The iconic banqueting hall bay window is Pugin Victorian Gothic Revival in style, and measures roughly 10m tall by 6m wide - the largest of its kind to be designed by Pugin for a private house!
Historically, it is the most important window of its kind outside the Palace of Westminster! After several years of painstaking work, the restored window will now return to its home, years after it was originally installed. Alton Towers Heritage. Discover and uncover the mysteries, myths and legends of the Alton Towers estate over the last years. From house and family members to the evolution of the iconic leisure park, discover everything you need to know about our heritage; dating as far back as !
The Beginnings of The Towers Founded on the site of an Iron Age camp, there were actually many different buildings before the existing Towers, but from until they all belonged to the same family - the Talbots Earls of Shrewsbury.
Heritage Alton Towers Resort has been a world-renowned haven of fun and adventure for almost years! Find out more. When Did Alton Towers Open? The dramatic house and Grade I listed gardens date back to In fact, Alton Towers opened to leisure visitors as far back as ! Who built Alton Towers? Who owns Alton Towers?
How big is Alton Towers? How many rides are there at Alton Towers? It was after many years that George realised that the medieval man never aged and accepted that it was clearly a spirit, despite his cynicism. The King was very promiscuous with the below-stairs staff and was reportedly there a good nine months before the unmarried parlour-maid had a baby which looked just like his George lived in Pink Lodge coming to that at the end of my Aunt and Uncle's driveway and had 'no father'.
He and his mother accepted this, of course, and everybody knew not to ask. Born in mysterious circumstances and never spoken about again, George is the spitting image of the King and, according to my grandparents who employed him on the estate his whole life, it is almost certain that, if life was fair, he would have been second in line to the throne after his 'brother' George V Apart from the crypt under the chapel where the most spectacular model railway I've ever seen was housed I had a mini version of it at home built by some of the same designers and engineers , the original Great Hall was the only part of Alton Towers that was regularly occupied and, by day, it was a veritable hive of activity.
Funnily enough, it seems it was by night too, even though there was nobody there! Nobody alive anyway With a large gift shop for the thousands of daily visitors and one of the few original restaurants on the estate, it was the beating heart of the fledgeling commercial operation. My grandmother ran this shop whilst my grandfather ran the estate, ably assisted by their daughters and a few other family members. Hippo, my uncle, took a sabbatical for a few years in the middle of his tenure to set up a school in Tenerife where he witnessed the worst air accident the world has ever seen.
In , two jumbo jets collided in the fog after a terror threat in Las Palmas meant that several 's were diverted there unexpectedly - it's actually mentioned in Breaking Bad!
The amazing thing about this is that the first paranormal activity Hippo personally witnessed in his early years at the Towers gift shop was when he came in early one morning and discovered a series of numbers randomly cut out of a book and left on the counter for him to discover. These numbers were and he clearly presumed it was a prank, albeit a very cryptic one! He kept the cut-out numbers out of pure fascination, convinced that they must have meant something to someone.
Whichever way he looked at them, the numbers were seemingly random though, until years later in , when Hippo had moved to Tenerife and the world's worst air disaster unfolded in front of him, at the old airport to the north of the island.
It took him about two days to realise that people died on the Pan Am aircraft and its flight number? Was it a strange coincidence? Or did he receive a message almost ten years earlier about a place he never knew he would be and at a specific date and time too? During the s and 's my otherwise sane and somewhat sceptical family witnessed regular paranormal activity in the gift shop. With their own eyes. In fact, the poltergeist which they believed to be a woman, as staff claimed to have seen her became so active that my family went to great lengths to investigate.
From sealing doors and windows to sleeping in the Towers themselves and even bringing specialist paranormal investigators up from London, they really tried to get to the bottom of it, but they never officially did It all started fairly gently, with granny noticing a line of ducks which she could have sworn were facing one way when she priced up the night before but were then facing the other.
She brushed it off but then it happened again. And again. And then it got scary. One morning a few weeks later, she unlocked the huge front doors and was faced with hundreds of those little green soldiers which had all been packed away and sealed in boxes behind the toy department scattered across the stone floor. But then she noticed something strange. All the soldiers who were brandishing weapons were lying on their front or on their backs, presumably 'dead' whilst every single one of the others all those without weapons were still standing.
Every single one was meticulously placed to stage this bizarre war scene. They used to sell a lot of postcards too and would, naturally, offer a stamp to each purchaser they were very commercial, my grandparents!
Well, these huge rolls of stamps which were kept in the till kept going missing. And I mean reels with hundreds of stamps on them. Now that's a little odd, especially as they would magically reappear weeks or even months later, but were covered in thick grey dust This activity was all fascinating but what was to come is altogether more spine chilling, goose-bump inducing and eye-wateringly awesome The gift shop was quite up-market in many ways as was park throughout my father's tenure with Gucci, Cartier and Armani shops on Towers Street when he first built it!
One such cabinet displayed an array of fine gold watches and, often, when they opened the gift shop in the morning, this jewellery would have been tampered with. Yet the glass cabinets remained locked, with the only key on a necklace around my grandmother's neck. And when I say tampered with, I mean in an inhuman way. And when I say 'in an inhuman way' I mean in a way that would be physically impossible for a human. These watches were twisted, torn and ripped to shreds.
The result of a violent act of vandalism and it was all carried out within a tiny display space behind toughened glass, for which nobody else had a key.
Don't believe me? Alton Towers is an amusement park by day but a ghostly playground by night. Poltergeists, twisted jewellery, flying books and the Chained Oak.
Be afraid Another frequent happening was for dolls to be somehow removed from their packaging and sat at chairs in the restaurant or sometimes in the middle of the floor with their arms extended, seemingly reading books from the book department at the other end of the shop which had been thrust into their hands on specific pages. They were also draped in jewellery, necklaces and bracelets as if a child had been playing 'dressing up' with them Frequently, seemingly random pages would be torn out of books and strewn all over the floor but once or twice, a bit like the Hippo incident, it would go further.
One such morning my granny and her catering manager, Dorothy Bond, arrived together. They'd both witnessed several unexplained occurrences between them Dorothy was always losing butter dishes and cutlery at an alarming rate and they would reappear months later, proving that passing customers hadn't been stealing them as she'd originally suspected! But this was different. The ghost had become personal, proving a level of consciousness which made the spiritual presence all the more palpable.
An alphabet book had been carefully carved up to spell the word D. Granny was mildly impressed and somewhat amused by this new level of activity but Dorothy was white as a sheet.
Ironically, the most famous Alton Towers ghost story was, in fact, somewhat of a family secret until the ride, Hex, told the story to millions of park visitors a few years ago. In a way, it's a shame as I used to love telling the story to school friends before walking them down through the forest to the site of the Chained Oak, which is possibly the eeriest place I've ever been.
It's also been somewhat desecrated now, due to excessive visitor numbers - there's even a sign from the main road by Pink Lodge which kind of shatters the magic Alton -Towers -chained -oak. On a cold, rainy and decidedly windy Autumn night in , Charles the fifth Earl was travelling back from London and as his carriage approached the Old Oak clearing half way up Barbary Gutter towards the Pink Lodge, an old beggar woman was blocking the road.
The carriage screeched to a halt, narrowly missing the old lady. The Earl disembarked from his carriage to find out what she wanted and she asked him for money. Upon hearing this, Charles flew into a rage and ordered her to be cast aside or run over. The old lady then screamed at the Earl, supposedly putting a curse on him and his family, specifically that whenever a branch fell off the Old Oak tree, a member of his family would die.
Thinking nothing of it, Charles dismissed this a nonsense and carried on home. That night the storm raged on and, mysteriously, Charles got word that a member of his family had indeed died that night, due to a sudden illness. There is also a report of a riding accident at the time where another member of the Shrewsbury's family was killed.
Whether another branch had fallen off it is not clear but it's certain that a major branch had fallen during that original stormy night in It's a spooky place though and my grandparents often used to ride down the Barbary gutter with my mother and auntie towards the lakes at the bottom of the valley.
On one such occasion, they came across a group of Druids, dressed in hooded brown coats with flaming torches and masks, chanting as they sacrificed an animal on a stone altar beneath the Chained Oak. The Druids stopped chanting and just silently stared at them as they rode past Alton Towers chained oak. My auntie and uncle's house was up a driveway from the Pink Lodge and overlooked the valley where the Chained Oak stands.
Annie experienced a number of ghostly happenings at the Towers but the most disturbing was what happened in their own house above Barbary Gutter.
0コメント