Transcription
Hi all. Great to have you with me for another episode. Uh, today for a haunting, we're on the way to the gorgeous English county of Dorset, uh, down in the southwest to investigate a truly inexplicable story. Wait, you hear it?
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Okay, let's set off on a trip that connects Los Angeles, California, and a little house in Dorset called Mount Cottage.
[music]
There's something uniquely odd about this one. Uh, it's set in a in a a little cottage, uh, Mount Cottage, uh, in a village in West Dorset. But before I get to it, I have you ever are you aware of houses having atmospheres? Houses you I mean I'm talking specifically about houses that you lived in as children or [snorts] at any point in your life, really. Uh, I ask because um, Trudy and I often talk about how the two main addresses that we've we've had together as a family, two different houses in uh, in Sterling have felt very noticeably benevolent to us both. You know, we you know, the subject came up at some point and we we agreed that we had both without ever uh conferring with the other had felt very um, you know, safe, kind of cradled, I suppose in in both addresses. You know, such that you know, if you had to be on your own in the dark in the house at night, you know, with nobody else there, never at any point have either of us ever felt anything spooky, you know. On the contrary, particularly in the in the the the first house that we lived in in Sterling. We both and we we this came up and we both one of us said it happened and and the other immediately said, "Yes, I get that too." And it was that sometimes, especially on the ground floor, but sometimes on the stairs, um, we would have a sensation of walking through a kind of almost like a a golden hued cloud. There was something slightly out of focus momentarily. It's like it was like just passing through something, you know, on the way from one part of the house to the other. And also here, also here in this completely separate, completely different house, we've both experienced that and it and it always feels very safe, you know, as though only you know, only peaceful times have been experienced in both addresses.
And I often think about the first house that my family lived in in Dumfries where I did most of my growing up. It was a house on Annan Road and um, that house was different. We we had a I'm talking about in the in the early 1970s we moved in there and there was a basement where that we used just for storage and there was a coal cellar down there and and what in the big room, the biggest room down there my mom had the washing machine and my mom did uh B&B, bed and breakfast for a few years in the 1970s and so there was a lot of laundry to be done, lots of sheets and pillowcases to be washed, you know, on a daily basis and she'd be down there and we'd all be at school and my dad would be away at work and she'd be on her own down there and it was a big old um top loader washing machine. I remember it being kind of red, mostly cream but red, an old-fashioned thing with a paddle in, you know, in the drum that turned back and forth and back and forth. This swishing sound as it as it as it moved as it agitated the water around the the the the laundry.
[sighs]
And my mom hated being in there. My mom didn't like the house and she definitely didn't like being in that basement on her own. She was a rational, a rational adult, you know, like the rest of us, but she there was a there was something about the house. So I just wonder if you come back at me and let me know if you've ever lived anywhere that's felt one way or the other, benign, malign, whatever.
And I I ask it because this one, this particular story about Mount Cottage in West Dorset is is about an an experience he's had in the place. Two specific experiences separated by time. When I wrote the book, my literary agent who's called Euan, she phoned me and obviously she knew what I was writing and she said that she had had she'd been speaking to a really a friend of a friend. I don't think this person was directly Euan's friend, but they were connected maybe by an intermediary and Euan had had cause to speak to to her and they'd had a long rambling conversation and uh the subject of of um, you know, this paranormal came up and this woman who's called Sasha related something to Euan which Euan then related to me and I was suitably inspired to contact Sasha myself to hear to hear it at firsthand and to get much more detail. She was called Sasha Marov. And right at the beginning of the conversation that she and I had together, to her it had seemed growing up and in her adulthood that her family, her immediate family, even her extended family had one way or another seemed to live in a succession of haunted houses. It had been a recurrent theme. They'd lived in various places obviously as you know, a nuclear family and then the offshoots of it lived in other places and they had this they'd had a recurrent experience of haunting. She was from she was English and from England but when I was speaking to her, she lived she was living outside Los Angeles, California.
Sasha, she's a writer. Uh, she wrote screenplays, you know, for TV and movies. Uh, that's how she was connected to uh Euan, my my literary agent, cuz Euan also looks after people who not just who write books, but who write other stuff like screenplays. Um, and it writing screenplays or writing was something that ran in her family. Uh, her maternal grandmother was Alice Mary Dilke who lived from 1919 to 2016. Now remember Alice in the golden days of Hollywood, Alice, Sasha's grandmother on her mother's side was a reader who was employed uh by the movie industry to to look for to find books and scripts that might you know be developed as movies. Uh, she worked for uh amongst others Victor Gollancz and she worked for Warner Brothers uh through some of the heyday of of Hollywood. Uh, Dr. No was a was a a novel that she read and thought would make a good film. Uh, but Warner's passed on it. She was for Warner's at the time and they didn't want it. Uh, [snorts] and then later amongst others she noticed a play by a guy called Frederick Knott which became Dial M for Murder which was directed for the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock. So Alice was in among it a reader of note. She read all the time. She read widely. She was also a great thinker. Uh, she was a uh, you know, a critical thinker. She was always on the lookout for new ideas. Uh, and she married uh a fellow writer, a guy called Christopher Dilke uh who was a scion of another literary family. So, you know, so Sasha's descended, you know, from writing types. And during World War II, Christopher uh served in the Royal Artillery and he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. So he had his he had his war years really working in intelligence and after after the war he worked for the BBC amongst others. He wrote books, he wrote for film and radio. Uh, Alice and Christopher together had four children in two sets, two pairs. They had a a pair of youngsters before the outbreak of the Second World War, Caroline and Annabel. Annabel and they had Fischer and Lucy after World War II.
And from uh and this is where this is important. This is the heart of the matter. Between between 1941 and 1945, they rented Mount Cottage in Dorset. At that time, they had Caroline and Annabel as youngsters, babies really and uh Annabel would be in time Sasha's mother. Okay. But she was a a baby and a toddler in Mount Cottage. And it was pretty basic uh when you when you hear about it. They got water from a spring. It was like a well. Uh, there was no uh electricity in the house. So it was all candles and Tilly lanterns. Uh, Alice had to grow her own vegetables in the garden. She had family nearby that she was, you know, she was connected to that part of England. Uh, and she had brothers, Giles, Sam, and Henry. Uh, and they were they weren't in the same village as her, but they were in Dorset, and they would come by and, you know, they would have visits, so she wasn't entirely alone. But, I mean, you might think it was kind of, I don't know, a pastoral idyll. But Alice remembered it and talked about it to Sasha, her granddaughter, as being a place of sadness, or she was sad in that in that little house. She was just a young wife, uh, a young mother of two. Uh, her husband Christopher was away on active service and she was a single mom effectively. She was raising two little children alone in pretty basic circumstances, hard work.
After the war, the family moved uh to Camden Grove in Kensington in London and they had two they had the two youngest born there. So that you much of the growing up happened in Kensington. Fast forward to 1970 and Alice inherited some money, the family money and she bought for £6,000 uh Veil House near the village of Whitchurch in the Marshwood Vale in Southwest Dorset. So she's regularly connected to Dorset and from around 1975 she lived there full-time. Husband Christopher died in 1987 and from that point on she lived alone. Uh, and Sasha said she lived alone, but for a rotating cast of cats and dogs.
Sasha said, "My family have always lived in haunted houses. That's how it is. Ghosts in everyone. It feels like it's the way we've been." I thought, "How odd to be within an extended family that takes for granted that there are ghosts everywhere they go." She loves California. She's happy to be there. She's where they are outside of LA. That, you know, the air is clear. It's good for thinking, good for writing. Um, and she had just when I was on the phone with her, she had just been visited by by cousin, a cousin and her cousin's partner, uh, who'd come out on a visit. And she said, "It's funny because my cousin and I spent the whole time talking about how whenever we can't sleep, we go back in our minds to Granny's house in Marshwood Vale. We can remember every single detail of the house, the books on the coffee table, everything."
And so together, Sasha and I, we speculated about whether it was something to do with her family, members of her family tending to form especially strong bonds to houses wherever they are, you know, I don't know, imprinting on them and being imprinted by them in turn. I mean, I suppose some maybe some people just pass through addresses uh, you know, and have a you know, a superficial practical connection to them. Maybe other people become a bit more bonded and bound to the place for various reasons, maybe on account of circumstances and events that unfold for them in that place.
Sasha said, "Funny enough, I was having a dream the other night and you don't often talk to strangers about their dreams." And she said, "Uh, in California in LA, her family there had a close connection to a family who were Navajo, you know, Native American, American Indian." And she said that they had learned through spending time with them that for the Navajo, ghosts are regarded as useful presences in life. Uh, a natural part of life, actually. You know, encounters with ghosts are to be expected and learned from and that experiences with and in the presence of ghosts, say the Navajo, enable and facilitate a better understanding of of the world of the living. And Sasha said anyway, she said, "In the dream, I was having a conversation with a Navajo elder and he was saying that what has to happen in the United States is that all the descendants of the the European settlers, the all the people that have come into North America in the last 200 odd years had [snorts] ghosts to confront. They needed to confront their ghosts because ghosts are a way to talk about the past. They're a manifestation of the past and that the sins of the past and ancient trauma can be can be brought forth and and dealt with via ghosts and that basically the Navajo say emotions are are better expressed using the sort of medium of ghostly encounters."
So, to get to the haunting, this is so odd. This is the oddest. This is the oddest ghost story I've ever heard. It's sometime in the early 1990s, and Sasha wasn't she couldn't remember the date, but early 1990s, Alice, grandmother Alice, an old lady by that point, happened to be a guest at a party in a house in Dorset. And at some point she be she realized that she was she had tuned into she was overhearing a group talking about something. You know, you you know that way you do, you suddenly realize that you're that you've hit their frequency and you listen to people on the other side of the room. Can you hear what they're talking about? And they were this this young couple were saying that they had had to move out of their house that that they'd been staying in because it was too haunted to live in any longer. So her ears pricked up because remember Alice is someone that figures that she's lived in one haunted house after another. So Alice, quite elderly Alice, joins the conversation. "Excuse me." And she, first of all, she says, "Where where were you living in Dorset? What house?" Because she But but she lived in a few addresses and and she certainly knew the area and was still living. She was now living in Veil House in Dorset. Had been since the 1970s. And uh and so she figured that she, you know, she'd like the precise details. And they said it was Mount Cottage. It was called Mount Cottage and it was the village. And so Alice said, "I lived there. I lived in that house during the war." And furthermore, she said, "I don't remember any ghosts there. I was there for four years. I don't remember anything like that." And the couple said, "Well, there's a ghost there now."
So Alice says, "Right, tell me tell me exactly what you've been seeing." Cuz you know, Alice could remember the house. She'd had life there, experience there. She'd had her two week first their eldest children there. Um, and now she was hearing from a young couple that had found the house so frightening they couldn't live in it. So they said more than once, multiple times they had seen a woman crying, weeping by the side of the fire, the fireplace in the sitting room. It was clear. It was nothing fuzzy about it or indistinct. They had seen it separately and together. It was a young woman with brown hair and they saw her regularly. So, so far so familiar. You know, as far as Alice was concerned, this sounded like just a, you know, just a standard ghost. Fair spirit of a young woman, you know, whatever. But, but there was, let's get to the point, said the couple. What was disturbing was something that the ghost of the young woman did every time she appeared. She would be weeping. She would be filled with sadness that they could feel. She never she never engaged with them. She was never aware of their, you know, there was no sort of as though she was seeing them. But while crying, she would turn, put her head against the wall beside the fireplace and bang it. She'd bang her head against the wall hard enough to to bleed. So, you know, nights without number, the couple had had to watch this weeping woman bang her head against the wall until until there was blood on the wall, you know, like a, you know, staining it like a, you know, like a rose and they couldn't take it anymore and moved out.
Alice, she'd not been haunted in the cottage, but she had altogether different memories of an altogether different experience. Back in the war, uh, while she was living there on her own with the kids, there had come a day when Christopher, her husband, had sent word, I don't know, telegram, asking her to go through his papers, you know, whatever, a desk, maybe whatever, a briefcase. There's something that he needed, something that he that he needed to to be reminded of. And he, you know, he sent her to find it. Uh, and she obliged. But in doing so, she ran across letters between her husband and another woman that made it plain to her that they had been having an affair. And Alice broke her heart with the news. She's she's all alone. And her husband's far away. Now she's discovered that he's been unfaithful to her. She was already vulnerable, you know, she was isolated and the the news of the betrayal was just like too much. It was just too much for her. And she had on on with the, you know, on reading it, on on discovering the betrayal, she had stood by the fireplace and she had turned and banged her head against the wall until she bled.
Now, Alice is still alive at this point. She's listening to a couple who've had their own experience of her house that she had lived in decades before. And as far as it went, Alice was a ghost while still alive and living elsewhere in Dorset. Somehow or other, she was also, unbeknownst to her, haunting her old home. As I say, it's the oddest, most unexpected ghost story. You know, the couple had had no way of knowing uh what experiences Alice had had there. She she was a total stranger to them and they to her. And at that point, Alice hadn't told anyone about it. It was a deeply held secret. It's just something she had never talked about to anyone.
Sasha did say that her family, some members of the family tended towards the dark of depression, let's say sadness. What do we even mean by depression? You know, it's kind of an overused, misused word in many ways. So although she had left Mount Cottage long ago, she stayed together with Christopher. They lived out the rest of life after the war. They had two more children. Um, so the question is, did she inadvertently leave behind the the essence, the residue of heartbreak? You know, so it the question is, are we haunted not just by the dead, but by the living? Are we haunted by ourselves?
Sasha's own dad died when she was two and get this, he was, people of a certain vintage will remember this, he was the Bulgarian dissident and writer Georgi Markov and Georgi Markov was murdered by the KGB in 1978 with a pellet of poison that was injected into his leg via the point of an umbrella. It was an infamous news story cuz obviously it was like it was like the plot for a movie. So he died and at that point obviously his widow was left behind with well Sasha to raise and granny Alice had helped um, you know, in the upbringing uh and Sasha's cousin, the one who had recently been on the visit to California, had also lost her mother when she was young and Alice had helped with her upbringing as well. So, so Alice, Granny Alice was was um pivotal, very important to the raising of of uh of two of her grandchildren and and according to Sasha, she was a a lovely grandmother, a lovely grandmother uh, you know, attentive and loving and great fun and so on. She said Sasha said she told us all about a world of magic and understanding. My grandfather died in 1987 and although she lived alone, Granny had tons of visitors. She was a wonderful, complex, deeply intelligent woman, a very deep emotional core, an emotional projection that was so strong. She was a formidable character, and she loved us. Sasha said, "She's kind of the reason we're all okay," which is a fine way to be remembered.
So, the the experience that Alice had in the '90s on encountering this couple um, it brought it all to the surface for her and subsequently she spoke about it. She she she aired it all with the the family. Sasha knew about it, you know, but she hadn't spoken about really her time in her wartime home up until that point. And kind of word word then percolated out through the family and word of Alice's experiences in the cottage um reached the two younger children, the ones that were born after the war in another address entirely, Fischer and Lucy. And they had their own ghost story to to recount which they in turn had not really mentioned much about, but they said that in the Kensington house, which was the house that Christopher and Alice moved to, you know, after the war, that they had sometimes seen an apparition dressed in black and sitting on a landing on the stairs. And they had known somehow or other that it was their mother, their living and breathing mother and yet not her.
So what is it about Alice? So that so that Fischer and Lucy had their own experience of encountering their mother when she wasn't there. Not in the physical sense. She was somehow there and or or some avatar of her was there when she when her physical form was somewhere else. And Sasha said she'd obviously thought about it a great deal. She said that her grandmother was possessed of, as she put it, an emotional projection that was so strong. And I wonder I wonder on listening to it if there was some sort of truth, some instinctive understanding for Sasha and the family of what was lying at the heart of it all such that was was Alice unconsciously having experiencing emotions and then projecting them outwards such that they could adhere like the scent of expensive perfume to the fabric after she was gone from the place. You know, was she was she manifesting some sort of phenomenon?
I said, you know, because of all the kind of movie connections, I said asked Sasha if if her if Alice, if her if her grandmother had ever actually made it to like Hollywood and had all of that experience in the studios, but no, Alice did all of it remotely, as it were. She did all of her work from from England and and just, you know, sent stuff out, whatever, phone calls and letters that that's how she did it. She never went she never went west. Um, it had been a dream, but you know, she never she never got out there.
So, until, like I said, I I came across Sasha and the Marov family late in the day, you know, the book was all but written. And I thought I had thought based on my own experience of ghost stories that there was a commonality about them. And I've read hundreds of ghost stories. I've had all sorts related to me over the years directly. And people have determined that it has to do with something that happened in the in the past. [snorts] People long gone, the dead, you know, wrongs inflicted on people now dead, awfulness, great trauma experienced then and and and whatever they've experienced lingering like like like glitches in the matrix, you know, or or or out there like clips to be downloaded and witnessed over and over by inhabitants of the present.
>> [sighs] >>
Or else, you know, in the case of the dead, an idea that there's some sort of version of them exists in limbo, reliving a moment over and over again. And and in some way, insisting that the living through it too, you know, I don't know, in some sort of payment of the debt of upset and fear. Obviously, if people who've listened to the rest of this, you know, about the story of the white car on Skye, that was different as well. And it it had some sort of some some overlap, you know, it the white car, it was less of less a lingering of the past. It was a portent of what was to come. It it was actually a a premonition, a prophecy of a tragedy that was subsequently fulfilled. Um, but you know, for the rest of the ghosts, what are they? They the ghosts serve or or they they answer a timeless need or they hold it be a timeless dread, I think, which is fear of death, fear of pain, fear of suffering. And when it comes to death, I think for most people, if they're honest, anything is better than death. Even existence as a ghost might seem better. An immortality of a sort might might feel better than just ceasing to be, which I think is what a lot of people fear more than anything else, just being gone.
In a book called A Natural History of Ghosts, um Roger Clark, he explains why England, as far as he's concerned, is extraordinarily haunted, more haunted than anywhere else. I mean, amongst the many things that seem to set the British Isles, the British archipelago apart, it would it would seem based on the available evidence that this place is especially haunted. You know, there's more ghosts per square mile than anywhere else. And Clark wrote about how the Catholic Church uh over its long dominion uh appropriated uh the ancient pagan belief in ghosts. You know, the world that they encountered was full of ghosts and spirits and and the pragmatic church, which you know, the Catholic Christian church was pragmatic. It it absorbed and repurposed the notions of of the people that it encountered. It made it made them its own. And the Catholic Church listened to these stories of ghosts and interpreted them as glimpses of souls in purgatory. People held in a limbo as as a punishment for something or other in their lifetimes. And then as the Catholic Church evolved and as the Middle Ages progressed, there was a a determination then to clamp down on the ghost business and and to declare it wrong even to talk about them. It was it was a sin even to suggest that you were in contact with the dead. It's like necromancy. And then, you know, came the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation. Uh, and the and the monasteries and the and the convents and the and the rest of the the properties uh of the of the of the Catholic Church were were taken and appropriated and monastic communities were scattered. Um, and and a belief then developed amongst the general populace that when the when the monks and the nuns died that they were kind of held by their or drawn back to the to the ruins of the places where they had lived. But there was a there was a way in which this evolution of the Catholic Church had had got to the point where rather than taking ownership of and kind of shepherding the the spirits the spirit realm, they abandoned them and left them to roam. So, you know, rather than the idea of it being souls in purgatory and the whole the whole matter was under control and and and and interpreted and and made sense. You know, the the the progress through the Reformation made it plain that ghosts were something to do with the devil, evil, just evil. And because by the end of the Reformation or as the Reformation progressed, they were disowned, the ghosts were disowned, the idea of ghosts was disowned and it left the general it left the general population susceptible to the stories again and they had to find their own way to accommodate them and make sense of them. So, you know, it was a it was a kind of a perfect storm. You now had all these ideas and and suspicions of and beliefs in spirits, ghosts, and there was nobody taking care of it, nobody marshalling it anymore. And so, they were just they went rogue. The whole idea of ghosts went rogue. And Clark wrote, "Belief in ghosts never became respectable, but its popularity was bolstered further by a new form of Christianity that tacitly espoused a belief in spirits and ghosts in the form of Methodism." So the Methodist church stirred the pot again. So it was through this sequence of events, it was through the involvement of the church, first the Catholic church, then the reformed church and then other uh iterations of Christianity that ghosts went through a metamorphosis. And rather than uh, you know, souls that might find salvation and be gone, they were just seen as having nowhere to go, no hope of release and so just persisting, the worst kind of sitting tenants. They were trapped in whatever in whatever purgatory they were in or or or whatever liminal state that they were in. And so all in all, it was this that that laid the foundations for a you know, a a plethora of haunted places all over Britain. One church building, one stately home after another. All of them with resident apparitions, religious and secular. You know, Iona Abbey, Windsor Castle, Glamis Castle, Rainham Hall, St. Peter ad Vincula Church inside the Tower of London, Bordley Rectory. All of them, all of them haunted. All of them, all of them stuck with their ghosts for good or ill. You know, there's Blickling Hall in Norfolk, the childhood home of Anne Boleyn. Her apparition appears there on the 19th of May in particular, which is the anniversary of her execution. There's Newton House in Carmarthenshire, haunted by the ghost of Lady Eleanor Cavendish.
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Uh, her husband to be had followed her home when she uh knocked him back and he strangled her. Uh, during the 1980s, a TV crew came to see if they could get her on film and a camera operator so blind that he felt hands on his throat. He was strangled. He felt strangled. Um, where else? Whitby Abbey in West Yorkshire. I mean, long before Bram Stoker came to Whitby Abbey uh to write Dracula, there were reports in the abbey of a of a novice nun who'd been who'd broken her vows and it was bricked up inside a wall to die a miserable death. Brighton's Preston Manor, you know, another contender for Britain's most haunted. There are more stories in Preston Manor of of ghosts than a person could shake a stick at. On and on and on it goes. This litany of spirits until Britain feels like a landscape smothered and muffled by the departed.
Sasha's experience, or rather her grandmother's experience that she recounted to me and the and the wider experience of the Marov family makes me wonder if where you bring ghosts, you find ghosts, you know, that whatever whatever is in you, you know, your experiences, your your subconscious, your trauma, you know, do you carry it with you and does it manifest from time to time as ghosts? I'm I'm made to think about my own experience of life and death. You know, at the time my mom has died now, but at the time I was writing the book, it was in the aftermath of my dad dying. Um, and I see my dad, but not as a ghost. I see him every time I look in a mirror. I see him looking I see him looking back at me through my own eyes. I've picked up some of his mannerisms and some of his foibles. I I hear myself saying things that my dad used to say that I never said while he was alive. With with my kids sometimes, if there's I don't know, sitting in the car, there's maybe a pause in the conversation, I don't know, I'm apt nowadays to say something like, "Well, I, well, there you go," which just to fill the space and my dad did it. I never used to do it, but now but now that he's gone, it's just one of of a number of his quirks that that are coming back through me. He used to when I was when I was a kid, my dad always asked if he could have his cup of tea or cup of coffee in what he called a thin mug. And he meant that he wanted something like, well, like fine bone china. You know, he didn't want a thick rim on his cup. And when I was living at home, it used to annoy me. I used to think it was just downright pernickety. What what difference does it make what cup you got your tea in? And now I do it too. I look for and ask for a thin mug as well. And I don't remember when that started. When my mom was clearing out after he died, she found some some socks that had been bought, but they were still in the cardboard. You know, they'd never been they'd never really they never been unpacked, certainly never worn. And they were they were socks of the sort that my dad liked, which was the the toes and the heels had a different patch of color than the main body of the sock. And I I took ownership of them and I wear them and I get a kind of a funny kind of comfort or connection from walking about in them.
I think belief in ghosts comes ultimately from fear of death. I think there are other reasons for it, many other reasons, but I think fundamentally we fear death and that there's anything better than dying for most people, especially people raised in an increasingly secular environment. You know, where we cling to the idea of disembodied spirits. It because it's it allows us to hope that something survives, something carries on that, you know, so that even an eternity as a ghost hanging about disturbing the living, which is a definitely a suboptimal existence, it's something. It's better than nothing. And the idea that some spirits pull it off and manage to linger, it might reassure us that that's better than disappearing altogether.
So what about what about Sasha and and and and Alice? We we talked more. She she spoke particularly Sasha about the recent visit that her of her cousin and her partner to her home in California. When they were in when the when the two of them were in bed like in a I don't know, a kind of whatever bit accommodation for guests and they were trying to sleep, music had started coming through the speakers, you know, there were speakers in the room and it was nothing they had put on. And it was no music that they knew. And they thought it was something techy, you know, they thought that maybe Wi-Fi speakers were picking up and transmitting something picked up via Bluetooth from a neighbor or whatever. And but they couldn't get it to switch off. And so they were lying they were lying in bed, the couple and um first of all Sasha's cousin became aware of a figure in the room, a figure with flailing arms and an angry, an angry presence in the room. And her partner then could see it as well. They were terrified and it lasted for a few moments and then it disappeared. Sasha said, "We talked about it for days. My cousin is a doctor. She's a scientist, but she was adamant about what they had both seen." Sasha said that her family had lived in one haunted house after another, that ghosts were a given, and she meant it, and she had the evidence. Well, she had the examples to prove it. And over the years, Sasha had learned to wonder if her family were just given to dark moods. And that you the the depression that that that they found hard to talk about and that that sadness manifested ghosts as an externalizing of their unhappiness. And once they could once they could once they could visualize or experience their own unhappiness outside of themselves, it made it easier to let it go. She said that her cousin had had felt angry and upset on arrival. I don't know why, but she she'd sort of arrived in a bad mood and that after the incident in the guest bedroom when she got through the night and and emerged into the morning, that she felt good again, that as though her anger had left alongside the flailing figure summoned by the music.
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More than once I've mentioned Archie Roy. I mentioned him in the context of Callander Muir uh in the Scottish Highlands and his turn of phrase about a sense of something strange. Um, Archie Roy was a professor of astronomy at Glasgow University, which is where I went to university. He was he was a very distinguished scientist. He was a a prominent astronomer. He was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. Uh, he was a fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and he was so much of an expert on orbital motion that NASA approached Archie Roy uh for his help designing the shape of orbits for the spacecraft of the Apollo 11 program. So whatever you think happened to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969, let's not get into that. Um, he was not Archie Roy was, you know, was a was a serious scientist, but he was also a fellow of the Society for Psychical Research. So that at the same time as being a serious man, he was also known as Glasgow's Ghostbuster. And for the last decade of his life, he he spent a lot of time investigating and assessing claims made by mediums and clairvoyants because he felt that that whatever it was that these people were describing um was something that should be investigated by the scientific method. And he also he attended all sorts of haunted houses, reportedly haunted houses. He was especially interested in poltergeist activity. And so it's it's up here somewhere. His book, A Sense of Something Strange. It was a Christmas present to to me from my mom in 1990. And I've read it multiple times. Basically, said Roy, this book contains just a few of the things that have over the years invoked within me a sense of something strange. I I remain agnostic, but you know, I read about something like the white car on the Isle of Skye and I listen to Sasha talk to me about her grandmother and I the hairs go up on the back of my neck and I feel a sense of something strange, which is a a physiological response at the very least. He died in 2013. Robin McKie uh who's a a writer in his own right produced an obituary in the Guardian newspaper for Archie Roy. As an anecdote, he recounted how um Archie Roy was ambidextrous and he would stand in front of of an audience of students and say, "Let us consider two intersecting circles," and while he was saying that with a piece of chalk in each hand, he would draw two perfect overlapping circles. An interesting character he was, an orderly man with with an orderly mind, but his mind was open.
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I with him in mind, you know, when I hear from people like Sasha and when I when I listen to and read about all of the rest of it, I won't dismiss their testimony out of hand. And when it comes to the idea of something persisting after death, something surviving after whatever death is, I remember that Archie Roy, a man of science, said, "If I die and find out I have not survived, I will be very surprised."
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