DIMPTON HALL
Location: West Dimpton is a tiny community eight miles from the center of London on the A10 near Waltham Forest which is said to be haunted by shadowy figures wandering around the trees. The partial hamlet combined with East Dimpton to the northeast are part of the London Historical Tour with charters available from the local British Bureau of Tourism.
Description of Place: Dimpton Hall is the town hall and courthouse for the tiny parish of West Dimpton in Middlesex County, England with the upper floors rented out for guests and visiting dignitaries. Four stories tall and constructed of limestone brick quarried from Sussex County, the Twelfth century fifty room edifice has twelve chimneys, thirty-five fireplaces, a grand dining hall, three main stairways and four back stairways along with two stairway turrets, twenty-two guest rooms, five grand suites and an elaborate basement and sub-basement of catacombs and crypts. It is also believed the structure is riddled with secret passageways and stairways with human remains being discovered even today. On May 18, 2005, a sealed room was discovered walled up behind a closet with a access passage way to a previously unrevealed room of the attic. An exploratory review of the room revealed a bedroom filled with furniture from the Eighteenth Century along with a period armoire containing two nearly complete human skeletons, one was a little girl, the other was an adult woman. The basement catacombs also were once used as crypts to old human remains as late as 1875.
Ghostly Manifestations: On May 17, 1994, eighteen-year-old Bud Bundy on a vacation to England tracing the lineage of his family's heritage from the United States to England stayed as a guest of this many storied British castle. His stay was almost uneventful; the town's feud with his ancestors had died out years before, but it was quite sure by those who lived in the town that the spirits of the past were not quite so ready to let the dead rest. Dimpton Hall is known locally to be very haunted and a vague nearly forgotten stopping point on ghost-hunting tours. Accompanied by his parents and often distracted sister, Bundy had the single honor of staying in a room that had once been used to hold shackled prisoners awaiting trial as well as for holding corpses waiting for burial. Today, it's a bedroom saved for guests. Shortly into the night, Bud heard wailing noises from beyond his room and he woke to see what seemed to be people entering his room and wandering by his bed. Needless to say, he got very little sleep.
Such stories occur often in the drafty and atmospheric inn whose first floor is mostly used for local town matters. Guests often wake to see a figure standing by the bed. Others have reported hearing children playing in empty rooms. In 1998, a young girl became lost on the third floor after trying to join the other playing children she had been hearing for over an hour. The third and top floor aren't even open to the public; it's the unrestored section of the castle filled with unused furniture, dilapidated walls and broken windows, but yet, every so often, something sounding like a marching band starts from one end and pounds the doors and walls from one to the other, sometimes three to four times a night. The only way to stop it is for someone to unlock the door to the north stairwell and walk through chasing off whatever is up there, but finding a volunteer to go up there by flashlight is not the easiest task in the world.
Due to the fact that part of Dimpton Hall has been used as a courthouse for over five hundred years, the location has been the site of countless hangings and executions, and the innocent as well as the guilty have been returning still screaming for justice. A stalwart figure in Victorian regalia has been seen several times near the courtroom. An RAF lieutenant saluted it in 1943, and it was caught by photo in 1979. Screams echo from empty rooms, and employees often feel they are being followed as they come down the grand staircase. When they nervously look up above them, the faces of nonexistent people jump back from the railings to hide from the living.
In 1704, Lord Walter Chitterling crossing through on his way from Edinburgh to London was writing in his jornal in the grand dining room when he just managed to catch the smell of something rotting from the fireplace. He writes in his journal that he contacted his hosts and directed them to inspect the fireplace for the smell, but they could not figure out what was causing them until a manservant just happened to look up and notice the top half of a corpse hanging from the center beam twenty feet above them. Chitterling writes: "It was blue-green in color in regards to its skin with wild, bulging eyes ablaze upon it, his dangling jaw open and frozen in time to a long dead scream with long white hair draped down over its black rotting body as if ripped apart by a powerful force. There were no legs to this poor rotting servant of God, just the unfinished mass of where his hindquarters had been...."
His host quickly locked the room and had his servants quickly summon the magistrate and a mortician from London, but when the local constabulary arrived, the room was empty except for the smell. There was only one entrance to that room; the other door bricked up around 1650. It would have taken several people a long period of time to hang a figure from the center beam, and Chitterling was convinced no one could have removed it in the short period the room was locked. Over the years, this figure has been almost fifty times with the most recent in 2002. A photograph in 2008 even shows a vague shadow above the table where it might have appeared.
Since 1854, guests with children have seen a nanny on service despite there isn't one on duty. Seen often by children, the vague white figure haunts the former nursery, now a judge's meeting room. A phantom housekeeper has been seen traipsing up and down the stairwell next to main entrance, sometimes carrying blankets or hiding in the corner of the landing. It's believed that people sensing a cold spot on the second floor landing are actually being felt by her presence. Women also feel being touched in the back as they ascend those stairs.
The basement and foundation is also quite haunted. Legends and stories of black shadows roaming through there go back to 1630. Closed off to trespassers, part of it is used as a wine cellar with the lower ramparts barricaded behind a locked steel door. Howling calls sometimes echo from down there as well as plaintiff calls for help. There is an exterior entrance from the lower garden descending down fifty feet at a hazardous angle, but it's been blocked and sealed behind steel bars further wielded in place by a tree growing against the the door. A glowing lady in green has seen at times lurking around the tree since the Eighteenth Century.
In 1976, a German psychic named Olivia Born visiting Dimpton Hall accurately identified fixtures and furniture on the first floor that had been added before 1940. These objects had been salvaged from the old Madderly Castle nearby which was also known to be haunted until it was bombed during World War Two after being used as an orphanage and then for RAF training exercises. When Born tried to explore the third floor, she refused to do it, going no further than the third step of the second staircase. She also predicted that the renovations would never go beyond the second floor because the rest of Dimpton Hall belonged to the spirits.
History: Legend has it that Dimpton Hall was erected atop Bundee Castle originally built by Saxon invaders in the Fifth Century AD. Driven from the lands conquered by their ancestors, the Bundee (Bundy) chieftains laid siege to the land for three centuries trying to reclaim their birthright, and were instead branded and hunted down as outlaws, thieves, heretics and criminals, often hanged or executed by the later ruling Saxon clans who conquered the area. Originally a manor house, it's been a hotel, inn, tavern and even a school in some capacity since 1658, being used as the town hall and courthouse since the 16th Century with an inn on the second floor since the turn of the Nineteenth Century.
Identity of Ghosts: Somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 thieves, highwaymen, heretics and murderers are believed to have been executed here since 1585, the last occurring around 1805. The majority of them were sentenced without even as much as a trial. Many of then buried en masse or at the expense of the relatives. Among them, Clerval Bundy executed in 1513 for stealing back his own stolen horses, and Praugh Bundee, who was caught and hung for using a deserted cottage to escape a rainstorm. The most notorious was Aloysius Prammel Bundee (Bundy) (1510?-1575) who tried to gain allegiance from King Henry VIII for help in regaining his family lands, but instead used organized warfare to unite his allies against the British Saxons who controlled the area, thereby splitting the area between East Dimpton loyal to his cause and West Dimpton demanding his execution. Aloysius was finally caught through the assistance of King Edward VI in 1575 and tied to two horses that pulled him apart. Without him, the remaining Bundee and Bundy clans fled the area for stakes in America, Scotland, France and Spain. Those who stayed behind turned to thievery, malicious mischief and terrorism directed mostly toward the British Saxons and the Protestant Church.
In the 17th century, mostly between 1610 and 1725, the catacombs under the hall and adjacent graveyard were used by a man's club dramatizing fake ritualistic ceremonies with dark robes and hideous masks. These tunnels once cut and used by Druids and elaborated upon by the Romans and Britons were used for playing out old rituals although many locals believed the rituals were quite real. When a young lady hired to be "the victim" in one charade became scared and raced out, she somehow stumbled on the exterior walkway and stumbled backward to her death. Many believed she had been killed in a real sacrifice. Although the ritualistic dramas ceased thereafter, rumors of cloaked figures and a shimmering female in green have been seen ever since.
Within Dimpton Hall, it's believed one of the ghosts is that of a beloved magistrate named Jonas Llewelyn Tisdale (1878-1941), but only because his most loyal friends and confidantes clamed to have seen him walking the hall near his old office and courtroom, but the descriptions suggest a figure much older. The spectral maid is believed to be a former housekeeper who was attacked and raped in 1865; her body found almost thirty years after her murder stuffed into a cabinet on the third floor that was nailed shut. No one knows who the ghostly children are, but they could be a holdover from the hall was used as a school.
Source/Comments: Married With Children (Episode: "Whoa England!") - Phenomenon loosely based on Amberly Castle in Arundel, England, the Hellfire Caves in Wycombe, England and Fort Lesley McNair in Washington, DC.