Gifted? (Part 2)
A few more spooky experiences from my childhood, I would love to hear your ghost stories... please feel free to leave a comment with your tales!!
39 Church St
We moved into Church St when I was 6. At that time my mum was still on maternity leave after having my little sister, and my Dad mostly worked from home so life was great! This house was something else, a big old Victorian brick built semi. I remember taking my school friends home for tea for the first time and they thought it was a mansion. Being a couple of hundred years old, the house had a lot of history, including once being a doctor’s surgery. It was, and still is a great family home, my sister and I had a very blessed upbringing and I still love going back there with my husband to see the clan. Generally this home has always been filled with love, laughter and lots and lots of my parents’ famous parties.
I had a few friends that I grew up with on the street. We were all around the same age but didn’t all go to the same school so had separate school friends too. This meant that sometimes I would find myself outside playing Kerbie with kids I didn’t really know. I will always remember a little girl that was playing with us one night after school, who was rather proud to tell me that she knew that a young boy had died in our house a few years before we lived there. I braved it out and told her I knew all about it, not that I actually did, it was the first time I had heard of it. But this was when things started...
The thought of someone dying in our house made me quite intrigued. At this point in life the only death I had experienced was that of the family pets; Peter the gold fish and Squeak the guinea pig. I could only imagine that this death of a youngster must have been quite tragic. Obviously I imagined he must had been murdered. I don’t remember how it came about that I learned the boy who died around the age of 17, and who we call ‘Not Robert’, had sadly died through misadventure sniffing solvents. Over time it seemed he quite liked being mischievous to the young teenage girl growing up in his old house!
Around the age of about 13 I started to take an interest in ghosts, buying books from the British towns that we visited on weekends away about their local hauntings. Going on ghost tours in historical towns like York and Chester. I even took part in a newspaper competition called ‘The Great British Ghost Hunt’ which I remember enjoying spending time looking at with both of my Grandmas. It was also around the same time that the fear of being alone in my room at night crept back in after one night I saw a green lady floating at the end of my bed. Now this occasion could quite easily have been a bad dream, but it still scared the hell out of me and I remember sleeping on my mum and dad’s floor that night. The usual childhood fears of being followed on the stairs and landing, not wanting to sleep with the bedroom door shut etc etc all followed, but there was definitely more to it than just that. I definitely had quite a few hair standing on end, goosebump moments where I felt I was being watched, or felt a breeze or light touch when there was no one else around.
My friends and I never dabbled with a Ouija Board or anything like that, but on the occasion that my parents were out we would all sit in the living room and try to summon up Not Robert’s spirit, asking him to show us signs that he was there. Guaranteed every time we would hear banging and footsteps from the rooms above, or the lights would flicker. One time the lights went off completely, it seems the trip switch had flicked down in the cellar, but instead of braving it out with a torch and going down there to check the box we just sat outside waiting for my parents to get home. Could Not Robert have done this? Well I certainly wouldn’t put it passed him!! I even remember the bangs from above being so loud that one time my friends and I picked up some hockey sticks from the umbrella stand in the hall to protect ourselves!
My bedroom once again became the place I felt things. I had these huge fitted wardrobes that ran all along the back wall. They were that big that we used to climb in them, play games in there and look for things to dress up in. I would often hear the doors slowly creaking open during the night, hangers rattling around. I often had to convince myself that there was a logical explanation like my mum was tidying things away in there whilst I hid under the covers to stop my eyes from seeing something. I also started to notice an awful smell in my room, it would come and go but the stench would make me feel sick. It was as if someone had put some prawns behind the radiator or something. I wasn’t the only one who smelled it, my Mum and Dad did investigate but didn’t ever find the cause. Eventually, after a few months, it died down of its own accord which brought us all some relief.
Things kind of came to a halt after the smell had gone and I didn’t give Not Robert a second thought for a few years. That was until I was in my second year at uni and things really flared up again.....