Mansions Without Roofs

The ghost hunter first visited this ancient set of mansions in the early part of the 1950s. Usually, one envisages a haunted mansion to be a solitary large building of some stateliness in the countryside, surrounded by woods and hills. Here, though, in the quieter quarters of a city centre were a row of such mansions with a mere narrow alley way between each one at ground level. So, not a terrace as such, but they were evidently conjoined at the upper floors. But like many terraces of smaller working-class houses, two-up-two-downs or back-to-backs as they were once called in the early twentieth century, they had attics that ran the length of their extent without interruption by any physical partition.

So, here, the ghost hunter, once clambering up to these attics, found a huge length of raftered space with uncertain flooring stretching from mansion to mansion, dark and and full of cobwebs. He held his torch steady to see what was what.

Downstairs, the living quarters were still in good shape, and in a few of the mansions their ancient families still held sway, some squatting in chairs staring through the grimy windows they could not be bothered to clean. They had allowed the ghost hunter into their domains with grudging nods. They has seen many such visits before from earlier ghost hunters to whom they charged a small fee. But this ghost hunter was different. It was me.

And I took one of the surly denizens with me upon this first torchlit visit to the now notorious corridor of attics, spanning several histories below us, each mansion having its own dynastic family. They used this area directly under the conjoined roofs as storage space. Many dark shapes of student trunks and suitcases and dolls houses and broken rocking-horses and stopped clocks provided sinister silhouettes as far as the eye could see. Many narrow gaps in the conjoined roofs supplemented my torch but I could see that, despite such gaps, there was not one sign of seepage from weather, because the gaps of light were opportunely angled to resist any fluid’s passage.

That night, having returned home, I dreamt of those attics. They no longer had roofs at all, but the heavens still failed to penetrate its inclement weather within. It was as if there was an invisible skin of light stretched between the rafters that protected the storage space. A mere dream but a clue to the ghost I sought, I thought, when I awoke.

I soon forgot the dream, and left for my second visit to the mansions. I sought out the same denizen who had accompanied me into the top storeys the day before. He had changed somewhat from how I remembered him, and this time he insisted on bringing his wife with us as we made a second exploration. He told me she had once seen the ghost up there, and, despite her own natural fears of the unknown, she trusted in the ghost being a good ghost, as most ghosts seemed to me always to be, should I ever find one. She would point the ghost out to me. She knew how to sense it, to recognise it. I suddenly remembered again my dream and told them both about it. The man shrugged, but his wife smiled. As if she knew something we both didn’t.

There was a child involved in their marriage who had to be cared for by another denizen of the mansion, and once that was arranged, the three of us set off, clambering through the lower partitioned attics towards the upper corridor of attics. Strangely, I had not noticed the lower attics yesterday, but I was never an infallible witness, and I shrugged my shoulders at this hole in my memory.

I invite you, nevertheless, to follow my hunting as far as I was able to reach that day. We managed to walk, in a stooped way, the whole length of the mansions. Listening to what was going on below in each of them, the sound of dynastic families passing through levels of time towards this era of chaos that seemed gradually to be affecting the whole world. The odd Singer sewing machine being treadled. Children’s voices. And a gramophone needle’s scratching. Prior to music sounding out.

Some of the gaps in the roof were now more like holes. And the bric à brac stored up there seemed to have skeletal outlines rather than yesterday’s unbroken shapes back to back. One rocking horse was now a cage. One of us opened it. But it still rocked with the rhythm of a clock, as the heavens above shone through the holes with what I imagined the Holy Ghost to be. The rest was forgotten. But it was not a dream this time. And terrace and terrors were not necessarily entwined as the ghost hunter had feared. Three-up-one-down.