Rose-Mary and her husband David Gowers, a science teacher, and their two children share their home with an unlikely guest... Rose-Mary and David Gowers had been in their present house, an old farmhouse in North Wales, for just a couple of weeks, when unusual things began to happen. Rose-Mary explains, "We own the field adjoining the house, and a reporter turned up on the doorstep to say that the Virgin Mary had been seen in our field by and Irish couple, and they'd subsequently been cured of their ailments - a cataract and a frozen shoulder..."
The Gowers response to this claim was politely sceptical, "We're not Roman Catholic or anything like that, so we found that very hard to believe." However, in 1997, their own domestic phenomena began. Rose-Mary - "My daughter, who was 21 at the time, was sleeping in a particular room when she said she saw a young monk sitting on the end of the bed. Of course, we naturally thought she'd had a bad dream. She said at first it was very pleasant. But then her brain kicked in and told her it wasn't exactly normal to see a monk sitting there, she was a bit perturbed to put it mildly."
The apparition was of a benevolent kind, and two days later, Rose-Mary saw it for herself, "It was fleeting - and my brain said 'Monk!' I could be deluded - I am aware of that possibility. In all I've seen him about four times."
The monk, or Brother Adolphus as the Gower family have come to call their ghostly lodger, is a real attention-seeker. Finding the cat scratching at the carpet, Rose-Mary propelled it out the back door, went back to look at the carpet and found in two foot high lettering 'Monk' scratched into the carpet. Even hoovering won't erase it. David finds the phenomenon aggravating on occasion, "I left my glasses on my desk and I couldn't find them anywhere. Our son pointed them out hanging over the curtain rail in the bathroom..." Rose-Mary claims this is because he'd referred to Brother Adolphus rather disrespectfully as Doli.
David's view is one of curiousity. He trained as a chemist, and scientific certainty is especially important to him, "I'm not sure there is a 'monk'," he says, "It's simply a name we've given to the phenomena which we are investigating - they're interesting and worthwhile, but that's as far as I'll go at the moment. We started getting words cut into the stone... They're not rough carvings, it's beautifully chiselled. Rose-Mary hasn't I think got the skills of carving that are shown in this. I'd like to get an stonemason to look at it. We'd like to look at the handwriting to see if it is a genuine medieval script ... and so on. There are genuine scientific ways of investigating a genuine scientific phenomenon. Once we've got the evidence, that's the time to speculate."
Rose-Mary is also puzzled, but less dismissive of the paranormal, "We could be the subject of a wonderful hoax, but quite frankly how it's done, I don't know. It's been going on for so long now, that I think people would have got fed up of it. Especially when I take photographs - I get some really weird and wonderful shots of monks ..."
Both David and Rose-Mary don't suspect their children, who in turn, don't suspect their parents, "They've given up the idea that I should be doing it," says Rose-Mary, "because they say, 'Mum isn't clever enough'!"
