A Ghost Story.
(From the Peterborough “Citizen.”)
While the people in Woodstone district are still discussing the strange story of the “Lady in Black,” a most detailed and circumstantial account of a wraith which has been abroad for months past comes to us from the same quarter.
I find (writes the Citizen Commissioner) that the weird story is implicitly believed by many people in the district. Briefly it is as follows:
Some time ago a Woodstone woman died, and on her death-bed declared that she would return from the Valley of the Shadow to watch over her motherless children. About a fortnight after her death the neighbours on either side were roused by the sound of an incessant, restless tramping in the house next door. On the following morning, when the children came out of the house they were questioned as to what had been happening, and bursting into tears said their mother had come back.
This went on for some little time, until owing to the complaints about the midnight noises from anxious neighbours the family was forced to move. For obvious reasons I shall abstain from naming the street.
For the first week all was still, and the new neighbours began to question the veracity of the weird rumour they had heard. On the eighth night, however just on the stroke of midnight, they were aroused (the partition walls are not very thick) by the sound of a dull, heavy tramping which lasted for exactly an hour. Next morning the children came out “roaring like little bulls,” and told a neighbour “Mother has found us again.” They were awakened, they sobbed, by the opening of the front door, and hearing their mother’s footsteps coming upstairs covered their heads with the bedclothes and lay trembling until she went away. In the morning the door was found to be securely locked on the inside.
A woman who has been assisting in the house has, it is said, seen the apparition on several occasions, and has given a minute and accurate description of the woman, whom she never saw during her lifetime!
“Do you believe that some supernatural agency is at work?” I asked a neighbour after he had given me an account of the mysterious noises. “Certainly I do,” he replied immediately: “so would you if you had heard those sounds night after night, and seen the state the poor little kiddies were in next morning.”
“You believe there are such things as ghosts?” “Yes.”
“Have you ever seen one?” “No, but my father once did. I will tell you about it. Years ago my father used to be horseman at Chatteris to a farmer who I will call Mr Brown. Things went badly with Mr Brown, and this preyed on his mind, and one foggy morning he was found hanging stark and cold in a cow hovel. Pretty soon folks began to say that Mr Brown’s ghost had been seen about, but my father laughed over the stories. When once, he would say, a man had got six feet of earth on his chest, he would never get out again till the Resurrection Morning. One moonlight night soon after, my father was walking home from his work along a road with a big ditch on one side and a high wild hedge on the other, when he spotted a man walking about a couple of hundred yards in front of him. ‘Hullo, Bill,’ he shouts, thinking it was Bill Jones, and wanting a mate to walk home with. But the man in front took no notice, so my father started running to catch him up. He had got within a couple of yards, and was wondering why the fellow did not stop, when all of a sudden he wheeled sharp round, and my father saw that he had a long black beard and a great hooked nose like a parrot. It was his old boss! He stood and looked at my father for a second, and then puff! he was gone. My father was that set back that it took him two hours to walk the mile and a half home. On his way he had to pass the shed where Mr Brown hung himself, and he said that if It had come again he should have died of fright.”
Another neighbour gave a precisely similar account of the strange noises. “We had heard,” she said, “what folks were saying about there being a lot of funny sounds, but we never set any stock by them. When the people came to live near us, my husband said we should soon find out for ourselves; and sure enough at the beginning of the second week we were both waked up by a tramp, tramp, tramp, from the direction of the house. This has been going on for months now, and nobody can explain what it is. The poor little bairns seem frightened to death!”
No one can explain the mystery and there is a suggestion of asking the Psychical Research Society to send down an investigator.
Hunts County News, 5th December 1908.