Pumpkin lanterns, pies and soups, autumn leaves and mists, it's a melancholic season and we need our creature comforts to set us up for the winter ahead. At such a time of year when the nights stretch out into long, dark hours and the sun fades from view, our thoughts turn to those who have passed over but yet not passed on - don't they? Don't you just love curling up on the sofa, with the fire blazing away, knowing you are safe and yet wanting to be a little bit scared? Tales of the paranormal are popular for a reason. I felt drawn to writing a book, The Rose Trail, with this theme and this is why:
I
can't prove it, but sometimes I can see into the past. Every time it happens,
and that is all too rarely, I have a physical sensation of cold - enough to
make me shiver. And I see things. Images so crystal clear they create an
indelible memory in my brain and can be remembered with clarity years later.
Sharper than real life, as good as a film, these pictures are fleeting but
all-encompassing and very vivid. They always take me back in time, sometimes
hundreds of years.
The first time it happened I was four years old. We were on a family
holiday in Wales, I'm not sure exactly where. Apparently I said, as we arrived
on a deserted hill top, "I know this place, I've been here before with the
Black Prince." Made Prince of Wales at the age of 12 in 1343, the Black
Prince, eldest son of King Edward III, spent most of his life in France
warmongering but took many Welshmen with him on an early campaign so presumably
visited his principality at least once. My announcement that I knew him has
gone down in personal family legend amidst much derision. Although that is an
old memory, I can easily recall the moment and my confident certainty of recognising
the place, although I had never visited it before - in this lifetime.
It happened again in Wales, when I was older with children of my own.
We were on holiday in Snowdonia, which I love, and were visiting Caernarfon for
the first time. I looked across the Menai Straits and that frisson of cold
crept up my spine. I heard and saw the Druids desperately crying for help as
the Romans approached before they slaughtered them. I felt their acute distress
and their fierce anger. I knew nothing of their history but subsequently
learned of the Roman's conquest of Mona, as Anglesey was called then, in around
57AD. My flesh crawled as I learned that the line of women and men keening and
shrieking that I'd seen in my mind's eye had really stood on those shores as
the Roman soldiers swam and waded across to wreak havoc in their spiritual
haven. Reading about that diabolical massacre explained the horror of their
distress as conveyed to me that day as I stood, ice-cream in hand, in the warm sunshine
of an ordinary 20th century day.
In
my work as an aromatherapist and Reiki practitioner I have received pictures
second-hand on behalf of my clients. Unbidden, these images were also
tremendously clear and crisp. Often I would not understand their meaning but
would recount them in detail to my client. Without fail, they would have
profound importance for them and help them make decisions or resolve personal
issues.
I wanted to explore this
interweaving between past and present time in my most recent book. I used a
spooky experience in Wiltshire, where I lived for many years, to provide the
inspiration for The Rose Trail, when I was working as a secretary in a
legal firm and had to deliver a will to a house on the Wiltshire downs. With
the errand achieved, I looked around the tiny village and felt drawn to one
particular dwelling. It was a beautiful old house, larger than a cottage, but
nothing grand. It stood, square and sturdy, basking in the sunshine and smiling
across to the other houses skirting the village green.
As I approached its whitewashed walls, I
noticed it was empty. I peered in through the warped glass windows, tucked deep
under the thatched roof. Inside, a large room with a massive fireplace at one
end had an uneven floor made of wide limestone flagstones, glossy from the hundreds
of feet that had worn them smooth over time. I could see straight through into
the walled garden through the window opposite.
Although the house was much humbler than
the Meadowsweet Manor featured in The Rose Trail, it spoke to me of the era in
which half the book is set, the English Civil War in the seventeenth century. I
sensed a family at war with each other; conflicted and arguing, heard the clash
of swords and the clang of armour. I remember vividly the chilling sensation
that crept up my arms, making them spring goosepumps all the way up to my
thumping heart. It took many years for the seed to germinate into The Rose
Trail. The story took
root as I delved into the past from where three ghosts emerged, one
particularly vicious one bent on revenge. Fay Armstrong, the troubled narrator,
is loosely based on my experiences.
With any historical novel much research
needs to be done but for me that initial spark comes out of nowhere - or at
least nowhere tangible. But that's where the fascination lies. How can the
spirits of those long past communicate through time?
All I know is I love uncovering these
ancient mysteries and weaving them into stories and so does fellow author, Thorne Moore. Thorne tells us what intrigued her enough to write about the paranormal. Links to her work are listed below.
I liked age from the cradle and
still do (I was evidently born with historian genes). It isn’t that I have any
fantasies about a past golden age when everything was wonderful. Far from it.
There have been moments of wonderful excitement and exploration in history as
well as moments of misery and tedium, but I am happy to look back on it all
from the present day. As a woman, I shiver at the notion of living in any era
or place other than this one. But signs of age in things and in places is a
tangible connection with all those people, famous and utterly forgotten, who
lived in the past and who, brick by brick and atom by atom, brought us to where
we are now. We live on foundations that go back to the dawn of Homo Sapiens,
and everywhere around us are hints, little footprints, that let us touch what
went before.
It’s houses that I find
especially fascinating. A brand new house would certainly have its appeal to
me, especially if I could design it myself, but any house, whether twenty years
old or two hundred, that has been lived in before, by someone else, must surely
carry in its fabric an imprint of their existence. A whisper of all the
emotions, hopes, arguments, griefs, shrieks of joy and gasps of passion that
happened there.
Houses do enshrine mysteries.
When I moved to Pembrokeshire, I lived in an old house – at least Victorian –
which had once been a shoe-maker’s shop. When rummaging among the cobwebs of
the loft, I was thrilled to discover a tiny child’s shoe, evidently at least a
hundred years old. An old man in the village told me it would have been placed
there as a charm and I should leave it in place if I didn’t want bad luck. I
did leave it there (I imagine it’s there still) and I thought fondly of what
seemed like a very sweet little superstition, until, years later, I learned
that child’s shoes, hidden in the roof, were mementoes of a child who had died
in the building.
I don’t know what child died, a
century ago, in that house, but it is pretty obvious that any old house, dating
back to pre NHS days, would have witnessed births and deaths, and everything in
between. Someone will probably have died in the room I am sitting in to write
this.
Not all those deaths will have
been quiet ones. Do their ghosts linger? Sometimes, even their bodies do. Murderers
seem to like burying bodies in cellars – whether Fred West or Dr Crippen. Ightam
Mote in Kent is a house that dates back to the fourteenth century, and must
have witnessed scores of deaths, timely and untimely. In the 1870s, the then
owners were annoyed by a chill draught that emanated from a corner of one room,
so they called in workmen, who discovered a hidden space behind panelling, in
which the skeleton of a woman was found, sitting in a chair. Theories have
abounded. One is that she was Dame Dorothy Selby, a catholic who inadvertently
gave away the gunpowder plot and was walled up by her family as punishment –
delightfully gruesome but untrue, since Dame Dorothy died peacefully in her bed
and her grave is marked at the church. Another theory is that the skeleton
belonged to a servant girl, seduced by the local priest, and walled up to
prevent scandal. The truth is, no one knows, but it’s all very chilling and
creepy. The other truth, unfortunately, is that there is no actual evidence of
a skeleton being found, so the whole thing might just be a juicy myth. But if
you ever visit Ightam Mote, it’s easy to believe it should be true.
Mummified cats are apparently
quite common, entombed in old masonry, along with occasional mummified babies.
And bottles of urine, hair and nail-clippings, presumably to ward off witches.
There is a legend, which has been
the subject of ballads and poems for at least 200 years, sometimes known as the
mistletoe bride, of a young bride who vanishes on her wedding day, usually
during a game of hide-and-seek. Her skeleton is only discovered, long after,
when someone opens an ancient chest, up in the attic, that had fatally slammed
shut on her. Not the faintest evidence anywhere for this story, but it is
claimed, as gospel, by Minster Lovell
Hall, Marwell Hall, Bramshill House, Tiverton Castle and Exton Hall, amongst many others. It’s one of those stories that ought to be
true, even if it isn’t.
If you accept that houses can hold physical evidence of past tragedies,
how easy is it to believe that they can also hold less tangible relics, whether
memories, vibrations, chill draughts or actual ghosts? After all, how could the
most intense human feelings and experiences, the most burning desire for
justice or revenge, simply vanish? They must still be there in the old bricks,
the stained stone, the creaking timbers. That was my premise when writing
Shadows, which is a domestic noir mystery like my other novels, but with the
slight paranormal twist of an old house that harbours all manner of ancient
secrets. Secrets just waiting to be uncovered. It didn’t seem a massive leap,
to me, to move from writing about the detection of the truth about murders to the
detection of the emotions that accompanied them."
