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The Doctor’s Story

I lived in Ealing for 35 years, so the locality described in this story is well known to me. Having said that, I have never actually ventured down this road. Montpelier Avenue is in a residential part of north Ealing, and there would have been no need to walk down it, and, while being not particularly nervous, I never fancied the idea of exploring. It had contained a very haunted house - the details are available on the inernet. I did, however, occasionally pass by the Perivale end of the road when returning, late at night from Greenford, where my brother lived. And, I remember, I would never look down that road. Reading the book “True Ghost Stories of our own time” by Vivienne Rae-Ellis I was, naturally, intrigued by by this tale.

I arrived at Ealing Common Station from London one evening at about six o’clock. It was dark; the lamps were lit. As a change I decided to walk back to the hostel through Montpelier Avenue. I usually went by a slightly quicker road parallel to it. Some way along I passed a policeman standing on a corner, also a small brown dog. A few hundred yards further, on the right side of the road where I was walking, I came to a fairly large white house, lit up, with a large gate and a path through the garden to the front door. Just before I got to the gate a black coach came out with, I think, two dark brown horses, although there might have been four. They stopped just outside the gate and I noticed that you could see the horses’ breath, but there was not a [sound of their breathing] or anything else to be heard. Then I noticed a number, say four, of dark people-shapes come out of the house, who were pushing someone else into the back of the coach, who didn't seem to want to go. I thought this was all very odd, and went back to the policeman, who accompanied me back up the road, but I could not then find any trace of the white house, or garden or gate, or any sign of the coach! I understand that there used to be some large houses in this part of Ealing in Regency times.

Dr Harris [name changed] is a retired general medical practitioner who now lives in Devon. When he was twenty-two he was living at a students’ hostel in Perivale Avenue, Ealing, while studying at University College Hospital in London.

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The Doctor’s

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