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…
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…
Sources:
Tydd, Cambridgeshire (1950s)
THE HANNATH HALL POLTERGEIST
https://hauntedisles.blogspot.com/2018/08/hannath-hall.html?m=1
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