First-hand account of ghostly goings on at rectory

I can assure you things did happen, although not always quite as described in the article. We kept quiet about it at the time as we didn't want to scare the people and numerous small children who came to church and Sunday school. However, for the sake of accuracy, and in case anyone is keeping records or thinking of writing a book, Jennie Seth-Smith's account, which I gave her over the phone, has become a little muddled. Unless she got the first story from an alternative source who knew better, one or two important points which should be corrected are as follows:

1. The goat in the churchyard. This was related to me by John Heaume, our Sacristan, who had attended Forest Church since a small child. His story went that:

A parishioner, who had somewhat over-indulged at Happy Landings, was making his way home in the dark and decided to take a shortcut through the churchyard. Sure enough, he saw the horns appear from behind a gravestone and thought the devil was after him for being drunk. Terrified, he fled as fast as his condition would allow.

The story got round, and it was revealed that the then rector, the Rev. E. F. P. Coleman, had put a goat to graze there to keep down some of the grass. It was not the rector who was drunk.

2. German soldier going through the garden wall. We had four children and it was the youngest, Marcus, who was lucky enough to have this experience, not our daughter, who is the eldest. All but one son still lives in Guernsey so their friends need to get it right.

3. A German soldier did die of poisoning, but I understood it was of hemlock, which looks a bit like watercress and grew in the stream in the spinney. When we arrived, there was no giant rhubarb either there or in the garden, but plenty of hemlock, which we regularly removed, along with other noxious weeds.

4. Banging in the attic. Very mysterious. First, there was no furniture in the attic, it was completely bare, yet in 1968, for several nights before our son Daniel was born, as I lay in bed in the middle bedroom, I heard what sounded like sofas being pushed around by someone wearing army boots. Wanting to get to sleep, I told myself that old houses do creak, or it might be the wind. Then I realised the noise was more than just creaks and the night was perfectly still, no wind, and no storm. I didn't feel afraid, just wished 'they' would shut up. I was told the sequel to this story some years later by my parents, who hadn't wanted to scare me. They had come over from England to stay while I had the baby and on the night that Daniel was born, they also heard noises in the attic. 'It sounded like great heavy books, like ledgers, being dropped on the floor and moved about.' My father got out to investigate and started to go up the attic stairs. Suddenly he saw the bottom half of the sash window on the landing being pushed up – yes, up – and it hadn't been opened for years. No one was doing it. He hurried back to bed, and the window was still open next morning. There had been no storm and the rain did not come lashing in. Quite a quiet, peaceful night in fact. He had been a soldier in the First World War and won a medal for bravery, but he was going no further.

5. Toy train set. This was not a ghost story, but an interesting glimpse of life in the rectory during the war, and told to me by Miss Rose Finey, whose father had been my husband's predecessor as rector. She and her brother had a toy train set, which they kept laid out in the attic. They were evacuated during the war and the rectory was taken over as accommodation by the German soldiers. When they returned after the war, they were interested to see that the train set was still laid out, had been very well maintained and obviously played with by the soldiers, but with one carriage missing – for a keepsake?

Footnote: (not referred to in article).

Later, we furnished the attic rooms and had several girl students from Sark and Alderney using them from time to time. We heard no more noises – we thought, until one night, when, just as it was beginning to get light, I was awakened by screaming from the middle attic room and found a quivering teenager saying she had seen a German soldier. We had never told her about these noises and having looked for rational explanations, like shadows from the light shade etc, decided to tell her about Marcus's soldier, and she described what she saw, which matched with his ghost of previous years. Later, I had the opportunity to ask a former student if she had ever heard anything when she slept in the end attic bedroom and she had also heard bumping from the middle room, but she had never felt afraid and the bumping ceased once we had furnished the room and her sister also came to board.

However, a cousin and her husband, who came for a short holiday to the rectory a couple of years after we had moved in, told that they had also heard noises in the floorboards. At that time, I had thought they were referring to mice. Many years later, when we met up again, I told them about our visitations and then they said, 'Yes, we thought it was a ghost we heard, but we didn't want to scare you.'

Our soldier never left me feeling afraid. I think he was just curious to see who was living in the house now and would really have been quite friendly.

CHRISTINE SHAW,

St Antony,

Clos des Cornus,

St Martin's.