Tarot is My Spirit Guide

When I was eight, Edith used to come to me in the middle hours of darkness, sit on the edge of my bed and appear in front of me.  My mum used to hear me talk to her and I was never scared, but always inquisitive.  I decided to tell my parents in the morning.  The look of surprise on their faces with worry about why I may be ‘concocting’ these dreams and illusions was a real picture I won’t forget!  The old lady used to appear regularly to me and more than ever every time my dad went away to visit family in Holland.  She was always by my side and although I used to speak to her often, she never spoke back until one night when I began to see her more clearly.  What she said didn’t make any sense but it felt comforting and made me fall asleep as normal.  

Today I wonder if she was speaking another language for a few foreign families had resided in the area of Deal in Kent many years ago.  After a while, I would begin to hear her walk across the hallway. At the time I had no door handle, only a round hole where it should be.  The light from the other side would vanish and I would know she was here to visit once more.  The creaky floorboards were often mistaken to be one of the three cats or two dogs we had and I never thought it would be anything else.  Slowly the door would open and Edith would suddenly be next to me again.  She was a comfort to me when my dad was absent and my mum was serving customers downstairs in the family run restaurant.  I often wonder who the old lady was and when a local baker visited (very much in tune with the spirit world and unaware of Edith) he went white when entering the building and proclaimed it was ‘full of evil’. 

I believe today she may possibly have been a nanny in the past and someone whose life was devoted to caring for the family she lived with.  In a building that was once a public house in a smugglers town, there could have been an endless amount of danger for a child my age over 350 years ago.  For many years I believed and felt Edith was an imaginary nanny to me whom only my eyes could see.  My parents told me there was no one there and eventually as I grew older, I began to believe what they said was true.

It was during a regular afternoon where my mum and dad had just walked the dogs along the seafront and I would soon be home from my day at school.  Out of the blue the family who used to live there came to visit.  They were Italians who ran an ice-cream factory for over twenty years before we made it into a restaurant.  Interested to see the property a year on and revisit the home they once had, they entered the ‘evil house’.  The upstairs promptly became the hot topic of conversation.  They began questioning my parents about a ghost they encountered whom they called Edith and if she had shown herself to us.  In disbelief and shock they all realised that I had been getting regular visits.  From what I had described the old lady as looking like, ‘with a long black cloak and no teeth’, the exact same words came from the Italian family’s mouths.  It all began to really fall into place for my parents when they started renovating the upstairs attic bathroom a couple of years on and found to their surprise an old oil painting of Jesus with a crown of thorns embedded in the wall.  The family had said the Priest had been in to exorcise the spirit of Edith away and the oil painting was where he had performed the ritual.  From the time they left and from that day on, none of the Italians story was ever mentioned to me. Edith became a memory and later on in my life I felt as though I had simply dreamt it all.  I was always a very superstitious child and as I remember for no apparent reason always walking around ladders!  My family were very much free spirits themselves and never acted as though they were worried about ‘the old lady’ to protect me.  They shielded me from the experience in case I simply didn’t understand or it scared me as they had no explanation for why she visited.