NELSON HALL
Location: An old Saxon out post left over from Old Britain, Wayland is three miles north of Enfield in Middlesex County. Surrounded by acres of farmland, the small hamlet is comprised of a population of only 503 people. Nelson Hall is on gated and posted private property deep within Enfield Woods off Cheshunt Road.
Description of Place: A three-story Tudor in great decline and dilapidation, Nelson Hall exists in uneven states of preservation and ruin, obscured from public view by acreage of oak, pine, elm and cedar. Endowed with tall chimneys, garrets, pitched roof and turrets, she also has warped floors, crooked doors and drafty rooms. The second floor of the west wing is almost completely gone, eaten away by water damage from a 1989 storm, removing access to some rooms. A secret passage off the main hall ascends to the attic as well as the basement, now notably flooded.
Ghostly Manifestations: Across the fabled and mythical lands of mystical England, the beautiful British landscape is dotted with haunted locations ranging from Welsh strongholds, forgotten Norman forts, aged Saxon edifices, British pubs and hotels and even the odd deserted and neglected abandoned church or monastery. Hidden away over the bridge beyond Hollows Creek, Nelson Hall stands in silent witness to ages gone by, waiting for a master who never existed. Her custody is in dispute, her ownership mired in confusion, but she is not empty. Laughter sometimes echoes from the great hall. A shadowy figure paces secretly in the downstairs library. A great wind has been felt gushing through the upstairs corridor even on the most blustery summer days. The Enfield constabulary has collected reports of vagrants and trespassers sleeping here and getting attacked by untold forces for several years. One officer collected thirty-seven such tales until 1953 when he retired, but no one knows where those files are now.
Unlike the majority of cases, the truth is that Nelson Hall has no historical record to compare with the tales of paranormal happenings that have been described here. For a review of manifestations, one has to start from scratch, interviewing the locals about people or acquaintances who might have seen or heard things there. The English are very proud of their haunted hills, but they are often skeptical and wary of American ghost-hunters. It is only through Stuart Vandal of the London Paranormal Science and Research organization that any research of Nelson Hall can be found.
According to Vandal, there are seven ghosts at Nelson Hall, but who they are or more accurately who they were is open to interpretation. The most passive and benign of the lot are the sisters, two female spirits of Edwardian dress and style who have opted to exile themselves to the study. They have been seen eleven times over twenty years, and heard talking and laughing from the shadows. One tale says that caretaker Miles Smedley heard the voices and advanced on them to toss the ladies out, but as he tried pushing against the doors to the study, he felt someone, or more appropriately something, pushing back to forbid him entry. When he took a running stance to plow through the door, he crashed to the floor inside the study, knocking the doors off their hinges, and discovering the musty and neglected room was empty.
Smedley has also detected the wafting aroma of French ladies perfume from the study, the kind of scent he compares to having come from "a bawdy and frilly whorehouse," leading him to suspect "the sisters" are not connected by relations but by occupation, but these are his own guesses. He's seen the brief glimpses of them watching him coming up to the house from up the path and on to the veranda, but after a hundred times, Smedley no longer runs to look for intruders. The windows are nailed shut; and the only entrance to the study in the main hall is barred shut. Anything in there not of this world can have it!
That method of restriction does not work well against the other ghosts not confined to rooms and the great hall. The apparition of a young girl playing in the house has been seen several times since 1888. Having the appearance of a young girl around five-years old, she is slight of build with brunette hair in two long pigtails, her gray dress is fragile and tattered. She wears no shoes; her feet covered in socks pulled to her knees. If a person is lucky enough to get too close, they are quick to realize she is not real; her eyes are solid white and she reaches out wanting to be embraced. She is a lonely and tragic waft looking for companionship in the afterlife. One motorist on Cheshunt Road slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting her racing across the road. Edward Ashbury who used to own the hall recalls seeing her dashing down the hill from the manor house down to a small neglected graveyard on the property. When he tried to give chase, she darted around a large oak and vanished. Smedley, however, has seen a glimpse of this girl several times from the third floor attic bedroom, but he doesn't go up there. The staircase to that bedroom collapsed in 1958.
A phantom bride has also been seen on the grounds, but only during 1945 to 1959 while Ashbury rented the edifice. His family saw the ethereal spectral bride walking from up the driveway, across the front veranda stretching the length of the property and then approaching the back servant's entry where she vanishes. Smedley proposes she was a servant girl taken to wed by the son of a former owner and then murdered and buried on the property to conceal a perceived family disgrace, but again, this is only his opinion. In October of 1959 when Edward's brother was returning to the hall, he met the spectral bride coming up beside him in his car, but as he looked back, he realized she did not have a face, just a vague gray area where her head was supposed to be.
Smedley also identifies a phantom monk on the property, but this presence enters the house and ascends the stairs to the second landing. His appearance is often preceding by the sounds of chanting, accompanied by the sounds of clicking, like a rosary being shaken. Smedley recalls hearing the moaning and clicking through his weekly ritual of airing Nelson Hall open to the air. He was coming down the stairs when he heard the sounds coming up to him from the first floor. Closing his eyes and carefully counting the steps as he descended to the first floor, he felt the apparition pass him on the second landing, "a cloud of air frozen solid as if it were the dead of winter coming past me and sticking my hair on end." Reaching the bottom landing, Smedley bolted through the open entrance and for his cottage down the hill without looking back.
The sixth spirit that bares mentioning were first seen in 1963, five years after the Ashbury Family departed Nelson Hall. Sir Widgen Willingham, a former RAF officer, used only the main part of the house and only the first and second floors. He testifies that one Christmas Eve after a hearty evening of partying that he was retreating to the master bedroom at the top of the stairs when he happened to glance up the stairs to the third floor landing and chanced upon a glimpse of a chained figure, slight of build but with long white hair and cadaverous, sullen features. He could not tell from this look if it was man or woman, but it was apparently weighted down with heavy chains "the sort used to detain prisoners of the Victorian Age." He acknowledged the ghastly visage, looked away to grab his service revolver on his person and looked back to take aim on the seeming intruder and realized it had vanished without sound or sight.
This same spirit, or possibly an eighth, was seen a year after the Willingham family departed in 1975. Inspecting the third floor for damage after a rainstorm, Smedley walked out of a bedroom and turned to the staircase to see a cadaverous figure coming out of the darkness for him. This figure was not bound by chains and instead resembled an animated corpse, hobbling around toward him on two thin stilt-like legs, lidless eyes staring at him from a fleshless skull of a face and two spindly arms bent up to shoulder level. "The specter of death itself trying to impersonate a man" according to the liquor-filled caretaker, but he swears to not had a drink in his body at that moment. Jumping backward into the bedroom he had emerged from, Smedley says he barred himself in the room and sat huddled under the windows trying to decide what to do next. For somewhere between a few minutes to an hour, he debated his fear of the ghosts versus his fear of tumbling off the roof while climbing down the outside of the house. Unwilling to go through the house again, he eventually debated to risk it and with a deep breath mustering every bit of courage in him, he charged down to the first floor and out the front entrance just as fast as he could, leaving a wake of turned over furniture in his wake.
From now on, Smedley would not go into the house unless he had one of his cronies or drinking partners with him "as a witness or defense." Since then, professional groundskeepers have been hired to tend to the property, overseen by local lawyer Laurence Eden. An intellectual and educated man, he has not seen any of the supposed ghosts of Nelson Hall, but when a locations director for the British TV Series, "Most Haunted" debated filming at the old mansion, a series of photos were taken of the hall from several points. One photo seems to catch three of the alleged ghosts: the sisters from the library, the young girl hiding in an archway and a skull-like face from a shadowy attic garret. Skeptics claim the images are part of some sort of "pattern recognition," but these images are not part of the photos taken before and after in succession.
History: According to oral reports, Nelson Hall was built in or around 1665, but nothing is known about the structure up until 1790 when it was obtained legally by British war hero, Lord Horatio Nelson, for either his son or a nephew. Neither such family ever lived here, and the house was instead rented out to several tenants over the next 150 years.
In 1967, barrister Edward Ashley decided to acknowledge American astronaut Anthony Nelson's reputed claim to being a descendant of Lord Nelson in order for him to pay undue back taxes on the property. This was based on the will of the astronaut's relative, Andrew Nelson, who believed he had legal ownership of the original deed, now since lost. A new deed had since been sold to Sir Widgen Willingham through the last person to rent the property. Whether Anthony Nelson is truly descended from Lord Nelson as his family believes is unrevealed, but his claims to the fact are tenuous at best and as yet unconfirmed. As of 1981, legal ownership has fallen to the Bank of England over the unpaid taxes.
Identity of Ghosts: There are believed seven different apparitions in the decaying edifice, but no one has any idea as to who they are. Records and history of the structure prior to 1790 have not been discovered.
Source/Comments: I Dream of Jeannie (Episode: My Master, The Ghostbuster"), Manifestations loosely compared to Borley Rectory in Borley, England, Raynham Hall in Fakenham, England, Jacobean House in Derby, England and Belgrave Hall in Leicester, England.