Dates of birth, meeting

We were told by the previous owners of our Elizabethan farmhouse in the Chiltern Hills that the house is haunted. Our previous house, a similar age of building and farmhouse too did have "footsteps" at two o'clock in the night across the galleried hall's landing. It was not central heating! Within the first couple of years of living in our present house, "footsteps" in the night on the creaking stairs were heard by my husband and he asked if it was me. I was asleep by his side. The alarm contacts on an attic door were being broken and eventually I took one door off and no further false alarms. One guest saw the "old man" sitting at the end of her bed in our elder son's bedroom and she had been a nurse and "seen" ghosts in hospital when working night shifts. In the orchard, my husband felt certain his ladder was pushed from under him when he was pruning an apple tree. The most interesting "ghost" was one night when BOTH my husband and myself, fast asleep, suddenly woke up together and looked spontaneously without either indicating what to see, to the fireplace wall on our left and saw a shimmering shape. It was not the moon casting beams. Nor ball lightening. We are certain it was something else!

Remembrance Sunday 1998. We were walking with old friends in our wood when I chanced to look up and through the tree canopy there was a gap of bright blue sky. "Oh! LOOK! The doves! THE DOVES!!!" My walking companions - three men - somewhat filled with a good lunch that had ben arranged the night before after midnight at a celebration party of old friends. (Thank goodness for Sunday shopping.) and much wine consumed around our circular dining room table upon which I had earlier placed a vase with the herb rosemary added. Rosemary is for remembrance and the shoots came from a fine plant given to me by my mother. My husband was some way ahead with the ladies. The men did not respond immediately and when they did, the doves had gone. My mother was found dead four days later and it would seem possible from the Coroner's report, it was the day she died. Whenever I see white doves in flight I am saddened for the year before my mother's death, I was looking out of the north-east facing window of my study one afternoon to see a flock of white doves swoop over our field. I thought they were going down to feed off the remains of the cropped wheat but they flew off. An hour later, I was telephoned to be told by the daughter of our former elderly neighbour who had removed to a nursing home in Hampshire, that she had died an hour before: when the doves had been seen. The elderly neighbour and her husband had kept white doves but the sparrow hawk made quick meals of them! Over and over again, these birds have told me of someone's passing. Are they the souls of the departed? But I have also felt the death of close family or friends, only to hear shortly afterwards they had indeed flown our world too.