I was chatting to my mum at the weekend. Out of nowhere she starts talking about when we went to France on holiday. I was tiny, only about 5 or 6 so my memories are pretty much non existent. My parents borrowed a campervan and with the inlaws, me and my sisters we went travelling through France. My mum specifically remembers one village they stopped at.
They had been driving for a while and this seemed like the best village. They parked up in the caravan site and went wandering through the town. Mum said it was fairly early - it wouldn't have been too late as with three tinies, she wanted to get us all in bed. As they walked through the small town, every house they walked past had someone shutting the shutters. If it had been one or two houses, then she probably wouldn't have thought much of it, but she said it felt very much like as soon as my parents got to the house, someone came out and shut the shutters. She said there was something in the atmosphere, it felt oppressive and she felt really uncomfortable. There was nothing there for them, so they returned to the camper van.
Us little uns and my grandparents were in the van and mum and dad had a tent.. Mum said all night she could hear running water - she said it sounded as though someone was filling a swimming pool. The only thing was, there was no swimming pool - either on the site or near by. There was no river, stream.. and my grandparents said there was no tap running in the van. Mum said there was nothing that could have caused the noise, and yet hear it she did. And she can famously sleep like the dead, so it was a noise that managed to keep her awake.
By the time she woke up in the morning, she said she felt panic all over. She started packing up the tent and our stuff and said that she wasn't staying another night there, and they had to go on and find something else. No one else knew what she was talking about. She said my dad hadn't heard or felt anything and my grandparents just thought my mum was a bit odd - forever more they referred to it as the village where X wouldn't stay. She never felt anything like it anywhere else on the trip, it was just that one place and that the feeling went once they left and drove further on.
She thinks it was called something like veerl, or virl... she can't remember. It would have been North France at any rate - we went over by ferry and I know at some point we did Normandy and the Bayeaux tapestries. Sadly I can't see anything on the map that looks like it, and it's too far away for her to recognise it.