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.