Haunted St Albans E-Book

Paul Adams

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 157

Beschreibung

St Albans is a city steeped in history, a place of former martyrs, Roman legions, battles, bloodshed … and ghosts. Here the paranormal history of this remarkable area is brought vividly to life in the first dedicated guide to its unique haunted heritage that presents true encounters with the world of the strange and the unseen. Paranormal historian Paul Adams opens case files both ancient and modern to compile a chilling collection of supernatural experiences – the much haunted St Albans Cathedral where phantom monks have been seen in daylight and the fighting ghosts of Battlefield House and the legless apparition of a long-dead butler are just some of the unnerving experiences that await the reader.

Leseprobe

For Eddie Brazil, to mark ten years of friendship.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

one Roads, Highways and Open Spaces

two Haunted Public Houses and Hostelries

three Ghosts of the Abbey Church

four Haunted Houses and Buildings

five Some Anecdotal Hauntings in Brief

six A St Albans Ghost Walk

seven Assessing St Albans’ Ghosts

Bibliography and Further Reading

About the Author

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A number of people deserve recognition for their help with the writing of this book, and my grateful thanks go to the following: Bill King, historian and investigator for the Luton Paranormal Society (LPS) for writing the foreword and for his interest in the project; Eddie Brazil, who once again has provided superb contemporary illustrations and has followed the progress of this particular book with his usual much-needed enthusiasm and humour; Peter Underwood, for providing access to his files on Hertfordshire and St Albans hauntings; Natalie Dearman from the Herts Advertiser, for help with collecting new local paranormal encounters; the late Tony Broughall, for allowing me to quote from his published memoirs; Juliet Milton for permission to reproduce material from the Mountfitchet Castle website; David Thorold and Catherine Newley from the Museum of St Albans who assisted with photographs and the checking of historical data; Damien O’Dell of the Anglia Paranormal Investigation Society (APIS), who allowed me to use material from his published accounts of the city’s numerous hauntings; Tom Ruffles, for helping with statistical information on Britian’s ghost hunters; and Peter Baker, who assisted with research into the history of St Albans. I would also like to thank all the residents of St Albans and others, including Mary Myers and Jo Clarke, who have contacted and shared with me some of their unique experiences of the city’s ghosts, and also Nicola Guy and Chris Ogle at The History Press for efficiently seeing this book through to publication. Finally, special thanks go as always to Aban, Idris, Isa and Sakina, for their patience and inspiration, as well as remembering our Saturday morning St Albans outings.

FOREWORD

IN 2008, a survey of 2,060 people revealed that nearly 4 out of 10 people believed in ghosts. This was almost identical to the results of a survey carried out ten years previously, yet it was a fourfold increase over the results of a Gallup poll from 1950, when only 1 in 10 said they believed in the paranormal (with 1 in 50 reporting that they had actually encountered a ghost). I have met people who have seen ghosts, and I have had my own encounters with the paranormal, especially during my years with the Luton Paranormal Society (LPS). After investigating nearly 300 sites in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, as well as places as far afield as Edinburgh, Gloucester, Norwich and Winchester, I have found that ghosts can be seen at any time of day, in any location, and by more than one person at the same time, so there has to be something beyond the claims that the sightings are just being down to people’s imagination.

As a local author with an extensive knowledge of the hauntings of the Three Counties, I know St Albans well and I am aware of how haunted a place it is; yet Paul Adams has managed to find even more hauntings for his book Haunted St Albans. Many ghost stories are anecdotal or even apocryphal, their origins are obscure and many just sound like tales passed down through the years, accompanied by the usual embellishments which plague such tales. Not so with many of Paul’s reports, many of which are either first-hand, or recorded decades ago by Bedfordshire’s proficient and pioneering ghost hunter, Tony Broughall.

St Albans’ medieval clock tower, starting point for the city ghost walk in Chapter 6. (Paul Adams)

I think it would be fair to say that there are many strange things out there which, so far, science has failed to explain. Within this book are a large number of these inexplicable occurrences, taken from a city which comes 38th out of the 51 English cities by population, yet has what is fast approaching 100 haunted sites; many more than its fair share, some would say. With full details and extensive background information, these well written reports will interest the hardened ghost investigator like myself, people interested in the history of St Albans and even the eternal sceptic. Enjoy!

William H. King

INTRODUCTION

IN early December 1869, two Cambridge intellectuals, Henry Sidgwick and Frederick W.H. Myers, took an evening walk under the stars. At some point their conversation turned to ‘those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognised hypothesis’, a subject that today we recognise more familiarly under the broad label of the ‘paranormal’. The seeds of their discussions bore fruit thirteen years later with the 1882 founding of the Society for Psychical Research in London, a ground-breaking organisation that took seriously the study of what up until that time had been considered as fantasy, romance or even heresy: ghosts and apparitions, haunted houses, prophetic dreams and mediumship, subjects that in our own times are perhaps no less controversial, but thanks to the ‘occult revolution’ of the 1960s, are more easily discussed and now accepted by many.

Whether ghost hunting has finally become a respectable past-time is open to debate. Thanks to an avalanche of reality television programmes on satellite and cable TV, catalysed by the pioneering Most Haunted, which first aired in May 2002 and survived fourteen series over eight years including several sensational live specials and spin-off programmes, many hundreds of people around Britain have become interested in paranormal investigation and have either joined established regional organisations or set up local groups of their own. According to writer and researcher Damien O’Dell, these psychical groups have a shelf-life of around six to eighteen months, while in 2006, parapsychologist Dr Ciarán O’Keeffe estimated that 1200 separate paranormal societies were active in the country at any one time, involving approximately an astonishing 5,000 amateur researchers and investigators; something that would probably have astounded Victorian psychical researchers such as the pioneering Sidgwick and Myers back in the 1880s.

Frederick W.H. Myers (1843-1901), one of the early pioneers of organised psychical research in England.

Many people from all walks of life claim to have had paranormal experiences, often those who have no particular or continuing interest in the subject, the most common and familiar being encounters with ghosts and hauntings. From the vast amount of material that has been issued in both popular and specialist publications, beginning with the Society for Psychical Research’s landmark Phantasms of the Living in 1886, researchers have established a pattern in the way that people ‘see’ or encounter ghosts, to the extent that it is possible to assign these spontaneous experiences as belonging to one (or sometimes more than one) broad classification for which tentative but ultimately un-provable explanations have been put forward. In his book The Ghost Hunter’s Guide (1986), Peter Underwood, one of our most experienced and respected investigators, divides ghost sightings and hauntings into nine separate categories which are still as relevant today as they were when this study was written. Leaving aside what can best be described as the induced phenomena associated with mediumship and séances, this classification is as follows: atmospheric photograph ghosts (also known as mental imprint manifestations), historical or traditional ghosts, cyclic or recurring ghosts, modern ghosts, ghosts of the living, crisis apparitions (including death bed visions), family ghosts, haunted objects and fraudulent hauntings.

As well as categorisation, it should be mentioned that an encounter with a ghost or apparition does not automatically equate to proof of survival or life after death, in much the same way that a sighting of an unidentified object or UFO in the sky is not proof of the existence of alien spaceships. This tends to often divide researchers of the paranormal into two broad camps: survivalists (believers in some form of afterlife) and non-survivalists (those who consider the mind to be a product of brain function which ends at death), who use evidence gathered from their own particular investigations and studies to support their opposing beliefs.

Investigators who are mediums or use mediums to add a psychic dimension to a ghost hunt are more likely to assign apparitions and similar phenomena as being discarnate personalities or unquiet spirits of the dead. However, there are some parapsychologists who eschew a belief in a spirit world and survival after death; they propose an alternative explanation for the information obtained from mediums and psychics, one that American researcher Hornell Hart termed ‘Super ESP’ (also known as ‘super-psi’). This involves theoretical projections or reservoirs of human consciousness that psychically endowed persons are able to tap into unconsciously in order to obtain supernormal information.

Where the appearance of ghosts and apparitions is concerned, many non-survivalists credit what has become popularly known as the stone tape theory and which forms the basis of Underwood’s atmospheric photograph ghost category mentioned above. Originally coined by Cambridge don T.C. (Tom) Lethbridge, a radical twentieth-century psychical researcher dubbed generously by writer Colin Wilson as the ‘Einstein of the paranormal’, the stone tape proposes the ability of a building or certain set of surroundings to record the psychic impressions of former occupants or happenings, which are then played back or recreated at some future time in the presence of a suitably psychic person. That we all have some inherent psychic ability, albeit to a greater or lesser degree, is shown by the fact that during a paranormal incident in a haunted building or location, one person may see a ghostly form or figure, while at the same time, his or her companion may only detect a drop in temperature or observe a shadowy shape rather than a full-form apparition. A keen and experienced dowser, Tom Lethbridge felt that the presence of water could be a key factor in certain paranormal experiences, a theory that he included – as well as other forays into the unknown – in two books written in the early 1960s, Ghost and Ghoul (1961) and Ghost and Divining Rod (1963), both of which are of interest to the serious researcher.

Where many old and ancient buildings survive collectively in a given location, the stone tape or atmospheric photograph is then perhaps the most natural non-survivalist explanation for many ghostly and supernatural happenings. For the city of St Albans, a location with an impressive and enviable association with history and antiquity, it may be the reason for many of the remarkable supernatural encounters that we will be looking at in this book. As a category of alleged haunting, it is one I intend to make a strong case for throughout the present survey.

According to Dr Mark Freeman in St Albans: A History, the first known urban settlement near what is now modern St Albans dates from the first century BC. This was a substantial Iron Age town known as Verlamion, which occupied the site of present day Prae Wood, 1.5 miles west of the city centre on the north side of the A4147. The site was excavated by the Scottish-born archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler and his wife in the 1930s and their work, together with more recent studies, have shown Verlamion to have been a thriving agricultural-dependant community with a large cemetery. In AD 43, Emperor Claudius invaded Britain and established Roman rule across the province. The original settlement of Verlamion was developed into a major Roman town, one of the largest in the country, and renamed Verulamium. The Romans paved the ancient Watling Street trackway and relocated the settlement from the higher ground around Prae Wood eastwards to the valley floor, closer to the River Ver. In AD 61, the leader of the Iceni tribe, Queen Boudicca (or Boadicea) lead an organised revolt against the Roman occupiers. During the conflict, the town of Verulamium was sacked and a fire destroyed many of the buildings. Existing records show that the Iceni queen’s last known location before her death was the area around modern day St Albans itself. Although the actual site of her defeat is unknown, it seems likely that Boudicca followed the Watling Street road north and made her last stand at Cuttle Mill close to the village of Paulerspury in Northamptonshire. Following the rebellion, Roman Verulamium recovered and in time became an extensive walled town with a theatre and houses equipped with under-floor heating. The Watling Street highway from Canterbury entered the town walls through the eastern London Gate and departed to the north-east from the Chester Gate over the River Ver.

The stone tape theory is one explanation for the appearance of ghosts and phantom figures. Here, a spectral monk seemingly materialises in the ruins of haunted Minsden Chapel in Hertfordshire. (Tony Broughall Collection)

Queen Boudicca, whose revolution against the occupying Roman forces ended at the Battle of Watling Street. Stories of ghostly figures associated with her uprising occur in at least two Hertfordshire locations.

The Roman presence lasted for over four centuries, during which time the execution of the pagan martyr Alban around AD 250 was the catalyst that lead to the establishment of the city as it is known today. The Anglo-Saxon king Offa of Mercia – said to have received the command to erect a shrine for the relics of St Alban in an angelic vision to atone for the murder of the East Anglian king Ethelbert by his wife Quendreda – is the traditional figure behind the founding of St Albans Abbey in AD 793, but it seems likely that the area was known as a place of pilgrimage many years before the death of Alban himself. Offa and his son, King Egfrith, endowed the monastery, a Benedictine order, with 60,000 acres in south-west Hertfordshire along with additional land in neighbouring Buckinghamshire. As the religious house grew to be the centre of the local economic community, the town of St Albans established itself and grew up around the abbey building; Domesday Book of 1086 gives the number of inhabitants to be around 500 people.

During the course of our survey we will encounter many other aspects of St Albans’ long and detailed history – the famines of the mid-thirteenth century, the execution of the rebel leader John Ball during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, as well as the bloody battles associated with the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. All these events and many others appear to have left their mark in the psychic fabric of this pleasant English city, and we will be examining the evidence for many of the area’s historical hauntings in the pages that follow. In 2008, the Revd Lionel Fanthorpe, a well-regarded researcher into psychical subjects and the current (as of 2012) President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), compiled a comprehensive survey of haunted locations across the British Isles which established St Albans’ paranormal pedigree. Fanthorpe’s Supernatural Britain Report concluded that the city was the fifth most haunted in the country, with eight ghost sightings for every 10,000 citizens.

For Haunted St Albans, the first dedicated guide to the city’s hauntings in twenty-five years, I have used a similar layout for my survey of the neighbouring ghosts of Luton and Dunstable and divided the book up into several broad sections: roads and open places, haunted houses and other buildings, public houses, with the ghostly history of St Albans Cathedral having a chapter all to itself. There is also a ghost walk taking in several of the sites covered in the text. This book, like the previous one, includes accounts and comparisons with other national hauntings and paranormal experiences which I feel are relevant to the discussions in hand, and which help to shed a greater light on this shadowy, fascinating, at times frightening, and for many, continually stimulating subject.

The great film director and screenwriter Stanley Kubrick, who admitted to a long interest in the subject of the paranormal, once called tales of ghosts and horror ‘archetypes of the unconscious’ that enable us to see the ‘dark side’ without having to confront it directly. Ghost stories also appeal to what he described as mankind’s ‘craving for immortality’. ‘If you can be afraid of a ghost, then you have to believe that a ghost may exist. And if a ghost exists, then oblivion might not be the end.’ Perhaps it is fitting that the director of the 1980 cult classic The Shining, based on the best-selling novel by horror maestro Stephen King, lived at Childwickbury Manor on the outskirts of St Albans for over twenty years; several of his most famous films were completed here. He died at Childwickbury in 1999, aged seventy.

In closing it is worth pointing out that where the mysterious world of the paranormal is concerned, one fact is clear: new ghosts are constantly being seen, convincing cases of haunting are always occurring and previously unreported accounts of supernormal happenings gradually come into the public domain, with the result that regional guides such as this one can never be finite or complete documents of the supernatural history of a particular town or place. I am always interested in collecting details of new experiences or additional information on any of the cases included in this survey, either for a future edition or a sequel volume – readers can contact me in confidence through my website.

As Luton-born ghost hunter Tony Broughall has commented: ‘Like time and space, the ghosts seem to go on forever’.

Paul Adams

October 2013

1

ROADS, HIGHWAYS AND OPEN SPACES

IN paranormal terms, the annals of organised ghost hunting and psychical research show that the roads of Britain appear to be populated by an unusually wide and at times frightening collection of apparitions and supernatural forms. Not all of these ghostly road users are phantom figures or even human in origin: there are numerous reports of phantom vehicles, animals (including numerous phantom dogs) and even birds and unidentified cryptids.