In the dream I was in Mount Gambier sometime in the past. I needed to go to the hospital. I can’t recall why, either to visit someone or because I worked there.

The hospital wasn’t easy to get to. I had to climb a steep hill (in the rain); there were no cars. What stuck in my mind though was the image of the hospital.

It was like a cross between a cathedral and a castle — a long stone building with arches and turrets.

When I woke up I dismissed the dream as fanciful. Mount Gambier has a modern hospital that’s not on a steep hill. The old hospital looks nothing like the image I saw in my dream.

On Tuesday I met the chief executive of the health service in his office at the new hospital.

In the waiting room I inspected some prints of the original Mount Gambier Hospital, and it looked exactly like what I saw in my dream!

Apparently it was knocked down to build a larger hospital, which can still be seen today.

In 1999 I spent many hours researching my family history. I focused on my great-grandparents Edward Gorey and Sophia Evans, and their children.

The project involved trips to Melbourne, Whroo, Rochester, Shepparton and Echuca. Whroo is a haunting place, a former gold mining district where hundreds of people died, especially children.

Edward Gorey had a farm near Whroo and spent some time gold mining himself.

Before Edward and Sophia moved to Whroo they lived at Corop on the other side of Rochester. Their eldest daughter Margaret, my great-aunt, was born there on March 1, 1876.

This article tells the tragic story of her short life and premature death before she reached her third birthday. I scoured newspaper articles, read the coroner’s report and I visited Margaret’s grave at Rochester.

During the winter of 1999, before I had finished the book, I was asleep one night at our home in Porepunkah when I woke up sensing the presence of a small girl in the room.

I thought it was Kathleen, who at the time was five years old. I tried to get up and see what she wanted but I was frozen solid. The child came close to me. She was affectionate and I wanted to reach out to her, but I couldn’t.

Something clicked in my brain that it was Margaret. When that happened I unfroze and the child was gone.

On another occasion I had a vivid dream, which I believe involved Margaret. I saw a happy, pretty child in a dusty farm yard. It was a hot day. The building and fences were all made of roughly hewn timber.

The child was about three years old. She had very long brown hair. She was wearing a long, heavy dark green dress. I can’t say for certain what the material was, but it was something like corduroy. I thought it odd that she was wearing a dress like that on such a hot day.

Unusually for me, I remembered all these details clearly when I work up in the morning. Something registered with me that the child was Margaret. Certainly the setting fits with what I came to know of her life.

The dream can be explained rationally, of course, as an understandable sub-conscious reaction to material which was circulating in my conscious brain.

The “physical” presence of the child in my bedroom is harder to explain.

I named my second daughter Margaret and felt some relief when she passed her third birthday last December.

I live in the UK. 40 years ago we moved to a 400 year old farmhouse halfway up a Welsh mountain (we lived there with our three sons for a few years). It was on the site of a Roman cattle road. The house needed a lot of fixing. We took out the floor boards in a bedroom – you could see through to the slate floor below. One night, I heard my 4 year old son crying.

I found him at the far side of the room, in the corner against the wall. He was sleep walking and had crossed the beams on his own in the dark. I had to cross them also to pick him up – no easy task. How had he done it with his little legs?

When he woke he said the Gorey had taken him there. I had never heard that word before. A couple of weeks later, he pointed to his teddy bear, which he had lost in the woodpile in the yard — he said, ‘It’s the Gorey.’

A local person told me that a man named Gorey used to live in the house many years ago. The reason I’m writing is I have always been puzzled by this. I see your family is Irish — did you have any Gorey relatives in Wales in 18th century? I found your site by chance looking up something quite unrelated.

The haunting didn’t stop and there were many more times when we, or one or two visitors saw, or felt a spirit. I don’t know if it was the same one, or different ones. The house — Bwlch yn Horeb, known as the Bwlch — was on an historic spot and we discovered that from about the 11th century to 1800s it had been an inn, before becoming a farmhouse.

The “spirits” could have been wind, or even rats, though more than once actual shapes were seen and voices heard. I camped out in it on my own when we first bought it, when it was a virtual wreck. Many times, I had such a strong feeling of a presence that I had to run outside.

I met two young policemen who told me about the ‘ghost’ they saw; it’s a long story.

The walls were four feet thick, stuck together with a lime and mud render. When we knocked a hole in one for a window, piles of wheat poured out and we saw the ‘rat runs.’

Locals told us the meadows behind, used for hay in the spring and then sheep, hadn’t had wheat on them since before the War. They meant WW1.

We left to live in Italy and later sold the house. We have never returned, so I have no idea how the current occupants find it.

The ghost story

Briefly: The Bwlch was cross shaped, a block at the front with a porch and front door, central stairs with rooms left and right; and a wing sticking out of the middle at the back.

There was a very small front parlour to one side of the central hall (later we knocked it into the room behind); on the other side of the hall was the main parlour, which was the depth of the house.

One day I was walking past the smaller parlour, when I saw a man in heavy tweeds hunched up in an armchair by the dead fire. I went in and there was nobody there.

One Easter, a year after the incident which I mentioned to you last time, when my son sleepwalked, lured by the Gorey — my parents and teenage sister came to stay. My sister went for a walk on the mountain and disappeared in a sudden blizzard. My father went to look for her and got lost. We called Mountain Rescue.

Twelve big policemen turned up and searched for her. They found my father, but my sister had vanished. During a regroup, standing around the kitchen, drinking hot tea, two of the older policemen told us that years ago, when young, one winter they had been called to the Bwlch because the elderly shepherd who lived there — a Mr Gorey — hadn’t been seen for a while and his dogs had broken out and made their way down to the village.

The policemen walked up through deep snow and in the small front parlour found Mr Gorey, dead in an armchair in front of the ashes of an old fire. The house was freezing.

They picked him up to carry him upstairs to the bedroom, but he was frozen into a bent shape, as if in a chair. They carried him up anyway, and laid him on the bed. His legs were bent, in the air. Without thinking, one of them went to straighten him by pushing on his legs. It made him sit up. They yelled and fled. They were sheepish, of course, when relating this.

I said I’d seen him once, in the armchair. That just led to lots of local Welsh ghost stories, in the middle of which, we got a telephone call to say my sister was safe. She had gone over the top and eventually ended up in a distant farm, by doing what I told her, follow a stream down if you get lost.

Incidentally, there was an Irish connection, though I don’t know if with Mr Gorey. Cattle and travellers would land from Ireland on Anglesey and follow the old Roman cattle (or drovers’) road that passed the Bwlch to Chester or Shrewsbury and then down to London.

I live in the UK. 40 years ago we moved to a 400 year old farmhouse halfway up a Welsh mountain (we lived there with our three sons for a few years). It was on the site of a Roman cattle road. The house needed a lot of fixing. We took out the floor boards in a bedroom – you could see through to the slate floor below. One night, I heard my 4 year old son crying. I found him at the far side of the room, in the corner against the wall. He was sleep walking and had crossed the beams on his own in the dark. I had to cross them also to pick him up – no easy task. How had he done it with his little legs? When he woke he said the Gorey had taken him there. I had never heard that word before. A couple of weeks later, he pointed to his teddy bear, which he had lost in the woodpile in the yard — he said, ‘It’s the Gorey.’ A local person told me that a man named Gorey used to live in the house many years ago. The reason I’m writing is I have always been puzzled by this. I see your family is Irish — did you have any Gorey relatives in Wales in 18th century? I found your site by chance looking up something quite unrelated.

My serious response was that our Irish genealogical records fizzle out around the 1840s. However, I’m aware of name variations in Scotland and France, presumably from Scots Gaelic and Breton Celtic connections, so a Welsh equivalent would not surprise me.

On a more contemplative note, I’m not aware of any Gorey ghosts.

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