Genii Locorum
I arrive at the house in late December. A hard frost lingers on the shaded circle of lawn before the front door, the bare branches of the surrounding trees scratching at the sky. It’s mid-afternoon and the light is fading rapidly, dusk crawling upwards from beneath the tall hedges that fringe the long driveway. The brick and flint façade seems less welcoming than the photographs on the website, taken in mid-summer; the stone mullions rather forbidding, their window-glass reflecting a steel-grey sky.
For most of the year the house is crowded and busy; three or four days a week the ground-floor rooms are open, and members of the public drift through, admiring 18th century dinner services and crewel work curtains from the reign of Charles I. But today is the last day of the season — no more visitors now until February.
The volunteers are welcoming. They take me to the kitchen, a lofty, brick-floored room with high windows, for tea and mince pies. There’s a black-leaded range, gleaming rows of copper pots, a scullery with deep sinks and angled draining boards. Plates huddle in the racks, cups are stacked on shelves, there are jars of currants and candied peel. A latched door leads to the courtyard, flagstones overlooked by dozens of blankly empty windows.
My companions are curious, wondering what tempted me to apply for the experiment. I’m honest about it — the money is good, and the house is beautiful. It’s not often that someone like me gets the opportunity to spend a week, alone, in a house like this, with its Tudor chimney pots and endless rooms. And the experiment intrigued me.
It’s said the house is haunted. But rumours and stories are just that, and I’ve been selected from dozens of applicants to investigate, or at least experience, what it has to offer in terms of uncanny noises and inexplicable draughts. The organisation wanted ‘an open-minded sceptic’ and I had to answer lots of questions before they chose me. I accept there are people who believe they’ve seen a ghost, or at least had an experience they’ve filed as paranormal in some way. I don’t think they’re lying, the people who report mysterious things, or at least, not all of them. In the same way that not everyone who sees a UFO or a cryptid is lying. What they’ve actually seen, or heard, of course, is another matter.
I’m shown to my room, unpack my things. When everyone has gone, I eat a solitary meal in the lamplit quiet of the kitchen, glancing now and then at the darkness of the courtyard as it presses against the windows. Nothing disturbs the silence. The house feels much larger now I’m alone, and I find myself straining to hear something — anything.
But there’s nothing to hear. The house is empty, but for me; the rooms deserted.
My days soon have a rhythm. I spend daylight hours roaming the house, examining each room in detail, sitting quietly to listen, or curled up on the library sofa, reading. That suits me best — there are other day rooms but they’re all a long way from the comfort of the kitchen. I read about the house’s history, about the gardens; local folklore, the stories of the village and surrounding woods and hills. I write my Christmas cards and letters to my friends and post them in the Victorian pillar box at the foot of the drive. I go to bed early, in order to rise at midnight, when I dress quickly in the cold air, slip my feet into felted slippers, and hurry down the long gallery, pausing for a moment to look out over the empty courtyard, where all is still, shadows lurking blacker than a raven’s wing. Tonight, pale moonlight fills the rooms on the western side, their curtains undrawn against the night. I stand motionless, listening. The harder I listen the more I hear my own breath, the movement of air in my inner ear, my heartbeat. It’s time to go downstairs.
There are said to be two ghosts. One is a Pale Lady, seen hurrying down the stairs in the costume of the 1650s, or so it’s claimed; a Civil War widow rushing to hear the fate of her only son. You might expect her to be in her nightgown as she only walks after midnight, but apparently not. There is a woman — see her there, in the portrait at the head of the stairs — who almost fits the timeline, her husband killed at Naseby, her ringlets whitened overnight — but she had three sons and they all outlived her, according to the parish records. The Pale Lady must, surely, be a Victorian invention. Certainly she hasn’t yet walked this week; perhaps she doesn’t like an audience. I sit for a while in the staircase hall, perched on a tapestry-upholstered chair, gazing upwards, straining my ears. There are Footsteps, too, or so they say. Whether they belong to the Pale Lady or not is undisclosed. That’s one of the reasons I’m alone in the house. No confusion caused by a team of ghost-hunters with night scopes and devices to measure fluctuations in temperature, just one woman in black leggings and a fleece, hands tucked into my pockets, watching, waiting.
I’ve often wondered why ghosts are assumed to walk at night. In life, they’ve surely spent the small hours sleeping. Why then spend eternity walking in darkness? This is just one of the questions I ask myself as I wait in the caliginous stillness.
The staircase hall is half-panelled to above head height in dark squares of oak. A pair of built-in dressers, beeswax-rubbed to a soft sheen, hold silver candlesticks and slipware dishes; a great blue and white porcelain bowl full of dried lavender and rosebuds, scenting the cold night air with their delicate linen-cupboard smell.
Heraldic stained glass looks down from a high window below the smoke-stained plaster of the ceiling, while the staircase twists upwards in three sturdy wooden turns, wide enough for two to walk abreast. The dark portraits in their gloomy gilded frames turn their pale oval faces to the room, eternally gazing, laced uncomfortably into their stays, tricked out in fur and velvet, with wigs dark or powdered, set in long curls or teased to complex height. The baluster spindles are turned oak, the heavy forthright newel posts loom over the room.
Almost disguised against the panelling, a door leads to the library, the smell of calf-skin bindings, the faint glimmer of gilt-blocked titles. From there, a window looks out across a frosted swathe of lawn. Here it’s even quieter; no clock ticks, no floorboards creak as the house sleeps in the moonlight.
The rooms are dressed for Christmas, with heavy swags of greenery and crimson ribbons. At the foot of the stairs stands a battered circular table, made of elm from the estate. The table top has been scratched, scorched, stained by carelessly placed wine glasses, then polished back to respectability over the last two centuries, and holds a battered silver ice-bucket full of sand, supporting a white-painted, leafless branch, strung with the crystal drops of a long-broken chandelier.
A door from the staircase hall leads to a wide, oak-panelled passageway, tenebrous, night-haunted; silent save for the slow ticking of the long case clock that slices time into endless seconds. A wide grid of moonlight falls onto the flagstones, sharp black shadows cast by the frame of the mullioned window, its broad carved sill above shoulder height. A supple arch of silvery Hookland stone defines the front door, five feet wide and seven tall, riveted with ancient rivets, the threshold worn by four hundred and fifty years of footsteps. To the right, up one step, the panelled partition opens into a large, high-ceilinged room, once the great hall. Floored in wide oak boards spread with Turkey carpets, it’s demoted to a sitting room, now, in these duller days. Three enormous Knole sofas, all turned knobs and tassels, richly upholstered in scarlet jacquard, form two right angles in front of the vast stone fireplace, where the embers of the fire still glow faintly, safely corralled behind a tarnished brass fireguard. Another wide swathe of moonlight, similarly cross-hatched by the window leads, pools on the wooden floor. A door in the far wall leads on to morning room, breakfast room, dining room and Lady Anne’s Parlour; rooms large and small, found up a step or down two, along an awkward, dog-legged corridor.
I’m not sensitive to atmosphere, particularly. I rarely find anything spooky, would happily sleep in a graveyard providing my bed was warm and comfortable. As the weeks goes on, however, I feel more attuned to the atmosphere of each room, the quality of the shadows, a breath of air against my cheek, the distant creak of a shifting floorboard. The clock in the hallway ticks slowly on. I yawn, and shiver — it isn’t warm, here in the December night. It’s almost the turning of the year, the pivot of midwinter approaches.
Getting up, I walk swiftly to the sitting room, where I kneel for a moment on the window seat to peer out at the moonlit grounds. The ruler-straight gravelled driveway leads past the looming darkness of the yews that crowd around the church, its tower just visible. I glance back over my shoulder, into the shadows beyond the comfort of those scarlet sofas, their colour drained in the monochrome light. The sitting room is the only room where I feel anything remotely approaching discomfort. It’s too large to be welcoming, perhaps, with its high coffered ceiling and proudly displayed antlers of long-dead deer. An immense tree, hung with red felt stars and antique glass baubles, fills the corner by the door like an illustration on a Christmas card, adding the smell of pine resin to the hint of woodsmoke in the air.
Nothing in here seems disquieting, and yet there’s — something. A subtle draught, perhaps, or a change in the flow of the room. There’s a blocked doorway, they told me; across the room, behind the panelling. Until four hundred years ago or so you could get to the kitchens that way, but now you have to go the long way round.
Get Jack Fraser’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Once, I lived in a house where the upstairs had been reconfigured in a conversion. My flatmate and I often walked into a wall where there had originally been a door, despite moving there decades after the changes had been made.
Can a house have memories? Do brick and stone record events?
The sitting room, naturally, is the location for sightings of the second ghost. Just as traditional as the Pale Lady, it takes the form of a robed or hooded figure, and glides across the room from the far corner beside the fireplace, where the blocked-up doorway is supposed to be. Eight hundred years ago there was a priory here, and the figure is assumed to be a monk. There are tales of sightings going back almost to when the house was built.
… My wyfe’s complaints were such that on St Lucy’s day I had the men brick up the doorway from whence the Hooded Man walketh. None believed this would stop his wanderings and so it proved. My wyfe now refuses to enter the great room and keeps to her chamber above stairs.
… All four of us were up betimes and waiting in the great room. At first my lady did laugh at the notion of spirits but none of us were comfortable with our wait. I will not speak of what we saw.
… Lately the maids have been all of a quiver with stories of the ‘Monk’ and I have had to speak quite sharply to them. Jane Wilson was reduced to hysterics on Thurs. although none of them claim to have actually seen it.
… Well, of course my brother used to talk about it when we were children, but I’ve never really seen anything. I’ll tell you something, though — none of the dogs will go in there.
… One of the younger boys asked about the ‘man without a face’ and got quite upset when Richard explained it was just a story. I didn’t like to say I’d seen it myself. You wouldn’t get me sitting in there alone at night, I can tell you.
I admit find these hints and suggestions far more disconcerting than the story of the Pale Lady.
I unfold a blanket from the sofa closest to the door and sit down. I leave my feet unwrapped to keep myself from dozing. Nothing makes you drowsy quicker than warm feet. And it won’t do to fall asleep, or even to doze, as I have responsibilities, a task to complete. I might be sceptical, but I’m determined to do a good job here, however odd that job might be.
I think about the morning. I’ll spend another day alone, unless someone comes up from the village to see how I’m doing. I’ve cautiously questioned the volunteers, asking whether they have ever seen — anything — while working in the house. No one says ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit’, it’s all more euphemistic. Have they ever had any … experiences… that were hard to explain? Well, no one’s seen the Pale Lady. As to the other things, several people think they might have heard — something? One woman admits she’s unwilling to go into the great hall in the evening.
I must have dozed, despite all my efforts. I jerk awake to the sound of the long case clock striking three, the chimes echoed a moment later by the deeper, fainter sound of the church clock. Three am, the deadest hour. The atmosphere in the room seems deeper, somehow, older, darker. Perhaps I dreamt something unsettling, something I don’t quite remember? All this creeping about in the dark is bound to affect your dreams.
The moon has shifted, and the room is heavy with shadow. In the corner beyond the fireplace, the darkness seems to thicken, expectant. I hear something, now; a strange low groaning, scraping sound that makes me hold my breath. Is it colder, or is that my imagination?
The figure passes through the wainscoting and into the room, dragging slowly across the floor, through the corner of the furthest sofa and onwards towards the window. It looks nothing like I’d imagined. It’s not monk-like in the slightest. I can see it very clearly despite the gloom, although it doesn’t glow or gleam. Despite its ability to move through walls it is disconcertingly substantial in appearance; some seven feet tall, it most resembles a post, a carved wooden post; its robes an illusion, its head a strange flat oval. It reminds me of a photograph I once saw of a wooden idol, extracted from a peat bog in Denmark, where it had lain for more than two thousand years.
It is far more ancient and terrible than any ghostly monk could ever be.
The dragging, scraping sound is louder, now, as it progresses slowly across the room. It turns its blank and featureless face towards me. Eyeless it may be, yet I feel the weight of its gaze, and the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up as my skin tightens with fear. A pure and nameless terror, paralysing; my heart thumping so hard I fear I may pass out.
I smell woodsmoke, hear the crackling of a vast and greedy fire, glimpse a landscape of wild unknowing spaces, unburdened by stone buildings. The figure pauses for a moment and appears to consider me before moving onward, the dull dragging, scraping sound fading again as it reaches the window and passes through the pale stone and out into the night.
For a moment I am unable to move or even think. Should I follow? Shuddering, I force myself to the window. Is it out there, moving ever onward? I peer unwillingly through the cold glass.
Nothing stirs. It has vanished, thank god, returned to wherever it came from, back into the unknowing past.
The atmosphere in the room returns to normal, my breathing slows. My brain dances unwillingly around the memory of the thing. It’s in the nature of the human mind to seek explanations but I have nothing to offer. Whatever I saw, though, it’s surely no ghost or revenant, no phantasm or wraith. More solid and less explicable, older and more dreadful.
