Kenwood Creeper: The ghost that haunted John Lennon
Considering the meteoric rise to fame that The Beatles experienced right from the beginning of their existence as a group, you could argue that John Lennon and his bandmates had it all. The amount of money they were raking in from record sales and performances all over the world would have likely had them set up for life, never having to worry about unpaid utility bills or having to call it a day for financial reasons like bands these days often succumb to.
Of course, becoming an overnight success also comes with a number of difficulties that celebrities have to navigate and overcome. There are always going to be overzealous fans who approach you at the most inopportune moments, making strange requests, and there’s also the feeling that you’re having your every move watched by millions who are ready to scrutinise your actions.
At the same time, the trappings of fame do also bring along moments to be celebrated, and the opportunity that the Beatles would’ve been afforded early on in their careers is being able to spend some of their income on buying themselves fancy properties that afford them a level of privacy and seclusion from the hordes of obsessive fans. However, for Lennon, purchasing his first home with his wife, Cynthia, turned out to be a far more troublesome affair than they might have hoped.
When the two settled on the idea of purchasing Kenwood, a fancy home in Surrey that cost the Lennons £20,000, it turned out to be a moment that would haunt the pair forever – in the most literal sense. While Cynthia was sceptical of the dilapidated property in the first place, John was desperate to acquire a place of their own despite his wife’s concerns that the place had an eerie aura.
It would turn out that several supernatural events began taking place when the couple moved in, and Cynthia’s 2005 memoir delves into more details on the spooky happenings that they were subjected to. “Lights would keep going off, objects would move mysteriously, and we all felt a strange presence,” she stated in the book. “We planned a party to cheer the place up, but halfway through the evening the electricity was cut off and a huge storm blew up.”
Not only was she having to deal with spectral occurrences, but she’d have the fright of her life when returning from a solo trip to Greece in 1968, coming home not to find a ghost but her husband amorously gazing into the eyes of his new lover, Yoko Ono. Their divorce was finalised shortly after, and John and Yoko would subsequently scoot themselves overseas and begin a new life together in New York City.
Lennon may not have been quite as perturbed by the house as his wife was, and you might think that he would have likely had more pressing things plaguing his nightmares, such as the decision to cumbersomely shoehorn ‘Revolution 9’ onto the White Album’s tracklist. However, while people may claim to have seen their own ghostly apparitions of the star after his murder in 1980, Lennon could claim to have had several of his own supernatural encounters long before.
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