Author: Megan Stratford
Directions: Exit the bedroom to the upstairs landing. Head through to the bedroom directly facing you.
Transcript
As you walk into Lady Ellen Thomas Stanford’s bedroom, to the right you will find Vere, her grandson, staring back at you from a photograph in his army uniform. Vere is a vision of the upper classes, and Ellen’s bedroom reflects this. She sleeps alone, although her husband is next door and close by, and the maids can enter from a secret door to the side of her bed. In Ellen’s time, it was seen as lower class to sleep in the same bed as your spouse as it demonstrated that you weren’t wealthy enough to own separate ones — imagine that?
This room is also the location of something rather strange. Look towards the bed and you will see the space that was occupied by the apparition of Vere to a young boy in 2014. In a pure demonstration of class outrage, Vere shouted at the boy to get out of his grandmother’s bedroom, the sacred space that only she and her closest confidants should occupy. What do you think happened?
Perhaps the timelines of now and the Edwardian period overlapped and the boy and Vere really saw each other? Or maybe Vere was simply a ghost, yelling repeatedly into eternity? Whatever you choose to believe, something terrified that boy enough one day to go and seek help from the manor’s staff.
Vere was very special to Ellen, and they had a close relationship. He was shipped off to World War One in 1914, but once he returned at the end of the war, it wasn’t long before he sadly passed away from tuberculosis. TB was seen as a poor man’s disease, and so the family concocted a story that in the war his regiment got gassed, and he bravely took off his gas mask and gave it to a fellow soldier to save their life. They claimed that when he returned home the effects of the gas were too much for poor Vere and he died a hero. Ultimately this highlights the sadness that characterised the Edwardian period.