The Brocket Haunting

Seán Manchester investigates Brocket Hall.

Lord Brocket married in the year following my first visit [to investigate the haunting at Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire], and his wife, a very charming and attractive lady from America, could not identify the room [that Lady Caroline Lamb had turned into a shrine to Lord Byron] due to conversions having taken place at the house. She was most apologetic for being unable to assist my discovery of Caroline’s bedroom, but, having explained that “Lord Brocket is a great non-believer,” went on to recount several uncanny experiences which had occurred at the Hall since her arrival. In February 1992, Lady Brocket wrote to me:

An echo of Caroline was being glimpsed and heard in the place she loved most of all and it was heartening to learn that the music of Chopin (which I, too, have played and loved since childhood) induced a responsive atmosphere. … My muse was suddenly interrupted by a shaft of sunlight piercing a nearby stained-glass window (above the Lamb Family Vault at St Etheldreda’s Church]. It struck the very flagstone beneath which lay Caroline’s sad remains. Yet more astonishing was the simultaneous tinkling sound in the distance ~ like the angelic notes of a harpsichord wafting on the wind from afar.

Whether the source was neighbouring Brocket or somewhere more celestial did not seem to matter in that moment. For my heart told me that Caroline was responding in her own inimitable way and the melancholy evoked by my surroundings was suddenly washed away.

The world she inhabited grows ever distant and with it recedes lingering echoes in the footfalls of one who pursued the images of high romance and impossible love.

(From Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know © Seán Manchester, 1992)