I’m under the eiderdown in the Tapestry Room at Muncaster Castle when it
begins. A bizarre guttural sound, vibrating through the other end of the
room. It seems to emanate from somewhere by the window, under the scowling
portrait of the third Lady Muncaster, just near the mark on the carpet that
looks disturbingly like blood.
Forgive the capital letters, but WHAT IN GOD’S NAME CAN IT BE? It rises and
fills the space, and I clench the covers more tightly to my chin – this
being the internationally recognised method of protecting oneself against
vampires, werewolves and other hell-fiends. The sound is not a figment of my
imagination – it is expanding now, swelling into a hateful, high-pitched
rasp. That’s when the dread truth hits me. It’s the 11.17pm from Manchester
to New York.
What a ninny. It’s not even midnight yet. Considering I’ve spent the whole
evening telling everybody I’m unspookable, my allnight vigil at “Britain’s
most haunted castle” has not begun nobly.
Every self-respecting stately home has its ghost story – a miasmic White Lady
or a bloke with his head under his arm. It’s good for tourism. But you’ve
got to hand it to the Pennington family, castellans of Muncaster since 1208.
Spirited away on the lonesome shores of west Cumbria, at the wrong end of
England’s scariest mountain pass, they go the extra mile to attract
fright-hungry visitors.
The Penningtons are not content with having a set of creepy turrets, a
graveyard in the garden and some seriously nasty murders in their history.
They have filled the castle grounds with creatures of ill omen – the World
Owl Centre is based here, guaranteeing a bloodcurdling dead-of-night screech
or two. On winter evenings, they illuminate their ugliest trees with
spectral smoke and sinister light effects. They employ a wizened charwoman,
“Mad Eileen”, who gibbers in the Great Hall about how she has “the power of
the second sight”. They’ve even got their own personal ghostbuster, who
turns up twice a year to investigate Muncaster’s mixed bag of hauntings.
Actually, this is where it gets interesting. Jason Braithwaite is no overgrown
schoolboy with a paranormal fetish. He’s a doctor of cognitive
neuropsychology at Birmingham University, who doesn’t believe in ghosts, but
happens to think that when enough people report bumps in the night,
something must be afoot.
Cue Peter Frost-Pennington, vet turned castle-keeper, who married into the
Muncaster clan 20 years ago. A plausible sort, in trim beard and corduroys,
he shows me around the family pile and its aristocratic treasures:
cockfighting chairs, Crimean medicine chests, portraits of uncles eaten by
bears, that kind of thing.
The oddest item is in the library: a glass dome protecting a sensor plugged
into a laptop computer. Wavy lines pulse across the screen. “This is Jason’s
rig,” Peter explains. “He’s working on the theory that anomalous magnetic
fields might trigger hallucinations in some people’s brains, so that they
imagine they’ve seen ghostly activity. I call it our spectre detector.”
All fascinating, but I haven’t come all this way for illusory monsters. I’m
after proper, ectoplasmic stuff. And, as darkness begins to bunch around the
mossy crenellations of the castle, we follow our torches out into the
moonlit graveyard, where Peter talks me through Muncaster’s cast of undead
ancestors.
“Most sightings are of Mary Bragg,” he says, “a housekeeper who was hanged on
the old tree outside the castle gates by a love rival. They found her in the
river; her face had been devoured by eels. Her ghost is often seen out in
the road, a restless figure shrouded in shadows.” Of course – a White Lady.
Peter creaks back the door of the estate church, where we examine the memorial
to Margaret Pennington, who died aged 11 in 1871, having been possessed with
“screaming fits”. Could she be the child sometimes heard softly sobbing in
the Tapestry Room, Muncaster’s most haunted bedchamber, where I’ll be
quartered for the night?
We crunch along the drive and Peter’s torch alights on Tom Fool’s Tree, the
haunt of Tom Skelton, Muncaster’s dastardly 16th-century jester. Skelton is
reputed to have inspired the Fool in King Lear, and he was nasty: his
favourite gag was to send lost travellers into the quicksands down in the
Esk estuary.
“His darkest hour was when he murdered his sworn enemy, the estate carpenter,”
Peter says. “He lured him to the Tapestry Room and beheaded him – using the
man’s own hammer and chisel.” Aha! A phantom head-carrier.
There’s no putting it off any longer. Time to be ghoul bait. We hurry indoors,
out of the night, and upstairs onto the creaky landing. There to greet us is
Tom Skelton, glaring malevolently in the half-light. It is a very unsettling
painting.
The Tapestry Room, it must be said, looks the part. It’s like something out of
an MR James story – the ones where people are forced to lodge with a
sinister squire, and wake up to find their palms are covered in hair. There
is a tiny four-poster, barely coffin size, and a vast Tudor hearth, its
firedog adorned with grinning devils. There are sepia photographs of
dead-eyed children – including the unfortunate Margaret Pennington, staring
out vacantly beside my bed. And it is freezing: several degrees colder than
the rest of the (not terribly toasty) castle.
Peter thrusts a tatty logbook in my hand: the handwritten accounts of previous
Tapestry Room survivors. “Bedtime reading,” he almost cackles. “Good night,
and good luck.”
So, huddled under the sheets of the oldest bed I’ve ever slept in, I turn the
pages on tale after tale of echoing voices, dragging noises,
doorknob-rattlings, weepings, gnashings and spectral lullaby-singing, “as of
a nurse comforting a dying child”. Brrrrrrr.
Suddenly, 2am. I must have dozed off. Pitch black. The lamp’s dead. Did I turn
it out? Then a long, shrill note from the landing. Bravely, I think, I pad
out barefoot, and freeze there, on the icy floorboards. Downstairs, a clock
chimes. Time stops. Tom Skelton eyes me murderously. Then, no question about
it, I hear a footfall on the stair.
It’s somewhere behind me. My body goes taut, my breath catches. I don’t
remember the ground moving beneath me, but instantly I’m back in bed, heart
somersaulting, cursing myself for losing my nerve and not investigating
further.
Then there’s a ghastly metallic scraping noise – not a dragging, more like a
chain clanking . . . and . . . and . . . the unmistakable sound of Mrs
Pennington’s lavatory flushing across the corridor.
The Tapestry Room at Muncaster (01229 717614,www.muncaster.co.uk)
is available for “ghost sits” year-round: it accommodates six, though there
are only two small beds. One night starts at £405, B&B, including
ghost walk.
The grounds are illuminated after dusk, and open until 9pm (£7, children £5).
Admission to the castle, with audio tour, costs £2.50/£1.50 extra. This week
(October 22-28 and 31), there will be nightly Hallowe’en ghost tours –
£3.50/£2.
The castle offers B&B and self-catering accommodation in converted stables
and granaries; doubles from £60. Or there is the rather swish Pennington
Hotel (01229 717222, www.thepennington.co.uk),
in nearby Ravenglass; doubles from £120.
More Hallowe’en spooktaculars
DOVER
With its labyrinth of cobwebby underground tunnels, Dover Castle (01304
211067, www.english-heritage.org.uk)
has a head start in the spook stakes, and a better class of ghost –
including the headless Charles I. This week, you’re guaranteed a sighting,
as the castle’s apparitions come to spine-chilling life.Tours daily from tomorrow
until November 2; £10, children £5.
OXFORD
Meet the wheyfaced undertaker for a stalk through the haunted history of
Blenheim (0870 060 2080, www.blenheimpalace.com)
– but beware an appearance by Grace Ridley, the first duchess’s undead maid.
Tremulous souls might prefer a ghost-train ride to the palace pleasure
gardens.Daily until October 28; £16, children £9.75.
EXETER
Why settle for visiting a spooky castle when you can haunt one yourself? The
wonderfully gothic Powderham Castle (01626 890243, www.powderham.co.uk)
has had its Grey Lady for centuries, but this week’s Hallowe’en tours,
designed for under13s, will add a few more apparitions – fancy dress is very
much encouraged. Daily except Saturday; £8, children £6.
GLASGOW
Holmwood House (0844 493 2204, www.nts.org.uk)
would make a fab setting for a Hammer horror movie: still being restored, it
has peeling wallpaper, broken staircases and lots of dark dead ends. The
tour includes the haunted dining room and the ghost ballroom, with its
infernal pianist. Admission £5, children £4.
