Are we moving towards the end of the age?

There is so much going on in the world that we do not understand. Dead birds fall from the sky in their thousands; dead fish are washed ashore by the million; 10,000 antelope are found dead in Kazakhstan; tens of thousands of crabs are washed ashore in the United Kingdom; bees are dying  in unprecedented numbers; natural disasters such as the flooding in Queensland, Australia and the mud-slide in Brazil claim hundreds of lives; and all of this has happened in the opening few weeks of 2011. I believe that all of these things point towards the fact that we are living in the end age. I believe that we have most definitely entered the 'beginning of sorrows' era. Oh, if only the world would sit up, look and listen!

 

This is a time in which those who will speak out for the Lord without fear must make their voices heard. For too long the Church has allowed herself to be manipulated for the enemy by men whose agenda is their own worldly progress and wealth, and heresies abound. It is so difficult in many towns and cities to find preachers whom are faithful to the Word, for so many seem to just want to tickle the ears of their listeners, making them feel comfortable with trite platitudes rather than warning them of the result of spiritual complacency. perhaps it might be argued too that many congregations get what they deserve in this sense, for so many of them have no real place for God in their lives.

 

There is a real need for those who dare to call themselves Christians to humble themselves before God and cry out for forgiveness for their tardiness in serving the Christ to whom the claim to belong. If Christ is not all in their lives then He is not in their lives at all. There can be no partial measures.

"I remember Thomas Hardy . . ." she said

This afternoon I interviewed a remarkable lady by the name of Evelyn Evans, who is 94 years old and currently resident in a Retirement Home in Runcorn. Her memory is sharp and she easily recalls the events which have shaped her life, especially growing up in the County of Dorset, often referred to as 'Thomas Hardy Country'.

Once the interview has been edited and interlaced with photos and a bit of music, then it will be available on DVD to share with anyone who is interested, particularly with schools.

Evelyn grew up in Dorchester, which Hardy immortalised under the name of Casterbridge. She well remembers Hardy walking around the surrounding countryside as he worked out his novels in his head prior to committing them to paper. The interview will be well worth looking forward to! If you would like a copy then just watch this Blog and when it is available then I'll post about it and how to get a copy.

Spooky happenings at Lacock Abbey

This is a photograph of the hauntingly beautiful Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, about five or six miles from my home town of Corsham. Lacock, which is a wholly owned National Trust village, is home to this ancient Abbey, which was converted to a home after the Reformation. Once the home of William Henry Fox-Talbot, a pioneer of early photography, there is now a Fox-Talbot museum close by. In more recent times parts of the Abbey, such as the Cloisters, pictured below, have been used as backdrops in the Harry Potter films.

I recall an occasion in the early 1960's --- I think it would have been 1961 --- when I was at Lacock Abbey for the local Hunt Ball, where I was to be working for my father for the evening. As a local Wine Merchant, he had been given the task of ensuring that the evening was well-oiled, and my job was to wander around collecting empty glasses and washing them up ready for refilling.

Because I was there to work rather than as a guest I had arrived fairly early in the evening, and there was a momentary panic on because the lights had blown a fuse, something which I was told by the occupier, Col. Burnett-Brown, was not unusual. I walked with him through parts of the Abbey, being shown around on a sort of mini guided tour, on the way to fix the fuse. At one point, walking down the corridor, we passed a room which gave one a strange feeling as we passed by the open doorway. The Colonel explained to me when I commented on this that his dogs would not enter the room willingly. He told me that if you tried to drag them into the room they would struggle to get out as quickly as possible. He then added that even he tended to not enter the room unless he absolutely had to, because it sent shivers down his spine and made the hairs on the back of his neck stand out. I asked him whether he thought the room was haunted and he confirmed that this was definitely his conclusion, although he had never seen a ghost there personally.

The fact that he was very much a 'no-nonsense' sort of man added a sense of authority to his comments, and from the sensations that I experienced walking past the room, and at several other points in the corridor, I have no doubt that the area was definitely the scene of ghostly happenings. I would imagine that this building, part of which is in a semi-derelict condition, is home to many such events. Perhaps another contender for a 'Ghost Walk, for the intrepid.

Spooky or what?

Following my post a couple of days ago when I wrote about the malevolent spirit in the cellar under Barnett Bros. shop in Corsham High Street, I have heard from a one-time neighbour who lived a few doors away from us about a friendly ghost that inhabited their property.

In addition to the ghostly happenings that I wrote about, we also had a room in the upper floor of my family home, The Wine Lodge, situated in Corsham High Street. The building is now an Estate Agebts and offices I believe, and I wonder whether the room in question is still haunted by the ghost. It raises the question as to whether ghosts haunt property or people, and if it's the latter, does the ghost go away once the particular people have left?

Anyway, let us expand my story a little. The house was both fairly large and fairly old. In fact it was very old in some parts, particularly the cellars where we found evidence that they might have been used by kitchen staff at one stage, for there was a lot of old kitchen-type implements found in a niche that we uncovered.

Five of the eight bedrooms were on the third floor of the house and it is in one of these that my story takes place. This room had been used on many occasions by my paternal grandmother, and it is believed that the haunting was by her less than friendly spirit. It was a room that I never went into unless I had to because I felt that it had an unfriendly and unwelcoming feel to it, not that I had anything other than my feelings to go on, but those feelings were shared bu other family members as well. On one occasion I had a friend come to stay overnight --- in fact, one reason that I remember this story is that it was the only time that I ever had a friend stay when I was growing up, although that changed in later years when I lived in the property in the mid '60's for a while when my eldest brother ran the business. Anyway, my friend Peter was given this particular room, usually referred to as 'Grandma's Room', and he duly retired for the night. The following morning I asked him how he had slept and a tired looking Peter explained that he had been up for most of the night unable to sleep because the room had suddenly become intensely cold in the middle of the night, waking him from his earlier slumber. There was a gas fire in the bedroom and so he lit this, but he said that even sitting in front of the fire with a bed quilt around him could not banish the cold. He commented that he could hardly wait for morning to come so that he could get out of the room, and that he'd sensed a presence that was willing him to leave the room.

Once again there was nothing to see but a very definite 'presence' to be felt, and I'm certain that this was not the same presence as that in the next door cellar, although I'm never likely to know now either.

The Haunted Cellar in my Corsham home

Let me state first of all that the photo above is not from the cellar in question, but just to get you in the mood a bit. I could equally have shown a photo of a flight of stone stairs to depict the ones which I often ran up, the hairs on the back of my neck still bristling with the fear of my experience.

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Sorry! I'm starting my tale at the wrong end I guess, so I'll begin it once again.

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The family home in Corsham was a very large eight-bedroomed house in the High Street,and housed my father's shop, which was a Wine Merchants. One side of the shop area , plus one of the bedrooms above, were let out to Cyril Thorne where he plied his trade as a chemist. Digressing from my main story slightly for a moment, I recall the old-fashioned 'candlestick' telephone that was housed in an opening between the back section of the chemists and our hall. There was a sliding panel that allowed either of us to answer the phone, and we shared the same number, Corsham 2277. That telephone is etched forever in my memory, being the bearer of so much news over the years, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Whatever the news was that travelled down the line, there was a comfortable feeling holding the phone stem in one hand whilst holding the ear-piece to the side of your head in the other. In many ways it ranks amongst the inanimate 'old friends' of my childhood.

My father being a Wine Merchant, there was invariably jobs that we children could do that earned us some pocket money, and this was especially so as the Christmas season drew near. The prize job was bottling up a cask of wine, usually there being, as far as memory permits, about seven dozen bottles to a cask. It was a job that took about an hour to an hour-and-a-half, depending on the size of the cask, and the rate of pay was 7/6d, a small fortune for a child whose pocket-money was normally about two shillings or two-and-sixpence per week. (I've held back from giving the conversion rate to New Pence, because the values have changed so much that a straight conversion is pointless.) If you really got the cream of jobs then you not only bottled the cask but you also got the job of putting the labels and capsules on the bottles as well. This would bring the total for a 7-dozen cask up to 14/6d! When you consider that when I started work in September 1959 my weekly wage was £2.5.0d, then you can understand what a fortune this was to a boy in his early teens!

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Originally the bottling was done in our kitchen, three large casks being hoisted up onto a special ramp and then allowed to settle for a time before they were ready for bottling. Getting ready for the job was a special procedure in itself. it was necessary to be able to see whether there was any sediment in the wine as you were bottling it, and so you placed a candle on a small stand in such a position that you created a backdrop of light behind the bottle, thus making any impurities obvious. Needless to say you had to concentrate on what you were doing.

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At some point my father negotiated with the Barnett Brothers who owned the newsagents next door, and he bought their cellars from them, a doorway being knocked between the two cellars to make them into one large area beneath the two properties. From then on all the bottling was done in the new section of the cellar, the casks being lowered into the cellar via an opening in the railings that were set in front of the shop window above, and later into the the pavement. One of the problems that came with the new cellar was that it often flooded after heavy rain, and had to be pumped out by the fire-brigade. I well recall going down the cellar steps, stopping about the third step from the floor, and seeing the water that swirled through the cellars, spoiling anything in its path. All in all, with the benefit of hindsight, I don't think that the additional cellar was a very good purchase by my father, for I don't recall our original cellar ever being flooded, despite the floor being flagstones laid straight onto the earth.

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On then to the main point of my story --- the haunting! At first everything was fine when I went down to the new section to bottle up a cask. I would settle myself down with the candle-light adding its warm glow to the experience and usually with Radio Luxembourg playing the favourite pop songs of the day in the background. I guess it was after I had done this over several weeks when I was busy as usual one evening, bent over the cask watching the bottles fill and checking for any tell-tale signs of impurities, that I suddenly felt the temperature in the cellar drop considerably. At first I assumed that there was a change in the wind direction of something as simple as that, but the room got colder and colder until it felt icy cold. I became a little disconcerted and concentrated on the job in hand even harder. Suddenly the air seemed to get thicker, the cold became more intense, and the hairs on the back of my neck started to bristle and I could sense that I was being watched from the far corner of the cellar, just below where the trapdoor opening was that led up to the street. The feeling became more and more intense, as though somebody or something was willing me to leave the cellar. I finished bottling that cask as quickly as I could and then rushed upstairs, afraid to say anything to anyone for fear of appearing a fool.

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After that the sensation of being watched in that cellar increased until the time when, part-way through bottling a cask, I fled upstairs, pale and shaking. In answer to my parent's questioning I simply said that I didn't feel well and wanted to go to bed. I was sorry, I told my father, that I would not be able to finish the bottling, and so he arranged for someone else to finish it. I never went down into that cellar again, having no wish to see just how far what I perceived to be a malevolent spirit would go.

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Many years later, in discussion with my eldest brother, he told me that the same experience had happened to at least three of us, although we each felt it was not something we wished to open a discussion on!

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What was it? Was it really a malevolent spirit from the past, or was it the fact that I was a pubescent boy with raging hormones? Does anyone really have an answer, or is it just one of the great mysteries that we encounter sometimes in our lives. Even today, I would hesitate about going down into those cellars, that's for sure!

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I wonder if any of my Corsham readers have any strange and unexplained mysteries of this nature to relate. If you do, dear reader, then why not email them to me and I'll share them through this blog.