It began as a game
In 1976, my family relocated to the opposite side of the Kentish village we called home. I was nine years old.
The house had been built in the late 1950s, during the post-war building boom. It was your average 3 bedroom semi-detached situated on a quiet country road that led to a secondary school.
There were quite a few kids who were a similar age as myself who lived in the same road. We formed a gang, The Midnight Dynamos, and our gang hut was an old tin shed at the top of our garden that my father had built for us. We had a wooden-based sofa and table in there, a dart board outside. It was a great place to hang out in between riding our bikes, playing football and cricket in the road, badminton and tennis in the gardens.
It was the time when families were buying or renting video players and heading to the local video shops to rent films. My family were no different. We rented 3 films a week, it must have been some kind of deal, the films were pretty much always classified A, AA and X, which were the British film certifications in the 70s and early 80s. My folks didn't rent childrens films. So, it wasn't too long before horror films were trotted out for an evening of family entertainment. I was not a fan of slasher type films, in fact I was young and they made me feel ill. Good old fashioned supernatural and ghost stories, count me in. I don't know what film I watched, but at some point I found out about using a Ouija Board to communicate with the dead. I suggested that it would be a good idea for us kids to have a go at it. I was young and naive, I did not know any better.
And then one afternoon
It was the school holidays. My parents were at work. Myself, my two sisters, friends Mark, Steven , Eugene and Karen set about readying our dining room. We covered the windows with some old dark sheets and tie dyes. Got some pieces of white paper and cut them into squares upon which we wrote the letters of the alphabet and number 0 - 9 and laid them in a circle on the dining table. I washed a pint glass of my fathers' and plonked it on the table upside down. I kept our cat in the room as we all sat around the table. We all placed our index fingers on the top of the glass. It was up to me to lead. We were giggling, it was a game after all.
"Is there anybody there?" I asked. Nothing. I kept asking and as the laughing began to subside my questioning took on a more serious tone. "Is anyone there?"
Suddenly the cat started clawing at the door to get out. We were a little freaked out about her insistence to get out of the room, so we opened the door, let her out and we recommenced with the questions.
"Is there anyone there? Can you show us you're here? Can you give us a sign?" I kept asking. Suddenly, the glass shifted.
In a rush, we all scrambled out the door and out of the house. We dashed to the front garden and settled on the lawn, panting heavily, a mix of excitement and fear pulsing through us. As we chatted with animated curiosity, questions flew back and forth: "Did you move that glass? Was it you? Did you see that? How could that have happened?"
We determined that not one of us had moved the glass, and so we ventured back inside, into the dining room and sat back down at the table to start again. "Is there anyone there?"
The glass began to move. Slowly at first but as we progressed with the questions the movement became more confident and the glass moved with increased speed.
"What is your name?"
The glass began to move towards the letters and spelt out E D W A R D.
"How old are you?"
The glass moved towards the numbers 3 8.
"Where did you live?"
H E R E
"What did you do?"
F A R M H E N S
"How did you die?"
H A N G E D
At that point we hastily abandoned the Ouija Board and headed outside and up the road to where the oldest resident in the street lived, Mrs Botting. We knocked on her door and when she answered we asked if she remembered the countryside along the road before the houses were built. Yes she said. It was a chicken farm.
We sat down on the kerb outside our house. So the farm statement was correct. To be fair, at the time behind our house there was an orchard (still there) and there was a cornfield and an allotment at the bottom of the road, so it would make sense that the houses were built on land purchased from a farm. But the fact that Mrs Botting had confirmed something that, as young kids none of us had known, was unsettling and profoundly fascinating to me.
It was also well known that the father of a family of three older kids who lived further down the road had hanged himself a few years earlier in the woods at the top of the road. Was it the ghost of him? No, Edward wasn't his name.
We concluded that tampering with Ouija Boards was probably very unwise, so I returned inside the house. I tidied up the dining room, discarded the paper letters and numbers, and then cleansed the pint glass with witch hazel (for some reason attributing it supernatural qualities) before tossing it beneath the hedge at the front of our house. I hesitated to shatter it, fearing it might invite bad luck or a haunting. After all, who could predict what might happen next?
Edward
Life went on. The Midnight Dynamos continued riding their bikes, scrumping for apples, playing together as kids do. Myself and my sisters made a pact to never tell our parents that we had used a Ouija Board in the house.
Yet, as time went on, the peace of our home was broken by continued strange occurrences. We were plagued by noises that defied explanation. The most frequent were heavy footsteps crossing the landing and entering the bedrooms while we were downstairs watching TV or completing our homework. These footsteps were loud, echoing as though someone was striding heavily above us. We often heard scraping noises, similar to furniture being shifted between rooms, and sharp thuds, like objects being thrown in anger or dropping suddenly.
Whenever I was alone upstairs in my bedroom with the door closed, I would hear footsteps along the landing that halted right outside my door. It almost felt as though someone was standing there, but whenever I pulled the door open, there was never anyone present. Similarly, in my parents' bedroom, I would hear scraping sounds even though they were out, and upon peeking inside, there was no one there and everything remained undisturbed.
On several occasions, I awakened to a dark figure standing at the foot of my bed. Once, I started awake to that same dark figure looming directly over me, as though it were staring into my face. I was so frightened I couldn't go back to sleep and spent the rest of the night reading a book under the covers with a torch.
My sister Michelle went through a period where she was convinced our late brother Francis was in her bedroom watching her. She said it felt like someone was where the cupboard was in the landing at the side of her bedroom door. Interestingly, that seemed the epicentre of the noises. On reflection she thinks it was more likely to have been Edward. She was never frightened though.
These disturbances became particularly noticeable in my parents' absence and continued for years. At times, all three of us would perceive the noises together, and at other times, each of us would hear them when alone in the house.
I can't say that the feeling in the house was evil. Just really unsettling and uncomfortable. I was never happy there.
To this day both my sisters will say that the house was haunted and my youngest sister in particular says that she never liked the house.
Did I let Edward into our house after the day with the Ouija Board?
My parents moved in 2006 to the adjacent village after thirty years of living at 10 Hubbards Lane.
Fast Forward to 2012
One evening in March I received a call from dad. He sounded really shocked. Our old neighbour Neil had received a frantic knock on the door from the wife of the couple that had brought my parents house six years earlier. Something had happened.
He hastily clambered over the fence that divided the two houses and went in through the front door. The husband, a serving policeman, was at the top of the staircase, near to the cupboard, which was the highest drop over the stairs.
He had hanged himself.
He was 38.
Was this just a coincidence? Personally, I don't believe in coincidences.
The newspaper article is here.
Comments