Unwanted guests of the ghostly kind are alive and well, discovers Christopher Hall
We all love a home with a family spirit. Balavil House, on the other hand, has two spirits - according to legend, they are of young housemaids who died there. The property in the Scottish Highlands featured as the home of Lord Kilwillie, the character played by Julian Fellowes in the BBC's Monarch of the Glen. But the spirits are not a fictional creation, according to the family who have lived in Balavil since 1993.
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Spirited company: Allan Macpherson Fletcher and his wife, Marjorie, at Balavil House. Above right, the King's Head, Llandeilo |
The maids are called Agnes and Sarah, and turn on lights and heaters, tinker with cars, fold clothes and rearrange kitchen utensils as well as fulfil more traditional ghostly functions such as knocking on doors and sending shivers through the place.
"I have five grown-up children and nine grandchildren who visit, plus my wife, Marjorie, and myself living here. We never, ever feel threatened. There are tinkling noises and pictures fall to the ground all the time. But we're used to it," says the owner, Allan Macpherson Fletcher, a consultant at estate agent Strutt & Parker.
Part of the house is used as a bed and breakfast, for shooting parties and as a corporate conference venue. "I was showing one group around the haunted areas. A door opened entirely by itself and one person who was already spooked by the prospect of seeing a ghost, legged it down the stairs at great speed. They hadn't had a drink first," says Macpherson Fletcher.
"The Scottish Paranormal Association says the place is full of friendly spirits. I'm a sceptic but these events cannot be explained," he says.
This kind of experience is not unique. Psychic groups claim tens of thousands of UK properties are haunted - and ghosts, it seems, do not recognise social divisions.
The local authority at Easington, in County Durham, earlier this year paid for the exorcism of a modest three-bedroom council house whose tenant, Sabrina Fallon, reported groans, doors slamming and clothes moving around, apparently unaided.
Meanwhile, Nottinghamshire businessman Anwar Rashid has just abandoned Clifton Hall, the 52-room country pile he bought last year for £3.6million. He says his wife and four children have been terrorised by mysterious noises and visions. The final straw, he says, has been the appearance of blood spots on a quilt in his baby's bed.
So, as Ray Parker Jr famously sang, if there's something strange in your neighbourhood, who ya gonna call? Well, you could try Suzanne Hadwin. She is a ghostbuster - although she prefers the term "spiritualist medium'' - and visits up to 40 homes a year to remove unwanted spirits.
"It's not just noises or incidents that suggest a haunting. It can be that family members are depressed or arguing a lot. They take in the atmosphere created by spirits who are reliving experiences about the time of their deaths," says Hadwin, who runs a "spirit-removing'' business called Gabriel from her home in Sunderland.
"It can take two to three days to remove spirits. I visit the house, walk through every room and find where the spirits are concentrated. I lay salt at the front and back doors and pass through the house with incense and sometimes sage. In nine out of 10 cases the spirits are murderers or have themselves been murdered," she says.
Many of her clients over the past 14 years have been people who recently moved in to a property and noticed ghostly activity. "The owners don't need to move out. I get rid of the spirits and the people can stay," says Hadwin, who has visited homes throughout Britain.
A few sharp estate agents have been known to play up a property's ghostly image when trying to attract gullible American buyers, but even the scrupulously professional admit to coming across miasmic ladies, rattling keys and freezing-cold rooms.
James Greenwood runs Stacks Property Search & Acquisition, a buying agency run by the same family for 30 years. "My father went to see a house where someone pointed out a strange marking on a wall," he says. "The outline of a person was visible. History had it that a man had been shot there. The pellets surrounded the man and had gone into the wall, forming the outline of the body's shape. Whatever the owners had done to obscure the pattern - paint, wallpaper, plaster - had failed. It just kept reappearing."
Philip Selway, of another search agency, The Buying Solution, says his eeriest experience was at Frome, in Somerset, in 2006. "I found a lovely property, Rode House. The client liked it but we later found out it was one of the most haunted homes in the country. In Victorian times it was the scene of a gruesome child murder," he says. The deal fell through.
Estate agents selling a home must formally disclose to would-be buyers any issue that may materially affect the transaction. "We can't rely on the vendor's word. We have to see documentation about ownership, planning issues, and so on. Quite how one does that about a ghost, I'm not so sure," says Macpherson Fletcher.
There are no recorded disputes in the UK of new owners taking legal action against their sellers for failing to disclose details of a ghost. But it is happening in Italy.
Gaetano and Stefania Bastianelli bought a house in the Umbrian town of Spoleto, without being told it was built on the site of a cemetery, near a previous property that had required an exorcism. The Bastianellis spent three years hearing things go bump in the night before resorting to the law. The row is now being settled out of court.
We British seem to do things differently. Estate agency Clee, Tompkinson & Francis (01558 823601), at Llandeilo in south Wales, is selling a haunted former pub, the King's Head, for £635,000. It is ripe for conversion into a family home. Far from being shy about the ghost, the agency is inviting potential buyers to spend the night and get to know their ''lodger''.
It might just be the market slowdown, but so far there have been no takers. Business for this haunted house, it seems, is dead quiet.
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