Ghosts represent my biggest fear. When I was little I would wake myself up all through the night thinking there would be a ghost looking at me. Somebody since suggested to me it’s a fear transferred.
My mother used to tell us about a house she lived in when she was young. It had been one of Henry the VIII’s hunting lodges and was panelled with dark wood and had a gallery. Her brother once dropped a junior hack saw from the gallery onto her head down below in the sitting room. Her father used to drop down Fox’s Glacier mints to her.
On Christmas Eve 1953 a man dressed as Father Christmas stood at the end of her bed. He smiled and he walked out of the room, down the corridor to the locked baize-covered servants doors.
In the morning my mother told her brother as she was already too old to believe in Father Christmas.
Her brother remarked that the man would regularly sit on the wicker nursery chair in his room and look past him crying.
My mother is convinced the ghost was John Cobb the land speed record champion who had conducted an affair with his mistress in the house, to a tragic conclusion.
