George and Joanna found their dream house just in time. They were just about to give up, having seen countless houses, none of which had that “something special” to set it apart.

This house was superb, large and rambling, the oldest part probably over 150 years old. It was in a bad state, having been uninhabited for seven months, but they could immediately envisage what it would look like. They set to work imme­diately, their enthusiasm grow­ing as the house and garden took shape. Everything seemed fine until it came to moving in their furniture.

The removals men had carried in most of their belongings and there was only about an hour’s work left. But it was getting dark and the men refused to go into the house. One of them, looking decidedly sheepish, admitted to George: “We won’t go in the house. It’s haunted.”

George was an utter sceptic. “Codswallop!” was his only comment. But they would not relent and the work was continued the following day.

Yet he was intrigued by the story and started asking around the village. A story gradually emerged of an Elizabethan knight whose ghost had been seen wandering around the house. He had a good laugh to himself over the whole thing and forgot about it.

And at last, the house was ready to move in to. Their two children had bedrooms downstairs and they slept upstairs.

About a month later, his mother came down from England to stay with them and George’s son was moved out of his room to make way for his gran. She was a lovely old lady, “a real character” he liked to say. She arrived late one evening and it was really only the next day that George had a chance to catch up on all the news. At one point, she asked who else was staying in the house.

George did not realise why she was asking and said that there was no one else there, prattling on about wanting to settle in properly first and so on.

“Oh, I see,” George’s mother continued. “Then you had a visitor, did you? Eleven o’clock was rather late to be calling, I thought.”

“Visitor? No, there wasn’t anyone here,” George insisted.

“Yes, there was. I had to go to the bathroom and came out of my room, and here he was in the corner of the hallway. I was rather embarrassed to find him there, I wasn’t even wearing my dressing gown,” she explained.

“I did stare at him at first. He was terribly good-looking. I think he must have been to a fancy dress party as he was dressed in those funny shorts and tights. I nodded a greeting and he nodded back,” she continued, unaware of the effect her little bombshell was having on her listener.

“But by the time I came back from the bathroom, he had gone. I came back out of my bedroom again a bit later to see if I could find him, he was ever so good-looking. I looked up the stairs but he had gone. I suppose he came down from your room and got confused about where the front door was, turning left rather than right.”

And then she realised that George was looking at her in bewilderment. There had been no one at the house, no visitors. He could feel the hair at the back of his neck stand on end.

“Oh dear,” she said, after he had told her the story about the removals men. “I wouldn’t tell Joanna and the children. They’ll refuse to stay here.”

But George did not have to tell anyone. It soon became quite clear that the whole village knew about the ghost and they always found it difficult to persuade locals to come to the house. For years, they could only persuade male babysitters to stay overnight and even their daughter would not stay alone in the house.

I did stare at him at first. He was terribly good-looking

Joanna tried to defuse the situation, calling the ghost ‘Percy’, which she felt was appropriate for the era he seemed to belong to. With time, they eventually managed to talk about Percy to their friends; it became a great dinner party story, a bit of a laugh.

Until about five years ago. By then they had lived in the house for over 20 years, and apart from the one episode involving George’s mother, no one had actually seen or heard anything again. And then there was a knock at the door.

A rather frail, elderly English lady stood there and she politely introduced herself as Anne, saying that she had lived in the house as a little girl. She asked whether she could speak to the owner. George had been working in the garden and she had obviously assumed that he was just the gardener. There was a momentary embarrassment but it was quickly dispelled when she spotted the huge tree which now towers over the corner of the garden.

“Oh, I remember when the tree was the same height as me,” she said.

They worked out that she had lived there almost 70 years before. She was obviously curious to re-visit her childhood home, and George and Joanna were quite happy to show her around and hear more about its history.

As they sat down over a coffee, George thought this would be the perfect opportunity to ask about the ghost. He was perhaps a little disappointed when she said: “Ghost? Oh, no. What rubbish. There was never anything at all.”

Anne left soon afterwards but a few weeks later they got a lovely card from her. In it she thanked them for their hospitality. And then she launched into a little story.

“I said that our years there were some of the happiest in my life. But perhaps that is not strictly true. In the last three months of our stay there, my father was very busy, working with the Services, and was away from home a lot. My mother met a handsome naval officer and fell madly and deeply in love with him. My sister and I were aged 12 and 14, old enough to be aware of what was going on. We were truly terrified that mother would leave us. But she did the right thing and did not run away with Tom, as he was called. In later years, she did admit to us that it was a great struggle.

“You may wonder why I am telling you this. Mother died in the early 1970s and it seems that Tom died around five years or more before her. And it is most curious. Apparently, mother and father met Tom and his wife at a carnival ball at the Royal Opera House. And Tom had been wearing Elizabethan dress. I wonder if he could be your ghost?”

And a story which could so easily have remained a dinner party anecdote suddenly became a story of a passionate, unfulfilled love. For they had moved into the house in 1969, just around the time that Tom died. Had he come to look for his lost love, hoping for the time they could be together again?

That is what George and Joanna would like to think. They no longer joke about Percy anymore.

This is the 33rd in a series of short stories The Sunday Times of Malta is running every Sunday. It is taken from The Unexplained Plus (Allied Publications) by Vanessa Macdonald. The first edition was published in 2001 and reprinted twice. It was republished, with added stories, as The Unexplained Plus. The Maltese version of the book, Ta’ Barra Minn Hawn (Klabb Kotba Maltin), is available from all leading bookstores and stationers and from www.bdlbooks.com.