In my early 20's I secured a suspiciously cheap rent on a room in a practically derelict huge Victorian terrace. All the other houses in the street were pristine and likely worth at least £1 million a piece at the time.
The others who lived there were all young guys, students or in dead-end jobs, including my mate who got me the room.
The first night I'm there in September, we were talking in the absolute tip of a kitchen and my mate says "you know we're haunted here, don't you?"
I didn't.
Being someone who has always had a strong sense of the spiritual and following an extremely traumatic episode my family suffered in a holiday flat in Bournemouth many years previously, I would definitely NOT have rented the room with that prior knowledge.
Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it as I'd already moved all my stuff in and had no where else to go, so was ****** off with my mate for not mentioning it previously.
"Don't worry my room gets the worst of it"
He had by far the biggest and nicest room in the house, on the very top floor - he had got it despite others in smaller rooms being there for years longer than him having the option to take it - they absolutely did not want that room. There was one significant caveat - every single person who had stayed in the room was subsequently diagnosed with clinical depression.
My room was a small room at the bottom of the landing from the top floor where his room was and generally the whole house had a bad atmosphere, masked somewhat by the general hedonism and rowdiness of the young male inhabitants.
Anyway, nothing happened until the night after Halloween (I swear on my life this is true). When I suddenly awoke at 4.30 am exactly with a sense of absolute dread in a freezing cold room - no central heating, so it was cold anyway but this was crazy cold. What followed was a very loud noise that I can only describe as someone violently being pushed down the stairs followed by a thud on each stair as it slowly approached the landing outside my door.
By this point I'm sweating profusely despite the cold, and I can sense something outside my door. The landing had 3 doors quite close to one another and to my horror I hear a double tap knock on the furthest door from mine, followed by a double knock on the next door - then finally a double knock on mine.
The knocks were almost imperceptible but absolutely audible, it's hard to describe but they definitely were not of this world. The next day everyone is acting a bit cagey and one of the guys admits to hearing and experiencing the same thing, the other guy on that landing who'd been there the longest barely left his room so we hardly spoke to him.
A couple of months follow without incident, when lo and behold, my mate in the top room is diagnosed with depression and goes to live back with his parents.
So his room became free. £5 more a month for a room 4 times the size of my current one.
I took it.
It was a massive attic room with a giant dark wood frame bed that looked to be at least 50 years old, in the daytime it was fine but just had a horrible atmosphere at night. I slept with both windows wide open even in the dead of winter, but other than that I didn't experience anything until the following summer evening when it was still light outside, a friend and I were watching TV and it was a documentary about ancient Hebrew legends that we were not really paying attention to.
There was an ancient text being read in Hebrew with subtitles regarding the afterlife, when suddenly a loud scratching emanated from the wooden floor near the door, it scratched all along the floor past us towards a frame-less free standing full length mirror which started violently vibrating.
"Turn the ******* channel!"
After which it mercifully stopped. I'd convinced myself that the Halloween episode was a one off, but to have that happen in essentially daylight in Summer was the final straw.
Cheap rent or not, I had to get out of there and I managed to convince my mum to let me live at home for a couple of months until I found another place. I still remember the relief at my first night out of that place, though there was one unfortunate result - I was subsequently diagnosed with depression.
I don't know what happened to the guy who took the room after me as I never went back again - nor do I know what happened in that room on that night after Halloween and thankfully I never will.
One postscript to this is the landlord/owner - a shifty, scared and almost guilty looking old man who took the rent in cash and never once set foot in the house, always only standing on the porch.
This a house that if done up would have been worth £1million, yet he let it out at a pittance and let it slide into dereliction.
In hindsight I have absolutely no doubt that someone had been murdered there by pushing them down the stairs, something I'm certain that the landlord knew full well about.
.
