Merry Christmas Everybody! This season is a time of tradition, and we here at Skullduggery in the Smoke uphold that most Victorian of holiday pageantry: Ghost Stories for Christmas. As in years past, we examine the fanciful and dolorous haunting of the British Isles for adventures ideas suitable for your holly-and-ivy-trimmed gaming table. All our haunting are selected from Peter Underwood’s “Gazetteer of British, Scottish, & Irish Ghosts”. So bring a torch Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for Christmas!
Just east of the seaside holiday town of Ilfracombe on Devon’s coast, a cozy country manor hides a grisly secret. Chambercombe (shortened from the house’s true name, Champernowne Combe) is a large white-washed gabled farmhouse surrounded by pleasant elm trees and thick walls. Its current inhabitants are farmers providing nearby villages’ with fresh vegetables and milk, but Chambercombe was the manor house of the Champernowne family since before the 1160s. When that family line ended, Chambercombe passed through several owners until it landed in the hands of Duke Henry of Suffolk. After he and his daughter, the famous Lady Jane Grey who was the queen of England for nine days, were executed for treason, the house became the property of the crown.
With the stain from being the home of infamous traitors, the fortunes of Chambercombe quietly fell through the years to the farmhouse it is today. Little of interest occurred in the house until either 1738 or 1865 when its owner repaired the roof. While deciding which window gave the most advantageous access to his roof, he discovered a window corresponding to none of the known rooms of his home. The owner calculated the interior walls outlining the mysterious gap and knocked a hole through one.
Inside he found black Elizabethan furniture, moldy tapestries, voluminous cobwebs, and laying on a curtained four-poster bed the skeleton of a young lady. Since that day strange sounds and moans emanating from the discovered chamber, and the shadowy figure of a young woman in a white dress standing near the pond startles many visitors.
Nobody knows the skeleton’s identity with absolute certainty, but the most commonly muttered story is that a young woman named Kate left Chambercombe to marry her lover without her family’s blessing. Their parting was bitter, but she promised to visit. After many years, a ship wrecked on the Devon shore and the woman’s father helped search the coast for survivors. He found a lady lying unconscious and badly maimed on the beach. He took her home and treated her wounds in the comfort of the chamber, but she died. The man discovered gold and jewels on the deceased’s body, sealed her body in the chamber to cover their theft, and used the wealth to purchase his home from his landlord. Next morning, he discovered the only unaccounted passenger of the wrecked ship was his lost daughter Kate.
Adventure ideas
The discovery and exploration of this secret room is something player characters should get to do. If they discover an unknown window or a crack in a wall, a skeleton is the best thing they can find.
Nobody knows exactly who the skeleton was, but court intrigue and royal murder are a part of this house’s past. Could the room hold a centuries’ old secret vital to the empire’s governance? Does the skeleton lead to a secret about the Royal succession from the reign of Bloody Mary?
Another rumor says forbidden spirits of a different sort haunt Chambercombe. Smugglers used a tunnel running under the house to Hele beach a mile away. The secret chamber was simply a secret compartment for illicit scotch and brandy built from an old priest’s hole used to hide from religious persecution. It might also have been used for storage by “wreckers”, criminals who shine bright lights on the coast to lure ships passing through dangerous waters into crashing into rocks so they can murder the crew and rob their cargo.
Chambercombe’s fall from a manor for a noble family down to a farmhouse makes a great angle for a haunting. In many cases, a ghost story is about a secret from a location’s past disturbing the peace of the present. All houses have a history and the strange background of a house long separated from its current use could fill in the gaps of a haunting very easily.
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