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“I don’t want to be on my own” – Ghosts at the Little Mill Bakery

By Jonathan Broughton, Dec 2011

The Little Mill Bakery

The Little Mill Bakery

I don’t want to be on my own – these words are thought to be spoken by a milkman called William. The story has it that he worked his horse-drawn milk-cart around St Leonards in the early 1900s. One morning, as he was doing his rounds, his foot caught on a stray rope. He lost his balance, crashed through the grate of a Victorian house in London Road, and hanged himself. The ground floor of that Victorian house is now the Little Mill Bakery . . .

‘There was a strange feeling in here,’ explained Claire Hitchings as she led me downstairs into the fridge room at the front of the basement. ‘Something wasn’t quite right. It hit the pit of your stomach.’
Claire doesn’t come across as someone who is easily spooked. She runs a thriving, award-winning business, with her husband Michael. She hasn’t got time to worry about ‘strange feelings,’ or the mysterious disappearance of kitchen utensils, or the odd moments when she knows she has put something down in one place, only to find it in another.
But somehow, that feeling that ‘something wasn’t quite right,’ persisted. One day, in the Cake Room, next door to the Fridge Room, one of the staff was preparing fondant, and couldn’t find a spoon. She turned to look for one on the shelves behind her, when there was a loud crash. The fondant bowl had fallen over on the workbench, and a spoon had mysteriously appeared next to it and was spinning round and round in circles.
‘Right,’ said Claire, ‘enough’s enough – that was when I called in a friend of mine, who is an excellent clairvoyant.’ The clairvoyant immediately sensed a presence in the basement – in fact, she sensed two, possibly three. Claire left her alone in the Fridge Room.
‘His name’s William,’ the clairvoyant explained when she re-appeared, and she told Claire about his shocking death. ‘He keeps saying, ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’ The clairvoyant assured Claire that she had done her best to ease his suffering.
Jonathan Broughton

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