Imagine yourself traveling down a
dirt road that winds through a dark forest. At every turn, the road seems to
narrow more until it becomes nothing more than a path that seems to lead
nowhere. Finally, enveloped by the eerie silence of the forest, you round one
more bend and see before you an old manor house. You walk toward it, relieved
that you've come upon a sign of civilization yet worried that you may find
something unsettling inside.
For
you realize immediately that this is the perfect setting for a haunted house.
Such a manor house actually exists in the English countryside near Brighton,
according to Ghost Hunter Peter Moss. Even though the house is well over 900
years old, his research uncovered a ghost which has haunted the house only since
1961. The most recent owners of the house told Moss about the ghost on the
condition that he would not reveal their identity or the exact location of the
house. This is their story.
In 1961, Mr. and Mrs. Forster and
their four children lived in the house. One morning, as the children were eating
breakfast with, their mother, they heard piano music coming from the room
directly overhead. Mrs. Forster was puzzled, since they didn't own a piano. Her
youngest son, Frank, wasn't surprised.
"I've heard that music
before," he said.
In fact, he had heard it on many
other occasions. The children raced upstairs to search the room but uncovered
nothing. A few months later, they heard the music once more, but never again
after that. The ghost, however, was just warming up for a full-blown haunting.
As it began to reveal its identity, other more mysterious and frightening
happenings occurred.
One day in 1963, Mrs. Forster was
ironing a white cotton blouse in the kitchen when a drop of red liquid dribbled
onto the blouse. So convinced was she that the liquid was blood, she immediately
checked to see if her nose was bleeding; it was not. Not stopping to wonder
where the blood had come from, Mrs. Forester tried to remove the stain by
running it under cold water. But the spot wouldn't wash out, even after she'd
rubbed in a little soap. Angry that the blouse was ruined, she returned to the
ironing board and found that another drop of blood had soaked through the cloth
cover. This time, she looked up at the ceiling: the white plaster was perfectly
clean. What's more, there were no cracks or joints overhead through which
anything could have leaked. Like the piano music, the blood could not be
explained, and life settled down.
It wasn't until 1971 that the
next major episode occurred. A friend of the family was spending the night at
the Forster's manor house, when she woke up from a deep sleep, aware that her
scalp felt prickly. As she became more alert, she realized that the room felt
stifling hot, almost as if it were on fire. Then she saw what looked like two
arms floating on the far side of the dark room.
At first, she questioned her
eyesight, but as the arms began to move toward the bed-the hands open, the
fingers extended--as if ready to grab her, the Forsters' friend decided that she
would have to save herself. A devoutly religious woman, she began to recite the
Lord's Prayer.
"Our Father, who art in
Heaven..."
Later she told the Forsters that
she couldn't remember if she said the prayer out loud or to herself. But the
white arms, the white hands, the white fingers kept floating toward her.
"Thy kingdom come, thy will
be done..."
The arms had reached the posts at
the foot of her bed, the fingers were aiming straight for her.
She reached the last part of the
prayer and said: "Deliver us from Evil."
At that moment, the hands
vanished, but the friend was so shaken that she refused to spend another night
in the house and stayed in a nearby hotel instead.
The Forsters were puzzled. They
didn't doubt their friend's experience. After all, she was an experienced nurse
and hardly the kind of person prone to hallucinations. But they wondered why the
ghost, if indeed it was one, never appeared to them.
Finally, one autumn evening in
1973, Mrs. Forster saw the ghost for herself. That night, with her husband away
on business, she had supper with the children and went to bed early. She had no
sooner picked up a book from the bedside table, when she heard the latch on the
bedroom door click and the hinges creak. She assumed that one of her children
wanted to see her and glanced up. She was stunned to see that a strange old
woman had entered the bedroom instead. Before she had time to think, the old
woman closed the door behind her and leaned against it, staring at Mrs. Forster.
During those few silent moments,
Mrs. Forster got a good look at the woman. Her gray hair was pinned into a tight
bun, and she wore a long drab-colored dress with a large ruffle of lace at the
neck. Then the woman clasped her hands in front of her, almost as if she were
praying, and began to walk toward Mrs. Forster.
At this point, she hadn't yet
realized that she was seeing a ghost. She was trying to make herself believe
that the woman was a stranger who had become lost and had entered the house
looking for shelter. She was so surprised by the woman that she couldn't speak.
But as the woman approached the
bed, Mrs. Forster finally asked: "Who are you? What do you want?"
At the sound of the voice, the
woman disappeared. It was only then that Mrs. Forster realized that she had seen
the ghost of the manor.
Sometime later, the Forsters told
some friends who lived in a nearby town about the apparition. Without
hesitation, the friends reported that the woman resembled Miss Thynne, the
previous owner of the house, who had died in a fire in 1958, just a few years
before the Forsters had purchased it. They also learned that Miss Thynne had
slept in the same bedroom now used by the Forsters, which accounted for her
appearance there.
Finally, in 1976, Mrs. Forster
had her last encounter with Miss Thynne. One day in September, Mrs. Forster
walked into the kitchen and saw a small spill on the kitchen table. She thought
it was odd that she had missed a pool of liquid on the table; after all, she had
cleaned up after breakfast. As she peered at the liquid, she realized that it
was blood. Unfortunately, the Forsters never determined where it came from. No
one had been in the kitchen, and, as before, no leaks were found.
A curious person might have
called a ghost hunter to investigate the mysterious occurrences. Instead, the
Forsters sold the house to the present owners, and the record of the haunting
stops there with many more questions than answers: Was the red liquid really
blood? If so, why did it appear in the kitchen? Was Miss Thynne responsible for
it as well as the piano music and the arms that menaced the Forsters' overnight
guest? When the current owners bought the house, the haunting apparently
stopped. But they learned enough about the house to know that someone like Peter
Moss should be contacted so that the story would be recorded. Just in case Miss
Thynne should ever appear again.
ŠJames M. Deem. Taken
from Ghost Hunters (Avon, 1992).
All rights reserved.
