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T C Lethbridge – Ghost and Ghoul

Here at Hole several of us have heard unexplained voices on different occasions. These have been heard outside the house and on three sides of it. It sounds as if two or more girls were chatting and giggling together. The voices are quite ordinary ones, but they are rather low and faint. No one was visible. We, thinking they were ordinary voices, have tried to see who was making the noise, on quiet summer's afternoons, without any success. There is no more to it than that. They appear to be voices with no bodies, just as the ghosts I have seen were bodies with no voices. There is no feeling of creeps, cold, or any other sensation attached to either phenomenon.

During the war, I spent some months in an old farm-house in a village outside Cambridge. I slept in a little room which had been built on to the north side of the old building and whose floor was below ground level. The head of my bed was against what had been the main north wall of the house and a flight of three steps led up to a door through it and into the main passage. To the right of my head, as I lay in bed, the passage went into the big kitchen, to the left it led to the staircase which did not look as if it were the original old one. I used to go to bed early and was usually asleep by eleven o'clock.

On many occasions I was awakened, between midnight and one o'clock, by the sound of a heavy tread going past my head from left to right. The footsteps came from near the stairs and passed on into the kitchen where they stopped. Thinking they might be someone going through the kitchen to an outside lavatory, I sometimes waited for the footsteps to return.

They never did.

They simply ended in the kitchen.

If there had been any lights on at the time, I should have seen them through the crack under the door, which was not far from my eye level. There never were any lights.

This solemn tramp went past my head, in the dark, from nowhere into nothing. I sometimes opened the door and looked out. All was dark and there was nothing to be seen.

There were no feelings attached to the footsteps either, except that of annoyance at being woken up. There was no horror, no feeling of cold, nothing. As I said before, I am used to noises in the night. These footsteps must have been very heavy to wake me up.