(I'll be away from my desk for a few days recovering from a hip replacement - be back with you ASAP)
Hello,
I opened this blog to compliment my book 'Ghost Encounters' with the view of adding any additional sightings of 'ghosts' in my area of North Devon (or beyond!). So far, I've been concentrating on launching and promoting the book (it's doing well, thank you for asking!) but I'd now like to expand this blog -- maybe once a month feature an article, interesting post or maybe a discussion of some sort?
So please leave a comment below if you'd like to - oh and I'd really appreciate some more reviews/comments on Amazon for the book!
APRIL/MAY DISCUSSION: A general question/opinion.
I believe that the majority of spirits/ghosts are benign - basically either friendly or indifferent - and that most are as unaware of 'us' as most of 'us' are of them ... Do you agree, or what is the opposite fascination (especially on TV) for believing most ghosts are hostile?
leave a comment - if Google is being awkward and won't 'let you in' feel free to email me at HMH@sent.com
Please do leave a comment - I'd be delighted to hear from you!
ReplyDeleteI lived in a lovely old house (older than my country, we used to joke), not far from the Cathedral in Ely, Cambridgeshire for some months. When we were moving in, my partner of the time was working evenings and needed working wifi for that work—it took a while for that to happen in the new house, so I was moving our things over from his mother’s home on my own.
ReplyDeleteYou know how when you’re having an argument with someone and they’re angry with you, you walk into a room where they are, and you can feel how angry they are with you? I started moving in on the Monday, and by Wednesday, walking into the bedroom felt like walking into a wall of anger.
By Thursday I was dreading coming into the house, and that evening I broke. I walked into that intense anger, it was like a physical shove, dropped the box I was carrying onto the bed, put my hands on my hips, and snapped, “This cannot go on like this! I have no idea why you’re angry with me and further I don’t believe I’ve done anything to warrant it!” I felt the wall of anger fall, replaced by a feeling of a startled someone listening, and out of nowhere I remembered a story I’d read and decided the words would work for this situation as well. “We love this house and you are welcome here, but not if you can’t be polite about us being here or don’t help us take care of the house!”
After that little pronouncement, the emotional feeling simply…went away, and I couldn’t decide if they’d gone away to think or if I was imagining things.
After that, we’d often hear what we thought was the other calling to us from upstairs or downstairs, only to find that the other hadn’t said anything. We chalked it up to living on the edge of a town car park, even though it sounded quite different from when people were yelling in the car park.
Sometimes (but never when we were both in the same room) something that had been sitting on, say, a bookshelf or windowsill would fall over, and we chalked that up to…vibrations from the house next door? Cars in the car park?
After a while, we decided it must be “the ghost,” of course. Sometimes when I was alone in the house, I’d talk to The Ghost, ask if they’d mind music and hoped they liked the kind I played, talk about the weather, our plans for the day or week, if they liked how I’d decorated the guest room, silly things like that.
And then I had to return to the States for a while. I packed my bag in the bedroom, zipped it closed, looked up and said, “Right, I’m off for a while. Take care of the house and of J— for me, all right?”
That evening, I found out later, when my partner returned from seeing me off to Heathrow, he went to bed at his usual midnight time, and turned off the light. Up in one corner of the bedroom, he heard scratching noises, like mice or birds in a chimney. He turned on the light again, and the sound stopped. When he turned the light back off, it started up again. After about fifteen minutes, the sound stopped.
This went on every night for a week, and he called the house’s owner, but when the owner of the house had someone in to check it out, there didn’t appear to be anything to explain it.
After that he just chalked it up to The Ghost and decided perhaps they were just letting him know they were there, always just after he turned out the light, and for no more than fifteen minutes.
A week before I got back to the UK, my partner got a call one afternoon that the owner was going to sell the house, giving him six weeks notice. When he hung up from the call, he heard the scratching in the corner of the bedroom for a while, the first time he’d ever heard it during the day.
After it stopped, he never heard the sound again.
He explained all that when I got back and we began the whole moving process, during which nothing fell over and we didn’t hear one of us calling to the other unless we actually had.
No clue what that was all about, but I do think fondly of our ghost from time to time.