Painted Ghost Returns

By Thomas Spychalski

Alan Smith would see the apparition around one A.M at Heale House, a historic English estate.

The appearances of the ghost were always accompanied by the sound of the music of Chopin as she walked the corridors and stalked the bedrooms, according to Smith himself:

“She was usually wreathed in a blue haze and just drifted around – you couldn’t see her legs. Sometimes she would even arrive at the bottom of my bed in the middle of the night.

I thought there must be some kind of scientific explanation, but other people who visited the house were terrified.”

But Smith found that the music loving ghost was here with a purpose.

When Smith visited the local junk shop in Bideford, Devon, the proprietor of the shop asked Smith if he was the ‘master of Heales’ and said that he wanted to return a painting to him, one of a women sitting at a piano in the Heale House drawing room.

Smith was taken aback as he recognized the apparition that had been haunting Heale House, and decided to investigate the paintings origins.

The Painting was believed to have been one Mrs. Bell, a former occupant at Heale House who had lost all of her money and was forced to sell her possessions, including the painting, shortly before she died sometime early in the 1900’s.

“It must have been sad for her to see all of her possessions sold.” Said Smith. “From what we know [now] about Mrs Bell, she was a very cultured lady.”

However, once the long lost painting was returned to Heale House’s drawing room, Mrs. Bell seems to have lost all interest in roaming corridors:

“She never appeared again…We even tried to use a Ouija board to bring her back but it looks as if she’s gone forever.”

This remarkable piece of art was later appraised on the BBC television series Antiques Roadshow, where the amazing circumstances and history of the piece of art did not effect its appraisal which was for about £500.

(Via Daily Mail)