Horror Writers and Their Ghost Experiences
On 3 September 2012, veteran horror writer James Herbert, author of The Rats, The Fog and The Dark, told audiences of BBC’s TV Breakfast programme about his own experience of seeing a ghost in Spain. He was invited onto the programme to discuss an adaption of his story The Secret of Crickley Hall, featuring parapsychologist ‘James Ash’, who also appears in one of his novels. Herbert previously created the character of ghost hunter Chris Bishop for his novel The Dark in 1980, modelling him on the late Andrew Green (1927-2004), who was one of Britain’s most active ghost hunters for 60 years.
Herbert told presenters of his own ghost sighting, which occurred in the presence of two friends, Bob Young and David Moores, former chairman of Liverpool Football Club. The trio were holidaying together with their wives “at a beautiful palace of a villa” owned by Moores in Marbella, Spain. The experience occurred at about 2.30am when their wives had retired to bed but the three men had remained sitting up still drinking and talking. From where they were seated, both Herbert and Young had a view through an open door into the hallway of the villa, while Moores was positioned facing them with his back to the door. Herbert told how suddenly, “Bob nudged me and said did you see that?” I said, “No, what?” and he said, “Someone went past the door!”.
Herbert saw nothing, but “About 10 minutes later the same figure walked back past the door. Now being a horror writer – a ghost writer – I was up like a shot… I ran after it. I was out of that door within two, one and half seconds… Just a marble hall with a marble stair – empty!”. Moores, having his back to the door, didn’t see the figure, laughing the sighting off as they had been drinking. This point was taken up in light-hearted fashion by the TV interviewers, but while Herbert admitting he was drinking, he dismissed the insinuation that he was hallucinating, stating: “I am a mean drinker – I can take a drink!”.
After his experience, Herbert asked if there was any history to the villa, but neither Dave Moores nor anyone else could shed any light on what might lie behind the apparition. Interestingly, this experience involving a famous ghost and horror story writer seeing an apparition walk past a doorway whilst relaxing with two friends has parallels with a little-known ghost sighting that occurred over 70 years ago, at Lamb House in Rye, Sussex. The writer was EF Benson, the author of many fine ghost and horror stories, perhaps in part inspired by his being the son of Archbishop Benson, one of the founders of the Ghost Club. EF Benson recounted his experience in his posthumously published autobiography Final Edition (1940):
“On a windless summer day two friends, of whom the Vicar of Rye was one, were lunching with me and afterwards we strolled down to the secret garden. It was a brilliant, broiling day and we seated ourselves in a strip of shade close to the door in the wall which communicated with the other garden. This door was open; two of our chairs, the Vicar’s and mine, faced it, the other had its back to it.
“And I saw the figure of a man walk past this open doorway. He was dressed in black and he wore a cape the right wing of which, as he passed, he threw across his chest, over his left shoulder. His head was turned away and I did not see his face. The glimpse I got of him was very short, for two steps took him past the open doorway, and the wall behind the poplars hid him again.
“Simultaneously the vicar jumped out of his chair, exclaiming, ‘Who on earth was that?’ It was only a step to the open door and there, beyond, the garden lay, basking in the sun and empty of any human presence… “Speaking of their experiences the vicar told me what he had seen; it was exactly what I had seen, except that our visitor had worn hose, which I had not noticed.
“Now the odd feature about this meaningless apparition is that the first time this visitor appeared he was seen simultaneously by two people whose impressions as to his general mien and his gesture with his cloak completely tallied with each other. There was no legend about such an appearance which could have predisposed either of them to have imagined that he saw anything at all, and the broad sunlight certainly did not lend itself to any conjuring up of a black moving figure. Not long afterwards it was seen again in broad daylight by the vicar at the same spot; just a glimpse and then it vanished. I was with him but I saw nothing. Since then I think I have seen it once in the evening on the lawn near the garden-room, but it was dusk and I may have constructed some fleeting composition of light and shadow into the same figure... I have no doubt whatever that the vicar and I saw something that had no existence in the material world.”
The vicar in question was the Revd. Prebendary John Fowler. In a statement he later provided after Benson’s death to the Society for Psychical Research Fowler stated: “None of us three had, I believe, been thinking of ‘ghosts’ – at any rate I had not and no word was spoken of them by any of us, that ‘windless summer day’. Why should ‘he’ be there and with a cloak too? But there are often these ‘Whys?’. I thought it was someone, not something, and sprang up to see who he was.”
Now owned by the National Trust, Lamb House perhaps deserved to be haunted. It was the home of Henry James, author of the classic psychological ghost tale The Turn of the Screw, who wrote a number of his novels at the property. The house became a centre for James’s wide circle of literary friends, including HG Wells, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, GK Chesterton Hillarie Belloc, Compton Mackenzie and Ford Maddox Ford.
James spent the majority of his time in Rye but died in London in 1916. It was his wish to return to Lamb House during his final days but he was too ill to be moved. After his death the lease was taken over by EF Benson, who also conducted tests with trance mediums at the property in the mid-1920s. These included an attempt by mediums to divine the contents of a sealed box left by Benson’s deceased mother as a survival test three years earlier. The tests failed with none of the mediums guessing the nature of the object, but it was noted that many of the answers obtained independently from each other were similar, which Benson ascribed to an unusual coincidence or perhaps telepathy between them.
There are a number of notable similarities between the two experiences recounted by Benson and Herbert, with both sightings occurring when the witnesses were in a relaxed frame of mind. It would be interesting to learn if Herbert has ever read or heard of Benson’s experience. Combining the two surnames of the writers, one also comes up ‘Benson Herbert’ which was the name of the founder and director of the Downtown Paraphysical Laboratory in Wiltshire in the 1960s and 1970s, which collected numerous ghost experiences from around the UK, but perhaps it doesn’t do to press such coincidences too far in searching for deeper meanings and connections.
