The ghost story that has haunted my life
The ghost story that has haunted my life
(And even scared Kirsty Wark)
Hallowe’en, the night when the living and the dead stray close, that the ghouls in Buffy the Vampire Slayer eschewed as an occasion for amateurs. I’ve had a curiously apt few days, full of life, death, and states in between.
On Saturday, I acquired a new godchild, little Primrose, a seventh child of a seventh child, and we all know what that entails. According to folklore, Prim will be able to see spirits, seven being the most magical of numbers. Well might we elders have been asked to deny darkness on her behalf. While today, on All Hallows’ Eve, I will attend the memorial of one of my dearest friends.
On the night of Prim’s blessing, a couple of hundred of us celebrated. I sat next to poor Dan Snow. I say “poor” because Dan’s History Hit podcast empire is my anti-depressant. A daily dose of its spin-offs, Not Just the Tudors and The Ancients, provide my will to live, or, at least, stagger out of bed: the scholarly NJtT because it was my period, The Ancients because it wasn’t, Neo-Assyrians and Neanderthals merely being my crack. Snow himself does straight, male, history: the Romans, Vikings, Napoleon, Industrial Revolution, Second World War, space race, shipwrecks and the like. (Here’s my favourite recent episode; and here my partner’s – someone needs to do a Frankopan-style look at the impact of substance abuse on history, as we discussed with the oracle himself.)
History Hit also boasts a “pixie pod”, After Dark, that looks at “myths, misdeeds & the paranormal”. It is strenuously cheery - thus not really my bag - but the Hallowe’en special is a cracker, giving the lie to the platitude that “It’s all just an American obsession” with a look at the festival’s Irish heritage.
Because of course All Hallows’ Eve is a tradition in these wet and wind-swept islands. We may not have trick or treated in my Seventies childhood, but Hallowe’en was so thrillingly vast in my Church of England primary school that evangelicals complained we were summoning Satan. Pumpkins were carved, apples bobbed, and sundry horrors conjured to a chorus of The Witches of Hallowe’en. (“We're witches of Halloween /Ooo-ooo / The ugliest you've ever seen / Ooo-ooo / We fly around at night /And give you such a fright! / We're witches of Halloween / Ooo-ooo”.
My mother, in particular, was a one-woman Hallowe’en machine, whose felt witches on broomsticks and weird, wooden carvings stayed up all year. (In fairness, so did Christmas’s paper chains so matters probably evened themselves out.) My father was a pyromaniac, who relished autumn as an opportunity to light fires and blast gunpowder into the night sky. We Bettses revelled in this time of year - bigger than Christmas in our atheist household - a time when we could be dark and dangerous and most ourselves. Matters never became frightening frightening. This was a cosy terror: tramping sodden leaves, sulphur fogging the air, pumpkins flickering on every semi-detached doorstep. Only, later, when I was a teenager, did shit suddenly get real.
And so we come to the meat of my substack. In late October 2013, an editor asked whether I knew anyone with a ghost story that I could “talk out of them”, journo-speak for give someone a grilling, then write up in their words. I did know such a tale, I told her, the ghost story to end all stories, only it was my own.
When this appeared the next day, the piece caused a furore. Some people thought I’d made it up. I hadn’t. “All Is True”, as Shakespeare subtitled his Henry VIII. The Week republished it in pride of place at the back of the mag. Twitter, now X, professed itself petrified, even the doughty Kirsty Wark. Such excitement did it inspire that the next year, and the year after, I was compelled to pen follow ups, ghost hunting first at phantom-crammed Hampton Court, then mournful Kensington Palace.
By the time of this second expedition, in 2015, my mother was recently dead, something that changed my view of Hallowe’en. As I wrote:
…our attitude…will depend on what, or whom, we have lost. Last year, these festivities were the traditional joke to me, an opportunity for avaricious children rather than the revisiting dead.
This year, four months on from my mother’s sudden and savage death, it is a different thing entirely. Ghosts are no longer ghouls: they’re just people you love whom you would give anything to see.
The piece closed:
Last night, I dreamt that the dead lingered, rotting, only leaving us when we brushed them off like a kind of lint. My face ached with the horror of it, yet the effect was curiously soothing because, again, my mother and I could communicate.
I spent years condemning her rages, but would give anything to be on the receiving end now. I crave her smell - the cool, iris scent of her skin – vanished from the scarf I stole. Yesterday, I heard her voice in my head so clearly I had to remind myself to breathe.
I saw my mother’s body three times to drum it into myself that she had gone. In my head, I still hold Webster’s words as a mantra: “Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle. She died young.” Yet, the nearness, the haunting, is everywhere.
These feelings were compounded when my father died a year later; someone - as I have said elsewhere - whom I still fantasise about clawing back via the dark arts.
It was around this time that I first heard from a nice chap called Danny Robins, who was making a podcast about ghostly experiences for the BBC. Initially, I refused to play a part, not least as my siblings and I were having to sell the family home, and buyers had already been scared off by its “demons” (this has to be imagined in a Birmingham accent). But, in time, Danny won my trust, as he wins everyone’s. This episode was the result. (Danny did a mini follow-up here, with further anecdotes my sister shared, round about: 07.00).
Obviously, I had no idea how colossal Uncanny would become, the series having enjoyed nearly 30 million plays, making it one of the most listened-to podcasts in Britain. I’ve had strangers recognise me by my voice alone. Others go hysterical when they realise it is me – ghost-me; 30-years-of-spectral-presences-Hannah; Wark-said-she-would-have-been-straight-out-of-there-Betts.
Right, enough preamble, here it is: the ghost story I wrote for The Telegraph eleven years ago. All Is True. Enjoy.
There was something about our new home...
By Hannah Betts
30 October 2013
This is a story I have never told in print for fear that I would sound mad. It is the version of events as I remember them, so that the tale told by another member of my family might differ slightly in order or timing. But it is a true story, none the less. It happened, despite our collective reluctance to admit it, and my reluctance now both to tell it and to own it as mine. And before you ask, no, I don’t believe in ghosts. Only, as I say, this happened.
I was 16 when, one June, my family moved to a lofty Victorian villa in the Midlands: ivy-strewn, hidden behind trees, high-ceilinged and replete with corridors. This sudden gift of space was not before time. When people asked how many siblings I had, I tended to chirp “we are too menny” à la Jude the Obscure, or “we are legion” à la biblical possession. Ours, in fact, was the perfect situation for a horror story: three girls of 16, 15 and nine, a boy of 11 and one of barely four.
To be sure, our new house had a degree of notoriety. Local gossip held that it boasted three “presences”: a woman who stalked the ground floor, an elderly doctor forever racing up its stairs searching for a dying grandson and, in its upper reaches, the victim of an argument that had spilled over into murder. There was even what appeared to be the requisite bloodstain that could not be removed, since covered with carpet.
The more credulous would not step inside it. We were not so naive. And yet, there was something unsettling about our new home, a personality, a sense that we were installing ourselves in a place already occupied. It never felt quite empty. Doors would shut of their own volition, footsteps would sound. It felt as if we were being watched, assessed.
Very soon, this phoney-war period became the subject of nostalgia. For, when the house kicked off, it kicked off in epic style.