Showing posts with label ghost stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ghost stories. Show all posts

A True Tale For Hallowe'en

 

Michael James Flynn in the middle, with the moustache and waistcoat,
seated next to the man with the tar bucket.


I don't know quite what to make of this story even though it happened to me - but it has stayed with me ever since. I leave you to make up your own minds.

Most writers, whether of fiction or non-fiction (and I do both) will tell you that we become so absorbed in our subject matter that we feel as though the people we're writing about are not just real - as they often are - but alive. Sometimes that sense of reality even rubs off onto our nearest and dearest. When I was  researching and writing a novel called The Jewel, about poet Robert Burns's wife, Jean Armour, back in 2015, I had talked about her so much that my husband swore that he saw her one night, walking through the door between our bedroom and my office - a woman in old fashioned dress, with something like a mob cap on her head. 

My tale for today is quite different, very personal and not nearly so fleeting. 

In 2018, I had been deep into research for a new book, about a murder in my Leeds Irish family. The book, called A Proper Person to be Detained, would be published in 2019 by Contraband. On Christmas Day, in 1881, my nana's uncle John Manley had been stabbed in the street by one John Ross and died where he fell. The two men had been casual friends. John Manley had refused to fight, but Ross was angry and drunk and found a tobacco cutting knife in his pocket. The murderer fled, to be apprehended a few weeks later. He was tried and sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to hard labour, a mercy that I felt was probably justified. 

In writing the book, I explored the situation of this poor Irish migrant family, whose parents had fled famine, only - like so many - to be abused and exploited in the industrial cities of England and Scotland. Researching the book also gave me the opportunity to find out more about my great grandfather, Michael James Flynn from Ballinlough, County Roscommon. (He went by both christian names.) He married my great grandmother, the murdered man's sister, Mary, already a widow with children, in St Patrick's Church, Leeds, in 1888. The Manley family had come from Ballyhaunis in Mayo, but the two villages are only five miles apart, so there may have been family associations. At that time, he was a paviour's labourer, but later, he would describe himself as a paviour. He built roads and pavements. 

From the accounts of those who knew him, he was a good, kind, generous man who managed to transform the fortunes of the family. The household into which I was born, more than sixty years later, was by no means wealthy. It was still a working class household,  but it was warm, clean and comfortable. Nobody went hungry. My nana remembered Michael as the most generous of fathers. If he was wearing a winter coat and he saw a beggar on the street, he was quite likely to hand it over to the more needy man, to the occasional frustration of his wife.

So what about my Hallowe'en story?

It happened in a supermarket car-park of all places. Not long after I had finished the book. It was one of those chilly, misty mornings, with a low sun shining in my eyes as I walked from my parked car to the door of the building. It was early and the car-park was fairly empty. A man walked out of the mist and the sunlight and headed straight for me. I had just crossed the narrow roadway leading into the parking spaces, but halted as he approached. I remember that he put a gentle hand on my elbow and encouraged me to step up onto the pavement. 'Take care, madam,' he said. He was Irish. Not Northern Irish, as so many visitors to this part of south west Scotland, but a soft southern Irish voice. 

'I was wondering,' he said, 'if you might be able to give me something to get myself a bit of breakfast.' He glanced back towards the supermarket doorway. 'They've all been ignoring me,' he said. 

I looked him up and down. He was covered in grey-white dust - it looked like plaster dust - from head to toe. He wasn't dirty or drunk. Just dusty. He wore boots and they too were dusty. He looked like a working man, a labourer. 

I didn't hesitate. I looked in my purse, found a five pound note, and gave it to him. I don't carry much cash these days and it was all I had. He thanked me. 'God bless you,' he said. 'God bless you!' And off he went. I watched him walk into the misty winter sunshine, as he headed towards the steps leading up into the town. I never saw him go up the steps.

I had one of those sudden intimations of something odd. Not frightening at all, you understand, but uncanny. And strangely uplifting. I headed for the supermarket, but had to find a seat and sit down for a moment or two. I felt quite shaky. It struck me that I have seldom, if ever, seen or heard an Irish labourer travelling alone in this part of the world. Ulster yes, but Irish? Tattie howkers used to come, but they seldom do now, and besides, it wasn't that time of year. 

I've never met one since. 

I can see him now, feel his gentle hand on my elbow, his warm 'God bless you!' 

All through my shopping, and all the way home, I thought about my kind, generous, much loved great grandfather, a man I had never known, but who was very much on my mind. Of course the sceptics will easily explain it away. And in a strict sense, it is perfectly explicable. Isn't it?

But I know what I saw. And I know what I felt. And it's an encounter that I still treasure.

What do you think? 


PS, If you would like to read a made-up supernatural tale, you'll find my strange little novella Rewilding  free on Kindle, from 31st October, for five days. 


Chilling and Spine Tingling


 

I'm never in the business of denigrating my fellow writers, so I don't usually give negative reviews. But it's depressing how many times these days I find myself downloading onto my Kindle a sample of a new novel with vast numbers of glowing reviews and recommendations. I read it, and think 'aargh no' and delete it. The last one was punted as 'the most chilling and spine tingling ghost story you'll read this year.' In this case, I did actually soldier on through the whole thing.

It wasn't (the most spine tingling etc)  and I'll tell you why. Because as I laboured on through a long novel that really wanted to be a novella or a short story, in a Scottish setting about which the author seemed largely ignorant, I suddenly realised that it was heavily inspired by one of the best ghost stories ever written: Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

And that really is chilling and spine tingling.

I've read this classic novella several times, including at university, but this time I decided that I would read it ultra closely, paying attention to every nuance, to every word. In fact, I read it as a writer, trying to decide how the author had done it. 

It was still chilling and spine tingling in every way. It haunted my dreams. But most of all (and if you haven't read it, this isn't really a spoiler) I still, after all these years, couldn't make up my mind whether the ghosts were real or not. And which of those two possibilities was the most horrific. Which was obviously James's intention. Genius. 

There is just too much hype out there. I know, because as a published author myself, the pressure to find glowing cover quotes is intense. We treasure positive reviews, knowing that we can quote them. I've done it all too often! 

But when those cover quotes don't seem to reflect the quality of the work, as a reader, you can feel cheated. For the last few weeks, I've felt very very cheated.

Sometimes, a good entertaining story well told should be enough, shouldn't it? Is that why so many crime stories are so popular? Because that's what so many of them unashamedly are? Good, entertaining stories, well told.





New Short Story Collection

 


I've always been fond of short fiction, both as a reader and as a writer, although I must admit that nowadays when I'm writing I tend to want the elbow room of a novel or at the very least a novella. Over the years I've had various stories published in all kinds of magazines, literary and popular. 

In the small hiatus between completing a draft of the current project, The Last Lancer, and thinking 'what next?' I decided to put a small collection of stories together, editing one or two of them. Here it is: a dozen short stories of all kinds from the reasonably literary to a couple of scary ghost stories that turned out to be very popular when first published. 

It's cheap although not always cheerful. But it might entertain you on a train journey or a flight, where you need something that you can pick up and put down as your journey dictates. 

The decision to edit or not to edit past work is an interesting one. On the whole, if something has already been published, it may be better not to change it. As I was working my way through these, I realised that the stories that had been published didn't need polishing. But there were a couple that hadn't found a home, and I took the opportunity to edit them, mainly because with the passage of time, I could see much more clearly what I had wanted to say. Could, in fact, see the wood for the trees. 

You'll find them here - A Bad Year for Trees - and I hope you enjoy them. 

Spooks Week: The Creature in the Field

 

My dad, as a little boy, in Poland.

This story really belongs to my lovely late dad. With a different setting and date I've used it in a novel called The Amber Heart, which is available in eBook form, and is about to be published as a paperback. It formed a very useful background to a major turning point in the book. 

But it happened to my father and my grandfather, Wladyslaw, when dad was just about the age in the picture above, so here it is. 

Dad came from what was then Eastern Poland and is now Ukraine. He was born and spent his childhood on the family estate in a place called Dziedzilow, now Didyliv. You can look at the village on Google's street view and find that it isn't much changed. It's rural, rolling agricultural countryside. Winters were hard with plenty of snow, and the family used sleighs to get about. But this story happened in late autumn, when the hard frosts had started, but the snow hadn't yet fallen in any quantity.

The two of them were coming back from a visit to a neighbouring house, in a pony trap, a 'droshky' to use the English spelling of a Polish word.  It was a very cold night, darkness had fallen, but there was a full moon. It must have been about 1933 or 34. Dad would have been seven or eight, and my grandfather, twenty nine or thirty. I never knew him, but I know that he was funny, warm, slightly autocratic, and definitely had a wild streak. I'm currently writing a new book about him called The Last Lancer.

They were passing a lonely field in which there were big heaps of manure, left there for the frosts of winter to break them up, when in the moonlight, they spotted what can only be described as a creature, on the other side of the field. It was child sized, dad said, but somehow it didn't have the look of a child. 

Not at all. 

Wladyslaw drew the trap to a halt and they watched, fascinated. The creature was leaping up onto each heap of manure and - as my dad described it - bending backwards and forwards like a coiled spring. He said it looked like an impossible contortion. Worse, as it bent backwards, it cried out 'hehee!' and as it bent forwards, it called 'hahaa!'. The sound, comical and sinister at the same time, echoed through the night. 

Wladyslaw - and this seems like exactly the kind of thing the man I have come to know and love would have done - stood up in his seat, cupped his hands, and shouted 'hehee, hahaa' in the general direction of the creature. 

It heard. It paused and turned its head in their direction. It looked, said my dad later, horribly grotesque and uncanny. Especially when it began to head rapidly towards them, leaping on manure heaps, coiling and uncoiling itself as it came.

'What happened?' I asked.

'My father sat down, whipped up the horse and we never stopped or looked back till we were safe and sound at home,' he said, with a grin. 

Nothing followed them. My dad was a scientist who didn't really believe in the supernatural. But he remembered exactly what they had seen, and could never find a wholly satisfactory explanation. Can you? 


Spooks Week: A Village Ghost

 



The Glebe in spring


This is the first of a few spooky - and mostly TRUE - stories, for the week before Hallowe'en. Feel free to add your own true ghost stories in the comments. 

Many years ago - although it seems like yesterday - we looked after my parents' dog while they were away in Vienna. Dad spent a couple of years working at the International Atomic Energy Commission there, before his retirement. I would walk the dog in the morning and afternoon, usually taking her up one of the roads out of the village. She had a particular tree that she liked to get to before turning for home again. 

It was autumn, just about this time of year, and not-quite-twilight when we were heading for home together, passing the field that you can just see in the photograph above, the Glebe, that used to belong to the old manse. It's very much a part of the village, with a low wall, and a driveway leading into old and new manses. The dog was a rescue dog with a very sweet nature. 

We were walking along the pavement and a fine drizzle had started, when I saw an elderly gentleman on the other side of the road, standing up against the wall in the picture. He wasn't unwell or anything. Just standing looking over the wall. 

Because this is a village where people are friendly and the road was empty and quiet,  I began to cross over, to speak to him. The odd thing was that the dog crossed over before I did. She tugged me across in his direction, pulling on her lead, so she clearly saw him too. 

When I got there - seconds later - he disappeared. 

He disappeared as swiftly and suddenly as a picture disappears when you switch off the television. It was so odd and so unexpected that I found myself looking over the wall, which was ridiculous, because it's not a high wall, and even walking the few yards back to the manse entrance, peering around the length of the wall, just to make sure nobody had bobbed down on the other side. The dog looked confused as well. She wagged her tail and looked up at me. 

There was nobody there at all. 

When I got home, slightly bemused, I told my husband, describing what I'd seen. 
'I think you've seen Jock,' he said.

Jock McBlane was the village chimney-sweep, general handyman and elder of the kirk. My husband remembered him well although I had never known him. But he knew all there was to know about all the houses in the village, where the drains ran, how the old houses were constructed. A useful person. He always wore white gloves in the kirk. And he liked to walk about the village in the evening, checking that all was well. He once told my husband that ours was one of the most soundly constructed houses in the village. It was built back in 1808, but Jock had definitely done some work here in the intervening period. 

The cafe in our village shop is called Jock's Cafe in his memory. It's situated in the village hall now, but it used to be in the old building that had once been Jock's workshop, over the road. Back when it was a restaurant, one of the previous owners told me that she would often come in in the morning to set up for the day and turn on the radio so that she could hear it in the kitchen, only to have somebody turn it down again. She assumed Jock didn't approve of loud music!


This Old House - Happy Stormy Hallowe'en


 

Shepherd's Warning 

Sitting at this desk, high up in the house, facing south, is a bit like being in the wheelhouse of a ship in this stormy weather. Every so often a flurry of horizontal rain is flung against the windows. Just like it's doing now.

I'm tired. 

In an old house like this one, the wind makes the house sound as though all 200 years of previous inhabitants, and a few from the house that was on the site before, are wandering around the place, pushing and tapping at doors, randomly, thumping on the stairs, creaking around on not-so-silent ghostly feet. It is just the wind, of course. Although if you think the wind is harmless, you've never read O Whistle and I'll Come To You. Don't do it. Don't blow the damn whistle. 

Anyway, I came to bed late, my husband was asleep, and I made the huge error of closing the bedroom door. At that point, the night was calm, a wonderful full moon was shining. And I closed the door.

I was woken at 2.30 am by the creak and muted thump as the door swung open a little way and closed itself again. This happens all the time, whenever there's a wind blowing. Just that I forget that on windy nights, I have to leave it open for the wind (or those previous inhabitants) to come and go as they please.  I was too cosy to get up, drifted off back to sleep, but only managed half an hour before more irritatingly random creaks and groans, this time from both doors into the room, woke me again - my office is just off the bedroom. 

So I had to get up and make sure the doors were open, by which time it was blowing a hoolie out there, and the various loud thumps and bangs and creaks from the rest of the house, as it adjusted to the weather, kept me wide awake. It's not frightening, you understand. Just irritating enough to banish sleep. 

I read for a bit on my Kindle. Coincidentally, I was reading Roger Clarke's A Natural History of Ghosts. I can recommend it, just not, perhaps at 3am in a very old house in the middle of a storm! 

I did doze off eventually for a couple of hours, only to be woken at 6.30 by my husband, who had had a disturbed night too, deciding that he had had enough and creeping downstairs. I followed him. The heating came on, and we sat clutching big mugs of tea - hurriedly made in case the power went off - it still could do just that - and watched Singin' In The Rain. It seemed appropriate somehow. And very cheering.

This Hallowe'en, do I think the house is genuinely haunted? I don't, really. It's old and friendly, and if any of the previous inhabitants are lurking about the place, they're very friendly too.  Although interestingly, one of my sisters-in-law stayed over in what became our son's bedroom years ago, and vowed never to do it again. I think it was the creaking doors again. It does sound exactly like somebody trying to get in. Charlie grew up with it and doesn't even notice it, although when he was living at home, even he got into the habit of leaving the door ajar on stormy nights, before he tried to get to sleep. 




Not My Ghost Story

Jock in winter 

 I've been reading the excellent A Natural History of Ghosts by Roger Clarke. (Not the R4 series of the same name but the earlier, brilliant book.) Seek it out, because it's well researched, thought provoking and entertaining. His exploration of the story of the events that may have inspired The Turn of the Screw alone is worth the price of the book. It's something very few people know anything about, perhaps because instead of a vulnerable governess, the hypothetical true story involves a brave 18th century woman, who was able to put up with a string of extraordinary events that would have had most of us screaming and running for safety.

I'm very fond of a ghost story myself and I've written quite a few - for example Rewilding is a ghost story of sorts, (and I'm thinking of writing the sequel, because there is one.) But there's also this little collection, titled Stained Glass although I think that the story called The Penny Execution in that eBook is the creepiest of the lot.

Have I seen a ghost? Well yes, yes I have. Years ago, when we were looking after my parents' dog, I was coming back from a walk one evening, when I saw an elderly man on the opposite side of the road. You have to understand that this is a small village where people often stop and chat. Besides, the dog saw him too and pulled me over the street to get to him. He was walking beside a low wall that runs alongside the old 'glebe' - the field that used to belong to the manse. 

When I reached him, he disappeared.

It was exactly like somebody switching off a TV set. I wasn't so much frightened as disconcerted. I found myself looking behind the wall, and up the long, open driveway of the old manse, to see if he was there. But he wasn't. Nobody was there. Later, my husband, who has lived here longer than me, said, 'That sounds like Jock.' And indeed, when I saw pictures of him, it looked like Jock. He was the village blacksmith and handyman and an elder of the kirk. What he didn't know about all the old houses wasn't worth knowing, and he used to patrol the village in the evening like an unofficial watchman, making sure everything was as it should be. Perhaps he still does.

The best ever 'told as true' ghost story, however, was not mine, but was related by a friend of such sound common sense, a practical man in every way, that to this day, it gives me a little frisson of fear. 

It happened many years before when he was a young man. Some of them had taken a party of scouts to camp out at Culzean, a few miles outside the town. It was a fine summer night, the wife of one of his friends was about to go into labour with their first child and - feeling worried - he had decided to walk back into town. Our friend volunteered to accompany him. So they found themselves walking along the High Road back into town, a road that on old maps follows what was once the ancient post road between Ayr and the coast (and incidentally the route that Tam O' Shanter would have taken in the poem of the same name.) 

He said his friend, anxious to get home, had outstripped him and was keeping up a good pace some yards ahead, when they heard the 'clip clop' of a horse approaching. This was about three in the morning, and at midsummer here, there would be just enough light to see what was coming. 

He looked up and saw a tall man on horseback wearing what he swore was a cloak and one of those old fashioned, wide brimmed slouch hats. 'Like a cavalier, in the pictures' he said. He wondered who on earth could be on the road at this time. He knew somebody who kept a horse and did sometimes ride out of town, (we knew them too) - but he couldn't imagine why they would be out here in the early hours, and dressed so oddly too. 

Just then his friend drew alongside the rider, paused briefly, and suddenly took to his heels and ran. Our friend said he himself stood still while horse and rider approached, looked up - and realised that there was no face, no head, nothing at all, between hat and cloak. Just a blank, black space. 

He too ran like Tam o' Shanter's mare, until he caught up with his friend. They kept on running and neither of them dared to look back till they were almost in the town. 

The road, of course, was empty. 

Not my ghost story, but a pretty good one all the same! 




A Proper Person to be Detained - a Spooky Postscript.


James Flynn, paviour, seated, fourth from the right.

My new book, A Proper Person to be Detained, is highly factual. Although since it's also a very personal account of a family tragedy and its aftermath, it does contain a certain amount of reflection - and an attempt to bring the story into the twentieth century, at least. However, in the course of all the intensive research involved, something happened to me that spooked me a bit. Even though there's almost certainly a simple, rational explanation. But like not wanting to know how conjuring tricks are done, because then you destroy the magic, I don't want to know.

Here's what happened.

I was in the middle of edits and writes, checking all kinds of dates and relationships to make sure everything hung together properly, and deep into the story of what had happened to poor John Manley, who was murdered in 1881, in Leeds, and what happened afterwards to his surviving sisters - and what became of his eldest sister, my great grandmother Mary, who had eventually married a good man called James Flynn. He was remembered as a kindly, gentle, generous man by those who had known him, and he certainly helped to change for the better the fortunes of at least one member of my family, blighted by terrible events.

It was a very chilly, sunny morning and I was walking through - of all places - Morrison's car park, on my way to the store. The low sun was dazzling me, and the car park was faintly misty as the early frost dissipated. I was preoccupied, thinking about the book, as I was pretty much thinking about the book all the time back then, when I felt a touch on my arm, and raised my head to find myself confronted by a middle aged man. I stepped back off the kerb in surprise, and he very gently assisted me onto the pavement between cars. He called me 'Madam'. He told me, in a quiet, but unmistakably southern Irish voice - a soft, rural voice - that he was very hungry, that he had had no breakfast that morning, and nobody outside the store would help him. The sun was still dazzling my eyes, but he was dressed in working clothes and boots and he looked - as I described it to my husband afterwards - 'dusty'. He was dusty from head to toe. Not dirty, but dusty like a working man is dusty.

And he had a kind face.

I took my purse out and gave him the only note I had in there - a £5 note. If I'd had a tenner, I'd have given him that instead but it was probably enough to get him some breakfast. He shook my hand, and he said 'God bless you, God bless you, madam,' and then he headed off through the car park.

When I turned around to see which way he had gone, there was nobody in sight at all.

It's hard to describe how this meeting affected me - and let's face it, I make things up for a living! I could feel a lump in my throat and tears starting in my eyes. I felt shaken. I had to go and sit down in the cafe to pull myself together. I wanted to tell somebody about the encounter but there was nobody around that I knew, and besides, it would have sounded daft beyond belief, because I'd have said, 'I think I just met my great grandfather.'

But even now, many months later, I still think I did.


A Little Pre-Christmas Ghost Story



Last month, I wrote a short post about my new book: A Proper Person to be Detained. After that, I plunged back into more revisions and time consuming fact checking. A genealogist friend has given me more help than I deserve - bless her - and I don't think I could have undertaken this project without her. The book is the true story of a murder and its aftermath, as well as a complicated tapestry of a part of my own family history, the Irish part, about which - before I embarked on this book - I confess I knew very little.

Now I know a lot more. Sometimes, over the past year, it has struck me that I know rather more than is good for me, because it has turned out to be a harrowing tale. But then every family has a harrowing tale or two, somewhere in its past.

The last couple of months have been taken up by ordering yet more PDF birth and death certificates from the General Register Office (I might as well have mortgaged my house to them when I add up how much I've spent there) and browsing Ancestry, trying to solve mysteries, some of which have remained tantalisingly insoluble to this day. In November and early December, and with the book written and more or less edited, but with questions still remaining, I spent some time surrounded by dozens of bits of paper, trying to piece together the final jigsaw puzzle of fact, error and speculation. The mark of a great editor is not that they try to change your style or rewrite  - it's that they have the knack of asking exactly the right difficult questions! I have a great editor.

One thing you learn very quickly when undertaking research of this kind is just how many of the online details are wrong. You learn to take nothing for granted. People make assumptions based on what they think they know about the past. Once you realise that they have made wrong assumptions about people whose details you know well from memory and acquaintance, you learn to treat a great many other supposed 'facts' with a certain amount of scepticism. Often the simplest explanation will be the true one - but not always. There is as much misinformation as information out there.

But I promised you a little pre-Christmas ghost story, didn't I?

So here it is. When you're writing something as immersive, as personal as this book turned out to be, you become so absorbed in the world you're exploring that it can be hard to escape. And just occasionally, something strange happens, something seems to intrude from that world into your everyday life, rather as though you had conjured it. Just as a few weeks ago, something like this happened to me.

In the picture above, to the right of the man with the beard and the tar barrel, sits my great grandfather, James Flynn, sometimes known as Michael. He's the one with the moustache. He was born in Ballinlough in County Roscommon. One census record says he was born in Liverpool, but as soon as he is allowed to write his own details onto the form, he is very precise about his place of birth, as were the rest of the family, who spoke of his strong Irish accent, and the fact that he had come over to Leeds as a road builder. In fact, he was a paviour, quite a skilled job.

I never knew him, but everyone who had known and loved him described him as a kind and generous man. He had his faults, but he was certainly a good man. I wrote about him, and about the role he played in my great grandmother's life. And as I wrote about him, he became very real indeed to me.

I was, of all places, in a supermarket car park. It was a fine day for once, and the low winter sun was shining full in my eyes and dazzling me as I headed towards the shop, when I felt somebody tugging gently at my arm.
'Madam, madam,' he said, 'Can I trouble you for a moment?' and the soft Irish accent was unmistakable. I peered at him through the halo of light, and a thin, kindly face, smiled at me. Surprised, I had stopped in the roadway, and again very gently, he ushered me onto the pavement. 'I was wondering,' he said. 'If you might be able to give me a little money to buy some breakfast. I really am very hungry, and nobody back there ...' he glanced towards the shop front 'will help me.'
He looked quite hungry. And he looked - well, he looked dusty. Dusty all over. Not dirty or unclean, just muddy. A working man in working boots. 'You see,' he said, as though it explained everything, 'I've come from Ireland.'
'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, I can hear that.'
I gave him a fiver for his breakfast - it was all I had in my purse at the time - and he said 'God bless you, madam, God bless you,' and raised a hand to me and walked off across the car park.

When I looked back, he had gone.

Coincidence, of course. All coincidence, the more prosaic among you will think. And so do I, in a way. But it shook me. I walked into the shop, feeling the tears starting behind my eyes. I kept wanting to tell somebody about it. I did my shopping in a dream and for all kinds of inexplicable reasons felt both sad and happy about the encounter all the way home.




Past Life Regression as a Source of Inspiration

From time to time, especially when I think a post may be of wider interest to my readers, I'll reblog one of my monthly contributions to the Authors Electric blog here. This was a popular post and I know a number of people were intrigued by the idea, even if a few others didn't believe a word of it! So here it is, and you can make up your own minds.

Something very old indeed.
A few years ago, one of my relatives, a Reiki practitioner, came to me with a slightly odd request. She was doing a course in ‘past life regression’ (yes – such things are available) and she needed a case study. How would I feel about being her guinea pig? Other people had said they would be too scared or just didn’t believe in it, but I jumped at the chance.

Which is how I found myself in a warm room, all wrapped up in a blanket, listening to her soothing tones as she took me through a set of preliminary relaxation exercises. This kind of session involves mild hypnosis, so I know it wouldn’t be for everyone. It also, I suppose, involves a willing suspension of disbelief – something writers find remarkably easy. At no point did I ever feel out of control or even particularly sleepy, although I certainly felt relaxed – with occasional lurches into inexplicable discomfort best described as a sense of falling, a momentary dizziness.

What happens next is a strange mixture of the extraordinary and the commonplace. She begins by asking me to look down at my feet. What do I see? That’s easy. I’m barefoot. I’m looking down at two small bare feet and I feel cold. The floor is chilly. So are my feet. What am I wearing? A white nightdress. Where am I? I’m in a room - it’s dark with the light filtering in. A plain room with whitewashed walls. It is my bedroom and there is a cat, fast asleep on the bed. (I don't have a cat, don't particularly like them, so have no idea what brought a cat into my head.) She tells me to go to the door, open it and go out. What do I see? I'm in a long corridor with wood panelling. But I suddenly know that it only looks long because I’m small. I feel small. I'm a child. This is a plain house, with white walls and dark wood and not much furniture and it’s my home. Plain but by no means poor. It smells like home. It’s morning and I can see the sunlight filtering in and I’m pattering down the corridor on cold bare feet.

We move on. I’m outside. It’s summer. There’s a huge, spreading tree. I’m sitting beneath it, playing. I have a doll or dolls. Made of wood, I think, but with clothes. My mother and father are watching me, my father in a long dark green coat. I’m still small. Yorkshire. I think we live in Yorkshire. What does my father do? ‘Does he work?’ my interrogator says. 'What is his work?' I feel faintly confused. No, he doesn’t work. Not work. In fact ‘work’ seems like the wrong word. He sees to things. He just comes and goes. Has things to do. Tells people what to do. There’s land, a farm. My mother sits and sews. There are ladies who come and sew with her, and then I have to play on my own but I don’t mind. Roses. I can smell  roses.

Time shifts. In fact time shifts a bit too quickly. I want the whole thing to go on much longer. I want time and space to explore and contemplate these places and people I can see so clearly. But these sessions seem to have a set length. Maybe they’re afraid we’ll get lost in some hypothetical past! I’m older. What kind of shoes am I wearing? I can see them very clearly: yellow satin, with ribbons and little heels. And they are pinching my feet. They are uncomfortable but beautiful. My dress is very stiff. They stitch me into it I say, casually. I know my full name now. I’m Anne Gilbert, I’m seventeen years old, my mother is dead and I’m still living in this plain stone house with my father. I have no siblings. The house smells of lavender, beeswax and roses. There are a lot of books in the house. But they don’t much interest me. The books are dry, sermons, I say. They are full of sermons and I don’t like them. I can read and write but I don’t want to read them. My voice seems a bit odd to me. Oddly detatched from me if that's possible. If I were to try to pin it down, it would be as though somebody else was speaking. Me and not me at the same time.

I have a friend. That’s why I’m dressed like this, in this dress, in these yellow shoes and this stiff dress. She is richer, lives in a bigger house. I go there to visit her. They are different over there. There are celebrations, visitors. We dance. I love dancing but our house is so quiet. Very quiet. In my head, I can hear the silence of the house. It's not unpleasant at all.

We move on again. I’m twenty and I’m married. I think I must have mentioned my husband’s name but I don’t remember it now. She asks me if I met this man at my friend’s house but I find that quite funny. Oh no, I say. Of course not. He came to our house. He only came to see my father. That’s how we met. He’s a scholar. I distinctly remember the way the word scholar pops into my mind and with it the image of a tall, scholarly husband – not old, but scholarly - with reddish hair. He doesn’t care about his appearance or what he wears, he’s a great ‘thinker’ I say, and I know that I love him dearly. He’s gentle, often distracted. I have to remind him of things. I read to him and I write things down for him. We live ‘in another house’ I say. Not my father’s house but not far away either. Another plain house with a lot of books. I have this image in my head of remote countryside with only a few houses and not much else. We have a little boy. He has red hair too and freckles.

In the next image, I’m forty years old and sad. There's a weight of sadness, of loss. I look down at my feet and see boots. My husband has died and I’m sitting in a chilly stone church – very small, a country church - and I’m sad. For the first time, a date pops into my mind. It is the 17th day of October 1696. (Can that be true? Who knows?) It’s after the funeral. I’ve lost track of time, here in this chilly little church. My son? He’s at sea. In the navy. I miss him. There’s a daughter. Her name is Alice and she’s married. She lives close by. I’m happy for her. But I’m tired. I can feel the sadness and fatigue seeping into me, but it’s not really distressing. I’m too removed from it now. Finally, seven years later, I’m ready to move on. It isn’t painful. I’m just ready to leave. I miss my husband and I’m tired and I slip away. Then, slowly and carefully she brings me back to the reality of the room where I’m still snug under my blanket.

Writing about this now, several years later, I can still see it as vividly as though it really had happened. Especially the wood panelled house, the stiff dress, the yellow shoes. But of course I’m a writer. I can see all kinds of things as clearly as if they had actually happened. That’s what I do. Make things up. And what's more, I often write historical fiction. What both I and my relative found intriguing though, was the very ordinariness of it all – a plain, circumscribed and quietly contented life. I think both of us expected more fireworks. A stronger plot. Fame and fortune. But the reality of day to day living probably was very much as I’ve described for most people, barring war, plague and other terrible eventualities. As you can imagine, I’ve done a bit of googling of Anne Gilbert. I certainly have no Gilbert forebears, to my knowledge. But beyond the fact that Gilbert seems to be a Yorkshire surname, there’s nothing. Nor would you really expect it. 

I still don’t know whether it’s all make believe or not. But I would caution anyone thinking of trying it to make sure the person leading you through it knows what he or she is doing. Even with Anne’s quiet life and death, the images conjured are surprisingly powerful. I could imagine under other circumstances that the whole thing might become a bit distressing, that you could have a ‘bad trip’.

Otherwise, well, whether you believe in it or not, it might give you some interesting ideas for fiction.

The Crusader Rose: one of the oldest in cultivation.
I haven't yet written about Anne Gilbert (not much plot there!) but you can find my Scottish historical novel The Physic Garden, published by Saraband, in paperback and as an eBook on various platforms.