I've shared this story elsewhere online and in a podcast, but will inflict it on yous here, as well, as I'd love to know what people think.
I'll just start by saying I'm one of nature's cynics and would never have believed this if it hadn't happened to me, etc etc. Cliche but true.
In the early 1970s, my mother died and after just a couple of years my dad remarried. He was about to marry Wife 2, someone he'd known years before, in the War, and as this woman came from the other end of England, we hardly knew her, although dad and Wife 2 took up their romance where they'd left off. She was also widowed and had kids of her own, including one who was exactly my age. As the two the same age, and about to be stepsisters, we were thrown together. Not long before The Wedding, my soon to be stepfamily came to stay for a week or so with us.
The house was full, so my dad slept on the sofa and myself and the girl my age shared my dad's room, with eachother (it was the only double bed). We had very little in common, and like kids often are when thrown together and told you will like eachother - we didn't, particularly.
Our house was part 18thC part 19thC farmhouse, with some new 1950s bits built on the back where part of the original house had fallen down after my parents bought it.
The room we were to sleep in was in the 'new' part of the house (remodelled before I was born but still seemed very modern upto the rest of the house). The house had an unaccountable voice, a miserable old (male) git, my brother and I sometimes heard in the afternoons, upstairs. Never sure where it was coming from and we had no male neighbours and in any case the walls were several foot thick. We were used to it, as we never actually saw anything, and had grown up with it.
We didn't want to make a bad impression of these strangers who would soon be our stepfamily and sharing our house. So we didn't say anything.
I felt utterly safe in that room as it was so unspooky and modern compared to the rest of the house. I'd probably slept in it as a baby. A short while before my grandad, then my mother had died in the room. But they were much loved people and so it held no particular fear for me to sleep in it (in fact my bedroom was the one where we most often had heard the weird old man's voice, although it never seemed to be coming from within the room... so I had more reason to be scared in my own room, than dad's room).
Anyway a day or so into the visit, my future stepsister and I went to bed (we were about 12) and she appeared to be asleep. Apropos of nothing, I saw an elderly man, hovering a couple of foot in the air, appearing to be sat down but no seat visible, and looking down at his hands like he was doing something, but again, whatever it was also not visible. He was so close to me and on my side of the bed, I could almost have reached out and touched him. He was 'in colour' (at a time our TV still wasn't!) but not solid. I could see right through him - he looked to be made up of pinpricks of light, and I remember vividly thinking he reminded me of a picture in a comic - coloured dots.
I was so terrified, I didn't dare move for I don't know how long. Literally frozen. Even pulling the covers over my head might alert him to my being there, although I could see he was utterly unaware of my presence, and still focused on the thing he was making. He had a beard, was elderly, and dressed in a way I'd now recognise as 19thC farm labourer or a rough looking farmer. After I dunno how long, I turned suddenly to face the other way so I didnt have to look at him any longer, and in the process of turning, banged my head on the metal bars of the bedhead. Which is how I know I wasn't asleep - as it would have woken me up, it hurt so much and the next day I had a bruise.
I told no-one but my dad. He was an arch sceptic and I expected him to laugh but amazingly, he told me something I now recognise as the Stone Tapes theory. That maybe old houses recorded memories. He did seem to believe me. Although years later told me in the 30 odd years he lived there he never experienced a thing. (I'm not sure that was the truth :lol: )
He was maybe convinced by the fact what I saw was several foot in the air, and he told me something I'd no way of knowing, that the original floor level of that room before remodelling was indeed, a couple of foot higher than the room as I knew it.
I didn't tell my prospective stepfamily, not one of them - the girl and I were never going to be best mates and I already disliked the woman who was to be my stepmother. I could sense she was waiting for a reason to dislike me or brand me as 'nuts'. I didn't want to be thought mad. And so I convinced myself, down the years, it had been a dream (despite the bruise) and nothing more. I did tell my husband about it though and some fiends, years later after I had left the village.
Fifteen years or so later my stepsister moved to the same city where I was living, well over 100 miles away.
We went out for a meal together, with her partner and mine one night. And not long after we sat down, she said to me:
"Remember that week we came to stay with you before mum and your dad married?"
I did.
"Well, remember we were in your dad's bedroom that week?"
Indeed.
"I didn't want to tell you then as we hardly knew eachother and I thought you'd think I was nuts, but... one night, it must have been that week as that was the only week we ever slept in that room, I was awake in the middle of the night and saw...."
Yes. You've guessed it. A Victorian farm labourer, floating in the air, a metre or less from the bed, appearing to be seated ...
My husband, hearing this, nearly passed out as he'd heard me tell the same story for years... I was glad she told me first as I'd never believed it had I told her and she'd said "Oh I saw that too!"
There is a sort of codicil to this.
Years later, my now grown up and moved away stepsister and her partner, and some other people were staying at the house.
Stepsister's partner was on the 2nd storey of the house. The other guests on the first.
In the middle of the night, (I think they said around 2am?) he was woken by the sound of an old, and furious person screaming obscenities and abuse out in the street and braying on the front door. The odd thing being, it sounded like the door was not central but slightly to one side. He couldn't believe the abusive screaming wasn't waking the entire street.
Everyone else seemed to sleep through it.
The next day, one of the other guests from a totally different floor of the house said at breakfast "Did anyone hear that old man shouting at the door out in the street last night?"
A while after this, in the 1990s, the house was sold and to improve its look, my dad stripped off the hideous pebbledash that had been on the front of the house from before he bought it. And there was the original door lintel, just to the right (if you looked from the outside) of the door as we'd always known it. Even dad had never known. The original front door? Where the guests had heard the noise.
Finally, one last piece of the jigsaw. Around 2000 I moved back to my village. There was an exhibition of previously unknown Victorian photos of the village. One photo showed the lane where our house was, at the time it was still a farm.
Outside the front door? An elderly bearded man in farm labourer's clothing. Feck me, I nearly fainted.
As a genealogist I have searched the 19thC newspapers and the censuses and can't pin down who that man was, at all (even late 19thC censuses didn't give house numbers for that lane).
