Philip: The Ghost That Never Was

Ben Cutmore (0:03)

In the early 1970s, a small group of Canadians making up the Toronto Society for Psychical Research set out to prove the existence of ghosts and poltergeists. Such an investigation was sure to need a highly controlled experiment if it were to hold any integrity at all. And the Toronto group felt that they had created just that, when they sat for several years communicating with their very own poltergeist. There was one small twist however, and that's that the poltergeist never actually existed, and was nothing more than the product of their own imaginations. This is Dark Histories, where the facts are worse than fiction.

Hello and welcome to Dark Histories Season 10, Episode 17 I'm your host Ben, and today I've got one of the more weirder episodes I think Dark Histories has probably ever done. I have a sort of malleable soft rule with Dark Histories that episodes will be set before the Second World War. I don't really deal with cases or stories that fall after the Second World War, unless I think that they're like good interesting stories, or they're weird enough, or there's something that really grabs me about them. And then I'll tend to kind of break that rule. And this is one such case. This case is from the 70s. It's from 1970 Well, it starts in 1970 I think it's certainly one of the strangest cases probably in the whole of the Dark Histories back catalogue. So yeah, strap yourself in for this one. It's, well, you'll see. We'll talk a bit more at the end. I'm not sure what about, but we'll talk a bit more at the end. Anyway, this story is called Philip the Ghost That Never Was.

60 miles north of London sits the small Cambridgeshire village of Diddington. Recorded in the Doomsday Book of 1086, it was a sparsely populated little parish with only 14 households, two of which were large manor estates. One of these sites hosted the foundations for the Diddington Manor, which is where Philip Aylesford was born 600 years later, in 1624

The son of a former member of parliament, he had the upbringing expected of a member of the gentry class, attending royal pageants where he was always wowed by military jousts and traditional martial displays. The first 10 years of Philip's life were, for the most part, relatively quiet and uninteresting. He was afforded the best private education with personal tutors and lived the quiet life of privilege. He was 10 years old when the first tragedy of his life struck. Laying in bed one night, he was shaken awake by his uncle, Baron Elsden, who brought him the sorry news that his parents, who had left three weeks earlier for a royal trip to London, had both died of smallpox. Lying in the cold dark bedchamber, his mind was thrown into panic and chaos as he came to grips with the idea that he was now alone in the world and with no brothers or sisters, he had the responsibility of the estate sitting squarely on his shoulders. Fortunately, Philip's parents had been well organised in their affairs, and his godfather, Sir Cedric of Pakenham, a long friend of his father from the neighbouring estate, was entirely willing to step up to his duty, taking Philip in and continuing his education, whilst he would manage the estate until Philip came of age.

A great source of relief, Cedric supplied a loving family environment for Philip, along with an introduction to his martial education that saw the young boy beginning his apprenticeship in the ways of chivalry. This was a little bit of a wake-up call for Philip, who had not been so used to the Spartan and tightly disciplined lifestyle that he was now subject to. But he took to it well, and if it wasn't for Cedric's daughter, Dorothea, who did not really like the newest member of the household, life was about as good as it could be for a boy who had just lost both his parents. Even despite the coldness directed towards him from Dorothea, Philip still managed to find playmates in the house, especially with the youngest member of the house staff named Agnes, who came from the nearby village and lived full time on the estate. Unfortunately, this friendship also ended in a certain degree of tragedy, when a few years later, Dorothea became the focal point of some relatively terrifying events. Scratches and bangs were heard in the wall of her bedchamber, and scratches appeared all over her body and face. Dorothea accused Agnes of witchcraft, and after convincing her father of the same, he had her formally tried. Ducked in the lake and then shortly after burned, Philip lost one of his closest friends at Pakenham, in the most confusing and darkest of situations.