Chapter 9
Ghosts are where they find you

Email To: Bill
From: Mother Ship
Date: 21 February
Subject: Dinner plans?

Hi Sweetheart,

Fancy having dinner out? We could take a drive first and amuse ourselves by playing ‘count the whites of their eyes’. It’s a full moon tonight so the animals should be howling. I made a reservation at the Crown for 8 pm which will give us plenty of time for hide and seek.

How was your day? It couldn’t have been as exciting as mine. This morning we had another power outage, then a bird flew into one of the drawing room window panes rendering the poor thing unconscious. This afternoon when I left the Hall a cow was sleeping near the road. The farmer said she would never wake up.

Come home as soon as you can. The full moon is making strange things happen.

Love,
Your Country Girl

Night sounds inside a 400-year-old building were like nothing we had ever known. Even more disturbing were the night sounds emanating from outside the windows. Some evenings the wind could be so fierce it actually rattled the inside shutters. At other times, it felt as if the rain was pelting the building from all four sides at once. Owls particularly enjoyed the inky-black hours of the night in which to conduct their family business, sorting out territorial disputes and resolving domestic quarrels. Even cows, like children, didn’t always sleep through the night without a whimper or two. It was no use opening the shutters for a peek outside on a moonless evening as there was absolutely nothing to see other than our own breath and reflections in the window.

I’m sure women have a built-in alarm system that can be activated by the sound of a pin dropping. When our house seemed to want to shift and move about a bit in the middle of the night, groaning as it tried to stretch and get a good scratch, I knew I was the only one to hear it. Even the sound of a twig falling down the chimney in the bedroom could break the silence of sleep. Eventually, the reality that nothing could actually harm us set in. Night sounds became as comforting as a distant train whistle.

Stocken Hall has a distinguished, yet hardly heroic, history that includes a tip of the hat to the spirit world. Originally built by John Brown in the early 1600s, it was sold to the Heathcote family then eventually let to various tenants, one of whom was General Thomas Grosvenor. As Master of the Cottesmore Hunt, General Grosvenor kept hounds and horses at Stocken, breeding the Duke of Wellington’s horse, Copenhagen, his mount at the Battle of Waterloo.

Finally, in 1907 the entire estate passed to Major Fleetwood Hesketh who lived there with his family until the Second World War. It was during this period of occupation that Peter, the second son of Charles and Anne Fleetwood Hesketh, recorded in his own hand Recollections, a childhood account of an idyllic time between 1907 and 1918 at Stocken Hall. Peter described his privileged life as a young man brought up by a governess, nursemaids and sundry servants. At that time, the estate comprised several farms and covered over 3000 acres including 600 acres of primeval forest. There were cottages for all the farm families, the chauffeur, the joiner, head keeper and bailiff. Inside, the Hall housed a platoon of household staff to maintain the kitchen, nursery, schoolroom, sewing room and private apartments. For recreation as well as relaxation, the family had an enormous south-facing lawn that cascaded into several terraces until it reached the park where herds of fallow deer roamed.

Peter recalled with humour the mile-and-a-half Sunday morning walk to the Stretton church where his mother played the organ and his father read the lessons. Apparently when the sermon overran the allotted ten minutes Peter’s father, who always sat in the first pew, would remove his gold watch and place it in full view of the vicar as a gentle nudge to draw the message to a close. The temperature in the church was so cold that vapour from the mouths of the congregation would fill the room as the pious huddled together to sing hymns. Sadly, nothing has yet changed to warm the bodies of today’s parishioners.

The old Hall must have been a fantastic place for Peter and his siblings to play hide and seek on rainy afternoons. The numerous corridors and hidden passages provided hours of unfettered entertainment during the day until the evenings turned these same hallways into spooky tunnels of darkness. The Hall, known amongst the townsfolk to be haunted, played havoc with their young, eager minds.

Recently, I came across an article in the Rutland Magazine & County Historical Record that referred to the ghosts of Stocken Hall. It was written over one hundred years ago and recounts the stories of three apparitions. First, a woman in black was reportedly seen gliding down the long corridors at night. This was possibly linked to the vague legend about a girl having been strangled in the tower. The second involved a small white dog, a phantom that produced a ‘burning chill’ on the skin when brushed up against. The third spirit myth concerned the figure of a man, possibly a sheep rustler, who was hanged from an oak tree on a hill near the Hall. Each of these incidences shared a striking resemblance to the tales orally passed on to us when we moved in.

You would think the darkness of the night would be the best time for ghosts to make their presence known but, like bears, they are where they find you. Early on, we heard tales from the builders about the foreman’s dog wandering around the Hall, stubbornly refusing to enter the tower block, supposedly the haunt of the veiled woman. Likewise, our new neighbours told stories of a headless rider galloping across the fields and a chambermaid who fell down the wine cellar steps to her death. Regrettably, we have not yet been formally introduced to any of them.

Somehow, one of these tales recently made it into a national newspaper which brought the Ghost Buster brigade to Stocken Hall to witness the return of the phantom sheep thief who was hanged centuries before. Apparently, he appears like clockwork on the anniversary of his death at precisely 2.45 pm. The spook patrol staked out each of the three oak trees on our property in order to get a glimpse of the departed, but the only thing they reported seeing was an ‘eerie condensation dripping from the boughs’ of one of the trees. Poking around the neighbourhood still further, they met a mother who claimed to have seen a stranger sitting on her young son’s bed. When she approached the man, he vanished. Another neighbour told the team that she had recently made a delivery to one of the flats only to find no one home. As she turned around a man was standing behind her. He, too, quickly disappeared.

Many people believe in a fourth dimension for wandering souls, claiming the spirit world has nothing to do with good or evil. I keep thinking our time will come and although I can’t be certain, of course, I feel I may have had a brief encounter with ‘something’ one evening while preparing dinner. At the limit of my peripheral vision, almost behind my head, I caught sight of movement in the hallway. It was so startling that I dropped my mixing bowl and spoon as I turned around to look. Although I saw nothing, I felt a void, if it is possible to sense one. It was warm, not cold, rather like breath from a long, deep exhale. I suspect we shall meet again.