By: JESSICA RHOADES
Staff Writer
A man’s wife became deathly ill the night before Christmas in 1798, he called for the doctor but by the time the doctor arrived his wife had died, or so it seemed. Her husband was so grief-stricken that he shut himself up on his own and didn’t attend the funeral the following day. The servants of the house carried the rich woman’s body to the Vicar who in a drunken stupor held the ceremony quickly. The veil was drawn across her face, the stone lid lowered and the iron grille locked.
When later that night the Clergyman fell to sleep he remembered the beautiful emerald ring the woman had been laid with on her finger. Wanting riches for himself and figuring no one would find out he went downstairs, unlocked the lid to open it, and tried to pry off the ring, but it wouldn’t budge. He ran to his lab and brought back a file to cut off her finger with. He severed her finger and pulled the ring off, as he left he turned around to pick up the iron lid, screamed at the top of his lungs, dropped the ring, and ran, the woman had awakened and was moaning and holding her severed finger towards him with a smile displayed evenly across her face.
He ran with all his might upstairs where he hung himself from the rafters of his home. If only he knew that the woman had only to thank him for she had not died after all but had gone into a coma and the cutting of her finger restored her circulation waking her from it.
Wearing nothing but her fine silk dress she walked back to the home and knocked on the door and rang the bell to no avail. The servants had all gone to sleep for it was late Christmas Eve. She felt an urge and lifted a heavy stone, threw it at her husband’s window, and waited. He came to the window with a sorrowful look on his face, and suddenly to her surprise, he yelled, “Go away. Why must you torture me so? Don’t you know my wife has just died? Let me mourn and do not bother me again.”
With this, he shut the window. He must not have realized it was his wife who had thrown the rock at him. She repeated this and he opened the window again, and she yelled to him, “I am no one but your so-called dead wife. Now come down here and open this door, Henry Page, unless you’d like me to die a second time on our doorstep.”
“You are a ghost then,” he said to her.
She said, “No, for ghosts don’t bleed. Now come down here before I catch my own death of cold.”
The man with a joyous look on his face came down to meet his wife and took her inside where he called the doctor once more and told him the news. They both lived long lives and their first son was born the next year.