The Paranormal

Dover Castle's Ancient Mysteries

The guides who conduct visitors on tours around stately homes, great cathedrals and old castles are no different from the rest of us. They like the people they are dealing with to show interest. They like their tour parties to express some enthusiasm for what they have seen and comment on the worthwhile nature of their visit. That's what makes it all worth doing. So at Dover Castle a few years ago the guides showed suitable appreciation at the gushing responses of the two Americans who had wandered round the castle and underground tunnels unaccompanied.

Everything had been so well organised, they breathed, everything so realistic, so authentic. And they were particularly congratulatory about the sound system, especially in the area of St John's Tower. The groans and shrieks they had heard, why, at first they thought they were real. Wait till they told folks back home, they said, smiling their way out.

Sensible of the guides to whom they spoke not to mention that there was no sound system in the specific area they were referring to. After the Americans had gone, and just to make sure, the guides checked to see if some visitor had fallen down and, unable to get up, had called out for help. Or perhaps someone was lost. But, no, there was no member of the public who had broken a leg or contrived to lose himself. So those groans and shrieks, well...

But in addition to noises off, Dover's great castle is home to several apparitions. It is hardly surprising that the place has over the past eight centuries absorbed so much of what the researchers Randles and Hough have called 'psychical residue', all the lingering waste emotion of past residents, their deepest hurts, their profoundest rages, hates and fears. Indeed, right from the start, from those first days of its building in the 12th century, it was marked by cruelty and terror. Superstitious builders, worried that their work was being impeded by spirits, buried a dog in the walls and when its owner, and old woman, objected to the sacrifice, she was immured alongside the animal. Though the ghosts of the pair of them , the old woman and her dog, have not now been seen for six hundred years, that is where it all begins.

In our time other apparitions from a long ago past have been spotted. In the Keep there is a man dressed in mid-17th century fashion, sporting a broad brimmed hat with a plume, a purple cloak and knee boots. A guide has seen a woman in a long red dress in the same part of the Keep. Then there is the Drummer Boy, murdered in the castle, they say, during the Napoleonic Wars, and who makes an appearance from time to time.

In other parts of the castle a figure in blue has been seen and once the lower part of a man's body walked through the doorway of the King's Bedroom. but when staff followed him into the room there was no one to be seen. Elsewhere, in the old Roman lighthouse there are claims that, very appropriately, a Roman soldier appears. In the Underground Works, alias Hellfire Corner, that great warren of passageways, three miles in all, cut out by the military in wars against Napoleon and Hitler, a pikeman, garbed in 17th century style, has been seen to walk through the guardroom wall into the adjoining room.

Several of the guides have had recent interesting experiences. One day in 1992, Leslie Simpson was accompanying a group of twenty through the tunnels. He paused to play a recorded commentary but noticed that one of the party, a woman, was taking little interest in what was being said. Her attention was focused on something else. Suddenly, it appeared to Simpson that she was looking alarmed and as he went over to her she stumbled, going down on one knee. The guide's first impression was that she was ill. But no, she was not ill though plainly shaken.

Hesitantly, she explained to Simpson that during the recorded commentary she noticed a man in naval uniform by a piece of machinery at the other end of the room. She imagined that he was a member of staff doing a repair. Then, she told the guide, the sailor stood up and walked at speed towards the group. And it was then that she realised that this was no ordinary sailor for he walked through the barrier and then he had walked through her. At that point she had turned and lost her footing, going down on one knee.

Later in the day, Leslie Simpson had another group to guide around the tunnels. He decided to make sure that all was well and to check the area in advance. He went down to where the woman had earlier seen the apparition. There was no one there. But the door to the annexe, always shut, was open. From inside he heard an odd noise, best described as part-mechanical and part-animal. It was frightening. But then it stopped. Leslie Simpson has not heard it since and nor has anyone else. But the apparition of the naval man near the equipment was later seen by an Italian visitor.

Another guide, Karen Mennie, touring the tunnels with a party of visitors, reported a similarly curious happening in 1993. A man and his daughter appeared to be conversing quite seriously with an unseen third person. How bizarre this was and how even more bizarre when the father suddenly went away from the rest of the party. Later, when the tour was over, the father and daughter explained to Karen that they now realised that they had been speaking to a ghost. This is in itself remarkable for ghosts speak extremely rarely. At the time of the conversation the father and daughter had had no idea that they were speaking to a ghost.

But then the ghost had given some important information about himself. He had been killed, he told his listeners, assembling an amplifier rack. The ghost had also told them that he had been a Postal Telecommunications Officer in Canterbury and that his name was Bill Billings. It was at that point that the ghost had disappeared and the father had tried to follow him. Karen Mennie had been disinclined to believe the story but to have two people swearing to have met a ghost half-convinced her that they were not deliberately lying. Perhaps they had been hallucinating. But is it likely that two hallucinate at the same time? And the name Bill Billings? The father and daughter seemed to think that he had been there during the war but records of that time are incomplete.

But did Bill Billings ghost crop up again in 1994, shortly after the filming at Dover Castle of Strange but True, and LWT television programme presented by Michael Aspel? The producers introduced a psychic to see if he could detect any of the several ghostly figures associated with the buildings. He could not but he did say that the name 'Helen' kept coming into his head though neither he not anyone else could say why. Some days after shooting was complete the assistant manager of the castle rang LWT. He wished to speak to one of the production team. An Australian tourist had met a very agitated ghost, who kept repeating the name 'Helen'. Perhaps this was Bill Billings again. As for the Australian, he could not possibly have known about the psychic and the name which kept popping into his head. He was newly arrived in the country, and the programme had not yet been broadcast.

Prior to the LWT programme there had been two joint investigations of the phenomena at the castle by the Thanet Psychic Paranormal Research Unit and the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena. These were conducted in 1991, the first on 12th October and the second on 30th November.

Each time the investigators took with them all of the equipment now seen as essential to successful 'ghosthunting'. The teams were divided into eight pairs who were stationed at various strategic points around the castle and the underground to monitor whatever was to occur. Various items of sophisticated equipment - video and still cameras, tape recorders, thermometers - were positioned on stairways, near doorways, in passages. Then the investigators waited.

On the first occasion, on 12th October, a heavy wooden door banged shut a precisely eleven twenty-two in the evening. Nothing of note happened for a further three hours and then, at two twenty in the morning there was another crash, this time behind locked wooden doors on the second floor. Adrian and Mary Coombs-Hoar who were stationed in that area at once unlocked the doors, but they could see nothing which could account for the noise. But no sooner were the doors locked than they were shaken vigorously for several seconds. Adrian said: 'We both jumped out of our skins, petrified, then went back to the door which was vibrating madly.' Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the vibrating of the doors came to a stop.

At the same time, two other team members posted in St John's Tower spotted a shadowy figure moving down the stone stairwell. One of them called out and the figure retreated back up the stairs. They were uncertain. Was it a colleague, they wondered. But when they questioned the only possible person it could have been, he told them that he had not been in that part of the building at the time they were speaking of.

At three thirty and four forty in the morning the same pair of observers heard the banging of a heavy door. These sounds were tape recorded. No team members had been responsible for these noises. They had not been charging round the building slamming doors. Yet several of them heard similar noises in different parts of the buildings.

Back to the doors which the Coombs-Hoars had seen shaking so manically. The investigators had now trained a video camera on them. At five twenty in the morning, the doors again shuddered violently and there are six seconds of video tape which show this. Nor was there anyone on the other side of the door. The precautions taken by the investigators against the unlikely possibility of an over-enthusiastic team member ensured that fraud was impossible. In any event, no one could have had the strength to shake the doors so powerfully.

It was a remarkable few seconds for the witnesses. Chris Cherry, who had put the camera in position was excited by what was happening before his eyes. He knew that he was in the presence of a powerful force of some kind. 'The noise was quite tremendous', he said, 'and all the tapestries above our heads started swaying.' In his excitement, Cherry shouted out: 'We've got it' and at once the manifestation came to a stop.

At the same time elsewhere in St John's Tower, a noise described as 'enormous' quite overwhelmed four other investigators. One of them, Ian Peters, claimed that it did not so much frighten him as startle him out of his wits!

The watch on 30th November was less eventful. The most noteworthy occurrence took place in the Mural Gallery in the Keep. Here, the tape recorder was switched off, and later the sound of it being tampered with is recorded. Was this an intelligence at work or was some highly charged electrical energy present? And what was the reason for the strong smell of perfume in this part of the castle? Later during that vigil there were two loud crashes in the basement of the Keep.

Of course, not everyone accepts that Dover Castle is haunted. Imagination, they say. It's the wind high up here, the air currents, the shadows. It's all capable of rational explanation. But is it? The scientists have provided first class equipment to record the odd events in this ancient place. The investigators have so organised themselves that cheating is virtually impossible. No, Dover Castle is imbued with its history; it is steeped in a past which is in the air, in the ether, in the walls. And that past comes out at times and impinges on those who care to visit. For several centuries this formidable stronghold was the centre of the utmost grandeur and power; it was also the centre for plotting, of torture, of murder and war. It is not surprising that it had its ghosts for within its walls have been enacted the most appalling crimes. It has been a place of the utmost sadness and desperation. Such places have their 'psychical residue'.