Sep 24 2007
Ghosts: First Ghosts
My first ghostly experience that I can remember clearly I was about six or seven years old. I was going to school, and I kept seeing a cat following me down the street when I would turn to look at it I could swear that I was sometimes seeing the wall it was walking in front of through it.
I went home and told my family because I couldn’t understand how this was possible. My friend at school was firmly convinced this was a ghost cat. My family thought I was “telling stories” and should stop.
It was about seven years before I encountered anything again properly.
This is not to say that I didn’t try to find things before that. I read books on ghosts and tried all sorts of different ways to make the spirits contact me or turf them up, make them do things, experiments listed in books like leaving glasses of water out for them and things like that. I’m fortunate really that I have good protectors because who knows what I could have brought to my grandparent’s house given we lived near a Viking burial mound, but then again those people died long enough ago that their spirits are probably thoroughly at rest and cannot be disturbed.
No, it wasn’t until we moved to a little bungalow down the street that I met the humming woman. My Mum and I moved to this residence when I was almost fourteen. It was a little cottage bungalow that had previously been owned by an elderly couple. We were in essence house-sitting for another couple who were going to move in when they retired, and as long as we didn’t mind them remodeling things a bit while we lived there, we could stay there.
On a particular day which was summer holidays I was waiting to go into town to meet my Mum to get my school uniforms, when there was a very lound BANG! from the back porch. I went haring out there and found that there were builders knocking down the porch. They’d thought no one was home because we didn’t have a car in the driveway and I’d been in the front room playing music and trying to do some homework and hadn’t heard them come up.
They apologized profusely and in traditional British fashion I went and made them some tea and brought them out some biscuits to prove all was right in my world, and then busied myself getting ready to go out. As I walked out the kitchen towards my bedroom I heard someone humming in the hallway. Definitely not a builder a high pitched female hum, just a few bars of a tune not enough to work out what the song was. I said, “Hello?” but nothing.
A few days later I heard her again. Mum’s theory, which stands not quite proven, to this day is that the builders knocking the porch down disturbed the woman who had lived there before, as she liked to sit out in that porch and watch the fish pond, from what our landlords tell us.
In my excitement to find out more I went down to our local New Age store and got myself a red candle and lit it and asked her to talk to me, but I didn’t find much more out. I think my long-winded explanation of why I wanted to talk to her may have put her at ease and meant she could rest once more because I was going on, “we’re not going to destroy your house, we really like this place, it’s just the porch was going rotten, and the people who own the place are really nice. We’re taking care of the fish…” and so on.
Until we emigrated the next year those were the main ghosts of note that I saw.
