HADEN HILL HOUSE.

HADEN HILL HOUSE on the borders of Blackheath and Cradley Heath features early on in Black Hearts And Blue Devils as the home of a brief love interest for our ‘hero’ sergeant Abraham Lively. Still standing it is a well-known feature of the area. Owned at the time of Black Hearts by one George Alfred Haden Haden-Best (no, that’s right, two ‘Hadens’) who inherited the estate in 1878 and immediately set about building himself a fine new residence (Haden Hill House). It would have been 9 or 10 years old at the time of Black Hearts. It was built next to the ‘old house’, also still standing, which is a large Jacobean structure almost as big as the new house. They are extremely close to each other, as an attached picture shows, and there is some evidence that Haden-Best was planning to demolish it and extend. However, he never got round to it – in Black Hearts this was because it still housed his elderly aunt Barr. These days it is a museum which is well worth a visit, as is a walk around the grounds which merge with and take you into Haden Hill Park. Many of the preserved features of house and grounds are described and made use of in the novel (if you are reading on Facebook there will be various interior shots also.) Most importantly, for the plot, it is a fact that Haden-Best, childless himself I believe, ‘adopted’ two local girls, Alice Cockin and Emily Bryant and brought them up as his daughters. It was to Alice that in fiction sergeant Lively became attached.

One thing visitors ask is ‘is it haunted?’. Funny you should ask I say, did you not see the double issue of ‘Most Haunted’ from the old house with Yvette Fielding in 2017? No? Well there was all sorts a gooin’ on! Ghosts (or camera crew, or ghosts of camera crew perhaps?) throwing things at Ms. Fielding (she must have upset them). Things were so weird that when a piano started playing on its own it was not even looked at for hidden mechanisms planted by some hoaxer, but taken as read as the tinklings of some discarnate entity. What a missed opportunity eh? Good job the show’s for entertainment only. Mind you, I visited at around that time, and I don’t recall seeing a piano: perhaps it was a spectral one. Daft thing is, when Derek Acorah left the show under a cloud in 2006 Ms Fielding allegedly described him as a fake. All I can say is that the place is not haunted in Black Hearts, although there is plenty of paranormal activity taking place elsewhere.

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