“THE OLD ONES ARE THE BEST…”
NEIL ARNOLD gets ready for Christmas by tracking the various appearances of Dickens’s ghost in his home town of Rochester.
When the festive season rolls round and Slade vocalist Noddy Holder for the umpteenth time barks “Does your granny always tell ya, that the old songs are the best” from his band’s 1973 hit Merry Xmas Everybody,
I like to paraphrase such lyrics and apply them to ghost stories. The old ones are most certainly the best, aren’t they? For many years I ran guided tours around the historic cobbled streets of Rochester in Kent. On fog-drenched nights I would regale spellbound audiences with tales of phantom monks said to drift through the walls of ruined abbeys, spin yarns of rattling, ghostly coach and horses that still rumbled down ancient roads and point to numerous anniversaries of tragedies believed to have spawned such ethereal stories. The crowds, however, were not so interested in the tales of the ghostly boy in the tracksuit or the young girl in a polka dot dress; instead, they wanted antiquarian horrors best suited to the pages of an MR James book – and, particularly, they wanted Charles Dickens.
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812 and died on 9 June 1870 at his home at Gad’s Hill Pace in Higham, situated just outside of Rochester. Dickens, in an article from the Manchester Guardian dated 10 June 1870, was said to have been suffering from a toothache on the Wednesday afternoon, but looked so ill that his sister-in-law, Miss Georgina Hogarth, became quite alarmed and recommended that he telegraph for medical assistance. “I shall be better presently,” he said, but shortly afterwards fell into unconsciousness from which he would not awake. One of the strangest aspects pertaining to his death is the fact that it came on the anniversary of a terrible railway accident in which he was involved that had taken place five years previously. At 3.13pm on 9 June 1865, the South Eastern Railway Folkestone to London boat train derailed at Staplehurst while travelling over a viaduct. Ten people died and 40 were injured as a result of a missing piece of track that had been removed during engineering works. Dickens, who was accompanied by his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother Frances Ternan, was fortunate in that the first-class carriage in which they sat did not slip into the river. Rumour has it that Dickens – who aided many of the survivors – never fully recovered from the ordeal of the accident, commenting two years later that, “I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable.”
In the 1866 Christmas edition of the periodical All the Year Round, Dickens’s ghost story “The Signalman” was published (see FT387:37). The plot concerns a railway signalman haunted by a frightful apparition that appears on the tracks before a tragic event. It is claimed that Dickens based the story on the 1861 Clayton Tunnel crash, which took place five miles from Brighton, but surely the traumatic Staplehurst incident could not have been far from his thoughts.
Should you visit Rochester, I recommend you head for the green moat that runs alongside the stunning castle situated on Castle Hill, just a few yards from the River Medway and the High Street. In this moat you will find a small plaque which reads: “This ground was originally part of the castle moat – Charles Dickens wished to be buried here.” The writer’s remains were, of course, interred at Poets Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey. It is said that Dean Arthur Stanley felt it time a celebrity was laid to rest at Westminster, despite this going against the wishes of Dickens himself. And this is where the ghost story comes in.
Many a frosty night I have stood in the moat of Rochester’s crumbling castle and told the story of how every Christmas Eve the spectre of Dickens makes himself known. His spirit has apparently been seen flitting across the moat in the direction of the churchyard of St Nicholas Church opposite, where he stands in front of an old gravestone that bears the name “Dorret”, from which he allegedly took inspiration for his novel Little Dorrit. Several local shop owners have claimed that they have experienced the ghost of Dickens – a few footsteps here, a creaky floor board there – but I know of no one who has actually seen his restless wraith.
However, should you ever find yourself in Rochester on Christmas Eve, I suggest you hide up somewhere and project your gaze to
the cobbles beneath the Moon-faced clock of the Corn Exchange – for this is where, so it is said, the ghost of Dickens appears every year at midnight. He is said to set his watch by the clock before vanishing. I have known a few people who have braved the cold night air on Christmas Eve and waited, in the shadows, for the great writer to appear, but he never does, surely making him one of the most unreliable of ghosts – alongside Dick Turpin and Anne Boleyn – in British history. Perhaps this is down to his diary, which is jam-packed with places he needs to be in order for his apparition to haunt them. Dickens is also said to appear over the festive period at the Swiss Chalet, situated behind Eastgate House in the High Street. The chalet was once located at Dickens’s Higham residence and it is claimed that his spectre is seen, throughout December, peeping through the cracks of the blinds while he attempts to finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
It is also said that the last place in Rochester that Dickens was seen alive was by the railings that look towards the imposing Restoration House, which he called Satis House in Great Expectations,
and yet his ghost has never been known to loiter there. Maybe his spirit dallies in the corners of his Higham residence, although a report from the Evening Express
of 10 December 1910 suggests otherwise. “Mr Alfred Tennyson Dickens, the eldest surviving son of Charles Dickens,” the report states, “related in a lecture how the servants at Gad’s Hill once threatened to leave because they were terrified by a ghost. Dickens, armed with a gun, and his sons, armed with bludgeons, set out to find it, and saw a white object which emitted an awful noise. It proved to be an asthmatical old goat.”
Over the years, I have filed some 50 reports of ghostly activity from Rochester’s High Street alone, making it far more ghost-infested than the entire village of Pluckley, reputed to be Kent’s most haunted location (FT87:53, 308:70, 386:35, 388:43-44). Many of the apparitions are said to appear at Christmas time. The Coopers Arms public house is one of the oldest pubs in the country and was built during the 12th century. This snug alehouse boasts a fascinating life-size figure of a monk encased behind a glass panel. Legend states that centuries ago a monk had an illicit affair and was bricked up somewhere in the walls by his disapproving brethren. Every November and December, he makes his presence known by the swaying tankards on the old oak beams, the beer bottles that rattle of their own accord and the cold spots in the corner of the inn.
However, I’d like to finish with a ghostly tale that has some evidence, not just anecdote, to back it up. Rochester’s glorious cathedral – situated opposite the castle – has been a place of Christian worship since AD 604 and also boasts a festive phantom or two. One is said to be that of a monk, possibly the same tormented chap who haunts the nearby pub, who drifts by the cathedral and heads towards Minor Canon Row before vanishing – but not before a young woman is said to follow the same route. However, the most impressive spectre is one that has been caught on film. In 2011, while writing my book Haunted Rochester, my co-author Kevin Payne visited the cathedral. Like me, Kevin was an avid collector of ghostly tales and we’d both been intrigued by reports of a ghostly clerical figure said to appear in the cathedral at Christmastime. While visiting one afternoon Kevin took a handful of photographs in the cathedral on his digital camera, and on looking back at them, while still in the building, was stunned to see a figure standing at the end of an aisle in one of the images. Although not overly clear, and definitely open to interpretation, the figure looks to be dressed in a clerical outfit and clutching its hands as if in prayer. There was no one else in the area at the time and the figure only appears in one photo. When Kevin approached a member of the clerical team and showed him the photo, the man replied: “Oh yes, I’ve seen him a few times – he’s a ghostly priest who disappears through a now bricked-up archway.”
Maybe there’s something about the festive period that stirs the spirits – and I don’t mean those mulled wines that sit heavy in the lower regions of the stomach after a roast dinner. Dickens, of course, enjoyed and wrote ghost stories, and while his own phantom may not linger in the shadows of historic Rochester – at least not if the complete lack of eye-witness testimony is anything to go by – I’m sure, as a writer, that he’d like us to think it does.
“He always said, what a curious thing it was that he should have found out, by such a mere accident as his climbing over the palings, that the ghosts of mail coaches and horses, guards, coachmen, and passengers, were in habit of making journeys regularly every night” – Charles Dickens, The Ghosts of the Mail
✒ NEIL ARNOLD is a folklorist, public speaker and author of several books including Haunted Rochester, Haunted Chatham, Haunted Ashford and Kent Urban Legends. He runs the Facebook groups ‘Haunted Rochester’, ‘Pluckley Ghosts’ and ‘The Ghost of Bluebell Hill’.