Why I believe in ghosts and you should too
After buying an old house in France and packing it with people and joy, Debora Robertson didn’t know that an old neighbourhood friend would also be interested in paying her a visit too. And then something very strange happened
We owe a lot to Charles Dickens and his invention of the modern spirit of Christmas. Without him and A Christmas Carol, what would we put on those posh biscuit tins and traditional cards? The images of snowy London streets, plum puddings and a turkey as big as a boy pervade our collective memories. And – because all pleasure, particularly in Victorian times, had to come with a lesson, Marley’s ghost appears to show Ebenezer Scrooge the misery of his fate if he remained as solitary as an oyster and failed to change his ways, to embrace kindness and happiness and goodwill to all.
This Christmas, I’m feeling particularly fortunate to have a ghost of my own, albeit one less chain-encumbered and more benign than Marley. I haven’t seen the ghost in our house, but I have felt him.
Three years ago, my husband and I tried out that well-worn summer-paperback plot of falling in love with a crumbling house overlooking a small harbour in the south of France and, within the year, selling up in London and moving every last dog, cat and teaspoon 1,000km south.
The first time we walked into this house with the estate agent it had been empty and shut up for a long time. On that first visit, we opened the shutters and let in the light. Motes of dust floated through the air. It didn’t feel like an empty house. It felt happy. As we walked through the rooms and I took in all of the patterned tiles, none of it matching, the pink marble stairs and the painted windows, the etched glass and curling wrought-iron balconies, my first thought was that whoever built this house built it with their whole heart and filled it with everything they loved.
We spent a couple of years investing in fripperies like a new roof, central heating, air conditioning, and wiring that allows you to use the cooker and washing machine at the same time without shorting the whole house. We cleaned and painted and planted a garden. Finally, we began welcoming visitors, and this summer, we hosted our nephew Angus and his fiancee Olivia’s wedding, filling the garden with fairy lights, an oyster stall, tables full of salads, cheese and barbecued lamb.
A few days afterwards, when all of the visitors had left, the plates and glasses were put away, the beds stripped and laundry done, I was having a cup of tea with my mother and she said, “I saw a ghost, you know.”
I wasn’t terribly surprised. My mother has what they call “the gift”. This isn’t her first ghost. My Great Auntie Lily, my mother’s aunt, was Lancashire’s most celebrated medium in that time after the war when you could fill a village hall with women, almost always women, who wanted to know if you had a message from their John or Bert or Harry.
In our family, we’re not afraid of ghosts. As they say on Hallmark cards, they’re just friends we haven’t met yet. So when my mum said she’d seen a ghost I was more curious than alarmed.
On the day after the wedding she was sitting in the orangerie, the small lantern of a room tacked onto the end of the house, a luminous full stop at the end of the sitting room and dining room. She looked up and saw a man walking past the dining table towards her. “I knew he was a ghost, that if I looked away he’d be gone. He was young, perhaps in his thirties, dark haired, dressed in black trousers and a white shirt with the collar removed, open at the neck. He was wearing a waistcoat embroidered all over the front with flowers.”
“He looked so happy. He made me feel happy. He was carrying a glass of wine in each hand and he walked towards me, like someone at a party.”
She looked away and he was gone.
Almost every surface that can be covered in flowers in this house is covered in flowers, from the roses and cherry blossoms painted on the staircase window to the sunflowers and narcissus on the mouldings. When my mother described the waistcoat, it made me think of Joseph Voisin who my research told me had built this house. He was the son of Jean Voisin, a prominent 19th-century wine merchant, a trade Joseph followed his father into. Jean Voisin built a large, Haussman-style building at the far end of the Quai de la Résistance (now a restaurant called the Château du Port) as his family home and business headquarters. His son, Joseph, built our house at the other end of the port and today you will find cafes, restaurants and boutiques in the warehouses from which they would load wine onto barges before they were transported up the Canal du Midi.
Was this cheerful ghost with his fancy waistcoat and glasses of wine Joseph Voisin? I don’t know, but I want to believe it was him so I will. I shared this small indulgence in a newsletter I write about living in France. A couple of days later, my cleaning lady came and, after the usual small-coffee small talk, she looked at me nervously, and said: “I read your story. I’ve seen your ghost, you know. I didn’t want to tell you in case it would upset you.”
But I am not upset or afraid. I want to believe that after the house that he loved so much had been empty for so long, it made Joseph happy that during that wedding weekend, we’d filled its rooms with beautiful young people, with life and noise and love and that we’d eaten great food and drunk great wine, wine made from grapes grown in the same vineyards that had made his family’s fortune over a century ago. So quickly, the house of his heart has become the house of my heart.
I appreciate for many, Christmas isn’t inherently a happy time. The pain of loss, grief, estrangement, distance and illness becomes all the more challenging when thrown into relief against the backdrop of codified jollity we see all around us. Recently, I watched an interview with the actor Richard E Grant in his ravishing Georgian rectory in south London. He sits in his yellow drawing room surrounded by the tumble of pieces he and his wife, Joan Washington, collected during their long marriage. He describes a moment a few days before she died of cancer, when she gave him and their daughter, Olivia, an instruction: “I charge you both to find a pocketful of happiness in each day.”
I hope wherever you are this Christmas, and whatever your circumstances, you put some happiness back into your own walls.
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