The Paranormal

A Dartford Mystery

The ability of the dead or dying to appear before friends or relatives plays a part in a strange story from 18th century Kent. It was approaching midnight on 27th November 1799 and Miles Andrews had already retired to bed at his house in Dartford, for he was feeling under the weather and had left his partner's wife, Mrs Pigou, to look after his houseful of guests. Andrews, MP for Bewdley and owner of the Dartford gunpowder mills, the greatest in England, was extremely wealthy, a man whose great entertainments and galas attracted all of fashionable London, all that was rich and all that was dissolute.

This evening's gathering at his house near the present Walnut Tree Avenue was as noisy and boisterous as ever. It would be more so on the Sunday when his great friend Thomas, Lord Lyttleton, had promised to come to join the party. Andrews and Lyttleton had for years been great companions. They had participated in 'many an orgy and in great profligacy'.

Andrews was suddenly roused some time between eleven and twelve o'clock. The bed curtains were thrown back and as he sat up he was aware of a figure at the bed end. There was someone standing there wearing a nightcap and gown. Was it Lyttleton? It surely was. What the devil was the fellow doing here at this time of night? What was he up to, decked out in this manner? But there came no answer to those questions. There was simply a grim voice telling him that all was over. All over? What on earth ... was this another of Lyttleton's tricks, one of his customary foolish pranks? Andrews was poorly, in no mood for frivolity. He leaned over the side of the bed, picked up a slipper and threw it at the figure. But there was no one there. Lyttleton had vanished.

Mystified, yet still convinced that this was some kind of trick being played on him, Andrews climbed out of bed and searched the room. He called for his manservant and together they searched the adjoining rooms. Soon enough the guests downstairs were enlisted into the hunt for Lyttleton. All of the rooms in the house were gone through and then the out-buildings were inspected by servants called from their beds. This was infuriating, Andrews said. When they found Lyttleton, he was not to be given a bed. If he thought it a joke then he would have to smile on the other side of his face. Either he would sleep in the stables or he would have to find an inn somewhere in Dartford. Certainly tonight he would not sleep under Andrews' roof.

But in the morning there was still no sign of his lordship. It was Mrs Pigou who went off to London later in the day and heard the news. His lordship was dead. He had died the previous evening at Pit Place. But she knew of all the fuss there had been in the night at Dartford, when everyone was out searching for Lyttleton. It was unaccountable. What on earth had occurred? She sent an express rider with the news down to Dartford.

At four o'clock in the afternoon Andrews heard that his friend was dead. He had died at about midnight the previous day. The shock of this information caused Andrews to faint, unable to accept what he was hearing. Had his friend not appeared at his bedside at that time, at the very hour when he was alleged to have died? And had they not once in jest, he remembered, promised each other that the first of them to die would appear to the other?

But this ghostly visit was not the only mystery of this strange story. In London something had disturbed the peace of Thomas, Lord Lyttleton three days earlier. Was it a dream or a ghost? Was the warning of imminent death that he received simply one of the frequent and horrific dreams from which he suffered? Or did the ghost of a woman, described variously as one of his several wronged mistresses - Mrs Amphlett or Miss Kay or Mrs Dawson or one of the many others - appear at the end of his bed and say to him: 'Prepare to die?'

Ghost or dream the story went round fashionable London with astonishing speed. For Lyttleton was so well-known. So infamous, in fact, that whatever he did was always a matter of interest and of gossip which outraged the more respectable members of society and which titillated and amused the rest. Lyttleton was the most profligate man of his age. a libertine exceptional for his excesses even in the most liberal of times. He was the 'wicked Lyttleton', a man steeped in the most fashionable vices of the age. Even members of his own family, shamed by his loose and prodigal behaviour, had long cut themselves off from him.

Was it a wonder that they did so? Even as a member of the Tory government and a brilliant and persuasive speaker, he was regarded as a loose cannon and some feared that this scholarly young man might eventually, in spite of all, reach very high government office. How could they trust this dissolute fellow who had even deserted his wife and carted off a barmaid to live in Paris with him? Not that that was a long-term arrangement. As in all of his many affairs the woman was eventually thrown aside to fend for herself. Several women, some high-born, others from lower down the social scale, had cause to regret their association with Lyttleton, from which they usually emerged with no reputation and sometimes with no property.

More recently, Mrs Amphlett's three daughters, whom he had in turn seduced, had taken up with him on a more or less permanent basis. It is said that their mother died of a broken heart.

It was at his Hill Street home in Berkeley Square the Lyttleton had his experience on Thursday 24th November 1799. He described how he had heard a footstep at the bottom of his bed and when he looked up there was a figure all in white. She had pointed at him and uttered her awful warning.

It was a dream, he reassured his friends. At the same time there is some evidence that he took the matter seriously. Lyttleton was an extremely superstitious man and such an experience shocked him. Nevertheless, he did his best to put it aside. One the next day he made a highly successful speech in the House of Commons on the condition of Ireland. That evening Hill Street was filled with guests. The usual roistering, dining, gambling took place until the early hours. The following day he met friends, laughed and joked with them about the dream or about the ghost, whichever way he chose to interpret it.

On the Saturday morning, the day before he was due to join his friend Andrews in Dartford, he told the Miss Amphletts who were staying with his: 'I have jockied the ghost as this is he third day'. He believed that he would 'bilk the ghost'. Later, walking through the graveyard of St James's church with his cousin Henry Fortescue, he pointed at the headstones. There was many a 'vulgar fellow' lying there, Lyttleton said, dead at his age, thirty five. 'But you and I who are gentlemen,' he announced confidently, 'shall live to a good age.'

That afternoon, Lyttleton left Hill Street for his country home, Pitt Place, Epsom. Accompanying him were several friends including Fortescue, Captain Wolseley and the ladies described scornfully by Horace Walpole as both 'a caravan of nymphs' and 'four virgins of the Strand'. This hardly complimentary description of well-born ladies was meant to include two of the three Misses Amphlett, those regular camp-followers of his lordship.

Arrived at Pitt Place, Lyttleton was taken ill. He had some kind of fit, of the sort that had frequently troubled him of late. He already had heart trouble and his health after years of dissipation was poor. Nevertheless, he recovered sufficiently to take a hearty dinner, 'supping plentiful on fish and venison.' It was a particularly rowdy occasion for many of Lyttleton's friends and hangers-on were invited, presumably to divert him from thoughts of midnight. He did himself express some confidence, saying to one of the Miss Amphletts that he did not expect to see any ghost that night. He went off to be at eleven thirty, still a shade concerned perhaps that the third day was not yet over and that there was another thirty minutes left before he could breathe easily.

As Lyttleton prepared for bed he looked constantly at his watch. At eleven fifty eight he called his manservant, William Stuckey, to close his bed curtains. But soon after midnight he was cheerfully asking about bread rolls he would like for breakfast. Triumphant, he told the manservant: 'The mysterious lady is not a true prophetess, I find.'

Now Lord Lyttleton ordered the manservant to mix his medicine, a mixture of rhubarb and mint water, but was furious to see the man stirring it with a toothpick. 'Slovenly dog,' s he shouted at Stuckey, telling him to bring a spoon. But when Stuckey returned to his master's bedroom, only a minute or so later, he saw that Lyttleton was seriously ill. Leaving the room once more he ran down to the drawing room where many of the guests were still enjoying themselves. 'My Lord is dying,' Stuckey called, but by the time his friends arrived at his bedside Lyttleton was already dead. The watch he still held in his hand read twelve fifteen.

But the dead men had been deceived. He was unaware that his friends had advanced all their watches by half an hour and that they had arranged for all of the clocks in the house to be similarly advanced. Even Lyttleton's own pocket watch and the clock by his bedside had been surreptitiously tampered with by his friends, who had thought that they could in this way lessen his anxieties. And indeed it had done. But in keeping with the prophecy, his lordship died on the third day shortly before midnight.

This is one of the classic mysteries, involving two mysterious appearances, one toof Lord Lyttleton. Did a ghost really appear to Lyttleton? Or did he simply dream of the woman in white with her awful warning? Did he perhaps dwell on the promise of death? Did that cause heart failure? After all, it was said that he died young in years, but old in body.

But what of Miles Andrews? What was it that he saw in his bedroom at Dartford at the very hour of his friends death in Epsom? Whatever it was, it took Andrews three years to recover from the shock. He had no doubt that he had been visited by a man who had just died thirty miles away.