Paranormal Story Archives
March 2002 –
Page 24
Two
British Ghosts
by Nicola
The first incident happened to my mother and me, although I have no recollection of it. I was raised in the United Kingdom, and the house I lived in when I was about four years of age was constructed in the 1600s. Apparently, when we first moved in and my bedroom was at the back of the house, I would often come to my mother and ask, "Where's the pretty lady who says good night to me?" My mother dismissed this as a childish fantasy and did not take too much notice of it. I moved from the back bedroom to the front of the house about six months later and my questioning stopped. It was not until a couple of years later that my mother awoke in the middle of the night, and on looking up toward the door (which was on a raised platform leading out of the room), she saw a young woman with long blonde hair dressed in what appeared to be a long white nightgown. My mother, being a little dozy from having just woken, at first thought it was me as I too had long blonde hair and did wake up a lot! My mother then said, "Nicola, go back to bed." And it was at this point that my mother realized it could not have been me; the girl was too old. The apparition then just smiled and my mother realized that she could also see the door through the figure. The figure then just faded away. An addendum to this, and something my mother did not learn until after we had moved from the house, was that two of my aunts had stayed in the back bedroom and one had just been very unnerved in the room and the other had actually felt hands pressing on the bed when she was lying there. They did not discuss this until after we had left. The other interesting point about the house was that there was a walled section to the cellar which my mother would never let my father knock down. She said that she had known immediately they walked in through the front door, that they would live in the house and by the same token, she also knew that he should destroy the wall in the cellar!
The second story actually involves my father and I think it was 1995. My father called me one night and, knowing I had an interested in such things, promptly told me that he had seen a ghost! My father is quite a stolid man, not really given to flights of fancy and he was more surprised than anything else. He told me that he had been working at the local manor house, the foundations of which would be as early as the 14th century. He was alone in the house and kneeling in front of one of the old fireplaces doing some stone work on the second floor. He described the room as having gone really cold and something just making him look behind. When he did look round (still on his hands and knees), he came face to face with a pair of long leather boots and, as his eyes traveled upward, he realized that he was looking at man who was dressed as a cavalier and, as my dad said, "with a big hat on his head." I asked dad what his features were like, but he said that they weren't absolutely clear, that the ghost did not have a solid quality. He said it was cold, the figure was there, it faded away and the room went warm again. I asked my father what he did next and in his usual, down to earth way, replied, "I got up and made a cup of tea!" The addendum to this also is that I had been listening to the local radio that day and asked my father a question. "Dad what time was this?" He replied that it had been around 9:15 a.m. I found that very interesting as at around that time, 350 years ago to the day, the Battle of Naseby a landmark in the English civil war battle between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, had began. The battlefield is about five miles away from this particular residence and being a manor house, probably safe to assume was loyal to King Charles. My father was not aware of the anniversary until I informed him during our telephone conversation.
< Previous story | Next story >
|
Do you
have a paranormal tale to tell? |
