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T C Lethbridge – Ghost and Ghoul

From 1920 to 1925 my mother had a house in Shropshire called Little Ness. It was close to a medieval church, which had a very large burial mound beside it in the churchyard.  I do not know whether this mound has now been excavated, but at the time it was apparently intact. I should think that it was either Roman or possibly Anglo-Saxon and not an ordinary Bronze Age barrow.

My mother rented the house and did not own it. Had she owned it, I should have tried to persuade her to cut down a cedar tree which had been planted much too close to my bedroom window. It almost shut all daylight out of the room.

On many occasions, when I went up to bed, I had a most unpleasant feeling in this room. It is not easy to describe such a sensation. It was not unlike the one I was to have on the Skelligs some years later, but there saw no active malice in it.

It made one feel that it would be nicer to have a light on when trying to go to sleep. One had the idea too that something might climb out of the cedar tree and into the room. This was confined to the one room. As I sometimes slept in other rooms, and was also away for long intervals at Cambridge, I do not think that I told my mother more at the time than that I did not like the bedroom. Too many other things were always happening in those days for me to worry unduly about a feeling of creeps when going to bed. Besides it seemed rather absurd to complain that one got the horrors in the night. I was ashamed of myself for taking any notice of the thing.

The house was rented from some people in the neighbourhood. I do not suppose that they are still alive, but as their relations might not like it, I shall not mention the name. The wife was of a nervous disposition and somewhat given to acute religious display. At one time they had lived in the house my mother rented. There had been a son, of whom his mother had been very fond, but he was dead. As a child he had spent a lot of time climbing in the cedar tree. The mother was always wanting to return to the house, because of her happy memories of the boy climbing about in the tree.