One of the other spectral residents of my childhood home was a rather pretty young woman who, although she appeared from time to time more often made her presence felt by her heart-rending sighs and an icy chill. These manifestations were restricted to the scullery, formerly the old dairy and the pantry which had ,in the past been part of the dairy and was filled with low stone shelves for settling the cream. We felt that it was therefore safe to assume that she was a former dairy maid, perhaps one who had been crossed in love.
I discovered the truth about our sorrowful little ghost quite by chance during a conversation with an old gentleman who's family had lived in the village from back as far as the Conqueror.
I was siting at a crossroads about a mile away from my house and he approached me as I sat resting before walking up the last hill before home. “Jenny won't mind you keeping her company.” He remarked with a smile, and of course I asked “Who's Jenny.”
Jenny was indeed a dairy maid who had been employed by the hall to look after the dairy. She and her family lived in the farm house and her father was a cowman on the estate. She was sixteen when she fell in love with a lad from the next village and they started to walk our together. All went well until the young man decided that he preferred the charms the daughter of a farmer several miles away. He had met her on market day and when he discovered that she was not only pretty but she was an only child and so sole heiress to her fathers large farm. I suppose the temptation was great in those hard times and my poor little dairy maid never stood a chance.
She pleaded with her faithless suitor but in vain ,and a few weeks later she watched them celebrate their engagement at the May Fair.
Jenny went home quietly by herself and while the house was empty hung herself from a huge beam in the old dairy.
Her father found her when he returned from the fields that night ,his heart was broken as she was his only daughter and had been the mainstay of the family, caring for her little brother after the mothers death in childbirth. It was only when they were preparing her for burial that they village women discovered her secret, she was to bare the child of the boy she had loved.
The church refused permission for her to be buried in consecrated ground and so the poor father buried her at the crossroads, knowing as he did so that the young man would have to pass her grave many times in years to come and would be forced to remember the consequence of his faithlessness.
The father need not have worried, The girl Ted married was a shrew of the first water and made his life a misery for the rest of his life. The farm did not prosper and he died aged only thirty caught in a severe blizzard.
No one in our house was afraid of little Jenny when she sighed out her sorrow, but on the few occasions that she allowed herself to be seem some catastrophe always befell soon afterwards. The last time I saw her a small child from a neighbouring farm was killed by a milk wagon a few days later. Poor Jenny,I put flowers on her pathetic little grave every year on fair day until I moved away for good.
Next time I have a mystery and a bad tempered ghost to tell about.
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