Ghosts & Gallows (22 page)

One evening a workman noticed a young girl standing by a single-storey storage shed near to one of the old farm outbuildings. Assuming it was a local child playing about, he shouted out and walked towards her, but by the time he reached the spot the figure had disappeared. Like his colleagues, he was convinced that no one could have hidden in the vicinity of the outbuildings without being seen or, likewise, have passed by him unnoticed. The shed itself was locked as was the barn immediately adjacent, the only other building in the immediate vicinity. The workman was not close enough to describe the face of the figure in any detail but Alf Spink, convinced by his own experiences that something genuinely paranormal was taking place, was also, as a local man, certain that he knew the identity of the apparition and also the reasons for her haunting the old farm. Its origins seemed to lie, so he subsequently told Roger Mackenzie, a reporter for the
Herts Advertiser
, in sinister events that took place in the same area exactly seventeen years earlier …

On the evening of Monday, 30 December 1957, Anne Noblett, the seventeen-year-old daughter of local farmer and company director Thomas Noblett, arrived back in Wheathampstead after attending a dance class in neighbouring Harpenden. The Nobletts were a reasonably affluent family: earlier in the year Anne had returned from a Swiss finishing school near Montreux and was now intent on pursuing a career as a children’s nurse. Carrying a paper bag filled with mushrooms, she got off a bus outside the Cherry Tree pub on the Lower Luton Road and set out to walk home to her parent’s somewhat isolated farmhouse, Heath Cottage, a quarter of a mile from the main road. Somewhere along Marshalls Heath Lane, a narrow road unlit and overhung with trees, she met her killer.

Anne was expected home just before seven o’clock. When over two hours had passed and she had not arrived, Thomas Noblett began calling her friends on the telephone and, with no news as to her whereabouts, eventually called St Albans police station. The following day, the police began a major search operation in the Marshalls Heath area. Groups of officers with dogs and reinforced with members of the public began combing the surrounding woods and fields, and a temporary headquarters was set up next to the roadway outside Heath Cottage. By the end of the day, and with no clues as to the whereabouts of the missing teenager, the search was turned over to Hertfordshire CID and Detective Inspector Leonard Elwell took charge of the operation. Over the next few days, Elwell organised a massive search involving 300 soldiers and over a thousand civilians; newsreels were shown at local cinemas, house-to-house searches were carried out and the police took down over 2,000 statements. One volunteer who gave his time to look for Anne Noblett was twenty-seven-year-old Alfred Spink, but despite the intensive operation that involved Scotland Yard and requests for information in newspapers across the country, several weeks passed with no sign of a breakthrough.

On the afternoon of 31 January 1958, exactly a month after the teenager disappeared, a young RAF serviceman in his early twenties together with his younger brother, were dog walking at Rose Grove Wood on the outskirts of Whitwell, a small village four miles due east of Luton, when in a clearing amongst the trees they came across what at first appeared to be a sleeping person. On closer inspection they saw it was a young girl who was clearly dead and immediately hurried back to the village to raise the alarm. Soon police were converging on the quiet rural spot but the circumstances of the discovery of Anne Noblett were to make it one of the most mysterious and baffling of post-war British murders.

The teenager’s body was found lying on its back, fully clothed, with hands folded across the chest and still wearing her glasses; her purse lay alongside her and still contained the same amount of money – thirty shillings – with which she had left the house on the day she went missing. What became immediately apparent to the police as they organised the moving of the body was the remarkable state of preservation: Anne Noblett had been missing for a month but her corpse showed no sign of the extensive decomposition which would have been expected in a body that had lain out in the open for that amount of time. Putrefaction, caused by the migration of bacteria from the intestines through the body tissue via the blood-vessels, normally begins within a period of two days after the effects of
rigor mortis
have worn off and after around three weeks a dead body is normally bloated and unrecognisable. Given the fact that Anne had been missing for a month and her body was in no way as grossly disfigured as would have been expected made it appear at first as though she had been held against her will and kept alive for some time after she went missing from Marshalls Heath Lane at the end of the previous December. It is doubtful whether Detective Inspector Elwell and his officers would have suspected the real reasons behind the remarkable preservation of the young girl’s body, which soon became apparent once it had been taken to the mortuary.

We have already briefly encountered Professor Francis Camps, one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished forensic pathologists. Camps carried out over 88,000 post-mortems during the course of his professional career, but the one that he performed on Anne Noblett must rank as one of the most intriguing. The cause of death was manual strangulation and from the undigested stomach contents it was clear that the girl had been murdered on the day she went missing. Camps suggested that the puzzling lack of decomposition was due to the fact that the body showed all the signs of having been kept at an extremely low temperature, such as would be consistent with being stored in a refrigerator. The ‘Deep Freeze Murder’ seemed almost unprecedented but the reasons behind the killing were plain enough: Camps noted interference of a sexual nature and from the arrangement of buttons on Anne’s underclothes the police were certain she had been stripped and later redressed in her own clothes prior to being laid out in Rose Grove Wood. Immediately, Detective Inspector Elwell ordered a check on establishments with deep freezers within a thirty-mile radius of Whitwell large enough to take a human body, including poulterers and butchers storing meat. It was to be in vain as, despite the new leads the autopsy provided, the police failed to make any progress and the killer of seventeen-year-old Anne Noblett was never caught. Today, over fifty years since her death, it is only possible to state that her killing was a planned sex murder, possibly by someone she knew, who had a good knowledge of the local area.

Did the ghost of Anne Noblett return, seventeen years after her mysterious and tragic death, to haunt the farm only a stone’s throw from the house where she lived a happy and normal life? People working in Marshalls Heath Lane at the time were convinced that she did and others since then have expressed the same opinion. The first person to document the case was Tony Broughall, a Luton-born office worker in his mid-forties who, during the 1970s, was making a name for himself as a serious local ghost hunter and intrepid investigator of the paranormal. Together with his wife Georgina, a natural clairvoyant, Broughall, who during his working life had an eclectic mix of careers which included a jazz drummer, a cinema projectionist, civil servant and funeral director, began visiting allegedly haunted locations throughout Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, compiling accounts of ghosts and strange occurrences. Christened ‘The Ghost Man’ by the
Luton News
, who featured him in a number of articles, he gave lectures on his numerous investigations, which included Chicksands Priory, Farnham Castle and Borley church, and was a member of the two most prestigious paranormal organisations of the day, the Society for Psychical Research and the Ghost Club. Between 1974 and 1978, Broughall compiled the first systematic survey of provincial hauntings, both historic and contemporary, for both counties, a full-length report which remained in typescript until it was finally published in an edited and updated edition in 2010
2
. Soon after the disturbances at Marshalls Heath Lane appeared in the Hertfordshire press, Broughall visited the farm but found the workers he met at the plant hire firm as well as local residents, no doubt upset by some aspects of the publicity, unwilling to discuss recent events concerning both the haunting and the murder of Anne Noblett, and his requests to interview witnesses and carry out an on-site investigation was turned down. As a result the case never received a contemporary examination by a competent investigator and for some it remains an interesting seasonal ghost story not to be taken too seriously. In retrospect, Tony Broughall’s inability to investigate the Marshalls Heath haunting is frustrating in that the case resembles, to a lesser degree, a well regarded case of haunting, the so-called Cardiff Poltergeist, which took place in 1979 at similar industrial premises (a lawnmower repair workshop) and which also involved both physical phenomena and the appearance of an apparition
3
.

Tony Broughall himself was no stranger to unusual happenings. In 1963, he had experienced a series of bizarre and seemingly inexplicable incidents while walking home along a deserted road in Houghton Regis, which in a personal way opened his mind to the reality of paranormal activity. In his memoirs he describes a scene not dissimilar from events portrayed by director Jacques Tourneur in the classic 1957 film
Night of the Demon
– of seeing an insubstantial black figure and being pushed to the ground by an unseen force, as well as hearing an eerie whistling noise which followed and eventually overtook him as he walked alone on two separate occasions along lonely Sundon Road in the early hours of the morning. When recalling the incident several years later, Broughall stated that he had subsequently been unable to discover anything which might explain these strange incidents, although a local woman in Houghton Regis had apparently taken a dislike to him and a short time before had threatened to put him under a curse. The fact that around the same time the ghost hunter had chanced to speak to a young man who had himself encountered similar strange happenings along the same road, including being thrown off his motor scooter into a ditch in a similar way that Tony Broughall was struck down by an invisible blow, makes it unlikely that the phenomena was the successful result of a personal black magic vendetta; that it was and remains an intriguing and bizarre event cannot be denied.

Today, the former farm premises in Marshalls Heath Lane, now derelict and abandoned, remains private property but, despite the passage of time, the Anne Noblett haunting continues to arouse periodic interest from members of the local paranormal community. In the early 2000s, a séance involving a planchette and ouija board was held by a group of Hertfordshire spiritualists in one of the old outbuildings close to where Alfred Spinks’ work colleague saw the apparition of the young girl in 1974. During the sitting, an alleged communicator identified itself as the murdered teenager and passed on information concerning the murder including what amounted to details of the killer, who was identified as a man, at that time still alive, and living at nearby Whipsnade in Bedfordshire. The credibility of information obtained in this way, involving as it does the asking of leading questions by people who subconsciously may know a substantial amount of information about a particular case or haunting beforehand, is debateable and controversial, although there is no doubting the sincerity of the people involved, who often wish to help or ‘rescue’ what they consider to be earthbound spirits that are confused or trapped on the earth plain to move on to higher realms. Where the case of Anne Noblett is concerned, the facts are that both the ‘Deep Freeze Murder’ and the Marshalls Heath haunting remain a mystery, both to the criminologist and the psychical researcher.

NOTES

1
. ‘Murdered Girl: Ghost Haunts Farm’,
Herts Advertiser
, 10 January 1975.

2
.
Two Haunted Counties: A Ghost Hunter’s Companion to Bedfordshire & Hertfordshire
(The Limbury Press, Luton, 2010).

3
. For a concise account of the Cardiff case, see
Ghost Hunters: A Guide to Investigating the Paranormal
by Yvette Fielding & Ciarán O’Keeffe (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2006), pp. 77-93.

The serial sex murders of Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, brought the frightening and brutal reality of his Victorian namesake’s ‘Autumn of Terror’ into the lives of ordinary people living in the late twentieth century like no other catalogue of modern British killings. Beginning in October 1975 and ramping up with chilling intensity through the second half of the decade and on into the early part of the 1980s, what became a total of thirteen savage murders of young and middle-aged women – the youngest a teenager of sixteen – was to keep towns in the north of England in a grip of fear, ending only at the beginning of January 1981 when Sheffield police arrested a thirty-five-year-old Bradford lorry driver who, it later transpired, was only minutes away from claiming his fourteenth victim. Sutcliffe had cruised the red-light districts of towns including Leeds, Manchester, Huddersfield and Bradford for five years, defying all attempts by the Yorkshire police to run him to ground, subjecting his lone victims to frenzied assaults, mostly with a hammer, often following the initial crippling attack with a series of horrific mutilations using either a knife or screwdriver. The majority of victims (eight in total) were prostitutes, but the Ripper also attacked women who clearly were not street-workers – a civil servant, a doctor, a university student – meaning that all women in fact were targets. As well as the sickening violence, the killer’s disturbing anonymity and the increasingly worrying way he continued to evade capture, there was another parallel with the infamous Whitechapel killings of nearly a century before in that, like Robert Lees before them, contemporary mediums and psychics also attempted to use their supernormal powers to assist the police in what still remains the largest criminal manhunt in recorded British history.