‘I don’t believe in ghosts – but I was haunted by a Hollywood actor’s great grandmother’

For two years, a strange tale has kept Tristan Redman awake at night. “There are times when I lie there thinking that there cannot be any possible answer other than a paranormal one,” says the 43-year-old news reporter, who has never believed in ghosts. “And then other moments when I think that I am being ridiculous for even considering that possibility.”

It nags away at him because he’s “inside the story” – a story about the family of his wife Kate (herself the sister of Hollywood star Hugh Dancy, last seen setting his cap at Lady Mary in Downton Abbey: A New Era), and the house in which he lived as a teenager. Yet it all started very innocuously. “I got an email from my dad a couple of years ago,” Redman says. His father wrote, “Does any of this ring a bell?”

His dad had just been in touch with a neighbour from the time when they lived in a Victorian house near Richmond Park in leafy south-west London. The neighbour related that two families who had lived in the Redmans’ former house had reported that it was haunted. They’d talked of frightening experiences at the top of the stairs, including the ghost of a faceless woman that repeatedly visited one of the bedrooms. 

It had been Redman’s bedroom. “I wrote back immediately,” he tells me. “And said, ‘I know exactly what he’s talking about.’”

Back then he had been troubled by what seemed almost like poltergeist activity in that part of the house. A vase that he was continually having to return to its place in the room, lights that turned on and off on the landing, an uncomfortable cold feeling that would descend whenever he was alone in the house. Guests of the American family who lived there subsequently would complain of a similar feeling at the top of the stairs.

Shortly afterwards, he and his wife were on holiday with friends, drinking wine and telling each other stories until past midnight, when Kate said, “Tell them that ghost story.” Tristan obliged. Then things got even weirder. His wife, Kate, had a murder story…

This story dated back to when they’d first got together, in that same teenage bedroom, on a visit home from university, where they had been just friends and flatmates. Tristan’s parents had invited Kate and her parents, Jonathan and Sarah Dancy, for dinner. They’d brought Kate’s grandad, John Dancy, with them too. “I remember that like it was yesterday,” Redman says. “Him coming up the stone steps with his walking stick – he’d had polio in the ’50s.” He’d had no inkling where they were going, just that they were going to meet Kate’s new boyfriend. “And then he must have got out of the car, in that driveway, and realised where he was.” For it turned out that Tristan’s haunted house was exactly next door to the house where John’s mother had been murdered.

Now Redman is exploring this bizarre, extraordinary coincidence in a new seven-part podcast – Ghost Story. In it, Kate Dancy picks up the narrative. “My grandad walked into the house. And before he said anything else, he said, ‘My mother was murdered in the house next door.’” John had been a respected headmaster, including at Marlborough College in the 1960s, where he introduced girls into the school for the first time, and where the Princess of Wales was later a boarder. Redman recalls that “he maintained his composure, because it was probably quite upsetting”.

It turned out that the killing had been a famous murder case in 1937, picked up by newspapers across the world. Naomi Dancy, a natal care specialist, had been killed, it was reported, by her brother Maurice Tribe, a shell-shocked First World War veteran. After murdering his sister in her bed, he tried to shoot Naomi’s husband John Dancy – or Feyther, as he is known in the family – before locking himself in the upstairs bathroom and slitting his own throat. Feyther had given the police his account of what had happened in great detail. Detectives quickly concluded it was a murder-suicide.

It was only when Tristan and Kate told their ghost and murder stories to friends on holiday, though, that they realised the proximity of the two tales might be more than just a coincidence. “My friend said, ‘The two things, they’re linked! One is because of the other.’ And then,” says Redman, “I really couldn’t think about anything else.” It was a singular detail that provoked their friend’s outburst about the murder and the faceless apparition: Kate’s great-grandmother Naomi had been shot at close range through both eyes.

It was this gruesome image that the press had picked up on at the time. Maurice had lost an eye in the war to shrapnel that was still embedded in his brain, and had been losing the sight in his other eye. It was said that he had developed a deep jealousy of his sister’s beautiful eyes. Feyther, a doctor himself, had described to the police an appalling scene, in which he went to his wife’s bedside to find her with “blood spurting from one of her eyes”, then broke down the door of the bathroom to discover Maurice with head bent. “A razor fell from his hands as I pushed the door open,” the statement reads. “I felt for his pulse and found him pulseless.”

Yet Redman soon discovered elements of the police report that rang alarm bells. Not least the presence of two anonymous letters that had been sent to the police, but dismissed by the investigating officers, suggesting that Feyther was the real murderer, who had killed both his wife and his brother-in-law.

Redman knew that even looking into the case might cause problems in the wider family. Feyther is a beloved character in Dancy family history, of whom tales are told to this day, and the reporter knew that he risked upsetting all of his in-laws. As Hugh Dancy tells me from New York, “When Tristan shared with me some of what he’d learnt about the crime, I was immediately adrenalised – it’s an incredible story. I wanted more and more information.” But then, he says, “my subconscious just kind of pulled me back”. He found himself thinking, “What the hell? Who does this guy think he is?”

But Redman was digging ever deeper into the past, and in Ghost Story, he lays out directly to Kate the questions that he feels are unavoidable: “Did your great-grandfather get away with murder? Is your great-grandmother the faceless woman haunting my teenage bedroom? And while we’re at it, did we end up married because this ghost wants me to solve a murder that everyone’s been getting wrong for a century.”

“We slightly laughed about that idea as being ridiculous,” Redman tells me, “but then it kept on coming back to us, and we’re kind of still in that place, actually.”

To help him get to the truth of the first – and least outlandish – of those questions, Redman brings in the former Met detective Jackie Malton, who was the model for Helen Mirren’s DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. She immediately begins noticing discrepancies in Feyther’s police statement. In the podcast, Hugh Dancy agrees to read Feyther’s statement aloud, giving voice to his description of the days leading up to the night of the murder. Maurice, we learn, was an alcoholic, whose mental state had deteriorated significantly over the years since the First World War.

Feyther reports that he had threatened to shoot his sister’s eyes out on several occasions, including in a phone call 10 days earlier. He was drinking heavily, and had recently been hit by a car, meaning he could barely walk.” The image of a man reaching the end of his tether is entirely plausible.

But why had Feyther washed the blood off Maurice’s hand and replaced the razor between his fingers? Malton, it soon becomes clear, is not at all happy with Feyther’s account. Later in the series, Redman introduces Hamish Campbell, formerly detective chief superintendent at Scotland Yard – and famously the lead detective in the Jill Dando murder case – as well as a panel of American detectives to probe further. He contacts psychics and mediums, and holds a séance, as the story takes turn after unexpected turn.

Feyther emerges as an inescapably compelling character, who left behind a handwritten 18-volume memoir of his life, parts of which are so remarkable that they were later the basis of a BBC documentary about his experiences. Hugh Dancy notes that he was always spoken of in the family as a “fabulist”. While the podcast was being made, he adds, he was “having a discussion with my dad” – the noted philosopher Jonathan Dancy – “and he offered that up again. So I looked it up immediately in the dictionary. It’s just another word for liar.”

I wonder if he would be prepared to reprise his performance of Feyther if the podcast became a feature film? “Oh, God, please. No, no thanks.” Does he wish that Tristan had… “never met my sister?” he says … No, I reply, that he had let sleeping dogs lie? “No, I don’t feel that way.”

As for the supernatural element of the podcast, “One of the things that I’ve learned from the experience of doing this story,” Redman says, “is that almost everyone you meet has their own ghost story.” Hugh tells me that he has “become more open to alternative explanations of phenomena that we can’t explain. I doubt very much that most of what we talk about when we talk about ghosts popularly is anywhere near the mark. But the notion that something can linger, that even our understanding of time is probably a little basic, I’m completely happy with.”

In Ghost Story, Naomi Dancy’s life, too, is restored with a level of detail that had been entirely absent from the way that she was remembered in the family, cast perhaps into the shade by the extraordinary stories which Feyther told of himself. Hugh talks of her with an emotion that should remind listeners that at its heart this story has a victim, who was a remarkable woman in her time. “It’s really awful, you know, not just the fact of her murder,” he says, “but the loss of a female figure, in the root of family life within living history, with such incredible qualities, to be lost, in every sense of that metaphor, lost because she lost her life and lost to our memory, to our understanding of our family story. It’s terrible.”

Redman’s investigation, he notes “might make for some faintly awkward Christmases”, but he says, “I think the best thing that Tris has done with the podcast is, insofar as it’s possible, to bring Naomi back into that story.”

Ghost Story from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios launches on October 23. Listen on Wondery+, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.