Copyright oggbashan October 2022
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons.
(Author's Note: I try to avoid typos, but my eyesight is compromised by cancer. I use two spellcheckers and print out in large typeface before submitting but I cannot guarantee that everything is typo-free -- because I can't see them. That is particularly true of the sub-title because I am typing blindly into a box I can't really see because it is so small.)
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I have a problem. My father was a tenant farmer, but he is retiring and giving up the farm in six months' time. I was running my accountancy business from an outbuilding on the farm and still living with my parents. But I will be homeless and without office space when my parents move into a retirement flat.
I need somewhere to live and work but the new houses being built in the village are far beyond what I could afford.
I couldn't get a council house. As a single man, my needs were so poorly regarded that I couldn't even get on the council's housing list, and even if I were to be on that list, I wouldn't get anywhere until long after I had died.
Then an old abandoned house, known as the Canon's House, that had been unoccupied for decades was put up for auction. It was in a poor state, with holes in the roof, smashed windows, hidden by overgrown wisteria and the garden was a jungle. But it might be affordable for me.
I went to the building society in the town and asked what level of mortgage I could get. They looked at the auction details and told me that the most I could expect was 50% of the stated reserve price until it was habitable. then, perhaps, up to 75% of the valuation but no more.
If the house sold at the reserve price, a 50% mortgage would mean with the money I had saved with the building society I could buy it and have about £10,000 for immediate repairs.
But there was a small note in the auction catalogue:
"The house is reputed to be haunted. Any buyer is warned that the sale is conditional on the buyer understanding that any supernatural events would not void the sale."
I knew that the house was haunted. When a teenager, I like other village teenagers, had visited the house after dark, even at Halloween. We had seen the ghosts and fled from them at Halloween when they seemed far more solid than at other times. Back in the 1860s it had been occupied by two single women, sisters, who had been engaged to Army officers who had died in a shipwreck when on their way to Cyprus.
When the sisters got the news that both their fiancés were dead, they hung themselves from the banisters on the upstairs landing.
Their father had built the house in the early 19th Century on the remains of a medieval building. The foundations of the older building had still been solid, so he had built the new house on those foundations and to the same footprint. The lower part of the house was medieval stone work with brick above.
The father had died from typhoid just after his younger daughter turned 21. He had left the house to them jointly.
After their suicides their ghosts haunted the house, moving through every room except the attic servants' quarters, sometimes crying and moaning.
The house had changed hands several times in the 19th Century until an old bachelor, Silas, bought it in 1895. He wasn't worried by the ghosts because he slept in a bedroom in what had been the servants' attic where the ghosts didn't go.
By the village standards of the time he was a rich man who could have bought any house in the village but he was almost a miser. He saw the Canon's House as a bargain, and he used to say on the evenings he visited the village public house that the ghosts didn't bother him. He claimed that he would often sit in the main living room on winter evenings in front of a fire and chat to the ghosts, Anna and Emma, for hours. No one believed him.
When he died in the late 1920s his heir was a nephew who was very happy with his investments but he didn't want the Canon's House which was a small part of his estate and in a poor condition even then because Silas had spent no money on maintenance. Of pounds spent a few hundreds of pounds on basic repairs and then let it to a succession of tenants, none of whom stayed long because of the ghosts. But it remained attractive to potential tenants because the rent was so low.
The nephew died in the WW2 blitz leaving everything, including the Canon's House, to the niece, his sister.
When she died in 1955 her heir was a relation in Australia who didn't want the house but it was still tenanted. In 1960 that tenant died and the house gradually became derelict and a playground for the local children.
At the auction, the Canon's House was the final lot. The auction room had gradually emptied as the professional bidders had bought or been outbid for the properties they wanted. Apart from me, there were three other people present. One bid half the reserve price but it was obvious that he wasn't seriously interested. I outbid him by a thousand pounds and won, at less than two thirds of the reserve price. I could pay that much without a mortgage. I wrote a cheque, and subject to completion of the paperwork, I was the new owner.
Technically I was the owner from the fall of the hammer and my payment. My father and I, using his farm equipment, cleared the whole garden. When he gave up the tenancy, his farm equipment might be sold to the new tenant, or if not would go to auction. But it was useful now.
I was worried that the village children might continue to access the house even while work was in progress. But the total number of the village children was only sixteen, all going to schools in another larger village. I arranged for them to help move all the shrubs and trees we cut down to a large bonfire, and paid each of them ten pounds on the understanding that they would keep clear of the building once work started.
I used a cherry picker to strip the wisteria from the building and pile the debris to be taken to9 the bonfire.
We made the lighting of the bonfire, early one evening, as a village event with cakes, beer for the adults, soft drinks for the children, and fireworks.
The next day we put hazard tape around the site. The garden was completely bare and I was surprised at its size at over just over an acre. There were also some outbuildings.
Before I bid I had spoken to the village tradesmen about how much renovation would cost -- the roof, the windows, repointing, rewiring, re-plumbing, including two new bathrooms, a new kitchen etc. Apart from the roof and windows which needed doing urgently, all the other work could be fitted around other jobs as long as I could move in before the end of my father's tenancy.
They all gave me rough estimates because until I had bought the house we didn't know exactly how much work would be needed.
I went back to the building society and asked for a mortgage of 25% of what had been the reserve price. That was agreed and I had finance, probably more than enough, for all the work.
Two months after the paperwork had been completed and three months after my successful bid, the house was waterproof, sound, rewired, re-plumbed with new kitchen and bathrooms. All I had to do was decorate to cover up where new electrical cables and new water pipes had been installed and to change the 1940s wallpaper.
I made what had been the second parlour into my office and spent many hours catching up with my work which had been delayed by the house repairs.
On the first evening after I had moved in I was tired. I sat in the first parlour in front of a coal fire, drinking a pint of the local bitter.
I wasn't surprised when the ghosts appeared either side of me. I had expected them. I stood up, turned round and bowed to them. They executed beautiful curtsies, holding out their large skirts.
"Good evening, George," one of them said. "You're not frightened?"
