More Ghosts

I managed to collect a few more family ghost stories when I was in Essex a couple of weeks ago following my great uncle's death...

To begin with I must report that my father has been getting around again (see my earlier entry on ghosts). This time he appeared to my great uncle Jack while Jack was dying (as we now know) in hospital. My great aunt Grace, Jack's widow, has a neighbour who would go to the hospital with her, a very nice lady in her 60s called Dorothy. On one occasion Grace had left Dorothy at Jack's bedside for some reason (seeing the doctor/nurse or going to the loos I imagine). Jack looked past Dorothy and said something about someone having left their jacket on the back of a chair. Dorothy looked around but saw nothing. Then Jack said that there was a man standing 'over there' and asked Dorothy to ask him to go away. Dorothy looked about but there wasn't anybody there. Then Jack told her 'Ben came to see me'. Dorothy had no idea who he was on about, and on the way home she asked Grace who Ben is. The only Ben that Grace or Jack knew was my father, so she told Dorothy that he had been her niece's husband. Dorothy told her what had happened. Grace asked her if she wasn't sure that Jack had said 'Hen' or 'Henny' (one of Jack's brothers), but Dorothy is clear that he said Ben. Who will he visit next?

Grace has seen her dead brother on a number of occasions. His name was George, and he was killed in action during World War II. If I remember correctly a mortar more or less exploded in his face. Grace says that at the time she had a dream in which she saw George standing in the street, and his head was all bandaged up. After that came the news of his death. Anyway, Grace would frequently wake up in the night and see George standing at the side of her bed, looking at her. He was always in uniform (not combat dress), and she always noticed that the buttons on the jacket shone. This detail is interesting, because a long time after the war her father-in-law came to stay at the house. The house was Grace's mother's, and she and Jack stayed in the same house until about 4 or 5 years ago. Her father-in-law stayed in George's old room, and one morning Grace heard him and Jack talking in Dutch (they were both dutch). Her father-in-law was telling Jack that in the night a man - a soldier - had come into the room. What he really noticed about him was that his buttons seemed to be very highly polished. So it seems that Grace wasn't the only person to see George. Apart from the apparitions, Grace, Jack and my own mother also experienced feeling a hand gripping the shoulder (left shoulder I think) while in the bathroom.

Grace eventually asked George to stop appearing to her one night (when he was standing there), and she didn't see him again except for one occasion a few years later. Again, she woke up in the night to see him standing there, except on this occasion he was not at the bedside but at the end of the bed. She thought this odd, and a freind or neighbour told her that if he had moved it meant he had come for someone (I haven't heard this piece of ghostlore before). Fairly soon after that Grace's mother died, and she never saw George again. When she had to move a few years ago she was concerned that she was leaving him behind, but Jack told her not to worry. He would be able to find her if he wanted to.

I never knew that Grace had been haunted until a few weeks ago! She also used to have premonitory dreams, though she never thought much of them as they were never about anything of consequence (except one where she dreamt of a plane crashing into a mountain side just before a famous figure - a lord - committed suicide by flying into the side of a mountain). I have also had similar dreams. At the time the dream stands out despite being about something totally ordinary; it is as though the dream burns itself onto memory, while other dreams just fade into nothing. A little while later the exact circumstances of the dream come true. It feels very strange, but it's always something totally mundane. I've not had any such dreams for some time though, and I am otherwise very much 'un-psychic'.

The tales of George have reminded me of some stories I've heard before but forgot when I wrote my original 'Ghosts' entry. My uncle Colin, who is my mother's brother and Grace's nephew had a hand-on-the-shoulder experience in Weald Park. Weald Park is a beautiful park of fields and woodlands, near South Weald village. Colin used to go running there in his youth, and would quite often still be there when it was quite dark (I was also prone to walking there in twilight/after dark during the 90s). There is a hill in Weald Park which has a structure at the top (two sets of steps that rise to meet each other) and one of the car-parks at the bottom. One night Colin had just stopped on the hill, looking down at the car, when he felt a hand grip his shoulder. He heard and saw nothing but in fright bolted down the hill to the car, opened the door and turned on the headlights, which revealed nothing. Perhaps it was his uncle George!

The other story I had forgotton happened to my aunt Lena, who is only 8 or 9 years older than me. Lena had a ghost-by-the-bed experience. She has been living with a chap called Dave for years now. Now, if I've got this right Lena had either recently moved in with him (or vice-versa) or they had recently moved into a new house. She woke up one night to see a man standing at the end of the bed, with a beard (I think I'm right about the beard). The next morning she told Dave and told him what the man looked like. In a matter-of-fact manner he declared that it was his grandfather. According to Dave, every time there is a major change in his life his grandfather appears at the end of the bed. As with the story of George, what fascinates me about this story is that it is a recurring apparition that appears to someone other than the usual witness, which would indicate that there is an objective reality to the ghost in question.

If I remember any more, or if my father puts in another appearance, I'll record it here for posterity.