Within five minutes of being given the tour by my hosts, I told them that I definitely wanted to take over their lease. (It was unbelieveably cheap, only 90 pounds a month, plus utilities) Arrangements were made to meet the landlord, which I did. I met with his approval and signed the lease a few days later. A month later, when my new acquaintances moved out, I moved in. For the first two months, I lived there by myself, enjoying the utter peace and quiet of the surrounding countryside and I slowly familiarized myself with the ways of rural English life. One of the things that I had to get used to was the fact that the only heat came from four coal burning fireplaces, two downstairs and two upstairs. It was a pain going out to the coal shed when it was cold outside, but after a while I got used to it. After two months, I got a couple of roomates. Both of them were single Air Force NCOs like myself. Within a short time, the cottage got the nickname (well deserved) as The East Anglia Home for Wayward Boys. Many a weekend-long party was hosted there and many a young lady shared our rural accomodations, but that is another story altogether. Life was good.

Within weeks of my roomies moving in, we all started complaining that things were turning up missing. Small things, keys, books, lighters, a piece of clothing. These things would go missing for anywhere from a couple of hours to days and would always turn up in the same place, on a shelf built into the wall beside the fireplace in the sitting room. All three of us were convinced it was a joke that the other two were playing and let it go. After a while, it became one of the accepted routines of the cottage. Another thing that occurred with regularity is that we would meet someone and they would ask us if we were the "Yanks that lived in Bridge Farm Cottage"? This happened several times. Once, at an old country pub called the Plough, that was to become a second home to us, the barmaid asked that question and when we said yes, she let everyone in the pub know, "Hey, it's the Yanks that live in Bridge Farm Cottage". Everyone wanted to talk to us and they all asked cryptic questions like "Er, how do you like it there"?, "No problems, eh?", "Have you ever seen anything strange?". We told them no, of course not and they just grinned. We thought it was just a local tradition to have a joke on the Yanks.

Not long after that, we had one of our famous weekend-long parties. An ironclad rule of the house was that if you were going to drink at our party, you either had to have a sober driver or you had to spend the night. This was doubly important as the roads were tiny, one lane, winding affairs, usually with canals on either side. At this particular party, we had a pretty sizable contingent stay over. Maybe fifteen or twenty people, sleeping on one of six sofas scattered between the sitting room and parlor or in sleeping bags on the floor. It was a mixture of G.I.s and locals and even a few new acquaintances from as far away as London. Shorty after retiring, about five in the morning, I was awakened from a drunken slumber by a scream and a commotion downstairs. Myself and my two roomates and our friends for the night stumbled downstairs. One girl, one of the London folks was in hysterics. She said that she'd woken up on one of the sofas and had seen a woman crouching on the stairs in the dim light at the bottom of the stairs. She said that the woman stared at her and then turned and went through the wall next to her. This was a solid brick, exterior wall with no openings of any kind near the stairs. After we got the young lady calmed down, we decided it was simply a case of too much to drink and let it go at that. By then it was turning daylight, so we made breakfast for our guests and resumed the party. About a month later, at another of our little soirees, less people but still a few stayed the night, the same thing occurred with almost an identical description of a lady crouched at the bottom of the stairs. This time, the lady was seen by two of our guests, a couple who hadn't drank much at all. We decided that it was a case of them not having enough to drink and maybe having heard something about the previous occurence. Over the next few months, we didn't have any more sightings, but something that did happen with regularity is that we would leave to go to work, shutting all the downstairs doors and windows and return hours later to find front and back doors standing wide open. Nothing was ever stolen, aside from the little odds and ends that would turn up on the shelf in the sitting room, so we never worried too much about it. During this time, we also learned the story of the house from the locals. Our "lady" was supposedely the wife of the original lock keeper. He was the man that tended the locks on the canals and ensured that every thing worked properly. This would have been sometime between 1635 and 1660 shortly after the original portion of the cottage was first built. At that time it was called the Lock Keepers Cottage. Even though we still were dubious and didn't really believe in the whole thing, we asked if anything horrible was supposed to have happened, but we were told no. She was just a lady who had lived there and stayed on. They did tell us that the cottage was charmed and that anyone who lived there would be married before they moved out, but being the confirmed bachelors that we were, we knew that wouldn't happen to us. According to the locals, the cottage had been rented to single American G.I.s since WWII and everyone had moved in single and moved out married. Fat chance of that.

One thing that we did discover was that a haunted house, even one we really didn't believe in ourselves, was a babe magnet. (Sorry if that seems crass, but it's true). Many is the young lady who accepted our invitation to see the place and then ended up spending the night. And no one wants to sleep alone in a haunted house, do they? Thus the name, East Anglia Home for Wayward Boys. This went on for about three years. As I said life was good. Uncle Sam kept us busy, but in our free time we enjoyed the local nightlife, learned more about the country we were living in and just did our best to "expand our cultural horizons". Somehow during this period, myself and both of my roommates became engaged to lovely English girls. It was just something that happened and not something any of us had planned on beforehand.

One afternoon, after I arrived home from work, I stayed out in the driveway, tinkering with my car. After about twenty minutes, I went in, entering through the kitchen and going into the sitting room. As soon as I walked into the sitting room, I was faced with a middle-aged woman standing at the bottom of the stairs. Actually she was standing IN the bottom of the stairs with the bottom three steps covering her legs up to the knee. It was later when I thought about it that I realized, that in the dark, her standing in the lower steps, at floor level, could be construed as someone crouched on the stairs. It is hard to describe what she looked like except to say she had straight hair, shoulder length, a dress that came in at the waist and what appeared to be a house coat of some kind. I can only describe her appearance as like when you look into a bright light and then close your eyes. You can still see the image of the light, but it's not really there. After a second or so, the woman, who was facing the back wall only inches from her face, turned to face me. That's when I let out a shriek, ran back out the way I had come in and jumped into my car and sped the five miles between the cottage and the Plough. As soon as I walked in, the landlord took one look at me me and said "So, you've seen her, eh?" Then he burst out laughing and fed me Courvossier shooters and pints of bitter for about an hour. When I was too drunk to sit up straight, still wearing my BDUs (Battle Dress uniform or camouflaged fatigues) he called one of my roomies to come pick me up (English pub owners are good about that kind of stuff). When he arrived, I told him exactly what had happened and he just looked at me and said, "Have you been doing drugs"?. For the next three months, I didn't see another thing, but I made a point of making lots of noise before I entered the house, thinking maybe that our lady would have the good graces to go away before I came in. The whole time, both of my roommates made occasional references to my mental state and continued to believe I was nuts. Then one night, I heard a loud noise out in the hallway, like one of my roomies had fallen down the stairs. In a couple of seconds, he was beating on my door yelling, "She's on the stairs, she's on the stairs, she's on the goddamn stairs!!!!". I opened the door and just laughed at him and asked if he was on drugs. We checked the stairs, but there was nothing, and I continued to give him hell about seeing things, knowing full well that he had seen something. Apparently he'd gotten up in the middle of the night intending to go downstairs to the bathroom (our only bath was downstairs, off of the kitchen). Half asleep, he had stumbled down the stairs, almost to the bottom, when he became aware that he was looking down on a lady facing away from him, close enough to reach down and touch. That's when he busted his ass, flying back up the stairs. He didn't make it to the bathroom either.(I gave him hell for that too. A grown man that can't control his bladder, tsk!)

I never saw our lady again, but I could feel her presence sometimes. Both of my roomates eventually married and moved out. My second roommate, never admitted to having seen anything, but for some reason he didn't like being in the house by himself and he didn't make fun of us anymore. I have a feeling that something happened and he just didn't want to admit it.

I got married and we lived in the cottage for the last year I was stationed in England. She loved the place, but she too, didn't care for being there by herself. If I was on alert duty, which could last for a week at a time, she would stay with friends or even with her mother in London. I never talked much about my sighting, not wanting her to think I was a total nutcase, but after about three months living there, she'd had her own. She was in the back garden, when she saw a lady standing with her back to the outside wall of the house, facing out over the canal like she was watching the sun set. When my wife called to her, she turned and walked around the side of the house. When my wife followed there was no one to be seen. It turns out that where she'd seen the woman standing corresponded with where the stairs came down on the inside of the house. It wasn't until we were about to move out of the house some time later that I found out from my landlord's son that the house had originally been only one story and where the stairs came down had been where the front door was. The second story had been added about 1790 and if you looked really hard you could seen the outline of the doorway in the bricks on the outside. So I guess, the whole time, the lady was just standing, looking out the front door.

About a month before we were due to leave England, (I'd been assigned to a SAC missile wing in Montana) I got a call one day, from the couple who had lived in the house before me. It was the first time I'd heard from them since they'd left to go to Spain. They were on vacation in England and wanted to know if they could drop by and see the old place, because it had a lot of fond memories. I told them of course. They came by that evening and we talked for a while and hit it off with them. After a while I asked if they'd like to stay in one of the spare rooms overnight and they said yes. After dinner and several bottles of wine, the wife looked at me and said, "Well, let's have it. Have you seen her?" I just stared at her open mouthed and they both broke up laughing. I asked them why they'd never said anything to me before and they said that I'd either have thought them crazy or if I believed them, I wouldn't have assumed the lease. They stayed with us for five days and I believe they were both very sad that they never saw the lady while they were there. She did acknowledge their presence by taking their car keys and putting them on the shelf. They were overjoyed.

We left England in 1986. On our last day there, we were doing a walk through of the house with the landlord. We'd spent a couple of days scrubbing and cleaning and except for a couple of pieces of old furniture and the kitchen appliances, the house was totally empty. My wife called me from downstairs. I went down and on the shelf, next to the fireplace, was a belt. It was a wide leather belt of mine that had gone missing years before, shortly after I had moved in. I had forgotten about it and as I hadn't met my wife until years later, she had never seen it. I just took it, and put it on. I still wear it to this day, every once in a while and think about the lady in the cottage.