It’s Halloween, the time when the border between the worlds of the living and the dead becomes porous, and the spirits of the long-departed walk among us.
Or maybe it’s just an excuse for some cheesy club nights and small children coming to your front door to demand sweets.
Either way, we’ve been seeking out a few local ghost stories that you might not have heard before.
A message from Old Orchid
This one was told in Haunted Churches, a 1939 book by Elliott O’Donnell, the famous Bristol-born collector of ghostly tales.
A lady, one Mrs Harrison, was living in Weston-super-Mare, and, as was her habit every Sunday morning, she went to church.
Just as the service was about to begin, one of the vergers came up to her and told her she was wanted at home at once.
She rushed back to the house and was relieved to find that everyone was fine, and assumed that the message had been some sort of hoax.
She was now very cross and was about to go back to the church to quiz the verger when a telegram arrived.
It was from one of her sisters, asking her to come to Bath at once, where their mother had been taken seriously ill.
She took the train to Bath and was at her mother’s bedside for a short while before the old lady died.
If she had stayed in Weston for the church service, she would have missed the few dying words of a mother she loved very dearly.
Back in Weston, she sought out the verger and asked him who had given him the message for her.
“It was a gentleman,” he replied. “Quite a stranger to me. I was standing by the main entrance when he entered the church. He came straight to me and said : ‘Will you kindly tell Mrs. Harrison she is wanted at home at once. It is very urgent.’
The stranger told the verger that if Mrs Harrison asked his name, the verger was to simply say “Old Orchid” and then left.
Mrs. Harrison asked the verger to describe the stranger. He did so, in detail, giving a description which matched that of Mrs Harrison’s grandfather, who had died in Bath a couple of years previously, and who was very fond of orchids, and always wore one in his button hole …
… And who was nicknamed “Old Orchid” by all who knew him.
The Phantom toilet-flusher of Coney Hill
According to an article in the Western Daily Press in 1995, a ghost at a home in Coney Hill, Gloucester, “continually flushed the loo as stunned observers kept watch.”
Members of the Cheltenham Psychic Research group visited the house following reports of a haunting which also rattled a bed against a wall, moved children’s toys about and opened and closed doors.
Group chairman Chris Romer said: “It was more comical than horrific, but it is a bit of a shock when a toilet flushes itself.”
The family living in the home had since relocated to Wales.
Hiding in terror under the sheets
Café Revival, at the corner of Corn Street and All Saints Lane in Bristol, was once the site of the House of the Kalendaries, a medieval guild of laymen and clergy who organised masses for the souls of the dead. It was wealthy and influential, and even had its own library. It was wound up in 1548 as part of the Reformation.
The current building dates back to the late 1700s, but there was a building here before that which was owned by All Saints Parish, and was supposedly used for some time as the vicarage for All Saints Church, to which it was physically attached.
By 1846 it was occupied not by the vicar, but the church sexton, a Mr Jones, and his wife. That year, the couple reported that they heard footsteps walking around the house at night. Mrs Jones said she heard “a man with creaking shoes” walking in the bedroom above her own and “was nearly killed with the fright”.
Mr Jones said he had regularly seen a light flickering on one of the walls. This caused him to shake uncontrollably, and curl up on the ground.
But it was the housemaid who actually saw the ghost …
She would bolt her bedroom door at night, but regularly, usually between midnight and 2am, it would be opened.
The apparition that came in, she said, was something resembling a human, and in strange dress, something like a medieval monk. It was, she said, “a whiskered gentleman” who would approach and shake the bed while she hid in sheer terror under the sheets.
Mr and Mrs Jones said they were determined to leave, “being certain that we shall die if we sleep another night in the house.”
And after 1846, we hear no more of the haunting of the site which was once a powerhouse of prayer to ease the passing of the tormented souls of the long-departed …
Haunted telephone
In the 1930s, telephones were only owned by only the well-to-do, and some of them lived in big old houses with a lot of history.
A telephone engineers’ in-house journal from 1933 published a letter from an irritated customer living somewhere in the west of England. It said:
As you are probably aware, we have three instruments (i.e. telephones) in this house. One is upstairs, and the only two times its use has been required it has failed to operate.
It appears that this house has the reputation of being haunted, and that the room in which the telephone is, is in some idiotic way supposed to be the worst in this respect.
One of your workmen at the time of installation got to hear about this, and having tried for a day or two to make the thing work, was advised to “apologise to the ghost.”
Incredible as it seems, the fool did this, and to make matters worse broadcast it in the village. It seems that no sooner had he done so than the wretched thing functioned satisfactorily, and as news of this sort travels rapidly in country villages, owing to his success what was formerly a fable is now a fact, with the ultimate result that we have the greatest possible difficulty in getting local servants … and when they are eventually here they will only go about in twos.
For all this and more I have the telephone to thank: I would willingly put up with the threatened inconvenience of being without it … if by removing it would also take the phantasmal stigma it brought with it to the place.
A failed attempt
In 1889 the Somerset village of High Littleton was thrown into a state of great excitement by tales of an alleged ghost which was supposed to be haunting a cottage next to the Wesleyan Chapel.
For several nights, mysterious noises emanated from the bedroom, sounding, said one witness, like small fireworks exploding. Chairs would fall over, the fender was moved from the fireplace and there were tapping noises on the walls.
Some stalwart villagers assembled in the room in the dark and after waiting a while, a couple of them, who had been resting their hands on a chair, felt it move violently. There were rappings and various sounds.
The following evening, around 200 people gathered outside, and the house owner and some friends met in the bedroom where they found that one villager had arranged a net – normally used for catching pigs – across the fireplace, reasoning that any ghost attempting to enter the house via the chimney, could be easily caught.
Alas, the spectre failed to make itself felt in any way that night and everyone went home disappointed.
Or could it be that there never was a ghost and the human person who was pranking the village thought better of getting caught in the “pig net”?
The poltergeist of Meadow Rise
Ghosts don’t just visit big old houses with ancient, creaky floorboards. They can come into new homes as well, like the one at Meadow Rise in Shepton Mallet, built in the late 1980s and where a poltergeist drove out two families.
In the mid-1990s a woman moved out after seeing her seven-year-old daughter being lifted from her bed by some invisible force and then being dropped again. The child said she saw three people dressed in black. They moved out of the housing association property, swapping with a family in Frome who only stayed two months and who also left in fear of supernatural occurrences, including rabbits with their heads cut off.
Another tenant left with her three children after her two daughters were terrorised in their bedroom by being pushed out of bed and having scissors thrown at them. Down in the kitchen, the woman watched as plates were pushed off the rack onto the floor one by one.
A local historian noted that the house was partly on the site of a former graveyard and a building on the same spot was where an American serviceman had jumped, or fallen, to his death during the Second World War.
In August 1996, a Western Daily Press reporter visited the house accompanied by a “spirit healer” from Glastonbury, the healer’s assistant and a psychic owl. The healer felt a “negative atmosphere” but it was his assistant who made contact, saying the spirit’s name was Anthony.
The healer told Anthony that no-one was trying to hurt him and that he should move on and join his “soul group”. Presumably Antony did as he was asked as that’s the last we hear of him.
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