HAUNTED once a year!
Turns out our spooks weren’t appearing at random, they were keeping to a schedule!
Iwas woken by my son, Apollo, then four. At some point in the night he’d crawled into bed between me and his dad, Jaime. ‘The boy in my room told me to get up,’ Apollo explained. ‘He wanted to play...’
Jaime and I exchanged glances as I reached for my phone to post about the incident on Facebook.
It wasn’t the first odd thing to have happened in our Victorian terrace in Pelaw, Gateshead. I’d noticed weird stuff since my ex and I had moved in, back in 2004.
When my eldest son Charlie, now 16, was a baby I’d gone upstairs to put his blanket back over him, only to find that someone had already done it.
I’d heard footsteps a few times while alone in the house and our pets frequently reacted to something I couldn’t see.
It wasn’t constant – months would go by without incident – and when my new boyfriend Jaime moved in back in 2014 he’d been sceptical.
Until one day, after he’d shut the cats, Bruce and Billy, in the utility room for the night, both cats waltzed into our bedroom.
‘They can’t have unlocked the door!’ Jaime frowned.
One evening in January this year our Hungarian Vizsla dog, Leo, suddenly started trembling and frantically trying to climb my legs. He looked petrified, like he was desperate to get away from something or someone I couldn’t see.
‘What is it boy?’ I asked.
After I’d calmed him down, I posted about his freak-out on Facebook.
Just as I did so, the TimeHop feature popped up, showing me posts from the same date on previous years.
That was when I gasped.
On 14th January 2013 I’d posted about hearing footsteps – before remembering the kids were at their dad’s... On 14th January 2014 I’d posted about hearing footsteps again while home alone. The same on 14th January 2015...
On 14th January 2016 I’d written: ‘Cats freaking out, hissing at nothing’. The post from 14th January 2017 was: ‘Two power cuts and someone walking about’. And 14th January 2020 was the day Apollo had been told to get out of bed by a ghostly voice.
I’d known the spooky activity came and went, but it was only now I realised it happened every year on the same date.
Asking around, it seems our spook might be a previous owner who was obsessed
with cats, owning about 20 of them. Perhaps that explained why he let ours loose and tried to scare Leo!
I still don’t know who the little boy who spoke to Apollo is – or why 14th January is so important. Perhaps that’s the day our spirit died?
Now we can’t wait for 14th January 2022. My little sister, Sapphire, wants to do a ghost hunt here on that date. Hopefully our spook still has the date in his diary!