Bad Times at Branden Farm

It is two days until Christmas at the time I'm writing this - and if Christmas means nothing else to a Fortean like me, it means that 'tis the season to tell ghost stories. I have been putting off writing this article for months for no reason in particular - I was just procrastinating as I am prone to do. As a Christmas present to my readers, I feel that it is only appropriate now that I sit down and pour the hours required into telling the ballad of Ian Davison...

## Davison and the Devil-Worshippers

The Ian Davison in question had previously been a successful London actor, but his success seemingly caught up with him in 1932. He realised that he wanted out of the city life, and that he wanted to be free from the incessant demands of the theatre lifestyle. At heart, he had always known that he was a country boy - and so it was for this reason that he decided to relocate to Kent for his retirement. He had scoured the country for a suitably secluded retreat for years before he found Branden Farm, just outside Sissinghurst in Kent. For some reason he chose this house as his place of retirement, despite the '*general air of neglect*' that hung around the property like a thick fog. This neglect was far more literal than some might've thought, however - with the outside of the house being overgrown with brambles and stinging nettles, the weatherboarding being rotten, the corrugated iron roofs on the cowsheds rusting and the oast house lying in disrepair. Heaps of tangled iron refuse lay in the overgrown back yard - and as if to put the rancid cherry on a stale cake, the entire property was infested with rats. The house was over 400 years old, and it seemed as if it had enjoyed all that time unattended. However, this didn't put Davison off at all - instead, he jumped at the challenge that renovating it would pose.

It took a few years, but eventually Branden Farm had been transformed into a luxury home to die for. The garden was now a beautiful picture of primroses, primulas, violets, camellias, daffodils, lupins and irises of all colours. There was always something in the mesmeric garden to draw the eye at all times of the year. His orchard was flourishing, positively brimming with apples, cherries, greengages and various nuts. '*My land is rich with trees*'. Not only was it rich with trees as he said, but it was populated by dogs, cats, cattle, chickens, pigs and Red Carneaux pigeons. He had created all this beauty from what had been a derelict wreck of a household - and despite the extraordinary paranormal phenomena he had experienced in the first two years...

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Davison was plagued by spirits right from his arrival at the derelict home in April of 1932. It started on the first night he was there - there was a tapping on Davison's window. He looked out of the window and failed to spot anyone, and there was no tree branch knocking against the window panes. However, Davison had always been accepting of the reality of spirits and other things that we might not understand, and so he was virtually unshaken by this little anomaly. The next oddity was the sound of footsteps outside the house on another subsequent evening - it sounded like two men running. It was shortly followed by a loud crash from the North end of the house - but, apparently unflappable, Davison wondered if the chimney (which was under repair at the time) had fallen. He also went and wandered around outside the house to check for intruders, but found that he couldn't see anyone. There was also no sign of damage to any part of the house's structure. Throughout the nights of the first two years, he would hear a wide range of bizarre and distressing noises - such as an agonising scream and a loud crash which sounded as if a heavy item of furniture had fallen somewhere inside the house. He would frequently hear heavy footsteps in his bedroom at night when he knew that he was alone in the house. Guests he hosted at the house would sometimes remark that they felt as if they were being watched, and Davison had to agree with them. Being within those four walls always made him wary of whatever might be in the corner of his eye. The guests in question would also claim to feel as if their strength was being drained. Several visitors said that they would have horrifying nightmares about being strangled while they were trying to sleep in the house. One such victim of somnolent strangulation even said that she felt totally exhausted for several days after having the alarming dream.

The smaller of the two downstairs rooms in the household was usually cold even when the fire had been lit all day, but there were also some occasions in which it would become extraordinarily hot to the point of being unbearable. Davison and various visitors sometimes felt dizzy in that room, and some of them even fainted while others just experienced extreme fatigue. The room smelled musty, and odd noises would often be heard emanating from its confines. The malevolent atmosphere within the room was ultimately decided to be so bad that Davison would only use it as a box room. The larger of the ground floor rooms was perhaps equally as haunted. One evening, one of Davison's friends reported having been seized by the neck from behind after having briefly dozed off, prompting him to wake with a start. Both Davison and another of his many friends fainted in the large ground floor room on one evening after the room had spontaneously become hot and airless. There was a table at the centre of that room, and on one occasion there was a claw-like handprint to be found in the dust on the table...

A man and his wife were sleeping in the attic bedroom of the house as Davison's guests when the first apparition to be reported from the house made its presence known to them. A woman carrying what seemed to be a tumbler walked through the room, and when the husband, after having received no response from calling out to her, threw a slipper at her - she promptly disappeared through a solid wall. Davison himself would see the same ghostly woman some weeks later when he was in the bedroom in question at 4pm in the afternoon. He described her as wearing grey, and as being slightly bent over as if searching for something on the ground. Davison felt no fear, but rather an intense pity for the tragic apparition. Perhaps Davison's nonplussed reaction to the manifestation of the grey lady went out to the Other Side like a challenge - because more apparitions followed her into his life promptly afterwards. There were some shadows and some vaguely human shapes which would appear most commonly in the large downstairs room despite sometimes being seen in other areas of the haunted farm.

The most alarming of these apparitions was a man with '*thick grinning lips*'. He would come into view through the wall of the large downstairs room before floating across the room and vanishing into the fireplace. He would normally be seen in the mid-evening, and his entry would always be marked by a sudden sharp fall in temperature, as well as sometimes being preceded by the manifestation of a phantom cat which was seemingly untouchable. The grinning man would stay for about five minutes before disappearing. Davison's first encounter with the foul phantom would take place in his bedroom, however, shortly after he had decided to let two dogs into his room after one of them had been scratching at the door. The scratching dog belonged to a visitor, and it was followed by Davison's own Great Dane by the name of Peter. The dogs seemed to be anxious and disturbed, and Davison soon realised that his brow was dripping with sweat from nigh-unbearable heat. He had previously been dreaming about the house catching fire, and so the thought crossed his mind that perhaps he hadn't been dreaming. After all, it was snowing outside and so such an abominable temperature could've only come from a fire. However, concerns about a mundane causation for the horrendous heat were quickly extinguished - so to speak - when his bedroom suddenly became transparent before disappearing entirely, leaving him with no way to escape from the room. As the door melted away, he became aware of a terrifying figure standing in front of him. David described him as '*the foulest looking man I have ever set eyes on*'.

The unearthly visitor stood over 6ft tall, and was dressed in a bizarre costume of bright green, brown and red. It appeared to be male, and had a horrifying look of pure hatred plastered across its face. Its thick lips were stretched back away from enormous yellow teeth in a nightmarish grin. Originally struck silent with terror, Davison managed to pluck up enough courage to demand that the entity identify itself. '*Who are you? A fiend of hell?*' To this, the entity simply laughed before vanishing just as quickly as it had arrived. It would often come into the large downstairs room in the evenings, and so its menacing presence was never too far away.

Psychic investigator and explorer Ronald Kaulbeck was one of Davison's innumerable friends. He was intently interested in what he had been told about the bizarre happenings on Branden Farm - and so he agreed to stay there overnight to see if he could cast any light on what was going on. He would later describe experiencing '*raw fear*' of a kind he had never encountered before in the box room. He was sitting in the box room one evening when he suddenly felt something clasp around his neck, and started clutching at it and gasping for breath. The three others who were in the room at the time claimed to have seen a faint shadow around Kaulbeck's neck. The three helped hiim resist the entity's attempt at strangulation through some unspecified means, and it took the full strength of all four of them to save the man's life. However, curiosity would seemingly have another opportunity to kill the cat when it came to Kaulbeck - seeing as he managed to remain mostly undeterred by the supernatural attempt on his life. He would stay on at Branden and help Davison study the phenomenon there - including eventually identifying the three primary figures among the veritable opera of characters that were seemingly haunting the house. First, there was the sad grey lady, then there was a rather ugly, stocky little man who Davison also sensed was unhappy - and finally there was the tall grinning man, who seemed to be the source of the palpable evil within those damned four walls.

Davison dedicated himself to getting to know the stories behind the legion of ghosts haunting his new house, and in order to achieve this he enlisted the help of various mediums and spiritualists. One such psychic told him that the spirits infesting the house were the lost souls of the members of a black magic coven who used to meet there regularly many years ago. It is interesting to note that each wall of the house faces a cardinal point of the compass foresquare, which would apparently have appealed to a practitioner of black magic. The North and West of the house were guarded by ponds, and there was a foul-smelling ditch to the South - which was acceptable seeing as witches would've apparently faced North to carry out their dark rituals. There was possibly another ditch to the West of the house, and according to the author of my source there were magic circles guarding the entrances and the places where sacrifices were made.

The psychic said that the spirits were trying to get rid of Davison so that they could once again take exclusive ownership of the property. According to her, if Davison chose to yield to fear now and sell the house, it would never again be habitable by the living - however, if he chose to stay and whether whatever it was that the entities would throw at him, the ghosts would be gone within five months.

She said that the Grinning Man's real name was George Tarver, and that he had lived in Branden Farm perhaps as early as the 16th century. Tarver was glover who had inherited the property from his physician father. He had been truly steeped in dark magic, and was the Grand Master of the witch coven that would apparently regularly meet at the house. One century later, five female witches would be burned at nearby Cranbrook, and a further pair of alleged practitioners were sentenced to death at Goudhurst for keeping '*an evil and wicked spirit in the likeness of a black dog*'. Tarver's coven had originally included his mistress, with whom he had a baby - but she was driven insane when Tarver decided to use their child in a human sacrifice ritual. Eventually he grew bored of his grief-stricken lover, and so he took her to the small downstairs room and suffocated her to death before burning her body. The stocky man had been identified as having been named Hunter at this point, and apparently he was disgusted at what Tarver had done to his mistress. He was evidently just a little too vocal in his protests, and so Tarver strangled him and buried his body in the grounds. The members of Tarver's coven had enjoyed the rituals, the sex orgies and the general defiance of Christianity - but they drew the line at murder. They felt that something had to be done, and so they took desperate measures to prevent it from getting any further out of hand. They hanged their Grand Master from a beam in the large downstairs room.

That horrifying history lesson must've provided Davison with anything but comfort, but despite it all he still wanted to stay with Branden. He would continue to renovate the house by day, working on the orchard and tending to the fast-growing garden - and would then weather the spirits by night. He continued like this for months until at last it all came to an tumultuous crescendo. It was late one afternoon when Davison went up to the bathroom where he would once again come face to face with Tarver's evil ghost. Tarver was waiting just a few feet away from the bathroom door, bearing his grotesque grin and looking frightfully strong. Davison was terrified, recoiling from the sheer evil of the manifestation before him. If he hadn't remembered the medium's words he would've ran away from the entity and down the stairs, but it then occurred to him that this must've been his test. This was his final tribulation. He steeled himself and faced Tarver - plucking up extraordinary courage and speaking boldly to the apparition. '*You must get out of the way! This house is mine! My will is stronger than yours! It does not matter what holds you here! You must leave! Go!*'

Tarver swiftly faded away into the wall behind him, and he would never again be seen in human form. The ghost cat which had sometimes accompanied him would also never make its presence known again. Three days after Davison's victory over Tarver, the grey lady appeared in the bathroom and for the first time since Davison had first seen her, she looked up at him. She smiled, no longer seeming to be sad and downtrodden. She seemed younger, and stretched her arms out towards him as if to say goodbye. That was the last time that he would ever see her. Hunter also said goodbye, standing by Davison's bed for a full twenty minutes one night - seeming somehow to be sadder than before, even bending down to the point that he almost touched Davison's face. As with most of the other apparitions, Davison never felt fear towards Hunter - and instead felt an intense sympathy. He asked the ghost if he could do anything to help him, but Hunter vanished before he could respond.

The last few ghostly manifestations at Branden Farm took the form of shadows, but their appearances became rarer and rarer until they ceased altogether. Ian Davison would stay at Branden, developing it into the fine house previously described - taking it out of his dreams and into the real world.

## Source

'Kent Stories of the Supernatural' by WH Johnson