The house was a vast six-bedroom red brick Victorian villa, set slightly back from the road and half a mile inland from the seafront in a renowned and quaint seaside town, lacking the vulgarity of arcades, kiss-me-kwik hats, candy floss and fairground rides.

It was, said the agent, an unfashionable part of town, off the tourist run and quiet.  To me it seemed the very epitome of faded English grandeur, which explained the discounted asking price.  True, it needed a makeover:  interior and exterior redecoration, a modern heating system to replace the open hearths, new kitchen and bathroom, new bedroom furniture throughout, the lot.  But when we did our sums I realised we could spend a year with the tradespeople in modernising our purchase and still finish within our budget.  If things went badly, resale for a tidy profit was a distinct possibility.

Just to be sure, I put in a low offer, twenty grand under the asking price.  The sale was being handled by the lawyer and executor of the estate of the last owner, an elderly lady who had died nearly two years before without any traceable family.  In the absence of other bids, he accepted ours, glad to get the property off his hands.

Having already sold our house on a suburban estate, we were living temporarily at my wife’s mother’s house some thirty miles from this location.  No question about it, this was a better quality of life in the making, one our two young children would grow to love.

For our first detailed examination of the house, we left the children with their grandmother and ventured to the coast on our own.  Our first visit left fleeting glimpses of Victoriana, the decor and furniture seeming to be as old as the house.  Luckily, our survey revealed a very solid structural composition and few if any expensive maintenance issues, but the next job would be to plan the interior.

As we opened the front door, the musty smell hit our nostrils.  The place had clearly not been aired for some while, though on our previous visit the agent had opened all the windows to dissipate the stench.

But now, with windows shut, it emanated from every source – all the heavy velvet drapes, all the rugs, every chair with its lacy antimacassar, they all retained an odour of time passing, as if they retained memories of everything that happened in the rooms.  The rooms were dark, the wallpaper foreboding.  Every ornament on the shelves and every picture had acquired a patina, a film of dust and dirt that would require full restoration to correct.

My wife Michelle opened windows upstairs, while I did the same downstairs.

“We need some air fresheners,” she shouted down to me.

“We need to get rid of everything,” I replied, though she knew I would never be that rash.  Deciding which pieces to keep and which to auction off was a key decision.  Some, I felt sure, would fetch a good price.

The Gothic front parlour, for example, deep in dust but the glory of the burgundy wallpaper and curtains could not fail to impress.  The patterned carpet picked out the colours, and so did the pictures.  Bookcases ran around three walls, each enclosed but displaying the fine hardbacks within.  Elaborate candlesticks sat at either end of the mantle above an ornate fireplace, marble with inlaid tiles in a green and red diamond pattern.

The dark wooden furniture was softened by the inclusion of delicate lace, possibly imported from Flanders.  An assortment of family photographs are spread around the walls and on the side tables, featuring statuesque men, women and children in their Sunday finery.  Above was a cornice marking out a plain ceiling, the centre of which featured a translucent tricorn glass lamp shade.  This was later than the rest of the features, probably Art Deco, installed when the room was converted to electricity.

My impression was that the room was otherwise left as it had been created, possibly as a testament to the dear departed.  The only thing missing from the room was the aspidistra.

I felt torn between the sheer delight at finding a room so perfect it should reside in a museum, and the urge to modernise, to make a family home for the 21st Century.  The answer was straightforward, though: I had to photograph everything, and possibly invite over the curator from the local museum to see what needed to be preserved.

“You should come upstairs!” Michelle yelled excitedly, “There’s a four-poster up here.  Very heavy furniture.  I wonder how they got it up the stairs?”

“In pieces,” I replied.  “Do you want to sleep there?”

“Too dusty!” came her answer.  It’s comfortable though, nice and firm.”

Things were built to last in the Victorian era, no question about it.

“Listen,” I said to her, “I think we need to bring in someone who knows about Victoriana, let them identify what needs to be preserved.  I will bring my camera and record everything.  Let’s go grab a coffee and find the experts.”

“OK,” she replied.

In fact, it was not difficult to find the town’s museum, though it only seemed to open for a few snatched hours here and there.  The curator was present, hiding away in a back office.  Mr Bell looked as dry and dusty as the Victorian volumes on the bookshelves.

“Welcome to our community, Mr Forrester,” he intoned, “Unfortunately I don’t have the budget to staff the museum, and so few people want to pay admission these days, so we are more a resource for preserving the history of the town for the benefit of future generations.”

“Very noble,” I assured him.

“I know the house you mean.  it was always my intention to make an approach when a buyer came along, though understandably the executor was less keen for me to view the property.  Other than as a buyer.”   He laughed to himself drily.

“Would you be able to come and take an inventory, Mr Bell?  If there are any pieces you feel need to be preserved, I’m quite sure we would be glad to help.  Otherwise we need to sell and make the place fit for habitation.  I don’t think my young children would find it very suitable right now.”

“Ah, that is the way of the world.  Nothing stays forever,” he lamented.  “But I do understand.  What we are talking about here is a chamber of jewels, something unique that can never be recovered.  Is tomorrow afternoon a possibility?  I will bring my wife to help, though we will need a good few hours, maybe longer.”

“I’ll check with my wife, but I expect so,” I replied.  “I’ll see if we can stop over.”

So it was that we checked into a seaside boarding house for an uncomfortable night, all the better to realise the value of our acquisition.

True to his word, Mr Bell appeared with his wife and a grown-up son on the stroke of 1pm at the house.  All were wearing overalls and were equipped with old-fashioned ledgers and up-to-the-minute cameras with strong flashes.  That at least would save me a job.

Leaving the Bells to it, we explored the town and made the most of the weak sunshine before the winter chill settled back in.  It was close on 6pm before we returned, to find the family Bell hard at work, having recorded all but two rooms in their entirety.

“You have some extraordinary pieces here, Mr Forrester,” said Mr Bell, pushing his grey-framed glasses further up his nose.  “In some cases I would be glad of the chance to raise money to buy them off you, unless you feel you could loan them to us.”

“I’m sure we can come to some arrangement,” said Michelle brightly. “What about the family stuff.  What can you find about their history?”

“As it happens,” Mr Bell said with pride, “I do know a bit about them.  If you feel able to part with the photographs and other personal memorabilia, they would make for a great exhibition in the museum about a local family.  If you have a moment I’ll tell you what I know.”

Michelle made drinks and we settled down to listen to the tale of the Wakefield family.

The Wakefields moved into the house, which was built in the height of the Gothic revival period, in the 1880s.  Mr, later Sir Hugh Wakefield, was a local entrepreneur and philanthropist.  He established several businesses, including the first factory to sell greetings cards and postcards, which at the time did a roaring trade. He manufactured wallpaper too, and it was his own products on the walls at the house.  He was persuaded to enter politics, and for a time became MP for the area.

Sir Hugh had married Edith in the 1870s, and by the time they bought the house on the strength of his fortune, they had seven children. A further two were born in the house, which was also occupied by his elderly mother in a granny annex built in the basement.

Unfortunately, the wealth resulting from Sir Hugh’s ventures did not result in good luck for the family.  Three children died in infancy or childhood, and Sir Hugh’s wife died of smallpox following a trip to Italy to meet her cousin. She was found to be with child at the time she died.

After that tragedy, Sir Hugh relied upon servants and family members to look after the remaining children.  After losing the next election, he sold his businesses and became increasingly reclusive, spending most of his time in the study with his photograph collection and his writings.

He died in 1904 at the age of 62, outlived by his mother.  She was, by all accounts, a grand and formidable lady, one who had led a hard life and who ruled the household with a rod of iron following her son’s death.  After her death a few years later, the eldest son lost his life in the war, so the next married daughter inherited the house.  Several of her siblings lived there too for some years,

When the daughter’s family died out, the house passed to her eldest daughter, a lifelong spinster who lost touch with the rest of the family and lived to a ripe old age.  It was her death that caused the house to be abandoned, and nobody came forward to claim it.  The house had stayed, a few examples of maintenance apart, exactly as it had when Sir Hugh died, and that was what attracted Mr Bell to the property.

“He retired to his photograph collection and his writings, you say?  I’m presuming you would like those on display in the museum.”

“With your kind permission,” said Mr Bell, “though I think you should  take a look yourself.  You’ll see in the study that there are volumes of photographs. Sir Hugh initially commissioned a photographer, but over time he became an enthusiastic amateur himself.  He took hundreds of exposures of his family, had the best printed, and saved them as a memento in a series of albums.  I’ve catalogued them, if you’d like to see.”

“Thank you, we will,” I replied.  “What of his writings though.  Is there anything significant?”

“To be truthful, the writings tell much about his state of mind after Edith’s death and the loss of his parliamentary seat, which some blamed on his erratic behaviour and negative speeches.  He became increasingly bitter and twisted towards the end.  There were suggestions he had gone mad.  There were even some whispers that he had taken his own life, though that was denied by the family.”

“How sad,” said Michelle.  “But his legacy lives on and can be preserved?”

“I do hope so,” said Mr Bell cheerily.  “I’m hoping, with your permission, English Heritage might contribute funding such that we can recreate that beautiful parlour right here in our museum.  But for now, we’ll leave you to it.  I can come and finish cataloguing the house next week, if you’re agreeable?”

After the Bells had gone, Michelle and I located the study to see what Bell had found.  This was a large and well-lit room with strident emerald wallpaper and one wall devoted entirely to bookcases.  With its back to the window sat a chaise longue in a matching green, while against the opposite wall, standing open, was an oak roll-top desk.  The desk must have been a very new innovation at the end of the 19th Century.  A green-shaded lamp shone on the contents of the desk, which sat in two neat piles, each bearing a meticulously applied printed label with a reference number.

The first pile consisted of several bundles of documents, all written in longhand and filed in cardboard folders, surely manufactured by Sir Hugh’s company.  The second pile comprised photo albums of varying thicknesses, many of them, dwarfing the document files.

The topmost album is a leather-bound volume, finished with a plush red silk cover and gilded corner pieces.  It is a work of art in its own right.  Each page is decorated with exquisite hand-drawn flowers, surrounding mounted sepia pictures in cut cardboard frames.

The first featured Sir Hugh and Lady Edith, he attired in a fine suit with a starched cut-throat collar and a silk tie, a top hat adorning his head and a pince-nez on the bridge of his nose, above a perfectly maintained handlebar moustache.  She wore a long brocaded dress and a floral hat, and held a parasol over her shoulder.  Together they looked like a couple out for a family stroll on a Sunday afternoon, frozen in time.

The next double-page featured miniature photographs in a family tree, linked by beautifully twined rambling roses.  It featured the grandparents, then Sir Hugh and Lady Edith, then each of their children in infancy, the names and date of birth of each recorded below the pictures in splendid calligraphy.

Each page in turn revealed new delights, each in turn dedicated to one member of the family.  Michelle turned a page to reveal a picture of two young children, side by side.  The eldest, to the right, wore a check-patterned dress, her long hair held in place by silk ties, and on her face a mischievous expression.  Her hand was slightly blurred, not uncommon given the long exposures required in those days to produce a perfect shot.  But the youngest was still, perfectly still, staring expressionless into the middle distance.

“What the… oh my god!  The poor child is dead!” cried Michelle, realising belatedly what was happening in the shot.  “They dressed her up and took her photograph after she died, how macabre is that?”

“Yes, I remember reading about it,” I replied, “Post-mortem photography was very popular then, so they had a record to remember their loved ones.  Remember people died young, many children died of diseases which we routinely treat these days.  It must have been heartbreaking for the parents, and imagine how this little girl must have felt, having to pose next to her dead sister.”

“How did they pose the pictures?” asked Michelle.

“I gather the photographers had special stands used to prop up late, lamented clients, and thought nothing of it.  Not only that, they sometimes painted eyes on their eyelids to give them the impression of being alive.  Except, of course, you can tell immediately by looking at the photographs.”

“So you can.  How creepy is that?” Michelle shuddered as she looked at the picture.

We turned another page, and there was another memento mori picture, taken, apparently, on this very same chaise.  Four children were sat upon it, in order of age and size, two boys and two girls.  The same girl as the previous photograph sat second from the right, her face mournful rather than cheeky.  To her right was her eldest brother, a brave and noble expression on his face, similar to that adopted by his father.  To their left were a younger girl, and, smallest of all, a boy, barely more than a toddler, dressed in a sailor’s suit with a wide, piped collar.  His face was peaceful and his eyes closed.  That he was dead, I had no doubts whatever.

“Let’s stop this, Angus, it’s scaring me.”

“OK,” I said softly, closing the book and putting an arm around my wife’s shoulder.

“Shall we go back home now or stay in the boarding house?” asked Michelle.  This is a fair question, because it is a Bank Holiday weekend and the children are being cared for, so we are not in a rush to get back.

However, the subtext of her reply tells me she is spooked and really does not want to stay here a moment longer.  I respect her feeling, but for my own part I want to know more about Sir Hugh’s documents and how his mindset changed in his final days.

“Tell you what, how about I take you to the B&B, while I look through the documents here?  It’s only one night, and the quicker I do it the quicker we can pass all this stuff on to the museum and get on with transforming the place.  What do you say?”

Michelle was not convinced, but made a sullen nod to accept her reluctant acquiescence.  At times, she behaves like a teenager, and she would probably say the same about me.

I drove back to the centre of town, where we ate at a local Chinese restaurant.  I took her to her seaside lodgings, then returned to the house, by which time it was fully dark.  The lights came on when I turned the switch, but dimly.  Every time I closed a door, there was a flicker, as if the lamps were really candles burning.  I would need to rewire the house and get modern lighting, without a doubt.

Returning to the study, I put on all the lamps to give the best possible  light in which to work.  I pulled out the largest stack of documents from the first pile, neatly tied with a length of cream silk, and pulled open the bow.

The first document was a letter written by Sir Hugh to the Chancellor of the Exchequer railing on about the lack of decent transport links to this town and how it prevented the effective mobility of goods to other parts of the country, and suggesting greater investment in roads and rail.  The fact that it was in this pile implied this letter had not been sent.  Several more rants followed, but then a very different letter.

This one was addressed to an unknown female acquaintance and spoke in emotional terms of his grief at the loss of his poor, dear Edith, of how he could barely look at her in the terminal stages of her disease, of how she was quarantined from the family in the smallest bedroom at the top of the house because of the infectious nature of the disease, of how all the children, staff and he himself were given the vaccine but how the room needed to be stripped and scrubbed with disinfectant by the servants after her death in order to prevent any further transmission of the virus.  This agony was more than the poor chap could bear, understandably so.  It told of his intention to withdraw from public life and spend a year and a day in mourning.

On a whim, I opened more photograph albums, and at the bottom found the one I was looking for.  On the cover it announced itself with the name ‘Edith’ in floral lettering beneath an oval frame featuring a charming picture of a contented young woman, surely taken at or before the time she was married to Sir Hugh.

The first few pages featured shots in her finest wardrobe of Edith on her own, with Sir Hugh, with her children, with other family members, out on the seafront.  They all betray the smile of a confident and contented woman.  And then… page after page of facial portraits of Edith.  I may be wrong, but they looked to me as if these were one shot taken each day after her return from Italy.

The first saw her looking increasingly unwell, pale and with growing mouth sores, accompanied presumably by fever and vomiting.  The second page saw the gradual swelling of the face and neck as her lymph nodes reacted to the virus.  Then the formation of lesions on her face, slowly coming out into pus-filled blisters.  By pages 3 and 4 these had formed around her entire face, on her lips, nostrils and eyelids.  As I moved on to page 5, they gradually scabbed over, turning this once beautiful face into a mess of sores and scarred tissue, each pustule black to indicate where haemorrhaging had occurred.

And then…. there was a picture that broke my heart.  A polished hardwood coffin lined with white satin, in which lay the much loved Edith, wife and mother, her face barely visible beneath the revolting black scabs.

I jumped back in revulsion, realising suddenly that the coffin was sitting on this self same chaise, or one so like it that the replacement must have been modelled on the original.  An uneasy feeling came over me, as if I was being watched from that chaise, a feeling I could dismiss as the same form of spooking that had overcome Michelle earlier without any just cause.

But all the same, I turned around slowly to look at the chaise in the dim light. Instantly, the lights flickered and failed.  The entire house was plunged into inky blackness for ten, twenty seconds, maybe longer.  When they flickered back on all I could see was the chaise, but for a fraction of a second I am convinced I saw eyes, lifeless eyes, staring back.

By instinct I stood, shocked, not sure whether my imagination was playing tricks or whether dead children could, by any unearthly power, have sat there looking, waiting for the whirr of motion as a camera plate was exposed and their image captured.

No, obviously not a manifestation, that was impossible.  Those images were purely on photographs, they were not real.  The people are long dead, so probably what happened was that their image became fixed in my eyes and when the lights flickered the image became silhouetted on my eyes.  There’s always a good scientific explanation for everything, when you look for it.

Except, I was not looking at the children, I was looking at their mother.  Well, it was probably the memory imprinted on my mind.  I turned back to the album, but then closed it with revulsion at the ghastly sight of her scarred and pitted face.

The letter to an unknown female friend, maybe a distant cousin, remained open on the desk.  Adjusting the shade, I read on with increasing alarm and felt the hot prickle of tears.  The words began to sear at my brain as the following paragraph formed itself in my mind.

In the days following her funeral I began to see her face everywhere.  At first it was a comforting feeling, as if her spirit was there with me, but when her blackened face haunted my dreams I knew something was deeply wrong.  Hers was an unquiet spirit, vengeful, lusting to inflict some evil upon me.

There was nothing for it but to find a medium and organise a seance in the parlour, after the nanny had put the children to bed and left for the night.  The woman conjured up her spirit very quickly and spoke a few words in Edith’s soft voice, but then she broke off and made to leave the house.  I could see that the medium was scared, but I told her to try again.

So she went back into a trance and summoned up the spirit of my late wife,

‘What do you want with me?’ she said in Edith’s voice.

‘Why are you haunting me?’ I asked her out loud, ‘What harm have I ever done you? ‘

‘You killed me just as assuredly as if you had stuck a knife through my heart’ came Edith’s voice through the medium’s lips, but in a tone far harsher than I had ever previously heard her speak.  ‘You photographed me but you denied me a doctor and you denied me the medicines that could have saved my life.  You murdered your poor, dear wife, Hugh.’

With that I stood up and threw the woman out of the house.  I told her is was all poppycock, but the haunting continued.  What’s worse is that I am now developing blisters on my own face.  I can’t go out, I can’t see my beautiful children,  Instead I must shut myself away and wait to die.  I don’t know how she has done this, but she has transmitted the virus to me beyond the grave.

I remembered that the Victorians believed in spiritualism where most people now would regard it as hokum.  The medium must have been a fake, but Sir Hugh certainly believed it and was scared out of his skin.

What he does not say was how long after his wife’s death he began to develop the symptoms of smallpox, so I can only imagine it was within the incubation period of 12-14 days.  After that he would have started getting a fever and sickness, then another 15 days or so before the blisters started to form on his body.  Did he also die of this dreadful disease?  It is not recorded in his biographies.

This I don’t understand either:  Mr Bell had given me the impression that Edith had died some years before her husband, though the letter is vague on dates.  I made a mental note to check out Edith’s death when I took these materials to the museum, though it might also be a good plan to find her gravestone in the local cemeteries.  I presume she was buried within the town, though Mr Bell would probably know.

Once more, I look at the chaise behind me and wonder what it was I saw, but as I do so there is another flickering image in my head.  For one moment I imagine there is an open coffin lying on the chaise, but I don’t dare turn my head.  The lights quiver into twilight  gloom, then blackness, then a dim vibration, as if a strobe light was turned to its lowest setting.

What was that I heard?

This was ridiculous: a grown man should not be scared of the dark!  I should face these absurd notions head-on.

I stood slowly, forced myself to turn, though the temptation to close my eyelids was never stronger.

There, looking directly into my face, was the scarred, blackened, swollen face of a woman dead from smallpox.  I say face, but her pustules hid the very appearance of humanity.

I could not help myself.  I screamed, ran from the room, stood in the entrance hall, supporting myself against the wall and hyperventilating.

The lights flickered back on.  Taking courage in both hands, I took slow steps back towards the study door, pushed it open and looked inside.  It was just as I had left it, the desk with lamp and stacks of papers and albums to the left, the chaise behind, the bookcase to the furthest wall, an empty fireplace towards me, but no apparition.  That was just my vivid imagination.

Even so, I turned off all the lights, locked the house and returned to the guest house where my wife was probably sleeping by that time.

To say I did not think any more of that night would be untrue, but I did not pay it any mind.  I told the agent to let Mr Bell in and told the man himself that he was welcome to the papers.  We would come to an agreement later about the other furnishings.  He was most grateful.

For the next few weeks I went about my job and family life as normal.  Michelle and I planned what we would do with the house, even commissioned an interior design guru to plan a sparkling new family home from the dark and foreboding Victorian layout, making the best of the original period features.

All was going well, until, one evening, I came over warm and uncomfortable.

“Take a tepid bath?” suggested Michelle, so I did.

After my bath I started to feel violently sick.  I threw up my dinner and retired to bed.  The sickness did not stop and the fever got worse.

The following day, Michelle rang in sick on my behalf, then called our GP, an old school type who still did house calls, in spite of the volume of patients at his surgery.  He promised to call round the next day.

“You have a virus, old man,” he said as he took my temperature.  “Hmmm, you’re 39.2C, this is worrying.  You need to drink plenty of fluids and aspirin every 4 hours.  Stay in bed until the fever breaks.  I’ll call back in a few days.  Watch out for those sores too.”

“Sores?”  I looked in the nearest mirror and saw what amounted to cold sores forming around my mouth.

The following day I looked again, following a sleepless night.  What I saw alarmed me.  Lumps had begun to form on my face, painful to the touch, weeping sores that dribbled pus down my previously smooth skin.  Lesions were growing at an alarming rate on my chest, my back, my whole body.  My breathing became erratic and laboured, growing worse by the day until even to my inexpert knowledge I knew that I had contracted a potentially fatal dose of pneumonia.

I no longer needed any diagnosis.  My voice barely more than a croak, I issued instructions to Michelle:  don’t let the children near me, tell the doctor I have smallpox, get him to arrange a quarantined bed in hospital.  Tell them this is the first case since the disease was effectively eradicated in 1980.

I expected the TV news to be there outside my window and to splash the story over all their broadcasts, but the news they were waiting for would not take too long.

There would be nothing the doctors could do.  They might give me the vaccine and anti-retro treatment, but I am sure of my fate.  Within a few weeks my face and body will have scabbed over, tiny haemorrhages will have formed.  I might succumb to pneumonia, but my life would be over one way or another, 

And the house?  That would be sealed up once again, put on the market.  How, they might ask, can the smallpox virus lie dormant for so many years in an old property?

Look for yourselves, I would say, and when you do, it would find you.