Writing for Fun
April 2019
Chain Of Events - Jeanette Rothwell
The chain of events leading up to the celebration of 100 years of my haunting this lovely old house were bizarre to say the least.
Yes I have been a ghost for 100 years. I have been very fortunate to stay in this old house and watch many generations of families grow up and eventually leave for pastures new. Mostly, I love the children and find myself watching over their childhood experiences and activities. The most recent family consists of the parents and their 3 offspring – a boy and 2 girls – teenagers, noisy, untidy and full of fun. They have no need of my care now and are already talking about taking off to university.
The summer holidays are just coming up and the whole family are planning a visit to the USA for 3 weeks so that will be a perfect opportunity for my celebration.
Getting out the invitations was the first hurdle. An old postman called Taffy Jones has haunted the village streets for about 20 years so I used him to give messages to my fellow ghosts: the Witch and her cat from the windmill, Colonel Chinstrap who occupied/haunted the local pub, The Reverend Porter who loved the local church so much he still enjoys overseeing the small congregation from the top of the organ, Mrs Doubleday, who loves to sit on the ovens in the bakery, Lord Frankensop who still wears his hunting pink and affectionately looks after his old horse who died at the same time as he did 200 years ago in a hunting accident, so he still rides around the surrounding fields.
I also invited 3 other ghosts from the nearby town but wasn’t sure they would come. One was the spirit of the Mayor from 45 years ago, plus the Town Cryer and his wife.
Much to my surprise, every spirit attended but that is jumping the gun. My next task was to decide how to celebrate. Being ghosts our partying would not include food and drink and music would be a problem. So what could we do apart from catching up on all the local gossip? Games of some sort was a possibility. Hide and seek a bit silly as we could all walk through doors and walls. Scaring people in the village could be good fun. We are all able to emanate a sort of green glow but that can take quite an effort. Moving small inanimate objects was also rather a hard task. What could we play?
Then I hit on an idea. Why don’t we play a form of Cluedo, as we are all already dead, we could pretend one of us had been murdered. I then remembered that Colonel Chinstrap had been murdered and was a bit touchy about the subject. I would have to think again.
The local Witch popped in for a chat and I told her about my predicament. Her suggestions were decidedly unhelpful, for example, board a flight, en bloc, to Rome and visit the Catacombs, or take a tour of the Tower of London where we would meet a lot of other ghosts, many without heads!
In fact there was a ruined castle a few miles away from the village. Food for thought. I wondered if there were any resident ghosts there. It might be interesting to find out. I took myself off to the Castle and lo and behold there were 3 ghosts and they had been there for 500 years. That was it. What tales they would have to tell.
The day of the celebration dawned and we linked hands and transported ourselves to the Castle. The 3 resident ghosts greeted us and showed us over the Castle. We then sat around in one of the towers and they told their tale.
They had been servants to a Duke and Duchess who owned the castle. They had fallen foul of King Henry 8th who had sent an army to capture and imprison them. The 3 servants had initially escaped the soldiers, but the rest of the castle staff had fled and these 3 servants hid in the dungeons. For some time they had managed to survive by eating the food left behind in the kitchens but they were too scared to venture beyond the castle to get more food and gradually they were too weak to survive. One by one they had died.
However, a favourite family of Henry 8th moved into the castle as a reward for their loyalty but the 3 servants gave them such a bad time with their haunting that they didn’t last very long and moved out lock stock and barrel vowing never to return. The castle gradually fell into ruin.
I found their story very sad but my fellow ghosts were thrilled with the tale. I suppose as they were all already dead, other tales of death did not bother them! So my idea of a celebration wasn’t quite what I had in mind but my guests all congratulated me on such a good party and left really elated.
Perhaps I won’t celebrate my next milestone, I will just enjoy myself alone.