GHOSTWATCH
ALAN MURDIE takes a look at the ups and downs of the haunted property market
Moving to a new house can be a stressful event at any time, not least in the middle of a global pandemic. Add on the possibility of an active haunting in your new home and all kinds of issues arise.
The decision by the recently elected Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to delay moving into his official residence, the Sori Kotei mansion in central Tokyo, has renewed the rumours of the building being haunted, which dogged his predecessor Shinzo Abe.
Suga took office as Japan’s 99th prime minister on 16 September 2020. So far, he has refused to move to the Sori Kotei and stays instead at a building provided for Japan’s House of Representatives. In this he is following the example of former prime minster Abe, who served two terms in office, 2006-2007 and 2012-19. During his second term, Abe also refused to live in the official residence, opting to make a 15-minute commute every day from his private home. He said the 11-room property was too big for his needs, but Japan’s Asahi Shimbun daily newspaper reported Abe admitting the “presence of ghosts” had made him think twice about returning to the house. His political opponents duly mocked him for being afraid of ghosts, but speculation has now been renewed.
Abe cited hearing ghost stories from his predecessors, including former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori who reportedly said he had seen the “leg of a haunted spirit” in the grounds. Apparitions of men in uniform have also been reported to walk the grounds of the mansion. Visions or hallucinations of severed limbs and body parts do feature in apparition sightings over the years, including hands, arms and feet.
The Sori Kotei has a grim history and there are bullet holes in the glass above the main entrance, said to have been made when the residence was attacked during coup attempts in the 1930s. Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855-1932) was assassinated at the mansion on 15 May 1932 by 11 Japanese naval officers and army cadets attempting to provoke martial law. All received light sentences for the killing. In 1936 the mansion was occupied by renegade troops for four days when 1,400 rebels stormed Tokyo’s government district, resulting in the death of several politicians.
Currently, Japan’s Prime Minister has announced he has “no plans” for relocating despite official assurances of good security on site. It would be most interesting to talk to those responsible for security at the mansion who might be most likely to experience anything.
Sources: ‘Prime minister turns down ‘haunted’ residence’ [UPI] 15 Dec 2020; The Atlantic, 13 Aug 2013; Int. Business Times, 28 Sept 2013.
Meanwhile in Hampden, Baltimore, boldly telling prospective purchasers that a place is not haunted has been adopted as a successful marketing gimmick. Real estate agent Joy Sushinsky, 40, has taken to placing black and white ‘Not Haunted’ signs outside hard-to-sell properties she is marketing. She claims her representations to prospective buyers, that they are completely ghost-free, are being well received and achieve sales. She says she first thought of the idea following a visit to New Orleans where she saw sale signs on properties in the French quarter which specified whether properties were haunted or not.
Playing up the ghostly and legendary reputation is a long-established promotional technique currently being tried by the new owners of the dilapidated Berengaria hotel in Cyprus (named after the wife of Richard the Lionheart), which has stood empty since 1984. The Limassol-based Prime Property Group who have purchased the building are using grim stories as part of a marketing campaign for restoring it and constructing luxury villas on surrounding land: stories of a former manager who committed suicide, a merchant’s wife supposedly found dead in the swimming pool who “seeks revenge”, a young woman dressed in white linen who appears at dusk leaning against one of the windows, and reports by local people of hearing screams and howls and the rustle of heavy velvet robes. ( Financial Mirror, 9 Dec 2020.)
In contrast, Ms Sushinsky is asserting that her Baltimore properties are not (right), which is said to be haunted.
haunted. She first deployed these signs four years ago and with the market in property slowing in 2020 she decided to repeat the exercise and post examples on the Internet “to make people smile after a difficult year”.
It is an area where one must tread carefully. The marketing, letting or selling of allegedly haunted houses has been a contentious one in a number of jurisdictions over the centuries. In the USA, the matter is approached on a state-by-state basis. The scope for legal action arising from property misdescription received a boost in 1991 with the decision regarding Stambovsky v Ackley [1991] 572 N.Y.S 2d 672, 676, 677 (New York Appellate Div Ct), where the Court permitted the plaintiff to withdraw from a contract of sale after discovering the seller had widely publicised a belief in the house being haunted. The Court acknowledged that it is both impossible to inspect for poltergeists and unreasonable for the prudent home-buyer to do so, the Court ruling: “There is no sound policy reason to deny the plaintiff relief for failing to discover a state of affairs which the most prudent purchaser would not be expected to even contemplate.” (See FT59:5, with photo.)
Ms Sushinsky reports that while not everyone is convinced by her assurances
“I knew it couldn’t be the cat making the noises, because he was in the bedroom with me”
that a house is not haunted, she has managed to sell several properties on the back of the campaign. It should be added that she is not a sceptic when it comes to homes being haunted, her opinions having shifted after experiences at her own home in Baltimore, previously empty and abandoned for eight years, which she moved into in spring 2020. “When I moved in weird things started happening,” she said. Her cat, named Killer, would make a strange ‘yowling’ noise when he walked past a certain corner of a room near the front of the house. He would stare at that corner for long passages of time, meowing. Her dog too seemed to ‘be aware’ of the apparent presence.
That this was more than a curious reaction on the part of her pets was demonstrated when Ms Sushinsky, who lives alone, heard the door across the hallway from her bedroom periodically opening and slamming by itself during the night. Confirming this was a physical phenomenon, she stated: “Every night I’d make sure it was locked, then wake up again and it would be open, having heard it open and close all night. It was freaky. I also knew it couldn’t be the cat making the noises in the middle of the night, because he was locked in the bedroom with me.”
Ms Sushinsky states that if she were
ever to sell her current home, she would definitely inform any potential buyers that it used to be haunted. Curiously, when Killer died suddenly in May, the bangs in the night that had so often startled her awake suddenly ceased. “There was no more opening or closing of doors all night long, it was the strangest thing,” she said. “The coincidence of it all made me a believer. It’s like Killer took the ghost with him.” ( Sources: Baltimore Sun, Daily Mail, 15 Dec 2020).
Indeed, this may be entirely coincidental, but associations between cats and ghosts are numerous. Ghost hunter Elliot O’Donnell (1872-1965) considered cats ‘psychic barometers’, though many of his own grim stories featuring phantom felines are highly suspect (e.g. ‘The House of the Bloody Cat’ and ‘The Headless Cat’ in A Casebook of Ghosts, 1969, edited by Harry Ludlam).
The cessation of haunting on the death of the cat brings to mind the archaic custom of concealing cats as foundation sacrifices within the walls and fabric of domestic buildings to deter evil spirits or vermin, and which was practised as recently as the 18th century. An earlier generation of folklorists proposed cats were immured in walls alive (shades of Edgar Allan Poe), but it is now considered that post-mortem burial was the usual practice. Nearly 20 years ago, folklorist Brian Hoggard estimated that there are some 100 examples on record, but around 10 times as many known anecdotally across England and Wales. ( Macclesfield Express, 2 Oct 2002.) In November 2017 I saw an undocumented specimen preserved at an old house in Powys built in 1751, and in the Mill Hotel in Sudbury, Suffolk, you can see one publicly displayed, being afforded its own glass-topped grave in the reception area (see FT363:74-76). However, despite such preservations, any protection is quite illusory as hauntings occur in buildings regardless of any ritual deposits – the two kittens discovered a century apart at the Tower of London being an example (exhibits xviii.587 & xviii 897, Royal Armouries Collection – see https://royalarmouries.org/stories/behind-the
“Woody is obsessed that his ghost is in the house as he can hear him miaowing”
scenes/cats-in-the-tower/).
That the experience of a haunting may depend far more upon the individuals occupying a property than the place itself is suggested by a report of a ghost cat from British actress and broadcaster Zoe Ball.
Speaking on her Radio 2 Breakfast Show, she said that her two-year-old pet cat ‘Monkey’, killed by a car on 11 December 2020, had subsequently been heard miaowing by her son Woody. She paid a poignant tribute to the pet on her Instagram page, writing: “Our beautiful cat Monkey has gone to monkey heaven. He was a great adventurer, so chatty, full of love and always up for a fireside cuddle… Rest well you magic ginger bundle”. However, she later told listeners that “Woody is obsessed his ghost is in the house as he can hear him miaowing. But I think it’s all in his head.” Sun, 22 Dec 2020.
Being haunted by one’s pet is not unknown (e.g. ‘Will your pet come back to haunt you?’ Daily Mail, 10 Nov 2011) in the same way that many people report the apparitions or other post-mortem signs of their deceased spouses in their homes after bereavement. I remember the late Lancelot Railton, a respected senior civil servant and valued member of the Ghost Club, telling me of seeing the ghost of his family’s pet cat in the kitchen of their riverside home at St Albans, Hertfordshire, the day after its peaceful death and noticing “it was faded around the edges”. Writer Ronald Blythe also told me of seeing a ghostly cat at the home of poet James Turner and his wife (pers. comm. 15 June 2011) at their cottage in Borley in Essex in October 1949, also later seen by the Turners themselves.
Lest such sightings be dismissed as a conceit of sensitive cat lovers, persons disliking cats have reported spectral appearances. In February 1892, a Mrs Gordon Jones who confessed to having “the strongest aversion to cats” wrote to the SPR about how she would never tolerate the creatures until obliged to keep a grey and white one by the presence of mice in her family home. The cat, which she seldom looked at, apparently became mad and a request came from the servants to drown it. Mrs Jones consented, and this was duly done by the groom.
“The same evening I was sitting alone in the dining-room,” she wrote. “I am sure that I was not thinking of the cat or of possible apparitions. I was reading; presently I felt impelled to look up, the door seemed to open, and there stood the animal that had been drowned in the morning; the same cat, but apparently much thinner and dripping with water only the expression of the face was changed; the eyes were quite human and haunted me afterwards, they looked so sad and pathetic. I felt so sure of what I saw that at the moment I never doubted that it was the living cat who had escaped from drowning.”
She summoned a servant to remove it ordering: “There’s the cat, take it out and [...] it seemed to me that she could not but see it too, but was clear and distinct to my eyes as the table or chairs. But the servant looked frightened and said ‘Oh, ma’am,
I saw the cat after William had drowned it – and then he buried it in the garden.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘there it is’. Of course, she saw nothing, and then the cat began to fade, and I saw nothing more of it.” This incident occurred around 1889. Reading her letter, one gets the impression that Mrs Jones was more irritated by her experience than disturbed by it. ( Proceedings of the SPR vol 10, 1894 p. 127). More widely, phantom cats have been reported at diverse haunted locations from Edinburgh Castle to Bodmin in Cornwall, where stories merge with cryptozoology and the much vaunted ‘Beast of Bodmin’.
Concluding, Ms Sushinsky states that if she was ever to sell her current home, she will definitely inform any potential buyers that it used to be haunted.
At the same time, stressful though house purchases may be, it is also important not to be too credulous, over-imaginative or just paranoid. Shortly before Christmas 2020 a photograph taken by a real estate agent of a recently sold property in Port Victoria, Australia, was circulated worldwide. It seemed to show a shape, interpreted by Tyler Thornton as an apparition. The photo had been sent out by the agent to celebrate the sale of the property, which had belonged to Mr Thornton’s mother and late father. “She sent me the photos while I was on the phone to her and I said, ‘Who is in the window?’ She freaked out and hung up on me.”
Regrettably, the image is so blurry it is impossible to say with any certainty what it is or might represent, but this did not prevent its circulation by Australia Paranormal, and the world’s press, or flippant speculation on-line, such as: “He’ll probably put a quiche in the oven, before he leaves...” ( D.Star, Sun, etc., 23 Dec 2020).
Faced with such a situation and possible liabilities, it might be better to state clearly whether a ghost haunts inside a property or externally. For example, the ‘Headless Ghost of Dunmore House’ is reasonably well-known in Kiama, Australia, and received a seasonal boost in a feature on haunted beaches carried by the Mail Online (Australia) on 23 December 2020. Yet closer examination reveals that it actually haunts the road outside the property.
One of the benefits of the virtual global village is the way one can now dip into the intriguing national, international, and local news stories published worldwide, in the equivalents of the Fishguard County Echo or the Wrexham Evening Telegraph (admittedly an early advocate of the literary gifts of Jeffrey Archer). Here one may discover anomalous reports arising in distant places of which one has never previously heard and which one is unlikely ever to visit. Such jewels can now be picked up with relative ease and relayed to a global audience.
And thus it proves with this story, originally appearing in the Illawarra Mercury, a local paper in New South Wales and given greater prominence via the haunted beaches feature mentioned above.
This reveals the spectre to be a man decapitated in a traffic accident outside, a gruesome additional extra detail being that the severed head was placed on a gate of Dunmore House, north of the Minnamurra River. Even more remarkably, the Illawarra Mercury revealed details of a sighting by bus driver Barney Dion, late one night in the 1950s. This rare example of a modern headless ghost is mentioned in the Dion family history ( Bus Pioneers of Wollongong: A History of the Dion Brothers Bus Partnership, 1997, by John Birchmeier) and confirmed by his nephew Les Dion ( Illawarra Mercury, 26 July 2017). Barney saw a figure in the road, lacking a head and with its body wrapped in a sheet. He gave chase in his bus, but the ghost outpaced him before it “threw a rope up into the air and disappeared”. (see https://kiamalocalhistory.wordpress. com/2007/08/31/headless-ghost-ofdumore-house/) This spectre joins another local ghost, a phantom boat coming down Minnamurra river, appearing in the early morning mist every Boxing Day, an anniversary haunting arising from the drowning of seven people on 26 December 1893. Altogether, another case of better out than in, one might think, as in the Dunmore House case.
Of course, talk of a headless ghost and Boxing Day reminds one irresistibly of the apparition of a headless clown who was decapitated when he used piano wire to hang himself at a private house at Tenterden Bottoms, Kent, in the 18th century and who reportedly appears each 26 December. Just imagine trying to explain that one to any potential purchaser when the property next comes up for sale, whether during a pandemic or any other time of the year. (See Our Haunted Kingdom, 1973, by Andrew Green).