Warned by a Ghost

AUTHOR’S NOTEIt is believed by some people who call themselves psychic that there are all kinds of ghosts. The ‘warning ghosts’, like the one in this story, who appear to give notice of a forthcoming death or tragedy are different from the earthbound unhappy spectres who are vengeful and send things flying around a room. Or it can be love that binds to this world after they have died the ghosts who haunt by continuing to carry out the customs that they observed in life. For all of them a certain spiritual energy and awareness is necessary for them to “go on, but to do so needs a decision and independence of will that can take aeons to acquire. During the First World War I had lessons with a girl of my age, thirteen to sixteen, who lived in a lovely house in Somerset. It was however haunted. There was always someone going upstairs in front of us and someone coming up behind. We used to hear a horse trot up to the front door, but when we looked out there was nothing there. It was some years before I learned that it was the home of a Royalist who had been wounded in the Civil War and who came home to die. An Irishman told us that there was a lovely woman with fair hair walking in the dining room. We laughed at him but five years later the workmen took up the huge flagstones in front of the fireplace. Hidden in there was the body of a young woman with long fair hair. Even while they were looking at it, it disintegrated and fell into dust. When I came to Camfield Place in 1949, I had the house blessed as I had no wish to live with ghosts. It was after I had the house blessed that I found in an autobiography of Beatrix Potter, whose grandfather altered the house and made it very much larger, that while she was here as a little girl she was frightened by ghosts in the hall and the large statues there. There are, however, no ghosts there today, except for the ghost of a dog who was put to sleep after the blessing and who has stayed with us because he loves us so much.