The Piggy-Path Ghost

by Wendy
(London)

My grandmother’s house was on a road that had been named after the hay mill that was once there. Once the whole surrounding area had been farmland, In fact one large field still remained at the top of the road.

I saw my ghost on the ‘Piggy-Path’ as it was called and it was much too narrow to drive pigs to market along at least when I used to use it only wide enough for one person really. On one side of the ‘Piggy-Path’ was a modern grammar school with playing fields bounded by a seven foot chain-link fence and on the other side was dense, thickly wooded bushes and brambles with a monastery beyond.

If you used the ‘Piggy-Path’ you saved a lot of time walking to the village from my grandmother’s and I was on a return trip. So, here I was walking along probably dreaming away as I did at that age and wondering what the monastery was like beyond all the greenery when I looked up and saw a woman walking toward me. I remember she had a light raincoat and headscarf and was carrying a shopping bag in her left hand I didn’t look too closely I just looked down at my feet and moved to one side so she could walk past. Simple as that but she didn’t go past me as expected so I looked up and around and there was no sign of her. The ‘piggy-path’ was a more or less straight line and being half way along it I could see all the way back and all the way forward. I didn’t feel scared I felt mystified. There was nowhere she could have gone in the few seconds it took for me to look down and then up again. It wasn’t till I got home that I started to feel uncomfortable and for a while I thought about it a lot. Sorry it isn’t a very exciting story but I think a lot of times ghosts are seen but unrecognised as ghosts because they look ordinary and are in some kind of loop of their previous lives and perhaps we tune into it for reasons unexplained.

After a few years, I had another strange experience when in Spain shared by my mother this time and I saw another ghost when in the grounds of a Tudor manor which is the more traditional stomping ground of ghosts but then I seemed to grow out of it and I can’t say I’m sorry.