Thanks to an introduction by Mrs Furse, Anne Naylor offered me the old playroom in Dancers Hill House as a studio to work in. Then in the late autumn of 1988, after a month of working diligently and happily in my extraordinary new studio, and walking or cycling home to my parent’s house which was at the time, by lucky chance, about four miles away, I was invited to move in as a house sitter proper. All bills were covered. So now I also had a bedroom in the 18th Century, 13 bedroom, Palladian mansion with a view from my amazing studio that looked out through the orangery onto the 27 acres of grounds.
When the spring arrived and friends had heard of my new abode, weekend visitors were frequent and many. People would bring supplies for the BBQ and there would be a football match on a “pitch” that had an ancient Juniper tree growing in the middle of it. The old gardener, who had been born in the 1890s and still pottered around doing what he could once in a while, told me the story that Princess Elizabeth, later to be Queen Elizabeth I, was said to have regularly stopped at the manor house that occupied the site before Dancers Hill House, to break up the “insufferable” journey between London and Hatfield House, and that sitting under the old Juniper was a favourite spot of Her Majesty’s.
This venerable old soul had also, as a young lad before the Great War, got in trouble with the Earl of Strafford of the day, master and lord of nearby Wrotham Park. Even though not at work, he had seen the Earl and the Earl had seen him on the High Street in Barnet, and the lad had failed to doff his cap in proper respect for his lord and employer. I can’t be certain of my memory, but I think he got a beating for that misdemeanour.
Whenever my friends arrived at my magnificent new home and studio, they would get the full Wiskey tour of the Dancers Hill grounds and house, starting with the little folly where I had once come across a sleeping fox cub in the sunshine. Then onto the Victorian swimming pool in elegant ruin with its Pointillist covering of duckweed, before heading indoors to see the numerous rooms, passages and staircases of my gorgeous stately pile. Finally we’d arrive on the east wing of the top floor, which had been the servants quarters — two bedrooms, a bathroom and a separate WC — for the tour’s final highlights.
After a few months of living in Dancers Hill House, while exploring the nooks and crannies, I had come across some rather interesting objects in one of these small bedrooms, which was devoid of all furniture, but had a built-in bookcase behind the door. There was a large scrolled plan of a proposed London ring motorway from the 1940s that showed an impressively far-sighted ten lane motorway, instead of the six lanes that were consequently built in rather short-sighted, miserly fashion between 1973 and 1986. The need for widening of the M25 was recognised as necessary within the first year of its grand opening by Margaret Thatcher, and expensive works to increase its capacity with added lanes has continued ever since.
There was also an oddly shaped tin box that was hand painted loosely in imitation of a cheetah’s markings, and which contained a splendid military hat from the Boer Wars, which had a coloured feather plume that could be screwed into place. There was a small companion box, shaped like a hip flask and painted in similar cheetah fashion. This was the final highlight. First, I would show the accompanying letters I had found in my uncharacteristic nosiness, from a British officer and ancestor of the Naylor family, sent from South Africa, while fighting the Afrikaans and presumably the Zulu too. Then with dramatic awe I would carefully open the smaller tin box to reveal the ashes of the fallen soldier, evidently cremated in situ and sent home, but never interred.
This was a wow moment that never failed to shock and impress, and every time I felt very important to be sharing this secret with my friends.
One night, after arriving home around midnight to a pitch dark house, on a pitch dark lane, from being in London doing some decorating work, followed by some socialising, I was looking forward to collapsing into my bed satisfyingly exhausted. I cycled everywhere at the time, on my trusty Cannondale SM600, and working in Chelsea and with after work activities and socialising every day of the week, I would easily clock up 200+ miles a week. I had “buns of steel” and would cycle like a demon, racing against motorcycle couriers.
After putting my bicycle away by the (wine-less) wine cellar and switching off the downstairs lights, I ascended the main staircase, turning lights on and off as I went up to the top floor. There were three floors to the house, the top one had a total of nine bedrooms, six of which were on either side of a central corridor that was about fifty feet long, between the top of the main staircase and the top of the servants’ staircase at the other end. There were just two dim lights illuminating the long corridor, in a rather atmospherically film noir way, one close to my room and the second halfway along, with the switch near my bedroom on the opposite wall about six feet away from my bedroom door. I turned on my bedroom light and turned off the corridor light. My bedroom light was now the only source of artificial light for about a half mile radius. The limit of the suburban sprawl of London was Barnet, almost two miles to the south, and the nearest house a five minute walk away.
I closed the door to get ready for bed and sleep, after my customary twenty minutes of meditation.
In this very large and thoroughly un-modernised house, there was only one telephone. A landline that had it’s wall socket in my bedroom, and which had a fifty foot extension lead that meant Juliet, Anne’s daughter, who occasionally stayed in a bedroom down the corridor, could use the phone in her room, and when she wasn’t around, the phone could, at a literal stretch, reach a few steps down the servants’ staircase so that I could hear it when it rang, from my studio on the floor below, which was where it was that night.
Before I could sit down for my meditation though, my attention was taken as I watched the phone extension cord that went from the wall socket, under my bedroom door into the pitch black windowless corridor, tighten for a few seconds, as if it was being pulled from outside my room. Then it slackened off again as if someone had now let go of it.
The hairs on my neck stood on end. I was not alone in the house. I knew Juliet wasn’t there. There was someone or something else in the house with me. Was it Bricks, the feral tabby cat who several months previously had walked past the orangery as I was looking out across the lawns, and who after we had struck up a meowing conversation, had slowly “tamed” me and become my mansion companion? No. She was right there, on my futon bed, sitting sphinx-like and peaceful, with serenely closed eyes.
My senses had instantly gone into heightened mode, I could have heard a pin drop two miles away in Barnet, but there was no sound for my senses to hear. No creaking floorboards in the 240 year old house were creaking. Nothing but pitch silence engulfed me.
I couldn’t not open the door and find out who or what it was.
So I moved as silently as I could, listening as keenly as I could, towards the door, and in one swift movement I grabbed the door handle, twisted it and pulled open the door onto the fathomless blackness of the corridor. Nothing. No body, no thing, no noise. Just my pounding heart as my eyes adjusted slightly to the dark. Next I had to spring into that darkness, to the light switch across the way. I couldn’t actually see the switch, it was not illuminated by the indirect glow of my bedroom light, but my physical memory knew where it was and I didn’t wait long enough to get more scared. I leapt, switched the switch and turned so my back was against the wall in one balletic movement, and looked quickly to my left to the main staircase, and to the right down the semi-lit top hallway. Nothing. No body, no thing, no noise. Just my heart and my breathing.
Now I needed to go to the end of the corridor, past the second dim light near Juliet’s room, and into the darkness that shrouded what had once been the servants’ quarters, because I absolutely had to find the reason what had pulled the phone line tight, with the hope it could ease my mind and sleep easy. It would also make me feel safer to have the phone in my room for any impending emergency calls I might need to make in the next few minutes.
Perhaps the phone had slipped and fallen down the stairs? How could that have happened? I was grasping at straws and maybe there was no rational and immediate answer to the mystery, but I had to keep going.
The way the bedrooms on the top floor along this stretch of hallway were arranged, their doors were directly opposite each other, which meant that there were two pairs of open doors that I needed to pass by, in order to reach the phone. Their configuration also prevented me from passing each open doorway with my back to the opposite wall, ready to defend myself against whoever or whatever might be hiding in wait for me. I sprinted past each pair of doors, pausing after each sprint to listen out for an assailant. Still nothing.
On reaching the top of the stairs, I found the telephone was there. No phone fall had taken place, it wasn’t even close to the top of the stairs. Silence. Darkness. I picked up the telephone and retraced my sprint-pause steps back to the safety of my bedroom, while collecting the extension lead as I went.
Once in the room, with Bricks still peacefully on the bed, I closed the door and moved the chest of drawers across the room to block it so nobody could enter quietly as I slept. If I was going to be able to sleep. I meditated, then got undressed and went to bed, lying on my back with ears still alert to any noise. Despite not normally being able to get to sleep lying on my back, I was exhausted enough to fall asleep fairly quickly. The next morning arrived and oddly I thought little more of the previous night’s surprise visitation. I cycled into London to do my decorating job and gave it no more attention, even when I arrived back home later that evening in the dark again.
At the weekend, there were more visitors. Friends of mine came on Saturday to join me at my fabulous mansion, some of whom had come before, some of whom were guests of my guests and who deserved the full Dancers Hill tour. So they got it, including the M25, the military hat, the Boer letters and the soldier’s ashes.
We had a barbecue, we played football on the Juniper tree pitch, and later we cooked supper in the ground floor kitchen. Soul II Soul’s Club Classics Vol. One blared out the anthem of the summer of 1989 from the sound system in my studio, with speakers positioned in the orangery, and as the night drew in we played a favourite old family game: Murder in the Dark.
How to play Murder in the Dark. With enough playing cards to match the number of players, the cards are shuffled and dealt out so nobody sees anyone else’s card. All the cards are number cards except the Ace of Spades and the Jack of Clubs. Whoever has the Ace declares the card, because they’re the Detective and will be in charge of switching the lights on and off from the fuse box, and attempting to solve the murder once it has been committed.
Whoever has the Jack is the Murderer, and the Murderer does not reveal themselves. Everyone else is a potential Victim or Witness/Bystander. The lights are switched off and people start to mill around, stumbling from room to room trying to not trip over any low furniture. At some point, the Murderer places their hands gently round the neck of whichever person they have chosen to kill, and whispers in their ear “you’re dead”. The Victim counts to ten before giving a blood curdling cry, collapsing to the floor or just lying down “dead”, depending on how much of a drama queen they are.
As soon as the Detective hears the scream, he or she switches on the lights and hurries to find the corpse. Everybody else, when they hear the scream, must stand completely still. The Murderer might not stay so still, but if others see them moving after the lights come on, they may be able to point an accusing finger. After the Detective has checked everyone’s location and that of the body, everyone including the Victim can move to a room for the questioning. Our family like the body to lie dead in the middle of the room to give a sense of realism. The Detective can then ask any number of questions of any person except the Victim, who is dead, so can’t speak. Everyone must answer truthfully except the Murderer, who can lie if they choose to. The Detective then has 1, 2 or 3 guess-accusations depending on the number of people in the game. “Are you the Murderer?” This is the only question the Murderer has to tell the truth about. The game ends with a caught Murderer or a Murderer who got away with murder.
Can you imagine playing this in a huge mansion with over 30 rooms over 3 floors? It was a bit chaotic with plenty of screams that were not murders, just scared or surprised participants, and we played several rounds, until way past 1am, when things slowed down for more drinks round the huge old kitchen table. That’s when things got scary.
One of the friends who had come that weekend for the first time was Kevin. I’d known him for a while, and a year or so later, I bought my first car from him: a Ford Fiesta van. By 2am everyone except Kevin was in the kitchen, when suddenly he emerged from the tunnel-like corridor that linked the west part of the ground floor to the east part. He was white as a sheet (an expression that had seemed ridiculous to me till that moment of seeing someone that pale) and was very angry and scared. He demanded to know “who the f*** was that?” several times. We looked among ourselves not knowing what the f*** he was talking about. He wouldn’t believe that we didn’t know what he was talking about, but he was clearly shaken and someone gave him a whisky and got him to sit down and explain what he meant.
Nobody had left the kitchen or come to the kitchen for a long while before Kevin arrived. So he told us his story.
He had needed the toilet, and not being that familiar with the house, had not gone to the most convenient, but had found himself at the small toilet on the third floor just by the top of the servants’ staircase. He had been sitting there going about his business, when there was a sudden banging on the door as if somebody had slammed their open hand against it very hard. It had scared the remaining s*** out of him and in the deafening silence after the slam, he had called out angrily. Silence. Just when he thought he must have imagined it, there was a second hard slam on the door. Now he was really scared too because in the silence he could not hear movement or breathing.
He tidied himself up as quietly and as best as he could, and pulled up his trousers before opening the door quickly in order to catch the mischievous prankster. But there was nobody there, just the unlit corridor and landing. Now he was really terrified and headed down the unlit servants’ staircase, kicking the air in front of him in his blind descent. He went down two floors slowly beginning to hear the noise of the rest of us in the kitchen, and emerged in front of us in his scared but angry state.
This all put a bit of a dampener on the night, and everyone was assigned their bedroom for the rest of the night. I couldn’t tell you how well each person slept that night, only that Kevin never came back to Dancers Hill House, and moved to the Netherlands not long after.
Having finished my decorating job the previous week, after the weekend ghost party I was able to get back to my proper job of making paintings. I was working on a large work made up of three canvases that measured 18 feet wide and 9 feet high, titled The Good Blood of God on the Hands of the Disciple, and while in the flow of being deeply involved with listening to my paint and following the needs of the painting itself, things came together in my mind about the recent events. The phone extension pulling, Kevin’s door slamming and the cache of Grand Tour highlight objects, including the ashes of the war hero, were all within about a three foot radius, albeit with a wall in the way. But as everyone knows, walls are no obstacle to those who inhabit the spirit realm.
The penny dropped.
I put down my brushes and palette and headed up the spooky servants staircase, which was still unnerving even in broad daylight, to the small bed-less bedroom that had been the source of recent bedlam. I picked up the canister of ashes and with genuine remorse for having disturbed and disrespected the dead officer, I apologised profoundly and unreservedly for my stupidity and my rudeness, promising to never show his remains, his hat or his letters to any other visitor while I was resident at Dancers Hill House, a house he likely grew up in.
From that moment I kept my word and was untroubled by ghostly happenings thereafter. In Dancers Hill House at least!
