Our ghost came to play.
By Lynne Dixon.
Was the strange incident of the Polaroid photograph a warning of the tragic accident that was to come? Mrs Jean Enderby and her 16-year-old daughter Anne often wonder but doubt they will ever know the truth. The story is certainly a peculiar one. Enough to send a shiver or two up your spine…
It all started five years ago when the family moved into a semi-detached house at Sherwood. The 50-year-old house, they soon discovered, had an uninvited guest. A ghost – and a playful one at that. Ordinary household objects like Jean’s cigarette lighter frequently went missing, only to reappear just as mysteriously days later. Doors slammed, lights and gas fires turned on and off without reason and unseen footsteps would be heard on the stairs. Then various members of the family began to notice the shadowy figure of a girl flitting about the house. Anne woke up in the night several times to see a girl sitting on the bed watching her. And a friend of the family got the fright of his life when he awoke on the settee in the small hours to see a wraith-like figure looking at him. Not surprisingly, the terror-stricken guest didn’t sleep another wink that night.
The apparition seemed to be that of a young woman in her early 20s, with long fair hair. “We usually saw the back of her as she scurried away from us,” recalls Mrs Enderby, a mother of three, a qualified nurse, and, even more to the point, a thoroughly rational person.
“After a while she started to mimic our voices. One day I was peeling the potatoes and someone said ‘hello.’ I spun round thinking Anne was in the kitchen bu tno one was there. It was as if the ghost was playing games with us, although having said that we never felt threatened by her. She just seemed to adopt us as a family.”
On one celebrated occasion, the ghost even helped get the tea ready, so the story goes. Anne says: “I was in the house alone one day and I put some bread in the toaster then walked out of the kitchen. When I went back in, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The toast had been taken out and buttered for me.” Although she was unnerved, Anne wasn’t scared out of her wits by the incident. In fact she even saw the funny side of it. “She never did me any harm, I didn’t feel there was anything to be frightened of.”
But the weirdest incident of all involved the photograph. Anne says she was smiling happily when a friend took a Polaroid photo of her at home one day. So she was bewildered when she saw the picture. It looked as though I was crying and there was an ugly orange mark on my chin. It was all very puzzling and I didn’t like the picture one bit so I threw it away. After that I didn’t give it much thought for a while.”
But a few weeks later, the awesome significance of the photo became apparent when Anne was the victim of a serious car accident. In fact she was considered lucky to be alive after being hurled through the roof of the car she was riding in when it was involved in a smash with a lorry. Her serious injuries included a fractured skull and a nasty scar on her chin. the scar, she later realised, was in exactly the same place as the orange mark had been on the photograph. Looking back, she and her mum see the incident as a portent of things to come. “We think the ghost was trying in some way to warn us of the danger that lay ahead.” Fortunately Anne, who is undergoing plastic surgery to minimise the scar, is still the bright, attractive girl she ever was, and is able to lead a pretty normal life again, in spite of having to wear a plate in her skull.
The ghostly happenings finally ended after a visit to the house by Nottingham spiritualist and medium, Mrs Violet Edwards. A gently spoken, neatly dressed, white-haired lady in her 70s, Mrs Edwards came to the conclusion that the ghost was that of a young woman who had lived in the house many years before. The girl, she sensed, had died tragically young, of a lung disease. But why was she haunting the Enderby family? “I feel that she was happy in the house and wanted to stay in the same environment that she loved during her life. She liked being with the family and wasn’t bothered about moving further on into the spirit world,” she said.
Mrs Edwards said a little prayer to encourage the spirit, she says, to move on to her next life. “The spirit world is a wonderful place. Happiness is waiting there for her,” she assured the family. Since then all has been quiet in the household. Says Jean: “Nothing has gone missing, no doors have opened or shut mysteriously, we have had no sightings of her at all. We never wanted to hold her here, but we didn’t want to frighten her away either. We just wanted her to find peace and hope that she finally has.”
Mrs Jean Enderby and her daughter, Anne, who was bewildered when she saw the Polaroid photograph of her taken at her home in Sherwood.
Nottingham Evening Post, 1st November 1983.