On 28 October 2024, alumni gathered around their computer screens for a cozy evening filled with spooky stories, expertly written and narrated by Johnian alumni and students.
These chilling tales, plus one previously unseen story from an anonymous contributor, are now available to read at your own leisure.
The Visitor
David Webb (1966)
As I was walking up the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d go away.
With apologies to Hughes Mearns.
How a first year undergraduate came to occupy a Fellow’s set with a putative ghost needs to be explained. In 1966 the Cripps Building unexpectedly remained unfinished. In consequence a tiny number of freshmen, I believe two or three, were accommodated at the last minute outside College. Apart from a truly Dickensian environment with textbooks mouldering in the damp the land lady insisted on a literal application of archaic college rules including locking of the front door at 10:30pm, no more than two visitors at a time, no women to be entertained, and no personal decorations. Meanwhile 100 yards away the full social life of a new intake was under way. After a few wretched weeks my kind tutor discovered that Chairman Mao had recalled a visiting academic, and I was installed in his vacated rooms in C staircase Chapel Court for the rest of the term.
Chapel Court is not the type of building to encourage supernatural ideas. There are no Gothic rooms or gloomy passageways, it seems a rather bland 20th century block with wide bare wooden staircases.
One windy evening late in the Michaelmas term when the staircase seemed otherwise untenanted I was studying in my room on the top flight of the stairs. I was delighted to hear the footsteps of a visitor as at that time I had had limited opportunities to make friends, and so was disappointed when the foot steps stopped on the landing without a knock on the door. I was still more disappointed when they were repeated, ending with a loud knock or the stamping of a foot on the landing. Investigation of the staircase revealed nothing, and I wondered who my strange visitor might be. It became difficult to concentrate due to a sense of unease and puzzlement, and as the footsteps repeated themselves unease changed to anxiety.
The weather grew worse. The footsteps changed. They grew louder as my visitor approached the door , but were now followed by a long wail ending in a crash. I knew all about the physiology underlying why one’s hair can stand on end , but now knew what is was like to experience it. Eventually I decided that I must encounter my caller so at the next audible step I opened the door, went out, and stood on the landing.
The breeze was whistling in the eaves, and the increasing sound of the footsteps started to echo around the bare staircase. It was only by the progressive increase in the tread of feet that one could guess as to where on the staircase my visitor had climbed, but the steps were getting louder. They soon seemed directly in front of me. There was nothing to see, no shadow or disturbed dust, but the steps were all around me. Suddenly the whole space was filled with a throaty wail. I looked around in somewhat fearful surprise, and saw the ceiling open up into a black cavity, before it closed with a mighty crash.
Fuelled by isolation, and an imagination overstimulated by circumstances a rational explanation had, until then, escaped me. All that was happening was that the wind was building pressure in the staircase until it was sufficient to lift the attic trapdoor, lightly and repeatedly, and to an ever increasing extent. It then flew open upon which the wind rushed through into the attics with a loud wail. If, as I was tempted to, I had simply locked the door and retreated into bed yet another mysterious visitation would have gone unexplained.
Last year at a College dinner I went to Chapel Court, and looked at the landing and trapdoor again. Despite the event being painfully real in 1966, I now find it impossible to understand how uncanny it was at the time. I wonder how many other phenomena have similar rational explanations, although I cannot help feeling rather sorry to have reduced the whole episode to mundane reality.
Date with death
David Lewis (1975)
The crematorium is busy, the car park full. Pall-bearers carry lavish wreaths and “floral tributes” to the chapel. Someone important will soon go up in smoke. But I am not here to attend a VIP funeral. I am here to mark the 20th anniversary of my mother’s sudden death, by visiting the spot where her ashes are scattered. Grandpa, my mother’s dad, died during my last year at university. I did not attend the funeral: Gran told me to focus on my Finals. Five years later Gran herself faded out in an old people’s home. I was here for that. And then Mum died very fast of acute leukaemia before I could make it home. I remember kissing her cold face in the hospital morgue, the blank faces of relatives at the crematorium six days later, and the desolation of watching the curtain close on her coffin in the chapel. The shadows on this cold clear All Saints Day are already long. I walk through the “Garden of Rest”, past the building with the list of tariffs for the various services on offer. Past the café, Sally’s Solace, where waiting pall-bearers are drinking tea at formica tables or smoking on the terrace.
I reach the back of the garden. Small flower-beds in the darkening shade. Dark green foliage behind. Discreet, modest, away from the limelight. Just like my mother and her parents. Not like whoever is being incinerated this afternoon. Both Grandpa and Mum were keen gardeners, so I am pleased their remains are now literally pushing up roses — small white blooms still resisting the cool of late autumn. And then clumps of lavender exuding a scent I associate with Gran and the fusty musty house she kept. Disturbed by traffic noise from the road behind the fence, I walk to what looks like a miniature chapel in the middle of the garden. Inside is a computer terminal at which visitors may enter the name of anyone they wish to remember. I type in the names of my grandfather, grandmother and mother in turn. Each time, the screen lights up with a golden book and gothic lettering like the start of a Disney film. Digital pages flutter to entries listing their dates of birth, death and cremation. I feel a rush of cold. The late afternoon light turns suddenly to dusk. I shudder. My hairs stand on end. An intense smell of roses and lavender fills the room. I sense my grandparents behind me and my mother to my right.
“I came to say goodbye,” says my mother’s voice, as if on a bad phone connection. “But why don’t you join us?”
A large figure in a cloak looms up behind me. The room is now almost pitch black. “Yes, why don’t you?” he croaks, wielding a scythe.
The digital pages flutter again to display my own name. As I fall, I glimpse the date of death: 31 October 2024
The Advent Visitor
Christina J. Faraday (2011)
The legend of a St John’s student who surrendered his soul to the devil in exchange for the knowledge to pass his exams was the inspiration behind Christina’s eerie ghost story.
You can read her story here: https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/advent-visitor or visit the College website to read more about her inspiration.
Come Out to Play
Mark Wells (1981)
Mark’s haunting narrative tells the story of a struggling student who enters an antiquarian bookshop for some retail therapy and leaves with more than she bargained for. Come Out to Play is the first story in the Cambridge Shadows ghost story collection.
You can read the story and get your free copy here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/kjw77ntuo
Bonus story: The Screaming in the Staircase
Anonymous
I had a room in First Court during my first year. It was a lovely room, light and spacious. I’d felt like I’d really lucked out! But that was before I started to hear the screaming…
During fresher’s week I’d barely noticed it. The coming and going of students, the partying. The odd scream every now and then simply blended in with the excited, drunken yells of young people on a brand-new adventure. It was when the parties turned to books that I started feeling something strange.
It was a Wednesday, and I had an essay due for 9am the next morning. A chronic procrastinator I had left it right to the last minute and so I found myself close to midnight sitting down to begin typing. The words were blending together as my eyes grew tired, but that all changed when I heard the shuffling on the other side of my door.
Shuffle is the best way I can describe it. Not a footstep. Not a drag. Something in between.
And then a harrowing wail ripped through the corridor. The most painful cry, screaming for help. And yet I couldn’t move. I was a coward in that moment. All I could think about were my flatmates, that one was in trouble. But there was a feeling in my gut that told me not to go. Something told me that it wasn’t my flatmates. That it was something else.
The screaming went on forever. And the other doors in the corridor remained firmly shut like my own.
But then it stopped. For the night.
It went on for weeks, months even. And I wasn’t the only one who heard it. My flatmates did too, all too scared to move from their rooms when it sounded. We barely slept. Our professors berated us for napping in lectures, but it was the only place we felt safe enough to close our eyes. They’d never have believed us if we’d tried to explain it anyway.
There was one who did though. After weeks of being awoken by that bloodcurdling cry, we held a flat meeting. We needed help, if only to get the damn thing to shut up. And so, we took ourselves to the chapel, to the Dean.
We explained everything. The shuffling, the banging, the scraping and moaning and screaming. The Dean nodded with understanding and for a moment, we really thought he was simply doing it to entertain our silly notion that something could be haunting our halls. But then with a sad smile, he turned to me and said, ‘That would be James.’
‘James?’ I asked in disbelief. ‘Who the hell is James?’
‘He was a student here. A long time ago. In 1746. He was murdered.’
The four of us froze. The Dean continued.
‘He was 17. A fresher just like you. He went drinking with a friend and the next day, he was found dead in a pool of his own blood with a wooden stake through his stomach. They say it was the friend that killed him, John Brinkley. Though the boy obviously denied it, saying that when he returned from using the lavatory the door had been barred shut. When he managed to break it down, James was already dead.’
‘Yeah right’, my flatmate scoffed and sat back in his chair.
‘And he got away with it.’
‘What?!’ The four of us sat forward in shock.
‘Yep. He gave no sign of having heard anything strange when James was allegedly attacked. When there was no answer, he did nothing until he heard a groan. Then he tried to pick up the body, only running to get help when the body went all limp. He has no positive evidence to demonstrate he didn’t do it. But his father was a lawyer’
‘So, he gets away with it’ I whispered in disbelief. The Dean smiled sadly.
‘James’s spirit isn’t yet at peace. This is often the worst time, start of term. Tends to calm down once his day of death has passed. All the same, I’ll see if we can move you into different rooms, make sure it doesn’t affect your studies.’ Not one of us said another word about it after that day.
The next week we were split up and moved into Cripps. When asked why we moved, we’d often shrug and blame it on the water or the heating. But I could never shake the feeling that I was being watched every time I walked through First Court. I swear one time there was a figure in the window of my old room, even though I knew no one was living there.
And it made me feel bad. Maybe James thinks I’ve abandoned him too? Who’s to say. But I slept soundly in Cripps that year. The same can’t be said for James.
