Everywhere you look in the Great Hall at Kentwell, something stares back at you. Suits of armour cast looming shadows in the musician’s gallery. A baby-faced harvest deity, carved into the fireplace, grins from under garland of twisting vines. High above our heads, Luxuria gazes impassively upon a crowd of Vices, who dance in diaphanous gowns or grapple, bare-chested, blood-lust glinting in their eyes. Dozens more figures are woven into tapestries, but despite the fact we’re surrounded by effigies of life, the room feels oddly empty. What is missing is the sense of a presence. The air feels light, pure.
“But the atmosphere of a space can change,” says the Principal Investigator, with the confidence of a seasoned ghost hunter. “If we come back here later, it might feel very different.”
He describes a time when, at The Ostrich Inn, he entered a room that exuded such powerful hostility, it felt like a physical force. A fellow ghost hunter, who experienced the same sensation, christened the place, ‘the room that pushes you out.’ Did he dare enter? Yes, he says, and it was as if a gathering of invisible presences had suddenly fallen silent. This description is eerily similar to what some have said about the chamber in which the PI, his husband, my partner and I are about to spend the night. More than one set of guests has commented that the Victorian Room (also known at the Haunted Room) feels ‘full of people’. Others have heard footfalls and the rustling of a dress at the level of the demolished Long Gallery, four feet above the current floor.
As in all good ghost stories, there is a legend lurking behind this manifestation. And, as in all good ghost stories, there are layers of narrative and competing versions of the tale. In one account, an enraged husband chased his wife down the Long Gallery, all the way to a latticed window. Later, the lady was dragged from the moat that encircled Kentwell Hall. Did she fall from the window, or was she pushed?
Another version of the tale is preserved in an early nineteenth-century ballad, ‘founded upon an old traditionary legend, which is current in Suffolk.’ The ballad was printed in The Minerva: Or, Literary, Entertaining or Scientific Journal, in 1825, and may have appeared in the local publication, G.W. Fulcher's The Sudbury Pocket Book, in 1838. [1]
The Ladies' Memorandum Book and Poetical Miscellany, also published by Fulcher, contains similar material to the pocket books.
Like the story above, it describes how a lady falls into the moat and drowns:
‘And did you not see a figure in white,
By the fitful lightening's flash,
In the deep, deep moat, to rise no more,
Fall down, with a fearful splash?’ [2]
Part of the moat at Kentwell—excitingly, the very spot where the notorious witch-ducking scene in the 1968 Witchfinder General was filmed. The area of the moat mentioned in the White Lady legend is now filled in.
The culprit, however, is not her husband, but ‘four men […] carousing with drunken glee,’ whose bad behaviour is spurred on by Sir Gilbert Vere. What the revellers do, and how it leads to the White Lady’s death, is never revealed. We are whipped straight from the scene of death to Sir Gilbert Vere telling his merry men to, ‘Ride away,’ leaving him to bear the burden of guilt alone. The ballad teases us with questions (‘Who is this lady whose soft lute tell / A tale of such deep fraught woe?’) and refuses to answer them (‘Hush! hush! 'tis a question you may not ask / Or may not be answered here’), while telling us enough to set our imaginations racing down shadowy corridors.
The ambiguity of the basic narrative may be a product of the oral origins of the legend, which would have shape-shifted with each new telling, some details being added, some lost, some misremembered. Sir Gilbert Vere, for example, apparently never was an owner of Kentwell Hall, but only a close neighbour. It is also possible that these errors and ambiguities are a part of the construct of the printed poem. Patrick, current owner of Kentwell Hall and true English character, suggested it was written by a ‘Leveson-Gower’ following a dinner party at the house, as a kind of Villa Diodati-esque amusement. Francis Egerton, also known as Lord Francis Leveson-Gower until 1833, was a practising poet around this time and could well fit the bill in terms of authorship. Although I can find no copy of the poem in Leveson-Gower’s collection, Translations from the German and Original Poems (1824), his ballad, ‘The White Lady’ contains similarities of style and subject matter:
‘I knew her at once by her long lank hair
And the garments as white as snow;
And she lingered there in her still despair,
And scowl’d on the troops below.’ [3]
In another poem, ‘The Magician,’ his speaker confesses to being a lover of ‘tales of ghosts / Circles, and charms, and mandrake shrieks’ in his youth. Given number of Gothic poems among his original material, it would not come as much of a surprise if Francis Leveson-Gower is giving us a glimpse into his own interests here.
In the absence of other evidence, we only have Patrick’s word that a Leveson-Gower wrote the poem, and I’m conscious that this information may have been passed from one person to another, much like the original legend may have been circulated among the servants and guests at Kentwell, changing a little each time. But aren’t these scholarly inconveniences classic ingredients of the ghost story? The unreliability of narration takes us away from the realm of the rational. The multiple framing devices keep us at a distance from the real traumas that transform into a rich and strange folklore.
The Haunted Room is up two flights of wooden stairs, past a set of Edwardian bells and at the head of a long corridor. Though much of Kentwell Hall dates from the Tudor period, the Haunted Room was created in 1826 by Thomas Hopper, and replaces the long gallery that ran along the length of the upper house. [4]
It is certainly atmospheric. The wallpaper, crammed with motifs of birds and flowers, is a French design from 1826; but sadly, water damage has eaten away at parts of the wall and ceiling, causing it to peel. Damp has also seeped into the door, making it physically difficult to get out of the room once you’re inside. A mahogany four-poster bed dominates the space, hung with dark, heavy curtains from Horham Hall in Essex. Chairs cower in corners, among them, one that Queen Victoria used at her coronation. A pigeon-haunted bathroom is accessed by a small set of steps that crack like a whip underfoot. I wonder whether a guest has ever woken in the middle of the night to see a pair of vein-mottled feet standing on the top step, water dripping from a long, white dress and pooling around blackened toes. I set up my camp bed nearby, hoping that such an apparition will grace me with its presence.
The plan is to perform a vigil, staying awake until the early hours and making notes on any thoughts, sensations and events. But the absolute darkness of the Suffolk countryside extinguishes the consciousness of my fellow ghost-hunters like so many candles, and soon, I’m the last one left awake.
I filter the air for any sounds and can hear nothing but the gentle breathing of my companions and the occasional rustle. I toss and turn in my sleeping bag, and the zip breaks. Cold crawls into my bones. I feel my way blindly across the room and sneak into my partner’s camp bed, but my intrusion is unwelcome and I’m soon back on my own, having stolen his duvet. I linger on the shore of sleep for most of the night, occasionally dipping into the shallow waters of a dream state. At one point, I hear my partner having a very frank conversation about our relationship with the PI’s husband, and I’m about to give my side of the story when I realise that the conversation isn’t—can’t be—real. Once the grey light of dawn washes through the curtains, I accept that no ghostly footsteps will echo over my head, and allow myself to sink into a deeper sleep.
In the morning, the four of us share our experiences. All of us had a spectre-less night. All, that is, but the PI, who was so plagued by vivid nightmares that he vowed never to sleep in the Haunted Room again. In true ghost story fashion, I will fade into the framing narrative and leave him to tell his tale. The dreams that so disturbed him are different from anything I encountered in the Haunted Room. Yet worthy of note is the cold, which drove me to the theft of a duvet, and the voices that seemed so disturbingly real.
‘There were three dream sequences which stuck in my memory. In the first, a man was lying in the bed - the bed in the room, I think. His face was pink and purple. I was looking down on him from above, to the left, and he was lying at a slight angle. As I watched, his face began to morph and change. Thick, stubby, crusty, tentacle-like protrusions started growing out of his cheeks, and then the face began to fragment and come apart.
Next, there were strange creatures—small—they seemed to be made out of meat, and eating each other. Later, I dreamed that I saw a stuffed toy on a large bed. It was sliding along of its own accord, uphill—and I thought, in my dream, 'it's happening'. Later, out of the window, I saw a cast iron bench sliding along the curving path outside. I called to [my husband] to come and see it, then we were outside, in the grounds of Kentwell, or a landscape that seemed to be the grounds. But very quickly I found myself being drawn by the same seeming magnetic force that had pulled the iron bench. It pulled me into a boggy, muddy hollow, where other people were also being pulled and sucked into the mud. Some were corpses, pink, swollen and bloated, already half-sunk, and I could feel myself sinking.
Then I thought, is this not a dream; what if it's real? I need to get out of this, so I jerked myself into waking up. It was then approaching dawn, still dark, and the room felt cold, though I was warm. As I lay there, I remember thinking, the others are asleep—and the atmosphere was rather strange. Then I heard a voice, a little above and behind me, say, ‘Yes’, in a short guttural tone. It didn't sound human—I remember thinking, more like a goblin voice. And I had been awake too long for it to have come from my dream, or in the hypnopompic state.’
[1] Sadly, few copies of the Pocket Book exist in libraries and archives. I was unable to obtain a copy of the 1838 volume.
[2] Anon, 'Ballad,' in The Minerva: Or, Literary, Entertaining or Scientific Journal, ed. George Houston and James G. Brooks, vol II, n.s. (New York: E. Bliss and E. White, 1825), pp. 399-400.
[3] Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, Translations from the German and Original Poems (London: J. Murray, 1824), p. 148.
[4] Details of building work, decorations and furniture from the information sheets in the Victorian Room at Kentwell.