THE SCEPTIC AND THE SUPERNATURAL: Higgypop dissects his personal ghostly experience.

Uncanny For thirty-five years I told no-one about the phenomena I experienced in Tanfield House. Even for an artist, poltergeists are a big no-no, there being a not so fine line between ‘Visionary’ and ‘Crank’. But in January 2021 I came across Danny Robins’s gripping podcast, ‘The Battersea Poltergeist’. The woman at the centre of the haunting, Shirley Hitchings, braved scepticism in the retelling of her childhood story. It made me reflect on the shame I felt at my own poltergeist experience. I decided to put my head over the parapet in support, and in January my story was told as ‘The Haunting of Tanfield House’, in Danny’s follow up series, “Uncanny”.

Haunted Magazine have invited me to share some of the pictures and writing I produced during the two years I spent at Tanfield House, as I tried to process the phenomena and hold onto my soul.

“....am I suspended in Gaffa?” Kate Bush

Gaffa is that sticky tape that you can tear easily with one hand and mend almost anything. I once surprised a building inspector who found me fifty foot up the side of an old chapel, wobbling about on my home-made scaffolding - two ladders, a chair and a bucket - gaffered to a porch roof, as I tried to nail on a barge board. Twenty years earlier my art tutor was peering up at me in much the same way, balancing precariously beneath the art school ceiling, gaffering giant cardboard constructions of white nonsensical planes. They grew to fill my studio space, and then my room in the flat. I refused to paint over them, and I wouldn’t explain to anyone what these things were.

I was trying to portray a hidden universe, somehow folded up into our outward reality, but fractured, so that things - living dreams - could emerge: to make sense of the impossible in the way that I knew best, through my artwork. Occasionally I would draw myself peeping through holes in the sculptures. What I was doing was imitating my poltergeist.

“I lie in a middle land, where half of me lives in a material world, and half somewhere else.” Diary entry (1985).

Tanfield House

I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, just another second-generation immigrant kid, embracing the amazing music and social scene of my industrial home town, Wolverhampton. I had a talent for portraiture and in 1984 I set off for Farnham, Surrey, to study painting. Not the simple market town I had imagined, Farnham was immensely posh. Rents were astronomical and finding accommodation was tricky. When in my second year I was offered a flat by two departing students, I felt I had won the lottery. I moved in with my friends and fellow painters, Nic and Jenny. An older photographer, Phil, used a fourth room as a base.

Tanfield House residents and friends (l-r), outside the back door, 1986: Patti Keane; Allison Galbraith, author; Steve Marchant, artist and teacher at London Cartoon Museum; Nic Carter, artist and author.

“Tanfield House is an old coach inn, on the more down town end of the main street…..My room looked out over the road and every morning I was woken by the first sunbeams…. Unfortunately Jenny could not settle in her room and so we swapped as it really didn’t worry me as to which room I was living in.”

Diary entry (21st December 1985)

My new room had a dense, heavy atmosphere. I would wake to see grey shadows grouped round my bed, a mattress on the floor: was this just a trick of the light? “At night something rustled near my bed. In the morning the light sat in grey guilty blocks around me. I always woke surprised and stared at it, And I would get up and not be sure…...”

Diary entry (1985)

Tanfield House sat in a parking lot next to a set of traffic lights, a grimy, rendered block. Once an old coaching inn, the Albion, it now housed an unmanned car showroom, with a tiny sandwich bar tucked in the crumbling extension to the side. The flat ran above both - four dilapidated rooms, a bathroom and kitchen. There was no heating, phone or washing machine and a landlord who left us alone. It was art student heaven. We could paint and hammer and saw up the furniture to our hearts content. I loved it from the moment I walked through the door. After only a few weeks Jenny asked if I would swap my tiny box room for her large studio one, telling me she felt depressed in it. I shuffled my bags across the landing and took possession of the Buttercup Room, so called because of a bright yellow chair that came with it.

Sunset in the Buttercup Room (September 1985).