‘There is no haunting, because there were no monsters’

The Dower House – colloquially referred to as ‘the big yellow house’ – sits comfortably within the opening exchanges of any conversation aimed at discriminating Bristol’s most stunning buildings from those built with only purpose in mind. Notoriety breeds folklore; that this localised fame brings with it rumour can be to nobody’s surprise. But this 500-year-old piece of real estate is today subject to a degree of slander fit to make a yellow castle blush pink.

There isn’t a child in Bristol incapable of reciting the narrative: a girl fell off her horse and tragically died in the grounds. Years later, the house was an asylum. The marriage of these truths, when consummated, brought forth a falsehood. The yellow house, as all Bristol knows, is haunted.

Tom Dewey lives in The Dower House and asks if it really is haunted. Photo by Tom Dewey

I moved into The Dower House earlier this year, feeling that the rarity of an inner city countryside might do well to restore the soul. Almost immediately, having signed the lease, I discovered that the reputation of this ostensibly haunted building preceded it by some considerable distance.

The fact of its ghoulish nature was asserted to me with the quiet hauteur the building itself exudes upon the cityscape. Friends and family gleefully educated me on the paranormality of my flat-to-be. The estate agent, during my viewing the property, informed me with nervous decorum that the previous prospective tenants had withdrawn their application on the grounds of the supernatural.

Why, then, should any of this matter? I am not, after all, a militant rationalist – blind to the numinous and hell-bent on draining the world of its majesty (à la evolutionary biologist, so-called new atheist, and all-around fun-sponge Richard Dawkins).

The reason it matters, then, at least to me, is that I’ve always found something rather sickly about this easy association between mental illness and the horrific. Perhaps because of my own relationship with mental health, which has not been cloudless. I’ve been hospitalised twice with mental ill-health. Once, when I was 14, very nearly dying. I was also an alcoholic for seven years, and recently celebrated a year of sobriety.

Tom has an apartment at The Dower House, which is rumoured to be haunted by a girl who died after falling off her horse. Photo by Tom Dewey

It’s possible that this superstition is an ineluctable consequence of historic stigma. The Dower House did indeed function as Stoke Park Hospital from 1909, to care for mentally unwell children and adults, before being closed circa 1997. But what unwell individuals have to do with nightmarish scare-stories eludes me. We would, after all, consider it to be in unspeakably poor taste to incite such gossip around a modern facility serving the same purpose.

Suddenly aware that I was splashing around in the periphery of a subject complex beyond this college-dropout’s station, I enlisted the help of my friend Liam McKinnon, director of engagement at leading mental health charity OTR Bristol, to explain – in short – what gives.

Liam is optimistic about progress made in recent years: “Importantly, there is now thankfully a wider acknowledgement about the determining factors of poor mental health.”

We have come, he says, to acknowledge that “there are wider, often systemic, issues influencing the way we feel. We know that this is often inequalities; unjust societal structures, stresses from pressurised academic environments; lack of opportunities, and most recently, the pandemic.”

Tom questions the link between mental health and horror, with The Dower House formerly being a mental hospital. Photo by Tom Dewey

According to Liam, the troubles people face today are “very often normal reactions to an abnormal set of circumstances, and contextualising what all-too-easily feels like an individual problem is an important part of de-stigmatising our mental health.”

Also worthy of attention is the necessity of lingual specificity: “There are way more conversations happening about our individual and collective wellbeing now, which is positive, and the pandemic in particular has brought this into focus pretty acutely.”

“As the public discourse shifts to one that recognises connection, relationships, compassion and education as crucial components to being ‘well’,” Liam says, “it also needs to recognise that our language and framing of struggling with mental health isn’t always medical or ‘scary’.”

When I moved into The Dower House, the conviction of my loved ones was with me. Could it really be, I thought to myself, that the building is haunted? What I discovered to be the case was far less exceptional, but no less worthy of note. There is no haunting, because there were no monsters. There were just people, who felt unwell.

This anticlimactic dawning was a welcome relief, and unsettling in its own particular respect. As I celebrated Easter at my new address, I found myself to be almost shaken by its normality, bedevilled by its banality, and haunted by its peace.

Tom Dewey is journalist, playwright and poet. He can be found @tomjamesdewey on Instagram and Twitter.

Main photo by Tom Dewey

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