Location: Coventry is 10 miles (15 kilometers) northeast of Warwick in West Midlands (formerly Warwickshire County), England northwest of London. South of town on Highway A429, the Verlaine Farm was once a small community centered around the family of Eighties folk singer Gabriel Verlaine and his friends.

Description of Place: The main house is a former turn-of-the-century house that predates 1920 when the known history of the house begins. It's a two-story stone and mortar structure on eight acres of land with twelve bedrooms and several outlaying cottages and barns on open pasture in varying states of neglect. Once decorated in its day, the house is all but gutted except for its stone walls and few possessions left behind inside the structure.

Ghostly Manifestations: Nearly lost among the distant hills and fields of former Northeastern Warwickshire County is the historical town of Coventry, England, well known in English history as the riding grounds of naked Queen Godiva, who rode the environs of her husband's lands to protest his taxation and unfair treatment of his citizens in the 11th Century. It is a well-known story in the tales of many locals. It was here in December 1990 that a horrific mass murder took place, wiping out an entire musical family. The murder was never solved, casting a pall over Coventry that still partially lingers today, but this dark cloud may not be the only thing still lingering here. There are many who believe that the spirits of the murdered musician and his family and friends may still remain here as well, their ghosts haunting the old house where they once lived and tragically died.

The home of Gabriel Verlaine rests on a peaceful country road outside of town. The crime tape is long gone, and the structure is kept locked tight with two large steel doors, opened only for fans and amateur crime detectives. There is no electricity on for the house, and yet, a recurring upstairs lamp can be oft times seen burning in an upstairs window where Gabriel once sat reading into the late evening hours. The sound of distant music can be heard wafting from the house, but it is not the modern music of today over a faraway car radio; many witnesses describe it as the timeless voices of a group of people singing together in open grounds as the Garden Of Love music band once did in the Late Eighties.

No one has lived in the house since an anonymous male voice called the Coventry police to report a murder in the old farmhouse. However, what the police found that night wasn't a mere murder mystery but a full-fledged massacre that out-staged the Manson Murders in 1960s California. American newspapers were limited to details about victims being vivified or having their eyes gouged out. One victim was reported sliced apart by chainsaw and scattered across two rooms, the hallway and the back stairs. Blood drenched walls and leaked down to the first floor through the floorboards, and walls and ceilings were nicked and gouged by the weapons of maybe twelve killers or six homicidal lunatics with two weapons each. For over ten years, no one was ever arrested in connection of the case although more than two hundred people were interviewed for leads. Crime tape and police guards kept the scene closed off for three and a half years. It is more than obvious that a massive amount of human energy as well as human remains were violently injected into the house.

"You can't get me to stay here at night by myself." Michael David Dolenz is the President of the Official Gabriel Verlaine International Fan Club. "And sometimes, I don't want to be here during the day." He gave the Collinsport Ghost Society a tour of the property in 2003. Today, the fan club has over five million members over several countries. Garden of Love memorabilia has not changed in over thirty years, but every few years, another book is published on his life that instead focuses on the details of of his formerly unsolved murder than his cut-too-short career.

"Little renovation has been done here," Dolenz continues. "We're mostly into the preservation of the location and G's memories." The location is mostly empty. There are whole rooms without anything in them, while others have a few pieces of furniture. A table, desk and chair with a lamp rest in in Gabriel's old study. A cold bedroom tableau is set up in one room without glass in the windows. If one looks closely at the shelves in the upstairs corridor, they might find tiny flecks of dried blood. The only room that looks remarkably pristine is the kitchen with the high framed windows facing the morning sun. Much the furniture that had belonged to Verlaine has vanished, but donations from fans have been donated to the house. The site is not in memory of a murder but to the life of a man.

"Several people have heard things here." Dolenz adds. "I've heard voices and gone looking for fans taking unattended tours, but no one is ever there. Tour guides have inconsistent numbers of people here. Five guests once toured the house last April, but by time they reached the second floor, it seemed more like seven. Coming down the back stairs, it sounds like twenty. When you get outside again, it is back down to five." The location has a guest book which fans are encouraged to sign, but it's optional for the tour. Next to each date, there is a number to keep track of how many was in the party, but several of the numbers have a second back-up number in parentheses next to a question mark.

"Just who are these extra people...." Dolenz shrugs and reacts ambivalent. "I don't know, but it's not unsual to see extra guests here who shouldn't be here. A male figure has been seen loitering the grounds and entering the house when the site is closed. My assistant saw him one weekend when a big storm was coming, and she wanted to close the windows. She told me that as she pulled around back, she saw a man come from one of the cottages and enter the back door, but when she came in, that door was still locked, and she didn't remember him hesitating to use a key."

When asked what he looked like, Marcia Jones, Dolenz's assistant, remarks he looked like a real person. He wasn't vaporous or transparent as one would expect a ghost to look like. He looked to be wearing a "poofy" blue and green shirt with white to light tan trousers and sunglasses on his head. Looking back now, she realizes that sunglasses for an overcast day seemed strange, but at the time, she didn't realize it. When shown a photo of the Garden of Love members, she immediately pointed at the face of Eric Stanley Lennon, the bassist, who lived in the cottage and often took the same trip through the property to visit Gabriel.

Ever since the farm house was opened in 1993, Garden Of Love fans, ghost enthusiasts, curiosity-seekers and diehard paranormal investigators have come here in droves and almost all of them ask about new sightings and stories. Not all the guides share stories, and most of them tend to avoid the subject as much as possible, often suggesting they talk to Jones or Dolenze instead. Nevertheless, there is a high turnover in guides.

Guests have gone away with mysterious audio, video and photographic evidence that suggests something supernatural lurks within these walls. Tours have been cut short by falling lamps, moving objects, banging sounds and a woman’s laughter while psychics who have come here have claimed to communicate with the spirits of the dead.

"We actually had one German psychic come here from Varrel." Jones tells CGS. "She spoke no English, but she had her sister here who spoke broken English, and she claimed to see and hear G's ghost following us through the house giving details on rooms. She identified the room G slept in, and the room his daughter was born in. She also identified which rooms the band members had when they stayed in the house. Her claims for much of the house were remarkably accurate, but she could have just been really good in her research. However, when she claimed that keyboardist Richard Crewe was carrying his head under his arm, then we realized something was up. Richard had been disemboweled and partially dismembered by his killer flailing an axe, but he wasn't decapitated. No one was..."

In his life, Gabriel insisted that his closest friends call him "G," and his most devout fans still refer to him as "G." He even asked his fans to call him that when he met them. He even collected "G's" and signed his paperwork that way. Many people believe it was to distance himself from his father who shared the name and had abandoned him. To this day, the small staff that keep an eye on the place find little "G's" inscribed on places in the house, such as walls and doors, even where one has never been seen before. One was even found on the outside of an upstairs window twenty feet off the ground, but no one knows how it got there.

During the 2000 anniversary of the murders, there was an unusual spate of increased activity in the house. Dolenz recalls coming to the house to unlock it for a Christmas party for local fans in the area and a select few. He recalls unlocking the large steel door out front and pushing against it a bit harder than usual. It was as if the weather had swollen the doorframe around it, but before he got it open, another force suddenly pushed hard against him and knocked him to the ground. As he was looking up, the door lightly drifted open without any effort. That same month, a female guest on a tour suddenly screamed and went running from the house. A college student getting details on the murder scene recalled getting pushed while he was leaning against the wall. The ghosts which had formerly been forlorn and distant were becoming more territorial. Where they had once been peaceful, they were becoming more brazen. Photos of orbs became more prevalent, and one picture that developed shows a cloudy figure with two glowing eyes. William Collins of the Collinsport Ghost Society tried to debunk it as a trick of the light with light glistening off a metal fixture in the background, but that photo was actually one of a series by local photographer Paul Starwin, and it doesn't appear in the photos before or after.

This unusual activity was occurring in the weeks before the eighteenth birthday of Gabriel's daughter, Rebecca, who had survived the murders but had no memory of them. The Middlesex Ghost Hunters Society came to do the first serious investigation of the house and caught strange noises as well as possible whispering and shadows that moved. Their psychic, Claudette Forbisher, described the ghosts as "normal-looking but in a deteriorated state - more like the movie version of zombies than movie ghosts," but no one saw any apparitions. An upstairs bathroom mirror that had fogged over seemed to have the message, "Help Me," but it had faded away by time anyone could get a camera to it. Afterward, one of the non-team extras were caught coming out of there after "finding" the words, "Get Out," on the glass. 

Since then, the house has returned to having long spates of inactivity between phenomenon. Sounds occur, objects move and the upstairs lamp is still seen on. An old record player plays itself in an abandoned room, and sounds of a lively breakfast conversation comes from off the kitchen. In 2010, singer Arny Harlow honored Gabriel by re-releasing his song, "Forever Yours," and taping the video in the house with old video footage of G alongside him. However, as video techs were re-digitizing the old footage to place in the new footage, they found Gabriel already in the footage, standing in the back shadows of the corridor off the kitchen with his arms folded against his chest and a big friendly smile on his face.

History: Gabriel Verlaine was a talented pop-folk singer of the late 1980s. He was born on October 13, 1958 in Redditch near Coventry. His father left him when he was five-years-old, but by the age of ten, he had taught himself to play guitar well enough to play music on the streets. The guitar was reportedly a gift from his mother on the advice of his music teacher. In his teens, he was part of a group called "The Looters" and playing in locations around much of Middle and Southern England. In 1982, after the re-release of his records, he was becoming an international recording star. He renamed the group, "Garden of Love," to reflect his more pop and hippie-style music stylings. He purchased the property in 1981 after being aware of it for several years, but nine years afterward on Christmas Eve 1990, he and his family were discovered horribly bludgeoned and mutilated to death by the police in a crime scene that was described as Satanic and ritualistic. Several of the bodies were mutilated beyond identification and even dismembered. At least seven different murder weapons were identified but never recovered. Gabriel was found with over forty-six stab wounds in him, more than anyone else killed that night, suggesting that he was the main target. The lone survivor was his infant daughter, Rebecca, who inherited his estate in 2002. The house, however, remains in the property of Gabriel's fan club as a shrine to his fans.

Identity Of Ghosts: Gabriel Verlaine was one of eleven victims of the cold-hearted massacre that took his life. The other members were his wife, band members and their wives and girl friends. It has always been believed that their ghosts wandered the property demanding justice for the crime which went unsolved for more than eleven years until his daughter, Rebecca, began suspecting her maternal aunt and uncle in collusion with Detective Thomas Munster knew a lot more than they had previously claimed. In 2005, the three along with Professor David Riven as an accessory were arrested in connection to the murders and convicted. As of this writing, they are serving multiple life sentences; their fellow accomplices in the massacre remain unidentified.

Source/Comments: The Haunting of Rebecca Verlaine (2002), Loosely based on the Moore House aka the Villisca Murder House in Villisca, Iowa.

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