The Ramhurst Manor Haunting: Dame Children at the Door

Ramhurst Manor House stands on Powder Mill Lane in the parish of Leigh, near Tonbridge, Kent. It is a timber-framed house of the 16th century or earlier, recased in brick in 1716. In 1857 it was home to Mrs R., the wife of an officer of high rank, with her family and servants.

October 1857. The noises began, and went on for several months. Knockings. Footsteps. Voices from an unoccupied room, talking, reading aloud, sometimes screaming. The servants were frightened. In broad day the cook heard the rustle of a silk dress close behind her. No one was there. Other servants said invisible clothing brushed past them.

Mrs R.'s brother, a young army officer staying for the shooting, was a sceptic. Then a voice he took for his sister's rose to a scream. He rushed into her bedroom with a gun in his hand. She was sleeping quietly.

Miss S., a friend of Mrs R., arrived on the second Saturday in October. She had reportedly seen apparitions since childhood. At the entrance she saw two figures, apparently an elderly couple, habited in the costume of a former age, of the period of Queen Anne or one of the early Georges. Over the following days she saw them again, by daylight, in different parts of the house. Each time they were surrounded by an atmosphere nearly of the colour usually called "neutral tint".

On the third occasion, they spoke. They were husband and wife, and they had once owned the house. They were sad it had passed to strangers, and their name was Children. The husband gave his name as Richard, and said he had died in 1753.

About a month later, Mrs R. was hurrying downstairs to dinner. In a doorway stood the female figure, identical to Miss S.'s description, even to the old point-lace on her brocaded silk dress. The figure remained stationary. It uttered no sound. Above her head, as if written in phosphoric light in the dusk atmosphere that surrounded her, were the words "Dame Children" together with some other words. One retelling says they described her as earth-bound.

Mrs R. closed her eyes. She rushed through the apparition and into the dining-room.

About four months in, the family nurse, Sophy, learned from relatives that a Children family had once lived at Ramhurst. An old man had recalled helping, in his boyhood, to keep the hounds of the Childrens.

In December 1858 Robert Dale Owen, a former US Congressman, took statements from both women. He searched churchyards and consulted a neighbouring clergyman and an antiquarian friend. The Hasted Papers in the British Museum recorded that "Richard Children settled himself at Ramhurst." Hasted's History of Kent confirmed that Richard Children died in possession of Ramhurst in 1753, aged 83. Owen later visited the house, by then a farmhouse. The occupants assured him that nothing worse than rats or mice disturbed it now.

Owen published the case in Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World in 1860, as an apparition of the dead confirmed by records the witnesses had not seen. Alfred Russel Wallace retold it in 1866, John H. Ingram quoted it in 1897, and Arthur Conan Doyle returned to it in 1920. Read cold, the case has weak points, starting with anonymous witnesses and statements taken 14 months after the disturbances began. The Childrens were still remembered locally, so the name could have reached the house by ordinary means. No hoax was ever alleged, and the two women's accounts still stand as Owen recorded them.