On a Haunting

in a Very Old House

Last night, there seemed to be a poltergeist in my room.

It moved around in the dark, making different noises. A teaspoon on a plate I’d left on the desk danced out a rattle. There was a quiet zipping or flitting from somewhere near the wardrobe.

I got up in the dark and moved the teaspoon onto the desk. There was no unusual coldness to the air. I sensed no human presence, saw no thicker black. I went back to bed.

And then from the carpet underneath the bed — I couldn’t figure out what this new, louder, closer sound was. A cat raking its claws? A rat stretching itself?

Then I had it — this was fingernails trying to rip their way through the weave, from beneath.

The fingernails resumed.

I turned on the bedside lamp, expecting to see a ghastly face inches away.

It wasn’t there.

The ripping sound stopped.

I checked my watch, on the bedside table. The time was two seventeen in the morning.

I went and stood in the middle of the room and listened.

There’s been quite a lot of talk about ghosts this week, among the writers.

The room next door to mine, and my shower room, are reputed to be haunted.

Years ago, when I snuck a look around the place, before it was refurbished — the playwright John Osborne’s study with damson walls and stained mahogany shelves — it had the heaviest, most miserable atmosphere I’ve ever encountered. The place was drenched in alcohol, bitterness and some form of malice.

People here had been hellishly unhappy. That was in the biographies. Obsorne and his fourth and fifth wives.

Since then, there’s been a wholesale change. Arvon has made sure of that. Everything has been renewed and lived in, week after week, by contented or joyous or at least not horribly self-tortured people. During daylight hours, I could detect none of the previous darkness of spirit. The Hurst is a happy place.

But it was two nineteen in the morning, and something seemed to have airily toured my room, making little rattlings and tinklings, before manifesting beneath the floor, beneath the bed, and starting to make a serious effort at scratching through.

I tried to be rational, in my pyjamas, wide awake. The Hurst is an old stone house. It was built in 1504. Of course, cooling floorboards creak. And folded cloths settle, according to gravity. And teaspoons rattle in a breeze.

But the night in the valley was magnificently still.

And these sounds had come across as an intelligent, percussive tour of the room. They had sounded mischievous and childlike. ‘What fun can I have next?’ they seemed to say, as they drew closer. ‘And this and this.’

Around the room I moved, checking possible sources for the noise. I laid the borrowed guitar on the floor, so it wouldn’t fall over and go crash. I pulled the high floral curtains aside, and a dark shape zipped along the room’s edge.

A mouse — perhaps a mouse.

I went back to bed, and tried to go to sleep with the light on.

Outside an owl, hilariously Hammer Horror, began its lonesome calling. And something non-owl, more burbling, seemed very quietly to answer it from an equal distance.

The carpet scratching started again.

I’d decided that the poltergeist, if it was one, rather than the far more likely mouse, wouldn’t hurt me.

It — whatever it was — had woken me up, entertained me, angered me, scared me into silently reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and now was fading off into generic self-parody.

Tu-whoo. Scritch-scratch.

Tiny claws, probably — not bloody fingernails.

I slept.