Taken from Newsletter Issue 35 - March 2006

Walter better known within the family as ‘air’, our Walt’ was a resident of Shirley Road Luton until he died aged 90 in mid September 1979. However I do not think his spirit departed this Earth at the time his body died for the following reasons.

During the Great War Walter had been in the Royal Flying Corps and afterwards became a carpenter. He out lived two sons one of whom died from TB and the other a heart attack. His wife died with terrible head pains in 1935 in her Doctors surgery and after this not surprisingly Walter was known as a bit of a misery. But he was not the sort of man to leave unfinished business and I believe this accounts for the strange event after his death. His older daughter Wyn was anxious to clear the house as quickly as possible and was happy for me to buy many of the contents along with a quite useful collection of tools. So it was on a cold damp and slightly misty October Sunday morning that I called round briefly to take away the belongings. I left my wife Brenda and my 7 year old daughter Rebecca in the car outside the house for about ten minutes.

Upon my return it was apparent that Rebecca had just experience something extraordinary. For she described how she could see me fiddling with a ladder in a side entrance. She also saw the misty looking figure of an elderly man wearing a felt cap and check patterned jacket appear through the front wall of the house and drift across the narrow front yard area passing through two dwarf walls each side of the passageway as also through a closed front door of a neighbouring house. She described the man as having a miserable expression on his face. It took Rebecca a second to realise what she was watching and bring it to her mother’s attention. However both Brenda and I saw nothing although Brenda said she had experienced a dreamlike state.

It transpired that Walter had rented the house next door when he was alive and had called on a regular basis to collect the rent. He had been a good landlord keeping the property well maintained. He wore clothes that fitted perfectly the description given by Rebecca and she had never seen or met him when he was alive. In fact she did not even know him at all. I have never been able to shake Rebecca’s story and do not believe it was a figment of her imagination.

I feel she did have some kind of paranormal experience other than that I am not sure what to believe. If there is any truth in the idea of a life force or spirit separate from the physical body or did I disturb Walter and drive him from his house? Maybe I prompted him to make one last call on his tenant for out standing rent or perhaps remind him of that dripping tap or damp patch on the ceiling needing attention? More importantly was this his last call before his spirit moved on to find peace? I should like to believe that is was.