Your
True Tales
October 2005 – Page
22
Grandma's
Ghost
by David Kimberley
When I was very young, my family moved to a large manor house in the country (in Norfolk, England) that had a tragic history. The previous owner had hung himself outside after his wife had left him, and the maid who used to reside on the top floor of the house died naturally several years ago there, too.
The very first thing I recall was my grandma dying, and before she passed away, she told my mother that she would dearly love to see our new home. One afternoon, about two days after she died, I was playing in the hallway and looked up to see someone standing looking at me and smiling. At first glance, I thought it was my mother, but then I realized it was my grandma (they looked very similar.) As my mother emerged from the kitchen behind me, my grandma's form glided backward and vanished around a corner, into what we called the "big lounge." After that, the lounge was a hotspot of activity. Paintings would fall from the wall, plant pots would be thrown across the room, and when my parents divorced, the painting that belonged to my father hanging in there was smashed and smudged.
The door to the big lounge was always locked when these things happened. Over the years, I became very interested in what was happening at the house; all three floors seemed to be haunted and I worked out that there were three ghosts there. My grandma on the ground floor, the previous owner who had committed suicide on the first floor, and the maid on the top floor. I have never witnessed such amazing things before. The best moment had to be walking into our large pantry to find every tin, can, box, and bottle stacked one on top of the other on the floor, so precariously that as soon as we touched it, the whole lot fell down.
To test my theory of these three spirits, I moved onto the top floor at the age of 15 and had 3 rooms to myself, connected by a corridor. The first night I slept up there, the tap in the bathroom came on and then every night after that until it developed into a sort of game. Then came the moment that both terrified and dumbfounded me. Sitting up there one night on my computer, I heard my mother call my name, so I wandered downstairs and asked my brother where she was. He told me that she had gone out an hour ago. I shrugged it off as just my hearing things and returned to my computer. The room around me suddenly went completely quiet and a woman's voice whispered my name very clearly into my right ear, as if she were standing right next to me. This I took to be the maid letting me know she was there.
A year later, we had to move from the house that I loved so much and, on the day we left, all hell broke loose as every item that wasn't bolted down in the big lounge was flung to the ground. I recently returned to the house (I'm now 28) and, after only 20 minutes of wandering around, I heard my name called again. It was such an amazing experience to almost be welcomed back home by the spirits that resided there.
However, that is not the end. The house we moved to after that manor was a smaller townhouse but, on the third night we were there, around 1 a.m., somebody knocked on my bedroom door repeatedly for about 10 minutes. Every time I opened the door, nobody was there. Was this someone letting me know they had come with me? I don't know, but it felt like it.
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