2023-07-16 10:56:00
(CNN) — More than 100 people were trapped for several hours at Greenway, the former home of famed British mystery writer Agatha Christie, in the English countryside on Friday.
In a series of events that might have stepped straight from the pages of one of Christie’s mystery novels, the tour group was stranded following a storm toppled a tree, blocking the driveway leading to the property in Los Angeles County. Devon, in the southwest of England.
Caroline Heaven, a tourist visiting the Greenway, contacted local news outlet Devon Live to spread the word that approximately 100 tourists were stranded on the grounds of Christie’s former holiday home.
Britain’s National Trust, which manages the historic site, quickly posted a message on its website, announcing that a large tree had fallen on the one-track path leading to the Greenway.
A spokesman for the National Trust said it was aware there were “visitors, staff and volunteers still unable to leave Greenway”, adding that the National Trust was “doing everything possible” to ensure their comfort while they waited.
The stranded tourists kept themselves busy, sipping cups of tea in the home’s tea room and playing rounds of croquet on the lawn, Heaven told Devon Live.
Heaven, who arrived at the home around 11:30 a.m. local time (6:30 a.m. ET) on Friday, praised the staff’s efforts to care for tourists.
“They’re doing a great job, they’re giving us free tea and stuff. It’s a bit gloomy,” she commented.
Christie herself was known to spend hours in the Greenway Gardens, playing clockwork golf and croquet and entertaining guests with snippets from her latest mystery novels, according to the National Trust website.
The trapped tourists would also have had time to explore the estate’s walled gardens and the famous boathouse that serves as the crime scene in Christie’s novel, “Dead Man’s Folly.”
Despite the seemingly calm atmosphere, some social media users mightn’t help but draw a parallel to Christie’s iconic novel “And Then There Were None,” in which ten strangers are inexplicably invited to a remote waterfront mansion. from Devon. As members of the group mysteriously die, the group soon realizes that there is a murderer among them.
A social media user shared a link to the Devon Live article with a countdown tweet, “99, 98, 97, 96, 94 (awful), 93.” Another user shared the article, advising stranded tourists to “implement a buddy system immediately.”
However, the tourists ended up finding a less spooky fate than Christie’s characters, managing to leave the property on Friday night following local rescue services managed to reopen the road.
However, those looking to taste the magic of the Christie murder mystery will have to wait a bit longer, as the National Trust warned would-be visitors in an update on Saturday that the Greenway will remain closed due to “extensive storm damage”. that suffered.
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