How did you spend Halloween this week? Here’s a true story I wrote a while back about the time I spent Halloween in a old and haunted English manor house. And yes, every word of it is true:
The wind-swept Salisbury Plains are just a few miles west of London, but exploring these barren and chilly hills on a grey October day a number of years ago, I felt as if I had also stepped back a millennia or two: I could feel the presence of Druids dancing around me at the pillars at Stonehenge, and when I checked into my hotel a few miles away, a cold mist instantly seeped into my very being, confirming the hotel advertisement that the place was indeed, haunted. But that was part of its appeal for me: I mean, if you find yourself on the dank Salisbury Plains around Halloween, and there’s a hotel nearby advertising itself as haunted, why wouldn’t you stay there?
Now, the English don’t fool around with Halloween too much, and they definitely don’t muck about with their haunted castles and hotels. England is the land, after all, where ghosts still walk the bloody towers, haunt the moors, and play starring roles in the greatest works of English literature. In England, ghosts don’t just appear on Halloween; they are front and center around just about every old stone or two, so no need to wait for a silly commercial celebration like All Hallow’s Eve to experience the ectoplasm. Just check right in to ye olde Manor House down the road, and get ready to experience the real deal, just about any time. This almost off-handed, muted approach to the supernatural is uniquely English, another cultural example of English understatement, and has a way of quietly but boldly justifying, with little or no commercial fanfare, the authenticity of your imminent introduction to the other world. Which is perhaps why my hotel, indeed a pile of old stones in the shape of a bygone old Manor House, offered little to hint of its hauntedness when I first checked in. No need to sell the ghouls and ghosts here up front; after all, this was England, and I would experience them soon enough.
Well, just after I fell asleep, actually. But that was just the first time that night. Little did I know that I would have several visitations before the dawn would fully awaken me. It began with what I remember to be a slight tinkling sound. Just enough to wake me, perhaps an hour or so after I crawled into a big, old Victorian bed, complete with canopy and comforter. The tinkling became insistent, and when I lay there in the dark, now eyes open, I recognized it as the sound of rattling teacups and saucers. My cups and saucers, the ones sitting atop the bureau just across the room from my bed, part of my in-room tea service. There was no train rumbling by, no thunder shaking the room, no disturbance in the silent, rural night. Nevertheless, the cups and saucers in my room were banging away, as if to say, “you need to wake up now and see something”. I turned on the light, and the rattling slowed to a stop. I tiptoed over to the bureau to investigate further. Maybe a mechanical vibration of sorts, the heating system perhaps, that was setting them off. But the heat was silently warming the room, and after a brief inspection, I determined that there was nothing to vibrate nearby that would set the tea service rattling away like that. I crawled back into bed, shut the light, and lay there breathlessly awaiting the next rattle. It wouldn’t happen again until after I fell back to sleep.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Dean Foster Global Cultures to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.