Spooky Advent: 20th December

The Batteresa Poltergeist. The apparent chronic haunting over 12 years of a teenage girl, Shirley Hitchings and her family, at their home in Wycliffe Road, South London, by the ghost of the son of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, nicknamed Donald. From 1956, Donald’s ‘residence’ at the Hitchings family home in Battersea was characterised by chaos and disruption: Donald chucked furniture and household objects, levitated Shirley, set fire to tea towels, stole jewellery for Shirley, wrote letters in a peculiar Franglais and even got Shirley sacked from Selfridges. The haunting became headline news, was discussed in the House of Commons and drew the attention of Harold Chibbett, tax man by day and an eminent ghost hunter by night, who investigated the case thoroughly at the time, becoming pretty much part of the family. Danny Robins’ podcast series on BBC Sounds, forerunner to the phenomenon that has become Uncanny, is well worth a listen if you want to know more. This drawing was one of the pulling teeth ones - each constituent part seemed to work quite well, but I found it really hard to pull everything together, which is my own fault for not planning it beforehand I suppose! I sort of drew it as I went along, which sometimes works but usually doesn’t...

Edited version of an Instagram post from May 2021

Spooky Advent: 19th December

The Black Monk of Pontefract. I remember this being reported on Look North or Calendar I the early 1980s and I have a distinct memory of a special effect they did with a mirror, and a clock like this one which led to a long standing fear of mirrors and no doubt my resulting permascruff appearance. It’s one of the newish (ie since the 1960s) breed of council house poltergeist, this one in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, thrillingly close to where my dad was brought up and my grandparents lived. Although mainly expressing himself in varied and violent poltergeist activity, this ghost of a wicked monk has also been allegedly glimpsed in mirrors.

Spooky Advent: 18th December

The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston. I was first introduced to this gentle tale of an ancient haunted house via the 1986 television series, broadcast just before Christmas. I can even remember that I had a cold when it was on, which only seemed to make it better somehow, swaddled as I was in a duvet guzzling Lemsip and Lockets. Me and my brothers had been big fans of the BBCs adaptation of the Box of Delights a few years previously and this is very much in the same vein. Both feature an upper middle class boy whose parents live abroad, both go to stay with relations during the Christmas holidays and both make friends with uncanny types, and have brushes with ancient evil.

The Children of Green Knowe is an altogether more wistful, melancholy affair compared to the boisterous adventurousness of the Box of Delights. Even the approach to the Green Knowe, the house of the title is allegorically portentous - the fens have been flooded and our hero Toseland/Tolly is first carried á la St Christopher and then rowed to the house by the evocatively monickered retainer Boggis. Once sealed off from real life entirely, and in the safe custody of his great grandmother, Linnet Oldknowe, he is largely left alone to explore and make his own entertainment. In the evenings, his great-grandmother tells him stories of the house’s former inhabitants, all of whom were his relations, and particularly of three children who lived and died there in the 17th century. It becomes apparent that these three have never actually left Green Knowe and slowly reveal themselves to Tolly, befriending him, at least to the extent that a four hundred year old spirit can befriend you. As the story progresses, Tolly comes to know more of the house’s history and his deep connection with it through the dozens of ancestors who have lived and died within its walls. Even his name resonates through the years - he’s only the latest of many Toselands of Green Knowe.

It’s a blanket of a story, a soothing wrinkle-handed stroke on the fevered modern brow for both reader and Tolly alike. He arrives alone at the house, apparently friendless, his mother dead, his father thousands of miles away, and finds that he is a part of the magnificent tapestry of the house’s history. Time itself becomes irrelevant, and the worries and bustle of the world outside fade, literally cut off by the rising floodwaters and then a heavy fall of snow. It’s a house that embraces its history to the extent that its past inhabitants forget to be dead. It’s not all sweetness and light though - the children that whisper and giggle in empty rooms died of the great plague, never to reach adulthood, and in the garden lowers the brooding demon tree Green Noah, a terrifying folkloric presence. But the easiest way to avoid him if I remember rightly is to run back inside where Granny is serving tea and cakes, just like her granny did and hers before that. Green Knowe itself was based on the 12th century (!!!) Cambridgeshire manor house that author Lucy M Boston bought in the 1930s and patently fell completely in love with to the extent that she set many of her books in it, and not only the Green Knowe series. I can’t say I blame her. After watching the series, and subsequently reading the book to my children, I’d quite like to move in myself and hang out with the ghosts, eventually becoming one myself. The TV series was not filmed there but at Crow’s Hall in Suffolk, which is Tudor in origin, but my picture does feature the original Green Knowe. As for the illustration, this was definitely one of those ones I just had to stop because it could have gone on forever. I’m not entirely happy with it, especially the ghosts who a) you can’t really see and b) look ridiculous if you zoom in on them so don’t bother.

This was first posted in 2020.