In October [my fiancé] Graham told me I had been invited to stay with his maternal aunt near Barnard Castle in Durham. The night before we left London I had such a vivid dream of a ghost I was going to meet in the house that, although we had tacitly agreed not to discuss spooks, I could not resist telling him about it.

He was disconcerted and implored me on no account to mention the subject to his relations. 'It would only embarrass them, dear. Do please believe me. I loathe it when people think you're odd or eccentric. Spooks and all that kind of thing are not only dangerous, it is unhealthy.'

I tried not to show I was hurt. It would be most unfair to blame Graham when I had deliberately chosen him because his downhereness would help me to live efficiently in the world with my feet firmly planted on solid ground.

I might never have mentioned the dream again unless he had tried to put me off by telling me that the house was fifty miles farther than it really was and driving past the gates at sixty. The moment I saw the stone pillars in the beam of the headlights they were so familiar that I told him to stop being an ass and turn back, which he did, rather sheepishly.

The house itself was a disappointment, for instead of being grey stone with a red pantile roof, the walls were so thickly covered with ivy that it looked dark green; and instead of being set in a sloping field of rough grass there were neatly terraced gardens. The staircase was in the wrong place too, and the room I was given was right only in its shape and the position of the window. The furniture and the wallpaper were quite different.

I found Graham's cousin, Norah, who was the same age as me, very congenial; but for two days I was discreet and dutifully practised casting with the pair of Hardy trout rods that he had given me to encourage me to fish. On the third night she came to my room for a gossip after everyone else had gone to bed. I knew, although I could not remember the details of the conversation, that I had spent most of the previous night chatting with the ghost. I could not resist telling Norah about her.

'She came in through the window,' I said. 'She was quite young, about our age, and wore a white cambric dress with lavender sprigs--the kind of dress a serving maid might have worn in the eighteenth century. I wish I could remember her name or why she was here. She was about thirty when she died, but she only lived here when she was young. She said to me, "Sometimes I come back to look at the old place. No one can prevent me from coming back any longer. "'

The story sounded very thin, and I felt shy for having embarked on it. 'I have had lots of dreams that were far more accurate than this one,' I said defensively. 'I've been trying not to dream lately because it's a thing I can't share with Graham. He is delighted that I got so many details wrong... I expected the house to be grey instead of green, and the staircase is in the wrong place and the gardens weren't here.'

'Where was the staircase?' asked Norah quickly.

'In the corner of the gallery. It was a spiral stair in the thickness of the wall. There was a horror on it which frightened me so much that I fled out of the house and down the drive. I woke up when I reached the gateway. That's why I remembered so clearly what it looks like.'

Norah smiled. 'I've got something in my room which you might like to show to Graham.' She brought me a watercolour of the house as it had been when her grandfather bought it about 1850. The house was then exactly as I had seen it. 'The staircase was where you described it too,' she said warmly. ' I don't know what the 'horror' was, but I remember my father telling me that before grandfather would live in the house he had the old staircase bricked up. He said it was unsafe.'

'Have you ever seen my ghost?'

'None of us have. I don't think we are a very ghost-seeing family. But several other people have. We thought it was only because they knew that the house is supposed to be haunted. She was the only daughter of the man who built the house, and she climbed out of that window and eloped to Gretna Green. Her father never forgave her, even when she was widowed. When she knew she was dying she wrote imploring him to let her come home, but he never answered the letter.' She smiled. 'I'm so glad that you were able to talk to her so that she knows she will always be welcome here.'

EDITOR'S NOTE

So all Joan has to do to win her fiancé's approval is to quit being her.

Joan soon dumped Graham. And good riddance.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Far Memory: the Autobiography of Joan Grant, 1956 (Ariel Press reprint, 1985), pp. 96-8

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