For I didn’t once see a coffee pot move across the table of its own accord or the lid on a jar of gherkins unscrew itself. Rentaghost they were not. And so I had to rely on stories from the chambermaids, one of whom I was smitten with, or the hooligans in the kitchen to find out which rooms were haunted and the characteristics of the spooks.

I worked in the place as a bartender, porter and tattie peeler in the summer of 1986 and because I was yet to watch The Shining it reminded me more of Fawlty Towers than the Overlook Hotel. 

Had I seen Kubrick’s depiction of the Stephen King novel then I doubt I would have been as keen to climb the steps down to the wine cellar each morning for the purposes of bottling up, or walk alone along the echoey corridors of the east and west wing. But this wasn’t a hotel with 237 rooms and I never had to encounter the Grady twins.

However, on my first day I was kitted out with a white waiter’s jacket about three sizes too big, handed a dustpan and brush, and told to go and sweep up the wasps from the freshly fumigated gents’ toilets. These buzzing beasties – or jaspers as we called them in the bit of Oxfordshire where I grew up – weren’t quite dead but nor were they completely stunned. It was a curious sight: an entire army vanquished by the work of the pest control people, exterminating angels who’d since left the battlefield, the fallen soldiers splayed over the entirely of the garnet-hued carpet, some still issuing a high pitched if pathetic hum, others left silently twitching in the sinks and urinals, drowned into the bargain. Some job this.

The history of the building was such that it could be dated back to the 12th Century and had in various incarnations been: a Benedictine nunnery; a manor house; a strategic location during the English civil war, one held by the Cavaliers before being taken by the Roundheads before being taken back by the Cavaliers; an MP’s country escape; a BBC hostel for evacuated staff during the early 1940s and subsequently an RAF sanitorium; a country club for aristos and artists; and now, by the 1980s, a posh hotel, corporate venue and local tennis club.

Those of note who spent time here included: Crusaders; a Yorkist; a number of non-conformists; Charles the 1st – prior to getting that haircut he didn’t ask for; Lord Bertie – as the Earl of Abingdon was locally known (how very Wodehousian); John Buchan – Perth-born Spectator columnist and author of The Thirty-Nine Steps; CS Lewis – when he wasn’t visiting Narnia through the back of his wardrobe; Hugh Curran – who played for Third Lanark, Wolves and Scotland, as well as the Mighty Oxford Utd; Julia Smith – original producer of Eastenders; Michael Grade – cigar chomping former BBC1 controller; and Mark Gardener – future singer of 90s shoegazers Ride and who took over my three-sizes too big white waiter’s jacket at the end of that summer.

Among the maybe-not-so-noted yet just-as-memorable other colleagues who worked in this moderately haunted house were: J the owner – who appeared to have no more than a passing acquaintance with everyday life and would unquestionably have been happier fishing or clay pigeon shooting than trying to run a top-end establishment; N the manager – a dandy whose put downs put you down but only after he’d left the room; D the head waiter – a wolf in wolf’s clothing who could run up a mountain with a cup and saucer on a silver platter and not spill a drop; A the housekeeper – who smoked like Didcot Power Station and would somehow make the words “yes dear” sound kindly even when they were soaked with contempt; G the Weegie washer-upper – who had seen Simple Minds in their early funny (for which read good) period; S the assistant manager – who fussed over everything as if she were a character in an Oscar Wilde play and once insisted that I go back and re-dust all the chair legs in the main lounge; and M the aforementioned chambermaid – who apparently quite by accident taped Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus over Love Will Tear Us Apart on the compilation cassette I made her. What a crew. Were we a band I wager we’d have broken up before the first rehearsal.

Guests? They were a combination of new money (an older Dundonian businessman, for example, with a trophy wife), foreign money (tourists from the US and Japan) and old money (the father of the owner regularly showing up to liberate a bottle of Glenmorangie from the spirits cupboard to which there were two keys – the one I had responsibility for and the one that remained in his pocket).

Some of the above apparitions, I confess, continue to wander the canyons of my mind. But no matter. These ghosts are ever so discreet.

Rodger Evans