Haunted Manswick Manor

Manswick Manor has always been a posh address in Rye, a cozy English town that had once been a seaside resort, but was now 2 km inland. The hotel was picturesquely situated on a hill with a breathtaking view over the hills in front and the adjoining sea.

But what made Manswick Manor famous was the fact that it was haunted. At least that's what Gareth and Joan Nader claimed. The Manor was now in the 5th generation of their family. Gareth and Joan were siblings. Both had never found a real partner. They simply had no time for it they always said.

All their attention was focused on the Manor. While Gareth took care of the hotel business, Joan loved to design the garden and to accentuate the dishes in the kitchen. She was also the one who mentioned the ghost in a big way in the hotel brochure and featured it as an attraction on the website.

Gareth wasn't a big fan of the ghost. He had to admit that since Joan had mentioned the ghost in the brochure and on the web, bookings had gone up tremendously, and people always asked about it directly when they arrived, but he was embarrassed by it in a way, and he and the ghost were also at war in a way.

Basically, there were three things the ghost seemed to do. First, he didn't seem to be a fan of the traditional English soccer club Crytal Palace, which played weekly in London, about 60 miles away. Gareth had been a supporter of the club since his earliest youth. And even now he tried not to miss a home game, even if it was only on the livestream on the internet, if he once again did not have enough time to drive all the way to London and back.

The spirit boycotted and maltreated him as best it could. Gareth had long since given up wearing a fan scarf. All too often the scarf had disappeared, become soiled or even damaged. Tickets disappeared, which is why Gareth often carried the tickets in his pajama pocket the night before the game and went to sleep with them. And even tampering with Gareth's cars the ghost didn't seem to shy away from.

Once two tires were dismantled. Another time the battery was dead or birds had soiled the windshield that it was impossible to see through and drive with it. Before Gareth had cleared the windshield to some extent, the time to leave in time had long since passed.

Recently, the ghost had taken to the internet. Guests told of eerie shadowy apparitions on the screen in the room, although the device was actually off. For Gareth, this tended to mean that during Crystal Palace's live streams, the device would miraculously switch to a different channel every time. No game had Gareth ever been able to watch from start to finish without glitches on the screen.

And the last mania the ghost seemed to have was, it liked to swap suitcases and keys. It seemed to find a thieving pleasure in swapping suitcases or room keys then when no one was paying attention. How often had guests complained at check-in that their key didn't fit before it became apparent that they simply had the keys to the wrong room. It was worse with the suitcases. People usually don't like strangers opening their suitcases and looking inside. The ghost seemed to have a good sense of when it was a good, unobserved moment.

As long as the suitcases were only taken to the wrong room in the hotel, it was a nasty nuisance, but not particularly consequential. Once, however, the ghost had actually managed to mix up the suitcases of arriving and departing guests. The suitcases were in a cab on the way to Gatwick Airport for a flight to Dakar in Senegal.

Clanging closet doors and opening windows or slamming doors, on the other hand, were harmless jokes and usually went over well with the guests. In other words, the ghost was both a curse and a blessing.

The ghost finally went too far, however, when it started swapping spices in the containers in the kitchen and salt and pepper in the shakers on the guest tables. Everyone knows that pepper belongs in the shaker with the few holes and salt in the shaker with the many holes. But no matter how many times you checked, and no matter how much you were on your guard, somehow the ghost managed to do it every now and then.

The ghost became a problem and had to go! - There was a consensus on that. Gareth became a Liverpool FC fan, and he hung Reds scarves everywhere and put salt and pepper shakers with Liverpool FC symbols on the guest tables. The ghost was gone that same evening and never returned to Manswick Manor.