Welcome to the Nightwalks…

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Throughout the world there have been reports of people hearing bizarre frequencies, some of them still unexplained. Is it the Om Buddhists believe in? Is it cosmic microwave background radiation? Or something else?

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There is a phenomenon known as the Hum, or the worldwide hum. It’s a persistent and often invasive low-frequency sound, either droning, humming, or rumbling, that is noticeable to many people (4% worldwide) in a given area (though not all people, interestingly enough).

The Hum was first reported in the UK in Bristol, England, in the late 1960s to mid-1970s. The Bristol Evening Post received an influx of letters about the sound. At first, it was blamed on large industrial fans running in a department store warehouse… but the reports continued years after the warehouse closed!

A recording of the Bristol Hum in 2020, during lockdown:

Other Hums were detected in the country, mostly in coastal areas (Hythe, Plymouth, Southampton and Swansea), but also in London.

In the early 1970s, there was a University study conducted on fifty people who could hear a low, throbbing background noise that others weren’t able to hear. The sound always peaked between 30 and 40 Hertz, only audible in cool weather with a slight breeze, usually early in the mornings. The sounds were often contained in a 6 mile-wide location.

The Hum has caused three people to commit suicide in the UK, according to Mark Pilkington in the Guardian. While some people find the Hum to be a curiosity or a bit of an annoyance, for others it is life-altering and can lead to anxiety or depression.

In the late 1980s to early 1990s, the Hum was heard in Taos, New Mexico, and Kokomo, Indiana.

Since then, Hums have been heard in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa  and many European cities. They’re often in densely populated areas and are named after the places in which they occur, for example the Taos Hum in New Mexico and the Windsor Hum in Ontario.

The Taos Hum

At least 2% of people could hear a Hum in Taos, New Mexico in the early 1990s. Every hearer noticed it at different frequencies ranging from 32 to 80 Hertz. It was possible for them to move away from the Hum, with one hearer saying it had a range of 30 miles, so the source was likely external and not biological. Middle-aged people were more likely to hear it, with an almost equal number of males and females affected. (There are also eight times as many ambidextrous hearers of the Hum worldwide than in the general population, and a lot more people with a personal or family history of autism or ADHD who can hear it.)

An example of the Taos Hum is audible here:

Auckland Hum

In 2006, a man named Tom Moir at the Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand, managed to get some recordings of this Hum, which was about 56 Hertz.

An example:

Windsor Hum

Back in late 2011, people living in Windsor, Ontario started hearing low, droning vibrations which were often loud enough to vibrate windows and cause annoyance. Some people experienced nosebleeds, headaches, and insomnia. On one evening in 2012, there were 22,000 complaints about it to officials.

The sound may have come from Zug Island, a very industrialised section of River Rouge on the north bank of the Detroit River. Canadian officials tried to get U.S. assistance in locating the source of the noise, but they were prevented from accessing the island.

A steel mill operated by U.S. Steel might have been the cause, but no new equipment was put in or switched on around the time the Hum became apparent. Once the blast furnaces were retired in April 2020, the Hum dissipated.

A recording of the Windsor Hum in 2011:

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Dr Glen MacPherson, a Canadian teacher who first heard the Hum while living and working in Sechelt in British Columbia, has a website dedicated to recording people’s reports of the Hum around the world: https://thehum.info/. It’s an interactive map and database that he set up in 2012. Currently, he is having someone comb through the Times of London’s digital archive for records of a Hum in the 18th or 19th centuries. If convincing examples of a Hum are found from these time periods, that means technological explanations for it could be ruled out.

Possible explanations for these Hums include high-pressure gas pipelines, power distribution lines, distant mining operations, small undersea earthquakes, atmospheric resonance, industrial machinery or fans at nearby factories, and other mechanical sources such as cooling towers, air compressors, diesel generators, vacuum pumps, or large transformers.

Some researchers hazard that very low frequency radio waves from the military TACAMO system, used by aircraft to communicate with submarines, might be the source of the Hum. According to Dr MacPherson, the human body is capable of experiencing electromagnetic energy as sound. The neuroscientist Alan Frey conducted experiments into “microwave hearing” which revealed that certain frequencies could be heard as sounds.

Another explanation could be tinnitus, or the venous hum (the sound of your blood circulation in your upper chest, near the collarbone. Also known as the “nun’s murmur” or “bruit de diable” [noise of devils].) However, the Hum is low-frequency and actual tinnitus within the ear is usually the hearing of high-frequency sounds.

Some people who hear the Hum say that it’s worse inside their homes rather than outside. Some say it’s just as noticeable outdoors as indoors. Some people have said the Hum is made worse by soundproofing (e.g. double-glazing).

Human ears are capable of generating their own random sounds from the cochlea, otherwise known as spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAE). 30 to 68% of adults with normal hearing have these, though most people are unaware of them. They are anywhere from 500 to 5000 Hz and can sound like cicadas or faint hissing, buzzing, or ringing, especially if you’re in a silent environment. They’re a byproduct of the ear’s sound amplification.

Various Hums can be caused by wildlife. A humming in Sausalito, California, was found to be caused by the mating calls of male midshipman fish. That particular sound was resonating through the hulls of houseboats.

The Scottish Association for Marine Science guessed that a hum during the night in Hythe may be coming from a similar “sonic” type of fish, though this is unlikely as that sort of fish isn’t found often in the inshore waters of the UK.

Low-frequency sounds or infrasound can come from ocean waves hitting the shore, or from wind blowing across the landscape.

The question is, why is a subset of humanity able to detect this signal?

Animals are known to be able to predict earthquakes via imperceptible (to us) sound, and take action to protect themselves. Perhaps from an evolutionary point of view, it’s a good thing some of us can hear these kinds of vibrations.

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Havana Syndrome

This is a mysterious neurological illness that is so far unexplained, but associated with the sudden hearing of a bizarre tone.

In August 2017, American and Canadian diplomatic personnel in Cuba said they had been suffering with weird health problems since late 2016. There were 21 original cases in Cuba, which began with strange grating noises coming from a certain direction, or loud screeching, chirping, clicking, or piercing noises. Some people experienced pressure, vibration, or a sensation similar to driving a car with a window partly rolled down. These sounds lasted anywhere from 20 seconds to half an hour, while the diplomats were at home or in their hotel rooms. Other people nearby (friends, family members or guests in neighbouring rooms) heard and felt nothing unusual.

The US State Department concluded that it was either an attack or exposure to an unknown device, though it didn’t say that the Cuban government was responsible. People speculated that it was a sonic weapon or infrasound of some kind.

Symptoms included nausea, hearing loss, memory loss, visual problems such as sensitivity to light or blurred vision, intense pressure or vibrating in the head, ear pain, tinnitus, dizziness or unsteady gait, diffuse head pain, insomnia, and poor concentration. Some of this lasted for months, and some of the sufferers had long-lasting health problems.

In August 2017, the US fired two Cuban diplomats in retaliation, and the next month it warned US residents not to travel to Cuba, announcing it would be withdrawing non-essential staff from the US embassy there.

In March 2018, some Canadian diplomats went to Pittsburgh to see a neurologist who had previously diagnosed some brain issues in the US diplomats. MRIs of the Canadians showed signs of brain damage similar to their US counterparts.

In early 2018, Global Affairs Canada ended family postings to Cuba and removed all staff members from there who had families. Many of the Canadians affected in 2017 were still unable to work due to their health problems.

Starting from late 2017, suspected Havana syndrome attacks were affecting US intelligence staff in various locations: Moscow in Russia, Tbilisi in Georgia, Poland, Taiwan, Australia, Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Austria.

In early 2018, US diplomats in China began reporting signs of health issues similar to those in Cuba. It was unclear whether it was the result of an attack, exposure to toxins, listening to devices that accidentally produced harmful sounds, or just mass hysteria. In June 2018, the US State Department issued a warning for the whole of mainland China, telling anyone who experienced unusual acute auditory or sensory phenomena accompanied by unusual sounds or piercing noises to not attempt to locate their source.

In August 2021, two American diplomats were evacuated from Hanoi in Vietnam, after cases of Havana syndrome were reported. In September of that year, an aide de camp of the CIA director had signs of the syndrome on a visit to India.

In 2019, a White House official had symptoms while walking her dog in a Virginia suburb in Washington. In November 2020, a similar thing happened on The Ellipse lawn adjacent to the White House’s south side. Still, the cause wasn’t found. However, eight recordings of the signal the sufferers heard in 2017 were analysed and found to be the chirping of the Indies short-tailed cricket. The sounds may have been used as a distraction or a cover.

In 2021, dozens of US personnel in Vienna (and some of their children) came down with the syndrome. Apart from Havana, Vienna has had the most incidents. Also in 2021, cases happened in Berlin, Serbia, and Bogota, Colombia.

There are still investigations underway as to whether the syndrome could be caused by some type of microwave, ultrasonic, or laser device. FMI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

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Eerie Undersea Sounds

In the Pacific Ocean in 1997, a mysterious “slow down” sound was identified. It was recorded by NOAA, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, on their array of underwater microphones.

It’s a long, drawn-out noise that decreases in frequency over the span of 7 minutes. The sound happens about 3 times a year at different times. It can be heard across thousands of miles. There has been speculation that it’s caused by a gigantic undiscovered undersea creature or even a prehistoric animal like a pleisiosaur. It’s likely to be caused by ice sheets sliding together or an underwater volcano, but whatever it is, it’s big.

The Bloop

Before that, in 1997, NOAA recorded a shorter signal under the Pacific Ocean that they named The Bloop. (They were actually trying to find evidence of Russian submarines.)

NOAA said it couldn’t be caused by anything man-made, so there was speculation that it could be the calls of a huge creature under the ocean. Then in 2012, scientists explained that the sound was caused by ice quakes, or a glacier breaking in half.

The Loneliest Whale Call

This runs at 52 Hertz, an isolated sound picked up by the US Navy while they were trying to track submarines. Whales usually call at a range of 10 to 40 Hertz, using the sounds to communicate with one another. This one appears to be larger – perhaps a blue whale – and is alone. The pattern of the call is like a blue whale’s and scientists have nicknamed it 52 Blue.

It’s higher frequency may have made it unrecognisable to other whales, hence its isolation. It has been recorded multiple times over years, but never seen. It could be a mix of a blue whale and a fin whale, or it may have a genetic mutation.

This recording has been sped up 10 times to make it easier for humans to hear, but this is the whale call:

Rosetta the Singing Comet

Comet 67P/C-G is giving off a humming or singing signal. The ESA sent its Rosetta probe to this 4km-wide comet, which detected changes in the comet’s magnetic field.

The comet is a contact binary, made of two smaller pieces joined together with a “neck” in-between them. Sunlight causes a lot of dust and ice to flare up from the neck, and the comet emits a low-frequency clicking sound caused by oscillations in its magnetic field as it interacts with the solar wind.

If you were close to this comet, you would smell rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide), a horse stable (ammonia) and almonds (hydrogen cyanide).

Recent analysis of samples from the comet show that comets similar to it may have been responsible for delivering noble gases and complex organic molecules to Earth while the planet was in its early days, billions of years ago.

The data has been sped up 10,000 times so that humans can hear it.

Radio signal SHGB02+14A

This signal first came to us in 2003 via a radio telescope in West Virginia. Identified by SETI at Home researchers, the signal was a repeating 1.42 second pulse that couldn’t be explained by a known source, natural or man-made. It had three frequency bands. NASA sent a spacecraft to its location to figure out what it was, but the craft malfunctioned.

The signal repeated again in 2015, the same frequencies from the same origin (between the constellations Pisces and Aries). No one has deciphered what caused it and it hasn’t returned since then.

Lorimer Bursts / Fast Radio Bursts

First detected in Australia in 2007, this was the first detected fast radio burst or FRB that only lasted 5 milliseconds, named after Duncan Lorimer, the astronomer who discovered it.

The FRB came from about 3 billion light years away, and was of unknown origin. FRBs may come from highly energised neutron stars in distant galaxies. The oldest FRB to reach us took 8 billion years to get here and had the energy of 30 years’ worth of what our Sun can produce.

Some FRBs repeat, but many don’t visit us again.

Here is an example of what the oldest FRB sounds like.

And just for fun, you can find sounds from planets and space missions from NASA at https://www.nasa.gov/sounds-from-beyond/ or on Soundcloud. Here is what the Sun sounds like:

https://m.soundcloud.com/nasa/sun-sonification

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Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum

Humdingers https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/jul/22/research.science3?CMP=share_btn_url

https://thehum.info/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260719040002.htm

https://strangesounds.org/strange-sounds/the-hum

https://theconversation.com/cracking-the-mystery-of-the-worldwide-hum-60296

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-hum-listeners-rebecca-hall-mystery-noise-b2647826.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

https://www.medicinenet.com/what_is_havana_syndrome/article.htm

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A rumour circulated in 1954 in Gorbals, Glasgow that a vampire haunted the old Southern Necropolis. It took a group of feisty kids and a newspaper story to defeat it. However, there are still whispers of its existence in the city…

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In the 1950s and 1960s, comic books were seen as a medium only for children, no matter what the content. There were a fair few comics concerning horrific monsters including vampires, so perhaps this was where the idea behind the rumour originated.

The Gorbals Vampire was apparently seven feet tall with red eyes that glowed in the dark, pale skin, and it had sharpened, iron teeth. It also seemed to have an appetite for children. The rumour held that this vampire had abducted, killed, and feasted on two small boys by draining them of their blood.

In spite of the adults, police force, and teachers trying to calm the hysteria, the children collectively decided to deal with the vampire themselves.

After school on September the 23rd 1954,  some two-to-four hundred kids, from 4 to 14 years old, armed themselves with crosses and kitchen knives, sticks, stones, stakes, and dogs, and rushed upon the Southern Necropolis (or “The Gravy” in colloquial terms) to do a spot of vampire-hunting. Even some adults joined in! They continued to search even as night fell, checking behind trees and Victorian headstones. They even carried on as a soupy fog rolled in, causing them to rush towards one silhouette after another, convinced it was the vampire.

The hunt would have been no mean feat. The Southern Necropolis, built in 1840, contained more than 250,000 resting inhabitants. The Dixon Blazes steelworks was at the rear of the cemetery, coughing out smoke, lighting the sky up orange, likely blocking out the moonlight, emitting a sulphuric stench. Flames from the works’ towers cast odd shadows over the graves, making the headstones seem to leap, making it so figures appeared to be walking along at the back, limned in red light…

On top of that, a bonfire was spotted close to the cemetery and the kids started screaming that the vampire was burning its victims.

Locals called the police, and Constable Alex Deeprose was dispatched to the Necropolis. He said, “When I appeared, I felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. All shapes and sizes of children streamed after me, all talking at once, and telling me of the ‘vampire with iron teeth’. This I could handle, but when grown-ups approached me and asked earnestly ‘Is there anything in this vampire story?’ it made me think.”

One child begged a journalist at the scene, “Hiv ye come tae shoot him, Mister? Kill him sae we can sleep tonight!”.

More police arrived followed by Edward Cusick, the headteacher of St Bonaventure’s Primary School, who gathered the kids together to reassure them that the vampire wasn’t real.

It started to rain and the children returned home. Gravediggers, cemetery officials and police couldn’t keep them away. Some of them went back to hunting the vampire in the Necropolis the next night, scaling the walls after the gates were locked, and the night after that. By the third night, their interest was starting to wane. By that time, stories were being printed about it in the national press.

The intrigue about the vampire spread through the wider population, prompting a discussion about the effects of American horror comics on youngsters. The kids’ vigilantism was raised by Alice Cullen, the Labour MP, during a debate on the 1955 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act. This Act banned the sale of “incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature” to minors. The Act was likely influenced by the Teachers’ Union, a few Christian groups, and the Communist Party (who wanted to stop American influences reaching the United Kingdom).

There were no missing or murdered children reported around the time of the Gorbals Vampire hunt.

At the time of the rumours, there was a horror comic about a vampire with iron teeth in the December 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries.  Other American horror comics at the time were Tales From The Crypt and The Vault of Horror.

However, many of the children living in Gorbals were in poverty and didn’t even have access to comic books or a TV. Most of the kids didn’t even know what a vampire was!

There was a passage in the Book of Daniel in the Bible, which would likely have been taught in schools: “Behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth.”

The children may also have been inspired by the folkloric figure “Jenny wi’ The Iron (or Airn) Teeth,” a variation of Jenny Greenteeth, a monster invented by adults to scare children into avoiding bodies of water where they would be likely to drown. Jenny wi’ The Iron Teeth supposedly haunted Glasgow Green in the early 1800s. This particular Jenny was interested in eating children who refused to go to sleep, according to the rhyme:

“Jenny wi’ the Airn Teeth,

come an tak’ the bairn.

Tak’ him to your den

where the bowgie bides,

but first put baith your big teeth

in his wee, plump sides.”

(Poem by Alexander Anderson)

Naughty children were also threatened with a visit from another folkloric figure, the Iron Man (not Tony Stark, but a being likely originating from the influence of the iron industry on the area).

In the cramped tenements of Gorbals, the Southern Necropolis was the only green space that children could meet up and play in. The atmosphere of the place lent itself to the swapping of ghost stories, which the kids did.

Gorbals, a place south of the river Clyde, began as a village in medieval times, but then Glasgow spread and surrounded it with the arrival of heavy industry. In 1340, there was a Leper’s House at St Ninian’s Croft hospital in Gorbals, and it’s said that when lepers crossed the bridge from there into Glasgow, they would ring handbells (or “gory-bells”) to warn the uninfected that they were coming.

By the end of the 1800s, Gorbals was suffering from overcrowding and poor sanitation. Many were drawn in by the promise of work with companies that provided worker housing. In 1900, there was an outbreak of Bubonic Plague.

As heavy industry declined and unemployment grew, there was an increase in crime and drunkeness. However, people still migrated into the area and filled up the tenements: people from the Scottish Highlands, Irish Catholics, Italians, and Jews. By the 1930s, around 90,000 people lived in Gorbals.

The infant mortality rate here was high, so it was little wonder that children would subconsciously conjure a being to explain child deaths which also had an association with metalworks. Iron had provided food – through jobs such as shipbuilding, the munitions factories in World War Two, and the iron foundry – but it had also taken away, leading to poverty, noise, light and chemical pollution, and dangerous jobs. In the children’s minds, iron was a thing with the power to destroy.

The Gorbals Vampire hunt was only one of several such hunts in history involving Glasgow children. In the 1870s, children hunted hobgoblins in Cowcaddens. In the 1900s, Glasgow children hunted banshees, ghosts, maniacs, and Spring-heeled Jack, the Victorian fire-breathing entity that apparently plagued London. In 1964, hundreds of children in Liverpool conducted a search for leprechauns.

In 2016, Johnny McKnight put on a play about the vampire in Gorbals, and residents of the area volunteered to act in it. At the same time, a competition was run in local schools for children to create a horror comic and design a mural paying homage to the vampire. Local teenage artist Ella Bryson and Art Pistol street artists Ejek painted the mural in an archway on St Luke’s Place near the Citizens’ Theatre.

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Writing Update

I have recently had a few stories released. My dark humour flash fiction piece “You Are What You Eat” appeared in Slash magazine:

https://www.theslashmedia.com/you-are-what-you-eat/

My poem “Landscape One” won the Chai magazine’s Prithvi anthology contest (which may be available to read later in the year):

https://www.instagram.com/p/DWWkLQpCM87/?igsh=MTR4Yzhrb2hyaHQ3eQ==

I have a flash horror fiction, “Deathwalk,” in GossamerWight‘s Uncanny Regimes anthology, available to read for free online:

https://www.gossamerwight.com/store/p/uncanny-regimes-pdf

And my post-apocalyptic tale “Assuming the Mantle” is in ELA magazine:

https://nightwalks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/4eef7-ela-3-theendoftheworld.pdf

As for Once Upon A Crocodile e-zine, it is closed to submissions until the start of 2028 due to a backlog, but planned issues are still going ahead. You can read issue 19 here, and issue 20 is in the works. The edits are done, and I’m now doing the illustrations. It should be out by early August at the latest.

I’m also still rewriting parts of the second Nighthunter book. The beginning needed a do-over and some more scenes need adding in.

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Sources

The Gorbals Vampire

Weird Britain (TV documentary series)

https://www.glasgowworld.com/retro/gorbals-vampire-explained-was-the-glasgow-folklore-monster-real-3891719

The Gorbals’ Vampire: The Iron-toothed, Child Eater who Terrorised Glasgow

The Gorbals Vampire – Did a 1950s Nosferatu Prowl Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis?

The Gorbals Vampire

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On a stormy night in 1957, newspaper journalist Mr A. Wilmot from Peterborough had his car break down close to Hannath Hall in the fens of Cambridgeshire. Unfortunately the couple in the building were suffering from a ghostly infestation…

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Mr and Mrs Derek Page were living in Hannath Hall (in Tydd St Giles, near Wisbech) at the time with their two three and five-year-old children Keir and Eve-Anne, along with Rose Halls, Mrs Page’s mother.(Derek Page later went on to become the Labour MP for King’s Lynn.)

After the reporter, A. Wilmot, heard about what had been happening in the building, he contacted the Society for Psychical Research, who then contacted the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research. An investigation was organised by Tony Cornell (one of the most prolific ghost hunters in that area who wrote Investigating the Paranormal in 2002, and was later the vice president and treasurer of the SPR). Cornell was at first suspicious that the haunting might be a publicity stunt.

Dr Alan Gauld, a psychology lecturer at Nottingham University, also joined in with the investigation. Teams from the University Society visited the Hall twelve times, holding vigils, and Cornell and Gauld visited the building twenty times over a number of years. They slept on the floor of the haunted bedroom and heard strange groans and footsteps, rapping, bumps, knocking, and dragging sounds.

One memorable visit was on February the 6th, 1958 (the night of the Munich Air Disaster), when they arrived at the Hall to find a lot of eerie sounds and stories of more unusual activity.

Gauld and Cornell claimed they had seen actual poltergeist activity upstairs. They saw a chair fly past them and at one point they became trapped in a room when a shiny, new-looking, brass toasting fork of unknown origin was wedged in the door hinges (or perhaps the lock, some sources differ). There were many inexplicable rapping sounds which they used to communicate with an entity in 1959, holding a seance in the haunted bedroom with an amateur medium. They supposedly contacted a woman named Eliza Cullen or Culler, who was murdered in the house in 1906 (though this wasn’t confirmed as historical fact). The entity claimed to have buried her dead infant in the garden and was looking for the baby.

Hannath Hall was originally built in the 17th century on a reedy peninsula amongst the bogs of the undrained fens, though it used to be called Sparrow’s Nest until Joseph Hannath bought it in 1812.

The kitchen and southern end of the house were built first, then the house was rebuilt and enlarged a hundred years later, adding the north wing. This meant it grew from the size of a cottage to one more suitable for a landowner.

The ground floor of Hannath Hall had three living-rooms, a kitchen, and a disused washroom. The first floor had a gallery onto which various rooms opened out, five bedrooms, a study, and a bathroom. 

One story explaining the haunting was that, in the 19th century, the former owner (Joseph Hannath)’s wife passed away. They had been married for forty years. The grieving and disturbed husband kept her body upstairs in her bedroom in the Hall (the one over the kitchen) for six to eight weeks, having meals sent up to her (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper) every day until authorities had to intervene and the woman’s body was given a proper burial under a chestnut tree in the Hall’s garden. Other sources state that Joseph bricked up his wife’s body in a space between the outer wall and the breast of the bedroom chimney, and that it wasn’t given a burial. He apparently carried bricks and mortar up the creaky oak stairs to do the deed himself.

A maid was driven to committing suicide by these events, and some folk have said they saw the ghost of a woman in white stalking through the corridors, or appearing in the windows of the house when looking at it from the outside. Nobody was able to sleep in the room where the body was kept after that.

Joseph Hannath was also deeply attached to his horse, Bess (so the tale goes). There were stepping-stones from the Hall to the stables so that Bess could walk without getting her hooves muddy. Her manger was always stuffed with hay. When Bess died, Joseph had her buried in the garden where he could see the grave from his window, and every morning an armful of hay would be put on the grave.

Another part of the legend states that Joseph Hannath sold more than half his thousand acres of land for around £30,000 but that not one coin ever went into a bank. There was a rumour that his missing gold was hidden somewhere in the Hall.

Mr Hugh Williams bought the Hall and farm in 1895. He said that dogs wouldn’t stay in the building, they would “clap their tails between their legs, howl their hearts out and bolt”. Mrs Williams refused to live in it – Hugh had to construct a bungalow for her two fields away. When Hugh was a boy, a maidservant dashed out of the place at midnight, screaming, and never returned. He said that people would hear sounds like a body being dragged across the floor, footsteps along the corridor at night and up the stairs, along with bedroom doors being flung open with quite a bit of force.

One of the Williams children (now Mrs Audrey Godman) was convinced that as a girl she saw the ghost of Hannath galloping through her bedroom on a big, white horse. John Williams remembers experiencing some strange dreams in his childhood. Aged eight to twelve, he experienced doors opening when they should have been closed and the bed lifting itself, though as an adult he dismissed the hauntings as rubbish. His mother used to tell him stories about Hannath not being able to accept his horse as being dead and keeping its body in a kind of vault, where food had to be brought to it by workmen. According to Mrs Olive Williams, the food was always gone later (but the workmen likely took the food home for their own animals).

Two of Hugh’s nieces slept over at the Hall, aged twelve or thirteen, and claimed they had seen hands dripping blood hanging over them.

However, Hugh and Olive Williams did not believe the place was haunted and didn’t experience anything uncanny themselves.

Hugh Williams and his wife left the Hall in 1950 and rented the Hall to the Pages. According to Hugh, Mr Page’s mother-in-law stayed for one night. She heard bumping and dragging in the corridor outside and something smashed through her bedroom door like it had been hit with an axe, then she left the next day (unsurprisingly).

Then Mr Page’s own mother stayed for a night at the Hall, and she also was quick to leave in the morning. Mrs Catherine Page was terrified by knocking on her bedroom wall at midnight, raps, thumps, groans, and footsteps. (Some sources say her name was Audrey Page.)

Rose Halls said she’d often heard regular tapping from the upstairs rooms while she was in the living-room downstairs. Once, she was startled awake in her bedroom (at the south end of the gallery, on the first floor) by a crashing noise, as if someone was breaking down a heavy door downstairs. Another time she was shocked by a massive jolting of her bed. In a statement dated 24th of April 1959, she said that recently she’d heard a heavy thud again during the night. She said that whenever any of these things happened, the door to the haunted bedroom at the other end of the gallery had been opened, somehow.

Mr Page was usually only at home on weekends, so he never heard anything. However, he told the investigators his mother had had to cut short a stay at the Hall because of some frightening dreams she’d suffered.

More in-depth details of the investigations can be found in some old newspaper articles here: https://poltergeistarchive.co.uk/tydd-cambridgeshire-1950s/

One later tenant of the Hall claimed that if psychical researchers visited the place, ghosts would emerge from the walls and scratch any children present.

The phenomena receded, but on April the 22nd 1959 (and later that same year) Mrs Page saw the ghost of a fair-haired, roughly six-year-old boy in the doorway between the living-room and the box-room.

Alan Gauld and Tony Cornell published an account of Hannath Hall in Poltergeists (1979) and in SPR journals. Tony Cornell recalled his experiences during a Ghost Club meeting in 1997.

Derek Page became Lord Whaddon later on. Mrs Catherine Page died in 1979, though Derek remarried. He then died in 2005.

At that time, many SPR members were of the opinion that poltergeists didn’t exist and that poltergeist activity had to have a natural explanation. The researcher Guy Lambert was promoting the geophysical theory: that subterranean water and small earthquakes were the things causing poltergeist phenomena.

After Gauld and Cornell shared their findings, the SPR grew a little less sceptical of poltergeist phenomena. To this day, the haunting hasn’t been scientifically explained or debunked.

Ten members of the London Imperial College H.G. Wells Society stayed in the abandoned Hall for two nights in 1967. They came with more modern recording equipment but didn’t find anything supernatural. The only unexplained noise was a sound “like someone kicking a bucket.”

In 2009, a woman named Alice was living in the Hall. She told a Fortean Times forum that her stepbrother had been sleeping in the haunted bedroom for about ten years and had not experienced anything out of the ordinary.

In 2019, someone else on the Haunted Isles blog shared a story of when they were living in the building as a child. Their brother was sleeping in the old maid’s room and frequently had conversations with “a lady called Mary”. The person also said people often had an uncanny feeling at the top of the stairs, as if there was someone behind them ready to give them a push…

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Sources:

Tydd, Cambridgeshire (1950s)

THE HANNATH HALL POLTERGEIST

https://hauntedisles.blogspot.com/2018/08/hannath-hall.html?m=1