HOUSING CRISIS
How haunted homes are falling prey to developers
In April 2014 a group of wealthy Scottish property developers posed outside the derelict Birkwood Castle at Lesmahagow in Lanarkshire and announced their plans for converting the building and its grounds into a luxury hotel, boutique and up-market housing. Over the next six months, promoters of the scheme openly played up the haunted reputation of the 155-year-old mansion as a publicity gimmick for advertising their plans. But now a large segment of the building lies in ruins following its sudden collapse on 21 July, with the aggrieved ghosts of Birkwood Castle getting the blame.
The dismal pile of rubble and what remains of Birkwood Castle are a melancholy sight indeed, making the headline carried by the Glasgow Herald on 28 October 2014, ‘Haunted hotel plan stands more than a ghost of a chance’ now seem like one of the grimmer jokes of the Fates. Formerly used as a hospital for mentally disabled children until 2002, the gothic-style mansion, set in 86 acres of parkland, was precisely the kind of derelict building around which one would expect legends and ghost stories to cluster. Suggestions that angry spirits have literally brought the house down – with a sudden noise like ‘an explosion’, according to neighbours – prompted headlines such as ‘Wrecked by ghosts’ ( The Sun, 8 August 2015) and ‘Did ghosts cause this castle to collapse?’ ( Daily Mail, 8 August 2015).
The person responsible for voicing the theory of development-wrecking ghosts at Birkwood appears to be Tom Robertson, a member of a local ghost hunting group. Mr Robertson speculated spirits “might be taking a hand in matters in causing a wall to collapse” because “they were being evicted from their home”. Recent years had seen claims of ghosts of former child patients returning, including a boy called Michael haunting the grand spiral staircase where he supposedly fell to his death, along with the eerie sound of a young girl’s voice heard crying and singing within empty rooms. Visitors and former staff reported smelling phantom cigar smoke, electrical disturbances and mysterious footsteps. It was even claimed the figure of a doctor (un-named) who suffered a fatal heart attack at the hospital was appearing at windows, a rare example of a medical man coming back as a phantom. In 2013, ghost hunters Glasgow Paranormal Investigations made an episode of the series Haunted Planet in the building, with the film crew saying it was one of the most active locations in which they had recorded – although this is a standard line routinely recited at almost every haunted location whenever a spot of filming takes place these days. Presciently, the rash and rather cavalier exploitation of the haunted reputation of Birkwood Castle and other sites by developers and publicity agents was noted in 2014 by Eric
Olsen, editor of Haunted America website, who wrote: “Surely, none of these owners are naive enough to think there won’t be paranormal ramifications from their developments.”
The theory that renovation work may stir up manifestations in old buildings is one that has been seriously discussed in the past (see Renovation Hauntings by Peter McCue FT268:30-35). I have even heard the hypothesis aired that living residents simply thinking about structural change may galvanise the mechanism behind a haunting, producing noises and apparitions. However, without any evidence as to the cause of the sudden collapse of Birkwood Castle, such ideas are unlikely to cause any more than a scintilla of a shiver in anyone contemplating changes to a historic property; there is plenty of local testimony that Birkwood Castle was in a bad state of repair and the collapse was thus foreseeable. Daily Herald, 24 July 2015; ‘One of Scotland’s most haunted buildings to become a boutique hotel’ Sunday Herald, 17 April 2014; Daily Mail, 18 April 2014; ‘Iconic Haunted Sites becoming luxury hotels as paranormal tourism spreads’ Haunted America website, 21 April 2014; http://www.americasmost-haunted.com/paranormal/high-endparanormal-tourism-is-about/#.Vdn2pYeFPIU.
However, the idea that wrathful ghosts may be coming back to wreck a building to thwart property developers is certainly a striking one, hitherto largely confined to romantic fiction and folklore, particularly in Celtic lands (in Ireland there have often been stories of misfortunes and obstacles dogging road schemes running near ancient sites and fairy trees). There have been a few alleged cases of ghost-damaged buildings recorded in the last 100 years, principally by fires in poltergeist outbreaks (for example Pitmilly House, Scotland, in 1944) but aside from ghostly arson, there is really nothing that compares to the supreme destruction claimed at Birkwood Castle.
For example, the ghostly Black Dog of Torringdon, Devon, allegedly knocked down a wall in the 1920s. The ghost of an ostler nicknamed ‘Spider’, who supposedly suffocated up the chimney of the Bear Inn at Stock, Essex, in about 1914, was blamed for putting a huge crack in the stonework after attempts to retrieve his sooty bones in the early 1960s (see stories regaled by James Wentworth Day in A Ghost Hunter’s Game Book, 1958, Essex Ghosts, 1974, and East Anglian Magazine, January 1962). A persistent female apparition that haunted Abbots Langley Rectory in Hertfordshire in the 1940s was held liable for making the fireplace fall out at intervals, thwarting all efforts at repair (see A Gazetteer of British Ghosts, 1971, by Peter Underwood). The Black Monk of Pontefract (active 1966-68) made cracks in the kitchen ceiling still visible a decade later (see Poltergeist! A Study of Destructive Haunting, 1981, by Colin Wilson).
Of course, whether such stories arise from an inordinate love of lying, a desire to please audiences, or are attributed to a paranormal cause (actual or believed) is a matter not easy
to determine. But the idea that incorporeal phantoms might be demolishing stone structures is certainly a very ancient belief, the classic example being the vengeful spirit of St Thomas a Becket blamed for knocking down parts of the Tower of London in 1241, decades after his assassination on the orders of Henry II.
As an alternative to ghosts, one might attribute the destruction to what Charles Fort called “wild talents” (the title of his last book), mysterious physical forces emanating from the living. Fort toyed with the idea of objects responding to emotions and anger in the community after a poltergeist case at Hornsey in 1921 in which lumps of coal exploded. noting a spate of similar reports across Britain and France over the next year, he observed: “In this period there was much disaffection among British coal miners. There was a suspicion that miners were mixing dynamite into coal. But, whether we think that the miners had anything to do with these explosions, or not, suspicions against them, in England, were checked by the circumstances that no case of the finding of dynamite in coal was reported, and that there were no explosions of coal in the rough processes of shipments [..] The coal in all these cases was coal from British coal mines. The newspapers that told of these explosions told of the bitterness and vengefulness of British coal miners, enraged by hardships and reduced wages, uncommon in even their harsh experiences [..] There’s a shout
of vengefulness, in Hyde Park, London – far away, in Gloucestershire, an ancient mansion bursts into flames.” (Fort, Wild Talents, 1931, ch.15).
Aside from speculation, the Birkwood Castle story perhaps provides a contemporary illustration of how ghost sightings, experiences and stories may reflect the collective concerns, fears and prejudices present within communities (See Appearances of the Dead, 1982 by RC Finucane). The irate ghosts of Birkwood may be perceived as a symbol expressing the wider feelings of a community opposed to change and development or the exploitation of its traditions and beliefs for commercial ends. It is notable that there has been little sympathy for the developers expressed by locals around Birkwood Castle, and opposition to development is often being expressed among many communities around Britain wherever treasured landmarks, old mansions, valued green fields and ancient inns and pubs are being sacrificed as part of the UK’s speculative housing bubble.
Sadly, in the last decade and a half, some marvellous haunted locations have either been lost to developers or turned over to private hands. I remember arriving at the historic House of Detention in Clerkenwell with a History Channel film crew in 2000 just as developers were moving in, following a swift repossession and transfer of the old jail and museum to private concerns. Another loss was Battersea Old House in London, maintained for many years by the formidable Mrs Stirling, a devout spiritualist who penned Ghosts Vivisected (1958). All manner of wistful spectres were said to manifest, and even sit in their antique favourite chairs, but Battersea Old House was, alas, converted into functional and characterless flats in 2011.
Some notable haunted educational establishments have been sold off for housing, such the historic Belstead House which stood at the end of the appropriately named Sprite’s Lane near Ipswich, with its dark and haunted Judge’s Room in which I spent a memorable lone investigation on 3 March 2007. I neither saw nor felt any ghosts, but my vigil was rewarded with the numinous experience of watching the moonlight fading away, dimming with the creeping shadow of a total lunar eclipse engulfing the entire globe of the Moon that very same night. Alas, no bloodstained ghost walked as the Moon turned a ruddy, copper hue.
At Battle in Sussex, another sad loss for the diversity of education was the closure of Pyke House residential college. Close to the site of the Battle of Hastings and the ‘Battle Triangle’ where three identical apparitions of a smiling girl have been reported (see article by Andrew Green FT67:47, Feb 1993) parts of Pyke House dated back to the 15th century. It was not only haunted, but also the place hosting the UK’s first official evening classes in ghost hunting and parapsychology in 1971, which continued into the 21st century.
Haunted and mysterious landscapes are also under threat. Occasionally a campaign to prevent their destruction succeeds, at least temporarily, as around Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott, where in 2003 the campaign ‘Save Scott’s Countryside’ challenged attempts to spread bland housing all across an area of great beauty and environmental sensitivity in the central part of the Tweed Valley.
Such threats are increasingly evoking strong feelings in communities, with concern for the ancient dead being raised by objectors. Just recently, the website Spooky Isles has led the way in encouraging people to protest directly to developers Countryside Properties of Brentwood concerning plans to drive a road and develop the Bronze Age and (possibly Iron Age) cemetery at Fornham All Saints in Suffolk (See FT325:18-19). The campaign has been spurred on by the discovery of a suppressed 2013 archæological report that mentions numerous finds suggesting multi-period occupation, hundreds of flint objects, fire pits, a Bronze Age cremation urn, human remains and mysterious palisaded enclosure.
not far away, at Abbas Hall on the Suffolk/ Essex border, protests are also being renewed about the revival of plans to build a housing estate in an area immortalised on canvas by the artist Thomas Gainsborough. ( East Anglian Daily Times, 15 May 2015). This scheme is close to the site of Abbas Hall, a notoriously haunted site of the 1950s that received national attention on account of its Grey Lady (see ‘Alarm at Abbas’ in Some Unseen Power, 1985, by Philip Paul). In the 1970s stories circulated of the ghosts of vengeful monks shaking and beating the cars of courting couples who rashly parked in the area on a certain night in October.
Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see how insurers react to the collapse of Birkwood Castle. Following this I predict it will not be long before claims of personal injuries inflicted by ghosts will be appearing elsewhere, in addition to claims for property damage.
Such claims are not beyond the bounds of possibility. In 1958 a George Hesketh sued for personal injuries suffered in the course of running away from ghosts at Bush House, a derelict mansion in Pembrokeshire, after he and his son had gone there to lay floors. The two men retreated into a local authority school next door and Mr Hesketh’s claim for a fractured skull arose as a result of him falling down an unlit staircase inside. Damages of £1,376 formed an agreed settlement after the judge Lord Justice Salmon acknowledged that the two men had “heard or thought they heard supernatural noises and saw or thought they saw a ghost”. ( Daily Express, 28 March 1958). Certainly, if one case is established to the standard required by law, it may well have all manner of interesting implications, not just for property developers but for other personal injury claims, as well as potentially prompting revision of the Occupier’s Liability Act 1957, the Defective Premises Act 1972 and other legislation.