We have a pair of golden retrievers with expensive tastes. They have to be fed special golden retriever food or they cease to be golden and develop pink noses. I may have these facts slightly wrong but that is the general principle.
As they have expensive tastes they are a heavy drain on our finances. When visiting the dog food emporium we tend to use the bank card for whichever account has the most money in it (or the smallest overdraft). On that day it was the turn of her card but my turn to drive towards the Norfolk Broads to gather the canine provender.
I returned, my car laden with frozen beef and chicken, numerous pigs’ ears and the most expensive bag of dried dog food you can imagine - and the funds in the card considerably depleted.
I sometimes forget to return the card, but I had a distinct memory on this occasion of handing it to her as soon as I was home, so that she could put it in her wallet.
The following day she asked me for her card (a little strange as her memory is far better than mine).
“I gave it to you yesterday” (said with already weakening certainty - but I held my ground)
So we set about searching for it - my pockets, her pockets, her wallet, my wallet, under and over every item on the kitchen counters and table, in, under and around every piece of furniture we had sat on in the last week. Back to our wallets, quadruple and quintuple checked. Nothing.
We accused the dogs (knowing they had lavish tastes and a bit of a penchant for plastic). They also denied responsibility. And certainly there were no little pieces of bank card to be found.
I called the dog food shop and asked if I had left a bank card there (even though I knew, or thought I knew I had not). I checked the account online to see if anyone was trying to drain it of the little funds that were left after providing for the dogs. But no unexpected withdrawals had been made.
The next few days were spent in a desultory search for the card, going over and over the places it might be, repeatedly checking wallets - and still there was no sign of it. Reluctantly she started to consider requesting a new card - which would have been an inconvenience as she had several repeat payments set up with it.
Then the bed started to creak. She had moved to sleep in her daughter’s bed (not with her - her daughter is currently living in London) as her back was aching and the mattress was firm. She noticed that the bed grumbled when she lay down in it. After a while it began to bother her.
I have to admit it did not bother me, but then I was not sleeping in the bed, so I was being a typical man and unconcerned because it was not my problem.
But she persisted. It is a big old bed with a heavy mattress and a substantial wooden frame. She worried about what her daughter might say when she came home. Would I help lift the frame and mattress so it could be investigated?
“Yes, yes” I answered thinking that sometime in the next 6 months would do.
Our house was built more than 400 years ago during the reign of Elizabeth I. It stands, gaunt crumbling but permanent near the Norfolk coast (or as permanent is anything is in this deteriorating climate). If there were not so many trees in the way it would be visible to ships in the North Sea. Rumour has it that in years gone by it was on the pilgrim route down to Bromholm Priory in our village and that one of Norfolk’s lesser known massacres took place just outside the house in the aptly named Bloodslat Lane.
The house is considered to be haunted. It was bought to provide necessary accommodation and security for the family (one of whom is severely disabled following a horrendous medical accident). The trees whistle and creak in the wind. More owls live here than feature in an average Harry Potter film – and they specialise in making their spine chilling cries after dark.
In the eighteenth century two people were murdered here. The house has been modified so many times since it was built that its walls no doubt would tell many secrets if only they could talk. To cap it all, Conan Doyle wrote one of his Sherlock Holmes stories here - the Dancing Men.
I do not believe in ghosts. I have never seen a ghost and I cannot conceive of any mechanism which would enable spirits from past lives to come back to show themselves to us in the present, let alone move physical objects.
But I am also a coward, and if ever I am confronted by a spectral creature (with or without decapitated head in hand and a ball and chain attached to his leg), I would not dispute his (or her) existence.
But others with far more powerful intellects than mine do believe. The late Dr Thomas Stuttaford, for instance, a man whom most regarded as having his feet firmly on the ground, reported that his Norfolk house was haunted – as a matter of fact in much the same way as the manifestations in this house.
One of the first ghostly materialisations came when my stepson (then aged seven) reported that he saw a man coming down the stairs into his room. A builder working in the attic later found that there had indeed been a staircase going down to his room.
One day my wife was in the house with a friend. Suddenly she heard the sound of laughter upstairs and the rush of children’s feet. Thinking that the children had come home early from school she went up to investigate. There was no one there and no one else in the house.
There have been many instances of a figure seen walking between the house and an old barn in the grounds. A woman in the village who, as a young girl had worked as a maid in the house had been terrified by a “Green Lady” seen outside.
One night a figure appeared to be sweeping up leaves at 1 am. It was initially thought by the others to have been me, but I was able to reassure the rest of the family that I never sweep leaves and certainly would not do so in the middle of the night.
Another time, a young police officer was visiting. He rushed out to intercept an intruder he saw walking across to the barn – but he found no one there.
We have lost count of the number of instances when items (usually wanted and important) have disappeared only to turn up later in the most unexpected places. Sometimes this can be most frustrating - as when my brand new digital dictating machine simply disappeared. Days of searching failed to unearth it and eventually I was forced into buying a replacement. The day it arrived I found the original under a pile of papers on my desk - a pile I had checked countless times.
My stepdaughter’s school uniform vanished. Much to her chagrin she had to go to school dressed in ordinary clothes - humiliating for a young teenager. Her uniform had to be replaced, Then about 6 months later the original reappeared neatly folded on her bed. Nobody in the house had put it there.
We are not alone in this. The Archers Facebook page is filled with accounts from ordinary people describing disappearing and reappearing objects.
But those thoughts were not uppermost in our minds at the time. We had to sort out the creaking bed, the priority for which had now leapt from “about 6 months” to tomorrow - or else.
However the card was still missing.
One of the pieces of advice offered by the late Dr Stuttaford was, on these occasions, to ask the ghost outright to return the item.
Feeling a little silly she loudly asked the ghost if he she or it would kindly return her bank card.
The following day, armed with a can of Lord Sheraton furniture polish (the beeswax in it helps adjacent pieces of wood to move between each other noiselessly) we made ready to lift the mattress and bed frame.
Before we started she decided enough was enough and contacted the bank to cancel the card and request a new one.
Then I set about lifting the heavy mattress in readiness for anointing the bed frame with polish.
And there - about 18 inches in from the side of the bed, neatly positioned between the slats, the right way up and at right angles to the bed lay the missing card.
“Thank you ghost” she whispered.
Ruling out the golden retrievers, only two living creatures in the house could possibly have put the card there. I knew I had not. Could she have done it, by somehow dropping the card and kicking under the bed? She being a scientist, we did some tests, but however hard we tried we could not get the card to do anything other than drop to the ground OUTSIDE the bed frame.
And then there was the appeal to the ghost - producing a result overnight that we had not achieved in the previous ten days. Did the ghost make the bed creak to point us in the right direction? Or did it hear the discussion about the creaking bed and decide that this was the best place for the card.
What I do know is that had we not used furniture polish on the bed, the card most certainly would not have been found, possibly for years.
Do I believe in ghosts yet? No, but I completely fail to understand how the card ended where it did. And the golden retrievers? They thought it was all a little barking.
But the good thing is – the bed has stopped creaking.
After you kindly liked my latest rambling, I’m glad I came to your site to read this one. Enjoyed the diversion. I’ll catch up with your earlier ones too. But now it’s time for tea.
Excellent and a little unnerving!