Ghostly Goings on at Cressing Temple

The Ghosts of Cressing Temple

Every Year on Halloween the Hallkeeper appears to tell the tale of the Hallman.

1. The Hall Man

The Hall Man is the most convincing and prevalent of the ghosts that haunt Cressing Temple. Appearing at the top of the main staircase on the landing near the bathroom he was visible to two young children who came to the farmhouse as sons of the managers.

The first to see and describe him was the son of Jim Stadden who was manager of the farm in the seventies. He was about eight years old when he began to describe a man that he saw at the top of the stairs.

Wearing a large hat he had dark, long curly hair, blue trousers and big boots. The second child was Liam Lidstone and he described him in the same place and gave him the name of the Hall Man. On the 24 October 1994 the family revisited the farmhouse and I was able to interview Liam and his mother and father. I put the following report into the archive.

20 10 94 Archive note by Barry J Crouch Ref. The Hall Man

Today I met Liam Lidstone (son of Richard Lidstone, last Farm Manager of Cressing Temple before ECC acquisition in 1987). He was accompanied by his father, mother, brothers and sisters and relatives. Liam is the boy who described the Hallman when he was about three years old. He was born in 1981.

His mother told me that he became wary of the backstairs and then of the main stairway and when questioned he gave a description as follows of a man that he saw on the stairs.

He wore dark trousers with a thin red stripe up them similar to tracksuit bottoms of the time. He carried a horn, wore a big floppy hat and had long dark hair. In another episode his mother found him laying the table with many places. He explained it was for the men outside and that they ate lettuce.

Apparently Liam was a very talkative child but he could not read at the time and the family did not have a television. Today Liam cannot remember any of these things.

His mother also said that they always felt the house to be a bit creepy and that the main bathroom could suddenly turn cold while you were in it. Everyone felt the backstairs were scary and nobody liked to remain in the house on their own. When Richard was once left by himself because the family had gone away he brought the dogs into the house which he would never have otherwise done.

Liam was also wary of the doorway at the top of the main stairs and it became his mothers custom to always tentatively look around that particular corner.

The Hallman appears at the top of the stairs in the Farmhouse.

Later the Hallman was identified as a cavalier when the child was shown a portrait of one. Morant's History of Essex mentions the death of the son of Sir Thomas Davies. Kt. Lord Mayor of London who took the estate in 1677, 1678. 'His eldest son- Thomas Davies, Esq; unfortunately shooting himself here; his brothers- John, Robert, and James, sold this estate, in 1703, to Herman Olmius, Esq.'

No record of where he killed himself is available to me but it is claimed he shot himself and there are certainly musket balls recovered from the archaeological digs. This would also explain why the ghost might carry a powder horn in order to charge his weapon.

Where he appears might be contentious. The landing and the area of the stairway certainly existed in the 1600's. The Farm house was built in two stages. The south part dates to c.1600 and the centre part, twenty five years later possibly built as a granary. The two parts were then joined together shortly afterwards.

However the bathroom, the hall and the backstairs did not exist until the C19th. But there may have been another structure prior to them such as an external stairway or longdrop. The original staircase was almost certainly beside the chimney stack in the south part of the house where now there is an alcove.

2.The Ostler and the Missing Horse

One of the Great Barns plays host to an unfortunate ghost who met a violent death whilst going about his everyday work. Depending on who repeats the rumour, the Wheat Barn or Barley Barn is haunted by an ostler who was kicked to death by his working horse.

The barns today are great open structures like cathedrals, high and airy but this was not always the case. In fact the opposite was true. The barns were penned and divided into rooms and hoppers and further compartmentalised to create the thrashing floors in the midstrey.

As late as 1932 the Barley Barn had two great rooms at either end created by curtain walls strung across Trusses Two and Five. The mortices for them are plainly visible as are the lines of torn off nails where the studs were nailed to the shores.

The room in the south end was photographed in 1932 and its use was to store the gathered crop for threshing. In order to get in as much as possible an old horse, past his best years and called a goaf, was walked around to compress the wheat or barley.

As the room filled the horse got higher and higher until he eventually had to be lifted out with a hoist, block and tackle. It was during one of these lifts that the ostler met his end. Frightened or annoyed at being off the ground, the old goaf struck out and killed the ostler with a hoof to the head and left his spirit to roam the barns.

A well documented story associated with this agricultural process was published in An abstract of the rolls of........ of Cressing from Anno 1648 to Anno 1817 for Dowager Baroness Waltham. It also give some early details of the site in general and narrates;

"Though now for the most part weather-boarded, it was originally half timbered, or 'black and white work', the spaces between the studs being filled with wattle and daub, as is shown by the slots cut on the inner sides of the studs to hold the cross pieces.

The massive posts are complete butts of oak trees, roughly squared with the adze. Some are 17 inches square at the base, others 18 inches by 14. At the western end of the Barley Barn you will find that a section has been cut out as though to form a door. The story of this is as follows:-

Many years ago some barley was being stacked in this barn, and (following the usual practice) a horse walked round and round in a circle on top of the stack to compress it and get in as much crop as possible.

At dinner time the men went away, leaving the old horse on top of the stack. When they got back the animal had disappeared. After searching everywhere for him they came to the conclusion that a clever thief had walked him away during the dinner hour.

Some three months elapsed, and one of the men when walking by the end of the barn heard a subdued "hummer" (which is Essex for a whinney), and on investigating the sound discovered to his astonishment that the old horse had slipped down between the stack and the barn wall and had been imprisoned ever since.

He had had a nice restful time, and had done very well for himself in the way of food, but was getting exceedingly thirsty. A hole was cut in the wall to get him out, and all would have been well, but for the fact that the horse immediately bolted for the horse pond and filled himself up with water. The corn swelled in his inside and unfortunately caused his death from acute dyspepsia."

This quaint tale was obviously remembered locally and in the July 20th 1867 edition of The Builder was put in as an aside to an article about rats. The details are slightly modified but closely follow the plot. The author, Mr Mechi wrote;

"To show how animals can exist by the water contained in what is called dry grain and its straw, I will relate the case of a horse at Cressing Temple, a few miles from me, where a horse used for treading or consolidating the barley in the barn, being left there all night, slipped down between the closely packed barley and the boarded sides of the barn. In vain search was made for him in the morning, and it was concluded that he had been stolen.

On Christmas Day, as the ploughmen came to attend to their horses, they heard the neighing of a horse in the barn, and after removing the barley, they found the lost horse as fat and as sleek as a mole. Thinking he must be very thirsty, they ignorantly allowed him to go to the pond and drink his fill, and in consequence he died. This is well known to persons now living. The horse had gradually eaten his way into a comfortable space."

The story was evidently oft told and Mr Frank Cullen, a great seed merchant who owned Cressing Temple from 1913 to 1971 when he died, must have entertained many of his dinner guests with it.

In 1932, a letter written to C.F.D Sperling Esq of Ballingdon Hall, Sudbury on the 10th of December and addressing him as "Dear President" concluded;

When the excavations have proceeded further I should like to ask you and Mrs Sperling to come over to lunch one day and visit the site. Mr Cullen will then tell you the funny story of the horse which fell from the top of the barley stored in his gigantic barn, and lived between the stack and the wall of the barn from November to Christmas, before a hole was cut in the side and it was rescued, only to perish from rushing to the pond and swallowing gallons of water.

In the Thursday, April the 14th edition of the Braintree and Witham Times of the same year, 1932, the story was revived in an article entitled 'A Miscellany', penned by "Nomad" and follows the gist of the previous accounts.

But what factual evidence is there for it and is it linked to the ghost?

A detailed drawn record of the south wall of the Barley Barn, (not the west as described in the early story), shows that four of the studs have been sawn through to create doorways.

In the eastern aisle the stud was removed 500mm from the top to create a doorway 900mm wide. In the western aisle two studs have been 'rabbited' to create a hatch 1555mm high by 600mm wide. Barely enough for a man let alone a horse as fat and sleek as a mole. It is also likely that the aisles were seperated off from the barley room for other storage and that the horse could not get in there.

Just off the centreline of the barn wall however the final stud was sawn off 600mm from the top and gave a door width of 1000mm. Enough for a reasonably sized bloated horse to wriggle through. Today all three doorways are blocked off, the central one having two fake window panels plastered into it.

3. The Roman Centurion and Lefty

The story of the appearance of a bloodied roman came to me as hearsay. I first started work at Cressing Temple in 1986 when I came here to do some field walking.

The roman soldier appears on the site and warns of the Boudiccan revolt sweeping the country from Norfolk to Kings Cross. Bloodied about the head and obviously distressed he pleads for shelter and a direction to flee.

This story has obvious problems. It must either be a very old oral tradition or it has been made up.

In the garden excavations, quite unexpectedly a Romano-british inhumation was discovered cut through by mediaeval planting trenches. Eerily his head had been carefully severed from his body and placed on his feet in the east-west grave.

'Doug' was described as probably male and an older adult possibly more than 35 years old and 173.3m (5'9") +/-40mm. He also had squatting facets on both tibia which normally indicates a hard life working on the hands and knees. Doug suffered from osteoarthritis in his feet and back, osteochondritus dessicans in the left hip which cleared up and he was peppered with osteophytes (small bone growths) including a large one locking up his left shoulder.

Of the complete head the osteologist was able to reconstruct the cranial vault but the bones of the face and the base of the skull were too fragmentary to reconstruct.'Examination of the skull, cervical vertebrae and hyoid bone revealed no evidence of cut marks or decapitation.'

If the head was not hacked off as an execution there are only two ways it could have arrived where it did. Firstly it could have been surgically removed by a skilled hand creating no bone trauma or simply the body was so rotten the head fell or was pulled off before burial.

Either way Doug had lived a hard, physical life, suffered badly from sickness and had someone who cared enough to bury him. Later on he was renamed 'Lefty' on account of only the left side of his body remained to excavate.

4. Frank Cullen's Punctual Ghost

Frank Cullen owned Cressing Temple from 1912 to 1967 when he died of old age. Being a bachelor his estate passed to his nephew Anthony 'Tony' Cullen. On the 31st of July 1993 Tony's son Michael visited Cressing Temple and he was interviewed on tape by Ian Mason who was the educational officer on the site at the time.

"The panelling in the Oak Room came probably from the big house across the drive which was burnt down during the restoration; a big party with lots of oyster shells and wine bottles.

I always understood the Walled Garden dated from that time as a pleasure garden for the big house.It was understood that somebody, maybe he lost his girlfriend or his wife in the big blaze, and he wandered about.

A cavalier has been seen either in the room you use as a library which was my great uncle's winter bedroom or in one or two of the little back bedrooms at the back of the house.The son of one of the previous farm managers saw that and came down and described it and his parents asked him if the school; whether they had been talking about it, and they said no they had n't told him anything about the cavaliers,and it tallied."

Michael Cullen then talked about his great uncles' obedient ghost who manifested itself on demand. "But there was another one that sometimes appeared. Because the cellars (were) underneath the Oak Room, one night after dinner my great uncle said, when somebody asked about a ghost, 'Oh well just wait a few more minutes,' (which was approaching nine o'clock), 'there's one coming along soon.

.And noises were heard and some people got very upset but in reality it was a mouse that had been making its way up through the house behind the panelling. Probably it got in from the cupboard at the top of the stairs, the cellar stairs, or somewhere that way."

5. Knights in Shining Armour.

During Michael Cullen's visit to Cressing Temple he was taken on a tour of the site and gave his recollections of when he was a boy and came to visit Frank Cullen. Amid the general memories he suddenly came up with a new legend.

" There are a few other stories. I mean somebody in the thirties decided they would try and find out. There is supposed to be a knight in shining armour buried somewhere in the grounds, so they got a water diviner with a couple of sticks of metal, divine metal, and in the corner nearest to the old pump house he started shaking,. So they dug and they dug but he didn't find a knight in shining armour."

One would expect a diviner to get a strong reaction from near a pump house as obviously it would be over the well. But serious excavations had been carried out in the thirties as witnessed in the letter to Mr Sperling and from photographs held in the Essex Record Office.

These were on the marked position of the chapel and in fact partially cleared one of the Tudor cellars of the Great House which was adjacent to the Chapel. The Brain Valley Archaeological Society were allowed to excavate this in the late 1970's.

Michael Cullen went on to talk about the excavations; "There had been a 'dig' done in the thirties. I think there were some records somewhere. I think Colchester Castle lost them. There were quite a few things deposited at Colchester Castle which got lost.

The other interesting thing I always understood, that when the Knights Templar were disbanded they hid their treasures somewhere on the site. Somebody suggested it might be in the bottom of the pond opposite; but towards the bottom of the well, which is made of blue Caen stone and is reckoned to be either roman or norman, there is an archway towards the bottom, blocked up. It has been suggested that the treasure is behind the blocked up archway. I'll be down there with a pickaxe!"

On the north face of the beautifully fitted ashlar blocks of Reigate stone with which the well had been revetted was indeed a bricked up opening. It was about 600mm wide by about 1000m deep. The bricks were fresh and well made of a creamy fabric and bonded with cement mortar and the construction was undoubtedly modern, at the latest Victorian from the bricks alone.

When Frank Cullen bought the site in 1913, he set about upgrading all the services and built the pump house to service two very large header tanks in the roof of the garage. The handpump was removed and a water lift pump installed over the wellhead, probably steam or diesel driven at first and an electric motor with lead acid accumulators later implemented. The open arch, no longer required was then bricked up as a revetment to the backfilled pipe culvert. Water was then piped all over the farm in galvanised steelpipes and also serviced the cottages on the main road. So it was not treasure or a knight in shining armour but the onslaught of technology.

For a long while the archway in the side of the well lent credence to the belief that there is a priest hole and escape tunnel leading from the front door of the farmhouse and apparently all the way to Hungry Hall. However this would be over half a mile which is stretching credibility.

More likely the labrinth of Tudor drainage culverts have been uncovered from time to time over the years and misinterpreted, deliberately or otherwise, as tunnels. After all tunnels are infinitely more romantic than drains.

The above account was written by Barry Hillman-Crouch who worked at Cressing Temple for six years on the excavations. No claims can be made for the presence of paranormal activity but the best way is to visit the site, soak up the atmosphere and make up your own mind.