Spooky!

From last Friday until this morning, my high-speed Internet connection was travelling at a snail’s pace. Which I calculate as seven-times slower than dial-up!

According to my ISP, there were no problems with the service. So I assume this must have been another manifestation of life in a haunted house.


I moved here in August 2006. And the first ghost I saw was a little girl, about 8-years-old, peering at me through the wrought iron gate of the walled garden. That first summer and autumn, I saw her several times. She always took a quick peek at me from exactly the same spot. She had short, mousy-blonde hair and wore a red sweater. I liked her, and was quite happy that she enjoyed playing in my secret garden.

I’d lived here for about two months, when I awoke one night to see what I thought was my maternal grandmother standing in my bedroom. She wore a dark-beige cardigan and jeans, and her wooden walking stick looked freshly polished. Just like the little girl, she looked straight at me.

But my grandmother NEVER wore jeans. She wore a dress and hat until the day she died. (I have her mink hat in a cupboard in my office.)

Though I wasn’t particularly interested in the history of the house, it has been thrust upon me. The old man who delivers the free local newspaper lived here until the mid 1970s.

One day, a late-middle-aged man was jogging along the pavement, and stopped me as I headed towards the car. He told me he was born in this house, in what is now my bedroom. He told me about the number of deaths of men from this street, and the impression that made on his uncle, who, as a child, lived here during the First World War. At one point, only two of the sixty houses did not have a black ribbon on the door.

He told me about the family who lived next door, and how his grandmother helped nurse their children before the youngest daughter died of TB. The land that is now my walled garden was part of a communal clothes-drying area … where the little girl loved to play.