Jane Deans' Ghostly Visit to Riccarton House

This is the bedroom guides here at Riccarton House call the "teenagers' bedroom," and they say it's the most haunted. It's where a nanny saw something really unusual the day after Austen Deans was born here on December 1, 1915.

The nanny was in here with Austen, who was just a baby in his bassinet, and his mother, Norna, who was resting in bed. The nanny noticed an elderly woman enter the room. This woman was small and fragile, dressed in black, with deep-set blue eyes. She walked right up to the bassinet and peered in at the baby. Then she just turned and left the room without a word or even a glance at the nanny.

When the nanny asked the other people in the house about the visitor, they were puzzled because no guests had been there that day. But when the nanny described what she saw, the family immediately recognized the description: it was Jane Deans, Austen's great-grandmother. The strange thing is, Jane Deans had been dead for four years by then.

Austen, the baby in the bassinet, grew up to be Austen Deans, an award-winning artist, mountaineer, and World War II survivor. He lived to be 95 and had a deep love for Riccarton House. He even thought about buying it at one point. He was the last Deans to be born here. His father, Alister, who was John Deans II’s sixth son, went off to fight in World War I the next year and was killed in action in Belgium in 1917. He never met his second son, who was born that same year.