Haunted Enfield E-Book

Jason Hollis

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 177

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The London borough of Enfield is full of haunted locations, but only a handful of them have ever been featured in books. Haunted Enfield brings together all of the stories, legends and documented evidence of the supernatural from around the borough into one volume. Who are the ghostly figures that roam the corridors of Trent Park mansion, Forty Hall and Myddelton House? Why does the shade of a little girl haunt the King and Tinker pub? Where does the black coach and horses that haunts Enfield Highway and Ponders End go? From famous cases such as the Enfield Poltergeist and the Bell Lane flyer to places that have never been featured before, the book provides an alternate, hidden history of some of the borough's key locations.

Leseprobe

Dedicated to Katherine and Paul

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

one The Phantom Coach

two The Grey Lady of Trent Park

three Camelot’s Ghostly Red Knight

four Of Witches and Winchmore Hill

five The Green Street Poltergeist

six Haunted Edmonton

seven Footsteps at Salisbury House

eight Investigation at the King & Tinker

nine Beers, Wines & Spirits

ten Forty Hall’s Unseen Servant

eleven Enchanting Myddelton

twelve The Ghosts of Capel Manor

thirteen ‘A Murder of the Blackest Dye’

fourteen The Old Fire Station

fifteen The Unkempt Man

sixteen The Haunted Ridgeway

seventeen Ghosts at World’s End

eighteen The Ghost Train of Hadley Wood

nineteen Industrial Shadows

twenty Shadows Across the Border

Bibliography

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for their assistance and support. Most notably, I would like to thank my wife Emma, my parents, Janet Thompson and her family, Graham Dalling, Kate Godfrey, Steve Dowbiggin OBE, Bryan Hewitt, Terry Oliver, Sarah Scales, Peter Everett, Martin Harrow, Jane Hodgson, Alex Mattingly, David Farrant, Celia Gooch, Gavin Williams, Vicky Sanderson, Maria Hamer, Oliver and Adam of Trent Park Open House, Christine Matthews, Leonard Will, Justin Hobson – and of course Mickey, Louise and the rest of the NLPI team.

INTRODUCTION

I have had a fascination with ghosts since childhood and have collected many books on true hauntings. The books concerning London usually include a couple of entries for Enfield, but always the same ones. I was born in Enfield and lived there for many years before moving to Hertfordshire, and it always disappointed me that other haunted locations within the borough were never mentioned. To end my disappointment, I decided to write this book.

Haunted places in and around the London Borough of Enfield. (© Jay Hollis, 2013)

I started my research in 2000, never thinking that it would take thirteen years to complete the book. That’s not to say I have been writing it for thirteen years. I gave up a number of times and life had a habit of taking precedence: since then I have met, courted and married my lovely wife, faced the uncertainty of redundancy and re-employment and become a father to two wonderful children, who are a constant distraction.

Perhaps it was inevitable, but after almost twelve years of researching ghosts I joined North London Paranormal Investigations (NLPI) and I am now one of their key investigators. Having been with them for a year I still class myself as a novice in the field and, as most of this book was written before I had even considered becoming a paranormal investigator, it should not be read as the memoirs of a ‘ghost hunter’. Indeed, it is not that, but rather a collection of stories that have been gathered together in one volume for the very first time.

I have discovered more haunted sites within the borough than I initially thought existed, although there are probably others yet to be unearthed (and I have deliberately left out a few). However, I am not trying to suggest that Enfield is the ‘ghost capital’ of the world, or even London, for I believe that if you dig deep enough into the history of an area you’ll find plenty of ghosts.

I hope you enjoy this journey through Enfield’s shadows. If you have an Enfield ghost story you would like to share, please email me at [email protected].

Jason Hollis,

March 2013

1

THE PHANTOM COACH

There are many tales of ghostly horse-drawn coaches from all around the country and they are often embellished with grisly details. Anne Boleyn’s coach, for instance, is said to arrive at Blickling Hall in Norfolk, driven by a headless coachman and drawn by headless horses, as is the coach that arrives at Bradgate Park in Leicestershire, carrying the ghost of the equally unfortunate Lady Jane Grey. It would seem that neither of these ladies are about to let anyone forget how they died. Less gruesome, but equally frightening, is the phantom coach and horses that has been seen in the eastern regions of Enfield, most famously in Bell Lane, Enfield Wash, in 1961. However, the first of the various sightings related here occurred a few weeks before Christmas in 1899.

It was a cold, clear, starlit night and sixteen-year-old Mary Read was walking home with two friends, Florence Beatty and Daisy Taylor, from the Edison Swan United Electric Light Co. factory (known to employees as ‘The Lamp’) in Ponders End, where they were employed in the production of electric light holders. They had been working late and it was dark as they made their way home along a path that crossed the fields to the north of Nag’s Head Road; an area that has long since been lost to housing developments.

All of a sudden, a black old-fashioned coach drawn by four horses appeared to rise up from the ground ahead of them, and the three startled girls watched the coach as it careered northwards, towards Brimsdown. They could clearly see a driver sitting at the front and there appeared to be a man leaning out of the window of the carriage as it rocked from side to side. The girls were a little uneasy and unsure of what it was they were witnessing, but what happened next left them with little doubt. The coach had almost reached Durants Arbour, an old and crumbling moated farmhouse, when it suddenly vanished. Mary and her two friends didn’t wait to see if the coach would reappear: they ran the rest of the way to a house in nearby Durants Road, where one of them lived.

This manifestation occurred in Ponders End, but most of the reported sightings of the phantom coach have been in Bell Lane, over a mile further north in Enfield Wash. Nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps of the area show that Bell Lane used to follow a route that consisted of three long sections, joined together by two short ninety-degree dog-legs. The road ran eastwards away from its intersection with Hertford Road, the main thoroughfare that once formed part of the old road from London to Cambridge. The first of these sections no longer exists, and Bell Lane is now connected to the main road via Eastfield Road. However, there may once have been a relatively straight track that passed through the area, sharing part of its route with what is now Eastfield Road, continuing into Bell Lane; the course that the Phantom coach has been seen to follow suggests that this may be the case, for it was seen here in 1912 by a lamplighter who watched it pass through a house whilst on his round in the early hours of the morning.

In his book Dark Journey, paranormal investigator David Farrant relates the testimonies of a number of people, interviewed by him, who had seen the phantom coach. The first of these, chronologically, was David Hanchett, who saw the coach during the Second World War. On the night of 28 June 1944, at about ten o’clock, he was cycling home along Bell Lane. Approaching the junction with Eastfield Road, he noticed two lights on the other side of a hedge bordering some allotments. They were approaching from the south-west (so at this point it was not following the course of either Bell Lane or Eastfield Road) and he stopped to watch as the lights got closer.

His intrigue turned to shock as a ghostly coach drawn by a team of four phantom horses suddenly burst through the hedge and continued to speed along the lane, rocking from side to side, before disappearing through a gate that led to some old garages, which have since been demolished. Mr Hanchett described the carriage as being a tall, black, box-like shape. It was silent, making no sound whatsoever, and an eerie, electric-blue light outlined the entire apparition. It was driven by a coachman in a tall black hat with a long whip at his side, and people could be seen inside the coach as it passed directly in front of him. He also noticed that the wheels were about 1ft off the ground. The same apparition was also seen by a young boy, who ran away in terror.

Another witness interviewed by Farrant was a woman who had lived at Eastfield Cottages in Eastfield Road throughout her childhood. In the early hours of Christmas Day 1957, when she was nine years old, she woke up and looked out of her bedroom window, whereupon she saw a black coach drawn by a team of horses. Thinking that it must be Father Christmas’s sleigh laden with presents, she quickly woke up her younger brother and they both watched the coach as it silently passed the gates of Albany Park opposite and disappeared down Bell Lane.

The coach was seen again four years later, about a mile south-west of Bell Lane. Jeanne Ballard was living with her parents in their house on the Great Cambridge Road, the garden of which backed on to the Carterhatch School playing field. As her bedroom was in the process of being redecorated, she was temporarily sleeping on a mattress in the downstairs living room. Sometime after midnight on 4 October 1961 she switched off the light and climbed into her makeshift bed. Suddenly, she heard a loud noise coming from the back of the house. As the sound got louder, she realised it was the sound of horses’ hooves. She was just about to get up and investigate when, as Jeanne later described to the local press, ‘Suddenly the room was lit up by shafts of light and from behind me, through the rear wall, came a black shiny coach drawn by two pairs of magnificent horses.’

Bell Lane, looking west. (© Jay Hollis, 2012)

In her interview with the Enfield Gazette & Observer Jeanne described seeing two women inside the coach. They were wearing large hats and period dress, and were talking to each other in a very excited manner. She remembered that one of the women was wearing an emerald green dress and that both had very refined accents, and although Jeanne could hear their conversation distinctly, she could not remember anything that they had actually said. She also noticed that part of the coach seemed to be passing through the wall to her right and that the wheels were 2ft off the floor. The coach then veered to the left and disappeared through the wall at the other end of the room.

The most famous encounter with the coach occurred a month later, again on Bell Lane, at around seven o’clock in the evening on Halloween. It was a cloudless and starlit night, very much like the night on which Mary Read and her friends had seen the apparition sixty-two years earlier, and seventeen-year-old Robert Bird was cycling westwards along Bell Lane. He had almost reached Albany School, where the lane bends to the right at the junction with Eastfield Road, when he saw two lights ahead of him, about 6ft above the ground and several feet apart. As Robert got nearer he could see that there were two figures sitting between the lights – and that whatever it was, was heading straight for him.

Bell Lane looking east. (© Jay Hollis, 2012)

The mysterious object got closer still and Robert could now see another figure, sitting further back. Two pairs of horses began to materialise in front of the lights. They were almost on top of him, and he could now clearly see the coach itself. Terrified, and with no time to get out of the way, Robert braced himself for the inevitable impact as the two leading horses galloped either side of him. He must have felt a sense of both horror and relief when the entire apparition passed straight through him! As the phantom coach passed around him, he also saw two ladies seated inside the carriage, just as Jeanne Ballard had done … and then it was gone. Hardly able to believe what had just happened, he turned around to find the road behind him empty and silent – the coach and horses had vanished even more quickly than it had appeared.

Robert’s frightening experience made the front page of the 24 November edition of the Enfield Gazette & Observer. After reading the article, both Jeanne Ballard and Mary Read, now (in 1961) married and in her seventies, contacted the newspaper and their stories were also printed the following week.

No one has yet been able to offer any explanation as to why a phantom coach and horses should be seen in the area, and there are no known records of an accident, or any other significant incident involving a horse-drawn coach in Enfield’s history. Indeed, there are a number of questions raised by these sightings that may never be answered: Where was the coach going, and where had it come from? Who was inside it? Could there even be more than one coach? The cases related here have the coach seen in different locations and heading in different directions. Robert Bird said it was heading east along Bell Lane, towards the marshes of the Lea Valley, where it is possible that a coach may long ago have come to grief. Indeed, all the sightings on Bell Lane have placed the coach travelling in the same easterly direction, although when David Hanchett first saw the apparition it was coming towards him from the south-west. However, the coach seen by Jeanne Ballard was travelling westwards, in the opposite direction to the Bell Lane sightings, and the one seen by Mary Read and her friends was heading in yet another direction and appeared to end its journey at Durants Arbour.

Durants Arbour shortly before it was demolished. (© Enfield Local Studies & Archive)

Perhaps there is an event in the history of that house to explain the haunting and even identify the occupants of the coach. The old farmhouse that Mary Read would have known as ‘The Old Moat House’ was built in the eighteenth century on the site of a medieval manor house. Both the farmhouse and its predecessor were surrounded by a moat that existed until 1910, when the building was demolished and the moat filled in to make way for a housing estate. It was once believed, mistakenly, that Durants Arbour had belonged to Judge George Jeffries (1644–1689), the notorious seventeenth-century ‘Hanging Judge’ who had hundreds of people executed, often without trial, for supporting the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion against James II. However, it was actually Jeffries’ daughter that lived at Durants Arbour rather than the judge himself who, it is believed, may have lived for a time at Salisbury House in Bury Street (see chapter seven).

In Ponders End, after Mary Read and her friends had seen the coach, local rumour said that the occupants of the phantom coach were two queens. There are no historical records to either support or disprove this, but it is nevertheless interesting to note that Jeanne Ballard described two very refined ladies sitting in the coach as it passed through her parents’ house.

In Forty Hill, about a mile and a half west of Bell Lane, there is a local tradition that the coach is seen rumbling along a private road that leads to the seventeenth-century Dower House. Are the occupants of the coach connected in some way to that house? It is said to emerge from this narrow, gravelled lane before proceeding eastwards down Goat Lane. It should perhaps be noted that Goat Lane becomes Hoe Lane at the point where it crosses the New River and Hoe Lane continues, despite now being bisected by the A10 dual carriageway, until it meets the Hertford Road, almost opposite its junction with Eastfield Road. It seems likely that these roads may have once formed a single road, and it has been suggested that Bell Lane may be part of an old coaching route that forded the river Lea and continued across Essex all the way to Colchester, although old maps of the area show that the main eastbound coach road crossed the River Lea further south.

The phantom coach is often referred to as ‘The Enfield Flyer’ or ‘Bell Lane Flyer’ because of the mistaken belief that the coach travels along Bell Lane 6ft above the ground. If this is the case it could not possibly have passed through Robert Bird in 1961 – unless of course Robert was a 7ft giant riding a penny-farthing bicycle! This is an error that seems to have crept into the story from Robert’s own remark in his original interview with the Enfield Gazette & Observer that the coaches’ lamps, which were the first things he saw, were ‘about six foot above the ground’. This would indicate that the coach itself was either ‘on’ the ground or certainly no more than 2ft above – which would tally with the accounts given by Jeanne Ballard and David Hanchett, who both stated that the coach was about 1ft above the ground. So yes, the ‘Enfield Flyer’ may well appear to travel above the ground, especially along roads such as Bell Lane which would probably have once crossed the marshlands of the Lea Valley on raised embankments. However, for it to now be seen ‘flying’ 6ft above the ground is perhaps a little far-fetched – even for a ghost story!

2

THE GREY LADY OF TRENT PARK

Trent Park mansion is almost a mile to the north of Oakwood tube station, surrounded by parkland that once formed part of Enfield Chase. This was an extensive area of land that had been designated as a royal hunting ground from the twelfth century until after the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, when it was given over as common land.

Enfield Chase remained common land until 1777, when George III had the area enclosed and divided. He granted some of the land to his physician, Dr Richard Jebb, as a reward for saving the life of his younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, at Trento in Austria earlier that year. The following year, Jebb built a small villa on Noddingswell Hill and called it Trent Place, at the King’s insistence. However, it is doubtful that the Duke, who seems to have been a chronic hypochondriac, was actually dying. He probably would have recovered without the treatments of Dr Jebb, whose remedies and methods were at best bizarre and at worst hazardous to health. With such a reputation, it is perhaps more surprising that the Duke did not die!

After his death in 1787, Trent Place was bought by the Earl of Cholmondley who sold it to John Wigston of Millfield House in Edmonton. He enlarged Jebb’s modest villa, which was sold again in 1813 to John Cumming, who spent around £20,000 on further structural improvements – a considerable amount of money at the time – adding two wings, an attic and cellars. Trent Park, as it was now known, was bought in 1833 by David Bevan, who gave it to his son Robert Cooper Lee Bevan, one of the founders of Barclay’s Bank. Both the house and family business passed to his son Francis in 1893.

The house was given yet another extensive remodelling between 1926 and 1931 by Sir Philip Sassoon. He had the levels of the first and second floors raised and clad the house with eighteenth-century bricks and stonework from the recently demolished Devonshire House, which had stood in Piccadilly. He also imported a wooden staircase from the same residence and a portico from Chesterfield House, and had specially commissioned murals painted inside the building by Rex Whistler that can still be seen today.

Trent Place. (Image supplied by The Enfield Society)

Trent Park was acquired by Edward Sassoon in 1908 and inherited by his son, Philip, four years later. Sir Philip Sassoon was, like his father before him, the MP for Hythe in Kent and was said to be the wealthiest man in the country. He was also the First Commissioner of Works and the Under-Secretary of State for Air. He held extravagant parties at Trent Park every weekend from May to August during the 1920s and ’30s, and his guestlists read like extracts from the ‘who’s who’ of the period; from royalty and high-ranking politicians such as Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Stanley Baldwin to Hollywood stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr and Boris Karloff, who as a child had attended Enfield Grammar School.

There are many stories to attest to Sir Philip Sassoon’s extravagance. He had a fleet of ten Rolls Royce cars, a private airfield in the grounds with a hangar for his aircraft, and he had a network of tunnels constructed under the house and stable block so that his guests would never see the lower servants; any servant that broke this strict rule of invisibility could face instant dismissal. On the upper lake he kept a variety of exotic aquatic birds such as pelicans, pink flamingos and even king penguins which he liked to feed himself. He died of a lung infection in 1939.