Spooky History – a sleepless night in a haunted house

When I was a child, we would drive up to Scotland every summer for the holidays. For a boy of eight, the eleven-hour trip to the highlands was hell for both my parents and me, and so to cut the arduous journey in half, we’d often spend a night or two with family friends. One July, my brother, father and I stopped to stay the night at the singularly spooky, Grantham House. It was the home of my dad’s old friend, a decorated Second World War soldier with the whimsically Wodehousian name, Major-General Sir Francis Brian Wyldbore-Smith, and it is supposedly one of the most haunted houses in Britain. Needless to say, it was a sleepless night.

The General, who by then was well into his nineties, was an extremely kind and considerate host. His wife had died a decade earlier, and he lived quietly in the former monastery, attended only by his former batman, who before supper eagerly showed us the glorious garden his elderly boss and late wife had lovingly grown and tended together.

After perusing their impressive display of hydrangeas and chrysanthemums, I remember being ushered into a large gothic dining room, curiously adorned by a collection of enigmatic portraits. The general sat at the head of the long table, and I began to ask him who the people in the paintings were. He told me their various stories and how they all related to the house in some way.

“He lived here during the reign of Elizabeth!” he said, pointing to a handsome fellow who had confidentially gazed out of his canvas at fascinated diners for centuries.

“She was deemed the greatest beauty in Europe in her day” he exclaimed, gesturing at a tall portrait of a lissom lady in a lily-white dress. “Her spirit is said to walk these corridors at night” he added casually.

My brother and I looked at each other aghast. We had always harboured nagging suspicions about supernatural goings-on at night and were alarmed to hear our host’s declaration as the evening darkened the dining room windows.

“You mean, this place is haunted?” my brother inquired sheepishly, looking over his shoulder at the grand paintings above. “Haunted?” the General bellowed. “There are no such things as ghosts, but this house is supposed to be home to more ghosts than I can name.”

He then proceeded to tell us a harrowing story, a tale that inflicted a ten-year bout of insomnia on my brother and I.

“When my wife and I arrived here, over sixty years ago, she claimed to sense a peculiar presence almost immediately. During our first week in this house, we were sleeping in our new bedroom (I say “new”, it hadn’t been renovated since the Civil War) when all of a sudden, I woke to my wife screaming “There’s a little girl at the end of the bed! There’s a little girl at the end of our bed!”.

I switched on the lights and saw nothing between the foot of our chippendale and the blank stone wall a few feet away. “For heaven’s sake,” I said, “calm yourself. There is nothing there. It was just a dream. Go back to sleep”.

At this point in the story, the general waved his hand to signal his need for something from his batman. His loyal attendant, who had been ceremoniously standing behind his commander throughout our supper, swiftly left the dining room and within a few seconds returned with an old black metal box.

“We knew from the start that this place was in desperate need of refurbishment”, the General muttered as his batman handed him the box, and he started rummaging through a pile of sepia newspaper cuttings and black and white photos.

“Not long after my wife’s sighting of a little girl at the foot of our bed, I had the master bedroom renovated.” His eyes abruptly widened over a particular magazine clipping, and he then asked us if we could guess what the renovators had discovered.

Bemused, my brother and I turned to each other.

“They found the preserved skeleton of a female child standing upright in our bedroom wall.” He lifted the slip of paper out of the box and presented us with a grainy photograph of a small standing skeleton, being held upright by two amazed workmen in overalls.

“It made the local news. Well, goodnight boys,” he said with a smile and a wink at my dad, who found this terrorising of his children hilarious.

My brother Philip and I shared a single bed and held hands all night, not daring to fall asleep, lest a spectre should try to creep over us. I remember waving the General goodbye the following day from the back of the car before promptly passing out.

A couple of years later, I attended the General’s funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral. My dad was honoured to give the eulogy, and he did a beautiful job.

Still, despite all of his eloquent efforts to vividly illustrate the exceptional life of a valiant soldier, all I could visualise as I sat in the front row of the funeral was that yellow picture of a tiny scaffold of ancient bones. It is an image that will never leave me.

Happy Halloween.