Ghosts & Gallows (29 page)

Ian Brady, born Ian Duncan Stewart in pre-war Glasgow in 1938, was the bastard son of a Scottish waitress who never knew his father. He grew up in the Gorbals, a rough slum district. In 1950, his mother moved to Manchester, where she remarried, but Brady remained in Scotland, eventually joining her after a period of four years, during which time he was put on probation several times for a range of offences including burglary and stealing. A court order had forced the reunion with his mother but he continued to offend and, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, was sent to Borstal for two years for theft. Although Brady was a thug, he was also clever and throughout his teenage years and on into his early twenties exhibited an intellectual quest that was designed to support and reinforce both his penchant for violence and lawlessness, as well as a hatred for the people around him who, he collectively considered, were totally worthless when compared to himself. He formed a cult-worship for Nazism and collected books on Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and the Nuremberg war crimes. Brady also immersed himself in the literature of the Marquis de Sade, compiling a library of his writings, as well as books on sex crime, torture and perversions. By early 1961, when he was working as an office clerk for Millwards, a chemical supply company based in West Gorton, Manchester, he had taught himself German in order to read
Mein Kampf
in the original edition, something he did at his desk during lunch breaks. It was at Millwards that Brady met a new typist, Myra Hindley, then aged nineteen. They eventually went out on a date (to the cinema to see the documentary film
Trial at Nuremberg
) after which Brady accompanied Hindley back to her grandmother’s house where, with the old lady asleep upstairs, he took her virginity on the front room sofa. Brady quickly began an ‘education’ into his world of sadism, Nazism and pornography, to which Hindley proved a willing disciple. Like an English ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, they planned bank robberies and talked of murder, all of which were justified as part of their anti-establishment existence. The armed raids never took place but the killings did, with, as Donald Seaman and Colin Wilson have described, ‘the young and unsuspecting as their prey’.

By the time of their arrest in October 1965, Brady and Hindley had carried out five murders. On 12 July 1963, Hindley enticed sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade of Wiles Street, Gorton, whom she lived close to and knew by sight, into her car on the pretence of looking for a lost glove on nearby Saddleworth Moor. Brady was waiting at a pre-arranged location, where the teenager was killed and buried in a shallow grave; this would not be found until twenty-four years later, in August 1987. On 23 November 1963, four months after their first killing, cruising in Hindley’s car in Ashton-under-Lyne, they offered a lift to twelve-year-old John Kilbride, who was waiting to catch a bus, in return for helping them to move some boxes. Like Pauline Reade, he was taken to Saddleworth Moor, where he was sexually abused by Brady before being murdered. Soon after Brady photographed Hindley, holding her pet dog, kneeling on Kilbride’s grave. The following year, just after eight o’clock on the evening of 16 June 1964, Keith Bennett disappeared in the Longsight district of Manchester while walking alone to his grandmother’s house. As with Pauline Reade, it would not be until 1986 that Myra Hindley would admit to killing the twelve-year-old schoolboy, whose grave has never been found.

Three months after the abduction and murder of Keith Bennett, in September 1964, Brady and Hindley moved into Hindley’s grandmother’s newly-built council house at Wardle Brook Avenue in Hattersley. Number sixteen, a two-storey two-bedroomed end of terrace property, occupied an elevated site and was overlooked by surrounding houses. It was there that ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was taken on Boxing Day the same year. The brutal sexual assault she underwent was documented in the photographs later recovered from the suitcases at Manchester Central Station and Hindley made the tape recordings found at the same time of the child begging for her life before Brady strangled her to death. The horror felt by those present at the Assize Court in Chester when the recording was played at Brady and Hindley’s trial in April 1966 reverberated across the country and is easily the most shocking piece of evidence to be presented in a British courtroom.

The second murder to take place at the house in Wardle Brook Avenue – the killing of Edward Evans the day before Brady’s arrest – was another planned attack, a display of power that formed the culmination of the couple’s grooming of Hindley’s seventeen-year-old brother-in-law, David Smith, into their anarchic and deadly lifestyle. Brady had taken Smith to Saddleworth Moor where, as they practiced pistol shooting as a precursor for armed robbery, he had boasted about having killed several times before. Early in October 1965, Brady had visited a gay club in Manchester, where he had struck up a friendship with teenage homosexual Edward Evans. Evans was lured back to Wardle Brook Avenue while Hindley went and fetched her sister’s husband on the pretence that her boyfriend wanted to give him some miniature wine bottles as a present. When Smith walked into the front room he witnessed Brady reigning blows on the screaming and defenceless youth with an axe. Evans fought for his life and Brady was forced to complete his ‘demonstration murder’ by smothering him with a cushion and, when that proved ineffective, using strangulation. While Hindley placated her grandmother, who had been woken up by Evans’ screams, Brady and Smith concealed the body in Hindley’s bedroom, after which all three cleaned up the living room. Smith, promising to return the next day with a pram that they could use to move Evans’ body into Hindley’s car, left the house in the early hours of the morning and went home. There he blurted out the entire episode to Hindley’s sister and the terrified couple went to a public telephone box to call the police. Seven months later, on 6 May 1966, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were found guilty of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey, John Kilbride and Edward Evans and sentenced to life imprisonment.

By 1987, thirty years after the Moors Murders had come to an end, 16 Wardle Brook Avenue was an empty boarded-up shell. Shunned and locally reviled, it was demolished the same year, the bricks and rubble being carted away and crushed to deter souvenir hunters. In the preceding decades, a succession of residents had claimed, both privately and publicly, that the former home of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley was a haunted house in which the horror of the notorious couple’s shocking crimes lived on. There were stories of an exorcism being carried out by a local priest at the request of one tenant, while another petitioned the local authority to have the house demolished, several years before it was actually pulled down. In March 1985, the experiences of the last occupant of number 16, forty-year-old Brian Dunne and his family, were reported in the national press, and gave an insight into the phenomena alleged to have taken place there, all of which were inextricably linked with the brutal killings of the 1960s
1
. Dunne, together with his thirty-one-year-old wife Margaret and their three children, three-year-old Joseph, Ann Marie aged two and eight-month-old Brian, all originally from Dublin, moved into Wardle Brook Avenue unaware of its unenviable association. They later claimed to have all experienced a number of strange and inexplicable happenings: loud banging noises and the sound of smashing furniture; the unnerving sound of children’s screams and crying, as well as the outline of a human body impressed on the counterpane of a newly-made bed. The house, unlike the adjoining properties in the same terrace, was mysteriously plagued with damp that representatives from the local housing department could not explain. ‘Damp just runs down the walls. The council have been round but can’t stop it,’ Dunne told newspapermen. ‘The adjoining houses aren’t like it. It is as if this one is crying.’

Claims for ghosts and paranormal activity at Wardle Brook Avenue were always dismissed or sidestepped by Manchester City Council, who felt it was not in the interests of their tenants to discuss such matters. To my knowledge no investigation by psychical researchers was ever undertaken in the house, with the result that practically all of the claims for a haunting cannot be substantiated. During the time that Brian Dunne was living there, he entered into a brief correspondence with Richard Lee-Van den Daele, a paranormal researcher from Shipley in Yorkshire, who also carried out an examination of the Borley haunting in the 1980s. Dunne confirmed a number of his experiences but later declined to talk about the haunting. Not long after, the Dunnes were re-housed and the ‘house of death’ was reduced to rubble. Today nothing remains except a grassed area that is easily overlooked.

Sceptics would argue that the haunting of Wardle Brook Avenue owes much to the familiar ‘possessed house’ blueprint of the Amityville case, which by the early 1980s was extremely well known, and tenants unhappy with living at an address with such a grim and unpleasant past would be likely to exploit stories of ghostly experiences, real or otherwise, as leverage in a case for being assigned accommodation elsewhere. It was a fact that Brian and Margaret Dunne with their three children plus a fourth on the horizon – Mrs Dunne was expecting at the time her husband was interviewed by the press – were all living in a cramped two-bedroom house clearly too small for their needs. However, it would be subjective and too casual to dismiss the Dunnes’ claims out of hand without a fuller examination of the facts, which now is not possible.

Writing in his
The Haunted House Handbook
(1978), American psychical researcher D. Scott Rogo reinforces what is still the current state of knowledge regarding haunted buildings – that despite years of study we do not know what makes a house haunted. ‘There are so many types of hauntings – human ghosts, animal hauntings, evil presences, and so on – that no one working in parapsychology has of yet ever come up with … what underlying force causes a house to become haunted’, but he goes on to note: ‘To be sure, there
are
[Rogo’s italics] cases on record in which houses have become haunted after having been the scene of some violence or tragedy. And the ghosts which appear in these places very often resemble the unfortunate victims of these melodramas.’ Rogo, a respected and prolific writer and researcher on paranormal subjects, himself was the victim of such an incident – on 14 August 1990 he was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home after a robbery.

If, then, the ‘mental imprint’-type haunting mentioned before
can
be created by an outburst of psychic or electrical energy resulting from a powerful outburst of emotion, to become locked inside either the physical structure or enclosed environment of a building, and is then able to either replay or manifest itself in some way at future times, it would seem that no more suitable building in England could possibly be found than the house that once stood on the former plot of number 16 Wardle Brook Avenue …

NOTE

1
. ‘Terror in the house of death’,
Daily Express
, 9 March 1985.

In the first part of his monumental two-volume history of mankind
The Curse of Ignorance
(1947), written during the dark days of the Second World War in the imposing setting of Rockingham Castle, Scottish businessman, writer and philosopher J. Arthur Findlay (1883-1964) makes a sweeping but at the same time intuitive statement when he says that ‘All religions are based on psychic phenomena, but are encrusted with theological error, which sooner or later must be dismissed as the drapings of an age of ignorance’. Findlay became convinced as to the reality of life after death after attending séances in Glasgow with the direct-voice medium John Campbell Sloan (1869-1951) in the years immediately following the Great War, experiences which were later reinforced in February 1936 when, at the headquarters of the London Spiritualist Alliance, he sat with clairvoyant and trumpet medium Agnes Abbott (1885-1942), who brought him convincing proof of the survival of his mother. Findlay ultimately bequeathed his estate, Stanstead Hall, to the Spiritualists’ National Union as a teaching college for mediumship and psychic subjects on the understanding that his extensive series of books on Spiritualism and survival, including the movement’s first real bestseller
On the Edge of the Etheric
(1931), remained in print for perpetuity.

Other Spiritualist writers and thinkers have followed Arthur Findlay’s reasoning behind the origins of organised religious beliefs and practices. Maurice Barbanell, who we have already met in connection with the mediumship of Estelle Roberts, writing in
This is Spiritualism
in 1959, described the story of revealed religion as ‘one that shows the interaction of spirit and matter’. ‘The power of the spirit has always been at work,’ Barbanell notes, ‘adapting itself, through the centuries, to the needs, understanding and capacity of its recipients.’ He continues:

The Bible, like many other sacred books, is a testament to spirit activity. Whether many of its characters are called prophets, seers or mediums makes no difference. They were all the instruments of a higher power which, as it flowed through human channels, produced signs and wonders which were wrongly regarded as miracles.

Aspects of the ministry of Jesus have been described in recent times in terms of the paranormal phenomena familiar to and investigated by, as Professor Archie Roy has described them, ‘hard-headed, initially sceptical but brilliant scientists, psychologists and others’, for over 100 years since the founding of organised paranormal study: these include materialisation, psychic healing, telepathy, precognition and psychokinesis, while American parapsychologist Arthur S. Berger has described Jesus of Nazareth as ‘an extraordinary noted witness [i.e. an outstanding and reliable historical figure] whose testimony in support of the paranormal should be considered’. In her book
Séances With God
(2002), an historical exploration of the eschatological (i.e. after-death) information provided by global mediumship over the course of thousands of years and its relationship with international religions and cultures, Dr Jacqueline Jones-Hunt follows in exhaustive detail in Findlay’s footsteps, examining from the standpoint of the findings of psychical research (a discipline that Hungarian-born writer Paul Tabori described, when writing about the life and work of Sir Oliver Lodge, as ‘the most important (and perhaps the only possible) way to reconcile science and faith’) world faiths including Shamanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.