CuriousIdent
Not yet SO old Great Old One
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2004
- Messages
- 1,510
- Location
- Warwickshire, England.
Okay, truth be told this didn't actually happen to me, but to a friend of our family, as will become clear.
I live here in Warwickshire, in the middle of the UK, the area which I grew up in and returned to after graduating University in Wales.
My parents are both teachers (Well, my mum isn't anymore. She got sick of the paperwork and antisocial hours, retrained) and through a shool my mother taught at during the late 70s my mother met another teacher who also lived in our town, and she and her husband had two daughters.
You know how it goes, we were throqwn in together as youngsters, and spent time together, but were always in different classes at chool etc...
Anyway, I digress...
Now their eldest daughter, who is the same age as me, recently moved back to the area. She had followed her mother's example and become a teacher, and had been teaching down in London. But teachers being paid as comparitively little to the means they require, she was eventually forced to move back home and seek a position somewhere a little less ridiuclously expensive to live.
She has just taken her first step onto the property ladder, buying a small house in Earlsdon, a region of Coventry (That ridiculous city trapped within the pincers of Warwickshire, and yet remains adamantly not part of the county). Earlsdon is, by and large a fairly decent part of the city, with several floor edwardian terraced housing. It's a bugger to find a house which actually has room for parking, but it's squarely on the bus route and populated by many of the student populace of Warwick University.
When she aquired the house, which has been partly modernised, the previous owners told her that whilst they were in the process of replacing the interior and exterior doors of the property, as part of the modernisation, they had to lift up the paving slabs outside the front door. As they did, just beneath them, they found something peculiar.
A string of Roman Catholic Rosary beads.
The Rosary had clearly been placed under the slabs whenever they had been layed.
The owners told her that they had replaced them under the slabs once the new door was fitted. Her and her parents did not think too much about it. There was still work that needed doing, and as part of the final deal the previous owners had negotiated to take the old fireplace away, as her father was going to fit new central heating into the place.
Now, odd as though it may sound, some weeks later when her father came around to continue doing just that, he received an unusual visitor.
In a number of Warwickshire towns, as is the case in many parts of the country, we are occasionaly visited by Romany women, who usually come around in groups of two or three, into shopping centres, high streets and even suburban streets, forcefully selling charms and lucky heather. And forcefull, even viscous they sometimes come across. They are usually quickly huried away by police or security staff within seconds in town centres. Nobody knows where they came from, nobody sees where they go.
On this day as her father was in the ouse with the door still open, one of these very women pushed her head through the door. Her patter was well rehearsed, and she came in asking if they were interested in buying a charm to protect the house-
And then she stopped dead, with her speech, paused a moment and stepped away from the open door.
She appologized, stating that she could see this house was already protected.
Her father smiled and said, 'really?' and something along the lines of it was probably good luck, as he had no change on him anyway.
"But you're not a religious man, are you?" She asked.
He confessed, no, but that actually this was not his own house but his daughter's.
The woman stated "But she is not either? You have two daughters, don't you?"
Shortly after this strange exchange the woman left, and they have not seen her since.
Of course it may just be pure coincidence, but it is nevertheless a curious story.
But by far the what interests me the most is the Rosary. Now, it's certainly an old house, and the beads themselves may have been in the earth there even before the slabs were layed. But I was wondering what it might of signified.
So far in discussion with others I have heard mixed theories.
The clearest is that they are purely placed their in the foundation as a a deterent, to keep out ungodly and unwanted forces, and possibly Romanies.
But another guy at work also seemed to believe that rosary beads are also used one step further than this. He believed that a string of Rosary beads was buried in the earth outside a doorway by a priest, as a final deterant after he had peformed an exorcism upon a spirit within a property which had been touched by such a force. The beads were placed under the door after the spirited had been moved, to stop it from returning.
Does anybody else know of any truth in either of these concepts?
Anybody else experienced anything similar?
I live here in Warwickshire, in the middle of the UK, the area which I grew up in and returned to after graduating University in Wales.
My parents are both teachers (Well, my mum isn't anymore. She got sick of the paperwork and antisocial hours, retrained) and through a shool my mother taught at during the late 70s my mother met another teacher who also lived in our town, and she and her husband had two daughters.
You know how it goes, we were throqwn in together as youngsters, and spent time together, but were always in different classes at chool etc...
Anyway, I digress...
Now their eldest daughter, who is the same age as me, recently moved back to the area. She had followed her mother's example and become a teacher, and had been teaching down in London. But teachers being paid as comparitively little to the means they require, she was eventually forced to move back home and seek a position somewhere a little less ridiuclously expensive to live.
She has just taken her first step onto the property ladder, buying a small house in Earlsdon, a region of Coventry (That ridiculous city trapped within the pincers of Warwickshire, and yet remains adamantly not part of the county). Earlsdon is, by and large a fairly decent part of the city, with several floor edwardian terraced housing. It's a bugger to find a house which actually has room for parking, but it's squarely on the bus route and populated by many of the student populace of Warwick University.
When she aquired the house, which has been partly modernised, the previous owners told her that whilst they were in the process of replacing the interior and exterior doors of the property, as part of the modernisation, they had to lift up the paving slabs outside the front door. As they did, just beneath them, they found something peculiar.
A string of Roman Catholic Rosary beads.
The Rosary had clearly been placed under the slabs whenever they had been layed.
The owners told her that they had replaced them under the slabs once the new door was fitted. Her and her parents did not think too much about it. There was still work that needed doing, and as part of the final deal the previous owners had negotiated to take the old fireplace away, as her father was going to fit new central heating into the place.
Now, odd as though it may sound, some weeks later when her father came around to continue doing just that, he received an unusual visitor.
In a number of Warwickshire towns, as is the case in many parts of the country, we are occasionaly visited by Romany women, who usually come around in groups of two or three, into shopping centres, high streets and even suburban streets, forcefully selling charms and lucky heather. And forcefull, even viscous they sometimes come across. They are usually quickly huried away by police or security staff within seconds in town centres. Nobody knows where they came from, nobody sees where they go.
On this day as her father was in the ouse with the door still open, one of these very women pushed her head through the door. Her patter was well rehearsed, and she came in asking if they were interested in buying a charm to protect the house-
And then she stopped dead, with her speech, paused a moment and stepped away from the open door.
She appologized, stating that she could see this house was already protected.
Her father smiled and said, 'really?' and something along the lines of it was probably good luck, as he had no change on him anyway.
"But you're not a religious man, are you?" She asked.
He confessed, no, but that actually this was not his own house but his daughter's.
The woman stated "But she is not either? You have two daughters, don't you?"
Shortly after this strange exchange the woman left, and they have not seen her since.
Of course it may just be pure coincidence, but it is nevertheless a curious story.
But by far the what interests me the most is the Rosary. Now, it's certainly an old house, and the beads themselves may have been in the earth there even before the slabs were layed. But I was wondering what it might of signified.
So far in discussion with others I have heard mixed theories.
The clearest is that they are purely placed their in the foundation as a a deterent, to keep out ungodly and unwanted forces, and possibly Romanies.
But another guy at work also seemed to believe that rosary beads are also used one step further than this. He believed that a string of Rosary beads was buried in the earth outside a doorway by a priest, as a final deterant after he had peformed an exorcism upon a spirit within a property which had been touched by such a force. The beads were placed under the door after the spirited had been moved, to stop it from returning.
Does anybody else know of any truth in either of these concepts?
Anybody else experienced anything similar?