h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

About thirty years ago, my parents lived in a large old house in the depths of the country in the townland of Corduff in Ireland, near to the scholl in which my father taught. My mother never liked the house and has many tales of strange occurances in it, but the strangest of all was this.

One night relations were staying in the house. My father went for a bath in the upstairs bathroom. My mother said that shortly afterwards she heard him banging and shouting and trying to get out of the bathroom and when they reached him he told them that when he went into the bathroom he could see what he thought was his reflection in the window, but it didn't seem to move when he did and when he wiped the dew from the window, there peering in at him was the ghostly figure of a young woman, pale white with piercing eyes, in the panic to get out he couldn't get the door opened.

My father, an extremely skeptical man, would never talk about this after until something happened...


A number of years ago, as a halloween project, my father asked his pupils to go home and ask their parents and grandparents for old ghost stories from the locality.

As he read through the stories, there was one in particular that mad the hair rise on the back of his neck. The girl's story was told by her grandfather and went as follows:

'About 100 years ago, the old house was owned by the local doctor. for some reason, a number of pranks had been played on the doctor where he was sent out on false calls. To prevent this from re-occurring, when anyone called to the house looking for the doctor to go on a call, he would charge them one penny to ensure the call was a real one.

One bleak night a knock came on the door and a poor youth stood there pleaing with the doctor to come to his mother's aid. The youth had no money and the doctor, thinking it was another prank, refused outright to go out. the youth cursed him and left.

The following day, word was around the country of the young woman who died in childbirth at the side of the road and the doctor who had refused to tend her.

One year to the night later, the doctor, tending to his normal duties in the house, left screaming as he saw the face of the young woman staring in at him from the darkness with piercing eyes.

After this the doctor's health started to fail as every year on the same night, the ghost of the woman would pay him a visit'.

My father was truly shocked as he had told no-one in the locality of his story, and then he read another of the essays...

'My grandfather knew a man who used to drive the coach for the doctor from the big house, about 100 years ago. The man told him that once he was bringing the doctor home from the town late at night when he notice a huge black dog with red eyes running alongside the coach. When he gathered his senses and informed the doctor, the doctor told him that he knew this beast and to drive on with all the speed he could muster and not to look at the dog.

Some days later the doctor was called out at night, and it was to be his final call as he was found in a shuck at the side of the road, drowned, the reason unknown'

To this day there is still a story of the phantom lights that can be seen tracing the steps of the doctor's last route and disappearing at the spot where he died.

There are still many sightings of the Hound of Corduff as it came to be known.

The house still stands, unoccupied, except for one night of the year when the rooms are filled with the frost of a pale woman's stare.