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Rosalind Heywood – The Infinite Hive

It was soon after our return from India - I was just thirteen - that I realized that in some intangible way I was at times aware of lesser presences in certain places. Some were grim and sad and I felt that if only I could see them they would be less unnerving. One was in my bedroom in my grandfather's house which overlooked Dartmoor. By day it was a gay little room, facing south, with a wallpaper festooned with blue ribbons and pink roses. But at night it was a very different place. Then a mysterious invisible Somebody shared it with me - and I didn't know who that Somebody was!

Because of its presence I undressed in the nursery, leapt blindly from the door into bed, pulled the blankets over my head and kept well under them until a friendly housemaid flung open the curtains to the blessed morning sun. Had the Somebody been mentionable to a grown-up I might have learnt that my mother and aunt had both independently seen the apparition of an old woman standing at the foot of the bed but, needless to say, they both kept this to themselves until years later after my grandfather's death. I suppose they assumed that children were not aware of what I am sure they called 'these things'.

(Note:   Since this book went to press I have heard, quite by chance, that there was a tradition in the village that someone had been walled-up in that room. Whether or not that was so, the idea might have been picked up telepathically from the villagers.)

I also felt invisible presences in another aunt's house in Norfolk - melancholy frightening presences - but again, not until I was grown up did I learn that to her they were not invisible but she often saw them and took them in her stride.

Years later I was told - too late to check it with her - that soon after her marriage she was lunching the other side of the county and saw a portrait of a man in seventeenth-century clothes.

'Why' she exclaimed, surprised into an indiscretion, 'that's the man who is always trying to stop me going upstairs at home.'

'That,'said her host, 'was Oliver Cromwell as a young man. As it happens when he was young he was involved in an unfortunate love affair with a girl who lived in your house’.