The bulk of the dirt.

Springfield Springfield was one of a row of three

cottages built by my great-great-grandfather on Locks Road, which was then a quiet country

lane and a small village on the south coast of Hampshire.

The initial white-painted detached house known as Dorcas Cottage, being my great-great-grandfather's

family home, with the two others being a pair of Adwardian semis, but later for one of

his sons, one of whom was my great-grandfather.

Dorcas Cottage was born from tragedy, being named after my great-grandfather's sister

who was murdered by her boyfriend on a railway bridge in a nearby lane.

Soon after, there were two more tragedies.

In the early 1900s, my grandmother's four-year-old brother, Joe, fell into a copper boiler in

diaphragm scalding.

A few years later, her mother died a slow, painful death at the hands of the consumption.

Some fifty years later, my father, not being one for superstition or paranormal, was

shocked to see what he strongly believed to be a semi-transparent apparition of a lady,

in white, Edwardian-type dress drifting around the side of the tragedy.

My grandmother also used to tell me that she did not like being in that vicinity when walking

back to her house after visiting her brother and sister's late in the evening.

I personally had a very similar experience some years later with the sense of being watched,

and some very strange noises, slash bangs, slash rattles, from inside an adjacent outbuilding.

That haunted spot has since been developed and now accommodates a rather cramped new-build

house.

...