A Ghost Story

A few years ago, I decided it would be interesting and entertaining to ask people, while traveling, if they had ever seen a ghost. The idea came to me on a late night in London (which is as good a city in which to think about ghosts as any) and I put the question to a small group of people – all folks in the watch business – and got some surprising answers. I hadn’t expected much of anything, but several people told me in no uncertain terms about what seemed like quite unambiguously supernatural experiences, including one story from one of the otherwise most level-headed and pragmatic men I know, about a room in his family’s old home in England which they simply, and in a very matter-of-fact way, called “the cold room,” and which no one ever entered.

I consider myself a deeply rational person, but at the same time, there is a part of me that remains irrationally convinced that there is a domain of experience common to all civilizations, and all periods of time, which is uncanny, inexplicable, and a good deal more fun to talk about afterwards than to actually experience. Ever since I can remember, I have been susceptible to nocturnal feelings of dread, which were so pervasive when I was growing up that for some time, I couldn’t fall asleep unless the lights were on. I often read myself to sleep, and just before dropping off, I’d slide the book I was reading under my pillow, with one finger in between the pages. The idea was that if some entity came into my bedroom, I could snatch the book out and pretend to have been reading all along, at the sight of which, the ghost, or what have you, would heave a grave-scented sigh of disappointment at not having been able to sneak up on me, and fade regretfully into oblivion.

Before I was ten years old, I had already decided that I wanted to be some sort of scientist, but at the same time, the old house in which my mother, older sister, younger brother and I were living, seemed to very much have an atmosphere of the supernatural. It was impossible to be alone in any of its rooms and not feel the indefinable sense of something uncanny which some places seem to possess. It was a rather stately place, with massive oak pocket doors downstairs, and a staircase with a landing, and a cellar subdivided into separate rooms, with a pile of unburned coal sitting next to an old coal furnace. The attic especially seemed to have a watchful air. I remember walking up the creaking wooden attic steps one dry hot summer afternoon, and being convinced that I saw, very briefly, something in a brown dress or brown robes flitter briefly across my field of vision before vanishing. I was probably ten or so.

My mother, despite the pride she took in being a person of culture (she loved music and the theater) was also frank about her belief that the spirit world was a matter of fact rather than conjecture. She used to tell us with relish about the asuang, or vampire, which she saw in the giant mango tree opposite her bedroom window, when she was a little girl growing up in the Philippines in the 1930s. I found out many years later that a wooden bust of a saint, life-size, which my mother had brought from the Philippines and which had originally come from a church, seemed to have a restless spirit as a tenant – it sat on a heavy cube of black marble on the living room coffee table, and my sister swore that one day, she had been alone in the living room, and it had rotated by itself until it was looking at her with its empty eye sockets. She refused to be alone in the living room with it after that. I myself had recurring dreams of a ghost in the form of a skeletal horse, or of a hand appearing at night out of the darkness to press itself against my second-floor windowpane.

When we moved out of the house, and as I got older, I seemed less and less apt to have these experiences, and rather than finding the supernatural, or the possible existence of the supernatural, a source of dread, I began to find it interesting. I got interested in the various magical practices used by different societies from the ancient world down to the present, although I found it rather difficult to take the world of modern occultism very seriously. People like Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner seemed more like grownups who wanted to play dress-up than serious masters of any mantic art, dark or otherwise. One Greek necromantic practice – you dig a pit, called a bothron, and fill it with blood, which gives what Homer called the strengthless dead enough borrowed energy for a quick tête-à-tête – at least seemed like a ceremony of sufficient gravity to deserve to be regarded with respect.

The edge of real fear which in my childhood I’d experienced during the hours of darkness when, to paraphrase A. Conan Doyle, the powers of darkness are exalted, became pretty blunted in later adulthood.

This led to a regrettable lapse of judgement on one occasion. One of my favorite ghost stories is The Upper Berth, by F. Marion Crawford; if you haven’t read the story it is as good a piece of Victorian told-by-candlelight storytelling as there is. The subject of the story is the upper berth of a stateroom on an ocean steamer – the narrator sleeps in the lower and it rapidly becomes clear that the upper berth, which is supposed to be unoccupied, may have a most unpleasant tenant. I read the story to my older son with great relish when he was seven or so. Last year (he is now in his early twenties) I asked him what his favorite ghost stories were.

“Well,” he said, “The Upper Berth is pretty scary.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, with some pride, “That’s a good one.”

“Yes,” he said. Then, “You read that to me when I was seven.”

“Oh, so I did.”

“We had bunk beds, then, if you recall.”

“Yes.”

“I had the upper bunk bed.” There was a silence as he let the point sink home, and then he said, rather heavily, “So … thank you for that.”

Last week, I had to travel to London for work for a few days, and while there we stayed in a very charming old hotel in Mayfair. The hotel is near Berkeley Square, and thus an auspicious place for a supernatural visitation – far enough away from the hurly burly of Picadilly, and its shops and tourists, that a proper ghost has a bit of peace and quiet in which to manifest. As it happens (I found this out the next morning) a house which has a reputation as being very badly haunted, is quite close by: 50 Berkeley Square, which is currently privately owned. An occupant of the house during the Victorian era – one Thomas Myers – was an eccentric, and a recluse, who slept during the day and made frightening noises at night (one story was that he had been rejected by his fiancée) and who is supposed to have slowly gone mad before dying at 76. After his death, the house developed its reputation – the spirit haunting it is said to be that of a woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from the attic window, to escape an abusive uncle. If you have the poor judgement to try and spend a night in the attic, she is supposed to manifest as a dark mist which envelops you and drives you insane.

That first night, myself and my two traveling companions thought we would make an early night of it. I had walked alone up to the British Museum to look at the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles, and some clocks and watches, and then we met at the hotel for a drink before dinner. We tried to get into the bar at Dukes, unsuccessfully, so we wound our way back to our hotel and had drinks and dinner there, before retiring at what seemed to us all like a commendably reasonable hour.

I slept badly, having had several martinis and dinner before lying down, as well as having pretty severe jet lag, and I woke up several times during the course of the night. My dreams were very detailed, not very cheerful, and full of baroque spectacle.

At about half past three in the morning, I woke up, or so I thought. I saw the room around me, in the dim light coming in through the parted curtains; everything was colorless in the gloom. Then, much to my horror, I became aware of something in the bed next to me, under the sheets. As I stared at the opposite side of the bed, the sheets and blanked rose up by themselves – whether of their own volition, or because there was something underneath them, I couldn’t tell, but I was sure either possibility was equally dreadful. I tried to cry out but found I couldn’t make a sound, and as I struggled to move – I felt as if I were being held down by something – the fabric by the pillow began to twist itself into something resembling a human face. Suddenly I felt as if whatever force that had paralyzed me, had suddenly vanished – I was free to move, and I struck down at the mounded bedsheets and blankets. They collapsed, fast as a balloon popping.

Certainly this was nothing more than one of those nightmares which takes place in the very room in which you are sleeping – these as anyone who has had one knows, can be very disturbing but are certainly not objective evidence of the existence of another world. Still, I was badly frightened. It took some time for the unpleasant hold the experience had on me to wear off. I managed to doze a bit once the sky had begun to lighten, but as you can imagine I went down to breakfast with a certain level of feeling.

On the way out of the hotel for a morning walk – I had forgotten a prescription at home and was on the way to a pharmacy to have it filled – I asked the doorman, a very pleasant, round-faced gentleman – if he had ever heard from anyone of the hotel being haunted.

He stared hard at me. “No,” he said. “No sir. Nothing at all.”