Expressway To Yr.Skull:An Evening Of Ghost Stories With The London Fortean Society.

Do you believe in ghosts? I don't - but I have to concede that they do make for great stories. From Scooby Doo to The Others, from Coraline to The Ring and onwards, ghosts are never far away when we start to tell each other spooky stories. You could go so far as to say they haunt us.

Sorry. I spent yesterday evening with the London Fortean Society at The Miller pub in Southwark and the talk, titled September Spooks:Ghostly Visions and Screaming Skulls, was a little bit more informal than normal. It consisted of two speakers, Tina Vantyler and Sandra Lawrence, taking to the stage and telling us a few ghost stories.

It almost didn't need to be a talk. We could probably have sat around a table in a pub and done it. A cosy fireside chat may have been even more effective. First up was Tina Vantyler. A journalist and therapist by trade (as she mentioned more than once) and a Skeptic by nature, Tina, nonetheless, believes in ghosts and that's because she claims to have personal experience of one.

In an anecdote that went on a little too long, she told us of how her, her then husband, and her newborn child had moved in to a lovely house in Tooting and instantly set about getting the loft converted into a spare bedroom and office. Soon enough, noises began to emanate from that office (both Tina and her husband heard them - as did a couple of builders they had in).

The noises consisted of coughing near the side of the bed, almost directly into the home owner's ears and then, one night when Tina slept in the loft bedroom, she heard a creaking office chair. Moving forward gingerly to inspect it she noticed it wasn't moving but when she put her hand out, anyway, to steady it the creaking stopped.

This creeped her out enough that when she and her husband divorced but stayed friends he was the one to keep the house. One she had, ghost aside, loved so much. Returning, many years later, to spend Christmas with her husband and now older child, she got over her fears and slept in that room once again. She described it as a terrible night's sleep and believed the room to be still haunted.

I don't doubt her belief. But I don't share it. She claimed that many people had come forward to tell her their own ghost stories and so she's compiled them into a book, True Tales of the Supernatural from the UK. I won't divulge too many (she has a book to sell) but will give you a taste of one example.

A friend of hers reported that her dad had treated his partner to a romantic evening in a Dorset hotel. When they checked into their lovely room there was a locked door at the side of the room and this disturbed the partner who asked at the reception why this was.

She was told that was a family room and as this couple had no kids it had been closed off. Having just had a miscarriage, the partner (no names were given - or false ones) was understandably upset but was far more discombobulated later that evening when she saw the spectral figure of a Victorian lady floating at the bottom of the bed. Carrying an item of what appeared to be children's clothing, the Victorian ghost opened the locked door and disappeared into the family room.

Spooked, the couple asked to change rooms and the next day checked out of the hotel. Running into the receptionist a conversation broke out and the receptionist revealed that an old local woman, a peasant, had, many years ago, been impregnated by a local nobleman and was offered a job for life at the hotel if she gave her baby up to the nobleman's childless wife.

She did but the pain in doing so destroyed her and, ultimately, she drowned herself in a nearby lake. Her ghost had been reported many times in that room but, in need of money, the current hoteliers had decided to take the risk of letting the room out. Perhaps, instead, they should look for those, and there are many, with an interest in the supernatural.

I couldn't help wondering if the recent trauma of the miscarriage played a part in the understanding of these events but I must admit it makes for a pretty spooky story. Sandra Lawrence was more my style of public speaker but she made no attempt to even pretend her story of the screaming skull was anything other than, in her own words, a "shaggy dog story".

I'll keep it brief because Sandra, like Tina, has a book to sell. Sandra's book, "Miss Wilmott and the Mystery of the Screaming Skulls', tells, in more depth, the story she would tell the small crowd of about twenty-five people gathered at The Miller. She provided a few laughs too. Which is always nice. Even when you're ostensibly trying to scare people.

The basic premise is that, scattered around England - mainly in stately homes, there are a series of restless skulls who can not be contained by the grave and have, instead, been placed on fancy chairs, on mantelpieces, or on walls where they scream in agony on occasions and haunt those who dare to stroke them.

A more realistic story came with the tale of one of these skulls being abandoned in a tree and becoming a home for a family of blue tits who used the skull's eye holes as entrances and exits. 

Miss Ellen Wilmott, in Victorian times, was a famous horticulturist and, in Sandra's words, "a bit of a one" who is alleged to have sprinkled ghostly sea holly in other people's gardens to ruin then. She was also a fan of almost everything paranormal or supernatural and as a very rich woman, as a seven year old - in Victorian times - she received a £1,000 cheque for her birthday, had the means to buy all sorts of weird shit which was, after her death, put in the cellar of Warbleton Priory in Sussex.

Later, many years later, this curious hoard, was moved to another large house in Worcestershire and Sandra and her colleagues were, eventually, given access to it. In amongst the dust, the mouse skeletons, the dead insects, and the potentially lethal spores they found all manner of weird and wonderful artefacts. Many of which they had no idea what they were or what purpose they would have served.

But every time Sandra went back, about once a month, she found something she'd never seen before. Had she been unobservant? Was someone playing tricks on her? Or was something more sinister at play?

The latter seems unlikely as further research suggests the story of the screaming skull, or at least the screaming skull that was owned by Miss Ellen Wilmott, was made up by one Augustus John Cuthbert Hare, a noted Victorian raconteur who was a celebrated travel writer at the time. Were his stories so well told he convinced people they were true or is there something more to it?

Shaggy dog story or not, Sandra Lawrence believes there's something more and her investigations continue. I wish her luck while doubting she'll find anything to prove that screaming skulls, or ghosts, exist.

It wasn't the best LFS talk, though it wasn't the worst, and, as I mentioned earlier, it was more informal than normal. In keeping with that I've kept this account very informal and, like the best ghost stories, kept some of the details hidden. Thanks, once again, to the LFS for another enjoyable evening and thanks to Scott, Dewi, and Jade for keeping me company. I had to shoot off early (doctor's appointment today) so I didn't get to hang round for what's normally a very enjoyable debrief afterwards but hope to make up for that soon. I'm glad that The Miller is now one of my haunts.