Trim up the tree with clanking
chains and floating orbs, it’s Christmas! As in years past, Skullduggery in the Smoke follows the
most Victorian of Christmas traditions: Ghost Stories. For the entire month,
I’m searching through Peter Underwood’s Gazetteer
of British, Scottish, and Irish Ghosts for hauntings fit for a gaming
table to pull out adventure ideas, historical connections, and bizarre details.
So bring a torch, Jeannette Isabella, we’re telling Ghost Stories for
Christmas!
The next ghost story of the
season leans back into the distant Victorian past and the less distant history
of the Battle of Britain, making a haunting fit for Victoriana and Their Finest
Hour. In the 1840s, nuns of the Benedictine order fled anti-Catholic sentiment
in Hampshire to settle in the village of East Bergholt. They rebuilt the empty,
faded chapel into the Church of St. Mary and converted the adjacent manor
house, “Old Hall”, into a nunnery.
The air of both St. Mary and Old
Hall crowd with legend and spirits. St. Mary lacks a bell tower, possessing
instead a medieval-styled bell cage on the church grounds with over 4-ton
weight of bells facing upside-down towards the ceiling and rung by dangerously
shoving their massive bulk by hand. According to village folklore, workers
spent 6 years attempting to build a bell tower, but the devil visited the
worksite every night and undid all their labor. In Old Hall, chambers suffer
sudden plummets of temperature with no obvious cause and wispy floating figures
cross the corridors.
Shortly after England entered
World War II, the Benedictine order evacuated their nuns from East Bergholt due
to the village’s location on the now-threatened southern coast. For the same
reason, the British Army requisitioned the former nunnery as a barracks for its
men stationed in the quiet village. The soldiers in Old Hall soon grew used to
their new home and its strange atmosphere. They learned to avoid the main
entrance and instead travel around the back of the building to the back door to
avoid seeing strange figures and feeling ghostly touches. Each night at 10:50
the door to the sergeant’s mess unlocked and opened about a foot and half as a
strange cold seeped into the hall. Soldiers armed with clubs waited on both
sides of the door to catch the suspected pranksters. With no culprit on hand
night after night, the enlisted men pragmatically started a nightly card game
outside the haunted doorway so they could sneak in for a snack after the ghost
unlocked the mess.
One young private
progressing towards sleep in his bunk saw his door suddenly burst open. A faint
shadowy figure crossed towards him and laid cold dead hands on his face. At the
frigid groping, the private overcame his fear and yelled for help. The specter
disappeared as his compatriots entered and turned on the light. The young
private’s dark hair had turned white with terror.
Adventure Ideas
St. Mary and Old Hall changed
denominations a few times in its history. Both Protestant and Catholic dead
decay in their architecture and grounds. Arguments in life lead to disquiet in
death. Do the strange unconnected hauntings reflect a ghostly battle of deeply
entrenched beliefs? How can a ghost be swayed about the metaphysical facts of
eternal life?
A bunch of soldiers stationed in
an ancient house with a strange history makes an ideal scenario for a haunting.
The men are trained and well-armed but not prepared for the supernatural. As
outsiders, they have only church records and legends told in the pub to hint at
the cause of their haunting. Best of all, they can’t leave the house without
risking a court-martial.
An inconveniently locked door
conveniently unlocked by a ghost could facilitate many schemes. Murderers,
thieves, prisoners, and star-crossed lovers could get that much closer to their
goal provided they are bold enough to use dead hands to do their dirty work.
In folklore, the glorious ringing
of church bells control the weather, grow crops, and drive away devils. The
cold metal of most bells has been ceremonially baptized before their
installation. Perhaps, the normally sacred church bells of St. Mary sleep in a
“cage” on the humble ground due to some stain of evil wrought within the bells.
What tragedies occur when a bell gets loose or worse installed high above the
ground in a bell tower?
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