The following is an excerpt from Richard Estep’s latest book Ghostly Encounters: Terrifyingly True Hauntings, published September 9, 2025, by Visible Ink Press. Available in hardcover, paperback, and eBook. 256 pages, $19.95 (paperback). Available where books are sold, or online at: Amazon, Amazon.ca, Barnes and Noble, and Books-a-Million.
Hubris: the notion that excessive pride, usually infused with a large bolus of arrogance, often precede disaster. The annals of history are replete with hubristic tragedies, and the British Empire had more than its fair share of them.
Arguably the poster child was the RMS Titanic. Depending upon which source we accept, between 1,503 and 1,517 souls lost their lives when the supposedly unsinkable ocean liner sank beneath the icy Atlantic waters on April 15, 1912. Yet the ship, which one White Star Line employee claimed that not even God Himself could sink, was riddled with design and manufacturing flaws, ranging from incomplete watertight compartments to an inadequate number of lifeboats.
The pride of British maritime engineering struck an iceberg at high speed, resulting in damage to her hull and catastrophic flooding. Titanic’s captain, Edward John Smith, was a highly experienced mariner. By all rights, he should have known better than to push his ship so quickly through waters that were infested with icebergs. Yet visibility was good that night, and Smith had a track record of taking such calculated risks throughout his career. Lookouts were posted atop masts to watch for icebergs, and Smith doubtless felt that Titanic was more than capable of evading any hazards once they were spotted. Indeed, so confident was he that Smith wasn’t even present on the bridge at the time of the collision.
Hundreds of Titanic’s passengers and crew paid for that poor decision with their lives. Smith was one of them, choosing to go down with his ship in the time-honored tradition of generations of sea captains.
The loss of Titanic delivered a black eye to Britannia’s image, and constituted a national trauma, the after-echoes of which can still be felt today. At the dock in her departure port of Southampton, the berth in which she was moored — number 44 — is still used by cruise liners today. A small memorial plaque serves as a memorial to the tragedy…a victim of British hubris.
Just as the age of sail gave way to the age of steam, so did the age of steam transition into the age of flight. Although the British Empire would enter a state of decline after World War II, in the late 1920s, British imperial colonialism still spanned the globe. Up to that point, ships had been the primary method of connecting the capital city of London and the rest of the British Isles with their far-flung overseas territories. Now, it was envisioned that vast fleets of airships might be used to convey passengers, merchant goods, and information across those vast distances in significantly shorter transit times than even the fastest ocean-going vessel could accomplish. If war should break out, the airships would be earmarked to deliver soldiers and military supplies quickly to deployment bases around the world.
In 1924, this ambitious plan was codified as the Imperial Airship Scheme. This plan called for two enormous airships, the R100 and R101, to be constructed as the first phase of what was intended to be a national fleet-building program. The sister airships, which would feature different designs and be built by separate manufacturers, would be the precursors for an entire new generation of vessels, if all went according to plan.
The burgeoning airship industry was ramping up production and experimentation throughout the 1920s. Eighteen years after the sinking of RMS Titanic, when another tragic disaster would befall the nation. Known as the Titanic of the skies, the accidental destruction of the R101 airship is remarkable for many reasons…not least the ghosts of its crew, who were claimed to have reached out beyond the grave to explain why it was that the mammoth vessel went down in flames.
After a lengthy design and construction process, both the R-100 and R-101 took to the skies for the first time in 1929, undergoing testing and shakedown cruises. The designers of the mighty dirigibles were all very familiar with the risks associated with airship travel, but some experimental changes were made to the R101 design which had never been incorporated into an airframe before.
Ever since its inception, the fledgling field of air transportation had seen numerous high profile crashes. Up to that point, it had taken courage (and perhaps even a degree of foolhardiness) to be a passenger or serve as a crew-member on board an airship. Floating through the skies in what was essentially a gondola slung underneath a gigantic bag of highly combustible hydrogen gas was definitely not for the faint of heart.
Fully aware of this, those same designers had made every effort to make the R101 not just the latest and greatest airship the world had ever seen, but it was also meant to be the safest. After scrutinizing the common causes and failure points which had led to other air disasters, they had engineered a plethora of safety features into the craft. This included less combustible diesel engines instead of the petroleum-based alternatives. The end result, however, was that R101 was heavier and slower than desired, particularly when the airship’s relatively dense steel frame was factored in.
By the time construction was complete and the R101 was ready to fly, it was believed to be safer than any other conveyance that was flying through the skies at that time. Others were not so sure; some qualified engineers commented darkly that R100 and R101 might in fact be deathtraps.
Once again, there was hubris. Once again, there would be tragedy.
R101 was the second of the two airships to take to the skies. In the summer of 1930, her sibling, R100, made the journey from England to Canada and back without a hitch, crossing the Atlantic Ocean in order to do so. Later that year, in October, an even longer journey was scheduled to inaugurate R101: a voyage to Karachi, India.
On paper, the journey seemed straightforward enough, but it was one which had never been made before. In a politically calculated public vote of confidence regarding the airship’s safety, included among the passengers was Christopher B. Thomson, the Secretary of State for Air and prime mover behind the airship program. Predictably, the construction process hit roadblocks underwent multiple delays. Thomson had pushed for R101 to be put into service as quickly as possible. In order to do so, the testing process had not been as rigorous as it might have been when the first passengers and dignitaries boarded R101 for its maiden flight to India.
Despite the project’s prestige status, it must be borne in mind that R101 was after all an experimental craft — and the biggest man-made object flying at the time of its launch. The airship was 777 feet from nose to tail, and was 130 feet wide. The bulk of her cubic footprint consisted of huge inflatable bladders which were filled with hydrogen gas, which when inflated would provide R101 with the lift required to soar.
In order to help change altitude, the airship needed ballast — a substance used to provide it with stability in flight. The R101 was ballasted with water, which could, if necessary, be dumped on the captain’s order to trim the airship and level it out.
Much like her spiritual ocean liner forebear, the Titanic, the R101 was considered the last word in luxury air travel. Passengers could while away time drinking at the bar, dining on the finest food, or simply enjoy watching the landscape passing by below them as they puffed on a cigar in the smoking lounge.
Enormous sheds that had been built during at their home base in Cardington, Bedfordshire, during World War I were repurposed to house the airship. To most people, the word “shed” conjures up images of small wooden huts used to store tools and gardening equipment. The sheds at Cardington couldn’t be more different. They were cavernous, constructed from 4,000 tons of steel, stretched to 812 feet long, spanned 180 feet wide, and were 157 feet high. The doors alone weighed 70 tons.
On the evening Saturday October 4, the R101 left her mooring position at Cardington and flew off on her rendezvous with history. Nobody on board suspected how brief that maiden flight was to be, or how tragic would be the outcome. Heading southward, the airship passed over the capital and then set out across the English Channel, bound for France. The crew was in a rush to try and get ahead of worsening weather conditions further along their flight path.
The early morning hours of October 5 found the airship cruising above the French countryside, making a speed of around 30 knots despite there being notable winds aloft. Most of the passengers had retired to their cabins and were asleep in their beds. Shortly after 2am, R101’s nose pitched forward unexpectedly. Fortunately, despite the airship’s tail-heaviness, the crew were able to regain normal flight by forcing the nose back up into a neutral position.
This was not the case when the same happened a second time.The airship began to descend again, a descent from which it never recovered. R101 hit the ground but remained intact, then slowly inched its way forward, dragging against the earth as it went.
Although the airframe was damaged, R101 had crash landed relatively intact. However, the hydrogen contained in the gas bags began venting into the atmosphere, where it came into contact with one of the hot engines. Predictably, it ignited. (This became the commonly accepted explanation for the explosion, though it was not conclusively proven, and never could be).
R101 blew up. The volatile hydrogen gas, along with the diesel fuel for the airship’s engines, burned until there was nothing left of the mighty airship but a twisted metal framework and a massive burn scar on the landscape near the village of Allonne.
Forty-eight of the R101’s passengers and crew lost their lives in the inferno. Only six crewmen escaped with their lives. One would succumb to his injuries days afterward. In addition to the death of Lord Thomson, the crash also killed Sefton Brancker, the senior government minister for Civil Aviation. Along with them went all hope and aspirations for a national airship program in the future. The loss of R101 was too great a wound to the collective psyche of the British public. R100 was taken out of service and scrapped, along with the remnants of R101’s steel skeleton.
On October 7, the bodies of those who died in the crash were returned to England. The French authorities accorded their remains high honors, with the prime minister of France himself being present. A brace of Royal Navy warships conveyed the coffins across the English Channel, where the British military took over escort duties.
A dedicated train transported them to London. On October 10, before the eyes of a grieving British public, their coffins lay in state in Westminster Hall, each one covered with the national flag as a mark of respect. People queued for hours in order to pay their respects.
On the following day, October 11, the remains were placed back on the train and taken to Bedford. The decision had been made to bury them all together in a mass grave in the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin Church in Cardington, where their fateful journey had both begun and ultimately would conclude. Many of the bodies were so badly burned, they could not be definitively identified. All 48 were laid to rest just a stone’s throw from the Cardington sheds, with full military honors including a flypast by fighter planes of the Royal Air Force.
There was, quite understandably, a national clamor to know exactly why the tragedy had happened. It came to light that criticism of the airship’s design had been swept under the carpet, in the name of expediting R101’s already overdue maiden voyage. The craft was heavy, particularly at the rear, and as a consequence the crew had found it difficult to gain the lift needed to prevent the final, fatal crash landing.
Most retellings of the R101 story end here, closing the book on what became regarded as a cautionary tale of tragedy. Yet there was more, for the ghosts of the stricken airship would soon begin to speak.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, October 7, while the bodies of the R101 crash victims were being repatriated to Britain, our old friend Harry Price was conducting a seance. The seance was held at his London-based National Laboratory of Psychical Research. Price was assessing the capabilities of the 37-year-old Irish trance medium Eileen Garrett.
Ever since she was a young girl, Garrett had perceived things that others could not, playing with ghostly children in a reminder of the axiom that not all imaginary friends are necessarily imaginary at all. At home one day, she encountered the apparition of her aunt, who was carrying a newborn baby toward her. It was only after the aunt told Eileen that she and the baby had to leave, that Eileen learned of her death during labor. Her baby also died.
A sickly youth, Garrett had three children of her own during her first marriage. Her first marriage ended in divorce; her second ended with the death of her husband on the Western Front in World War I. His death was revealed to her in a psychic vision.
Spiritualism exploded across the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Great War, borne on a tidal wave of grief at the loss of an entire generation of young men in the bloodbaths of trench warfare. Exploring those new horizons convinced Eileen Garrett — and soon, an army of supporters — that she was able to communicate with the dead. Communication was achieved by entering a trance, at which point her “control” would come to the fore. This was the spirit of who claimed to be a deceased Arab soldier named Uvani. He facilitated the connection between Eileen and whichever other entities wished to speak through her, much like the moderator of a panel would at a conference.
The intent on that particular Tuesday in October was to attempt connection with the spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had died on July 7. What came through instead was somebody very difference.
Eileen Garrett entered a trance state, and turned over control to Uvani as per usual. In his distinctively slow and halting manner (English was not Uvani’s native language) Uvani announced the arrival of a spirit calling itself Irwin.
Flight Lieutenant H.C. (Herbert Carmichael) Irwin had been the commanding officer of R101. Speaking through the mouth of Eileen Garrett, H.C. Irwin had an incredible story to tell. As the words spilled out of her, a secretary scribbled away furiously, transcribing the words for posterity. (Price would later publish the account in his book “Leaves From a Psychist’s Case Book”).
Price describes Irwin as being “extremely agitated,” completely understandable if one has just died a violent death. Using technical terms appropriate to an airship officer, Irwin stated that R101’s “bulk was entirely and absolutely too much for her engine capacity.” Further: “Useful lift too small.”
In both assessments, he was correct. R101 had indeed struggled to attain sufficient lift, something which the design’s detractors had already pointed out. Irwin went on to rattle off a laundry list of faults with his doomed airship:
Elevators, the movable control surfaces designed to change the angle at which air flowed over themselves and therefore change the pitch of the airship, had jammed;
An oil pipe had gotten plugged;
The fabric of the outer skin was too tense, resulting in chafing. If it tore, then the inner gas bags containing the volatile hydrogen would be exposed to the elements;
Due to the R101 being underpowered, it was never able to reach cruising altitude, because the airship was too heavy to rise;
The trials that R101 was run through prior to her maiden voyage were too short, intentionally truncated in order to meet the fast approaching departure date.
It was a damning list, and made absolute sense when one factored in what was known about the R101’s flaws. Irwin went on to state that the weather was too poor to safely undertake a long flight, and that rain had soaked the fabric of the balloon, adding still more water weight to an already overloaded airframe.
“Nose is down,” Irwin went on. “Impossible to rise. Cannot trim. Almost scraped the roofs of Achy. Kept to railway. An enquiry to be held later. It will be found that the superstructure of the envelope contained no resilience and had far too much weight in envelope. The added middle section was entirely wrong. Too heavy. Too much over weighted for the capacity of the engines.”
R101 was indeed nose-heavy, something for which the crew would try to compensate by trimming the airship. “Trimming” is the process of setting the control surfaces, such as the elevators (which Irwin claimed would jam) in such a position that the airship would fly straight and level without any control input from her crew. Pilots trim aircraft all the time. Once it’s trimmed correctly, the aircraft can then cruise “hands off” for the most part, flying at a consistent altitude for as long as the air conditions do not radically change. According to Flight Lieutenant Irwin — or the spirit claiming to be him, at least — R101 could not be trimmed and also refused to rise. That put her in a dangerously unstable state, as demonstrated by the R101 almost hitting the rooftops in Achy — a village located northwest of where the airship finally came down.
Irwin also mentioned to “an exorbitant scheme of carbon and hydrogen.” This referred to a proposed experiment in which the airship’s gas bladders would be filled, not with pure hydrogen, but rather a carbon-hydrogen mix. This is what Irwin meant when he said that the airship would get to “no altitude worth speaking about.” Although debated, this hadn’t happened yet, but it was a piece of information which shouldn’t have been known to a member of the public.
The weather had indeed been less than optimal, with rain soaking the envelope as the R101 made for France. Mrs. Garrett was also correct about there having been a middle section added, in order to accommodate an additional gas bag. Her reference to the airship having overflown Achy would also not have been common knowledge, as the newspaper reports did not mention the settlement, and it did not appear on many maps, being considered too small to be significant.
Eileen Garrett continued to pour forth a torrent of aviation-specific technical information. This was data that the average person in the street, even if they were well educated, would probably be unaware of. Had the medium set out to defraud Price, she would have had relatively little time to prepare, having to locate technical manuals and absorbing a wealth of complex engineering-related data, before regurgitating it while faking a trance state. This would have been no small task, to say the least. Garrett talked about fuel injectors, air screws, and other components of the airship in a knowledgable manner. Is it reasonable to believe she had spent the last 36 hours taking a — no pun intended — crash course on dirigible design and mechanics, purely in an effort to impress Harry Price?
Could Eileen Garrett simply have read about the crash in the newspapers, and prepared her spiel accordingly? It is possible, but unlikely, given the timeframe and the depth of information she provided. The R101 went down in the early hours of Sunday morning. Word made it back to England that same day, and it was certainly front page news in the press all day Monday.
Playing the Devil’s Advocate, there was much public discussion regarding the reasons behind R101 having gone down. Every patron in a pub had an opinion, so some of the information could have been gleaned by picking the brains of her friends and acquaintances…but not all of it. Again, the information regarding the proposed hydrogen/carbon mix was not public knowledge particularly stands out. The terminology used by Mrs. Garrett, such as “disposable lift” and “bore capacity”were directly in accordance with those used by airship crews at the time. A supply officer for the R101, whom Price referred to as “Mr. X” and was actually named William Charlton, read the transcript of the seance and gave his professional opinion that much of what had come through made sense to him.
In short, “Irwin,” whether it was truly the ghost of the R101’s commanding officer, a figment of Eileen Garrett’s subconscious, or a strange form of telepathy, clearly knew its stuff. Whichever was the case, Price for one found the evidence presented via mediumship to be credible, even if he wasn’t necessarily convinced that Garrett was speaking with the dead. It should be noted that not everybody was in agreement with him. Some aeronautical professionals were openly critical of the Garrett-“Irwin” communications, alleging that some of their content failed to make a great deal of sense, and that not all of the information she provided was as obscure as Price and the experts he consulted made it out to be.
Eileen Garrett’s connection with the R101 tragedy was not over yet. After her seance with Harry Price, she undertook similar seances with Major Oliver Villiers of the Air Ministry present. Villiers had known some of those who perished about R101, and took both a personal and professional interest in the supposed afterlife communications that were being relayed by Eileen Garrett.
Fittingly, one such seance took place on Halloween night of that same year (1930). Once again, a communicator purporting to be Flight Lieutenant Irwin quickly came through via Mrs. Garrett. He announced that “we feel like damned murderers,” presumably a reference to allowing the R101 to make her final flight three weeks prior. In death, the commander of the stricken dirigible bitterly regretted not having pushed back against the authorities that had compelled him to captain the maiden flight of a flawed and unready vessel.
Irwin’s ghost went on to explain that a broken nose strut had torn a hole in the airship’s outer skin, allowing the gusty air to penetrate the interior of the R101, Irwin claimed. This had contributed to its poor handling characteristics art the time of the crash: “The rush of wind caused the first dive, and then we straightened again, and another gust surging through the hole finished us off.”
In future seances, other occupants of the R101 came through. One purported to be Air Vice Marshall Sir Sefton Brancker, the British government’s Director of Civil Aviation, who had been a VIP passenger. Brancker claimed that himself and Irwin, along with navigator Ernest Johnston and Major George Scott, the government’s Assistant Director of Airship Development, had informed Lord Thomson that the R101 was undergoing technical difficulties which meant that the flight should probably be scrubbed. Thomson was having none of it, Brancker said; the senior government minister knew that his reputation was at stake, and was hell-bent on getting the airship to India no matter what.
The ghost of Major Scott emerged and backed up Irwin’s claim about the damaged strut ripping open the R101’s covering. Scott even gave Major Villiers the precise location of the strut, numbering it precisely in accordance with its place on the airship’s design blueprint.
Accusations of charlatanry were leveled at Harry Price throughout his career — accusations which were not without merit. Nevertheless, he was not present at the seances which were conducted with Major Villiers, so he could not have influenced their results even if he had wished to do so.
One of the classic motivators behind an intelligent haunting is that of unfinished business. In the case of the R101, assuming that the Garrett communications were legitimate, it is entirely possible that the spirit communicators wanted to confirm the reasons why their airship crashed, and make it known that the tragedy was not their fault. Human failure had been involved, but most of it had taken place prior to R101 embarking on her final voyage. The crew had gallantly remained at their posts, wrestling with their controls in a vain attempt to avert disaster. They failed, and paid for their efforts with their lives.
To make matters worse, Flight Lieutenant Irwin repeatedly alluded to “them/they” knowing the truth regarding the crash, but not allowing it to be told. Not to put too fine a point on it, from beyond the grave, the R101’s commander was accusing the British authorities of instituting a cover-up, presumably to protect culpable parties within the government itself. The inquiry into the crash, which was ongoing in parallel with the Garrett seances, was alleged to have been a whitewash.
In addition to wanting the truth to be told, there was another motive. Flight Lieutenant Irwin emphasized that the R100 should never be allowed to make a prolonged flight. It, too, was poorly designed and engineered; another disaster waiting to happen, albeit for slightly different reasons. In this, the spirit got his wish. R100 was grounded, broken up, and scrapped. Some of the remnants, along with those of the R101, were sold off to the German Zeppelin company — and ended up, it is believed, in the structure of the equally ill-fated Nazi airship Hindenburg, which fell from the sky in a blazing fireball over New Jersey on May 6, 1937. 35 of the Hindenburg’s occupants died, along with one hapless person standing beneath it on the ground.
The curtain was coming down on the age of airships, which reached a fiery end.
One can walk in the graveyard at St. Mary the Virgin and pay respects to the dead of R101. Inside the church, framed and mounted on the wall, is the British Ensign flag that was flown by the doomed airship. It was salvaged from the wreckage by French rescue workers, and stands as a stark reminder almost a century later of the terrible human cost wrought by the tragedy.
The sheds at Cardington that were built to house both the R100 and the R101 still stand today. There’s a good chance that you have seen them on the silver screen, as many Hollywood blockbuster movies have been filmed inside them. The R100 shed housed parts of Gotham City for Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight series. Two Star Wars movies were shot there, as was Marvel’s Black Widow and a plethora of TV productions.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sheds are said to be haunted. Local lore holds that the spirits of some of the restless crew and passengers are responsible for phantom footsteps, disembodied voices, and other strange occurrences that have been reported at Cardington.
We can only hope that someday, they shall finally find peace.