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It was a lesson two homebuyers didn’t want to learn: that the cottage they bought was haunted by the ghosts of two troubled teachers.
Joanne Forman wrote a number of books on the paranormal, including The Mask of Time (about time lapses), The Haunted South, The Royal Ghosts, The Haunted Royal Houses, and The Gold Coast, a book about experiences first hand near death and dying. survival.
She also wrote Haunted East Anglia in 1974, which includes this ghost story about teachers whose ghosts return to their last home.
A member of the Society for Psychical Research, Forman spent much of his life investigating the paranormal, gathering data through field investigation and personal interviews.
Brooke, just outside Norwich, is a village that traces the former course of a Roman road – still visible in hedgerows and straight lanes – and its landscape echoes its past: prehistoric flints lie just below the ground, the bodies of Saxons sleep on the border in ancient cemetery.
The original village mansion was built near the church and replaced by Brooke Hall, built by the Holmes family in about 1830, which had attached cottages.
It was in one of these houses that the following incidents occurred.
This particular house was owned by a family with two daughters who grew up to become teachers in the village. Neither married nor left the village or the house.
They continued teaching until they were old ladies and when their time came they passed away in the home they lived in and loved and the house was eventually sold.
The new owners moved in, but the villagers were baffled that they moved out within a few months, replacing their beautiful old house with a newer home.
Then they shared what had happened in the old cottage.
“It seems that the new people have discovered that they are not the only occupants of the house,” Ms. Forman wrote. “Once the wife entered the bedroom and saw a female figure lying on the bed. She thought it was a trick of the light and dismissed the question as an illusion.
“However, when the incident happened again, she became upset and the couple decided to leave the property.”
The house sat empty for a while before being bought by another couple – all was quiet on the ghost front for a while until one of the residents noticed something curious about her alarm clock.
“She wound it up as usual and placed it on the bedside table,” Ms. Forman wrote, “but a few hours later the watch was discovered on the bedroom floor in another part of the room. Neither husband nor wife touched it and no one else was in the house.
One day the woman living in the house intended to go and introduce herself to an elderly neighbor, but when she entered her living room, she saw what she took to be the same neighbor sitting in a chair.
Surprised, she spoke to the woman, telling her what a coincidence this was, as she had planned to visit her, but when she looked away and then again, the woman was gone.
She then remembered that the woman wore a long green dress and was a “little old lady with white hair”: when she shared the description with the villagers, they compared her to one of the two teachers who had once lived in the house.
Forman added: “My informant, who knew the house and had visited it several times, stated that whenever she was in the sitting-room she felt a cold draft where the seated figure had been.”
The couple quickly decided the house wasn’t for them either, and it sat empty again until it became home to a family who had children.
“Since then the ghost has not reappeared,” writes Foreman, “the two old ladies were, as you remember, school teachers and beloved children. Both families who had visits were couples without children.
“Supposedly the ghost is now pleased to have children in the house again.”
READ MORE: If you go down to the woods in Brooke… do you know why the ghost of a screaming woman has been spotted among the trees?
Got a Weird Norfolk story? Email stacia.briggs@newsquest.co.uk.
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