The idea of a mysterious phantom blasting out notes and chords upon a massive pipe organ possesses an appeal that spans the generations. Back in December 1986 New Statesman magazine told readers not to bother rushing to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Phantom of the Opera, reasoning that it ‘will still be showing when your children are in college’. And so it has proved, the famous musical being just the most successful of all the numerous dramatisations, film versions (including the classic Lon Chaney interpretation, pictured right) and interpretations of the tale of the maniacal and disfigured musician haunting the Paris Opera House, originally penned by Gaston Leroux as a popular serial back in 1909-1910
In reality, actual organ-playing phantoms prove something of a rarity, although it must be said finding a decent organ-playing ghost would easily eclipse dozens of cases of mysterious footsteps, crackling EVP recordings or anonymous nocturnal moans and groans, in terms of challenge, mystique and fascination. Undoubtedly the most famous British example is what may be called the ‘Phantom of the Torquay Organ’, which haunted the Church of St John the Apostle, built at Torquay in 1867 (pictured on facing page). As recently retrieved by the We Are South Devon community website, during the mid-1950s the case received international attention, thanks to the public statements of the then vicar, the Revd. Anthony Rouse.
However, the case cannot be attributed simply to a single news-conscious cleric, for the Revd. Rouse was just one of a line of successive witnesses to a ghost that had by then been returning periodically to the Devon church and its nearby vicarage for some 72 years. But what is even more curious is that the ‘Phantom of the Torquay Organ’ was ultimately considered to be not just one ghost but two. Neither of these phantoms was recalled as mysterious Lon Chaney lookalikes, but otherwise ordinary and dedicated church organists, dying 60 years apart.
The first musician concerned was one Henry Ditton-Newman who died on 19 November 1883. Described in some accounts as the ‘young organist’ of St John’s, he was in fact 39 years old at the time of his demise, but this is a relative term when it comes to ecclesiastical musicians (I was recently told of a Sussex church organist who until promoted to glory at an advanced age in February 2016 had been playing the organ of his village church since the reign of George VI – over 65 years). According to some accounts, Henry Ditton-Newman was still completing his training, but other sources suggest he was already a distinguished musician, previously organist at Anfield in Liverpool and who posthumously published a book of compositions and tunes. But whatever the case, the significant thing is Henry’s toils at the Torquay organ did not cease when his earthly life was abruptly ended by a bout of pneumonia and pleurisy. Almost immediately afterwards, the peals of ghostly music were heard at St John’s while his body rested in its coffin in the church on 20 November 1883, the witness being the vicar, the Revd. Hitchcock. Another witness was a lady who was still alive in the 1950s, traced by Devon folklorist Theo Brown. It seemed Henry Ditton-Newman had returned to play at his own funeral!
Despite the manifestations, Henry was duly laid to rest and the incident might have been forgotten but for the then Prebendary (an honorary canon attached to a cathedral or collegiate church) Basil Airy, who heard the music again and also reported seeing a ghostly hand on the organ keyboard (which by some quirk had reversed colours – the white keys were black and vice versa).
Phantom hands are a phenomenon reported for centuries, both in ghostlore and in the séance room, appearing around mediums such as DD Home, Eusapia Palladino, and Eva and the Schneider brothers – and in certain poltergeist cases. Indeed, so many cases of phantom hands could be cited that as the psi researcher the late Manfred Cassirer declared: “It would be tedious to create a catalogue”. This incident might have been treated as an hallucination but for the church verger at St John’s seeing the hand too.
Subsequently, the full apparition of Henry Ditton-Neman was seen and heard by priests living at Montpellier House next door to the church. Witnesses included the Revd. Sir Patrick Ferguson Davie and a curate and his wife, Mr and Mrs Sproule, who addressed the ghost directly as “Henry”. The haunting continued on into the 20th century. In The History of St John’s, Torquay (1930) the Revd. Boggis recorded that after Ditton- Newman’s death “strange things happened, and there are well-authenticated accounts of apparitions… recorded down to the present time.”
Interest peaked two decades later when the latest incumbent, Revd Anthony Rouse, reported hearing “sweet but sort of heavy” music and even seeing a transparent ghost seated playing the aged keys. He also stated: “Quite a few members of the choir have been conscious of someone standing by the organ when they were singing unaccompanied, as if the organist had got off his stool and was at their side”. Others reported a sense of depression around the organ and domestics employed at the vicarage continued to report odd incidents.
In these cynical times some might suspect the Revd. Rouse of a publicity stunt to raise funds for replacing the aging organ; but this was the 1950s when religious observance and practice was a matter of much stricter adherence and formality, and such antics would have been sure to cause deep offence and draw a stern response from both clergy and congregation. However, the 1950s were also a period when the Anglican Church was treating psychical phenomena with a growing intellectual seriousness, and the Churches’ Fellowship for Spiritual and Psychical Studies (founded in 1953) convened a special meeting at a local hotel to examine events in October 1956. The Revd. Rouse recounted his experiences and described how a local woman, Miss Kent, had also heard the organ apparently playing by itself (she recognised the music as Edouard Silas’s Mass in C). A visiting organist also declined to play at church after twice encountering a presence sitting near him, and the local Torquay Times succeeded in locating several other witnesses: a parish clerk Mr Downey, a Mrs Palmer and a Mrs Beer who all vouched for strange incidents. A ghost hunt was organised at Montpellier House by journalist Peter Large from the Western Mail. Large and his friend John Whatmore saw nothing but heard strange noises, perhaps exaggerated by the house, whilst a later visitor, Commander P Osborn, reported awakening at 3.10am to hear unexplained noises and confronting a strange cold spot.
In February 1957 the old organ was removed (“it was totally worn out” stated the Rev. Rouse) and a new model installed. Edmond P Gibson in Fate magazine wondered if the ghost would return from Montpellier House to try the new model. But Gibson also questioned whether Henry Ditton-Newman could be responsible for the manifestations, asking: “Can this be a case of multiple haunting in which the ghost of the former organist plays only one of the parts?” These words proved very pertinent, or perhaps Gibson had some inside information. For by the following year the Revd. Rouse was questioning the notion of a recurrent haunting generated by Ditton-Newman since 1884, and began speculating that a second phantom might be at work.
In the autumn of 1958, whilst the Revd. Rouse was away, members of a choral society rehearsing in the church reported manifestations around the organ, including an apparition, strange noises, and a sense of an oppressive presence. The curate, Sir Harold Papworth, was summoned and he sprinkled holy water over the organ stool and said prayers. Nonetheless, the sense of malaise about the new organ continued, with church organist Frederick Fea sensing an invisible someone sitting next to him, particularly on Fridays and Sundays. Mr Fea duly complained to the Bishop of Exeter. Considering the haunting was entering a new phase, at Christmas 1958 the Revd. Rouse consulted a medium, Mrs Leith-Walker at the College of Psychic Studies in London. She gave him a reading that an organist at the church had gassed himself and required the sprinkling of holy water on his grave.
Making local enquiries, the Revd Rouse discovered that shortly before his arrival at St John’s, a 50-year-old music teacher named Francis Crute who played for the church had been found dead. This was on 11 September 1953, with an inquest recording the death as suicide. The Revd Rouse learned that although a funeral had been held for Francis Crute, during the service his body had remained outside St John’s church throughout. Well into the 1960s and later, the Church of England could deny full funeral rights to suicides, killing oneself still being classed as a form of homicide and illegal until 1961 (though the notion that unsuccessful suicides went to the gallows is a candidate for ‘Mythconceptions’, the crime being punished as a misdemeanour, not a capital felony).
So in order to lay what was presumed to be a wandering soul, on New year’s Day 1959 the Revd. Rouse and Dr Malcolm Russell, a counter tenor from Exeter Cathedral, went to the grave of Francis Crute, prayed, recited a Psalm and sprinkled holy water. Thereafter, the haunting of the organ is considered to have ceased, but there is apparently no shortage of other ghosts in Torquay, the town now being the latest to earn the dubious and unverifiable accolade of the most haunted place in Britain in 2015 – the verdict of an estate agent’s organisation. (See ‘Revealed: The towns where things really go bump in the night’ Daily Mail, 15 May 2015).
Meanwhile, We Are South Devon website even suggests there may have been a third phantom at St John’s, the Revd. Hitchcock who first heard the music in 1884, but this may be a confusion in the subsequent re-tellings of the story. There are no details if it is so. In 1970 a later rector, the Revd. BG Burr, sought to play down the haunting, saying: “There was a blind parish clerk who used to play the organ for his own amusement without bothering to put on the lights”. However, this individual has not been identified and even given the longevity of some church musicians, as Graham McEwan pointed out in Haunted Churches of England (1989), this fails to account for all the reports over 75 years.
See: We are South Devon website ‘The three musical ghosts of a Torquay church’ 15 March 2016; ‘The Ghost of the Torquay Organ’ by Edmund P. Gibson in Fate 1957 pp 85-90; Spirit Hands: Fact or Fraud’ (1978) Manfred Cassirer in SPR Journal vol.49 pp.875-80). Other examples of ghostly organ-playing include the claim of Elliot O’Donnell in his enjoyable, if overly imaginative Haunted Churches (1939) that weird organ music was heard issuing late one night “some years ago” from the church of St Crux in york.
The witness, a policeman on the beat, was naturally startled to hear the funeral march being played in the church at night and went to investigate. As he approached, the door of the church opened by itself and he had a sensation of crinolined figures passing by him, though he could see nothing. Since the church was demolished in 1885, the story was then over 50 years old and second-hand, so the tale can easily be shelved along with those emanating from that most tantalising and productive informant, ‘anonymous’.
Other alleged examples of spectral organ players include at the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Albans, St Mary’s Church, Bowers Gifford, Essex, St Peter and St Paul Church at Caistor, Lincolnshire, and Borley Church, Essex. Unfortunately, local enquiries in 2000 by parapsychologist, conductor and musician Dr Melvyn Willin failed to yield any hard evidence but a variety of alternative explanations, ranging from pranksters to the claim “air remaining in pipes can be expelled by the movement of mice, of which we have many”. A church organist at Caistor confessed to playing music late at night. “you can imagine, therefore, how the rumours started, especially with a boarding school close by!” One unexplained case is the organplaying reported at Borley Church, although John May’s story from 1947, of being in the churchyard and hearing ‘soft notes and chords from the organ’ I think may be discounted. (I think John May was another alias of eccentric fantasist Louis Mayerling who wrote the spurious ‘We faked the ghosts of Borley Rectory’, 2000).
