It was reading avowedly 'true' ghost stories when young that led me to enjoy their fictional counterpart and then to prefer these, because they require more literary style and can offer more ambiguity and atmosphere. But the Rougham-Bradfield St George case is in many ways a beguiling story, of a kind that is quite often found in supernatural fiction, where such concepts as timeslips, parallel worlds and other dimensions are invoked.
The essentials of the story have been widely repeated, often in bare summary and without reference to the original source. Here I want to look at the particular context, which is not usually fully explained and is, I think, important.
It was about one hundred years ago this month (so far as she recalled) that Ruth Wynne, a young woman tutor, and her charge Evelyn Allington, saw a Georgian mansion in between the Suffolk villages of Rougham and Bradfield St. George that wasn’t there the following spring. It had apparently vanished.
They were not the first, nor the last, to witness a similar mysterious Georgian style country house in this area: there are accounts from 1860 and 1912, for example: and there have been several later accounts too. In addition, researchers think they have found good evidence that there was indeed an early 19th century house, long since demolished, in the area of the sightings.
About eight years later Ruth Wynne recalled the experience in response to a 1934 BBC radio programme, subsequently adapted for a book, Sir Ernest Bennett’s Apparitions and Haunted Houses: A Survey of Evidence (1939), now quite rare. Her account is plain and direct, with circumstantial details, and gives an impression of sincerity. Notably, she does not invoke any of the common sensations often associated with the supernatural, such as coldness, sudden silence, a strange atmosphere or a feeling of foreboding. Ernest Bennett traced her pupil, who confirmed the account.
Ruth Wynne, aged 29, was out for a walk with her pupil Evelyn Allington, aged 14. They lived at The Rectory, Rougham, where the tutor’s father was the Rector. “On a dull, damp afternoon, I think in October 1926, we walked off through the fields to look at the church of the neighbouring village, Bradfield St. George,” she recounted. They had not taken this walk before.
Emerging from a farm track onto a road they found opposite them “a high wall of greenish-yellow bricks”, which they followed: walled estates are a common feature of the English rural landscape. They came to “tall, wrought iron gates set in the wall. I think the gates were shut, or one side may have been open . . . Behind the wall and towering above it was a cluster of tall trees. From the gates, a drive led away among these trees to what was evidently a large house. We could just see a corner of the roof above a stucco front in which I remember noticing some windows of Georgian design. The rest of the house was hidden by the branches of the trees.”
Miss Wynne was surprised to see the house because she thought she knew all of the country houses of the area, whose residents had called upon her parents, as was the social custom of the time: yet none had from this one. She discussed it with her parents but then thought no more of it.
The pair “did not take the same walk again until the following spring. It was, as far as I can remember, a dull afternoon with good visibility in February or March.” But this time, on emerging from the farm-yard onto the road, there was no wall: “we both stopped dead of one accord and gasped. 'Where's the wall?’” Instead, “[t]he road was flanked by nothing but a ditch, and beyond the ditch lay a wilderness of tumbled earth, weeds, mounds, all overgrown with the trees which we had seen on our first visit.”
Not only was there no wall, “but there were no gates, no drive, no corner of a house to be seen.” However, “closer inspection showed a pond and other small pools amongst the mound where the house had been visible. It was obvious that had been there a long time.”
A comprehensive account of the Georgian house apparitions in this area is assembled in The Rougham Mystery: An Investigation into the Time Slip Phenomenon (2018) by Carl Grove, which explores all the different sightings of the vanishing house and pays close attention to the terrain, using maps and fieldwork, before considering various possible explanations.
The reason we have Ruth Wynne’s account at all is because the BBC had begun to broadcast a series on the unexplained which invited listeners’ participation. The radio programme involved was part of a series entitled Enquiry Into the Unknown. The introduction to this, broadcast on Friday 5th January, 1934, explained its scope and purpose: “no less than a scientific investigation into the occult—the hidden and intangible world of the mind and spirit . . . in these broadcasts eminent modern intellects will sift and explore and examine such beliefs as spiritualism, and such things as mental telepathy, dreams and prevision, ghosts and haunted houses, the influence of the mind over the body, and the whole question of survival.”
The presenter of the introductory programme was Gerald Heard, later to be the author of two well-regarded volumes which included supernatural fiction, The Great Fog and Other Weird Tales (1944) and The Lost Cavern and Other Tales of the Fantastic (1948) and of the Jamesian novel The Black Fox: A Novel of the Seventies (1950). Each of the following episodes in the series was headed by an authority on the subject under discussion. Heard acted as general editor.
The relevant episode for the Suffolk mystery was ‘Ghosts and Haunted Houses’, first broadcast on Friday 2nd March, 1934, at 21:20 on the National Programme. The Radio Times said: “Sir Ernest Bennett will emphasise the certainty that men and women, with sound minds and bodies, do from time to time see phantasms of both the living and the dead . . . He will tell listeners how the Psychical Research Society took a wide census of alleged experiences in 1899, discarded all narratives which could not be corroborated, and then analysed the number left which amounted to over five hundred. He will tell listeners the result of that analysis and exactly what has been learned from it; and he will ask them at the end of his talk to send in accounts of any experiences of their own, for only by investigation can still more be learned of these phenomena.”
It was presumably in response to this invitation that Ruth Wynne sent in her account of the house that vanished. The presenter was a Labour MP, and Minister, and also on the Council of the Psychical Research Society. This, then, was a nationally broadcast series headed by weighty figures and intending to adopt an objective, scholarly approach. It was framed in such a way as to encourage serious engagement. What this tells us is that Ruth Wynne still thought her experience unusual and inexplicable enough eight years later to justify her in contacting the BBC about it. This was not, we may reasonably infer, to her a mere anecdote: she thought it significant enough to tell it to this national investigation. Together with the cautious and measured account she gave, this context suggests Ruth Wynne was still calmly curious about what exactly happened on that walk one day around October in 1926.
(Mark Valentine)
Picture: Queen Mary’s Doll’s House, for which M.R. James wrote a ghost story.
No comments:
Post a Comment