Day a spot of sunbathing was interrupted by Civil War cavalier running from the woods with his sword drawn

Since setting up my investigation group in 1995, I’ve had a fleecy jacket that proudly displays the name Torbay Investigators of the Paranormal. Over the years, many people have read out the name to attract my attention, using it as an excuse to share with me their own ghostly experiences. Once it was read out by a veterinary nurse who used to look after my cats in Paignton. This happened to be in the gift shop at St Nectan's Glen, a beautiful, spiritual, network of waterfalls just outside of Boscastle, in Cornwall. I had no idea she had moved to the area to live and work.
Just the other week, another example of this happened to me at a garage store on the Bovey Straight, just around the corner from where my brother and his family live in Heathfield, near Bovey Tracey.
I’d stopped there to pick up a few bits of shopping and as I searched around the cabinets for what I was after, the cashier spotted my jacket. As I approached her to unload my items, she said, 'so you are a ghostbuster?' After I’d confirmed this, she treated me to an unusual experience she had had shortly after her father had died.
She was in the habit of playing online word games, with veritable strangers, I do something similar only with pop music. One morning, she was engrossed in a game with a woman she challenged regularly, when suddenly the winning answer came to her. Duly, she filled it in and it became apparent her opponent didn’t know this one.
Instead she wrote the word PUDGE, a random slang word that not many people would know, but the cashier knew it for it was her father’s nickname...her father who had only died three weeks previously.
She had taken this as a sign that he was still around, I agreed with her, that he was looking over her and wanted her to know he was ok. On another occasion, around that time, her challenger had erroneously filled in the word SABLE. This had been the name of the cashier’s dog, long since deceased, but her opponent wouldn’t have known that. However, her father did
If we’d had more time to chat, I would have been able to inform my new acquaintance that the very area we were standing in, and talking about spooky stuff, was itself most haunted. The nearby Bovey Heath was the site of an English Civil War battle on January 9, 1646. A ghostly re-enactment of which, is said to take place on the anniversary.
As I said, my brother lives just around the corner, on a relatively new housing estate, and they were amongst some of the first residents to move in whilst other houses were still being built. One summer's day, one of their neighbours had a relative staying with them who claimed that whilst she was sunbathing in the back garden she clearly saw a Civil War cavalier, complete with plume in his hat, cloak, and drawn sword, come running out of the woodland behind the house, run along the treeline, before disappearing into the woods again. Prior to that experience, she had no belief or interest in ghosts, but she does now.
One other story, concerning the Heathfield area, came to me via a phone call. My phone number is out in the public domain, so I’m always getting called up by people wanting to tell me about odd experiences they’ve had, that they just can’t explain. On this occasion, the call came from a worker at the tile factory then situated on the industrial estate. They were new in the job and had been given a forklift truck to operate. The site was quite big so they often had to transfer pallets from one side of the compound to the other. One day, they had been on their way to pick up a load from the back storage area when they noticed someone walking ahead of them, someone they hadn’t met before. Being of a friendly disposition, they called out to say hello. However, the figure ignored them and proceeded to walk through a brick wall.
As you can imagine, my caller was particularly shaken up by this experience, and had rung me seeking answers. Unfortunately, the owners of the factory concerned weren’t interested in having their worker’s story being looked into, presumably for fear of upsetting other workers. So, without being able to investigate further, and my attempts to research both online and in my own library, having drawn a blank, I had nothing to offer my enquirer but this case, along with the other stories I’ve gathered from the Heathfield area, certainly deserve to be looked into and hopefully, one day, I will get the opportunity.