IT HAPPENED TO ME...

First-hand accounts of strange experiences from FT readers

Impossible footprints

Back in 1963, I was a young joiner given the job of replacing wooden skirting boards in a three-storey house in Holyhead, Anglesey. It had been empty for years and was musty, dusty and very dirty. While downstairs on the second day I heard the distinct sound of someone walking in the bedrooms above, but thought it was my boss come to check how the job was progressing. The only odd thing was that he would normally whistle when he came to check on his workers, a kind of warning that he was there. I checked, but found no one. The same thing happened a few days later, but I thought it must be my imagination.

Some time later, just for curiosity, I went up to the attic and was astounded to see footprints in thick dust coming directly from a wall and going directly into another wall. There were none going to the door; it was really spooky. I didn’t tell anyone at work as I knew they would have taken the mickey – but on reflection I realised they had shown an unusual interest in asking how the job was coming along.

After finishing in the bedrooms for the day, I left my tool bag in an alcove and shut all the doors. The following morning I was surprised to find all the doors open and my tool bag moved slightly.

On going back to the workshop I told my boss and in a rather casual manner he said: “Well I knew, had I told you, you wouldn’t have gone to do the job. The other joiners won’t go there.”

“Told me what?” I asked. “Some years ago,” he replied, “a man had murdered his wife and two children and then hanged himself in the bedroom you have been working in. It’s been empty for years. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Sorry!”

I was speechless, but plucked up enough courage to go back the following day to complete the job. At least I knew the man was dead and couldn’t harm me… could he? Melvyn Griffiths

Llanfairpwll, Anglesey

Mother’s dream

Sometime during the early 1970s, I am convinced I experienced telepathy. I recall I was in the living room of my home reading Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. My mother was asleep in an armchair some four feet [1.2m] away. Totally absorbed in the book, I had just finished reading the part where the main character, Titus, as a young child, is beside a lake with his guardian, Mrs Slagg. He strays from the woman and heads towards the water’s edge, where it is suggested a ‘shark’ is lurking near the shore. However, Nanny Slagg rescues Titus when she becomes aware of the danger and rushes to the lakeside to pull him clear. It is later inferred that the supposed shark is the character Steerpike, swimming across the lake.

Just as I had finishing reading this passage, my mother woke up and said she had had a strange dream. As she described this dream, it became immediately apparent that I had somehow relayed what I was reading to my mother’s subconscious mind. In her dream she had taken my young nephew Adrian to nearby Eastney Beach, whereupon he wandered off towards the sea, just as a shark appeared near the shore, and she had to dash to pull him clear of danger. I still remember the hairs rising on the back of my neck, as I realised how undeniably uncanny this experience was. Nothing like it has happened before or since. Thank goodness I wasn’t reading one of the more nightmarish sequences from the book!

Nick Maloret

Milton, Hampshire

Sharp knife!

This account popped up on my Facebook memories recently. My daughter, then aged two (so this would be four years ago), fell asleep across my lap on the sofa in the front room one afternoon. I extricated myself and left her napping while I went to the kitchen to catch up on some housework. I was at the sink washing up and there was no sightline between us. I reached out to take up and wash a little vegetable peeling knife when I heard my daughter call out in alarm. She was shouting “Sharp knife! Sharp knife!” I would like to think it was an indication of a strong mother-daughter bond – but it was probably just an odd coincidence.

Clare Law

Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Strange flashes

Jim D of Warrington, Cheshire, gives details of three occasions when he and his wife experienced weird flashes that lit up everything around them [FT382:77]. Twenty years ago, a similar thing happened to my then-husband and me. We were walking through a field he knew well as he was a farmer. It was February, around 8pm, so still dark. Our cottage was at the bottom of this field in a hamlet in Wiltshire called Shute End. Suddenly, there was a flash so bright it lit everything up for about a second. Everything was clear, the trees, grass, bushes, everything. It was as if the flash came from above us but not from the sky. We lived in a rural area, there were no streetlights around and this flash was far brighter than any car headlights could be.

My 18-year-old was awoken at 1am in August 2018 after he said he saw a very bright flash directly outside the bedroom window of our bungalow. It was not random lightning because he said it was “too low down”. He had been asleep and something had woken him up moments before. We are not overlooked by properties at the back of us and there aren’t any roads nearby. We tried to replicate the experience the next night using a torch, but my son insists the ‘flash’ was 100 times brighter than any torch. Alison Crocker

Salisbury, Wiltshire