Danny Robins hears from a man who came face to face with the former owner of his new home. The problem was that she had been dead for a year…
I am sure you are inundated with stories,” reads the email. “All I can say is that this one needs to be heard.”
Moments later, I’m typing a reply, convinced Grant has sent me one of the oddest, most unsettling ghost stories ever. Apparitions – ghosts you can actually see – are rare, but this case has loads of them! Grant’s story takes place when he moved to Rottingdean, a windswept clifftop village near Brighton in the late 90s.
Back in the 1930s and 40s, the village was home to a luxury hotel named Tudor Close. Hollywood stars such as Cary Grant and Bette Davis stayed there and it even inspired the board game Cluedo, which was originally known as ‘Murder at Tudor Close’. When the hotel closed, it was converted into a crescent of separate houses, and it’s one of these that Grant bought. “We still had the original 1930s bath,” he tells me. “And our dining room had been the dining room of the hotel.” From the photos I’ve seen, the house really does look like the set of a murder mystery. The previous owner was Elizabeth Dacre, a well-known figure in Rottingdean – a charismatic military widow, glamorous and wealthy, who’d died in her nineties, a year before Grant moved in.
The oddness starts one night as Grant is coming home from work. As he gets back to Rottingdean, the weather’s at its worst – torrential rain and a savage wind coming in off the sea. The streets are deserted, but outside the local church, an old woman is sitting on a bench, braving the storm in an expensive camel coat, slowly rocking back and forth. If this seems strange, it gets stranger the next night when Grant sees her again on the exact same bench, in the exact same clothes, rocking in the exact same way…
Grant might have thought no more of it, but, a short while afterwards, his daughter says she sees an old lady standing outside their glass front door. When Grant’s wife goes to answer it, there’s nobody there! Then there’s a visiting friend who tells Grant she sees his grandmother going up the stairs. Only Grant doesn’t have a grandmother and there’s nobody else in the house. Who is this mysterious old lady who keeps cropping up?
One day, Grant is sitting outside the house when some neighbours come over to say hello. They’ve lived on the crescent for years, and wonder if he might be interested in a book they have – a self-published autobiography of the house’s previous owner, Elizabeth Dacre! Grant looks at the photo on the cover, of an old woman, still glamorous in her nineties… Suddenly, everything makes sense. He’s staring at the face of the woman he saw outside the church! How can this be possible? Has Elizabeth really returned to haunt the new owners of her house?
Probably the strangest part of Grant’s story, though, comes one night when he awakes as the burglar alarm goes off. Going downstairs, he opens the door to the dining room to be greeted by the sight of the 1930s dining room of the Tudor Close Hotel, full of guests decked out in period attire. It feels like a timeslip moment, a real-life version of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel photograph, a roomful of ghosts turning to stare at him as if he were the intruder!
This article was first published in the June 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
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From ghostly phantoms to UFOs, The Battersea Poltergeist’s Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of paranormal encounters on his BBC Radio 4 podcast Uncanny. Episodes available now on BBC Sounds
