It was in
1947 when the Cheales family, Mr Cheales, his wife and their 2 small daughters
moved to Wyck Rissington Rectory. Mr Cheales had served as an army chaplain
during WWII so now was a good time to find a parish where all the family could
live together. The previous rector to the Cotswold village of Wyck Rissington
had only lasted 9 months and when Mr Cheales enquired as to why such a short
time, he was told that the children of that family had suffered from terrible
nightmares there. Mr Cheales found the response rather odd but pushed it to the
back of his mind.
The rectory
property was built in various eras and the previous rector had closed off the Elizabethan
and Queen Anne parts of the building and only lived in the Victorian part. Mr
Cheales decided it would be better to live in the Elizabethan part and not the
Victorian part of the building. All was quiet for the first month.
It was when
Mr & Mrs Cheales were in bed one night that they heard footsteps coming up
the stairs. They describe the footsteps as like those who were wearing hobnail
boots and would take slow and measured steps whilst climbing the stairs. These
footsteps were heard 5 times during the next week and would always follow the
same pattern; slow and steady footsteps up the stairs, then the footsteps would
walk on the landing, right by the Cheales bedroom for it to walk right past the
room again and down the stairs. When Mr Cheales would open the bedroom door to
investigate, there was no one there but the footsteps would still be heard!
Mr Cheales
started asking around the village about these strange footsteps and found 2
elderly ladies who had once worked as maids at the rectory. They went on to
describe that they had shared a room whilst working and living at the rectory
and that one night, both were woken up and had both seen an elderly man with a
full white beard peering at them, who then just disappeared! They asked for a
new room due to this. It seemed that whoever slept in that room would be
visited by the bearded spectre and no one wanted to sleep in it and in 1900,
the room was turned into a bathroom.
When the
Cheales had been in the rectory for 3 months, when things took a turn for the
worse. During the night, an ear-piercing disembodied scream was heard. This
made the children cry out in terror from their sleep and Mr & Mrs Cheales
were scared witless by it. But it was to build up to a very violent happening.
One night
when Mr & Mrs Cheales were lying down in bed, what felt like an explosion
erupted under their bed and they were physically lifted out from their bed.
Their windows were rattling and plaster from the ceiling fell onto them. This
frightening incident was enough for Mr Cheadle to visit the Rural Dean to ask
for a new parish or new place to live as all the Cheadle’s had had enough of
this haunting.
The Rural
Dean listened to Mr Cheadle and all that his family had gone through, and he
was a man with many years experience so related the experiences of Epworth
Rectory. home of the Reverend Samuel Wegley, father of *John Wesley, the
founder of Methodism in 1716. Samuel Wegley found that the more he prayed, the
worse the haunting became, and he came to the belief that whatever was haunting
his residence was reacting to all the prayers. It was decided to take no notice
of the haunting and not to pray about it- and it worked!
Mr Cheadle
took the same attitude, He told his children that the ghost was called
Geoffrey, who looked like Father Christmas and had once lived in their house so
would come at night to revisit the house. The Cheadle family undertook this
attitude and as time went on, the visitations became less until the only things
to happen were the ghost of a black cat would be seen from time to time around
the house and on the same day, every year, the sound of a window smashing would
be heard. It would appear the Cheadle’s lived in that rectory for many years
afterwards and were said to be happy there.
A note of
interest is that in the 1950’s, Mr Cheadle had a dream about a maze so he made
a maze on the grounds, which had symbolic meanings and would be used as a
spiritual tool for the Cheadle’s and their visitors. The maze was sadly
destroyed when Mr Cheadle died in 1980 and the rectory was sold but there is a
tile in the church which has a copy of the maze and there is also an
information sheet by it, to explain the symbolic meanings and how it was used.
*John
Wesley 1703- 1791 was Anglican clergyman and founder of the Methodist movement
in the Church of England.
