The Battersea Poltergeist

November 2nd is All Souls' Day, and in Mexico, it's the final Day of the Dead, so perhaps it's not inappropriate that the Hallowe'en decorations in our neighbourhood have not yet been taken down.

Ghost stories are not limited to the end of October, however.

I follow BBC Four on Facebook, and on Hallowe'en, my attention was caught by a multi-part radio programme entitled The Battersea Poltergeist, which was first broadcast at the beginning of this year.  As it happens, I have familial connections to Battersea, so I tuned in.

The haunting took place over about a dozen years at 63 Wycliffe Road.  The house is long gone, as is the part of the street it occupied, but I brought up Google Maps and entered the address.  I was astonished, and rather alarmed, to be directed to an area about a nine-minute walk from elder daughter's flat --- in South Wimbledon.  

Fortunately, along with the half-hour episodes, there are three "case updates" to accommodate just a few of the listeners' hundreds of questions and comments. One of the discussions involved the proximity of railway lines, so I learned that Clapham Junction Railway Station is about a mile to the west of where the house stood, that part of what was Wycliffe Road is now Ashbury Road, and that Lavender Hill is just to the south.  That narrows the area to somewhere around the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nectarios, about five miles north of elder daughter's flat, and one mile south-east of where one branch of my ancestors were living in the second half of the nineteenth century, near the west edge of Battersea Park.

Nicely oriented, I settled in, listening (in daylight, of course) to nine episodes over Hallowe'en, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day.  It's a twisty-turny, rollercoaster sort of tale, veering from inexplicable to explicable, from other-worldly to mundane, and from belief to disbelief-- and back again.  It's a mixture of dramatization - the cast is led by none other than Toby Jones - and interviews, including several with Shirley, the original tormented girl, who is now eighty.  (At least she was in early 2021.)  All in all,  we have a fascinating examination of the paranormal, and our differing perceptions of what is plausible.  Follow the above link, and give it a listen.

I'm a little perplexed by the illustration of the series. 

The image is spooky and arresting, but it shows a green-eyed girl against a very old map of the East End of London.

And not particularly close to South Wimbledon.

Shirley Hitchings was (is) a brown-eyed girl, and Battersea is south of the Thames.

Ghost of Christmas cats

A few months ago, a large lithe tabby joined our household.  Like Rum Tum Tugger, he's a curious cat.

Early morning, pre-dawn,  I'm standing by the bedside table, engaged in my morning routine. I'm applying lip balm, when I hear a strange noise.

The cat is crouched by the bedroom door, gazing out into the dark hall that leads into the living room.  He's giving that rising and falling growl that cats emit when threatened.

I peer out into the direction in which he's glaring.  Nothing, but it's dark.  I venture into the hall, turning on lights, and feeling rather creeped out.  Nothing.

I return to the bedroom, and the cat has vanished, except for irregular intervals, when I hear that growl.  I lie across our large bed, and hang my head over the edge to see underneath, where the cat is crouched, dead centre.  He's never hidden under the bed before.

I decide the wisest thing is to dress quickly, and get my shoes on.  All sorts of unpleasant possibilities race through my brain: an intruder, or some sort of feral animal - cats can see ghosts, can't they - and don't they sense imminent earthquakes?

I hastily insert my contact lenses and check the apartment again.  The Resident Fan Boy is bathing; younger daughter is in bed, reading her phone.  I retreat, and set to applying my makeup.

As I pull on my jacket, the cat emerges from under the bed by inches, slowly, slowly.  His ears are back, his spine is in a high arc, and his striped tail is like a bottle brush.  He creeps to the door, pauses, then crawls into the hall, smelling the floor and baseboards.  He continues in this fashion out to the living room, then returns through the kitchen, back to the hall, where he pauses by younger daughter's slightly ajar door to sniff some more.  I return to the master bedroom to collect my things.

By the time I depart to the coffee shop, the cat's body has relaxed, and I feel confident enough to stroke him.

Unnerving.

Home from the sea

Years ago, I attended a party at the home of my Friend of the Right Hand. My clearest memory of the gathering was a conversation with a violinist from the Victoria Symphony who told me a number of creepy Victoria ghost stories, including his own weird experience while working at the Maritime Museum. There's an old-fashioned cage elevator there and he said he was working it one night, glanced up through the mesh and saw someone peering down the shaft at him.

I thought of that today as I returned to the museum for the first time in years. I don't even know when I last visited; I remembered it as being a rather small, dark, and unexciting place.

It certainly has changed! There are several exhibits, most in large well-lit rooms. I took away four things from today's visit.

1) The Jolly Roger flag had many variations, depending on which pirate was after you.

2) The courtroom three flights up (you could take the haunted elevator -- we walked) has been restored.

I think this is a later courtroom from the 1890s and not the one associated with death sentences and hence, the ghosts. No one was around when younger daughter and I came upon it, so I mounted the prisoner's box and faced the bench. I trust this will be the only time I do this.

3) We were lucky enough to be in town for an exhibit commemorating the centenary of the sinking of the Empress of Ireland, commonly called "Canada's Titanic". She went down in the St Laurence Seaway within 14 minutes on May 29th, 1914. A sign near the end of the exhibit goes over reasons why this disaster, which resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand people, is not well-remembered. One possible reason is that her passengers were not as famous -- although Henry Irving's son Laurence died with his wife, also an actor. The most likely reason is that Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo one month less a day later, and the world slid into war.

4) I was puzzled by a number of packsacks dotting the exhibits, usually brightly coloured with things pasted to them. It wasn't until I reached the second floor that I realized they were part of the Field Trip Project, a collaboration between children and artists in both Japan and British Columbia. British Columbia, of course, shares the spectres of tsunamis and earthquakes, but there is a special connection with the Japanese tsunami of 2011 and British Columbians, who began finding debris from the disaster on their shorelines as the ocean currents swept it across the Pacific.

The packsacks are the kind worn by Japanese schoolchildren. Some of the art on the packsacks is about the results of the tsunami, and others have chosen to address personal or political issues. This exhibit was unexpected and moving.

As we left, I managed one more furtive glance up the elevator shaft which was glowing with midday summer sunshine from the offices above. To my relief, no one was there.

Daytime viewing

I've blogged about ghosts before:  ghosts in houses I've been in, my husband's dream encounter with his recently deceased mother, and, most unnerving of all, a haunting by someone who is still alive.  Do I believe in ghosts?  Let's just say I've never actually seen one, nor do I particularly want to.  But I will admit that one of my guilty pleasures is Celebrity Ghost Stories on the Biography Channel.  I guess I don't mind other people's experiences of the paranormal.  Frankly, I feel rather the same about family weddings -- they're great if they're happening to someone else's family...

I've just had a birthday recently and a rather ghoulish theme emerged in the presents I was given.  This was not by design; the Resident Fan Boy has found it simpler to consult a rather ancient wish list I set up at Amazon.ca, and thus I was rather startled to receive an old Granada Television anthology of ghost stories first transmitted in the early eighties entitled Shades of Darkness and the audiobook version of The Woman in Black.

Just as well the days are getting longer because there was no way I'd be working through these at night.

So I settled myself down with the DVD which features six stories, and discovered I'd remembered two of them well (which was why it was on my wish list), one vaguely, and the other three not all.  These are very old-fashioned ghost stories, none of them set any later than the 1940s, and filmed in the leisurely detailed way  which is verboten these days when the greatest crime of all is to keep anyone waiting.  The two I remembered the best were the two I found the creepiest:  The Intercessor, based on a short story by May Sinclair, with John Duttine (above) encountering the pitiful spectre of a little girl , and Afterward, based on a short story by Edith Wharton about a ghost which isn't revealed to be a ghost -- until afterward...

*Shudder*

About six years after these stories appeared on television, some bright spark came up with the idea of dramatizing The Women in Black, an 1983 novel by Susan Hill, for British television --- on Christmas Eve, of course.  (Is this a British thing?  Why does their Christmas programming involve vampires, murder mysteries and Doctor Who?)  Being a Canadian, I didn't see this production until a year or two later (and definitely not at Christmas), but I remember being scared rigid by it.  I don't remember being quite so frightened by anything else on television with the possible exception of the Gulf War.

Based on the memory of that, I headed off to an early evening show of the latest incarnation of The Woman in Black starrng Daniel Radcliffe, having made a pact with Friend With Whom I Have Coffee.  (I figured this film might be a bit too intense for younger daughter.)

 I understand that many showings have turned into adolescent scream-fests.  I'm happy to report that this was not the case where we were, although FWWIHC and I may have cried out involuntarily from time to time while futilely attempting to climb into our medium popcorn bags.  For most of the flick, I coped by watching the action through my fleece top, and concentrating on the anachronisms (example:  death certificates would not have been typed; I'm a family historian -- I know about death certificates), and clinging to them like lifelines.  At one point, I willed myself to imagine the film crew in the haunted nursery with Daniel Radcliffe, anything to take myself out of the story.

So yeah, the movie was scary. FWWIHC told me, as we worked on suppressing our shivers during the drive home, that she would definitely not be taking her three daughters who range in ages from eleven to fifteen.  Smart move.  I've met her daughters. No point in giving them more ideas. They share a macabre sense of humour.  At least, I think they're joking...

By the end of the week, I'd calmed down a bit and wondered if the 1989 production (which stars, ironically enough, a young Adrian Rawlins who would later portray Daniel Radcliffe's father in the Harry Potter movies) was indeed as scary as I remembered.  I found it on YouTube of course and spent a cold afternoon watching it.  Like Shades of Darkness, the story-telling is at a slower pace, aimed at viewers from an era of  longer attention spans and perhaps a lower threshold of squeamishness. It's a quite different story from the current movie, set in a later time and featuring an ending that doesn't resemble that of the film in the slightest. (And the book is something else again, by the way.)

I found it creepy but not quite as terrifying as I remembered.  Until I walked into the kitchen and glanced out into our neighbour's backyard and saw someone standing by the fence....

It was a sagging line of coloured pennants which had somehow tricked my eyes.  I fixed myself a warm drink and sat down until my heart stopped pounding.

The episodes of Shades of Darkness are also available on YouTube.  Take a look if you have a taste for that kind of thing.  But I'd recommended viewing them in the daylight.  With someone in the house.  Alive, that is.

The doppelgänger effect

A traffic jam isn't all that bad when viewed from a double-decker. You can see what's going on (more illegal left-hand turns than you can shake a stick at), and it's air-conditioned. This trip was marred somewhat by a German group of seven people taking up the twelve front seats and talking loudly while they lounged, but younger daughter and I were enjoying our elevated view nonetheless.

Sitting further back gave me an excellent view of anyone climbing up from the lower deck, and when a ten-year-old boy emerged from the stairwell, looking exactly like a family member who I know is now nearly thirty, I managed to stifle an audible gasp. It was a good thing that I was busy holding my breath, for the young boy was followed by his father, a dead ringer for the much younger version of the person I've come to believe hates me more than anybody else in the world.

Hate is a peculiar emotion. I refuse to believe that there is anybody that is loved by everyone, despite what you may read in obituaries and testimonials; we all have people who dislike us to varying degrees of intensity. However, the few times I've been aware of someone's enmity, I've always been surprised. Not that I'm such a likable person (although I am...really...), but because in each case the person expressing antipathy is never someone I know well. Hatred seems like such an intimate sentiment, but I think for it to truly work, it needs to be based on lack of knowledge. It is hard to hate someone we truly know well; understanding may not promote love, but it dilutes hatred. The fellow-who-wasn't-the-fellow-on-the-bus has never told me what I've done to earn his antagonism. It's probably far easier to go on hating me than to explain why. I suspect it's rooted more in something he's been told, and possibly in my resemblance to someone else. I know in my own case, that when I feel instinctive disinclination to a person, it's invariably because they remind me of someone who has angered or hurt me.

Once I got over the shock of this doppelgänger, I remembered five other spooky incidents connected with my bête noire:

1. My awareness that there was a problem came quite swiftly. Essentially, bête noire was speaking to me when I left Victoria with my new husband, and not speaking to me when I returned a year later. It took a few social gatherings to realize that this was a campaign, and when the usual measures failed to thaw him, I sought professional advice and finally resolved to ignore him back. This had the almost humourous effect of making him disappear completely, so hard had he been working on freezing me out. Things deteriorated from there.

Bête noire attended the same church as the Resident Fan Boy, and it was in that church that it dawned on me that this was a whole new kind of detestation. When I attended service with the RFB, I realized that the sinking feeling that took over my stomach coincided not when I caught sight of BN, but a few minutes before. I actually seemed to be able to sense the moment he had entered the building. I went from bewilderment to fearfulness. I mean, this was downright creepy.

2. It got creepier over the course of the next year. The Resident Fan Boy and I were shopping on the third floor of a department store one Saturday afternoon, when I was suddenly hit with the same feeling of dread dropping through my belly. When we left the building, and started up the street, we almost ran smack into BN. As usual, he greeted my husband and ignored me.

3. When the sensation hit me a few weeks later, I was at my own church and preparing to meet the RFB to attend the christening tea of one of his godsons. "Is (BN) going to be there?" I asked nervously. "No," he replied. My gut knew better. He was.

4. The Resident Fan Boy and I attended a show at the Royal Theatre. By this time, of course, I knew what the stomach-drop meant. We got off the bus, and I knew BN would be attending, so watched out carefully. There he was, talking with his brothers. We slipped in another door.

5. Finally, during a city-wide bus strike, I was walking home through a neighbourhood not far from where BN lived. By now, I knew that the warning sensation meant a sighting within the half-hour and was ready to avert my eyes and cross the street.

I've experienced the "doppelgänger effect" once before, as well. I was more relieved than anybody when BN and his family got posted overseas. Imagine my horror when, strolling into town on the West Bay Walk one late autumn afternoon at sunset, I found myself staring into the malevolent eyes of BN's double: same sort of clothes, same posture, same manner of walking. However, I knew BN was thousands of miles away, on another continent. When I got home, I made a note of the time (December 16th, 4:32 Pacific Standard Time). If there was any significance to this sighting, it has not yet been revealed to me.

Sitting on a double-decker bus years later, I didn't look back. I had not the slightest inclination. I've written about hauntings before. I think, given my druthers, I'd rather be haunted by the dead, who seem, on the whole to have less ill will.

Ghosts of September

I've been leafing through my journals for a glimpse of past Septembers as my days on NaBloPoMo draw to a close, particularly appropriate as the NaBloPoMo "theme" for October is "haunted". I've discovered the hard way that I shouldn't do this before bedtime; the past of John Mortimer, even the slaughter of the Romanovs, is a good prelude to sleep while my own past keeps me awake.

The last time I did this exercise (both NaBloPoMo and journal-review) was in February, that frozen little limbo in the dead of winter that seems to go on forever. September is different, a inexorable engine of transition, being in many ways the true beginning of the year. Fluttering back into my own past, I found my daughters plunging into the unknowns of new schools, the struggle of adjusting to new homes, new neighbourhoods, new cities. I relived the starts of my pregnancies (both confirmed in September), and the first hospitalization that led to my father-in-law's final slide into death. I remembered other crises: an abortion in the family, and my own marriage trembling precariously on the brink. It isn't all Sturm und Drang, but September never has been a month for eager anticipation; it's more a gauntlet to be got through, so one can lick one's wounds in October.

Since my mind is on ghosts and September, let me keep a promise I made in August. At that time, I wrote about elder daughter's encounters with her paternal grandmother who died three years before elder daughter was born. I was inclined to believe my daughter's story and here's why: Less than twenty-four hours after my mother-in-law died, the Resident Fan Boy had a vivid dream in the early hours of a September morning. His mother came to his bedside, as she used to do when he was a small boy in the rectory, except this time her breathing was laboured as it had been in the hospital during her final week.
"I'll be dead in three days," she told him, "but I'll be out in the living room if you need me."

The Resident Fan Boy woke with a start, desperately needing to go to the bathroom, but terrified of passing by the living room in our small apartment...

Three hundred and sixty-four days later, on the eve of the anniversary of my mother-in-law's death, I too was awoken in the wee sma' hours -- by a very large moth which "strafed" me, zooming from one ceiling corner of our bedroom, down right past my ear so I could hear the small motor sound of its wings, then up to the other side of the ceiling. It did this about four or five times until I wailed in terror, waking the Resident Fan Boy. I peeped out from my refuge under the covers and noted uneasily that the time on the alarm clock was the exact hour of my mother-in-law's passing. Then I mused over the coincidence of "moth" and "mother" beginning with the same letters. She never liked me much....

Well. So much for September. As I've said before, my comfort level is really about two posts per week, so I'll be leaving NaBloPoMo for now, and see if I actually accomplish those things I've neglected while posting daily. Seeing as I've been working with short months first, I plan to "NaBloPoMo" it again in April 2010.

Uninvited ghosts

Woman and Baby with Ghost(s)
Originally uploaded by meowhous

I've just finished listening to an audio-book in which a young boy's mother has vanished. He is certain she is dead because he senses her in things like candles. "People don't hang around without their bodies unless they're dead," he explains reasonably.

This reminded me of my eldest daughter when she was four. She was frequently visited by the spectre of her paternal grandmother who only spoke to her once to say: "Do you know who I am?" My daughter replied, of course --- she'd seen the picture on the mantle. (My mother-in-law died three years before elder daughter was born.) She mentioned this in the off-handed way children mention these sort of things, and I battled not to show the shudder descending through my body. Something about the words and the circumstances rang true, and it would be just like my late mother-in-law to hang around. She had an unshakable faith in her own indispensability, and both my husband and I had unsettling experiences after her death, which I'll tell you about some other time.

Later, when elder daughter was thirteen, she gave me a little more detail. She said her grandmother would be sitting in the rocking chair in her bedroom, smiling pleasantly and watching her granddaughter play. The rocking chair had belonged to my sister-in-law, a gift from her parents when her first son was born; the rocker had been passed on to us when she left the country. When we moved, I donated the chair to the Unitarian Church, which would not have pleased my devoutly Anglican mother-in-law.

Elder daughter told me her grandmother only appeared if the Resident Fan Boy was in the house, and faded when anybody came upstairs. She stopped her visits altogether when the RFB started a series of secondments to Ottawa in 1998, which had him away from home for three-week periods, broken by three-day jet-lagged weekends. Father-in-law began making appearances shortly after his death in 1999; elder daughter would see him leaning on our front yard gate, something else she told me at the time in a matter-of-fact tone. I had no reason to doubt her. I felt him enter the living-room one evening and said calmly: "Hello, Edward." The feeling passed, and we moved to Hades less than a year later. Elder daughter said she was always waiting for her maternal grandfather to show up, but as we learned the year she was thirteen, he was still alive then, so not prone to hang around without his body. Now my daughter is seventeen and he is dead, I doubt somehow that he'll show up, unless he's visiting younger daughter and she doesn't have the words to tell us...

I'm not sure whether I believe in ghosts or not. I've had enough creepy experiences to make me wonder, and know plenty of intelligent people (such as my daughter, my sister, and even my mother, among others) who say without a hint of melodrama, that they've seen, felt or heard something.

I like to push such thoughts from my mind, particularly when I'm house-sitting a large old home by myself, except for younger daughter. I've one more night in this particular house and the Resident Fan Boy flies in from Hades to help me house-sit the second residence tomorrow (which only has an ancient dial-up computer, so you may not hear from me until I'm hauled back to Hades in about three weeks). Last night was a relatively cool evening after a run of unusually hot days for Victoria (including a 40 humidex, fer Gawd's sake; Victoria never gets a humidex above 33... and smog????), so I slipped into the hot tub under the Garry Oaks, and listened for the Symphony Splash as the sun set, because often the music drifts for miles if the wind is right. Unfortunately, someone was having some sort of rave closer by, so all I could hear were the rhythmic thumps and crunches of the techno stuff.

After a short soak, I drifted around the house in the routine that has emerged during our stay: checking the intercom by the front door which has been crackling like a popcorn-maker since the worst of the heat-wave, despite everything I've unplugged; checking the side door which has mysteriously unlocked itself, despite my diligence, at least three times; drawing the blinds against the encroaching dark. Much later, I tuned the radio for company, and was gathering the courage to switch off the bed-side light, when I saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked and saw nothing and realized I was too weary to be scared. Haunt someone else, whoever and whatever you are, I thought, as I faded into sleep.