We managed to get out of Paris after a year or so and landed a great country house in Orgeval, about an hour to the west. When we met the landlord I don’t recall anything being mentioned about there being a contentious ghost living in the house. What he did say though was,”Don’t open up that top room.” It was a small room at the top of the stairs and it was padlocked. One uneventful night, exuberant on LSD, we (or maybe it was just Wells) felt entitled to ignore that admonition and busted in to the forbidden room. As it turned out that was a large mistake. Mark some of the events that followed:
Frequent sightings of this spectre hovering about the living room rafters. Like a thin white sheet. France is full of ghosts, especially the older houses – ghosts of the Revolution and the guillotine and the Terror, ghosts of the wars, and just old souls who died in difficult circumstances and never left the earthly plane. Didier Rosafy, the owner of the house, said, “I don’t believe in des telles choses (such things) but there seem to be more of such things happening in this house.” Small consolation for the band.
A few of us had the same nightmare: you are strangely asleep but dreaming that you’re sleeping but awake at the same time. When in your dream you want to wake up you feel something strangling you as soon as you try to rise. Then the pressure would relent when you settle back down. The pressure would fade but not the feeling of malevolence and menace and of your own powerlessness. This happened for months.
I turned the kitchen tap on to fill a bottle and the water went anywhere but in the bottle, all around the outsides of it but not in.
In the kitchen I heard a tap tap noise as of someone walking. Then the handle to the kitchen door turned, the door opened and closed, the handle turned again and again the tap tap as of footsteps.
We had a dog named Sabine that mysteriously went missing in the house. We searched the walled garden and all the rooms in the house but couldn’t find her anywhere. A bit later Doc decided to look again in Ronnie’s room which we had already searched thoroughly. He opened the door and Sabine came flying out of the room as if she’d been hurled and Doc staggered backwards almost down the stairs ashen in countenance. Doc was a big guy, a football player, and very hard to scare but whatever came out of that room shook him badly.
We never found out what poor soul was kept in that room and perhaps died there but I was content ever after to admit of the presence of spirits and their capacity to interact with us, the incorporated ones. It was all very scary while it was happening.
This is Rod’s recollection of those events:
As I remember it, a couple weeks after we moved in we had a job in Chalon’s Sur Marne and Fanchon came out to take care of the dogs and cat. She called us because she had seen “the man” at the top of the stairs and the animals had all freaked out.
Rosafy came out a few weekends after we moved in, and sitting in the garden talking, asked if we ever noticed something strange happening in the house. We immediately said yes and he told us the story of how he bought the place which was a barn and rebuilt it into a weekend country house. On their first weekend in the country his wife saw “the man”, freaked out and would never come out again, which was why he rented it to us. That was when he told us not to open the door.
He said he had asked about the history of the property and the original owners of the farm had a son that was crazy. Rather than put him in an asylum, they made a room for him in the barn where he lived and died. I always assumed that was the room.
The Sabine story was when you guys went to the Auberge for dinner and I stayed with the animals. We were sitting on the couch when they start getting weird and Sabine went barking into the kitchen where she let out a howl. I went into the kitchen but couldn’t find her so I drove down to the auberge, got you guys and we started the search.
I have other stories I remember too.
