FT270


The following happened when I was in my early 20s and down for the weekend from university, visiting my older sister. As there was no guestroom in her Victorian terr­ace house, I crashed the night on the lounge floor, comfortable on big cushions pulled off the sofa. Comfortable yes, but restless. There was a bright streetlight just outside the window and it shone through the thin curtains. I couldn’t sleep. About one o’clock, I was thinking of getting up and finding a book to read. I rolled onto my back and saw two boys standing at my right side, looking down at me. They were wearing Edwardian-style sailor suits and had blond pageboy haircuts. One looked about eight years old, the other about 10. I ‘knew’ they were brothers straight away. I sensed no malevolence, just curiosity. Nonetheless it scared the bejezus out of me!

At that time in my life, ghosts didn’t fit my worldview. I closed my eyes in denial. I lay for a while too petrified to move to the light switch or to open my eyes in case they were still there. I tried to believe it was just a dream, but one knows – once a dream ends – when it was a dream. Then I was convinced they were real: when I had shut my eyes, I had seen a negative image fading on my retinas. An image in a dream would just vanish, but a real object reflects light. When I event­ually dared look again, they were gone, but I had no more sleep that night.

With some embarrassment, I told my sister about the vision. She believed me. Later, I discovered from old newspapers in the local library that two boys had died of consumption in that house in Edwardian times. Their mother had died in hospital shortly before that and I guess the boys had not had the news before they died. I think they were still waiting for her to come home. I didn’t stay again for some time. When I did, my sister told me she had sometimes been saying, to ‘the house’, “your mother has gone on, you must follow.” It seemed to do the trick, as I never felt uneasy there again.

Derek Wood
Cambridge





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