Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

I imagine this is roughly how it happened, because I was not a first-hand witness to this demonstration of nature’s brutality, but was playing a few hundred yards away with Mum in a New Forest car park as my dad and brother made their discovery. On their return, though, my jealousy was palpable – I’d never even seen a live snake in the English countryside before, let alone one performing a gruesome act resembling something from Life on Earth. We all set back out together into the hazy greenness of the late-summer woods, only to find the Eden beneath the oak empty, the unseen serpent watching us through the undergrowth.

The day before, we’d arrived at the end of a narrow track where our bed-and-breakfast was located – a two-storey cottage hung with weather-bleached deer skulls – just as an enormous pig was ambling around the dusty yard. In my memory, the setting came to resemble something out of an American horror film like The Evil Dead, though I supposed I’d accorded it a far more backwoods-gothic atmosphere than the reality until years later when my brother and I stumbled upon the place, its brickwork unchanged and still antler-ridden, as we searched for rare honey buzzards in the forest’s depths. I’ve been obsessed with these wasp-eating raptors – special feathering on their head helps safeguard them from stings – from the moment a pair I never managed to witness was rumoured to be nesting in a wood close to Nan’s house in Norfolk. At the time it was a species I had yet to see anywhere, but the birds – if they ever existed at all – eluded me for the fortnight I was there, despite a handful of spurious half-sightings that I tried to convince myself might be the real thing.

If the exterior of this lonely farm cottage was somewhat off-putting, then the inside was worse: ramshackle and dirty, so that Dad took the anarchic step of piling us straight back into the car and doing a flit, driving to the tourist office in Lyndhurst where alternative accommodation was found. The new guest house was better in the eyes of my parents – no dead trophy animals at least – but in my opinion (with which my brother agreed) it was spookier. The out-of-time bedroom the two of us shared was inhabited by three antique china dolls; Chris had to get up and twist them towards the wall, because we both found them menacing. It didn’t help that our bedtime reading included Chris’s newly purchased copy of Raymond Briggs’ nuclear Armageddon parable When the Wind Blows, or that it was stiflingly hot – the whole 1983 holiday, which had encompassed a grand tour of England’s south-west, was sun-baked, everywhere the grass dying and brown, like Leo’s fateful summer in The Go-Between. At regular intervals my brother called out ‘cold pillow’, an instruction to turn over our head supports in an attempt to claim temporary relief from the oppressiveness, and an opportunity to check that the staring dolls were still facing the other way. The landlady was frightening too, an old woman with bleached hair and excessive make-up – she had something of the artificial appearance of a porcelain figurine herself – who, my parents joked, looked like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

I had no idea who they were talking about, though I would have if they’d namechecked The Watcher in the Woods. I’d seen this Disney children’s horror film – set in England, it was filmed largely at Pinewood Studios and in the surrounding Buckinghamshire countryside – the previous year with two of my classmates. To my shame, that night after the cinema I’d had trouble sleeping. My companions felt the same, I was relieved to learn, as we joked with daylight bravado about the movie at school the following Monday, having had the whole weekend to muse over it. The main source of our thankfully short-lived terror did not stem from Bette Davis’s creepy performance, but from the film’s copious use of tracking shots through the branches, captured from the voyeuristic perspective of the watcher and accompanied by a dramatic, jarring orchestral score. As my friends and I watched the film in our local Odeon – a building that was to close soon after, looming empty and abandoned for the next four years like the ominous pavilion in Carnival of Souls – we were left with a genuine fear that something malevolent was in the trees, unobserved yet observing us.

Like that frog-swallowing snake I would later fail to find.

The name ‘New Forest’ is something of a misnomer, as it is clearly anything but new, and large swathes of it consist of wide-open gorse- and heather-filled heathland, rather than the dense fairy-tale forest that is my landscape of memory from that family holiday. The region’s poor soils have supported this mixture of lowland heath and woodland since well before 1079, when William the Conqueror declared the area to be his Nova Foresta, a stretch of land reserved for the pursuit of deer and wild boar by the monarch (the original meaning of the word ‘forest’ is hunting ground, and maiming physical punishments were meted out to commoners caught breaking the rules).

The first Norman king’s successor, his ruddy-faced son William Rufus, was killed in the forest in August 1100, shot through the breast by a rogue arrow supposedly aimed at a stag by one of his companions (though assassination is not out of the question). William Rufus’s older brother Richard had also died some years previously in a hunting accident in his father’s preserve. And three months before, in May 1100, the king’s illegitimate nephew had likewise been slain hereabouts by another arrow gone awry. These two earlier incidents should perhaps have served as a warning to the country’s new ruler about the hazards, if not of the forest itself, then of his chosen pastime. But, even if the memory of how his relatives had met their end no longer weighed upon William II, various contemporary warnings and omens do appear to have had an effect and led the king to postpone the departure of his ill-starred stag hunt. However, this was to delay his doom for just a few short hours.

We visited the Rufus Stone, which marks the spot of the regicide, during that same sunburnt summer: the original stone, according to the 1841-erected replacement, was ‘much mutilated, and the inscriptions on each of its three sides defaced’. Among my box of old family photos and slides I can find only a solitary picture of the marker post – an image of my father engaged in the act of capturing the monument on film; the photo possesses a grainy, otherworldly hue that now would have to be digitally fabricated by some Instagram or iPhone filter. In more recent years the unobtrusive turnoff on the A31 has beckoned me to the place every time I’ve passed it on my way to see my brother at his nearby Dorset home.

Today is different – I’m heading in the opposite direction and there is no prospect of the two of us meeting later and searching the skies for twist-tailed honey buzzards. Before, though, I have often given in and broken my long journey, turning across the busy dual carriageway to absorb the atmosphere of the forest around the monument, wondering if this was also where Dad and Chris happened upon their infamous serpent. If so, perhaps another less grand marker would now be appropriate?

That the spot where an event so memorable might not hereafter be forgotten – close to here a man and his son watched a grass snake devour a fully grown frog.

Philip Hoare’s book England’s Lost Eden relates the strange events and portents surrounding the death of William Rufus in wonderful detail, before going on to catalogue the hypnotic attraction that the mysterious, superstition-filled Arcadia offered towards the end of the Victorian age to those who came here seeking a higher plane. He tells of how the forest became host to Mary Ann Girling, a farm labourer’s daughter from Suffolk who claimed to be the stigmata-scarred Messiah, but ended up encamped in increasing squalor with her rag-tag band of followers outside the village of Hordle; their Rapture never did arrive, just starvation and disappointment and, for Mary Ann, the cancer of the womb that would kill her.

At the same time as Mary Ann’s New Forest Shakers were attracting day-tripping tourists to gawk at their sorry spectacle, an eccentric Spiritualist barrister, Andrew Peterson, channelled the ghost of Sir Christopher Wren at séances and built a monument to the lure of the esoteric at nearby Sway. Today, as I walk along the narrow lane at its base, the 218ft folly – believed still to be the tallest non-reinforced concrete structure in the world – seems somewhat forlorn, squeezed in among houses and bungalows and crying out for a grander backdrop. Glimpsed, however, from a distance, jutting above the breeze-blown trees, its incantatory effect remains undiminished.

A mile and a half south-east of the Rufus Stone is Minstead. At the back of the village’s delightfully ramshackle, red-brick All Saints’ Church lies the grave of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, another who found comfort in the forest, drawn to Spiritualism after the death of his eldest son Kingsley, who was wounded at the Somme and died in 1918 from the resulting complications. The originator of Sherlock Holmes had famously been taken in by the fairies photographed by two girls, sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, at Cottingley near Bradford. The images came to Doyle’s attention via the Theosophical Society, and he broke the sensational story in a December 1920 article in The Strand magazine; the women finally confessed to the fakery more than sixty years later, long after Doyle had printed his full investigation of the pictures in his book The Coming of the Fairies. Doyle maintained that ‘there is enough already available to convince any reasonable man that the matter is not one which can be readily dismissed’, albeit adding that: ‘I do not myself contend that the proof is as overwhelming as in the case of spiritualistic phenomena.’

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By this late point in his life Doyle’s faith in Spiritualism was seemingly without scepticism. He was by no means alone in his beliefs, as the unprecedented slaughter of European youth that had taken place during the First World War had led to an upsurge of interest from those of the bereaved who wished to attempt communication with their dead loved ones. In 1927 Doyle published Pheneas Speaks, a catalogue of comforting messages received from the other realm at private family séances by his second wife Jean, who acted as medium. Pheneas was their third-century BC Mesopotamian spirit guide, who directed first Jean’s automatic writing (referred to as ‘inspired writing’ by Doyle) and later ‘semi-trance inspirational talking’. Many of these séances were held at their mock-Tudor New Forest retreat, Bignell House, a couple of miles east of the Rufus Stone; Pheneas even requested a room of his own in the cottage, decorated in mauve, which would psychically lend itself to ‘clearer vibrations’. The family conferred with departed relatives including their late, war-wounded son Kingsley, and Doyle’s brother-in-law – the novelist E. W. Hornung (husband of Doyle’s sister Connie), author of the Raffles ‘gentleman thief’ stories and a renowned non-believer in Spiritualism while alive. John Thadeus Delane, a former editor of The Times who had died in 1879 – a person and name, according to Doyle, apparently ‘quite unknown to my wife’ – also appeared in the ether for a chat. When asked whether he still edited a paper in the next world, Delane replied: ‘There is no need here. We know everything. It is like wireless in the air, and all so much bigger and larger and so splendid. It is great, this life.’

Later, at the same June 1922 séance, Doyle’s thirteen-year-old son Denis, ‘a great lover of snakes’, asked Kingsley: ‘Where are the snakes with you?’ To which his ghost brother replied: ‘In their own place, old chap. We are so proud of you, Denis, and the way you are developing in every way.’ Reading these transcripts now it’s difficult to imagine how the man responsible for the creation of the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes could accept these banal messages so unquestioningly as solid evidence of an afterlife, and not as the understandable attempts (either consciously or subconsciously) of his wife – who had also lost her brother during the Great War – to bring comfort to a grieving old man and his family.

At the beginning of the 1920s Doyle struck up an unlikely rapport with Harry Houdini, the American magician and escapologist who was starting to engage in a mission to expose fraudulent mediums, hoping in the process to find a genuine means of communicating with his dead mother.* In the same month that Denis asked his vanished brother about the snakes, Jean engaged in automatic writing in the presence of Houdini, producing seven paragraphs purporting to be from the showman’s mother. Houdini was unimpressed – the deceased woman’s English was poor for one thing, and Jean’s transcript failed to capture her way of talking. The two men’s friendship began to fracture thereafter, their disagreement later magnifying into a high-profile spat. Reading them now, the words alleged to have come through to Jean from the late Mrs Houdini bear a striking resemblance to those received from John Thadeus Delane: ‘It is so different over here, so much larger and bigger and more beautiful …’

In a 1927 magazine article Doyle argued the case that various Victorian writers – notably Oscar Wilde and Jack London – continued to produce works from the other side. Doyle also conducted a conversation himself, through another medium, Florizel von Reuter, with a figure he reckoned could well have been Charles Dickens, and who went on to provide him with the solution to the mystery of Edwin Drood: ‘Edwin is alive and Chris is hiding him’ (‘Chris’, according to Doyle, being the Reverend Crisparkle).

‘Every year spring throws her green veil over the world and anon the red autumn glory comes to mock the yellow moon.’ Purported communications from Wilde like the preceding sentence (part of a larger tranche of writing said to emanate from the dead aesthete) were, however, Doyle’s favoured evidence of posthumous literary work. They were transmitted to the hand of a medium, Mrs Dowden, which was in turn laid upon their transcriber, a Mr Soal. Doyle seizes on their florid language and use of colourful adjectives as proof of their famous sender’s identity: ‘This is not merely adequate Wilde. It is exquisite Wilde. It is so beautiful that it might be chosen for special inclusion in any anthology of his writings.’ Doyle does not seem able to countenance the possibility that he is being duped:

What then is the alternative explanation? I confess that I can see none. Can anyone contend that both Mr Soal and Mrs Dowden have a hidden strand in their own personality which enables them on occasion to write like a great deceased writer, and at the same time a want of conscience which permits that subconscious strand to actually claim that it is the deceased author? Such an explanation would seem infinitely more unlikely than any transcendental one can do.

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It would not be long before the 71-year-old author joined his fellow literary giants London, Wilde and Dickens, as well as his eldest son, Kingsley, and his former friend Harry Houdini.† At eight thirty on the morning of 7 July 1930 – seated in a basket chair in his bedroom, looking towards the window – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle passed peacefully at his main residence, Windlesham Manor in East Sussex. He was buried in the gardens of the house, surrounded by a sea of well-wishers’ flowers, next to his writing hut. In the immediate aftermath of his death – on occasions including the memorial service held at the Royal Albert Hall six days later, at which a vacant chair was left for him on the stage beside his wife – numerous mediums asserted that they had received beyond-the-grave communiqués from Spiritualism’s grand flag-bearer. With reports of these alleged messages threatening to become overwhelming, his widow pushed back, stating: ‘When he has got anything for the world he will communicate with us first.’ And it was not long before the family resumed their contact. Jean continued to hear Arthur’s voice at the sittings she conducted right up to her own passing in 1940, even claiming that her husband’s spirit had diagnosed her own cancer before her doctors; whether Pheneas was at this point still her otherworldly guide, I could not say.

We do, however, have irrefutable proof of at least one last earthly trip Doyle was to make, a quarter of a century after his body had departed this life: a hundred-mile hearse ride. In 1955, after the Windlesham estate had been sold, his remains were exhumed, moved and reinterred, along with those of his spouse, beneath a mature oak in the southern corner of Minstead churchyard, close to their beloved New Forest retreat. It is a pleasant, peaceful final spot of rest; when I visit, ponies are galloping after each other in the adjacent paddock. Someone has placed a bent smoking pipe on top of his headstone too, which seems an appropriate touch.

Since the Doyles’ purchase of nearby Bignell House in 1925 it had acquired a reputation for being haunted – locals knew the family held their séances there, with the 1929 fire that gutted the property adding to its aura. Doyle put the blaze down to psychic forces, though sparks from the kitchen that ignited the thatched roof are the rational explanation. And, although he brought in builders to restore his house in the woods (today a private home set back from the busy main road), Doyle did not live to see the work completed. In 1961 Bignell’s new owners – both doctors trained at the University of Edinburgh, the same institution at which Doyle had also studied medicine – had the place exorcised. No more unexplainable noises were reported, and there were no further sightings of the tall, moustachioed, slipper-wearing figure of Conan Doyle’s ghost, said to search the attic for a missing red leather diary the late author required for his spectral memoirs.

Something of the new beginning that the Girlingites hoped for, as well as hints towards the answers to the existential questions that those others drawn to the forest longed to find, are also present in the work of Algernon Blackwood, a prolific Edwardian writer of ghost stories and what is often classified as ‘weird fiction’. (H. P. Lovecraft defined the ‘true weird tale’ as one that possesses a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces’.)

On the suggestion of his publisher, Blackwood also penned a number of crossover tales intended to cash in on the success of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, successfully introducing, in 1908, the psychic investigator John Silence, who used his detective skills and other more esoteric abilities to bring about a resolution to various occult mysteries. The brilliantly named Silence is a figure similar to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr Hesselius (from the tale ‘Green Tea’ some forty years earlier) and was followed two years later by William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki ‘the Ghost Finder’, and several lesser imitators right up to The X-Files