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Strange But True S04E02
Transcript
00:00Good evening.
00:26There are many old buildings in Britain which have their history written in blood, but even among these, the mansion in tonight's story is special.
00:36It's a matter of historical record that Little Cat House in Wiltshire was once the setting for a terrible murder.
00:43400 years on, those who know the house well claim that this dark deed is a legacy which reverberates down the ages.
00:50In over 700 years of continuous habitation, Little Cat House in rural Wiltshire has been owned by only six families.
01:02Little Cat has witnessed many events in its turbulent history, and all have left their mark on the building.
01:09One of its most notorious owners lived here in the 16th century.
01:12His name was William Darrell, but his reputation earned him the title Wild Will.
01:21One dark night, a local midwife, Mother Barnes, was called to the house for the promise of high reward if she would attend a lady who was about to give birth.
01:31Conducted up six steps of stone, she passed the hall at the 20th stride, mounts one and thirty glossy stairs, and lo, the bandage is untied.
01:41I sent for you to do your work.
01:43Do it well and save the lady.
01:45If you succeed, you will be well rewarded.
01:47If you fail, and the maiden dies, then you too shall die.
01:52You have a beautiful baby sound, my dear.
02:16Well, woman, so you've succeeded.
02:29My lord, you have a beautiful son, but he has no clothes to keep him warm, save the sapron of mine.
02:36I have no use for this child, nor any other child.
02:40I bid thee dispose of it with all haste.
02:42Oh, my lord, I beg of you, let me take him a care for him as if he were my own.
02:47I will say nothing.
02:48You have my sworn word on it.
02:50Give me the child.
02:54Die.
02:57And let guilt, shame, and sorrow die with you.
03:03Whilst Mother Barnes was attending to the lady in the bed, she took a cutting of the bed hanging.
03:15She was blindfolded again, taken down the stairs, which she counted, and back to her cottage, where she was given a bag of cold and told to keep her mouth shut.
03:25She went into her cottage, but her conscience started niggling a waiter, and next morning she decided to go to the magistrate and confess what had happened at Littlecote House.
03:37She was able to match the bed hanging, and Daryl was arrested.
03:42Daryl was quite an influential man and was able to bribe a judge to get him off the charge.
03:49Daryl was quite a judge.
04:19Daryl also features in Sir Walter Scott's poem, Rokeby.
04:23After Daryl's death, Littlecote was seized by the then Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Popham.
04:29Daryl had used the house as a bribe to get off the charge of infanticide.
04:33The identity of the mother was never established.
04:37Locals believe she may have been Will Daryl's sister.
04:40Despite Daryl's curse, the Popham family held on to Littlecote until 1929, when Sir Ernest Wills bought it.
04:47Lady Wills believes that the legacy of Daryl's deeds may live on.
04:52To me, the house was very friendly, very nice, and I really enjoyed living there, but a lot of people who came had some very strange happenings and experiences.
05:05One night, I was in my room, and I heard footsteps coming along the corridor, and they stopped at the door, which was very strange, because I thought somebody was coming in.
05:16It sounded as though somebody was just walking along and coming into the room, but nobody came into the room.
05:22So I thought, well, that's my husband.
05:25So I threw open the door, and there was nobody there.
05:31When my daughter told me about the footsteps, I wasn't in the least surprised, because I had heard the same footsteps many and many a time when I stayed there.
05:41I told her it was rubbish, because I didn't want her to be frightened.
05:45But one night, I had been reading, and I lifted my eyes, and suddenly there was someone standing at the foot of the bed, holding what I took to be a child over her shoulder.
05:59She was gazing at me, and I gazed at her.
06:04We didn't speak, I didn't speak, but she just looked, and a look of calm and peace came over her face, and with that, she faded away from the room completely.
06:17And fame reports the lady comes with babe of fire at dead of night, but harmless to the innocent, they come to see that all is right.
06:25I was at the bottom of the cantilever staircase and looked up, and suddenly a figure glided along the brown landing, and it was that of a lady.
06:35She was obviously very young, and her fair hair was blowing out behind her.
06:40It was a split second to see her, but I've never forgotten it.
06:48In 1985, Little Cote was sold to entrepreneur Peter de Savory.
06:52He took it on, together with all its worldly contents, but he believes he also inherited a rather unworldly aspect of its more recent past.
07:02When I saw the house, and I liked the house, I decided, to hell with the ghosts, I'm going to buy the house anyway, and nothing's going to put me off or frighten me.
07:11It was a lovely sunny morning, about nine o'clock, and I was on my way out to the garden, because there we were holding an auction of the contents of the house.
07:24And as I stepped into the hall, I suddenly saw a lady coming towards me.
07:29She was dressed in modern country clothes.
07:32And I do remember thinking at the time, gosh, which room did she come out of?
07:38She looked straight at me, and she said, you are a very evil and wicked man.
07:44And she was looking straight at my eyes, and I was taken aback, and I said, I beg your pardon, what do you mean?
07:50And she said, you have taken my baby's things.
07:54They were in the wooden box in the chapel.
07:55They belong to my son, and you have taken them away to be sold.
08:00And she again stared at me without smiling at all or flinching, and she said,
08:05Please put them back in the chapel.
08:07If you don't, you and your family will be cursed and damned forever in this house.
08:14I suppose I could try and find them for you.
08:17And she looked at me, and she said, and if you do put them back where they belong, you and your family will be blessed forever.
08:26And just at that moment, she smiled, and she was gone.
08:32She was just gone.
08:33I was white.
08:35I was trembling.
08:36I was a man genuinely possessed with fear.
08:39Something very unnatural had happened that morning.
08:44De Savary quickly found the box in his house.
08:47And as I held the box and looked at it, I realized that I had had an experience very few people have ever had.
08:55I was holding the baby's clothes, and I had been speaking earlier in the morning to the mother,
09:00who had come back as a ghost in modern dress with a modern look.
09:05I took the box.
09:06I went to the chapel.
09:08I put it on the window ledge from where it had been taken,
09:11said a short prayer in the chapel, and told the auctioneer,
09:15The sale may now commence.
09:16Ten years later, De Savary sold the house to Warner Holidays, the hoteliers.
09:22But even Warners insist that the box should remain where it has always been.
09:27I'm utterly convinced I saw a ghost that day.
09:31I was cooking for a meal in the kitchen for the De Savary family,
09:35and all our staff were in period costume at that time.
09:38And I see somebody go past me and go into this little room outside of the kitchen.
09:44I said to Mary, who was working at the kitchen sink,
10:00Where have you been, Mary? Why have you been out of the room?
10:03And she said, I haven't been out of the room at all.
10:05She said, I've been here all the time.
10:06Which, of course, she must have been, because there was no other way out of the kitchen.
10:10So I was quite convinced then that I'd seen a ghost.
10:13John had just gone down into the cellars.
10:18I was here.
10:20Nobody else in the house.
10:23And whilst I was pottering about here, I heard footsteps up above.
10:26I thought, that's strange.
10:35John's just gone into the cellar.
10:37So I dashed upstairs, went through all the rooms up there, not a soul about.
10:43About a year ago, I was up in the attics checking things on a Saturday night,
10:48and was coming down in the Jerusalem stairs, which I'd been up and down hundreds of times, hundreds.
10:55And I was halfway down the stairs, when suddenly I was crashing against the wall.
11:02I broke my shoulder, my collarbone, and my ribs.
11:07And I don't know what happened.
11:09I didn't slip.
11:10I wasn't pushed.
11:12And I didn't fall.
11:13I was just suddenly, wham!
11:15This isn't an evil house as such, but that day, something evil definitely did happen.
11:23I've never, ever experienced that feeling in the house before.
11:28It really left me frightened.
11:32Whatever the truth about the claims,
11:34these strange events, as documented in the poem about the Littlecote ghost,
11:38suggest that the spirit of wild will may live on.
11:41Whilst Daryl's wretched spirit, tis said, as if in magic circle bound,
11:47offed by benighted rustics, seen the fatal spot to wander round.
11:55Today, Littlecote house has been converted into a hotel,
11:59with a capacity for up to 400 guests.
12:02Well, those are the paying ones, at least.
12:03Some cultures take the view that, being close to the skies,
12:13mountains are suffused with magical properties.
12:16To them, the highest places in the world are a meeting point between heaven and earth.
12:21The ancient Greeks believed the summit of Mount Olympus to be the home of the gods.
12:25And Tibetan folklore tells of a mountain Shangri-La,
12:29where men become immortal in a land of eternal youth.
12:32I like the sound of that one.
12:34In our second story tonight,
12:36mountain rescuers turn to the mystical forces of a cold and forbidding alpine peak.
12:46The Bavarian Alps boast Germany's highest peaks,
12:50just the challenge for keen skiers and old friends Steve Swindlehurst and Ian Middleton.
12:55In February 1994, they came to Oberammergau to tackle the infamous Mount Laber.
13:02We decided to set out round about three o'clock.
13:05We looked at it to think that it was going to be about a 25-minute journey from top to bottom.
13:09It is a black run, it's powder and pieced, and it is quite an awesome run.
13:18When we actually got to the top of the mountain,
13:20we did actually find that the fog was starting to come in,
13:23which lowered the visibility.
13:25Both good skiers, the two men had no fears.
13:30Ian, a former army ski instructor, went first.
13:34Despite the weather, the going was good.
13:40My father-in-law told me about skiing on the Laber, how difficult it was,
13:44and it was a real challenge that Ian and I should have a go at it by the end of the holiday.
13:47We'd skied down about 150-200 metres on a fairly steep slope.
14:02Halfway down, we realised that it wasn't the piece that we had obviously made a wrong turning.
14:08Then we realised that we were actually off-piste and skiing in terrain, which was quite dangerous.
14:14The two men tried to find their way back to the marked-out piste,
14:18which would lead them down to the safety of the village.
14:21But then, disaster struck.
14:23Ah!
14:25Oh, Brian!
14:28Are you all right?
14:30Yeah.
14:30What I'd done, in fact, was break the binding clip,
14:33so when I tried to lock my ski back down again, it wouldn't close in the boot,
14:37and it was unable then to ski any further.
14:41By now, well and truly lost,
14:42they attempted a new route towards the village, this time on foot.
14:49That was when it started to get a bit hairier,
14:51and on a couple of occasions we came to what were, in effect, sheer cliffs.
14:57The snow just dropped away into nothing, and you couldn't see the bottom.
15:01And the whole time, both Ian and myself were getting all dejected
15:03that we weren't going to find the slope.
15:05It was now getting on towards six o'clock in the evening and getting dark.
15:08The rest of the holiday party, waiting in the village below, have become worried.
15:14Ian and Steve were now seriously late.
15:16Obramagau's mountain rescue team were scrambled.
15:28With the temperature set to plummet to minus 20 degrees that night,
15:38the rescuers knew the men would only survive for a few hours.
15:46We went down all the official pieces, first of all.
15:48Then we separated into groups and went down the unofficial trails,
15:51all the time calling and shouting to try and find the two men.
15:54But there was no sign of them.
15:59Of course, the darker it got, the harder it was to see where we were going.
16:02And I guess at about 7.30, 8 o'clock,
16:05we realised that we weren't going to get down that evening.
16:11By now, the two men had strayed into dense forest.
16:16I don't think we ever got anywhere near that piece.
16:19Well, if it is, we're not going to find it now.
16:21We're running out of daylight.
16:22All the action, man.
16:27What are we going to do now? Build an igloo?
16:29At the time, both Ian and myself didn't really appreciate how cold it was getting.
16:33We realised that if we were to sit in one place,
16:36it wouldn't be the best way around to do it,
16:37because you may just sit there and freeze to death.
16:39It's not getting any warm. We've got to build some sort of shelter.
16:42Hey, this'll do it for a start.
16:45Yeah.
16:49Yeah.
16:52Surrounded by trees, there was little chance of the men being spotted by the rescuers.
16:58But as the search party gave up and headed back to the village,
17:02there was someone else concerned for their safety.
17:0670-year-old George Horak has lived in Oberammergau all his life.
17:11He's an acknowledged expert on the mountains which encircle the village.
17:14But George is also a dowser.
17:26By holding his divining rod over a map of the mountains,
17:29George claims he can tap into their energy
17:31and sense what is happening on the slopes.
17:34I could feel what they felt, trapped at night on a mountain in the dark and cold.
17:44I could feel the danger they were in and that they were afraid to die.
17:52The rod showed there was something broken.
17:56I didn't know what was broken. It could have been a leg.
17:58I could also see they were sitting underneath something which had to do with earth.
18:08But I could not think for the sake of it what it could be.
18:11Some sort of shelter.
18:16Despite their physical exertions,
18:20Steve and Ian were starting to suffer from the bitter cold.
18:23They're bound to find us in a while later.
18:24Yeah, hopefully sooner.
18:27Before the gangrene sets in.
18:29Come on, more branches.
18:30The important thing is to keep moving.
18:40One can get frostbite on feet and toes,
18:43on the fingers or nose and ears.
18:46The whole body gets so cold
18:48and the body temperature sinks so low
18:50that the heart stops beating.
18:53Oh, let's have a nip of that brandy, Ian.
19:02I'm freezing.
19:04Just a tiny drop.
19:12Dinner?
19:12Dinner?
19:15Yeah.
19:17Oh.
19:18I'm still feeling in my fingers.
19:24Let's get out of it.
19:25Move around.
19:28We shouldn't rest in one place
19:29for more than ten minutes at a time anyway.
19:33It's at those times that you begin to feel the worst.
19:35You wonder if you're going to survive the cold,
19:39if the rescue people are going to find you in the morning.
19:41Alone on the mountain,
19:45the men had no idea that a village dowser
19:47might be their last hope.
19:57George Horak relied on the reactions
19:59of his divining rod to guide him,
20:02as he plotted what he believed
20:03was the men's exact latitude and longitude
20:06on the mountain.
20:07I told the mountain rescue team
20:12where the men could be found.
20:14Then they went back up again.
20:16I returned home,
20:17hoping that the men could be found,
20:18even if not in the place
20:19where I thought they were.
20:20The mountain rescue is grateful for all advice
20:29and investigates all the information they get.
20:33We did not think about
20:35if the advice was wrong or right.
20:36If we get advice,
20:37we follow it up.
20:38Here, come here, quick.
21:01There's someone out there.
21:05Here we are.
21:18This way!
21:19The first time you could see
21:21the rescue people's torches
21:22shining through the trees
21:24was absolutely amazing.
21:25The sheer sense of,
21:27well, we're going to get out of this
21:27and we're going to get out of it now.
21:29I guess it was then
21:30that the adrenaline stops working
21:32and you suddenly realize, A, how cold you are, and B, how tired you are.
21:37As soon as Mountain Rescue found us and they came down
21:39and they had hot sweet tea for us to drink,
21:42we were shivering, absolutely shivering all over.
21:44I was absolutely shaking like a leaf.
21:51Steve and Ian were brought down to the village, cold but unharmed.
21:55It was only later that they learned just how serious their predicament had been.
22:00We were speaking to Mountain Rescue the next day.
22:02And I was trying to explain to this guy what we'd done,
22:05the way we'd built the shelter, the working and the resting,
22:10everything that we'd done all the way through.
22:11And he disregarded really what I was saying and said,
22:15you would have died.
22:16You would not have come down off that mountain.
22:18You would have been dead.
22:21It wasn't until they were back home in England
22:23that they learned about George Horak's role in their rescue.
22:26I was fairly skeptical about the whole thing.
22:29It wasn't really until I'd heard stories about the Mountain Rescue team
22:35doing one last run and going to an exact area pinpointed by the dowser
22:40that you realize that there probably is more to dowsing and alike than you realize.
22:46Well, I'm glad he did it.
22:49I'm here.
22:52It's...
22:53We were told at the end of the day what he did with the dowsing rod
22:58was like getting a needle out of a haystack.
23:01Three years on, Steve has his hands full with his 13-day-old daughter, Emily.
23:08I can remember Ian when we were sitting on the mountain
23:11in one of the quiet moments saying that he'd got two young boys
23:16and he was absolutely adamant that he was going to come down.
23:18There was no way he wasn't.
23:20And I guess with my arrival, yeah, it puts everything into perspective.
23:23Some would say it was no more than a stroke of luck
23:28which enabled George to locate the skiers.
23:31Perhaps the real test would be whether he could do it again.
23:34So far, resturers have not needed to ask him for more help
23:37and they hope they'll never have to.
23:39Good night.
23:40Good night.
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