The Paranormal

Cranbrook's Pest House Ghost

Right from first seeing the house in in early 1952 Robert Neumann, the Austrian psychologist, was strongly attracted to the place. As for Cranbrook, it was just what he believed old England must have looked like. With its wealth of old houses, Tudor and Jacobean, set in beautiful surrounding countryside, the village was idyllic. Steeped in its quintessential rural Englishness, unspoilt, peaceful, it was the ideal spot for contemplation, study, writing. And it had the advantage of being not too distant from London.

The Pest House in Frythe Walk had an ancient sagging roof which on one side came down almost to the ground. It had been built in 1369 as a one-room cottage and early in its existence it had been use as a pest house - that is, as a hospital in times of plague, small-pox and other infectious and contagious outbreaks. Later the house was extended for the priest and subsequent owners and then, in the 18th century, it was once more enlisted for use as a hospital. In the cellars, corpses from the plague years were buried. Ultimately the cellars were sealed up and it was finally converted into two separate houses.

In his book, The Plague House Papers, Robert Neumann acknowledges that on the day of his moving in, his cleaner told him that the couch in front of the fireplace was 'in the path'. She apparently knew the route the resident ghost sometimes took from the fireplace to other parts of the house. Furthermore, she told Neumann that she would not go up into the attics. They unnerved her. That same day the removal man was similarly reluctant to enter the low, dark loft, behind one of the attic 'guest rooms'.

Yet the two attic rooms were undeniably pleasant. From the window seats in the gable windows of the outer attic room there were extensive and beautiful views. The room itself, warm and extremely comfortable in daytime, cosy and intimate at night, had ancient floorboards and old rafters. Some recesses in the room had been walled off. The inner attic room was reached through this first room. And it was in there that it seemed to Neumann that some indefinable entity existed. It was as if there was some presence there which had seeped into the walls, a presence which sometimes oozed out. In this inner room were two old brick-walled cupboards of pre-Elizabethan date, which were in fact part of the chimney and fireplace immediately below which the cleaner had said was 'in the path'.

There certainly was an inexplicable uncanniness about The Pest House that made many visitors uncomfortable. There were noises. Dogs showed a marked reluctance to go into the attic and there was something about the place that caused a decided unease.

Some of Neumann's many visiting friends had disconcerting experiences while staying at The Pest House. A visiting American, for example, had asked one morning at breakfast who was the other lady staying in the house apart from its mistress and the housemaid. Was there another guest that he had been unaware of? Sleeping in the outer attic room, he had been disturbed by moans during the night. At first, in his sleepy state, he had thought that his wife was making the noise. He had wondered if she was unwell. As he struggled to full wakefulness, however, he became aware of a middle-aged lady, dressed in a sort of nightdress, passing his wife's bed. She seemed to be carrying an oil lamp

The American came to the conclusion that the woman was another guest he did not know about, sleeping, he assumed, in the inner attic room adjoining his. It did strike his as odd the Neumann had not mentioned that someone was sleeping in the next room. The American concluded that the woman was sick, which accounted for the moaning, and that she wished to go to the bathroom. As there were no toilet facilities in either attic room, anyone sleeping in the inner room who wished to use the bathroom in the night, was obliged to pass through the outer room. To Save the stranger any embarrassment, the American had feigned sleep until she had passed out of his room. He then lay awake for some time. He eventually fell asleep thinking that his surprise fellow guest was a long time returning to her room. Like several other guests, when the American couple came to realise who their night visitor had been, they cut short their stay.

But after one particular visitor had returned home from a stay at The Pest House, Neumann received a letter from her. And it was testy. She was not pleased with her host despite her pleasant stay at Cranbrook. On the last evening of her stay Davika - her surname is not known, only her unusual first name - had gone up to the attic room reserved for guests at The Pest House. She was a high-flying financial expert and she needed to dictate an urgent report on the national economic situation into her tape recorder.

Only when she returned to work in London the following day did Davika realise that her host had played such an infantile trick on her. Well, more than one trick really. She had not so much minded the nocturnal visitor to her room in the attic, she wrote. But the business with the tape recorder, this interfering with her serious research work, was really too much and not the sort of trick to be played on a guest.

'The only trick I cannot explain is the one you played with my tape recorder,' she wrote to Neumann. 'I only noticed it when the secretary brought me the typed text. I remember, of course, that halfway through the sentence about the progressive export quota I stopped to think for half a minute while the tape ran on, but when exactly did you play it back to find the empty spot? I thought I never lost sight of the machine. Also, if you absolutely must take advantage of other people's empty spots on their tape recorders, I should have hoped you would have been more witty. Dissembled voice and ancient English - well and good. But what is the meaning of "Eight pounds, oh, oh, eight pounds" ...? It was a somewhat silly joke.'

Certainly Davika was less concerned about the lady who had come into her room at two o'clock in the morning. As she said, she could more or less work out how Neumann had done that. By the light of the moon she had seen the plump outline of a middle-aged lady come from the corner of the room where there was a locked door leading to a staircase beyond. The woman appeared to be wearing a night garment of some kind and, after looking down at Davika for some seconds she left, shaking her head and moaning. She then gave the impression of walking through the closed door into the adjoining attic room. Davika was prepared to accept Neumann's tomfoolery, his setting up of this not terribly elaborate hoax, but she was unforgiving of his interfering with the tape recorder. She had not thought that her host would have dreamt of interfering with that.

And what was the meaning of the words - 'Eight pounds, oh, oh, eight pounds' - that Davika had found inserted into the text of the tape recorder in a 'dissembled voice and ancient English'? These words, in the thirty-second vacant spot where she had paused in her dictation, were so inexplicable. What on earth had Neumann meant, Davika asked in her irritable letter.

In his reply to his guest, Neumann was able to explain the figure which had passed through Davika's bedroom. That was no elaborate hoax, he told her. He admitted to The Pest House ghost, who was absolutely harmless. He knew that some of his guests might be disturbed at the thought of sleeping in a haunted room and so usually he did not tell them.

Nevertheless, Neumann had to confess to Davika that he had no idea of the ghost's identity. He was, however, particularly intrigued by her mention of the curious words on the tape recorder. What could be the significance of the words: 'Eight pounds, oh, oh, eight pounds'? And who could have uttered them? Could this ghost have been tape recorded?

It was a local historian who brought Neumann the clues he needed to solve the mystery of The Pest House. An old document of 1578 revealed that some years earlier the governors of the local grammar school bought the property for use as a school 'with three Plague House Fields from Master Benenden and his daughter for an unknown sum.' Michael Benenden, who had sold the house for the not insubstantial sum of forty four pounds, insisted on the inclusion of 'an annuity for the unmarried daughter of the said seller, who shall also have the use of the house, during her natural life.'

Five years later, her father now dead, Theresa Benenden's eight pound annuity stopped. Doubtless at the time the agreement was made, some of the governors had had the idea that she would not live long for she was already middle-aged. Her confounding of the estimate regarding her life-span was costing them money. After all, eight pounds was not at that time a sum to be sniffed at. But Theresa Benenden's petition to the Queen to have the annuity honoured was rejected. Distraught, the wretched woman hanged herself in the cellar of The Pest House.

Thereafter, over the centuries, the portly figure of Theresa Benenden appeared at the house in which she had lived, had been defrauded and had died. Always garbed in some kind of night gown, she would walk across the large ground floor room, passing through a door without opening it, and then go on to the dining room. This was her regular path, beginning in the area of the fireplace, as the cleaner had informed Neumann. From the dining room she would pass through another door into a cupboard under the winding stairs. The entrance to the cellar was possibly in this part of the house. From the cupboard she, in Neumann's words, 'oozed up' to the first floor and thence to the attic. Here she passed through the narrow Victorian bedroom and into the second attic. In here she entered the built-in cupboard and thence passed through yet another wall into the upper part of the chimney.

An account of the haunting of The Pest House, written in 1801, suggests that Theresa's punishment, presumably for her having committed suicide, was to walk for two hundred years. Her ghost was also, one assumes, to act as a reminder to those who had reneged on the financial arrangement. The especially wild years were from 1774 until 1779 when her ghost was said to have been laid. Carvings on the door of the dining room have caused some interest. They read: 'TB 1774, TB 1775, TB 1776, TB 1777, TB 1778'. Under these was a shape that looked like a figure 8 on its side.

What does it all mean? Is TB Theresa Benenden? Are the dates to mark the last five years of her two hundred year penance? And the figure 8 on its side... infinity? Eight pounds? Was her phantom not laid in 1778? Or was she laid temporarily, emerging once again when Neumann began renovations to the house and opening up the old cellars where she had committed suicide?

And what about that message on the tape recorder? What about the 'dissembled voice and ancient English', the words 'Eight pounds, oh, oh, eight pounds'? Was the Theresa still bewailing the loss of her annuity, was that her speaking across a void to the 20th century? It does seem so!

Addendum: On 28 September 2007, the current resident of Pest House, Rebecca Chapman, contacted us with the following clarification:

"I know that we do not have any cellars, for certain, and that Neumann was a very nasty piece of work, forget any ghosts. His sister in law visited me here about 10 years ago and told me all about him."