them. So it was recorded, as they who builded and they who came after knew aforehand where they should build. But these things are overpast and of no value now. The spirit was lost and with the loss of the spirit the body decayed and was of no use to (us).

There was the Body of Christ, and round him would have been the Four Ways. Two were builded and no more. In ye floor of ye Mary Chappel was ye Zodiac, that all might see and understand the mystery. In ye midst of ye chappel he was laid; and the Cross of Hym who was our Example and Exemplar.’

GHOSTS OF THE LONDON UNDERGROUND

The London Underground, or the Tube as it is known to the commuters who use it, shuts down not long after midnight, which is a likely relief to its many late-night workers. Many employees fear they will meet more than muggers, drug addicts and drunks if they work the ‘graveyard shift’.

When the original underground tunnels were excavated during the Victorian era several historic graveyards were destroyed to make way for the network, and it is believed that their inhabitants were none too pleased at having their eternal rest disturbed. Other historic sites including gaols, pauper’s graves and, most significantly, seventeenth-century plague pits were wilfully destroyed in the name of progress.

During the construction of St Pancras Station the church complained that the reburying of caskets at the site of an old cemetery was being carried out in haste and with disrespect for the dead. As recently as the 1960s the construction of the new Victoria line had to be delayed when a boring machine tore through a plague pit unearthing the corpses and traumatizing several brawny navvies.

If you add to this the number of poor souls who have committed suicide by throwing themselves under trains and those who have perished in disasters, you have a real-life ghost train experience waiting for the unwary traveller.

This station was built on the site of the Royal Strand Theatre and was said to be haunted by the ghost of an actress who hungers for applause. Closed in 1994, Aldwych had a higher than average turnover of cleaning and maintenance staff as dozens refused to work there after being confronted by a ‘figure’ which suddenly appeared on the tracks inside one of the approach tunnels without warning.

When Bank station was built, workmen are said to have disturbed the restless spirit of Sarah Whitehead, known locally as the ‘Black Nun’. In life she was the sister of a bank cashier who had been executed for forgery in 1811. She acquired her nickname from the commuters who saw her dressed in black waiting, every evening for 40 years until her death, outside the bank where he had worked.

Staff at Covent Garden demanded a transfer to another station in the 1950s after a tall Edwardian gentleman in a frock coat, top hat and wearing opera gloves appeared unannounced in their rest room. It is thought that he might be the actor William Terriss who was stabbed to death outside the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand in 1897. The station was built on the site of a bakery which the actor patronized en route to rehearsals.

After closing time, when the station falls silent, the night staff have reported hearing phantom steps, inexplicable rapping sounds and doors banging shut. It is believed the platforms are haunted by the ghost of a traveller who was in such haste that he tripped and fell under an oncoming train.

Of all the London Underground stations, Farringdon is the one to avoid if you are travelling alone. It is the haunt of the ‘Screaming Spectre’, a vengeful young apprentice hat maker who was murdered in 1758 by her master and his daughter.

Highgate underground station is in the vicinity of the famous cemetery of the same name, a place that guarantees some serious spectral activity. Contrary to popular belief, ghosts do not linger around their graves as they do not want to be reminded that they are dead or how they met their end. Instead they ‘commute’ to where they can relive their routine lives and for many recently deceased Londoners this means their home, office and the Tube network. And you thought the trains were overcrowded with the living!

Curiously, local residents claim to be able to hear the sound of trains running through an abandoned and overgrown cutting that was intended to connect with the Northern line when the station was extended in 1941.

The only reported sighting of a ghost train was made by a passenger in December 1928. The commuter claimed to have heard the screech of its brakes and to have seen a phantom figure dressed in an Edwardian smoking jacket and peaked cap clinging to the side of the engine just moments before it was swallowed up in the darkness of the tunnel.

GHOST FLIGHT

Executives of American carrier Eastern Airlines were literally haunted by their past when they decided to reuse parts salvaged from a crashed Tristar Lockheed L-1011 to repair other planes in their fleet. Their troubles began in December 1972 when Flight 401 fell out of the sky over the Florida Everglades claiming more than 100 lives including the pilot, Bob Loft, and flight engineer, Don Repo.

Within months of the crash, members of the cabin crew were reporting sightings of both men on their flights and these were augmented by sightings from passengers who had been disturbed by faint but full-length figures, subsequently identified as Loft and Repo from their photographs. One female passenger became hysterical when she saw the man in the seat next to her disappear. He had looked so pale and listless that she had called an attendant to see if he was ill. The attendant arrived just in time to see the man disappear before her eyes. He had been dressed in an Eastern Airlines uniform and was later identified from photographs as Don Repo.

Merchant seaman and tea planter turned actor, William Terriss or ‘Breezy Bill’ as he was known, was stabbed to death by a deranged and out-of-work actor in December, 1897

On several occasions the pair have taken an active interest in the flight. A flight engineer was half way through a pre-flight check when Repo appeared and assured him that the inspection had already been carried out. One particularly persuasive account was recorded by a vice president of Eastern Airlines who had been enjoying a conversation with the captain of his Miami-bound flight from JFK until he recognized the man as Bob Loft. Needless to say, the apparitions played havoc with the schedules. When the captain and two flight attendants saw Loft fade before their eyes they hastily cancelled the flight.

Usually the pair appear simply to check that all is well but on one particular flight they intervened to prevent a potentially fatal accident. Flight attendant Faye Merryweather swore she saw Repo looking inside an infrared oven in the galley and called the flight engineer and the co-pilot for assistance. The engineer immediately recognized Repo’s face, then they heard him say, ‘Watch out for fire on this airplane.’ The warning proved timely. During the flight the aeroplane developed serious engine trouble and was forced to land short of its destination. The oven was subsequently replaced to appease the cabin crew who were becoming increasingly unsettled by such incidents.

This and other episodes are a matter of record in the files of the Flight Safety Foundation and the Federal Aviation Agency. The former investigated several incidents and concluded: ‘The reports were given by experienced and trustworthy pilots and crew. We consider them significant. The appearance of the dead flight engineer [Repo] ... was confirmed by the flight engineer.’

The airline responded to the intensifying interest in their planes by refusing to co-operate with anyone other than the airline authorities. It appears they have learnt the true meaning of ‘false economy’. The story inspired a bestselling book, The Ghost of Flight 401, by John G. Fuller and a 1978 TV movie of the same name starring Ernest Borgnine and the then unknown Kim Basinger.

HAUNTED HOLLYWOOD

‘What the average man calls Death, I believe to be merely the beginning of Life itself. We simply live beyond the shell. We emerge from out of its narrow confines like a chrysalis. Why call it Death? Or, if we give it the name Death, why surround it with dark fears and sick imaginings? I am not afraid of the Unknown.’

Rudolph Valentino

Living legends die hard, particularly those whose larger-than-life personalities dominated the silver screen in Hollywood’s heyday. Hollywood Memorial Cemetery (recently renamed Hollywood Forever) is the oldest graveyard in Tinseltown and is reputed to be uncommonly active as far as spectral sightings are concerned. The cemetery backs on to Paramount Studios which is said to be haunted by the ghosts of its most enduring stars, Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino, who do not seem content with merely revisiting the scene of their past glories. Curiously, the ghosts do not appear during the day while filming is taking place, but instead wait until the sound stages are quiet and the crew are preparing for the next day’s shoot. The most remarkable incident occurred one evening when a technician fell 20 ft from a lighting gantry and was apparently saved from certain death by a spectral Samaritan who broke his fall. He seemed to hover in the air just inches from the ground for an instant, before dropping to the floor, unharmed, in full view of his startled colleagues.

On another occasion two property men suspected their colleagues of playing a practical joke after chairs that they had stacked in a corner of a storeroom mysteriously returned to the centre. They decided to stay overnight in the hope of catching whoever was responsible and that night , to their horror, they heard scraping sounds and saw the furniture moving around the room by itself. The following night they plucked up sufficient courage to attempt another vigil, but the phenomenon did not recur. Evidently the spirits were satisfied that their presence had been acknowledged.

At Culver City Studios, carpenters speak in whispers of a grey figure dressed in a jacket and tie and sporting a fedora hat who walks right through them and disappears through a door in the facing wall. From the description he appears to be the restless spirit of former studio boss Thomas Ince who is credited with establishing the studio system and creating the role of the producer. He died in suspicious circumstances aboard a yacht owned by William Randolph Hearst in 1924. It is rumoured that the rabidly jealous newspaper tycoon was trying to shoot Charlie Chaplin at the time but killed Ince by mistake.

For a generation of silent movie fans Rudolph Valentino personified the ‘Latin lover’ and after his death at the age of 31 he became the most active ghost in Hollywood. His spirit glides elegantly through the rooms of his former mansion, the Falcon’s Lair, gazing longingly from a second-floor window and visiting the horses in the stables. Staff at Paramount studios have sworn they have seen ‘the Sheik’ admiring the stock in the costume department and walking soundlessly through Studio Five where he lived every man’s fantasy, seducing beautiful female film stars and being handsomely paid for doing so. Curiously, his fans appear equally persistent. The ghost of a lady admirer in a veil is often seen bringing phantom flowers to the star’s tomb at the Hollywood Forever cemetery.

Another haunted studio is Universal which was the setting for the original silent version of Phantom of the Opera (1925) starring horror screen legend Lon Chaney Sr whose spirit has been seen scampering along the catwalks and gantries with his cape billowing behind. Chaney, who died in 1930, was known as ‘the man of a thousand faces’ because of his uncanny ability to transform himself – by aid of make up and acting – into all manner of the most hideously deformed characters.

TV’s original Superman, actor George Reeves, is said to have shot himself at his Beverly Hills home in 1959, three days before his wedding, because he could not cope with being typecast. His friends and family maintain that he was murdered. Visitors to the house have reported sensing his apparition dressed in his Superman costume.

Another mysterious murder/suicide was that of Thelma Todd who appeared with silent comedy stars Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton. She managed to make the transition to sound pictures but died in 1935 in the garage of her beachside café on the Pacific Coast Highway, near Malibu. The police suspected a suicide, but there were bloodstains which were never satisfactorily explained. The present owners of the property claim to have seen her ghost on the premises and to have smelt exhaust fumes in the empty garage.

The Vogue Theatre, Hollywood Boulevard, is said to be haunted by a projectionist who collapsed and died in the projection booth, a maintenance engineer, and a school teacher and her pupils who were burned to death when their school, Prospect Elementary, which had previously occupied the site, was destroyed in a blaze. The theatre had been a regular venue for studio broadcasts but there have been so many instances of (paranormal) interference with electrical equipment that TV companies are reluctant to hire the theatre any more.

Other haunted Hollywood locations include the Roosevelt Hotel in which several stars made their second home. Guests have frequently complained of hearing a clarinet playing in the early hours only to be told that it is the resident ghost of screen star Montgomery Clift who had stayed at the hotel during the filming of From Here To Eternity and had to learn the instrument to secure the role that earned him his third Academy Award nomination. Guests at the time had complained of the unsociable hours he chose to practise and they are continuing to complain long after his death.

More unsettling is the case of the haunted mirror which used to take pride of place in a room Marilyn Monroe had stayed in. Long after Marilyn’s death a cleaner suffered the shock of seeing Monroe’s face appear in the mirror, forcing the management to remove it and hang it in the hallway. But the ghost reappeared in the mirror whenever a guest paused to check their appearance and it has since acquired a reputation as ‘the ghost glass’.

Some ghosts had too good a time during their life to waste the afterlife wailing and moaning. Writer, director and bon vivant Orson Welles continues to enjoy brandy and cigars at his favourite table in Sweet Lady Jane’s Restaurant in Hollywood. Fellow diners, the living ones that is, regularly comment on the smell of cigar smoke but the maître d’hôtel refuses to give a refund.

Actor Hugh Grant is said to have heard the ghost of Bette Davis sobbing and moaning as it sweeps through the luxury apartments in Los Angeles’ Colonial Building where she used to live, while another larger-than-life actress, comedian Lucille Ball, is said to haunt her home at 100 North Roxbury Drive; windows have been broken in the Ball house, furniture has moved of its own accord and shouting has been traced to an empty attic. But if the new owners were thinking of calling in the Ghostbusters they might want to think again. Ghostbuster star Dan Ackroyd may have been fearless when facing spooky special effects on the big screen but in real life he admits to being unnerved when he realized he was sharing his bed with the ghost of Mama Cass Elliot, one time member of 60s singing group The Mamas and the Papas. ‘A ghost certainly haunts my house. It once even crawled into bed with me. I rolled over and just nuzzled up to whatever it was and went back to sleep. The ghost also turns on the Stairmaster and moves jewellery across the dresser. I’m sure it’s Mama Cass because you get the feeling it’s a big ghost.’

One would imagine that behind the walls of their luxury homes Hollywood’s celebrities would enjoy peace and privacy, but the home of actress Elke Sommer and husband Joe Hyams was a living hell to rival anything seen on screen in the Amityville Horror. On several occasions the couple and their dinner guests witnessed the spectre of a middle-aged man in a white suit passing through the rooms. The couple were repeatedly forced to flee from the choking fumes of fires which spontaneously and inexplicably broke out at all hours of day and night. Fire Department investigators made a thorough examination of the luxury property on several occasions with particular attention paid to the attic where the conflagrations had begun, but they could find no physical cause for the blazes such as faulty wiring, and expressed disbelief that the fires could have caught hold in that part of the house as there was no inflammable material to feed the flames. Dissatisfied, the couple called in the American Society for Psychical Research who documented a catalogue of anomalous incidents, but they could not appease the spirits. Sommer and Hyams were finally forced to sell their dream home before it burned down with them inside. It was subsequently sold no less than 15 times with many owners living there for less than a year.

But arguably the most disturbing Hollywood haunting was that experienced one evening in the 1960s by the late Sharon Tate, actress wife of film director Roman Polanski. Tate was in her bedroom when she saw the spectre of a ‘creepy little man’, as she later described him, enter her room and appear to search for something. She recognized him as the former owner of the house, Paul Burn, a theatrical agent who had shot himself in the upstairs bathroom after the break up of his marriage to actress Jean Harlow. When Tate fled from the room she came face to face with a second apparition at the foot of the stairs. It was the spirit of a woman who was tied to a pillar with her throat cut. Tate’s screams echoed round the walls for it was her own ghost. Shortly afterwards the house became the scene of a sickening ritual murder when Tate was killed by members of the so-called ‘Manson Family’, who tied her to the staircase and slashed her throat.

THEIR FINAL BOW

Hollywood is not the only place to be haunted by dead celebrities whose egos were too large to go quietly. Flamboyant entertainer Liberace (1919–1987) reputedly haunts Carluccio’s restaurant off the Las Vegas strip which he once owned and where he still demands that his presence is acknowledged. Regular customers recall the time when the lights failed and all power to the kitchen was cut off until someone remembered that it was Liberace’s birthday. After they had drunk to his memory the power came back on. But unfortunately that is not the extent of his activities. Several female patrons swear they have been on the receiving end of the former owner’s mischievous sense of humour – they claim to have been locked in the cubicles in the powder room by an unseen hand.

Elvis Presley, arguably the biggest star of all, is clearly not yet ready to bow out gracefully. Las Vegas stage hands have reported seeing the portly apparition in his trademark white sequined suit taking a final bow at the venue he made his own in the early 1970s, the Hilton hotel. Elvis has also been seen revisiting scenes of his former glory, specifically the former RCA recording studios off Nashville’s Music Row where the mere mention of his name is answered by falling ladders, exploding light bulbs and odd noises echoing through the sound system.

Not all the apparitions in Las Vegas are those of the entertainers who lived like kings in the 24-hour pleasure palaces. The town’s most notorious resident was Mobster ‘Bugsy’ Siegel who is credited with turning the desert town into the gambling capital of America. On 20 June 1947, Bugsy was ‘whacked’ by disgruntled business associates who accused him of overspending their ill-gotten gains and skimming some off the top for himself. He has been sighted mooching about his favourite casino in the Flamingo Hotel in Vegas dressed in a smoking jacket and grinning from ear to ear, as well as in the presidential suite which he had made his home. He has also been spotted running and ducking to avoid imaginary bullets at his girlfriend’s mansion in Beverly Hills, the scene of his murder, although he was shot while seated on the sofa. Perhaps it is his guilty conscience which pursues him into the afterlife.

SPOOKED CELEBRITIES

Some people can take spirits in their stride while others need to sleep for weeks afterwards with the light on. Oddly enough it’s usually the action hero types who discover that their fearless on-screen persona deserts them when faced with the inexplicable.

Jean Claude Van Damme, ‘the Muscles from Brussels’, admits he was spooked the night he came face to face with a ghost in his bathroom mirror. ‘I suddenly felt very cold. I turned round and thought: “I’ve had a vision or something.” It was blue and white and had a very smoky body. Since that moment I’ve believed in ghosts.’

Movie star Nicolas Cage, who has cultivated an edgy, unpredictable screen persona in such films as Face Off, Windtalkers and Lord of War, admits he was freaked by a phantom intruder at his uncle Francis Ford Coppola’s home. ‘I was living in the attic, and there were bats there between the walls – you could hear the scratching. One night I was not quite asleep when the door in front of my bed opened and there was this pitch-black silhouette of a woman with big hair. I thought it was my aunt coming to say goodnight. So I said, “Goodnight”, and it didn’t say anything. Then it moved towards me and my body froze up and I let out this bloodcurdling scream and threw my pillow at it. Then it disappeared. Now, am I saying I saw a ghost? I still don’t know. But I saw something that freaked me out.’

The Matrix star Keanu Reeves may have been a messianic hero who saved the world in cyberspace, but he can still wake up in a sweat when haunted by nightmares of a real ghostly encounter during his childhood. ‘I was living in New Jersey when I saw and felt this ghost. I remember just staring at this suit which had no body or legs in it as it came into the room before disappearing. It was a double-breasted suit in white, and I looked at my nanny who was just as shocked as me. I just couldn’t get back to sleep afterwards, and I still see the figure in my dreams and nightmares.’

Richard Dreyfuss, star of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was wide awake when he encountered the spook that cured him of his cocaine habit. ‘I had a car crash in the late 1970s, when I was really screwed up, and I started seeing these ghostly visions of a little girl every night. I couldn’t shake this image. Every day it became clearer and I didn’t know who the hell she was. I had no kids, I was a bachelor. Then I realized that kid was either the child I didn’t kill the night I smashed up my car, or it was the daughter that I didn’t have yet. I immediately sobered up. I still don’t get it, but, hey, it did the trick.’

LIFE IMITATING ART

Even horror movie queens are unnerved when they meet the real thing as Scream star Neve Campbell discovered when she bought her Hollywood home without checking its history. ‘Someone was murdered in my house six years before I bought it. I had friends round and I left them in the living room to go in the kitchen and they both thought I had just walked back in again. But I hadn’t, so what they saw was the woman who was murdered. The previous owner had an exorcist come in, but I don’t think it worked.’

Rumour has it that celebrity ex-couple Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman were forced to abandon their eighteenth-century dream home in Sneden’s Landing, New York, only months after they had moved in, because of inexplicable incidents. It appears that they were too scared to describe what they had seen and experienced even after retreating to the safety of their old Manhattan apartment.

Rock star Sting was driven to call in professional ghostbusters when he discovered that his family were sharing their north London home with mischievous spirits. ‘Ever since I moved there, people said things happened – they were lying in bed and people started talking to them, or things went missing. I was very sceptical until the night after my daughter Mickey was born. She was disturbed and I went to see her. Her room is full of mobiles and they were going berserk. I thought a window must be open, but they were all shut. I was terrified.’ It seems exorcists did the trick as Sting and his kids now sleep soundly without unwanted interruption.

The late John Entwistle, bass player with The Who, enjoyed playing the role of the lord of the manor at his nineteenth-century country estate and was evidently prepared to share it with the previous resident. ‘A lot of weird things have happened in the 22 years I’ve been here. Among them are sightings of a lady in nineteenth-century clothes walking the grounds, and the camera of an uninvited photographer falling apart. Most recently I was having trouble locating a recording of Keith Moon pounding out a never-used Who song, and so I asked my friendly ghost for a helping hand. A few hours later, when I was about to give up the search, the tapes spontaneously fell off a shelf behind me revealing the Moon recording which had been hidden behind them. I used it.’

One would think that living in a converted church would guarantee peace and quiet but Tim Robbins, star of the supernatural drama Jacob’s Ladder and writer-director of the (ironically) titled Dead Man Walking was evicted from his home, a former chapel, by decidedly unholy spirits. ‘It was in Los Angeles, 1984. I had just moved into a new apartment in a converted church. I had two cats. I came home one night – everything was still in boxes – it was dark and the cats were terrified. There were clearly spirits in the room. Then I looked on the wall and there were cockroaches all over it. I moved out the next day.’

John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono discovered a ‘lost’ Lennon song without supernatural assistance but when the surviving Beatles came to finish it they sensed the presence of the author overseeing the production. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were volatile soul mates and successful songwriting partners during the Beatles’ heyday until their acrimonious split in 1970. So it is perhaps not unexpected that the surviving members sensed the late Lennon’s presence in the studio when they reformed to record John’s Free As A Bird using his unfinished demo. McCartney has said, ‘There were a lot of strange goings-on in the studio – noises that shouldn’t have been there and equipment doing all manner of weird things. There was just an overall feeling that John was around.’

CELEBRITY SEANCE

Dave Grohl of rock band The Foo Fighters was sceptical when it came to the subject of the supernatural until his wife, Jennifer, persuaded him to join her in a séance. She had sensed unseen presences at their Seattle home and was determined to discover their cause. Grohl remembers, ‘Jennifer asked if there were any spirits in the house. The glass on the Ouija board spelled out: “Y-E-S”. I was just looking at Jennifer and she wasn’t moving at all. The glass was travelling without her pushing it. Jennifer then asked, “What happened here?” The glass spelled out: “M-U-R-D-E-R-E-D”. I asked who was murdered and got the reply: “M-Y-B-A-B-Y”.’ The couple has since learnt that according to a local legend, a native American baby was murdered there by its mother and buried in a well. The Grohls believe that it is her restless spirit which haunts their house grieving for the child and pleading with the present owners to give it a proper burial.

But it’s not just Hollywood celebs and rock stars who admit to being spooked. Princess Stephanie of Monaco has confessed to having written a song with her dead mother, Princess Grace, who had died in a car accident in 1982. ‘I found I’d written my own song and recorded it without really being present to the whole thing. Something was telling or guiding me to sit down and just write. I grabbed a pen and pad and the words came flowing out. I can’t explain it, but I don’t feel as if I wrote them. The words just came into my head as if someone on the other side was writing them down for me.’ Her second album contained ‘Words Upon The Wind’, a song dedicated to her mother. According to her daughter, Princess Grace reappeared when Stephanie succumbed to stage fright during a French TV broadcast. ‘Without my mother’s help, I could never have done it. I was so petrified that I couldn’t speak. Yet as soon as I got in front of the cameras, I could hear my mum telling me to relax and to just remember everything that she had always told me.’