October spooks

How I Stopped Feeling Spooked by the Ghostly Presence in the Barn

Wandering in the dark, I would always feel a desperate spirit lingering in the doorway

In my early twenties, I was living on a farm in Cornwall.

Most of my first year there was spent living in the main house. During that year, my boyfriend and I built our own yurt and were given permission by the community to erect it in a field known as “the old goat yard.”

It was a lovely spot, beneath an old leat that channelled water around the edge of the farm, and beside a small orchard.

The quickest way to reach the old goat yard from the main house was to walk directly past an enormous old barn, known as the lower barn, and to climb over the metal field gate. This was to be our home from here on and we built a raised wooden floor, installed a wood burner, and lined the yurt with a woollen layer to keep it warm and cosy in the winter.

When I set up my small business of the once-a-week bakery, my business partner and I would spend every Tuesday night baking from 7 pm until 2 or 3 on Wednesday morning. When we finally finished for the night, we would both stumble off to bed, exhausted from a night of kneading and lifting dozens of loaves.

She would go off to her bedroom in the house while I would make my way outside, through the kitchen yard, out of the main farm entrance, across the car park, and then down into the shadows where a grassy path led past the large barn. From the first time I made this dark-of-night journey, I felt the eerie presence of a spirit almost trying to grab at me as soon as I reached that opening to the lower barn.

It was a raised opening, beginning around four feet off the ground, and so there was the added eeriness of a figure looming above me, reaching out to grab a hold of me.

That first time, it shocked me but I decided that I was just imagining things because…well, darkness in the very late night and extreme tiredness all led to wild imaginary occurrences.

Following that, whenever I passed that spot at night, despite that eerie feeling hitting me each and every time, I would tell myself that I was imagining it. Nevertheless, I would scoot past and hop over that gate as fast as my legs would carry me.

It turned out I wasn’t the only one

As Christmas approached, my boyfriend and I were planning to head up to Wales to visit his parents for the holiday period.

A large group of friends who had been living down in West Cornwall had come to stay at the farm for a few months and were planning to be there for most of the Christmas period. Another mutual friend, Kel, would be visiting and so we suggested that she might want to stay in our yurt. This would help us by keeping a fire lit in the wood burner and keep the space dry.

It was a perfect arrangement, not to mention that our cat, Piglet, would have company and someone to feed her.

The day we returned to the farm, we arrived as evening was settling over the land, and all our friends were gathered in the upper barn, which had been converted to be a usable space with a nice, large kitchen area. They happened to have cooked a large quantity of food and we were invited to join them to eat.

Kel was still there, although she had vacated our yurt and was sleeping in the end room of the barn. As we talked over dinner, I asked her how she had got on staying in the yurt.

She replied that it had been a wonderful, warm, and cosy space and that she had loved it. And then there was hesitation as she prepared herself to say something else.

“But what about that ghost in the barn?” She exclaimed. “That freaked me right out.

“Every time I went past, I felt a frightening presence and would run for my life until I reached the yurt. Piglet was my saviour — always there to comfort me when I got there.

“Don’t you guys feel it?” She asked.

“YES!” I replied, almost too fast. I was that excited to discover that it wasn’t just me.

At which point, the conversation around the whole table zoned in on this ghost, and everybody piped up with their own experience of this ominous presence. But, once everyone had shared their moments of feeling spooked out of their minds, and quiet fell again, Sue, a lady in her sixties who had lived at the farm for many years, shared a story I had never heard.

Once upon a time, a young man had hung himself in that barn. The reason I don’t remember but that presence is believed to be the ghost of his mother, still refusing to leave the place where her son took his own life.

Everybody who passes that point feels the sense of a woman reaching out to grab them. She is presumably desperate for someone to help her — either to bring her son back to her or to help her to be released from the curse of being stuck there.

The story actually helped to soothe my own fear

After learning that not only was I not alone in sensing this spooky presence but that there was a story behind the spirit that lingers there, I actually felt more at ease.

Following my learning of this, I began to speak to her as I passed her by at those unearthly times each Wednesday morning.

I would tell her that I was so very sorry for her loss and that she needed to forgive herself for her son deciding to take his own life. I felt that I wanted to assure her that it was only she who was holding herself hostage and that she needed to give herself peace, as her son had sought to do for himself.

I don’t think any of what I said worked, or perhaps she just didn’t hear me, for I never felt her presence any less. The only positive was that I stopped feeling spooked or threatened in any way by her presence.

What are your thoughts?

Do you believe that the spirits of dead people hang around and can be felt, seen, or heard by the living?

Or do you think it’s all a load of rubbish and that, in the case of the farm in Cornwall, the barn simply lent itself to spooking people, with its big dark opening? Hence, everyone having the same experience.

Because I certainly have considered this side of things. But, then again, I have friends who claim to be spiritual mediums and are sure as the day is long that they are hearing the voices of dead people speaking directly to them and through them. The things they are told by these spirits would be wildly coincidental if they aren’t genuinely being spoken to by them.

Coincidence or not? Do the ghosts of dead people still wander in our presence or are the mass global festivities of Hallowe’en, Samhain, and The Day of The Dead simply based on a load of nonsense?

What do you think?

October is spooky month and I love it. Check out the first of my Dartmoor ghost tales:

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