. His latest inductee is George Albert Smith (1864-1959), on the grounds that Smith conducted two investigations, a minor one in Norwich and a far more significant one in Brighton, where he and his wife Laura lived in an allegedly haunted house for over a year. The tribute is headed ‘George Albert Smith: A Short-Term Ghost Hunter Who Conducted a Long-Term Ghost Hunt’, and I was pleased to see this recognition of part of Smith’s contributions to psychical research. The article relies heavily on Frank Podmore’s ‘Phantasms of the Dead from Another Point of View’ in the
, which does not mention Smith by name, and I was surprised that Prasil ends with the words ‘It makes perfect sense that Smith is the fellow who signs his name “X.Y.” in Podmore’s article – but how do we know that it was him? For certain?’ If it is apparently uncertain, one is likely to muse, why is Smith in the
However, Prasil can rest easy, for there is much documentary evidence to indicate it was Smith (and Laura) who made psychical research history, before Ada Goodrich-Freer’s investigation at Ballechin House and Harry Price’s at Borley, by occupying a house for an extended period in an attempt to detect paranormal activity. Of that occupation, Society for Psychical Research (SPR) historian Alan Gauld describes it as ‘one of the eerier cases of which we have records.’
It is possibly even unique in its way: ‘...ghosts are kittle cattle, and so far as I am aware the nearest any member of the Society got to encountering a ghost was to hear odd raps and other minor noises in the Brighton house occupied on behalf of the SPR in 1888-9 by Mr G A Smith.’
The following is divided into three parts: the investigation prior to Mr and Mrs Smith’s residency, the residency itself, and the aftermath.
Smith’s identity only became known at a much later date, after the case was covered by the
.
It was designated G. 187 in the SPR’s numbering system, and the generally sceptical Podmore considered it significant because it involved two separate sets of residents of a house who both reported phenomena with no communication between them having taken place (though this was not true, as will be seen). Podmore’s ‘other point of view' as indicated in his title was that apparitions were products of telepathy, and this type of case, where there was apparently no telepathic connection, challenged his hypothesis.
Statements from both sets of occupants are included in Podmore’s article. The location of the terraced house was withheld in the public account but the file in the SPR archive identifies it as 18 Prestonville Road, Brighton.
The first statement is from a Miss L. Morris, who wrote to the SPR in June 1888.
She and her aunt had taken a lease in October 1882 and odd events began the day they moved in, with the sound of footsteps round the drawing-room table, though nobody was visible. Then a sister heard footsteps upstairs (her two sisters were occasional visitors throughout the tenancy). Miss Morris searched the house but found no intruder. Yet that night she could hear footsteps trudging round the house and felt a presence of someone in her room. There followed further footsteps each night until she had become used to it. About three weeks later she saw the figure of a woman, in black with a face ‘intensely sad and deadly pale.’ Not thinking anybody would believe her, she kept this secret for three years. The household also experienced a great deal of annoyance, from June 1884, with the front door bell being rung frequently. This, with knocks on the door in addition, continued for three weeks. Nobody was seen to ring the bell though the residents were on guard.
Other phenomena included in 1885 seeing a woman in black glide along the basement hall. Miss Morris thought it might be her aunt but she found her in the drawing-room. Sometime after this the aunt died, and the family vacated the house in December 1886 as the lease had expired, to Miss Morris’s evident relief. She attributed her experiences to a woman having committed suicide in the house some years earlier, which she had been told about by a friend. Podmore visited Miss Morris on 9 July 1888 (the month following receipt of her letter). She believed that the house had remained vacant until taken by a Mrs G, and said that her predecessor, Miss E, had not experienced anything untoward during her time there. She had clearly been doing some investigation prior to writing to the SPR. Podmore also spoke to one of Miss Morris’s sisters, who confirmed the particulars.
Podmore was not the original investigator of the case but had taken over from fellow SPR member Edmund Gurney in unfortunate circumstances. Gurney had seen Mrs G on 13 June 1888 (coincidentally the date of Smith’s marriage to Laura Bayley), and rated her credibility as a witness very highly: ‘I have never received an account in which the words and manner of telling were less suggestive of exaggeration or superstition.’
He asked her to compile a report of her occupancy and this was dated 15 June 1888. Gurney’s visit to Mrs G was only a week and a half before his death, and the investigation might have provided a reason for Gurney to be in Brighton on the night he died at the Royal Albion Hotel (the night of 22/23 June 1888).
This is certainly more plausible than the theory advanced by Trevor Hall in his 1964 book
The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney that Gurney was in Brighton to meet Smith’s sister, summoned by her so that she could tell him her brother had cheated in telepathy experiments the two men had conducted together. Hall does not mention the possibility that Gurney’s visit was connected to the case at all, probably because, if Gurney were staying at the hotel to conduct interviews and perhaps arrange Smith’s tenancy rather than in despair at having uncovered cheating in telepathy experiments, it very much undermines the likelihood that the suicide theory is correct.
[8] One loose end is that the obituaries in
Light and
The Athenaeum say that Gurney’s body was identified by an unposted letter in his pocket inviting someone (unnamed), a ‘colleague’ according to the former, to join him on whatever business had taken him to Brighton, and it is unclear why he should have wanted someone else to participate in this investigation.
[9]Mrs G, a widow with two children, took the house in November 1887. She recounted a variety of unexplained phenomena, beginning about a fortnight after moving in.
[10] The first were sobs and thumps at night and a voice saying ‘Oh, do forgive me!’ three times. She also experienced unexplained thumps, crashes and tramping sounds. The door bell rang repeatedly even when she stood by the window and could see that nobody had approached the door. The children and servant, not to mention the dog, were badly affected too, and one of her children, Edith, claimed to see a white face peering round a door. During a visit she made to them the neighbours mentioned bells ringing, but they linked this to a ‘wicked servant’ of Miss Morris’s. Edith saw ‘a little woman’ pass her and later her younger sister Florence saw a man standing by the window. The knocks and other noises became worse, including the sensation of someone entering the children’s room, shaking the bed and walking out. On occasion they saw lights in their room. Mrs G discovered from the landlord that a woman had hanged herself in the house. A succession of friends and relatives came to stay but did not experience any significant disturbance.
At this point Mrs G exchanged notes with Miss Morris, so her account is not independent, as Podmore suggested when he wrote that the case was ‘remarkable because two successive sets of occupants of the house, without any communication with each other, or any conscious knowledge on the part of the second set that the first set had had experiences, were “haunted” by sounds and sights.’
[11] Mrs G even recounts stories Miss Morris had told her, and it is entirely possible that these had coloured her own perceptions. Eventually Mrs G asked the landlord to release them early from the lease but was told that she would have to pay until Christmas (this would appear to be late March). The children continued to see ghostly figures so Mrs G took them to London leaving the servant and her father in charge. However, phenomena continued in her absence, and she finally left in early May 1888, after a troubled five months. Gurney implied that the expense and inconvenience of her decision to quit the house told in her favour. He never interviewed Miss Morris and Podmore, taking over the investigation, interviewed both: Mrs G on 8 July 1888 and Miss Morris, along with Mrs G’s daughters and Anne H – Mrs G’s servant – the following day.
[12] Miss Morris and Mrs G both wrote their accounts in June 1888.
In addition to his interview with Mrs G, Podmore had access to her diary from which he reproduces extracts and which add a measure of verification to her account.
[13] He includes witness statements from Anne H dated 16 June (her graphic account suggests a febrile atmosphere in the house) and various other people, including three professional gentlemen who, having heard of the house’s reputation, mounted their own investigation in May, the month Mrs G left.
[14] Two of them provided statements to Podmore, and he interviewed all three, though not particularly vigorously. They heard the bell ring and crashing sounds, and W O D saw ‘the dress of a super-material being,’ while the Rev. G O saw an entire figure (undescribed), but Podmore rightly points out that they would have heard all manner of stories before they visited. C also saw part of the dress but did not provide a written statement.
[15] While W O D was convinced of the reality of their experiences (‘I am firmly convinced in my own mind that the phenomena we beheld and the noises we heard were the results of supernatural forces’), this was not a serious investigation because on a second visit they were thinking of leaving after only thirty minutes when they saw the ‘form.’
[16]The final element included by Podmore is a newspaper extract dated 5 April 1879, which provides details of a suicide in the house.
[17] However, Podmore did not feel that there was a strong link with the phenomena subsequently experienced and, unsurprisingly, did not consider it indicated post-mortem agency strongly. Instead he discusses such possible explanations for experiences occurring independently (as he saw it) to two sets of tenants in terms of coincidence; apparitions resulting from alarm caused by the strange noises, themselves an elaboration of real sounds – an example of
point de repère; or even telepathy from Miss Morris to Mrs G. He certainly saw the experiences as hallucinations rather than as a ‘semi-corporeal ghostly entity’ for, ‘To me it is not obvious why the dreams of the living should possess less potency than the imagined dreams of the unknown dead.’
[18] This tack irritated Andrew Lang, who refers obliquely to the case in an article in
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, in which he accuses Podmore of taking ‘the gilt off the spectral gingerbread in a very ruthless manner’ by explaining phenomena as rats or the wind, or some other noise which is misinterpreted as an hallucination.
[19]
The residency
The importance of the case, despite the difficulties in unravelling its causes, was such that Smith and Laura moved in for an extended stay on 17 August 1888, three months after Mrs G left and two months after their wedding.
[20] The finances of this arrangement are obscure, and Gauld reasonably suggests that the SPR was subsidising the tenancy.
[21] Smith’s narrative is described as by ‘An Associate’ of the SPR, and takes the form of his diary for the period.
[22] After describing the house’s appearance and layout (but not providing a plan), Smith discusses its location, particularly its proximity to the station and the clarity of shunting operations when the wind is favourable.
[23] He adds that the house is close to a branch line though they never heard noise from it, however there is an implication that noise from the station might account for some of the sounds heard by the occupants. Smith says that they did not experience anything ‘startling or violent,’ and did not see any apparitions. Smith seems to be downplaying his time in the house because while not violent, some of the noises they heard appear to have startled the occupants, and the account appears to belie Smith’s anodyne verdict.
They had visitors from time to time and Smith provides statistics on them, indicating that he kept careful records. He says 25 men and 14 women slept in the house over a total of 137 nights, and presumably the presence of women staying at night would have necessitated a married couple rather than a single man in charge of the operation. Smith even notes which bedrooms were used by visitors and gives occupancy rates, presumably a measure designed to track who was where should anything noteworthy occur. The visitors included a smattering of military men – Smith refers to Colonel and Mrs H, Lieutenant-Colonel S and Captain N.
Smith supplies his diary entries, of which there are 21 published in Proceedings, most of them brief, covering the entire stay. Initially the Smiths were on their own, but a maid-servant, M W, arrived on 6 September.
[24] A comparison of the unpublished account with the published one shows that many references to SPR personnel and Smith’s family staying in the house were deleted. Laura’s mother and sister (unnamed, possibly Eva, who stayed in February 1889) were there from 15-23 November, but this is missing from the published record. Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick were regular guests; on one occasion Mrs Sidgwick brought ‘Miss Balfour’ (presumably her sister Alice) with her and they stayed from 11-14 December. On another occasion Mrs Sidgwick and Alice Johnson shared a room for a week. Mrs Sidgwick came back with Henry and they stayed for three weeks – but in different rooms.
[25] On another occasion they stayed for eight nights, again separately. Henry Sidgwick also came alone for a week and Mrs Sidgwick squeezed in a couple of days on her own. These visits were all excluded from the written report, but nobody experienced anything out of the ordinary. Visits seem to have been more frequent in the summer months, suggesting that there was a certain mixing of business and pleasure.
However, although their visitors were not troubled by odd occurrences, the tenants were. The first incident involved Laura, three days after they moved in. Twice she heard what sounded like a zinc pail being rattled, though there was no evidence that the pails had been disturbed. On 4 September Smith ‘returned from town,’ indicating that he combined occupation of the house with his duties for the SPR in London. On this occasion Laura, who had been alone in the house all day, had on two occasions heard loud crashing sounds though nothing had been displaced. While investigating this, they both heard what sounded like the crack of a whip, but again there was nothing to account for it. The following evening Smith heard similar crashing sounds while writing at his desk, Laura ‘dozing upon the sofa.’ Oddly, though they seemed loud to Smith, they did not rouse her. As their predecessors had experienced, they were subjected to the front-door bell ringing, but after one of these Laura was quick enough to spot children running away. Mysterious bell-ringing occurred later as well (the house may have been a target for children because of its reputation). On 18 October Smith was in London when knocking was heard by Laura at 5.30pm.
Later in September Smith heard gentle tapping upstairs. While on this occasion he did not consider the possibility that the noises came from next door, he did at other times. One day the maid-servant said she had heard sounds while in bed and had wondered if they came from next door, but said they sounded very close. Smith mentions here that the adjacent property on the same side as their staircase was empty. Another day Colonel H heard ‘mild groans and loud breathing,’ which Smith attributed to the adjacent bedroom in the house next door (presumably on the other side), possibly one phenomenon which was explicable, if too delicate to describe.
[26] On a couple of occasions, noises occurred while Smith was writing, which suggests that he brought work home as his diary entries were generally not long.
The longest entries are both in December, when something definitely out of the ordinary took place. Smith shows a remarkable steadiness of nerve in confronting the unknown. At 8.30pm on 9 December he was on his own in the house, writing, when he heard a bumping noise moving around just outside then away from his door. Smith took his reading lamp and went to investigate but found nothing. He returned to his desk but five minutes later the sound recommenced, from the position where it had left off before. This time he ran out so fast he forgot the lamp but as he reached the stairs the sounds ceased. In the dark but not wanting to waste time fetching the lamp, he went downstairs backwards, feeling the stairs with his hands. On reaching the kitchen, in the basement, he turned up the gas but once more could not see anything to account for the sounds. Returning once more to his writing, he shut the door and settled to his task when there were three thumps just outside. This might have unnerved a lesser man but Smith ‘sprang across the room and threw the door open.’ Predictably there was nothing there, and he was left not able to account for what had happened. He discounted the possibility that the sounds emanated from next door as they were so clear. Smith and Laura did not at that point have a cat.
On 15 December, at 11.35pm, there was a strange incident, but it throws a fascinating sidelight on the Smiths. Their bedroom was separated from the sitting-room by curtains. In the sitting room was a piano and above it on the wall hung a guitar. Smith says that he had gone to bed, leaving Laura in the sitting room saying her prayers by the fire as it was cold. This is an interesting insight, suggesting Laura’s piety and Smith’s relative lack of belief. It is possible Smith was making this up with Laura’s collusion, but there would be no reason to invent a scenario in which Laura was praying while he lay in bed. One wonders if, when Smith was on his own on Sunday 9 December at 8.30, Laura and the servant M W were at evensong.
Suddenly, the guitar strings sounded:
‘–
pung, pang, ping – pung, pang, ping – here my wife called out in a loud, awe-struck whisper, “Did you hear that?” whilst even as she spoke a third
pung, pang, ping sounded clearly through the rooms. I immediately sprang out of bed and rushed in to her, finding her kneeling upon the hearth-rug by an armchair, staring with astonishment at the guitar upon the wall.’
[27]
They sat by the fire for over half an hour but no further sounds were heard. Laura said that she had been distracted a couple of times during her prayers by odd sounds, like someone sweeping a hand over the wallpaper. They now had a cat (‘an extremely lazy Persian’) but it was asleep. She said that when the guitar sounded the second and third times she was looking at it and saw no movement, nor was anything near it. The sound was not caused by the pegs slipping and a note sounding as a result. On 13 January Smith came in at about 10.30 and Laura said that the guitar had again produced a note. Smith ends this section of his diary by saying that he cannot account for the phenomenon.
[28] Later a visitor, Mrs V, when alone in the sitting room, heard the guitar, not knowing it had happened before.
[29]In March, Laura’s sister ‘Miss E.B.’ [i.e. Eva] slept in the house for a week.
[30] She heard raps on her door in the early hours on her first night but nothing subsequently. Smith himself slept on his own in the three bedrooms (the two guest rooms and the servant’s room) from time to time to see if anything happened, but nothing did that he noticed. Smith and Laura left the house on 27 September 1889 and a new tenant moved in the following day. There is a friendly letter to Smith in the SPR file from the new tenant dated 13 March 1890 saying that disappointingly nothing had been experienced since moving in.
[31]Alas, given the length of time this investigation took, and the number of people involved, the SPR file is rather thin and appears to have been weeded at some point. Considering that Smith’s account indicates he spent much of his time writing, very little of it seems to have been preserved. Most of the surviving material relates to the previous occupants and the intrepid trio of independent investigators, and while including much that made its way into print, with hardly anything relating to the time Smith and Laura spent there, apart from a draft of his statement. To take over a house like this for such a long period and maintain a constant presence in case phenomena occurred was groundbreaking, and it is disappointing so little of the documentation remains.
The aftermath
Here the matter rested until an article appeared in the SPR’s
Journal, ‘The Journalist at Large in Psychical Research’, in April 1905, by which time Smith had long ceased to be active in the Society.
[32] Noting the sensationalist aspect of many ghost-related articles in the press, the writer argues that it is worth seeing how stories develop, and describes two in which their evolution could be tracked. After disposing of the Talking Baby of Bethesda (alas deceased), the article moves on to a case which appeared in the
Daily Mail the previous Christmas Eve and circulated widely, even being picked up by the foreign press. A chunk of the
Mail’s article was reprinted, concerning a haunted house in Brighton where a ghost had been seen. In part it reads:
‘A gentleman well known in Brighton lived in the house with his wife and children for fifteen months. Sturdy and muscular, with a partiality for mountain-climbing as a pastime, this gentleman, who was seen by a
Daily Mail representative yesterday, is certainly not the kind of man to suffer from “nerves”.
[33]‘He said that he had not seen the ghost, but a very curious thing happened in the corner of the drawing-room where the figure is said to have appeared...’ [and goes on to describe three notes being played three times on a guitar.]
The account also notes that a barrister who had watched with two friends had had a revolver, and a woman had committed suicide in the house because of a man’s cruelty.
[34] The article goes on to say that the case was referred to in the
Annals of Psychical Science for the preceding January. The
Annals had indeed included a piece in its ‘Odds and Ends’ column, taken from newspaper accounts and beginning, ‘English newspapers have had much to say about a
haunted house at Brighton the last few days,’ giving hardly any space to the experience of ‘a former tenant,’ referring briefly to a ‘gentleman and his wife’ who had occupied the house for fifteen months, and devoting most space to a lawyer who had spent a night there with two friends, his revolver, and a dog.
[35] The writer in the
Journal pointed out that these accounts implied that this was a recent case, but were clearly reminiscent of the one published in
Proceedings back in 1889 (i.e. in Podmore’s article). Given the similarities, a letter had been sent to Smith to ask him about it, and part of his reply is printed.
[36]Addressed from his Southwick home
The Laboratory, Roman Crescent, and dated 25 February 1905, it finds Smith in a sharp mood but, as with the diary kept during his tenure of the house, it helps to round him out by including a detail from his life which would not otherwise be available. He had seen the account in the
Daily Mail and was not impressed with the way the story had been handled. At Christmas 1903, a reporter on a Brighton newspaper had approached him saying he was writing a ‘seasonable’ column and had a few cases of local hauntings, including the one in which Smith had been involved, which Smith was asked to verify. This duly appeared and as far as Smith was concerned was ‘substantially accurate.’ He did not think that his name was included. Then a year later it appeared again, in the
Daily Mail,
but so worded to make it appear to be recent, not fifteen years old. The article mentions the
Mail representative having seen Smith ‘yesterday’, implying an interview, though what had happened was that the journalist had indeed ‘seen’ Smith, but across a crowded concert room with not a word passing between them; they had only nodded at each other. Smith was there ‘to see my little daughter’s calisthenics.’ The local journalist also wrote the piece for the
Mail, hence knew of Smith’s involvement in the case and was recycling his copy. The JSPR article’s author added that the reference to the suicide was at odds with that given at the inquest and the reference to ‘The cruelty of a man’ was a journalistic addition.
[37] The
Annals duly reported that the affair was a good example of the unreliability of newspapers, as rather than being recent, the case was one that ‘has already done hard work.’
[38]Alice Johnson at the SPR had written privately to Smith, presumably to ask his opinion on the matter. He replied to her on 15 March 1905. There is again personal information, as so often with Smith only supplied in passing, and it explains a certain irritation over the matter:
‘The proprietor of the
Brighton Herald is my brother-in-law, and he is much annoyed by the want of principle shown by his reports.
[39] The proprietor is a genuine stickler for literacy accuracy & truth, & I should be sorry to see his paper named reprovingly as it seldom deserves it. The young reporter who dished his 12 months old article up for the
Daily Mail did it entirely on his own account. His original article in the
Brighton Herald was I understand based upon conversation with the witnesses. He certainly took the trouble to see me, but though I confirmed what he had heard I would not allow my name to be used.
‘Of course there is no objection to using my name in the Journal or elsewhere in SPR publications as tenant of the house...’
One final mystery of the investigation is the address given for Smith during his occupation of the Brighton house. Trevor Hall says that Smith was living at Manstone Cottage, St Lawrence, Ramsgate, in December 1888, having taken this from the list of new associates in
JSPR.
[40] He catalogues Smith’s movements from 1888 to 1892 but does not mention the Brighton house at all. He seems to think that Smith was living in St Lawrence: ‘it seems possible that he found it convenient to make his home with his wife’s parents for a time’ (on the sole grounds that Laura came from Ramsgate).
[41]The December 1888 membership list may have been prepared in advance, but hardly before August, when he and Laura moved into 18 Prestonville Road. The next list, dated May 1889, also falls within the period of his tenancy of the Brighton house, yet still gives his address as Manstone Cottage. And that is the address given in the
Proceedings'
list dated December 1890.
[42] Thus while living in Brighton, the impression was given by the lists that he was in Kent. Could this have been to deflect knowledge of his involvement and help to protect the house from further notoriety?
