...and I'm finally going to get around to writing about the house that haunts me. Nasty? I don't know. Sometimes. Something lonely about it maybe - or remote - or certain rooms in the house felt remote - and in it's remoteness, or loneliness, there was something malign about it all.
Rambling. Probably trying to find a way to start. Probably best at the beginning. I'll split it into parts to make it a bit easier to read. It's a bit rambling this account really, and in the grand scheme of things nothing much happens.
1. Early Years (1985 - 1990)
I was 13 when we moved to Woodstock Drive in Ickenham, nearly at the end of the Metropolitan tbe line in London. It was autumn of 1985 and we had just moved down from North-East Scotland. My Dad was in the RAF, and had been 'posted' from Kinloss in Morayshire down to Northwood. The 'married quarters' at Northwood were due to be demolished, and the nearest to be had were in Ickenham, not that far away really.
Our 'married quarter' was a medium / large four bedroom, red-bricked semi-detached house - much like all the others on the surrounding roads that were all owned by the RAF too. I think I heard someone say that it had been built in the fifties. It certainly looked it. Ordinary looking house really.
It soon became apparent to me that there was something unsettling about the house. Nothing I could really put my finger on. I don't suppose I thought much of it at the time. I had spent my childhood obsessed with ghosts so I was used to feeling spooked out in places. I was aware I had - and still have - an overactive imagination.
I didn't like being upstairs. My room - at the front of the house looking out onto the garden - seemed remote from the rest of the house - and though my room felt 'safe' - the landing certainly didn't. I remember running through that seemingly never ending darkness there (and it was only a short landing really) being convinced that one of the doors would open and something would grab me. One thing from these early days that does strike me - I changed the position of my bed around, and returning to my room, found that this new position made me feel both on edge and oddly depressed. Unsettling. Unsafe.
I'd lie in bed at night and listen to the sounds of the house settling down - though it seemed that the 'house settling down' consisted of huge boxes being thrown about in the attic. My sister complained to my parents of hearing noises in the walls too. My parents tried to reassure her by saying it was just 'spiders in the walls' which was not possibly as reassuring as she might have hoped - or to me when I got told this too.
Odd noises seemed to persist throughout the years. Unexplained bangs. The sound of someone walking in empty rooms upstairs when everyone was downstairs (and I tried to tell myself that it was just the sound of next door moving about).
Both me and my sister would have the unsettling experience of sitting alone in a room and 'hearing' someone come in behind us. We would turn around to say 'hello' to whoever it was and discover there was no-one there. When both my parents were working evenings and there was just my sister and myself in the house, it felt wrong to not have anyone in the living room, in the 'heart' of the house, and that strange lonely feeling would come down - except 'lonely' doesn't quite describe it. 'Remote' is perhaps a better word - though mix in with 'remote' a feeling of something nasty and you might be closer. The house always seemed larger than it was somehow, as if it was connected to a far larger building that we just couldn't see. Always felt there were more rooms than it should have had.
I lived there until 1993 - nearly 8 years altogether - and there were long phases where nothing seemed to happen, where that odd 'remote' atmosphere receded... (though never completely though). What I would say is that as the years passed, the place seemed to grow more unsettling.
There always seemed to be a lot of shadows in the house. I wanted as many lights on as possible if I was alone, to dispel the shadows. If I was alone in the house, I'd have every light on. I'd also check every cupboard, every room - just in case... In case of what though? The thought of being in the house without every space being checked was absolute anathema.
2. A Night In April 1990
I'll never forget this night as long as I live, and even now, 27 years later, I still get shivers thinking about it. My parents - and sister - were away for a week. I was having friends stay over on and off throughout the week. Oddly no-one was much into drinking back then. We would just have tea, hang out and watch television. Anyhow, this one night, the four of us were in the living room, me, Craig, Steve and Eddie. Craig, Steve and Eddie were having something of a heated discussion about politics and war, while I sat and listened, on my headphones, to Carcass's 'Symphonies of Sickness' album. I suddenly began shivering, and my teeth started chattering - the same kind of symptoms you get at the beginning of the flu - except I didn't feel sick, I just felt freezing - and this cold didn't seem to come from me. Accompanying this shivering was an image I couldn't get out of my mind. A vague image of a skeletal form wrapped in a cloak, approaching the house through the garden. It felt like something very dark was coming. My friends noticed I was shivering, and asked me what was wrong. I told them exactly what I was feeling. Craig then said that the other night when he had stayed over that he had a 'feeling of intense evil' from the hallway, and had to find a cross or something to help ward off the feeling (I was asleep at the time). I suppose we all began talking about the weird stuff that had happened in the house then - I can't really remember - but it was at about this point that the electricity started to fail. We would be plunged into darkness for five seconds, and then the lights would switch themselves on again. This didn't help already jangled nerves. What we should have done is to just chill out, have a bit of a laugh, a cup of tea, and go to sleep. Try to calm ourselves down. What we ended up doing was quite the worse thing we could think of, and that was to try and bless the house ourselves.
Craig wanted to become a priest (and this is in fact what he ended up becoming) and with his guidance he said some prayers over a jug of water and then what we would do is move from room to room, while he flicked the water about and more prayers were said. We started downstairs. Leaving the safety of the living room was diffcult. The kitchen felt 'okay' but the downstairs toilet was a bit unnerving. Probably because of the mirror (it wasn't until the next day that we all discussed how none of us could stand the thought of looking into mirrors). The dining room was vastly unpleasant, infect with that cold loneliness, that malign remoteness that seemed to make the house far larger than it was.
We moved upstairs.
For as long as I live I hope to never experience anything quite as 'malevolent' and 'cold' as we did up there. My parents room was fine, as far as I can remember, and then we moved along the landing, and the spare room was 'bad' - I can't remember why though. My room was pretty bad too - my sister's room was okay. And then there was the bathroom. The bathroom was tiny - just enough room for a bath and a sink, and it was hard to fit all of us in there. The bathroom felt huge. Huge and impersonal - as if we were in the bathroom / toilet of a huge hospital, something bright and labyrinthine and utterly utterly cold - in an atmospheric sense anyway. When I met up with Craig over 24 years later and we discussed that night, this was what he said, how cold that bathroom felt.
Getting back down again wasn't much of a relief. At Craig's insistence, we ended up ringing the priest (at 2:00 in the morning or something ridiculous!). The priest asked us if we had been taking drugs or messing about with ouija boards. We were keen to tell him we most certainly had not. While we were talking to the priest the electricity failed and we were plunged into darkness - again for about five seconds, and then the lights came on again. The priest said it was probably a power cut, and we should say some prayers and go to sleep. We tried saying some prayers, but the lights kept failing on us the same way.
Eddie and Steve somehow fell asleep. Craig and me stayed awake long into dawn - and still it didn't feel safe. I didn't want Craig to stop talking because I could hear a crackling outside of the window - some toxic sounding noise - and I didn't want to be left alone with it. 'Do you hear that too?' Craig asked at some point. I miserably assented.
Somehow, long after dawn, I managed to fall asleep.
3. After-Effects
There wasn't as much talk about that night the next day as you might think. There was something a bit shameful about the whole episode almost. Letting ourselves get carried away. Despite this, the house didn't feel quite safe... Craig and Steve left for work, and me and Eddie were alone in the house. Some point in the afternoon - around about the time soap opera Neighbours was on, a grey gloom descended about the house. Eddie said to look at his hand - there seemed to be an imprint of something between his finger and thumb. He said it was teeth-marks, but whatever it was it sent us into panic. We had to get out of the house. We grabbed our coats and fled. Such a relief to be out.
Craig and Eddie stayed over that night - then just Craig the next perhaps - and finally I had to stay alone in the house. I slept in the living room, tried to ignore those footsteps walking overhead.
Just next door, I kept telling myself, just next door walking about.
What happened that night? I'm firmly on the side of hysteria and self-hypnosis - after all, nothing that happened can't be explained away - like so much in the house. But those panics and hysterias seemed to happen more often in that house than other places I've lived in.
4. Last Years In The House (1990 - 1993)
I can't pin down when this happened to a particular date - but it was definitely in the last couple of years. I was going through a phase of eating dinner in my room. I went downstairs, collected dinner from my Mum and went back upstairs to my room. As I sat down on my bed I distinctly heard the sound of someone run down the landing, bound down the stairs, open and slam shut the front door, and run up the garden path. I looked out of my window and saw nothing there. I inwardly shrugged and went back to my dinner (and my reaction in itself is strange). I was interrupted by my Mum - the rest of the family had all heard the same thing in the living room, and thought it was me. My Mum was quite surprised to see me in my room - and was convinced - somehow - that it had all been my doing.
Another time I was playing guitar in my room. I happened to glance up across the room, and saw a box of paints suddenly lift itself up in the air and then fall down again. I thought 'hmm, that's interesting' and returned to playing the guitar. It was only a few hours later that the reality - kind of - struck that I had actually witnessed a 'poltergeist' phenomena that I could find no rational explanation for. Even so, it never quite seemed as monumental as I felt it should have been. Almost anti-climactic.
5. After The House
We left the house in spring 1993. My parents moved away to the midlands, and I rented a room in nearby Uxbridge. The year after that I left for Southampton to study illustration, and then to Worcester, finally to Brighton, now back to Worcester again.
And at some point the dreams began. They come regularly, if not frequently, and they're remarkably similar. I'm back in the house again. It's late afternoon - often heading to sunset (the red sun seen through the branches of the tree in the front garden). I shouldn't be in the house - other people are living there now. I know that the house is haunted and whatever is haunting the house is going to manifest fully by nightfall. I need to get out. There are variations to the dream - one time I was in the kitchen listening to a documentary about the hauntings in the house. Another time, there were mysterious rooms that were haunted by the ghosts of party goers. Sometimes the ghosts of our old dogs are.
I first went back there in 2006. I made sure I walked past the house after dark. Every light in the house was on, and I was reminded of when I would have to turn on every light in the house if my parents weren't in. Too many shadows. I usually end up going back every year in late autumn, just to walk past the old house. Sometimes every light is shining, sometimes not. There's been an extension added on now, and the place seems too different to when I lived there so I'm unsure if I'll make the annual pilgrimage again.
I still find fragments of that time living there though. As I was preparing to move out of my last house I found a piece of writing I had done in that last autumn of 1992, where I wrote about how the house 'seemed to have too many rooms I couldn't see'. I don't remember writing it at all. I was quite surprised that I had somehow taken it with me from house to house in the intervening 25 years.
Anyhow, that's it. My own nasty house, and my apologies for rambling on so long - not my intention at all when I began I assure you! If you've managed to make it to the end here, well, thank you for your patience... I hope it wasn't too uninteresting.