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Anna
Adams (1926 - 2011)
in collection Green Resistance,
1996,
Enitharmon, ISBN 1 870612 57 4
Mister Jarman's Ghosts
Don't
you find it creepy, Missis Adams?
I
feel it on them stairs: a sort of coldness;
and
you fly up and down quite quick, I notice.
I
used to do the same myself, but now
old
Annie Domino has slowed me down.
I
started here on night security,
and
one night, after midnight, on that landing,
I
met a lady. She was very small,
not
five foot high, dressed in old-fashioned clothes.
She
said 'Who are you? Tell me who you are.'
She
had a small, high, strangled sort of voice:
old
and far off. I didn't tell her nothing.
Then
once, in the front hall, Sir Allan Grant
glided
towards me through a haze of smoke.
That's
how you tell it's them.
They
come through smoke,
and
it's all dark behind them, spangled like
with
Christmas glitter. He was like his bust.
And
then, by day, I saw another lady.
I
couldn't see her face but saw her dress
had
lots of little buttons, glass, or diamonds.
She
walked away with quick but tiny steps -
like
this. An old chap told me I had seen
the
woman who kept house when he was young.
'You
got her to a tee,' he said. Quite often,
up
in the Private Rooms, I seen a shadow.
It
moves across the windows, and I've heard -
down
by Nun's Walk - a scream like someone murdered.
Then
someone set a tape-recorder up
outside
the restaurant, and left it running,
recording
all the noises of the night:
the
pipes and groaning fridges, then this scream.
They
got it on the tape: a woman screaming.
One
night, down in the vaults, one tapped my shoulder.
I
turned, and there was no one. I'm a psychic.
The
lady from the Psychical Research
said
I was Extrasensitive. My Mother
would
give what she could spare to those in trouble.
She
was religious. I'm a seventh child.
That's
why I got this gift. I see and hear them.
Haven't
you never seen one, Missis Adams?
Anna
Adams
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