I've come across a few places with bad atmospheres, but only one really nasty house. I think it must have been late 2001, October or November maybe. I had a day off work, and I’d arranged to visit a friend in his new home on the outskirts of North Belfast.
It was a new-ish maisonette apartment, situated on the upper floor of the building, built maybe ten years previously. My friend had moved in with his partner and their baby daughter a few months before, and it looked like a good starter home, with two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen-diner and bathroom.
The main drawback was the staircase – a steep, narrow flight of stairs leading from the front door at street level up to the apartment, with a 180-degree return a third of the way up, and then opening out onto a small landing beside the kitchen door. Not great for getting a pram up and down, anyway.
The main bedroom was beside the kitchen, looking out the back of the building, and a short corridor then led towards the smaller bedroom at the front, with doors to the bathroom and the living room branching off on opposite sides.
On arrival, my overwhelming impression of the apartment was that of darkness. Not just because it was late in the year and overcast outside; there seemed to be almost a darkening filter over everything in the place. I've seen a few other references here to 'brown light', and that's what it seemed like. The apartment was clean and neatly decorated, but I still didn’t feel comfortable at all.
His partner was at work and the baby was being minded by her grandparents, so we had the place to ourselves. We chatted for a while in the living room, just catching up, with me trying to shake offthe feelings of unease, and then we went into the front bedroom where he kept all his music stuff – records, guitars and the like. It was eventually going to become a proper bedroom for his daughter, but for the time being she was still sleeping in a cot in the main bedroom.
My friend left me to my own devices while he went off to the kitchen to make us both some lunch, so I amused myself by flicking through his LPs and messing around with his guitars. These were exactly the kind of activities I enjoyed – yet the longer I stayed in that room by myself, the more uncomfortable I became. My surroundings seemed to be getting even darker still, and I felt somehow watched – by something that was actively hostile to my presence.
Eventually I had to set the guitar down and hurry out of the room, as the hostility was building to the point that I felt like I was being pushed out.
Slightly shaken, I went down the corridor and leaned against the kitchen doorway, talking to my friend while he was busy at the stove. I didn’t mention anything about what I was feeling.
As I was standing there, trying to act normal, I glanced back down the hallway – and caught my breath as I saw what looked like a tall, dark shadow standing just behind the doorway of the front bedroom.
It was shaped roughly like a human, and it was tall – very tall. Where the head should have been seemed to extend above the height of the doorframe, and I couldn’t see any features, or limbs, or any detail. Just a long, vertical shadow, thicker and darker around the middle section. But it hadn’t been there before, and it definitely wasn’t a trick of the light.
I felt like the figure was watching me, and the sense of hostility only grew. With a rising sense of panic, I looked round to see if my friend had also noticed it, but he was busy chopping something. I turned and looked back down the hall again – but the figure was no longer there, although the sense of being watched persisted.
I felt quite upset, and that something was badly wrong in the apartment – but didn’t know how I could even begin to broach the subject with my friend, who I knew from previous conversations to be a bit of a skeptic about such things. I didn’t want to come across as a crank, and I didn’t know what could even be done about this shadowy figure. So I tried to push it down, forget it, and make an attempt to enjoy the rest of my visit. But I didn’t go back into that front bedroom.
My friend and his family didn’t stay in the apartment for very long; they suffered a number of mishaps, including my friend being hospitalised following a motorcycle accident. A few months later, they moved out and into another house nearby.
He never really talked about exactly why they moved – but he did tell me that they didn’t feel the house was safe, after the pram suddenly fell down the stairs from the landing one day. His daughter was still in the pram at the time. She was unharmed, but no explanation was proffered about exactly how or why the accident happened – and from his expression of unease, I didn’t feel it appropriate to enquire any further.
I was vastly relieved to hear they’d moved out, but still felt horribly guilty that I hadn’t mustered the courage to tell him that afternoon about what I saw and felt.