Hello. I'm Richard McClain smith, creator of Unexplained. The following is an extract taken from a new book, which is available to buy in print and audiobook at bookstores and online in Waterstones, Blackwells, and Amazon, amongst other outlets. The book will also be available to purchase in the US and Canada in fall twenty nineteen. I Hope you enjoy
Chapter ten. Every story is a ghost story. The ghost holds a unique place in the world the supernatural, As capable of scaring as senseless as they are of inflicting us with the deepest of melancholies, they also come in many forms. The ghosts that we carry with us in our daily lives, memories of those we have loved and lost, or perhaps even wronged, thoughts that sit in the deepest
parts of the psyche straining to become manifest. But what are the apparitions that seem not to have been brought forth from the subconscious, Those that have no connection to the observer, but instead seem to be reaching out to us from a seemingly timeless space. For some, to witness a ghost, particularly that of a relative, might bring a certain comfort. The reassuring glimpse of a life beyond death
almost without exception. However, dating back to our earliest cultures, from those of the Igbo in West Africa to the Bengali of South Asia, the sighting of a ghost was rarely something to celebrate. Commonly, the appearance of a ghost would speak of something unsettled, the result of a body not properly buried, perhaps, or one that had been lost at sea. Or it might be a sign that the
cause of death was suspicious and required avenging. Failure to rectify the situation could condemn the ghost to an eternity of restlessness. For the ancient Sumerians, death was an act from which there was ordinarily no coming back. The souls of the dead left to dwell in Kur, the land
of no Return. It was a place where all men and women were equal, regardless of their actions in life, no matter how rich or poor, a place where they would remain for the rest of eternity in dreary unlight, watched over by Irish Kegal, the dark Queen of the nether world. The oppressive conditions of Kur were said to be alleviated for the dead if their surviving family continued to make offerings of food and drink once they were gone.
Failure to do so would see the ghost of the deceased return to punish their callous relatives with misfortune and ill health. In ancient Japan, the appearance of a ghost or yuri was especially ominous. Yuri was sometimes said to transform from souls or racon in fits of explosive emotion, often motivated by vengeance. Violent murder or suicide would almost always presage the arrival of a yuri intent on retribution. Until the disturbance had been settled, they would be fated
to haunt the living indefinitely. Yuri are traditionally portrayed as women with long black hair, wearing white burial robes, with hands hanging loosely from the wrists, an image that fans of the character Sadako Yumama might recognize from author Koji
Suzuki's Petrifying Ringou series. Yumamer's portrayal as a traditional yuri with a ponchhot for climbing out of TVs and video monitors as realized devastating effect in Hideo Nacata's Terrifying nineteen ninety eight adaptation of the first book in the series. Is for me the most nightmarish betrayal of a ghost in cinematic history. Often, a ghost or apparition is said to be inexorably linked to a specific location. For those of us living in the United Kingdom, there are many
such ghosts. Two of our tourist boards claiming the Great Tower of London and Edinburgh Castle as their respective country's most haunted destinations. However, I have always found such a notion problematic in a very literal sense, at least for reasons laid out with a great, mournful and affecting beauty
in a ghost story. In this striking twenty seventeen film, written and directed by David Lowry, the eponymous ghost of the title, having chosen to remain behind on Earth, is fated to drift through time as all the world changes around him, Although Lowry slips the ghost back into his original corporeal timeline. I have always wondered where such a ghost might end up were it not so easy to
escape the seemingly ceaseless arrow of time. Just where might a ghost be left a haunt tens of billions of years from now, when the planet has long since been obliterated by the sun. When it comes to the sheer terror of the supernatural. For me, there are few more disturbing notions than the Poltergeist, malignant spirits of wrathful energy, dead set on singling you out for inexplicable and therefore
deeply frightening reasons. Though some consider supposed poltergeist activity to be the result of the extrasensory projections of troubled teenage minds, it is surely in the betrayal as an active spirit that the notion is most potent. I have always felt a little haunted by this idea. Doubtless there are many of my generation whose first experiences of the fabled knocking ghost came through Toby Hooper's mesmeric nineteen eighty two film Poltergeist,
which many forget was written by Steven Spielberg. Perhaps it is simply nostalgia that draws me back to this masterful movie, hypnotic in its alluring fusion of slick Hollywood with a less familiar place that seems to call out silently to us from somewhere between the frames. But there is something else, although there is little telling which was cause and which effect.
For as long as I can remember, since seeing this film, I have had a recurring, terrifying poltergeist nightmare, always occurring in that liminal, lucid space surely before waking. It begins with me standing at the top of the stairs of an old childhood home, while friends or members of my family are gathered at the bottom. But as I walked down to join them, something has caught me in its grip, something of unfathomable malignance from which I know I cannot escape.
As I kick and scream, it continues to pull me back further and further, and then I wake up. Every time it is the same. I understand this to be a common dream trope, and was once advised that the way to do away with it might be to try to turn around and face this unseen manifest fear. I've not yet been able to achieve this, though I'm sure
there's a good lesson in there somewhere. So it always fills me with a particular sense of caution, but no little excitement when I learn of new alleged politgeist events, particularly ones that invoke the work of Nigel Neil involving
learned men and women on the hunt for ghosts. At thirty three years old, Tony Cornell was by no means the most senior member of the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research, but he was certainly one of the more proactive, always on the lookout for a new sight to investigate. Like most members of CUSPR, he was a proud rationalist with little time for superstition or spiritual nonsense, whose interest in supposed paranormal and supernatural events began from a thoroughly
skeptical point of view. He did, however, maintain a healthy fascination with the strange due to a peculiar event he had experienced ten years previously. As a young naval officer during the Second World War, Tony had been stationed in southern India close to the Nilghirie Mountains, where he became enthralled by stories of the local fakir, holy men and women without any possessions or relations, who are believed to
possess mystical powers. It was said that a fakir could perform miracles, with many people traveling for miles to seek their wisdom and guidance. One such fakir was said to be living in the hills not far from where Tony was billeted, and although thoroughly dubious, Tony was none the less intrigued enough to try to find the man in
the hope of witnessing these miracles for himself. After a number of hours trekking through rolling, tree capped hills across treacherous paths flanked by steep, jagged cliffs, Tony had made it to about six thousand feet above sea level when he came across an old man in simple clothes standing at the end of a small plateau as if he had been waiting for him. To the side of the plateau lay a steep drop into a gully with a stream gushing through it. Without acknowledging the young Navy officer,
the fakier asked what it was the Tony wanted. I hear you couldn't perform miracles, You're too materially stick. But I'll give you what you want. There was a pause as the fakier thought for a moment. Tony smiled awkwardly, suddenly self conscious at this clash of cultures. Look towards those hills, my son, Tony was not quite sure what to expect. He pointed towards some prominent peaks in the east.
Those hills The fakir gestured yes with a gentle nod of the head, and Tony Julie turned back to inspect them Yoyoshi. Tony looked confused, scratching his head before turning back to the man. I'm sorry, I don't but the man wasn't there. Tony heard a shout from the far side of the stream. Well, my son, did that entertain you? Tony stood for a moment, trying to fathom how a seventy year old man could have dropped into the gully and raced to the other side at the fast flowing
waters in only a matter of seconds. Smiling now to himself, he watched as the fakir slowly picked his way along the rocky bank before disappearing into the bush. Are you always taking care of your family? Do you often take care of others and not yourself? Now it's time to take care of yourself, to make time for you you deserve it. TELEDOC gives you access to a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling your best to feeling like yourself again. With TELEDOC, you can speak to
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the app. Visitteldoc dot com forward slash Unexplained podcast today to get started that teladoc dot com slash Unexplained podcast. The Society of Psychical Research, of which Tony's CUSPR group was an affiliate, had been established in eighteen eighty two, largely in response to a peculiar craze that had been gripping the nation, which had its origins in a small wooden house in the tiny hamlet of Hydesville, New York.
It was there that, in eighteen forty eight, two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, claimed to have made contact with the spirit of a dead man who had communicated with them through a series of knocks and bangs. In other words, they had allegedly made contact with a poltergeist, and in doing so had inadvertently created a movement that would come
to be known as spiritualism. As news of the Fox sisters incredible claims spread through the UK, it wasn't long before everybody from scullery staff to Queen Victoria were conducting seances in an attempt to communicate with the dead. As the movement grew in popularity throughout the world, so too did the stories of strange paranormal happenings that seemed suddenly
to be breaking out everywhere. For those caught up in the scientific fervor of the Enlightenment age, the emergence of such stories was a horrifying repost to the increasingly rationalist
and atheistic principles catalyzing academia at the time. However, although many in the scientific community dismissed paranormal claims out of hand, a small number of academics, led by Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick, William Barrett and Edmund Gurney, amongst others, decided instead to approach these varied problems without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems once not
less obscure nor less hotly debated, and so the spr was born, the world's first ghostbusters. The Cambridge branch of the society had been founded in nineteen o six and fifty years later existed mostly as an organization for like minded people to get together and share stories regarding the latest papers and theories they had read. But sometimes, if they were lucky, the chance for something more hands on would crop up, like that which Tony brought to the
group one evening in November nineteen fifty seven. The curious case had presented itself a few days earlier, when a young journalist based out of Wisbeach, some forty miles north of Cambridge, had contacted him at the beginning of October. Anthony Wilmot, who worked for the Wisbeach Advertiser, had overheard a conversation about some mysterious goings on at an old manor house known as Hanneth Hall, situated out in the
fens not far from where he lived. The house, he would later discover, had been plagued by hauntings for years. Wilmot didn't care much for silly ghost stories, but after learning one of the current tenants was the local labor candidate Deryck Page, he couldn't resist following up on the story, having arranged to interview Derreck and his wife Audrey, as well as Audrey's mother Rose, who lived with the family. Wilmot had arrived with tongue firmly in Cheek, only to
find them in a state of some distress. For the next hour, he was treated to a variety of extraordinary tales outlining their experiences. Since they had arrived from Cheshire two months previously, they had only been there a matter of days, as Audrey explained, when she was first awoken in the early hours of the morning by the sound of a very clear and insistent tapping that seemed to
be coming from just outside her bedroom. Thinking she had only imagined it, she turned to go back to sleep, only for it to come again, this time a little louder. Sitting up in bed, Knowing it couldn't have been Dereck since he stayed in Ipswich during the week for work, she had assumed it was one of the children, or perhaps a mother who slept in the bedroom opposite. Yes, Hello, Audrey bolted upright and hurriedly switched on the bedside light Hello,
but there was no reply. Collecting herself, she stepped out of bed and made her way cautiously towards the door. With a trembling hand, she took hold of the handle and eased the door open a fraction. Peering through the gap into the corridor beyond, there was nobody there. Ever since that night, the family had been hearing similar knocks
and taps throughout the house. Audrey was certain that on a separate occasion she had heard footsteps descending stairs with a clearly defined shifting of weight from one foot to another. She had been alone in the house at the time.
A few weeks later, Awdrey's mother Rose had woken up after feeling a violent jolt against her bed, and not long after, despite being partially deaf, she had been woken in the middle of the night by an inexplicably loud, crashing sound just outside the door, as if the door itself were being smashed in. Derec had not heard these noises himself, and joked that it was probably the old Tories who used to own the house, turning in their graves at the thought of him living there. He did
recount one rather strange story of his own. However, not long after they had moved in, his mother had traveled down from Manchester with a view to staying with the family for a few weeks. After a couple of nights sleeping in the spare bedroom, she began to experience a
recurring set of bazaar and terror fine nightmares. A couple of times she had found herself floating out of her body and looking down at herself as she slept, with the very vivid sense that something profoundly malignant was trying to pull her away, and that if she didn't return to her body, she would never wake up. Other times, she found herself trapped under the legs of a horse as it kicked violently at her face. After less than a week, having also started to hear the noises, she
made a hasty retreat back to Manchester. Audrey and Rose told the young journalist that the knocking sounds had become worse over the last few weeks, and that increasingly they seemed to be coming from one room located at the north end of the first floor. The room was assumed by the family to have been a bedroom at some point,
owing to its size, but was currently being used for storage. Since, unlike every other room in the property, it had never been rigged up to the mains, the pages were happy to keep it that way and rarely had cause to go in there. After leaving Hanneth Hall that afternoon, Wilmot determined to do some further digging of his own, and that, as he explained to Tony over the phone a few weeks later, was when things started to get really interesting.
The house, as he discovered, had been built some time in the sixteenth century and was thought originally to have belonged to a Richard Sparrow, earning it the nickname Sparrow's Nest. Over the years, it had been passed through a number of owners, gaining its current name after being purchased by Joseph Hanneth in eighteen twelve. The house was sold again to George Williams in eighteen ninety nine, who elected to
keep the name Hannath Hall. Wilmot got in touch with the building's current owner, Hugh Williams, George's grandson, to find out more. Much to his surprise. Hugh and his family, who had lived in the house for forty years before deciding to rent it out to Audrey and Derrick were
more than familiar with the spooky goings on there. Hugh went on to describe an incident a few years back involving his brother Peter, who, while staying alone in the house, had witnessed a door handle turning of its own accord. Another time, Hugh's nieces had suffered vivid nightmares while sleeping in the now disused room at the far end of the property, and had also awakened one night to find a pair of blood stained hands floating in the room
with them. That wouldn't be the bedroom on the north side with it by any chance, Wilmot had asked, you mean the haunted bedroom, replied Hugh. As it turned out, Hugh's family had taken to calling at this on account of a morbid story they had heard about one of the previous owners, long before the house had been wired for electricity. The haunted room had in fact been the
sole master bedroom. As the story went, it was in this room that the wife of former owner Joseph Hanneth, who bought the property from his father in eighteen twelve, had died young. The death had left Joseph so bereft he couldn't bear to release the body for burial, deciding instead to have it interred in an open coffin, which he kept at the end of the marital bed. For six weeks and increasingly unhinged, Joseph continued to order his servants to bring his wife three meals a day as
her body steadily putrefied. Eventually, with the stench becoming unbearable, Joseph was brought to his senses just long enough to take the body into the front garden, where he is said to have buried it under a large horse chestnut tree, as Wilmot continued to explain over the phone to Tony. Since the first article had been well received and with Halloween drawing near, he approached Derec and Audrey about the possibility of spending a night in the house with a
view to publishing another article about it. Since the couple were eager to prove they weren't making anything up, they welcomed Wilmot, joined this time by a senior colleague from the paper, as well as a local friend and his pet labrador, Simba, back to Hanneth Hall on thirty first
of October to conduct an investigation. Later that night, as the devil's hour approached, and with Audrey Rose and the children fast asleep, Deryck, Wilmot and his colleague took up positions on the landing, while the friend and Simba kept watch in the old master bedroom. Despite some initial nervous joshing, it hadn't taken long for a pervasive eeriness to descend, when from somewhere in the house a clock struck twelve.
Simba began to whimper mournfully. A noise was heard from inside a spare bedroom off to the side, but not one of the men had the courage investigate. A moment later, they all sensed a significant drop in temperature, followed by the smell of sandalwood that seemed to be sweeping back and forth along the corridor, although little else occurred that evening, whether it had been the charge of the occasion or
merely the atmosphere of the evocative old building. When the men finally called it to night at two thirty am, it was with the distinct impression that they had experienced something. All elements of Unexplained are produced by me Richard McClain Smith. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or on Twitter at Unexplained pod. Now. It's time to take care of yourself. To make time for you, tell a doc gives you acts to a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling your best. Speak to a licensed therapist by phone or video anytime between seven am to nine pm local time, seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is available through most insurance or employers. Download the app, or visit teledoc dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained
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