Haunted by a real-life poltergeist
Offaly-born mum Caroline Mitchell was inspired to write a book about the violent spirit who invaded her home...
WHEN you ask an author why she first began writing you don’t expect the answer to involve recording paranormal activity in her house. Especially when that writer is as down-to-earth and, well, normal as Offaly woman and motherof-four Caroline Mitchell, 48.
The international number one bestselling crime author also spent the best part of a decade working as a policewoman in England, moving up the ranks to detective and specialising in sexual offences and domestic violence cases. She is as calm and level-headed as you imagine someone to be who is trained to cope in such highly-charged, real-life situations.
So it is astonishing to hear her speak about a scratching, growling, violent presence in her house — requiring an exorcism sanctioned by the Pope — in the tranquil seaside town of Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, where she moved from Ferbane with her second husband Neil Coughlan in 2003. ‘Even now you’re reluctant to talk about it too much because you don’t want people to think you’re crazy or doing it to make money or something like that — we’re not,’ she says, in her enduring Irish accent when we meet in Athlone, where she has rented a holiday house.
Caroline regularly visits her four older siblings in Ireland (a fifth is in London) and her father Niall, a former lock-keeper in Rahan, who is now in a nursing home in Tullamore. Her mother Bridie died in 2014.
‘Basically I was at work in the police and my husband rang me one day and said, “Caroline there’s something really weird going on at home, things are being thrown, I don’t know where it’s coming from. There’s pictures coming off the walls, it’s crazy here, can you come home?”
So I came back, brought a colleague with me and it was like there was an invisible person in the house just throwing things around. That went on for years on and off. We’d have a break from it for weeks and months, it would just stop and then it would start up again.’
For this reason — and for financial reasons — the couple and their children stayed put in the house. Caroline had met Neil when he moved to Ferbane from Frinton-on-Sea with his Irish parents’ dry ice company and hired her to work for him. Love blossomed and after five years they moved back to Frinton-on-Sea, opening a gift shop in nearby Clacton-on-Sea.
But Caroline, who had volunteered with the Samaritans in Athlone, wanted to do something more meaningful. When she saw an ad on TV recruiting for the police force, Neil encouraged her to enrol. Her fourth child was just a baby at the time but Caroline thrived in the demanding job.
‘I just wanted to progress so I moved on and I did my CID exam and I became a detective which was a big move forward. I used to deal with rapes and serious sexual offences. I was what’s called a SOTO, a sexual offence trained officer.
‘So at that time I could be called during the night. They’d ring me up and say, “We’ve got a rape come in, you need to come in and deal with it”. I’d go out and deal with that and that would be eight hours of your day. You’d bring the victim to the unit, get them examined — basically be with them from start to finish.
‘And then I progressed to the domestic abuse safeguarding team. We worked with victims and offenders in domestic abuse situations. High risk, again. Basically our people were victims who were most likely to end up getting murdered by their partners.’
The day job was stressful — but nothing compared to what awaited Caroline when she got home.
‘We had growls in the house, we had things being thrown, we had fires. It was really, really bad. We had to get the priest down, we had to get an exorcism and it had to be approved by the Vatican in Rome before they could have an exorcism in the house. It was a brand new house and things would happen outside it too. I mean, it was really hard to believe but thankfully because I was in the police my colleagues witnessed it.
‘They’d come down after work and watch all this stuff going on so they wrote little accounts in the book for me as well to verify that it happened,’ says Caroline, who self-published her first book Paranormal Intruder, True Story of a Family in Fear, in 2013.
‘Our mobiles would ring each other and you could take the batteries out of them and they’d still ring each other. And you’d get these weird messages. We had the priest come round and they watched all this and they said, “No, you need to get an exorcism, this needs to go to the Pope to be approved”.
‘We had the Free Church in, we got every priest we could get into our house because we were so desperate,’ she says, with a rueful laugh. ‘Because in the police you know what to do when a situation happens but this was one thing where you just didn’t know what to do. We didn’t understand it either, we couldn’t understand what the motivation behind it was. Because it was a new house.
‘But then we had mediums come in and all these people come in and try to help us and they said, “It’s the land. It’s something attached to the land. Something freaky there.” I mean, we’re still in the house. But it did stop with the exorcism.’
Caroline is reluctant to give precise details of the exorcism because ‘they don’t like publicity with regard to these things. People have blessings but not many people have full-on exorcisms and this is what they had to do. It was two priests and two lay people and the minute they came in one of the lay people ran screaming out of the house, running down the road saying, “I’m not going in there, there’s something evil in that house”. The priest ran after her.
‘At this stage we’ve had fire brigades out to our house because we had instantaneous fires, we’ve had the police when things were really bad. Now we had the priest running down the road and I was just looking out the window going, “What are the neighbours thinking is going on in this house? This is crazy.”
‘So they got her back in and they started the exorcism and she fainted halfway through and they just carried on. They finished it and they said, “The most important thing you have to remember is not to focus on it. Don’t talk about it, pretend it’s not happening. Because every time you get afraid about it you’re feeding that fear and that’s what they feed off.”’
All the same, the family moved out for a while. Caroline has a son and a daughter, now aged 25 and 23, from her first marriage, and a son and daughter aged 17 and 12 with Neil. Her eldest son now lives with his father in Ireland and works in retail. All four were young and living with Caroline and Neil when the exorcism happened.
‘It was hard with the kids going to school and everything. I used to sleep with my runners on me in bed and my feet sticking out in case we needed to run out in the middle of the night. My kids were all on mattresses on the floor next to me on the bed because at least we were all in the one room. And I had a bag packed by the door.
One night my husband said to me, “If anything happens will you wait for me to get dressed?” I said, “You’re on your own, I’m off! If anything happens I’m going, I’m grabbing the kids and we’re out the door.”
‘I can laugh about it now because that’s a coping mechanism but at the time Neil nearly had a nervous breakdown — my poor husband. It used to scratch him really badly and he’d be bleeding and physically attacked,’ she says, of the presence in the house. ‘It’s really hard to explain because even as you’re say-
‘It used to scratch Neil really badly’ ‘There’s something evil in that house’
ing it, it sounds mad.
‘One of the worst days some of my colleagues in the police came down to the house and there was liquid dripping, not from the ceiling but from a few inches down, physically from thin air, and it was just dripping in the hall.
‘It was me, my husband, his parents, two or three police colleagues and myself and we were just standing watching this and they’re going, “Oh my God I can’t believe what I’m seeing here, this is crazy”. It was like being in a horror film,’ she says.
‘Thankfully we took the priest’s advice, we stopped talking about it, we completely disassociated ourselves with it and that’s why we don’t talk about it at home now. We’ve had TV channels who wanted to come down and film and do a documentary on us and I said, “If it involves us sitting in our house having to talk about it I’m not going there because I can’t go through that again”.
‘Especially for the kids. I mean, it never did anything to the kids, not directly. They’ve seen things but it didn’t do anything to them, thankfully. We got through it and the silver lining was the writing.’
Self-publishing that account of the frightening events in her house gave Caroline the confidence to keep writing.
‘After I finished writing it I thought, I’d like to write something for me now that’s not so horrific. I really enjoyed the process of writing. So I wrote a series about a detective who had psychic abilities, who used to see supernatural things while she was investigating crime.
‘I then progressed on to psychological thrillers, to just ordinary crime because not everyone likes the paranormal and I wanted to widen my audience. But it’s still a very popular series,’ she says, of books including Time to Die, Death Note and Witness.
‘But it’s amazing even now the amount of emails, letters and communication I get from ordinary people who have undergone similar experiences — not quite as bad, but similar — thanking me for putting my story out there.’
For a year Caroline got up at 5.30am to write while working for the police all day. In 2016 she was signed by publishers Thomas and Mercer and now writes full time.
A prolific author, she writes two and sometimes three books a year. Her recent book Silent Victim got to number one in Australia, America and Britain and her tenth book Truth and Lies, inspired by the Fred and Rosemary West case, was released this summer. She has kept in touch with her pals in the force and is forging new friendships with fellow authors.
‘Martina Cole is a lovely lady and the crime writing community are the nicest people you could meet, even though we write about really dark stuff. They say the romance authors are dodgy but the crime writers are alright!’
Earlier this year, Caroline was shortlisted for an award at ThrillerFest in New York where she met Game of Thrones writer George RR Martin.
‘It was this really surreal moment,’ she says. ‘I was sitting beside him going, I must be dreaming. I’m going to wake up in a minute and say to my husband, “I’m a writer, I’ve got an agent” and he’ll say, “No, Caroline, you’re dreaming. It was all a dream”. I must have sold over three-quarters of a million books now, I’ll be coming up to the million soon. That’s in less than five years,’ says Caroline, who hired Neil to work as her assistant on the advice of her accountant.
‘I worked round the clock because when I left the police we still had a mortgage, we still had bills and I really wanted it to work. I just said to my husband, “Right, you look after the kids, I’ll write, I’ll stop for meals”, and he’d cook me my meals. Thankfully now I’ve got what we call a backlist you’re generating a good income from the books you’ve already written. So every time I have a new book out people buy some of my backlist so that generates a bigger income which is brilliant. Now I’ve done that I can relax a little.’
Especially now that the weird goings-on in her family home have ceased too...
‘It was like being in a horror film’