My dad tells me he doesn’t believe in ghosts. Somewhat confusingly however, he also says he’s heard one.
When he was in the army, stationed in France as a military musician and stretcher-bearer, he was once stationed at a chateau not far from the front. It seems the old castle was haunted and many of the soldiers reported seeing apparitions of ladies in medieval garb, walking along the halls then turning to walk through a wall that hadn’t been there in times of yore.
One night my dad, a young man then and a bit of a lightweight when it came to alcohol, went out on leave to a bar in town with the guys he was billeted with. I’ve never known him to be a big drinker, and it seems back then he was just the same, quickly getting squiffy and deciding to stumble back to the digs.
He and two other guys were sharing a turret room on the side of the chateau, with access via some perilous winding stone steps which wound around the outer wall. He fell asleep quickly, and was woken sometime later by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs towards the room. They stopped outside and there were three soft knocks on the door.
Thinking it was his roommates, he shouted that the door wasn’t locked, feeling too tired and tipsy to get up and go to the door. After a couple minutes, to his surprise he heard the footsteps continue up past the door, winding up to the roof. They crossed the roof deliberately and stopped.
My father panicked. He thought his roommates had got so drunk they’d somehow missed the room and toppled off the roof. He jumped out of bed, ran up to the roof and looked around.
Nothing.
Running downstairs to the sentry post, he raised the alarm, and a search party bearing torches went all around the grounds, looking for someone who had fallen from the roof in a drunken haze. While this was happening, the roommates returned from the bar in town, drunk, confused but very much alive and wondering what all the fuss was about. They had not been back to the barracks all night.
The mystery went unexplained for several days, and the reputation of the castle and the strange things that had been witnessed there saved my young pa from the worst of the teasing about ‘hearing things in the night’.
As he recounted the story in the same local bar in town later that week, an old man listened intently, nodding sagely to himself at each new detail. When the story was told, he rose from his seat and cleared his throat.
He told the young British soldiers, in near-faultless English, the chateau’s tragic love story. It seems the turret bedroom was once occupied by the beautiful daughter of the local baron. She fell in love with a poor young peasant neighbour, and planned to run away with him.
The night of the planned eloping, her father found the love letters and locked her away, deep inside the castle. Her lover came to her room that night, knocked three times on the door, but heard no reply.
Night after night he returned. Night after night he was disappointed, until one night he went past the room, crossed the roof and threw himself from the ramparts. Ever since, he returns on the night of his death, retracing his steps, vowing his undying love, and disappointed once more, throws himself back to his doom.
Hopefully now enraptured by the gorgeous sounds and vocals of The Miserable Rich, check out the latest album "Miss You in the Days" and head out to one of the forthcoming UK dates commencing next week on April 17th in London.
Me, I'll be at The Deaf Institute in Manchester on Friday the 20th.
No comments:
Post a Comment