It opened in 1873 and grew to be the largest mental hospital in England. It pioneered the use of EEG’s and was so large it had a church, farms, telephone exchange, railway and much more. It officially opened on 1st April, 1873 and already had 115 patients, the capacity was for 1100.
In 1878 it was expanded for another 700, in 1884 a sanatorium was added for patients with infectious diseases and by 1915 it had grown once more, there were a recorded 2,820 patients there. A railway line for the asylum built in 1887 was used for staff, passengers and supplies like coal and this ran until 30th June 1957.
In the First World War patients were treated there, any casualties were buried in the private cemetery and civilian use resumed after the war. Post War it became part of the NHS and was renamed Whittingham Hospital and in July 1967 there was a meeting due to concerns about patient treatment, cruelty and fraud. Initially the complaints were suppressed but eventually the accusations could no longer be hidden away.
Patients were left untreated, some only got bread and jam, or ‘slops’ and some were left outside. Patients had witnessed other patients being dragged by their hair and other such allegations. As a result some staff suffered criminal punishment, two members of staff were jailed for theft and another was jailed for manslaughter when an elderly patient suffered an assault and died because of it.
The hospital closed in 1995 and parts of it have since been demolished. The church and St Luke’s main entrance block stay because the church in particular is grade II listed. Invariably it is now a spot for ghost hunters and urban explorers until its full fate has been decided.
[[File:St Johns church, Whittingham Hospital (geograph 2315764).jpg|thumb|The disused St John's Anglican Church in the hospital grounds, a Grade II listed building[21]]]
This was originally hidden away on my fiction account, as I sort of wanted to document it but I was worried about how it might sound. I have decided to re-visit and to also say hello, I am sort of here still, when I first wrote about it my mother was also still alive, so this is a pretty old recounting.
My mother was never one to be easily deterred or frightened; so, I guess that is why I took her coming through the door in a panic seriously. It was a winter night, freezing cold and I worked on a very early morning shift so would sleep in the afternoon and then stay up at night to watch my younger brother, feed our horses and prepare for mum coming home around 9-10pm.
My brother was around 14 to 15 years old and leaving in a rural area it meant that my mother liked me in at nights. She felt, that although at that age, he was mature it was always better to be safe than sorry and I might have moaned at the time but in retrospect I would have to agree. I was in the kitchen, in my god-awful boxer shorts that had been washed enough times to go grey, slippers on and a shirt that was likely some metal band. I was the epitome of the lazy ass student at the time… I wonder if anything has changed there.
I was single, working nights between a kitchen and then a morgue. NO, the two are not related before you ask but most of my spare time was spent on music, wargaming miniatures and reading. When I wasn’t doing that, I was either working or helping with the horses, animals or generally hanging around with friends. Some of which might read this, and I have since left that area, but they know who they are!
Anyway yeah back to the situation right? My mum came through the door, me in boxers and the dogs that had been asleep jumped up and started wagging their tails and getting excited. Dear Lord, mum took a look at me, I was expecting some form of lecture. She hated that I wandered around like that. It was bad for my brothers’ friends, I was setting a bad example, yada yada…
“Get your bloody coat on and dive in the car…” She says holding the keys. I’m looking at her. The car door is wide open and she’s not even moaning just looking concerned.
“Err can I get dressed?” I hear myself asking though finding it rhetorical, as she hastily shoves my long coat at me. My messy hair is hastily tied back, and the dogs are shut in the kitchen. I head out behind her. “What’s wrong?”
“There was a girl, she was… she was trying to hitch a ride. She was in her nightclothes, red coat over the nightie, running and I was scared to stop on my own, but she looked like she needed something. I figured we could go back, it’s just a couple of miles. We’ll find her easy enough.” She gave me the 101 on the situation.
“Sure.” I mutter as I steal one of her cigarettes (things were different back then, no I don’t smoke now). I notice now that there is heavy rain. My feet are cold. I light up and watch as we pull off.
And now a little geography for you: We live in England, United Kingdom and more specifically we lived in Exton, Rutland in England. There are a lot of villages and small towns, it’s a county and our nearest city is like 30-40 miles. Not far but darned far if you were say hitching a ride or whatever. Anyway, we drove about a mile out, passed some big farm that had sheep. All the lights were off, we headed past that, last local place for I think another two miles. Now we’re into the area where ploughed fields and trees are your scenery. For the more discerning rural spotter we of course have random animals that run in your path, such as deer, rabbits and the like.
Okay so you get the idea, it’s dark, raining and I’m already slightly peeved. Mum is driving, on a mission, she’s heading to this road. It’s quite a badly kept country one and it’s dangerous if you don’t know where you are and break down. You know you need are going to need a mobile or good walking shoes. So, we drive to where this woman was, and she starts to slow down to look for her.
“Okay she looked about twenty-ish and she was,” she lights a cigarette, “running down the road. There isn’t another road off, and I am sure in this time unless she has been picked up, we would have seen her.” My mum was looking and I’m thinking ‘don’t you make me get out this car’ and she looks to me. “She had a nightie and a red coat. She was running really fast.”
“Mum maybe someone else got her?” She looks to me like I am talking another language, which on this occasion I am not.
“No one really comes down here. No, she should be here.” My mother, who I am convinced now may need sectioning, finishes her cigarette. “Damn it.” She pulls to turn around and we head back home. I am now cold and firmly awake; the weather has eased so I get dressed and take the dogs out and think nothing more of it. The next day I finish work and head home and I have all but forgotten it as one of those silly things you can bring up as a guilt trip for a free pint at the local. The mum tells me that she told someone in the local shop about it and that person in the shop described the woman perfectly; naturally this led to my mother asking how of course.
“So?” I try to sound interested, expecting it to be a local person well-known to the villagers for this sort of shenanigan.
“The girl was called {I forget the name} and her boyfriend was killed three or four years ago at the crossroads when a Range Rover hit him. She was waiting for him to arrive, and he never did but she heard the noise. She went running to find him in her nightie and when she got there the Range Rover was speeding towards her. She never had the time to move out of the way. She was killed twenty feet away from him.” I looked at my mum and she looks back incredulous she’s even telling me it at all. In all the years after that if my mother had to drive that way it was only during the day, or if she had someone in the car with her.
I decided with a slightly clearer head to dig around. It’s pretty hard to know what to search for in order to try and help validate my mother’s claim and now it seems that the village has undergone changes from when I was there. In 2016 the Civil Parish of Exton was abolished and is know merged with Horn, (which has three properties by the way) and so I think the records of things like death’s etc all go to the Leicester offices. I did fine one thing about a roadside crash, a bit further away however at Manton Hall, this is situated on the other side of the large body of water known as the Rutland Water Nature Reserve but in “The Villages of Rutland (Vol 1, part II) the old had reports of noises when it was empty in 1942 and another report mentions Stocks Hill, Manton, was witness to a phantom passenger killed in a coach crash in 1973. Now just like so many places there are tales about the local historic hauntings but they are more campfire and undocumented. Can I verify it? No… do I believe my mothers conviction about what she saw? Yes. Any tales of your own you want to share but don’t want to put your name to? Or just comments in general you can mail me at silentthrillblog@gmail.com
Exton Church Graveyard, the Dovehouse is visible in the background.
If you look this up on Wikipedia it’s summarised the phenomenon of Black Eyed Kids (BEK’s) as urban legend, but is there more to this than simple campfire tales?
Websites generally attribute the start of the BEK legends to be around November 1998, a mailing transcript was sent out by Brian Bethel who describes an encounter with two children in Abilene, Texas and had found a second person with a similar encounter in Portland, Oregon. He recounted the story for ‘Monster and Mysteries in America’, a TV show and maintains his believe that it was legitimate.
The basics are that Brian was in his car, he saw two teenage boys staring at him from the street and during the encounter only one of them spoke. He felt frightened by them for no real reason and they wanted a lift to their home. Brian states that the encounter just felt wrong and at one point his hand was straying to the door subconsciously but he stopped himself just in time.
When the strange spell broke he realised their eyes were completely black, no pupils, no iris just two whole black orbs on each face. During the whole encounter both children were insistent and kept saying they needed to go home and see their mother, a normal request but the whole thing was just too odd. Brian felt utterly convinced if he had let them in that they would have killed him.
Outside of this mention little else came to the forefront about the incident or anything after it, but skip to 2012 and BEK are back on the rumour circuit. A Kickstarter horror, Black Eyed Kids, and an MSN feature in 2013 for the Weekly Strange helps bring the subject back up.
Snopes haven’t updated their perspective on this matter since the 2013 article and leave it to the status of legend.
2014, Birmingham Mail, from the UK reported about BEK’s in the Cannock Chase area. A local paranormal investigator, Lee Brickley, opened an investigation into the sightings after a woman described her experience. The woman heard what she thought were screams, she followed the noise and came across a wandering, sightless spectre.
She did not see a child until she turned around, they saw a girl of around 10 years old with her hands over her eyes. The witness tried to speak to her to ask if she had been screaming, this prompted the child to drop her hands and the girls eyes were pitch black. The witness left with her daughter and when she did turn around the girl was gone.
I looked around a little more, according to the ‘journal of the bizarre’ website article there is an explanation. Someone who got referred to as Onizuka claimed to have been a BEK and claims to them that the black eyes come from drugs and 99% of the sightings are people on drugs and into the Lolita fashion. Whilst his claims might seem odd to some people it might explain some cases.
The manor is also known as William A Bell House, it is a pink sandstone house in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Construction started in 1872, he went off to marry a woman in England who said she would live with him in Colorado as long as she could have her children in England. In 1973 it was added to the nationa; Register of Historic places.
In 1886, one night Dr Bell was away on business and Mrs Bell woke up to a room full of smoke. Embers had escaped from a fireplace and fortunately the children, and herself, got out along with the servants. The gardener also managed to help her save a painting by Thomas Moran but the rest of their belongings were lost.
The family returned in 1887, constructing a second manor, with a school room, conservatory, cloister and library with a special alcove so they could display the saved painting.
There have been eye-witness reports of people hearing chimes, of being bumped or touched. Strange noises have been heard, mystery footprints seen and objects moved.
There have been reports of apparitions too, a young girl with curly red hair, Mrs Bell and more oddly a skeletal woman in white who roams the estate.
By <a href=”//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:ERoss99″ title=”User:ERoss99″>ERoss99</a> – <span class=”int-own-work” lang=”en”>Own work</span>, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
Thanks to the Youtube channel series ‘Ask a Mortician’ I ended up travelling to Lincoln Cathedral. I spent a good twenty minutes from the car park up the steep hill to get there and was not disappointed, it was worth the walk and I got plenty of good exercise too.
According to Wikipedia they are also known as transi, and the term Cadaver Tomb refers to a variety of monuments. Thee carving is of a decayed/decaying body with the shroud wrapped around it. Some of them have another sculpture above of the persons likeness before their death. The term includes both the single cadaver monument and the ‘double decker’ that hosts the alive and dead.
The one I went to see if the one at Lincoln Cathedral, it is of Bishop Richard Fleming who died in 1431. It’s said to be the earliest surviving one in England and I took a video and pictures, you can enjoy the link –
There are examples in Italy too, including in Rome at the tomb of Pope Innocent III. France also has examples, Henry II is buried in ice.
Cadaver tombs look dramatic and macabre, with perhaps a deep meaning for those of faith. A reminder that the body must decay so the soul can be released, once left to dust the soul would not longer be trapped and paired, instead the soul would be released and thanks to prayers (and of course money) the soul could ascend.
My last one to look at is a transi-monument that really went the full hog… René de Chalon’s memorial is at Saint-Étienne Church at Bar-le-Duc in France. The young prince died at age 25, either his wife asked or he had asked her, but the upshot was the memorial was about a life-sized skeleton with strips of skin over it, a right hand clutching at the rib cage. He wanted the left hand holding up his heart up high. The hand once held his real and dried heart but somewhere along the lines it was believed to have been stolen during the French Revolution.
I didn’t get to France but I did appreciate the one I found more locally. I hope you like the pics I got courtesy of my phone.
Investigations into the unknown and weird 