Some Haunted Houses of England & Wales

THE GREEN BANK HOTEL,
BARDSLEY

THE RACE FOR LIFE

One afternoon in the July of this year I took tea with Lady B—— at her club in the West End. Lady B—— is a very old friend of mine, our friendship dating back to the days when I wore Eton collars and a preparatory school cap. She was in unusually high spirits at the thought of a cruise in the Baltic, whilst I was equally exuberant at being once again in London after a very trying sojourn in a particularly remote and isolated town—a town renowned for pilchards, pasties and Painters.

Now, there is nothing mean nor petty about Lady B——; she is generosity itself: so kind, so courteous, and withal so daintily pretty that to be near her, even, is to be in Elysium.

Remembering the interest I had always taken in matters psychical, she had invited several friends especially to meet me, and it was from one of them—Miss Charlotte Napier—that I heard the following story:

“Chancing to be stranded late one night at Bardsley,” she began, “owing to a slight miscalculation of the time-table, I had no other resource than to put up at the Green Bank Hotel in Russell Street.

“It was a very ordinary hotel; ordinary both in accommodation and appearance. One part of it—that in which I slept—possibly dated back to the Elizabethan period, but the rest—most hideously renovated—was quite modern.

“Outside my room—No. 56—was a long and somewhat gloomy corridor connecting the old and new portions of the house.

“I retired to rest about eleven—closing time—and had been asleep barely an hour before I awoke with a start to find the room flooded with a pale, phosphorescent light.

“The moon shone through my window-panes: it gleamed with an unearthly whiteness across the bed, and thence across the room, glancing upon the panels of the door in such a manner that I was constrained to follow its course and to fix my gaze wherever it shone.

“The door was a mass of light: I could see each crack and scar upon it, even the finger-prints on the white handle, with painful distinctness. A sudden sensation of horror overcame me; I would have given anything to have been able to look elsewhere. I could not.