A Haunted House?

I once spent two years living in a house that was wrong for me. I love the countryside, the house was in a town, I love small and homely, the house was large and rambling, I don’t like heights, the house had three storeys!

I hadn’t been there long when I felt a strange sense of foreboding whenever I had to go up to the top floor. At first I put this down to the somewhat vertiginous view down the stairwell, but after a while I felt there was something more. Lights didn’t always work on the top floor, doors sprung open of their own accord.

The house had a beautiful sitting room at the front, with many features from its Edwardian era, sunlight flooded in from the large bay window. I only went into this room when absolutely necessary. For some reason, a little scenario would play in my head where the door to this room would close behind me and I wouldn’t be able to escape.

Children were being mischievous ringing the doorbell and running away, until the night that I was actually standing in the doorway when they rang. ‘Aha,’ I thought, ‘got you,’ except that there was nobody there when I opened the door, nobody in the entire street. It dawned on me that perhaps there had never been anybody there, and also that the doorbell shared a circuit with the old servants bells that ran throughout the house. I couldn’t be sure which was ringing.

The camcorder switching itself on and off was soon joined by the TV, and various electrical devices that chose occasionally not to work or to work when unbidden. The clattering of an invisible object falling down the staircases became a regular occurrence. As did the sound of mail dropping through the letterbox. When ‘somebody’ hugged my legs like a small child when all of my children were sleeping I knew that I had mysterious company.

The voices followed. A young girl didn’t like me going out into the garden, and would call quite pleadingly for me to return to the house. Somebody would like to whisper a tentative ‘hello’. I was relieved in a way when my husband heard a whispered conversation, it showed that perhaps my imagination wasn’t in chaos but it also confirmed my fears that we were not alone in the house.