The Burpham Crash: A Mysterious Replay?

A short time before Christmas in 2002, when the evenings draw in quickly and the cold air chills the flesh, a police switchboard received a number of calls from concerned motorists travelling along the A3 at a place called Burpham, near Guildford in Surrey. It turned out that a group of them had witnessed a car with its headlights shining leave the road abruptly and disappear down a steep, overgrown embankment.

Officers were immediately dispatched to investigate what sounded like an everyday accident, but were stumped when they could find no sign of the vehicle in question. There were no hints of tyre marks on the road nor any visible crushed foliage or smashed branches that might have given away the location of the car’s resting place.

When dawn broke the following morning, a more in-depth search was undertaken and it was then that the police found the vehicle. But the officers uncovered not just wreckage of a crashed car, but also a grisly mystery.

Twenty metres from where the motorists’ reports had said it veered off the road, there lay a dark red Vauxhall Astra. It was nose down in a ditch, almost obscured by trees and brambles and more-or-less invisible to users of the road above. Although they were left on at the time of the crash, the headlights were now off thanks to a drained battery. Not too far away lay the unfortunate driver—very much deceased. It seemed as though he survived the crash initially, but then expired as he tried to drag himself up the embankment in an attempt to summon help. And here’s the mysterious part—the driver was almost totally decomposed. He was barely more than a skeleton. How could this be, when a multitude of witnesses saw the same car crash only the evening before?

A police spokesman said: “We believe the car left the road and ended up in the ditch during July. It doesn’t appear that any other vehicles were involved. The car was discovered as a result of a report from members of the public who thought they saw a car’s headlights veering off the road”.

The driver was identified from his dental records as Christopher Chandler, a 20 or perhaps 21-year-old, from Isleworth in West London. At the time of his death, Chandler was wanted by the police for his part in an alleged robbery and was last seen in Hounslow before being reported as missing by his brother David in July.

Had the motorists that saw a car swerve off the road and plough into the undergrowth actually seen some kind of spectral re-enactment of the original accident?

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Nan Tuck, the Witch of Tuck’s Wood

Buxted, East Sussex.

A couple of centuries ago, an old woman named Nan Tuck poisoned her husband. Unfortunately for Nan, the murder did not go unnoticed and soon the local lawmen were hot on her heels. She did her best to evade their clutches and managed to avoid capture for days. Eventually she decided to try to reach the church. If she could get to the altar she would be granted sanctuary.

But the church would prove to be out of reach and instead she “plunged into a nearby wood”. Into the leafy boughs went her pursuers, but none of them could find Nan. It seemed as though she had vanished as surely as if she had turned into the air itself. Somewhere in that wood it is said that she met her end. Even now her apparition is supposed to occasionally appear to those walking in the area and in the wood a circular patch of earth can be seen upon which nothing ever grows—supposedly the place of her mysterious demise.

 

But there is another version of this tale, one which is rather more tragic. It tells that Nan Tuck was a simple old woman who lived alone on the outskirts of Buxted. Ignorance, superstition and fear made the people of the town began to suspect Nan was a witch and a mob gathered to deal with her once and for all. Of course, it is unknown whether the mob intended to burn Nan to death, or just frighten her away from their lands; whatever their intention, Nan fled down the lane and into the wood that came to bear her name and was never seen again.

How an old woman managed to hitch up her skirts and run faster than the rest of the townsfolk is anyone’s guess and, I fancy, proof that the story isn’t exactly entirely authentic.

Anthony D. Hippisley Coxe, author of the quite excellent tome Haunted Britain, has a different opinion take on the whole affair, one which I think may be closer to the truth:

Buxted, which I suspect, was the scene of a lynching. Nan Tuck, a simple girl, was accused of being a witch. She sought sanctuary in the church, but was refused by the priest. She suffered trial by water, and half-drowned, bedraggled and terrified once more managed to escape. Her tormentors, like hounds on her heels, took up the chase. She was found hanging from a tree in what is now known as Tuck’s Wood—a suicide, the villagers said. In the Church of St. Margaret there is a record of her burial in 1661. But, would a suicide have been buried in consecrated ground? And would a girl who had managed by her own desperate efforts to escape sentence of death then take her own life? I think the village of Buxted had a murder on its conscious. That is why they did not like going up Nan Tuck’s Lane, and kept well away from Tuck’s Wood at night, and that is why these places are still haunted by the ghost of a poor frightened girl.

For more real-life ghost stories check out my popular Eerie Britain series—available as ebooks and a paperback.

The MacKenzie Poltergeist

This chapter is taken from the ebook Eerie Britain, available now from Amazon UK, Amazon US and most other Amazons, worldwide.

A terrible and well-documented evil lurks within this infamous Edinburgh mausoleum.

In December of 1998, a homeless man wandered through Edinburgh’s storm-lashed streets. Seeking shelter from the night’s downpour he staggered into Greyfriars Kirkyard and broke into one of the old mausoleums in the Covenanter’s Prison section—no doubt attracted by its intact roof. Inside, the vault was pitch-black and the brave (or foolhardy) vagrant decided to explore his surroundings with what meagre light he possessed. He removed an iron grate in the floor and descended a short, twisting, stone staircase and entered a second chamber. There, he came across four wooden coffins. Perhaps looking for valuables to steal, the man began to smash open the dusty caskets. As he did so, a hole suddenly opened beneath his feet and he fell through a wooden division into a third chamber—the existence of which had been previously unknown. The unfortunate intruder landed in a deep pit that had been used for illegally dumping those that had died from the plague. Despite being hundreds of years old, the pit had remained well-sealed and the corpses that greeted the luckless tramp were far from skeletal. Semi-putrefied and covered in green slime, the rotten carcasses had sunken features, ragged clothing, matted hair and emitted an overpowering stench.

Not surprisingly, the man desperately fled the tomb, not stopping even when he cut his head on the tomb’s entrance in his reckless flight.

A nearby security guard and his dog had heard strange noises coming from the Covenanter’s Prison and were in the process of exploring the graveyard when they saw the wailing vagrant hurtling towards them. The sight of a bloody, filthy and bedraggled man charging out of a crypt in the middle of a stormy night was too much for the guard and both men fled separately into Edinburgh’s darkness.

The security guard turned up for work the next day, related the tale of his terrifying encounter and promptly handed in his notice. The tramp, however, was never heard from again.

And frankly, he couldn’t have chosen a more sinister vault to break into, for its name is the Black Mausoleum and to this day it houses the remains of the most notorious resident of Greyfriars Kirkyard: the 17th century judge and Lord Advocate Sir George MacKenzie, otherwise known to the Scots as “Bluidy MacKenzie”. Made Advocate in August 1677 by King Charles II, MacKenzie organised an enthusiastic and bloody prosecution of Covenanters in retaliation for their refusal to replace Scotland’s Presbyterian Church with the Episcopalian Church that had come to dominate England to the south.

The summer of 1679 saw defeat for the Covenanters at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge and 3000 of them were captured. MacKenzie brought them to Greyfriars where some were hanged and some beheaded, their rotting skulls displayed on walls around the city. Others were tortured publicly while a thousand where dispersed among other prisons or allowed to go free.

The remainder were kept corralled at a section of land adjacent to Greyfriars Kirkyard in a makeshift, open air prison that would become the first recorded concentration camp. By mid-November of that year, most of the 1,200 ill-fated detainees had died from starvation, disease or exposure to the harsh Scottish winter.  The surviving few hundred were packed onto a ship bound for Australia. It is estimated that MacKenzie was responsible for the deaths of 18,000 unfortunate Covenanters, his own countrymen, during a reign of terror now referred to as ‘The Killing Time’.

An infamously brutal man, indeed.

In seeking a place to sleep for the night, the homeless man seems to have inadvertently awakened far more than he could have expected, for mysterious and disturbing activity was to be reported almost immediately after his unwitting interference with the mausoleum’s contents. The very next day, an unnamed woman, peering through the iron grate set into the vault’s door, was reportedly “blasted back off its steps by a cold force”. Soon after, another female was discovered sprawled on the ground near the tomb, her neck ringed with heavy bruising. She claimed “that invisible hands had tried to strangle her”. Similar injuries were found on another victim, this time a young man who was found lying opposite the vault.

Soon, it all became too much for Edinburgh City Council. They locked the Black Mausoleum’s door and declared the location to be out of bounds to all but those with express permission to enter. That was until local author Jan-Andrew Henderson asked the council for permission to bring controlled tours to the mausoleum. The council acceded and now The City of the Dead Tour enjoys almost exclusive access to the menacing site, running regular visits. Since then, it seems that the paranormal activity has escalated alarmingly.

Phenomena at the Black Mausoleum stands out against that experienced at many other purportedly haunted locations in that it has been startlingly frequent in occurrence, often severe and very well-documented. Since 1998 there have been over 450 attacks and that’s just the reported incidents, who knows how high the number actually is? Amongst the 450, some 180 people have lost consciousness, inexplicable fires have broken out, weird cold spots abound and an unusually high number of dead wildlife has been found in the vault’s immediate vicinity. People have had their fingers broken, hair pulled and felt as though something has punched or kicked them. Unexplained bruises, scratches and burns, skin gouges, nausea and numbness have all been frequently reported. Cameras and other electrical equipment malfunction in the area of the Mausoleum.

Intriguingly, the physical signs of attack often go unnoticed until people get home and relax or return to their hotels for the night. Only then do the unexplained injuries manifest. Some of the scratches and burns disappear as quickly as they emerge while others may last for months. Some though, scar for life. Furthermore, many of the frightening experiences don’t end when the tour finishes. People have reported that some of the phenomena listed above actually follows them home, with strange occurrences such as light bulbs blowing and electrical appliances switching on and off by themselves. One man, an ex-police officer who prefers to remain anonymous described his experience:

“After the tour I decided to go back to our hotel room. I was glancing at ‘The Ghost that Haunted Itself’ [a book about the story of the Mackenzie Poltergeist by Jan-Andrew Henderson], when I felt a sharp burning sensation on the right hand side of my neck. There were at least five deep scrapes [that appeared just under my Adam’s apple]. On returning home the next morning I went straight to my mother’s house and told her my tale, along with handing her The Ghost That Haunted Itself, which I had decided I did not want in my home. Yesterday I phoned her and asked her what she thought of the book.  Remarkably, she was just examining five large scratches under her Adam’s apple [that were] identical to my own. I am not the sort of individual who frightens easily but, hand on heart, I am very frightened now. The phenomenon you have in that graveyard prison is very real”.

Sometimes, every participant of a particular tour will feel or see the same phenomena and so some of these events boast corroborative witnesses by the bucket load. Not only that, but Black Hart Entertainment, the company that runs the tours, keeps detailed records and photographs of the injuries sustained by visitors to the mausoleum and its surrounding area.

And the frightening events are not limited to physical attacks, either; the baffling aroma of smelling salts and the powerful stench of sulphur have been reported on occasion, while inexplicable laughing and growling has been heard along with strange knocking sounds that seem to emanate from beneath ground level. One tour member reported:

“We had not been in the Black Mausoleum long when we started hearing knocking noises coming from beneath us, which steadily grew louder and seemed to move up and round the walls…”

Interestingly, exorcisms have been carried out twice at the location, first by a spiritualist minister named Colin Grant and a year later by his son. Both were unsuccessful and the attacks continue. Jan-Andrew Henderson himself says:

“I am a very scientific person, and I don’t know if I believe in ghosts or not, but I just don’t have an explanation for the sheer number of people who have collapsed, had their fingers broken or whatever. I’ve even had phone calls from two people who say their partner has now been committed, and blame it on the ghost”.

Seemingly, the poltergeist activity is not limited to the mausoleum. Smashed plates, unexplained fires and object aportation have been reported by the residents in four different houses that border the graveyard. Then, in October 2003, a large fire swept through both Jan-Andrew Henderson’s nearby home and the Black Hart Entertainment offices. Henderson says that the fire—the cause of which insurance investigators could not identify—destroyed “five years worth of letters, photographs, records and statements concerning the MacKenzie Poltergeist as well as every possession I had in the world. None of the surrounding properties were damaged”. This apparently wide-roaming poltergeist is also thought by some to be the cause of a number of the malignant and odd activity in that other of Edinburgh’s infamously haunted locations: the South Bridge Vaults.

Explanations for the spooky goings-on abound. Even before the bodies of the Covenanters were added to its earth, Greyfriars was a graveyard literally bursting with death and decay. Much larger than today’s plot, it was established in 1562 and, topographically, was formerly a depression that sank twenty feet or more until, thanks to the combined effects of some 500,000 recorded burials, it has become rather more of a hill, rising fifteen feet. Such is the concentration of human remains that on especially rainy days some of the bones of the long-since interred actually rise to the surface. It is said that it is not uncommon to spot the white gleam of a femur’s end among the Kirkyard grass. So, the entire location it seems, is a canvas perfectly primed for things that go bump in the night—surely if ghosts really do exist this would be one of the most fertile fields for them to spring forth from. Indeed, there have been many sightings of unidentifiable shapes lurking between the headstones; pallid figures, spectral white birds and wraithlike children.

But despite the area’s bloody history providing innumerable candidates for a ghostly perpetrator of the happenings at MacKenzie’s tomb, hauntings are rarely this consistent or active. What’s more, the kinds of attacks witnessed are far more redolent of a poltergeist. But this presents us with a problem too as typically, poltergeist phenomena centre on an ‘agent’ who, often unknowingly, serves as a focus for the associated disturbances. No one living person could act as such a hub at the mausoleum. Also, research by Alan Gauld and A. D. Cornell established that barely a quarter of poltergeist episodes last more than a year, whereas whatever lurks within MacKenzie’s tomb has been scaring people for over a decade now.

Another explanation, and one which Henderson and his tour guides often espouse, concerns pheromones. Pheromones are chemicals which are excreted or secreted and can influence the behaviour of other species members, most notably in insects. Humans can also be affected by these chemical signals. In the case of the Black Mausoleum it is hypothesised that the pheromones released by the intense emotions of those who were tortured, imprisoned and killed in the Covenanter’s Prison have somehow been ‘imprinted’ upon the location and, combined with the fear and apprehension felt by modern-day visitors, it is this that is psychosomatically causing the nausea, coldness, dizziness and perhaps even the poltergeistesque activity. Indeed, some paranormal researchers think that poltergeists can actually move along pheromone trails, with the two being linked. If this is true it would go some way towards explaining why many of the tour members have reported the impression of being followed home from the Kirkyard by something sinister.

Of course, it is possible that the answer lies within environmental factors. To the rear of the Mausoleum is Edinburgh University’s Artificial Intelligence Unit where high voltage machinery is housed. These machines can give off electromagnetic energy, a force that some believe could create hallucinations in people that are ‘EM sensitive’ and be the explanation for certain paranormal activity. This again, however, does not explain the physical attacks that visitors to the vault have suffered.

A further environmental theory suggests that the answer might lie deep below ground; deeper even than Greyfriars’ interred dead. According to the British Geological Survey at Murchison House in Edinburgh, sandstone forms much of the rock underneath the Greyfriars area. Brian Allen of SPI suggests that:

“If the pores of the sandstone were to become saturated with mineral electrolytes, this in effect would create thousands of tiny batteries. Given the right conditions, a micro-tremor perhaps, the stored energy could be discharged, creating an electrical field above the ground affecting a sensitive person by causing a tiny seizure in the temporal lobes of their brain. These seizures appear to run in distinct patterns, with the people affected experiencing the same or similar images”.

As is often the case with hauntings that are said to have their roots in times long passed, there are many legends associated with MacKenzie’s tomb. One popular tale describes a failed petty criminal—possibly a highwayman—named John Hayes who, fleeing justice and the police, found shelter in the second chamber of the Black Mausoleum. For six long months Hayes secreted himself within the vault, scavenging food wherever he could. Eventually, when the local police caught up with him, they found him to be completely insane, insisting that the coffins that kept him company would move each night of their own accord and that ‘Bluidy MacKenzie’ could be heard shuffling and scraping within his own wooden box—the man being so evil in life that his corporeal remains could find no peace in death. It must be said that spending six months in a tomb with only a handful of coffins to share your hideout would probably make anyone go mad, whether the deceased residents moved around or not.

Perhaps pheromones provide the most rational explanation and certainly hysteria whipped up by the theatrics of the tour guides cannot be discounted; fear is, afterall, said to be contagious and standing in the dead of night in an ancient graveyard would be enough to frighten most people even without dramatic tales of ghostly attacks from beyond the grave being whispered in your ear. Maybe the truth is a combination of some—or even all—of the factors described above. Whatever the cause of the disturbances; ghosts, a poltergeist, elementals, the environment or even, as some visiting spiritualist mediums have claimed, the legacy of Satanist worship in the area, it is safe to say that the Black Mausoleum is a remarkable and intriguing addition to Edinburgh’s already generous helping of ghoulish delights. As Jan-Andrew Henderson put it:

“Let me put it this way—if the Mackenzie Poltergeist isn’t a genuine supernatural entity then I don’t think there’s any such thing. Not anywhere in the world.”

This chapter is taken from the ebook Eerie Britain, available now from Amazon UK and Amazon US.

For more research into real-life cases please check out my ebooks.

Urban Exploration: New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane

“Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints.”

At the centre of a sprawling one square mile site is a vast and imposing building. Founded in 1875 and popularly known as Greystone Park, the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane makes for a striking sight.

Built to the Kirkbride plan, the austere architecture was once alive with the throng of workers and inmates. This was a ‘self-contained city’ with dozens of buildings including a fire station, post office, police station, a farm and myriad other clerical and recreational constructions. Now however, the corridors echo only to birdsong and the eerie whistle of the wind.

Thomas Story Kirkbride believed that the ‘building was the cure’ to mental illness and planned his structures accordingly, with staggered wings that allowed in as much sunlight and fresh air as possible and set them within large grounds—idealistic sanctuaries “away from the pollutants and hectic energy of urban centers”. Kirkbride’s philosophy was (thanks in part to the reformer Dorothy Dix’s efforts) widely embraced and many asylums were constructed to his design. However, by the early 1900s new drug and psycho-analytical treatments emerged and these, coupled with the lack of funds, led many of the Kirkbride asylums to be closed, demolished or absorbed into new institutions.

Greystone was no exception.

Read the rest here.

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The Voynich Manuscript

The medieval book that defies the code-breakers.

At the heart of Yale University’s sprawling campus, a large rectangular edifice dominates one side of Hewitt Quadrangle. Six pale floors of bronze, granite and translucent Vermont marble rise above ground level to be supplemented by a further three subterranean storeys. Replacing the traditional glass window panes, the pallid marble nullifies the harmful effects that direct sunlight would have upon the building’s precious contents and helps to create a compartmentalised and unabashed facade. And the contents are precious indeed, for this is Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; one of the largest buildings in the world dedicated to the collection and preservation of rare texts. Gutenberg Bibles, Dickens’ first editions and many more highly-prized tomes can all be counted among the Library’s impressive collections.

Among the several million manuscripts that reside within the building’s shadowy depths is one particularly intriguing manuscript, catalogued as Item MS408.

MS408’s origin, language and meaning are shrouded by a cloak of mystery; even the author is unknown. Its translation has defied NSA code breakers, veteran World War Two decryption experts from Bletchley Park and everyone else on the planet for centuries. Even that learned figure from England’s history, John Dee, is supposed to have owned the tome and found its contents to be unfathomable.

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