The Haunted House

I once spent the night in a haunted house.

It was England in the 1970s, and the editor of my magazine, an amiably chain-smoking despot called Bridget, had heard of an expert on the paranormal who lived in an extravagantly haunted house somewhere on the edges of Salisbury Plain, and thought it would be an amusing idea to send a reporter to sample its delights for the night

Photo by Bee Felten-Leidel on Unsplash

What strikes me looking back, is that back then no one, not Bridget, not myself, not anyone involved, gave a moment’s second thought to sending an unaccompanied 20-something female to spend the night with a strange man in his house in the wilds of the countryside. For myself, certainly, the idea of any possible illicit designs on my host’s part was so low on my list as to be all but buried in the footnotes. What I was concerned about was not the physical element, but the spectral.

I had been terrified of ghosts in my childhood. I was something of an expert on the topic, having devoured in delighted horror every ghost story I could lay my hands on, and throughout my early years would spend long nights lying trembling in the most delicious grip of terror, rigidly – although it would always turn out unnecessarily – alert for whatever phantom dreadfulness the night might throw my way.

I had thought until my trip to Salisbury that all of that was safely locked in the past. I had grown up since then, I had thought. I had put away childish fantasies and entered the adult world of jobs to keep and deadlines to meet. If there were spirits of the dead abroad in the world, I had thought, they assuredly had other business to be about than to bother me. To sum up, I told myself firmly, as I settled into my train seat one sunny spring afternoon with my coffee and my cheese and tomato sandwich safely to hand, I was a grown woman and a professional journalist, with a reputation to uphold and an assignment to carry out. I was staying in a haunted house to report on it. End of story.

So why, when the train pulled into the quiet country station on the edge of Salisbury Plain, did my stomach sink like a stone as the cold hand of fear I had not felt since childhood crept its way snakelike up my spine?

I’ll call the paranormal expert Dr. Venkman, after Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. He was a briskly peppery professorial sort who picked me up at the station, drove me to his house – yes, just him and me, out of the town and through the fields and down the remote and bumpy lane to his large and rambling house, and, yes, you are correct, those were indeed very different days – and fed me a meal over which we argued, mostly amicably, about Irish history (“you’re very fiery,” he would comment somewhat bemusedly when we parted, “but I’ve enjoyed your company anyway”), and then, as agreed, sat down for an interview about his paranormal investigations.

Dr. Venkman had conducted very many paranormal investigations. And he had, it turned out, stories from all of them. He had stories of unearthly howls issuing from empty basements. He had stories of women clad in old-fashioned garb emerging from one wall and melting into another. He had stories of ashen-faced children sitting forlornly in former nurseries where no living children had been for years. He had stories of disembodied extra hands that would occasionally join the party at seances. Dr. Venkman told these stories and more with élan and a mild chuckle. Dr. Venkman, it transpired, was a firm atheist who knew for a fact that there must be a scientific explanation for all of these seemingly inexplicable events. I, on the other hand, wasn’t. And I didn’t.

At last Dr. Venkman escorted me – yes, such different days indeed – to the room that would be mine for the night.

“I won’t tell you what you might expect to have happen,” he said. “Because I don’t want to put ideas into your head. I want you to be open to whatever comes along.”

Oh, no, no, no, we weren’t having that. If I were to be left alone with the ghosts, I needed to know exactly what I could expect to be in store for me.

All right, he agreed, still chuckling. I would be more likely to hear something than to see something, he told me. It might be the rustle of a woman’s dress brushing against the furniture. (Eek.) It might be a set of footsteps walking towards the bed. (Eeek.) It might be a knocking on the wall from the room next door. (Aaii.) And if I were to get out of bed and return the knocking (aaiiee) then it would be more than likely that whatever were knocking there would knock back (aaiieee!!!) Well, he hoped I slept well anyway. Good night.

For want of any particular alternative, I stripped to my nightgear, and climbed into the simple spare bed, where I lay trembling more fiercely, and with far more reason so to do, than I ever had in my childhood. I tried to forget all the ghost stories I had read, only to have each and every one rush into my head to dance together in a ghastly cross-cultural cotillion for undead spirits. I tried to count sheep until, without warning, Little Bo Peep’s soul-damned spectral sister leaped from a hedgerow to thrust into mine a face of horror from beneath her frilly bonnet. I tried to while the time by calling to mind the roster of my entire acquaintance, and calculating which of them might have consented to put themselves in my particular situation right now: I came up with just two, both of them known lunatics.

Worst of all, was the silence. I am a Londoner born and bred, and the sound that lulls me to sleep is the dulcet rattle of taxis, the soothing symphony of police sirens, the sweet melody of drunks arguing on the pavement at closing time. Here, there was … nothing. Nothing but the night and the stars and the faint rustlings of the birds of prey swooping on their victims and an endless void waiting to be filled with ghostly footsteps walking towards the bed or ghostly knuckles rapping on the wall outside. I have never been so frightened in my life.

Well, but no, I at last discerned as my ears attuned gradually to the gaping quiet, there was not quite nothing. Somewhere in the house, there was a clock. It was quite close by, in fact, and was ticking, now that I was able to hear it, loudly and assertively, in the way my grandmother’s tall-cased clock had ticked in the hallway of our childhood home. I had hated the clock at the time, finding its ticking both irritating and intrusive; but now I fell on it as a parched person falls on a long glass of water, as a sanity-saving piece of normalcy, a voice from the everyday world where time passed and people lived and died and then, with a bit of luck, stayed so. Let me not exaggerate, it didn’t lull me to peaceful slumber, or even to a fitful nap; but it kept me company as I waited and listened in vain for ghostly sounds, and throughout that endless fear-filled night I was more grateful to it than I can say.

“How did you get on?” Dr. Venkman asked me when at last I dragged the ragged remains of my nervous system to the breakfast table.

“I didn’t hear anything strange,” I said. “But I was really glad to have that clock ticking next door or I’d have been even more scared.”

Dr. Venkman looked at me curiously, and said …

…Well, the astute reader will have already guessed exactly what it was the good doctor was about to say. But I promise you, up, down, sideways, and on the graves of both my late and sainted mother and Louisa May Alcott herself, that this is precisely what he did say….

“What clock?”

We went upstairs to my room. All was silent as the grave in the watery morning sun. We checked the rooms on either side. We checked the landing. There was not, so to speak, the ghost of a clock to be seen or heard anywhere. There was just no clock there.

I now feel differently about the spirit world than I could ever have imagined I would. I can come to no possible conclusion but that the sound I had heard that night was one that came from beyond the physical realm; but if it did come from somewhere else, it came to comfort me, not to scare me. If it were indeed a ghostly presence, it was a sweet and tender one that was most firmly on my side. And what on earth, in heaven, or anywhere in between, is not to love about that?

But I didn’t suggest staying an extra night to hear it again.