The Old Hall, an old church, and our ghost hunting friends

Well, "sleeping in" sounded like a swell idea, but we were still pretty new to this hotels-across-the-sea thing and neither of us slept very well that night. The Bestwood is a nice enough place, but we didn't like the room and when we return in 2015, we probably won't stay there.

Sharon got up early, threw on some jeans and went down to the lobby with her single-serving hotel room coffee for a morning smoke. I long ago adjusted to the fact that Sharon is a can't-function-without-my-coffee type, and that's ok. She insists the coffee over there is pretty bad; all I can do is take her word for it. I don't drink coffee - all of it tastes pretty bad to me.

While she was gone, it occurred to me that she was still without her spare Nikon battery, which was likely merging with some Yorkshire churchyard flora somewhere, and as we were in a big city, maybe there was a chance we could snag one in Nottingham before our scheduled meetup with the Past Hauntings crew. What I found from a quick Google search for camera stores was, unsurprisingly, a handful of Curry's in and around the city centre, leaving me the prospect of negotiating downtown traffic and finding a place to park, most probably to learn that they didn't have the same camera battery that the Curry's in York didn't have. I pitched Sharon on the idea upon her return, half-heartedly, and she waved it off.

It was our idea to meet up with the Past Team during the early afternoon, as we wanted to visit at least two locations and were leery starting off after sunset, lest we'd be in for a long night and too little sleep. We were traveling to Suffolk the next day, and needed to get our ghost hunting fix in before it got too late.

We packed up the equipment and went down to the car, passing a few hugging wedding reception holdovers from the night before, and one or two others who looked like they needed more pretty bad coffee. The GPS fired up, we eased out of the car park, headed for our arranged meeting at Sutton Scarsdale Hall, a recommendation from the Past Hauntings patriarch, Sean.

Sutton Scarsdale Hall - Derbyshire, UK

The ruined Georgian mansion (or, more properly, "stately home") was built in the 1720's, the third or fourth building on the grounds dating to pre-Conquest days. It was commissioned by Nicholas Leke, 4th Earl of Scarsdale with blue blood extending back four hundred years. He died childless, though, and the place eventually passed into the Arkwright family, where it remained, more or less intact, until WW1.

Much larger inside that it appears from in front, scattered here and there with graffiti, desperately sad, the place is unmistakably early Georgian with its classical architectural conceits still in battered evidence; I suppose a convenient metaphor for the decline of Empire for anyone concerned about that sort of thing, but it didn't feel like that. More like a forgotten place of worship, to an indifferent and vacated god. Its ruin was more compelling than its scale.  

We don't know if it's haunted - we did a fair amount of EVP recording and got nothing, and nothing noteworthy appeared on still or video - but we imagine the place must be intolerably creepy at night. In an overcast afternoon, it just exuded a yawning, vaguely impatient melancholy.

Sharon shot some walkin'-around video. Let us know if you see anything paranormal - we didn't.



The War created a massive upheaval in the fortunes of the historically wealthy families of England, between the dearth of manpower to sustain massive estates, heavy taxes imposed by the Crown, and, most brutally, the death of so many estate inheritors in the French and Belgian trenches.  We don't know for a fact that Sutton Scarsdale fell victim to this wealth-sclerosis, but suspect so. The place was purchased by investors in 1919, stripped of many of its absurdly ornate features (including mahogany staircases and complete paneled rooms, one of which was purchased by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and still stands today...in Philadelphia), and left to crumble slowly as a cavernous  shell, until saved by a local writer named Osbert Stillwell in the 1940's. The place is now owned and managed (lightly, it should be said, as there is not gate nor admission) by English Heritage.

Hi Sharon ! - Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire

Next door to the Hall is the ancient St Mary's Church, built in the 13th century and rebuilt by the Leke's in the 14th and 15th century.

St Mary's - Sutton Scarsdale, Derbyshire

 Some amazing floor and wall memorials, and a terrific churchyard.

Floor memorial - St Mary's Church

 

Floor memorial - St Mary's Church

Memorial - St Mary's Church,

We spent a couple of hours or so at the Hall and the church, the churchyard just would not let us go. The Past crew, whom we had met last year and was kind enough to give us another whole afternoon for English ghost hunting, suggested we go off for lunch before hitting the evening attraction, a re-visit to the desperately creepy Annesley Hall, just outside Nottingham. The place is a ruined manor house, parts of which date to the 13th century, and on its grounds is a ruined church (All Saints) dating to Norman times, and an abandoned cemetery.

While we would have been pleased enough to go hit another site, I did experience a very unsettling phenomenon at Annesley in 2012, and we both wanted to go back. Better still, even after taking a long lunch, we'd get there during the daylight, which would give us a chance to get a better look at the church and the cemetery, both of which were essentially bathed in darkness in 2012, frustrating our obsessive graveyard photography ambitions.

Plus...we wouldn't be tripping over tombstones. (Actually, I tripped over one anyway...)

I made Sean - who at one time was a cabbie in Nottingham - promise me that he'd do his best not to lose me on the way to Annesley, and he cheerfully assented. A lover of all things automotive, he regarded our rental wheels with a little envy, telling me he had his eye on the very same model. I conceded my indifference to the thing, admitting that we got ours in an auto-transmission trim. He laughed a bit. Tourists.  

We found a place to eat lunch not far from Annesley, a family-type affair called The Badger Box. Sharon tells me that this site was hosted a legendary ancient public house from the days of Robin Hood - you'd never know it from looking at the place, but England is like that.

We had a full crew: Sean and his wife Sarah, his son Daniel, daughter Sian and her boyfriend (now fiancee) Leon. Ghost hunting is a family affair for the Cadmans. We chatted about the ghost hunting scene, Sean lamenting the increasingly competition for decent sites to investigate, and exchanged our philosophies about evidence gathering and the unfortunate popularity contest that social media had introduced into what was once a relatively humble and carefully drawn discipline.

Sharon went outside for a quick smoke, and a local approached her for a light. She responded to his request in her American accent, and the guy immediately went off into a rant about, of all things, John Kerry, who had ruffled some feathers the day before by characterizing France as "our oldest ally" in his diplomatic efforts to gain support for US intervention in the Syrian civil war. I suppose he was technically right, as it was France who helped us win the Revolutionary War against George III's vainglorious colonial governors, but still...stupid and needlessly offensive to our British pals.

It wasn't a big deal, but like the 2012 trip when we encountered (and sympathized with) a group of Welsh golf vacationers in York who took some exception to Mitt Romney's idiotic remarks about London's readiness for the 2012 Olympics), we were gently reminded that clumsy US political rhetoric regarding our relationship to the English did not slip by unnoticed. Nor, evidently, anything favoring the French. 

We finished up lunch and headed off to Annesley Hall in the fading late afternoon light.