The spirit of Ann Luxon

Many folk like to put aside the idea of spirits and the like. And many times to talk about it generally may give the distinct impression you are an eccentric.

My thing is always to try and keep an open mind, maybe there are many things we, as mere humans, do not understand.

But certainly in my haunts of Torbay and of spirits of those long gone - there is an abundant store of history all around, and for myself in taking time to absorb a particular place, like an old building, or Berry Pomeroy castle there is something about the atmosphere that, for me anyway, prompts me to stop and meditate, to really attempt to connect with a spirit of the past.

But I have come to the conclusion that for me it never works that way. I can halt, I can listen and be at the ready to accept any spirit who maybe would like to contact me - but it is all in vain.

It is more likely to happen when least expected, like when I was researching Oliver Heaviside buried in Paignton cemetery when a friend of mine picked up distinct apparitions in my photographs of the scene.

Until ten years ago I was a sceptic of anything spiritual in the sense that one could be seen, our imaginations can render all sorts of things given the right circumstances, but what I experienced in the Paignton Parish churchyard was something else.

I was in a mad rush needing to get somewhere I should have been an hour before, just taking the turn of the path beneath the large yew making ways for the exit gate.

I know it could not have been an imagining because for one, my mind was cluttered with the present tasks and anyway, if there was ever any chance of my seeing a spirit I had in mind a sort of transparent figure with ghostly, perhaps scary form.

“Cheer up, Peter” was all she said in passing. You know how it is, your mind on anything but where you be. Me thinking who the devil was that. She was young, attractive and had a radiant smile - and she knew me, but should I know her then?

I quickly stopped and glanced around , this in the course of a couple of seconds so you’d think she would still be there, making way for wherever she was going.

But she wasn’t, all I say was what appeared to be a moving cascade of light dissolving into one of the gravestones there.

All thoughts of my project were gone, I just had to go back to the place I had seen the light.

A grave bore the inscription of an Ann Luxon who’d died in 1850 aged 20.

I just knew it was her, the girl I saw wore Victorian garb for one and the stance of a girl of the time, her hair, her shoes, everything. She’d flashed past me and yet I remember her like a picture in my mind.

Why on earth I should see this joyful young woman, who had died so early baffled me. And still does, Yet it made me think just how miserable I must have looked that prompted her to tell me to cheer up.

And it gave perspective too that probably those souls long gone can be happy with their lot.

I have many times strived to see her again, but I guess it was a one of, and anyway it could never happen with forethought.

I wonder though if anyone else has seen her?