It was covered with lichen, [said Peggy Fraser] and its windows were lighted with a diffused light that speaks of comfort and welcome. There was a gravel drive leading to the porticoed entrance and on the left was built a low sloping-roofed addition with the words ‘American Bar’ in neon lighting. I can see as if it was only a moment ago the small red-shaded lamps and the bar and bottles and small inviting tables.
To the couple’s regret, it was not the hotel where they had booked to stay; but they decided to come back later to sample the ambience and drink a nightcap after dinner. But that evening, although the Frasers tried repeatedly to find it again, the quaint hotel seemed to have vanished into thin air. Said Mrs Fraser:
We talked of nothing else that weekend and my husband was annoyed, for he felt such a thing should not have happened to him of all people. Since that time we have made many journeys along that road to visit my parents in Hastings and each time we have looked for the hotel but we have never seen it again.
The Frasers’ was not the first ‘phantom hotel’ to have attracted the attention of psychical researchers. In 1933 a Mr and Mrs Clifford Pye were travelling round Cornwall by train and bus. Just outside Boscastle, as the bus paused for a moment to let off a passenger, the couple noticed what they took to be a splendid guest-house surrounded by a beautiful garden full of scarlet geraniums. Chairs and tables were set out on the lawn beneath black and orange umbrellas. Mrs Pye announced that it would be an ideal stopping-place for the night, but at that moment the bus moved on and took them into Boscastle. Later, when they tried to find the guest-house, they could see no trace of it, and further searches in the surrounding area proved fruitless.
The Pyes’ story caused some excitement among psychical researchers, for they hailed it as an example of a rare phenomenon, a ‘collective hallucination’. These are greatly prized, for the theory goes that while an apparition reported by an individual may exist only in the mind of the beholder, one seen by more than one person may have an objective reality. But the excitement was misplaced, for the Pyes’ guest-house and the Erasers’ country hotel turned out to exist after all.
Denys Parsons, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, was impressed by the detail of the Erasers’ story. He was sure that they must have seen a real building, and confirmed his suspicions by the simple expedient of writing a letter to the East Sussex police. The ‘phantom hotel’, they replied, was a fifteenth-century tea-house called Waldernheath. It stood on the road the Erasers had taken and matched their description almost exactly, except in one inexplicable detail: Waldernheath had no bar and therefore no neon sign.
After a visit to the area and ‘an excellent meal in the “non-existent building”,’ Parsons concluded that the Erasers’ powers of observation were clearly first-class – their description of the ‘hotel’, which they had only seen from a moving car and during a torrential downpour, was accurate in almost every respect. What surprised him was ‘their failure to identify a building which turns out to be not only where they thought it was but which tallies with eighteen out of twenty-one of the mental images they associated with it’.
As a result of Denys Parsons’ revelations, the file on the Boscastle ‘guest-house’ was reopened, and an investigation by another member of the Society for Psychical Research, Miss A.M. Scott-Eliott quickly cleared up this case too. After a visit to Boscastle, she reported that the building which the Pyes had glimpsed from the bus did indeed exist. It was called Melbourne House and stood halfway down a steep hill into the village. Miss Scott-Eliott even established that red geraniums had been growing in the garden at the time of the Pyes’ visit.
So why had they been unable to find it when they retraced their journey? For one thing, Melbourne House was almost totally hidden behind a hedge and a high wall. It would have been difficult for anyone on foot to see it, especially if they had been going up the hill and not down, as the Pyes had done in the bus. Secondly, there had never been any tables with black and orange umbrellas in the garden: these had been outside a cafe further down the hill and had somehow been ‘transported’ in the minds of the visitors to the lawn of Melbourne House.
Finally, the place was not a guest-house at all, but a private home. Perhaps the Pyes’ eagerness to find somewhere pleasant for the night had caused them to assume that it did take guests. Since their first impressions of the place had been so inaccurate, it was hardly surprising that, even if the couple did catch a glimpse of Melbourne House during their search, they failed to associate it with the ‘guest-house’ that had seemed so welcoming from the bus.
In retrospect, the psychical researchers to whom the stories were first told may have been too uncritical in publishing them as evidence of collective hallucinations, and simple checks like a letter to the local police or a thorough search of the area by an independent investigator would have cleared up the mysteries long before they were enshrined in print. Denys Parsons pointed up the lesson:
We should indeed accord almost zero value to the type of statement with which accounts of such ‘hallucination’ cases always conclude: ‘Although we searched everywhere and made all sorts of enquiries, the building had vanished without trace.’ The layman knows neither how to search nor how to make enquiries … Let us resolve to be more fussy about alleged hallucinations.
Today’s researchers have taken the hint, and a remarkable story told by two married couples from Dover is being rigorously investigated. This, arguably the strangest of all tales of ‘phantom scenery’, began in October 1979 while Geoff and Pauline Simpson and Len and Cynthia Gisby were driving through France en route to a holiday in Spain. Late in the evening they turned off the autoroute near Montelimar and tried to find rooms at a nearby motel, the Ibis, but it was fully booked. Instead they were told to ‘try down the road’. A short drive brought them to a long two-storeyed stone building fronting directly on to the highway. The travellers parked their car in the lay-by opposite and Len Gisby went in. He found himself in a large room that housed a bar. Then the patron appeared and indicated that there were rooms available (he spoke no English and the travellers knew very little French).
The place struck the couples as quaintly – almost comically – old-fashioned. The bedroom windows were unglazed but fitted with double shutters. The sheets were of heavy calico and there were bolsters instead of pillows. In the bathroom the travellers were amused to see that the soap was impaled on an iron rod. But the place was comfortable and clean and, after a dinner of steak, eggs, pommes frites and beer, they went to bed, relieved to have found somewhere for the night.
Next morning, while the Gisbys and the Simpsons were having breakfast, three people came into the hotel: a woman with a little dog and, shortly afterwards, two gendarmes. They also seemed oddly antiquated. The woman wore a long dress and button-boots and the gendarmes were kitted out in gaiters, capes and high hats. Len Gisby remembers thinking that their uniforms were quite unlike those worn by the police they had passed on their way through France.
The bill for the night came as a shock, but not for the usual reason. It was ridiculously low: a mere 19 francs (less than £2) for dinner, beer, bed and breakfast for all four. But the patron was insistent, and the Gisbys and Simpsons, hardly able to believe their luck, continued their journey to Spain.
A hotel offering so much for so little is a rare find indeed, and the couples naturally made for it on their way home. Once again they turned off the autoroute at the sign pointing to Montelimar Nord and followed the road past the Motel Ibis: exactly, they say, as they had done a fortnight before. The only difference was that this time the building seemed to have disappeared without trace.
They drove round the area three times before giving up in bewilderment. There was no sign of the house nor of the lay-by where they had parked on their way down. They had to make do with a hotel near Lyon which charged them 247 francs for their stay – realistic for 1979 but thirteen times as much as they had had to pay at the other quainter – and now mysterious – hostelry.
A few weeks later, when the couples’ holiday snapshots came back from the processors, their puzzlement grew. Both Geoff and Len recalled taking photographs of their wives leaning out of the hotel bedroom windows just before breakfast, yet the negatives showed no trace of them. A careful examination revealed no blanks in the film and the serial numbers of the frames were consecutive.