The House with Four Chimneys - Part Twoby Walter WaideFor the first installment see the last issue of "The Rossendale Rambler" The gutted house stood alone for 70 years but because of the care with which it was built, the walls remained straight as a die and the structure of the property remained sound. Then, a rich young couple bought the house and restored it to its former glory, together with the wrought iron gates and strange >tombstone’ gate posts. With big windows it was a bright and cheery place. The trouble with the master fireplace remained however and the wife found it impossible to get a decent fire in the hearth. She made some enquiries about the problems and was told the terrifying story of Alice. So frightened was she of what she heard, she ran to the library in Haslingden on Christmas Eve to see what was recorded there. She had told her husband about hearing noises in the night, that sounded like a child in agony, from the chimney, but her husband dismissed these things and, in order to convince her of the absence of ghosts, climbed up the chimney to see what was causing the problem whilst she had gone to the library. No-one knows for certain what happened next but it is said that when the wife returned, having read the gruesome details of what had happened some 70 years previously, she too wanted to dismiss the story as folk legend. Seeing the fire prepared in the grate, she probably wanted to lay the ghost and in doing so put a match to the kindling and once more the flames roared up the chimney to the agonising screams of her husband who was trapped up there. Again the house was filled with the stench of burning flesh. The young woman was distraught and though she called the fire brigade, they could not find the house and by the time the body was recovered it had been gutted again as the flames spread from the grate to the fabric of the building. The police investigated the matter but were unable to find anything to substantiate foul play and the event was recorded as a tragic accident. The poor woman never recovered and took to walking the hills late at night on her own. Local folk were frightened of her and she eventually took off to live near Lancaster where she was said to remain until her death. I had a look up there the other week and like the journalist in the magazine, I was filled with a strange shivery feeling but then, it might just have been the winter chill ! - even though the place was being renovated. The new owners seemed to be taking no chances though - the silver flue pipes protruding from the chimneys suggested that central heating was to be the order of the day !
Epilogue.Having read the above story in the 'Lancashire Life' magazine and had my interest thoroughly stimulated, I did just what the woman in the sequel story did - I went to the library to try and learn more. The situation of the house must have meant that the mill that was referred to was the building that now houses the Helmshore Museum or one of the other of the mills in that particular area. I spent a good few hours searching for any reference to the name 'Calvert' but try as I might I could not; none of the voters lists of the area revealed anyone of that name in the whole of Haslingden, never mind Helmshore. I also searched old newspapers of the time, both around 1892 and 70 years later around 1962, to try and look for the story which must have made the headlines. The microfiche records revealed nothing and I began to get suspicious. By pure co-incidence I saw Arthur Baldwin in the library, a man whose local knowledge is staggering; he was talking to John Simpson, another local historian who wrote the 'Ellen Strange' booklet, and I raised the matter of the House with Four Chimneys with them. It seems that the chilling ghost story is just that - a story!! The article in the magazine showed a tombstone with the legend 'In Memory of Orphans Employed by I & I Calvert' carved upon it and one of the names was that of Alice Devitt, the alleged 'Tiddler'. But it seems that this photograph was taken at a different location altogether, probably Preston where the name 'Calvert' is common and the whole thing was subsequently just a figment of the original authors fertile imagination. So the story is not true, as is the case with most ghost stories, but this one was so local, so believable that I was really sorry to discover that there was not even a hint of fact or even local folk-lore in it - that does not make it any less of a damn good story though!
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Walter Waide Our e-mail address is: waidew@globalnet.co.uk
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