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Ghostly moment for Halloween

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EC2
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Ghostly moment for Halloween

Post by EC2 » Thu October 31st, 2013, 12:21 am

This is a true one!

My husband is a pragmatic down to earth sort of guy who never used to believe in ghosts or the supernatural. 'I'll believe in ghosts when one comes up and talks to me,' he said.
One did...

It was a hot August afternoon back in around 2005. R. left me writing and took our dog Taz out for his afternoon walk on a circuit that led along a public footpath beside the river Trent. This footpath at one point cut through a field of sheep. Taz had a double coat of thick fur and was becoming uncomfortable from the heat, so R. took him down to the river and let him have a splash and a cool down in the shallows. Taz was a well trained, experienced dog and not bothered about the sheep. On returning to the footpath, R. found himself confronted by the angry sheep farmer who asked him what he thought he was doing leaving the footpath and going into the field?
R. replied that the dog had been hot and he had taken him to cool down and that as he could well see, Taz was under control. The farmer was still grumbling but R.gave him as much short shrift as the farmer gave him. He knew him because we sometimes saw him on our walks. He only had one eye and was a tad disreputable. He drove a battered blue Ford Cortina, which R. could see in fisherman's car park in the lane beyond the field. This particular farmer had a reputation for policing his field and also for spying on courting couples who used that car park - a bit of a dirty old man.
R. continued after the altercation, finished the walk, and on arriving home told me what had happened and that was the end of it.
A couple of weeks later, we were talking to a neighbour who knows the farming community well, coming from a farming family himself and often round and about on the land with his terriers. During general conversation, R. told him about his run in with the one-eyed sheep farmer.
'You couldn't have seen him,' the neighbour said. 'He's been dead since last October.'....
That gave us the chills. Of course the neighbour might have got his dates mixed up, but we checked with the village butcher who also knew the local farmers well, and he corroborated the tale...
I have no idea what happened that day - some sort of time slip? A spirit who hasn't moved on because he still has to guard the sheep and watch out for snogging couples?
Since then, R. has had other experiences. Another timeslip one involving a cyclist in front of him when he was driving home late at night, but the cyclist took the route of a road that was no longer there, the layout having been changed a couple of years ago... And then the other day he saw Taz (now deceased) trot through the kitchen and into the lounge.
R. is still terribly pragmatic and down to earth, but he now accepts he sees these things and just treats them as part of life's scenery and gets on with the everyday. I think it's a good philosophy to have.
Les proz e les vassals
Souvent entre piez de chevals
Kar ja li coard n’I chasront

'The Brave and the valiant
Are always to be found between the hooves of horses
For never will cowards fall down there.'

Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal

www.elizabethchadwick.com

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MLE (Emily Cotton)
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Interest in HF: started in childhood with the classics, which, IMHO are HF even if they were contemporary when written.
Favourite HF book: Prince of Foxes, by Samuel Shellabarger
Preferred HF: Currently prefer 1600 and earlier, but I'll read anything that keeps me turning the page.
Location: California Bay Area

Post by MLE (Emily Cotton) » Thu October 31st, 2013, 12:40 am

Interesting anecdote, EC. To quote the Bard, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dream't of in your philosophy!"

I was raised a materialist through and through -- if I couldn't see it, feel it, hear it, or if my tiny limited consciousness couldn't fully comprehend it, then the very idea was absurd. (Don't ask me to explain why I believed in atoms, electricity, or ultraviolet light -- oh yes, I took that on FAITH! :D )
And then, for a party game and general teenage show-offedness, I learned to read the Tarot.

I will not enumerate the creepiness of those cards, but after three years I was more and more reluctant to engage in my standard (and unfortunately well-known) fortune-telling schtick, because the cards dramatically defied statistical averages. And the results were harmful in many lives.

Eventually, like C.s. Lewis, I had to acknowledge that spiritual forces were real. And when you're an avowed Athiest, that presents a problem!

annis
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Post by annis » Thu October 31st, 2013, 6:49 am

That would give you the shivers up the spine, EC.

Although I'm in the usual way of things a cynical type, I have actually lived in a haunted house, so don't discount anything :)

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Lisa
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Favourite HF book: Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman
Preferred HF: Any time period/location. Timeslip, usually prefer female POV. Also love Gothic melodrama.
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Post by Lisa » Thu October 31st, 2013, 10:13 am

I love anecdotes like that, and although nothing spooky has ever happened to me (kind of wish it would) I don't see why spirits, time slip events, etc shouldn't exist just because we can't prove anything.

My grandfather did see ghosts sometimes. I remember when I was about five years old he told me that the ghost of a little girl in "old-fasioned clothes" about my own age was sometimes coming and hanging around next to me in his living room, then she would eventually get up and run behind the sofa and disappear. I never saw or sensed anything though, although I was always looking for her behind the sofa!

Among his other 'spooky' experiences was one in 1945 near the end of the war, at Lübeck Cathedral (I've got his full account written down somewhere else). His unit was heading towards Lübeck when word came through that a Nazi munitions dump had been reported in the city’s cathedral vault, and they were ordered to seek and destroy the ordnance before any remaining German Resistance could make use of it. They were awaiting a floor-plan when he felt an overwhelming sensation that he'd been there before, although he definitely hadn't. He recognised the cobbled streets branching off the square, the cathedral in front of him, and said it felt like "time was standing still." When the floor-plan didn't arrive, he asked if he could go down there and take a look in the vaults himself, and he was granted permission, although he was warned that the vaults appeared to be a labyrinth of connecting corridors and there may be booby-traps.

On entering, he again had this overwhelming sense of recognition of the place, despite the rubble lying all around, and went straight to a side-door that opened up on a downward staircase. Descending the steps, he felt that he was floating out of his body and looking down on a figure dressed in a monk’s brown cloak and hood, and he somehow ‘knew’ that the monk was himself. It turned out that the vault was a maze of corridors, right and left, but without taking one wrong turn during the search, the monk finally halted and opened a large wooden door into a wide, low-roofed cell, containing hundreds of crates of explosives and ammunition. He had found the dump, just as he ‘knew’ he would, and that experience led him to believe that there may just be such a thing as reincarnation, and that he had been a medieval monk at Lübeck Cathedral in a former life.

After that he always kept a silk postcard of Lübeck Cathedral hanging in the hallway of his house.

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