Winter Spirits

By Leigh Green

Winter Spirits is a ghost story, set in a Victorian mansion. It follows the course of one of the tenants, whose job it is to collect the rent in the landlord's absence. On his rounds, he gets to know everyone in the house, including the mysterious woman on the first floor. She sets off a chain of events that makes him reconsider everything and challenge the safety of his sceptical mind. Winter Spirits is a novella of approximately 27,000 words and has nine chapters.

 

'At the bottom of the stairs, I instantly felt so distant from the normal, rational world, as though I was in a foreign land that had suddenly become hostile. A feeling of isolation crept over me and with it the subtle mist of a presence that was looking in on me, detecting and assessing me. With this in my mind, I walked on tiptoe so as not to disturb whatever might be there, as though the quietness of my movements would give me an advantage. I felt like an ancient hunter living on his instincts, but in that no man's land I did not know how obvious or stealthy I was being. I felt I was in uncharted territory and would wake a sleeping phantom'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leigh Green
• Release date: Sep 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781291784879

Leigh Green

I live in the south west of England, near Bristol as I have all my life and am a full-time working man. I write in my spare time for my own entertainment. I hope you enjoy my books.

Book preview

Winter Spirits

Leigh Green

First published March 2014

Version 2 released June 2016

Copyright © 2014 Leigh Green

All rights reserved

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ISBN Numbers

978-1-291-78487-9

ISBN 13: 978-1502797360

ISBN 10: 1502797364

leigh-green.wix.com/leigh

To Cathryn

Foreword

Seeing and experiencing the presence of a ghost is a strange and confusing experience that causes the senses to be evaluated and re-evaluated and everything in the mind to be questioned. It causes beliefs and knowledge to be re-thought and a question is posed to the self, Is all that you see always real? or does the mind place an image in the mind’s eye every now and then?

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All I know is the experience I had was very clear and very real. ‘I was in my house, an ordinary nineteen sixties semi-detached, it was a normal day and just getting dark outside. I was going downstairs from the first floor bedroom and as I approached the top of the stairs I saw a figure below. The figure of a girl in a long white dress and she skipped along from the kitchen to the lounge, across the hall, from left to right. Although the figure was unfamiliar, for a split second I tried to justify who it was and put the image into the frame of someone who it could have been. The nearest fit was my daughter and for a moment I thought it might have been her. However, my daughter was older and taller and was upstairs in her room. Having realised that I was in complete shock and I was really taken aback, I became confused and disorientated.  I nervously descended the stairs and went into the lounge where the ghostly figure had gone a few seconds previously, only to find my wife asleep on the sofa, alone, oblivious to everything. One by one I checked all the rooms downstairs, to find there was no one there. The ghost I had seen wore a white old fashioned dress and had long fair hair - she was a classic. It was that ghostly sighting that brought me to write this book.

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Introduction

In heaven above there are angels, kind spirits who look over every living soul, guiding them along from their very beginning to the final end. Whereas in the netherworld below, in hell, there are the fallen ones, demonic evil creatures, who prey on the living, tempting them and leading them astray. In between these two states, there is Earth, a crowded place of shared occupancy. Shared between the living and the lost souls of ghostly spirits, who cannot detect each other.

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So for most they never have an encounter with one of the others. The living never see a lost soul whose direction has not yet been found and a ghost may never have a reason to communicate with the living, who they are no longer a part of. However, there are places, times and people who can spark coincidences and clashes between these two worlds. When these worlds collide there are places both can see, places that have stood the test of time. Times when such significant events occurred, that an opening becomes triggered, triggered across the dimensions of time and space. Then there are the protagonists, agents who are blessed or cursed with extra perception that enables them to build a bridge between, so that a living soul can face a lost one.

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It is my belief that I lived in a place at a time of particular susceptibility in the company of one such protagonist. I was unaware of the sequence of events as they unfolded and remained sceptical to the end.

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Winter Spirits

Chapter I

It was Friday, December 13th 2013 and on my winter walk I saw the mighty Stag emerge from the woods and graze in the open fields. As I approached he stood across the path blocking my way, his black eyes wide in his frost coated head, his great antlers high and magnificent. In those few moments of our meeting as our eyes locked, he stared into me and in his eyes I felt he had all the winter spirits in him.

It was bitterly cold everywhere, not only outside but in the house too. All around there was a festive feeling in the air as Christmas decidedly approached. In the house there was a goodwill buzz going around, people walked about with distracted smiles on their faces, saying hello to each other when they usually wouldn't even look at each other. Some had gone so far as to decorate their doors with tinsel and cards and some even had put proper wreaths up.

It was Friday 13th, which was supposed to be unlucky, but I didn’t feel unlucky. I wasn’t prone to superstition. The house was a huge detached Victorian, Gothic s mansion. It was quite square looking from a distance, with high windows and high angled roofs that pointed ever upwards. It was very well appointed and was adorned with striking stone features. It was built with materials of top quality when things were made to last, when it was never dreamt of to cut back, when a structure was created to last as long as possible. On the large dominant front gable, a huge finial pierced up into the sky, like a man’s finger pointing to emphasise the ever present gloom overhead. On each corner and at regular intervals, just beneath the rickety cast iron guttering, stone gargoyles crouched, facing outwards, covering every main point of the compass, put there to warn off evil spirits. The gargoyles had crazed expressions on them, looks of fixed shock and pain and mad horrific laughter. To the north they looked with snarls, to the south they faced with gritted teeth, to the east they stared out sombrely and blankly and to the west they wore a look of open defiance.

The house stood at the top of a T-junction and so from its large front windows you could look across the long front garden left and right along the busy main road and also down the smaller side street straight ahead. To the outside world the house went unnoticed as it was set back so far, but at one time the house would have been more at the centre of things and lived in by one big Victorian family.

It would’ve been a grand and happy place, lavishly decorated, buzzing with life, with lots of children, many servants and at the head of it all the wife and husband. It would've been like that for at least the first fifty to sixty years of its life. Now it was divided up into many separate dwelling places, rooms, flats and flatlets and was generally run down and in some need of repair. In need of repair and just general cleaning and care. There was plenty of damp and dust in every corner, it hung in the air, it was everywhere. The damp inhabited the dark places, the places that never got warm, like the sides of walls that had no light and underneath the windows where moisture dripped. The dust filled the corners of window frames and coated the uneven creaky floorboards, it built up in drifts and blew around in gusts.

The house had too many interior doors, too many for each room to cope with in fact. For example, in the kitchen, which was quite a large six-yard square with its various cupboards and units clinging around its edges, there were four exit ways to choose from. The main door out of it was to the high ceilinged and draughty hallway, which led on out again to the front door, the main way everybody used to get in and out of the house. Then there was the door the opposite side of it, which led out to the conservatory, through which there was a further west wing, containing a host of