The haunted factory
RAY NEWMAN grew up in the shadow of the British Cellophane factory in Bridgwater, Somerset, and heard stories of its ghosts. Thirty years on, he decided to find out more.
The factory opened in 1937 as a joint project between the French firm that owned the rights to the process for massmanufacturing cellulose film and British textile company Courtaulds. It was built on fields next to Sydenham House, a 16th century mansion with its own stock of strange tales, as recounted in Berta Lawrence’s 1973 book Somerset Legends. The Duke of Monmouth, she wrote, haunts a bedroom where he is said to have stayed before the Battle of Sedgemoor in July 1685. The room overlooked an oak tree, and some years later a member of the Perceval family was lifted by “some invisible spirit out of the chamber beyond his windowbars and, by levitation, set in the oak’s branches”. 1 The house was used by Courtaulds for corporate hospitality and, beyond the security boundary, hidden behind foliage, attained semi-legendary status among local children. I was taken to the garden once as a child and found it unsettling – the perfect setting for a timeslip.
I spent most of my childhood living within five minutes’ walk of the factory and its famous stink – it was often called ‘Smellophane’ – and my father worked there in the 1970s and 1980s, as did the parents of many of my peers. The first person to tell me a ghost story about it was my childhood best friend, whose father worked in the section dedicated to producing non-woven synthetic fabrics. I asked my friend if he remembered what he’d told me all those years ago and his reply was as follows: “Late one night, Dad saw someone in a checked shirt at the end of the production line. There wouldn’t have been many people about at that time, so he went to investigate – but the person had gone and the only door nearby was locked. The bloke couldn’t have gone anywhere else. It turned out someone from the other shift had died in just that spot (drowned in a cooling tank or dragged under the rollers) and had been wearing the same clothes as the figure Dad saw”.
As an eight-year-old I’d simply enjoyed shuddering at this story but I find myself wondering today if my friend’s father – quite a joker – might have been teasing him. My friend thinks not: “Mum said he was absolutely convinced at the time and quite shaken.”
I also remember a variant of this ‘drowned in a vat’ tale told by another school contemporary: a figure spotted on a high gantry, then apparently falling from the edge into a tank; emergency services called, the vessel drained, but no body found.
I asked my own father if he’d ever found working on the site unnerving. He talked about the general twitchiness of factory life, especially working nights, practically alone in vast, echoing spaces, and the long stretches of boredom between bouts of strenuous labour. But as to specifics, he said: “The only
experience I had was of something that passed through a corridor. It might have been that somebody opened a door and it was a cold chill or something… It was weird. It wasn’t something I saw, just felt.”
My younger brother suggested I get in touch with a friend of his who worked on the site in its final years, who wrote: “One of the machines there, called C2, killed a guy back the 1970s and it was definitely creepy in that area. He was pulled into a huge heated steamrolling press. There was no reverse mechanism and the firemen had to sledgehammer the machine apart to peel him out.”
My dad had a similar story from British Cellophane – strangely similar, you might say – about an operator who got cocky while threading a length of film through the moving parts of a machine. He was pulled into the workings and then, when the machine reached full speed, it “tore his limb right from his shoulder – voom! He dropped dead.” My suspicion is that these were scare stories, garbled and embellished as they spread, perhaps intended to reinforce the importance of safety procedures, or merely to wind up new recruits. The arm-ripping incident my father recounted of course happened ‘a few years’ before he joined the firm, like all good urban legends.
It’s hard to prove that something didn’t happen but I can say that I have not been able to find any record of any events like these in newspapers, even though relatively less gruesome accidents at the factory were reported. A painter died during construction of the plant; 2; a laboratory apprentice fell from a landing stage with no barrier and later died; 3 a foreman dropped dead while walking along a gantry; 4 and Raymond Culverwell set a legal precedent when a truck crushed his leg: being late back from his tea break, the Court of Appeal ruled, he was not entitled to compensation. 5 Gruesome incidents at other industrial sites were frequently covered, so the press were clearly interested.
My father has his own explanation, simultaneously more down-to-earth and scarier than any ghost: the factory, he says, was often dense with chemical fumes and he would frequently find himself wading in pools of toluene, a liquid solvent known to cause hallucinations. It’s easy to see how that might combine with the disorientation of shift work, and those grim tales, to generate unease. Though none of that explains how Perceval got into the oak tree.