Strange Noises

Now, don't laugh but I have the increasing feeling that there is a visitor at the Manor. An invisible visitor. A visitor intangible to the human eye. A (dare I say it?) ghost. Spirit. Spectre.

And I'm not surprised. When we moved here, there was a definite, if faint, presence in the house. I suspected that it was the vestige of the spirit of the mother of the previous owner, a Mrs Black, who had lived in this house since buying it from new in 1959, and had died in the previous two years but couldn't quite let go. And now her daughter had sold the family home to strangers and the strangers were doing things like replacing kitchen and bathrooms, re-decorating, shifting their furniture around and even doing wild things like playing a different station on the radio.

Mrs Black made her presence felt (by me at least because Andy, being a scientist, poo-poohs these ideas and blames odd noises on the bathroom door), by making random sounds. Well, actually, she made her presence felt on the day of the sale by causing the upstairs shower to leak through the ceiling into the hall. I also blame her for the misplacement of a very favourite posh pen of mine which I have turned the house upside down to find, and can't. And I NEVER lose anything I cherish. But after that, every time we made some kind of change to the house, there would be a rumbling of noises voicing the disapproval of what she considered was still her home.

And then, all went quiet. We weren't doing anything to the house. We were concentrating on the garden, which was Mr Black's domain. I know this because we still get gardening catalogues arriving for him through the post, and Lord knows how long he has been departed. But what have we had done recently? We've had the hall, stairs and landing redecorated. We've the audacity to install a dado rail. And the noises have started up again.

Yesterday, for about 20 minutes in the middle of the afternoon, there was a considerable amount of banging and stomping going on. Pretty impressive for an elderly lady, I thought. Pandora Kitten has never experienced the stompings of Mrs Black before. She looked with such intensity at the hall, crouching close to the floor like a tightly coiled spring, that I half expected the lady herself to walk in and enquire exactly what I was doing, lying sprawled on the floor surrounded by my reflexology study books. I had to take Pandora on a house tour in the end, to reassure her that there was no physical presence.

Mrs Black had another moment in the middle of the evening, during QI. But I suspect it was more to do with me having a clothes sort-out and leaving a pile on the stairs ready to go to the charity shop rather than the pink 'n' yellow shirt 'n' tie combo that Stephen Fry thought fit to assault our eyes with.

I don't mind Mrs Black being around. She's not the kind of person I would have taken to in life; she seems a very 'scratchy' sort, if you know what I mean. But maybe she has got the worst end of the deal, having to relinquish her domain to a bolshie cow with middle-class pretensions. Still, that's life, isn't it?