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True Ghost Stories | Ravenswood | Lydia Atley

This Is How a Ghost Became My Best Friend

My shocking introduction to life with a ghost (Part 2)

Liberty Forrest
5 min readNov 29, 2021

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ghost woman in long red dress at bottom of staircase
Photo courtesy of ELG21 from Pixabay

“What are these,
So wither’d, and so wild in their attire;
That look not like the inhabitants o’ th’ earth,
And yet are on ’t?”

- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

In 1850, Lydia Atley disappeared from Ringstead, Northamptonshire, a village in England. Witnesses heard the young woman arguing with the married butcher and father of the baby she was about to deliver. The last anyone heard of Lydia were her screams on that fateful night.

Her ghost is said to haunt the village, where I lived for several years in a quirky stone cottage.

This is an introduction to several bizarre but true stories I’ve shared about my encounters with her in my cottage.

She was waiting for me. She must have known my own ghosts when we met. She must have seen inside my soul and understood the grief, the longing, the desperate need for healing — and for peace.

After all, she permeated every space in the cottage, every room, every quiet corner; she was everywhere…

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Liberty Forrest
Liberty Forrest

Written by Liberty Forrest

Award-winning author. Join my private community for exclusive tips on fiction writing and self-publishing: https://www.patreon.com/c/libertyforrest

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