Who's There? E-Book

Colette Shires

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 208

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

'Then, adding horror to horror, a pair of thin, long-fingered hands placed themselves on my stomach and proceeded to inch their way up my body. They crawled underneath my own hands resting on my chest. I gripped the bony fingers to push them away, but I couldn't - I was not strong enough. As they neared my throat, I thought I was about to die.' When the Slater family heard what sounded like a baby crying in their new house, they had no idea that it was the beginning of a terrifying haunting that would last for more than thirty years, and follow them across the city. This is their story.

Leseprobe

Who’s There?

THE TRUE STORY OF A LEEDS HAUNTING

Who’s There?

THE TRUE STORY OF A LEEDS HAUNTING

Colette Shires

To my niece Amanda, 18 July 1961 – 28 May 2005

First published 2008

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Reprinted 2011

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Colette Shires, 2008 2013

The right of Colette Shires to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5645 1

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Introduction

My Immediate Family

1Moving House

2The First Signs

3The Haunting

4The Ghosts

5Tony

6Homeless

7A New Start

8The House in Potternewton

9The Accident

10The Ghosts of Oakwood Hall

11Dad

12The Hollies

13The Croft

INTRODUCTION

I would be a very wise woman indeed if I could give cut and dried answers to explain the existence of ghosts. Psychic research has endeavoured for years to provide them.

I am not offering proof of their existence, but a true, unexaggerated account of the many paranormal events that took place in the homes of my parents. It is for you to make your own judgement of the existence of ghosts by assessing the strange phenomenon that occurred.

I know some people think I am slightly unhinged when I tell them I believe in ghosts. And who could blame them? Ghosts are not exactly the normal, everyday things they are likely to come across, but for my family, friends, and me for years they were almost part of our everyday life.

Apart from my mother, who few believed, and my ex sister-in-law, who spilled the beans, we were reluctant to speak about the haunted house other than to a selected few. For quite some time, we even found it difficult to discuss our strange experiences amongst ourselves. As I have grown older, however, I have become braver and wiser, and the way I see it now is that, no matter what others say or think, I cannot alter this part of my life, and the fact that I was there and lived it. Therefore, other people’s opinions do not affect me like they once did. I am just a normal, every day person. So much has happened: it is a story that must be told, and I want to tell it because I do not think ghosts exist – I know they do!

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY

My parents

Edna Slater (née Walters)

Arthur Slater

My brothers and sisters (from the eldest to the youngest)

Laura

Alfred

Edmond

Brideen

Myself - Colette

Conrad

One

MOVING HOUSE

My story begins in the early summer of 1958, when I was almost eleven years old and we were to leave Glover Street because my mother could no longer face living there. Everything had changed after the deaths of her ageing parents. Her mother passed away first from cancer in 1952; then, two years later, her father followed. Mamma always said he died of a broken heart. She missed them terribly, and now the rest of her family was moving away from the area, so she wanted to move too.

My parents, Edna and Arthur Slater, had spent months scouring the city of Leeds trying to find a suitable property in the right place at the right price and size. The ideal location in my mother’s mind would be as near as possible to the city centre because she would consider herself as living in the back of beyond if she was not in walking distance of the shops. With a husband and children to shop for, the nearer the shops were to her doorstep, the better.

As it was for most people at that time, we did not possess a car. I cannot recall of ever thinking we had a need for one, as trams and buses were plentiful. My mother usually walked into town, but sometimes caught a tram or bus home if she was heavily laden with groceries. She loved the hustle and bustle of city life, and would never have dreamed for a moment of living in the country; she loved the country, but only for its beauty and as a holiday destination. My father was very easy going, and would go along with whatever she wanted. He was able to settle wherever he could throw his cap. This was the longest they had lived in the same house since the war, so to them another move was no big issue.

My older sister Brideen had the job of taking Conrad (my younger brother) and me to see our new home for the first time. She was fifteen years old then. I can still see us now. It was Saturday. Mamma had made sure that none of us were to visit the house empty-handed. Conrad and I were loaded up with our bits and pieces, carrying them on our way like busy little ants. Brideen was leading, a big cloth bag thrown over her shoulder. Her once long, blond hair, now cropped short, made her look even taller than before. A weak glimmer of sun managed to shine through the overcast sky adding an extra glow to her natural fairness. Brideen and Conrad, being fairer than me, took after the Slater’s side of the family. I was darker and brown eyed and took after the Walters’ side. As I walked up the road swinging a very full brown paper bag, the handles made from thin strings cut into my fingers creating deep grooves close to the bone, but that did not dampen my enthusiasm. Even though I did not want to leave our old house, I still felt excited with the idea of living somewhere else. I was confused with my feelings, but the reality of it was I wanted the best of both worlds, which I could not have, so I looked upon the move as an adventure with a lot of exploring to look forward to.

My older sister, Brideen.

Although the house was only a mile or so from our old home, the area was unfamiliar to me. I had only ever passed through it on the tram to Roundhay Park before. Now they had buses instead.

‘Will I have to catch a bus to school, Brideen?’

‘No, it’s just a little bit further than before; you’ll just go a different way.’

I had hoped the answer would be yes as I always wanted to go to school by bus. Noisily, we walked on, chattering and pointing out this and that. We bombarded Brideen with our questions about the house and the area.

‘Wait and see,’ she answered repeatedly with a big grin across her face. Her green eyes flashed at our impatience. ‘We’ll soon be there. It’s not far.’

We crossed over Sheepscar, a triangular-shaped intersection, and turned off to walk along Roundhay Road. We passed a library, pubs, shops, and streets of terraced houses, some back to backs. Eventually, we approached a schoolyard surrounded by wrought-iron railings. The school building was set back at the bottom of the yard which sloped away from the busy main road. Looking through the railings and across the yard, we could see a row of old terraced houses. They were larger than the other houses we had seen – taller somehow. Brideen pointed her finger towards them.

Looking down Roundhay Road – what was Grant Street is behind the railings on the right.

‘Look, the sixth one down is ours,’ she said.

‘It’s not one of those back to backs, is it?’

‘No, Colette. They are all through houses sort of like our old one, except they don’t have a garden at the back, just a small yard.’

‘I’ve been here already,’ piped up Conrad. ‘Mamma brought me with her to see it.’

‘Where had I been?’ I wondered. Everyone seemed to have seen the house except me. I did not feel a need for a garden at my age then, so I did not mind not having one. So far everything met with my approval – until we reached the house. On seeing it close to I could not help but feel a little disappointed in it. It seemed to loom over us, yet it was not any larger than the house we were about to leave. It was built of traditional red brick. It had a tiny garden at the front, and not much of a view looking across the school playground to the street opposite. There was no extended family in sight. The address was No. 11 Grant Street at the front and No. 12 Grant Place at the back.

It was obvious that the house had not been decorated for many years, outside or in. The wallpaper and paint work were the drabbest I had ever seen. I thought that perhaps it was the awful décor that put me off, and I had to admit to myself that our old house was much nicer. I decided then that I really did not want to move here. I wanted to stay in Glover Street where I was happy. I could not understand why my parents chose this house to buy: I could only guess that they took it on purely out of frustration because they had difficulties in finding a house that they really wanted and were sick and tired of looking around. I don’t know why they finally chose this house in Grant Street, other than it being near enough to town.

Dad in Grant Street, taken from outside No. 11.

Dad and our two elder brothers Alfred and Edmond (named after Dad’s brothers) were already at the house when we arrived. They were doing the preparations for redecorating. They only had the weekends and evenings to do so as they were all busy with their day jobs. My father was a pipe fitter at the time. Alfred, the eldest of the two, worked on the buildings as a hod carrier, and Edmond was a roofer. Even a stranger would know that they were brothers as they were very much alike, same good physique, and thick dark hair, and both good-looking enough to break a girl’s heart. They took after the Walters’ side of the family in looks. They did not have time to chat to us, so we just got on with scouting the bare large square rooms with Brideen acting as our guide. She told us that on her previous visits she’d heard the sounds of a baby’s cry coming from somewhere upstairs. Knowing that there was no baby around, not even next door, she came to the conclusion that she must have mistaken the cries of a cat for a baby as they could sound very much alike at times, and she had no other explanation. She had already searched the entire house, but could not find anything and assumed that the ‘cat’ had to be trapped somewhere in the house out of sight, perhaps between the floorboards or up a chimneybreast. On hearing this, the three of us began a search for the ‘trapped cat’. As the house was not yet furnished, it should be easy to find, especially now that there were three of us to look for it. Our stampeding footsteps echoed up the uncarpeted stairs and around the house. We hunted from the cellar to the attic, but found nothing. Later, we were in the kitchen eating fish and chips for lunch when I heard it.

‘Shush. Listen!’

Sitting very still with full mouths and eyes wide we stared at each other as the sad cries drifted down the stairs from somewhere in the bedrooms. We got up and moved to the foot of the stairs and listened carefully. The cat did indeed sound just like a baby. Feeling confident that we should definitely find it this time as we could go directly to its source, we went up to the bedrooms to resume our search. But the cries hung in the air as they met our ears and made it very difficult to judge from which direction they came. We put our ears to the floors and walls, looked and listened up the chimney breasts, but to no avail. We could not find the poor unfortunate creature anywhere. I felt that the strange sounds may have come from a space beneath the attic stairs, but it was impossible for anything to be there and not be found. Defeated, we gave up the search.

Off and on for the next two weeks, the crying continued to be heard around the house before eventually falling silent. We could only guess that the ‘cat’ had died. We felt very sad and unhappy at not being able to help it. We were not to know then that the crying would be heard a number of times over the years to follow.

The day came for us to move in. Everyone seemed to be happy about it and their enthusiasm soon brushed off onto me. My disappointment had quickly dispersed after the house had been decorated and furnished. It looked so much more presentable. I began to feel excited again. We moved in without any problems.

Brideen and I shared the large attic bedroom. We thought it would be great, thinking that we would have a better view of the moon and stars. The reality was that it was as black as pitch when the light was out because the streetlights did not reach the skylight window. I still liked it though, because it was well away from the rest of the house and I could play records without disturbing anyone. The room had been decorated in lovely, yellow, ‘Madam Butterfly’ wallpaper. It looked bright and sunny, but it did not take long for the walls to be plastered with pop pin-ups, mainly of Elvis Presley. Everyone else slept in the rooms on the floor below.

Two

THE FIRST SIGNS

A year or so later, Dad made and fitted a new door in the kitchen to close off a tiny hall leading to the stairs and the sitting room. During the school summer holidays, I was surprised to be given the job of painting the door by Mamma. While I carefully applied an undercoat, she busied herself outside with the washing and tidying up the yard, but made sure she checked up on me every few minutes, filling me with praise for doing a good job. Then she called out, ‘Colette, come and look at this on the wall!’ I looked up to see my mother’s face come into view as she pushed open the back door and beckoned me outside.

‘Just a second.’

I carefully laid the paintbrush across the top of the tin before getting up from my knees. Then I headed out of the house. Mamma was standing by the gate and poking her finger at the wall.

‘Look!’ she said, before I’d even got down the steps to the yard. As I got closer, my eyes followed her finger and focused on some crude engravings on the yard wall. They were difficult to see at first, as they were as black as the rest of the stone around them, making it obvious that they had been there for many years. (It was normal in those days for everything to be blackened by sooty smoke as it billowed from coal fires, especially in a large industrial city such as Leeds). They were symbols of some sort.

‘What are they?’ I asked.

‘Oh! Colette, they look like black magic or something. What do you think?’ Even though I was still a child, she often respected my opinion, which made me feel quite responsible and grown up.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered truthfully, and ran my fingers over the strange shapes. But I had seen something like them before, perhaps in a film or comic book.

‘Do you really think they could be black magic things, Mam?’

‘Oh, God! I hope not,’ she said in a low voice.

‘... Mam...What is black magic?’

‘Ooh! It’s Devil worship – the occult and things.’

I had heard of Devil worship and the occult, but I had never come across anything relating to it before. We were intrigued by the strange markings. They seemed to hold some sort of symbolic significance, but we were baffled as to who made them and why.

I was back at school after the holiday and returned home one day to find my mother trying to chisel out the strange shapes. Her curiosity for them had slowly built up to a strong dislike.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

She turned and looked at me as I walked through the gate. Her hair was covered in fragments of stone, which somehow looked comically out of place with the serious expression on her face.

‘I’m getting rid of this. It does not belong around a Catholic household. I think it has got something to do with black magic, so I don’t want it here.’

I did not know what to make of it. As she chiselled, the light sandstone underneath began to show through.

‘But look what you’re doing to the wall. You are making it look very messy.’

‘I don’t give a hang!’ she said. ‘I just want to get rid of it. I’m going to cement it over.’

I left her to it and went into the house. After I put my things away, I went into the front room to play the piano. As I raised the lid, I heard my mother’s voice call out.

‘Colette! Oh, Colette!’ She sounded distressed. Her voice was almost like a scream. I jumped up from the piano stool and raced out to her.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Look at this!’ she said as I appeared in the open doorway. She turned and pointed to the wall. I ran down the steps from the house to take a closer look, and was shocked at what I saw. The face of horned goat was clearly looking out at us. It had not been there before.

‘It’s a ram’s head. It’s a ram’s head,’ said Mamma.

‘Are you sure you didn’t do it?’

‘No, I couldn’t do that. I was only making a rough surface for the cement to grip.’

With no further ado, with cement already mixed, she quickly plastered over it.

‘There now, it’s gone,’ she said softly, as if reassuring herself. But that was not the end of it. A few days later the cement fell out. The ugly defacement stared out at us once again. Mamma re-chiselled and re-cemented it several times thereafter, but it still fell out – and the face seemed to become more apparent each time. After a long time, some of the cement eventually stayed in place, but to cover only half the face. Mamma quickly grew to hate the house and stayed out of it as much as she could.

By the time I reached thirteen years of age I had settled quite well into the house. I had not given Glover Street much thought, as it now seemed an age ago, as did the crying cat and the markings on the yard wall. But I was to wonder about the carvings once more when I was standing in the front doorway of the house, looking out on to the tiny front garden and street. Alfred had cemented the frontage of the house giving it a stone effect, which smartened up the old brickwork considerably.

Three people walked by: a middle-aged man, a woman and a girl aged around eight years old. My mother had also spotted them, and whispered into the back of my neck that they were the family who had lived in the house before us.

The woman, possibly in her late thirties, looked miserable and kept her eyes straight ahead. The little girl, holding her hand, did not take her eyes from the ground as they walked by. Neither of them gave the house or me the slightest hint of a glance. I thought this was rather odd. I would have found it almost impossible to keep such a restraint on my natural curiosity, yet even the little girl could do it. The man did look across, and gave me a small, smarmy smile. I disliked him instantly. I felt as if he was looking down on me, and thought how cheeky of him to do so, considering that he had left the house in such a drab state. And for some unexplained reason, I wondered in the back of my mind if he had been responsible for the carvings on the wall.

‘I don’t like the look of those people,’ I said to my mother after they had passed by. She glanced after them through the window, and then spoke out loud. ‘Yes, I know what you mean; I thought they were strange too.’

That was the first and last time I ever saw or heard of them.

One evening, towards the Christmas of 1959, my family and I were quietly watching television in the living room. Victor, our curly haired, Airedale-terrier cross, was lying under a chair. He was an intelligent and obedient dog and we all loved him. A big coal fire roared in the grate and we all sat snuggled into the settee and armchairs that surrounded it. It was a cosy, tranquil scene.

Suddenly, Victor startled us by scrambling madly out from under the chair. It clattered as it was tossed to one side by his body. He was frantic, and without warning he charged across the room as if propelled. To our amazement, he leaped into the air and began a frenzied attack at some unknown entity in the space between the top of the door and the ceiling. He was in a rage like we had never seen before. Keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the spot, he frantically tried to reach whatever it was by leaping off the back of the settee and biting into the air. He then found he could reach the space better by jumping off a nearby chair instead, but again, he just bit the air. We had never seen him act so viciously, and sat with our mouths wide open at his unusual behaviour. After the initial shock we attempted to calm him, but he would have none of it. The door from the living room led to the tiny hall in the centre of the house and to the bedroom stairs. We searched the house upstairs and downstairs, inside and out in a vain attempt to find a reason for his outburst. Our efforts did not satisfy him, and we were unable to distract him from the space above the door. We passed our hands through the space in an effort to show him that there was nothing there, but this only made him more intent on attack. Eventually, after a lot of coaxing, he retreated briefly from his solitary fight, but only to repeat the scenario all over again.

The evening pressed on and Victor calmed a little. He went back to lie under the now straightened chair, but his eyes never left the spot above the door. He continued to growl and snarl. We all sat quietly with our own thoughts, afraid to say what we were thinking – either that Victor had gone mad and would have to be put down, or there was something very strange in this room with us that only Victor could see!

The following day we were relieved to see that Victor was his normal loveable self again. He never repeated his odd behaviour of the night before, and continued his life as any normal dog would.

Even though all my instincts told me that Victor did see something in the room that evening, I did not consider at that time that the house might be haunted. I suppose it was because I did not know what to expect from a haunted house. I took the incident to be a one off, weird event.