The Haunted Cellar in my Corsham home

Let me state first of all that the photo above is not from the cellar in question, but just to get you in the mood a bit. I could equally have shown a photo of a flight of stone stairs to depict the ones which I often ran up, the hairs on the back of my neck still bristling with the fear of my experience.

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Sorry! I'm starting my tale at the wrong end I guess, so I'll begin it once again.

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The family home in Corsham was a very large eight-bedroomed house in the High Street,and housed my father's shop, which was a Wine Merchants. One side of the shop area , plus one of the bedrooms above, were let out to Cyril Thorne where he plied his trade as a chemist. Digressing from my main story slightly for a moment, I recall the old-fashioned 'candlestick' telephone that was housed in an opening between the back section of the chemists and our hall. There was a sliding panel that allowed either of us to answer the phone, and we shared the same number, Corsham 2277. That telephone is etched forever in my memory, being the bearer of so much news over the years, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Whatever the news was that travelled down the line, there was a comfortable feeling holding the phone stem in one hand whilst holding the ear-piece to the side of your head in the other. In many ways it ranks amongst the inanimate 'old friends' of my childhood.

My father being a Wine Merchant, there was invariably jobs that we children could do that earned us some pocket money, and this was especially so as the Christmas season drew near. The prize job was bottling up a cask of wine, usually there being, as far as memory permits, about seven dozen bottles to a cask. It was a job that took about an hour to an hour-and-a-half, depending on the size of the cask, and the rate of pay was 7/6d, a small fortune for a child whose pocket-money was normally about two shillings or two-and-sixpence per week. (I've held back from giving the conversion rate to New Pence, because the values have changed so much that a straight conversion is pointless.) If you really got the cream of jobs then you not only bottled the cask but you also got the job of putting the labels and capsules on the bottles as well. This would bring the total for a 7-dozen cask up to 14/6d! When you consider that when I started work in September 1959 my weekly wage was £2.5.0d, then you can understand what a fortune this was to a boy in his early teens!

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Originally the bottling was done in our kitchen, three large casks being hoisted up onto a special ramp and then allowed to settle for a time before they were ready for bottling. Getting ready for the job was a special procedure in itself. it was necessary to be able to see whether there was any sediment in the wine as you were bottling it, and so you placed a candle on a small stand in such a position that you created a backdrop of light behind the bottle, thus making any impurities obvious. Needless to say you had to concentrate on what you were doing.

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At some point my father negotiated with the Barnett Brothers who owned the newsagents next door, and he bought their cellars from them, a doorway being knocked between the two cellars to make them into one large area beneath the two properties. From then on all the bottling was done in the new section of the cellar, the casks being lowered into the cellar via an opening in the railings that were set in front of the shop window above, and later into the the pavement. One of the problems that came with the new cellar was that it often flooded after heavy rain, and had to be pumped out by the fire-brigade. I well recall going down the cellar steps, stopping about the third step from the floor, and seeing the water that swirled through the cellars, spoiling anything in its path. All in all, with the benefit of hindsight, I don't think that the additional cellar was a very good purchase by my father, for I don't recall our original cellar ever being flooded, despite the floor being flagstones laid straight onto the earth.

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On then to the main point of my story --- the haunting! At first everything was fine when I went down to the new section to bottle up a cask. I would settle myself down with the candle-light adding its warm glow to the experience and usually with Radio Luxembourg playing the favourite pop songs of the day in the background. I guess it was after I had done this over several weeks when I was busy as usual one evening, bent over the cask watching the bottles fill and checking for any tell-tale signs of impurities, that I suddenly felt the temperature in the cellar drop considerably. At first I assumed that there was a change in the wind direction of something as simple as that, but the room got colder and colder until it felt icy cold. I became a little disconcerted and concentrated on the job in hand even harder. Suddenly the air seemed to get thicker, the cold became more intense, and the hairs on the back of my neck started to bristle and I could sense that I was being watched from the far corner of the cellar, just below where the trapdoor opening was that led up to the street. The feeling became more and more intense, as though somebody or something was willing me to leave the cellar. I finished bottling that cask as quickly as I could and then rushed upstairs, afraid to say anything to anyone for fear of appearing a fool.

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After that the sensation of being watched in that cellar increased until the time when, part-way through bottling a cask, I fled upstairs, pale and shaking. In answer to my parent's questioning I simply said that I didn't feel well and wanted to go to bed. I was sorry, I told my father, that I would not be able to finish the bottling, and so he arranged for someone else to finish it. I never went down into that cellar again, having no wish to see just how far what I perceived to be a malevolent spirit would go.

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Many years later, in discussion with my eldest brother, he told me that the same experience had happened to at least three of us, although we each felt it was not something we wished to open a discussion on!

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What was it? Was it really a malevolent spirit from the past, or was it the fact that I was a pubescent boy with raging hormones? Does anyone really have an answer, or is it just one of the great mysteries that we encounter sometimes in our lives. Even today, I would hesitate about going down into those cellars, that's for sure!

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I wonder if any of my Corsham readers have any strange and unexplained mysteries of this nature to relate. If you do, dear reader, then why not email them to me and I'll share them through this blog.