They said that The Grange was a haunted house,
I said, ‘you’re having me on!’
But no, they said, ‘he’s back from the dead,’
I thought it a giant con.
‘Just spend one night in that house alone
With the power cut off, you’ll see,’
I said, ‘I’ll go, if Carolyn goes,
If Carolyn stays with me.’

Now she was more of a nervous type
But she said, ‘I’ll go with you,
Just promise you won’t make whooshing sounds,
There’s nothing a ghost can do.’
‘There isn’t a ghost,’ I told her then,
They’re all just having us on,
We’ll spend the night, if you feel uptight
I’ll prove that it’s just a con.’

We ventured in through the cobwebbed porch
As the hour was getting late,
The only light we had was a torch
And the fire we lit in the grate,
The Moon came presently shining in
Its ghostly beam through the gloom,
And Carolyn came and cuddled up
As we sat on the floor of the room.

‘Where did they say the ghost would be,’
She asked, as I patted her hair,
I couldn’t say, I was miles away,
Then we heard a creak on the stair.
I thought, ‘Oh no, it will spoil the show,’
I was hoping for just one kiss,
For this was the first time, she and I
Had ever been close, like this.

Then from above there were creaks and groans,
It came stumbling down the stair,
It looked like a bundle of rags and moans
And a skull, with eyes that glare,
Carolyn screamed as it reached for her
This thing from another world,
It bubbled and rasped in its throat, and said
One word that I think was ‘Girl’.

It must have remembered from days before
It had held a girl like this,
Death had never erased the thought,
Or the feeling that was bliss,
But now, the rags of the grave were foul
It gave off a graveyard stench,
And Carolyn, all she could do was howl,
This alive and lovely *****.

What seemed to me an apparition
A ghost in empty air,
Was rotting flesh and bones to Carolyn
Tangled in her hair,
It held her in a grip of steel
As it probed beneath her dress,
I couldn’t even fight it off
For to me, it was stagnant breath.

They came to us in the dawning light
With a key to let us out,
I lay as in a palsied dream
But I heard them scream and shout,
‘What have you done to Carolyn,’
But they were to late to save,
For she had gone where the ghost had gone,
To join him in the grave.

David Lewis Paget