A bit of a ghost story today from Julia Roberts - no, not that "Julia Roberts" - but still a "'pretty woman'". I digress, so let's just get on with this ghostly tale from Julia.
"My grandmother was born and bred in the house where she lived all of her life in Cornwall. She was a friendly but firm old soul with a large family and therefore had lots of grand and great-grand children.
From the age of about seventy-five, until she died at the ripe old age of ninety-eight, she always sat in the same corner of her living room, from morning until night, gently rocking herself in her old, wooden rocking chair.
Eventually granny went to where all good grandmothers go, after they have had their fill of rocking and life in general.
As the house was now empty, my father, after much negotiation with the rest of the family, decided to move into granny's house. He soon set about modernising things but somehow couldn't get rid of the old rocking chair which remained in the corner of the living room.
Finally my mother flipped and said the chair had to go. It didn't fit in with the other, more modern furnishings. Dad agreed to chop up it up. Not sure why, as he could probably have sold the chair, but that was what he decided.
Mum and dad were in bed the following night and heard strange creaks and noises from the attic immediately above their bedroom. In the morning, when dad had gone to work, mum plucked up courage and went to investigate the attic.
As she looked inside there was the old rocking chair and, as she watched, it started to gently rock backwards and forwards. It sent a chill up mum's spine.
In the evening dad admitted that he hadn't been able to throw the chair away for sentimental reasons and had therefore stored it up in the attic.
Mum reluctantly relented and the rocking chair was placed temporarily back in the corner of the living room, it's rightful place.
A couple of weeks later mum moved the chair to another room. After doing so mum and dad found that the chair would start to rock when anyone entered the room. Dad said it was just a coincidence, or the wind from the door being opened, but mum felt it was granny's ghost at work. She didn't feel comfortable and the rocking, when entering the room, went on for days and days.
Dad was under pressure from mum to sort it out. In a moment of bravado, or madness, he took the chair into the garden and started to break it up into pieces. Mum and I were horrified when we saw what he was doing, we rushed outside, but it was too late to stop him.
Nothing immediately happened, until we returned to the house and the living room. There, lying on the floor, was the new fireplace which had been recently fitted. It had come right away from the wall and lay shattered. Dad said it was Granny's Revenge.
Nowadays, when all is quiet, there is still sometimes a creak to be heard from the floorboards, in the corner where granny used to gently rock her chair. It's a constant reminder never to mess with granny because her ghost is always watching."
With Halloween growing near, it's a good time for a ghost stories. My brother and I were trading ghost stories when he recalled something he'd seen on TV as a child. There were no History, Travel or Syfy channels in the late 60s, but the program was definitely a documentary. It featured haunted houses and the people who lived in them. One of the interviews was with German-born actress, Elke Sommer, who played opposite Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther movie called "A Shot in the Dark".
Elke Sommer and her husband, Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams, lived in Benedict Canyon in North Beverly Hills, California. They claimed that a ghost was living in their house. I can remember feeling spooked after watching this program. Sommer and her husband reported that they had a ghost in their dining room. The chairs would move around at night. Marks were put on the floor below the chairs before they went to bed, and in the morning the chairs wouldn't be standing on the marks anymore. The chairs would be all over the place.
In the middle of the night, Sommer and her husband would wake up to what sounded like a dinner party going on downstairs in the dining room. They heard voices, chairs scooting, glasses tinkling, and silverware clanging. Yet when they would venture downstairs, no one was there. Sommer said, "Things would move all the time and it would be very noisy and the usual poltergeist nonsense, you know." The ghost was described as being a middle-aged man wearing a white shirt.
After attempting to battle the spirits themselves with no relief, Sommer called in some help, contacting the Parapsychological Institute at UCLA. When Life photographer Allan Grant arrived at the house to take some pictures, he was a skeptic - but not so when he left. He said:
"Something happened that spooked me. On one roll of film that I shot in a particular room where they first spotted the ghost there were about four or five frames of film that were progressively fogged down to the end of the frame, giving it a ghostlike appearance, especially (of) Joe Hyams, who was in the shot. When that was processed and I took a look at it, I thought, there's no way that would happen...in the center of a roll...something else had happened that I couldn't explain and I've spent years as a photographer and that had never happened to me before....Something did happen in that house. "
The haunting continued. One night, awakened by a knocking on their bedroom door, Hyams opened the door to discover that a mysterious fire had broken out. He and Sommer managed to escape through a window. Shortly thereafter, they moved out of the house permanently. Hyams wrote a book about the haunting experience called "The Day I Gave Up the Ghost. "Evidently, though, the ghost didn't give up. The "severely haunted house" at 2633 Benedict Canyon was bought and sold more than seventeen times since Sommers vacated it, and many have reported ghostly phenomena.
Oddly enough, this ghost story made it to the pages of a 1965 and 1966 Jehovah's Witness publications, "AWAKE!" and "THE WATCHTOWER". Yet to be found, are the results of the investigation conducted by UCLA.
A police force has revealed a catalogue of more than 150 supernatural and paranormal cases which have been reported to them in recent years.
Details of investigations involving ghosts, UFO's, aliens and fairies were released by Devon and Cornwall Police after a Freedom of Information request. In some examples people have called the police force to deal with spooks in their houses, or even to a field infested with fairies. However, most of the paranormal reports revolve around UFO sighting, and peaked in 1996 when a variety of strangely shaped spaceships were spotted.
In odd news the 1996 peak also coincided with the release of the movie Independence Day and the popularity of the X Files on TV. Other odd examples reported to Devon and Cornwall Police include someone who said they had encounters abusive aliens in a field and another who claimed to be one.
