Cine re-run?
One line in Alan Murdie’s column “The Romans in Britain: Part One” [ FT364:18-20] stood out for me: “Images drawn from the cinema and media are aiding and abetting the creation and experiences of Roman soldiers in York and other places”. This was enough to make me rethink my ideas about what I really saw during a ghostly encounter I had almost 20 years ago. It involved the 1970 film version of Wuther
ing Heights, and what I believe to have been a hallucinatory image of the actor Anna CalderMarshall. Let me explain.
It happened in May 1999, when I was working a nightshift in a Hampshire nursing home. At around 8.30pm, while walking from the kitchen, I briefly saw in the corner of my eye the image of a young girl in a long white dress running in the opposite direction from me, further up the corridor. I turned to look, but it was too late: the figure had turned a corner. As I ventured up the corridor, there was no one to be seen. Afterwards, I recalled how the figure’s motion was jerky, like the projected image of a Super 8mm film, where the frame rate does not match real time. I was aware that oth- ers had witnessed unexplained phenomena at the same spot, such as the sound of a child crying. On another occasion a resident’s electric shaver was found switched on, with no one in the room to activate it.
From the long white dress, I assumed that I had seen the ghost of a girl from the Victorian/Edwardian era. Researching at the local reference library, I discovered that in the 1950s there was a house on the site of the nursing home. The first floor of the house was on the same level as the corridor where I had seen the ghost-girl, but I could find no evidence in the census records of a young girl resident in the premises at any time from the Victorian period to the 1990s.
Fast forward to 2004: I got to the bottom of the mystery, or so I thought, through a chance encounter with someone who knew something about the last residents of the house before it was torn down in the mid1990s. I was told that an elderly couple occupied the premises, and once took care of their granddaughter while her mother endured a serious illness, which was eventually to claim her life. I was told that during her mother’s illness, the daughter was well cared for and loved by the grandparents, to the point where their house became almost home from home for her. No doubt she became attached to the place. Shortly after her mother’s death, the young girl was diagnosed with leukæmia and succumbed to this in 1991.
Because of this story, I believed that the ghost I witnessed was of this girl; that is until earlier this year, after viewing the Blu-ray of the 1970 movie
Wuthering Heights. When I first saw this movie on TV in 1989, one image became ingrained in my mind. It was during the scene at 1:40.02 where Heathcliff (Timothy Dalton) watches the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw (Anna Calder-Marshall) running away from him towards Hindley Earnshaw’s farmhouse. The ghost is wearing a white dress. I believe that the reason the image became so embedded in my mind was that, for me, it conveyed a powerful sense of how a ghost might indeed appear, in reality: the ethereal figure, running in an abstract, out-of-time motion. When I re-encountered this sequence, I realised she looked exactly like the ghostgirl in the nursing home – the position of the figure, the white dress, the out-of-time running motion. Then, when I later read Alan Murdie’s column, I felt the mystery was resolved.
I’m not saying that I absolutely did not see a ghost. After all, in 1970, Anna Calder-Marshall was hardly the age of the young child I gained an impression of in 1999; but I do believe that I underwent a hallucinatory experience at the nursing home, where somehow that implanted cine-image came to the fore, causing me to believe that I was seeing the ghost of a young girl. And yet, a girl did live on the former premises and did die prematurely, so was that what I saw? Ed Hodson Winchester, Hampshire