Britain's "Psychic Detective" and the first live-broadcast ghost hunt
On the morning of 10 March 1936, an olive-green truck turned off the main road from London to Rochester in the southern United Kingdom. It moved slowly and carefully, driven by two men in white lab coats who leaned forward to scrutinize the rough country roads ahead of them. They had annotated maps, and were following a pre-planned route through the Kent countryside to the village of Meopham.
It was a wet, dismal sort of morning and a cold wind blew in off the North Kent marshes, swaying the leafless trees that crowded the roads. From time to time, one of the white-coated men would have to get out and guide the van around a tight corner or through a shallow ford. Its engine complained at the steep slopes and mud from the roads splattered up across the letters "B.B.C.", which were painted on the side.
A narrow country lane near Meopham, Kent. Even today, you'd be hard-pressed to get a BBC outside broadcast van round this corner. [Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0/user: Malc McDonald]
For the men of the British Broadcast Corporation's Outside Broadcast division, this was just another day at the office. Over the last few years they'd carted their van-load of microphones and amplifiers to concert halls and cathedrals, down mine-shafts and up to the top of mountains. On this occasion, the job sounded straightforward – the route was relatively easy, a Post Office crew had already run telephone lines to the location and the talent were on site and ready to go.
The only complication that weighed on their nerves was the fact that their boss, an austere former barrister called Seymour de Lotbiniere ("Lobby" when he was in a good mood), was to be running this show himself. That, and the thing they'd come to record, which was a ghost.
The Psychic Detective
Before we get to that, however, I need to pause and introduce the main character of this particular story: famous paranormal investigator (and chairman of Ghost Club) Harry Price.
Price grew up in New Cross, a neighbourhood of South East London whose economic fortunes have swung back and forth quite a bit over the last 200 years. Its early-19th-century houses have cycled between uses as single family homes, crowded flophouses and sub-divided flats. Charles Booth's Descriptive Map of London Poverty, which was researched in the 1890s when Price was a teenager, marks the streets he would once have walked as "Poor & Comfortable (Mixed)", which seems to be a pretty good description of Price's upbringing as the son of a travelling salesman.
In memoirs and interviews, Price would make vague allusions to aristocratic ancestry and an education in the idyllic Shrophsire countryside, but public records say he was a New Cross boy through and through. He attended Edmund Waller Primary School, then Haberdashers' Aske's (an oddly named secondary school up on Telegraph Hill) and finally Goldsmiths College – none of which are more than 800 metres from New Cross Gate station.
His early adulthood seems to have been marked by a sort of unfocused enthusiasm for a wide range of things. Price dabbled in amateur dramatics and theatre, helped out with archaeological excavations and conducted scientific experiments into the cutting edge technologies of his day. He also became fascinated by illusion and magic, obsessively practising his legerdemain and misdirection until he was an expert conjurer.
On a day-to-day basis, however, Price was – like his father – a travelling paper salesman. He moved to a village in Sussex and married Constance Knight in 1908. He inherited a stake in a paper mill when his dad died, and used that money to support his magical training and his growing library of books on the supernatural.
Escapologist and magician Harry Houdini was a major influence on Price's decision to start investigating spiritualists. Houdini would later write admiringly of Price's work debunking the claims of several high-profile British mediums.
In 1920, when he was 39 years old, Price joined the Magic Circle and enthusiastically followed the lead of his idol, Harry Houdini, by turning his skill at conjuring towards unmasking the deceptions and frauds of spiritualist mediums. The theatricality of this work seems to have appealed to Price, and he became adept at courting publicity with dramatic debunkings that made him a household name.
It would be wrong to paint Price as a hard-nosed skeptic, however. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he retained a belief in the supernatural and his love of a good story often won out over any scruples he might have had about sticking to the facts. In the 1930s, Price would establish a reputation as Britain's premier paranormal investigator – he preferred the term "Psychic Detective" – with his work at Borley Rectory ("the most haunted house in England").
The haunted house
Some time in late 1935, Price had been approached by the BBC to assist with the production of a broadcast from a "haunted house". It seems this idea had been kicking around at Broadcasting House since the early 1930s, but was one of those pitches that always comes up in meetings but never actually gets made. In 1932, producers had gone as far as to do some location scouting, trying to find a suitably spooky spot within a reasonable radius of London, but again dropped the idea for logistical reasons.
The house Price recommended in 1935 was Dene Manor (sometimes called Dean Farm), an isolated 15th-century farmhouse in north Kent. A friend of his, Mr Richards, had taken up a lease on the property about a year earlier, and had been urging Price to come and investigate the place, as it was apparently packed to the rafters with ghostly goings on.
Killick's Mill, which is the major landmark in Meopham, just off the village green. In case you're wondering, Meopham is pronounced "mep-um" for mysterious Kentish reasons. It lies near Wrotham ("roo-tum"), and Trottiscliffe ("troz-lee"). It's best not to look for logic in English place names. [Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0/user: Clem Rutter]
Dene Manor is a rather fetching half-timbered building, once part of the manor house of a medieval landowner – though not as grand a building as that description might make you think. It sits in a shaded, steep-sided valley a few miles east of the Meopham, separated from the rest of the village by an area of forest ominously known as The Brimstone Wood.
Even today, this little pocket of north Kent – between the capital's outer suburbs and the towns of Rochester and Maidstone – is surprisingly rural and quiet considering it's only an hour away from GWR's City of London office. I'm sure that it provided the correct haunted-house ambiance back in the 1930s.
Any doubts Price might have had about his suggestion were immediately dispelled when a shocked BBC producer informed him that Dene Manor was the very location they themselves had picked out back in 1932. It seems Mr Richards was not the first person to have experienced something strange there.
With the location agreed, Price and the team at the BBC put the broadcast in the schedule for 10 March. The idea was that Price would make two separate broadcasts from the house – one at 8 p.m. introducing the concept, giving some background on the house and explaining the methodology, and one shortly before the BBC went off the air at midnight, which would include reports of anything that had happened in the interim, or that was happening at the time.
Harry Price's personal inventory for the ghost hunt broadcast, which I photographed while looking through his archived papers at the University of London's Senate House Library. It's typed on the back of a piece of letterheaded paper belonging to Price's National Laboratory of Psychical Research (which mentions the wonderful telegraph address "Teleplasm, London").
Preparations for a long night
This all brings us back to that rainy day in the spring of 1936. When the BBC outside broadcast crew arrived, Price and his colleagues were already at the house setting things up. As the van was unloaded, and the enormous wooden-cased audio equipment carried through to the dining room, Price and his fellow investigators walked through the house, meticulously attaching tamper-proof seals to all the windows and doors, spreading cornstarch on the floors and wiring up a crude electrical motion detector on the door to the cellar that was at the heart of most of the reported activity.
They left just the exterior door to the kitchen unsealed, where it was to be watched over by Mr Richards' cook and from which access to the rest of the house was only possible via the room in which the ghost hunters were assembled. With all preparations made, and the party briefed on their individual responsibilities, Price and his intrepid assistants took their places.
Now I should explain at this point that no recording of this broadcast exists. At the time, broadcasting live was a far less technically demanding prospect for the BBC than recording anything. If the BBC wanted to make a recording of a broadcast during this period, they typically had to patch the audio through to Abbey Road Studios in St Johns Wood. This was expensive and complicated, and generally something that was only done for extremely high-profile, pre-planned programmes, such as speeches by the king.
I know roughly what was said, however, because Price kept his typewritten notes from the show, as well as a full copy of the script used in the 8 p.m. introductory broadcast. This material, as well as a post-broadcast debrief that he wrote for the BBC magazine The Listener, is kept with Price's other papers at the University of London's Senate House Library.
Introducing the ghost busters
At 8 p.m. sharp, an announcer in London introed the show, while at the house Seymour "Lobby" de Lobtinere, headphones on, counted the ghost-hunters in for what would be the first live-broadcast ghost-hunt. BBC announcer Frederick "Freddie" Grisewood smoothly began the night's events with a cheerful "Hello", before continuing, "There are eight of us here. We're all sitting around a long oak table in the dining room. There's an enormous open fireplace in this room – in fact our side is practically all fireplace – and there's a log fire burning away brightly."
As he talked, Freddie introduced the others who were in the room with him. Top billing, of course, went to Price, but there was also Richard Lambert (editor of The Listener and one of Price's frequent collaborators) and Professor Cryil Joad, a philosopher and public intellectual with an interest in the paranormal.
Grisewood didn't explicitly name the others present, at least not in his introduction, and the script uses pseudonyms for some of the people present ("Mr Smith", etc.), but I've been able to figure out who they were from Price's handwritten annotations. The other people in the room that night were Mr Woodall (or "Wooding" as it is written in a few places), who was the groundskeeper at Dene Manor; Mr Richards, who was renting the property with his wife Pauline (who doesn't seem to have been present); and John Baugh, a former resident of the house with stories to tell.
This fantastically grainy picture is the best image I've been able to find for what Lobby's audio gear would have looked like. It's a picture of the set up used on a boat during coverage of the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race in 1934. Lobby would have likely used four-channel passive mixer (basically four big volume controls, one for each input channel), at least one OBA/7/7 amplifier (to boost the signal for broadcast) and likely a few IB/103 buffer preamplifiers to drive the ribbon microphones. Each one of these components was at least the size of a modern microwave oven, weighed 20–30 kg (44–66 lb) and would have given off almost as much heat as the crackling log fire.
The introduction continued with a brief explanation of the experimental set-up. Seymour's men had wired up four microphones: one was on the table in front of the presenters, one was in the cellar, another hanging from the rafters in the attic, and the last one in the branches of a tree outside. As he mentioned each microphone, he paused to allow Lobby to fade up the channel for each mic and hold it for eight seconds (the script is oddly specific about this). The audience was informed that Mr Lambert and Mr Joad were monitoring the cellar and attic mics on headphones, and would interrupt if they heard anything remarkable.
Again, because all I have is a pre-written script, I don't know what the audience heard when the mic feeds were faded in, but I'm guessing it was just the creaking of an old building on a windy night. Grisewood, after stating his hopes for the evening – "I don't particularly want anything to happen, and I don't want anything not to happen, if you see what I mean." – then passed to Price, who began his description of the house and its history:
"Like all mansions worth of the name, this house has a psychic history. There are legends of muffled footfalls having been heard in some of the passages, and, even on the hottest night, cold breezes are said to occur in at least one part of the building. The focal point of the alleged haunting is in the wine cellar, which happens to be in the very oldest part of the Manor. The approach to the cellar is down a flight of stairs, at the top of which is a door. This door is said to open of its own volition, unless latched or locked. It is through this cellar that the cold breezes sweep. Adjoining this chamber is another cellar, walled up many years ago in order to strengthen the superstructure of the house.
These manifestations were perhaps a distant echo of some tragic and emotional scene and were not necessarily caused by spirits. Such phenomena are of rare occurrence; but, when they DO happen, they are very impressive, and it is the duty of the scientific investigator to inquire into the meaning of them without prejudice."
Unfortunately the actual meat of the first broadcast – the ghost stories themselves – are indicated in the script by placeholders like "[MAN'S STORY AND CROSS EXAMINATION]" or "[ASK MR SMITH A FEW QUESTIONS]" because this stuff was all to be done live and unscripted. So all I can offer you is this brief summary, given in Price's write up for The Listener:
"Listeners heard Mr Jon Baugh, a former owner, tell the story of his strange experiences, and a workman at the place [Mr Woodall] also told us about the curious noises he had heard. Just before the broadcast, Mr Grisewood and I received a letter from Mr G Varley who used to rent the manor and he related an extraordinary story. He not only heard strange noises, but saw the ghost on several occasions and once hurled a poker at it – or rather through it."
With the appropriate atmosphere established, Price passed the mic back to Freddie Grisewood. Listeners were treated to another 20-30 seconds of live haunted house ambiance from the cellar and attic mics, before they signed off with "goodbye until quarter-to-twelve – and don't expect too much!"
A diagram of Harry Price's door movement detector, which appears to involve having an exposed mains-voltage electrical contact on the floor in front of the door. I guess ghost hunting is easier if you make some new ghosts yourself.
So what happened?
At 11:45 p.m. the BBC cut away from the light dance music of the Joe Loss and his Band in order to get an update from the team at Dene Manor. Eager listeners, who had stayed up late to catch this dramatic update, leaned into their wireless sets. What had happened at the house? What might they hear as the witching hour approached?
The answer, as you might have already guessed, was nothing. The first live broadcast ghost hunt had disappointingly ended the way that so many of its descendants would, with some slightly embarrassed vamping for time. No transcript of this unrehearsed 15-minute broadcast survives, but we have Price's notes.
It seems that the highlights of the evening were when a mysterious sound – "like that of running water" – was heard from the attic mic. An intrepid team ascended the narrow, spooky stairs, torches in hand, only to discover that it was, in fact, actual running water. The cook in the kitchen had gotten bored and decided to do some washing up, and the cistern was refilling. They then rushed to the cellar, where the sound of footsteps had been heard – but eventually concluded they were hearing their own footsteps in the rooms above.
Article from 11 Mar 1936 The Daily Sketch (London, Greater London, England)
The only mysterious event that Price could point to was a tiny variation in temperature, picked up by the thermograph in the cellar. It moved by about a degree in a relatively short time, though he was disappointed to see that the temperature had gone up, rather than the traditional ghostly down.
The public reception to the broadcast was mixed, but Price remained undeterred, writing the following as his concluding thoughts on the whole saga.
"Although a few listeners appear to have been disappointed that we did not get the ghost in front of the microphone during our broadcast, the great majority of my correspondents agrees that the experiment was well worth while. It was novel, it was educational, and it had the merit of permitting the listener to participate in the investigation. That we chose an eminently suitable house for our purpose cannot be denied."
Header image: Harry Price set up in front of the microphone at Dene Manor on 10 March 1936. [Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain/User: Jonund] combined with a public domain image of an entirely innocent and blameless cellar door in Massachusetts, which I've clumsily altered into something sinister.