This Side of the Pond

A country with thousands of years’ worth of human infestation is bound to rack up ghost stories, from beheaded queens to translucent monks ringing bells that are no longer there. You can’t swing a cat in the UK without hitting a supposedly haunted pub, priory or stately home.

You’d have thought that, by now, we’d have collected more than enough spooky legends to keep even the most avid ghost hunter occupied, but apparently not. I stumbled across a new addition to the haunted library this week and I’m still trying to figure out who thought it was worthy of inclusion.

Though it’s only just appeared in a local UK newspaper, which contains a delightfully barmy section called “Weird Suffolk”, this tale actually dates back to 1976.

On a winter’s night, a local gentleman was making his way home from a church service. As he neared his house on the edge of the green, he glanced to the right to see a specter in all its glory. It was… a hedge.

“I was startled to see between me and the houses what appeared to be a leafless thorn hedge, waist high and covered in raindrops,” he is reported to have said.

Mr. Arthur Slater CBE knew very well, he said, that there was not a hedge where there was at that moment a hedge, for that section of the path was asphalt. That’s some impressive detective work already, but he wasn’t done yet.

Arthur looked to see if something might be casting a shadow, but all he could see was… a second hedge. He is not clear in his account whether the second hedge was otherworldly or a common garden shrub.

He swung his walking stick against the hedge – a perfectly sensible response – and saw the stems give way and felt resistance. This does rather suggest that what he’d done there was to attack a hedge for no reason and it makes me question how much communion wine he’d been allotted.

Arthur tried to grab the hedge, but said he could feel nothing. He then walked to his apartment, looked back and saw no hedge there after all.

Now, you’d expect the ghost hunting community to approach this tale with several grains of salt, or at least dismiss it as beneath their interest, but no. The Borderline Science Investigation Group suggested it was a “glimpse of the past” – a time slip through which Arthur was seeing a once-hedge that had been there at some point but wasn’t any more. Well, except when it was.

Arthur, intrigued by this idea, started to comb through old pictures and maps to see if a hedge had ever stood in that place. He does not appear to have been successful, shockingly.

This may not be the first story you’ll think of next time you’re sat round a campfire, but it was the first I’d heard of ghost objects. I’d assumed that only people and animals were able to return from the other side, largely because I didn’t know there was an other side for inanimate objects.

But it turns out we have plenty of haunted objects in the UK, for whatever such a claim could be worth. Senate House, for example, is an Art Deco building that houses the main library of the University of London and its eighth floor holds 13,000 books dedicated to the occult, which were gifted by paranormalist Harry Price in 1948. I’m sure the head librarian was thrilled.

Access to that floor is restricted because those books are about as haunted as it’s possible to be (you may take that statement as you wish). They whisper, float and conjure up apparitions, all of which must be terribly distracting for the students trying to write papers.

Then there is a rocking chair that belonged to Thomas Busby, a murderer who was executed in 1702 for killing his father-in-law. As they fitted the noose, he allegedly swore he would haunt anyone who sat in his favorite chair, which is exactly the kind of final thought you would expect a person to have.

The chair now hangs in a museum and is accused of involvement in a number of suspicious circumstances. For this reason, they have now hung it from the ceiling to be sure no innocent tourist comes to a sticky end.

Then you have the ancient Egyptian statue of Neb-Senu, stored for obvious reasons outside a museum in Manchester. And by “obvious”, I of course refer to the fact that Britain went through a stage of wandering round the world liking things and deciding to bring them home, which is fine when it’s from the souvenir stall but less so when it’s bits of someone else’s culture dating back millennia.

The statue (this one was thieved from a tomb) apparently used to rotate in its glass cage at night as though surveying its surroundings. There was even CCTV footage of it happening, much to the surprise of everyone who doesn’t believe in ghost objects.

It’s one of the only times there has been definitive proof of such a phenomenon, which makes it even more depressing to find out there was a sensible explanation: vibration from nearby traffic.

Last but not least, my favorite: the Great Bed of Ware, a tale worth telling for the name alone. It’s also an apt title, because this Tudor four-poster is big enough for eight people to sleep in and was built by a master carpenter for royal use.

The carpenter appears to be adamant on that last point. Now housed in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, he is said to still haunt the bed to punish any of the great unwashed who have the audacity to try to sleep on his masterpiece.

How much stock one should place in these stories is not something on which I feel qualified to speculate. On the other hand, I’ll sure be treating my hairbrush more kindly from now on.