Haunted House Tour: The Mad Scientist's Lab

The room we had been led into was purportedly the laboratory of the resident before Mrs Mills. This resident had been a jobbing mad scientist, called Bigelow Edwards, and rumour had it that he had been the focus of an investigation into the supposed disappearance of several young women in the area. Barnes told the story of how the police had found him hanged from that beam; he indicated a beam that had a noose hanging from it, for the benefit of the unimaginative. The story went that this had happened two days after the last of the disappearances.

The room was decorated as a 1930's Hollywood vision of a mad scientist's laboratory. Along one wall on a bench, a maze of glassware gurgled as viscous green stuff glooped about the knotted and twisted tubes. In a corner was a glass column with a spark that climbed two wires and made an electrical humming noise as it rose. On another wall were a pair of steeply sloping tables with leather straps and a helmet at the top of each from which fat cables led to a rack of equipment with flashing lights and flickering meters; quite obviously a Hollywood-style personality transfer machine.

The centrepiece of the room was a small round dais below a tall glass cylinder suspended from the ceiling. Close by was something that looked like a control console; having levers and switches and dials all over it. The lighting in this large room was such that the eye was drawn to this equipment.

"What's that?" asked a male member of the party.

Barnes, the butler, slouched to it and we all gathered round in the hope of some macabre explanation. "We think that this was what Mr Edwards was working on before the pressure of being investigated by the police got to him and he committed suicide. We aren't sure what it was for, because he burnt his notes before placing the noose round his neck and then kicking away the stool he stood on." Barnes indicated a wooden stool tucked neatly under the bench of chaotic glassware. The butler told us more details about the disappearances giving the names of the missing woman and how the case was considered closed after they had found Mr Edwards' hung corpse, despite the bodies of the missing women never being found dead or alive.

While this story was being told one of the girls lost interest and wandered away from the group around the control console. She casually moved to take a closer look at the glass cylinder that hung over the dais. Having circled it she stepped onto the dais, ducking her head under the edge and standing up.

At this point, Barnes noticed what she was doing. "Excuse me Miss. Please come away from there it could be dangerous. We don't know what it might be for or could do." There was a definite sound of panic in his creaky voice.

The butler turned and pushed his way out of the surrounding group. In the process he pushed one of the other girls over and she sat heavily on a lever of the control console, breaking it off, but not before it had moved through an angle of about sixty degrees. In response to this accident there was a loud rattle of chains and the cylinder descended trapping the girl who stood on the dais. We could hear the dull thud as the girl caught within the tube of thick glass beat on the walls surrounding her. The girl who had fallen got up and stared at the lever she had broken.

"How do we get Helen out of there?" she asked. Her face showed a combination of shock, and concern, although I could not tell if the concern was for her friend or herself.

"I don't know because it has never happened before," replied Barnes, seemingly on the edge of panic. "What did you do?"

"I think I pushed one of these levers," she said, picking up the broken lever to show him.

Meanwhile one of the men had gone over to the trapped girl, to try to calm her down, by telling her that we were going to get her out and that she should breathe slower to conserve oxygen.

"Did you touch anything else?" asked Barnes, "because we don't ..."

He was interrupted by a loud hiss which drew everyone's attention to the cylinder trapping the girl. A jet of white vapours was flooding the glass walled chamber until the cylinder was quite opaque. All we could see of poor, trapped Helen were the palms of her hands as she desperately tried to escape her prison. We could also hear her muffled cries of panic and pleas for help; the fog in the cylinder did not seem to effect her breathing. This unhappy state of affairs took a sudden turn for the worse when we heard the characteristic hum of an electrical discharge and the mists glow fitfully for three or four seconds and Helen screamed.

You could have cut the silence that followed with a knife. The obscuring gases in the cylinder dissipated over about thirty seconds that seemed like an eternity to reveal the terrified girl with her hands clamped over her ears; she was sobbing. Most of us sighed with relief and realised that we had been holding our breathes. We were about to set about the task of finding a way to raise the cylinder and releasing Helen, when one of the other girls squealed and cried, "Look! She's changing."

When we had first seen Helen she was thin to the point of being skinny and not particularly well developed in the bosom department, but now she was filling out to an elegant slenderness, her blouse was now tightly stretched across her chest and her short hair seemed to be growing to her shoulders and beyond. As we watched she blossomed from a skinny girl into an elegant young woman, but the changes did not stop there. Soon wrinkles began to show on her face and the roots of her hair turned grey. In moments she went from looking as if she was in her early twenties to appearing to be in her eighties. Moments later she took on the appearance of a mummified corpse, still dressed in a decaying shirt. Immediately after this there was a moment like one of those time-lapse films of things rotting as the flesh and clothes disappeared leaving a skeleton, which promptly collapsed and became a pile of grey dust.

Most of us were completely stunned, even the butler character looked as though he had never seen anything as shocking as what we had just witnessed. Finally, he revived and shambled to a cupboard. In the cupboard he lifted a very old looking telephone. After a nervous wait quickly reported that there had been an accident and gave sketchy details. He put down the Bakelite handset and spoke to us. He told us that he had spoken to Mrs Mills and she would report the accident to the authorities, who would probably want to speak to us, so they were going to keep us here. We all groaned.

He was about to say more when he noticed that two of the group Helen had been with we trying manipulate the broken lever. He raised his voice to tell them to leave it alone, and at that moment the lever moved and the cylinder rose to its former position. Before our eyes the small pile of dust that was Helen's remains blew away on a draught that I do not think had been there before. We stood there in respectful silence.

"Erm," began Barnes, "I feel sure you would rather not stay in this room while we wait for the police, so I suggest we move on, so as not to contaminate the scene any more than necessary." So saying he led us into the next room.