It’s strange how some memories of adventures one had whilst still only a young child, tend to stick in one’s mind with an uncanny clarity. Along with a couple of close childhood chums, I had a particularly keen penchant for old houses - especially if they were empty and derelict. We would ramble for miles around the local area where I was raised in Northern England, searching for very ancient houses that were haunted.

How did we know they were haunted? Did our other friends or school chums tell us they were? No. Was it something that we’d heard our parents or their friends discussing, as we hid, pyjama-clad, behind the parlour sofa listening in, when we were supposed to be upstairs fast asleep? No. No. They weren’t any of those things, nor did many of those places enjoy any particular local renown, notoriety or dread as being the abodes of the earthbound spirits of the dead.

We just KNEW that they were haunted by some arcane instinct, perhaps an atavistic sixth sense passed down in our genes, or maybe we were simply gifted with the psychic power to discern such spiritual entities. I just don’t know. I only know that I myself didn’t qualify on any of the usual grounds. Nor was I the seventh son of a seventh son, I was an only child! Nor did I have a parent who had "the sight" - as my Scots forebears would probably have claimed.

Like my two similarly oriented brethren-in-arms, I could pick up the eerie vibrations of a haunted house at ten thousand yards. A certain tingling in the cervical vertebrae, with a slight raising of the hackles in the same region, or maybe a particularly fluttery and dolorous "gut-feeling", often accompanied by an elevation in pulse and respiration rates. These were typical warning signals that the three of us received in common whenever we found ourselves approaching a "haunt".

Maybe I should give you a "For Instance", and leave you to judge for yourself?

I recall most clearly that, when I was a youngster, there was a big, rambling old ruin of a house, which stood in its own grounds beside a pleasant hedge-bordered country lane. The lane led from my grandparents’ old farmstead up to the main highway. It was quite an ancient place, built, as I later learned, around the mid-Georgian era. In its heyday it must have appeared very elegant, as I can still recall that it retained some faint lingering vestiges of its original grandeur.

However, for some reason or other, as far back as I - and my parents before me - could remember, it had stood forlorn and neglected in the overgrown wilderness of ragged and struggling weeds that must once have been a lovely well-kept garden. Now it stood gazing sightless upon a swiftly changing world, out of uncurtained broken windows that resembled the empty eye-sockets of a crumbling skull. You will note, however, that although say it was forlorn and neglected, I do not say that it was unoccupied or tenantless. The reason for this omission is simply because the house was not thought by locals to be without occupants. In this particular instance, the house was branded as being haunted purely because no one had lived in it within the memories of either my parents or theirs.

There had to be a reason, and for the rather fanciful folk I recall from my childhood, there could be none other! No one seemed to contemplate such off-putting alternatives as dry rot, woodworms, and (dare I include them) Deathwatch beetles. Or perhaps simple financial considerations, since the place was so far-gone that it would surely have cost a mint to renovate.

It certainly had all the hallmarks and the air of a haunted house, according to my childish occult senses. It seemed to exude a powerful atmosphere of brooding hostility and malevolence that was tangible to far less sensitive souls than myself. Even in broad daylight, on their way to the shops at the lane’s end or to catch a bus on the highway, I saw people cross to the other side of the lane as they passed the place, giving it a furtive or even fearful glance. It definitely affected me in this way from my very earliest recollections of it as a toddler. I had to pass it often, either on my way to or from the village infant school, half a mile or so distant, or when I was later sent on errands to the shops that stood beyond, closer to the main road.

Of course, I’d been thoroughly indoctrinated about the house by my family and friends from infancy. In those far-off days, before even radio had begun to dominate family life, conversation was far more prevalent and popular in the family circle, especially in the evenings, than it is today. The subject matter of such fireside chats frequently centred on the strange or mysterious – particular death and ghosts!

One thing I can personally vouch for is that we needed no horror-packed paperbacks or bloodcurdling video movies to send us quaking with nameless dread to our beds in those days. The verbal stories we heard from our elders and betters carried far more weight in terms of conviction and veracity than any printed or filmed ghost stories ever could today.

Call us superstitious northern country bumpkins or gullible fools, and laugh if you must, but in the days of my childhood people in general had a much deeper belief in both God and the Devil. And thereby they had a far stronger sense of the supernatural than they do in this modern era of enlightenment.

Ghosts were as much a part of the spirit world then as were God, Christ and the Angels, and, in my infantile theology, the Holy Ghost was a benign Heavenly Phantom, Who, as part of the Holy Trinity, I regarded as proof-positive of the existence of ghosts in general. If, in fact, any such proof were needed!

Similarly, demons and bogeymen were equally accepted, since these were the spiritual agents of the Devil, and I never met anyone in my childhood who didn’t believe in him. Satan was as much a part of our religious system of belief as was God. You simply couldn’t have one without the other, any more than one can acknowledge the concept of Good without also accepting the concept Evil. And this still holds true today. Consider the close similarity of these two phrases if you will: "GOD AND DEVIL" - "GOOD AND EVIL". Uncanny isn’t it?

However, I seem to have digressed and must return to my narrative…

The uncanny reputation of the old house was greatly enhanced by its being known among the locals as the "Graves House", having belonged, so legend had it, to a wealthy family of that name. A family whose descendants still lived allegedly lived close by and had a market garden that abutted on to its southern property boundary. However, I never discovered any actual connection between the relatively ordinary market-gardening Graves, and the original loftier owners of the ancient pile, so it may have merely acquired this local title because of their proximity, and some presumed connection with the land on which it stood. But, I suspect it was the other connotation of the name in the noun "Graves" that lent such an added sinister atmosphere to the place.

I recall how I used to wonder if its bramble-strewn ruin of a garden perhaps concealed a hidden cemetery plot in which the deceased members of the one-time occupants lay buried. It was fairly normal for wealthy people to enjoy the privilege of burying their dead within their own grounds, even when I was a boy. It is evidently still true of persons of titled rank in Britain, even to this day. Take the case of Princess Diana’s burial place at Althorpe, as an example.

A high stone and brick wall, with large trees and shrubs growing around it largely surrounded the house itself. This wall was broken in two places - the large gateway, which always stood wide open - and another section fronting on to the lane where it was replaced by a thick and tall hedge. There was a solitary gas lamppost beside the kerb of the public footpath outside this hedged section, one of the three or four that illuminated the entire length of the lane by night. However, instead of illuminating the lane, the feeble gas-lamps, being spaced at something like three hundred yard intervals along it, served more to accentuate the long swathes of inky darkness that lay in between them, than to dispel it.

The lamp outside the house was so surrounded by overhanging elm branches that on windy nights their monstrous black shadows swept over the grey walls and blank windows in a most disturbing manner. One could be forgiven for imagining that uncanny dark figures moved beyond those upper windows so pallid lit by the intermittent glimmer of the flickering lamp. I remember this all too well, since, in those far off days, child-molesters and muggers simply weren’t heard of in rural areas, and burglary was confined only to the homes of the wealthy. Thus it was perfectly safe for women and young children to walk those country lanes after dark without fear of molestation.

Frequently, my Dad dispatched me to the corner shop at the lane’s end for a pack of cigarettes or an evening newspaper. Clutching a few coins wrapped in a scribbled note (in case I forgot what I’d been sent for) I would race from one friendly oasis of yellow gaslight to the next. But inevitably I had to face that dreaded spot where that selfsame friendly light might betray me to the watchful window-eyes of the house – and to whatever nameless horrors lurked within.

Summoning every ounce of courage and speed, I would hare past the awful place at high speed on the opposite side of the dark lane, imagining a pack of ravening demons from Hell itself to be issuing forth out of its gaping gateway in soundless swift pursuit of me. I never dared to glance back over my shoulder in case my worst fears should be realized!

No wonder Mr. Constable, the kindly newsagent (who bore an uncanny resemblance to Walter Pidgeon, the late movie star), often stared in wonderment at me, as I ran gasping, white-faced and bathed in cold sweat into his brightly-lit newspaper and sweetshop to lay my coin-wrapped note on his shop-counter. His friendly chit-chat whilst serving me with the evening paper, cigarettes or whatever was on the note, helped greatly to calm me down and restore me to my normal senses. Then I would leave his shop fortified with a measure of reassured boldness – even whistling bravely as I headed back down the lane at a steady walking pace.

However, I would soon find myself crossing the road again, and breaking into run long before I got within a hundred yards of the terrifying looming shape of the house. Once again I would fly past it at Olympic speed, with the pack of imagined hounds of Hell once more leaping and bounding after me, snapping silently with slavering jaws at my flying heels and grasping with clutching talons at my sleeves.

.

Because this house of horrors was some two thirds of the distance along the lane from our home to shop, the return trip was twice as long after passing it, and twice as terrifying. Consequently, I’d be almost at the point of total collapse by the time I entered our front gate and thankfully slammed it shut behind me.

* * *

As the years slowly passed and I grew bigger and bolder, my dread of the house gradually waned, until one day, when I was around eleven years old, the two pals I mentioned at the outset of this tale, persuaded me to actually go inside the Graves Place with them. By then, we had already visited and entered several of the old and derelict country houses that stood here and there around our local district and had some adventures and made some rather interesting discoveries in them.

At one time, in the later Georgian and early Victorian eras, the region where I was raised in the pleasant and verdant North Cheshire countryside must have been a country residential area for wealthy merchants who had business enterprises around the city of Manchester, some dozen miles or so north. It was probably quite similar to some of those more southerly areas written about by Anthony Trollop and Jane Austen. A haven of rustic peace far removed from the bustle of the cities.

The houses of which I speak had, in their day, been minor mansions. They were probably not quite of the same opulence as those greater houses that one might find under National Trust listing in the southern Home Counties around the London area, of course, but nonetheless definitely in the grand style. One had only to look at the number of attic rooms that had once been occupied by the household servants, to gauge the wealthy status of their owners. One would have been for the butler but each of the others would have housed two or more of the female servants.

We learned later that they’d had had butlers, housekeepers, cooks, and gardeners as well as scullery-maids and housemaids. Some even had coach-houses and stables with quarters above that had once housed coachmen and grooms!

It had evidently been a very well-to-do area in its time, until the Manchester cotton-boom declined and such luxurious households could no longer be sustained. Then gradually it became a market-gardening district and many of these great houses began to fall into decay and disuse through lack of funds to maintain them. The real-estate agents had obviously long since given up any hope of selling them, so they were simply abandoned.

However, to return to my story.

As we approached the Graves Place, I realized that, during the intervening years since I’d first become acquainted with its grim reputation, it had sustained many more broken windows, and the external stonework on its walls had deteriorated even worse than before. We entered the garden, and noticed that one of its massive double gates had been mysteriously lifted off its hinges. It now lay rotting among the debris inside the walled courtyard, next to the remains of an ancient wooden "For Sale" sign, from which most of the painted letters had long since curled and peeled away.

The courtyard garden itself was now a tangled jungle of undergrowth and overgrown briars that almost reaching our shoulders, and there were many dangerously razor-sharp broken slates underfoot that had been dislodged from its high roofs during violent storms. These were concealed among the almost knee-deep carpet of dead leaves and twigs that had showered down through the many blustery autumns that the place had stood empty and neglected. One of the elm trees had been blown over too, and made much of the garden impassable. Yet despite all the neglect, there was still something noble about the place, and I wondered why it hadn’t been sold in all those intervening years.

Maybe its reputation for being haunted could possibly have put off many would-be purchasers, or maybe it was something far more mundane like rising-damp. Who knows? Anyhow, at the time of our exploration as eleven-year-olds, such considerations never crossed our minds. As far as we were concerned, the house was haunted, if not by day – certainly by night!

We ventured gamely onward toward the house itself. Much to our surprise and slight apprehension, the back door was standing slightly ajar when we located it. It seemed ominously sinister that we should find it to be so conveniently open. To my mind at least it was all too reminiscent of the curious fly being lured into the spider’s parlour, and we were all three inquisitive young "flies"! I dreaded the upcoming encounter with the house’s "spider"!

However, in we went, regardless of any lingering misgivings, and eventually, after passing several dark doorways that led into scullery, kitchen, pantry, storerooms and cellars, we found ourselves suddenly emerging into the lesser gloom of the large main hall of the house. Here, in the dulled yet comforting glimmer of daylight that filtered in through a large and grimy fanlight of coloured glass above the massive double front door, we paused to take stock and surveyed our surroundings.

Several paint-flaking doors led into the main ground floor rooms, as we discovered when we opened each of them in turn and peered nervously inside. These rooms were quite empty of furnishings, apart from rotting, mildewed old wallpaper that dangled in long tatters from the walls. The remnants of ancient linoleum curled up off the dusty floorboards scattered with fragments of fallen plaster from the once-ornately-moulded ceilings and shards of broken glass from the shattered windows.

Dust-thickened cobwebs hung in festoons everywhere and the plaster-powder that lay upon floors, mantelpieces and window-sills was tracked with the spoor of rats, mice and occasionally with the prints of human shoes. Whilst these shoeprints indicated that others had entered the house before us since it had fallen into dereliction, they were far from comforting. What if their makers were still here?

Despite our comparatively tender ages, we were all three well-versed in such horrors as zombies, vampires, and the undead in general – thanks to the lurid American pulp horror magazines our elder brothers and younger uncles left lying about for young eyes to fall upon! Magazines such as "Weird Tales" and "Astounding Stories" crammed with hair-raising yarns and graphically illustrated with painstaking attention to grisly and ghoulish detail! So our disquiet at finding those large shoeprints can well be appreciated, for creatures such as those invariably inhabited just such places as this!

But we pressed gamely on. Now we turned our gaze upon the wide uncarpeted staircase that ascended from the hall into the upper reaches of the house, and we stared fearfully upwards into the looming dark shadows at its top. For some reason, all of the bedroom doors were shut – no doubt they had been blown shut by the draught that moaned in through broken windows. Or had unseen occupants closed them deliberately at the sound of our approach?

Tremulously, we tried to creep silently and softly up the bare stairs, hardly daring to breathe, but the ancient treads betrayed us with loud creaks and groans. One step in particular cracked like a rifle-shot as I trod upon it and almost sent us fleeing wide-eyed in terror back down to the bottom again. I suppose that we half expected one or other of the closed doors to be suddenly flung open by some demented hideous monster or other, with a roar of demonic triumph. However, we managed to wrap our selves in what tattered remnants of foolhardy courage still clung about us and at last we gained the first-floor landing.

There we paused peering wildly about us and at each other; not daring to even whisper for fear of arousing whatever nameless horrors lurked patiently behind those doors. And as we crouched there for a full minute or more, I got the distinct feeling that the house itself was gloatingly watching us with malevolent anticipation, as if waiting for us to blunder into some deadly trap it had set for us!

In the end, after much silent gesturing and voiceless mouthing, we summoned up our dwindling grit and entered the first bedroom. To do this without prolonging the terror we used the approach we’d seen so many movie detectives employ - by stealthily turning the doorknob, then violently kicking the door wide open, in the hope that whoever – or whatever – was crouching behind it, would be stunned by the impact. Fortunately for us, that room, and the other four or five, too, were all quite empty and flooded with almost blindingly bright afternoon sunlight.

This heartened us considerably. So far, so good, we thought!

Before long we had explored every bedroom – and both bathrooms – on that entire first floor and the landing was now brightly lit by sunshine from the now-opened doorways. Alas, our confidence was short-lived and faded considerably when we came at length to another, narrower flight of stairs. One that led higher again into what must have been the attics of the old house. We hadn’t bargained on this, never having realized that the higher dormer windows, that were just visible from the laneway, meant that there was a third storey to the place, above the six bedrooms!

Needless to add, after much whispered argument, our curiosity finally overcame our fear, and we stole up this final staircase with many misgivings. We now found ourselves upon a much smaller landing with four bedrooms opening off it. Though the doors of these rooms all stood ajar, the rooms themselves were rendered dark and gloomy by the dense foliage of the elm tree branches that shrouded the top section of the house in deep shadow. They brushed and scraped with an eerie shuffling sound against the dormer windows and the gables above them, and scared us half-witless!

The fact that the attic doors were open made them somehow seem more menacing than had the closed doors on the floor below and we froze in terror when we saw shadowy movements within. It wasn’t until we realised that these were only the shadows of tree branches being stirred about by the wind outside, that we were able to breathe easily again. But not for long!

As we entered the third attic, a wildly threshing whitish shape suddenly arose from a darkened corner and gave vent to a piercing scream as it launched itself at us. With one accord we turned and fled pell-mell down the stairs, pure unadulterated dread lending wings to our flying feet! It was not until we had regained the main hall, and commonsense began to reassert itself in our minds, that it dawned upon us that we had disturbed a nesting barn owl. The angry bird could now be seen perched upon a bannister rail high above our heads still glaring and whooping peevishly at us.

The three of us now sat down on the bottom stair and laughed hard and long. Not so much in amusement, however, but rather in moderate hysteria. At least it cleared our minds of bogeys and ghouls – or so we fondly thought!

We now decided that we‘d all had just about enough excitement for one afternoon, and, since the shadows were beginning to lengthen, we made our way back toward the rear door. However, our escapade wasn’t quite yet over. One of my companions spotted an open cellar door through which we could see a flight of stone steps leading downward, and we stopped to peer down into the dank depths.

It smelled really horrible down there, but we could se a faint gleam of light in the darkness below, and, feeling that we’d already proved convincingly that the place was not haunted after all – well, at least by day – we foolishly ventured down the crumbling stone steps.

At the bottom of the steps we found that there were in fact three cellars, and two of these had half-windows which gave us a worm’s eye view of the tangled undergrowth outside, and admitted sufficient light to permit us to discern flaking whitewashed walls and lichened flagstone floors. An almost physically tangible foul musty odour pervaded the dank air.

The main cellar boasted a fireplace, and beneath the window stood a long stone sink with a rusty pump nozzle and handle at one end. Obviously it must have been some kind of laundry room. The second cellar had shelving all around the walls upon which stood several old wooden wine-racks. It was here that with a thrill of spine-freezing horror we thought we had stumbled upon a dead body! However, upon closer dread-filled inspection, it turned out to be a fallen sack of long-rotted root-vegetables, covered with a horrible coating of white, hairy fungus. It was this that was the origin of the foul stench!

The third cellar, which had no window, was pitch-dark inside. As we tried to glance furtively in through the partly open doorway, there was a sudden scuttering and sliding, rumbling sound that came straight toward us. It sent us all flying, hair standing on end, up the cellar steps and out through the back door of the house – closely followed by a large and angry black cat! We had evidently surprised it hunting for vermin in what we later discovered was a partly stocked coal cellar!

That was essentially the end of our fruitless but nonetheless exciting Ghost Hunt. We did make some sort of a vow to return in a couple more years’ time and try the place out at midnight. But of course we never did. After that I never again feared the old house in quite the same way – although, later on still as a teenager, I could never pass the place without automatically crossing to the other side of the lane. Call it force of habit, or whatever you will, that old house still managed to exert some form of eldritch influence over my psychic sensitivity.

* * *

Imagine then my surprise, some forty-five years later, on a return visit from my new home in Australia, half a world away, when I found the place not only still standing, but completely renovated into a block of flats! I couldn’t help wondering if its now comparatively youthful occupants would rest so easily in their beds at night if they knew of the house’s arcane history.

But consider my even greater amazement, years later still, when upon mentioning these recollections to my then aged mother, she told me that she and my father had very nearly bought the place themselves to renovate it and to live in it! It had stood for so many years neglected and ill-reputed that its market value had declined to a mere fraction of its true worth, and my parents could have purchased it for a mere song!

Apparently, despite many attempts to have it demolished and the land used to extend a church next door, such permission was never granted. Nor had the place been knocked down or taken over by the local authorities in lieu of back ground- rates during my childhood because of some insoluble legal entanglement that related to an overseas family heir who had never returned to claim his or her dubious inheritance.

Somehow, I can’t help feeling greatly relieved that my parents decided not to buy that house, even though its value must be at least a million dollars if not more, by now and no one has ever since heard of any weird disturbances or manifestations. My mother sadly departed this life a number of years back, but before she died, I finally learned from her the true name of the house – which I recalled once trying to decipher as a child from the weather-worn carved inscriptions on its great sandstone gateposts.

The name was "Olive Lodge".

This was indeed a passing strange coincidence, since one of the greatest of Britain’s "ghost-hunters" when I was a young boy, was a psychic investigator of world repute named Sir Oliver Lodge!

But for me, however, it will always simply remain ‘The Graves Place".

The End