Getting spooked in Ham House

A few days ago, I expressed an interest in becoming a tour guide at Ham House. As luck would have it, the very next day there was a training session on how to guide the ghost tours.

I jumped at the chance so the following morning, the training was due to begin at 10am. The house is generally kept quite dark, to avoid light damage to any of the delicate things in the rooms. This makes the whole place a bit spooky. My plan was to go into the house at 9.30am and have a little look around for some ghosts while the place was still quiet and dark.

I went and stood in the chapel, where the Duke of Lauderdale’s body lay for a week after his death and where a woman dressed in black has been seen kneeling by the altar and where a handprint was found in the dust one morning, at the Duchess’ pew. I stared into the darkness and my heart beat fast and eventually I lit up my phone to scan the room for ghosties but didn’t see one.

Next I went to to the Round Gallery where, in the book I recently talked about, one of the main characters sees some ghosts. While I am not claiming this book is based on anything factual, I still thought I might come across something, given all the portraits on the wall.

Nothing.

Back downstairs, I went into the Duchess’ bedchamber. This is the room where she spent the last years of her life, ridden with gout and feeling trapped. I can’t remember the exact quote but she writes about feeling imprisoned in her beloved Ham House. There have been ghostly sightings by room guides here, who’ve been so scared by what they saw, that they have been unable to return to the house.

I lingered around, looked in the mirror, looked at the portrait of the Duchess as a young woman and waited.

Nothing.

Undeterred, I went into the White Closet, a beautiful little room that was one of the Duchess’ private closets in which she entertained only her closest friends.

As I stared at a painting of the back of Ham House and the gardens, I remembered someone saying that this painting contains most of the people at Ham House who have been seen/heard as ghosts. So I started looking for them in the painting. And I heard a noise…..

Whirrrrrrrr…..

Oo! Oo! It’s the ghosts! Through there! Up there! In the next room! I snuck along following the noise, with a beating heart, and found….

One of the staff members hoovering the floor in the Long Gallery.

Ah. Yes. Of course that was it. Silly me. Ghosts don’t whirr, everyone knows that.

I did tell him off, though, for hoovering while I’m looking for ghosts. How can they walk around or say hi to me if he’s busy hoovering them up? It takes them bloody ages to get back out of that hoover so I wouldn’t see them until much later in the day.

By this time, it was 10am and the training was starting so I went upstairs and complained about the lack of ghost sightings. We talked a lot about how a tour should run, then a few of the experienced guides did a sample tour for us around the house.

I still didn’t see any ghosts on this tour but not for lack of looking.

Anyway, the training finished and I left, clutching my notes and dreaming about being the Best Ghost Tour Guide The World Has Ever Seen, and ran into my manager from the cafe, who told me about a name scratched into the kitchen window in one of the house steward’s flats upstairs in the house.

The story is, briefly, a young man called John McFarlane was at the house. He was in love with one of the kitchen girls but she was in love with the butler. He was super distraught about it and threw himself out of one of the upstairs windows and died. But not before scratching his name into one of the window panes – John McFarlane 1790.

So we went to see this name scratched in. I was really having to restrain my excitement. People have photographed this window before and seen an orb in the photo! I attempted to take a photo of the name but my phone was like, “There is no more space for photographs on your phone.”

Humph.

So I deleted some photos to make space and tried again. Same thing. I deleted some more and eventually I got one but I couldn’t take any more. After walking through the front room into the hallway, we decided to look around upstairs.

As we approached the stairs, Sarah said to me, “There are stories of a little boy ghost on these stairs,” then she turned the light on…

And the light popped and the bulb threw itself out of the socket and it hurtled down the stairs towards us and smashed on the ground, only just missing us. I tried to photograph the smashed glass but the phone was having none of it. Sarah checked the fuse box but nothing had blown….

Make of it what you will, my friends. Make of it what you will.

My walk to Ham House

I do this walk once or twice a week when I go to Ham House to volunteer and I love it. Once I’ve got out of town, I hit the river and this is the best part of the walk….

Through Buccleuch Gardens….

Out the other side and along the edge of Petersham Meadows…

Petersham Meadows on my left and the Thames on my right…

Cows in Petersham Meadows…

Ducks on the path…

The Thames, behind a ton of forage-able dock leaves….

Horses came here recently!

Marble Hill House on the opposite side of the river so I know Ham House is soon….

When I see an open space in the trees ahead on the left, I know Ham House is only another minute away…

Sure enough…

The little bridge….

The trees are hiding the house…

Horses from the riding school next door….

Almost….

There it is!

To the right of the front door, the windows you can see at the bottom here, those are the kitchen windows! I spend all day looking out at feet!

I take the side gate around the building (that’s my kitchen window again, bottom left)…

… Which brings me to the door the volunteers use to get in, the black one on the left….

I then go down a few steps to the bathroom area….

… Into the eerily quiet and empty downstairs, which contains the bathroom, the beer cellar, the kitchen and the mess rooms…

Turning left, I get into the scullery, which then opens out into my favourite room in Ham House….

The kitchen! This is where I spend all my time baking, the room I know most about and the place where I feel most comfortable, whilst working at the…

Beautiful and huge old table, built in the kitchen in 1610 using elm wood from an elm tree on the estate. This table is my favourite thing in the house. And probably my favourite table of all the tables I have known.

Readers, if you do not yet have a favourite table, I suggest you get onto it.

And that is my journey, once or twice a week. It’s quite nice, as it happens.

Vegetable chat

Pretext to this conversation = I have been foraging once. Once.

This is a conversation I had with some of the other volunteers yesterday at Ham House.

Volunteer 1: “Oo, this asparagus is huge! Is it from the kitchen garden?”

Me: “Yeh. The gardeners just brought it over. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

Volunteer 2: “I don’t know how they’ve got it so soon either. The warm weather hasn’t been here long.”

Volunteer 1: “The cabbage in my vegetable patch has only just put in an appearance and my cherry tomatoes are yet to arrive.”

Volunteer 2: “Mine have only just started to grow and are still really small.”

Me: “I know what you mean. The long cold winter has meant hardly anything has grown.”

Volunteer 2: “Yeh.”

Me: “I mean, the best thing I’ve found has been nettles, because the winter doesn’t affect them.”

Volunteer 1: “Nettles?”

Me: *all knowledgeable* “Yehhhhh. They’re great. I make nettle soup with them or steam them and have them as a vegetable with my dinner.”

Volunteer 2: “That sounds interesting.”

Me: *super casual* “O, I’m always doing it. It’s so easy. I just come to the river with a glove and a tupperware box. I love it. I forage loads of stuff. Some people call me Madame Forager, actually.”

Volunteer 1: “O, right. What other stuff do you get?”

Me: *panic* “O, there’s loads of things about. Loads. Edible flowers… Sorrel…. Nettles….”

Volunteer 2: “Wow, that’s brilliant.”

Me: “It is, yeh. I love it.”

One of the strangest girls ever

I once went to Aylesbury, to a young offenders’ centre to train as a mentor for young men at the prison who were about to be released, to encourage them to not come back, essentially.

So I had a phone interview, then an interview in person then two days of training. Everyone else there had also had two interviews so I’m not sure how this girl made it to the next stage.

She was one of those people who is totally socially unaware. When the woman running the session asked us to take a few minutes to write something, like why we wanted to become a mentor, we would all fall silent. But this girl didn’t seem to realise what was going on. She was sitting, talking aloud and sighing and huffing and puffing.

“Why do I want to be a…. *loud sigh* …. hm… a mentor… hffffff… Why do I….. Erm…. *sigh*.”

It was bizarre! We were all silent, scribbling away and she was talking aloud to herself as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

When we were asked to each read one thing off our list it went as such…

“To help people.”
“To help reduce crime by repeat offenders.”
“Because I’d like to do criminal defense work so feel this would help me understand the issues involved.”
“Because I just retired and would like to do more voluntary work.”

And then it gets to her at the end of the line and she is asked for a reason. She looks at the list of things other people have said, which have been written up on a board and sighs, then picks one.

“To reduce crime by repeat offenders.”
“O, haven’t you got something off your own list that you wrote?”

She continues looking up at the board, not even glancing down at her own paper and goes, in a vacant type of way, “Yeh, it’s the same. All the same ones.”

Erm. It doesn’t make any sense. How can she have those same same things? The whole day went like that, talking aloud, sighing, saying odd things, copying whatever anyone else said.

When we left at the end of the day, I was offered a lift to the station by a woman who then offered the strange girl a lift too. It was hilarious. Five minutes in to the journey, she freaks and goes, “I’ve lost my passport! I’ve lost my passport.”

So we pull over and she talks v e r y slowly through what she might have done with it. And she figures out she has thrown it in the bin in the prison! Yes. That’s right. She has thrown it. In the bin. The BIN! How stupid is she?

I forget how she worked it out. But she ended up calling the prison to ask them to go and check in the bin. Of course, in a prison, you do not just run around different buildings looking in bins. Every door is opened and closed by keys. You never have two doors open at a time. You open one and close it behind you and it all takes a long time. We had been in the admin building, the staff of which had all gone home when we left. No-one was allowed in the building when the staff left. The security measures were tight.

She tried persuading the officers to go in the admin building. They obviously said no. She was going, “But my passport is in the bin!” like an idiot.

It was unbelievable.

I forget if she got it back. I just remember that I had to stare out the window really intently when we were in the car and try not to laugh out loud.

When we got to the train station, she got the same train as me! It was awful. She said, “I can’t believe I’ve left my passport in the bin,” about a billion and four times.

Now I’ve met strange people in life but I think she might have been the worst.

P.S. It’s Danda’s birthday today!