SKELETON IN THE CLOSET 💀💀💀
Hello Weirdos. I used to love looking for this image in the book, as it contains two of my favourite things; skelebobs and bats! 💀🦇
When Mrs Ewing's sister-in-law and nephew came to stay, she decided to put them up in the small box room above the scullery. (Apparently a scullery was a small kitchen or washing up room). After their first night in the room, her sister-in-law refused to sleep there again. Her son had been screaming most of the night, complaining about a 'nasty lady'. 😱
The story that accompanies this cool image is about the Ewing family who moved into a house in Devon back in the 1930's. They were overjoyed with the house when they first moved in, but their joy didn't last long...
From this point on, Mrs Ewing began to hear the sound of a child crying coming from the scullery. Her husband suggested it was the wind blowing down the old chimney, but his wife insisted it was the wailing of an infant.
Later in the year, Mrs Ewing's brother-in-law came to stay. He was given the box room to sleep in. The following morning, Mrs Ewing came down stairs to find her brother in law asleep on the sofa, and he also point blank refused the stay in the box room again.
The following evening whilst talking, the brother-in-law admitted that something didn't add up about the box room. Why was the scullery so much larger than the box room, even though one room lay directly above the other? He suggested that part of the box room may have been walled off for some reason.
So, Mrs Ewing and her brother-in-law decided to head upstairs and explore the box room. They tapped the walls to see if they could discover a false wall... they found one. They grabbed tools and began to break the wall down. As the dust cleared and light began to our into this forgotten space, they could see human bones, a dead bat and a children's toy box. They immediately collected the bones together, wrapped them in brown paper and took them to the local doctor.
The bones where that of a small child, and where eventually laid to rest in the public mortuary. After this, the house became quieter and the crying ceased.
Mrs Ewing felt at peace in her home once again, but she would receive one last ghostly visit. One October evening, when walking to her parents house in a nearby town, she felt like she was being followed. She continued to walk, turning every so often, expecting to see someone behind her. But there was no one there. At the most quiet and remote part of her journey, she turned and came face-to-face with the apparition of a lady wearing an old fashioned sage green dress and large black bonnet. They made eye contact, and then she disappeared.
When she reached her parents, she told them of the ghostly woman and the crying child. Her mother remembered there had been a scandal attached to the house many years ago. It was a farm for babies who's parents where too poor to afford to bring up their children themselves.
Maybe the woman was the ghost of the mother of the child they had found in the box room?
The image below is of the house where these events happened. It is now the Lyn and Exmoor Museum, so, you can pay a visit... if you dare!