“Want to come and release a ghost?” asked Margo Williams. Most days that was exactly what she did. She pulled on an anorak, grabbed a large handbag stuffed with scraps of paper, pencils, a sharpener and a thermos flask.
The Ghost on the Staircase
Clairaudient investigator Margo Williams set out in search of people whom she believed might be trapped in a haunting.
I followed her into a haunted house. Watched while she went to work.
She smiled, friendly warm and comforting to the distressed householder and her family, disturbed by a cold and frightening shadowed figure in the house; most often seen on the staircase.
There was none of the sombre ceremony often associated with exorcism; no black-clad priest performing the ancient Bell, book and candle ritual.
Pink woollen hat removed so as not to muffle sounds, big handbag close and open, Margo sat on a step halfway up the stairs; hushed everyone so she could listen, poised ready with sharpened pencil and a clutch of half page size scraps of paper.
A few moments later the pencil began moving rapidly across the paper, producing page after page of tightly joined handwriting.
What Just Happened on the Staircase?
Three minutes or so later, the writing stopped. Margo collated the sheets of paper into sequence and read aloud the deciphered dictated message to the anxious family.
The communicator had identified himself as a former owner of the house. First came an introduction, Margo read a name.
Followed by an apology from the owner who claimed to have built the house a hundred years before. The communicant spoke of regret for the frights and inconvenience he had caused by his continued presence in the building.
The former owner seemed to have become the house's permanent sitting-tenant. He expressed frustration at the circumstances of his haunting. The message described repeated cruelty to members of his household, long gone and forgotten by the living.
The communicant seemed to assume that was the cause of his curious incarceration.
The message concluded with his astonished description of the sudden appearance of lights, and distant voices calling to him. A moment or so later, the communication ceased.
The family gathered in their living room, mum, dad, two children of teenage years. Everyone listening to the polite confession.
"Has he gone?" was the question everyone wanted answered.
Related Essay
Nick Hammond
Exorcism, Hallucination or Release?
A month later I contacted the householder and asked if there was any difference in her home.
"All quiet," was the family's response. No sign or sight of any shadowed figure on the stairs.
Had he gone, permanently?
It remained possible that each family member had consciously or unconsciously absorbed and reinforced the same developing ghost story.
That would probably be among the psychological non-surviving spirit conclusions.
It did not seem so one-dimensional. When I spoke to different family members, each expressed their own experience and fears of the same dark glowering man-sized presence in the house.
Those individuals, like most people I meet, seemed sufficiently self-aware to know truth from make believe in most situations.
A shared misunderstanding remained possible, but it did not seem to fit the people I met or the consistency of their accounts.
That was how Margo worked. Cheerful, sensitive and discreet. She had lots of Thank You letters from satisfied customers.
Nothing theatrical in what she did. She never charged for her time, asking only the cost of her bus-fare in getting to the site. Margo never learned to drive.
Often accompanied by friends, media reporters and interested observers. Some days she engaged with ghosts stuck out in the wild, on lonely paths through woods; edge of a field, even a beach.
And sometimes attached to pieces of their poignant past. Occasionally the communicants referred to forgotten objects lost decades earlier, which seemed to have become unexpected anchors in their own personal afterlife. Margo referred to these as "finds".
Over the years she had accumulated a large and fascinating collection of such artefacts.
That afternoon was the beginning of seventeen years accompanying Margo on investigations across Britain. The more cases I witnessed the more convinced I became that whatever explanation ultimately proved correct, the work deserved to be documented.
Investigating the Investigator
Also included in these archives is the period during the 1970s and 80s when Margo Williams and her scientist husband Walter became famous in world media.
How they were twice invited to present their findings to a collection of scientists gathered at PSI conferences.
How the couple attracted the special interest of senior members of the parapsychology departments at Edinburgh and Virginia university. In a paper published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research the authors declared the Williamses' evidence as from non-paranormal source.
The conclusion of the published paper was clear: the voices did not originate with surviving personalities the authors argued, but from Margo herself.
Margo Williams the Later Years
Margo's work continued throughout the 2000s up until her passing in 2009. This archive also includes investigations I encouraged her to engage in, especially some of the UKs most famously haunted landmark and historic buildings.
Where possible I identified the dead; their stories and settings.
The communications attributed to them often reflected on life and death. Some were surprising, some humorous, others were moving or thought-provoking, to be mindful of the gaps between dimensions.
For many years I accompanied Margo Williams at work; researched archives and records whenever names were spoken and records might reveal identity. Old houses kept the best records of their residents.
Some of the names she spoke were identified. Many remain unknown.
Some stories were tragic.
This archive exists to preserve those voices, the investigations that followed, and the questions they continue to raise.
The Margo Williams Clairaudient Archive
Margo had already produced a series of small books during the 1970s and 80s describing her work of rescue and release, and unearthing "finds" as she described them; accompanied by friends and willing helpers.
Now out of print and unavailable, this current digital archive aims to restore these fascinating case files for wider access. This archive exists to preserve the historical record, not to persuade readers to any particular conclusion.
Of the hundreds of communications recorded during the 1970s, only around thirty original dictated transcripts now survive.
Much of the remaining material was destroyed by Walter Williams following publication of the Beloff and Stevenson critique in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Whether that decision prevented misunderstanding or erased irreplaceable evidence depends on the reader's perspective.
These surviving transcripts are from Margo's original notes. The archive also contains her work in the field, so to speak: the in-situ ghost cases from her early books and later investigations. These are presented in five collections:
Heaven & Hell
Royalty & Rogues
Destiny & Desire
Famous & Forgotten
Life & Death
All of which will be archived here in posts.
A Lifetime in a Joined Line of Memory
Some of the investigations were witnessed by me, others were witnessed by those who accompanied Margo out on her work.
Some names have been historically verified, some identifications remain speculative. Many remain unidentified.
Some names are withheld, though very few, where testimonies included personal information that might influence retrospective associations.
Communications are not always reproduced in full. In some cases excerpts have been selected simply because of length although complete transcripts are presented wherever appropriate.
None of the original wording has been edited or modernised. Original spelling and punctuation have been retained throughout.
Some investigations remain incomplete and probably always will. Some names were never identified. Whether these voices belonged to surviving personalities, unconscious imagination or something else entirely remains open to interpretation.
What survives here is the record itself.
Some who came to speak wished only to leave a memory of how they had lived and what they could not forget.
Whether they were the voices of the dead, creations of the living mind, or something not yet understood, many of these stories would have been forgotten had they not been preserved.
