A tale of Spooky Towers

 After reading the recent blog about ghosts in the cemetery, I thought I would tell you of our recent interaction with the poltergeist known as Agnes. I don’t think that’s her name, but that’s what we call her. I think she owns our house and she allows us to live here. She must like us as she gives us no real trouble whereas she was the reason the previous occupants sold. Although, knowing that family as I did, I wouldn’t want them in my house either.

The Front Garden

Let’s just say they were the kind of people who would pour concrete on a 100 year old parquet floor. And when one of the windows fell out they just left it on the ground,  with a gaping hole in the wall.

Mostly all we hear is someone playing the piano, badly, and it’s always in the room next to the room that we are in no matter how much we walk round the house we can never catch up with it.

The house is listed at Glasgow University as a site of paranormal activity. Everybody in the village knows it’s the haunted house. My pals dad is 96 years old and he grew up in a house at the end of the road, and he always called my house ‘the haunted house’. Today I refer to it as Spooky Towers. I think Agnes has got a sense of humour.

I have a small practice at the back of the house where patients sit in what used to be the living room of the granny flat. A few times they’ve commented that there’s someone walking through the garden. Of course, when we go out there’s nobody there, and their description’s always the same. A woman in a grey dress. Although my pal in the BBC costume department says that the costume is not right for who we think Agnes is.  By her dress Agnes was around at the end of the first world war.

                                               

                                                     Agnes has a favourite window

Recently, while we were away at the Crimefest we had left the builders with a list of jobs to do. These are big hairy Scottish builders who eat deep fried pizza sideways and swear an awful lot. One afternoon chief builder phoned us while we were in Bath and asked if we’d given anyone else the key as somebody had come in the front door and gone upstairs without saying anything. The builders were all in the utility room at the back and, on hearing the footsteps had gone to the bottom of the stairs and shouted up. No response. We could tell by his voice that senior builder, a big guy known as wee Joe, was rather spooked by this because he knew.

He knew. The hairs on the back of his neck was tingling.

Together, they went upstairs to have a good look around in Scooby Doo fashion. Nobody there. And while they were on the top landing they heard someone go down the stairs and go back out the front door. Nobody went down the path and out the gate. They were slightly unnerved to say the least. Knowing Agnes as I do, I know she was checking up on them, she’s a very good clerk of works. I asked them if they had been upstairs and they explained that that very morning they had to go upstairs and go in to every room as they needed to know how many feet of radiator the boiler was servicing. That was what Agnes didn’t like. So she decided to go up and just check it out.

She’s like that.

One day I will blog about the building work with wonderful before and after pictures but we’re so busy we haven’t even put the furniture back where it belongs and there’s something very comfortable about life in one room with one sofa, a tv, 2 cups and a Staffordshire Bull terrier called Mathilda.

                                             

                                                             Me in my writing habitat.

Isn’t it nice to end the blog with the words “see you all soon”.