Haining - The mammoth book of true hauntings

PETER HAINING has written and edited a number of bestselling books on the supernatural, notably the widely acclaimed Ghosts: The Illustrated History (1975) and A Dictionary of Ghosts (1982), which have been translated into several languages including French, German, Russian and Japanese. His companion volume to this anthology, Haunted House Stories, was published in 2005. A former journalist and publisher, he lived in a sixteenth-century timber-frame house in Suffolk that was haunted by the ghost of a Napoleonic prisoner of war. Peter Haining died in 2007 after finishing this book.

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Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2008

Copyright Peter Haining, 2008

The right of Peter Haining to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library

UK ISBN 978-1-84529-688-9
eISBN 978-1-78033-365-6
5 7 9 10 8 6 4

First published in the United States in 2008 by
Running Press Book Publishers
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

US Library of Congress number: 2008931721
US ISBN 978-0-76243-396-4

Running Press Book Publishers
2300 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371

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Printed and bound in the EU

For my son

RICHARD

herein youll find the result of all those years of rustling...

The tea-party question, Do you believe in ghosts? is one of the most ambiguous that can be asked, but if we take it to mean, Do you believe that people sometimes experience apparitions? the answer is that they certainly do.

Professor H H Price, 1953

Probably every fourth person you talk to has had an experience with a poltergeist or ghost or knows someone who has.

Steven Spielberg, 1982

1. A Century of Hauntings

2. The Ghost Hunters

3. Phantoms in the Sky

4. Encounters With The Unknown

5. Haunted Stars

6. Supernatural Tales

7. Phantom Lovers

8. What Are Ghosts?

9. An AZ of Ghosts

Foreword

I am a Researcher of the Supernatural

I have been fascinated by stories of ghosts since my teenage years. First as a newspaper reporter and later as an author I have investigated stories of the supernatural in Britain, Europe, America and even further afield though never as a member of an organized group or society. This is not because I have an aversion to such organizations far from it, because many of them have brought a scientific approach to a subject too long treated as superstitious nonsense but I prefer to plot my own course through the voluminous material that exists on the subject in newspaper files and libraries and make my own enquiries into haunted localities with the people involved. This book, which focuses on the supernatural in the twentieth century, is the result of almost half a century of my research.

I investigated my first ghost story in the winter of 1958 as a reporter on a newspaper in rural Essex and still have the cutting from the West Essex Gazette. The story concerned the Holt family who lived in a 500-year-old farmhouse, Brook House Farm in Chigwell, which they claimed was haunted by a ghostly presence they named The Invisible. Sitting in the living room of the dilapidated wood and plaster house surrounded by bowls and pails to catch the water that dripped from the ceiling whenever there was heavy rain, seventy-five-year-old Henry Holt, a retired works foreman, told me about the events that had been a regular occurrence for many years:

The ghost paces up and down the Long Room and a tiny passageway beside it. Im not frightened of what I cant see and it never causes any trouble. My wife and I have often laid awake at night listening to him.

My suggestions that the haunting in the house might be due to creaking timbers or the weather rattling through the rafters were immediately denied by Mr Holt and the three members of his family then living in Brook House. Hilda, one of the couples seven children, recounted her own experience: