The Ghost Hunters (57 page)

As I sit here, listening to the rain drumming on the roof, longing for that safe time before the Rectory, before the darkness, I thumb through the pages I have written and I wonder whether there is any significance in this story.

I think of Father and of Rudi Schneider and how no satisfactory explanation for the miracles he produced at the National Laboratory for Psychical Research was ever found. I think of
Velma Crawshaw, the young medium who had told me there was a mark upon me and who, just months before her tragic death, had told us she saw nothing of her own future. I think of Reverend Smith, of the last thing he said to me when we left the Rectory the morning after the fateful seance: that Borley Rectory was evil from top to bottom and it should have been burned to the ground years ago. Well, now the house has burned, and all the rectors who once lived in it have passed away. I think of Vernon Wall and how different my life might have been if I had heeded his early warnings and walked away from the Laboratory. I think of Marianne Foyster, how later in her life she changed her name and claimed that her husband was also her father. I think of Lionel Foyster who, I heard, spent his remaining days locked in his bedroom, his bed soaked in urine, as he rambled about a haunted house and his lost
Diary of Occurrences
. I think of the reports in the papers of ghosts lurking still in Borley.

And I think of my beautiful son, Robert, given to the Caxtons, a doctor and his wife living in the valley of Farndale. Because for all those years, across all that time, it wasn’t only the Dark Woman I had seen in my dreams but my beautiful baby boy’s face, his cheeks the softest pink, his skin so new and smooth. I cried through the night until my child was taken from my arms. I cried until the weeks and months rolled by and carried me back to London. I never stopped crying.

Son, if you should ever read this, believe me: always and forever, I was crying for you.

What on earth will you make of me? I hope you will consider me a good woman who led a bad life; a woman who had much in common with the legendary Dark Woman of Borley, betrayed and abandoned. If you survived the war I hope that you are more content than your parents ever were, and I hope you have inherited our better qualities – my zest for life and your father’s
keen and probing mind. I like to think of you as a distinguished professional, a scientist perhaps or an academic. But mostly I hope that you do not probe the supernatural; for as Price realised that night in his office, those who hunt ghosts are hunted, in turn, by them. They find us eventually as the Dark Woman found your father and will – I am certain – find me.

But know this: Harry Price will always be part of my family. He is your father so I will always care for him, whether I want to or not.

I had waited and waited for him to answer my letter but of course he never did.

Harry Price’s body was discovered the same afternoon I encountered the vision in the road at Queensberry Place, the time of death seven o’clock, the exact time at which my watch stopped. It was his wife who found him, slumped over his writing desk, working on his new book on the Borley affair. His face was frozen, she said, in an expression of absolute terror, the fingers of his left hand still gripping his pen; and in his right hand, securely attached to his gold watch chain, he held a curious item she had never seen before:

A brass St Ignatius medallion.

Sarah Grey

November 1955, London

Note

1
It is interesting to observe that bizarre and strange accidents were reported at the site of Borley Rectory also. The
Suffolk Free Press
carried an editorial passage on 24 May 1944 entitled ‘Queer’, which reads:

‘I understand that the fire-ruined Borley Rectory … is being demolished and the bricks carted away for rubble. I heard an interesting story the other day which supports the idea that there is always something queer about the place. A local firm was engaged in felling some trees, and ‘everything seemed to go wrong’. Three axes broke in the course of the work; one man received a shoulder injury; and two trees which were roped and cut so as to fall into the grounds, fell into the road instead, the ropes breaking, and a tractor had to be fetched to haul the timber off the road.’

by Doctor Robert Caxton

– Virginia Woolf,
Mrs Dalloway

The sun was creeping up as I slipped the weighty manuscript back into the leather pouch with the broken lock. I sat staring at it.

Was it possible?

You might think that a middle-aged psychologist would have little about himself to doubt. But when I had finished reading Miss Sarah Grey’s memoir of hope, terror and betrayal, I sat in my study at home in Oxford, unravelling as the shape of the world and my own sense of belonging within it dissolved.

That manuscript dropped a conclusion on me, like a hammer on the mind.

As someone who has spent my career helping people cope with trauma, I admit only with grim reluctance that I have evaded the truth about my past since I was eleven. Since the
day my parents decided to sit me down at the kitchen table in our farmhouse on the snarling North Yorkshire moors and tell me the truth: that I wasn’t really their son.

The truth of my adoption rattled through me. All my life I had felt out of step with the rest of my family and now I knew why.

‘Your real mother was from a respectable Catholic family in London,’ my parents told me. ‘She was just twenty-six when she came here to give birth to you.’

They explained to me how difficult it must have been for a woman of her age to have a child out of wedlock; that little else could bring more shame upon a family.

I felt no animosity towards the woman who had given me away, but lacking knowledge of her identity, my true father’s identity and thus my own heritage cast me adrift on doubt, leaving me certain only of one thing: the fundamental essence of my identity did not descend from my adoptive mother. Or my father.

He was a doctor of medicine, but also held a degree in physics and could easily have pursued a career in that field. Quite brilliant, he read Einstein and Bohr in his recreational hours. He understood them.

I could not. Something in me recoiled from the notion that everything, including thought, was ultimately reducible to chemical reactions in my brain. I felt it with every shred of my being and found the evidence in every pungent smell, every vivid colour. There had to be something more. Not necessarily a soul, but something more than bits and pieces. Beyond the particles.

I became fascinated with finding it, looking for evidence of it. It became my secret hobby to read about people who claimed abilities in extrasensory perception and out-of-body experiences. I consumed everything I could access that was written
about world religions and belief systems, folklore and ancient mythology.

My adoptive father did not encourage these pursuits. While I was young he tolerated my interests with pursed lips and heavy frowns, consoled that I was interested in reading even if the subject matter was not as orthodox or intellectual as the Greek scholars he had mastered as a young man. He was always a loving and decent father, but as I grew towards adulthood his tolerance evaporated. ‘If you want to be taken seriously,’ he insisted, ‘then you must choose a serious path.’

I know he would have been pleased for me to choose medicine, though he never pressed it upon me. Perhaps he thought the subject beyond me. One thing I did know: his curiosity about my ancestry was growing. Where did my fascination with ‘pseudoscience’, as my father scornfully disparaged it, come from if not my mysterious birth parents?

We knew nothing else about my biological mother, but my parents were unstintingly generous in their offers to help me find her. I shook my head against the idea. I already had a mother, sweet and dedicated to my well-being above all else. She had more than earned her claim to the title of Mother, and no one would take it from her.

My parents – for that is what they were – had left London in their late thirties, and sold their house to begin a quieter life in the cottage that came with fifteen acres of pastureland. He took a more relaxed position than the prestigious but life-encompassing post of consultant neurologist; being the only General Practitioner within a fifteen-mile radius was still lucrative and respectable and allowed time for him to write monographs on various ailments of the brain.

She, inevitably, retired from her job as a primary school teacher to devote herself to keeping house and home for the
family. They were good people, generous and, with only one significant exception, unfailingly supportive. What right did I have to risk dishonouring them by searching for my birth mother?

I wanted for nothing. Our village in the valley of Farndale was remote and peaceful, and notwithstanding the sombre, bleak atmosphere that characterised the late winter afternoons, my upbringing was stable. My life was happy. I had no desire to change it.

Thankfully, the tension with my father never degenerated into outright hostility, but even so there are few things more corrosive for a young man’s spirits than a parent’s thinly concealed disappointment. I learnt to conceal the more outré theories that caught my interest beneath the academically respectable cloak of psychology.

The most modern of the sciences, of all academic disciplines psychology offered the greatest possibility of delivering an explanation of the mind that did not rely purely on molecular actions in the brain.

My father agreed, through gritted teeth, to fund my study of Philosophy and Psychology at Cardinal College, Oxford.

Yet conflict raged within my heart. By the time I had left university the need to find my biological mother had returned, more urgent than before. The compulsion was almost irresistible but resist it I did. Whatever my birth mother’s reasons for giving me up, I knew her suffering must have been unbearable. Was it fair of me to risk finding her when she might not want to be found, to risk embarrassing her with shame? I couldn’t do that.

Nevertheless, the questions continued and eventually a visceral need to know opened a hollow space at my core. I filled that space by carving out my own route through the world: a
career in psychology, first as a counsellor for children receiving the dubious benevolence of the social services and later in academia; a return to Oxford for my doctorate, then as a lecturer and eventually a Fellow of my old college.

Psychology may have been enjoying a wave of popularity, but I worried that if I publicly announced the full range of my scientific interests in areas such as extrasensory perception and telekinesis, my colleagues would laugh at me. That I would never publish again. At least, not in my own name.

That was the solution I deployed. I conducted my research into these esoteric fringes of psychology in secret, and published my findings under assumed names, in heretical journals. Journals that sold a great many subscriptions in plain, unmarked envelopes.

The work was my therapy, helping pacify my mind and banish, or so I thought, the residual doubts about my unconventional preoccupations and my unknown parents.

I helped children with traumas that eclipsed my own and in the process I helped myself. I learned to quiet my questioning mind; I brought my thoughts to order and subdued them. I learned to be at peace with the past.

And I was, for a time. Until John Wesley’s letter. Until Senate House and its curious library on the eighth floor.

Until Sarah Grey.

Now, as dawn broke through the shuttered windows of my study, I was overcome with an all consuming anger. All my life I had wondered about my birth mother, hoping she had enjoyed a happy, fulfilling life, only to discover, so late, how mislaid those hopes were.

The truth about my real father’s identity lunged at me from the manuscript. Harry Price had been a rogue and a fraud, had
abused the trust of my mother and of the whole world. He had presided over a carnival of gaudy lies, and covered his deceptions with the charm of a showman. The idea that my abiding interests were the legacy of his blood was intolerable.

How could John Wesley, a stranger, have kept this from me? How could I have been the last to know?

I spent all morning gazing into my coffee, struggling to make sense of the information I had read. I began to redefine my own identity in the language of Harry Price’s shortcomings. I recalled my arguments with my adoptive father, and realised with dismay that I wanted him back.

Maybe, just maybe, I was mistaken. Growing up in North Yorkshire, I was very well acquainted with dark tales of ghosts and superstitious legends. Perhaps this explained why, like Harry Price, I had held a lifelong interest in matters of the peculiar.

The argument raged back and forth in my head. The clues were compelling: same dates, same name, even the same village. I had to know the truth, if not for my sake for that of my dear wife Julia and my little ones.

Where to start? Who to ask? My adoptive parents had taken their offer to help me track down my parents with them to the grave. There was only one way to know for sure.

By lunchtime I had informed Julia that I was I stepping out, heading back to London, to Senate House and the Harry Price Magical Library.

*

I found the curator, John Wesley, as before, on the eighth floor, sitting at a large desk before a high leaded window. I strode towards him, past playbills from the 1930s and framed posters for performances by various mediums, magicians and entertainers.
Something about the gloomy room was different; there were more boxes than I remembered and fewer books.

‘How long have you known?’ I demanded once I was standing over him.

The old man raised his head into the weak light. At the corners of his eyes, beneath yellowing skin, blue veins crawled away. ‘Too long,’ he said with grit in his voice. ‘Long enough to have watched you from a distance to be certain that you were the one to help me.’