Cleeve House

Cleeve House

Saturday 25th April 2009

Saturday 25th April Phoenix of Wessex and Twilight Shadows had the privilege to visit Cleeve House in Seend for our newest investigation.

In 1857, the eminent land-owner Wadham Locke III owned a property in Seend called Rew House. After knocking it down, his son, Wadham Locke IV built Cleeve House half a mile from the original site, to be the Wadham family home. He and his five sisters made their home here, and one sister, Frances Locke, became famous for going to the Crimean War. She was the last Locke to live at Cleeve House, and when she left in 1883 the building was sold to the Bell Family.

Squire William Heward Bell, having built his fortune on the family's coal mines in Merthyr Tydfil, purchased the property for his family. He pulled down a large amount of the building and rebuilt what is now the Great Hall and adjoining entrance porch in 1884. The Hall was adorned with the many trophies of Squire Bell's hunting prowess, including a huge moose head and the skins of a tiger and a bear.

Squire Bell and his wife, Hannah Taylor Cory Bell, had four children, one of whom was the famous writer and critic Clive Bell. In 1907, the final part of the Cleeve House, including the Library and above bedrooms were built to 'make the house more comfortable' as it was the year of Clive Bell's marriage to Vanessa Stephen. Both Clive and Vanessa Bell were important members of the culturally revolutionary Bloomsbury group, in which Clives writing was influential, and Vanessa was a prominent artist.

The young Vanessa Stephen pursued art as her profession while her sister, Virginia Woolf, chose writing. Close to her sister throughout her often troubled life, Virginia Woolf visited Vanessa Bell in Cleeve House, and wrote about the house in her famous diaries. Of the four Bell children, Colonel W Cory Bell, who was an MP and Sheriff of Wiltshire, lived at Cleeve House longest, until his death in 1961.

The Bell family crest adorns the front porch, and personal Bell inscriptions can be found among the stone and woodwork throughout the house.

We arranged to meet at the house for 8pm and I could not believe my eyes at the beauty of this place. Once everyone had arrived we were welcomed by the owners of the house that informed us that unfortunately a few rooms had been let upstairs but we had the run of the downstairs of the building.

After we had got our bearings the team was split into 3 groups of 4 and we all took a room at a time. I left a trigger object in the library of a cross made of coins and a trigger object in the tea room which was a toy car.

My group started in the tea room. We decided to spend about 45mins to an hour in each room so my team which consisted of Maria, Loretta, Sharon and myself settled down and started chatting. It was in fact about an hour later that we realised that is all we had done. Chatted. The room had a very social atmosphere but nothing paranormal happened while we were in there.

Our next room was the Salisbury room. This is the room that is used for conferences etc. A few of the newer members of the team did not like this room from the beginning. My team settled in various places and we started to call out. It took a while but we felt a horrible atmosphere descend on us. i was sat by the top main window and as I asked out again I felt a definite prod then stroke around my back which I can only describe as being from a male hand as it felt far to large for a woman. With this I jumped up like a shot and scared the whole team by shouting out. I moved towards Maria and felt physically sick like I had been violated. After 5 mins I tried to call out again but was very aware that this spirit male was stood right behind me. I moved next to Sharon and Maria exclaimed she could sense the male spirit person too and she felt very on edge. I felt it was male and not very nice. He was incensed that we were in there and wanted us out.

We had spent quite a while in this room so we all changed locations and we ended up in the library. I still felt very unsettled and was not happy to turn off the lights. Once the lights were off and your eyes adjusted, I thought that the family cat had crept in the room with us as I could see something coming towards us about knee height. On closer inspection though nothing was there. I was not the only person to see this. There was lots of movement around the fireplace. We saw flashes of light which was reported by other members of the team and we had audible taps in response to our questions from the far right hand corner of the room. We also saw what looks like orbs with our naked eye in that room which is practically unheard of.

To finish off we decided to all congregate in the Salisbury room for one last vigil. Pete our guest medium had picked up on a male spirit. Not a particularly nice one that picked on woman but was too much of a coward to do anything to a man. He named him as William or Bill and hinted that he had done things to woman when no one else was around but the master of the house had found out and maybe metered out punishment. It was now that it turns out nearly every group had experienced some type of physical attack in there and it was always a woman it happened too.

As it was getting late we decided to call it a night. On gathering up our trigger objects, one coin from the coin cross I left in the library had moved but the toy car had not.

I would like to thank all team members present for making this night a very successful one and also Pete and Nettie for taking precious time out and joining us on this brilliant investigation.