The ghosts of two teachers who haunted a house in Brooke

Joan Forman wrote a number of books about the paranormal, including The Mask of Time (about timeslips), The Haunted South, Royal Hauntings, Haunted Royal Homes and The Golden Shore, a book about first-hand experiences of near-death and death-survival.

She also wrote Haunted East Anglia, in 1974, which included within this ghostly story of the schoolteachers whose ghosts returned to their final home.

A member of the Society for Psychical Research, Forman spent a large portion of her life investigating the paranormal, collecting data through on-site investigation and personal interviews.

Brooke, just outside Norwich, is a village which charts the former course of a Roman road - still visible in hedge lines and straight lanes – and its landscape is an echo of its past: prehistoric flints lie just beneath the ground, the bodies of Saxons sleep on the boundary in an ancient burial site.

The village’s original manor house was built close to the church and replaced by Brooke Hall, built by the Holmes family, in around 1830, which had associated estate cottages.

It is in one of these cottages where the following incidents occurred.

This particular house had been owned by a family with two daughters who both grew up and became teachers in the village. Neither married, neither left the village or the house.

They continued to teach until they were old ladies and, when their time came, they died in the home they’d lived in and loved and the house was eventually sold.

The new owners moved in, but villagers were perplexed that they moved out within a matter of months, swapping their beautiful old house for a newer home. 

Then they shared what had happened in the old cottage.

“It seems that the new people discovered they were not the only occupants of the house,” Ms Forman writes. “On one occasion, the wife went into the bedroom and saw a female figure lying on the bed. She thought it was a trick of the light and dismissed the matter as an illusion.

“However, when the incident was repeated, she became unnerved, and the couple decided to leave the property.”

The house stood empty for a period of time before it was bought by another couple – all was quiet on the ghostly front for a good while until one of the residents noticed something curious about her alarm clock.

“She wound it up as usual and placed it on the bedside table,” wrote Ms Forman, “however, some hours later, the clock was found on the bedroom floor in a different part of the room. Neither husband nor wife had touched it, and no one else had been in the house.”

One day, the woman living in the house intended to go and introduce herself to an elderly neighbour, but when she went into her sitting room, she saw what she took to be the same neighbour seated in a chair.

Surprised, she spoke to the woman, telling her what a coincidence it was as she’d been planning to visit her but when she looked away and then back again, the woman had disappeared.

Afterwards, she remembered the woman was wearing a long green dress and was “a little old lady with white hair”: when she shared the description with villagers, they drew a comparison with one of the two teachers who had once lived in the cottage.

Forman added: “My informant, who knew the house and had several times visited it, stated that whenever she was in the sitting room, she experienced a cold draught in the spot where the seated figure had been.”

The couple fairly swiftly decided the house was not for them either, and it once again stood empty until it became the home of a family who had children.

“Since that time, the ghost has not reappeared,” Forman wrote, “the two old ladies were, you will remember, school teachers and loved children. Both the families who experienced visitations were childless couples.

“Presumably the ghost is now satisfied to have children about the house again.”

READ MORE: If you go down to the woods in Brooke...do you know why the ghost of a shrieking woman has been spotted between the trees?

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