| We recently received the following from a lady who lived at Shrubbery House for a brief time in the 1950s. We would like to thank Unity MacLean for allowing us to reproduce her story that began with unusual happenings on a Saturday morning.......... |
| The story is not very remarkable but then most phenomena is of the ‘could
be explained reasonably’ kind. I believe we bought the house in 1955 or 56. It was in a terrible, terrible state. Colonel Molesworth and his wife were very old and infirm and lived in just two rooms downstairs and seldom went upstairs. The house was filthy, windows were broken, the roof was in terrible repair and the walls were wet. There was a lot of dry rot. And worst of all the house and outhouses were overrun with rats. We even found a dead rat under the floorboards in the drawing room. The garden was hopelessly overgrown. Why my mother wanted to buy the house defeats me, but we all set about the task of bringing this beautiful house back to the pristine condition it was in when Sir Hubert Miller lived there. It took many years! Every weekend my father and his father would work in the garden. By now we had a huge and working vegetable garden. One Saturday morning as we were sitting on the back door steps shelling peas my mother said to me and my sister, “is that Grandad upstairs?” My sister said it must be, as whoever had walked through the upstairs of the house had gone into his bedroom. My mother called upstairs that lunch would be at 1’ o clock. Getting no response she went up to his room, but, on finding no one around, she came back downstairs and said - “that's funny, I could have sworn I heard him upstairs.” We all asked him when he came in for lunch if he had been upstairs at all that morning, but he said no. He agreed that recently he had also heard foot steps outside his room, but never heard anyone going into his room, just footfalls. Over the next few months we heard the same footsteps again and again going from the newer part of the house where the bedrooms were, to the old cottage upstairs. Although it made me very nervous, everyone else thought it a hoot and my mother thought it was Sir Hubert casting an eye over the renovations we had done. After about three months the foot steps were never heard again by any of us. Sir Hubert’s private chapel was on the ground floor. A huge room with windows overlooking the lawns down to the river. Rather irreverently, I guess, we turned this into a games room with an upright piano in one corner. After dark, if you walked past the windows you could see lights or candles flickering in the room. On investigation there would never be any lights or candles or anything out of place in the room. One day I was practicing the piano and I could feel someone behind me, watching me. I turned around with a jolt and the piano slammed shut with a huge bang! I ran from the room and very seldom went into the room alone again! This could well be my imagination or my lousy piano-playing, but lots of people felt a very eerie presence in the old chapel, it was always cold and remote. |
| Unity MacLean. February 2006 |
