by Chris Harris
It is exactly three years to the hour and I am walking past exactly the same spot that I saw the ghost of Virginia Woolf. It is dark, very cold and 5.30 am. I am dictating. I always walk early; I am an early riser and prefer the solitude at that time. The spot is essential, just outside Lewes where two footpaths meet on the C7 road to Newhaven on the corner of the Stanley Turner rugby pitches. The significance is for later.
Charleston House The Ice in the Room.
It was Christmas 2022. On a bright winter’s day, the 30th of December, we decided to visit Charleston House, the legendary home of the Bloomsbury set. Technically, Virginia Woolf didn’t live at Charleston itself but spent much time there. She lived a few miles away towards the coast, in Rodmell near Newhaven, another detail for later, but Charleston has always carried her presence in the imagination. I’ve always lived near Lewes and meant to visit Charleston a combination of Christmas inertia, and I had just read Jacob’s Room, meant finally getting my act together.
We arrived early, to beat the queues. The day was bright blue and bitterly cold: that crisp winter light that makes everything look sharper than usual. Honestly, if you get nothing else out of this blog, take this as a recommendation: go and visit Charleston House. It’s extraordinary. It is not in a stately home way; it is a large farmhouse and feels so alive. The artwork, the styling, the colour, the defiant eccentricity of it just sparkles.
We viewed the larger downstairs rooms first, the most impressive ones. We went upstairs into the top floor rooms. There were probably eight or nine of us, and the guide led us into a bedroom. She paused and said that this was the room that was supposed to be haunted.
Everyone did what people do, jokingly pretend to look worried.
We crossed the hallway to another bedroom, as I entered the room an icy cold went through me, way beyond the general chill of winter, something sharp and immediate, like walking into a pocket of freezing air. It lasted only a few seconds, just long enough for my body to react, and then, as I moved properly into the room, the normal temperature returned. Nobody else reacted at all.
We finished the tour, went back to Lewes. It should have been the end of it. A good day out. An outstanding house.
But it wasn’t the end.
The Apparition on the Footpath
Before I describe the apparition itself, and the coincidences and factual details that make it harder to dismiss, I need to explain something about my background. Not because it proves anything, but because it sets the context properly.
I’ve been fortunate enough to live in a number of large, old houses over the years, both in the South of England and holidaying in central France. I have personally experienced a dozen or so separate apparitions or paranormal activity. There are poltergeist experiences in my immediate family. My parents experienced it in the mid-1970s, although I lived in the house but did not register anything. My nephew did in the mid-1980s too, being slung out of a bed. Other members of my family have their own stories, I sometimes wonder if we are one of the most haunted families in the country!
For my own part, the last fifteen years had been quieter. Nothing dramatic. But there have been what I’d call minor skirmishes.
Which brings me back to that morning.
As I approached the stile in the corner of the field, it struck me as odd that a woman was opening the gate to walk onto the path ahead of me. It was half past five: dark, cold. But you don’t analyse these things in real time. Something happens, and then it’s gone, and only afterwards does the mind start catching up.
I didn’t see her face. She was dressed in a light beige, with a suede-like texture. The overall look was unmistakably bohemian. She wore a headscarf, and because of the angle, and the way she opened the gate, her face remained turned away from me the entire time.
It did not click as she looked real, there was no sudden, oh I’ve just seen a ghost. Besides, at that hour, I instinctively avoid engaging with people. There’s also the very modern self-consciousness of not wanting to alarm someone, the awareness that a middle-aged man acknowledging a lone woman at half past five in the morning is something best avoided altogether. So I kept walking, giving her space, letting her pass into her own morning.
She closed the gate behind her. I didn’t hear it click, because it’s not really that sort of gate, it’s one a farmer has never bothered to secure properly, usually just looped with rope. Nothing that makes a sound.
And then, a few seconds later, it twigged.
That must have been the ghost of Virginia Woolf.
And I know how that sounds. I can hear it even as I write it. Which is why, before I go any further I want to lay out the reasons, why I think that conclusion deserves at least to be considered.
Team Believer or Team Sceptic?
So here’s why I think it was the ghost of Virginia Woolf, and why, even as someone who isn’t remotely prone to melodrama, I can’t make myself file it away as “probably nothing.”
You know when you walk past a person, they are there. You did not imagine it, and this was a person, not an apparition, something vivid, this was human form. So let us dispel it was a trick of the light or my imagination. It was visually a real person.
Firstly, timing matters. The day before, I’d been to Charleston House and experienced the first genuinely paranormal-feeling moment I’d had in around fifteen. I’ve experienced but not studied the paranormal but it would make sense something attaching itself to you in this case, how or why it would, I have no idea.
When I got home and properly processed what had happened, I went online and looked up images of Virginia Woolf. I’ve always known what her distinctive face looked like in the general sense, but I’d never examined her stature and her build. And that’s what really unnerved me. Because I hadn’t seen the woman’s face at five-thirty that morning. I’d seen her outline. Her silhouette. Her clothing. The headscarf. And when I looked at Woolf’s style and those of the times it resonated, although the clothing was , maybe, tighter than you’d think, she was almost swathed in her clothes like a mummy.
That’s the moment I stopped entertaining other explanations. Because it wasn’t just “a woman in the dark.” It was the inevitability of it. For me, that was the point where the whole thing moved from odd to significant. If you know the area you will know it is quite well lit, in case you are questioning the darkness.
There’s also a personal connection, slight but real. She lived at Monk’s House in Rodmell just down the road from where I am. My sister lived for years in a cottage opposite Monk’s House, on the other side of the road. An old cottage too. Virginia Woolf would have seen it countless times and I spent many an hour in the front garden. She would have noticed it during her rhythm of her life.
Then there’s the nearby River Ouse. The tragedy is famous: she drowned herself there. But what makes it feel uncomfortably close is that for a couple of years I managed a catering and boating business along the River Ouse, a river I know in the way you only know something you’ve worked on.
But perhaps the most convincing argument, the one that keeps returning to me, is the path itself. The route where I saw her is exactly the natural walk and footpath from Rodmell into Lewes, the sort of path she would have taken without thinking. When she walked into Lewes she almost certainly walked that way hundreds of times. And that’s the point that sticks: I saw her on a path she would have known intimately.
About three months later, I had a moment that nearly gave my inner sceptic some ammunition. I was out on a daytime walk and passed a woman dressed in a similar kind of garb, the same general bohemian look. Because I walk the same route so often, sometimes twice a day, I clock people. I notice the regular walkers, even if only subconsciously. This woman wasn’t someone I’d noticed before. She wore dark clothes, slightly vintage, and she smiled as she walked past me. As time dims you start to question yourself and come up with explanations.
I’ll admit it: when I’m walking past that spot in the dark, somewhere between five and half five, and it’s just me and the brook and the cold and the quiet, it does creep me out a bit. In those moments, if I’m feeling unsettled, I sometimes allow myself a little rational comfort: maybe it wasn’t a ghost at all. Maybe it was that woman. Maybe I saw a real person and my brain stitched a story onto it afterwards.
But of course I know it wasn’t. Whilst writing this, to me the final ending of any speculation, another piece of evidence, the latter woman was 5ft, I am 5ft7in, I checked online today. Virginia Woolf was 5ft7in.
A sceptic can argue it was a trick of my mind, but it was tangible, it was real, and there are enough coincidences to suggest it was the ghost of Virginia Woolf.
#Virginia Woolf #Bloomsbury #Charlestn House #Paranormal #Ghost
The Rights of Fans. 