During the first half of the 1970s, Tom Perrott, as well as keeping his scrapbooks recording hauntings the length and breadth of Britain (see FT440:28-35), had also been keeping an eye on his own neighbourhood. Living at the same house in Muswell Hill that his father originally bought in 1943, he was well placed to see numerous stories unfold in the Hampstead & Highgate Express concerning the ghoulish antics and carry-ons over at Highgate Cemetery. This led him to start up a special scrapbook entitled ‘Vampirology’.
He had also been monitoring developments in Dorset, the county of his birth, and became co-author with Rodney Legg and Mary Collier of The Ghosts of Dorset, Devon and Somerset. One Dorset haunting he rapidly came to question was that of Sandford Orcas Manor House where a collection of extraordinary spectres was being gushingly promoted by its eccentric tenant Colonel Francis Claridge and his wife. The couple boasted of sharing their home with 14 ghosts, including a lady in red silk, a dog, a monk, a suicide, an Elizabethan woman, and the shades of Sir Hubert Meldeycott and a seven-foot phantom rapist. This latter apparition “only appeared to virgins” (“How did you work that out?” Perrott asked). Colonel Claridge proved a temperamental character who erupted when challenged over his veracity and was even given to menacing sceptics and nay-sayers with an antique sword.1 When enquiries failed to locate any first-hand witnesses to the colourful phantoms beyond the Claridges themselves, Perrott concluded all the ghosts were pure invention, dreamed up for a publicity scam.
GHOSTS ON THE PREMISES
In January 1975 the owners of a plant hire business in Marshalls Lane, Wheathampsted, in Hertfordshire were alarmed by strange incidents. The apparition of a young girl was seen inside one of the barns of the plant hire business, vanishing when challenged. The surprised employee went and searched the barn, finding it empty – and there were no other exits. Following this, two employees refused to work on the premises after dark.
The phenomena were attributed to a murdered girl – the ghost of Ann Noblett, a 17-year-old student who had lived
