Eddie Brazil - Haunted High Wycombe

N O book is ever written completely alone. I would like to thank those people who have helped with information and support during the writing of Haunted High Wycombe. Donna Barnett, Sally Scagell, Josie Atkins, Jan and Andy Maclean, Kate Osbourne, Michael Powell, my good friend and colleague Paul Adams, Peter Underwood, for his inspiration and kindness, Janet Kaye, and Matilda Richards at The History Press. And finally, to my wife Sue and my daughter Rebecca my islands in the stormy sea.

T HE origins of this book go back almost fifty years, to the late spring of 1966, when, aged ten, I was living with my family in an eighteenth-century house in the Stockwell district of South London. We had moved into the house in November 1963, and as far as I was concerned the following two and a half years were an uneventful period of normal, family routines. However, on an ordinary June afternoon, a year before the hippy summer of love, that was all to change.

I had returned early from school around 4 p.m. to find no one at home. Letting myself in, I went and sat in the kitchen and read comics whilst I awaited the return of my grandmother. It was unusual for the house to be empty during the afternoon, as my Gran was normally at home and my father, who was a shift worker, would either be asleep or getting ready to go to work.

As I sat in the kitchen I became aware that the house had become unnaturally still and quite. The muffled sounds of the traffic and the shrieks and shouts of children playing outside seemed to have been silenced, and once or twice I looked up from my comic to peer quizzically around the quiet room.

Without warning, my younger brothers toy robot, which he often left wherever he last played with it, clicked and whirred into life and began marching across the floor towards me. The sudden breaking of the silence jolted me from my chair, and I got up, went over and stopped the robot. There was no indication as to why it had inexplicably burst into movement. I put it back in its box and returned to my seat with a puzzled frown.

It was sometime later that I suddenly heard a door upstairs close with a sharp slam, followed by footsteps. My immediate thought was that one of my brothers, or my father, was at home and now coming downstairs. And yet the sound of the descending footfalls on the stairs, and the way they seemed to edge tentatively down each step, made me listen up. It didnt sound like my fathers measured tread, or the rushing eagerness of one of my brothers. At once the thought came to me that it might be an intruder who had broken into the house and, on hearing my return, was now cautiously coming down the stairs to make their escape. The footsteps reached the bottom floor and seemed to halt outside the kitchen. I sat transfixed, my eyes on the door, heart thumping, waiting to see who would enter.

The authors boyhood home in Stockwell, South London, where he first experienced the paranormal.

I was certain that if I got up and opened the door I would be confronted by a large man with a stocking over his head and a crowbar in his hands. Yet, I didnt need to, for noiselessly and without warning, the door swung open on its own. I quickly sat upright, half expecting someone to enter, but no one did. I eventually mustered enough courage to get up and go and look out into the hall. It was then that I realised that the sounds were not those of one of my family or the clumsy footsteps of a burglar. The hall and the stairs were empty. I immediately panicked and bolted from the kitchen and into the garden, too frightened to re-enter the house.

The arrival of my grandmother soon after restored an air of normality to the situation, and I went back inside, although not without some trepidation. My cautious looks around the room, out in the hall and up the stairs brought from her a knowing look that seemed to say, ah, so you have heard it too? Indeed, my grandmother and my father had both experienced odd incidents in the house. I was to later learn that such was my parents concern that my brothers and I would become so frightened if we became aware of what was occurring that both of them would try to ignore it. On certain days, when alone in the house, my grandmother would hear footsteps in empty rooms and doors closing by themselves. During the night, my father would often hear the front door of the house open and close, followed by footsteps that came along the hall and ascended the stairs. The footsteps would pause outside his bedroom before continuing up to the top floor. Getting out of bed, he would open the door and emerge out onto the cold, dark landing to see if there was anything out of place, and check that we were all in our rooms asleep, which we were. Eventually we moved from the house without discovering a reason for the strange disturbances.

One might have thought that my experience of living in a haunted house, and the encounter with disembodied footsteps and doors opening of their own accord, would have made me wary of the paranormal, or anything that went bump in the night. Yet, on the contrary, it awakened in me a fascination with the supernatural and ghosts, which has continued to this day. It is a road that has led to a collaboration with veteran British ghost hunter Peter Underwood and my close friend and colleague, paranormal historian Paul Adams, and the writing of The Borley Rectory Companion: The Complete Guide to The Most Haunted House in England (The History Press, 2009), countless visits to alleged haunted sites, a study of haunted churches and, ultimately, to the book you are now reading.

Yet, it was also whilst living in Stockwell that I glimpsed hints of a future direction in my life. Each evening, as I played outside my front door, I would notice a single-decker Green Line bus which trundled along the road. Emblazoned across its destination panel were the words High Wycombe. I wonder where High Wycombe is, my inquisitive young mind would think. The name, at least to a youngster growing up in the grime and noise of the capital, seemed to have a bit more allure than the place names of my local area such as, Clapham, Balham, Brixton or Tooting. It conjured up visions of a lofty, rural idyll, with fields, farms, woods and meadows.

It would be twenty years later that I got my first look at High Wycombe when, on a weekend in 1985, my future wife Sue, a native of the town, introduced me to the district during a visit to see her family. Wycombe, at least its centre, I discovered, was not at all high, for it sits within a long valley of beech-covered slopes within the Chiltern Hills, thirty miles north-west of London. But appearances can be deceptive. The name is derived from the Wye Valley high above the river Thames. And it really is so; if you stand in the middle of the high street you are level with the dome of St Pauls Cathedral in London.

In AD 800, it was neither hamlet, village or town but Wicumun meaning the farm or settlement in the valley. Three hundred years later and it is recorded in the Domesday Book as having twenty-seven villagers and eight serfs. Hughenden, Bassetsbury and Crendon are all listed as distant hamlets. Todays heavily developed areas, such as Castlefield and Micklefield, were, as late as 1930, still areas of unspoilt, rolling countryside. By 2010, High Wycombe had become the largest town in Buckinghamshire, with a population of almost 170,000 people. Its centre is a mixture of old and new, and throughout the years the town has grown and expanded up and across its surrounding hills with housing and commerce, in particular the furniture industry which for many years Wycombe was justly famous for. Sadly, today, that industry has now almost disappeared within the town. Nonetheless, the lofty rural idyll I had imagined as a child can, happily, still be found in its surrounding countryside.