Windows
A sort of ghost story that really happened…
The farmhouse we were staying in had belonged to the Trevellyan family for generations. It was reputed to have dated back to King Arthur's time. One of his knights was supposed to have been buried in the grounds together with his lady: Nellie she was called. Nellie was the family's private ghost and she was supposed to walk whenever there was a full moon.
One night old Ross Trevellyan suggested that we all sit up and wait for her to appear; the moon was full and beautiful, shining out of a cloudless sky, so armed with a flagon of the local somewhat lethal cider eight of us, including Ross and his wife assembled round the kitchen table waiting for Nellie to appear from her customary panel. Needless to say we waited in vain and by two in the morning most of us had staggered off to bed. Only Ross remained along with a second flagon of cider and perhaps predictably at breakfast the next morning he told us that we had given up too early. Nellie had indeed appeared but only Ross had seen her!
It was, I suppose, about a month later that I awoke sometime in the night and found myself gazing at a strong shaft of moonlight slanting through the window. It was full moon and I smiled to myself remembering the night we had sat up waiting for Nellie. Then suddenly I became aware of something else. Rain. Heavy, pounding rain. We don't get bright sunlight with pouring rain, do we? Perhaps it was different with moonlight. I sat up. The rain was certainly slashing against the window - but it was a different window. I turned and looked again. Slashing rain and bright moonlight. Each coming from a different direction. And did we have two windows? Surely not. Focusing, I tried to place the one I recognised. It was the one that was taking the pounding of heavy rain. The moonlight was still there but it was beginning to fade so I went to sleep.
In the morning I was just getting my clothes out of the cubby-hole covered by a curtain which was what the farmhouse provided as a makeshift wardrobe. It was a brick cubby-hole - a brick cavity. I looked again… It was not just a cavity. It was a bricked-up window. The window through which I had seen moonlight streaming the night before had been bricked up some 150 years ago.
by Margaret Briggs