The Ghostly Coven Of Branden Farm

Ian Davison was a successful librettist, actor, and playwright on the London stage during the 1920s.  However, Davison grew tired of the big city theatrical life, and decided to retire to the countryside.  His choice of rural retreat was Branden Farm, just outside Sissinghurst, in Kent.

At first glance, Branden seemed an odd pick for someone seeking a pastoral idyll.  The farm was over 400 years old, and looked it.  The place had been abandoned for many years, and boasted rotting wood, overgrown weeds, and rats.  But Davison saw great potential for the house, and relished taking on the project of making it habitable.

Within several years, Branden was completely transformed.  It became a perfectly charming residence, surrounded by flower gardens and orchards full of fruit and nut trees.  It was a genuine farm, with cattle, chickens and pigs.  Davison moved into Branden in April 1932, little guessing that he would have roommates: a pack of ghosts who were very annoyed at having their territory invaded.

The apparitions wasted no time in making their presence known.  On Davison’s very first night in Branden, he heard a tapping at his bedroom window.  When he looked outside, nothing was there.  Nothing visible, at any rate.  Soon afterwards, he heard footsteps outside, followed by the noise of two people running.  Then there was a loud crash at the north end of the house, but when Davison went to inspect the area, he found no damage, or any sign of who or what had been running around.  He began hearing other unsettling sounds--agonized wails, more crashes, heavy footsteps through the house.  He and visitors to Branden always sensed that they were being watched by some invisible presence.  Many of Davison’s guests felt oddly exhausted while staying at Branden, and some had terrible dreams where they felt that someone was strangling them.  In one downstairs room, the atmosphere would go from unaccountably cold to inexplicably blazing hot.  The room made people feel dizzy, or even faint.  In another downstairs room, the imprint of a clawed hand mysteriously appeared on a table.

One night, a couple who was sleeping in an attic bedroom saw the figure of a sad-faced woman walk through the room.  The husband threw a slipper at her, after which the figure disappeared through a wall.  A few weeks later, Davison saw the same unhappy woman appear in his bedroom.  She was bent over and seemed to be looking for something on the ground.  Other shadowy figures began appearing throughout the house, including a ghostly cat.

Davison was obviously a phlegmatic sort--or perhaps his theatrical career gave him the mindset of a Man Who Had Seen It All--because he was largely unfazed by the supernatural goings-on.  He did not become genuinely alarmed until one night, when he heard a guest’s dog scratching at his bedroom door.  He let the animal in to join Davison’s own dog, Peter.  Both the dogs were clearly upset about something.  Davison realized that his bedroom had become so hot, he feared the house must be on fire.  Then the door suddenly seemed to disappear, revealing the presence of what Davison later described as “the foulest looking man I have ever set eyes on.”

The man was wearing an odd outfit in bright green, brown, and red.  He was extremely tall, and his revoltingly ugly face glared menacingly at Davison.  The librettist shouted, “Who are you--a fiend of hell?”  The figure laughed mockingly and vanished.  

One of Davison’s friends was a psychic investigator named Ronald Kaulbeck.  When he heard of the uncanny events at Branden, he volunteered to visit the farm to see if he could determine what was going on.  He later said that during his stay there, he experienced the worst fear of his life.  One evening, he suddenly began struggling for breath and clawing at his neck.  Others in the room saw a shadow appear around Kaulbeck’s neck that was clearly trying to choke him to death.  It took all their efforts to free him from the ghostly would-be strangler.

Kaulbeck was able to identify three distinct ghosts at Branden: the woman who was endlessly searching for something, a short, thick-set man who also had an air of unhappiness, and the tall, malevolent man who was clearly the source of all the evil at the farm.

Davison, determined to find out how his new home came to be a gathering-place for unpleasant spirits, brought in other mediums and spiritualists.  One told him that many years back, Branden Farm had been a meeting-place for practitioners of black magic.  Many terrible things, including animal and human sacrifices, had taken place on the site.  The medium sensed that the ghosts of these long-ago sorcerers wanted to force him out of the house, so they could again have it all to themselves.  She believed that the tall, sinister spirit was a George Tarver, who had occupied Branden in the 16th century.  He was the Grand Master of the satanic coven which met there.  The ghostly woman had been Tarver’s mistress, who went insane after her newborn baby was used as a human sacrifice.  The short, stocky ghost had been a coven member named Hunter.  After Hunter turned against the coven, Tarver strangled him and secretly buried him in the grounds.  Eventually, Tarver became too dangerous and frightening even for his fellow devil-worshippers.  The remaining members of the coven hanged him from a beam in one of the downstairs rooms.

This medium warned Davison that if he allowed the spirits to scare him away, Branden would never be habitable for any living human.  However, if he could just brave it out for five months--fighting off whatever evil might be thrown at him--the ghosts would give up and leave.

Davison decided that he had not put all that money and effort into renovating Branden just to be forced out by a pack of satanic ghosts.  He resolved to stick it out.

His life among the apparitions went on as usual until one day, when he encountered Tarver’s ghost in a hallway.  The spirit sneered at him.  The force of the ghost’s wicked, hateful presence left Davison, for the first time, thoroughly frightened.  Fighting off his instinct to run away, Davison shouted, “You must get out of my way!  This house is mine!  My will is stronger than yours!  It does not matter what holds you here!  You must leave!  Go!”

To Davison’s surprise and unimaginable relief, Tarver reacted by fading into a wall, never to be seen again.  Three days later, the female ghost appeared before Davison.  For the first time, she smiled at him, after which she too vanished for good.

Hunter was the last of the ghosts.  One night, he appeared by Davison’s bed, staring at him with such sadness that Davison, who had always pitied this spirit, asked if there was any way to help him.  The apparition silently disappeared.

For a short time afterwards, odd shadowy figures continued to be seen, but their appearances gradually became rarer and rarer, until they ceased to be seen at all.  The unholy forces that had occupied Branden Farm for so very many years had finally been evicted.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

And feel free to visit the Strange Company HQ dining hall.

Via Hulton Deutsch collection

The mysterious Jack the Strangler.

What may be the oldest known dice.

Money laundering in the art world. 

The ongoing mystery of the missing scientists.

An ancient city may be even more ancient than we thought.

Benjamin Franklin in London.

The Hull-Ottawa Fire.

The child soldiers of WWII.

The dark origins of fairy fiction.

That time when people thought they were made of glass.

That time when Chile (briefly) ruled the waves.

The days of body-snatching and burial reform.

Our mysterious brains.

The Soviets and the Cambridge Five.

A centenarian's adventurous life.

An eccentric abolitionist.

A legendary squid attack.

A dog gets a proper burial.

That time when the British Parliament burned down.

The surprisingly complicated history behind a murderer's preserved head.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll meet a ghostly Satanic coven.  Fun for the whole family!  In the meantime, here's Tracy Nelson.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Tenants have been evicted by their landlords for many reasons, but I’m guessing “Your dead relative is lowering my property values” doesn’t crop up very often.  The “Detroit Free Press,” December 29, 1929:

Berlin, Dec. 28.(U. P.)--There is a landlord in Berlin who absolutely refuses to let tenants bring ghosts with them into his apartments. He has gone to court to ask for permission to eject a family that, he alleges, has been harboring an all too active spirit in their rooms.

According to popular report, not only undenied by the family but actually confirmed by the family pastor, the ghost is that of an uncle of 11-year-old Lucy Regulski, the only person now alive to whom the apparition has appeared.

Other members of the family, however, have heard the noises made by the unearthly fellow during his nocturnal calls upon his niece, and years ago, it is said, Lucy's grandmother was once favored with a visit from her then recently deceased son. 

Family ghosts may be all right in their way, the owner of the building suggests in his petition to the court, but families possessing them should at least have the common courtesy to report the fact before signing leases on new apartments. Sometimes they can be very disturbing, as  apparently they have been in the case of Uncle Regulski.

The landlord argues that the Regulskis must have known of the existence of this ghost before they moved in because it had once called upon the grandmother. It is his contention that its occasional presence in Lucy's bedroom, but more especially the effect that its presence there has had on neighborhood opinion, will result in decreasing, to his financial loss, the desirability of his apartments as living quarters and thus also eventually lower the market value of the building.

Just to play it safe, in the event that there really are no such things as ghosts, he included in his petition another plea in which he asserts that the entire affair is probably a hoax upon the part of the Regulski family, that the ghost has been invented by them for unexplained but nevertheless sinister reasons. In either case, he feels he is being damaged and he wants to dump the Regulskis, ghost and all, out into the street. 

Meanwhile spiritualists and other persons learned in the ways of manes and wraiths have been cooperating with the Regulskis in trying to lay low the secret of this restless uncle.

The judge in the case eventually ruled that as the Regulskis obviously genuinely believed their apartment was haunted, it proved that the family was not intentionally trying to annoy their neighbors or their landlord.  Therefore, they had the legal right to occupy any ghost-infested dwelling they chose.

Which really seems only fair to Uncle Regulski.

Accident, Suicide, or Murder? The Aeileen Conway Riddle

When someone is suddenly, inexplicably murdered, such cases can be very difficult to solve.  When law enforcement is unable to decide if a person’s violent death is a result of murder, accident, or even suicide, you generally have a mystery where finding a solution is virtually impossible.  Such was the tragic case of a seemingly normal housewife.

Fifty-year-old Aeileen Conway lived with her husband of 33 years, Pat, in Lawton, Oklahoma.  Although there is little public information about her personal life, she appeared to have led a quiet, ordinary, peaceable existence, which ended in an extremely shocking way on April 29, 1986.

On that day, a farmer working in his fields just outside of Lawton saw smoke coming from a nearby road.  He notified police, and about twenty minutes later, Oklahoma Highway Patrol officers arrived at the scene.  It was a remote, lonely road that for years had seen little activity.  The officers found that the source of the smoke was a car crashed inside a deserted bridge.  The vehicle was burning so fiercely that it had fused with the metal guardrail.  The officers saw that a body was inside the car, although it proved to be burned beyond recognition.  Skid marks on the road indicated that the car had been going 50 to 60 miles an hour when it smashed into the bridge.  The officers assumed that what they were dealing with was a gruesome, but unremarkable accident.

It was soon learned that the car was registered to Pat Conway, and by the next day, the body was identified as his wife Aeileen.  Case closed?  Not as far as Pat was concerned.  He insisted that some sort of foul play had led to his wife’s brutal death.  He pointed out that when he returned home from work on the day Aeileen died, he found their house in a state of rather sinister disorder.  Aeileen’s purse containing her driver’s license and eyeglasses, which she always carried whenever she left the house, was still there.  A garden hose was on, running water into their swimming pool.  The ironing board was set up, with the iron still on.  A bathtub was full of water, and their phone was off the hook, as though Aeileen had been interrupted while trying to make a call.  Some jewelry was missing from the house.  To Pat and his children, this all screamed that Aeileen’s death was no simple accident.

Pat and Ray Anderson, an investigator from the District Attorney’s office, went to the crash site to conduct their own inquiry.  They found a church bulletin on the ground some distance from the scene.  Pat identified it as one that Aeileen kept on her car’s dashboard.  However, his wife always drove with the windows rolled up, so the bulletin could not have flown out of the car.  To Pat and Ray Anderson, this indicated that the car had been stopped.  They theorized that some unknown person had abducted Aeileen from her house and killed her.  The assailant then drove to the crash site, set the accelerator, put it into drive, and fled, hoping that Aeileen’s death would be dismissed as an accident.  

Anderson’s findings were able to persuade authorities to reclassify Aeileen’s death from “accident” to “unexplained,” particularly since the Oklahoma State Fire Marshall could not rule out arson as the cause of the car catching on fire.  He noted that the car was so destroyed by the blaze, it seemed likely that some accelerant was used.  Additionally, the gas cap was missing.  In most cases where a car burns as a result of arson, the cap was removed.

Unfortunately, the investigation into Aeileen’s death virtually ended there.  Law enforcement agreed that it was very possible that Mrs. Conway had been murdered, but who the killer could have been, and why he/she would want Aeileen dead, were questions nobody was able to answer.

Until his death in 2013, Pat Conway devoted his life to trying to solve the mystery of his wife’s horrifying death.  However, although many theories have been proposed, ranging from burglary-gone-wrong to suicide to “it was an accident after all,” we will probably never know for certain just how Aeileen Conway’s seemingly normal day around the house came to such an abruptly violent end.  This is one of those rare cases where it’s been impossible for anyone to stitch all the known facts together into a completely coherent scenario.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Feel free to join the Strange Company staffers for a stroll around the grounds.

A particularly gruesome (and notorious) murder case.

Does Egypt have a second Sphinx?

15,000 years ago, kids were playing with clay.

How DNA in dirt is a boon for scientists.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the upside-down H.

3/I Atlas has probably been weird for a very, very long time.

It is my great pleasure to inform you that Newcastle upon Tyne has a vampire rabbit.

The mystery of 16 Psyche.

A deadly disaster in a cinema.

The relationship between humans and dogs goes way back.

Pro tip: Stealing antiquities is usually not the best career choice.  Especially if you're a couple of dunderheads.

The mystery of Ohio's Serpent Mound.

A Guatemalan "Atlantis." 

People who took their Easter finery way too seriously.

The legendary Route 66.

A fiendish fumigator.

A "mythical" city turns out to have been very real.

In praise of pedants.

The "Stonehenge of the East."

A medium goes to Harvard.

Vintage photos of the Tower of London.

Why we've always been obsessed with crystals.

So maybe sharks don't exist.

The latest research on how dolphins communicate.

The fishy April Fool's Day.

Scientists are busy pondering why we have chins.

The Island of Leftover Food.

Evidence of an ancient Roman wine ritual.

65,000 years ago, Neanderthals nearly died out.

A gentleman jewel thief.

A prison romance.

A plethora of Dick the Devils.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a woman's extremely puzzling death.  In the meantime, here's, uh, this.  God love ya, 1940s.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Some people could be said to create an “electric atmosphere.”

This is not always a good thing.  The “Wells Journal,” December 9, 1993:

A physicist claimed this week to have come up with evidence which completely exonerates pensioner Frank Pattemore for any involvement in the weird goings on with the electrical system at his home. 

For more than 11 years, Mr Pattemore's Iverson Cottage, at West End, Somerton, has baffled teams of experts as electrical appliances, heavy duty fuses and wiring have been destroyed by unexplained power surges, sometimes up to 12,000 volts. 

The problems are continuing, even though Southern Electricity stripped every piece of wire from the cottage and installed completely new power circuits. 

As recently as August SWEB [South Western Electricity Board] implied the problem was inside the house itself, pointing the finger at Mr Pattemore, aged 83, or his son Nigel, who lives with him, according to physicist Mr Bill Love. 

Mr Love, of Folkestone, Kent, said this week he has evidence that, following the latest rewiring, a Southern Electric sales representative was among the witnesses who saw the Pattemore meter record power being consumed when nothing was being used, and was there when a 100 amp fuse blew--even though the tails were not connected to the outside supply.

Mr Love said SWEB was continually evading the issue. The company kept replying that the meter had been checked and found to be accurate when, in fact, it was not the meter it was concerned about, it was the power system. 

He has asked SWEB at least to exonerate the Pattemores in view of the latest information. 

In a report prepared after several days of investigation at the cottage in 1991, Mr Love said: "There is something very strange happening at Iverson Cottage and it would be very wrong to leave Frank Pattemore and his son to suffer another winter of physical discomfort, the fear of fire and the stress of innuendo and gossip." 

In one of his latest letters to SWEB on behalf of Mr Pattemore, Mr Love said: "It amazes me that SWEB continues to ignore these facts which have been witnessed by qualified people. 

"The main fuse blowing before the tails were connected throws considerable doubt on SWEB's assertion that their supply is normal.

"Could it possibly be that SWEB are taking instructions from higher authority, or are they suggesting that witnesses to these strange events are unreliable?" he asks. 

A SWEB spokesman said a lot of time and energy had been spent trying to get behind the problems at Mr Pattemore's house. 

“Apart from making sure our equipment is as good as it possibly can be, there is not much else we can do. 

"We have not been asked to get involved again recently.  If we were, we would be happy to check the tolerances and specifications of our equipment again," he added. 

"It seems his neighbours have no problems. It is all a mystery.”

A year later, there were a few follow-up stories which indicated that the bizarre electrical manifestations were still occurring.  Bill Love had been continuing to pester SWEB to get to the bottom of the mess, but board members insisted that they could do no further investigations until Pattemore and his son moved out of the house, something the two men were stubbornly refusing to do.

In the July 2003 issue of "Fortean Times," Love wrote a detailed account of his investigations into Iverson Cottage, including some very strange peripheral details, such as Nigel Pattemore being followed by--yes!--two "Men in Black," after which he was briefly jailed (for "causing criminal damage to SWEB property at his home,") while police searched the cottage under warrant.  Love and the Pattemores seemed to suspect that the military was somehow involved in the mystery, but they were unable to come to any definite conclusions.  Love closed his "FT" article by stating that there were now "more unanswered questions" than when he began his research, and that "remnants of the phenomena exist to this day."

The Bird-Beasts of Var

When reading about UFO sightings, one gets a bit bored of encounters with the usual saucer-eyed little green men, so it’s always welcome when extraterrestrials think outside of the box and offer us humans a more novel spectacle.  In the November/December 1968 issue of “Flying Saucer Review,” a French UFO researcher named Lyonel Trigano presented a striking case which had been brought to his attention.  It was related by a businessman named only as “Mr. S.” who ran a successful garage in Herault.  Trigano described him as “a solidly-built man in his fifties, who is quite the opposite of an impressionable person!”  “Mr. S.” told him:

“One evening in November 1962 I was driving along a minor departmental road in Var.  It was a dark night, and raining in torrents, so that I was driving with my lights full on.  Rounding a bend, I saw, 80 metres ahead, a group of figures clustered in the middle of the road.  I slowed down to avoid the group, and at the same moment it split into two parts, suddenly and jerkily.  My window was down and I leaned my head out slightly to see what was the matter; it was then that I saw beasts, some kind of bizarre animals, with the heads of birds, and covered in some sort of plumage, which were hurling themselves from two sides towards my car.

“Terrified, I wound up the window, accelerated like a madman, and then stopped 150 metres further on.  I turned round and saw these things, these beasts, these nightmarish sort of beings, which were heading, with a sort of flapping of wings, towards a luminous dark-blue object which hung in the air over a field on the other side of the road.  It resembled two plates upside down, and placed on one another.  On reaching it, these ‘birds’ were literally sucked into the underpart of the machine as if by a whirlwind.  Then I heard a dull sound (clac!) and the object flew off at a prodigious speed and finally disappeared.”

Trigano added that “Mr. S," out of the not-unreasonable fear of appearing to be barking mad, had told this story to very few people.  At the time of this incident, “S” had never heard of UFOs, and had not thought to connect it to extraterrestrial visitations until some time afterward.

Whatever you think of “Mr. S” and his story, you have to admit that it’s not the sort of thing you hear every day.