Andrew Green, who first wrote the house up, said that as a boy in September 1944 he visited the empty house with his father, a council housing officer. The house had stood empty for about ten years after a nursemaid in 1934 reportedly threw herself and her young charge from the top window of its tower, a drop of some 70 feet. Green said his mother, a nurse, attended the aftermath and saw footprints appear in the grass with nobody walking there.
Green added that a twelve year old girl, Anne Hinchfield, had leapt from the same room forty seven years earlier, and that he had heard of twenty suicides in all at the house. Workmen sent in to repair it left after a few hours, citing a sulphur like smell, vanishing tools and an oppressive atmosphere. Green said that on climbing to the tower he felt a grip around his waist, heard a voice telling him to walk to the parapet, and was pulled back by his father as he was about to jump.
After the 1973 book an elderly woman told Green she had been a maid there in the late 1800s and that black rugs and candles were carried up to the tower every Friday night, and Green noted symbols carved in the tower brickwork. The rooms had at one time been used as a chemical laboratory, which Green offered as a source of the smell. The house was split into flats, then demolished about two decades after the 1940s for the block called Elgin Court.
The figures, especially the claim of twenty suicides, rest on Green's account alone and are not independently checked in the source used here. Treat the story as a traditional ghost tale with a possible factual core. The pin is approximate and the site is private flats.
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