Heaven can wait!
Why was our spirit not willing to budge?
Ifollowed Mam into the back yard of our new house. ‘Can you smell cigar smoke?’ she asked, wrinkling her nose. It was the late 1990s, I was 14, and we’d just moved into a 1940s, three-bed semi to be nearer Mam’s parents in Witley Bay.
The outdoor space was shared with our new neighbours, so we assumed one of them smoked.
But a few days later I got chatting to the woman next door, Susan, and when I mentioned the cigar smell a strange expression crossed her face.
‘We don’t smoke,’ she said. ‘But the old boy who lived here before you did.’
Turned out our place had belonged to an elderly couple, but after the husband died, the wife had gone into a care home.
‘They were a sweet couple,’ Susan recalled. ‘She was ever so house proud, always cleaning. He wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house, she made him come out here for a puff!’
I thought it strange that the smoky smell was still hanging around, outdoors, but I shrugged it off.
It wasn’t the only strange thing about the house. As soon as we’d moved in things had started going missing and reappearing. It was mainly cleaning products – the kitchen brush one day, a pack of sponges or bottle of bleach the next. Mam would be adamant she’d left something somewhere specific, only for it to seemingly disappear completely. Days later it would generally turn up again, wherever she thought she’d left it in the first place!
It was around a month after we moved in that I sensed someone behind me in the kitchen. Assuming it was Mam, I asked a question. It was only when she didn’t
answer that I turned around – and screamed! There, sitting on one of the chairs at the kitchen table, was an elderly man in a flat cap.
As soon as I screamed, he vanished.
‘What happened?’ Mam asked running in. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’
I could barely get the words out to explain that was exactly what I’d seen...
After that I was convinced the former owner of the house was hanging around. So from then on whenever anything went missing from the cleaning cupboard we’d ask the man to put it back – which he normally did within a day or two. We remembered what Susan had said about his houseproud wife – and joked he was trying to keep things clean and tidy for her!
Then, one day I came downstairs and the energy felt different. The sense I’d often felt of someone else, unseen, hanging around was gone.
A few days later Susan broke the news that our spook’s wife had passed away.
That was when Mam and I realised. Her devoted husband must have stayed behind, waiting for his wife, until they could pass on, together. Proof, if needed, that true love never dies!