Lucy Melford: The Ghost Room

I was in Canterbury two days ago with my cousin Rosemary, and as usual we had afternoon tea and cake at Tiny Tim's Tea Room. Here are some shots of the place, taken at various moments from 2018 onwards:

It has an upmarket feel, and you can in fact have a rather posh and full-blown formal afternoon tea here. Very suitable for, say, someone's birthday treat. The premises, on three floors, are full of character, with a lot of it genuinely old - no surprise, as Canterbury is full of very old buildings. Oak beams in the ceilings, naturally, and there is a somewhat Jacobean winding stair that connects the floors, with the kitchen halfway up, and toilets at the top. It's a modern construction, but very much in that sixteenth century style, all pointy finials. Very reminiscent of spooky Chastleton House in Oxfordshire, which has just such a winding staircase, one that must be frightening in the darkness when lit only by a flickering candle that might go out in the draught. Even in late afternoon, around sunset, the Chastelton House staircase is full of menace:

You get the idea. I have of course tweaked some of these pictures to bring out the spookiness, but Chastleton House really does have that staircase, and you can easily imagine how fearful a nervous person might be if need drove them upstairs after dark. It must have terrified little children and old maids.

The stairs at Tiny Tim's were replacements for the originals after the building was badly damaged by fire in 1964, but only modern bright lighting distinguishes them from the much older stairs at Chastleton.

I'm not used to stairs, and avoid them if I can, as my knees protest. But I wanted to go to the loo, so up I went. At the top, beyond the toilet, was a room. It was well-lit, and looked like a comfortable sitting-room with its own fireplace.

Some of the framed pictures, photographs and texts on the walls explained the reconstruction work necessary after the fire in 1964. There was information on an Elizabethan pirate called Sir Geoffrey Newman, who, after many years of pillage on the Spanish Main came to own a long 999 year lease of the house. But that is nothing to the point. On a side door was this notice:

It seems that when carefully investigating the walls of this room and the next, some mummified remains were found, plus various articles. The remains included the bodies of three children. Now it was once not uncommon, centuries ago, to inter cats and other creatures in wall cavities, in order to bring the house good luck. Bad luck on the cats, of course; I do hope they had already died, but maybe not. When in Lincolnshire last summer, I visited Ayscoughee Hall in Spalding, and they had a mummified cat in a cabinet, interred for just this purpose:

Well cats are one thing; but children? And were they victims of the kind of fatal illnesses one encountered back in the the sixteenth century, or youngsters done to death for some reason? Why would you hide children inside walls? And how could this bring the house 'good luck', if that was the intention? Strange and disturbing.

This area of Canterbury was the abode of Hugenot refugees from the late 1500s. Apparently the locals didn't like them, because Kent had suffered from French raids for a very long time, and many Hugenots spoke French. So, grudgingly, they were given run-down accommodation in the unhealthiest parts of the town. Given that, it wouldn't be surprising if children died from some pestilence or other, and being denied proper burial (despite being Protestant), had to be walled up in the house. All supposition, but perhaps not implausible.

And therefore many several centuries later, the workmen repairing and modernising the premises came across these mummified children. But then, so the story goes, things began to happen. Little things mostly. Whisperings, infant voices, things being moved. The top floor of the building acquired a reputation for being haunted.

Of course, that reputation was an asset. Many people are intrigued by ghost stories. Tiny Tim's thus became not only a great spot for tea and cake, but a focus for ghost-hunters and anyone interested in the paranormal. Rather an odd combination of attractions, but it hasn't put off anyone. There are not many places where you might cock an ear for the sounds of ghostly children while sitting on the loo! And if you did, what a frisson you'd get. Needless to say, I heard nothing. Indeed, so well-lit was that upstairs room and landing that it was at first difficult to feel any disquiet. Not that little children, ghostly or not, should have been a threat of any kind. No surprise, then, that in this photo I looked scornful and full of bravado, snapping my fingers, so to speak, at any possible danger.

But looking a little closer in the Ghost Room, I found this odd-looking print of a man with a misshapen head:

It was entitled 'Marcel' - a French name - and he could have been one of those Hugenots who were compelled to live in what was then a decaying and plague-ridden slum house, injurious to good health. Had a man like that been the father of the three dead children?

I grew less confident that the whole thing was a load of baloney, and merely a tourist tale. What had actually killed the children? Was it still there, in the fabric of the building? It wasn't now so hard to imagine walking up those Jacobean stairs when the lights were dimmed, climbing slowly to the top with anxiety mounting, and meeting whatever was up there with a scream.