DESTROYED BY EVIL...
We’d hoped for a trip down memory lane, but what we found left us disturbed. By Roger Kidd, 73
So haunted our house had to be flattened
We were watching telly in the living room when I heard footsteps, which seemed to be coming from upstairs. I looked from the ceiling to my wife, Val.
‘That can’t be our Lindsey, can it?’ I said, confused.
Our baby daughter, who was meant to be in bed, had just turned one and was barely toddling. The footsteps sounded much heavier than she could make.
When I headed upstairs to check, she was fast asleep and there was no sign of anyone else.
The unexplained footsteps weren’t the first odd thing I’d noticed since moving into the RAF married quarters in Carterton, Oxfordshire in the Autumn of 1973.
The house came with my job as an aircraft engineer at Brize Norton, the nearby military base. Val and I had been keen to make it our own. Not long after moving in we’d bought a new sofa, only to notice what looked like scorch marks on it a few weeks later. Another time a bird ornament had moved from the centre of the radiator shelf to the edge, seemingly by itself.
The footsteps became a regular thing after that first time. Val always shrugged it off, but I was convinced there was something spooky going on.
Growing up my mum had read tea leaves, so I was open to the spiritual side of life. As a teenager I’d done card readings until, aged 21, when the cards predicted my mate’s dad’s unexpected death a week later and
I’d been so freaked out I’d quit.
Then in my early days in the RAF an old man in uniform joined me on the plane I was working on. I’d been surprised he was still working at his age and afterwards I’d asked a colleague who the man was.
‘Ah, you’ve obviously met the ghost of 496,’ he replied seriously. ‘We’ve all seen him on there!’
A few months after we’d first heard the footsteps Val fell pregnant again and not long after that I was posted out to Cyprus, following the Turkish invasion there.
It was while I was in Cyprus that I got an odd telegram saying Val was going into labour. I was confused as I knew she wasn’t far gone. I was flown home, only to find out she’d miscarried. We were sad, but it was just one of those things.
Later that year a friend, Doreen, came to stay and the subject of our spooky experiences came up. I suggested a Ouija board, to see if we could find out who was behind it all.
We didn’t have a proper board, so I laid out an alphabet of Scrabble tiles in a circle, adding the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the centre and the three of us sat round the table and placed our fingers on a blank tile in the middle.
‘Is there anybody there?’ I asked. Nothing.
‘Is there anybody there?’ I repeated, a little louder.
This time the tile moved firmly to YES.
All three of us were so shocked that we pulled our fingers off it, like we’d been scalded. After a bit of discussion we decided to try again, but this time when we asked who was there the tile shot round the table and knocked all the tiles off, as though someone was in a rage. It was pretty scary, so we packed everything away and never tried again.
The following year Val fell pregnant again and our daughter Tracey was born.
Tracey was just a few weeks old when our neighbour, Ali,
‘Ah, you’ve met the ghost of 496’
called me on my night shift to say I should get home quickly.
I could hear the screaming before I even reached the front door. I found Lindsey, then almost two, clinging to Val and in a terrible state.
‘When I went up to her room she looked terrified. Her eyes were like saucers!’ Val said. ‘I don’t know what on earth has got into her.’
We tried to put Lindsey back down to sleep, but she kept screaming and pointing into thin air at the end of her bed.
She was so distressed that in the end we put Tracey down in Lindsey’s room and let Lindsey sleep in Tracey’s cot bed.
We never got Lindsey to sleep in her own room after that. And baby Tracey went from being a great sleeper to crying all night in Lindsey’s room. Val and I had to do shifts staying up with her!
Then one night in late 1975 something happened which even sceptical Val couldn’t explain. She and I were talking in bed when the bedroom door suddenly swung open. This was a bit strange in itself, as the thick bedroom carpet meant it took quite a shove to shift it.
I looked onto the landing, expecting to see Lindsey. Instead, I saw an older girl, aged around 10. She was wearing a long dress, through which I could clearly see the bannisters behind her!
‘Can you see her?’ I stammered to Val. Val nodded, her face ashen. Bracing myself, I got out of bed to move closer to the apparition, but as soon as I did, the girl disappeared.
We never saw the ghost girl again and the following year I left the Air Force to take a job in the private sector, meaning we had to move.
The day we left, our neighbour, Ali’s wife Georgie, approached us.
‘I didn’t want to worry you while you still lived here,’ she said. ‘But that night Lindsey got upset, our dog howled at the partition wall all night.
‘The people who lived there before you had similar problems to you. They had issues with their furniture and they lost a baby as well. There’s definitely something odd about the place.’
A shiver ran down my spine and I was suddenly very glad we were moving.
I hadn’t thought about the house in years, but then, in 2016, Val and I were visiting some old friends in Oxfordshire when we decided to drive round and take a look at our former home.
When we pulled into the estate I gasped. It was all gone – the houses, the pub, the petrol station... It was just an empty plot of land.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. The houses had only been about 20 years old when we’d moved in. Why on earth had they been ripped down?
Back home in Nottingham I did some research online and found that, in the years after we’d left, the whole estate had become derelict, with boarded up homes, squatters and drug dealers rife.
I thought back to our odd experiences and couldn’t help but wonder if some dark energy was to blame for the place’s rapid downfall. Had the estate been so haunted that no one wanted to live there, so it had been flattened?
I also wondered what happened to the spook, or spooks, who lived in our house, once the place was demolished. Where are they now?
‘Our dog howled at the wall all night’