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Let us help you succeed. Here's al Go to beachbody dot com to claim your free membership and start feeling great on a stormy night on the small island of Guernsey, a young paranormal expert joins a skeptical history teacher to record the first in a series of podcasts based on the island's incredible folklore and paranormal history. As the expert regales his horrifying stories, the teacher learns that we all have our own truth, our own story ghosts that haunt us.
Starring Olivier nominated actor and former Blue Peter legend Peter Duncan, When Darkness Falls is a spine chilling ghost story that delivers a twisted, terrifying and thrilling tale that The Guardian said will leave you cowering in your seat. Catch the brand new UK tour of When Darkness Falls from September fifteenth in a town near you. Select nights will also feature myself delivering a live episode of Unexplained. For more details or to book tickets, visit When Darkness Falls dot
co dot uk if you dare. Back when I was about ten years old, some friends and I had a sleepover in the weeks leading up to Christmas. That night, as we stayed up late watching television, we chanced upon a curious BBC drama that immediately caught our attention. It wasn't loud or violent, or a wash with vibrant colors like much of the children's television we were used to. It was washed out, quiet and subtle, the TV equivalent
of mist, and we were riveted. Without knowing anything about it, and despite having little understanding of the genre, it was clear from the moment we saw it that we were watching a ghost story set in Victorian times. From what we could tell, it seemed to be about a man named Arthur Kipps who'd been dispatched to the country to put someone's affairs in order, a woman whose recent death
had cast a troubling spell over the local community. But before long we were introduced to the true star of the show, a woman attired in black morning dress, first seen attending the funeral of Kipps's recently deceased client, her face fixed with a cold, unyielding, malignant stare. She was, of course, the Woman in Black, which, as we later found out, was the name of the film, and she was just about the most chilling thing I'd ever seen.
Based on Susan Hill's uponymous nineteen eighty three novel, the BBC's nineteen eighty nine adaptation remains one of my favorite films of all time. When asked once what inspired the story, Hill replied that her chief ingredient was atmosphere, which I think sums it up perfectly. Some have suggested she might also have found inspiration from a little known haunting said to have taken place in Cheltenham back in the eighteen eighties. This is that story you're listening to, Unexplained, and I'm
Richard mc lean smith. In December eighteen eighty four, a then forty one year old Frederick Myers, founding member of the famed Society of Psychical Research, which had been established only the year before, received a letter from his friend John Graham regarding a possible haunting that he might want to look into. As Graham explained, a friend of his, Captain Frederick Despard, had for the past two years been renting a large townhouse in Cheltenham, where he lived with
his wife and their eight children. In recent weeks, they'd come to believe that their house was haunted. Myers is thought to have first become interested in psychical research after being unsettled by the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, which for many scientifically minded Christians like Myers, had seriously disrupted the notion that a God had created human beings, and with no God there could be no heaven or any other after life to speak of.
Desperate to find evidence to the contrary, Myers contacted Captain Despard requesting permission to visit his home to conduct his own investigation into the matter. At first, Despard was reluctant to speak publicly about it out of concern on his landlord's behalf for the value of the property, which he feared could decrease if it developed a reputation for being haunted.
Over the next year or so, Myers persevered until Despard finally agreed to his request, and so it was in May eighteen eighty six that Myers arrived at the gates of Garden Reach, the grand double fronted, four story Victorian residence as it has been described, on the corner of Pitfill Circus Road and All Saints Road in Cheltenham. The house derived its name from the property's extensive garden and orchard, which Myers could see tacked alongside the house on its
left side, before disappearing somewhere behind it. A short time later, he was led into the drawing room, where the apparent ghost had most often been seen, and where the sixty three year old Captain Desbarred and his twenty three year old daughter Rosina were waiting to tell him all about it.
Back in eighteen fifty eight, Frederick Desbarred was living in Rome with his wife Rosina and their two year old daughter Frederica, when Rosina died unexpectedly at the age of twenty four Later that year, Frederick remarried, and by eighteen eighty two, along with his second wife, Harriot, had had another eight children, nineteen year old Rosina, seventeen year old Edith, sixteen year old Florence, fifteen year old Henry, thirteen year old Lilian, twelve year old Mabel, ten year old Frederick,
and lastly the six year old Wilfrid. Having traveled the world extensively due to Frederick's job as a captain in the British Army, and with Harriot becoming increasingly poorly in her later life, the Despards decided to settle in Cheltenham, and in April eighteen eighty two they moved into Garden Reach, with three floors and eight bedrooms for the family. It also comprised a basement floor with live in quarters for
their servants. As Rosina explained to Myers, the family knew nothing about the house's history before they moved in, and had heard nothing about it potentially being haunted, but in hindsight, the signs had always been there. One afternoon, for example, not long after they'd moved in, Rosina was taking a pleasant stroll through the orchard when one of the family dogs, a large black Retriever, came bounding up to her in
a strangely agitated state. The dog simply wouldn't stop barking as it kept its eyes firmly fixed on something in the middle distance. Rosina tried her best to calm it down as she scanned the garden for any sign of any one else, but there was nobody there. Now a word from our sponsor, Better help. It can be tough to train your brain to stay in problem solving mode when faced with a challenge in life, but when you learn how to find your own solutions, there's no better feeling.
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e lp dot com. Slash unexplained one zero. A few months after moving into their new home, Rosina was in her room on the second floor, lying in bed as one of the family's dogs, a small sky terrier, was sleeping quietly at the end of it. Just as Rosina was about to blow out the candle, the dog's ears pricked up, suddenly, seeming to hear something from outside. It leaped off the bed and raced over to the door, where it proceeded to yelp and scratch at the gap
underneath it. Rosina got up and wandered over to the door, but when she opened it, the hallway was completely empty. She looked at the frightened dog with confusion, then picked her up and took her back to bed. A few nights later, Rosina was prepared hearing for bed on her own this time, when she heard what sounded like footsteps
coming up the hallway toward her room. Believing her mother might be coming to say good night, she took the candle from her bedside table and went to greet her mother at the door, but when she opened it there was nobody there. Just then, she heard more footsteps coming from the darkness at the far end of the hall. Holding the candle out before her, she was surprised to see a figure standing turned away from her at the
top of the stairs. From what she could make out, it was a rather tall woman wearing a black dress. Thinking it might be one of the servants who she hadn't yet met, Rosina called out to her, but the figure ignored her and remained completely still. I say hello, said Rosina again, but the figure gave no reply and showed no sign of movement. A strange cold feeling came over Rosina, but before she had time to process it, the figure suddenly took off down the stairs into the
darkness below. Wait, cried Rosina after her as she swiftly gave chase, cupping the flickering candle with her hand as she went. She was just in time to see the figure's head disappeared down the second flight of stairs when the candle suddenly blew out, plunging Rosina into total darkness. By the time she'd lit the candle again and returned
to the stairwell, the figure was long gone. Rosina had all but forgotten about the incident when in the autumn of the following year, eighteen eighty three, her older sister, Frederica, from Captain Despard's first marriage, came to stay with the family for a few months. One evening, as Frederica entered the dining room to join the others at dinner, she asked who the Sister of Mercy was that she'd just
seen walking through the main hall. The Sisters of Mercy are a community of Roman Catholic women who dress in distinctively black, flowing habits, but as her father explained, there was no such person in the house. Frederica insisted, however, that she had just seen the woman walk across the hall and enter the drawing room. Captain Desparsed ordered a servant to carry out an immediate inspection of the property, but when they returned a short time later, they found
no one matching Frederica's description. A few weeks later, six year old Wilfrid Despart, who'd spent the morning playing with a friend of his, burst suddenly into his mother's bedroom with a look of abject terror on his face. Wilfrid's mother, Harriet, who was only forty nine at the time, was largely bedbount and was being tended to by Rosina. After waiting to catch his breath, Wilfrid finally explained what had happened.
He and his friend had been playing on the path outside the drawing room when they looked in through the window to see what he took to be a woman dressed all in black seated at the writing table. Fred couldn't see the figure's face because she was holding a handkerchief in front of it. Curious to know who it was, the boys rushed inside and into the drawing room, but by the time they got there, the woman had gone.
It was only then that Rosina remembered the mysterious woman she'd seen at the end of the hallway outside her bedroom. Could it also be the woman whom Frederica had mistaken for a sister of Mercy too, she thought. A few nights later, Rosina was once again disturbed by what she took to be the sound of footsteps moving about outside
her bedroom door. Taking the candle in her hand once more, she quietly opened the door and gasped at the sight of the mysterious woman standing again at the top of the stairs in the shadows at the far end of the hall. The woman seemed to be facing her, but just like when Wilfrid saw her, her presence was made all the more eerie by the way in which she
held a white handkerchief in front of her face. Seeing her more clearly now, Rosina could see that she was in fact dressed in morning clothes, with what appeared to be some kind of black bonnet and fail just visible above the handkerchief. Then the figure turned and dashed down the stairs again. This time, Rosina was ready for her and followed close behind, going a little slower this time
so as not to lose the candle light. She managed to track her all the way to the ground floor, when she then seemed to float out into the main hall and drift across it to the drawing rooms. Heart thumped in her chest, Rosina followed her into the room, where she watched her take a seat at the writing desk, then stood up again and moved back out into the hall. Rosina then watched the figure head toward the back door to the garden before it vanished right in front of her.
A few days later, Rosina received an odd letter from her close friend, Katherine Campbell. Katherine was the first person that Rosina had spoken to outside of the family about the strange events that had been going on at Garden Reach on the night Rosina had followed the apparition into
the drawing room. Katherine, who lived a hundred miles away in the north of England and couldn't possibly have known anything about that night, claimed she was in her bedroom some point between twelve and twelve thirty at night when she had a sudden vision of a flight of stairs. Moments later, a woman in black came running down the steps, followed close behind by Rosina, who was wearing a loosely tied dressing gown and holding a candle out before her.
As she went, a loud noise from another room in her house punctured the vision, and Catherine found herself once more back in her own room. Over the next few months, Rosina claimed to have seen the woman on a number of different occasions, though each time making the exact same movements. Then, in late January eighteen eighty four, Rosina followed the apparition into the drawing room, where this time it just stood still next to the sofa, still keeping its face obscured
in that same unsettling way with the handkerchief. Seeing an opportunity to engage with it, Rosina then took a step forward and was relieved when the figure didn't move. Are you lost? She said, the words almost catching in her throat. Is there anything I can do to help you? The
apparition seemed almost imperceptibly to flinch, but remained silent. When Rosina tried to get closer, it suddenly burst into life once more, scooted out at the drawing room, and disappeared once again by the door that led to the garden. At the time at the apparent haunting, Rosina had ambitions to arm a doctor of medicine, as such, being academically minded, She claimed to have attempted a number of experiments to try and learn more about what exactly the apparition was.
She placed straying across the stairs at various heights to test if there was any material substance to it, but said the ghost simply passed through it. She attempted to talk to it a few more times, but it seemed not to register her at all. She also made efforts to touch the ghost, but no matter how quickly she followed behind it, it seemed always to be a good
few steps ahead. Up to this point, it was only Rosina who'd seen the figure, with the exception of Wilfrid and Frederica, who were not entirely sure what they had seen. Frederica was especially unnerved by Rosina's insistence that there was a ghost in the house. One morning, when she and Rosina were in the drawing room, Rosina became suddenly animated, insisting that the woman in black had just walked into
the room and were standing right next to Frederica. Frederica was pregnant at the time, but sadly lost her baby a few weeks later. Not long after, Frederica was in her bedroom when she was woken by the sound of footsteps coming from above, followed by the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor. The room above was
vacant at the time. The terrifying sounds continued until one night Frederica steeled herself enough to head into the hallway, having heard again the passing sound of footsteps, when she too finally saw the woman that Rosina had been talking so much about, and soon they were all seeing her. On the night of August second, Rosina's sisters Edith, Florence, and Lillian, who were all sleeping together on the top floor of the house, were also woken by ghostly footsteps outside,
but were too terrified to leave their room. The following morning, the family's cook recounted to the horrified girls her own story of the night before, in which she'd been heading downstairs to fetch some hot water when she also saw the woman in black. Having been nervous about how he might react, Rosina and her sisters eventually decided to tell their father about what was going on, much to their amazement.
The man who'd heard a light time of stories regarding strange, ghostly happenings from his time in the Army did not dismiss the possibility completely. On August sixth, the family were visited by the son of the man who lived opposite, a recently retired general of the British Army. The young man explained that his father had been looking out of his bedroom window when he spotted a lady dressed all in black, standing in the orchard who appeared to be
crying into a handkerchief. The general, who knew Frederica to be mourning the recent death of her baby, assumed it to be her and had sent his son around to see if she was okay, but Frederica had not been in the orchard that day. After hearing of this last sighting from a retired general, no less, Captain Despard was left in no doubt that something explicable was taking place
in his home. He and Rosina began to dig into the history of the house in the hope that it might shed some light on all that had apparently been going on. As it transpired. The house was built only twenty years before the Desbards moved in, and were sold to A Henry Swinhoe, a solicitor who arrived there in eighteen sixty from Calcutta. With his wife, Elizabeth and their two children. Another two children followed before Elizabeth became pregnant
again in eighteen sixty five. The following year, Henry, who was known to absolutely adore his wife, was hit by a double tragedy. On August eighteenth, eighteen sixty six, it was announced in the birth register of the Gloucestershire Chronicle that on August eleventh in Cheltenham, a stillborn son had been born to the wife of Henry Swinhoe. A few inches below in the deaths register, it read that Elizabeth Francis had also died in Cheltenham on August the eleventh.
Over the next few years, a darkness seemed to descend on the property, that some worried might consume Henry completely. It is said that the man turned increasingly to alcohol to manage his pain. Four years after Elizabeth's death, he was married again to an Imogen Hutchins from Clifton in Bristol. From the moment they met, however, Henry and Imogen's relationship was said to be a tumultuous one. Both were prone to heavy bouts of drinking and frequently quarreled viciously with
each other. By eighteen seventy five, the relationship at all but disintegrated, with Henry becoming so convinced that Imogen wanted to steal his late wife's jewelry, he instructed a carpenter to build a secret compartment under some floor boards where
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free today on the App Store or Google Play. You'll even get five dollars worth of in game rewards when you reach level five. That's Friends without the Art Best Fiends. In eighteen seventy six, Imogen and Henry finally decided to separate, with Imogen heading back to Bristol and Henry continuing to live at Garden Reach when a few months later, on July fourteenth, he died from what many said was a
broken heart. Imogen died two years later in Clifton on the twenty third of September eighteen seventy eight, from the effects of alcohol abuse, such was the custom, despite her and Henry's clear antipathy toward each other. Imogen's body, none the less was brought to Cheltenham and buried in the grounds of the Holy Trinity Church in Portland Street, not
far from Garden Reach. In the years following Henry's death, Garden Reach fell into some disrepair and was eventually sold to Benjamin Littlewood, an elderly man from Sherdington in eighteen seventy nine. Little Word had extensive work done on the property and renamed it Pitfield House. A month later, Benjamin died, after which the house was once again vacant. It is said that both Benjamin Littlewood and Henry Swinhoe died in the exact same room, a small sitting room where Henry
thought to have had his wife's jewelry hidden. After Littlewood's death, the house was renamed again the following year, becoming known then as the Nor House, which, for reasons the dispards were never quite able to ascertain, was offered for rent at a price considerably cheaper than what they eventually ended
up paying for it. Perhaps it was merely the recent deaths in the property that seemed to have been putting the renters off, Or perhaps, as Rosina wandered, could it be that she and her family weren't the first people to encounter the mournful woman in black. A short time later, Rosina was shown a photo album by some people local to the area and asked to pick out anyone that
looked like the apparition she'd apparently been seeing. Without hesitating, Rosina is said to have picked out the image of a woman who just so happened to be the sister of the deceased image, and Swinhoe, with the two being
said to look incredibly similar. Over the next few years, the family continued to be haunted by the appearance of the variously terrifying, unsettling, or simply melancholic woman in black, with sightings said to be more frequent in the months of July, August and September, the months in which Henry Swinhoe, Elizabeth Swinhoe, and Benjamin Littlewood respectively, died at the property.
For a while, the ghostly sounds heard round the house grew in intensity, with one servant said to have been so terrified by something unseen rattling her door handle that she suffered from facial hemiplegia as a result. Gradually, however, the hauntings became less frequent, with the woman seldom seen between eighteen eighty seven and eighteen eighty nine, and by eighteen ninety two she was no longer being seen at all.
Rosina Despard, writing under the name R. C. Morton, published a full account of her and her family's experiences titled Record of a Haunted House with a preface from Frederick Myers, in the eighteen ninety two Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. It isn't known if Myers himself ever saw the apparition. The Despards eventually moved out at the property in eighteen ninety three, after which it was turned into a boy's preparatory school before becoming a nunnery and later
a college for training Nanni's. In nineteen seventy, local resident Missus Jackson was heading past the building during a driving lesson, when, much to her instructor's surprise, she suddenly slammed on the brakes to make an emergency stop. When the instructor asked her why she'd done it, she said, quite pointedly, so that she didn't hit the woman dressed all in black who just walked out into the road in front of her.
Seeing the instructor's bemused look, Missus Jackson turned to point her out to him, only to find the road was completely empty. In nineteen seventy three, the building changed hands again, this time being bought by a housing association that had it converted into separate flats, which, if you were to
go there today is how you would find it. Twelve years later, in the middle of summer, two middle aged friends were walking along Pittville's Circus Road close to the property around ten pm at night, when they spotted a strange looking woman standing on the nearby Saint Anne's Close footpath. The woman appeared to be dressed in a thick looking black Victorian dress. The men were so taken aback by her appearance they headed back in the hope of seeing her again, but by the time they made it back
to the footpath, the woman had gone. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now do so far a Patriot to receive access to add three episodes. Just go to patron dot com forward slash Unexplained Pod to sign up. Unexplained book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores.
All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, 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 Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast