ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anna Rains, moved for the 48th time in 2006, having previously lived in England, Scotland, Wales, Hong Kong and California. She has experienced every conceivable type of home: a bus after the Second World War, a caravan, a 120-foot schooner in Hong Kong, a houseboat on the Birdham Canal near Chichester, skyscrapers, high rises, town houses, a thatched cottage and a haunted Cheshire farmhouse.

For the past twenty-five years, she has lived in Cheshire, near Macclesfield, where she has been involved in fundraising for local charities, doing Punch and Judy shows and speaking to the local Women’s Institutes about ghosts and fortune-telling, as well as returning, soon after her sixty fifth birthday, to work as a part-time training officer for a large firm of Estate Agents.

She has had almost as many careers as she has had living quarters. Apart from training sales staff , she has worked in the hotel industry, travel, selling high-priced watches in Hong Kong, and as a telephonist and typist in England. Other ventures have been in Real Estate, as ‘short-order’ cook in a café, in banking, motivational sales, boat sales and sales of coffins and caskets, all in California before she came back to England to start her own business as a Sales Trainer.

Anna comes from a family that can be traced back in direct line to William the Conqueror. She has many other illustrious ancestors, many of them very eccentric, particularly her more recent nearest relatives. As one after another of the older members of her family died, she decided she had to put some of the most memorable stories down on paper so that her grandchildren and future great-grandchildren would know all about their forebears – otherwise the stories would be lost.