Old perfume, cooking food, the foul stench of decay… sometimes a supernatural smell is the only evidence of a haunting
By Richard Holland
Recently I stepped into a building and was immediately struck by a familiar smell: an unknown brand of floor wax identical to that used in my old student hall of residence, a place I hadn’t set foot in for about fifteen years. The aroma was so evocative that for a moment my mind’s eye was transported back there, as if for an instant I had traveled back in time.
Bearing in mind the evocative nature of our sense of smell, it seems surprising to me that ghostly scents are less common than sights or sounds. They do occur, of course, as Nottinghamshire man Richard Statham recounts from personal experience: ‘My grandma passed away in 2003 (Richard writes). After her funeral, we got back from the crematorium and [I noticed] the net curtain in the front room had been moved; a favourite pastime of mama’s was curtain twitching. My dad subsequently gutted her bedroom. Everything was ripped out: floorboards, the plaster on the walls, everything. A couple of days later, I went to visit my parents. On my way to the bathroom, I decided to take a look at what my dad had done, so went into mama’s old room. I was very surprised to walk into a cloud of “Tweed”, quite a heavy perfume mama used to wear. It was so strong it gave me a headache and I had to beat a hasty retreat. I’ve smelled her perfume a couple of times, mostly around Christmas, but not for a couple of years now.’
To Richard the scent of ‘Tweed’ was not only distinctive but also strongly associated with his grandmother, so much so that he has identified it with her continued presence after death. Old-fashioned perfumes are sometimes smelled in old houses, and may be the only evidence of a haunting. Lavender seems to be the most common. The heavy scent of incense is another, not just in ecclesiastical buildings but also in ancient manor houses where Mass was secretly carried out in times of Catholic suppression.
Incense has been smelled in a former medieval hospice, John o’ Lydgate’s House, in Suffolk. In the 1970s the ‘delicious smell of baking’ and of roasting meat was also detected in a sitting room used as a monks’ refectory centuries ago. Joan Forman, who relates this information in her ‘Haunted East Anglia’, also gives examples, from Essex, of much less pleasant examples of this phenomenon: visitors experiencing ‘an appalling smell’ on a staircase at The Bell Inn, Sible Hedingham, and ‘a strong smell of burning’ and an ‘abominable smell’ at a house near Catmere End which had been built on the site of an earlier house where a family had died in a fire.
For two more examples of spooky smells, check out my ‘Haunted Wales’ blog at: http://hauntedwales.blogspot.com.
[SOURCE: Personal communication from Richard Statham. ‘Haunted East Anglia' by Joan Forman, 1974.]
© Richard Holland 2008
