Kevin Dixon: England's most haunted house was in Torquay?

For decades Torquay’s Castel-a-Mare on Middle Warberry Road was regarded as England’s most haunted house.

The crumbling Victorian villa had acquired a reputation having reputedly been haunted for 50 years during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This notoriety was seized upon by those wanting to promote Torquay as a centre of the occult.

Several explorations of the house took place to look into phenomena such as piercing screams, doors refusing to stay closed, steps heard running along corridors and up and down stairs. Ghosts were supposed to haunt not just the house but the stables where frightened horses had to be forced in backwards, while dogs being taken for walks would howl as they passed, their owners having to walk on the other side of the road.

Mediums failed to exorcise the spirits, no tenants would stay very long and eventually the building fell into disrepair.

We know most about Castel-a-Mare from the memoirs of committed Spiritualist Violet Tweedale. It is from her book ‘Ghosts I Have Seen’ (1920) that we take a detailed description of Violet’s involvement with the villa.

Violet’s initial investigations found that her “twig and straw arrangements”, left overnight to indicate human interlopers, remained undisturbed. However, “not a single door was shut, all were thrown defiantly wide”. 

Resolving to solve the mystery, a team of intrepid investigators stayed in the house. Violet recalled “Suddenly a click made us look up. The handle of the door was turning, and the door quietly opened wide enough to admit the passing of a human being. It was a bright sunny day, and one could see the brass knob turning round quite distinctly. We saw no form of any sort.”

This needed further investigation, and in 1917 Violet joined an eight-strong team which included a medium, a builder and a soldier on leave who also seems to have been an amateur exorcist in his spare time. They began to explore the notorious house.

Soon the medium fell into a trance and “sprang to her feet with surprising agility, pouring out a volume of violent language. Her voice had taken on the deep growling tones of an infuriated man, who advanced menacingly… In a harsh, threatening voice he demanded to know what right we had to intrude on his privacy.

“The entity that controlled her possessed superhuman strength. His voice was like the bellow of a bull, as he told us to be gone, or he would throw us out himself, and his language was shocking… suddenly she rushed full tilt at the soldier, who had stood his ground, and attacking him with a tigerish fury drew blood at once. This frail little creature threw us off like feathers, and drove us foot by foot before her… she was too much for us. Then suddenly, without warning, the entity seemed to evacuate the body he had controlled, and the medium went down with a crash and lay at our feet, just a little crumpled dishevelled heap.”

Another visit was then arranged, and the male entity again took control of the medium: “The same violence, the same attacks began once more.  ‘Poor master! On the bed. Help him! Help him!’ she moaned, and pointed to one side of the room… By clenching her hands on her throat, the medium indicated death by strangulation…’”

Later the medium told them that a physician “of foreign origin” had strangled the master of the house and had then gone on to murder a maidservant. There’s a good range of Victorian stereotypes here. 

Just to put things in a bit more of a context, Violet wasn’t a stranger to supernatural manifestations. She once described being terrified by “a large headed, vicious elemental gnome” who turned up in her hotel room in Switzerland, and she had the very good fortune to spot a pixie sitting on a leaf in the garden of Lupton House near Brixham.

Our second narrative from the paranormal frontline comes from the writer Beverley Nichols. In 1920 Beverley, his brother and a friend, Lord Saint Audries, were drawn to the house having heard of its haunted history. 

Searching with only a candle to light their way the three ghost-hunters climbed a narrow staircase to the top floor. Beverley said that his mind and body seemed to slow down and his thinking had become confused. He managed to crawl to a window before fainting.

Lord Saint Audries then decided to look around alone but he would whistle to let the others know that he was safe. For 20 minutes  he searched the house and was heard to whistle. Suddenly Beverley and his brother felt something leave the house, silently passing them. They then heard a terrified shout from Audries and the noise of a violent struggle. A dishevelled Audries then ran into the garden and collapsed beside them. 

When Audries recovered he said that his attention had been drawn to the room where Nichols had fainted. He saw a greyish light in the darkness coming from the room. Something “black, silent and man-shaped knocked him to the floor. An overwhelming sense of evil overcame him, and he struggled to keep his sanity as he ran from the house.”

According to accounts, the three later discovered that a mad doctor had killed his wife and their maid in around 1870. Another version of the story is that a guest or patient was visiting the same deranged doctor and was murdered. No record of any of these outrages seems to exist, however. 

Significantly, such incidents give us a new form of angry and spiteful poltergeist for a new century. Torquay’s traditional spectres were sad and tragic figures, seeking out a remedy for some past wrongdoing. These modern spectres were malicious entities manifested during and after the Great War. Violent ghosts for violent times.

Castel-a-Mare was renovated in 1920. Not unexpectedly it then acquired another layer of myth. Local builders said that, even though they had securely locked up overnight, their ladders and paint had been found to be knocked over when they opened up in the morning. One added that he didn’t like the feeling and atmosphere of the new bathroom at the top of the stairs…

So, we have a well-recorded series of supernatural encounters witnessed by a variety of named and educated individuals. 

Yet there are other explanations.

In 1859 author Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote his short novelette ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’. Edward lived in Torquay’s Warren Road and certainly knew his subject having studied paranormal phenomena, spiritualism, and mesmerism for over twenty years.

He based the fictional story on the famous case of London’s 50 Berkeley Square, and it would become one of the world’s most anthologised haunted house tales.

This was the first modern haunted house tale and it effectively created the genre. Before that, authors placed their ghosts in remote locations and the Gothic past. Edward set his narrative in an urban present, and identified the cause as psychic phenomena; a theme many later writers would utilise. Indeed, the novel established the rules for big house cinematic ghost stories including the 1999 Liam Neeson movie ‘The Haunting’.

‘The Haunted and the Haunters’ is a first-person fact-finding mission to find rational explanations for supernatural phenomena. The investigator hears footsteps, encounters furniture moving about, a cold room at the “heart” of the house and ghosts replaying their tragic deaths.

The similarities between Edward’s story and the Castel-a-Mare haunting may just be a coincidence. But presumably supernatural enthusiasts, such as Violet and Beverley, would have read the novel. So did Edward’s fiction act as a subconscious script for their terrifying experiences?

Sadly for those of us interested in Torquay’s paranormal past, the current occupiers of what was once Castel-a-Mare have not reported anything unusual about their properties.