A Note About a Ghost in Bridgwater
Thirty years ago I was moving house, looking at properties for sale in and around Bridgwater. One afternoon I visited a house for sale off the Wembdon Road. The access was strange; you drove through gates off the road into the grounds of Aspen Court where a handsome Victorian Villa now houses an opticians practice and across the tarmac car park some blocks of utilitarian low rise apartments had been built in red engineering brick. Behind those flats was the house I looked at, a single, modern, family home in its own plot, nicely designed in the 60s or 70s, and clearly a quality build, it even had a small swimming pool in the garden, but all in a strangely isolated setting. I was shown around by a man who was living there, a friend of the owner or his tenant or both.
All I remember of our conversation is that before I left he told me that there was ghost there, sometimes seen in the garden. It was an odd thing to say — hardly the way to sell a house, but he wasn’t there to make a sale. I looked at the stainless steel stair rail and the flush mahoghany doors and said that it wasn’t the kind of house you expected to find a ghost in. “No,” he said “not from this house, but there was a house here before, a long time ago. Back in the Civil War and the Monmouth Rebellion a lot of bad things happened round Bridgwater, there was a lot of score-settling and there was big house out here on this site. He’s from then”
I thought nothing of it except how odd the place was and how unlikely the ghost was and went on my way. It wasn’t somewhere I wanted to live.
Twenty years later my work took me to an appointment with an elderly man living alone with a Jack Russell terrier in a one bedroomed flat on the ground floor of the low rise brick apartments. I entered and introduced myself and by way of casual conversation remarked that I hadn’t been in the gates since I looked at a house and how I had been told that there was a ghost there.
“I seen it” he said quick as a flash. “ He walked right through here, the dog went mad, he walked in here and out through there and there’s no way out through there. Nobody believed me when I told them but I saw him clear as day, he walked straight through and the dog went bloody mad.”
I felt a chill, to say the least.