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Unhappy Houses & Odd Happenings

lf l had met Nilsen “socially” due to my “inclination”, l’d probably now be in kit form, blocking a drain.

maximus otter
I'm one degree removed from Dennis Nilsen. A very pretty gay boy who I used to go clubbing with would have been one of his victims but managed to escape and give evidence. If I'd visited him in London, who knows what might have happened?
 
Reading a post in another thread has made me think of something else that the happened in my old house – and unless I read something else that stirs the mind, this is probably the last story I have on our experiences whilst living there.

I wouldn’t say that what I experienced that night particularly scared me, but I did find it very weird

It was 10.15 / 10.30 on a Sunday night in late Autumn 2008 – I remember the year as the financial world was going through the credit crunch, and the company I was working for at the time was deep in the mire of it all.

I was sitting at the kitchen table reading a book. My 2 daughters (who were very young at the time) were safely tucked up asleep in bed, and my wife had popped out for the evening and not expected home until midnight-ish

All was quiet when suddenly there was a loud thumping noise coming from upstairs. Four loud thumps in total. When my girls were young, the noise they made while playing up in their rooms and the upstairs landing was quite distinct, and the thumping sounded exactly like that.

Confused as to what they were doing out of bed at that time of night, I went up to their room to find it in complete darkness. I switched on their bedside light and saw they were both fast asleep - I know all about kids faking being asleep etc, but no, they were definitely out cold.

I went back down stairs and no sooner had I sat down and picked up my book, there was the thumping coming from upstairs again. Once more I went up there, and this time turned on their bedroom top light, but it was obvious to me that whatever had made that noise had nothing to do with them, as they were both out for the count.

Half an hour later I decide to take my book upstairs and read in bed. I must have been reading for around 45 minutes when I heard the front door open and close, then someone with high heeled shoes walk through the hallway and enter the kitchen. Thinking the wife was home, I got out of bed, and went downstairs to find it dark and empty. I looked out of the window and her car wasn’t on the driveway and it was obvious to me that no one had come into the house.

Coupled with the earlier thumping , this new strangeness freaked me out slightly – I knew that in no way was it my imagination. I went back upstairs and continued reading when about 20 minutes later, I heard exactly the same thing as before - front door open / close, high heels in the hallway etc.

I immediately looked out of the window, and there was the wife’s Mini Cooper on the drive, so I went down stairs and found her sitting at the kitchen table taking off her shoes. I asked her the obvious question – did she come in and go out again for any reason, but she said no.

I then told her about the thumping and the sound of someone coming into the house, and she told me a few weeks prior she was in the kitchen washing the dishes, when she heard the sound of the girls playing upstairs. Confused as to how they could have slipped past her and gone up there, without her noticing, she went up and checked. Finding the upstairs empty she back down to the living room and found them both sitting on the floor watching TV

Weird eh..?
 
Great account. The part with the sounds of your wife's arrival is a great example of a vardøger experience. With the other part, the thumping, might it be fairly said you were under some stress at the time? Sounds likely as you say the company you worked for was "deep in the mire". Stress has been suggested as a factor in poltergeist-type happenings.
 
Great account. The part with the sounds of your wife's arrival is a great example of a vardøger experience. With the other part, the thumping, might it be fairly said you were under some stress at the time? Sounds likely as you say the company you worked for was "deep in the mire". Stress has been suggested as a factor in poltergeist-type happenings.

Thanks for that Gloucetrian. Yes, I have read that stress can play a part in poltergeist type phenomena, but I’d never heard of the vardøger experience.

I’m going to google that right now.
Cheers again

DT
 
Morning all just been reading about shoes etc found in old houses and vida loca ‘s scary stories.I read a very interesting book on the church graffiti found across the country. And another article on ritual burn marks on old timber joists etc in old houses.The burn marks article was in a archeology magazine.Scariest thing my family had was when the old man was stripping off old wallpaper in a bedroom and a past tenant had drawn a very life like man emereging from the door post gave us kids the scares good and proper.
 
Morning all just been reading about shoes etc found in old houses and vida loca ‘s scary stories.I read a very interesting book on the church graffiti found across the country. And another article on ritual burn marks on old timber joists etc in old houses.The burn marks article was in a archeology magazine.Scariest thing my family had was when the old man was stripping off old wallpaper in a bedroom and a past tenant had drawn a very life like man emereging from the door post gave us kids the scares good and proper.

Whenever I strip wallpaper it's always right down to the plaster. Can't resist drawing on the walls, so everywhere I've decorated there are giant cats, moonscapes, cartoons etc hidden away.
I once stood up in the bath and drew the baby Moses in his basket among the bulrushes on the bathroom wall. Dunno what that was about, except that the baby I drew was the same age as my son at the time.
 
Yup, when I worked in secure units I met a few murderers and some characters who'd only narrowly missed killing people.
One particular murderer had what I can only called dead eyes; they didn't have a shine or sheen like normal eyes. Like matte-effect contacts, not that there's any such thing.

He was pleasant enough and it was hard to believe what a terrible thing he'd done. He killed himself a few years later.
re dead eyes, ever see a picture of devin nunes?
 
In the UK, there can hardly be a house that's over 100 years old that hasn't had death (whether accidental, murder, illness or age related) or some degree of incredible sadness experienced inside it. Think of all those families who lost relatives in the World Wars or children to scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles or polio, in the era before the NHS when people went to hospital to die.

So why do some houses retain that 'aura' and others don't?
its got to be how the family dealt with it, acting out of love and strength, or out of anger and fear
 
People do live in Murder Houses though. Doesn't bother some and I presume the property goes cheaper?

A uni mate of mine was about to close on a pleasant suburban semi when she learned about the unpleasantness in the master bedroom. A previous owner had murdered his wife there, messily, with a shotgun. She did not complete.
 
@James_H what was that you were saying about murder flats in Hong Kong?
Basically here flats which have been the site of a suicide or murder are considered 'haunted' and lose a lot of real estate value. So do the surrounding flats - in fact there's a three-dimensional sphere of depreciation surrounding such apartments.

I have some South African acquaintances who live in a famous murder flat. It doesn't bother them and they've never had any unusual experiences.

Here's a recent story from a foreign couple renting such a flat because of the attractively low price: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post...nted-hong-kong-flat-american-tenant-tries-get

Here's an example of property losing value because of a murder: https://www.scmp.com/business/article/1897328/haunted-flat-scene-1996-gas-poison-murders-hong-kong-sells-heavy-discount

Here's a property website that lists haunted flats: https://www.squarefoot.com.hk/en/property-guides/haunted-house/all/

I made a post about it a while ago now: https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...-a-haunted-location.62472/page-2#post-1701560
 
I once stood up in the bath and drew the baby Moses in his basket among the bulrushes on the bathroom wall.
Both contain bathroom and baby Moses in the bulrushes have water themes. Maybe that relates too?
Real life is so like a dream sometimes, with odd connections all over the place.
 
This is a superb thread. I have never lived in a unhappy house but I'm quite glad after reading your stories.

I also have a story about Dennis Nielsen. Just before he retired a former work colleague said that he had started his career working in the same jobcentre as Nielsen. Apparently as work colleagues go he was pleasant and couldn't do enough to help my work colleague in his new job. His work colleagues could not believe their eyes when they found out about Nielsen's personal life.....
 
This is a superb thread. I have never lived in a unhappy house but I'm quite glad after reading your stories.

I also have a story about Dennis Nielsen. Just before he retired a former work colleague said that he had started his career working in the same jobcentre as Nielsen. Apparently as work colleagues go he was pleasant and couldn't do enough to help my work colleague in his new job. His work colleagues could not believe their eyes when they found out about Nielsen's personal life.....
Cool Nielsen anecdote .. did you read Maximus Otter's one about when he was a policeman in this thread?, he did the DNA swab on Nielsen. Crazy.
 
Yeah i think so dredging the old memory banks.A truly evil person . I thank the lord have never met some one like that.
Met some truly horrible people in my time but never a killer. The other side of the coin is the idiots who think they are
(Hard)?? My son was a manager of a pub and threw a scrote out for selling drugs on the premises.Said scrote went and got his mum and dad to have a word.his mummy said he was very upset and so was she.
Needless to say they got barred to. This by the way in front of his mates.Who then took the p##s out of him THEN he throws a complete hissy fit in the pub.:rollingw:
 
In the UK, there can hardly be a house that's over 100 years old that hasn't had death (whether accidental, murder, illness or age related) or some degree of incredible sadness experienced inside it. Think of all those families who lost relatives in the World Wars or children to scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles or polio, in the era before the NHS when people went to hospital to die.

So why do some houses retain that 'aura' and others don't?

My mother as a child lived in a terraced house in Hope Street. At one time I knew the house and used to walk past it regularly, and wondered if the owners knew that my mother's younger sister had died at the age of four the 1930s, and been laid out in her coffin in the front room in a beautiful white dress, looking like an angel, and people had come from miles away to see her.
 
My mother as a child lived in a terraced house in Hope Street. At one time I knew the house and used to walk past it regularly, and wondered if the owners knew that my mother's younger sister had died at the age of four the 1930s, and been laid out in her coffin in the front room in a beautiful white dress, looking like an angel, and people had come from miles away to see her.
My great aunty lived in (squatted, in fact, in) a beautiful Tudor cottage that was left in a will to my mum and her siblings. When her sister died, in the 1950s, she simply moved in and never moved out. Didn't;t pay rent. Literally squatted in it. She must have been well connected down a local solicitor's because when she died in the 1980s, she willed the house to someone... My mum's cousin. Who promptly sold it to a woman who got it cheap because she gave my "aunty" (second cousin) a sob story.

The person who lives in it now, has no idea he lives in a "stolen" house. To this day I have no idea how my great aunt managed to get herself on the deeds to a house she didn't own.

We drive past her chocolate box cottage most days. And I always give it a rueful look because by rights, it's partly mine! I've spoken to the man who bought it in the early 2000s I think and didn't have the heart to tell him the story. I have my mum's copy of the will that willed it to her. I'm guessing she thought she'd get it back when squatter aunty died but my mum died young and long before the elderly aunt.

Interesting thing is, the house had a toilet in the back garden that was a hole bored into like a cliff face of 20 foot or so of solid rock. The hole was over a stream, a few metres from the river. My brother and I found that toilet endlessly fascinating as kids and would always pretend we needed the toilet just so we could go look down it.

And nobody told me as a kid, I only found out many years later but... the aunty who originally owned the house, she had had a baby around 1915. Her one and only child. When it was tiny, she went out for a while and left someone (I dunno who) babysitting it in that very house. Which I'm guessing my great grandad bought her. She was estranged from her husband - and never lived with him when he came home from WW1. But in 1916, the baby was drowned whilst alone with this now forgotten babysitter. I often wondered if rather than the river, he didn't fall down this toilet...

And my aunty who "borrowed" the house, lived alone in this very old, creepy cottage (I stayed there once and it was extremely creepy but also fascinating). Where her nephew had drowned.

The house had a flight of stairs taken from a ship (well, large vessel). Our ancestors around 1800 lived in the same village and were haulers on a river, and owned a large vessel. I've often wondered if that wasn't the second (third) time our family lived in that house... The stairs, all carved wood I remember, came directly down into the kitchen. In fact, there is an entry for 1820 in the parish record of this same village, where one of mine and great aunt's mutual ancestors was a hauler who drowned in the river. So baby wasn't the first.

This same great aunt used to say, every time she saw George Oldfield, head of the Ripper enquiry on the TV "Oh that's little George! I used to hold him in my arms when he was a baby!" Big, gnarled bruiser of an old copper. But to her, he was still baby George. Luckily, nobody dropped him down the toilet as an infant... That was by no means the only house along that street that's toilet was simply a hole drilled through rock.

The house had a nice atmosphere. It could be a bit creepy but that was more to do with old lady house than the building itself...

ETA: Just checked and George was born 1923 - only a few years after my great aunt lost her baby. Ah, that makes me sad now because if her sister held him in her arms, she probably did, too.
 
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My Nan and gramps moved around quite a few times pre-during-and-after the war years when they were teachers, and she stayed in a couple of places that she said we’re definitely unhappy. But she believed that one of them was not a haunting as such , or not by anyone dead!

She was teaching in Bristol but she and my gramps were renting a house in a village. (Chelwood) It was a big old place that had had been built onto and the owner was a Lieutenant-Colonel who was away, Far East, I believe she said. His bedroom was locked. She didn’t like the sensation from that closed door, she said, but as a passing thought. It was a sadness, a gloom.

My oldest uncle was a baby and so there were only three of them in this place, and it was the blackout and very dark in the country at night. They would usually use candles in the evenings.

She went upstairs one night to check on the baby and was in the bedroom when she looked around and saw a tall shadow in the doorway. But, she said, her thought was that the walls were thick — until she remembered this was the newer part of the building and the walls were thin, as in modern day houses. There was no reason for this shadow to be there. It was something she’d never seen before despite going there many times with her candle/lamp.

Then it moved and seemed to stretch toward her.

Nan was a strong woman and not much frightened her, but she said she screamed her head off for my grandfather, grabbed the baby and had to run ‘though’ this shadow out into the corridor and to the stairs.

By the time she got to the kitchen where my gramps was, she was still frightened but feeling a bit embarrassed. My gramps was a rather stern, hard sort of man, no kind of nonsense about him. Her family on the other hand, had a kind of history of seeing and feeling things (Her mother saw a headless ghost walking along a railway track in Wales)

But she told him, and he nodded and said, ‘I didn't want to say anything to you but...’ A couple of weeks before he said he was walking downstairs in the dark at night to get a drink and ‘A hand touched me on the shoulder.’

Of course, when I was young I was all round-eyed and ’Ghost’ but she didn’t think so. She was a teacher and had no compunction in talking to people; she’d go to church, the local store and make friends and there were no ghost stories about the house. She thought it was the owner, so far away, going through the hell of war, and that he was thinking about his home, or being there in his imagination, perhaps. He was still alive at that time, although she never knew if he did die later in the war.

She did live in and visit places she believed were sad, haunted by the past, but not that one.
 
My great aunty lived in (squatted, in fact, in) a beautiful Tudor cottage that was left in a will to my mum and her siblings. When her sister died, in the 1950s, she simply moved in and never moved out. Didn't;t pay rent. Literally squatted in it. She must have been well connected down a local solicitor's because when she died in the 1980s, she willed the house to someone... My mum's cousin. Who promptly sold it to a woman who got it cheap because she gave my "aunty" (second cousin) a sob story.

The person who lives in it now, has no idea he lives in a "stolen" house. To this day I have no idea how my great aunt managed to get herself on the deeds to a house she didn't own.

We drive past her chocolate box cottage most days. And I always give it a rueful look because by rights, it's partly mine! I've spoken to the man who bought it in the early 2000s I think and didn't have the heart to tell him the story. I have my mum's copy of the will that willed it to her. I'm guessing she thought she'd get it back when squatter aunty died but my mum died young and long before the elderly aunt.

Interesting thing is, the house had a toilet in the back garden that was a hole bored into like a cliff face of 20 foot or so of solid rock. The hole was over a stream, a few metres from the river. My brother and I found that toilet endlessly fascinating as kids and would always pretend we needed the toilet just so we could go look down it.

And nobody told me as a kid, I only found out many years later but... the aunty who originally owned the house, she had had a baby around 1915. Her one and only child. When it was tiny, she went out for a while and left someone (I dunno who) babysitting it in that very house. Which I'm guessing my great grandad bought her. She was estranged from her husband - and never lived with him when he came home from WW1. But in 1916, the baby was drowned whilst alone with this now forgotten babysitter. I often wondered if rather than the river, he didn't fall down this toilet...

And my aunty who "borrowed" the house, lived alone in this very old, creepy cottage (I stayed there once and it was extremely creepy but also fascinating). Where her nephew had drowned.

The house had a flight of stairs taken from a ship (well, large vessel). Our ancestors around 1800 lived in the same village and were haulers on a river, and owned a large vessel. I've often wondered if that wasn't the second (third) time our family lived in that house... The stairs, all carved wood I remember, came directly down into the kitchen. In fact, there is an entry for 1820 in the parish record of this same village, where one of mine and great aunt's mutual ancestors was a hauler who drowned in the river. So baby wasn't the first.

This same great aunt used to say, every time she saw George Oldfield, head of the Ripper enquiry on the TV "Oh that's little George! I used to hold him in my arms when he was a baby!" Big, gnarled bruiser of an old copper. But to her, he was still baby George. Luckily, nobody dropped him down the toilet as an infant... That was by no means the only house along that street that's toilet was simply a hole drilled through rock.

The house had a nice atmosphere. It could be a bit creepy but that was more to do with old lady house than the building itself...

ETA: Just checked and George was born 1923 - only a few years after my great aunt lost her baby. Ah, that makes me sad now because if her sister held him in her arms, she probably did, too.
Fascinating history there Ghost. I would suspect that most houses over a century old have had people die in them, leaving behind traces of their DNA in the nooks and crannies. I wildly speculate that the existence of these traces might be connected to hauntings and ghost sightings. Could be talking rowlocks though.
 
To this day I have no idea how my great aunt managed to get herself on the deeds to a house she didn't own.

Adverse possession. If you take and occupy a property for 12 years you can lodge a claim with the Land Registry to register the property in your ownership. The original owner is notified but if the property was unregistered with the Land Registry as many old houses used to be then they have no way to contact the original owner. I think they would have placed a notice in the paper of record (London Gazette).

Adverse Possession is no longer so straightforward since the criminalisation of squatting some years ago. Historically it was quite an important right because otherwise many old properties become unoccupied as no one is sure who owns them. The downside was some very questionable behaviour like that shown by your relative.
 
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